light – Mum's devotional

O, Dayspring!

December 21st

O Dayspring, brightness of the everlasting light, Son of Justice, come to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death!

O Oriens* antiphon

These are the last words of David:

“The inspired utterance of David son of Jesse,
the utterance of the man exalted by the Most High,
the man anointed by the God of Jacob,
the hero of Israel’s songs:

The Spirit of the Lord spoke through me;
his word was on my tongue.
The God of Israel spoke,
the Rock of Israel said to me:
‘When one rules over people in righteousness,
when he rules in the fear of God,
he is like the light of morning at sunrise
on a cloudless morning,
like the brightness after rain
that brings grass from the earth.’
If my house were not right with God,
surely he would not have made with me an everlasting covenant,
arranged and secured in every part;
surely he would not bring to fruition my salvation
and grant me my every desire.”

2 Samuel 23:1-5 (NIV)

*If this sounds familiar it’s because O Come, O Come Emmanuel is based on the Greater [‘O’] Antiphons. As I may have said before, they are very, very old, and have been translated, paraphrased and re-translated many times.

Here is another John Wesley hymn: literally the only version of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing I found that I liked, by the U.S. Army Band of all things. (I think it’s just because it needs a lot of deep voices, but most of the men’s choruses that did it used the Willcocks arrangement, which I loathe with a passion.)

…and here is an image of another spiral galaxy, M74, from last year’s Hubble Advent Calendar in The Atlantic.

Here’s this year’s calendar, if anyone’s interested.

Blamelessness

November 22nd

Do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, “children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.” Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky, as you hold firmly to the word of life.

Philippians 2:14-15 (NIV)

We never can be faultless in this life, but God’s Book brings out that we must be blameless, that is, undeserving of censure from God’s standpoint, and remember what His standpoint is. …We must distinguish between the working of our own suspicions and the checking of the Spirit of God who works as quietly and silently as a breeze. Sanctification means that God keeps my whole spirit and soul and body undeserving of censure in His sight.

[And] we must not say because we are sanctified we are sure to be right. Blamelessness is not faultlessness. We never can be faultless in this life, we are in impaired human bodies; but by sanctification we can be blameless.

…Paul does not say we are to be blameless in our self life in the view of other people [either]. We never shall be; Jesus Christ was not. It was said of His bodily life— “Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber,” of His soul life—“He… is mad,” and of His spirit life— “He hath a devil”; but before God He was blameless. Some of us are so concerned about being blameless before men that we are to be blamed before God. The Apostle Paul prays that we may be sanctified and preserved blameless; then it is a matter of absolute indifference what anyone thinks of us, but it is not a matter of indifference what God’s Holy Spirit thinks of us. If we are sanctified by the power of the God of peace, our self life is blameless before Him, there is nothing to hide; and the more we bring our soul under the searchlight of God the more we realise the ineffable comfort of the supernatural work He has done.

Of ourselves we can never be any of the things God says we must be. We can never be blameless by thinking about it, or by praying about it, but only by being sanctified, and that is God’s absolute sovereign work of grace.

…Has He performed His work in us or has He not? Do not ask anybody else about it, the Holy Spirit will show you as clearly as can be.

from Oswald Chambers’ The Love of God, Now Is It Possible?

‘If hell and paradise were in the middle of the marketplace…’

November 1st

If hell and paradise were in the middle of the marketplace, everyone would be a saint. Of all the blessings bestowed on man, the greatest lies in the fact that God’s face is forever hidden from him. Men are children of the Highest and the Almighty plays hide and seek with them.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gimpel the Fool

Therefore, since we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we do not give up. Instead, we have renounced shameful secret things, not walking in deceit or distorting God’s message, but in God’s sight we commend ourselves to every person’s conscience in open display of the truth. But if, in fact, our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. Regarding them: the god of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelievers so they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we are not proclaiming ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your slaves because of Jesus. For God, who said, “Light shall shine out of darkness” —He has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ.

2 Corinthians 4:1-6 (HCSB)

What brought me back to the story was actually “No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world,” but I picked this because it reminded me of the quote (maybe from Star Trek?) “It’s easy for people to be angels in heaven.“

Timelessness

September 20th

He alone is immortal and dwells in unapproachable light. No one has ever seen Him, nor can anyone see Him. To Him be honor and eternal dominion! Amen.

1 Timothy 6:16 (BSB)

If there is, then, something eternal in a man, it must be able to exist and to be grasped within every change. Nor can it be wisdom to say, indiscriminately, that this something eternal has its time like the perishable, that it makes its circle like the wind that never gets further; that it has its course like the river that never fills up the sea. Nor can it be wisdom to talk of this eternal element in the same vein as if one were speaking of the past, as if it is past and past in the sense that it can never, not even in repentance, relate itself to a present person but only to an absent one. For repentance is precisely the relation between something past and someone that has his life in the present time. It was unwise of the youth to wish to talk in the same terms of the pleasure of dancing and of its opposite. For this clear act of folly betrayed that the youth, in his youth, would like to have outgrown youth. But as for the Eternal, the time never comes when a man has grown away from it, or has become older — than the Eternal.

from Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (Ch. 1)

Homophones

September 6th

But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays. And you will go out and frolic like well-fed calves.

Malachi 4:2 (NIV)

LET foreign nations of their language boast,
What fine variety each tongue affords:
I like our language, as our men and coast:
Who cannot dress it well, want wit, not words.
How neatly do we give one only name
To parent’s issue and the sun’s bright star!
A son is light and fruit; a fruitful flame
Chasing the father’s dimness, carried far
From the first man in the East, to fresh and new
Western discoveries of posterity.
So in one word our Lord’s humility
We turn upon him in a sense most true:
For what Christ once in humbleness began,
We him in glory call, The Son of Man.

The Son by George Herbert (in The Temple)

So many puns. I’m sure God will forgive us. (Camels and needles etc; he doesn’t seem to think he’s to good for it.)

If anyone is thirsty…

August 26th

On the last and most important day of the festival [the Feast of Tabernacles], Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, he should come to Me and drink! The one who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, will have streams of living water flow from deep within him.” He said this about the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were going to receive, for the Spirit had not yet been received, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.

John 7:37-39 (HCSB)

If you get rid of… the finger-pointing and malicious speaking, and if you offer yourself to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted one, then your light will shine in the darkness, and your night will be like noonday. The Lord will always lead you, satisfy you in a parched land, and strengthen your bones. You will be like a watered garden and like a spring whose waters never run dry.

Some of you will rebuild the ancient ruins; you will restore the foundations laid long ago; you will be called the repairer of broken walls, the restorer of streets where people live.

Isaiah 58:9-12 (HCSB)

Where is the light?

July 29th

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

1 John 3:2 (NIV)

Tell me, where is the light?
I’ll after it
with gentle zeal
and modest adoration,
though it dangle off the ceiling
from a bulb
glowing dimly bright.

Better that than night.

Oscar Mandel’s Where is the Light?

To be clear, the rest of Mandel’s work… does not suggest a particularly devout spirit. But I’m a sucker for clever poets.

The witness

January 13th

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

Psalm 19:1 (ESV)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

verses from John 1 (ESV)

The Final Word by Michael Card, on Youtube and Spotify respectively.

‘…and your neighbor as yourself’

January 6th

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

John 13:34-35 (NIV)

Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and in you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining. Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness. Anyone who loves their brother and sister lives in the light, and there is nothing in them to make them stumble. But anyone who hates a brother or sister is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness. They do not know where they are going, because the darkness has blinded them.

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.

verses from 1 John 2 (NIV)

…and next up, we have Love Me Do by the Beatles. Just joking, here’s Casting Crowns’ If We Are the Body, which, if not as catchy, is probably more edifying. Or something like that. And here’s a Spotify link because I’m platform agnostic.