9th August Trinity
Matthew
6: 19-34
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“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."
9th August - September Trinity
Matthew 6: 19 – 34
At harvest time, fruits grow ripe. They enclose the seed
that will ensure next year’s life. The fruit will eventually disintegrate. But
the seed lives on.
We have arrived at the soul time of the year when the soul
too is inwardly ripening. We are preparing for the harvest, preparing to separate
the seed from the chaff. It is no coincidence that the Muslim Ramadan practice
of prayer and fasting occurs now; or that
the fall Hebrew celebration of the ten Days of Awe end in Yom Kippur, a day of
intense prayer and fasting. These are practices that teach the soul that it can
continue to live, despite the falling away of its usual outer bodily supports.
In today’s reading, Christ speaks directly to our soul’s
seed nature – to that which lives in the core of our hearts, that which is
destined for further life. And he warns us to be aware of what it is into which
we are investing our heart’s energy. We can pour our heart’s energy in an
excessive way into acquiring the temporary things of earth, such as wealth or
food or clothing. Food, clothing, money are of course things that have their
rightful function - they help us stand on the earth. But they are like the
fruit that encloses the seed; they are temporary, a means of life, not the purpose itself of life. We cannot devote
ourselves exclusively and anxiously to these things, or our hearts will
eventually shrivel and die. The seed nature at our heart’s core needs the
freedom to be able to grow and rise into the light.
The seed is the important thing. It is our future. The seed
that dwells in the depths of our heart is the seed of the divine in us. It is God’s
seed of love, the Christ in us. We need to become aware of the Christ in us. He
is the seed of further life, the seed of love and peace that we need to nurture
and grow in our hearts.
An early saint said,
Put fear aside. Now
that He has
entered…,
all who live
As seeds cast to the earth…,
will not perish,
but like those seeds
shall rise again…
[1]
St. Athanasios, (298 – 373), “The Death of Death”, in Love’s Immensity, Mystics on the Endless Life, by Scott Cairns, p.
14.
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