6th February Trinity 2019, Become His Likeness

February Trinity 

(Sunday after Ash Wednesday)

Matthew 4:1-11

Tissot

 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the loneliness of the desert to experience the tempting power of the adversary.

After fasting forty days and nights, He felt for the first time hunger for earthly nourishment. Then the tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, let these stones become bread through the power of your word.”

Jesus answered, “It is written, ‘The human being shall not live on bread alone; he lives by the creative power of every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Tissot

Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the parapet of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’”

Jesus answered him, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

Again a third time, the devil took him to a very elevated place and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give to you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me as your Lord. “

Tissot

Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship [pray to] God your Lord who guides you and serve him only.’”

Then the adversary left him, and he beheld again the angels as they came to bring him nourishment.

6th Feb Trinity

March 10, 2019

Matthew 4: 1-11

  

A tree lives and develops in three zones. It is rooted in the earth where it is nourished by the soil. It weaves and works in air and light; it blossoms and fruits in the warmth of the sun.

In overcoming the three temptations, Christ, the divine human being, clears the three basic areas in which our living souls develop. He reminds us to root ourselves, nourished ‘in the creative power that comes from the mouth of God.’ Matthew 4:4 That is, we are to recognize that we are not fed and sustained by the material nature of bread, but rather by the living power of the universe that God places in the grain.

Tree of Life

While rooted in God’s creative power, we are to weave in the light and air of the divine world and its lawful order, within the divine ‘ordering of space and course of time’. To make one’s ego supreme, to impose one’s own wishes and desires on the world, to test the divine order, is to be like leaves trying to fly—such leaves, separated from the tree, are in fact already dead.

And we are to blossom in the warmth of divine love, not in the heat of overbearing pride. For it is the wise guidance of God that brings us to our full glory and fruitfulness, not our own seeming mastery over the world.

Rooting our souls in God, working and weaving in His light, blossoming in His warmth, we will gradually develop into what God intends us to be—fully and divinely human. Overcoming the basic standard temptations, the temptations of materialism and egotistical pride, our true humanity will blossom.

We were created in God’s image. Through Christ’s strength of overcoming, we will weave and work His purpose, in His daylight. Through Christ, we will blossom into God’s purpose and promise for us: that we become His likeness.

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3rd February Trinity 2018, The Great Intangibles

Tissot

3^rd, 4^th February Trinity (also children)
(Sunday after Ash Wednesday)
Matthew 4:1-11

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the loneliness of the desert to experience the tempting power of the adversary.

After fasting forty days and nights, He felt for the first time hunger for earthly nourishment. Then the tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, let these stones become bread through the power of your word.”

Jesus answered, “It is written, ‘The human being shall not live on bread alone; he lives by the creative power of every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Then the devil took him to the holy city and

Tissot

had him stand on the parapet of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’”

Jesus answered him, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

Again a third time, the devil took him to a very elevated place and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give to you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me as your Lord. “

Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan!

Tissot

For it is written, ‘You shall worship [pray to] God your Lord who guides you and serve him only.’”

Then the adversary left him, and he beheld again the angels as they came to bring him nourishment.

3^rd Feb Trinity
February 18, 2018
Matthew 4:1-11

The story of Christ’s temptation is the archetype of the three areas in which all of us human beings are tempted, simply by virtue of living in a body.

The devil tries to tempt Christ into magick-ing stones into bread. The first temptation is to concentrate on the material aspects of life. Christ’s answer points to the fact that the magic is already there, in the food; it is God’s creative power that bids what we eat, and thus we ourselves, to live. It is the divine life in the food that nourishes us, not the mineral.

The second temptation is to imagine that we can do anything we want and that God will save us. Christ’s answer: No arrogance: God’s love is unconditional; nevertheless, we human beings will ourselves have to bear the consequences of our own deeds.

The third temptation is to misunderstand where true power comes from. True power comes from freely and voluntarily letting ourselves be guided by the divine. Divine guidance will ultimately lead us toward the kind of sacrificing of personal power out of love of others. This is something that the devil, the prince of this world, cannot comprehend—the power of sacrifice.

Christ’s answers to these three temptations are all linked by one theme: to remember the divine world from which we come; to volunteer in humility to take the creative guidance and sacrificial power of God’s realm into our thinking. This has become all the more urgent in our time, since we Westerners have essentially been nourishing ourselves on the stones of usury, worshipping our own prowess and testing the limits for far too long.

The poet David Whyte says:

We shape our self 
to fit this world

and by the world 
are shaped again.

The visible 
and the invisible

Blake

work[ing] together 
in common cause,

to produce 
the miraculous….

So may we, in this life
trust

to those elements 
we have yet to see
or imagine, 
and look for the true

shape of our own self 
by forming it well

to the great 
intangibles about us.  *

* David Whyte, “Working Together”, in House of Belonging