9th Trinity III
Matthew 6:19-34
"Do not save up your treasures on the earth, where moths and rust destroy and thieves tunnel in and steal. Save up your treasures in heaven, where no moth nor rust destroys, 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 they will hate one and love the other, or they will put up with
one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and greed's demon of
riches.*
"Therefore 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 clothes? 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 like 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? 
Jan de Kok
"So do not worry, saying, 'What will we drink? What will we wear?' The nations 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 19, 2021
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, hot, hard work, work for the future.
In our time, such work is largely done on a mass scale for
us by others. Even though we work hard now in other ways, we always 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 comes 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. The poet Alice Luterman 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
is the work of the world's
heart.
