Last Week and This Sunday

Bobby moved his sculpting work into our space . . . which gave us a great opportunity to have regular morning prayer each day at 8:30 am. We gather in the sanctuary, light a Christ candle, and pray the hours. Anyone is welcome to drop in to pray with us. I believe that I need the rhythm that such discipline produces.

Father William presided over our holy communion last Sunday, and was such a blessing. His presence and manner completely deconstructed any sense of pomp that one might have assumed because of this vestments. He had a distinct joy and lightness of spirit in leading us through the breaking of bread.

Last Sunday morning I spoke on this text: I have made you known to them and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them. John 17:26

I focused on the promise of Jesus to continue the work of making the Father known to us, encouraging us to open ourselves to this ongoing work of Christ in us. The end, of course, is that the love of God will be rooted in our hearts, and Christ himself will be formed in us.

This Sunday, I plan to take up this word of Jesus: the one who feeds on me will live because of me. John 6:57. Christ was no steely logician. He was not an empiricist. He did not look at life, God, and the world through a modern perspective. Jesus was a mystic who spoke about the mystery of coming into real union with God.

With the discrediting of the scientific worldview as a sufficient and adequate way of interpreting reality, and the corresponding epistemological shift, Christ's mystical sayings take on more of their original depth and mystery, eschewing the flat meanings modernity imposed. Jesus is certainly not saying pray a sinner's prayer or believe in me and you will go to heaven as a reward. He says I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. Our life in Christ is the same essentially as his life in the Father. There is mystery and spiritual union here . . . divine stirrings and grace that modernity can never grasp.