Thursday, January 16, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Partners
Come, let us bow down in worship; let us kneel before the Lord our God, our Maker. For he is our God.
Men and women have been praying this way for centuries, and we are still. Let us kneel before the Lord our God, our maker. Those words ring in my ears; it’s a song we sang for years at the Urbana Vineyard. I close my eyes and the hair rises on the back of my neck. I shiver with joyous goosebumps of memory. I feel warm inside.
Not everyone prays this way, and not everyone ever did. I move quickly into the warmth of a welcoming chapel, but central heating is a relatively new thing. Sometimes Margaret and I watch Poirot or Miss Marple or Father Brown on icy evenings, curled up in our 10×10 blanket we found at Menard’s on Black Friday. The churches and chapels in Britain 80 years ago are stone edifices that look impregnable and cold. Let us kneel before the Lord our God our Maker.
We are the people of his pasture, the lambs in the flock under his care.
Working on another devotion, I found a painting titled “The Suicide of Saul” by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Pieter painted it in 1562, well into the history of Protest against the Catholic church. What else was happening in 1562? 45 years earlier theology professor and priest Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. By 1562 wars between Catholics and Protestants kept many from bowing down in their chapels.
In March that year the first of the eight Wars of Religion began in France. These wars would not end until 1598, and, really, not even then. As George Burns says centuries later in the movie Oh, God!, “Try to not to hurt each other any more. There’s been too much of that. It really gets in the way.” Let us kneel before the Lord our God, our Maker.
Massacre of Vassy
On March 1, 1562, the Duke of Guise’s troops killed 100 Protestants attending a service in a barn
Capture of Orléans
On April 2, 1562, Louis de Condé, the leader of the Protestant Huguenots, captured Orléans
Siege of Rouen
In May 1562, Claude, Duke of Aumale, led 3,000 troops against the Huguenot fortress at Rouen
Soldiers multiplied in the years to follow, and of course so did the deaths.
Pieter Brueghel was a devout Catholic, married a year after he painted “Saul’s Suicide” to a beautiful Catholic maid in a Catholic church. After his wife gave birth to two sons, Pieter the Elder died in 1569, just as the Eighty Years War was beginning in the Netherlands, and thirty five years before the birth of Rembrandt. His sons Pieter the Younger and Jan became brilliant artists along with Rembrandt van Rijn.
Oh, that today you would hear his voice. Harden not your hearts, that God will not weary of our generation.
At Valpo I majored in history. So much of history is littered with stories of war, destruction, killing and greed. But victories of goodness, truth and beauty line the streets as well. God leaves us alone.
One day I choose selfishness, the next I share myself with others and learn a little more about how to love. I think loving in Jesus’ way requires many repetitions and much repentance of my failures and selfishness.
But more than anything Jesus’ way of love, his way of life, is nurtured by worship. God is good. I can learn. Let us kneel before the Lord our God, our Maker.
Jesus cured every disease among the people. We become partners of Christ if only we hold the beginning of his reality firm until the end.
(Hebrews 3, Psalm 95, Matthew 4, Mark 1)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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