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Laboring for Christ

“The grand premise of religion is that man is able to surpass himself; that man who is part of this world may enter into relationship with him who is greater than the world.”

― Abraham Joshua Heschel

Scripture: Genesis 2:15

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

Reflection: Laboring for Christ
By Augustine of Hippo (c. 420 C.E.)

We were made, it is true, by the hands of Truth, but because of sin we were cast forth upon days of vanity. “We were made after the image of God,” but we disfigured it by sinful transgression.

Man walks in the image of truth, and will be disquieted in the counsel of vanity. He is disquieted, he heaps up treasure, he thinks, and toils, and is kept awake by anxiety. All day long you are harassed by labor, all night agitated by fear.

That your coffer may be filled with money, you soul is in a fever of anxiety. Why are you preparing a strong defense for your riches? Hear the Power of God, nothing is more strong than he. Why are you preparing wise counsel to protect your riches? Hear the Wisdom of God, nothing is more wise than he.

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth destroy, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where no thief approaches, nor moth corrupts: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

I am giving you counsel for keeping, not for losing. The enemy has broken up our house; but could he break heaven open? Though he is the Lord, and does not need our goods—yet that we might do something even for Him—he has granted to be hungry through his poor.

“I was hungry,” he says, “and you gave me food.” Lord, when saw we you hungry? “Forasmuch as you did it to one of the least of mine, you did it to me.” To be brief then, let men hear, and consider as they ought, how great a merit it is to have fed Christ when He hungers.

— Excerpted, and language updated, from Saint Augustin: Sermon on the Mount, Harmony of the Gospels, Homilies on the Gospels.

Prayer: The Refrain for the Morning Lessons

Our Help is in the Name of the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. — Psalm 124.8

— From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime by Phylis Tickle

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Reading
Genesis 3 (Listen – 4:14)
Matthew 3 (Listen – 2:17)

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A New Look at Creation

“Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is.”

— Viktor Frankl

Scripture: Genesis 1.27

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

Reflection: A New Look at Creation
The Park Forum

Ancient creation narratives have fallen out of favor in the modern world. Yet even a cursory glance at history reveals a link between a civilization’s understanding of creation and how its people live in the world.

The Ancient Egyptians believed men and women were projected out of the god Atum’s nose as he sneezed over the earth—and their understanding of human rights was a derivative of their understanding of creation. Accounts of ancient Egyptian life document near-perpetual war, systematic injustice, and brutal slavery (pyramids don’t build themselves).

In our own culture, the foundation of human rights is drawn directly from the pages of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. If humanity were created by chance, as many modern creation accounts hold, what justification is there for individual rights?

In The Idea of Human Rights, Yale law professor Michael Perry concludes, “There is, finally, no intelligible (much less persuasive) secular version of the conviction that every human being is sacred; the only intelligible versions are religious.” The Christian creation narrative teaches that each human being is made in the image of God, and is therefore valuable.

In the Christian creation account we also see:

Genesis’ picture of a world untouched by evil, combines with Christ’s renewal of all things in a world scarred by evil, to give us hope that cannot be taken. A renewed understanding of the Christian creation account not only answers our world’s most difficult questions—like human rights—it reorients our own lives in ways which give us hope, purpose, and joy through the Creator Himself.

The Prayer Appointed for the Week

O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son, Jesus Christ.

— From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime by Phylis Tickle

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Reading
Genesis 2 (Listen – 3:42)
Matthew 2 (Listen – 3:18)

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Rohr on Transformative Faith  :: Reflections for a New Year

By Father Richard Rohr:

Moralism (as opposed to healthy morality) is the reliance on largely arbitrary purity codes, needed rituals, and dutiful “requirements” that are framed as prerequisites for enlightenment. Every group and individual usually begins this way, and I guess it is understandable.

People look for something visible, seemingly demanding, and socially affirming to do or not do rather than undergo a radical transformation of the mind and heart. It is no wonder that Jesus so strongly warns against public prayer, public acts of generosity, and visible fasting in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:1-18). Yet that is what we still do!

Any external behavior that puts you on moral high ground is always dangerous to the ego because, as Jesus says, “you have received your reward” (Matthew 6:2). Moralism and ritualism allow you to be independently “good” without the love and mercy of God and without being of service to anybody else for that matter. That’s a far cry from the full and final participation we see Jesus offering or any outpouring love of the Trinity.

Our carrot-on-the-stick approach to religion is revealed by the fact that one is never quite pure enough, holy enough, or loyal enough for the presiding group. Obedience is normally a higher virtue than love. This process of “sin management” has kept us clergy in business. There are always outsiders to be kept outside.

Hiding around the edges of this search for moral purity are evils that we have readily overlooked: slavery, sexism, wholesale classism, greed, pedophilia, national conquest, gay oppression, and the oppression of native cultures. Almost all wars were fought with the full blessing of Christians. We have, as a result, what some cynically call “churchianity” or “civil religion” rather than deep or transformative Christianity.

The good news of an incarnational religion, a Spirit-based morality, is that you are not motivated by any outside reward or punishment but actually by participating in the Mystery itself. Carrots are neither needed nor helpful. “It is God, who for [God’s] own loving purpose, puts both the will and the action into you” (see Philippians 2:13). It is not mere rule-following behavior but your actual identity that is radically changing you.

Henceforth, you do things because they are true, not because you have to or you are afraid of punishment. Now you are not so much driven from without (the false self method) but you are drawn from within (the True Self method). The generating motor is inside you now instead of a lure or a threat from outside.

*From Richard Rohr’s Meditation: Drawn from Within.

Today’s Reading
Malachi 3 (Listen – 3:13)
John 20 (Listen – 4:17)

 

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Elisabeth Eliot on the Future :: Reflections for a New Year

By Elisabeth Eliot

While a new year offers us a fresh start, it can also bring anxiety. Questions crowd into our minds. Will my job become redundant? Is God going to keep me single for another whole year? Where is that mate he’s supposed to be bringing me? Where will the money come from for college, rent, clothes, food? Must I continue to suffer this person, this church, this handicap, this pain, this loneliness?

We have a calming word in Psalm 138.8; “The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; your love, O Lord, endures forever—do not abandon the works of your hands.” That word stands. He will fulfill. His love endures. He will not abandon.

We are meddling with God’s business when we let all the manner of imaginings loose, predicting disaster, contemplating possibilities instead of following one day at a time, God’s plain and simple pathway. When we try to meet difficulties prematurely we have neither a light nor the strength for them yet.

“As thy days, so shall thy strength be” was Moses’ blessing for Asher—in other words, your strength shall equal your days. God knows how to apportion each one’s strength according to that day’s need, however great or small. The psalmist understood this when he wrote, “Lord, you have assigned me my portion and my cup; you have made my lot secure.”

Whatever may be tomorrow’s cross I never seek to find. My father says, ‘Leave me to that, and keep a quiet mind.” — Anonymous

To lug into this new year all the baggage of the last year would greatly impair our ability to concentrate on what our heavenly father wants us to do…. Oswald Chambers wrote:

Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ. Leave the irreparable past in his hands, and step out into the irresistible future with him.

Can we wholeheartedly surrender to God, leaving quietly with him all the “what ifs” and “but what abouts”? Will we truthfully say to him, “Anything you choose for me Lord—to have, to be, to do, or to suffer. I am at your orders. I have no agenda of my own”?

*Abridged from the Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter.

Today’s Reading
Malachi 2 (Listen – 3:12)
John 19 (Listen – 6:23)

 

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Heschel on Discovering our Humanity :: Reflections for a New Year

How much the faith community has to offer our divided and increasingly hostile world. Silence and solitude have been devoured by technology—the Church can be a place of stillness. Partisanship and hatred of the other have eroded our humanity—the Church can be a place of embrace through Christ’s transcendent work.

Perhaps no one lived this message more vividly in modern history than Abraham Joshua Heschel. At the 1953 gathering of the Rabbinical Assembly of America, Rabbi Heschel reflected:

If “prayer is the expression of the sense of being at home in the universe,” then the Psalmist who exclaimed, “I am a stranger on the earth hide not your commandments from me,” was a person who grievously misunderstood the nature of prayer. Throughout many centuries of Jewish history, the true motivation for prayer was not, “The sense of being at home at the universe,” but the sense of not being at home in the universe.

We could not but experience anxiety and spiritual homelessness in the sight of much suffering and evil, in the countless examples of failure to live up to the will of God. That experience gained in intensity by the soul-stirring awareness that God himself was not at home in a universe where his will is defied, where his kingship is denied.

To pray, then, means to bring God back into the world, to establish his kingship, to let his glory prevail. This is why in the greatest moments of our lives, on the Days of Awe, we cry out of the depth of our disconcerted souls, a prayer for redemption.

Great is the power of prayer…. The problem is not how to revitalize prayer; the problem is how to revitalize ourselves. Let us begin to cultivate those thoughts and virtues without which our worship becomes, of necessity, a prayer for the dead—for ideas which are dead to our hearts.

We must not surrender to the power of platitudes. If our rational methods are deficient and too weak to plumb the depth of faith, let us go into stillness and wait for the age in which reason will learn to appreciate the spirit rather than accept standardized notions that stifle the mind and stultify the soul….

To Judaism, the purpose of prayer is not to satisfy an emotional need. Prayer is not a need, but an ontological necessity, an act that expresses the very essence of man. He who has never prayed is not fully human.

Today’s Reading
Malachi 1 (Listen – 2:47)
John 18 (Listen – 5:16)