12So teach us to count our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. 13Relent, Yahweh! How long? Have compassion on your servants! 14Satisfy us in the morning with your loving kindness, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. 15Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen evil. 16Let your work appear to your servants; your glory to their children. 17Let the favor of the Lord our God be on us; establish the work of our hands for us; yes, establish the work of our hands.
This prayer asks for a clear sense of how short our time is, not to frighten us but to teach us where to spend it. It admits that mornings can be heavy and asks for gladness to meet them anyway. The closing request is humble: that the small, ordinary work of our hands would somehow matter. It is a good reading for a Friday, when the week's labor is nearly done and we wonder what it amounted to.
A Rhodian, who was handsome and rich, but nothing more, insisted on joining his class; but so unwelcome was this pupil, that first of all Zeno made him sit on the benches that were dusty, that he might soil his cloak, and then he consigned him to the place where the beggars sat, that he might rub shoulders with their rags; so at last the young man went away. Nothing, he declared, was more unbecoming than arrogance, especially in the young.
R. D. Hicks, 1925
Zeno (about 333–261 BC) was a merchant's son from Citium in Cyprus. He founded the Stoa in Athens, and his own writings are lost. This anecdote reaches us through Diogenes Laertius, who wrote his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers in the third century AD and drew on earlier biographers such as Apollonius of Tyre. It survives in the medieval manuscripts of that work.
The story is a little unkind, and the Stoics knew a teacher's methods could be rough. The point still holds. Zeno didn't object to the young man's looks or money. He objected to the young man treating them as if they were achievements. Most of us have worn borrowed glory like that, whether a title, a good address or a well-known name, and expected the room to defer to it. Zeno's test is to ask what is left once those things are taken away.
PracticeToday, notice one moment when you lean on a title, a possession or a connection to be taken seriously. Set it aside and make your point plainly, or ask a question and listen to the answer.
In 1529, two Reformation leaders agreed on almost everything. One sentence of Scripture still kept them apart.
In early October 1529, Landgrave Philip of Hesse brought the leading Protestant theologians to his castle at Marburg. He had a political motive. He wanted a united Protestant front, and the quarrel between Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli over the Lord's Supper stood in the way. Zwingli arrived first, a few days before the others. Luther came reluctantly, after being persuaded to go. The debates ran from 1 to 4 October.
Both men agreed that the bread was a sign. They disagreed about how far the sign was from the thing it signified. For Zwingli, Christ's risen body was in heaven, at God's right hand, and to believe was to eat. For Luther, Christ was bodily present in the meal. He opened the sessions by chalking the Latin words of institution, Hoc est corpus meum ("This is my body"), on the table. He treated them as a statement he would not reinterpret.
The surprise is how much they did share. When it was clear the talks would fail, Philip asked Luther to draft a list of points both sides could accept. The result was the fifteen Marburg Articles. Everyone present could sign the first fourteen. They covered the Trinity, the person of Christ, faith and justification, the Word of God, baptism, good works, and civil authority. The fifteenth affirmed a spiritual presence of Christ's body and blood in the Supper. It left open only whether that presence was also bodily, and whether it was received by the mouth.
That remaining gap outlasted both men. Zwingli was dead within two years, and the Lutheran and Reformed churches went separate ways. Nearly four and a half centuries later, in 1973, most of their European descendants agreed to the Leuenberg Concord and began sharing communion.
RememberThe Marburg Colloquy of 1529 failed over one point of doctrine, after the two sides had agreed on fourteen others.
Read nextHermann Sasse, This Is My Body: Luther's Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar