Psalm 91:5-6

Psalm 91 was the Psalm this week (for the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels), and I was reminded of something I noticed about it a couple years ago (in December 2016), specifically in these verses:  "5 You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, / 6 nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday."  Both of these verses contain a merism relating to time:  "night" and "day" in verse 5 and "darkness" and "noonday" in verse 6.  Taken individually, each verse gives a sense of God's protecting us during the course of a single day.  But if they're taken together and each temporal element is understood as a different day, there's a sense of God's ongoing and continual protection.

1 Corinthians 1:18

Last Friday, there was an installation service for various LCMS leaders.  I saw some clips of this (on Instagram stories, of all places), including some of the readings.  I noticed something about 1 Corinthians 1:18:  "For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God."

I realized that this is in the form of a chiasm:

A. For the word of the cross is folly
B. to those who are perishing 

B. but to us who are being saved
A. it is the power of God.

As a word, chiasm comes from the Greek letter chi (χ), which is shaped like a (tilted) cross.  I don't know if there's really anything theological to this, but I thought it interesting (and a bit amusing) that this description of what "the word of the cross" is has a structure named after a cross-shaped letter.