Saturday, October 08, 2016
Pentecost 21, Proper 23 C ~ October 9, 2016
Sermon for The Twenty-first
Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 23 ~ October
9, 2016
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Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
“Your faith has saved you.”
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
We pray in the Collect that God’s grace may
always precede and follow us. We would be surrounded by grace, enveloped in it,
so encompassed in it that we maybe don’t even notice it. As is often the case, The
Collect has us ask for that which is already granted, only we don’t recognize
it. So, as is often the case, we are praying for a change in our own
consciousness. What we are asking for is consciousness of grace, that is to say
a consciousness characterized by gratitude.
As the Jesuits say,
all is grace. Grace is the basic fact of the universe. The free gift of God, to
which our only response can be the joyful recognition of the gift. We call the
recognition gratitude. The Samaritan
leper represents the minority of us who become conscious of grace. The other
nine are not wicked; they are just spiritual infants. They are consumed with
joy about their own healing, as well they might be, but they take it for
granted. I don’t think God holds that against them. But they will be even
happier when they become conscious of
the grace they enjoy.
For gratitude is
heaven. That is to say, it is complete self-forgetfulness: human attention
focused entirely on the love of God. Most of us have felt it for a moment or
two. It is consciousness of grace, which usually lasts briefly. Eternal life is
permanent consciousness of the grace that ever precedes and follows us.
Perfect, timeless gratitude, the self lost in the adoration of Divine Love —
that is heaven. We can believe that it is real, because we have experienced it
momentarily. When we are thankful in that self-forgetful sense, however
briefly, we are conscious of Eternal Reality, and we have seen the Kingdom of
God, come in glory here and now, before we die, as our Lord promised.
I like to tell the
story, from time to time, of the Hasidic rabbi who could never read much of the
Torah in public, because as soon as he, came to the words “God said…” He fell
in ecstasy and could not go on. The holy man had experienced some slight
inkling of what it means to say that God reveals Himself to us. It is an
impossibility, which we nevertheless experience, though rarely. Mostly, we are
like the nine lepers — overjoyed, but not aware of God’s grace. It is as though
you or I had decided to communicate with insects, or even with a microbe. How
would we go about it? How would we get through them? All of the world’s genuine
holy Scriptures are accounts of building that kind of bridge. It is all God’s
doing, bridging our separation from Him and from one another, and bringing us
gradually together in gratitude, which is to say in grace. Grace that always
precedes and follows us.
The Samaritan leper
is a foreigner, as the Gospel calls him, an alien. That’s significant: His kind
of gratitude is foreign to us. We have to learn it, and most of us don’t. We
have to practice it, if we are to fulfill our purpose as human beings. Life is
a school of gratitude, and a good life is one marked by more and more
gratitude. More and more grace.
Jesus says that the
grateful leper was healed by his faith. Then what saved the other nine, who
were healed of their leprosy as surely as the Samaritan? All of them, after
all, had asked Jesus to heal them. All of them, must’ve had some faith. Maybe
Jesus is talking about some healing – some salvation – besides the leprosy,
when he said to that single Samaritan ex-leper, “your faith has made you
whole.”
Maybe the story is
about God’s gracious work, piercing our own limitation: the insect-like
distance between Reality and our consciousness. Here, perhaps, the veil of
appearance is lifted, and we see for a moment God’s gracious work, symbolized
by the gratitude of the Samaritan leper. His joy at his own good fortune, was
enlarged into an even greater dawning of the consciousness of limitless grace,
as he fell at Jesus feet. Maybe, like the Hasidic rabbi, he had fallen in
ecstasy. That would be appropriate, a fitting human response to the, momentary
and overwhelming consciousness of grace, the grace that always precedes and follows us, though most of us fail to see it.
In that case, the Samaritan's faith,
which Jesus says has saved him, saved
him not from leprosy, but from our microbial consciousness, and its inability
to adore God.
We come to this
place, like the Samaritan leper, to give thanks. Eucharist. Good gift. Good
grace. Eucharisto.
Thank you, in Greek. We come to practice gratitude, so that — with practice — it may become more and
more natural to us, as our microbial consciousness is gradually replaced by the
consciousness of Grace that always
precedes and follows us, the consciousness that is the grateful adoration
of Infinite Love.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME LORD JESUS
