3rd June Trinity 2018, Providence

3rd June Trinity
June 10, 2018
John 6: 53 – 69

Jesus answered, ‘Yes I tell you, if you do not eat the earthly body of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my body and drinks my blood has life beyond the cycles of time, and I give him the power of resurrection at the end of time. For my flesh is the true sustenance, and my blood is the true draught. Whoever truly eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. As the life-bearing Father sent me, and as I bear the life of the world by the will of the Father, so also he who makes me his sustenance will have life within him through me. This is the bread which descends from heaven. It will no longer be as it was with the fathers who ate of it and died. Whoever eats this bread will live through the whole cycle of time.’ He said this in his teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.
Many of his disciples who heard this said, ‘These are hard and difficult words; who can bear to hear them?’ Jesus was aware that his disciples could not come to terms with this and he said to them, ‘Do you take offence at this? What will you say when you see the Son of Man ascending again to where he was before? It is the Spirit that gives life; the physical by itself is of no avail. The words that I spoke to you are spirit and are life. But there are some among you who have no faith.’ For Jesus knew from the beginning who would betray him. And he went on: ‘This is why I said to you: No one can find the way to me unless it is given him by the Father’.

3rd June Trinity
June 10, 2018
John 6: 53 – 69

The story of the creation of the world makes evident that the Creator provides. Step by step and with foresight, the world was created until everything was in place to receive and nourish His final creation: the human being.

We count on this providence, this foresight of God, even today. We know that we must plant in order to harvest, for that is how God made the world; that we must care for the animals in order to have the food and other things they produce and to maintain the balance God created in nature.

In today’s reading, Christ talks about another level of providence. He is speaking

Arild Rosenkrantz

ahead of time about nourishing and sustaining, not physical bodies, but human spirits. At His Last Supper, He gave of Himself as food for our spirits. He poured His soul, His love, His life into bread and wine. He turned bread and wine into His body and blood. And he gave to his disciples, and to all who will come to Him and learn from Him in future ages, the power to do the same, to concentrate his essence, his life and love into bread and wine. His body as bread heals our ills; his blood as wine gives us the strength to clean up our messes, and to deal with what is coming in the future. In His providence, he created something that makes it possible for our spirits to be healed, nourished and strengthened even today.

Out of our mindful remembrance of His deed and through our hearts’ connection with Him, His healing essence is concentrated in bread and wine, even today.  For as a poet said:

….The Four Kingdoms of Earth
Prepare the Way-Bread for healing.
Let us now harvest and press,
Let us grind and bake
And consecrate everything that needs it.

Then Man the Consecrated approaches the Grave-Table,
And with him the folk and the circle
Experience creating the Open Secret
That He gives to them time upon time. *

* Sebastian Lorenz, „Menschen-Weihe“ in Die Christengemeinschaft 10_06, pg 507. Translated by C. Hindes.

3rd June Trinity, New Light and Sound

June Trinity

Crijn Hendricksz

John 3: 1-17

There was a man in the circle of the Pharisees, whose name was Nicodemus; he held high rank among the Jews. He came to Jesus in the night and said, “Master, we know that you are a high teacher of mankind, come to us from God, for no one can do such signs of the Spirit as you do unless God himself is working together with him in his deeds.”

Jesus answered and said to him, “The truth out of the spirit I say to you: whoever is not born anew from above cannot behold the kingdom of God.”

Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born again when he is old? Can he return to his mother’s womb to be born again a second time?

Jesus answered, “the truth out of the spirit I say to you: whoever remains as he is, and does not come to a new birth out of the formative power of the water and out of the breath of the spirit [or, …and is not born anew out of the spiritual power of eternal becoming and out of being touched by the might of the spirit world] cannot enter into the kingdom of God. What is born out of earthly elements is of earthly nature. But what is born out of the breath of the spirit, is itself spirit. Do not wonder that I said to you that you must be born anew from above. The spirit wind blows where it will; you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from, or where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born anew out of the breath of the spirit.

Nicodemus replied and said to him, “How can one attain this?”

Jesus answered, “You are a teacher of Israel and do not know? Amen, the truth I say to you: we speak of what we know, and we bear witness to what we have seen in the spirit, but none of you accepts our testimony. When I speak to you of earthly things and you do not believe them, how shall you believe when I want to speak to you of heavenly things? No one has ascended to the spiritual world who has not previously descended out of the spiritual world, that is, the Son of Man.

Just as Moses once lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who finds his power in their hearts can win a share in the higher life beyond time. God has so loved the world that he has given his only begotten Son. From now on, no one who fills himself with his power shall perish, for he will share in timeless, higher life. God did not send the Son into the world to condemn it, but in order that the world be saved [healed] through him, and not fall prey to ruin.”

June Trinity

June 14, 2015

John 3: 1-17

Each human being has two sets of parents. Our earthly parents made possible the birth of our physical body. At the same time a second set of parents are also at work. Mother Earth offers her great body to support, to nourish and sustain all her children. And our Spirit Father sends our eternal spirits into the earthly body, again and again. Yet, as the poet says, ‘our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.[1] We don’t remember the spiritual home from which we have come.

Christ’s conversation with Nicodemus tries to indicate that there is yet another layer to being born, another way, while we are still in bodies on earth. Our spirits can be touched by the power of development, touched by the might of the spiritual world. And this is the birth of a second Man in us. It is an awakening and a remembering. We awaken to the reality of our spiritual nature; we remember our spiritual home; we move on the breath of love.

When Nicodemus asks how to accomplish this, Christ foretells the deed that will make this possible for all human beings. He is lifted up on the cross, arms outstretched, embracing the whole world in love. He ascends to the place where the world is eternally created and sustained. He sends the living spirit of love and understanding to enlighten our thoughts.

He, Christ, is indeed the renewer of the world. Through our love for Him, we too can be reborn, here and now, out of the might and power of the good beings of the spiritual world.

…for many now can hear again

the word of angels: Do not fear!

New light and sound in us appear

for strengthened heart and wakened ear.[2]

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[1] William Wordsworth. 1770–1850, “ Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

[2] Lent Song, German folk song, translation from Camphill

3rd Trinity 2010, Asking for You

June Trinity

John 11: 17-44

Sombart

When Jesus got [to Bethany] there, he found that he [Lazarus] had already been in the tomb for four days. Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles away. Many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him. But Mary remained within. And Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

Martha answered, “I know that he will rise again in the great resurrection at the end of time.”

Then Jesus said to her, “I AM the resurrection and the life. Whoever fills himself with my power through faith, he will live even when he dies; and whoever takes me into himself as his life, he is set free from the might of death in all earthly cycles of time. Do you feel the truth of these words?”

And she said, “Yes Lord. With my heart I have recognized that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”

When she had said this she went and called her sister Mary and said to her privately, “The Master is here and is asking for you.” Jesus had not yet entered the town. He had stayed in the place where Martha had met him.

Rembrandt

When the Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out, they followed her. They thought she was going to the tomb to weep there. But Mary came to the place where Jesus was, and when she saw him, she fell at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been there, this brother of mine would not have died. “

When Jesus saw how she and the Jews coming with her were weeping, he aroused himself in spirit and, deeply moved within himself, he asked, “Where have you laid him?”

They answered, “Come, Lord, and see.” 

Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him.” But some of them said, “Could not he who restored the sight of the blind man keep this man from dying?”

And again Jesus, deeply moved within himself went up to the tomb.

It was a cave, and a stone lay across it. And Jesus said, “Take away the stone!”

Then said Martha, the sister of him whose life had reached completion, “Lord, there will be an odor [he has already begun to decompose], for this is the fourth day.”

But Jesus said, “Did I not say to you that if you had faith, you would see the revelation of God?”

Then they took away the stone. And Jesus lifted up his eyes to the spirit and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me; but because of the people standing here I say it, so that their hearts may know that you have sent me. Then he called with a loud voice: “Lazarus, come out!”

And the dead man came out, his feet and hands bound with strips of linen, his face covered with a veil. And Jesus said, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

3rd June Trinity

June 13, 2010

John 11: 17-44

  

Sombart

When her brother dies, the ever-active Martha rushed out to meet Christ. She gently rebukes him for his absence at her brother’s death, while stating her faith that somehow He will fix things. To Martha Christ gives the answer: Whoever fills himself with my power through trust, he will live even when he dies. John 11:26 Christ reveals Himself as the resurrecting power of life that permeates all of creation. And He probes her heart for her sense of the truth of what He is saying.

It is then Martha who summons Mary. ‘The Master is here and is asking for you,’ John 11: 28 she says to her. To Mary’s same rebuke, that His absence has resulted in Lazarus’s death, Christ responds with tears of compassion for the grief of loss. He moves to the tomb and commands that the heavy stone be rolled away. And then, in concert with His Father, He calls—Lazarus, come forth! And then, ‘Unbind him’. John 11:43

Martha and Mary are two sides of the human soul. Our more active, Martha side arrives first, and responds in hope to conversation with Christ. She summons the other side, the more inward, contemplative Mary side, the side of deep feeling. Christ weeps with them both and then does battle with death. Lazarus, the representative of the eternal human spirit, rises from death to the call of Christ.

In the Act of Consecration of Man, the communion service, each side of our soul is activated. Our Martha side hurries us to the chapel to meet with Christ. She calls forth our more contemplative, Mary side to join in the deed of offering, so that our inner Lazarus, our eternal spirit, is called forth from the place of death. Every time the Act of Consecration of Man is celebrated, Martha’s words sound forth: The Master is here and is asking for you. 

www.thechristiancommunity.org

3rd June Trinity 2007, Birth Eternal Spirit

June Trinity

John 3: 1-17

Hendrickcz

There was a man in the circle of the Pharisees, whose name was Nicodemus; he held high rank among the Jews. He came to Jesus in the night and said, “Master, we know that you are a high teacher of mankind, come to us from God, for no one can do such signs of the Spirit as you do unless God himself is working together with him in his deeds.”

Jesus answered and said to him, “The truth out of the spirit I say to you: whoever is not born anew from above cannot behold the kingdom of God.”

Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born again when he is old? Can he return to his mother’s womb to be born again a second time?

Jesus answered, “the truth out of the spirit I say to you: whoever remains as he is, and does not come to a new birth out of the formative power of the water and out of the breath of the spirit [or, …and is not born anew out of the spiritual power of eternal becoming and out of being touched by the might of the spirit world] cannot enter into the kingdom of God. What is born out of earthly elements is of earthly nature. But what is born out of the breath of the spirit, is itself spirit. Do not wonder that I said to you that you must be born anew from above. The spirit wind blows where it will; you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from, or where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born anew out of the breath of the spirit.

Nicodemus replied and said to him, “How can one attain this?”

            Jesus answered, “You are a teacher of Israel and do not know? Amen, the truth I say to you: we speak of what we know, and we bear witness to what we have seen in the spirit, but none of you accepts our testimony. When I speak to you of earthly things and you do not believe them, how shall you believe when I want to speak to you of heavenly things? No one has ascended to the spiritual world who has not previously descended out of the spiritual world, that is, the Son of Man.

Just as Moses once lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who finds his power in their hearts can win a share in the higher life beyond time. God has so loved the world that he has given his only begotten Son. From now on, no one who fills himself with his power shall perish, for he will share in timeless, higher life. God did not send the Son into the world to condemn it, but in order that the world be saved [healed] through him, and not fall prey to ruin.”

3^rd Trinity Sunday

June 17, 2007

John 3: 1-17

Every night we fall asleep. What belongs to the earth – our body – remains lying in the bed. But our soul

soars aloft to breathe divine spirit-air. It rises to the place where our own true spirit, our higher self nourishes our earthly life. Sleep is there a natural form of prayer, one God-given way of connecting with eternal being.

            Christ has a conversation with Nicodemus in the realm of the night. He tries to tell Nicodemus that He, Christ, has come to earth to add something new to the natural order. He has come to help us find our way to our won eternal spirit without first having to fall asleep. He came so that we can begin to bring down, bring to birth our eternal spirit, our higher self, here on earth; so that we can breathe in the wind of the spirit also when we are awake during the day.

            This is what is meant that Christ descended out of the realm of the Father spirit to save the world: He came to bring the eternal realm of the stars down to the earthly world. He came to bring heaven to earth, so that we can raise the earthly into the heavenly.

www.thechristiancommunity.org

3rd June Trinity 2009, The Chorus

June Trinity

John 3: 1-17

There was a man in the circle of the Pharisees, whose name was Nicodemus; he held high rank among the Jews. He came to Jesus in the night and said, “Master, we know that you are a high teacher of mankind, come to us from God, for no one can do such signs of the Spirit as you do unless God himself is working together with him in his deeds.”

Jesus answered and said to him, “The truth out of the spirit I say to you: whoever is not born anew from above cannot behold the kingdom of God.”

Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born again when he is old? Can he return to his mother’s womb to be born again a second time?

Jesus answered, “the truth out of the spirit I say to you: whoever remains as he is, and does not come to a new birth out of the formative power of the water and out of the breath of the spirit [or, …and is not born anew out of the spiritual power of eternal becoming and out of being touched by the might of the spirit world] cannot enter into the kingdom of God. What is born out of earthly elements is of earthly nature. But what is born out of the breath of the spirit, is itself spirit. Do not wonder that I said to you that you must be born anew from above. The spirit wind blows where it will; you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from, or where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born anew out of the breath of the spirit.

Nicodemus replied and said to him, “How can one attain this?”

            Jesus answered, “You are a teacher of Israel and do not know? Amen, the truth I say to you: we speak of what we know, and we bear witness to what we have seen in the spirit, but none of you accepts our testimony. When I speak to you of earthly things and you do not believe them, how shall you believe when I want to speak to you of heavenly things? No one has ascended to the spiritual world who has not previously descended out of the spiritual world, that is, the Son of Man.

           Just as Moses once lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who finds his power in their hearts can win a share in the higher life beyond time. God has so loved the world that he has given his only begotten Son. From now on, no one who fills himself with his power shall perish, for he will share in timeless, higher life. God did not send the Son into the world to condemn it, but in order that the world be saved [healed] through him, and not fall prey to ruin.”

3^rd June Trinity

June 21, 2009

John 3: 1-17

Every night we surrender our bodies and enter the realm of God and his angels. There we are fed and repaired. In the morning we return to the house of the body; we awaken refreshed and, as it were, reborn.

Nicodemus meets with Christ in the realm which we enter at night. Christ tells him there of the necessity of being reborn on yet another level. Not physically, nor in the daily way of waking up, but on an even greater level.

For even when we are awake, we are all of us asleep, dreaming the dream of our ordinary lives. Yet behind this world is the real world, the mighty world from which originates all that is evolving. It is a place in which we are not ordinarily conscious. It is a place where we can hear the sound of God’s breath as He breathes the breath of new life into everything at every moment; where our life is His creating life. Christ urges Nicodemus, urges us all, to awaken into this realm, to be born into this higher life beyond time. It will take us a while; we ‘take our waking slow’. But we have all caught glimpses. The poet asks:

Your great mistake is to act the drama

as if you were alone.  ….Surely,

even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out your solo voice. [1]

So may we, in this life 

trust

to those elements 

we have yet to see…[2]

www.thechristiancommunity.org

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[1] “Everything is Waiting for You”, David Whyte, in Everything is Waiting for You.

[2] David Whyte, “Working Together”, in House of Belonging. 

3rd June Trinity 2012, Practiced Powers

June Trinity

John 4, 1-26

At this time the Lord became aware that it was rumored among the Pharisees that Jesus was finding and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself did not baptize, though his disciples did.) Therefore he left Judea and went back again to Galilee.

Now he had to pass through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan town called Sychar, near the plot of land Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was also there. Jesus was weary with the journey, and he sat down by the well. It was about midday, the sixth hour.

Then a Samaritan woman came to draw water. And Jesus said to her, “Give me to drink.” For his disciples had gone into town to buy bread.

Then the Samaritan woman said to him, “How can you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a Samaritan woman?” For the Jews avoided all contact with the Samaritans.

Jesus answered her, “If you knew how the divine world now draws near to men, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give me to drink’, you would ask him, and he would give you the water of life [the living water].

“Sir,” the woman said to him, “you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. From where will you draw the living water? Are you greater than our Father Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his flocks and herds?”

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water that I will give him, his thirst will be quenched for all time. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up as true life for eternity.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, that I may never be thirsty again, and need never come here again to draw.”

He said to her, “Go call your husband and show him to me.”

“I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You have well said that you have no husband. Five husbands you have had, and he whom you now have is not your husband. This you have said truly.”
“Sir,” the woman said, “I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews say that only in Jerusalem is the place where one should worship.”

Jesus answered, “Believe me, o woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship a being you do not know; we worship what we do know. That is why salvation had to be prepared for among the Jews. But the hour is coming and has now come, when the true worshippers will worship the Father with the power of the spirit and in awareness [knowledge] of the truth.”

Then the woman said to him, “I know that the Messiah is coming who is called Christ. When he comes, he will teach us all things.”

Jesus said to her, “I AM he who stands before you and speaks to you.”3^rd June Trinity

June 17, 2012

John 4:1-26

If someone were to ask us for a drink of water, most of us would do our best to accommodate them. We know how basic and burning a need thirst can be. We also know that human interdependence means that we often need others to provide what we need.

Christ requests of the Samaritan woman, of all of us, ‘Give me to drink.’ Astonishing to think that He who created water has to ask human beings for a drink. Yet this demonstrates the tremendous generosity and respect that the Divinity offers us—that it asks, and waits for us to respond.

Christ has a burning thirst for what we can give Him. He needs our noblest thoughts, our hearts’ love, our

devoted wills. Offering them to Him creates a fountainhead within our own being. He joins with us in creating a fountain of love for God, a fountain of creative, peaceful love for fellow human beings, a fountain of wonder and amazement for the way God works.  So in the words of Rilke:

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out

until they span the chasm between two

contradictions ... For the god

wants to know himself in you.[1]

www.thechristiancommunity.org

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[1] Rainer Maria Rilke, in Ahead of All Parting, ed. and translated by Steven Mitchell

3rd June Trinity 2008, Scent of Light

June Trinity

John 6: 53-69

Mary Mcinnis

Jesus answered, ‘Yes I tell you, if you do not eat the earthly body of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my body and drinks my blood has life beyond the cycles of time, and I give him the power of resurrection at the end of time. For my flesh is the true sustenance, and my blood is the true draught. Whoever truly eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. As the life-bearing Father sent me, and as I bear the life of the world by the will of the Father, so also he who makes me his sustenance will have life within him through me. This is the bread which descends from heaven. It will no longer be as it was with the fathers who ate of it and died. Whoever eats this bread will live through the whole cycle of time.’ He said this in his teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.

            Many of his disciples who heard this said, ‘These are hard and difficult words; who can bear to hear them?’ Jesus was aware that his disciples could not come to terms with this and he said to them, ‘Do you take offence at this? What will you say when you see the Son of Man ascending again to where he was before? It is the Spirit that gives life; the physical by itself is of no avail. The words that I spoke to you are spirit and are life. But there are some among you who have no faith.’ For Jesus knew from the beginning who would betray him. And he went on: ‘This is why I said to you: No one can find the way to me unless it is given him by the Father’.

3^rd June Trinity

June 1, 2008

John 6: 53-69

O. Shuplyak

We are all on a path toward a goal. Sometimes we skip along, progressing rapidly. Sometimes we encounter obstacles that cause us to stumble, or even fall. The natural tendency is to look and see what it is. What we do with these obstacles makes all the difference.

Christ says, “If you do not eat the earthly body of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you…For my flesh is the true sustenance and my blood the true draught.” John 6: 53, 55   Hearing these words in a literal, material way, many were naturally repulsed. The words themselves became an obstacle.

Christ’s words were prophetic. The possibility of literally taking in His body and blood would not be fulfilled until the events around Golgatha. At the Last Supper, He would pour His luminous spirit form and shining life into bread and wine. At His death He would pour them out into the earth, into everything growing on it. In so doing He indicates that ongoing spiritual human evolution, ongoing eternal spiritual life is to be gained here, on the earth, not in some distant heaven or spirit world.

Unconsciously, we eat His luminous earthly body and drink His sparkling blood in every meal that we eat. For all bread is his body; all fluid is his blood. One of our goals on the path is to make our eating less thoughtless; to make our eating more sacred, more aware of the element of the divine in it. The Act of Consecration of Man is the archetype, the model of how we do this. In it, we raise the act of earthly eating and drinking into a consciously grateful and intentional sacred act, as He showed us how to do at the Last Supper. In Communion we take in His living light body.

The poet writes:

Like a great starving beast

My body is quivering

Fixed

On the scent

Of light.[1]

We who stumble on the path look back to see what trips us up. Sometimes it is just a stone. But sometimes it is a luminous treasure, a treasure that meets our deepest hunger, the thirst of our yearning.

www.thechristiancommunity.org

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[1] Hafiz, “The Scent of Light”, in The Gift, by Daniel Ladinsky, p. 90.