April 16: The Enormity of God's Love
♫ Music:
Tuesday, April 16
God’s Relentless Desire to Heal the World
Scripture: Luke 23:33-34
And when they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And they cast lots to divide his garments.
Poetry:
From “Holy Week: Illuminations”
by Lisa Russ Spaar
Tuesday
Would I want to live forever, old claw
of winter branch, jogged by the puffed jay
preening there, his lush lapis body blurring wet into wet
against the cold-press wash of the sky?
To feel in me the oneiric tension of pent rain,
the velvet foreskin of each branch’s terminus,
the road a vellum, tar-slick vein encrypted with headlights,
flickering beyond the palings of a stand of saplings--
but then to rock in a final gust of wings,
shocked and emptied, and vibrate slowly to a standstill,
bereft in the wake of sacrifice and cycle--not my will, but thine?
And will this be heaven--a world I’ll inhabit, but is not mine?
THE ENORMITY OF GOD’S LOVE
It’s difficult for many of us, if we’re honest, to truly grasp the enormity of God’s love for us, is it not?
The first chapter of a book entitled Surrender to Love by David Benner begins with this provocative statement, “Take a moment and try a simple exercise. The results will tell you a great deal about your spiritual journey. Imagine God thinking about you. What do you assume God feels when you come to mind? When I ask people to do this a surprising number of them say the first thing they assume God feels is disappointment. Others assume God feels anger. In both cases people are convinced that it is their sin that first catches God’s attention. I think they are wrong and I think the consequences of such a view of God are enormous.”
Perhaps as Brenner wrote, it’s because we may feel we’ve disappointed Him in some way or He’s angry with us. It could be that we feel guilty or ashamed because of something we’ve done, or it could just be we’ve taken our eyes off an event that has grown so familiar to us that it’s lost its impact; I’m speaking of the cross of Christ
As Christians we have certain practices, we read the word, worship, serve, attend a group, give of our time energy and money, but as beneficial as those things might be they are not at the core of our faith. So what is? Oswald Chambers put it like this: “The center of salvation is the cross of Jesus and the reason it is so easy to obtain salvation is because it cost God so much. The cross is the point where God and sinful man merge with a crash and the way to life is opened-but the crash is on the heart of God.”
It is there we are delivered from both the penalty and the power of sin; it is there we will always find mercy and superabundant, lavish grace; the utterly irresponsible grace of God poured out on us who deserve the exact opposite.
My iniquity, my sin, my stuff is all I ever brought to the table in this deal; I was utterly helpless before the Lord; powerless to escape sin, powerless to escape death, powerless to resist the snake that was coiled around my heart. Jesus turns up on the scene and everything changes.
N. T. Wright paints this picture in his book Simply Jesus: “The pain and tears of all the years were met together on Calvary. The sorrow of heaven joined with the anguish of earth; the forgiving love stored up in God’s future was poured out into the present; the voices that echo in a million human hearts, crying for justice, longing for spirituality, eager for relationship, yearning for beauty, drew themselves together into a final scream of desolation.”
Imagine God thinking about you today. What do you assume he feels when you come to mind?
The real answer to that question can always be found at the foot of the Cross of Calvary. The first lines of the hymn from the 1904-1905 Welsh Revival capture it well:
Here is love vast as the ocean,
Loving-kindness as the flood,
When the Prince of Life, our ransom,
shed for us His precious blood.
Prayer:
Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down,
That the mountains might quake at your presence,
As fire kindles the brushwood, as fire causes water to boil-
to make your name known to your adversaries,
that the nations may tremble at your presence.
When you did awesome things which we did not expect
You came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.
Amen
-- Isaiah 64:1-3
Nigel Morris
Vineyard Church Pastor
Jazz Drummer/Percussionist
For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Artwork:
Christ Between the Two Thieves,1635
Peter Paul Rubens
Oil on wood
193.5 cm x 296.5 cm
Museum of Augustines
Toulouse, France
Artist Peter Paul Rubens is best-known as a painter of feminine beauty and for his princely portraits of the courts in Europe. However, his contribution to the field of religious painting is also significant. Upon his return from Italy in 1608, Rubens was asked to produce paintings for the altars of Antwerp churches to replace those destroyed in the iconoclastism of the end of the 16th century. The visual contrast between Christ’s pale complexion and the dark, earth-colored skin of the thieves was intended to contrast Christ’s innocence with the sin of the thieves, as does the downward gaze of the thieves compared to the upward gaze of both Jesus and Mary.
About the Artist:
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was a Flemish Baroque painter. He engaged in an extravagant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. Rubens is well known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and paintingsof mythological and allegorical subjects. Rubens's skill at arranging complex groupings of figures in a composition, his ability to work on a large scale, his ease at depicting diverse subjects, and his personal eloquence and charm all contributed to his success. His style combined Renaissance idealization of the human form with lush brushwork, dynamic poses, and a lively sense of realism.
About the Music:
“Lament - Radio Edit” from the album Diaries of Hope
About the Composer:
Zbigniew Preisner (b. 1955)is Poland's leading film music composer and is considered to be one of the most outstanding film composers of his generation. For many years Preisner enjoyed a close collaboration with the director Krzysztof Kieslowski and his scriptwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz. His scores for Kieslowski's films – Dekalog, The Double Life of Veronique, Three Colours Blue, Three Colours White and Three Colours Red – have brought him international acclaim. Preisner has scored many feature films including Hector Babenco's At Play in The Fields of The Lord, Louis Malle's Damage, Luis Mandoki's When A Man Loves A Woman, Agnieszka Holland's The Secret Garden and Charles Sturridge's Fairytale: A True Story.
About the Performers:
Lisa Gerrard, Warsaw Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, Dawid Runtz (Conductor)
The Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra is a Polish orchestra based in Warsaw. Between 1901 and the outbreak of World War II several conductor-composers regularly performed their works with the orchestra, including Edvard Grieg, Rachmaninoff, Maurice Ravel, Camille Saint-Saëns, Richard Strauss, and Igor Stravinsky. The Philharmonic has played host to the Chopin International Piano Competition since the contest began in 1927. The orchestra underwent an eclipse during the Second World War, during which it lost half its members to the war, as well as its building, which had been modeled after the Paris Opera. In 1947, the orchestra resumed its regular season, but had to wait until 1955 for its home to be finally rebuilt. The conductor Witold Rowicki was responsible for helping modernize the ensemble and ensuring the orchestra cultivated Polish music, bothold and recent, as represented by the works of Chopin, Górecki, and Lutos?awski.
Lisa Gerrard (b 1961) is an Australian musician, singer and composer who rose to prominence as part of the music group Dead Can Dance with music partner Brendan Perry. In addition to singing, she is an instrumentalist for much of her work, most prolifically using the yangqin(a Chinese hammered dulcimer).
Dawid Runtz (b. 1992) studied symphonic and opera conducting with Antoni Wit at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw. In 2014 he won 2nd prize in the international Wiltold Lutoslawski Conducting Competition and was invited to represent Poland at the International Forum of Young Conductors in Zielona Góra. In 2016 he made his debut with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra and in 2017 he became assistant conductor to Jacek Kaspszyk, the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra's music and artistic director. As a composer he won first prize for his chamber orchestra work entitled Evolution at the national Competition for Young Composers Uczniowskie Forum Muzyki in Warsaw.
About the Poet:
Lisa Russ Spaar (b. 1956) received a BA from the University of Virginia in 1978 and an MFA in 1982. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Orexia (2017), Vanitas, Rough (2012), and Glass Town (1999). The Boston Reviewnotes, “Lisa Russ Spaar’s intensely lyrical language—baroque, incantatory, provocative—enables her to reinvigorate perennial subject matter: desire, pursuit, and absence; intoxication and ecstasy; the transience of earthly experience; the uncertainties of god and grave; the dialectic between fertility and mortality.” She is also the author of The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry (2013), a collection of poetry history and criticism, and she was a 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. She has edited multiple poetry anthologies, including Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Jefferson (2016). Spaar has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors and awards. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.
About the Devotional Writer:
Nigel Morris
Vineyard Church Pastor
Jazz Drummer and Percussionist
Nigel Morris is a pastor spending much of his time in compassionate outreach efforts to service the poor in Orange County, California. He is also a world-class jazz drummer and percussionist. His passion for music and Christ came together when Nigel found himself part of the Third Wave Movement (TWM), a Pentecostal revival that swept the US, the UK, and Europe. Begun by Vineyard Church in Anaheim, CA, under the leadership of John Wimber, the TWM was responsible for bringing thousands of people to Christ. The Vineyard Church, in addition to its Gospel ministry, was also responsible for creating the sound and style that has become the bedrock for contemporary Christian Worship music. Morris became a well-respected compassion ministry pastor for the Vineyard Church and also an acclaimed worship leader whose talent has been featured on several of the Vineyard Music recordings. In 2015, Nigel began to explore new vistas in improvisational playing which resulted in his 2017 album Repercussion! In 2018, Nigel stepped down from his pastoral position at Vineyard Church, Anaheim, but both he and his wife Lynn continue to serve God, though you will often find them doing so on the deck of a cruise ship.