Advent leads us to Christmas. Christmas is essentially meaningful for us Christians for one reason: we meet God who comes in the person of Jesus. This coming of God can only mean something to us when we actually encounter that God in the most intimate and personal way. Suppose Billy Joel or a very famous celebrity came near us. Does it matter to us? Not really, unless there’s a personal encounter with us. In this sense, for Advent to have any spiritual impact on us, we want to make sure who we are longing to encounter. While we celebrate and give thanks to God for his coming to us in the person of Jesus, we also want to meet this God in our lives. During this Advent, our spiritual aim is then quite clear. We want to meet Jesus.
This spiritual aim or goal to meet him begs the question. In what sense do we anticipate to meet? Do we mean that we meet him in person like you and I meet or like the crucified and risen Christ showing his wounds to Thomas? Perhaps. But this actually doesn’t change us. Just because we meet someone, that encounter does not transform us. That relationship is superficial in that we do not really get to know that person. So, even if we meet Jesus in person, this doesn’t guarantee we will be transformed. Let’s not forget that all those eyewitnesses in the gospel stories who saw the risen Christ did not necessarily believe in him. Unless our heart is awake, nothing happens. If we are spiritually blind and lax, we wouldn’t sense anything and anyone around us. Let’s think about some relationships that have an actual impact on us. Friendships we treasure and cherish can be one. We have friends who we deeply care and love. One of the reasons why this friendship you have with your friend is so precious and meaningful is that you and your friends have walked together through joys and sorrows, all the ups and downs. That friend of yours has been there for you. You and your friends have spent time through all kinds of events in all your lives. You walk on the path together. Isaiah in the first lesson knows the importance of this journey of walking together. He says, “...that God may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths...let us walk in the light of the Lord.” This act of walking together isn’t different with God. Do we want to get to know God? We walk in God’s paths. Do we want to get to meet Jesus? We must walk in his paths. We are to walk the walk of Jesus. We follow his spiritual footsteps which led to the cross. Jesus’s walk, his way was led by the Holy Spirit according to the will of the Father. Recently, I had a chance to watch an independent movie, “Find me.” The storyline is quite simple. Joe and Amelia work together. They are actually more than colleagues to each other that they are sort of best buddies at work. After a painful divorce, Joe is isolated and lonely, having no social life and ordering the same food every evening after work, “Chicken combo, steamed veggies and fries.” One day, his friend Amelia is gone. Apparently, she’s embezzled thousands of dollars from the company and donated it all to charity! Joe waits and waits but months pass by. Finally, one day he receives a letter from her, which is an instruction with the note, “Find me.” He takes vacation days which he hasn’t taken for years and is in search for Amelia. He follows Amelia’s traces through the notes of instruction at each designation. In his search for his friend, he experiences the beauty of Zion National Park, Death Valley, Yosemite, and other sites which Amelia also loves. He gets to know her deeper and love what she loves. I won’t spoil the movie. The point of my sharing this movie story with you is it shows what it’s like to walk in the path of someone. Advent is the very first starting point of this journey to deepen our relationship with Jesus. It is the walk, not just to meet Jesus at the end but to see what he sees, to hear what he hears, and to experience what he experiences in his relationship with the Father on his journey led by the Holy Spirit. This walking in his path is not metaphorical or rhetorical. We’re invited to walk this walk. We are to get in his boat and put ourselves in his shoes. This is the only way to know him, meet him, and experience the Father he experienced. As you know me, I’m all about how we actually do this walk. How do we walk in Jesus’s path? Jesus and Paul give us the clue in today’s lessons. Jesus tells us, “Keep awake.” Paul commands us, “Now is the time to wake up from sleep.” A spiritual sense of waking up from sleep is like the overturning of our entire selves. It’s like getting up from bed every morning. We get up and shower, not just to make ourselves presentable to others but to fully wake up and begin a new day. This spiritual wake-up that both Jesus and Paul talk about opens up something completely different and life-changing in us. This may be experienced as a life-and-death experience in a spiritual sense. We discover something radically different in us when we are awakened by the Holy Spirit. What we used to believe to be ourselves and how we used to identify ourselves will totally change. They are gone. We might have believed we are our thoughts or we are our feelings. But this is no longer true. We are not our thoughts. We are not our feelings. We are not our senses. Instead, only the Holy Spirit in us defines our entire selves. Each of us carries something eternal which is not just a part but a whole. I believe this is what Jesus experienced first and journeyed to the cross. The Holy Spirit assures in us our true identity that does not change. This experience of the Holy Spirit is not merely about having the Holy Spirit breathed into us. A mid 20th century Japanese philosopher, Keiji Nishitani says quite powerfully, “...our very being becomes ‘God-breathed’ through the breath (spiration) of God.” (Religion and Nothingness, p. 28) I say this is powerful and thought-provoking that the Holy Spirit is not merely a part of who we are. But our entire being is ‘God-breathed’ that the Holy Spirit is that which creates and defines who we are. It is the whole. That’s why a French Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin can say, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” And we all know basic human experiences consist of thinking, feeling, and sensing, which is the function of the ego. When we truly experience the Holy Spirit who defines us and is our being, our ego is sort of born again as God’s children. (The sacrament of Baptism expresses this very transformation of our ego to God’s children ritually and publicly whereas the Eucharist visualizes and manifests that very divine nature that defines us in the body and blood of Jesus.) I hope I have made myself clear so far. Advent is the very beginning of our walk with and to Jesus. To walk in his path, we need to get up from bed and wake up. And to walk in his path is nothing but to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and put on the armor of light as Paul says. But then, I still haven’t answered the question of how to keep awake or how to wake up from sleep. Here’s what I want to share with you which might help you get in touch with the Holy Spirit who is your being. I would like us to close our eyes for a moment: "You are to wonder regarding the subject in you that hears all sounds. All sounds are heard at a given moment because there is certainly a subject in you that hears. Although you may hear the sounds with your ears, the holes in your ears are not the subject that hears. If they were, dead people would also hear sounds. . . . You must wonder or get curious deeply, again and again, asking yourself what the subject of hearing could be. . . . Only be curious more and more deeply . . . without intending to experience the Holy Spirit and without even intending not to intend to hold the Spirit; become like a child in your own breast. . . . But however you go on wondering, you will find it impossible to locate the subject that hears. You must explore still further just there, where there is nothing to be found. Continue to become curious deeply in a state of single-mindedness, . . . becoming completely like a dead man, unaware even of the presence of your own person. You will arrive at a state of being completely self-oblivious and empty. But even then you must bring up the Great Wonder, “What is the subject that hears?” and asks still further, all the time being like a dead man. And after that, when you are no longer aware of your being completely like a dead man, and are no more conscious of the procedure of the Great Wonder but become yourself, through and through, a great mass of wonder and curiosity, there will come a moment, all of a sudden, at which you emerge into a transcendence called the Great Enlightenment or the perpetual presence of the Holy Spirit, as if you had awoken from a great dream, or as if, having been completely dead, you had suddenly revived or resurrected." (Paraphrased from Religion and Nothingness, pp. 20-21) With this experience, we begin our journey to meet Jesus and love him deeper. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Last Sunday after Pentecost/Christ the King C(Jer 23:1-6; Cant 16; Col 1:11-20; Lk 23:33-43)11/25/2019 On this feast of Christ the King which we celebrate today, we see the king hung on the cross. This king is insulted and mocked. The religious leaders insult and scoff at him, “Save yourself if you’re the Messiah.” I sometimes imagine how I would respond to them if I were in Jesus’s shoes. I would just get myself off the cross, smack their heads, and say, “What now!?” or “How do you like them apples?” I would show them that I can very well save myself.
But this isn’t what Jesus does. He does something radically different from my imagined reaction of revenge. In this act of Jesus, who we see is the King of kings and the Lord of lords who does not belong to this world but to the Kingdom of God. So, when we say Jesus is the king, this is another word for the kingdom of God. Jesus himself is the embodied, enfleshed kingdom of God. He is the human form of God’s reign on earth. This is exactly what Saint Paul means when he says Jesus is “the image of the invisible God.” The invisible God is revealed in Jesus. The invisible God’s reign, the kingdom of God is seen and lived in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Then, we might wonder why the Church has decided to conclude the last Sunday of the year with this feast of Christ the King. I can make two reasons why this works. First, it is to prepare and remind ourselves of who we are waiting to see right before the first Sunday of Advent. The baby born in the manger is the same one who we celebrate as the king of God’s kingdom. The other reason I can think of is that this act of Jesus on the cross we see in today’s gospel lesson is something that we are to follow and live out as his followers and disciples. We ourselves as baptized are to embody the kingdom of God in our lives as in Jesus. To do so, I would like us to focus on one saying of Jesus this morning: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” Forgiveness in our Christian tradition can be mistaken as forgetting and nullifying whatever wrong thing one has committed. Jesus’s forgiveness has nothing to do with this kind of understanding. It always has two sides of mercy and justice. God’s mercy is always available that one is unconditionally embraced by God’s love. Which also involves one’s change of heart. On the other hand, God’s justice is always realized as a wrongdoer takes serious responsibility of consequences for his actions. With his repentant heart, he is empowered by the Holy Spirit to face and go through all the consequences to serve justice. In the case of Jesus in today’s gospel lesson, God’s forgiveness of those who crucify Jesus is that they honestly face what they have done wrong to the innocent while they themselves ask for God’s forgiveness and accept God’s unconditional love which transform them. With this clear understanding of forgiveness in our tradition, the prayer of Jesus, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” is something that we would like to memorize and utter in our hearts over and over again until it becomes our own words. (Which is also the reason why all of us here at Saint Agnes Church say the Words of Institution.) This prayer can be first applied to ourselves that we pray, “Father, forgive me; for I do not know what I am doing.” Ask for my own ignorance and then for others. Praying for others’ ignorance, however, is a harder task because we don’t like to forgive others first. Why would I ask for the forgiveness of others who hurt me when I don’t even forgive? This is an impossible task if we try to do this on our own according to our ego. As I repeatedly emphasize the power of the Holy Spirit who is abundantly and equally given to all of us, we are empowered to confess and pray the prayer of Jesus. Let’s unpack this saying of Jesus. Jesus asks God for the forgiveness of those who mock, insult, crucify, and kill him because they do not know what they are doing. This, however, seems quite odd. How come Jesus doesn’t say he forgives them first? Logically speaking, isn’t Jesus supposed to forgive them himself first and then to ask God’s forgiveness on behalf of them? So that the order is something like “Father, I forgive them. Please forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Jesus somehow doesn’t feel like he has to forgive them, even at the moment of his own death when they are the ones who are crucifying him and killing him. He could’ve also prayed, “Father, punish them for what they are doing.” We can list all the things that he could’ve and should’ve done but we’re more interested in what prompted him to say that prayer and how he was empowered to pray for those who are killing him. In the eyes of Jesus, there is no you and me. He has overcome what divides him and others. He does not distinguish himself from others but sees everyone and everything as a whole. He is not locked up in his own ego but is freed from it. He is beyond his ego, his body, his feelings and thoughts. He only exists as he is, watching everyone as they are and everything as it is. He prays for the best of everyone which is the will of God. In him, there’s no one to forgive. They do not know what they are doing. They are not living in the kingdom of God. As in our collect for today, they are divided and enslaved by sin. They are not yet freed and brought together under Jesus’s most gracious rule. In Jesus, on the other hand, everyone at the moment of his death is part of him so that he seeks justice and forgiveness for the benefit and well-being of those who are doing wrong. The eyes of Jesus are the eyes of God. We too often believe that we can’t be like Jesus. This nevertheless contradicts the meaning of the term “Christian.” A Christian is the one who follows Christ. A Christian does what Christ does. If we were to simply admire Jesus, then we shouldn’t use the term Christian but “Christian-wannabe.” This unfortunate situation may be happening because we have forgotten and have not experienced or paid attention to the Holy Spirit dwelling and empowering in us. The Holy Spirit, the Breath of God is what sustains us right now at this moment. The Holy Spirit in us enacts, empowers, and observes all our thoughts, feelings, senses, actions, words, and everything. Our Christian spiritual life is then all about being attentive to the inner presence and work of the Holy Spirit. How we exercise our spirituality is to be in this presence of the Holy Spirit by actively checking in with ourselves and uttering intentionally to ourselves, “I am. I exist. The Spirit in me. Jesus in me. Abba Father in me.” This spiritual awakening tells us who we are in Christ. We don’t know what we are doing when we do not know who we are. In Christ, we know who we are and that we are. Our breath is just oxygen we breathe in and out but the breath of God that flows from head to toe. This spiritual exercise is what Saint Paul means by “transferring us into the kingdom of his Beloved Son.” We are constantly transferred into the presence of Christ the king. From this innermost depth of our being where the Holy Spirit reveals through our feelings, thoughts, and senses, Jesus’s prayer can truly become our prayer, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” When this prayer becomes our own prayer in our everyday lives, we hear the voice of Jesus Christ, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me at Paradise.” in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The four blessings and the four woes Jesus talks about in today’s gospel lesson are about poverty, hunger, sorrow, and respect. It’s called the four Beatitudes in Luke which is often compared with the eight Beatitudes in Matthew. Using Saint Francis of Assisi’s way of looking at the kingdom of God as the world upside down, it isn’t too hard to make sense of where Jesus comes from with all these four blessings and four woes. If you’re hungry now, you will be filled in the kingdom of God. If you’re full now, you will be hungry in the kingdom of God. If you’re well respected now, you will be ashamed in the kingdom of God.
This explains why Jesus told the disciples to love their enemies. The world teaches us to hate them and retaliate against them because they have done something wrong to us. But Jesus teaches us to bless them and pray for them. The world teaches if someone strikes you on the cheek, we sue him. But Jesus teaches us to offer the other cheek. What about those who steal from us? The world tells us to punish them. But Jesus tells us to give everyone who begs from us. He finishes his teaching with the golden rule: Do to others as you would have them do to you. Everything here and now is flipped upside down in the kingdom of God. While this is the logic of the kingdom of God, knowing and understanding it doesn’t necessarily make us live according to that logic. Having knowledge of how to cook doesn’t mean I actually know how to do it and want to do it. Jesus is able to say with conviction and certainty that those who are hungry now will be filled in the kingdom of God because he not only knows the divine logic but also embodies it within himself. He means what he says. He becomes what he says. He is the Word of God. Jesus was poor and hungry. He wept and was hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed. The crucifixion was the very proof of his life of the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes in both Luke and Matthew represent Jesus’s very own life here on earth. A saint in our Christian tradition is the person who at least tries to live this life of the Beatitudes. As we celebrate both the feast of All Saints and the feast of All Souls, we remember all the saints who we don’t personally know but are famous as well as the local saints with whom we have personal relationships. One truth about them is that they were not perfect. Saint Paul was easily irritable. When he was annoyed by people who were following him, he asked God to make them blind. What about Saint Peter who is known for his hot temper? We are not so interested in imitating those very human traits. We remember them for two main reasons. One is to remind ourselves of the love of God which goes beyond life and death and unites us with the dead in Jesus Christ. The other is to follow all the saints’ footsteps which is always to imitate Jesus of Nazareth. In Christ, we are united with all the saints. To Christ, we run with them. With Christ, all the saints and we are determined to live the life of the Beatitudes. So what enables us to not only get the logic of the kingdom of God but also live it out? How do we willingly become poor, hungry, sorrowful, and hated by the world? And do we really want this life of the Beatitudes? No. Not without the Holy Spirit. We can dare to love our enemies, turn the other cheek, and live this life of the Beatitudes only when the Holy Spirit empowers us and fills our hearts, when the Holy Spirit completely fills our hearts and transforms the way we look at ourselves, others, and the world. Only then we can repeat the Beatitudes with conviction and certainty. The more the Holy Spirit fills us, the more we’re aware and attentive to the Holy Spirit alive in ourselves. The more we are shaped by the Holy Spirit in us, the less we are attached to our ego and the world and the poorer our ego becomes. The first beatitude seems to be the key to the rest of the beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” This is the belief that whatever the world provides can never satisfy the ones who are filled with the Holy Spirit. Everything in this world changes whereas the Holy Spirit remains the same, beyond the beginning and the end of all. This poverty that the Holy Spirit awakens us with is spiritual non-attachment to the ego and the world. Because nothing in the world can be satisfying, the ego feels deficit yet the self is filled with the Holy Spirit and is always content. This is why Saint Paul hears the voice of God, “My grace is sufficient for you.” With this dissatisfaction that the ego experiences and the Spirit places in the heart of a saint, with this spiritual non-attachment to the ego and the world, she is always hungry for justice. She’s satisfied and fulfilled only with the Holy Spirit who dwells in her. She weeps for those who suffer. She places herself in solidarity with those who speak, live, and fight for the forgotten, the oppressed, the poor, the sick, and the undocumented. She can dare to love her enemies because nothing evil can ever hurt or ruin her life. Her ego might sense all the hurts that her enemies have done, yet her true self that is filled with the Holy Spirit is always calm, open, embracing, forgiving, graceful and content. God is her refuge. She refuses to remain in the place of pain and bitterness. Instead, the Holy Spirit in her sets her free from that bondage of hurt and resentment and transforms her heart as well as her enemies in the name of love and justice. This is not just the way of a saint but essentially the way of the cross. Thus, Jesus prays on the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” Again, as we celebrate our communion with all saints and all souls, with their perpetual prayer for us the church, with the Holy Spirit dwelling in us and sustaining our lives, we are cultivating the life of the Beatitudes in this life that God has given us. It might still look like an impossible task. It is unrealizable only if you look at your ego that does whatever it desires and never seems to care so much about God’s will. But Saint Paul reminds us of our baptism in our second lesson, “You are marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit.” With the Holy Spirit who never ceases to be in our lives, we can be saints for the sake of this world. May the Holy Spirit awaken us, enlighten us, transform us to live the life of Jesus, our incarnate Beatitudes in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
January 2025
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