Showing posts with label Luke 17:5-10. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Luke 17:5-10. Show all posts

Sunday, September 10, 2017

8th August/September Trinity 2016, The Food that Fills (Redux)

8th August Trinity
Luke 17: 5-10

And the apostles said to the Lord, “Strengthen our faith!”
And the Lord said, “If you had faith as full of life as a mustard seed, you could say to this sycamine [mulberry] tree: be uprooted and be planted in the sea!  And it would obey you.

Van Gogh
Who among you who has a servant for plowing or for herding sheep, who will say to him when he comes home from the field, “Come at once and sit down at table?” Rather you will say, “Prepare the meal for me, put on your apron and wait on me until I eat and drink; afterward you can eat and drink too.” Does the servant deserve special thanks for doing his duty? Think of yourselves like that; when you have done all that you have been told to do, then say: “we are feeble servants, we have only done what we were obliged to do.”

8th August Trinity
Sep 11, 2016
Luke 17: 5-10

There is a children’s story about a lazy young woman, freshly married. Instead of sleeping in, she needed to step up and take hold of the running of a large household farming enterprise.  Other household workers were waiting for her orders. She had to learn to direct the household servants so that the whole enterprise, including the servants, would thrive and be fed.

Perhaps today’s reading is awkward for us. We don’t have servants. And we want to be kind. But perhaps we can look at the servant/master relationship as parts of ourselves that need to come into a healthy hierarchical relationship.

There are parts of our souls that are meant to serve us. Our desire life serves best when it serves the inner master, when it is harnessed for work and caring for others. The soul’s inner master is the I, that part of us which focuses and makes decisions about the work and the caring. Desires in and of themselves can’t be allowed to take precedence, like the lazy wife who desired to stay in bed.

Christ’s use of this metaphor, of course, goes further. It points to our own relationship as servants to the Master of the Universe, to the Lord of Karma. Our task is to offer him food first – then we will be fed. 

The Act of Consecration is the pattern for this. We offer him our noblest and purest thoughts and feelings, our loving devotion. He then has something to transform, to offer us in return as nourishment and strengthening. We bring these offerings because we need to offer him something positive in compensation for our natural errors, weaknesses, and failures. We are feeble servants, only doing what we are obliged to do. But we can have faith and trust that when we do our poor part, when we do our inner and outer work, when we serve Him first, we will, in turn, be nourished and strengthened. 

Albert Steffen wrote*:

Nicole Helbig
I walk through the tilled red land:
The seed sleeps.
I walk through green crops:

The stem shoots up.
I walk through golden fields:
The grain ripens.
I find the miller
And the miller says:
The earth is the face
Of the Son of Man,
And ‘he who eats my bread,
Sets his foot upon me’**
I kneel down
And he offers me the food
That fills, permeates, me
On my earthly journey.


*quoted in Rudolf Steiner's Gesamt Ausgabe (Collected Works) Vol. 36, p. 200 (in German)

** 'He who shares my bread has lifted up his heel against me,' Jn 13:18, Psalm 41:9


Sunday, September 15, 2013

8th September Trinity 2013, Feed the Living Divine

8th August Trinity
Luke 17: 5-10

And the apostles said to the Lord, “Strengthen our faith!”

And the Lord said, “If you had faith as full of life as a mustard seed, you could say to this sycamine [mulberry] tree: be uprooted and be planted in the sea!  And it would obey you.


Who among you who has a servant for plowing or for herding sheep, who will say to him when he comes home from the field, “Come at once and sit down at table?” Rather you will say, “Prepare the meal for me, put on your apron and wait on me until I eat and drink; afterwards you can eat and drink too.” Does the servant deserve special thanks for doing his duty? Think of yourselves like that; when you have done all that you have been told to do, then say: “we are feeble servants, we have only done what we were obliged to do.”

8th September Trinity
Christ washes Peter's feet, Ford Madox Brown 1856
September 15, 2013
Luke 17: 5 – 10

As earthly creatures, we believe in the things we can see, hear, taste, touch.  We have faith that these things exist, and that what we do will have certain results. Our faith is like a tree planted in the earthly realm. It is rooted in our experiences; its crown is our thoughts and actions, based on what we see and hear and know.

Over lifetimes we come to develop certain competencies; we become masters in the earthly realm.

The sea has always been a metaphor, a symbol of the living, ever-flowing world of the Spirit. This is the world of our origins, the world that gave birth to the earthly.  In this reading, Christ is suggesting that we take our earthly tree of faith, of belief and trust in the earthly material world, and transplant it into the invisible world of the Divine Spirit.  When we do this, we become humble servants of the Living Divine World from which we have come. And interestingly, in the picture Christ uses, our first task is to feed and nourish the Master of the Living World.

We feed the Living Divine by offering the Master the substance of our noblest thoughts, the love of our hearts, our devoted wills. The Act of Consecration of Man is the archetype, the pattern and practice for how we do this. We listen to the Word of the Spirit; we offer ourselves in humble awareness of our unworthiness. What we offer He then gives back to us transformed, as our meal, our nourishment of soul, as nourishment for the world.

Christ himself enacted the archetype of the humble servant, in His washing of His disciples’ feet at His last supper with them. He continues to do so with us today.