Theology – SSJE: Recent Episodes
Theology – SSJE
Br. Lain Wilson
Preached at The Church of the Redeemer, Lexington, MA
The Sixth Sunday of Easter
Acts 17:22-31; John 14:15-21
On behalf of my Brothers of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist in Cambridge, I’m delighted to be with you all this morning. And happy Mother’s Day to everyone here, and to those watching online (including my mom!).
I’m especially delighted to be with you all on this Music Appreciation Sunday. I grew up surrounded by music. My earliest memories are filled with it. As a teenager, I sang in the cathedral choir. There, I learned what it was to be an Episcopalian. I learned the treasures of the Anglican musical tradition. Hymns and anthems continue to be one of my primary encounters with scripture and theology – including today’s gospel, which I still can’t help but hear in Thomas Tallis’s lush setting, “If ye love me.”
Music has also, in an important way, saved my life.
When I was in my early twenties, I found myself questioning my faith. Why did I believe what I believed? Did God exist? Was God necessary? Was I behaving irrationally or delusionally in clinging to belief? Wouldn’t it be better, more intelligent, more reasonable simply to let it go?
I spent a lot of time thinking, reading, and discussing this. And yet, one question persisted in the back of my mind. “What about Bach?”
“What about Bach?”
In my own journey of faith, this question was something like a lighthouse, its clear beam cutting through the storms and fog of doubts and uncertainty.
Maybe it was irrational to believe in something unseen, maybe I had doubts . . . but what I experienced in listening to Bach (and Benjamin Britten and Bill Evans and Jeff Buckley and so many other artists) was a transcendent beauty that seemed to go beyond what I could explain. Music was a place for me of encounter, shining a light to reveal the living God’s presence and activity in our world. “What about Bach?”, that annoying and persistent question, was the light that guided me home, back to my faith.
Saint Paul in his missionary activity sought to be that lighthouse, shining a light in the minds of his listeners and helping them to notice and encounter the living God. In the passage we’ve heard this morning, Paul speaks to the gathered assembly in Athens. He asks them to look anew and notice what’s there already, just in front of them. The altar, among the city’s objects of worship, may have been dedicated to a god who was unknown to them, but not to Paul. This was the creator God, the Lord of heaven and earth. This was the God active in all nations and peoples, drawing them to search, to grope, and perhaps to find. This was the God he worships, the God of Jesus Christ, in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
Paul invites his listeners, past and present, to know and encounter this living God: infinitely beyond our imagining, and simultaneously closer to us than our own skin, the ground of our being and the framework of our existence.
Each of you will have your own experience of encountering this God, present and active. It may be when you take and eat the mystery of Christ’s Body and Blood in communion. It may be when you join with the gathered voices of the rest of creation in praising our Creator, in the bleeding colors of a sunset, the magnificence of a summer thunderstorm, or the perfume of a lush garden. It may be when you recognize God’s perfections in the beauty of a mathematical equation or the impenetrable wonders of our universe. It may be when your daily work is done, and you are able to simply be in silence.
How have you come to know and encounter God? And, perhaps just as importantly, how will you be open to encountering God, who is always present, anew? The founder of our Society, Richard Meux Benson, noted that “there is no limit to what [God] will call us to. . . . As God calls us nearer to Himself, it is not merely that we may know Him more perfectly according to that manner of knowledge, or that manner of fellowship, which He has vouchsafed to us already, but He would teach us to know Him in new ways. We are to seek, and find it, from day to day.”[1]
Paul and Father Benson urge us to be open to seek and encounter God anew each day. And Jesus, in this morning’s gospel, reminds us that who we meet in these encounters, the living God present in our midst “not far from each one of us,” is Love.
Jesus gathers his friends together for a final teaching before his walk to Good Friday and Easter. “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. . . . On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them” (John 14:18, 20).
What Jesus intimates to his friends is something that we Brothers affirm in our Society’s rule of life: “the very being of God is community; the Father, Son, and Spirit are One in reciprocal self-giving and love.”[2]
God is love. Period. And this love is offered to the community of Jesus’ followers, then and now. Christ’s body – you and me and all who gather today and any days that have been or are yet to be – all gathered together into this great nexus of community, of belonging, of love.
This is so vital, because so many of the loudest voices proclaiming Jesus today may cause us to ask where the love is. We Brothers see this, and I know many of you do, too. Lifelong Christians come to us questioning not their faith but whether that faith is “Christian” anymore. Young seekers grappling with what it means to be faithful in a rapidly changing world don’t hear of a God of love and community, but of grievance, vengeance, and domination. Twenty years ago, I questioned whether Christian faith was rational; today the struggle is often about what being “Christian” actually means.
The good news is that God calls us to bear witness to what it means to be Christian in the example of our lives. We cannot encounter this living God, this One who is Love and community, and go away unchanged. We cannot meet the God whose Love abides in us without being transformed. “One soul really and truly sanctified” – made holy, as our Father Benson writes – “is capable of transmuting a whole world into newness of life. . . . The love of God shines out in the love of [us humans . . . and] there can be no limit to this love.”[3]
The good news is that if we are well and truly changed by our encounter with love, we become agents of that love. We become God’s lighthouses, our faithfully lived lives shining a light to bring others home to rest in God’s love. We become for those seeking after meaning, after purpose, after God the question that demands their attention, the example of a life transformed, the voice calling them to recognize the God of love, “in whom we live and move and have our being,” already present and ready to meet them.
Amen.
[1] R. M. Benson, The Religious Vocation, 74, 75.
[2] “The Witness of Life in Community,” ch. 4 of The Rule of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist (Cowley Publications, 1997), 9.
[3] Benson, Religious Vocation, 41, 42.
Br. Jamie Nelson
Luke 15:11-32
In their original manuscript form, the gospels did not assign titles to Jesus’ parables. But over the centuries, today’s gospel passage has acquired a well-known title you’ll find in many Bibles today: The Parable of the Prodigal Son.
There are several noticeable weaknesses with this title, as Biblical scholars have pointed out.[1] For instance, there are three characters in the story, but only one, the younger son, the Prodigal, is referenced. The father and the older son get no press despite their essential roles in this family melodrama.
And here’s another weakness: there are actually two prodigals in the story, not one. The word prodigal means wasteful or extravagant. Yes, the younger son spends his inheritance in recklessly wasteful and extravagant ways. No one can dispute his prodigal habits.
But there’s someone in the story who acts even more prodigal: the father who demonstrates extravagant compassion, mercy, and love towards both beloved sons. This is a parent who ran to embrace his long-lost younger son, who killed the household’s fatted calf for a feast and dressed the son in the best party clothes in the closet, the attire befitting the guest of honor for this lavishly catered homecoming celebration. This is a parent who left the party to beg & plead for his older son to join in the joy.
Titles function as signposts for the perspective we are encouraged to take while hearing a story. If we were to workshop a new title for the parable, there are multiple perspectives we could take. We could call this The Parable of the Two Lost Sons – given that this story concludes a trinity of three parables about lost things in Luke chapter 15 (lost sheep, lost coins, and lost kids), it makes sense. But the title I suggest we consider today is The Parable of the Father Offering Grace.
At its core, this story is about grace. The Book of Common Prayer’s catechism describes grace as “God’s favor towards us, unearned and undeserved” (p. 858). The freely given and undeserved favor of God is like a fountain eternally overflowing with the living water of forgiveness, transformation, and new life. Both sons learned something about grace through their father’s words and deeds.
What did they learn? A lesson about economics. The word “economy” refers to the system of producing, distributing, and consuming goods, services, and resources through exchanges of value. It originated from the Greek word oikonomia, which referred to the household management of a family estate, similar to the family estate depicted in our parable.
The two sons are operating in an economy based on scarcity, consumption, and merit. The younger son treats his inheritance as something to be consumed. The older son treats love as something to be earned and proportionally distributed according to performance.
However, the father operates in a vastly different economic system, one based on abundant grace freely given and received. In this economy of grace, relationships, reconciliation, and rejoicing erase the record books of consumption and merit. Free and undeserved favor is given regardless.
You may have heard of a gift economy. In a gift economy, gifts create relationships, giving is not tracked for exact repayment in kind, and value circulates through generosity. God’s economy of grace works similarly.[2] In a grace economy, everything begins as a gift from God, earning and deserving are replaced by belonging and relationship, and abundance supersedes scarcity-based thinking.
So how can we participate in this grace economy? We’re doing it right here, right now.
The sacraments are defined as “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace” (Book of Common Prayer, 857). By participating in the Eucharist, we are participating in experiential training on grace-based economics. Eucharist is a gift offered, received with thanks, broken open, and shared. Fed with the bread of life and cup of salvation, we are reminded that God’s love is an inexhaustible gift.
So take, eat, and go forth in grace, beloved children of a Prodigal God.
[1] Among others, A.-J. Levine,“Titles Matter,” in Short Stories by Jesus (HarperCollins, 2014), 30-32; W. Barclay, Daily Study Bible Series: The Gospel of Luke (Westminster, 1977), 243-45.
[2] Kathryn Tanner’s book Economy of Grace (Fortress Press, 2005) develops this concept.
Br. Keith Nelson
Saint Michael and All Angels
Revelation 12:7-12
John 1:47-51
“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.”
In the Nicene Creed, we affirm our faith and trust in God our Creator in these terms. As the earth all around us proceeds from a divine source, so too does heaven: the nearer presence of God to which we are invited for eternity. As the beings and things around us manifest to our senses constitute the “material expression of God’s love,” so too do those unseen beings of the same created order share a mysterious role in God’s unfolding plan for us, albeit one hidden from our natural senses.
This, in a nutshell, is the theological ground of our celebration today: The feast of St. Michael and All Angels. We prayed in today’s collect, “Grant that, as your holy angels always serve and worship you in heaven, so by your appointment may they help and defend us here on earth.” Angels – and angel simply means “messenger” – act as mediators between earth and heaven, the seen and the unseen. The angels point us to the perennial question: “How is God present in the world? And what is our response to that presence?”
The ministries of angels may seem too fanciful or abstract a place for the modern mind to begin, so we can turn first to the ministrations of everyday creatures.
Through this liturgical season of Creation, we have affirmed and celebrated God’s presence to us in the creatures God has made and called “very good”: other humans, but also the sun, moon, and stars; the sky above and waters below; the soil and plants, birds and four-footed beasts. God is present in the world to us through them.
Perhaps you have experienced moments in the presence of God’s non-human creatures when you felt quiet and still, wordlessly available to the simple goodness of that being in its otherness. A plant or a stone, a river or a bird, can indeed minister to us, and we to them. This is not simply human projection, but a glimpse of God’s original intention for creation: a relationship of harmonious companionship, in which our mutual presence lifts one another beyond complexity, difference, and enmity, closer to the heart of the Creator.
I feel this especially when I am in the presence of certain very old trees. An old oak tree, encountered individually in this way, hums with its own distinct life and personality. Yet it also acts powerfully, even selflessly, as an ambassador of its entire species. To encounter one Oak is to encounter all Oaks, all oak-kind. In the life of one is the life of all. This is corroborated not only by global folk wisdom but by modern tree science.
Perhaps angels are not all that different than oaks.
Though today we celebrate St. Michael, and by extension other named angels such as Gabriel, Raphel, and Uriel, the vast majority of scripture’s many angels are anonymous. In the life of one angel is the life of all angels: and this life, in its essence, is a life centered in the nearer presence of God. It is the glory of God, not themselves, that the angels are intent on communicating.
The author of the Letter to the Hebrews asks, “Are not all angels spirits in the divine service, sent to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?”
Christian tradition has interpreted this to suggest that, as spirits, angels are invisible and immaterial creatures. Summarizing the tradition in the thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas maintains that angels possess individual consciousness, but consciousness that is utterly unlike ours because it is not mediated or organized around a body. As “bodiless powers,” angels have no physical senses, no appetites, and presumably no gender. They communicate and receive communication from God and from one another beyond language, non-discursively, and instantaneously. And they act in response to such communication with an efficacy of will that far surpasses ours.
Tradition holds that they appear to us in forms legible to our senses, and remarkably like our own, because this is the most effective means to inspire awe, to establish relationship, and to draw our minds, hearts, and wills into harmonious alignment and obedience to the divine will.
Perhaps you can see where this is leading: all angels point us toward the mystery at the core of our faith, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the greatest messenger of God’s presence. The incarnation of Jesus Christ – God made human – has bridged the divide between heaven and earth in a way no angel could: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of a Father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” Jesus answers most fully the question of how God is present in the world: not simply like one of us, but as one of us; with a body like ours; joys like ours; pain and sorrow like ours; a death like ours; and a resurrection from the dead that has destroyed the power of death. In Jesus, we participate in that resurrection life even now. The first letter of Peter affirms: these are “things into which angels long to look!”
If visible creatures and invisible angels are our neighbors in God’s created order, the demons are, by their own choice and proclamation, our unseen enemies. As the loud voice in heaven proclaims in our reading from Revelation: “Rejoice then, you heavens, and those who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, for the devil has come down to you with great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!”
The great sin of the fallen angels is pride: not the rightful sense of satisfaction in a job well done, but that spiritual presumption that fails to recognize that no gift is inherently our own, but a gift of the Creator to be used for the good of all creation.
Here is how one early monastic writer, John Cassian, describes the origin of pride in the fall of Satan:
“We see that the angel who, on account of his great splendor and beauty, was called Lucifer was cast out of heaven for no other vice than this one. . . . This thought alone was his first downfall. Because of it he was abandoned by God, whom he did not believe that he needed. At once he lost his balance; he tottered, became fully aware of the frailty of his own nature, and lost the blessedness that he has enjoyed as a gift of God. . . . In his belief that he could attain to the glory of the Godhead by his own free will and effort, he lost even that which was his by the grace of the Creator.”
St. Michael the Archangel (art by Br. Keith Nelson)
I will end with an image. You have before you a small token of today’s feast, an image of the archangel Michael I created based on an early medieval prototype.
In the upper left of the image, we see the cross of Christ, held in the right hand of St. Michael. In and by the cross, every enemy of love and truth is conquered. The cross surmounts a spear. While the tail of Satan, depicted as the dragon of Revelation, raises its own barb at God’s angel, St. Michael fearlessly holds Satan in his proper place and at his proper distance. The spear tip is aimed at the mouth of the dragon, who is is “the deceiver of the world” through the lies he speaks. The truth of God’s salvation in Christ is the antidote to every lie. In his left hand, St. Michael holds a sphere that symbolizes the world, held safe in the hand of God its Creator.
The name Michael means “Who is like God?” The answer of course is: no one is like God. The humility before God at the heart of Michael’s name is the source of his victory.
While most images depict St. Michael and the dragon, Satan, as inverse opposites, there is one telling detail in this image that reveals their common origin: their wings. Unlike later images of Satan, with leathery bat-wings, his wings here are identical to Michael’s. This is a pointed reminder that Satan and his host are fallen angels. In this we find something profound: they are not evil by nature. They have become evil by their own choice to turn from God. Nothing created by God is inherently evil. Genesis declares, “And God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good.”
Like the angels, we are gathered here before the heavenly throne to pray on behalf of all and for all. Like St. Michael, we are called to hold the world’s evils at the proper distance, rising above it in thought, word, and deed, with God’s help. But with the angelic host we worship a God of unrelenting Love, extending prayers to the farthest depths, where we see only evil, hatred, even antichrist with his many masks. Persisting to the end, we “shall see greater things than these: heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
Trinity Sunday
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5
Several years ago, I enrolled in a drawing class. I am not a creative person, but I thought it would be good to exercise that part of my brain. In my first class, the instructor gave us a stick of charcoal, put us in front of a piece of blank newsprint, and told us to draw anything.
Did I mention I’m not a creative person?
Honestly, I just froze. Absolutely nothing came to mind. I stared at the blank sheet, mildly panicking, and feeling very powerless and very alone.
The class got better, and I did learn to draw. I don’t think I became any more creative, but what I did gain was a fresh perspective, a way of looking through what seemed to be a new set of eyes. I learned to see shadow as well as line, the spaces in between as well as familiar forms.
Today is Trinity Sunday. And on this Trinity Sunday, we are being invited, more than ever, to see with a new set of eyes. As we celebrate the mystery of God as Trinity; as we rejoice in our creation, redemption, and sanctification; as we lift our voices in hymns and praise; we cannot but be aware of what surrounds our celebration. War and political violence, fear and insecurity, petty vindictiveness and hollow posturing. Whether we read it in the news, see it with our eyes, or feel it in our bodies, we are all aware of the overwhelming wrongness that surrounds us, in our country and in our world.
But I think this celebration is exactly what these troubled and tumultuous times calls for. This celebration today of the triune God has so much to say about who God is for us, who we are for God, and who we are for each other. We are invited to see the Trinity afresh, and that seeing encourages us to see others with new eyes.
We praise today God our Creator. Our Rule of Life expresses one central way to understand the Trinity: “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are One in mutual self-giving and receiving.”[1] The very act of creation, of our creation, of the world’s, an act of “pure self-emptying,” is an expression of who God is.
Our creation was in the image and likeness of this self-giving God; sin—turning away from God, again and again and again—eroded this image, making it harder and harder for us to see that God-shaped pattern that we were created with. Disobedience and murder took place in the first two generations of humanity’s primordial story. Each age confronts the consequences of sin in its own way. In ours, dislocation and isolation, convenient violence, demonization and dehumanization. The denial of the inherent, God-given dignity of all of our neighbors, fellow children and creations of God.
Remembering God our Creator today draws our attention out from ourselves: “O Lord our Governor, how exalted is your Name in all the world!” (Ps. 8:1). It draws our imaginations up: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses” (Ps 8:4). And it reminds us of our own dignity as creatures: “What is man that you should be mindful of him? The son of man that you should seek him out? You have made him but little lower than the angels; you adorn him with glory and honor.” (Ps 8:5-6).
How does this exalted language strike you today?
Praising God our Creator today, as we encounter so much hardship, so much anxiety, so much uncertainty, alerts us to the gap between the glory and honor promised us and the sorry state we so often find ourselves in—and the help we need.
And so today we praise God our Redeemer, who meets us in that sorry state, who empties himself and takes on our human nature. “God proves his love for us,” Saint Paul writes to the Church in Rome, “in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8); and it is through him that “we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God” (Rom 5:2).
Remembering God our Redeemer today draws our gaze back down to earth, to our daily struggles and afflictions and inadequacies, to all the ways in which we daily fail to live up to the promise of our creation—draws our gaze to all of that, and makes us know that that failure is not the last word.
What are you carrying today?
Remembering God our Redeemer today reminds us that whatever failures or disappointments or setbacks we face, no matter how bad the world and our own lives get, that is not the last word. The last word is that God has freed us through Jesus Christ, and that God remains with us always.
And so today we praise God our Sanctifier, guiding us who have been created and redeemed through a world that can still so often feel hostile. In the face of injustice, of violence, of overweening pride, of sin—of all that is not God—God our Sanctifier surrounds and upholds and strengthens us with the daily, the hourly, the constant assurance and hope of God’s unfailing love and presence. “We also boast in our sufferings” (Rom 5:3)—what Saint Paul asserts here, as Joseph Fitzmyer notes, is that “suffering and affliction become precisely the point at which hope is encountered and proves itself.”[2] “Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts” (Rom 8:5).
If for us God is Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, what, then, are we to God? We are God’s beloved, and we are God’s delight. “What is man that you should be mindful of him?” What is man—what is humanity—who are we—but God’s beloved creations, fallen and redeemed, God’s image and likeness in the world, God’s children in whom God delights. “I was daily his delight,” Wisdom speaks in the book of Proverbs, “rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race” (Prov 8:30-31). And so equally today when we praise God our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, we can only be humbled by our own high calling—God’s beloved, God’s delight, the apple of God’s eye.
How does this feel to you today? Do you accept it? Do you struggle with it?
How wonderful, how strange, to know ourselves to be God’s beloved, to come to know and feel in our very bones that we are God’s delight . . . while still seeing all that is wrong around us.
I feel that this may be as much of a mystery as the Trinity is.
If the mystery of the Trinity, even only imperfectly understood, elicits in us praise and celebration, the mystery of our own salvation by that same Trinity—Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier—can only—should only—elicit in us a response of humble thanks and determination to adopt a fresh perspective, to see with new eyes. To see all our neighbors with the eyes of the Trinity: as beloved siblings, in whom is found cause for delight, who suffer in ways that may be hidden from us, and who share in the same hope of God’s future, when all will be one.
Amen.
[1] The Rule of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist (Lanham, MD, 1997), 12.
[2] J. A. Fitzmyer, Romans, The Anchor Bible (New York, 1993), 397.
Br. Geoffrey Tristram
‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely from now on, all generations will call me blessed.’ The great song of praise which Mary poured forth to God, which we know as the Magnificat. Mary says all generations will call me blessed, and so today, on this last Sunday before Christmas, we too honor the Virgin Mary, and we call her blessed.
Four miles outside the city of Jerusalem, there is a small village called Ein Karem. Those of you who have made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land may know it. In the village, set high up above a lovely, wooded valley stands the ancient church which was built over the traditional site of the home of Zechariah and Elizabeth. And that is where Mary went as fast as she could, as our gospel reading tells us today, right after that extraordinary encounter she had with the Angel Gabriel. Gabriel came to with a message of good news; ‘Mary, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son and you will name him Jesus. He will be holy and will be called of God’. She must have been terrified and amazed. Can this be true? She needed to tell her older cousin about the angel’s message, the utterly stupendous news that she had been chosen to be the mother of God’s Son. So ‘She arose, and went with haste’, Luke tells us, and then we have one of the most beautiful and poignant passages in all of Scripture. After a long journey Mary arrives at Elizabeth’s house, and she greets Elizabeth. ‘And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary,’ Luke tells us, ‘the babe leapt in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb”.’
Elizabeth’s prophetic insight is amazing. She knows that Mary has been specially chosen by God, and that her child is special. She knows, without being told, that Mary is pregnant, and that her child will have a significance even greater than that of her own son John. But then comes Elizabeth’s most dramatic statement, dropped almost casually. ‘Why is this granted me that the mother of my Lord comes to me?’ The mother of my Lord! This was a breathtaking thing to say, because the word ‘Lord’ was only used among the Jewish people and in the Hebrew scriptures, when referring to God. It is the same as if she said, ‘Why is this granted me that the mother of my God comes to me.’ Mary’s very presence in her house causes Elizabeth to be filled with the Holy Spirit, the child in her womb leaps for joy, and Elizabeth cries out aloud. This is no cozy domestic scene. Elizabeth’s cry is an ecstatic response to the presence of the divine in her midst. The moment is for Elizabeth a full-blown divine revelation, a theophany. And for Mary, it is also a confirmation from her cousin that the message from Gabriel was true; that she would indeed give birth to the Son of God. And so she too, in a similar ecstatic response, breaks out into a great song of praise to God, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my Spirit rejoices in God my Savior…the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.’
In this humble home, in this tiny village, Elizabeth becomes the first to witness the great mystery of the Incarnation, which lies at the heart of our faith, that, ‘For our salvation, our Lord came down from heaven; by the power of the Holy Spirit, he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man.’ Theologians through the centuries have tried to fully understand and explain the mystery of the Incarnation, yet it remains a mystery. Sometimes, before a mystery, it is better to remain silent and to simply gaze in awe and wonder. One of my favorite icons, and one which I have gazed at over many years, is the icon here of Mary and her child Jesus. I find it extraordinarily beautiful, with unfathomable depth. It is a 12th century Byzantine icon known as ‘Our Lady of Vladimir’. After our worship you would be welcome to come up and have a closer look. The child Jesus is being held in the arms of his mother Mary. They embrace cheek to cheek. Jesus gazes towards his mother, whilst Mary looks out toward the viewer. Her gaze I find quite compelling. Her eyes are filled with maternal tenderness, but there is also a poignant sense of sorrow, as if already anticipating Calvary; ‘for a sword will pierce your own soul too.’
But what I find most moving about the icon is something which it is easy to miss. But for me it speaks most eloquently, both emotionally and theologically about the mystery of the incarnation. Just below Mary’s left ear there is a tiny hand. Jesus has his arm right around Mary’s neck and his hand is holding her tight. Here is the Son of God, but now vulnerable, trusting and clinging tightly to his human mother, Mary. How extraordinary that God, in order to save us, should take on human form and entrust his Son to a human mother. Why did the omnipotent God risk choosing to involve Mary in the great plan of redemption, and even wait on her consent?
It’s a mystery, but some words of St. Augustine have been important for me over the years. He said, ‘Without God we cannot: Without us, God will not.’
Without God, without God’s power, God’s strength we can do nothing; there would be no creation. But without us, without our willing cooperation, without our saying ‘yes’ like Mary, to God’s call, God will never force his way into our affairs. God calls us, invites us, and longs for us to say ‘yes.’ Without us, God will not.’ The thought that God actually needs me to share in God’s work of healing and mending a broken world is truly humbling. The thought that God trusts me and you enough to call each one of us to be co-creators with God in the work of the Kingdom. That is pretty wondrous. All through our lives God calls us to share in this holy work of building God’s Kingdom. I wonder how God might be calling you now. At this point in your life, how is God inviting you to share in mending our broken world? What is stirring in your heart? It’s not so much what we do for God, but what we allow God to do through us. However unskilled or inadequate, or whatever failures we feel in the spiritual life, however poor we feel our offering to be, it is our openness and willingness to be used that God honors. ‘Here am I, weak, anxious, but send me.’ ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word.’ We rarely see how God uses us. It would probably do our pride no good if we did! We sometimes wish we had more to offer than these few loaves and fishes. But it is precisely the offering which is important, and God will do the rest!
On this last Sunday before Christmas, we offer simple gifts of bread and wine to God that they may become for us the Body and Blood of Christ. As you come up to receive these gifts, offer the gift of yourself to God, just as you are, and with Mary say yes to God’s call: ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word.’
Br. Curtis Almquist
Judges 13:2-7, 24-25
Luke 1:5-25
Our lesson from the Book of Judges and our Gospel lesson according to Luke speak of angelic revelations to childless women who will miraculously bear children: the mother of Sampson and the mother of John the Baptist. The angelic revelation to the Virgin Mary is soon to follow.[i] We will hear a stream of supernatural revelations during the remaining days of Advent, then Christmastide, then into the season of Epiphany: dreams and visions coming to Zechariah[ii], Elizabeth’s husband, and the same for Joseph.[iii] The wisemen in the east will follow a star to the Messiah, then follow a dream that will lead them safely home.[iv] The shepherds in their fields are visited by singing angels who invite the shepherds to the visit the infant Messiah.[v]
Many of us have heard these stories so many times. We may take these supernatural revelations for granted, though they are very revealing of God’s ways. These revelations do not make rational sense. There’s nothing to figure out or to understand. Rather, these revelations are to “behold.” This is simply what is. Behold God’s revelation, embrace it, and follow it.
If we were to tabulate the Bible, the amount of the scriptural text given over to the report of dreams, visions, prophecies, angelic visitations, miraculous events, and other references and allusions to God’s mysterious ways of meeting and leading people, we would find these non-rational revelations comprise approximately one-third of the Bible. Dreams, visions, prophecies, angelic visitations, miraculous events, the gift of knowledge and language, along with other indirect references to God’s mysterious and yet undeniable manifestations: one-third of the Bible. This supernatural way of knowing is quite countercultural for most of us who live in the western world. Yet the scriptures are replete with God’s ways being more than our mind can tell.
We know that the adult Jesus asked a seemingly-obvious question to the infirm: “Do you want to be healed?” I can imagine, in that same spirit, Jesus’ asking us: “Do you want to know more?” “Do you want to know more of God: the mind and heart and ways of God?” If so, make that your prayer, which would be a tremendous spiritual gift to unwrap this season. Open your hands, open your heart, open your mind to God’s supernatural revelation. God is always More. Ask for More.
[i] Luke 1:26-38.
[ii] Zechariah’s dreams: Luke 1:5-25, 39-80.
[iii] Joseph’s four dreams: Matthew 1:19-25; 2:13; 2:19-20; 2:22-23.
[iv] Luke 2:1-19.
[v] Luke 2:8-20.
Br. Lucas Hall
Matthew 8:23-27
Amos 3:1-8, 4:11-12
“What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?” That question, I believe, strikes at the heart of Matthew’s gospel. Matthew’s intent in all his gospel is to focus on Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophets. He deliberately emphasizes the ways Jesus inverts expectations of the looked-for messianic figure, and seems to quite delight in tying these inversions together. When we compare this with our first reading from the prophet Amos, we see the lines of comparison Matthew draws; he does not view Jesus as simply another prophet. In Amos, God acts, and speaks, and the prophets listen, and prophesy to these acts. Here, Matthew depicts Jesus as the one who speaks and acts. And this message, this action, this intent is not simply to Israel, nor is it simply to humanity; the winds and sea obey, or more literally from the Greek, they hearken, they listen and follow.
It should be no surprise that Matthew views Jesus in this way; the idea that he has command over all Creation puts us in the mind of even the Genesis creation stories, where all is brought into being by the proclamation of God. It should be noted that these creation stories have a highly theological purpose; they closely line up with other similar stories among various contemporary religions, but they affirm the creation comes from a singular God. The various aspects of creation are not treated as individual beings to pay homage to, but equally created, and so equally under the sway, of the one God. And so Matthew depicts Christ in this way.
“What sort of man is this?” I don’t often like to get too in the weeds of the Greek or Hebrew translations of Scripture, but this matters here. The Greek word used is most literally translated as a question about where this man is from. From where, from what country or region or place, is this person, exactly, that he’s able to do something so bizarre? I am put in mind of John’s Gospel narrative, of Jesus before Pilate; when the crowd tells him Jesus claims to be the son of God, the pagan polytheist Pilate is quite willing to accept this possibility. And he, “ more afraid than ever…again…asked Jesus, ‘Where are you from?’ But Jesus gave him no answer.” There is an awe-filled otherworldliness to Jesus in these moments, something tangibly real and tangibly other, not just an ordinary person, indeed, not just an extraordinary person. There’s something deeper, beating at the heart of this man.
I want to point out that these encounters are not comfortable or joyous; they are fearful. We can imagine these people around Jesus with goosebumps up and down their arms, with hair standing on end, with heart hammering in their chest. I worry we, in a wealthy, educated, powerful culture and society, are more liable to forget that aspect of God than most. An encounter with God should push us, at least a little bit. It should surprise us, at least a little bit. It should bewilder us, at least a little bit. An encounter with God is an encounter with power not our own, beyond our own, something that should cause us to stop and pay attention, to be broken open, to kneel. This experience, even if frightening and uncomfortable, should assure us that this God is no mere idol of our own comfortable desires, no mere tool we’ve mastered, but living and active, with evermore to show us, teach us, and welcome us into, even if our steps forward are trembling ones. “Prepare to meet your God!” Amos admonishes. So we do, whenever we take that trembling step.Po
Growing up in the Church, as I did, I often found myself, in those moments waiting for the service to begin, exploring the Prayer Book that I held in my hands. I would flip thought it, as perhaps you have done, and read the interesting bits. I liked to look at the The Calendar, and wonder who some of these people were: Bede, Dunstan, Dominic, Stephen. Over the years I have stopped wondering who they were, or even their place and role in history. I have come to know them as friends. As our Rule of Life says, in a somewhat different context: we remember that they are not dead figures from the past. Risen in Christ, they belong to the great cloud of witnesses who spur us on by their prayers to change and mature in response to the Holy Spirit who makes all things new.[1]**
Or I would make my with through the Table of Kindred and Affinity, where I would read: A Man may not marry his Mother, his Sister, his Grandmother, his Aunt.[2] As I worked my way through the list, and picture the people I was not allowed to marry, I would wonder, not so much as why I may not marry them, but why on earth I would want to marry my mother, my sister, my grandmother, or my aunt, in the first place!
The other place that gave me endless hours of entertainment was the Creed of Saint Athanasius.[3] I would read and ponder what this riddle that is our Faith, is actually about.
Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith.
Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
And the Catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.
For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost.
But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.
Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost.
The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, and the Holy Ghost uncreate.
The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost
incomprehensible.
The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Ghost eternal.
And yet they are not three eternals, but one eternal.
As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated, but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible.[4]**
All this was pretty heady stuff for a teenager, but many of you already know that about my teenaged self, so it probably no wonder to you that I ended up where I have in life, as a priest and now a monk.
At one point in the life of the Church, parishioners were expected to plough their way through the Athanasian Creed several times a year, but today it is relegated to the back of the Prayer Book in the section referred to as Historical Documents of the Church.[5] But while the text itself may be an historical document, the Faith it proclaims is anything but. For the Faith it expounds is nothing less than what Christians over the centuries have come to know to be true about God’s very being.
What Scripture proclaims, what the Creeds declare, and what Christians have affirmed about God over the last two millennia, is not some mathematical riddle the tells us that 3 = 1, but that God is a God who communicates with creation; that God was revealed to us in the person of Jesus; and that God continues to be known to the people of God, even today.
For us as Christians, God is not some distant, uninterested and unknowable, divine being, far removed from human life. Rather, God is known and experienced, not only in history, but in the tiny moments of daily living. We see God in the wonder and beauty of creation, and the awe of worship; we touch God, in the person of Jesus, and the simple elements of bread, wine, water, and oil; we know God, to be closer to us, even than our own breath.
We see and touch and know God, not as three gods, but as one eternally creating, redeeming and sanctifying God, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is this knowable, loving and sustaining God whom we describe as Trinity of Being, and Unity of Substance. But it is so easy to become lost in the math, and ignore the reality of our experience.
Father Benson, the founder of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, in a letter dated 10 November, 1875, once said this:
I quite feel that the practical neglect of the doctrine of the Trinity has been the great cause of the decay of Christendom. The Church —the Sacraments —Hagilogy, I had almost said Mythology — have filled the minds of devout people, partly for good partly for evil. ‘Thyself unmoved, all motion’s source’ this mystery of the circulating life of the eternal Godhead, has been almost lost to sight, spoken of as a mystery, and not felt as a power or loved as a reality.[6]**
I think what Father Benson was trying to say is that when people lose sight of their personal experience of God, and cloak God in unmeaning jargon[7]** then God simply becomes mumbo jumbo. For many people today, and perhaps even for some of us here today, all this god-talk is nothing less than meaningless mumbo jumbo.
For the Church to reclaim a vision of God which is not shrouded in mumbo jumbo, we need to feel God as a power, and love God as a reality. I believe that the world is desperate for the witness of the Church to a God who can be known, loved and felt.
We say, again in our Rule, that: our human vocation to live in communion and mutuality is rooted in our creation in God’s image and likeness. The very being of God is community; the Father, Son and Spirit are One in reciprocal self-giving and love. The mystery of God as Trinity is one that only those living in personal communion can understand by experience. Through our common life we can begin to grasp that there is a transcendent unity that allows mutual affirmation of our distinctness as persons. Through prayer we can see that this flows from the triune life of God. If we are true to our calling as a community, our Society will be a revelation of God.[8]**
The heart and example of Christian community, whether that be household, parish, or monastery, is the heart and being of God, who is community. Unless we live, and are known to live, in communion and community with one another, our witness to a God who is first and foremost community, will fall on deaf ears.
Our witness to a God who can be known, loved, and felt, stems from the witness of the way in which we live together with one another, not in our ability to decipher mathematical impossibilities.
If we are true to the mission of God, which is our mission, then God will be known, loved and felt, in our midst, not as some distant, uninterested and unknowable, divine being, far removed from human life, but rather as one eternally creating, redeeming and sanctifying God, who is knowable, loving and sustaining and whom we know as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Today as we rejoice in God as Trinity, we do so not to confound people with mumbo jumbo, but to proclaim to a world hungry for the good news of the eternal reality that God can indeed be known, that God is indeed loving, and that God is indeed forever present. This is our mission. This is our purpose. This is our call.
[1] SSJE, Rule of Life, Our Founders and the Grace of Tradition, chapter 3, page 6
[2] BCP, Canada, 1962, page 562
[3] Ibid., page 695
[4] BCP, Episcopal Church, 1979, page 864
[5] Ibid, page 864 ff
[6] Benson, Richard Meux, Letters of Richard Meux Benson, page 187
[7] Ibid., page 187
[8] SSJE, Rule, The Witness of Life in Community, chapter 4, page 9
Jeremiah 20:7-13
Psalm 18:1-7
What do you do when all options in front of you are bad ones?
This is the situation that Jeremiah finds himself in this morning. God has called him to his vocation as a prophet, to proclaim God’s word. In doing so, Jeremiah is mocked and plotted against, even by those close to him. In not proclaiming God’s word, though, he experiences pain, “something like a burning fire” (Jer 20:9).
All this because of who God has called him to be.
Is it any surprise, then, that Jeremiah hurls against God one of the bitterest invectives in Scripture? Different translations have different force—“O Lord, you have enticed me,” “you have seduced me,” “you have deceived me” (Jer 20:7)—but the basic accusation is that God has broken trust, that God has forced the prophet into submission.[1]
This is an accusation you can only hurl against someone you deeply love.
And it is, perhaps, something that we can relate to.
God calls each of us in ways that we may not understand, that we struggle to accept, that we may rail against. Our vocations, our experiences, our very lives may be excruciating mysteries to us. For reasons beyond our understanding, we may, like Jeremiah, end up in places and at times asking ourselves, “how did this come to be,” able only to cry to God, “Is this what you intend for me?”
But even here—even here, at his most frustrated and desperate and bitter, Jeremiah has a word for us: “The Lord is with me” (Jer 20:11). Or, in an alternate translation, “I have desired you.”[2]
“I have desired you.” “You are with me.”
Maybe it’s that Jeremiah has nowhere else to turn. But I don’t think that’s it. It’s not just that God can save Jeremiah, that God has the power to save, but that saving is God’s very nature: “my strength . . . my stronghold, my crag, and my haven,” the psalmist names God, “my rock in whom I put my trust, my shield, the horn of my salvation, and my refuge” (Ps 18:1-2). Jeremiah turn to God not because God is the last, best option, but because God just is salvation.
But it’s not even just that. Jeremiah presumes God’s presence with him. Even when we are most frustrated and desperate and bitter, the truth is that God is just here, the ground under our feet, the air we breathe, the very fabric of our being in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). “Where can I go then from your Spirit,” the psalmist sings elsewhere (Ps 139:6). Where could I possibly be that you are not?
Jeremiah knows this to be true, and so can we. Even when all options are bad, God is here, with us, closer to us than our own selves, with us in our frustration and desperation and bitterness. God is here, with us, the source and object of all our desiring. God is here, with us, mighty to save, and salvation itself.
Amen.
[1] For a sample of translations: “enticed”: NRSV; “seduced”: NAB; “deceived”: NIV, ESV, KJV, Good News Bible
[2] This alternate translation is proposed as a consequence of a revocalization by W. L. Hollady in Jeremiah 1, in Hermeneia—A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible (Philadelphia, 1986), 548. This alternate reading is “O Yahweh, I have desired you, O terrifying warrior,” compared to the NRSV: “But the Lord is with me like a dread warrior.” Holladay’s commentary: “By this understanding the verse is not so much [Jeremiah’s] affirmation of confidence as his affirmation of a deep desire for Yahweh and for his help” (550, with further explanation for this proposal on pp. 449f and 557f).
Mark 12:28-34
Psalm 81:8-14
Hosea 14:1-9
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Jesus identifies who—and what—God is. He also offers up an indictment of all the alluring temptations in sight that lead us astray from a God who all too often remains hidden from us.
“O Israel, if you would but listen to me! There shall be no strange god among you; you shall not worship a foreign god” (Ps 81:8-9). This command is repeated throughout Scripture, and yet the pages of Scripture are filled with rebuke and lament for the failure to keep to this basic commandment.
This turning away, though, isn’t surprising, because our God is often hidden. In times of anxiety and uncertainty, we crave what is visible, tangible, assured. What people, institutions, processes, products do you turn to for assurance, for certainty? What are your idols today?
How easily, and how naturally, we all turn away from this commandment.
And if Jesus says something about who and what God is, he just as assuredly tells us something about who we are. “The Lord our God.” Our relationship is fundamental, and proportional. The more we put our faith in those things that are not God, the more we draw away from who we are created to be.
If the story of Scripture, the story of our faith, is a story of failure, it is also a story of returning, again and again—returning to our God, and to ourselves. “Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God,” the prophet Hosea says, and God will be as the dew, and you flourish as a garden (Hos 14:1, 5, 7). “As the dew”—even in returning, in this life, God often remains hidden: if we stand “in the Lord’s own garden and [hear] His Presence,” as theologian Katherine Sonderegger writes, the Lord nevertheless “walks on by, just out of sight.”[1]
Our God is, and remains in this life, a hidden God, and we will be continually tempted to turn to other sources of comfort that are more apparent, that seem more sure.
What does faith in a hidden God promise?
Fundamentally, it promises that hiddenness is not the same as absence. That once we let ourselves be in the discomfort of uncertainty and invisibility, we will find that God’s hiddenness from us is another way of saying that God is near us, present to us in ways that are both unfathomable and assured. That those departed in death, whom we remember today, are hidden and present to us. That we are fully ourselves, a people whose lives are hid with God in Christ, firmly and irrevocably fixed on God our creator. “The Lord dwells richly in His creation,” Sonderegger continues, “He stands at the heart of it. He, the King, has come to His city; He dwells there. The earth shines.”
Amen.
[1] K. Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis, 2015), 110.
Br. Curtis Almquist
Thomas Traherne (1637-1674)
Job 12:7-13
John 3:1-8
Thomas Traherne, whom we commemorate today, was a mystic, a childlike mystic. If his own lifetime had overlapped with J. R. R. Tolkien, or C. S. Lewis, or George MacDonald, I think they would have been very good friends. However Traherne lived more than two centuries earlier than these other three, Traherne born in 1637. He was the son of a shoemaker, and he went on to earn three degrees at Oxford. His university days during the 1650s were the best of times and the worst of times. Best was the intellectual stimulation. However this was a time of civil war and of religious conflict, actually less religious conflict and more agnosticism, which was certainly true for Traherne. For him, life was without meaning; he was listless, full of dread, deeply lonely. In his journal, we read about one sad evening, his being alone in a field, when all things were dead quiet. He writes, “a certain want and horror fell upon me, beyond imagination.”
And then something happened, we don’t know how. It was like an implosion of light in his soul. His abject emptiness seemed to create the inner space for a revelation. It’s not that Traherne looked up; he looked down and awakened to the enthralling wonder of creation. His deadened soul became illuminated with his experience of the created beauty that surrounded him and filled him: from things celestial to things infinitesimal, all of it, he now realized, as a reflection of none other than God’s glory. In this awakening, this epiphany, Traherne found meaning in life, or rather, the meaning of life found him. He became smitten with God. And within a couple of years following Oxford, he was ordained a priest, year 1660, at the age of 23.
In this spiritual awakening – I’ll call it Traherne’s conversion experience – he now saw what he had earlier failed to see. “The world,” he now said, “is the frontispiece of eternity.” Traherne began living his newfound life, his soul flowing in wonder and gratitude. His despair had been converted to utter amazement. “You never enjoy the world aright,’ he says, “till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.”
Traherne was reawakened to his own life experience as a young child. Children do not need to be taught about innocence and the innate wonder of life. To a young child, everything is new and fascinating. Watch the face of a very young child as their eyes grow in amazement over – what? – almost anything. The rapturous smile coming over a newborn’s face, their eyes teeming with fascination, their arms beginning to drum, their hands squirming with delight. Traherne imagined God’s delight in his own birth. One of Traherne’s poems begins, “How like an angel came I down…!”
It’s not so much that Traherne learned something new but that he rediscovered something old, what he had actually experienced beginning in his own childhood: the everyday wonder and delight in so much of life, especially the commonplace. Obviously, he was no longer a young child. His realization was that the epiphany of childhood delight could complement his very schooled adult mind. It’s as if his innate experience of wonder made his brilliant mind brighter.
For Traherne, the linchpin was Jesus: God becoming fully human, God entering the world that God had made, in the face and form of Jesus. This becomes Traherne’s primary language: the cohabitation of the eternal with earthly life, the God-created life that fills us and surrounds us. Jesus gives us access to participate now, every day, in every way, in the life of God. “Your enjoyment of the world is never right,” Traherne says, “till every morning you awake in heaven; see yourself in your Father’s palace; and look upon the skies, the earth, and the air as celestial joys… as if you were among the angels.” The wonder and beauty of life always connects us with its source, with its Creator. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy the beauty of creation that surrounds us and fills us. But don’t stop there. Always experience beauty as a bridge back to its Source. Beauty is not an end in itself. Our experience of beauty on earth ferries us to God’s presence. Traherne writes, “All earthly beauty is but the shadow of heaven.” For Traherne, our praise to God encircles us back to God, the beginning and end of life and the source of all beauty. So we are reminded in our lesson from the Book of Job:
“Ask the animals, and they will teach you;
the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?”[i]
The whole of life is God’s revelation. This becomes the centerpiece of Traherne’s experience of life and his newfound theology.
Another theme that laces through Traherne’s preaching and poetry is love. God is love. God so loves to share life with people, with plants and animals, with seas and mountains. We as humans have special agency to beam God’s love, especially to the little and lonely ones – not only to people but to other creatures as well. We are to be lovers; love is of our essence. Traherne writes that “love is the soul’s light.” He writes, “[We] are as prone to love, as the sun is to shine.” And yet, Traherne adds a qualifier. Though love is of our essence, living life in love must begin with our own selves. It’s to look on our own selves as God looks upon us, enlightened with love. Traherne writes, “Had we not loved ourselves at all, we could never have been obliged to love anything.” We have been given life to participate in God’s love. Receive God’s love to reflect God’s love. Live life in wonder; live life in love.
Near the end of his life, Traherne wrote that we should view the world as if we are already in heaven. Live our lives from a heavenly perspective. Isn’t that inviting? That insight maybe in some way prefigured in Traherne’s preparation for his own early death from smallpox in 1674. He was 37 years old.
Within a generation Traherne seems a forgotten man. Traherne’s poetry and prose went unpublished and largely unknown for more than 200 years until it was found in handwritten form in a London bookseller’s stall in 1896.[ii] Shortly before his death, Traherne had written:
“Flesh is but clay!
O fly my Soul and haste away
To Jesus’ Throne or Cross!
Obey! [iii]
And that he did. Traherne had lived and died as an immensely satisfied, deeply inspired, grateful man, and, for us, such an encouragement in our own day. Live life in wonder. Live life in love.
Blessed Thomas Traherne, whom we remember today.
[i] Job 12:7-9.
[ii] Traherne’s most well-known work is Centuries of Meditations, a collection of prose reflections and meditations on living an inspired life: “Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you awake in Heaven: see yourself in your Father’s Palace; and look upon the skies, the earth, and the air as Celestial Joys.”
[iii] These are four lines from Traherne’s “Hymn Upon St. Bartholomew’s Day.”
“This idea of going to God with a question, a genuine question, open-handed, neither clinging to something as an expectation nor closed to new things that we might receive and might surprise us, going to God open-handed, genuinely with a question, whatever that is, big or small, presupposes a God who is alive, who communicates, and has these desires and wills, and wants to share them with us.”
Br. Lucas Hall encourages us to free God from our tidy philosophical concepts and engage actively with the Living, life-giving God.
Hebrews 7:23-8:7
“He holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues for ever. Consequently he is able for all time to savethose who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them. For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens.” The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews instructs us to trust Jesus Christ above all else; His Atonement for our sins is established forever, and nothing can separate us from His love.
The Levitical priests that the author of the Letter to the Hebrews are referring to served an incredibly important function for the Israelites, as an intermediary between the people and God. The priests offered ritual sacrifices on behalf of the people of Israel for the forgiveness of their sins, both individually and collectively. The high priest performed the sin offering on the day of Atonement, which was offered on behalf of all of God’s people, wiping the slate clean, as it were. The new covenant in Christ, the writer tells us, replaces the old covenant, which was based on offering the sacrifices required by the law of Moses. The new covenant does not depend on our own efforts or our own sacrifices, but on the grace of God. The author explains that Jesus is our Great High priest forever, a priest who is not a priest based on genealogy, as the Levitical priests were, but based on being anointed by God to absolve human sin forever. Theologian William Barclay writes: “Jesus can do what the old priesthood never could—he can give us access to God…Jesus came to show men the infinite tender love of the God whose name is Father—and the awful fear is gone. We know now that God wants us to come home, not to punishment but to the welcome of his open arms…Jesus on his Cross made the perfect sacrifice which atones for sin. Fear is gone; sin is conquered; the way to God is open to men.”
I’ve come to learn that shame of my own sinfulness can prevent me from bringing all of myself before Christ. Jesus wants all of us, not just the parts we deem worthy. By His atoning sacrifice He has made us worthy once and for all time. We can bring our whole selves—however broken and blemished—before Christ and say to Him just as He said to God, “Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit.”
Our Rule of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist states: “The entire life of each member of Christ’s body is intercessory. Christ takes up our whole self to the Father. If we abide in Christ he will show us that he accepts our labors, our struggles, our afflictions and the ordinary actions of our daily lives as sacrificial, and uses them to bless and uphold the world.”
Although we continually struggle and often fail to love and honor both ourselves and our neighbor as we ought to, our efforts are not in vain. We will inevitably fail to recognize Christ among us, both in our neighbor and in ourselves; however, we must trust in the mercy and the power of our savior, Jesus Christ. By His Atonement we are His forever, and nothing can separate us.
Hilary of Poitiers
Several weeks ago, we celebrated the feast of St. Martin of Tours[1]. It was Martin, as we saw then, who introduced, even before Benedict, the monastic movement into the Western Church. From Martin, sprang monasteries all over Europe, which ultimately flowered under St. Benedict[2] over a century later. If Martin can be described as the Father of Western Monasticism, then Hilary, in a sense can be considered its grandfather, as it was Hilary who took the young Martin under his wing, and supported and encouraged him in his endeavours to establish the monastic movement into Europe.
Hilary was born about the year 315 and was baptized when he was about 30 years old. In 350 he was made a bishop. The church in the mid fourth century was not unlike ours. It was a time of controversy, division, and fragmentation. Then it was over the nature of God and the person of Jesus. The Arians believed that Jesus was subordinate, and not co-equal or co-eternal to the Father. The Catholics, of whom Hilary was a prime proponent, believed that the Son was both co-equal and co-eternal with the Father. For the Catholics, and for Hilary, the Arian view was problematic in that it denied the full divinity of Christ. But so what? What’s the big deal? Why is it important that the Son is both fully God and fully human, co-equal and co-eternal?
The big deal is what it says about us. For Hilary, salvation was about much more than liberation from sin. It was about sharing in the life of God. As 1 Peter puts it, through Christ we are participants in the divine nature of God.[3] As Athanasius,[4] who lived about a generation before Hilary said, God became human, so that humans might become God. We Brothers pick this same theme up in our Rule of Life when, in the chapter on The Mystery of Prayer we say a ceaseless interchange of mutual love unites the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Our prayer is not merely communication with God, it is coming to know God by participation in this divine life. In prayer we experience what it is to be made “participants in the divine nature” …[5] If in the incarnation the Son is not both fully God, and fully human, then it is not possible for us as humans to share in the life of God. This doctrine, known as theosis or divinization, is central to Catholic theology, and remains so today, because in it lies the Christian understanding of the dignity of all humanity. Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons? Will you respect the dignity of every human being? I will, with God’s help**[6] we promise in the Baptismal Covenant. Humans possess dignity, not simply because we are creatures made in the image and likeness of God, but because through the mystery of the Incarnation it is possible for us to be participants in the divine nature of God.
That we can be participants in the divine nature of God is crucial to our self-understanding as humans. It is this understanding that is rooted in the teaching of Hilary, and others like him. He may have lived nearly 2000 years ago, but his teaching on the nature of God and the person of Jesus, is as significant for our understanding of what it means to be human today, as it was then. And for that, we give thanks.
[1] Martin of Tours, feast day 11 November
[2] Benedict of Nursia, feast day 11 July
[3] 2 Peter 1:4
[4] Athanasius of Alexandria, feast day 2 May
[5] SSJE, Rule of Life, The Mystery of Prayer, Chapter 21, page 42
[6] Episcopal Church, Book of Common Prayer 1979, page 305
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