Br. Curtis Almquist

Judges 13:2-7, 24-25
Luke 1:5-25

Our lesson from the Book of Judges and our Gospel lesson according to Luke speak of angelic revelations to childless women who will miraculously bear children: the mother of Sampson and the mother of John the Baptist. The angelic revelation to the Virgin Mary is soon to follow.[i] We will hear a stream of supernatural revelations during the remaining days of Advent, then Christmastide, then into the season of Epiphany: dreams and visions coming to Zechariah[ii], Elizabeth’s husband, and the same for Joseph.[iii] The wisemen in the east will follow a star to the Messiah, then follow a dream that will lead them safely home.[iv] The shepherds in their fields are visited by singing angels who invite the shepherds to the visit the infant Messiah.[v]

Many of us have heard these stories so many times. We may take these supernatural revelations for granted, though they are very revealing of God’s ways. These revelations do not make rational sense. There’s nothing to figure out or to understand. Rather, these revelations are to “behold.” This is simply what is. Behold God’s revelation, embrace it, and follow it.

If we were to tabulate the Bible, the amount of the scriptural text given over to the report of dreams, visions, prophecies, angelic visitations, miraculous events, and other references and allusions to God’s mysterious ways of meeting and leading people, we would find these non-rational revelations comprise approximately one-third of the Bible. Dreams, visions, prophecies, angelic visitations, miraculous events, the gift of knowledge and language, along with other indirect references to God’s mysterious and yet undeniable manifestations: one-third of the Bible. This supernatural way of knowing is quite countercultural for most of us who live in the western world. Yet the scriptures are replete with God’s ways being more than our mind can tell.

We know that the adult Jesus asked a seemingly-obvious question to the infirm: “Do you want to be healed?” I can imagine, in that same spirit, Jesus’ asking us: “Do you want to know more?” “Do you want to know more of God: the mind and heart and ways of God?” If so, make that your prayer, which would be a tremendous spiritual gift to unwrap this season. Open your hands, open your heart, open your mind to God’s supernatural revelation. God is always More. Ask for More.

[i] Luke 1:26-38.

[ii] Zechariah’s dreams: Luke 1:5-25, 39-80.

[iii] Joseph’s four dreams: Matthew 1:19-25; 2:13; 2:19-20; 2:22-23.

[iv] Luke 2:1-19.

[v] Luke 2:8-20.

Br. Luke Ditewig

Zephaniah 3:14-20
Philippians 4:4-7
Luke 3:7-18

In Advent we wait, preparing to celebrate how God came as human in Jesus Christ. We also await God’s final triumph, accomplished and not-yet. Advent is more than these weeks before Christmas. Karl Barth wrote: “What other time or season will the Church ever have but that of Advent?”[i] Leaning toward the Word Made Flesh and the restoration of all is our life.

The prophet Zephaniah spoke to the people of Judah during the reign of King Josiah. Most of the book warns of coming judgement and destruction to Israel for turning away from God and for Israel’s enemies. Like other prophets, it’s a call and warning is to change behavior, to return to right living. There’s a dramatic change at the end including today’s text. The last word is not warning but instead joy and restoration. God “will rejoice over you with gladness” and “renew you in [God’s] love.” God says: “I will remove disaster from you,” “gather the outcast,” “change shame into praise,” “bring you home,” and “restore your fortunes.”

From prison, Paul encourages the church in Philippi again and again to rejoice. Rejoice in all circumstances, in suffering, even in chains. Celebrate. God is near. Act rightly by being gentle. Don’t be anxious. Pray your whole life—gratitude, grief, and desire—because God loves fully. We belong to God. God holds us as we are, including loss, grief, and in captivity. God’s peace, the wholeness here and not-yet, the restoration of everything that is beyond our understanding, will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

In our Gospel lesson, John the Baptist echoes previous prophets with stark warning. He instructs repentance with how to act rightly. Share food and clothing with those in need. Don’t collect tax beyond what is due. Don’t exhort money. Be satisfied with what you have. Then John points to Jesus coming with far more power.

Jesus kept surprising folk including John. Jesus called for right action and enormous compassion. Jesus taught repentance is like a lost sheep. The shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep to search for the one lost. The shepherd seeks, finds, lifts onto shoulders, and walks back carrying the sheep.[ii] What does the sheep do? It accepts. Kenneth Bailey wrote: “Repentance is not a work which earns our rescue. Rather, the sinner accepts being found.”[iii]

We expect we must work to be saved, for God to love us, but the truth is so much better! For God seeks the lost like searching a house to find a coin. God is wildly generous like a gardener who doesn’t just plant where growth is likely, but scatters seed everywhere for every possibility.[iv] God loves no matter what. God gathers the outcast, changes shame into praise, restores goodness, rejoices over with gladness.

What does it feel like to be rejoiced over with gladness? When another’s face lights up at seeing our face, we feel love. The psalmist says: God, look at us. “Restore us, O God of hosts; show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.”[v] God looks at and saves us. As one who finds a lost sheep or coin, God then says to the community around: Come celebrate with me![vi] Imagine seeing another’s face wide-eyed with big smile. We naturally mirror on our faces. Notice how it feels in your body, the delight, this joy. God feels it for you!

Joy is the third Sunday of Advent theme, so there’s pink in the vestments and pink roses in the wreath. Joy, a theme throughout scripture as God’s gift, is delight not dependent on circumstance. It’s less what we seek and more what we accept. It comes in experience not confined to what may be described as religious or even spiritual. As with Paul, rejoicing, thanksgiving, and prayer go together.

Henri Nouwen wrote that our life of faith: “… requires choosing for the light even when there is much darkness to frighten me, choosing for the life even when the forces of death are so visible, and choosing for the truth even when I am surrounded with lies. I am tempted to be so impressed by the obvious sadness of the human condition that I no longer claim the joy manifesting itself in many small but very real ways.”[vii]

What small but very real ways reveal and spark joy for you? What has been grace, goodness undeserved, unsought, unexpected?        It need not be anything religious but ordinary like sunlight, touch, and a smile. What are you thankful for? What last made you laugh at wonder? Look back and look around to see.

Look forward. Despite the terrors of today and encroaching darkness, God has triumphed and will restore all. In a cosmic way, the bitter cold of winter will thaw to spring. The One who triumphs came as an infant. God seeks, finds, and carries us home, rejoicing over us with gladness, so “rejoice, give thanks, and sing.”[viii]

i] Karl Barth (1988) Church Dogmatics, IV/3.1. New York: T&T Clark, p322.

[ii] Luke 15:1-7

[iii] Kenneth E. Bailey (2005) The Cross and the Prodigal: Luke 15 Through the Eyes of Middle Eastern Peasants. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, p34.

[iv] Luke 8:4-8

[v] Psalm 80:7

[vi] Luke 15:6-10

[vii] Henri J. M. Nouwen (1992) The Return of the Prodigal Son. New York: Doubleday, p109.

[viii] Our post-communion hymn

Matthew 11:16-19

Jesus had to deal with a lot of criticism. Just think of how often he was criticized. People criticized who he ate with, what day of the week he healed, who he spoke with, and so on. All the way to the cross, Jesus was criticized.

One of the many things I love about Jesus is how he responded to criticism. Jesus responded to criticism with both words and actions. Jesus defended his actions with words and defended his words with actions. Jesus was a man of both honesty and integrity. As a result, both his words and actions had tremendous power.

We too will criticize and be criticized. It is an unavoidable part of our life as human beings.  We will not be pleased by everyone and we will not be able to please everyone, no matter how hard we try. Now this does not mean we should not be good people or not be good to people, what this means is that we should be wise people and wise about people.

We human beings are all complex. We will never fully understand what is going on in our own heads, and especially other people’s heads, even those we are closest to. We will say and do things that will confound ourselves and one another.

At the end of the day, we are most likely to criticize our own selves. One of the worst freedoms we have is the freedom to crucify our own selves in our own head through relentless self-criticism. We can spend the rest of our lives agonizing over every mistake we’ve ever made. We can also spend the rest of our lives in wisdom, learning and moving on from our mistakes.  This God given freedom to choose how we want to live our lives is a beautiful gift, but it’s also a tremendous responsibility.

We have a responsibility to live a solid life. A life solid with meaning, a life solid with change, and a life solid with God. This solidarity forms the foundation of how we build our days.

Jesus reminds us we must keep returning to wisdom while in the arena of humanity. Of course this is easier said than done. But, as the man himself says, wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.

The Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Genesis 3:9-20
Luke 1:26-38

Today we observe an unusual feast: the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Two other feasts commemorate events in the life cycle of St. Mary of Nazareth. Her Nativity, or birthday, which we will celebrate nine months from today, on September 8; and her Dormition, or death, which we will celebrate on August 15.

Though we encounter no mention of either event in Scripture, the Church regularly honors its saints on the day of their death. The birthday of only one other saint is observed: St. John the Baptist. The birth of St. Mary of Nazareth, the mother of Jesus, like that of St. John the Baptist, his cousin and forerunner, is momentous in the unfolding of salvation history. Both events anticipate the birth of Jesus.

But why also observe St. Mary’s conception?

The birth of a child is like an announcement from the rooftop – after much visible but hidden growth, a new life arrives. A death is similarly evident, only in reverse: it is an exit, a departure.

But the conception of a child – the first moment of its personal existence – is like a secret whispered in an inner room, something we are right to be almost shy to mention. It is an event unfolding behind a closed door.

And indeed, a prominent, early image for the Blessed Virgin Mary herself is the closed gate or the closed door.

We read these words in the prophecy of Ezekiel:

Then He brought me back
to the outer gate of the Sanctuary,
which faces East;
and it was shut.
And He said to me,
‘This gate shall remain shut;
it shall not be opened,
and no man shall enter by it;
for the Lord, the God of Israel,
has entered by it;
therefore it shall remain shut.’

(Ezekiel 44:1-4)

Commenting on Ezekiel, St. Ambrose of Milan writes:

Who is this gate if not Mary? Is it not closed because she is a virgin? Mary is the gate through which Christ entered this world, when He was brought forth in the virginal birth and the manner of His birth did not break the seals of virginity.

And the twelfth century abbess Hildegard of Bingen writes:

Today a closed portal [i.e. Mary]
has opened to us the door
the serpent slammed on a woman. [i.e. Eve]

Before I venture to suggest how the image of St. Mary as a closed door may enrich our own faith as contemporary people, especially in the season of Advent, I must name two things:

Describing a person as a “closed door” may well stir up fairly negative connotations for us as contemporary listeners. In contrast, we tend to value being open: Open-hearted; open-minded; open to life, possibility, spontaneity. To be open is to be free. In contrast, we may speak of someone as “closed off” in their attitude or posture, or close-minded. Someone who is hard to read is a “closed book.” Events happening “behind closed doors” rather than “in the open” may immediately raise suspicion about what is being wrongly hidden from us.

Secondly, describing this person, the Virgin Mary, as a closed door – on this feast day in particular – runs the risk of reinforcing a historic message in the Church that sex is bad. A closely allied message has been that women, supposed by the Church historically to have a less ordered or less contained sexuality than men, are thus secondary to men. Theological understandings of the Virgin Mary that emerge from those false and damaging suppositions cast Mary as the exception to her gender, a kind of superwoman and superhuman, because she kept her sexuality closed off to all but God. All this is certainly a topic for another sermon, but I must pause and go on record as a celibate religious and a Christian to say: Sex is a very good gift of the Creator. Our sexuality more broadly – our capacity for intimacy, love, generativity and interpersonal communion – is a powerful gift. We need to speak more about this gift in church, as the church, as people who are vowed celibates, married, coupled, or single, of any sexual orientation, and with varied sexual histories, so that this powerful gift can be engaged and offered up in love, in responsibility, and in genuine holiness.

To return to this sermon, then. Contemplating the value of this image of the closed door, we can recall the words of Jesus: “Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6).

When our doors are open – the door of our house; the door of our heart; the doors of our senses; the door of our inbox, the doors of all those apps we have open – we may well experience many things, welcome many people, feel many emotions, receive and communicate many messages, and accomplish many tasks.

But if those doors are never closed, when will we rest from the work of welcome? What might we welcome in that is not good or life-giving? When will we know quiet, or solitude? When will we have even a moment to wash off the make-up; to take off the armor; to slip out of the starched business suit or the shimmering party dress (or the silk chasuble or the black cassock for that matter) and stand naked before our inmost self, and before our Maker – naked as we entered the world, and naked as we shall leave it?

It is in those moments that you may most powerfully glimpse a hidden part of yourself, where God longs to conceive Christ anew, in the way that only you are meant to conceive him. Caryll Houselander calls this inner space “that still, shadowless ring of light round which our being is circled, making a shape which in itself is an absolute promise of fulfillment” (The Reed of God).

To dare to speak of the first moment of St. Mary’s personal existence, her conception, I am invoking the image of the closed door because conception – Mary’s or anyone else’s — is ultimately surrounded in mystery. It is unseen by human eyes, known in its fullness by God alone.

The word mystery is derived from the Greek myein “to close or to shut,” probably referring to the lips or to the eyes. To draw near to the sacred in the ancient world meant to honor what could not be spoken or described, to remain silent out of deference for that which belongs to another order of reality.

 We speak of God’s mystery in similar terms in our Rule, in our chapter on silence: “In silence we honor the mystery present in the hearts of our brothers and sisters, strangers and enemies. Only God knows them as they truly are and in silence we learn to let go of the curiosity, presumption, and condemnation which pretends to penetrate the mystery of their hearts.”

Advent offers us a special invitation to close the door and draw near to the mystery of God’s indwelling presence gestating within each of us. We do this in trust that another way may open and unfold at God’s initiative and in God’s time.

Br. Jamie Nelson, SSJE

Matthew 9:27-31

Can you imagine what Jesus’s Curriculum Vitae might look like?

What speaking engagements, teaching series, events, & mission statement might be included on his CV?

Let’s imagine what it might look like based on today’s gospel passage, and rest of the stories in the ninth chapter of Matthew’s gospel. In Chapter Nine, Jesus’s mission statement is clear: to heal the sick, offer forgiveness to sinners, and bring Good News of the Kingdom of God to God’s people.

So, what’s listed in the Experiences section of Jesus’s CV?

As Matthew narrates the gospel story, Jesus was quite a busy guy. Just looking at the first 30 verses of Chapter 9, Jesus:

• Heals a paralyzed man, offering forgiveness as well as healing (Matt. 9:1-8)
• Invites a social outcast and his disreputable friends to dinner, sparking the beginning of a lifelong friendship (Matt. 9:9-13)
• Teaches a group of John the Baptist’s followers about fasting, inviting them into a new form of relationship with God (Matt. 9:14-17)
• Resurrects a beloved daughter (Matt. 9:18-26)
• Heals a woman who’s been cast to the margins of society while living with a chronic illness for 12 years (Matt. 9:20-22)

And of course, as we read in today’s gospel, Jesus restores sight to the eyes of two blind men (Matt. 9:27-31).

It’s not a public or flashy healing for these two, just a moment of connection, person to person. They came to Jesus desiring mercy and healing. They followed him inside a home, and alone, without the crowds, Jesus simply asked if they had faith that he could give them sight. “Yes, Lord,” they said, and Jesus the healer touched them and opened their eyes. Through him, they saw new life, a life where they were seen and valued.

Where are you and your story found on Jesus’s CV?

Is there a moment with Jesus that has opened your eyes?

Isaiah 11:1-10

“If only.”

This past week, I recalled a Thanksgiving from almost a decade ago. I had messed up at work and ended up stuck with a pile of papers over the holiday. Not knowing how to admit fault and ask for help, I was caught in a cycle of self-blame, wishing for a way out.

“If only I were somewhere else,” I thought to myself, “If only I were doing something else.”

I’m sure each of you has had your own “if only.” A desire for escape, for something new, for greener grass. A looking ahead and hope for a better future.

I can’t help but think there’s an “if only” lying behind our readings from the psalms and Isaiah this evening. Both foretell an era of justice and prosperity, of deliverance and redemption, of wolves living alongside lambs. If only we had a righteous king.

Both passages have traditionally been interpreted as referring to the coming messiah. Who else could be this textbook-perfect?

Jesus came as the messiah, but as a humble servant, not a conquering king. But if a servant, then still the son of God, greater than the prophets could have hoped: “no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Lk 10:22).

But even so, Jesus’s first advent did not to fulfill the “if only” of the psalmist and Isaiah. It yet remains unfulfilled. There’s still injustice and corruption and scarcity and conflict, and wolves still eat lambs. We still look ahead, we still hope for the promised future of our savior’s second coming, but in this in-between time, what are we to do?

I think it’s significant that Jesus’s revelation in tonight’s Gospel comes shortly after one of the earliest appearances of the word “repent” in Luke’s gospel (first appearing as a verb at Lk 10:13; noun form, “repent” appearing earlier, at Lk 3:3, 3:8, and 5:32). Jesus as messiah doesn’t lead an army but calls us to repentance.

In this season of Advent, we recall our savior’s first coming and we wait in hope and expectation for the “if only” of peace and justice and prosperity and deliverance of his second coming. But in this not-yet time, we can also follow our savior’s call to repent, to admit our fault and ask God for help. To turn from the “if only” to the “even so,” continuing to live into the invitations and challenges that we encounter. And to be consoled, in the traditional words of the Advent Prose, by God’s promise to us, here and now: “my salvation shall not tarry. . . . Fear not, for I will save thee: for I am the Lord thy God . . . thy Redeemer.”

Amen.

Luke 21: 25-36

Well good morning and happy Advent! We made it. We survived Thanksgiving and now we are well on our way through the holidays. This morning, we celebrate the first of four Sundays that make up the season of Advent.

As you can see, our chapel has been wonderfully “Advented”. My personal favorite feature of our chapel in this season is our beloved Advent wreath stand. I affectionately call it the “Shin Cracker” as I have painfully bumped my shins into so many times when moving it in and out of the chapel. Thanks be to God I was spared that duty this year.

We all know that the season of Advent is often most famous for being about patiently waiting. I must confess that I’ve never really known what that means but it always sounds good. However, I can say with honesty that I do know what the opposite of patient waiting looks like.

A few weeks ago, I got cut in line. Don’t worry, it was not here in the chapel or in the refectory. It was actually at Logan Airport.

You see my plane had landed and taxied and I had spent several minutes doing my best waiting for all the rows in front of me to get up and leave. When it was finally my turn, I started to stand up and felt a pair of shoulders brush up against me and a man sliding past me. I quickly realized I was being cut! I turned to look at who had cut me, and I met eyes with a man who looked back at me with cold indifference.

I’d like to stand here and tell you I acted like a calm, cool, collected monk and immediately started praying for the man, but I would be lying. I wouldn’t say that I was filled with murderous rage, but I was definitely angry. It was late, I was hungry, and I just wanted to go home. All I could think about was that this guy had ever so slightly delayed that from happening.

So it was great irony that about twenty minutes later, I stood shoulder to shoulder with this same man waiting at baggage claim. Something had gone wrong and our bags had been delayed getting on the right carousal. As I stood there watching the empty carousal go round and around, I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. All that rage I felt over being delayed a few seconds just to go wait in another place for another thing to happen felt so ridiculous. Yet, that’s me, another human being.

In this season of Advent, we are called to examine our relationship with waiting. Not just waiting for anything, but waiting for God. It’s a serious task.

Every at the beginning of every Advent, I try to remind myself how much time and energy I spend waiting, planning, and comparing what is happening with what I had planned for to happen. Speaking as a monk, I often feel embarrassed at how often my mind is not where my feet are.

One of the greatest dangers in life is to be constantly waiting for one thing to end just so that you can hurry up and move on to waiting for the next thing to end. It’s an easy trap to fall into. A permanent mood of stop and go traffic with your day to day life.

It can be hard to see God when we are constantly looking at our watch. It can be hard to have compassion for our neighbor when we see them as obstacles on our way home. It can be hard to be honest with ourselves when we are hyper focused on getting things done as quickly as possible.

We often know what we are waiting for and why we are waiting for it. However, we don’t always ask ourselves the question how we are waiting? Are we waiting with anxiety? Are we waiting with anger? Are we waiting with God? Are we waiting with love?

These are the kinds of questions we answer with our lives. Both in the big parts of our life, like family, friends, and health, but also in the tiny parts of life, like getting off of an airplane. How we wait for one thing is how we wait for everything.

So what does Jesus have to say about how to wait? In our Gospel this morning, Jesus speaks in a serious tone about how to wait. Jesus is speaking about the Kingdom of God coming near. Jesus tells us to stand up and raise our heads. Jesus tells us to be on guard. Jesus tells us not to have our hearts weighed down by the worries of life. This is serious.

So how do we follow Jesus’ words here? How do we stay on guard and wait in the way Jesus’ wants us to?

Start by considering the world in which we live in. I know it’s cliche to say, but we live in weird times. It’s ok to admit it. It’s gotten hard to tell what’s going on nowadays, it’s gotten hard to know what’s going to happen, and it’s gotten especially hard to know what to do about it.

We always run the risk of temptation in times of darkness, confusion, and anxiety. We run the risk of indifference becoming the norm. We run the risk of cold heartedness becoming acceptable.

To be present, with Jesus, in the world we live in, with the life we have, is always a challenge. To put aside our fears, our regrets, and sometimes even our strongest desires, in order to be fully aware and present to God takes a lot of effort. We must run to meet God.

The good news is that God is always present. No matter what we’ve done or how we feel, or how tired and hungry we are, God is present to all of us. We must be on guard to meet God, no matter what the circumstances of our life are.

In just over three weeks from today, we will gather here again together to celebrate the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and it will be a joyous occasion. In between now and then, we are bound at some point to be stuck in traffic, or waiting for a response to an email, or waiting for better days. Stay awake. Be vigilant. Be ready for God.

Br. Luke Ditewig

Luke 21:5-9

“All this will be thrown down.” The temple, a monumental building, glorious and beautiful fall. The prized, central, historic place of worshipping God. The temple is not God, and it will not last. People respond not surprised or upset but asking: When? Jesus replied: Don’t be led astray. Some will come saying they are the One. They will say the end is near. Don’t follow them.

And “Do not be terrified.” There will be wars and insurrections, but these don’t mean the end is soon. Grieving loss is real, important, and not to be diminished or dismissed. We will lose what we most cherish. “All will be thrown down.” We will suffer. There will be much suffering including by war. We don’t know why.

We don’t know when, but one day the end will come. Jesus who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords will fully reign overall. Because of this, though we grieve and hurt, we are not terrified. Because of this, as we lament and work to alleviate suffering, we are not terrified.

God is bigger, more expansive than we see or experience. “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Have it not been told you from the beginning?” the prophet Isaiah wrote “[God] is the one who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants, [we] are like grasshoppers. [God] stretches out the heavens like a curtain.”[i]Earthly rulers pale in comparison. God knows and holds everything. Christ came down in flesh and feels all we feel.

With that expansive and intimate perspective, what hurts today? What losses do you grieve? What injustice stirs your anger? What burdens do you bear? The God of Heaven and Christ who came down as a human and the lifegiving Spirit has not forgotten us. God has not forgotten you. God sees, hears, knows, and loves.

What are grateful for? Who have been and are good companions? How have you been surprised by courage, beauty, and grace? What unexpected word or welcome or sight recently warmed your heart? Pray all of this, your whole life, grief and gratitude, with expansive hope. Do not be led astray. Do not be terrified.

[i] Isaiah 40:21-22

Luke 6:37-45

In our Gospel this morning, Jesus tells us to take the log out of our own eye before looking at the speck in our neighbor’s eye. We have all sorts of expressions that get at a similar meaning. Focus on yourself. Stay in your own lane. Mind your own business. Keep your side of the street clean…my personal favorite is put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.

What’s amazing about these expressions is you could probably say them to anyone, at any age, anywhere on earth and people would understand what you mean. These are timeless truths and make common sense, yet personally I fail at following them all the time.

One of the great paradoxes of human nature is that we can think about ourselves all the time and still have the energy to obsess over other people. This is especially true when we obsess over the faults of other people – their mistakes, their shortcomings, their annoying habits, and so on. We can talk at length about how other people are driving us crazy, yet when it comes to opening up about our own soul, that takes work.

Every year on this day, when we celebrate Saint Clement of Rome, I take some time to pray with the image of Saint Clemont’s cross. The cross named after him is shaped like an anchor, it is also known as mariner’s cross. Saint Clement was supposedly martyred by having an anchor tied to him and then thrown overboard. I think with his style of cross, Saint Clement got the last laugh on his murderers.

I find great comfort in praying with this image of an anchor. I try to imagine my own heart being an anchor of forgiveness and compassion. I try to imagine with an anchor like that, could I be still and let God do God’s work on other people without my input? Could I simply focus on my own boat and allow the winds to drive others where they may?

Of course this does not mean we will not bump up against other people. The lives of saints did not exist in a vacuum and neither do we. Like it or not, we all live together. Our lives are are a day-to-day balancing act between focusing on our own selves and working on our relationships with others. If we sway too far to either side, we are in danger of drowning in ourselves or drowning in the lives of others.

Above all else, anchor yourself in God. Keep God as the refrain in all your relationships. Let the Holy Spirit guide you in all that you do.

Br. Curtis Almquist

Psalm 146:4-9
Luke 12:32-34

In the calendar of the church we remember today a medieval princess named Elizabeth, born in year 1207 into immeasurable privilege as the daughter of the King of Hungary. At age 14 she happily wed a German nobleman, Ludwig. Meanwhile the poor surrounded her on every side, especially because of a famine and epidemic that had ravaged the population in 1226. Elizabeth was smitten by the endless needs. With her husband’s blessing, she built a hospital, then gave away her dowry, crown, jewels, and royal attire all for the relief of the poor and sick.

The following year her husband died and her in-laws descended, accusing Elizabeth of squandering the royal purse on the vagrants of the land. There was a palace coup and she was put out. The poverty which had been her passion to alleviate now became hers to bear. She became a Franciscan tertiary. In the succeeding years her dwelling places varied, sometimes with charitable relatives, and sometimes in a pigsty, literally. Elizabeth lived in poverty, her life a self-offering. She was deeply loved and revered. She died at age 24 on this day in 1231, and was canonized four years later. Her name, Saint Elizabeth, has been remembered through the centuries for her gifts of healing, and help, and hope, especially for the poor and the infirm.

We hear in the gospel lesson appointed for today, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Our ultimate treasure, the end for which we have been given the gift of life, is in God. And therefore everything in life – every relationship, every distinction or responsibil­ity, every ability, every trinket or property to which we have been entrusted – are not our possessions. They are temporary means to realize our end, which is “to know God, and to love God, and to serve God.”[i]

This is ultimately the distinction between an idol and an icon. An idol is some thing to which we cling and to which we may give ultimate worth, which is called “worship.”[ii] It can be anything: our youthfulness, our good name or good looks, our title, our privilege, our chest of money. An idol is some thing we fix on, clutch at, possess, or are possessed by. Whereas an icon is like a window through which to experience something More, something larger that belongs to God. It makes a world of difference to see life as “iconic” (like an icon), that is a window through we experience the most amazing people and other gifts of creation which come from God as channels to and from God. All that we are and all that we have are not our possessions but rather are gifts from God and for God. Life is not a possession; life is an invitation, a recurring invitation. Life is like an icon, a window to and from God.

Emulating Saint Elizabeth, two practices are helpful for living life freely and faithfully:

• At various points in life, it is helpful to intentionally dispossess ourselves of what we may be clinging to – what may take up inordinate space in our treasure chest, or in our closet, or in our hands – to make space for deeper things, the beginning and end for which we have been created, which is in God.[iii] Dispossess things.
• And secondly, to identify a need or needs that seizes your own heart. Is it children in need, or those without a home or a homeland, or the imprisoned, or those who are discriminated against?[iv] There are endless needs, as you well know. But what particularly seizes your heart’s attention? We cannot do everything, but we can do something. What now is that for you?

And in thanksgiving for blessed Elizabeth of Hungary, whom we remember today.

[i] These words are the “Foundation and First Principle” of The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.

[ii] The English words “worth” and “worship” come from the same etymological root.

[iii] In our appointed Gospel (Luke 12:32-34), Jesus says: “Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven…”

[iv] Our appointed Psalm (146:4-9) names many different people of need.