Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC
This morning preachers can hardly avoid noting the jarring differences between the Beatitudes that we have come to know and love from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew given as Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount and those that we hear this morning from Saint Luke’ Gospel. The former are familiar and warm or, at the very least, reassuring. But this morning's version is more concise and, in its way, more disturbing. Jesus, teaching from the Plain or on the level place, levels with us not only in describing who is blessed but also those who are or will be facing great woe.
It's important to understand that these are not primarily blessings and curses. They are rather a description of the deeper reality of things and people, whether we are talking about individuals or societies, nations or cultures. They are prophetic in both senses of that term. They reveal what is in fact now the deep truth and what will be further revealed in the fullness of time, when God's reign is finally and fully established in our created order. And of that, most of us have only caught glimpses, fleeting but nevertheless life giving.
We gathered here this morning are likely numbered among those who are rich and full and filled with mirth and laughter and spoken well of. And to us, Jesus’ words are disturbing. They are probably meant to be. On the other hand, for those millions who are numbered among the poor, the hungry, the desolate, the excluded, or those reviled for the sake of Christ, these words come as liberation and consolation and promise.
The Beatitudes, whether from Matthew’s version or Luke’s, are explicitly laid out in binary form. They describe two large categories of people or institutions or structures or ways of living. We are increasingly uncomfortable with binary thinking and often for very good reasons. But in the scriptures, particularly in those books which are classified as wisdom literature--think of the psalms for example or the Book of Proverbs or Ecclesiastes--there are only two paths, two ways forward, though they are usually described in quite general terms. They are the way wise versus the way of the foolish. Or the way of the righteous versus that of the wicked. Or that way that leads to fullness of life versus that which leads to a death.
In today's Old Testament lesson the prophet Jeremiah introduces these binary categories in powerful language:
“Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a shrub in the desert and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.”
In contrast, there are those who trust in the Lord and not merely in their own strength:
“Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought, it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.”
The image offered us of the blessed, the happy, likens them to trees deeply rooted in ultimate reality. They are grounded. And no matter what happens around them, they can tap into hidden life-giving streams that will see them through the vicissitudes of life. Whereas those who trust in their own strength or in the strength of others and not in God have no such deep root and cannot withstand the recurring heat and dryness of human living.
Psalm 1, the lectionary psalm appointed for today, repeats this same imagery. In fact, biblical scholars aren't sure if Jeremiah was borrowing from the psalm or the Psalmist was borrowing from Jeremiah. It's a psalm well worth memorizing. In six short verses it contrasts the way of those who are happy and who delight in the Lord’s law with those who are wicked and whose way is doomed. The same illustrations are served up: of the righteous who are like trees planted by streams of water “…bearing fruit in due season with leaves that do not wither” and of the wicked who are “like chaff which the wind blows away.” Admittedly none of this is readily apparent in our lives or the lives of others. But it is a claim upon a deeper, if hidden, truth which we need to embrace.
Our Christian tradition offers us resources that assist us both to know concretely which way to follow in our lives along with practical wisdom and techniques , if you will, on how to do it or to do it better. There is for example sacred scripture itself. There is the guidance of God's Spirit active throughout creation and in our own hearts. There is the fellowship of the saints and ancestors and the tradition of their counsels. There is the community of believers that we call church and the precious gift of human reason. And there is the practice of virtue. All of these help us to distinguish the path that leads to life from the path which leads to a dead end. And they empower us to choose and walk that right path.
But there's a catch, as there so often is, and it's the catch which Jeremiah names as he concludes his description of the cursed and the blessed. They are words that are all too true as we know from experience: “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse--who can understand it?” The devious heart refers here, I believe, to the amazing and persistent ability we have to deceive ourselves or to let ourselves be deceived by others both as individuals and as nations and peoples. As Psalm 64 says: “The human mind and heart are a mystery.”
I came of age in the 1960s and 1970s where there was a growing emphasis on complete self-transparency (“Let it all hang out”), absolute clarity, and ideological certitude. We made and continue to make an idol of self-knowledge. Therapy, forms of therapeutic religion, even spiritual direction and practices of discernment have been presented to us, wrongly, as roads to clearness and certitude. I’m not saying that these practices are wrong; each of these disciplines, if used rightly, is useful in attaining greater transparency, greater clarity, and a certain manageable certitude. But we will never know ourselves fully in this life even as we must strive toward it. Full knowledge is a matter for the heavenly vision given to us in part now but not yet in its fullness.
The Jesuit priest, philosopher and author John Kavanaugh once asked Mother Teresa to pray for him to have clarity. She responded, “I've never had clarity and certitude. I only have trust. I'll pray that you trust.” Even that great master of spiritual discernment, Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, said that in our discerning the most we could hope for is some degree of clarity, one that philosophers call moral certitude, by which they mean adequate evidence to act upon, but rarely if ever absolute certainty or clarity. As Jeremiah said: the heart is devious. Or as the psalmist said, it is a mystery, and we can never totally unpack it.
I remember reading an
excerpt from Gateway to Hope by Sister Maria Boulding, an English
Benedictine nun, which drove this point home. There she said: “We are more
sinful than we know, more deeply flawed than we can recognize by any human
insight; but grace works in us in the deepest places of body and spirit. We
must live from our weakness, from the barren places of our need, because there
is the spring of grace and the source of our strength…. When we can stand
before God in the truth of our need, acknowledging our sinfulness and
bankruptcy, then we can celebrate [God’s] mercy. Then we are living by grace,
and we can allow full scope to his joy.”
The key to all of this is trust. To trust not in our own strength or in the strength of other mortals or in systems or kingdoms or governments, but in God. Again, as Mother Teresa reminds us: “I only have trust. I'll pray that you trust.” At its heart and in the end, our faith is not about propositions or doctrines or creeds, though they have a role to play. Faith is trust in a God who is no less than personal and who is eternally disposed toward us in love. And with whom we can be in relation. More accurately, with whom we are already and always in relation, whether we know it or not.
As we offer our gifts and ourselves at the altar this morning, we will sing Hymn 635. I find the hymn tune lugubrious and its tone very Germanic, but its words are to me words of life:
If thou but trust in God to guide thee,
and hope in him through all thy ways,
he'll give thee strength with ere betide thee,
and bear thee through the evil days.
Who trusts in God's unchanging love
builds on a rock that nought can move.
May this hymn be our prayer today whatever our faith or doubts, certainties or uncertainties might be. Let us trust the One who is both Rock and Refuge. The One who is Love itself. The One revealed to us in our Brother Jesus Christ…may His Name be praised. Amen.
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