"Consider the Lilies"

Our recent gathering on the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist included a brief meditation on Manna. We came to understand the decisive role of Manna in marking the life and character of the Forerunner as being "of God," "God's own," "a man after God's heart" — fed with the finest wheat and honey and obedient to God's word (Ps 81:16).

The same principle holds true for that prime instance of a people marked as being "God's own," the people Israel, called away from great civilization into the Sinai Wilderness. Their isolation from all means of living, even from the essentials of life itself — air, water, food — become the most important aspect of their character and their identity. Truly, they are marked by this.

Their air and atmosphere is the Holy Spirit:

"..... so as to go by day and night." This is their coming and their going, this is their day and their night: the Word of God breathed out upon them as a cloud, burning ever bright as a diamond of Uncreated Light in the night, revealing its inner essence of holy fire.

Their water is only that which proceeds from God's hand. Consider the walls of water standing in restless and sublime fury on their left and on their right as they trod through the impassable paths of the Red Sea, through places forbidden to man's foot to fall. They are set apart for God through this awe-inspiring initiation. That is, they all in this sense become Nazirites. As we considered last Wednesday — reflecting on a man who was set apart in a wilderness dedicating every aspect of his life to God — they too have been set apart perhaps have no people has ever been set apart.

As for water to drink ....

Water alone proceeds from God's command. So as God commands, Moses stood before the elders of Israel saying,

They see water nowhere. Everything is stone. And you cannot squeeze water from a stone. Yet, with God there is water .... even living water.

Lastly, we remember their food. Like water there was none, only what God will provide. And He provides it in a way intended to teach this lesson. For Manna, the Bread of Heaven, proceeding from Divine goodness, cannot not be stored. Like the appearance of an angel, it is splendid and surely right there before you, and then it is gone. Like Heaven itself, it is of the moment, an instance of Heaven's now. It can only be eaten at God's table. In this sense, Manna is a form of communion with God. Naturally, attempts by the people Israel to horde it result in the loss of its angelic quality, for then it soon gives off a foul stench as all life divorced from God soon becomes lifeless and foul. The very act of storing it signifies self-sufficiency and meals eaten alone, no longer in communion. This sort of life has abandoned the now of Heaven.

Godly life is rooted in Abraham's deepest and most dramatic lesson at God's knee — a master course on the subject of relationship with God:

Jehovah jireh. YHWH provides. He provides. He is called Providence. Isaac will not be sacrificed upon an Altar. The Lord provides all that is needed. God calls Abram. As with the people Israel much later, He calls Abram, away from a great civilization, Babylon, into the wilderness and then wilderness after wilderness, to be set apart. Abram responds. He answers God's call. And God provides.

Today, we humans follow the "rule of threes": we cannot live more than three minutes without air, cannot live more than three days without water, cannot live more than three weeks without food. In our self-sufficiency, we very well may cast our bold vision in any direction, even to outer space in privately-funded rocket ships. But our pride is cut to the quick in facing these three hard limits: three minutes, three days, three weeks — a short tether to be sure. A sober appraisal of our situation must recognize, however, haughty or proud we might be, that these proceed from the palm of God's hand. He has placed them there to subdue us.

Alone with His people in a different wilderness, the Son of God meditates on this same ideal of relationship with God, which is complete dependence:

Consider the lilies to be a kind of Manna descending from Heaven: beautiful to behold, fragrant, impossibly soft in our hands. Its perfection is now, not later. The birds eat whatever is suddenly there, set before them, but it cannot be horded and stored into barns.

God surrounds us with these same fleeting beauties nourishing the soul, which cannot be stored in barns: the bloom of the lily in your hand; in springtime, the moment of a cherry tree's fullness of snow white blossoms; at sunset, the soaring canyons of white and gray clouds backlit with magentas, purples, and reds; in the quiet of dusk, a field alit with fireflies — all little glimpses of Heaven's now. And they all proceed from God's hand. We cannot imitate or reproduce or provide them ourselves. Only He can.

Do we not at moments wish we could step into these perfections filling our gentler senses and finding balm for our souls? We experience them in their fullness and undoubted reality but, then, they are gone.

In the world we call nature, we find we are caught, really, between two worlds. There is this undoubted beauty viewed through a heavenly focus. For a moment, we glimpse harmony among all creatures in nature. How many painters have tried to capture it, so we can frame it and place it at the center of our lives and have it always?

Then there is the other focus: a cruel and merciless food chain. Both views are true. Both are always present. Both are undeniable. "Which one is the true picture?" we ask, for their contrasts are so extreme. They cannot possibly be one and the same! This mystery we ponder is no passing fancy. It is real .... as real as our intimations of the Divine at dawn. Then .... night falls, and we must lie down on hard ground with rocks and stones and endure biting insects who would pull us down into their food chain if only they could.

In finding our way to this high mountain pass, where we view a kind of Divine life on one side yet view a slaughterhouse of relentless mortality on the other, we have ventured into our own Sinai Wilderness. And we see that God's "Land of Promise" .... is exactly what it says it is: promise. The Divine we glimpse around us promises — it points away from here, away from pantries and larders and barns, promising an ever-present now of lasting beauty and goodness, and, yes, harmony.

The people Israel in the Sinai Wilderness and the people fanned out around the Son of God on the Mount of Beatitudes and we ourselves are inescapably in relationship with God, .... even if presently alienated. And that relationship must always be complete dependence. Whether we will own it or not, our lives are tethered to the source of life, attached in a short radius which begins to tug at a limit of three minutes and from which we cannot stray beyond a boundary of three weeks. Within this arc of threes is our relationship with God: trust. It is our wilderness as we seek the Land of Promise. All else is rebellion, and beyond the arc: death.

Jesus says to the people in the Second Wilderness, "O ye of little faith!" And this is the heart of the lesson, the reason He begins His meditation: faith. This is what God requires above all. Relationship with Him always means complete faithfulness: all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind, all of the strength of our body. His message from Eden to the Sinai Wilderness and then on to the Mount of the Beatitudes rings in our souls today: "Trust in Me." This is always His message.

You know, the Ancient Father, Irenaeus, said that the failure in Eden was not so much obedience; that was the proximate cause. It was a lack of faith: "trust in Me. All these things that you want, all the intimations of your heart, all that you desire will come into your hands. Be patient. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God .... and all these things will be added unto you."

St. Irenaeus pointed out that man and woman were created as children, not as adults. (Shouldn't that be our natural expectation?) And in their immaturity, they grabbed for that which was beyond the limit. "Trust in Me," the Lord says. It will all come to you."

Let us bound this meditation with an Alpha and an Omega, a Beginning and an Ending. We have considered that we live in two worlds simultaneously: one a place of evanescent beauty and the other an inescapable food chain. Mysteriously, they are one and the same. One is bound up in the promises of God granting us intimations of Heaven. The other is earthbound, where the lily blossom quickly fades, rotting into compost. It is this two-focused view that we must always have of our world. Like the Roman god Janus, we are fated to view the world through two faces. Let us call one view life and the other death. One face looks expectantly out toward God's "Land of Promise." The other stares blankly from the bottom of a grave.

May I say that this "Janus" is the pivotal point of our own lives? It controls the most important fact of our lives and will determine whether or not we will have faith and therefore life. To illustrate this point, let us ask an additional question.

How can it be that we call the most joyful day of our lives, the day when we step into the Promised Land, we call the worst and most-dreaded day of our lives? How can this be? Indeed, we refuse to dignify this day with the phrase, "day of our lives." No. We call it, "the day of our death." On this most holy, most happy day, when we ought declare our highest praises to God and offer our most ardent prayers of thanksgiving, .... on this day many people shake their fists at Heaven, declaring an everlasting enmity against God.

Have you not met the woman who curses God even as her departed daughter is lifted by flights of angels into Heaven's empyreal Kingdom? Have you not known the man who drinks too much spitting dark oaths against God in lonely rooms even as his departed wife has been brought safely into lasting happiness. Here is the world of Janus: two views. Which of them will have the upper hand in our lives? Which will become ruler of our souls? It all depends upon which we will worship. and which we will trust.

We have mentioned an ancient theological principle: the fallen angels, choosing the House of Death over the Lord of Life, have no material reality of their own. Their only means of material expression is to pervert what God has done. For He has made everything that was made (Jn 1:3), and He saw that it was good (Gen 1:3-31).

Is this not what Jesus means when He begins the meditation with the image of the lamp? The eye is the lamp and light to our body. But if our view be not sound, our light will become darkness. And if darkness, how great the darkness!

I wonder if we will admit our part in this unholy alliance of fallen angels. I wonder if we can see that by declaring life's end to be a tragedy, the greatest tragedy, we have turned God's good world upside-down. We have reversed what is most holy making it unholy. We have defaced life by insisting on the hideous face of death. And we have unfounded an entire lifeworld, which God has taken such pains to set before us in its goodness and its beauty. When you consider the alleged crimes people have heaped upon God's head, saying, "How could God have let this happen?" you will quickly see that most have to do with this last day on Earth. But what else might we expect when we have reversed the order of things, when we have turned God's good world upside-down? What had been intelligible now becomes menacing.

I can tell you that death has no dark significance here at the Hermitage. When we hear of loved ones who have died, we rejoice. And week does not go by that we do not mention that last day, which we look forward to, when our labors here are complete.

Which world we see all depends upon our faith, not God's. He is the Faithful One. Enduring every kind of affront, neglect, and worse, He remains always faithful, dependable, our Provider.

This is the choice Jesus offers on the Mount of the Beatitudes. It is our moment of truth. Will we love His Holy Name? Will we reverence the goodness and beauty He has set around us? Will we trust Him and pray that we might be worthy of the Promises of Christ? Here is an indefectible rule of life: to love Him and in loving Him to follow His commands, walking in His Holy Ways .... all the way to Eternal Life.

"O ye of little faith," Jesus cries out. Will you not trust the only One Who Is Trustworthy? Will you not love the Only One Who Is Love?

Let us say, yet again, this morning and always, and again and again and again, "We do!" And, "We will!"

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.   Amen.