So they came to Jerusalem. Then Jesus went into the temple and began to drive out those who bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. (Mark 11:15)
Lord Jesus, come and clear the temple of your church in our day – cleanse my heart of al that should not be there.
And he would not allow anyone to carry wares through the temple. (Mark 11:16)
Holy Spirit, help us all recognize that we are on holy ground when we come into your temple.
Then he taught, saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’” (Mark 11:17)
Father, restore a life of prayer to your people; help us daily join with Jesus as he intercedes for us and for the world. Thank you.
The hand of the Lord came upon me and brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley; and it was full of bones. Then He caused me to pass by them all around, and behold, there were very many in the open valley; and indeed they were very dry. And He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” So I answered, “O Lord GOD, You know.” (Ezekiel 37:1-3)
Lord, send own your Spirit to bring to new life the dead and dry bones in your Church. If you say it, the dry bones can be covered with flesh and live. Come Lord Jesus.
A word received: Keep coming to me — I AM your strength.
Monday: 106:1-18 * 106:19-48; 2 Samuel 17:24-18:8 Acts 22:30-23:11 Mark 11:12-26
Tuesday: [120], 121, 122, 123 * 124, 125, 126, [127]; 2 Samuel 18:9-18 Acts 23:12-24 Mark 11:27-12:12
Notes from the Front Line
Tennessee Ernie Ford and Odetta – What A Friend We Have In Jesus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaTTm2F57pc
Albany Intercessor
Saturday, August 13, 2011
http://pastorbobcornwall.blogspot.com/
What is the Lord’s Table’s Role in Worship?
For me the Table of the Lord is the central act of worship. Regular attendance at the Eucharist serves to remind us all that Jesus is truly present with us as we take this journey of faith. Bread and wine stand forth as witnesses that the Logos of God became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn 1:14). “I am the bread of life” Jesus tells the crowd in John 6. In him we find the answer to our spiritual hunger and thirst. Come and eat, Jesus says to us, eat of the bread of heaven.
For Jesus table fellowship offered a way of inclusion. The accusation was that he ate with sinners and tax collectors. In doing so he declared them clean, fit for relationship with God. Jesus does the same for us, by inviting us to the Table we, like the sinners of his day, are declared clean and welcome at his Table so that we might join in fellowship with him and with his people.
At the table we also celebrate the presence of the crucified and buried one who is raised by God from the dead. It is this risen Christ who cleanses us from sin and raises us to new life. When we come to the table we bring our biases, bigotry, racism, suspicions, our hatred, and hear the call to let go of them and embrace our neighbor. Jürgen Moltmann writes that “the Lord’s Supper takes place on the basis of an invitation which is open as the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross. Because he died for the reconciliation of `the world,’ the world is invited to reconciliation in the supper”.[1] The table of the Lord is a place of welcome, a place where distinction of race, gender, social class, age, sexual orientation, they are irrelevant. The Table is a place of unity and transformation, a place where Jesus Christ is encountered through the activity of the Spirit. In his vision of the heavenly realm, John the Elder heard the promise that those who are invited to the “marriage supper of the Lamb” are blessed (Rev. 19). In the Eucharist, we hear Jesus call us to salvation. Human evil threw itself at Jesus, seeking to destroy the one sent of God. The effort failed, to the benefit of all creation. The seed of Abraham, the descendant of Isaac, proves to be a blessing to all nations (Gen. 12:1-3).
The celebration at the table is an act of hope. Paul writes that “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (vs. 26). Even as the table looks back to the decisive events of the cross it also looks into the future and the completion of God’s act of reconciliation. Therefore, we may “rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lord has come, and his bride has made herself ready; to her has been granted to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure — for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints” (Rev. 17:7-8).
The Table looks forward to a wedding feast to which the world is invited. No matter our backgrounds or theological differences, the Table offers us the opportunity to experience a moment of God’s grace that is powerful enough to break down any barrier we put up. As Paul has said: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are made one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17). Therefore, whether we are black or white, young or old, male or female, rich or poor, Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox, we are one in Christ when we share in the bread and cup. Although barriers remain that keep us from enjoying full table fellowship, this vision of the Lamb’s wedding feast stands as a sign that the barriers will not prevail.
[1]Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, (Harper and Row, 1977), 246.
Posted by Pastor Bob Cornwall at 6:00 AM
“The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that
one is loved”.
–Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
When you look at the crucifix, you understand how much Jesus loved you then. When you look at the Sacred Host, you understand how much Jesus loves you now.
–Mother Teresa of Calcutta
A BODY OF BROKEN BONES
You and I and all men were made to find our identity in the One Mystical Christ, in Whom we all complete one another “unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ.”
When we all reach that perfection of love which is the contemplation of God in His glory, our inalienable personalities, while remaining eternally distinct, will nevertheless combine into One so that each one of us will find himself in all the others, and God will be the life and reality of all. Omnia in omnibus Deus.
God is a consuming Fire. He alone can refine us like gold, and separate us from the slag and dross of our selfish individualities to fuse us into this wholeness of perfect unity that will reflect His own Triune Life forever.
As long as we do not permit His love to consume us entirely and to unite us in Himself, the gold that is in us will be hidden by the rock and dirt which keep us separate from one another.
As long as we are not purified by the love of God and transformed into Him in the union of pure sanctity, we will remain apart from one another, opposed to one another, and union among us will be a precious and painful thing, full of labor and sorrow and without lasting cohesion.
In the whole world, throughout the whole of history, even among religious men and among saints, Christ suffers dismemberment.
His physical Body was crucified by Pilate and the Pharisees; His mystical Body is drawn and quartered from age to age by the devils in the agony of that disunion which is bred and vegetates in our souls, prone to selfishness and to sin.
All over the face of the earth the avarice and lust of men breed unceasing divisions among them, and the wounds that tear men from union with one another widen and open out into huge wars. Murder, massacres, revolution, hatred, the slaughter and torture of the bodies and souls of men, the destruction of cities by fire, the starvation of millions, the annihilation of populations and finally the cosmic inhumanity of atomic war: Christ is massacred in His members, torn limb from limb; God is murdered in men.
The history of the world, with the material destruction of cities and nations and people, expressed the interior division that tyrannizes the souls of all men, and even of the saints.
Even the innocent, even those in whom Christ lives by charity, even those who want with their whole heart to love one another, remain divided and separate. Although they are already one in Him, their union is hidden from them, because it still only possesses the secret substance of their souls.
But their minds and their judgments and their desires, their human characters and faculties, their appetites and their ideals are all imprisoned in the slag an inescapable egotism which pure love has not yet been able to refine.
As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is the resetting of a Body of broken bones. Even saints cannot live with saints on this earth without some anguish, without some pain at the differences that come between them.
There are two things which men can do about the pain of disunion with other men. They can love or they can hate.
Hatred recoils from the sacrifice and the sorrow that are the price of this resetting of bones. It refuses the pain of reunion.
There is in every weak, lost and isolated member of the human race an agony of hatred born of his own helplessness, his own isolation. Hatred is the sign and the expression of loneliness, of unworthiness, of insufficiency. And in so far as each one of us is lonely, is unworthy, each one hates himself. Some of us are aware of this self-hatred, and because of it we reproach ourselves and punish ourselves needlessly. Punishment cannot cure the feeling that we are unworthy. There is nothing we can do about it as long as we feel that we are isolated, insufficient, helpless, alone. Others, who are less conscious of their own self-hatred, realize it in a different form by projecting it on to others. There is a proud and self-confident hate, strong and cruel, which enjoys the pleasure of hating, for it is directed outward to the unworthiness of another. But this strong and happy hatred does not realize that like all hate, it destroys and consumes the self that hates, and not the object that is hated. Hate in any form is self-destructive, and even when it triumphs physically it triumphs in its own spiritual ruin.
Strong hate, the hate that takes joy in hating, is strong because it does not believe itself to be unworthy and alone. It feels the support of a justifying God, of an idol of war, an avenging and destroying spirit. From such blood-drinking gods the human race was once liberated, with great toil and terrible sorrow, by the death of a God who delivered Himself to the Cross and suffered the pathological cruelty of His own creatures out of pity for them. In conquering death He opened their eyes to the reality of a love which asks no questions about worthiness, a love which overcomes hatred and destroys death. But men have now come to reject this divine revelation of pardon, and they are consequently returning to the old war gods, the gods that insatiably drink blood and eat the flesh of men. It is easier to serve the hate-gods because they thrive on the worship of collective fanaticism. To serve the hate-gods, one has only to be blinded by collective passion. To serve the God of Love one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to love in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one’s neighbor.
It is the rankling, tormenting sense of unworthiness that lies at the root of all hate. The man who is able to hate strongly and with a quiet conscience is one who is complacently blind to all unworthiness in himself and serenely capable of seeing all his own wrongs in someone else. But the man who is aware of his own unworthiness and the unworthiness of his brother is tempted with a subtler and more tormenting kind of hate: the general, searing, nauseating hate of everything and everyone, because everything is tainted with unworthiness, everything is unclean, everything is foul with sin. What this weak hate really is, is weak love. He who cannot love feels unworthy, and at the same time feels that somehow no one is worthy. Perhaps he cannot feel love because he thinks he is unworthy of love, and because of that he also thinks no one else is worthy.
The beginning of the fight against hatred, the basic Christian answer to hatred, is not the commandment to love, but what must necessarily come before in order to make the commandment bearable and comprehensible. It is a prior commandment, to believe. The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved. The faith that one is loved by God. That faith that one is loved by God although unworthy—or, rather, irrespective of one’s worth!
In the true Christian vision of God’s love, the idea of worthiness loses its significance. Revelation of the mercy of God makes the whole problem of worthiness something almost laughable: the discovery that worthiness is of no special consequence (since no one could ever, by himself, be strictly worthy to be loved with such a love) is a true liberation of the spirit. And until this discovery is made, until this liberation has been brought about by the divine mercy, man is imprisoned in hate.
Humanistic love will not serve. As long as we believe that we hate no one, that we are merciful, that we are kind by our very nature, we deceive ourselves; our hatred is merely smoldering under the gray ashes of complacent optimism. We are apparently at peace with everyone because we think we are worthy. That is to say we have lost the capacity to face the question of unworthiness at all. But when we are delivered by the mercy of God the question no longer has a meaning.
Hatred tries to cure disunion by annihilating those who are not united with us. It seeks peace by the elimination of everybody else but ourselves.
But love, by its acceptance of the pain of reunion, begins to heal all wounds.
If you want to know what is meant by “God’s will” in man’s life, this is one way to get a good idea of it. “God’s will” is certainly found in anything that is required of us in order that we may be united with one another in love. You can call this, if you like, the basic tenet of the Natural Law, which is that we should treat others as we would like them to treat us, that we should not do to another what we would not want another to do to us. In other words, the natural law is simply that we should recognize in every other human being the same nature, the same needs, the same rights, the same destiny as in ourselves. The plainest summary of all the natural law is: to treat other men as if they were men. Not to act as if I alone were a man, and every other human were an animal or a piece of furniture.
Everything that is demanded of me, in order that I may treat every other man effectively as a human being, “is willed for me by God under the natural law.” Whether or not I find the formula satisfactory, it is obvious that I cannot live a truly human life if I consistently disobey this fundamental principle.
But I cannot treat other men as men unless I have compassion for them. I must have at least enough compassion to realize that when they suffer they feel somewhat as I do when I suffer. And if for some reason I do not spontaneously feel this kind of sympathy for others, then it is God’s will that I do what I can to learn how. I must learn to share with others their joys, their sufferings, their ideas, their needs, their desires. I must learn to do this not only in the cases of those who are of the same class, the same profession, the same race, the same nation as myself, but when men who suffer belong to other groups, even to groups that are regarded as hostile. If I do this, I obey God. If I refuse to do it, I disobey Him. It is not therefore a matter left open to subjective caprice.
Since this is God’s will for every man, and since contemplation is a gift not granted to anyone who does not consent to God’s will, contemplation is out of the question for anyone who does not try to cultivate compassion for other men.
For Christianity is not merely a doctrine or a system of beliefs, it is Christ living in us and uniting men to one another in His own Life and unity. “I in them, and Thou, Father, in Me, that they may be made perfect in One….And the glory which Thou has given me I have given them, that they may be One as we also are One.” In hoc cognoscent omnes quia mei estis discipuli, si dilectionem habueritis ad invicem. “In this shall all men know that you are my disciples—if you have love one for another.”
“He that loveth not abideth in death.”
If you regard contemplation principally as a means to escape from the miseries of human life, as a withdrawal from the anguish and the suffering of this struggle for reunion with other men in the charity of Christ, you do not know what contemplation is and you will never find God in your contemplation. For it is precisely in the recovery of our union with our brothers in Christ that we discover God and know Him, for then His life begins to penetrate our souls and His love possesses our faculties and we are able to find out Who He is from the experience of His mercy, liberating us from the prison of self-concern.
There is only one true flight from the world; it is not an escape from conflict, anguish and suffering, but the flight from disunity and separation, to unity and peace in the love of other men.
What is the “world” that Christ would not pray for, and of which He said that His disciples were in it but not of it? The world is the unquiet city of those who live for themselves and are therefore divided against one another in a struggle that cannot end, for it will go on eternally in hell. It is the city of those who are fighting for possession of limited things and for the monopoly of goods and pleasures that cannot be shared by all.
But if you try to escape from this world merely by leaving the city and hiding yourself in solitude, you will only take the city with you into solitude; and yet you can be entirely out of the world while remaining in the midst of it, if you let God set you free from your own selfishness and if you live for love alone.
For the flight from the world is nothing else but the flight from self-concern. And the man who locks himself up in private with his own selfishness has put himself into a position where the evil within him will either possess him like a devil or drive him out of his head.
That is why it is dangerous to go into solitude merely because you like to be alone.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 70-79.