9th August Trinity 2011, Wholesomeness

9th August Trinity

Matthew 6; 19-34

   

  “Do not save up your treasures on the earth, where moths and rust eat away at them and thieves tunnel in and steal. Save up your treasures in heaven, where no moth and no rust consumes and thieves do not tunnel in and steal. Because where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

“The lamp of the body is the eye. So if your eye is wholesome, your whole body is lighted; whereas if your eye is bad, your whole body is in darkness. So if the light inside you is dark…what great darkness!

“No one can serve two masters: either he will hate one and love the other, or he will  put up with one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and greed’s demon of riches [mammon].

“That is why I tell you, do not trouble your heart about what you will eat and

drink or with what you will clothe your body. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothing? Look at the birds in the sky: they do not plant, do not harvest, and do not fill barns, and your heavenly Father still feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Can any of you, by being vastly concerned, add one moment to the span of your life?

And why do you worry about clothing? Study how the lilies of the field grow: they do not work, and they do not spin cloth. But I am telling you that not even Solomon in all his glory was ever arrayed as one of these. If that is how God clothes the wild grass of the field, here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, will He not do much more for you, o small in faith?

“So do not worry, saying, ‘What will we drink? What will we wear?’ It is the nations who ask for all these things, and indeed, your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. Ask first for God’s kingdom and its harmonious order, and these other things will be delivered to you as well.

So do not worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow can worry about itself. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

9^th August Trinity

September 18, 2011

Matthew 6: 19-34

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we are in the time of diminishing light. The days are shortening; the dark is rising. And what can follow in our souls, unconsciously, is the rising of a subtle level of anxiety.

Once again the gospel reading addresses our human tendency to worry, our fear of insufficiency. Christ encourages us not to diminish our focus, the range of our attention, through concentrating only on food and drink, clothes and riches. Rather we are to pay some attention to our own powers of perception. ‘If your eye is wholesome, your whole body will be filled with light’, He says. That is, if our way of seeing, our way of picturing the world is wholesome, then our body and our way of working in the world will be filled with light, radiant with love. What does a wholesome way of seeing the world consist of?

It consists of looking at what has already happened through the lens of gratitude. Gratitude expands and enlightens our vision. It widens the angle of what we see.

Wholesomeness also consists of imaging the future through the lens of trust; trust in God’s harmonious ordering of events, trust in the beneficence of His guidance. Correcting our vision with lenses of gratitude and trust lets the light into our bodies so that the light in us can radiate out into the world.

In the words of Anne Sexton:

 

….So while I think of it,

let me paint a thank-you on my palm

for this God, this laughter of the morning,

lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,

dies young.[1]


www.thechristiancommunity.org

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[1] Anne Sexton, in The Awful Rowing Toward God