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 you have gathered a treasure, there your heart will bear you.
“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].
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| Jane Halliwell Green |
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 Trinity
September 20, 2015
Matthew 6: 19-34
In the Northern Hemisphere this is the time of harvest
and of ‘putting by’. Older generations may still have experienced how families
canned and preserved what they grew. August and September were times of
intense and hot, hard work, work for the future.
In our time such work is largely done on a mass scale for us
by others. Although we work hard now in other ways, we have the opportunity to
examine our attitudes toward things of earth. Christ gives us some advice about
our relationship to earthly things. First He begins by directing our gaze
toward the way we perceive, and toward what it is that we value. For what is
primary is what lives in our hearts. If we perceive in a clear and accurate
way, then our inner life is full of light, enlightened. We will be able to see
clearly in two directions.
First we will be able to see that an over-eager and hot pursuit of personal gain come from a spirit of greed that is demonically driven. And secondly we will be able to see the glorious beauty of the created world, and the care that our heavenly Father gives to all creatures, including us. And therefore our hearts can be striving, but in peace, even when we are hard at work. A poet says:
….I think all the time about invisible work.
…. all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am
being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work
that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of
healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth
can breathe
and bees ransack this world into
being,
….
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
