The Man Born Blind

The Man born blind 5 17 15 1 Pt 3:13-22, Ac 9:32-43, Jn 9: 1-39

We just heard the evangelist refer to the believers as Saints. The Greek word Hagios is frequently translated ‘holy’ but the root of the word means different. The Hebrew people were different-set apart from the other people of this world. They were chosen to do the work of God. The Hagios are specifically a holy people. They are a different people chosen for the special purposes of God. Christians became the people who are different. That difference does not give us greater honor or prestige but does require of us a greater service. What might that service be? The greatest service we can give is to be the saint we are meant to be. A saint is someone whose life makes it easier for others to believe in God. Are we a living example of Jesus in how we live?

In Acts this morning we witnessed that Peter did not say I heal you but Jesus Christ heals you. And when he approached Tabitha he prayed for her to be healed. He did not say “be healed.”Anything we achieve comes from God. We need to give serious thought to what in Jesus we are striving daily to imitate. We believe many things about the Christ, about our God. Give some thought to why those things are believed. We believe in many mysteries of our faith. Think about why we believe them.

There are many things about Jesus which are not mysteries, many things about goodness, that we believe. Take time to examine why you think they are true and why others might think so. For your own sake and for the sake of others who might someday ask why your belief, it is good to ponder these things. Be open to the Spirit when considering them. Reflecting on these things will help us to remember that we are grace-bearing creatures, commanded to be the salt of the earth and to be a light for those around us. If we obey this divine command of service offered to our community, lovingly, patiently, gently, through prayer, kindness, integrity, fidelity and all the rest that goes with being witnesses of Christ, healing will come through us to others.

If our hearts are set on earthly things, possessions, pleasure, good health, prestige, ease and comfort we are very vulnerable to unhappiness. Any of those things can be lost at any moment.

If the relationship with God is of the highest priority, our blessedness is secure. Even when we are suffering we can remember to unite our own suffering with Jesus’s sufferings and can attain peace. Sometimes we might be suffering because of less than smart decisions we have made, sometimes it is just due to the human condition. None of these sufferings can touch that which matters most –our union(relationship) with God.

We can often find ourselves stumbling in this world as if we were blind. We grasp and search for truth and wisdom in so many places, usually not seeing Jesus himself right in front of us. if we would focus our life on Christ and keep our minds focused on the one needful thing then we would see, we could affirm as did the blind man, “Lord, I believe.” Let us pray that Christ will illumine the way to that pearl of great price.—the source of all.

Christ is risen!!


Our faith is not a body of written down beliefs but a living example of Jesus in our life.

Mid-Pentecost

May 2015
Homily by Sister Rebecca

      We just heard the gospel passage: it is mid-way of the Jewish feast of Tabernacles when Jesus goes into the Temple and teaches.  The Feast of Tabernacles lasted 8 days.  At the close there were some symbolic rites with water: this was to remind the Jews that God is the one who continues to quench his people's thirst, as in former times when the Israelites journeyed through the wilderness.  It is in this context that Jesus, on the last day of the feast, cries out:  “If anyone thirsts, let them come to me and drink.  Whoever believes in me, ‘Out of their heart will flow rivers of living water.’”

       During Vespers we sing: “You went to the temple at mid-point of the feast, O Lord, and you poured forth the waters of your wisdom to satisfy those thirsty for divine grace.”   In another hymn we pray:  “O source of our life: Let our thirsty souls partake of the waters of true devotion, for you invite everyone to come to you and drink. “This feast’s liturgical texts frequently allude to the experience of thirst.  We know how it feels to be thirsty. When really thirsty, like, during a hike, water will be the only thing we think about:  slaking our thirst, preferably with cool, running water.  To be receptive to the water that Jesus offers, we need to experience a kind of inner thirst that feels like a poignant yearning. This yearning is one of the most valuable attributes of a spiritual seeker; it becomes the motivating force of the whole journey of return to God.  When this yearning takes hold of us, nothing in this world can satisfy this longing other than the Source itself, God.  Without this yearning, there is no opening in the heart for receiving the outpouring of the waters of life, the Spirit of Wisdom. 

            All people experience some kind of yearning.  It is a common human experience. Many of us, however, mistake the meaning of this yearning and in our ignorance try to fill it, more or less, with abusive substances, or behaviors.  The yearning is there.  And God most compassionate knows our fragile nature and our ignorance and at some point visits us with a totally free gift of spiritual awakening.  For some of us our hearts crack open so wide that we are like inebriated with an influx of an overwhelming sense of God’s presence within ourselves that there is an 180-degree turnabout in our lives.  For others of us, this awakening is more subtle, but not less real.  It is always about an inner change and often, too, an external one in a new chosen path of life.

            Concerning this yearning, let us go to a text from the book of Revelations where the Lord says:  “Would that you be hot or cold but because you are lukewarm (read: mediocre, indifferent) I vomit you from my mouth”.  This shocking provocation: we don’t like this kind of language today.  We would like to strike out these kinds of provocative words from Jesus’ mouth. The current spirit of our times is inclined to scrub clean from our image of Jesus every offensive feature, but it has little to do with the realism of his preaching. But the goal is about repentance:  a piercing of the heart to arouse compunction leading to inner awakening.    In our text, as in others, Jesus keeps prodding away at the crowd, the Pharisees, and scribes:  they are stuck in their linear mind: How can this man teach like he does when he has not been schooled?  This linear mind thinks only in ‘a + b = c’.    The Lord says through the mouth of Isaiah: “Your thoughts are not God’s thoughts”.   This kind of thinking is a major blockage to being permeable to the word of God, to the urgings of our innermost hearts, to living in the sacred now which is awareness of both/and: the tic-tock time of everyday life and the Kairos time of God’s time or eternal time.  Jesus points out that not only their thoughts are barriers but their whole attention is centered on ego gratifications, namely, thinking and making decisions according to outer appearances.   Without prayer, reflection and meditation we, too, risk losing sight of God’s presence in the NOW and we tend to get entangled in our difficulties and challenges to the point of stifling our zeal for God. 

           

            Spiritual teachers note that for some people the awakening to Divine Wisdom changes their lives and they never leave this ‘abiding sense’ of God.  They hear the inner whisper “don’t go there”, or this inner urge that they know to respect and heed to:  ‘go there’ or ‘do this. They learn from experience that this inner voice can and must be trusted.  For most of us:  we spiral up and down and at times just stay stagnant.  We hear the Word, heed to it and put it into practice; then we get distracted, we waste our precious time in this or that - not useless in itself- but in the long run, we are out of balance.  By the grace of God, we wake up again and reset our compass toward listening to God.  

           

            I would like to interject here a story:  years ago a friend of mine told me about her Jewish friend.  He was one of the fortunate ones who escaped the ovens at one of the death camps such as Auschwitz.  Like thousands of others, he lived in a barrack with many other inmates.  We have all heard of the unimaginable atrocities in these camps. The men were discouraged, beaten down, some life less just waiting to be killed on the job, collapse under the weight of hard labor and then be shot to death…One day this man felt inspired:  I will designate one square, a foot in length and width on the floor: it will be the Tabernacle as in the desert:  the place of encounter with our God.  I will stand there every day for 15 minutes and commune with God.   I will ask my companions that when I stand in this square, please leave me in silence during the 15 minutes for I am standing as in God’s Holy Temple.  And this he did.  It was a leap of faith as he could have been reported to a Kapo and then shot to death.  Well, to his amazement, others not only heeded his request, they began little by little to ask to have their turn.   In the end whenever there were prisoners in the barrack, there was always someone praying in that square day and night.  He said that the men that shared this compound gradually changed…no more depression, swearing, anger, debilitating paralysis of the mind, heart, and spirit; there was no more stealing or ratting on another inmate to one of the kapos to get some miserable perk.  Instead, acts of compassion, kindness emerged in and among them.  This practice, freely taken on, the intentional ritualizing the very meaning of the Feast of Tabernacles was life giving – life changing.  We miss the point if we think that they escaped death in the camp because of the prayer: the point is that by their prayer they allowed God to suffer within them, transforming their lives inside out.

            Today as we celebrate in this Temple:  would that we in our daily lives have something of the intensity of these men in their seeking God’s Holy Presence.   And no matter where we are or what conditions of body, mind and heart come our way – small in comparison or beyond what we think we can endure, may we too listen to our heart’s inspiration and wisdom to likewise seek a small space within to stand firm in the Divine Presence.  As Moses before the burning bush in the wilderness of Mt. Sinai, let us hear the Lord say to us: “the place on which you are standing is Holy Ground. (cf. Acts 7: 30-33) 

Thomas Sunday

Preached in Holy Wisdom Church
April 21, 2015

1Jn 1:1-7b, Ac 3:25-4:21, Jn20:19-31

Christ is Risen! 

In pondering this morning’s scripture readings I was struck by a cause and effect scenario.  The first reading is possibly the substance of what Peter and John preached to the crowd when they had brought about the healing of the crippled man.  The preaching is the effect of something that happened previously- the cause.  Recall, when Jesus stood in their midst they were hiding for fear of the authorities. Now, Peter, and no doubt John too, though warned to cease and desist from talking about Jesus by the highest religious authority, are able to declare the divinity and love of Christ to any who would listen. What a change!Is not their belief in the Resurrection Mystery the ultimate cause?

The doubt of Thomas is understandable and helpful not only to us these many centuries later but I’m sure reinforced the other apostles’ conviction that they were not imagining seeing Christ. There was no doubt it was Christ, so His appearance must have been what they had seen before his Resurrection. The second appearance was certainly a reinforcement that they were not dreaming. Did they really believe Jesus was resurrected before he appeared to them these two times? The resurrection Mystery is the ultimate cause of their belief. Their Spirit-filled wisdom, courage and dedication followed from their belief in the Resurrected Christ.   

Whether we would be a Peter or a John or a Thomas or even better a Mary Magdalen who believed in Jesus no matter what happened, the Resurrection of Jesus is the culmination of our greatest challenge -faith in darkness. We are blessed when we believe without being able to put our hands into Jesus’ side and into the holes in his hands.  We believe even without being able to touch Jesus except through our very belief.

 When we follow Jesus, the path can be and is often through darkness looking like failure, defeat and hopelessness.  Sometimes these challenges in life are simply there to remind us how much greater God truly is, beyond our comprehension. God’s love is greater than our past and greater than all other things the world has to offer. This abundant life of union with God is offered freely to each of us! When we carry the message of Jesus—when we live the life of Jesus here and now, then we too, carry out the light of Truth in our own hearts. Then our lives are filled with joy even as we might be called to suffer terribly.  As the eyes of the body are enlightened when they see light, our spirit, when we are intent on God, is illumined by God’s infinite light. Prayer stands before God as an honored ambassador. Prayer from the heart that is not just confined to fixed times or periods but continuous throughout the day. It gives joy to the spirit, peace to the heart.  It is truly a gift of the Divine Spirit.

The choice is ours. Jesus has said to each of us individually: “come follow me”.  He wants us, He wants us to be his disciples and carry on his work. The more we know Jesus the stronger our convictions. Our faith will be built on rock and we will be willing to stand up for our faith and the truth. For Peter, John and the other disciples, we see the cause and effect of  their deep faith and convictions. Is our belief in the Mystery of the resurrection expressed by our response to life today---tomorrow---- and the next day?

 Christ is Risen!