Holy Wisdom Church
The teaching of the prophet
Micah this morning has resonated within me for many years: I have told you
what God requires of you: to do justly, to act with love and to walk humbly
with your God”.
I have not yet
fathomed the depth and the practice of this message, even though I have
struggled to understand what these words really mean and point to in my own
life. These words most certainly
resonated in Jesus and were lived out in his life as we see in todays Gospel
and in St. Paul’s, as in his letter to the Corinthians that we have heard
today.
I would like to
single out the very heart of this message:
The literal Hebrew of ‘act with
love’, is to act with Hesed. There are many translations in in our English
Bibles: the Hebrew word “Hesed”, is translated : To love kindness, to love
goodness, to love faithfulness, and so on, or to paraphrase: to treasure the
Lord’s gracious love which conveys God’s unconditional love.
One of the
difficulties in finding an adequate translation is because loving here springs
forth as a deep feeling from the heart, the very center, the core of our
being. It is not an action. But it is transmitted, channeled into
action. Within every human being there
abides this capacity to love, and to live out God’s loving within us: to be
conscious of it and awakened to it in all our relationships. This is why we are
called to prayer of the Heart, contemplative prayer, meditation.
This kind of
prayer is all the more important in living out this ‘hesed’ in our daily life. It may seem at times to be ‘pie in the
sky’…yet in times of emotional dissonances, or even upheavals, leaving us
feeling helpless, despairing…we need to remember. Remember what? Remember the times when we experienced a
spark, a fire of love. We need to go to
that space that is in the NOW…it was felt in the past. But the reality of love has never left us; it
is simply gone from our memory for the time being where other feelings have
suddenly taken precedence. At this time,
we need to go inward without denying the present feelings and thoughts, but
anchor our minds to Remembering God. -Not thoughts of remembering
but actually remembering all the while feeling terrible. This is what is meant by acting in love. And remembrance of God will not let us down. Recall the psalms…
Our Christian
understanding of “hesed” is Grace as an unending flow of love that surrounds us
all the time without our asking for it, without deserving it, without by force
of will power. Hesed is God’s
unconditional overpowering abundance of God loving each of us and all
humanity. By extension this love enables
us to love one another as we are loved by God.
Recently I heard a story from a
Rabbi: two Rabbis were having
conversation. One of them asked his
friend: “Do you love me?” The other,
astonished at his question, said “Of course I love you, Abraham! How could you
ask such a question?” He answered:
“Because you do not know what gives me joy and what gives me sorrow”.
To love enables us to see what is
truly in another’s heart.
This hesed is the most important
part of Micah’s message, for within it is a prescription for healing the breach
between our efforts see beyond the surface of people, to do justly and to walk
humbly with our God.
In the Gospel
today, we can understand Jesus’ teaching as beckoning us to build relationships
on that underlying love: that same Love that Jesus lived and taught: Hesed holds the power to unite humans with
the Divine and to transform our relationships to work together so that the
Kingdom of God be truly realized on earth as it is in heaven.
Just recently I
asked an elderly monk who is considered a wisdom teacher both by Christians and
Jews alike, what this love of God looks like in his life. He very simply said: part of my early morning prayer is to breathe
in God’s breath and to breathe out God’s loving in my life. How so I asked? Well, like when I write a weekly homily, I
say to God: “ok now, let’s write it together; and then when I have to go
shopping and I get into the car and say: “ok let’s do shopping” and so on. How simple can walking humbly with God get?
And yet how deeper and authentic can it get?
To be conscious, and
open, and to receive this wondrous, grace of God’s Love, what an awesome Reality
to begin anew in the spirit the celebration this evening, when the Jewish
community all over the world celebrates Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
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