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.
