8th August Trinity 2018, I Thank You

8^th August Trinity

Sep 9, 2018

Luke 17:11-19

James Christensen

The ancient Hebrews were required to tithe, that is, to give one-tenth of their income back to God by offering it to the temple. In today’s New Testament reading, one outcast in ten returns to give thanks to the Son of God for healing his destiny. We could read this story’s characters as being the different parts of one human being.

We all feel ourselves divided, ill, outcast from heaven. We ask for mercy, to be healed and rejoined to the community of the heavens. In the story, all ten who ask are granted their request. Yet only one returns with a heart-offering, a tithe of gratitude. However, Christ, the Lord of Karma and our Destiny-Guide, notes that this is only a tenth.

C. Shuplyak

Can we remember to be grateful for everything that happens to us? For our destiny would be immeasurably aided if we were to give wholehearted, one hundred percent thanks to God for everything that happens to us. In this way, we align ourselves with our own destiny. We receive it with an open heart. And we can work with it in a creative way.

We can give thanks for everything, both ‘good’ and ‘bad’. For we know that Christ and our guardian angel mean only the best for us; they are always there to guide us toward our future, especially when we return to them with thanks. Knowing this and expressing our gratitude makes us strong. And this power of trust and gratitude for the beneficence of God becomes our own power to perceive the good in all that happens. Christ himself demonstrates this by giving thanks to His Father before uniting himself with bread and wine, His chosen destiny.

So we say in the words of e.e. cummings:

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:…

(i who have died am alive again today,

…

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing …

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)*

---

* e.e. cummings, in Complete Poems 1904-1962

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7th August Trinity 2018, No Hands But Yours

7^th August Trinity

Luke 10: 25 - 37

van Gogh

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”

He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

In reply, Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.  A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.  So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.  But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him.  He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him.  The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

7th August Trinity

Sept 2, 2018

Luke 10:25-37

Corrine Vonaesch

One way into understanding the gospel parables is to consider each of the characters as parts of a single human being.  The man who was robbed and beaten represents that part of all of us traveling on life’s path - a part of our soul has been robbed of our spiritual wealth and beaten down until our souls are half-dead. 

There also lives in each of us a priest and temple servant who serve the first part of the commands of the law, the part about serving God with one’s whole heart, mind, and strength. It is a holy office, requiring that one show up at the appointed time, ritually clean, for a service performed on behalf of the whole people. 

And we all have an inner Samaritan, a foreign stranger traveling through life, who is under no tribal obligation to help a Hebrew from Jerusalem. And yet help he does, purely out of human compassion. He fulfills the second part of the commandment, the part about loving whoever one stands next to. He does so not only by personally ministering to the wounded but also by paying someone else to continue his efforts.

What Christ is saying is that our ritual observances toward God are only a part of what serving God means. We also need to fulfill the second part of the commandment, the commandment of love for our fellow human beings. We need to find within ourselves healing ways to serve the God within others. This does not necessarily have to be dramatic. But we need to be able to inwardly pause and help others we encounter along the way. We can comfort with a kind word or even a smile. We can offer something that helps soothe a wounded soul. We can help someone in whatever way we can toward their own healthier future. We can even, if necessary, make it possible for someone else to do it for us. And we can always pray for others.

Christ as Good Samaritan, Codex Rossanensis

We turn towards God with all the strength of all our soul’s capacities. And we turn toward our fellow human beings with the strength of our love. Love manifests not only in thoughts and feelings but most especially in deeds. For we are God’s hands on earth. As St. Theresa of Avila said, 

Christ has no body now but yours

No hands, no feet on earth but yours

Yours are the eyes through which He looks
compassion on this world
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

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6th August Trinity 2018, Be Opened

Mark 7, 31-37

6th Trinity August

As he was again leaving the region around Tyre, he went through the country around Sidon to the Sea of Galilee in the middle of the region of the ten cities of the Decapolis. They brought to him one who was deaf and who spoke with difficulty and asked him to lay his hands on him. And he led him apart from the crowds by himself, laid his finger in his ears, and moistening his finger with saliva, touched his tongue, and looking up to the heavens, sighed deeply and said to him, “Ephphata, be opened.” His hearing was opened and the impediment of his tongue was removed and he could speak properly. And he commanded them not to say anything to anyone. But the more he forbade it, the more they widely they proclaimed it. And the people were deeply moved by this event, and said, “He has changed all to the good: the deaf he makes to hear and the speechless to speak.

6^th August Trinity

August 26, 2018

Mark 7: 31-37

The inner ear is formed in a spiral like a seashell. Sounds whirl in ever tightening circles through the organ of hearing. This movement is an incarnational one; it generates words; it generates thought and meaning in the soul, which can then spiral outward again as creative speech.

The deaf-mute is someone who is hindered in this process. He can neither take in words and their meaning nor create them. Such a hindrance also cuts one off from one’s community. It tends to generate fears and suspicions in the soul. It hinders the exercising of our highest human function: objective thought, creative speech. Even without an organic problem, we human beings can be mind deaf, heartsick, soul mute.

Tissot

Christ’s healing consists of an intimate quality of touch. With His fiery words, ‘Be opened’, He opens the man’s ears, loosens his tongue, opens his soul. He restores to him his full human capacities—open senses, open heart and mind, open speech. The man goes from being imprisoned within himself to being able to spiral outward again. He is healed of his illness.

We too all suffer from “the sickness of sin”, the sickness of the human condition. But even this illness is there to create new capacities. In the words of John O’Donohue,

When the reverberations of shock subside in you,

May grace come to restore you to balance.

May it shape a new space in your heart

To embrace this illness as a teacher

Who has come to open your life to new worlds.

May you use this illness

As a lantern to illuminate

The new qualities that will emerge in you.*

*John O'Donohue, "A Blessing for a Friend on the Arrival of Illness", In To Bless the Space between Us, p. 60

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