The Narrow Path

  Tuesday, August 1, 2023 Psalm 74 2 Samuel 11:1-21 John 8:48-59 Observance: Holy men and women of the Old Testament Before Abraham was, I AM. With all this talk of little green men from Mars coming out of the United States at the moment, an old trend has found the excuse to try and regain some relevance. Pointing to the fact that these flying objects seem to defy the laws of physics, so the argument goes, aliens must be living and operating in a different dimension. Therefore, to access this dimension and thereby gain contact with them, spiritual activities such as are found in New Age-ism need to be employed. The wonderful thing about Christianity’s central claim is that through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, we have all the access we could ever want to the spiritual realm, to the highest dimension. With the Lord as our Shepherd, we are led safely through the spiritual realm, protected on all sides from the powers and principalities of the...

  Monday, July 31, 2023 Psalm 59 2 Samuel 10 John 8:31-47 Observances: Joseph of Arimathea; Ignatius of Loyola, priest and founder of the Society of Jesus (d. 1556) You belong to your father. I have the distinct pleasure of seeing two little boys grow up together at the same time. They were born only some weeks apart, so seeing their differences and similarities as they get through those first months raises all sorts of theories as to which boy will take what role in the relationship. That is to say, when they become of age, who will be the one cooking up the schemes, and who will be the one who gets in trouble for them? David didn’t even have a friend cooking up schemes for him. He wrote today’s Psalm while trapped in his own home hiding from Saul’s assassins. “For no fault of mine, they run and prepare” he laments. It is something every little school child has cried out: “But I didn’t do anything wrong!” Worse yet was the trouble he ran into with the Amm...

  Saturday, July 29, 2023 Psalm 69:1-16 2 Samuel 8:15-9:13 John 8:12-30 Observance: Mary and Martha of Bethany Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness. Australian sports journalist Martin Flanagan was interviewed on the radio this week because of a book he has recently published about his experience as a schoolboy in a school riddled with child sexual abuse. The effect it had on his later life was described as a descent into madness and misery. It was so terrible that he found common ground with older men who were suffering from the experience of fighting in war. He made a comment that stuck out: as part of coming out of the shame and into a place of grace, he recounted something said to him said by an Anglican priest, that life is like finding your way through a dark room. Looking up and out at the world around us, it seems reasonable for so many humans to give up and give in to nihilism. There is no such thing as “the good life”. Everything is sta...

  Friday, July 28, 2023 Psalm 71 2 Samuel 7 John 8:1-11 Observance: Samson, bishop (d. 565) The LORD will make you a house. We learn three things from this conversation between David, Nathan and God. First, it is that we do not invite God into our presence. Rather, God comes alongside us, where we are, hiking through the wilderness. God gets down into the dust with us and puts up a tent. There is a reason why John made so much of this tent language in his first chapter: that the Word became flesh and pitched His tent among us. Whichever part of the Bible we are reading, we see God coming to the people, rather than the people moving towards God. This is of particular comfort when we feel like we haven’t prayed enough, or regularly. We might have been distracted by the dust on our feet, but God has always been there right beside us. We just have to look up. Second, it is that God’s presence among us is not something to be feared. Have you noticed that,...

  Thursday, July 27, 2023 Psalm 68:1-20 2 Samuel 6 John 7:32-53 Observance: Brooke Foss Westcott, bishop and teacher (d. 1901); John Comper, priest (d. 1903) I will celebrate in the presence of the LORD! Anglicanism sits in the “middle way”, the via media . But in between what and where is this middle way? On a surface level, we might look at the different ways Anglican churches worship on a Sunday. Go into one, and you will hear sacred music from the Renaissance, smell the incense, and see a sanctuary filled with men wearing brightly coloured robes. Walk into another Anglican church down the road and you will hear a drum kit, smell the coffee machine in the lobby, and see a short stage filled with people wearing jeans. Both of them are Anglican; both will be worshipping the true and living God. And they are reflecting two appropriate attitudes towards God that we read about today in 2 Samuel. Uzzah was one of two men responsible for transporting the Ark o...

  Wednesday, July 26, 2023 Psalms 65; 70 2 Samuel 5:6-25 John 7:14-31 Observance: Anne and Joachim, parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary May those who jeer withdraw because of their shame. Idiomatic phrases are wonderful things. There was a whole book of them some years ago that seemed to be in everyone’s Christmas stocking explaining the background of some of our most popular ones because the history behind them are so interesting. Keeping a copy of the King James translation of the Bible lying around is good for this, too; so many popular turns of phrase come straight from those pages. Perhaps we could bring another Biblical expression back into the vernacular, the one that came from David’s capture of Jerusalem: “The ‘blind and lame’ keep him from entering the house”. Just as the blind and the lame couldn’t keep David from taking the city, they couldn’t keep Jesus from invading this world with His kingdom of heaven. A couple of chapters ago, Jesus came along...

  Tuesday, July 25, 2023 Psalms 62; 63 2 Samuel 4:1-5:5 John 7:1-13 Observance: James, apostle and martyr No one spoke about Jesus openly. It seems to be a frequent call from the pulpit: if we are having trouble evangelising our family and friends with words, then we should live out the gospel and draw them in that way. We all know the quote misattributed to St Francis of Assisi: “preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words”. But isn’t that, in some ways, even harder? We know ourselves better than anyone. Who would want to follow someone like me as an example? The confidence to speak about Jesus openly seems trapped down the wedge where the rock has rolled up against the hard place. We can try and speak in our actions, but so often they fall short. Or we could speak about Jesus with words; but then we look at our example and think we have no right to talk about Him. But what words of Jesus have been spoken to you that made you fall in...

  Monday, July 24, 2023 Psalms 56; 57 2 Samuel 3:20-39 John 6:52-71 Observance: Declan, bishop (d. c. 5 th C) I will fulfil my vows to you. Our God is a God of grace. Once we have been washed in the blood of Jesus we are considered right with God. God judges us by the inclination of our hearts, not by the specific actions we perform. This is why confession and absolution in the church is considered a ministry; when we remind ourselves and each other that when we acknowledge our sins before God and ask for forgiveness in Jesus’ name, we are filled with peace and the refreshment of the kiss of God’s love. This means we can make vows to God in good faith and with not a little excitement. Because where the pagan would try to make a deal with a higher power for their own benefit, we turn to our heavenly Father and tell Him we would like to do something to make Him happy. In this Psalm, David has been captured by the Philistines and is asking God to fre...

  Saturday, July 22, 2023 Psalm 51 2 Samuel 3:2-19 John 6:35-51 Observance: Mary Magdalene Deliver me my wife. When Charles I was sitting in the dock, brought to trial by the lowest scallywags 17 th C England had to offer, his one and only defence was to ask by what right his captors were charging him. It was a good question; it was the only defence he needed. Parliament was against the trial, and the people were repulsed at being implicated in any act of regicide. The single claim to any right to authority that the Army could make was right of force, and that only lasted a few short years before the Restoration. David is now making his final push to win the civil war and claim what is rightfully his – the throne of the Jewish people. Having been approached by the turncoat Abner, David responds with shrewd political intellect: his first betrothal, Michal, must be returned to him, in order to reinforce his right to rule. It proves he is Saul’s rightful he...

  Friday, July 21, 2023 Psalm 50 2 Samuel 2:18-3:1 John 6:16-34 Observance: Howell Harris, preacher (d. 1773) The bread of God. During a discussion between formation students preparing for ordination, the topic of spiritual attack came up. One of the words used to describe the experience of ordinands and their spiritual struggle was “relentless”. When reading a Psalm like today’s, God’s promise to rescue all who call on His name can seem difficult to appreciate. Perhaps we are all still trying to work out what it means to follow Jesus to the cross. Because during times of dark struggle, it can get easy to look at our believing neighbours and ask God to just let off the pressure a bit and give us a good life, just like they have it. But to be truly “incarnational”, that is, to really appreciate and also live the way Jesus did, means to disown our attachment to this life for the sake of the eternal life offered by God. This doesn’t mean that we give u...

  Thursday, July 20, 2023 Psalm 48 2 Samuel 2:1-17 John 6:1-15 Observances: Margaret of Antioch, martyr (c. 4 th C AD); Bartolome de las Casas, apostle to the Indies (d. 1566) This has to be ‘the prophet’ who is supposed to come into the world. Have you ever been in the unhappy situation where, in the midst of a conversation on one of your favourite interests, you are asked what you like most, and immediately lose all memory? If someone came out of nowhere and asked me what my favourite food was, it would take me a moment to realise that yes, I do indeed enjoy eating food. Uh, jam toast? Reading these accounts of the wonders Jesus performed in John can feel like that sometimes. Why did His disciples come to trust in Him when He turned water into wine at the wedding at Cana (John 2:11)? Why here, on the hills overlooking the lake, after being fed, did the people come to realise that Jesus was the prophet promised by God through Moses in Deuteronomy 18:1...

  Wednesday, July 19, 2023 Psalm 45 2 Samuel 1:17-27 John 5:30-47 Observance: Gregory, bishop of Nyssa (d. 394) and his sister Macrina, deaconess (d. 379), teachers of the faith How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! There was a pop-scientist in the second half of the twentieth century, Carl Sagan, who came up with a little piece of writing after reflecting on the size of the universe. “Pale Blue Dot” was the title, inspired by a photograph of Earth taken from the Moon. It has captured the imagination of many shallow minds, arguing from a purely material point of view that we humans are insignificant on a galactic scale, and so should be doing everything we can to try and preserve ourselves and our pale blue dot. This line of thinking insults the intelligence: one can not simply state that humans should act in a moral way to one another as if it were a universal truth without first demonstrating why. Our Lord Jesus teaches us that everythin...

  Tuesday, July 18, 2023 Psalms 41; 44:1-9 2 Samuel 1:1-16 John 5:19-30 Whatever the Father does, the Son does too. Yesterday we thought about how the Persons of the Trinity are united in purpose, as is their attitude towards us. Today we read some precious teaching from Jesus as He unpacks that a little more for us. Moving from the end of 1 Samuel and into the start of 2 Samuel we can reflect further on consistency. Consistency is a good thing; being consistently honest is admirable. Jesus’ words to us reinforce this idea. We are invited to look at Him, and then look at the Father, and see how they are both singing from the same song sheet. (And it is a beautiful tune they are playing for us.) It is for the purpose of honouring the Son just as we honour the Father that they work together. The judgement Jesus will execute is the same as if it was coming from the Father directly – because Jesus doesn’t seek His own desire, but the desire of the One who sent Hi...

Monday, July 17, 2023 Psalm 40 1 Samuel 31 John 5:1-18 Pick up your mat and walk! Trinity Sunday was a while ago now, but a recent conversation brought up the question of what our personal relationship with each of the three Persons of the Godhead are like. It is actually a helpfully revealing exercise in self-reflection: do you feel comfortable with Jesus, and are maybe a little afraid of our Father, while the Holy Spirit is there as someone you really ought to get to know more? Or perhaps the loving Father is the one you run to by instinct, while Jesus might seem a little stern, but the Holy Spirit encourages you along to our loving Brother and Friend? Maybe it is the Holy Spirit who is the first to receive your attention, which seems reasonable because He is the one closest to us in the sense that He literally dwells within us? If we feel like we are a little imbalanced in our relationships with the Persons in such a way, we can be encouraged with the knowledge t...

  Saturday, July 15, 2023 Psalm 37:1-17 1 Samuel 3:7-25 John 4:43-54 Observances: Swithun, bishop of Winchester (d. 862); Bonaventure, friar, bishop, teacher of the faith (d. 1274) Trust in the LORD, and He will act. I recently had the dubious pleasure of watching a news broadcast on a commercial television channel. The fog of memory hiding my high school English education was instantly cleared: the amount of emotional manipulation in each story was so apparent I almost felt embarrassed for the producers. Many stories followed this formula: a local crime had been committed; the victim was sympathetic while the criminal was the very embodiment of evil; this particular crime was only one part of a larger “crime wave”; we could all expect the justice system to be the instrument of vengeance. It’s such an easy emotional state to fall into: to experience injustice, to feel the adrenaline start pumping and desire to get up and do something about it; and then fe...

  Friday, July 14, 2023 Psalm 34 1 Samuel 29:1-30:6 John 4:16-26 Look to the LORD, and be radiant. There was an article awhile ago on cultivating healthy mental habits, where the primary focus was on starting the day on the right foot. It asked the question: what is the first thing you look at when you wake up? For many, their phone is at hand, and the first thing they see is whatever their phone decides is most important. I was raised in the type of home where one was unable to sit down for breakfast without a book; it was only a few years ago I finally met someone else who also was unable to start their day with a bit of reading. All this to say that what we look at has consequences. We can’t unsee things, and our eyes are tender organs. Jesus Himself teaches us to be careful with what we look at, because as the window to the soul, any old thing can pour in directly through the eyes and into our very being (Matt 6:22-24). It all goes into us and sloshes aro...

  Thursday, July 13, 2023 Psalm 35:1-17 1 Samuel 28:3-25 John 4:27-42 Observance: Sydney James Kirby, bishop, pioneer of outback ministry and the Bush Church Aid Society (d. 1935) Eat something. There used to be a television show, terrifying in its hubris, laughably sad in its outcome, where a group of people would all sit in a room and the host would speak to one or more of them on behalf of their dead relative. Those of us with more morbid curiosities will have read up on the practice and found that its more modern incarnations (beginning with the revival in the Victorian era under the euphemism “spiritualism”) are closer to psychology than the paranormal. That is, self-professed psychics are exclusively and entirely charlatans who have just enough of an ability to read human emotions but not enough emotional intelligence to channel that ability into something productive. Can you imagine the shock felt by the woman Saul consulted when she discovered that Saul ...

  Wednesday, July 12, 2023 Psalms 28; 29 1 Samuel 27:1-28:2 John 4:1-15 A spring of water gushing up to eternal life. Trying to discern God’s will for our lives is difficult. We consult the scriptures for God’s likes and dislikes; we reflect on the unique gifts with which God has blessed us; we try and work out how we “fit in” to our church and see how God wants those gifts to be used. Often it is through trial and error that we eventually discover where God wants us, and how God wants to use us. Through all this process of discernment there is disappointment. Perhaps we thought God wanted to use our known gifts, and instead sends us off on a path that teaches us we actually have gifts in other areas. Perhaps our idea of what would be a successful vocation is different to what God thinks is successful. To be refined as gold in a fire (1 Peter 1:7) does not imply an easy process. Consoling ourselves through this disappointment comes through two perspectiv...

  Tuesday, July 11, 2023 Psalm 31 1 Samuel 26 John 3:22-36 Observance: Benedict of Nursia, abbot (d. 550) He gives the Spirit without measure. There was a successful Canadian comedian, now deceased, Norm MacDonald, who once observed that it was easier to be poor than to be rich. He would have known: gifted with exceptional intelligence, he moved to the US, rose from strength to strength in the comedy circuit, became a national household name, and is still mourned today as an adopted national treasure in that country. But he liked to talk about how short-lived his time as a homeowner was. Almost as soon as he bought his first home, he sold it again – too many things to worry about, too many added stresses. I wonder if this attitude (which we all have) creates the circumstances that makes it difficult for us to accept that God really does love us and wants to bless us as much as He does. Having just the right amount of money – a little more than enough, but ...

  Monday, July 10, 2023 Psalm 25 1 Samuel 25:23-44 John 3:1-21 Your life will be bound in the bundle of life with ADONAI your God. We take a short excursion from following the adventures of the apostles in the book of Acts to spend some time with Jesus in the Gospel of John. Don’t worry, the reading cycle will bring us back there in a couple of weeks, but for now, we will follow Jesus in what has been described as the “gospel of signs and wonders”. The account of the meeting between Jesus and Nicodemus is a well-worn track for those of us who love to read the Bible; it contains both the world’s most famous Bible verse (sixteen), as well as this wonderful phrase “born again”. But the verse chosen to reflect on for the day comes from our other reading: 1 Samuel 25:29. Because doesn’t it bring to mind the idiom that describes a newborn baby as a “bundle of joy”? In another place, Jesus describes the rejoicing in heaven when the lost sinner is brought home t...

  Saturday, July 8, 2023 Psalms 20; 21 1 Samuel 25:2-23 Acts 15:22-35 Things to disturb you and unsettle your minds. Christianity is not a difficult religion to understand. The basics are just that – basic. It is so simple we could sum up our faith in a single sentence, and indeed many have found such single sentences in scripture. I like 1 John 4:10, “In this is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” I am sure you have your own. Falling into love with God means that we then spend a lot of time thinking and reading about Him. This makes sense: why wouldn’t we want to spend the rest of our existence gazing into the eyes of the One who searches us out in the way that Jesus of Nazareth did? There will always be jealous people and devils who see the loving relationship we have with our God and try to break us apart. Let us spend a moment in mourning and prayer for those who have been snatche...

  Friday, July 7, 2023 Psalm 19 1 Samuel 24:8-25:1 Acts 15:12-21 For who has ever found an enemy, and sent the enemy safely away? Have you ever found yourself in the situation where there is tension between you and someone else close to you, where they have offended you, and the situation has not been resolved, and the tension just continues to bubble away? It can get really quite bad; one can find themselves irritated beyond mention at the mere thought of the other person, to the point where one finds one’s self having imaginary conversations with them in the shower. I know that I am not the only one who has suffered this condition because there is even a word in German for it. Enemies are so easy to make. All it takes is the merest slight and immediately two paths are opened: one is apology and forgiveness, and the other is stubborn indignation. One leads to life and the other leads to death. And as time goes on it gets easier to stay on the path to death, a...

  Thursday, July 6, 2023 Psalm 18:1-31 1 Samuel 23:19-24:7 Acts 15:1-11 Observance: John Fisher, bishop, and Thomas More, martyrs (d. 1535) We believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus. When I was first given a scrap of leadership working in the fast food industry, the store manager would take photos of all the places I had neglected to clean during the previous night’s closing shift. He would sit me down and go through them all with me, ramming home the lesson that the standard for management class is on a level never imagined as an entry-level fry cook. From a cut-throat industry viewpoint, it worked, because despite our unenviable store location, we were consistently the highest-performing store in the state. Imagine if God worked like that. Imagine if every time we sinned we had to painstakingly go over every single little offence as a matter of necessity; that the only way we could be made spiritually pure would be through endl...

  Wednesday, July 5, 2023 Psalms 15; 16 1 Samuel 23:1-18 Acts 14:19-28 It is through many persecutions that we must enter the kingdom of God. If we were to do a comparison between how the Church spoke of itself and its mission now and a hundred-some years ago, something that would come up is how we don’t tend to use militaristic language anymore. Even in a single generation we find that Sunday School children no longer sing about standing up for Jesus as “soldiers of the cross”. If we are soldiers, we are spiritual soldiers, and our weapons are peace and love; the move away from the theme of warfare in our language is well-meaning, for sure. But we may have also lost something in the move, because there is something encouraging about the image of the stoic soldier standing watch in miserable conditions, unwaveringly loyal and firm in their duty, when we apply it to ourselves in our struggles against the flesh, the world, and the devil. Paul and Barnabas return...

  Tuesday, July 4, 2023 Psalms 11; 12 1 Samuel 22:6-23 Acts 14:8-18 God has not left Himself without a witness doing good. Modern historians seem to enjoy writing articles about the Classical pagans suggesting that they did not, in fact, actually believe that their pantheon of gods existed. Working backwards from their modern atheist presuppositions, it is suggested that while there may have been a few religious weirdos who believed in a big bearded man living on top of Mount Olympus, most of the rest of the population just went along with things. But this account from Acts, of Paul and Barnabas in Lystra, suggests otherwise. It would seem people are desperate to find a reason for the good things in life from anywhere – as long as it isn’t the living God. Have you heard the phrase “the miracle of modern science”? Is this attitude not just a repackaging of that of the people of Lystra offering sacrifices to Paul and Barnabas? God is not a pagan god. God d...

  Monday, July 3, 2023 Psalm 9 1 Samuel 21:8-22:5 Acts 14:1-7 Observance: Thomas, apostle and martyr [ If not observed on December 21 ] ...and he became captain over them. When I was a teenager in high school, I used to look at all the fathers and wonder what went wrong in the years between adolescence and fatherhood that caused them to dress the way they did. How could a man go from caring so much about the finer details of basketball shoes, haircuts and logos on t-shirts, to leaving the house with a short back and sides and clothes from the discount rack at the same shop that sells crockery and hardware? Now that I am beginning to cross that divide, it is becoming clearer that there is indeed something to be said about “dad fashion”. There is something that happens in the brain when one is responsible for the raising of a child, where the discovery is made that to be aggressively anti-fashion is actually the height of fashion. Pride is ridiculous. It is ...