Daily Devotional • June 8
Pentecost Sunday
A Reading from Isaiah 11:1-9
1 A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
2 The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
3 His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see
or decide by what his ears hear,
4 but with righteousness he shall judge for the poor
and decide with equity for the oppressed of the earth;
he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
5 Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist
and faithfulness the belt around his loins.
6 The wolf shall live with the lamb;
the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed together,
and a little child shall lead them.
7 The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
9 They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.
Meditation
I have heard it said that we rarely listen to the people we know best — years into marriage or friendship we begin to write predictable scripts in our own minds instead of listening to those closest to us. And it’s not just friends and partners. We also tell uninterrupted stories about that church or those folks or the people that vote that way or believe that. It’s easy to hold people to the scripts their actions up to this point have written, leaving no room for surprise. No room for fresh plot lines. No room for newness of any kind to break in.
Today is a day we turn down the station playing the old story, and we make room to hear God telling new stories.
Today is a day where we are reminded that God is not only capable of surprising us, but is in the habit of doing so. God is telling new stories. The Holy Spirit that moves within us is the guarantee that God has not finished telling us new stories — and writing new stories in us and through us. There’s a story in our text today. The story is of a stump bringing forth fruit, an odd and surprising thing for a stump to do. Bareness is giving way to life, and a stump-like people are being reminded that God is still working.
Something new is happening, and that is the heart of Pentecost. Out of the old stump of our broken relationships and lives God is bringing forth a branch. God is doing something new. This is not the old, stale world of predictable stories being replayed; this is a shoot springing forth from a stump.
Pentecost means that God can surprise us. Pentecost means that stumps may just sprout because we have a future with God. We have a future with God, and we cannot say now what that story will look like.
Hannah Howland lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband, Curtis. They enjoy discussing their supremely different interests and eating ice cream. She is an aspirant in the Diocese of Christ our Hope.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
The Diocese of Multan – The Church of Pakistan (United)
The Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande
