The Talebearer

Give Ye Them to Eat: The Feeding of the 5000 Seen Through Jacopo Tintoretto's Miracle of Loaves and Fishes

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:51:11 GMT

Jacopo Tintoretto, The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, (1545–50) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Jacopo Tintoretto painted The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes in Venice around 1545 to 1550. The canvas is oil on linen, five feet high and more than thirteen feet across, and it hangs today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The wide, horizontal shape is Venetian. Tintoretto painted it to run along the wall of a portego, the long central hall of a palace, or the lateral wall of a chapel. It was made to be looked at as you walked past.

Jacopo Tintoretto, The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, (1545–50) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Look at what he has put in the middle. Christ stands facing to his right in a pink tunic and a deep blue cloak, a gold halo around his head, dark hair and beard. In his left hand he holds a single round loaf of bread. His right arm is stretched out at his side, palm open, in the gesture of blessing. On the ground behind him lies a shallow dark plate holding three or four silver-gray fish. The fish are what the boy brought. Tintoretto has put them under Christ’s feet.

On Christ’s right stands an apostle in a black doublet with a gold-orange mantle wrapped at his hips. He is bearded, powerfully built, and turned in toward Christ, one hand extended, listening. On Christ’s left, a younger apostle, bare-chested with a russet cloth wrapped around his hips, stoops and holds up a shallow woven basket of loaves toward Christ. This is the whole engine of the picture. One apostle receives the word. Another lifts up the inventory. Christ blesses. The fish are on the ground.

Now look at who Tintoretto has put in the crowd. On the hillside behind and on both flanks of Christ, ranged in tiers up the slope, are women in Venetian silk gowns. Not five thousand ordinary men on the grass. Not a peasant crowd. Venetian gentlewomen with pearls and elaborate hair, seated on the hill as if for a summer afternoon at the park. A few older bearded men are scattered among them, but the crowd is overwhelmingly female and overwhelmingly patrician.

The foreground continues the theme. At the far left, a woman in a pink gown with a green underskirt sits with her hand on the shoulder of a half-naked man reclining beside her. In the center foreground, a woman in a coral gown with a pointed hood sits on the grass, and in front of her a naked child kneels, one hand reaching down toward a dark shape on the ground that reads as one of the fishes. On the right, a woman in a silvery-cream dress leans back holding a small child in her lap. Beside her stands a tall woman in a coral mantle with a pearl tiara, and another woman in silver beside her. The two rightmost women look on with the distance of a portrait — the ladies who paid for the picture, or their friends.

Tintoretto has painted the five thousand as the whole city of Venice arranged on a hill. He is not being irreverent. He is telling you the miracle is not for peasants only. The Lord fed everyone. The gentlewoman in silk needs the Bread as much as the beggar. The child in the arms of the mother needs it. The elderly patriarch further up the slope needs it. Nobody at Shepherd of the Hills is exempt. Nobody at Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice was exempt either.

Now turn to the Gospel. And when it was evening, his disciples came to him, saying, This is a desert place, and the time is now past; send the multitude away, that they may go into the villages, and buy themselves victuals. The disciples are being reasonable. It is evening. There is no food. Send them home. The Lord answers with a command. But Jesus said unto them, They need not depart; give ye them to eat.

Give ye them to eat. The disciples’ request is reasonable and the Lord’s answer is not. The disciples answer with the inventory. We have here but five loaves, and two fishes. And the Lord answers with a second imperative. Bring them hither to me.

Cyril of Alexandria, on the parallel account in Luke, sees exactly what has happened. The Lord takes the apostles’ inadequate resources and makes them the vehicle of the miracle. He does not multiply the bread out of nothing. He multiplies the boy’s bread through the hands of the twelve. What the apostles bring is what he blesses. That is the whole doctrine of the Christian ministry in one sentence.

The Prayer of Humble Access knows it. We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table. Cranmer took the words of the Syrophoenician woman and set them before the Bread. He wanted every communicant to hear the crumbs and to remember the twelve baskets of fragments. Article XXVIII is precise on the substance. The Bread which we break is a partaking of the Body of Christ. Not a symbol. A partaking. The boy handed over the loaves. The apostles carried them. Christ blessed. The five thousand ate. Every Sunday morning at every altar in the Anglican world, that action is done again.

The applications.

First, bring what you have. The apostles brought five loaves and two fishes and were embarrassed by them. The Lord did not scold. He blessed. Your gifts are inadequate. Your prayers are inadequate. Your Sunday School class is inadequate. Your visits to the sick are inadequate. Bring them anyway. What Christ blesses does not stay inadequate for long.

Second, do not send the crowd away. The temptation is to solve the crowd by dispersing it. Send them away. The Lord’s instinct runs the other way. He gathers, he seats, he feeds. When the parish grows and the resources feel thin, do not begin by rationing. Begin by feeding. The multiplication happens after the feeding starts, not before.

Third, count the fragments. The Lord had the disciples gather up what was left. Twelve baskets. Every Communion service ends with the ablutions and the reverent consumption of what remains. This is not fussy ritual. It is the recognition that the fragments matter. Every Sunday something of the meal is left over. It is your job to gather it. The parishioner still hungry after the service; the couple still troubled after the sermon; the child still lonely after the coffee hour. Gather the fragments. Feed them again.

Fourth, give them the Bread. That you must do. You have no better food to give a congregation. You cannot fix their marriages by advice or their doubts by a logical argument. You can put the Bread in their palm, and Christ has already blessed it. Cyril knew it. Cranmer knew it. Tintoretto’s noblewomen on the hillside are still waiting for it. Give it.

Bring the loaves. Bless them. Break them. Serve.

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 13, Year A. Track 1 readings from lectionarypage.net : Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 17:1-7, 16; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:13-21. Artwork: Jacopo Tintoretto, The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes , c. 1545–50, oil on canvas, 154.9 × 407.7 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (13.75). Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Luke , on the parallel account of the feeding. Prayer of Humble Access and Article XXVIII from the Book of Common Pray er .

Jacob's Spiral Staircase-Seeing Genesis 28 Through the Eyes of William Blake

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 18:15:37 GMT

William Blake, Jacob's Ladder, c. 1799-1806, pen and gray ink and watercolor, 39.8 × 30.6 cm, British Museum, London (1949,1112.2)

William Blake drew and colored his Jacob’s Ladder between about 1799 and 1806, and it hangs today in the British Museum in London — a modest sheet of pen and ink and watercolor on paper, less than sixteen inches high, with the Genesis reference penciled by Blake himself in the lower right corner. What is worth noticing about the drawing is that it is not, in fact, a ladder. It is a spiral staircase. Broad shallow steps curve up through the picture in a lazy S, rising from a rocky ground at the bottom of the sheet to a golden solar disc at the top, and the disc is not the sun but a doorway, at whose threshold you can just see the last figures crossing over and disappearing into the light beyond. What Blake has drawn all along that winding stair is not a procession of angels but a great throng of persons: women with baskets on their heads, a mother lifting a child, two figures in an embrace, a messenger carrying a scroll. Some are ascending. Some are descending. Two of them, halfway down, meet on the step and greet one another, and the whole spiral is populated with commerce between heaven and earth. At the very bottom of the sheet lies Jacob, his head on the stone and his arms flung out in a yellow-gold robe, deeply asleep, so that he does not know what is happening above him.

William Blake, Jacob's Ladder, c. 1799-1806, pen and gray ink and watercolor, 39.8 × 30.6 cm, British Museum, London (1949,1112.2)

Blake’s reading of the text is remarkably close to the Hebrew. In Genesis 28 Jacob has just deceived his father and stolen the blessing meant for Esau, and he is on the run — heading north from Beersheba to Haran, stopping at a place where the sun has set, taking stones (the plural is important, and the rabbis noticed it) and lying down. In his dream he sees a ladder, סֻלָּם (sullam) set up on the earth. The word is a hapax legomenon, appearing only here in the Hebrew Bible, and although it has been translated ladder since the Septuagint, the root suggests something more like a ramp, a stairway, or a mounted heap. Blake evidently knew this, because he drew a stair. The Lord stands at the top of it and speaks the covenant renewal — I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac — and then, most tenderly, he adds, Behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land. Jacob wakes and says two things: Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not, and, This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. He calls the place Bethel.

Now hear how the Gospel this Sunday reads Bethel back to you. In John 1:48, when Jesus meets Nathanael under the fig tree, he says, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. The Lord takes the whole staircase and locates it in himself. He does not say the angels ascend and descend on the ladder any more, but on him. Jesus Christ is Bethel. Jesus Christ is the gate of heaven. Augustine catches this in his seventh Tractate on the Gospel of John: where does Christ set the ladder now? On himself. Whoever climbs, climbs upon the Son of Man, and whoever descends, descends by the Son of Man. He is the scala — the stairway — between earth and heaven.

Blake was not a churchgoer, and he hated the establishment, and he wrote strange things about Milton and Los and the Zoas that no bishop could parse; but when he read Genesis 28 he saw something the theologians agree with, that the staircase is thronged, that heaven is not empty, that God is not distant, and that the wilderness where the deceiver sleeps on a stone is the same wilderness where angels are running errands overhead.

We should not soften or explain away the test on this point. Jacob has just committed the second worst act of his life, having lied to his blind father, stolen from hia brother, and fled the country. He is running for his life, and in the middle of that flight, at the end of a hard day, on a stone in an anonymous place, God comes to him — not to punish him, not to condition the covenant on better behavior, but to renew the promise. Behold, I am with thee. The staircase is grace, and the staircase came down to him.

Now hear the applications of this verse to life.

First, do not confuse repentance with worthiness. Jacob at Bethel has not yet met his brother, has not yet wrestled with the angel, has not yet paid back a shekel of what he stole; he is on the run, and God does not wait for him to become a better man before renewing the covenant, but comes to him in his flight. Wesley in the Notes on the New Testament observed that mercy runs to meet us while we are still headed the wrong way. God is not waiting for us to clean up our act. He is standing at the top of the stairs speaking our name.

Second, mark the stones. When God has broken through in your life, mark the place, as Jacob poured oil on the stone at Bethel and as the Prayer Book pours oil in baptism and confirmation. Keep the anniversaries; note the days; there are Bethels in your own biography — the year your father died, the night you were converted, the Sunday your first child was baptized, the funeral at which you finally believed the resurrection — and when the wilderness returns, and it will, you will need to remember that God has been in that place before, and you knew it not.

Third,acknowledge the traffic. Blake’s staircase is busy, and the angels are ascending as well as descending, carrying, presumably, our prayers and sighs upward and bringing back mercies and providences, because Hebrews calls the angels ministering spirits sent forth to serve them who shall be heirs of salvation. Modern Christians have grown embarrassed about the angels; do not be embarrassed. The gate of heaven is open, and there is traffic on the stairs.

Fourth, sleep on the stone. That is the imperative. There will be nights when the situation is bad and the sky is dark and the only pillow you have is a stone, and when those nights come you must sleep there and not despair of Bethel, because God has appeared in worse places than this one. Wake in the morning, pour the oil, and go on. The staircase is a spiral, and it is thronged, and Christ is at the top.

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 11, Year A. Track 1 readings from lectionarypage.net: Genesis 28:10-19a; Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43. Artwork: William Blake, Jacob’s Ladder, c. 1799-1806, pen and gray ink and watercolor, 39.8 × 30.6 cm, British Museum, London (1949,1112.2). Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 7. Wesley, Notes on the New Testament.

The Architecture of the Lord's Prayer (Adult Education at Shepherd of the Hills Episcopal Church, Lecanto, FL)

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 16:22:15 GMT

The Architecture of the Lord's Prayer-Chiastic Structure in the Lord's Prayer

Class Outline at a Glance

Introduction — the confession; prayer as architecture

What is a chiasm? Definition, Hebrew provenance, center-as-point principle

Macro-level: Lord's Prayer as center of the Sermon on the Mount

Structure 1: The Seven-Petition Chiasm (Wenham / Meynet) + epiousios

Structure 2: The Forgiveness Chiasm — volitional statement; Matt 6:14–15

Structure 3: The Doxological Ring — manuscript history; BCP context

Sources

Introduction

Good morning. The topic for this Sunday’s class comes from a question a parishioner raised, about the petition to forgive our sins, as we forgive the sins of others in the Lord’s Prayer. She wanted to know where this stood in relation to the other petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. How did Jesus’ disciples hear it? How should we hear it?

And then, a friend, Dr. Gavin Ashenden, posted an article on his substack page, The New English Catholic, discussing the structure of the Lord’s Prayer – its architecture. That led me to thinking and reading – but first let me start with a confession.

I have said the Lord's Prayer — by a very rough estimate — somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand times in my life. That number is probably conservative. Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, the Eucharist, baptisms, funerals, hospital rooms at two in the morning, and countless Sundays where I was standing at the altar on autopilot while my brain was composing the announcements.

And for most of that time, I treated it the way you treat a very familiar piece of music. You know it so well you stop hearing it. You know the shape of it, the sound of it, but the actual content — the specific, intentional, theologically loaded content — has gone quiet. What I want to do this morning is make it loud again.

Not by adding anything to it. Not by giving you a new translation or a new interpretation or a new spiritual exercise. But by helping you see something that was already there — something that was there when Jesus first taught it, something that the early church noticed and the medieval church preserved and that modern biblical scholarship has in the last generation worked very hard to describe with precision.

The Lord's Prayer is not just a prayer. It is an architectural object. It has a structure — a deliberate, sophisticated, carefully crafted literary structure — and when you see that structure, the prayer does not become different. It becomes deeper. The words you already know start doing something new.

The single sentence to hold for the next 30 minutes:

"The Lord's Prayer is the center of the Sermon on the Mount, and it has its own center, and once you see where that center is, everything else in the prayer reorganizes itself around it."

What Is a Chiasm?

A chiasm — from the Greek letter chi, which looks like our letter X — is a literary device in which a sequence of ideas is stated and then repeated in reverse order. The name comes from the way the pattern crosses itself. You go out and then come back.

The simplest example I know comes from Genesis 9:6: "Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person's blood be shed." In Hebrew, the words arrange themselves: blood / man / sheds / sheds / man / blood. It crosses at the center. That is a chiasm.

But chiasm can operate at much larger scales. It can organize a paragraph, a chapter, a whole book. And the crucial thing — the thing that makes this theologically interesting rather than just formally interesting — is this: In a chiasm, the center is the point. Everything before it leads toward it. Everything after it echoes back from it. The center is the destination.

This is not a Greek device, I should say. It is native to Hebrew poetry and prose. It runs through the Psalms, the prophets, the narrative portions of the Torah. When Matthew is writing a gospel for a Jewish-Christian audience, he is writing for people who are trained — even unconsciously — to read this way. They expect structure. They expect mirroring. They know that when a teacher sets a pattern, the center is where you should focus.

The Lord's Prayer as Center of the Sermon on the Mount

Matthew chapters five, six, and seven are the Sermon on the Mount. Scholars who study the Sermon's architecture — Jonathan Pennington at Southern Seminary is one of the most recent; Ulrich Luz, the great Swiss commentator, laid much of the groundwork — have identified a chiastic structure in the Sermon as a whole. The exact contours are debated, but the convergence is striking:

By almost every reconstruction, the Lord's Prayer falls at or very near the center of the Sermon on the Mount.

Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7)

↳ Section on prayer (Matthew 6:1–18)

↳ Teaching on prayer (Matthew 6:7–15)

★ The Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9–13) — THE CENTER

That phrase — "the center of the center of the center" — should stop you. Matthew was not an accidental writer. When he places the Lord's Prayer precisely here, he is telling you what he thinks the Sermon is about. Tertullian, writing in the early third century, saw this instinctively. He called the Lord's Prayer breviarium totius evangelii — "an epitome of the whole gospel." He meant it theologically, but he was also seeing the structural logic Matthew had built. This prayer is not inside the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is around the prayer.

The Internal Chiastic Structures

There are three main proposals I want to walk you through. They are not mutually exclusive — more like three different photographs of the same building. Each illuminates something the others may not fully capture.

1. The Seven-Petition Chiasm (Wenham and Meynet)

David Wenham — a British New Testament scholar, writing in the Expository Times in 2010 — and Roland Meynet, a French Jesuit and scholar of biblical rhetoric, arrived independently at a similar reading. The proposal: petitions one, two, and three form a unit oriented toward God — his name, his kingdom, his will.

Petitions five, six, and seven correspond, oriented toward our struggle with evil — our debts, our temptations, our need for deliverance. And petition four — daily bread — sits at the center.

Petition (opening half) Mirror (closing half)

A (1) Hallowed be thy name A' (7) Deliver us from evil

B (2) Thy kingdom come B' (6) Lead us not into temptation

C (3) Thy will be done on earth as it is

in heaven

C' (5) Forgive us as we forgive

★ (4) Give us this day our daily bread

[ C E N T E R ]

The Paired Petitions

Pair Wenham / Meynet (Seven-Petition) Significance

A / A’ Hallowed be thy name ↔ Deliver us from evil The holy name of God against the reality of the evil one — the outer frame of all Christian prayer

B / B’ Thy kingdom come ↔ Lead us not into temptation

The eschatological kingdom and the eschatological conflict that precedes its full arrival — two sides of one reality

C / C’ Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven ↔

Forgive us as we forgive

Both petitions contain an "as" clause — God's macro-will on earth takes the specific shape of forgiveness between persons

★ Center Give us this day our daily bread (epiousios) Physical bread + Eucharistic bread + bread of the coming kingdom — the eschatological and sacramental hinge

Meynet compared this arrangement to the seven-branched candlestick — the menorah — where all six branches angle toward the central flame. The center is not incidental; it is what the whole structure is lit by. The Word at the Center: ἐπιούσιος (epiousios)

This is one of the most discussed single words in the New Testament — and for good reason. It appears only twice in all of ancient Greek literature, both times in the Lord's Prayer: Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3. Origen, writing in the third century, noted that it appeared to be a Matthean neologism. He suggested it meant "what is necessary for existence."

Jerome, when he translated the New Testament into Latin in the late fourth century, handled the word differently in each gospel. In Matthew, he rendered it supersubstantialis — supersubstantial, above substance, beyond merely material. In Luke, he used the simpler quotidianum — daily. From very early on, the church was reading this word two different ways simultaneously.

Three registers — all at once (Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, ch. 5)

1. Physical: Bread for today — daily dependence on God, trust without reservation

2. Eucharistic: The Body of Christ as the true bread of life

3. Eschatological: The bread of the age to come — already given in the Eucharist as anticipation and pledge Tertullian, writing two centuries before Jerome, already reads this petition eucharistically: "Christ is our bread. In petitioning for daily bread, we ask for perpetuity in Christ, and indivisibility from his body." That is not a late medieval development. That is second-century North Africa.

If Wenham and Meynet are right — if daily bread is the center of a chiastic prayer that is itself the center of a chiastic Sermon on the Mount — then Matthew is saying that the Eucharist, physical sustenance that is also eschatological foretaste, is the hinge on which the whole ethical vision of the Sermon turns. "Give us this day our daily bread" is not the most modest petition in the prayer. It may be the most audacious.

2. The Forgiveness Chiasm

The second proposal focuses on a different center — confirmed by something Matthew does that is unusual. He adds a commentary.

Look at Matthew 6:14–15, immediately after the prayer:

"For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." Matthew is a careful literary craftsman. He does not comment on other petitions. He does not say "and of course mean it when you say hallowed be thy name." He does not explain the eschatology behind thy kingdom come. The only thing he stops to reinforce — with a conditional that is strikingly sharp — is forgiveness. And within the prayer itself, there is something unique about the forgiveness petition that distinguishes it from every other line. Every other petition is a request.

But the forgiveness petition contains the only volitional statement in the prayer made by the person praying: "...as we forgive those who trespass against us." This is the only line in the prayer where the one praying makes a claim — a commitment, a self-declaration — rather than a request. Present tense: we forgive. Not "we will try." As we forgive. The logic is as alarming as it is obvious: you are asking God to treat you as you treat others. Matthew will not leave this alone — returning to it in 6:14–15 functions structurally as a bracket. The prayer is surrounded by the theme of forgiveness.

Opening petitions

A Our Father ... hallowed be thy name

B Thy kingdom / will be done

C Give us daily bread (physical dependence)

★ Forgive us — as we forgive (volitional commitment)

Mirror petitions

A' Doxology: power and glory forever

B' Deliver from temptation / evil

C' Lead us not into temptation (spiritual dependence)

★ ← moral hinge; expanded in Matt 6:14–15

For us, liturgically, this is a serious word. When we stand in the nave and say the Lord's Prayer together, we are collectively making a claim: as we forgive our debtors. The prayer is asking: what kind of community are you, really?

3. The Doxological Ring

The third structure is the most contested, because it requires taking seriously something the critical text of Matthew leaves out. "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen."

These words do not appear in the earliest Greek manuscripts. They are absent from the Codex Vaticanus, the Codex Sinaiticus, and most of the critical witnesses. Modern translations, including the NRSV, omit them or relegate them to a footnote. The critical consensus is that they are a liturgical addition — probably very early, probably appropriate, but not original to Matthew 6. And yet.

The Didache — the late first or very early second century church manual, one of the most important witnesses to early Christian practice we possess — includes a doxology and instructs communities to pray the Lord's Prayer three times daily. The doxology is built into practice from the beginning.

The Doxological Ring

OPENING: "Our Father, who art in heaven..."

Hallowed / Kingdom / Will → God's glory and sovereignty

[Petitions for bread, forgiveness, deliverance]

Kingdom / Power / Glory → God's sovereignty and glory

CLOSING: "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory..." The very attributes that make the petitions possible — God's sovereignty, God's power, God's glory — are named at the close as the reason the prayer works. Notice what this does to the outer frame: petition one is "hallowed be thy name," and the doxology ends with "the glory, forever." The name of God and the glory of

God bracket the entire prayer. The evil one, petition seven, is the only element that falls outside the doxological ring — which is, theologically, exactly where he belongs.

In the 1979 Book of Common Prayer — the one we worship with — the doxology appears in both Rite I and Rite II: Morning Prayer (pp. 54, 97), Evening Prayer (pp. 63, 116), and the Eucharist (pp. 336, 364). Cranmer, when he wrote the 1549 Prayer Book, was insistent that the Lord's Prayer be said not once but twice in Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer. Part of the logic was precisely this: it is not an ornament to the liturgy. It is a spine. It is load-bearing.

For those of us who are Anglicans, the doxological ring is not a textual accident. The critical scholars are right that it is a liturgical addition. But liturgical additions are not corruptions. They are the church responding to something structurally incomplete and completing it. The congregation has been, for two thousand years, finishing the architecture.

Theological Implications and Pastoral Applications

1. This prayer is not vain repetition.

Matthew 6:7 warns against battalogeo — babbling, mechanical repetition without meaning. The Lord's Prayer, as we have been seeing, is the opposite of meaninglessness. It is a structure of intense density. Every petition is load-bearing. Every word is placed. The fact that you say the same words on Tuesday that you said on Monday is not meaninglessness — it is returning to a map. The map does not become less accurate because you read it more than once. When you understand where you are in the prayer's architecture, saying familiar words becomes an act of navigation.

2. The structure tells you what to linger on.

Adult Education — Shepherd of the Hills Episcopal Church If you want to pray the Lord's Prayer with attention rather than on autopilot, the chiastic structure gives you a map for contemplation. Take a week on each of the seven petitions. Hold the pairs together. Pray petition one and petition seven side by side: what does it mean that the holy name of God and the reality of evil are the

outer frame of Christian prayer? Sit with petition three and petition five — the two "as" clauses. God's will being done on earth takes a specific shape: forgiveness between persons. This is not abstract. This is about specific people in your life, named and unnamed.

And sit at the center. The epiousios bread. Ask honestly: when you say "give us this day our daily bread," what are you actually asking for? Physical food? The Eucharist? The bread of the coming kingdom? All three? Tertullian says all three. Jerome's two translations were both grasping for the same untranslatable word. That is a word worth sitting with.

3. Knowing this structure changes what the Eucharist feels like.

If the Lord's Prayer is at the center of the Sermon on the Mount, and the center of the Lord's Prayer is bread — specifically, eschatological, Eucharistic bread — then every time we celebrate the Eucharist, we are standing at the theological center of the Sermon on the Mount. We are at the center of the center of the center.

We are, every Sunday, receiving the answer to the prayer Jesus taught us to pray.

4. The forgiveness petition is the only line you have to mean.

Every other petition is something you are asking God to do. But in the forgiveness petition, you are making a claim. Origen struggled with this. Chrysostom, in his homilies on Matthew, spends considerable time on what it means that the petition is conditional — and he does not soften it. He says: this is what it is. You are asking God to be toward you what you are toward others. That is alarming. It should be alarming. It is intentional. The one place in the prayer where you are not a recipient but an actor is also the place where the stakes are highest. The prayer is asking the congregation a diagnostic question about its own life together.

Closing

There is a pattern in the Hebrew prophets of placing the most important thing in the most structurally prominent position — not so that people will find it easily, but so that when they find it, they will know they have arrived somewhere. It is like an architect who buries the load-bearing beam inside the wall. You do not see it until someone points to it, and then you realize: that is why the building stands.

The chiastic structure of the Lord's Prayer functions the same way. When you pray it in the liturgy — in the Daily Office, at the Eucharist, at a graveside — you are running an architecture. You are standing at the center of something that the church has been inside for two thousand years, that the Sermon on the Mount was organized around, that Tertullian called the epitome of the whole gospel.

Every time you stand in that nave and say this prayer, you are doing something that connects you to Origen in Alexandria, to Tertullian in Carthage, to John Chrysostom in Antioch, to Thomas Cranmer in the Tower of London the night before his execution, to the early church gathered in someone's house in Syria, praying it three times daily as the Didache instructed. The architecture has not changed. The prayer is the same. The center is still bread. The hinge is still forgiveness. The outer frame still holds the name of God against the

reality of the evil one.

Seven petitions. A center that is bread. A doxological ring. A forgiveness hinge that Matthew will not let you skip. And over all of it, the outer frame: the holy name of God against the evil that stands against it.

That is not vain repetition. That is the most carefully constructed prayer in human history — and you already know it by heart.

Key Sources

● Wenham, David. "The Sevenfold Form of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew's Gospel." Expository Times 121.8 (2010):

377–382.

The key modern scholarly article for the seven-petition chiastic structure. Wenham identifies the A-B-C/D/C'-B'-A' arrangement and the two parallel "as" clauses in petitions three and five..

● Meynet, Roland. Rhetorical Analysis: An Introduction to Biblical Rhetoric. Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Foundational methodological work from the Jesuit scholar of biblical rhetoric. Meynet applies chiastic and concentric structure to the Lord's Prayer and compares the seven-petition arrangement to the seven-branched menorah.

● Tertullian. De Oratione (On Prayer). c. 200 AD. The earliest extended Christian commentary on the Lord's Prayer. Source of breviarium totius evangelii and the early eucharistic reading of epiousios. Available in Schaff's Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3.

● Origen. On Prayer (Peri Euches). c. 233 AD. First scholar to note that epiousios appears nowhere else in ancient Greek and is likely a Matthean neologism. English translation in Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, and Selected Works, trans. Rowan Greer

(Paulist Press, 1979).

● Pennington, Jonathan T. The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing: A Theological Commentary. Baker Academic, 2017.

The most thorough modern treatment of the Sermon on the Mount's chiastic macro-structure, synthesizing Luz, Allison, and others.

● Luz, Ulrich. Matthew 1–7: A Commentary. Hermeneia series. Fortress Press, 2007. Standard critical commentary. Luz develops the view that the Lord's Prayer is "at the very centre of the Sermon on the Mount."

● Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger). Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. Doubleday, 2007. Chapter 5.

Ratzinger's treatment of the Lord's Prayer in its Jewish context. His analysis of epiousios as carrying three simultaneous registers (material, Eucharistic, eschatological) is a model of patristic synthesis.

● The Book of Common Prayer (1979). Episcopal Church.

The Lord's Prayer appears in Morning Prayer (pp. 54, 97), Evening Prayer (pp. 63, 116), and the Eucharist (pp.

336, 364). Available at bcponline.org.

The Knife in Mid-Air; Sermon Thoughts on Art and Scripture, June 28, 2026

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 17:40:30 GMT

Observations on Rembrandt's Sacrifice of Isaac and the Old Testament reading for this Sunday: Genesis 22:1-14, Proper 8A-- the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

The knife in mid-air: Sermon thoughts on art and scripture for Sunday June 28, 2026

George Conger

Jun 22, 2026

The painting hangs in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Rembrandt finished it in 1635, oil on canvas, six and a half feet tall. He was twenty-nine years old. He had only recently come into his own as a painter of biblical narrative. He chose to paint the moment most artists avoid.

Abraham has bound his son. Isaac is naked, his head pulled back, his throat exposed. Abraham’s left hand is clamped across his face, a gesture half of love and half of expedience. He does not want to see what he is about to do, and he does not want the boy to see it. His right hand has just released the knife. The angel has seized his wrist from behind. The blade is in the air. It is falling. It is inches from the boy’s chest.

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Sacrifice of Isaac (1635) Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg Most paintings of the Akedah show the angel arriving in time. Rembrandt shows the knife already on its way. The reprieve is not theoretical. It is a hand on the wrist at the last possible instant.

Look at the painting. Then read Genesis 22.

“And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering.”

The KJV - the Authorized Version - uses the verb tempt. The Hebrew is nissah. To test, to prove, to try by ordeal. Calvin in his commentary on Genesis says God did not need to learn whether Abraham would obey. God tested Abraham so that Abraham would learn what he himself believed. The fire was for the man, not for the LORD.

Three days they walked. Three days is the time it takes for a thing to die. Three days is the time Christ would lie in the tomb. The chronology is not accidental. The Fathers were unanimous on this. Augustine, Chrysostom, and after them the whole medieval tradition read Moriah as Calvary. Isaac carries the wood up the hill on his own back. Abraham carries the fire and the knife. The boy asks, “Where is the lamb?” The father answers, “God will provide himself a lamb.” In the Vulgate: Deus providebit sibi victimam. God will provide for himself the victim.

The Letter to the Hebrews picks this up directly. “By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac… accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure.” In a figure. En parabolē. As a type. Hebrews is reading the Akedah as a parable acted out three days before its meaning was clear. The boy is given back as from the dead. Abraham receives him as one already raised.

This is the OT lesson appointed for Sunday. It is the hardest reading in the cycle. There is no way to soften it. The text demands a son. The text demands obedience to the point of holding the knife. The text does not give Abraham a way out until the angel speaks.

There is also a gospel. Matthew 10 ends with three short verses that complete the missionary discourse Jesus has been giving the Twelve. “He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me. He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward… And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.”

Set the two passages next to each other and the shape of the week’s preaching emerges. The Akedah asks the great question. What will you give up for God? The Gospel answers in the smallest possible currency. A cup of cold water given in the name of a disciple. The God who asked Abraham for everything is the same God who counts a cup of water.

Jeremy Taylor, the Caroline Divine, wrote in Holy Living that the test of faith is not the great trial but the daily one. “He that will not be faithful in a little, will not be faithful in much; and he that despises the lesser graces, shall not be trusted with the greater.” Taylor understood that the cup of cold water and the knife on Moriah are the same instrument in different sizes.

Now three points of application.

First, do not read the Akedah as a problem. Read it as a mirror. The temptation, when Genesis 22 is preached, is to spend the sermon defending God against the charge of cruelty. That is not what the text is doing. The text is asking the congregation what it is currently being asked to give up. Most of us are not being asked for an Isaac. Most of us are being asked for a Tuesday afternoon. Or a particular grievance. Or an idol the family does not yet know is an idol. The question of Moriah is alive in every life. It does not look like Rembrandt’s painting. It looks like the small thing you have been refusing to put on the altar this week.

Second, hold the knife. The temptation in Christian devotion is to skip to the angel’s intervention before the test has been felt. Abraham did not skip. He raised the knife. Faith, in Hebrews 11, is not the certainty that the ram will appear. It is the obedience that proceeds without the ram in view. If you wait for certainty before you obey, you will not obey. Hebrews calls Abraham faithful because he reckoned that God could raise the dead. He did not reckon that God would intervene in time.

Third, do not despise the cup of water. The same God who asks for Isaac records the cup of water. The disciple’s whole vocation is not made of Moriahs.

It is made by small acts of fidelity. A meal taken to a sick neighbor. A phone call to someone who is alone. A check written without telling anyone. The Lord notices these. He will not forget them. Matthew 10:42 is the gospel’s promise that the small obediences are not lost in the noise.

Fourth, look at the painting again. Rembrandt has caught the knife in mid-air. That is where most of our lives are. The thing has not yet happened. The reprieve has not yet been announced. The hand of God is on the wrist, and the blade is still falling, and the angel’s voice has not yet been heard.

Trust that hand. The blade will not reach the boy. The ram is in the thicket already. You have not yet seen it. You will.

Take to the altar this Sunday whatever you have been carrying up the hill. Hold the knife. Let the hand of God catch your wrist.

Lectionary citations from the Episcopal RCL, Proper 8A, Year A , Track 1: Genesis 22:1–14; Psalm 13; Romans 6:12–23; Matthew 10:40–42. Painting: Rembrandt, The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1635, oil on canvas, 193 × 132 cm, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg . Working sources: Augustine on the typology of Isaac, City of God XVI.32 ; Calvin’s Commentary on Genesis 22 ; Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living .

The Killer at the Altar: Sermon thoughts for Sunday, June 21, 2026

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:21:34 GMT

Musings on the Gospel for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost — Proper 7, Year A

The Killer at the Altar: Sermon thoughts for Sunday June 21, 2026

Author’s note : I begin my sermon preparation on Sunday evening — working through each of the texts and experimenting with ideas, images and meaning as time permits across the week. I’ve been encouraged to write up my notes to share with the congregation, so they can see how we get to Sunday morning’s sermon from the Lectionary reading.

If you walk into the church of San Luigi del Francesi in Rome and turn left toward the Contarelli Chapel, you find three Caravaggios on three walls. To see then, you have to drop a euro coin into a meter, which turns on a light on a timer. As light brightens the room you see the Calling of St. Matthew on the left; the Inspiration of St. Matthew over the altar; and the Martyrdom of St. Matthew on the right. Caravaggio painted them between 1599 and 1600, in his late twenties, for executors who wanted a complete life of the saint on the chapel walls. The three pictures hang in the order of a life. A call. A book. A killing.

The Roman who came in for Mass walked past the killing to get to the rail.

That is the picture I want to explore for this Sunday’s Gospel. Our reading from Matthew 10 is a hard passage. Jesus is sending the Twelve out on their first mission, and he does not soften the assignment. He tells them they will be hated for his name’s sake. He tells them they will be brought before governors and kings. He tells them — and this is the verse the modern parish least wants to hear read aloud — that he came not to send peace, but a sword.

That verse is verse 34. It troubles us because we have been catechized to expect from Jesus a calm voice and a soothing hand. He is, after all, the Prince of Peace. He has just blessed the peacemakers in the Sermon on the Mount. We come to Sunday services partly because we expect to find peace there. And now, halfway through Matthew, we are told that the Lord we are following has come with a sword.

Calvin will not let us read this away. Neither will Luther. The careful expositors will tell you that Jesus is not commending violence. He is describing an effect. The Word he brings is not a soft word. It cuts. It cuts between truth and falsehood, between the kingdom and the world, and sometimes — Jesus says this plainly — it cuts between father and son, mother and daughter, and through the middle of a household. The sword is the natural consequence of telling the truth in a fallen world.

Caravaggio paints exactly that consequence.

The painting is enormous. Three hundred and twenty-three centimeters tall by three hundred and forty-three centimeters wide. Matthew has been struck down at the altar he himself was serving. He is on his back, brought low. A naked, muscular figure stands over him with a sword in his right hand, raised for the death blow. The killer’s left hand is reaching down for the apostle’s wrist. He means to finish the job.

The killer in Caravaggio’s painting has a name. Tradition, preserved in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, tells us that Matthew had carried the gospel to Ethiopia, where he converted King Egippus and his daughter Iphigenia. Iphigenia took a vow of virginity and entered the company of consecrated women. When Egippus died, his successor, King Hirtacus, desired her for his wife and asked Matthew to release her from her vow. Matthew refused. He would not soften the word he had given. Hirtacus sent a soldier to the altar, and the apostle was struck down as he celebrated the Eucharist. The man with the sword is no anonymous brigand. He is a king’s instrument, sent because a priest would not bend the gospel to a ruler’s appetite.

Around them, the worshippers of the church recoil. A boy in the corner is screaming. Newly baptized men and women in white are pulling away from the altar steps. A single shaft of light — Caravaggio’s invention, the light that made his name — falls from the upper left and picks out the killer’s shoulder, the apostle’s outstretched hand, and one more thing.

An angel is leaning down out of the cloud. The angel is offering Matthew a palm. The palm is the ancient Christian sign of martyrdom. It is the wage of the apostle who has died for the Lord he served.

The blade is falling in the same shaft of light in which the palm is being offered.

That is what I want the people of Shepherd of the Hills to see on Sunday. Two things happening at the same instant. A man being killed for his Lord. A reward being placed in his hand by his Lord. The sword and the palm are not opposites in this picture. They are simultaneous. They are part of the same Gospel.

Here is the pastoral point. The peace Jesus offers in this passage is not peace with the world. He says so plainly. He says he came to bring a sword that will cut between members of the same family. The peace he offers is something different. It is peace with God.

Most Episcopalians have been told their whole lives that they can have both peaces at once. That following Jesus is socially comfortable. That the Gospel will not cost them their friendships, their family relationships, their standing at work. The text in front of us this week tells the truth they have not been told. There is a peace on offer that holds, but it is not peace with the world. It is peace with the Father who counts every hair on the disciple’s head and sees every sparrow that falls.

George Herbert understood this. The poem “Aaron,” in The Temple, is the priest’s confession that he is “profaneness in his head” and “defects and darkness in his breast,” and yet, because Christ is in him and dressing him, he is “well drest.” The herald of the costly Gospel is also the disciple under the same sword he is preaching about. The rector who steps into the pulpit on Sunday with Matthew 10 in front of him would do well to read Herbert the night before.

So what does the sermon ask of the congregation?

First, that they not soften the text. The Lord Jesus said what he said. He did not come to send peace on earth. He came to send a sword.

Second, that they look at the painting — or imagine it — and see the two things happening at once. The blade. The palm. The killing. The reward. The disciple does not have to choose between them. They are part of the same moment.

Third, that they ask themselves which peace they have been seeking. The world’s peace will not hold. It is already failing them. The Father’s peace will. It is the only thing on offer this Sunday that will.

Caravaggio painted his own face into the picture, just behind the killer’s shoulder, bearded, watching. He insisted on being a witness. He insisted that the viewer be one too. We will be a witness to the same scene on Sunday morning, at the same altar where Matthew was killed, in spirit if not in fact. The question is what we will see, and what, when we have seen it, we will go home and do.

Lectionary: Genesis 21:8–21 · Psalm 86:1–10, 16–17 · Romans 6:1b–11 · Matthew 10:24–39 (RCL Track 1, Episcopal use), via The Lectionary Page . On the Contarelli Chapel cycle, the standard reference is Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio (Westview, 1983). George Herbert, “Aaron,” in The Temple (1633); see John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of Georg

The Quiet, Fruitful Season of Lent

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 20:30:18 GMT

The Quiet, Fruitful Season of Lent 

About three times a year I take a road trip through Western and Central Pennsylvania where my family calls home. As I have grown older, I have learned to love the natural beauty of my home state. I ran from this for years, focusing on run-down steel towns and increasing feelings of poverty throughout the Rust Belt that permeates many of the small towns in the Western part of the state. Today I choose to see the potential of the in-between places that used to seem lost and dying to a young person.

As I traverse the rolling countryside, often choosing tiny county roads versus highways, I drive through and by communities that offer a slice of life that seems otherworldly to me. Towns that do not often have a red light, or odd names like Nanty Glo, Alum Bank, and Scalp Level. I find myself wanting to stop in a corner store to feel the life of the people who live there. I often do pull over to small churches and wonder about the families this long-standing community may have supported over the years. Do their problems and wants and desires mirror mine? Do they struggle to pay their bills? Do they hope to be a larger congregation one day or is this it? While I am at it maybe aliens inhabit this lost part of the world!

On these excursions from place to place, I have developed my own micro ministry of praying for people that I encounter along the roadside. Not only do I pass by accidents but also the people attached to abandoned vehicles, truck drivers sleeping, illness along the way, the protection of those assisting others, and the animals who have gotten in our way by saying, “Lord, have mercy.”

February in Pennsylvania is not what it used to be. The snow totals have decreased significantly from my childhood, and while you may have a day hovering in the low twenties or teens, the following may be quite tolerable at 50 or 60 degrees. However, the temperature and landscape do not account for the feeling of stillness the late winter gives here, snow and grey skies or not. If rest had a feeling, rural Pennsylvania is it. This quiet season seems to fit internally, though. Especially when comparing it to our liturgical season of Lent.

While Lent traditions like Fish This Friday advertisements are not as common today, a sense of contemplation and abstinence remains from living a weather-influenced, country life. The cold pulls you into the easy chair as early darkness descends. Outside activities are restricted to necessary chores and travel unless you enjoy the cold. Abstinence comes naturally while you wait for the weather to turn. The growing season is months away when the air is crisp. Patience is not hard to come by.

When I take my usual hike, I may pass a few other humans and their furry companions enjoying the briskness of the air, but often my tracks are lonely. I find praying easy in Shawnee Park on Route 30 in Shellsburg, save for the want of beauty assaulting my eyes. At times I can find myself doing this for the better part of an hour. I am focused. The highway sound is far off, but close enough to be comforting when there are no leaves on the trees, and a buffering snow layer covers the trail. I revisit the closed-off and dormant places in my mind, only the places I want to share with God because I am embarrassed to share these failings with humans. I find sorrow, and healing in confessing and talking with my maker in the beautiful world He created. Where will this sanctification walk take me? I cannot see it. I have not been able to for years. But I can feel a sense of peace and anticipation as I traverse through and to it. Despite the lack of clarity, there is humbleness and hope as Easter approaches.

I challenge you to visit the places along the way on your journey to wherever. Experience a moment of life that seems foreign to you. I would bet that while the geography we live in affects our life’s movement, we are all the same flawed and amazing beings no matter where we find ourselves. Use this season to go into those places in your Christian Walk we do not dare go lest we tear off the scar we have so diligently sought to heal over. You may find the initial pain brings true healing, or a start of it, and clarity of the road ahead. If not, at least the ability to hold steady as you go.

Jesus died for us so we could be born anew, forever. There is great hope in His message and death. Won’t you spend time with Him this Lent?

The Talebearer

Healthy Praying

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 00:28:51 GMT

Healthy Praying

Thinking about a New Year’s Resolution this week? My resolutions usually focus on improving my health. Have you resolved to exercise more, to lose a little weight, to adopt a healthy diet? There is another practice you can adopt this year to improve your health that also connects you to God. That is prayer.

It is no secret that the practice of daily prayer and devotion brings spiritual blessings, but science now recognizes that it is also a source of physical health. Adopting a daily regimen of prayer – not just praying when the shells are about to land on your foxhole – helps you breathe in a way that strengthens your cardiovascular and nervous systems.

In a 2001 study published in the British Medical Journal, scientists at the University of Pavia in Italy undertook a study on the health benefits of praying the rosary. Twenty-three test subjects, all in good physical condition, had sensors placed on their body to measure blood flow, cardiac rhythm, and nervous system activity while they recited the rosary.

The Roman Catholic rosary is a Scripture-based prayer that begins with the Apostles' Creed, followed by the Lord’s Prayer, then the passage from the Gospel of Luke that begins the Hail Mary prayer and concludes with Elizabeth’s greeting to Mary from the same Gospel passage. For Roman Catholics, the rosary prayers center on the events of Christ's life and focus on four sets of Mysteries: Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious, and Luminous. Catholic rosary beads have 49 beads: six large and 43 small, and a Cross. The beads are divided into four groups of ten called ‘decades’, separated by large beads, with three small and two large beads on a small strand that ends with the Cross.

The Anglican Rosary prayers, which were offered at SOTH on Wednesdays before COVID, and which we hope to restart this year, are shorter and have a similar structure. Anglican prayer beads have 33 beads, five large and 28 small, forming a circle with one large bead and a cross outside the circle at the top. Inside the circle are four large beads, separated by seven small beads. These groups of seven are called ‘weeks’, and can be used for different prayers. Anglican rosary prayers do not have a formal structure like the Catholic Rosary but are self-designed, using the Lord’s Prayer, the creeds, seasonal prayers, the Jesus Prayer, and any other prayer that is important to your spiritual life. Praying an Anglican rosary begins with the Cross and large bead outside the circle, and then proceeds to the weeks.

In my private devotions, I begin by taking the cross in my left hand and saying a prayer from the Compline service: “O Lord make speed to save us, O Lord make haste to help us”. I then take in my fingers the external large bead and say: “Glory to the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.” Then I begin the weeks.

In the tests, the sensors registered a slowdown in the participants’ breathing, which caused the flow of blood to the brain and the variability of the cardiac frequency to begin to increase. This helped the heart and the nervous system to function with their greatest efficiency. When the participants ended their prayers and spoke and breathed as they normally did, blood and nerve flow reverted to their normal status.

In 2013 New York doctors, Patricia Gerbarg and Richard Brown carried out two studies published in the book: “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.” They concluded that the most efficient breathing was when patients inhaled for 5.5 seconds and exhaled for 5.5 seconds, breathing between 5 and 6 times per minute.

These studies helped survivors of 9/11, who suffered a chronic cough from exposure to the rubble. Practicing the 5.5-second breathing cycle for ten minutes a day, had long-term positive results on the cardiac, pulmonary, and nervous systems of those who faithfully practiced this discipline.

It is not the prayer beads that provide the spiritual and health benefits – it is the practice of prayer that accomplishes this. The beads are merely a tool, akin to a Prayer Book, to assist you in your devotions.

So if you want to get healthy this year: lose weight, exercise, change your diet – and adopt a prayer protocol that strengthens your soul as well as your body.

Happy New Year!

Hearing God

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 22:28:34 GMT

Scripture Reveals 11 Distinct Ways

1. God Speaks Through His Word The Lord speaks through His Word. This can be a verse, or He speaks to us in our daily reading or He reveals truth through a study. And there are many times He will highlight a verse or portion of scripture and then confirm it in our experience or thoughts. You might find yourself running into that same verse somewhere else, or someone else saying It’s like the Holy Spirit is breathing afresh on those Holy Words!

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.– 2 Timothy 3:16-17

2. Hearing God’s Still Small Voice There are times when the Lord will speak to us in a still small voice. This can be contrary to what we think God should talk like. We expect a powerful wind, a big shaking like an earthquake, or a roaring fire. We want God to be LOUD! But the Holy Spirit decides to whisper to us. These whispers can look like a passing thought, an impression, a strong sense of knowing. These things can be very real and powerful ways God speaks.

The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind, there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. 12 After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came to a gentle whisper.13 When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”–

1 Kings 19:11-13

3. Hearing the Voice of God Through Impressions & Sensing Impression or sensing something can be God telling us something. This is not to be confused with suspicion. It is a deep “knowing”. In Acts 27 the apostle Paul perceived that the ship wasn’t going to make it.

Now when much time had been spent, and sailing was now dangerous because the Fast was already over, Paul advised them, saying, “Men, I perceive that this voyage will end with disaster and much loss, not only of the cargo and ship, but also our lives.”– Acts 27:9-10

When Paul said “I perceive” the original Greek is θεωρέωtheōréō, theh-o-reh’-o; which is defined in the dictionary as “to be a spectator of, to discern, (literally, figuratively (experience) or intensively (acknowledge)):—behold, consider, look on, perceive, see. If Paul had a vision that would have been a different word. Paul had an intense “knowing” that the ship was going to sink.

4. Angels: God’s Messengers God will sometimes send an angel to speak to us. We see countless stories in the Old and New Testaments. The very word angel, Malachi in Hebrew, means messenger. The archangel Gabriel came to Mary to tell her she was going to conceive and bear a child.

And Mary said to the angel: How shall this be done, because I know not man?

And the angel answering said to her: The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee. And therefore also the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. And behold thy cousin Elizabeth, she also hath conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth month with her that is called barren: Because no word shall be impossible with God.

And Mary said: Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her. — Luke 1:26–36

5. Recognizing God’s Voice Through Creation The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.–Psalm 19:1-2 It’s such a beautiful picture when God uses creation to speak to us. This can look like the Lord reminding you that His strength is like a mountain, or how flowers speak of His beauty. But God can also use creation in unique ways to speak to us prophetically. Almost like nature is doing a prophetic act before us. This is also seen throughout scripture.

6. God Speaks Through Visions God speaks through visions and dreams. Visions come in two types: 1. Open Visions– These visions are like a TV screen is all of a sudden in front of us with our eyes wide open. They are extremely vivid and detailed. I have experienced these before and it’s something you don’t forget. 2. Visions of the Mind- These are more subtle, like the still small voice. These pictures happen within your mind’s eye. You can see this when Paul the apostle was blind and had a vision of Ananias praying for his healing…He didn’t see the vision with his natural eyes. Acts 9

7. God Speaks Through Dreams In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.–Acts 2:17

Dreams have always been a way God speaks to His people.

Now the generation of Christ was in this wise. When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph before they came together, she was found with the child of the Holy Ghost. Whereupon Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing publicly to expose her, was minded to put her away privately. But while he thought on these things, behold the angel of the Lord appeared to him in his sleep, saying: Joseph, son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife, for that which is conceived in her, is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son: and thou shalt call his name JESUS. For he shall save his people from their sins. Now all this was done that it might be fulfilled which the Lord spoke by the prophet, saying: Behold a virgin shall be with child, and bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us. — Matthew 1:18–23

8. God Speaks Through Trances Trances are not something you hear a lot about, but they are mentioned in scripture. “Trance” is ekstasis in the Greek. It means a displacement of the mind, i.e. bewilderment, “ecstasy”:—+ be amazed, amazement, astonishment, trance.

About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw heaven open and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”

“Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”

The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

This happened three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back to heaven. Acts 10:9-16

9. Hearing the Voice of God through Godly Counsel & Fellowship with other Christians Sometimes God uses other people to speak through. We see this throughout the Bible. Here are some examples below:

● The Baptist with Jesus

● Jesus with Peter

● The story of Paul and Ananias

● When the Prophets prophesied over people (example: Samuel & David)

● The story of Ananias and Sapphira

10. God Uses Circumstances to Speak to Us There are times when God speaks to us through circumstances. An example of this is the story of the prophet Balaam and the donkey (Number 22). God used an angel to prevent the donkey from being able to move forward. This hindered Balaam from cursing the Israelites, which God later told Him not to do. God will close doors, open others, and get us where He needs us. Sometimes God speaking isn’t through words, but through circumstances in our lives.

11. Audible Voice of God We see this in the scriptures with Jesus, Paul, and others. It tends not to be a very common way God chooses to speak, but He has done it.