In our study group we would realize that Jesus means this story to teach us about our life and our relations with God.  The landowner would be God and we would be the tenants.  The vineyard would be our life, given to us by God.  We are to make something of it and give a portion of it back to God.  So far so good; but what might Jesus have meant by the capital improvements?  What do the wine press, the fence and the watch tower represent?  In other words, what assets did God throw into the bargain to make our lives more successful?  We might name a lot of things: capacity for compassion or health or family or intelligence, energy, conscience, common sense – each of us came into this world with many God-given assets in addition to the main asset of life itself.  So this parable tells us that we are in relationship to God the way a tenant is in relationship to a landowner; and not only that, but our landowner, God, has been exceptionally generous to us in all that God has put at our disposal.

Now if this is a proper Bible Study group, we would move on to apply what we just learned to our own lives.  So we talk about harvest time, time for the collection.  Our Landlord has two ways to collect from us, just two.  We can give God our time and we give God our money.  Apart from these two things, we have nothing to give back to the Landowner.

That sounds like paying taxes, only worse.  Not only do we have to hand over a proportion of our money, but also our time.  Wrong.  In fact, sharing our harvest with God is the opposite of paying taxes.  And it’s not because God has no IRS to come and take what is owed by force.  The opposite is this: if we fail to pay taxes we go to jail.  If we fail to pay our ‘harvest’ we remain in jail.

Following in the footsteps of Isaiah, Jesus ends his parable harshly.  He asks his hearers what will happen to the tenants who do not pay?  And his hearers say this: “[The landowner] will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”  Jesus does not correct them when they say this.  In fact, whenever Jesus’ teaching makes God sound punitive or harsh, it is because we are up against a spiritual law, and unlike human laws, spiritual laws cannot be broken with impunity.

The law here is this.  God created us to be fully alive.  We come from our mother’s womb with physical life, but then we have to grow into fulness of life, what Jesus called eternal life.  St. Irenaeus put it this way.  “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.” God has given us any number of aids to come fully alive, but the two essential aids are to give of our time and to give of our money.  This is the spiritual law: we cannot come fully alive until and unless we give in these two ways.  Otherwise, we live in a self-made prison, which is to say we live in a tightly constricted world.

As for money, giving, even to God, can be hard to do.  It is common to feel we do not have enough, or to believe we will come up short at the end of the month.  But we do it anyway, as cheerfully as we can, as a token of our faith and trust in God’s bounty.  But what about our time?  That, too, feels in short supply, especially when it comes to prayer.  We can usually find time to serve at the soup kitchen, or Habitat for Humanity, or any number of similar places where we do God’s work.  But prayer?  Giving time to God for prayer is the hardest thing of all to give, and yet that is what God most needs from us.

I think that is why Jesus told this parable with such a harsh ending.  He is willing to scare us into doing what is needful, if that is what it takes.  Not because God is actually harsh, but because the consequences are harsh if we fail to give.  God, through Jesus, will go to any lengths to help us come fully alive.  And this is another spiritual law: you may be absolutely certain that whatever God asks of us is for our own good.  Whether we like it or not, God insists on showering us with blessings.  In fact, we could let all this rain we are having serve as a reminder of how God showers us with blessings.  But we have to stop hunkering down under our umbrellas!  Let us resolve at this season of harvests to fold up our umbrellas and walk out freely into the rain with up-turned faces and outstretched arms.  Amen.

First, a story to frame what I want to say.  I saw a gem of a movie last week — “Higher Ground.”  It starts with the protagonist, Corinne, as a nine-year-old girl in church.  The pastor is conducting class, at the end of which he asks the children to close their eyes and raise their hand if they want to invite Jesus into their heart.  Corinne does.

The film jumps ahead to when Corinne is a teen.  That raised hand has long gone.  She gets involved with Ethan, a rocker, gets pregnant, and they marry.  They live a hectic, hand to mouth life in a band of would-be rock stars on the road.  At one point, when a fight breaks out on their bus, the bus veers over the side of the road and plunges into a river.  The band members escape out the back door as the bus is sinking.  But what about the baby, who had been sleeping in a cooler?  Corinne and Ethan dive back into the bus and frantically start opening coolers that are floating around.  They do find the baby and get her out to dry land.

We jump ahead.  Now Corinne and Ethan have joined a rigid, but heart-felt church.  Its structure and boundaries are exactly what they need.  They have found stability through a literal understanding of the Bible, and it brings them genuine happiness.  In their house church gatherings they sing together and study the Bible under Pastor Bud; and this brings them into a close community where they blossom.  They go on like this for years.

Another jump.  Corinne has begun to question the restrictions of their faith.  For instance, women are not allowed to instruct a man about matters of religion.  The elders allow or disallow the women’s style of dress.  Questioning is frowned upon.  Ethan has no problem with their faith, which may account for why Corinne finds herself drawing away from him as well as the fellowship.  Finally Corinne can no longer stand the limitations of their faith.  Ethan and their three children will stay, so her decision to leave both Ethan and the church costs her a lot.  In her last time together with the house church — people she still cares about — she speaks from her heart about why she is leaving.  She does not blame them, or find fault with them in any way.  She just cannot live that way any longer.

What will her next move be?  We were given an intimation.  During the period of her growing dissatisfaction, we saw her visit a liturgical church.  It was empty at the time, but we saw her stand there gazing in wonder at stained glass windows, an altar with vestments, a communion rail, a pulpit, a baptismal font, an organ.  The film invites us to draw our own conclusions.

As I interpreted the film, it wants to tell us that life, when we really live it, is a spiritual journey.  Like molting creatures we are meant to shed the skins of our faith as they become too constricting.  A given set of beliefs and practices stand us in very good stead for one season of our life.  By that I mean they give us a solid base from which we can grow to a new level.  Then we become stable at that new level, and reap the joy that stability brings.  In time, though, inevitably, stability turns to stagnation.  It is time to move on, and to the joy that brings.

This is where the church comes in.  How does it see itself?  Is it like a club that guarantees salvation to its members as long as they recite the doctrines, follow the rules and pay their dues?  Or, very different, does it see itself as a resource for the spiritual life, which is the journey into mystery?  Too often churches present themselves in the former guise.  The emphasis is all on stability and harmony.  Teaching and preaching spell out what lies on this side of the horizon, so to speak, rarely if ever encouraging us to look beyond, to explore the mystery, to move on.

If Corinne moved on to — let me call it a ‘resource’ church — she would be in a place that never tried to stunt her growth or waylay her on her journey.  Its resources, whether of Word or Sacrament, would be there to support her during her seasons of stability and to sustain her during her seasons of journeying.  She could move on, in other words, yet stay in place.  A paradoxical kind of rooted freedom.

Now let’s think about the two readings — two stories.  The one from Exodus is told as if it were history.  Not so.  No one knows the true facts of the Israelites’ journey across the wilderness; but over the years masters of the spiritual life used that journey to shape helpful stories.  We could call them koans or parables.  We could call them challenges to discover a hidden truth in life’s events.  The beauty of a story lies in its ability to contain a wealth of meanings.  Here, for instance, when the people are hungry, they think God hasn’t noticed, or has led them to this impasse with evil intent, or that God has abandoned them.  The story says, NO!  God is in your very midst.  Open your eyes.  See what God has provided.  It isn’t history, it is a teaching for us and for all generations, one we can turn to in a wilderness of loss or grief or failure, or betrayal, feeling helpless to help ourselves.

This is exactly why Jesus told stories.  Here he cast God as an unjust landowner, or at least that is how we see him.  He paid those who worked one hour the same as he paid those who worked twelve hours.  Again we have a story from which we can tease out a wealth of meanings.  The one that lies just below the surface for me is that most of us identify with the 12-hour laborers, not the one-hour laborers.  If we went through life feeling like a one-hour laborer, think how different our lives would be!  How different our attitude toward God and our fellow creatures.  Come to think of it, that might be the next stage of my journey — to practice thinking of myself as a one-hour laborer.

Let me come back to where we started.  If our church dictated how we should understand these stories, that would hobble us.  We might actually appreciate it for a while, because when it comes to exploring the meaning of the stories and symbols and sacraments of our faith, the church has a depth and breadth of understanding that far exceeds our own.  But to dictate?  The church cannot know where we are in our journey, and if it really wants to help us it needs to acknowledge that, and freely offer us every help and resource it can to move on.  To do otherwise turns many people away from religion.  Worse, it may leave them ignorant of the spiritual journey itself, with all the joy and vitality to be found on the way.  Simone Weil, another spiritual master, who greatly influenced theologians in the last century, said this: whenever you are forced to choose between Jesus and truth, choose truth; for you will find in the end that it leads you back to him.  I would just add this: back to Jesus, yes, but never to the end of the journey, for we can always be drawn one step nearer to God.

When we start counting, though, we have to ask, how shall we count?  Should we count the whole of the World Trade Center attack as one huge offense?  Or should we start naming the separate offenses, as I tried to do just now?  Or the individual people?  Is seventy-seven times the limit for one episode, or for one day?  Does an offense have to have a degree of magnitude to count as one of the seventy seven?  Questions abound.

Apart from figuring out how to count wrongs or calculate the magnitude of offenses, forgiving involves another complication.  To forgive someone requires, first, the struggle to forgive, and then ever after, watchful maintenance of that forgiveness.  This locks up a lot of energy.  And if our watchfulness slips, we might find ourselves back to retaliating, back to square one with our hard-won forgiveness.  So to be honest, trying to forgive offenses puts us in an impossible situation.  We cannot do it.  Jesus’ command to forgive from the heart amounts to lifting ourselves up by our boot straps.

This is not the forgiveness Jesus is asking for.  It’s not about counting how many times we forgave or how hard we struggled.  In the Hebrew tradition seventy-seven stood for an infinite number.  In other words, Jesus is saying, don’t even start to count.

What Jesus is saying is quite radical.  Let me give you an image for what Jesus means when he says forgive.  Think of an offense as a bullet.  Picture it slamming into soft soil, into humus.  It goes no further, doesn’t ricochet, does no more damage.  The the bullet’s momentum dies.  The soil absorbs all the angry energy.  This is the work of forgiveness.  It does not aim outward toward the offense at all, but inward toward the heart, toward its gradual transformation into a heart of humus.  The work of forgiveness aims toward having a heart like the heart of God or of Jesus.  No offense is even taken.  To forgive from the heart is to be as the earth.

Yes, but what about Jesus’ parable where the king, himself, seems vindictive?  Surely the king stands for God!  At first the king was kind to his slave who owed him 10,000 denarii.  In fact, he wiped out the entire debt.  But when that same slave showed no mercy to a fellow slave who owed him only 100 denarii, the king turned against the first slave.  He sentenced him to be tortured until the entire 10,000 was paid.  Jesus ended by saying, “so my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”  Is this a case of God’s saying, “Do as I say not as I do?”

Jesus told the story that way to emphasize the supreme importance of a transformed heart, not to paint God as a vindictive judge with a heart of stone.  In fact, God can only love.  If we are tortured by being barred from the kingdom of heaven, it is not because God would keep us out.  Far otherwise!  God longs only to bring us in.  It is we who keep ourselves out.  And forgiveness from the heart is the key by which we either keep ourselves out, or let ourselves in to the kingdom of heaven.

At this point we may be saying to ourselves, “I want in!”  But let’s make sure we do want in.  Here are two questions we can ask to test that claim.  First, how comfortable would I be in a place that outlawed judgment and blame?  Imagine going through life without the satisfaction of making judgments — of separating, at least in my own mind, the good from the bad, the deserving from the undeserving, the right from the wrong.  Or going through life without the relief of blaming, given careless or criminal behavior?  The second question is this.  How comfortable would I be in a place where everyone and every thing were interconnected?  Where whatever happened would affect me, and whatever I did would affect the rest of creation?  Can I imagine living in a place with these norms?

Let’s go back to Jesus’ parable where he mentions torture.  We do not think of our everyday life as torture; but where we deal out judgment and blame almost subconsciously, and where think of ourselves as solitary individuals. . . well, in terms of Jesus’ parable, that life is torture.  And yet, if that is where we’re comfortable, we need to think twice before we claim we want to leave it.

Let me step aside for a moment and make an important distinction between judgment and discernment.  Judgment asks what or who is wrong here?  Discernment asks, what is needed to bring healing here?  Judgment is passive, seeing the situation as “not my problem”.  Discernment is active, seeing the situation as involving me, personally.  Applied to 9/11, discernment would follow a process, first analyzing: what is going on here?  What concatenations of causes have brought this about?  And after analyzing, discernment would assess: given the whole picture, what resources do I have — what skills, experience, influence — that can bring healing?  One of the people at Centering Prayer yesterday spoke of a special kind of creativity, the “creativity of kindness.”  It’s a great way to think of how discernment springs into action with ingenuity as well as energy.

Going back to Jesus’ parable, for those of us who do want to enter the kingdom of heaven, how shall we go about transforming our hearts from rock to humus  — that is, achieving forgiveness from the heart?  I think of Jesus and his disciples that time in the boat on the Sea of Galilee.  The wind was raging, the waves threatened to swamp them, the storm was reaching its peak and Jesus was asleep in the bow with his head on a pillow.  How was that possible?  It was possible because Jesus, himself, was in the eye of the storm.  We can take that literally, if we like, but the deeper meaning for us is that always, whatever was going on, Jesus dwelt in a place of inner tranquility.

He did not get there by special dispensation, being the Son of God.  He did not enjoy some level of divinity that put him on a different plane from ours.  He got there with practice.  Every day, perhaps from quite an early age, he set aside time to practice — let me put it this way — being in the eye of the storm.  The storm may have been no greater than the tumult of his thoughts.  Or it may have been the very real threats that began to accumulate.  But he practiced every day, putting himself inside the storm, in the tranquility of its eye.  And when the end did come he was ready, not with blame or judgment, but with forgiveness from the heart, no offense taken, for he knew that he was intimately interconnected.  His transformed heart discerned he was one with the whole of creation.

Picture the Jordan River Valley.  The river rises in the north on the slopes of Mt. Hermon and flows south to the Dead Sea.  Jesus has been heading north, teaching his followers as they went along, forming them spiritually.  They climb the slopes of Mt. Hermon to Caesarea Philippi.  From there they can scan the valley, and trace the way they have come.  I picture them sitting on a rocky outcropping, gazing out at the view, reflecting on their journey.

Jesus breaks the silence with a question.  “Who do people say that I am?”  It doesn’t call for much thought; it scarcely interrupts their reverie.  They simply repeat some of what they have heard — “John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets.”  Then Jesus asks the zinger.  “But who do you say that I am.”  Suddenly everyone snaps to attention.  This is the turning point question.  The first question didn’t involve them at all.  It was about facts.  They answer it from their heads, their memories.  The second question involves them completely.  It is actually about their identity.  Who do you say that I am?  They can only answer from their hearts.

Up to now Jesus has been preparing them for this question.  He has been teaching them to experience life, to experience the world, as he does — as the kingdom of God.  He has been showing them how he prays, going apart in solitude, simply to soak in the presence of God.  After this moment he will turn and head toward Jerusalem, toward his death.  Has he prepared them well enough to make this turn with him?  Will they be able to stick with him once the going gets tough?  Everything will depend on how they answer this question, because it is not so much an answer they will give — a name — but a commitment.  From this point on, depending on their answer, their lives will not be their own.

If we stop now, and gaze back over the way we have come on our journey of faith, we will see something similar.  Most of us started out with head-faith.  If anyone asked us who Jesus was we would spout what we had learned: the Savior, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, the son of Mary, and so on.  Then a point came — it could have been sudden or gradual — when heart-faith took over.  We no longer just knew about Jesus, we knew him personally.  We had experienced his presence with us and within us.  We had felt his love and unconditional embrace, the way we feel our backs go warm when the sun hits us.  That is our turning point, our equivalent to Peter’s sudden recognition that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of the living God.

The trouble is, many of us stop at that point.  It is such an experience of love and joy and peace, we want to hold on to it as to a treasure.  It is a treasure.  So we continue to grow and learn in other areas of life, but not in our beliefs.  Our beliefs are like a strong box that holds the treasure of our faith.  Nothing must touch it.

The gap between what we know of the outer world and what we know of the inner world grows wider with every passing year of life experience, because the latter is not moving.  Sooner or later doubt springs up.  Sophistication asks questions that naivete cannot answer, except to say, “Do not challenge my beliefs!  My whole happiness depends on them!”  This is a no-win situation.  These doubts do  trouble the peace of my faith; and yet I dare not explore them.  Ironically, by clinging to my beliefs I jeopardize the very peace they were meant to uphold!

My fears tell me: if I question I will be disloyal.  Disloyal to my faith!  To my church!  I will lose it all!  Everything I base my life on will be gone!  God’s reality will be uncertain.  Salvation will be hopeless!  Everything I value will be up for grabs!  Too much is at stake to take any risks.

Many remain at this point; they have faith but they cannot enjoy it.  It all starts with how we answer Jesus’ question: “Who do you say that I am?”  If we think he’s asking about facts, about a correct answer, the proper name or title, our faith will serve us like those hoods that are put over falcons’ eyes to keep them quiet and motionless.  But suppose Jesus is asking about a process?  Suppose he is hoping to hear, “You are the one with whom I want to share the adventure of life.  You are the one with whom I want to explore the mystery of eternity.”  Then we are making a commitment, not to a correct set of beliefs, but to the spiritual and existential journey.

Now we welcome every doubt or question as an invitation to go deeper in faith, to understand it in a broader way.  We actually seek out doubts — and there will always be new doubts, because the mystery of faith is unfathomable.  And it is not God we are doubting, but the adequacy of our model.  In one respect this is unsettling, for it denies us a final answer.  We have to live in a constant state of uncertainty.  In another respect, however, this is profoundly reassuring; because we understand that the God our questions seek to know will never change.  Only our models change, slowly growing more adequate as question succeeds question.  Our security does not depend on our having the correct answer, it depends on that bottomless source of renewal, which is God’s never-changing love and care for us.

Now to bring this full circle, if our response to Jesus’ question takes the form, not of a name or a label, but of a commitment to an ever-deepening faith, chances are good that we will be able to complete the journey with Jesus.  He knew that he would be heading toward his death, but he also knew that if they followed, the disciples would be heading toward their own death, too — though not literally.  For us, we enact that death in Baptism, vowing to die to our self-interested lives and to live into the Christ-centered life.  It is a process where the end-point is to realize our oneness with God and with all creation, and to experience the unshakeable joy of that life, which we know to be eternal.

You may remember Whittier’s Civil War poem, “Barbara Frietchie.”  It tells how Robert E. Lee marched into Frederick, Maryland, one morning, leading his Confederate troops.  So far the war was going their way, so Lee may have been shocked to find Union flags, forty of them, fluttering in the morning breeze.  He ordered them cut down to be trampled under foot.  Having done it, the troops marched on.  The citizens of Fredericksburg let the flags lie — all except one citizen, Barbara Frietchie.  Bowed with 90 years, Barbara Frietchie took one of the flags, carried it up to her attic window which faced down on the main street, and hung it out on a staff.  A short while later Stonewall Jackson, Lee’s implacable general who held his line of battle with the strength of a stone wall, marched into town at the head of his troops.  Seeing the stars and stripes flying overhead, he stopped his men and ordered them to shoot.  The flag was ripped, the window shattered, the casement splintered.  The story, as told in verse by Whittier, goes on as follows:

Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff
Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf.

She leaned far out on the window sill,
And shook it forth with a royal will,

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

Jackson stared up at the woman for a long time and finally cried out,

“Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog!  March on!” he said.

All day long through Frederick street
Sounded the tread of marching feet:

All day long that free flag tost
Over the heads of the rebel host.

The story is known to most high school students of American poetry, and I remind you of it this morning, because Barbara Frietchie illustrates walk-on-water faith.  Jackson had all the force, and he undoubtedly thought he had right on his side.  Yet a ninety year old nobody had more authority than he did due to her faith.   I am calling this walk-on-water faith, because that is what the Gospel writer was getting at with his story of Peter walking on water.  If we take it literally, what relevance does it have for us?  None of us is ever going to walk across an unfrozen sea.  But if we take it as the poetic language it is, the story can inspire us to new faith.

The story is this.  The disciples are fighting a losing battle on the Sea of Galilee.  They have been rowing for home for hours, after the feeding of the five thousand, but the winds are high, the sea is rough, and they lose headway rather than gain it.  Jesus, who stayed behind to pray and regain his spiritual strength in solitude,  comes to help them.  They see him approaching and are afraid, for what he is doing, walking on water, is against nature.  Only an apparition could do that!  Jesus senses their fear and, as always, says, “Fear not!”  Peter, always impetuous, reasons with himself: if this truly is Jesus a miracle will prove it.  What shall I ask for?  The first thing that comes to mind is to ask to do the thing that Jesus is doing.  All goes well as long as Peter keeps his eyes on Jesus’ eyes.  But Peter’s attention wavers and he begins to sink, and cries out for help.  Jesus rescues him, but at the same time chides him.  What does he chide Peter for?  That is the answer we need to know if we aspire to having walk-on-water faith, which is to say faith approaching Jesus’ faith.

The critical moment for Peter came when he turned his attention from Jesus to the surrounding peril, and that was fatal to his success.  Why?  We could say because he became self-conscious, but I’d like to suggest another way to look at it.  All of us live, potentially, on two levels; or in New Testament terms, we have two lives.  One is called “life in Christ” or “eternal life” and the other is our life in this world.  Typically we live on the latter level, where we depend on our own power, Stonewall Jackson power.  Jesus lived on the eternal level.  This sounds mysterious, but we can claim that life just as he did.  The secret is in the story.  Remember how the disciples took off in the boat?  Not Jesus!  He knew he needed to renew himself in eternal life.  So he stayed behind, alone, because the renewal he sought only comes with meditative prayer.

To give you an image of that kind of prayer, imagine yourself as a sponge in water.  It takes no time at all to get the sponge into the water, but it takes quite a while for the water to get into the sponge.  So time is needed, plus stillness and a degree of silence, for God’s Spirit to fill us.  Words are not needed; in fact, they are a hinderance.  Just silent soaking in the loving presence of God.  In time the sense of oneself as a solitary individual diminishes, and a sense of oneself as being one with all creation increases.  In other words, the transition from time-bound life, self-bound life, to eternal life, limitless life has begun.  And to give you an image of those two levels of life, think of Stonewall Jackson and Barbara Frietchie.

So the story of Peter walking on water is not the story of a bizarre incident, but a story full of practical hope for us.  It says that we need not feel hopeless or helpless, even though we stand awash in waves, be they the S&P downgrading, the unrest in the Middle East, the stock market plunges, the dangers of hydrofracking — we live in a sea of threats.  To face them without fear, and with the capacity to act effectively to make a difference, we practice as Jesus did.  We seek a place of solitude and quiet, allowing God’s Spirit to work in us, making us one with all creation.

I’ll add my own version to this string of similes – a metaphor, really. The kingdom of heaven is like the life of Anthony Bloom. Bloom was a Russian Orthodox Archbishop, no doubt familiar to some of you, because his teachings marked him as a remarkable spiritual leader. People of all faiths sought him out. He was born in 1914 in Switzerland, where his father had been a member of the Czar’s diplomatic corps; but after the Russian revolution the family drifted around in poverty, ending up as exiles in Paris. At the age of eleven Anthony was sent to summer camp where he had a puzzling experience. He met a priest there who seemed to love the boys with all his heart. It didn’t seem to matter if they were bad or good, all were equally dear to this young priest. That struck Anthony as odd. He had never met such a person. He went on with his life. But he had noticed, and that was his mustard seed moment.

As a teenager, Anthony identified himself as a thoughtful and passionate atheist. He said that he, “hated everything that connected with the idea of God.” He joined a Russian youth organization in Paris and one evening had to sit through a lecture given by a priest. He intended not to listen, but he couldn’t help himself. What he heard made him furiously indignant. As soon as the lecture was over he raced home, where his mother had a Bible. He wanted to refute what he had been hearing. He sat at his desk, turned to the shortest of the Gospels, and impatiently began to read. Before he reached the third chapter he became aware of a Presence across the desk from him. The certainty that it was Christ standing there was so strong that it never left him. That was the yeast at work, the secret, transforming growth that had been going on in him – the hidden growth of the kingdom of heaven. So that when the time was ripe he would be prepared to experience the resurrection, not as doctrine, but as a fact – his own experience.

In 1939 at the age of 25 he became a monk. Faith had grown in him over the years to the point where he wanted to commit his whole life to Christ. But like the treasure in the field, he could not have the living Christ, without also having a surrounding Christian community. In his case it was a monastic community, but it could have been a parish church.

The kingdom of heaven continued to grow in him, but now it gets harder to talk about. He said, himself, that it only happens gradually, year after year, and is difficult to learn. As he described it, he learned to look at people and see the radiant beauty in them. And not only people, but things and even situations. But it wasn’t just a question of opening his eyes. Like having the pearl of great price, in order to see in this way he had to let go of all desire to possess, or control. To possess that pearl he had to empty himself of his desires and dislikes – in other words, self-emptying was the price.

I like the story of Anthony Bloom, because he illustrates Jesus’ final simile. The kingdom of heaven is like a net…. No one would have looked at Anthony as a youngster and claimed that he was caught up in the net of the kingdom of heaven. And yet he was, from birth. As he grew up that became evident. Jesus assures us that everyone is caught up in that net. The question is, why is it so evident in some lives and not in others?

No one can answer that question. I’ll offer some thoughts, though. Remember in the Gospel of John when Jesus tells the disciples that he is going away, and he says that they know the place where he is going? He was speaking of the kingdom of heaven. Thomas retorted, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus was speaking metaphorically when he said ‘place,’ but Thomas took him literally.

Taking Jesus literally is a modern problem, too. This problem arises when we fail to distinguish between thinking and awareness, yet they are worlds apart. Thinking takes place in what was or what will be – in time. Awareness takes place only in the now. Thinking, as allied to the past, includes remembering, feeling nostalgia or regret, learning, analyzing, and so on. Thinking, as allied to the future, includes planning, rehearsing, problem solving, worrying, etc. Many people go through life crushed between the past and the future, without being aware of that razor-thin crack between them, which is the here and now. C.S. Lewis wrote about this in his classic children’s story, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where the wardrobe stood for now, for the gate to the kingdom of heaven. Through the wardrobe lay a vast universe. Yet if you walked around that piece of furniture, it was completely contained in this world. A mystery! That’s how it is with the kingdom of heaven. The gate is right here right now, but we do not detect it, because the past and the future press in on us. We urgently need simply to be aware in the present moment, but thinking holds us captive.

This may account for why some lives give evidence of being caught in the net of the kingdom of heaven and others not. What is needed is to press into that knife-edge of of the present moment, that still point at the center of the turning wheel, and gradually, over time, feel it open up for us. Anthony Bloom wrote about one woman who adopted a daily practice of sitting in stillness and silence, and one day she became aware, as she said, that the stillness was a Presence. To put it in Jesus’ words, she discovered the ‘place’ where he was going. Or in the words of today’s Gospel, she discovered the kingdom of heaven.

I do not know what Jesus meant when he added this: “… [W]hen [the net] was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” I am sure he did not mean that some people will be separated out, for we are all a mixture of evil and righteousness. Perhaps he meant that, in each of us, those parts of our lives that were not illuminated by the light of the kingdom of heaven must be left behind when we follow Jesus to the ‘place’ where he was going.

The Fourth of July celebrates ambiguity. On the one hand we thrill to the beauty of fireworks; yet on the other hand they stand for bombs bursting in air, and all the suffering they cause. What is it then? A day of celebration or a day of mourning? Can it be both?

Many people, including Christians reason as follows. You cannot stop violence by practicing violence. Slaughtering people is not the way to peace. War never solves problems; it only leads to further crises down the road. And today’s readings support this point of view.

The the reading from Zechariah gives us that familiar image of God, named as a warrior, triumphant and victorious, yet appearing as humble and riding on a baby donkey. In other words, God’s might is the paradoxical might of gentleness and vulnerability. The prophet goes on to contrast God’s might with the way that the nations of the world show their might, and he names the “bombs and rockets” of that earlier day: that is, chariots, war horses, and battle bows. The day is coming, says the prophet, when God’s might shall rule over all human might. And notice how he puts it. Does he say that God will destroy the weapons of the nations? That God’s violence will nullify the violence of the nations? No! He says that God will “cut off” those weapons. Something will come between us and our reaching for our weapons. The image is one of God offering us something more attractive, more appealing, even more effective than our instruments of violence.

The Gospel reading confirms the nature of God’s might. Jesus first declares that to know him is to know the Father; and then he describes himself as “gentle and humble of heart.” He answers the question left hanging in the reading from Zechariah, which was: How will God cut us off from our instruments of violence? The answer is that we will come to Christ, for we have finally recognized how weary we are and how heavy are our burdens. We respond to his invitation to come to him and he will give us rest. Jesus Christ is God’s instrument to cut us off from our weapons of war.

If you are like me, you have been listening to the argument thus far with a “yes, but” in the back of your minds. Yes, but if we hadn’t used violence against Saddam Hussein, he would still be carrying on his own brand of unspeakable violence. Yes, but there are some people who simply do not respond to reason, to gentleness and vulnerability. Yes, but if we had not used violence against Hitler, the whole world might be living under a Nazi regime, even to the present day. And to turn to Revolutionary times: yes, but if the thirteen colonies had not risen up in armed revolt against the British, the American experiment in democracy might never have happened.

If you are like me, you are troubled about not being able to come to a clear and definite conclusion about the NATO action in Libya, and about the use of violence in general — whether it is legitimate or not. Part of me wants to adopt what I believe to be the biblical stance, and declare violence, force and weapons of war to be ineligible when it comes to solving problems, whether on the personal level or the international level. But part of me believes that violence is sometimes necessary to prevent or to end greater violence.

What Paul wrote to the Romans in today’s reading speaks to this uncertainty. I was trying to think of an image that would give a felt sense of what Paul was driving at, and I remembered a visit that Stuart and I made to Istanbul. It was not uncommon to see a man leading a bear through the streets. The bear was tarted up with tinny bells on the collar, sometimes a silly hat. The man jerked the bear around with a leash and made him perform demeaning tricks on the street corners, such as a shambling little dance. Yet all the while, in plain view but not seen, a magnificent animal stood before us, with wise eyes, capable of great power, potentially a creature of awe. It suggests an analogy to what Paul is saying. Like Paul, we are creatures on a leash. Two hands hold that leash and jerk us around; one is all those things we do not want, especially our fears, and the other is all the things we do want. Meanwhile, our true being, our greatness lies hidden.

This same image can illuminate the Gospel. Jesus might have said, “Take my collar upon you.” In other words, let me be your handler. With Jesus there will be no leash, no tinny bells. Our collar will be internal, bringing out the greatness in us, our true selves.

How does this relate to our question about the legitimacy of violence? Perhaps in every case, when we turn to violence to solve a problem, it is that performing bear that is acting, or approving. This is the self that is driven by passions — the self that can be inflamed by injustices and calls us to fight for high ideals. For instance, didn’t we find our own passions aroused by pictures and tales of atrocities perpetrated by Qaddafi? If we could rise above this side of ourselves, so that we heard such stories, or saw such atrocities, with our true selves; with the self that is, as Paul puts it, “in Christ Jesus;” we would be moved to violence less often; conceivably not ever. This is not to say we would be passive in the face of injustice, only that we would not meet violence with matching violence.

In the meantime, we do have to live as Paul did, with these two sides of ourselves, and with the uncertainty about violence – whether it is ever justified. But if we set aside the question of whether violence can be justified, we can at least agree that violence is too prevalent in our world; that we resort to violence too quickly to try to solve our problems; that violence is often not the answer. If we can agree about that we can do as Paul urges us to do: set our minds on the things of the Spirit. This way we can hope to grow less prone to violence in ourselves and less confused about the use of violence in the world. Then when as a nation we set our mind on the things of the Spirit, and we gather to sing the National Anthem, we can answer its question, “O say, does that star spangled banner yet wave?” Yes it does wave, we will say, over the land of the free – a people free from violence. Amen.

Two weeks ago a few of us visited the nesting site of dozens of herons. They had pitched their nests in the topmost branches of trees that stood tall and dead in a broad marsh. Every few minutes a heron would appear in the sky and then glide to its nest. It struck me, though, that they never approached the nest directly, but always in a wide spiral. That is how I want to approach today’s Gospel, spiraling in on it, ultimately to hatch the question, what is doubting Thomas really asking for?

We’ll start the glide with a true story. When the Germans marched into Paris in World War II Jacques Lusseyran was 16 years old. Hearing about the atrocities of the Gestapo, he made a commitment to himself to help the resistance, and began by recruiting several of his friends. Together they started a youth movement, calling themselves the Volunteers of Liberty. Their great challenge was to enlist members whom they could trust. Over time the Volunteers grew to more than 600 youths, and every one of them had been approved only after after a personal interview with Jacques. No exceptions. Why Jacques? Jacques was totally blind.

Jesus spoke of the blind and the sighted in John’s Gospel, saying that often, paradoxically, it was the blind who could see. Jacques had that ability to see what the sighted are often blind to. How did he see? It was more than intuition. You could think of it as a meeting. Jacques was listening to see, one after another, if each of those young women or men had the ability to meet him. I am using the word meet in a special sense, and I want to describe it at some length.

Meetings are rare, and especially so in our society, where demands can feel like black flies in summer. Still, most of us have experienced a meeting. Call them moments of grace. They usually happen between two people, but for a small group of people to meet is not impossible. We all hunger for meeting; and yet a meeting can take us by surprise, even happening on a bus with a total stranger, when a casual conversation transforms into a meeting. Sometimes, between intimates, a meeting will take place in silence. While meetings cannot be made to happen, we can increase the possibility of their happening.

First, the whole self must be present and willing to share – body, mind, soul and spirit. Further, no agenda can be present, nor any kind of judgment. This may explain why some of us rarely met our parents. I can scarcely think of a time when my parents did not have an agenda for me. Also, for a meeting to take place we must set aside any ‘credentials’, that is, anything that makes for inequality. In other words, where you were born, your race, what you do for a living, your education and place in society, your age or reputation – these must be set aside as irrelevant if a true meeting is to happen.

A meeting can be brief and not go very deep, or be extended and go deep indeed. As an example of the first, I remember a woman who used to take care of me when my parents were away on a trip. Her name was Pearl, and I would not remember her in the least, except that she and I met more than once; and for that I love her to this day. I remember none of the things we talked about, just that when the meeting was over I felt charged with vitality, and totally right with the world. I would never call any meeting shallow, but these meetings with Pearl did not go too deep.

As an example of the second, a deep meeting, a story is told about a priest in a small French village. He noticed that an elderly peasant used to sit in the empty church almost every afternoon. This went on month after month, and the old man seemed to be doing nothing. Finally the priest could restrain his curiosity no longer. He approached the man and asked him, “Excuse me, my dear man, what are you doing here in church when nothing is going on?” The old man turned a radiant face to the priest and replied, “He looks at me and I look at Him, and we are happy.” A true meeting can go very deep.

Jacques cannot have gone too deep in most of his meetings. I dare say they sounded like chit chat. Underneath the chit chat, however, he could detect if there was anyone ‘there’. He could discern if this was a person capable of meeting. There had to be a self at the core to stand against the fear their work entailed, or resist the interrogators if any of them should be caught. Only once could he not tell either way. He gave that person the benefit of the doubt, and this proved to be the person who betrayed them. Jacques was caught and sent to a concentration camp. He lived through it and later wrote his autobiography. It’s entitled And There Was Light.

I’ve gone on at length about meeting, because it was this that Thomas sought. During Jesus’ lifetime Jesus had met his disciples again and again and through those meetings they found their lives transformed. It reminds me of a line in Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son, “The great person makes everyone feel their equal.” If you could meet Jesus that was how you felt. What did it matter to Thomas if Jesus’ body returned? He spoke in terms of putting his hand in Jesus’ side and his finger in the holes from the nails, but he was groping for words here. What he really wanted was Jesus to be back with them in reality. In other words, back with them in such a way that they could meet him. Continue their transformation; recharge their vitality, as before. You notice that when Jesus did return and Thomas was there, he had no need to put his finger in the nail holes or his hand in Jesus side. The power of meeting overwhelmed him.

Doubting Thomas could be a poster child for spiritual seekers of today, even teens, especially teens. They hunger for meeting, but they seriously doubt that any real meetings take place within the church, or even within organized religion. How ironic! This is precisely the purpose that hatched the church. What went wrong? How did we get such a bad reputation among the unchurched? Somehow Christianity came around to offering, not meeting, but concepts pertaining to the meeting, such as redemption, atonement, damnation, justification, consecration, sanctification, salvation. You know the litany. Concepts do not feed the hunger. Worse, putting believing in place of meeting, the church scarcely acknowledges that the hunger exists. Yet hunger for meeting comes woven into our being.

The story of doubting Thomas suggests that, even 2,000 years later, we are at no disadvantage when it comes to meeting. And the church can help. True, the church cannot make a meeting happen. Even Jesus could not do that. But he knew our need, and what he could do, he did. He instituted the Eucharist to kindle our expectations and enhance the possibility of a meeting. You could say he set the stage.

When we come to the Sunday liturgy here at St. Gregory’s the stage has been set. For one thing, credentials have been set aside; we gather as equals. In addition, no one has an agenda for us; nor is any judgment taking place; and the welcome is wholehearted. Beauty fills our eyes and ears. We even experience a degree of silence. The stately pace of the liturgy draws us away from our time-driven lives toward a timeless space. The result is that many of us do experience a meeting, occasionally a meeting of great depth. In those meetings Jesus Christ may be as present as he was to Thomas, and like Thomas we can feel transformed.

The liturgy cannot do all the work, of course. It helps if we arrive, open and expectant, ready and willing to meet and be met by God. We can prepare for this in many ways. Serving those in need, in the Spirit of Christ, is one way. Or if you are an artist, spending time with your art, as if you were a root, right out there where the growing tip of your art meets the solid face of the soil. Reading spiritual biographies is another way. For instance, I find it helpful to read that small, but perennial classic, Practicing the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. Yet another way we might call the way of the heron. It can become a daily practice. We find a place high above the busy world, so to speak, a place and time of quiet. We settle ourself down, and like the heron on its nest, we brood. Also like the heron we are expectant. We know the hatching cannot be hurried, but we know, too, that forces beyond our grasp are working for us. In God’s own time the egg of meeting will hatch and the sweetness of it will make any amount of waiting worthwhile. Then we will say with the Psalmist, “in your presence there is fullness of joy.”

Why can we not serve two masters? Lots of people hold down two jobs. What says they cannot like both bosses, and like them equally? What is Jesus getting at when he says no person can serve two masters? I want to approach this question with a story from the book of Exodus. You remember how Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, and on out into the desert, bound for the Promised Land. After about three months on their journey they came to Mt. Sinai, where they stopped and camped while Moses went up on the mountain to receive God’s commandments. At one point the people became anxious, because Moses had been gone a long time. They asked Moses’s brother Aaron to make them some gods to lead them, and Aaron fashioned a golden calf. Then the people began to worship it. Meanwhile, up on the mountain, God told Moses what was going on down in the camp and Moses rushed down to confront Aaron and the people with their idolatry.

Now comes a curious detail. It is a detail of such significance that it may explain why this episode of the golden calf was included in the Bible. Moses took the golden calf, burned it, ground it to a powder, sprinkled the powder on water and made the people drink it. Was he angry? Yes, very. Was he punishing them? No, not at all. If Moses was filled with God’s Spirit, as he assuredly was, he could only act to build the people up, and punishment does not do that. Tough love does; and tough love can look like punishment. The difference lies in the intention behind the action. In the golden calf Moses saw a teachable moment, and like all great teachers, he knew the best lessons are driven home and made memorable with a bodily experience. So he made them choke down the golden calf.

What was that lesson? It is the pivotal lesson of our spiritual lives. It speaks to our most fundamental question; that is, how shall I live my life? Where do we look to answer that question? As children we might look to our mother or father. Getting older, we may turn to our teachers or our priest. Older still, we may seek role models at work; and there is always the need to obey the law. Of course we have the Bible. When we reach a point of spiritual maturity, however, we turn and look within. So Moses was not punishing the people for not being loyal to him. He was teaching the people to go beyond him, to go beyond all external sources of authority. He was telling them, by forcing the calf down their throats, that the place to find what they seek – in truth, the place to find God – is within.

Jesus’ whole ministry centered on teaching his disciples that same pivotal lesson. Remember when he told them, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”? Hate is a strong word. Jesus did NOT mean: do not cherish your parents, do not honor and respect them. Jesus uses the word hate to emphasize the point: you must look within for the answer to life’s deepest questions. Look within to learn how to live your life, to learn who you are. Look within for God.

To say “within” takes explanation. “Within” can mean the world of our thoughts – the world we put together inside our heads by living and learning, by studying and experimenting. It’s the world made up of our body of knowledge. It’s our model of the universe as each of us understands it. To build up this inner world we do look outside of ourselves for authority – we look to teachers, financial advisors, the law, art critics, doctors, theologians, Consumer Reports, and especially Google! The world we piece together in this way mirrors the external world.

Many take this to be the only world “within.” Yet we will never find God in that world, in the world of our thoughts. Our thoughts can be about God, but they never touch God. A theologian may know a mountain of facts about God, and yet inwardly live in a desert where the sweet rain of God’s presence is never felt. The “within” Moses meant, the “within” Jesus meant, refers to a world of awareness, outside of thought and beyond thought; beyond feelings as well.

To get a sense of the difference between these two – what I am calling worlds – let’s imagine ourselves in the camp with the people of Israel. Moses has been gone forty days. We are beginning to ask – to use Jesus’ words – “What will we eat?” “What will we drink?” “What will we wear?” In other words, how can we feel safe and secure? How can we live? We have two choices. One: we can do as we have always done when we followed Moses. We can look outside of ourselves for authority. Two: we can try what we are still just learning to do, look within ourselves for authority. Naturally, we do the first, and fashion a golden calf to worship.

This has the comfortable result of keeping the responsibility for what we do on someone – or some thing – else’s shoulders. It also has several unfortunate results. We fail to grow spiritually, for one thing. For another, it will not work for long. When food becomes really scarce we will turn on each other. Fear will paralyze our ability to think of creative solutions. Chaos will follow in short order.

Supposing we tried the other, instead; we turned within. This is not a turn to our own ingenuity, our own problem-solving skills. It is not a turn to ourselves at all. It is a turn to that place within us where we are aware of the presence of God. This is simple, but far from easy; because while we can turn within, once we are there we have to wait for God to manifest God’s presence. We’ve noticed this. Sometimes our prayers carry us aloft into the light and joy of God’s presence without effort; and at other times, no matter how we try, our prayers seem heavy, dark, and lifeless. So turning within calls for patience, trust, humility and then more patience. But given such patience, a sense of God’s presence will come to us, a pervasive peace that lets us know we are safe and secure, a peace that erases anxiety about what we shall eat and drink and wear. Under the shelter of that peace our minds can spring into creative action, and solve problems in countless ways that build up the community.

This question of which way to turn, inward or outward, can become very subtle. On a large scale I can let my parents or friends or some other outside authority tell me what do do about a career, or about ending a relationship, or about coping with a serious loss. But on a smaller scale, sometimes that outside authority can be alcohol, or gambling, or television or the internet telling me what to do, how to spend my time, even moment by moment. The orientation we take, inward or outward, affects us at all levels of life. It points us toward whether we merely exist, or become fully alive.

Jesus faced the same quandary as Moses. How do I get my followers to turn within to find their authority? He found his final answer at the Last Supper. “This is my body,” he said, and handed around the bread. “This is my blood,” he said, and handed around the cup of wine. He knew that, as their outside authority, he would soon be taken away from them; but that would be all to the good if they could learn to look for him within. Like all great teachers, he knew the best lessons are driven home and made memorable with a bodily experience. This is the powerful, pivotal life-giving lesson of the Eucharist.

Learning this lesson takes time and practice. It takes patience. To receive communion is not enough, no matter how often we receive. Communion helps to make actual a hidden, living reality, but we have to touch the pulse of that reality. We have to seek out a place of silence and stillness where we can sense that pulse and let it beat within us. We have to strive to open ourselves to it. As we do, we realize that in Christ there is no inside and outside; we realize that in Christ all are one.

So why can we not serve two masters? Because when Jesus said masters he meant authorities. One of those authorities lies within and the other without. Until God gives us two faces, we are forced to choose which way to turn. This has always been the way. In Moses’s farewell address to the people of Israel, shortly before he died, he said to them, “… I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.” Jesus would have said AMEN.

With political boils breaking around the Middle East, Israel looks vulnerable indeed. Israel receives a lot of ill-will, as do Jews elsewhere, most of it unwarranted and all of it disproportionate. Christians have fueled that animosity for 2,000 years. Today’s Gospel invites us to look at the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, and gives us a chance to set straight a colossal misunderstanding that has fed anti-Semitism for far too long.

Let me approach the topic with a story. Once upon a time on a stern and rock-bound coast, some villagers built a rescue station on a promontory overlooking the sea. So when a storm hit, they could be on the spot, watching for boats in distress and being ready to row out to save sailors from drowning. As years went by members of the rescue station began to furnish it a bit. They went on to decorate it. In time it became a cozy home away from home, but as it did, the members spent less and less time scanning the sea, and their rescue boats fell into disrepair. Eventually it became a club for the benefit of its members.

This describes a common human pattern. I’m told that in recent decades many Buddhist priests in Japan have run their temples just to collect the “stole fees,” nothing about saving spiritual lives. I only mention Buddhism, because it is sometimes easier to see a problem in someone else’s life than in one’s own. But think about the Church of England in its history. It became so encrusted with barnacles of ritual that too often it lost its will to put to sea and save lives. Even today in individual parishes, comfort and custom can sink mission. In short, form can edge out function whenever a religious body loses touch with its reason for being.

Jesus faced just such a situation with the Judaism of his day. Yet somehow, through the grace of God, he was able to see his religious tradition with fresh eyes. This, too, is a common pattern. Thinking again of the Church of England, look at George Fox and the Quakers or the Wesleys and Methodism. Some mysterious force lifted them above the religion they were immersed in, and allowed them to take a critical look at it. Critical, mind you! Not rejecting! So too with Jesus. Remember, Jesus grew up in the Jewish faith; it formed him through and through. Transformation came to him, but it came on top of a formation that Judaism had put in place. In fact, many scholars argue that Jesus never intended to start a new religion; he saw himself as a barnacle scraper, as it were.

With this in mind, try re-reading the Gospels. Jesus chastises the scribes and the Pharisees time and again. He is fierce, but out of what we might call today tough love. They stand for the hierarchy, for some of the leaders who grew rich from their official positions, who cared more for their own elevated status than for the spiritual hunger of the people, who perpetuated an unresponsive system. Jesus could see that they were in as much need of spiritual salvage as any of the people, but privilege blinded them to their need.

As the decades and centuries went by, Christians read Jesus’ words as if he held himself apart from the Jews, as if he rejected them, as if his followers superseded them. Readers did not stop to consider that Judaism had been good enough for Jesus; he attained all he did spiritually out of the rich resources of that religion. So they thought they were taking Jesus’ example and they scorned the Jewish people.

That is not the sole source of anti-Semitism, of course. The fledgling Church also resented those Jews who elected to stay faithful to Moses. So when mainstream Judaism and the Jesus wing of Judaism divorced, Jesus’ followers developed a lot of animosity. Put that together with Jesus’ own words, wrongly interpreted, and you have a toxic mix; and that toxic mix found its way into the anti-Jewish invective of the New Testament.

What is the real issue, then, between Jesus and the Jewish establishment? Jesus said in today’s episode, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” That one word, fulfill, holds the key to understanding the real issue. Jesus uses the word fulfill a lot. For example, he said, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be fulfilled.” Picture building a sail boat. You have it all right and tight, strong keel, sturdy rudder, but it still needs a sail. The law and the prophets are that beautiful sea-worthy boat. The joy is the sail.

Jesus is saying to the people, do not stop with the law and the prophets. They are essential, but go for the sail, open up to the wind, fly free. Unfortunately, not all of those who heard him had the spiritual maturity to understand him. Free, as Jesus spoke the word, did not mean license, did not mean do as you please, did not mean forget the discipline of the law and the prophets. So for those who did not get it, Jesus had to emphasize, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.” In fact, we cannot be free without them.

When we read this passage, and others like it, as a case of “us versus them,” fulfilled Christians versus needy Jews, we rob ourselves of the very fulfillment Jesus had in mind. To understand what he meant by fulfillment we have to understand that religion is a two-part process, formation and transformation. Transformation is hard to talk about, because it can only be experienced. Formation can be taught; transformation can only be caught.

What if we read this passage, not as Christians vs. Jews, but as “us versus us” – as in looking at ourselves in the mirror? What if we asked ourselves about our own boat and sail? Is our boat sound? Have we found our sail? In short, are we living free, at play among winds of joy? Unless the response is a resounding “Yes!” this passage is about you and me.

The challenge for any religion does not come from building the boat. I want to stick with that trope of the boat and sail, because it helps to express what is really beyond words. The boat stands for all that religion can teach us – values, ethical behavior, practices, attitudes. These can be imparted almost the way math is imparted. It’s called formation. Formation can reach very sophisticated heights of theological insight. But, if that is as far as our religion takes us, then to quote Thoreau, we may be leading “lives of quiet desperation.” We need the sail. We need transformation.

How do we find it? Now words fail us. We can only say how not to find it. We cannot work for it. We cannot earn it. We cannot deserve it. Nothing will bring it to us. Actually, that is the truth: nothing will bring it to us. I am speaking of a kind of prayer, a self-emptying form of prayer, the kind of prayer Jesus prayed when he went out alone on the mountain to sit in silence with God. In the years leading up to his transformation Jesus must have spent countless hours like that. Just sitting in silence – inner as well as outer silence – with his heart open and longing to be filled with the Spirit of God. Just waiting, but even the waiting carried its own joy.

Think of the purity of that prayer. It is not about “me” at all. It is all about God. All about, as Jesus said, losing my life to save it. All about a willingness to let the self-caring “me” be replaced by the self-spending “me.” For the whole meaning of freedom is to be able to spend myself in service to the world.

Every religion that has stood the test of time has its own means of pointing its people toward transformation, what I am calling the sail. Christianity has no monopoly on it, and Judaism has no lack of it. Without it good works can become routine and sterile; because the sail connects the energy of the Holy Spirit to the real needs of the present moment. Making space for that connection is what religions exist to do… not by one religion “fulfilling” another, but by each religion developing its own means of fulfillment.

Now for the commercial. St. Gregory’s has a Centering Prayer Group that meets on Saturday mornings at 9:00 for the purpose of doing exactly nothing – just basking in the oceanic presence of God. Perhaps we should call ourselves “The Sailmakers.” Everyone is welcome.