Daily Liturgy and Scripture

“You will be judged by the law that sets you free.” …what now? How does that work? It’s because, if we are following Jesus, we must put ourselves into the flow of his life. His way is to make life abundant, and also less worrisome. By chasing after the things that want to take his place, we also set ourselves against him. His love is a mighty river, a flow that washes over us in the Spirit. Being...

Today we start the book of James, written by a fascinating author. It is thought that he was the brother of Jesus, and likely that he didn't believe in Jesus as Messiah until after the resurrection. (Remember that time Jesus' family showed up to haul him off because they thought he was crazy?) He opens the letter talking about wisdom and humility. That's a pretty fitting theme for a man who probab...

At the conclusion of Hebrews, this new covenant comes down to its most important piece: love. This is what binds us to God and one another. It is the story of God, moving in his people through history, moving the Son to be come one of us and our High Priest. It is the undercurrent of God's being.

To complete the transformation from old covenant to new, the Temple must be taken into account. It was the centerpoint of Jewish worship. In this verse, we have just that: the people are not at Mount Sinai, where the law was given to Moses. Our temple is not of earthly buildings at all, but made of living stones. We join with Christ, the High Priest and the sacrifice, and we become the temple of t...

We are surrounded by generations of believers who join us as citizens of the Kingdom of God. The birthright of that Kingdom is suffering, but our route is different that Esau’s: where he suffered and gave up his identity, our identity is born in suffering and is grounded in Christ. He is the one who has done the work of imparting holiness and citizenship, and the one with whom we stand.

The writer of Hebrews has just put us next to Jesus the High Priest in chapter 10, in chapter 11 he puts the legends of the Hebrew Scriptures with us in Christ. By faith, we are one. By faith, these great heroes of Hebrew history showed their belonging to God. So it it with us, and we join their ranks.

It’s really great that the Feast of Matthew lined up with this reading from Hebrews about Jesus’s opening of the Holy Place, because Jesus does an early version of that in this picture of Matthew’s calling. When Matthew becomes a disciple of Christ, he invites people he already knows. Not exactly the front row of your average church service, more like the people who have never darkened the door. B...

For a sacrifice to satisfy the standard of God, it must come from God. This is why the blood of animals was never a complete sacrifice. God never intended that to be the final word, but he did use that system to form and define his people until the Messiah come. With that plan complete, we are eternally secure in his finished work.

The Temple would have been no place for someone who didn’t like the sight of blood. The whole place must have been covered in it. This seems really gory, but God didn’t put this in place for no reason. It also wasn’t in place to satisfy some blood lust of the Almighty. It was to bring the people to repentance, and their repentance was dire business. Is there any thing more significant than the los...

Today our scriptures come together! What happened to the idea of the Temple under the new covenant, this thing we’ve read so much about in 1 Kings? There is still a temple, and still a High Priest. The Temple is in Christ’s Kingdom, and Christ himself has become both High Priest and sacrifice.

Having established Jesus as the High Priest, the writer of Hebrews now comes back to the very thing that forms God’s people: the covenant. Jews draw their identity from that covenant, formed through Abraham and sealed by Moses. But that one was never meant to be the last word. The first covenant was about the people being faithful, and could never be fully effective. The second covenant was about...

The history of priests sort of winds back and forth in this passage, but this is the gist: Jesus’s priesthood connects uniquely across Israel’s history. He is in the order of a priest that came before the covenant with Abraham, but he is also of the line of Abraham. While priests typically came from the tribe of Levi, Jesus comes from the tribe of Judah. He is a new line of priest, and the ultimat...

Continuing the journey through Israel’s history to show its connection to Jesus, we come to Abraham. Again, Abraham isn’t replaced, but the whole plan is shown to fit together. As God found nothing greater to swear by than himself, he used his own name as the seal. And Jesus as high priest is identified with Melchizedek, who was Abraham’s priest. All these historical markers center around Abraham...

Today’s verse from Hebrews falls on a perfect day to remember the cross. Jesus was a high priest, but he did something no other high priest ever did: he became the sacrifice. He was both the perfect sacrifice, but he was also the only one qualified to be an eternal high priest as both God and man. As the writer of Hebrews continues to connect the Hebrew tradition to the new Kingdom of Christ, this...

A LOT of talk about resting today. Don’t we need that? God certainly offers that option, and this section of Hebrews talks about three different options: The first is the seventh day, observed in the Sabbath, where God took a rest from his work and calls us to do the same. The second was the land of promise, a land given to his people to provide them with a rest from wandering in the wilderness, a...

For Jesus to be part of the plan God had enacted through Hebrew history, he needs to fit into that history and its figures. Today, we see how Moses fits. Moses has not been ejected or replaced, he holds his place in Israel’s history. But Moses lived in the house of God, and that house belongs to Christ. In that context, Christ was present, participating in Moses’ prophetic role.

For a book to be written to the Hebrew people, it would have to contain a deep awareness of Hebrew scripture. In chapter 1 and 2, we have already heard the scripture from Samuel, Isaiah, and Deuteronomy applied directly to Jesus. We’re not done yet! The Old Testament isn’t a failed idea, it’s the first part of God’s plan, and the plan is incomplete without it. In Jesus, we see that plan come to li...

Hebrews is a very Jewish book, and will pick up some references to Jewish practice and history along the way. (Sorry, spoiler alert!) The author of Hebrews is unknown, but they definitely have an agenda: helping a Jewish audience understand that Jesus and the new Kingdom do indeed fit into the covenant already established with Israel.

As Paul concludes this letter to the Ephesians, he takes them two very different ways: one of submission, and one of defense against the darkness. It’s interesting that the action he asked them to perform was only in submitting to one another. For the armor of God, he really didn’t ask them to go about, wielding the sword of the Spirit, at all. He said to put on “God’s armor,” which means that the...

This passage about wives submitting to their husbands is often argumentative. I believe that we often miss the two halves of what Paul says: the husband / wife relationship, and then the Christ / church relationship. Did Christ ever demand to be treated like a king by anyone? Did he ever fail to love, even in the face of persecution and death? Submission is the wife’s role, but she is not the only...

In laying out the specifics of what it looks like to be God’s people, Paul brings together an idea that may be familiar: light. Not only does light expose things (which means we should conduct ourselves as citizens of the Kingdom), but it also wakes us in the morning. That same light which exposes also brings people to knowledge of itself. This is the work of the Spirit, raising us from our prior...

A supreme God, involved in our lives, come to earth: now something is asked of us. We are to BE that people that Christ showed us how to be. Behavior of a people like that should look different, but it’s not manufactured. It must be grounded in love, and love like that comes only from the Spirit.

If the people of Ephesus were still with Paul having been told that there was one supreme God, that his Son had died and resurrected, and that he called us into his work, this part ought to really drive the point home: the God who came here not only invites you to be included in his work, but he gives you gifts to do that work. This is much more than a God drifting somewhere far away. This God is...

To a church that was immersed in a myriad of false gods, Paul’s claim that they could approach God must have been pretty mind-blowing. The stories of the false gods were of petty arguments between deities that used humans as pawns, occasionally stooping to include a human or two. To be included in the life of the Spirit, known by God, would have been quite a pill for those people to swallow.

As Paul continues his line of thought with the Ephesians, he now brings together the body of Christ as a whole. He has established that Christ reigns over all the gods that the Ephesians have known, he has talked of the sacrifice of Christ setting us right with God. Now he goes to the next step: Christ’s sacrifice brings us closer to God, and to each other. There are no insiders and outsiders when...