Christian Community Homilies

Friday, June 20, 2014

4th June Trinity 2010, I Am Not I

June Trinity

John 17: 6-11

I have made manifest your name to those human beings who have come out of the world to me through you. Yours they were, and you have given them to me, and they have kept your word in their inmost being. Thus they have recognized that everything which you have given me is from you; for all the power of the word which you have given me I have brought to them. They have taken it into themselves and have recognized in deepest truth that I come from you, and they have come to believe that I have been sent by you . I pray to you for them as individual human beings, not for mankind in general. Only for the human beings which you have given me, because they belong to you. Everything that is mine is yours and what is yours is mine, and the light of my being can shine in them. I am now no longer in the world of the senses. And I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep, through the power of your being, those who came to me through you, so that they may become one, even as we also are one.

4^th June Trinity

June 20, 2010

John 17: 6 – 11

The child is cradled and guided by folk and family. They are the forces that guide the child’s life and form its

character. When the child becomes an adult, s(he) takes over the responsibility for shaping and forming his/her own life. In fact one could say that until one makes one’s own decisions and exercises one’s own strength of character, one remains a child, regardless of age.

In the history of humanity, and in our lives, guidance once came from outside; as adults it comes from deep within the core of our own individual being. It is not always easy to live out of the depths of the heart, particularly if folk and family try to dictate and pressure us otherwise.

In this Gospel reading, strangely Christ says to His Father: ‘I pray to you for them as individual human beings; not for mankind in general, but for the human beings that you have given to me.’ John 17: 9 Living out of one’s core self is often a lonely proposition. But Christ supports our attempts to strive for authenticity. For He carries the pattern of each individual’s true self. He is our silent partner along the path. In Him we live, even when we die. In the words of the poet:

Simeon Solomon

I am not I.

I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see,

Whom at times I manage to visit,

And whom at other times I forget;

The one who remains silent when I talk

The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,

The one who takes a walk where I am not.

The one who will remain standing when I die.[1]

www.thechristiancommunity.org

[1] “I Am Not I”, by Juan Ramón Jiménez, in Risking Everything, ed. By Roger Housden, p. 19

June Trinity 2012, Mighty Doorways

June Trinity

John 17: 6-11

1^st June Trinity

June 3, 2012

John 17: 6-11

Wulfing

We each of us have a guardian angel. This angelic being has been with us from the very first chapter of the story of our lives. It never for a second leaves us. It knows how our chapters want to turn out. And with the tenderest love and encouragement, it stands by, hoping to be called upon to collaborate in the authorship of our lives. It waits to carry the offered substance of our prayers up to God.

God and His angels have also offered us one most precious gift. Out of their love, they give us the gift of our freedom. We can choose, or not, to ask for their guidance and help. The mystics say that one of the saddest sights in the spiritual world are the angels whose charges have left them unemployed.

Communities also have an angel. It watches over and guides the workings of the members of the group. The angels of the individuals collaborate with it, as it gathers the noble thoughts, the warmth of love, and the devoted wills of the individuals joined together in prayer. The prayers of the members form a fragrant bouquet. It is the fragrance itself, offered to God through the angels that nourishes and strengthens them in their work of love. Bread and wine, offered to be the body and blood of Christ, are food for our angels.

Perhaps before going to sleep at night, we might think to our angel:

Through my earth-days, watchful angel,

Thankfully I feel your presence

Knower of my destiny.

When I listen, you are helping.

When I move, your strength is with me:

Birth and death alike you show

Mighty doorways for my spirit—

Never lost, never forgotten

Held before your holy vision

Faithful, patient, hopeful angel.[1]

www.thechristiancommunity.org

[1] Angel, by Adam Bittleston, in A Window into Worlds

June Trinity 2013, Unifying Love

Durer

June Trinity

John 17: 6-11

Father, I have revealed your name and your being to all human beings whom you have led through destiny to me. They were yours; they lived out of the powers that worked in folk and family, and now you have given them to me, and into my working that lives in the Self, and they have kept your word in their inmost being. Thus they have recognized how all the spiritual power that you have given me truly proceeds from you; for all the creative spiritual power that you have given me, I have brought to them.

They have taken it up into themselves and have recognized that in truth I come from you, and they have gained insight, and trust that I have been sent by you. I pray to you for them as individual human beings; they who are to live out of the power of the self, as individuals, I pray to you for them; not for mankind in general, but for the human beings which you have given me. For they belong to you, just as everything which is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine, and the light of my being can shine in them [I am revealed in them]. I no longer live in the outer world, but they live in this world.

My whole being is devoted to you. And I am coming to you. Holy Father, you who give healing to the world, keep in your name and in your being all whom you have given to me, so that they may be one even as we also are one.

1^st June Trinity

May 26, 2013

John 17: 6 – 11

Every school child learns this: we can add single things together to make a greater sum. And we can take things away from the whole and thereby diminish it.

In today’s reading, Christ is conversing with His Father about how they have chosen out of the world a number of individuals, and added them to the sum of those connected with themselves. But in the realm of the Father there is a greater principle: The Father is One. And the number one is itself in fact the great all-inclusive unity containing all numbers. One, the whole, when divided, generates the rest of the numbers: two, three, four…. We are all part of the original One-ness of God.

And in the realm where the Father and the Son are joined, there is another great principle – the sum is greater than the parts. Those joined together with the Father and the Son are no longer merely isolated entities. They have rejoined the greater unifying One-ness from which we have all come.

We are held in the unifying love between the Father, who holds World Destiny in his hands, and His Son, who turns all things toward the good. The love between them and for the world is the Healing Spirit. When we recognize them, they live in us; we partake in their unifying, healing love. In fact, that is their wish – that we may be One, whole, a greater unity, just as they are One.

www.thechristiancommunity.org

5th June Trinity 2013, Field of Sorrow

June Trinity

John 11: 17-44

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.

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.”

5^th June Trinity

John 11: 17-44

June 23, 2013

In today’s reading, Jesus interacts with the three siblings, Martha, Mary and Lazarus. As one of them dies, each of them is plunged into the depths of human experience. We can look at each of these characters as archetypal parts of one human soul.

Martha is the active one; she goes out to meet Christ on the way, because her heart has recognized Him as the Son of God. Then there is Mary, the more inward side of the soul, sunk in contemplation and grief, waiting. And there is Lazarus, the rich young man who had asked what he must do to attain eternal life and who was told to follow the deep path of sacrifice. (Matthew 19:16, Luke 10:25) He has preceded Christ into the realm of death. After his own death experience, he will be able to stand under the cross and as the disciple John he will accompany Jesus’ death.

And finally there is Christ Jesus himself, who is both compassionate and ultimately called upon to draw on His deepest powers. Deeply stirred within, He pours out the power of his Life, the power that overcomes death. And He calls Lazarus forth from the grave, restoring him to Life. He is anticipating His own death, His own entombment, His own rising from the grave.

Martha acts; Mary waits; Lazarus has surrendered. They are all three images of what is necessary when the soul faces loss. We do what we can; we wait; we surrender ourselves to the greater will of God. And Christ comes. He takes away the stone that seals the grave of the heart in death. He brings new Life. Often it is the unexpected. One poet says:

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. ….
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

…Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; ….

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen to you.[1]

[1] Sheenagh Pugh, “Sometimes” in Good Poems, ed. by Garrison Keillor

Thursday, June 19, 2014

2nd June Trinity 2008, Different Wells

June Trinity
John 7: 33-40
Jesus said, ‘Only a short time shall I still be with you; then I go to Him who sent me. You will seek and not find me. Where I am you cannot come.’And the Jews said to one another, ‘Where could he go that we would not be able to find him? Perhaps he intends to go to the Jews in the Greek lands and teach the Greeks himself. What does he mean by those words: You will seek and not find me: where I am you cannot come?’On the last, the great day of the festival, Jesus stood there and called out loudly: ‘Whoever thirsts, let him come to me and drink! Whoever fills himself with my power through faith, from his body shall flow streams of life-bearing water, as scripture says.’He said this to indicate the spirit which those were to receive who unite with him in faith. But this Spirit was not yet working, for Jesus had not yet revealed his spirit-form.

2^nd June Trinity

May 25, 2008

John 7: 33-40

Human culture has created many ways to send water to where it is needed. Essentially they all involve some form of capture, in a vessel or a pipe or canal. And somewhere at the other end there is a place of release for the water to flow out. For the whole point of capturing water is to let it go again, so that it can support life.

Christ likens Himself in this reading to a giver of water. He gathers the Father’s life-giving spirit waters. He makes Himself the conduit for these waters of the spirit. At the end, he will pour out the water of life. He pours His Life first into wine and bread at the Last Supper. In so doing he creates another extension of the channel, a conduit that reaches through time into the present day. Then he pours His blood and water from the cross, re-enlivening the dying earth. And finally He ascends to the clouds, to inhabit the life sphere of the whole earth, to pour the waters of life, both spiritual and physical, onto the earth. This is what He means when He says: “Then I go to Him who sent me. You will look for me and not find me. Where I am going you cannot follow.” John 7:34 We cannot yet follow Him in all His ways, into the biosphere, for we have not yet ascended. So He pours out his life as He rains down on us from the clouds.

Yet this process involves not only Him; we are also included, for He says: “Whoever fills himself with my power through faith, from his body shall flow streams of life-bearing water.” John 7: 38 For Christ’s life-giving spiritual-physical power flows not only in rain, in the wine, in His blood; His waters of life flow now through the blood that flows through every human heart. The poet says:

There are different wells within your heart

Some fill with each good rain.

Others are too deep for that.

In one well

You have just a few precious cups of water.

That “love” is literally something of yourself.[1]

Christ’s waters of life now flow through the blood that flows through the heart of everyone who drinks from the well of His being. We become the conduits of His streaming life. From human hearts can flow the streams of His life-bearing waters. We receive His waters of life in order to let them go again, to pour out the water of life, of love, wherever it is needed.

www.thechristiancommunity.org

[1] Hafiz, “Some Fill with Each Good Rain”, in The Gift, by Daniel Ladinsky, p. 76.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

2nd June Trinity 2007, Dug Deep

June Trinity

John 4, 1-26

Woman at the Well, He Qi

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.”

Samaritan Woman, He Qi

“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.”

2^nd Trinity Sunday

June 10, 2007

John 4: 1-26

Times of day have their qualities – the joyful freshness of dawn, the quiet expansiveness of sunset. And in between, the starry midnight, and the compressed starkness of midday. When everything here stands in clear and objective relief. At noon everything earthly comes to the foreground.

Christ’s conversation with the woman at the well begins with earthly facts: with His very presence, with thirst, with history. But the conversation quickly expands so that the earthly becomes an image of broader and higher spiritual facts. What He discussed with Nicodemus in the realm of night he speaks of here openly, in broad daylight with the Samaritan woman in day-waking consciousness. She herself, her own inner state, becomes the content of this spiritual conversation.

The five husbands of this woman of the day may well also refer to the leadership role that her five earthly senses have played in her life. They have been important in their own time and sphere. But Christ wants to indicate to her that she, along with all of mankind is at an important juncture; for now, spirit and truth, which exist also in a realm beyond the sensory, spirit and truth will now be leading human beings. The same kind of clarity that noontime brings to the earthly realm shall now shine forth into and from the realm of the spirit. Day waking consciousness shall extend into the realm of the spirit. There we will see the One who is to come, offering us the water of life.

The well of the water of life is dug deep in the earth. And even at noon, the deep waters reflect, not the sun, but the world of the stars. To drink of the water of life, the living water, it to drink of the life of the stars, offered us by Christ. In us this living water becomes a wellspring within, a stream that overflows with true life, ever-flowing toward the stars.

www.thechristiancommunity.org

5th June Trinity 2008, Thirsty Fish

June Trinity

John 4, 1-26

Now he had to pass through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan town called Sychar [Si’-kahr], 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.

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.”

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.”

5^th June Trinity

June 15, 2008

John 4: 1-26

Sometimes a person is too ill to take anything by mouth, and it becomes necessary to give fluids directly into the bloodstream. As a result the person feels no thirst, for thirst is quenched in another way.

In this gospel reading, Christ meets a woman drawing water from an ancient well. It was a well established by Jacob the Patriarch and over the centuries had quenched many a thirst. But over those same centuries, mankind had become more and more ill. This illness produced a deep existential thirst that needed to be quenched in another way.

Divine Physician

The hope was that this thirst for meaning, a thirst for guidance and purpose, could be quenched by the five senses, represented by the woman’s five husbands. She is the Soul, looking everywhere for her missing half, for her completion. She looks for meaning through taste and touch, through sight and sound and scent. She looks to the past and to the ancient ways; she looks for purpose in high worship on the mountain. But no longer does any of this suffice. This experience is captured by Rumi:

I have a thirsty fish in me

that can never find enough

of what it’s thirsty for!

Show me the way to the ocean![1]

Humanity’s soul is ill. She needs the World Physician who will quench our deep thirst another way. “Whoever drinks the water that I will give her, her thirst will be quenched for all time. Indeed, the water I will give her will become in her a spring of water welling up as true life for eternity.” John 4:14

Through our union with Christ, our deep existential thirst will be quenched, for we will be hooked up to the Source; we will find our way to the great Ocean, drinking in, filling ourselves with His life-giving love.

www.thechristiancommunity

[1] Rumi, “A Thirsty Fish”, in The Essential Rumi, by Coleman Barks, p, 19.