Sermon 195 Feb 25, 2024 Lk 18:9-14, Phil 3:5-9 Dt 6:4-18 Publican & Pharisee - Prayer from the heart

As preached by Brother Luke

Holy Wisdom Church


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

Lent is an old English word for Spring. So it marks the season for spring cleaning. Some of us may relish this time and others may want to flee it. The church in the English speaking world has coopted the term Lent and applied it to the period of preparation for our entry into the mystery of the Passion of Christ. How might we use this period to its fullest benefit? The church gives us a valuable starting point by placing before us, as Great Lent approaches, the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee.

The story presents a rather stark contract between the two characters: humility vs self-righteousness. But what if we back up a bit from this particular moment in the temple and ponder what might have led these two individuals to go to the temple to pray at this time. There is no indication that this was connected to any particular celebration or high holy day.  So, what might we imagine was going on in the lives of these two people?

We might assume that the pharisee had his own personal rule of prayer and that it included specific times set aside for prayer in the temple. So he may have gone to the Temple not just to fulfill an obligation but rather to engage in part of his regular practice of prayer. It was his routine. This would be expected behavior since he was a pharisee. This would also tend to show that he was a person who valued his prayer life and believed that by pursuing it he was doing God's will and living life in a way that pleased God. Probably not unlike many of us.

Now the publican's life was quite different and we have no way of knowing what kind of prayer life he may have had.  Instead, we have an image of a man who pursued a vocation that included serving the interests of a foreign occupier by collecting taxes on their behalf. It was expected that he would use his position to collect money for himself; a practice understood, but despised, by his fellow Jews, and seen as quite illegal by us today. My guess is that few of us would identify with the tax collector: aiding a hostile foreign power and using our position to "feather our nest" as the saying goes. Even if we translate these activities into something closer to home, such as: compromising our principles in order to keep our jobs and finding ways to varnish the truth to avoid paying our taxes, we most likely will not see ourselves in those roles either. And yet, the parable is telling us the tax collector was the righteous one in the end. How is that possible?

Prayer from the heart.

Whether our prayer is regular or spasmodic, it needs to be from the heart, not just from the head. And the heart needs to be open to God's urgings. Sometimes an open heart is created by prayer that softens an otherwise hard heart. Sometimes it may emerge from a crisis that finally challenges our assumptions about life and how we are living it. There needs to be an opening, that "narrow door," through which God can enter to help us find our way back to that better, or true, self we are all created to be.  We can't know, but we can surmise, that the publican had to be experiencing some kind of personal crisis of conscience that led him to the temple that day to pray for forgiveness. The pharisee, on the other hand, was still very secure in his view that he was doing God's will. But the scene in the temple that Christ creates, is showing us that our inner disposition informs our prayer. The publican had reached the place where his prayer, his desire for forgiveness, and consequently, for help in changing his life, was connecting with God's urgings. The pharisee, however, still secure in his image of his righteousness, was unable to see how far his prayer was from God's intensions. Did our tax collector change his life? We don't know, but we do know that Jesus was zeroing in on who this tax collector really was and not just on what he was doing. He was calling him, and us, to align our life to the true self God created us to be.

So, we enter this period of self examination, striving to soften our hearts and thereby to open ourselves to God's designs for us. To do this to the best of our ability, we need to live at all times mindful of God's love for us and strive to share that love with our neighbor and all creation.

Glory be to Jesus Christ!

Reflections on Lk 19:1-10

As preached by Brother Theophan
Holy Wisdom Church

Today’s Gospel reading is about how the intensity of our desire to know God meets with God’s desire to know us, in a very personal way. Zaccheus was a rich publican - someone who made his riches in a kind of sleazy way, by extorting excessive taxes from hard-working people. Not only was he rich, he was also the chief of publicans, so to some extent had both money and power, but there was still something missing. There was a deep longing in his soul that none of these external things could fill, a loneliness that he kept hidden. So when he heard that Jesus was passing through Jericho, his heart caught on fire.  He was willing to feel the full force of his longing: deep in his heart he had an intuition that finally, he’s found that one thing that he was always searching for.

So he acted on this intuition. He stopped caring about what others would say or think about him: pride and vanity couldn’t hold him back. The crowds laughed at him, but it didn’t matter. He scrambles up the tree, above the crowd of distractions and doubts, hoping just to catch a glimpse of Christ. He was being magnetized to a greater Love. And what happened when this desire took over his heart? God arrives to meet him: the God who knows him by name. God wants to be a guest in his house - the human heart becomes God’s place of visitation. To be seen like that by God is to experience a love that nothing else in this world can offer. Zaccheus is overwhelmed and completely transforms his life, he corrects his past mistakes.

This Gospel is reaching out to what is most alive inside of us and giving it a shake: that something that wants to be in deep connection, that is like an open window to mystery. It’s asking us to fully feel our longing and desire for what is deepest in life - we call that God, the source of life, source of our being.  That source is always calling us but to be receptive we have to consent to feel our need for it and risk becoming completely vulnerable.  And only then do we start having the capacity to be filled up with a life force that is infinitely greater than what any of the so-called substitutes can offer. Our culture never stops offering us a whole range of substitutes and if you refuse to believe in these, rest assured someone will be there to ridicule you like they did Zaccheus.

This hunger for God can be experienced as a loneliness that nothing can cover up. Zaccheus shows us what happens when we consent to consciously own this loneliness without always trying to fill it up, or numbing ourselves to avoid feeling that aching homesickness for our own essence. Part of the Gospel teaching is to allow ourselves to fully feel the pure energy of desire and longing without settling for a quick fix. To risk falling in love with Love itself. If we can enter into this twilight of loneliness and longing, enter and then learn to stay in it, then God will appear to meet us there as a fountain of radiance and strength, of beauty and pure goodness. Then life will be full of meaning and we will have the answer to everything we were searching for out there.

Fr Thomas Keating said that we all have our own “emotional programs for happiness” - all the different ways of going after what we mistakenly believe will bring us lasting happiness. We learn these programs from an early age and they have a very strong influence over us. But sooner or later all of them leave us more or less disappointed - because human beings were made to be satisfied only by the infinite and yet we are always mistaking temporary spikes in happiness as the entire purpose of life. These programs hook us so that we forget about the one thing necessary. And as long as we aren’t conscious of them, the futile programs for happiness run our life. So when our needs for comfort, a good reputation, outside attention and approval are met we look around and we’re haunted by a sense of emptiness - and we think: what’s missing? Fr Keating defines metanoia or conversion as a radical 360 degree change in where we look for happiness. This is an ongoing process, not a one time and you’re done sort of thing.  We have to be willing to consciously unhook from the mistaken emotional programs and that’s a rocky road - it’s usually the last thing we want to do because we’re addicted to the quick-fixes and instant gratifications. But doing this spiritual homework is the only way God can enter in and the only way we can reconnect with our source.

I’d like to share some short reflections from St. Tikhon of Zadonsk about Christ as the fulfillment of our deepest longing-

Do you desire good for yourself? All good is in Me.
Do you desire beauty? What is lovelier than I?
Riches? All riches are in me.
Wisdom? I am the Wisdom of God.
Friendship? Who is a greater friend than I - I who laid down my life for all.
Happiness? Who can be happy without me?
Do you seek peace? I am the peace of the soul.
Do you seek life? In Me is the fount of Life.
Do you seek light? I am the Light of the world.

Glory be to Christ.

Reflections on Lk 5:29-39 2/11/24

As preached by Brother Theophan
Holy Wisdom Church



Christ tells us here that He came to save the sinners and not the righteous. Now it’s important to realize that there’s a kind of irony at work - because the righteous, the Pharisees, are righteous only in their own perception of reality, but not in the inner world, the heart, which is where Christ is always drawing our attention to. So the sinners are those who are mindful, conscious of their own sinfulness, while the righteous have their heads in the sand - thinking everything is just fine when the whole house is on fire.

It is easy, I think, for me to read this passage and pay lip service and make a half hearted admission of my sinfulness. But when I say this am I really feeling the truth of what I’m admitting to, with all of my being - body, soul and spirit? Or am I paying lip service? The Pharisees stopped at paying lip service only.

Now it would be really all too easy to become lazy and passive here. After all, I live in a monastery. I pray multiple times every single day. I go to church all the time. Am I a sinner? I am protected here from many temptations so how much trouble can I really get into to consider myself a sinner?

The saints often considered themselves the worst of sinners. St Paul counted himself chief among sinners. Were they being disingenuous? Was it “humble bragging”? I don’t think so - rather, in reading the lives of saints like St Silouan we know that the saints were aware of their sinfulness because they were graced with conscious experiences of the unimaginable light, beauty, love and compassion of an all embracing God and this gave them a vision of how far short they fell of it. Think of how tiny we feel sometimes looking up at the stars at night. This captures, I think, some of the cosmic scale that we are dealing with - it begins to put things in the right perspective. When the light is very bright you’re liable to see every mote of dust. It’s hard to notice the filth and disorder in a room if you never draw the blinds or turn on a lamp.

So I think it’s important here to go just a little deeper and consider what sin means. In Greek, the word is amartia and the literal translation, as we all know, is “to miss the mark”. To miss the bull’s eye. To go through life and really miss what it’s all about. The human tragedy, in a sense, is not to realize, to really realize in a way that affects us down in our guts, that we are, in fact, made in the image of God. That God has hidden unimaginable treasures deep inside of us. We are called to something cosmic, but day by day, we live under the tyranny of the trivial.

In many ways, the whole goal of the Christian life is to become who we really are - to consciously assimilate and live out of our deepest self, our inner core, the image that radiates with the light of Tabor.  To be mindful of that unceasingly. That is what is expected of us. And yet do I hit the mark? How often do I really live from this depth of myself - how often do I show and do even some of what I know of this wisdom that sleeps inside of me? How can I see myself in the way that Christ sees me and act in the way He trusts I am capable of? Metropolitan Anthony Bloom said a sinner is someone afraid of their own depths and so a sinner relates to life situations and others from a superficial level.

Now Christ is calling us to a radical shift - the old containers cannot be patched up and recycled to hold the major shifts we are being asked to make. This isn’t a small remodeling job - we are called to a new life in which we replace old habits with new ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, acting. To move past our all too human drift toward selfishness and the comfort of what is familiar and well rehearsed. This is a project that is meant to engage every fiber of our being.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow had many interesting things to say about something he called the Jonah complex which exists inside all of us. The Jonah complex is the deep awe, reverence and even fear we feel when we catch a glimpse of our authentic greatness. As a reaction, we are almost paralyzed by the calling that beckons to us from our depths. It sounds paradoxical but we are afraid, and even terrified, of our authentic greatness - so we sometimes boast and take flight into an imaginary, made up greatness or we feel sorry for ourselves.

It makes us deeply uncomfortable to shine with the Light of Tabor. It makes us deeply uncomfortable to see others shining in that same light because it may require us to do the work of throwing off the shackles that hold us back - fear, lethargy, forgetfulness. The wisest human beings saw this very clearly down through history - in one voice they tell us that most of the time we are sleepwalking through life, mired in the minor cares, worries, and obsessions that will not survive the grave. Sadly all too often we don’t have a vivid realization that the life we lived was a pale shadow of what God is calling us to manifest in this world - and that is to miss the mark, to be off the bull’s eye. Walt Whitman wrote ‘You have not known what you are - you have slumber’d upon yourself your whole life.’

But when we really come face to face with these treasures inside of us - which really are not our possession at all but God’s free gift to us, on temporary loan - our heart is pierced by a dimension that comes from a different place than our mundane existence. Something of the cosmic and eternal shines through. And we realize that this treasure is sort of like a pearl or a diamond with many facets to it - one facet is the sense of wonder reawakening, like we knew in childhood, another facet reflects beauty, gratitude, deep joy, humility. Our heart is tenderized by genuine contrition of having missed our hidden potentials; we experience a deep, aching longing to enter more into the mystery, to actualize these treasures God has placed inside of us. This is the call of our life. And we need Christ to be our Healer, our Physician, the Way we follow to get to our destination.

Feast of the Encounter 2024

 Homily by Sister Rebecca

 

We read this morning a passage from St Luke’s Gospel: “And Behold a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon...he was just and devout expecting the consolation of Israel, the Holy Spirit was upon him: it was communicated to him that he wouldn’t see death before he would see the Lord’s Christ.”

 

Note that the Gospel begins with the word Behold.

 

The word “behold” is found over 1000 times in scripture: it points to an immensely important revelation: open your eyes, pay attention. It denotes Wonder, Awe, Surprise!

 

And indeed, today’s feast of the Encounter is about the revelation of God, the one true Light to the world.  The word “revelation” involves removing the veil from our eyes…to see what really IS beyond the surface of things, to encounter the Divine Presence in our midst right now.

 

I ran across a quote from Carl Jung that might speak to us about this seeing:

 

“What a tragic delusion...theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.” 

 

This feast presents us with an opportunity to zero in on this art of seeing as exemplified by Simeon and Anna. It invites us today to peer into the depths of seeing the true Light offered to us as we celebrate the revelation of the Light of Christ.

 

Simeon and Anna both see this light: they have over many decades of their lives nurtured the art of seeing. The scripture says this: that they have been preparing for this moment. We heard that the Holy Spirit was upon Simeon and that it had been revealed to Simeon that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. He was able to see because of his devout vigilance, because the Holy Spirit had unveiled to him that he would see the Lord’s Christ before death. Anna too had been vigilant and watchful, like Simeon, preparing herself to see and receive the Messiah.

 

This ability to see—the art of seeing—doesn’t just come overnight. It must be nurtured and practiced for a long time. This practice of seeing, called nepsis, is about watchfulness, mindfulness. Without nepsis our spiritual lives wither, grow weak.

 

This practice is how we train ourselves to see what is before us without grasping, without holding on to what is good or pushing away the good we do not feel like accepting. This practice enables us to see things as they are now, and not as we want them to be—as happens when we are caught up in fear of what life presents us with.

 

Some of us here are familiar with Olivier Clement’s masterpiece The Roots of Christian Mysticism, in which he comments that people are leaving Christianity for Eastern religions because they can no longer find in the Church the very things that were at the heart of Christianity from the very beginning. These things are still in the heart of the Church. It is just that we have simply forgotten. We have forgotten the art of seeing, nepsis, being awake, conscious of union and communion with God. We must teach this again to all who want to learn the art of seeing.

 

In our present culture our sense of loneliness has become very pervasive. And this loneliness persists despite the abundance of social media, where many people have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook. Where does loneliness arise? Might it really be that people are estranged from their deep selves? That this yearning is actually our spiritual instinct that is knocking on the door of our heart?  God—the Sacred Presence—is striving to awaken us to see what really matters and fulfills us: our soul’s innermost space, where we see our deep connection with one another and all of life.

 

Thomas Merton described the faith journey in this wonderful prayer, part of which is given here:

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.

A similar image comes from the writer E. L. Doctorow: driving a car on a dark highway, during which the car’s headlights show only part of the road, but by following the headlights, the driver will reach the destination.  

The practice of mindfulness is “turning on the headlights.” As with Simeon and Anna in their long spiritual journeys, this means stripping away the layers of skin from our spiritual eyes of the heart—skins of fear, of self-centered desires and actions, of being entangled in unconscious living as if we are on automatic pilot.

 

The narrow path of vigilance and mindfulness is offered and open to all of us. It is a prerequisite to deep repentance, since it brings us to self-knowledge. This is not a sad journey. On the contrary, it leads to a deep, gentle bliss of mind and heart. It calls to mind the inner meaning of the first few verses of Psalm 119: “Full of blessedness, bliss, is the one who seeks the way of wholeheartedness to God, who is watchful and vigilant in walking in the presence of God.”

 

Simeon and Anna show us today what can happen when watchfulness is practiced consistently and with patience. Let us pray and trust in God’s gift to truly see the revelation that Christ is present and will dawn in our hearts as powerfully as the Second Coming of his kingdom.

 

NB: I would like to express my gratitude to Fr. Antony Hughes, Fr. Ronald Rolheiser and a number of others I cannot name for their inspirational thoughts.