2nd November Trinity 2014, Sky Bridge

2nd Trinity November

Tiffany Stained Glass,
Angel of Sardis

Rev. 3, 1-6, (Sardis)

And to the angel who penetrates the congregation of Sardis write:

Thus speaks he who has power over the seven creating spirits of God and over the seven stars: I know the consequences of your deeds, for one says of you that you live, and yet are dead. Awaken, and strengthen what remains in you, that is otherwise about to die, for I have not found that your works possess reality before my God.

Remember how you were once receptive for all the workings of the spirit, and for all words which came from the spirit. Care for them in your soul in inner loyalty. Change your heart and mind.

If however you do not awaken, I will come over you suddenly like a thief, and you will not know at which hour I will come over you.

But you have some names in Sardis whose souls have not been darkened by illusion and addiction to the senses. They will walk with me in white garments, for they are worthy of them.

He who overcomes, he shall be clothed with white garments, and I will not wipe out his name from the Book of Life. I will speak out his name and acknowledge him before my Father and his Angels. He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the spirit says to the churches.

2^nd November Trinity

November 9, 2014

Revelations 3: 1 – 6

This letter is from the Son of Man. It is written to the angel of the community of Sardis. It can be heard as a letter to an entire community, ‘a community whose members feel the Christ within themselves’.

It is natural that a community tends to drift away from its original receptive gesture of soul. After all, things change. Habits form. And over time, a community’s relationship to the spirit may become dull. This letter stresses being open to the words and workings of the spirit. Christ encourages us to revive our original prayerful openness, in loyal dedication to Him.

Sky Walk, Grand Canyon

Such openness helps us to overcome illusion through the Truth of Christ’s Being. It helps us overcome our need to see, hear, touch a physical God. The poet Czeslaw Milosz was asked about praying to a God one could not perceive:

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.

All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge

And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,

Above landscapes the color of ripe gold

Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.

That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal

Where everything is just the opposite and the word 'is'

Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.

Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,

Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh

And knows that if there is no other shore

We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.[1]

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[1]  Czeslaw Milosz, “On Prayer” in New and Collected Poems, 1931-2001, trans. Robert Hass

2nd November Trinity 2008, Angel Arrives

2^nd Trinity November

Rev. 3, 1-6, (Sardis) or

Rev. 3, 14-22 (Laodicea)

Escorial Beatus

Rev. 3, 1-6, (Sardis)

And to the angel who penetrates the congregation of Sardis write:

Thus speaks he who has power over the seven creating spirits of God and over the seven stars: I know the consequences of your deeds, for one says of you that you live, and yet are dead. Awaken, and strengthen what remains in you, that is otherwise about to die, for I have not found that your works possess reality before my God.

Remember how you were once receptive for all the workings of the spirit, and for all words which came from the spirit. Care for them in your soul in inner loyalty. Change your heart and mind.

If however you do not awaken, I will come over you suddenly like a thief, and you will not know at which hour I will come over you.

But you have some names in Sardis whose souls have not been darkened by illusion and addiction to the senses. They will walk with me in white garments, for they are worthy of them.

He who overcomes, he shall be clothed with white garments, and I will not wipe out his name from the Book of Life. I will speak out his name and acknowledge him before my Father and his Angels. He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the spirit says to the churches.

 2^nd Nov Trinity

November 9, 2008

Revelation 3: 1-6

In the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty, the twelve good fairies bestow their gifts on the child at her christening. Before the twelfth fairy can offer hers, a thirteenth, angry at not having been invited, storms in and predicts the child’s death at fifteen. The last twelfth fairy cannot undo the curse, but can soften it. She changes the death sentence into a sleep of a hundred years.

The writer of the Revelation also demonstrates this activity of past predictions reaching into future life. For the letters to the seven congregations are actually addressed to the seven ages of mankind’s development. The letters are an assessment of each age, its strengths and weaknesses. Today’s letter to Sardis, the fifth one , is aimed particularly to our present age. The warnings are a matter of life and death. “One says of you that you live, and yet you are dead.” Rev 3:1  For we human beings have indeed been asleep for a long time, unaware of those spiritual beings that constantly surround us as we sleepwalk through our lives. If we continue in what John calls our illusion and addiction to what the senses convey of the material world, then our own souls and spirits will indeed die.

Burne Jones

The cure for this sleep, this sickness unto death, is to wake up. For our souls and spirits live and are fed through wakeful consciousness; their very nature consists of conscious awareness.  In mankind’s childhood, we received the gifts and blessings of the divine world, because we were open and receptive. But then we fell into a long sleep, in which we no longer received the gifts, no longer even remembered the givers. The time of sleep and forgetfulness is over. Mankind needs to wake up.

In the fairytale, when the hundred years were over, the prince passed through the thorny hedge that protected the sleeping kingdom and awakened the princess with a kiss. In our time, the Prince of our soul is kneeling beside our sleeping spirits, waiting for us to wake up out of our own freedom and initiative. If we refuse, the awakening will come, but will appear as doom, fearful and frightening.

John’s letter to the fifth age is a clarion call. Wake up and live! Wake up and converse with your Prince! Live in loyalty to the Spirit who loves you.

This conversing with the spirit of love we call prayer. An early mystic wrote:

The Holy Spirit has compassion on our weaknesses,

and though we remain impure, He often comes to visit us.

When He finds our spirit praying to Him in love,

He immediately dispels the marauding horde of thoughts

that keep it hobbled. And then he bids it forward

to the delicious works of spiritual prayer.

When the angel of the Lord arrives,

he scatters by his word alone

every force that acts against us,

and brings to our spirits that light

that shines without deception.[1]

www.thechristiancommunity.org

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[1] [1] Evagrios of Pontos, “Effusions on Prayer”, in Love’s Immensity; Mystics on the Endless Life, Scott Cairns, p. 55.

2nd November Trinity 2010, Spiritual Sun Calls

2^nd Trinity November

Rev. 3, 1-6, (Sardis) or

Rev. 3, 14-22 (Laodicea)

Rev. 3, 1-6, (Sardis)

And to the angel who penetrates the congregation of Sardis write:

Thus speaks he who has power over the seven creating spirits of God and over the seven stars: I know the consequences of your deeds, for one says of you that you live, and yet are dead. Awaken, and strengthen what remains in you, that is otherwise about to die, for I have not found that your works possess reality before my God.

Remember how you were once receptive for all the workings of the spirit, and for all words which came from the spirit. Care for them in your soul in inner loyalty. Change your heart and mind.

If however you do not awaken, I will come over you suddenly like a thief, and you will not know at which hour I will come over you.

But you have some names in Sardis whose souls have not been darkened by illusion and addiction to the senses. They will walk with me in white garments, for they are worthy of them.

He who overcomes, he shall be clothed with white garments, and I will not wipe out his name from the Book of Life. I will speak out his name and acknowledge him before my Father and his Angels. He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the spirit says to the churches.

2^nd November Trinity

November 7, 2010

Revelation 3: 1-6, to Sardis

Sunflowers are so called because they keep moving their faces toward the sun in its course across the sky. They know that their life and strength, their power to live, comes from the sun. Anchored on the earth, it is their ability to orient themselves toward the sun that helps keep them alive.

The creating words and the creative working of the spirit are what keep our spirits, our souls and our bodies alive. The Creating Word is our spiritual sun. Anchored here on the earth, the light of the Word of God keeps us alive.

The reading today reminds us to remember: ‘Remember how you were once receptive for all the workings of the spirit, and for all the words that came from the spirit. Care for them in your soul in inner loyalty. Change your heart and mind.’ Rev 3:3

Our spiritual Sun is calling to us. It is asking us to remember Him, to remember the Logos, the creating Word of God, who took on human form. He is asking us to remember the source from which our lives flow, our spirit-sun, and to turn our faces toward Him.

We know this; it is natural to forget. But it is up to us to remember, to turn our will toward a conscious re-connecting. Only thus can we continue to truly live. Only thus can Christ community grow.

And so, in the words of the poet, we might also hear further words of the spirit-sun speaking to us:

May the light of your soul guide you.

May the light of your soul bless the work

you do with the secret love and warmth of your heart.

….May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light and renewal to those

who work with you and to those who see and receive your work.[1]

www.thechristiancommunity.org

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[1] John O’Donohue, “May the light of your soul guide you.”

2nd November Trinity 2011, Be the Sun

2^nd Trinity November

Rev. 3, 1-6, (Sardis) or

Rev. 3, 14-22 (Laodicea)

Rev. 3, 1-6, (Sardis)

And to the angel who penetrates the congregation of Sardis write:

Thus speaks he who has power over the seven creating spirits of God and over the seven stars: I know the consequences of your deeds, for one says of you that you live, and yet are dead. Awaken, and strengthen what remains in you, that is otherwise about to die, for I have not found that your works possess reality before my God.

Escorial Beatus, Seven Churches

Remember how you were once receptive for all the workings of the spirit, and for all words which came from the spirit. Care for them in your soul in inner loyalty. Change your heart and mind.

If however you do not awaken, I will come over you suddenly like a thief, and you will not know at which hour I will come over you.

But you have some names in Sardis whose souls have not been darkened by illusion and addiction to the senses. They will walk with me in white garments, for they are worthy of them.

He who overcomes, he shall be clothed with white garments, and I will not wipe out his name from the Book of Life. I will speak out his name and acknowledge him before my Father and his Angels. He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the spirit says to the churches.

2^nd November Trinity

November 6, 2011

Rev 3: 1-6

Blake, Angel with One Leg on Land and One on Sea

White is the color of purity, the color of the spirit. In today’s reading we hear that those in white are souls who stand clear shining in truth. And part of the greater truth in which the souls in white stand, is that there is a spiritual world, a spiritual world in which dwell spiritual beings, beings who are not perceived by the senses; beings who only leave their footprints, as it were, in the sensory world.

Those in white have overcome the addiction we human beings have, the craving for sensory proofs. Those in white, aligned with the spirit, have stopped cherishing comfortable untruths, the comfortable illusions, especially the illusion that the material world is all that there is.

Those in white are radiant, like the sun; they shine in a luminous world most of us don’t see. As Angelus Silesius said of that world:

My spirit once in God will eternal bliss become

Just as the sun’s own ray is sun within the sun.

Myself I must be sun, whose rays must paint the sea,

The vast and unhued ocean of all divinity.[1]

www.thechristiancommunity.org

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[1] Angelus Silesius, in Cherubinic Wanderer

Picture by William Blake, The angel with one foot on the sea and one on land.

2nd November Trinity 2012, No Body But Yours

2^nd Trinity November

Rev. 3, 1-6, (Sardis) or

Rev. 3, 14-22 (Laodicea)

Rev. 3, 1-6, (Sardis)

And to the angel who penetrates the congregation of Sardis write:

Escorial Beatus

Thus speaks he who has power over the seven creating spirits of God and over the seven stars: I know the consequences of your deeds, for one says of you that you live, and yet are dead. Awaken, and strengthen what remains in you, that is otherwise about to die, for I have not found that your works possess reality before my God.

Remember how you were once receptive for all the workings of the spirit, and for all words which came from the spirit. Care for them in your soul in inner loyalty. Change your heart and mind.

If however you do not awaken, I will come over you suddenly like a thief, and you will not know at which hour I will come over you.

But you have some names in Sardis whose souls have not been darkened by illusion and addiction to the senses. They will walk with me in white garments, for they are worthy of them.

He who overcomes, he shall be clothed with white garments, and I will not wipe out his name from the Book of Life. I will speak out his name and acknowledge him before my Father and his Angels. He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the spirit says to the churches.

2^nd November Trinity

Nov. 4, 2012

Rev 3; 1-6

Once a group of idealistic young people decided to start working on a small biodynamic farm. Their enthusiasm and desire to change the world led them into deep conversations long into the night. Naturally this led them to sleep in late. When a guest pointed out to them that the goats had long been crying out to be milked, they answered that their deeply spiritual conversations were more important.

Much too often, our thoughts and ideals fail to translate themselves into actual effective deeds and habits. We are perhaps under the illusion that thinking good thoughts is sufficient. Perhaps we lack the will to translate them into actions. We fail to bring our habits and actions into congruence with our ideals. And thus we fail to bring our ideals into the earthly.

In today’s letter to the community, the angel brings us the message from Christ: I have not found that your works possess reality…. Care for the workings of the Spirit…. Walk with Me…. Overcome your illusions.

As a community we may ask ourselves: what are the ideals of a Christ community? Do we only think we are such? What does a Christ community do? Perhaps these words from Theresa of Avila give us a hint of an answer:

Christ has no body now but yours

No hands, no feet on earth but yours

Yours are the eyes through which He pours out

compassion on this world

Christ has no body now on earth but yours.[1]

www.thechristiancommunity.org

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[1] Teresa of Avila