The Narrow Path

  Friday, September 1, 2023 Psalms 1; 2 1 Kings 2:1-12 Acts 22:17-30 Observance: Giles of Provence, monastic and hermit (d. c. 710) The LORD knows the way of the righteous. It must be the time of year for people to start getting bored with their current jobs. The advertisements for universities seem to be targeting such people, alluring prospective mature-aged students with the promise of a more exciting and rewarding career path. Wouldn’t it be nice if life worked this way? Nice and simple, nice and easy. Want to go there and do that? Here is your path; walk in it. God’s way is far less predictable, but far more exciting. Take the example of St Paul, appealing as he does in today’s reading to his own people in their own language. He is a Jew among Jews; trained by none other than Gamaliel; just as zealous for God as they, minding their clothes while they stoned Stephen to death. Looking back on his own life, Paul must have thought that God’s plan was for ...

  Thursday, August 31, 2023 Psalm 83 1 Kings 1:32-53 Acts 21:40-22:16 Observances: John Bunyan, preacher, spiritual writer (d. 1688); Aidan of Lindisfarne, bishop and missionary (d. 651) They say, “Come, let’s wipe them out as a nation!” All this talk of a referendum made it seem like a good idea to go and actually look at the Australian Constitution. To be honest, most of the talk of things like minister’s salaries and trade between the states didn’t really jump out as fascinating reading. What was fascinating, however, was the very first sentence. On the 9 th of July 1900 the people of Australia put down in writing the idea of a nation that was “humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God”. In other words, the Australian Constitution is a covenant made between a nation and God. We can compare this with Israel in the time today’s Psalm was written. That was a nation that was under a covenant that God had made. There is a difference: God was the one wh...

  Wednesday, August 30, 2023 Psalms 148; 149 1 Kings 1:1-31 Acts 21:27-39 Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a twoedged sword in their hand. In this pagan temper tantrum people call the “culture war”, there is a certain attack which, like all other attacks, reveals the truth of the gospel if you know where to look. You would have heard of it; I am referring to this idea that words can constitute violence. The knee-jerk politically-minded response is to scoff, because violence is something involving sticks and stones, whereas names have no power to hurt. But let’s spend a moment looking at this idea with a Biblical mindset, granting that words may be able to cause something approaching violence, and investigate where those types of words might be found. If we were to believe what the Bible teaches us about humans and humanity, we would have to admit that every single human being bears the image of God in a way that cannot be turned on or off (Ge...

  Tuesday, August 29, 2023 Psalm 145 2 Samuel 24:15-25 Acts 21:15-26 Observance: Beheading of John the Baptist I will not offer burnt offerings to the LORD my God that cost me nothing. The niche area of Reformed Christian social media was set in a bit of a spin somewhat recently. A certain infamous political conservative speaker had made the claim that Judaism is a religion of actions, while Christianity is a religion of believing. This set off a number of responses and counter-arguments from our bearded Calvinist internet friends, who quite correctly pointed out that to reduce these two religions to those two basics shows a fundamental misunderstanding of both. All through the Old Testament, and particularly in the prophets, God calls the people to stay away from a surface-level understanding of religion; to turn in their hearts back to the Lord. Meanwhile in the New Testament we find no lack of instruction and exhortation to reflect our faith with the fr...

  Monday, August 28, 2023 Psalms 143; 146 2 Samuel 24:1-14 Acts 21:1-14 Observance: Augustine, bishop of Hippo (d. 430) Make me hear of your love in the morning. There are a number of unwritten “rules” contained within any given language, that are unknown to students and only apparent to native speakers. English is full of such rules; for example, if you want to describe something with more than one word, those words will need to go into a specific order without sounding clumsy, otherwise you end up with the brown quick fox jumping over the lazy dog. Some “rules” of ancient Hebrew we do know about, and one of those is when you see the type of phrase constructed in the eighth verse of Psalm 143. The first two lines set up a statement of fact, and then the second two lines say the same thing but in a different way. You see this sort of thing all through the Old Testament, and it is used to try and get a really important point across to the reader. But...

  Saturday, August 26, 2023 Psalms 137; 138 2 Samuel 23:1-23 Acts 20:17-38 The whole counsel of God. The thing about surrendering our lives entirely to Jesus means we cannot decide to ignore things we do not like. This journey of discipleship began at our conversion, when something about Jesus was said to us that convinced us of His beauty and truth, but that was only the beginning. To ignore something in the Bible because we don’t like it does two things: firstly, it reveals something about ourselves in our personal relationship with God. There are more than enough examples of a passage that, at first sniff, does not make sense or raises our emotional hackles. Today’s Psalm is one such passage (we looked at this Psalm on June 26 th , 2023. Click Here. ). But to write such a passage off completely simply because we don’t like it reveals that we are not fully committed to the Lord. That type of reaction reveals our spirit of rebellion, an evil spirit that needs...

  Friday, August 25, 2023 Psalm 135 2 Samuel 32-51 Acts 20:1-16 Observance: Ebba of Coldingham, abbess (d. c. 683) Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him. There is a story of a time when a preacher got up to deliver a sermon. He had forgotten his watch; and after extemporising for an insufferable length of time, apologised to the congregation for being without his time piece. “You don’t need a watch” replied one wag, “you need a calendar!” If hymn selection is the trench warfare between congregants and preacher, then a preacher’s preaching is the air battle. Every preacher must have looked at this text about poor Eutychus and seen certain assurance that there is no such thing as too long of a sermon. If St Paul can get away with it, then surely so can the reverend! But there is something about this passage that is both more interesting and encouraging, and that is the model of how the first church met. It is from Biblical examples such as these th...

  Thursday, August 24, 2023 Psalms 130; 131; 133 2 Samuel 22:17-31 Acts 19:21-41 Observance: Bartholomew, apostle and martyr But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be feared. When it comes to film-star action heroes, none manage to be quite as enviably masculine as Jason Statham. In the aptly-named Wrath of Man , the fourth collaboration between him and director Guy Ritchie, he is at his broken-nosed, square-shouldered, gruff-voiced best. It is a film perfectly matching story-line with actor: Statham spends the movie on a mission of revenge, hunting down the armed robber who ended the life of his teenage son in a robbery gone wrong. But nothing captures the emptiness of human vengeance as well as the ending shot of the film: as our hero drives off having successfully hunted down the villain, the camera pans up, showing a city at night. If our Lord marked our iniquities, who could stand, asks the Psalmist. All our lives, every human interaction,...

  Wednesday, August 23, 2023 Psalms 124; 125; 126 2 Samuel 22:1-16 Acts 19:1-20 Observance: Tydfil, martyr (d. c. 5 th C) Those who sow in tears will reap with cries of joy. Twice a year we are all told that our Australian culture was formed on the beaches of Gallipoli in the First World War. This seems, however, like a bit of an early assumption. It wasn’t until the second half of the last century that having convict heritage changed from a source of shame to pride; and in the lead up to the upcoming Referendum we are now hearing of the “New Indigenous”: people who have recently discovered Aboriginal ancestry and instead of hiding it, are looking to discover more. This “return”, of people with Aboriginal ancestors looking up their elders, is causing no end of division, and it makes one wonder about the situation in Israel when Psalm 126 was written. Babylonian armies had razed the nation to the ground and hauled off a large portion of the population into ex...

  Tuesday, August 22, 2023 Psalm 118:1-18 2 Samuel 21:1-22 Acts 18:18-28 I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the LORD. Recently I found myself clicking around a website of one of those new, trendy non-denominational suburban mega-churches that pop up every now and then. What stuck out to me the most was just how irrepressibly happy the whole thing seemed. Shifting uncomfortably in my sensible Anglican chair I found I could look down my snobbish nose at the “beliefs” section of the website; like so many of these new churches, there was no mention of any of the historic creeds. Of course, they have a statement of faith that is effectively a slightly-rephrased Nicene creed; but it didn’t change the fact that for many Christians, these included, life is wellspring of effervescent joy: and this joy is a blessing to those of us who find ourselves pitched into the outer darkness of life’s trials. Today’s Psalmist has good cause to rejoice. Living in ten...

  Monday, August 21, 2023 Psalms 121; 122; 123 2 Samuel 20:14-26 Acts 18:1-17 Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Once upon a time, when there would be a natural disaster, a particularly heinous crime, or some other such widely-known tragedy, our fearless representatives would stand in front of cameras and microphones announcing that our “thoughts and prayers” were with those suffering. Then there was a campaign by activist comedians that convinced all those representatives that thoughts and prayers were worse than useless, and we discovered that those representatives were not so fearless as we once thought. Now, whenever tragedy strikes, they tell us that those suffering only have our thoughts as consolation. For some reason this idea of solidarity seems to be a popular way of signalling one’s spiritual connection with another, without having to go through all the fuss of actually believing in the spiritual connection all human beings have. But we are all spirit...

Saturday, August 19, 2023 Psalms 110; 111 2 Samuel 19:41-20:13 Acts 17:22-34 Whom therefore you ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you. This portion of Acts – the speech Paul gave at the Areopagus – is one of the best pieces of Biblical text we have in both understanding better the Christian faith for ourselves, as well as how to explain it to unbelievers. In a few short sentences, Paul outlines what is of primary importance; how to explain it; and what to expect in return. His tone is excellent. So often today we hear Christians bickering with each other over the tone we should be using to communicate the faith to the unbelieving world. On one side, there are those who would throw out the truth of the gospel with no consideration for the listener, while at the other extreme, there are those so twisted up in trying to meet people where they are they distil all the power out of the message. Enter Saint Paul: he finds the point of meeting; “the unknown God”. So ...

  Friday, August 18, 2023 Psalm 107:1-22 2 Samuel 19:24-40 Acts 17:15-21 And He rescued them from their distress. Sometimes it is difficult to listen to programs designed for working professionals. There was a recent discussion on the radio involving some sort of workplace productivity specialist, where she was extolling the virtues of not allowing perfect to be the enemy of good. Far better, said she, to ration out one’s daylight hours ruthlessly, and should a particular task threaten your weekend, simply leave it done as “good enough”. Shivers ran down my spine: working in restaurant kitchens as I have, there is a clear list of tasks to complete. If someone in my position were to simply leave tasks unfinished, I would have committed the unforgivable crime of leaving customers hungry. But having since moved away from that rockstar lifestyle and into the romantic world of the domestic, it starts to seem quite reasonable to simply leave certain things for tomorrow. S...

  Thursday, August 17, 2023 Psalm 106:1-24 2 Samuel 19:8b-23 Acts 17:1-14 They eagerly welcomed the message, and examined the scriptures every day to see whether these things were so. Common sense is a wonderful tool. It keeps us from being run over when we cross the street; it makes sure we only eat fresh food. When it gets a little more dangerous is when it crosses into the realms of politics and religion. For example, common sense would dictate that children should be supervised near the backyard pool. However due to the high number of tragedies that have occurred in Australian homes, we now require that all pools be fenced by law. This is an example of a higher, transcendent moral standard that comes from outside: that we all bear responsibility for each other’s safety. An example of this moral standard coming from outside, from on high, is in Deuteronomy 22:8, where God gives us a law concerning home building standards: since people liked to have parties...

  Wednesday, August 16, 2023 Psalm 105:1-22 2 Samuel 18:19-19:8a Acts 16:25-40 Observance: Charles Inglis, bishop of Nova Scotia (d. 1816) The king is weeping. I recently made the decision to remove all social media apps from my phone. Discovering that they were giving me the early stages of an addiction, I decided to wean myself instead of going cold turkey, and so my methadone is partisan political magazines. What has been more entertaining than the articles themselves is noticing how all shades of political opinion cast their opponents as so patently unreasonable and tribal in their position on any given issue that they are incapable of independent and rational thought . But reading today’s readings makes one sympathetic to those stuck in an impossible situation. King David’s mourning for his son is heart-breaking. All he wants, all he deserves, is to be able to properly mourn the death of Absalom, rebellious as he was. (And the humiliating way Absalom me...

  Tuesday, August 15, 2023 Psalm 104:1-25 2 Samuel 18:5-18 Acts 16:11-24 Observance: The Blessed Virgin Mary I order you in the name of Jesus Christ. There is a certain Japanese take-away chain that I was recently surprised to see still in business. My surprise came from the fact that I clearly remember how, some years ago, they caused quite the scandal; their chicken curry did not, in fact, contain any chicken. What they had been caught serving to customers was in fact the “forbidden chicken”: ibis meat. I suppose when it had been crumbed, deep fried, sliced, and then slathered in sauce, nobody really noticed until the food inspectors got a look into the back room. The feeling of getting one thing and later discovering it is something completely different begins at disappointment, and ranges to much worse. Having put food in your mouth only be told that it is actually something else automatically makes you want to spit it out. This is why Paul got fed up ...

  Monday, August 14, 2023 Psalms 108; 109:20-30 2 Samuel 17:15-18:4 Acts 15:36-16:10 Observance: Twentieth century martyrs The spirit of Jesus would not let them. We now end our little excursion into John’s gospel of Jesus, and return to where we left off in Luke’s gospel of the Holy Spirit, also known as the Acts of the Apostles. To bring us back up to speed: Paul has had his conversion moment, he has done his time learning from other Jesus followers the way of the Master, and has begun planting churches. There has been a big meeting in Jerusalem which he had to go and attend, and he is now heading back out into the world to tell everyone that Christians do not need to follow Jewish purity laws: we need to instead follow the spirit of the Law, directed by our love for the Lord Jesus. And so the next stage of the adventure begins, and we get this curious statement from Luke, with no explanation: when they tried to travel to certain places, the Holy Spirit ...

  Saturday, August 12, 2023 Psalms 99; 100 2 Samuel 16:20-17:14 John 12:36b-50 Observances: Muredach (Murtagh), bishop (d. c. 480); Blane, missionary (d. c. 590); Ann Griffiths, poet (d. 1805) I have come as a light into the world. Everyone loves giving advice. This is how you should vote in the referendum; that is how you should invest your money; you should check your car engine oil more often; you shouldn’t put that in your mouth. What is infinitely more difficult is taking advice. There are plenty of good reasons for not taking the advice of someone else. On political issues, there is the healthy suspicion of the lust for power. For issues with a commercial element, there is the risk of not behaving as a good steward. But on spiritual issues, such as with Absalom’s search for counsel, and the people of Jerusalem who Jesus taught, taking advice is impossible under our own strength. We read two reasons for rejecting sound spiritual advice today; tw...

  Friday, August 11, 2023 Psalms 95; 96 2 Samuel 16:5-19 John 12:12-36a Observances: Clare of Assisi (d. 1252), John Henry Newman, cardinal and theologian (d. 1890) My Father will honour anyone who serves me. Everyone likes a good comeback story. Having recently re-watched the 1970 film Waterloo in anticipation of the upcoming Ridley Scott biopic of Napoleon, that old film seems to have an (almost accidental) underlying message of the tragedy of a comeback story cut short just before it started getting good. Even though, as a good Anglican, one must sympathise with those who described Napoleon as “the monster”, one cannot help but admire the tenacity of a man who refuses to acquiesce to external pressure. King David is showing similar tenacity in his flight from Jerusalem. All through this journey we have been reading about his shrewd political nous, in selecting who of his loyal followers should return to the city to serve Absalom and keep the new court u...

  Thursday, August 10, 2023 Psalms 92, 93 2 Samuel 15:24-16:4 John 11:55-12:11 Observance: Laurence, deacon at Rome, martyr (d. 258) Adonai, what you do makes me happy. Scholars of human emotion tell us that to be emotionally literate we need to have at least thirty different words to describe different emotional states; us mere laypeople usually only have four. To be “happy” is thought of as one of those four base emotions, but until only recently, this was not the case. To philosophers, from the ancients through to the founders of the United States and on, “happiness” encompassed far more than some benign, general, positive feeling. Happiness is, in classical terms, what one feels when they have triumphed over the existential crisis: when the question of life, the universe, and everything is finally solved. It is a sense of rest. When one is truly happy, they no longer feel that sense of discomfort from being a rational being existing in a seemingly irra...

  Wednesday, August 9, 2023 Psalm 89:39-53 2 Samuel 15:7-23 John 11:38-54 Observance: Mary Sumner, founder of the Mother’s Union (d. 1921) Consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people. There are few joys in life greater than feeling like you are wasting time when actually you are accomplishing something. Sitting comfortably in an outdoor setting is one; resting in God’s presence without the intrusion of words is greater. Settling in with a half-decent British crime drama is a little lower on the list, but it still makes the list. Endeavour, the modern imagining of Inspector Morse’s formative years, is one of them. There was a scene in one of the last episodes, where Morse’s superior Fred Thursday has to defend his tragic decision to drop an important child abuse case in order to save his son’s life: “What about all those other boys?” an indignant Morse asks. “They aren’t my boy” Thursday replies, on the verge of tears. Chris...

  Tuesday, August 8, 2023 Psalm 89:1-18 2 Samuel 14:25-15:6 John 11:17-37 Observance: Dominic, priest, founder of the Order of Preachers (d. 1221) Who is as mighty as you, O LORD? This first part of the 21 st century truly is an amusing time to be alive. Creativity is absent from popular media, and the ease of international communication provided by the internet has brought out the basest of human nature right into our pockets. One of the most amusing side-effects of these cultural and technological movements has been the rise in what is called “neo-paganism”: a belief system that I am sure is mostly tongue-in-cheek, whereby the old “gods” of the vikings are considered still relevant and worthy of veneration. Seeing as the most famous of these heroes of old are now dressed up in tight-fitting, brightly coloured clothing and appear in B-grade film adaptations of comic books, this is the definition of a fad, moving out of fashion even as it was coming in. M...

  Monday, August 7, 2023 Psalm 90 2 Samuel 14:4-24 John 10:40-11:16 Observance: John Mason Neale, priest, hymn writer (d. 1866) God will devise plans so as not to keep an outcast banished forever from His presence. There was a theory going around once that, as all theories do, hold up for as long as one keeps it more as folk wisdom rather than divine law. It suggested that an individual’s political leanings reflect their family situation: where people voted conservative, their homes would have happy relationships, and the inverse was true for those who voted progressive. This all relied on the idea that if one was unable to resolve their personal relationships, they would outsource them to the government to solve. As an armchair philosophy it is not such a bad one, in that the theory itself is laughably brittle, yet the underlying thought process is sound. And the underlying thought process is that there is a universal human desire for happy family relationships...

  Saturday, August 5, 2023 Psalms 82; 84 2 Samuel 13:20-14:3 John 10:19-39 Observance: Oswald, king and martyr (d. 642) A day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. The BBC World Service recently produced a program on the exciting world of boredom. They went into the fascinating psychological and physical aspects of boredom; where it comes from; why it happens; and suggested a few reasons as to how it might be made useful for human flourishing. However, one cannot help but hear these well-meaning and thorough investigations into the human condition theologically. There seems almost to be a pathological need to escape boredom. The whole ritual of clocking off from work, racing to the bottle shop, racing home again, finding a new recipe for dinner with which to kill an extra hour or two before bed, and then slumping on the couch flicking through the first five minutes of innumerable television programs and movies on one’s preferred streaming ser...

  Friday, August 4, 2023 Psalm 80 2 Samuel 13:1-19 John 9:39-10:18 Observance: John Baptist Vianney, parish priest of Ars, France (d. 1859) The sheep hear His voice. When I was young, I used to read Commando comics voraciously. They were these little comic books, the size of your palm, and they contained stories of bravery and adventure in war. What was particularly seductive to this little boy’s mind was the idea of donning the blue suit with little wings on the shoulders, climbing into a Spitfire, hearing that Merlin engine roar, and flying off into the clouds. There are all types of heroes – and I don’t mean the type that wear their underpants over the top of their Lycra body suits. We all have them, and they play no small part in inspiring men and women all over the world to follow in their steps. To see a captain of industry, or master architect, or daring explorer, or even the man who drives the big truck, can work something in our minds that seems t...

Thursday, August 3, 2023 Psalm 78:16-38 2 Samuel 12:15b-31 John 9:18-38 I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me. Have you ever heard (or even been a part of) a conversation musing on the possibility that there might be a hierarchy of evil deeds? The most famous might be the one between Martin Luther and Rome, when the difference between venial and mortal sins were thrown out alongside purgatory and indulgences. Perhaps it is more the case that, when we ask the Holy Spirit for help to overcome a particular sin we are facing, one of the ways He helps us is by helping us see just how truly ugly that sin is. Whatever the case, the reason why sin is such a disaster for our souls and an affront to God is because ultimately they all lead to the same place: death. And there is nothing uglier than death. In the face of the imminent death of his baby boy, David asked God to prolong the boy’s life in every way he knew how. This is a good attitude to have. How often ...

  Wednesday, August 2, 2023 Psalm 77 2 Samuel 11:22-12:15a John 9:1-17 Observance: Germanus, bishop (d. 448) I went; and as soon as I had washed, I could see. One of the greatest films about aliens invading the planet Earth has to be They Live. The aliens have already successfully managed to take over human society, but they disguise themselves in plain sight. Only when the main character discovers some special sunglasses that see through the disguise is the game up, and human liberation can begin. What makes the film so special is that it exposes the myth of neutrality. There is no such thing as a neutral, middle ground. If we decide to turn off our brain and simply go with the flow, then we might as well be under the influence and control of the little green men from Mars. It is only when we put on the special sunglasses; that is, look at the world thoughtfully from a point of view we have been convinced is true, then we can really see things for what they ar...