Homily for All Saints the Beatitudes - June 23, 2019

 As preached by Sister Cecelia Holy Wisdom Church

Matthew 5:3-10

If helpers are to do their work intelligently and effectively, they must be instructed. In this morning’s gospel, Matthew describes Jesus instructing his disciples about what they were to teach others. The sermon on the Mount contained the essence of Jesus’ teaching to his chosen ones. Scholars have suggested that Jesus had taken his followers to a quiet place for a long period of time, perhaps a week, perhaps a month, and these beatitudes are the distillation of that time. There is far too much in these beatitudes for only one time of instruction. What does this teaching really mean?

In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, the word that is translated “happy” or “blessed” is an exclamation of what is, not a future tense. They are not hopes of what shall be, or prophecies of some future bliss, but congratulations for what is. In effect, the beatitudes say, “Oh, the joy of following Christ! Oh, the happiness of knowing Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.” A gloom-encompassed Christianity is unthinkable in the light of the beatitudes.

Makarios, the Greek word translated as blessed or happy, describes that joy, which is serene and untouchable. A joy that is completely independent of all the chances and changes of life. From the Evangelist John in Chapter 16, verse 22, Jesus assured his followers that “No one will take your joy from you.” The beatitudes speak of that joy which seeks us through our pain, that joy which sorrow and loss, pain and grief are powerless to touch, that joy which shines through our tears and which nothing in life or death can take away. It is the awareness that comes from walking in the company and presence of Jesus Christ that enables us not to lose our joy when a change of fortune, a collapse in health, the disappointment of an ambition for our life, or even an unlikable change in the weather happens.

How does one align this joy with the first beatitude listed as the poor in Spirit?  What might the word “poor” have meant when Jesus said it? The Greek has two words for poor. One, penes, means a person who has to work for a living with his own hands. This person has nothing superfluous, but is not destitute, either. The second is ptochos, which does mean that the person has nothing at all. Ptochos means “Blessed are they who are abjectly and completely poverty-stricken-absolutely-destitute.” In Aramaic, the language Jesus used, the words Ani or ebion developed into four stages of meaning. The first meaning was simply poor, the second became having no influence, power, or prestige because they were poor.  The third development was that because they were poor and had no influence, they were down-trodden and oppressed. The fourth came to mean that the poor, having no earthly resources, put their whole trust in God.

While the Greek word is interpreted as destitute, the Hebrew/Aramaic word dies not. This first “blessed” does not call actual material poverty a good thing. Jesus would never call blessed a state where people live in slums or are homeless and do not have enough to eat, or where their health is endangered due to the miserable conditions of life. That kind of poverty is the aim of the good news of our gospel to prevent or remove.

For the Jews, then, poor described the helpless person who puts his or her trust in God. Two things happen when a person puts their whole trust in God. The attachment to God becomes complete, and detachment from all other things takes place. This blessed poverty is the poverty of spirit which enables us to realize our own lack of resources to fully meet life. Ours is the kingdom of heaven when we find our help and strength in God. This leads us to trust God, and trusting God leads us to want to obey what we think God wants of us. The kingdom or reign of God is where God’s will is as perfectly done on earth as it is in heaven. That first commandment to love God and Neighbor is God’s will for us. 

Today we commemorate all saints. We don’t know who all of these saints are, but we can be sure they are the ones who did their best to bring about God’s kingdom. Let us join all the saints who went before us in learning to put our whole trust in the loving God who made us all.

 Christ is in our midst!

Pentecost 2019

As preached by Brother Christopher
Holy Wisdom Church

On the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood up and cried, “Let anyone who thirsts, come to me, let anyone who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living waters”…

          Thirst is an experience that each of us knows deeply. Much like hunger, when we thirst there’s an inner imperative to relieve it. Think of yourself on a hot summer day, when your mouth is parched and your body cries out for something cool, like a refreshing glass of water. How does that feel? Most of us can identify with the word, “Ahhh…”

          Yet we know that the relief of the thirst is transitory. Soon, thirst arises again, and before you know it, we’re at the water faucet again. In order to survive, we have to stay hydrated, and that means responding to our bodies when thirst tells us that we need water. This is thirst on a physical level, and ultimately it can never be fully satisfied. Tomorrow we will thirst again.

          But in this morning’s Gospel, Jesus speaks of a spiritual thirst, a thirst that he boldly believes he can satisfy… definitively. “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, let the one who believes in me drink…” He is not talking of a spiritual soda that quenches thirst only for a short while. Rather, he’s speaking about an existential draft that resolves the deepest questions of the human heart, regardless of the external circumstances we may have to go through. Much as he said to the Samaritan woman in the 4th chapter of John, “If only you knew the gift of God and who it is who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink’, you would have asked him and he would have given you living waters… Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty, but those who drink of the waters that I will give, will never thirst again…” In effect, what Jesus is saying to both to the woman and to us is that once you have discovered that none of the empty promises of the surrounding culture — money, status, personal comfort — really satisfy the thirst of your heart, that deep longing for true meaning and fulfillment, then come to me and drink of the true and living water, and you’ll find that not only is your thirst slaked, but out of you will flow rivers of living water as well, the true fruits of the Spirit.

          Today is Pentecost. There’s a way in which we can think of this feast as the aftermath of Pascha, sort of a footnote to the end of the Paschal season. Everything else that follows this the rest of the year is called “ordinary time”. Perhaps a better way to think of this feast is that it is organically connected to Pascha and which fulfills the promise that occurred at Pascha. What Pentecost universalizes is Jesus’ presence to all believers. During his earthly life Jesus was localized. He was here, not there… But now, through the indwelling of the Spirit, he is intimately present to each of us… not as a ghost, but as an unceasing, living presence. And through the Spirit we are not only linked together with each other, but we are also called to allow the living waters of the Spirit to flow out from us, to be channels of grace from which the world may realize Jesus’ presence as well.

The Man Born Blind

As preached by Sr. Rebecca
Holy Wisdom Church

            Today’s Gospel celebrates the healing of the man born blind. It centers on the dawning of new Light and Life and the victory of Light over darkness.

      The story starts with Jesus and the disciples on the road.  Suddenly, the disciples see along the wayside, a man who is blind from birth. They ask Jesus. 

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” This kind of thinking was common:  sin was the cause of sickness and all bad things that happen in people’s lives.

            Jesus tells them: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” - many translations from Greek say: “so that the works of God should be made manifest in him. Another possible translation is:  Neither this man nor his parents sinned “but, let the works of God be manifested in him”. In other words, God did not mysteriously cause the blindness in the child SO THAT Gods work might be made manifest, but rather:  here is a human being, a child of God suffering from blindness and Jesus sees him, knows he is called in this moment to heal this man’s blindness manifesting God’s light.  He was blind – now he sees.  Amazing grace!

            Jesus leads his disciples to spiritual light of consciousness to see that all things (no matter what the cause) can become a path to manifesting the power of God’s grace, grace that has no other cause than as sheer gift of love-we don’t have to merit it.

            There is much to unpack in this story. We can see a certain irony in this story: the man born blind receives light, yet everyone else loses their sight-not their physical vision, but the capacity to trust and understand what Jesus has done and what they witnessed in this man’s healing.  Without exception neighbors, Pharisees and even his parents are not able to see in this event God’s loving and compassion healing.

            As to the healed man, he comes to seeing gradually. His sight increases and grows in outer and inner depth and clarity through his willingness to be true to himself:  he knows he was blind and now he sees. He stands firm in the face of blindness of others.  When he was blind he was alone, marginalized, and now that he sees, he experiences a different kind aloneness – that of a distancing from his parents and even to the point of being thrown out of his religious community.  He now stands again alone- a totally different kind of aloneness:  and at this very point Jesus seeks him out.  He now sees the face of Jesus and in the light of Jesus faith he sees his God. He is no longer alone.  We see this in our own lives, don’t we?  A moment of enlightenment, seeing more clearly is most often followed by many challenges, and sometimes we have to undergo a certain sense of aloneness before we are able to integrate this light into our lives in a healthy and wholesome way.

            In his journey this man shifts from blindness to seeing not only the world outside him, but interiorly, to claiming his own graced God-given power over his life.  He stands up for what he has experienced regardless of how it displeases and angers the powers that be: social, religious and political. He knows who he is and claims his new found identity and differentiates himself from ‘crowd think’ the tribal mindset. 

            The kind of seeing that we are invited to this morning invites us to step back from the different levels of darkness around and in us.   From the soul’s perspective we can see a two-fold reality unfolding simultaneously:  a process of dying and at the same time a birthing anew.  In the absence of soul vision we have a world of ugliness, hatred, fear, ignorance-a world on the edge of an abyss.  It is the tendrils of the heart reaching upwards to the Light of the soul that are helping us to cross the abyss into a new world.

 We are learning together to see through the eyes of the heart, which are also the eyes of the soul.

       This vision is not far-fetched.  We are presently seeing many initiatives that are manifesting the first stirrings of soul awareness on a wide scale.  The challenge for us all is to do our inner work, to free ourselves from entanglement in patterns of thinking and acting that come from our conditioning and lack of insight.   We are all blind to some extent, but we are called to recognize our limitations, our ignorance, and our attachments that blind us to the Light of Christ Jesus that is continually offered to us.  This is real inner work – God’s work in us –we call synergy. We are called to attend to the true Light that pierces our consciousness and we need to nurture and develop our will to love-to learn to abide in the soul’s inner vision of connection to the Source of Life replenishing our inner and outer lives with one another and in this world of ours.