Fifth Saturday of Lent
Lectionary texts for Saturday:
Philippians 3:12-14
Romans 8:11
Lectionary texts for Sunday:
OT: Jeremiah 31:34
Psalm 51:1-12 (UMH 785)
Epistle: Hebrews 5:1-10
Gospel: John 12:20-23
Thanks to April for her comment and Glen for his email. Kristen Vincent is a United Methodist minister in Alabama and a graduate of Duke Divinity School. I'll do a future blog on her Protestant Prayer Beads in the near future. We Protestants appear in the last couple of decades to have been getting over our fear of the visible and tangible. Historically we have been stuck in only the auditory ever since the 1520's when Radical Protestants raged through cathedrals in Europe slashing paintings, smashing stained glass windows, sledge-hammering statues, and axing altars. The Puritans did the same thing in England in the 1650's. Nowadays I think we Protestants need every prayer help we can find.
In his email Glen asked a series of questions about the differences between Anglicans and Puritans. Some of his questions will require me to do a little research. I'll talk about them next week in our Early Methodism series.
Last night I used Mark Thibodeaux's "Daily Examen" app to rescue me from insomnia. It's not boring, but it is relaxing. The app leads you through prayer and thought on a general personal issue. Last night the app hit me squarely. It was on making a decision in your life. As the app led me through 10 different questions about God and the decision, every succeeding screen on my i-phone hit remarkably directly on my making a decision on whether I should do the Daily Office project. I still want to hear from a few more of you who would be interested in it. Your commitment would be simply to try it out as we went along. Pray through it two or three times. You could, but would not have to, send me comments and suggestions.
I did hear from one of you today who declined. She was already committed to her own daily devotional resources. That's a good reason to say "No." I'd rather have a "No" answer than no answer. So let me know. I would like to get about 4 more yes answers before I make this decision.
We'll have a short Acts study today. Please read Acts 16:35-40.
After the jailbreak in Philippi, Paul and Silas don't take flight. Rather, they confront the local magistrates. Paul informs the magistrates that he and Silas are Roman citizens and that the city had therefore had no right to punish them without trial. The idea of equal justice before the law was simply not even in thinking of ancient Romans. Rights went with citizenship and social class. Well less than half of the free Roman population had citizenship. The assumption when Paul and Silas were arrested is that they were not citizens.
Two questions present themselves. Was Paul actually a Roman citizen. Scholars divide on this point as you would expect. German scholars think no. British scholars think yes. Americans are divided, usually on religious lines. The problem is that Paul himself in his letters never mentions his being a Roman citizen, even though he frequently mentions being imprisoned and tortured. Is his citizenship a Lucan invention?
Citizenship is hereditary. If a freeman does things regarded by provincial Roman authorities as worthy of citizenship, they can award him citizenship. His citizenship accrues to his family and his descendants. This would seem to be the case with Paul, at least as Luke sees him.
A second questions is why did Paul not appeal to his jailers that he was a Roman citizen. I don't have a good answer for that one. Perhaps he did and his jailers didn't believe him, but Acts does not tell us that.
Paul's Roman citizenship will come up again in Acts. We will deal with it further. Sitting in my book case a social distance away from me now is the classic work of Sir William Ramsey, St. Paul the Traveler and Roman Citizen. It's next on my reading list.
God of our prayers,
I pray that you will give me and us clear direction as to whether to pursue The Daily Office project. In the name of Jesus who prayed so well. Amen.
Faithfully,
Christian
2 comments:
Dad, I love your use of "a social distance" to describe six feet away - I will definitely tell my work team about that and they will love it - but just so you know, you do not have to socially distance from your books. Ideas can be more dangerous than germs, but having spent many hours looking at your library (especially when I was fighting my inherited insomnia) I feel that you are fairly safe with your books.
Also, what is a Book of Days? One of my favorite songs is by Enya, called "Book of Days." It is the theme song from the Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman movie "Far and Away " and was put on a mix tape for me by a college friend who later went on to be a computer science PhD, and is now, along with his wife, sitting in an endowed chair in Computer Science at University of Chicago. He wanted to date me but I declined, so once again I missed a chance to marry well... but as you will attest, I have missed many more chances to marry badly! I've been listening to "Book of Days" a lot lately and it sounds medieval and Celtic, like all Enya songs.
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