Daily Devotional • September 4
A Reading from James 4:13-5:6
13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.” 14 Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. 17 Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it commits sin.
5 Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. 2 Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten.3 Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure during the last days. 4 Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. 5 You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.
Meditation
Draw near to God and God will draw near to you. (James 4:8)
As a musician, composer, pastor, and preacher, I think of the singing of popular “love songs” repurposed in praise to God as emotionally manipulative. Yes, the believer is likely to have experienced some form of romantic love—at times desirable, even transcendent. But surely the love God has for the world in Christ is deeper, more durable, more fervent than the love a lover has for the beloved. The kind of love that the cross demands of the disciple has a rough edge, backbone, and raw, exposed vulnerability that few romantic lovers are willing to risk.
Yes, I know—the Song of Songs seems to set a precedent, you say. Fair enough. And yes, Hoagy Carmichael in the hands of the right preacher might come close:
It’s not the pale moon that excites me
That thrills and delights me, oh no
It’s just the nearness of you.
Notwithstanding the cotton-candy spirituality this genre can sometimes encourage, the underlying theme of nearness continues to tie romance and praise together. But when the writer of the Book of James assures the reader that God will draw when you draw near, he is not indulging in sentimentality. He’s calling you and me to turn from broken covenants towards the cross of Christ. He’s asking us to abandon fig leaves and sheep skins and move toward the empty tomb. He’s inviting us to stop building towers to heaven—and instead to lift our eyes and see our humanity, in the crucified, risen, and ascended Christ, drawn into the very life of God.
The part of me that values propriety and theological ‘integrity’ continues to resist analogies in popular praise songs that draw on the thin substance of romantic love. And yet—oh, how I long to walk with Him again in the “cool of the evening.” Oh, how I long for the nearness of God.
Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!
E’en though it be a cross that raiseth me;
Still all my song shall be nearer, my God, to Thee. (Sarah Flower Adams, 1805-1848)
The Very Rev. Timothy Kimbrough is the director of the Anglican Episcopal House of Studies and the Jack and Barbara Bovender Professor of the Practice of Anglican Studies at Duke Divinity School. He was previously dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Nashville, Tennessee.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
Church of the Ascension and Saint Agnes, Washington
The Diocese of Oke-Osun – The Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion)
The Very Rev. Timothy E. Kimbrough, dean and rector of Christ Church Cathedral in Nashville, is a seven-time deputy to General Convention. This year he will serve as vice chair of the convention’s Constitution Committee.
