Sermon 01/19/2020

As preached by Brother Marc
Holy Wisdom Church

Last June 6th, it said in the news Pope Francis changed the Our Father. A shocked and appalled seminary president said, “This is the Lord’s Prayer. It is not, and has never been, the Pope’s prayer, and here we have the very words of Jesus…being changed.

What is different is the liturgical French translation, which now follows the Spanish and Portuguese: the equivalent phrase “lead us not into temptation” now says “do not let us fall into temptation”. The French responded to what the new testament and its scholars have been saying all along: God does not lead people into temptation; only our own inclinations and the evil one do so.

The Lord’s words were not changed. Pope Francis helped some people see the prayer’s meaning more clearly. It was the internet that led many astray.

In the gospel today according to Luke, chapter 17, Jesus gives four stark sayings: on temptation and bad things, on forgiveness, on faith, and on serving God. These sayings are not simply a list of moral duties. Some popular expressions, like, “A word to the wise is sufficient!” and "There are none so blind as those who will not see!" might better describe them. They are at the heart of living together in community as the people of God [Charles Hendrickson].

Trials and temptations will come. Be careful and alert you don’t cause them. Confront those who offend or do harm. Forgive those who are sorry again and again. Serve God without expectations.

Jesus often calls new believers "Little children" (Lk. 10:21), "children" (Mk. 10:24), or “little ones” (Matt. 18:6). They sometimes lack social influence, power, status, or maturity. To deliberately discourage them, he warned, or cause them to despair or sin, is more than despicable.

Jesus had already noted the Pharisees who refused to enter the kingdom of God but also kept others out (Lk. 11:52). They’re misleading those who need spiritual leadership…away from God.

Christians from the beginning have also too often not been open to God's mercy and forgiveness. Invoking rigid legal and religious rules, when someone needed to repent, find relief, live the faith according to their own conscience, or could not follow because of dire circumstances.

God has ways of forgiving we may not know. God cannot make a rock so heavy God cannot move it; there cannot be a sin beyond God’s power of forgiveness.

When Jesus said, “You must forgive seven times a day,” those disciples who first heard it suddenly realized their huge need for faith in order to be able to be good mentors and to forgive!”

When Jesus said, "If you have even a tiny bit of faith, you can move a mountain or gigantic tree," he didn't mean use force to send the tree into the sea. Faith is not for the blind denial of difficulties. It's much deeper than that. Faith is about forgiveness and trusting God’s word. The people who wronged us: It’s easier to use their sins against them than mercifully offer forgiveness.

To forgive someone may seem impossible, but genuine faith can remove that mountain. Theologian Paul Tillich once defined faith as courage. If you have the courage to listen and act when the spirit says, “Forgive,” you can speak to all kinds of brokenness and dysfunction and make them whole.

With the faith to forgive, comes the hope to love, and love knows no impossibilities. We also need faith for the possible, seeing goodness around us, doing the right thing, being kinder than needed. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry shows this brilliantly. It’s a book everyone should read.

So in fact we are the little ones, inhabitants of the kingdom of God, unworthy servants of God, bearing with one another, yet God’s holy people, friends and lovers of Jesus, brothers and sisters of the Lord. We are called to be true to self, to God and to one another, without expectation of honors and reward.

Christ is in our midst.

Blessing of the waters Jan 12, 2020

As preached by Sister Cecelia
Holy Wisdom Church



Our wholehearted celebration of Christmas gives us a clear vision that is not bound by time, place, culture, race or ethnicity. In the Incarnation, God became so much one with humanity that Jesus could slip into our world unnoticed. Until the Baptism in the Jordon little is really known of God who took on our humanity. The Baptism in the Jordon revealed to the world the three persons of the Trinity, the father who spoke that this is my beloved Son, the Son being baptized and the Spirit in the form of a dove hovering above Jesus.

Connected with the Theophany of Christ, this manifestation of the God-man, the church has created a special day of the Blessing of the Baptismal Waters. As the new Adam, Jesus’ baptism symbolizes the cosmic fact that everyone and everything can be washed, and renewed.

Initially, water was blessed to use for the baptism of the catechumens. Eventually, the blessing of water in church practices took on many symbolisms and uses. Some of these practices take on an almost magical ability. Here, as a visible reminder, we use the water to bless our homes, ourselves and drink it for good health of mind and body.

Too often the world, material things, has been linked with evil or that which takes us away from God. The blessing of the water is a visible sign that all creation is filled with the holy-making presence of God. So what has caused us to lose a sense of the Sacred in this universe of ours? Many believe the universe started as a fluke and operates by chance. They believe the universe is not trying to accomplish anything nor does it have a purpose and we humans have no special place in it. We are simply an accident and our seeking meaningfulness is only a ‘pie in the sky’, a superstition.

There are those though who have a feeling that all living things, not just human beings, are living from the same life, like leaves on a single tree. Each life, taking some particular form, whether human, animal or plant is the basis for a sympathetic affinity, indicating a unity deeper than our everyday superficial relations. Are we not all filled with a mystical longing, for belonging, for a profound union in ultimate meaningfulness?

A scientist wrote that the world consists of communication-interactions among its components or members in which matter, energy and information is exchanged. If so, we can recognize and celebrate this symbiosis as a gigantic Eucharist where each feeds all the others with each one’s own being. Any symbiosis that is a sharing of life so as to make one whole being is an image of the Trinity, the original symbiotic Unity. “It is that presence of the Trinity as a pattern repeated at every scale of the cosmic order that makes the universe the manifestation of God and itself sacred and holy”.1*


We are familiar with the concept of the Mystical Body of Christ, imaged as an organic unity, a single living organism. Each member makes a particular contribution drawing the whole into tighter communion. This living body can be seen to even extend to those who are not official members of our church, maybe not even Christians. There can be a sense of the sacred, the feeling that God is somehow resident in the interactions of these shared relations, shared lives, contributing to the unity of the whole. It is the actions of the members toward one another that constitutes the unity. The Persons of the Trinity love one another to the extent of” indwelling” one another.2 The members of the Mystical Body are to love one another and share the various gifts of our lives. See water as the symbol of the depth of life and the calling of cosmic transfiguration.

As we begin a new year and a new liturgical season, we can trust the voice of God the Father who invites us to walk with Jesus, to experience the friendship of him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.




1* God’s Ecstasy by Beatrice Bruteau page 14

2 Ibid.



To conclude, I quote His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s message when in 2005, he stated:"... Water, then, signifies the depth of life and the calling to cosmic transfiguration. It can never be regarded or treated as private property or become the means and end of individual interest. Indifference towards the vitality of water constitutes both a blasphemy to God the Creator and a crime against humanity"



Discover Christ anew in the persons and events we encounter.

“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Sermon 172 Jan 5, 2020 Mt 3:1-11, 1 Tm 3:14-4:5, Mal 3:1-4 Sunday before Theophany

 As preached by Brother Luke

Holy Wisdom Chapel

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit!

        At meals and during matins we have meditative readings. Over the past several years a number of these readings have been drawn from the writings of Richard Rohr, a Franciscan who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico. He writes on a wide range of topics, yet he frequently returns to his favorite theme: the pitfalls of dualistic thinking. We can easily engage in dualistic thinking without realizing it. I was brought up to think that way. Things are right or wrong, good or bad, safe or dangerous, acceptable or unacceptable. People are with us or against us, its us or them, friend or foe. Well you get the idea. This is a world-wide phenomenon which is brought home to us daily in the news. Wars, social unrest, violence, and intolerance abound: the products of dualistic thinking. The pedigree is ancient. However, our computer age has reinforced this tendency. The computer is the paragon of dualistic thinking. Whether or not one wants to ascribe thinking to a computer, the way it operates is by making millions of choices between two possibilities. It must choose and only one is right, the other wrong.

        So, when St Paul writes to Timothy and tells him that “everything created by God is good, nothing is to be rejected,” [1 Tim 4:4] one might interpret this as an early attempt to break out of the dualistic paradigm. Paul was warning against people spreading an interpretation of the Gospel at variance with his; for example, that marriage and some foods were bad.

        Even John the Baptist’s call to repent is for everyone. Sure, he gives the Pharisees and Sadducees a hard time, but he still baptizes them and warns them of the coming of the one who will baptize with the holy spirit and fire [Mt 3:11]. Sometimes it takes passion to break the spell of indifference. Isn’t that what the prophet Malachi is saying when he calls on people to prepare for the coming of the Lord? “Who will endure the day of his coming? ... Who can stand when he appears? For he is like the refiner’s fire.” [Mal 3:2] Whenever I hear Malachi’s text I think of the famous aria from Handel’s Messiah: “For he is like a refiner’s fire.” There’s more to Messiah than the Halleluiah chorus!

        The unfortunate reality is most people stand pat and pay no attention to this call for repentance; a call to rethink the way we treat each other and the way we treat the earth. What a wonderful coincidence that the Feast of Theophany comes at the beginning of the New Year. This is the time for New Year’s resolutions. It’s not a time for recriminations against ourselves or others about what may have been done in the past. It’s a new beginning. Let’s take advantage of it. Where to start?

        Start with Genesis where we are told that everything is good in God’s creation [Gen 1:13]. If we now notice that we often act as if much in God’s creation is expendable, this is our new opportunity to turn that behavior around. So, what can we do in our little corner of God’s earth to make a difference? We can be welcoming to all who come our way, longtime friends and strangers to befriend. We can remember to do our part in recycling and caring for the earth, our one and only home. We can try to take in other peoples’ points of view as opportunities to expand our vision and grow in understanding rather than push those ideas away as if they were threats to our very existence. Notice, much of what is involved here is a change in thinking and a change of heart. It’s not an impossible task. It doesn’t require an academic degree, heavy lifting or a new workout regime. It simply requires us to remember that God is love, God created us and all that is around us in love and asks us to receive it in love and to respond to it lovingly. When the refiner’s fire clears away all the debris that has covered over God’s love in our hearts, we have our new opportunity to nurture and care for God’s precious gift. Then God’s glory will truly be revealed to all.

Glory be to Jesus Christ!

Homily: Feast of the Circumcision January 1, 2020

by Sister Rebecca

Holy Wisdom Church

Our Gospel today mentions the event of the circumcision.  It says nothing more, other than that it happened, and that Jesus was given the name the Angel had given him before he was conceived.

Paul, though, in the Epistle, describes for us the meaning and spiritual reality of the circumcision. “For in Christ all the fullness of God lives in bodily form. In him you were circumcised not performed by human hands.”  He goes on to say that our former personal identity ruled by our instincts has now been replaced by Christ.  We hear from Paul elsewhere that we have robed ourselves into Christ Jesus.  The word “robed” here is a symbol for embodiment. As God has taken flesh in Jesus, in him we have become conscious that God takes flesh in us from the very beginning of our existence and into this very moment.  God embodies within us.  Yet, our instincts, our unhealthy habits, even addictions do not just go away.  Awakening is not yet transformation of our consciousness.  When we invite God into our lives, God works with us in meeting our shadows…and here indeed is the encounter of darkness in all its shapes and shades.  But there is also our golden shadow of our hidden gifts that we are fearful to face, and engage in.  Let us recall here the Angel’s announcement to Mary and her fear.  But just as for her, God does with us that which is impossible for us to accomplish alone.

In pondering this reality, I have very much touched these days upon revisiting anew a poem by Symeon the New Theologian 1000 years ago.  I have strongly felt like sharing these words with you this morning:

We awaken in Christ’s body as Christ awakens our bodies, and my poor hand is Christ; He enters my foot and is infinitely me. I move my hand, and wonderfully my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him (for God is indivisibly whole, seamless in His Godhood). I move my foot, and at once He appears like a flash of lightning. Do my words seem blasphemous? Then open your heart to Him, and let yourself receive the one who is opening to you so deeply. For if we genuinely love Him, we wake up inside Christ’s body where all our body, all over, every most hidden part of it, is realized in joy as Him, and He makes us utterly real, and everything that is hurt, everything that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged, is in Him transformed and recognized as whole, as lovely, and radiant in His light. We awaken as the Beloved in every part of our body.

—Quoted by Stephen Mitchell, The Enlightened Heart. San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1989, pp. 38-39.

Symeon doesn’t urge us to merely honor or love the Beloved Christ as though Christ were apart from ourselves, from a distance; instead, my whole self becomes Christ.

This morning I put aside many other thoughts, having a deep sense that this poem for me points to and expresses best what the Nativity Gospels are really about.

As we begin this New Year there is a certain feel of a timeless moment, and again I find words from others. This time T.S. Elliot expresses the inexpressible:

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate…
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

—T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1943.