9th Trinity III 2022, Harmonious Order

 

9th Trinity III

Matthew 6:19-34 

Arya Sheffer

"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 [Mammon - spirit of hindrances or avarice]. 

"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? 

Jan de Kok

"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? 

"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."

 9^th August/Sept Trinity

September 18, 2022

Matthew 6:19-24 

It seems that suddenly the days have been shortened. It gets dark so early. Everything begins to seem so pressured and insufficient. A half-conscious anxiety creeps over us—we worry whether we will get everything done today, this month, this lifetime. We sense that the light is declining. 

This gospel reading comes at a good time. It tells us to look closely at the worries and fears that darken our inner landscape. It tells us of the importance of maintaining the inner light in the face of growing outer darkness. It encourages a light generated by an undivided trust in and devotion to the divine, in whose hands we are held. 

Ultimately worries and anxieties can be traced to the greatest fear that our little ego has — the fear of annihilation. The poet Rilke* gives us an interesting view of this fear: 

I cannot believe [he says] that little death

Collot d'Herbois

whom we so busily ignore

should still trouble us so.

 

I cannot believe that he is that powerful.

I’m still alive, I have time to build.

My blood will outlast the rose. 

For, (as he points out):

My knowing is deeper than the teasing way

he [death] likes to toy with our fear.

I am the world

he stumbled out of. 

What a thought! We human beings were here first. The fact that we live comes first; death is a secondary aspect of our existence, an emanation out of us. “I AM, I grow, I know” is primary and far more powerful than death’s mocking threats of annihilation. 

Death and life are not polar opposites, like black and white. Just as the year does not end in total darkness, but gradually segues into another spring, so death is not the end of life. The moment of death, like the moment of birth,  is actually a kind of solstice, the transition to yet another phase of life. Life does not end with death, but life and death become resurrection, life in another form, on another level, another kind of life. 

To recognize this threefold aspect of our existence, to recognize the life/death/life cycle is to know and therefore experience the revelation of God, as demonstrated by his Son. Being born, growing, dying, rising, knowing — this is the pattern of all human existence, the pattern which Christ, the Human God, fleshed out for us. This pattern lives in the smaller events in our lives and in the overall pattern of life itself. 

“So be not anxious; seek first for God’s kingdom and its harmonious order.” To connect with Christ is to know the Truth and to connect with the Way, the path to another level of Life. 

*Rilke, Book of Hours, Barrows and Macy, page 72

 

 

9th August/September Trinity 2016, Vertiginous Clarity (Redux)

9th August Trinity

Matthew 6; 19-23

“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!

9th August Trinity

Sept 18, 2016

Matthew 6; 19-23

We know, at least intellectually, that we cannot take our physical possessions with us across the threshold of death. We even make ironic jokes, like ‘he who dies with the most toys wins!’ But even if we could somehow bring them with us, they would eventually disintegrate because they belong to the world of the transitory.

We are encouraged to store up heart-treasures, treasures that we can take with us through death. One such heart treasure is reverence and wonder toward God, toward our fellow human beings and toward the living being of nature. The health and vitality of our soul, indeed of our whole organism, depends on the manner in which we look at the world. If we look at the world through eyes open in wonder, filled with awe, then seeing through such eyes generates light, both inwardly and outwardly. Through wonder and awe, we gain the light of knowledge and the light of wisdom. Our eyes will shine. Lacking reverence before God, man and nature, our souls begin to darken. Even our bodily organism becomes darker and harder, less translucent. Awe enlightens. 
The poet says:

Never between the branches has the sky

burned with such brilliance, as if

it were offering all of its light to me,

to say – what? what urgent mystery

strains at that transparent mouth?

….the air

suddenly arches itself like this into infinity,

and glitters.

This evening, far from here,

a friend is entering his death,

he knows it, he walks

under bare trees alone,

perhaps for the last time. So much love,

so much struggle, spent and worn thin.

But when he looks up, suddenly the sky

is arrayed in this same vertiginous clarity.*

For, as Christ says, ‘Where you have gathered a treasure, there your heart will bear you’.**

*Jean Joubert, “Brilliant Sky,” Trans. by Denise Levertov in The Gift of Tongues, ed. by Sam Hamill

** Matthew 6:21

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