Romans 5:1-10 • Matthew 6:22-33
Glory to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today the Lord tells us, “The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!”
The “eye” that Christ is speaking of is the eye of the soul; there isn’t a very good word for it in English so in Greek we call it the nous.
That’s not your brain, that meat computer in your head that generates thoughts and images and memories. The nous is the part of you that is designed to perceive eternal realities. Your eyes and ears and sense of smell tell you when something changes in the material world around you, but your body doesn’t have any senses that can perceive angels, or departed saints, or Christ our God.
Not unless God himself acts to open up another sense, the nous, so that the eye of your soul can start to see what’s really going on.
In another couple months, in August, we’ll celebrate the Transfiguration of Christ. That’s when the Lord goes up Mount Tabor together with Peter, James and John. There he is revealed to them in the bright light of his glory, and his disciples are able to see the prophets Moses and Elijah speaking with the Lord. The eyes of their soul have been opened to see the reality that Jesus is not just a man from Galilee: He blazes with blinding light.
For just a moment, the apostles are seeing the Lord as he is: a human being, a son of Adam, united to the living God, the Creator of the universe, in a single person. And it’s so overwhelming that it knocks them down off their feet.
And what they’re also seeing is a look at our future. If we persevere until the end, that is what the Lord has predestined us for: To be united, here and now in our real experience, to the nature of God in Jesus Christ. I thank God you’ve all been called to worship him today – but God’s not done with you yet. “Beloved, now we are the sons and daughters of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that, when He appears, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is.”
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You know, when I was looking into Orthodoxy, that hymn we sing all the time to the Virgin Mary seemed a little over the top. “You are more honorable than the cherubim, and more glorious than the seraphim…”
Then I saw in Psalm 8, where King David sings, “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon, and the stars which thou has appointed. What is man, that thou dost take thought of him? Or the son of man that thou dost care for him? Thou hast made man a little lower than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honor to rule over thy creation, and under his feet thou has put all the sheep of the field, and all living things and what passes through the sea.”
And Saint Paul says, “If we have died with Christ, we shall also live with him; if we endure, we shall also reign with him. Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? Do you not know that we shall judge angels?” This is what the Lord planned in the beginning, before the creation of mankind, when the Father said to the Son in Genesis, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, and give man dominion over all the world.”
When we celebrate the glory that the Mother of God has gained through her obedience in Christ, we’re confessing that all of us human beings in Christ are called together to union with God in his glory. All the saints, radiant with divine glory, are here to call us all to enter into the joy of the living God.
That’s the vision that knocked the apostles off their feet when they saw Christ revealed, when for a moment Grace opened the eyes of their soul. And their whole soul was filled with light.
But if we are sons and daughters of glory and kings of the earth in Christ, surrounded by saints and angels… then it appears the eye of our soul is not working so well. All I see people and houses and cars and Wal-Mart.
“If your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If all the light in you is darkness, how great is that darkness.”
Somebody asked me this week: Can’t God just forgive sins? Then why did Christ come and die?
Of course, God can forgive sins just because you asked, and because it’s what he delights to do! And nobody can stop him.
And now what?
Forgiven from all accusations, we still need to be saved from our sins. Unconditional pardon from God is a totally free gift – however being forgiven does not change the fact that we bear in our bodies and souls the damage, compulsion, power, and presence of our sins. The Lord is not interested in a legal fiction that lets us into heaven, leaving us still full of our sins that trip and bind and distort and harm us.
The free and holy God wants to rescue and make us whole from this condition, recreate us from the inside till we are purified, illumined, and filled with his own righteousness and holiness, so we are prepared to rule and reign with him in the age to come.
So in the womb of the Virgin, Christ unites our human nature with his own God nature in himself. He takes our deadness, joins himself to it and makes it alive with his own life.
Now, our repentance and desire for healing can be turned into joyful obedience and transformation and renewal in the life and righteousness of God – if we are interested in repentance and renewal.
If not, then we can pass out of this life into eternity without any love of God’s righteousness, but as strangers to holiness and estranged from relationship with God, seeking to flee from the One who fills all creation.
“Where can I go from our Spirit? Where can I flee from before your face? If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down into hades, there you are. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
* * *
“But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.” What do I do if my eye is bad and I’m full of darkness?
In the days before GPS and Google Maps, you’d plan your cross-country road trip with paper maps. It was complicated! And sometimes you’d wonder, maybe you just can’t get there from here. You needed to talk to somebody who’d already been there, and have them tell you the route they took.
Spoiler alert: That’s why we keep telling you to read the lives of the saints, read their teaching. What the saints are telling you is, “If you want to get what I got, here’s what I did. Do it like this.”
Have I said before that Saint Paul’s second letter to the Church at Corinth is my favorite book of the Bible? I know I’ve said that about other books, but this time I mean it. This whole letter is a lesson in What Christ Did for Us and What He’s Going to Do In Us, if we’ll let him.
In 2 Corinthians, Paul talks about Moses. When Moses would come back from talking with the Lord, he’d be so full of God that his face was shining like the sun. Paul says,
“We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to prevent the Israelites from seeing the brightness fade away. But their minds were blinded. And even to this day when the law of Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away… And all of us, who with unveiled faces behold the Lord’s glory, we are being transformed into his image from glory to greater glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Holy Spirit.”
Here’s the lesson Paul has for us: When Moses met with the Lord, he was transfigured and filled with light. What Moses continuously looked at, held in his thoughts, and allowed to fill him, is what he was transformed into.
So Paul says, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove for yourselves what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”
“But be doers of the word, and not only hearers of the word, and so deceive yourselves. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror. He sees what he is, then goes away, and immediately forgets what he is. But the one who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it, they will be blessed in what they do.”
Here is why we keep telling you to read the Gospels. Come and listen to the services and the hymns; join in the prayers so you can add your Amen with understanding. Be filled with the vision of what you really are.
And remember that your mind, your brain, your memory, have been formed by your experience up to this day. Your mind will keep on producing thoughts, good and bad, and then some thoughts will be like grenades that are lobbed into your camp by enemies outside.
But thoughts are things you have, they are not you.
Your phone buzzes and you see you have a text. That text says, whatever, some message. You are not responsible for the texts your phone receives. You can trash a text and never care about it again.
You might be getting texts, thoughts that visit your mind and call your attention to memories, fantasies, outright lies. And before that thought ever has a chance to get stuck to you and make you think it… trash the text. Thoughts are things you have, they are not you. You’re the owner of the house, and you get to have house rules, and say this thought I recognize and I want it to stay a long time; that thought I am kicking out in the street right now. Not welcome here. When the devil’s at your door… don’t even answer.
Saint Isaac says “If a man does not argue with the thoughts that the enemy secretly plants in us, but by prayer to God cuts off conversation with them, this is a sign that he has attained wisdom, and that he has found a short path.”
That advice is a lot easier if you’ve been filling yourself with the word of God, shaping yourself into the image and likeness of Christ. Being transformed by the renewing of your mind.
I’m not going to give anybody a command to burn your TV or your music collection. But I am going to tell you that if you’re filling yourself up with peace and beauty and justice and mercy, through your actions and through what you put in you — then you’re building a foundation that the Lord can use to make you a saint in a short time.
In the Psalms, we read, “Who shall ascend into the mountain of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart.”
My prayer every day has been, Lord, grant me to offer you clean hands and a pure heart, make my life a sacrifice that pleases you.
And if my choice of music and media and the art in my home and yours are helping us, supporting us to become that, then thank God.
“Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are righteous, whatever things are pure, whatever things are beautiful, whatever things are of good report; if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy: Meditate on these things. The things which you learned and received and heard and saw in me, do them, and the God of peace will be with you.”
To the glory of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
