Pentecost 12

Pentecost 12 (Matthew 18:15-20)
Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.

A solitary soul is a soul in disintegration.

Moses was very clear when he declared God’s word: it is not good for man to be alone. The Biblical teaching of creation is the teaching that God created human beings as a community. We are each unique in our personality and gifts. And, we are part of a greater whole.

The Anglican poet priest John Donne said it best: no man is an island.
Jesus tells us he is present to us most fully and completely in community. Those who are baptized into Christ are one with The Father, through the Son, in the Divine Presence of the Holy Spirit. Through our baptism we are reunified with God. We discover the astonishing reality that the One God is a community of three persons.
To be in Christ is to be in a new relationship with God, other people and the truth of our own soul.

Our Heavenly Father designed the fullness of humanity to be the forever companion of the co-eternal Beloved Son. The Father designed each of us individually and all of us as a unified species according to the pattern, plan and purpose of the Beloved.
The pattern is love. The love is what defines God and expresses the oneness of God in three persons: the One who loves (the Father), the Beloved (the son) and the very power and presence of love (the Holy Spirit). The pattern of human life as designed by God is to be in an active, dynamic, spontaneous, creative and never ending community of love.

The plan is love. God the Father created humanity by the power of God the Holy Spirit to share the Love of God the Son. Through the Son God pours his love into us. Through the Son we pour forth our love to God, other people and to ourselves.
The purpose is love. God the Father designed humanity to be dependent on Him and interdependent with each other. It is in God and God alone that we live and move and have our being. The highest form of our original purpose is worship. Through worship we make a real choice to immerse the totality of our being, our mind, heart and will, in the eternal love of the Triune God.

We have life only through God. God just doesn’t have life. God is life. God is eternal life. We live because God created us. We die because we as a species made an original choice to separate from God. We live again as we reunite with God according to the original blessing of God. That original blessing is the Beloved, Jesus Christ.
The original blessing becomes real to us and present to us in the three loves that define our essence and can form our existence. Those three loves are love of God through worship, love of other people through service, and love of self through personal transformation.

Our Heavenly Father has sent the Holy Spirit into the world to call all people to receive the gift of the original blessing in the co-eternal Beloved, Jesus Christ. The call of God is the call to worship, the highest form of love. The call to worship is the call to reunify with the Father through the Son. The call to worship is the call to transform our mind, our heart and our will in the living presence of God the Holy Spirit.

The call to transformation is the call to service. It is the call to ask the question of other people: how may I help? It is the call to humility in the way we relate to each other. It is the call to practice compassion.

Our Heavenly Father’s Plan of Salvation is to restore a lost, broken and disintegrating humanity to wholeness, health, happiness and holiness.
There can be no rugged individual in the new life of Christ. There can be no solitary spiritual pioneer in the new way of living in the Holy Spirit. There can be no exclusive right to rule or dominate.

God created our species to be a unified interdependent whole. Jesus reminds of this truth when he teaches that if one of us suffers we all suffer. The apostle Paul reveals to us that we collectively, not individually, are the Body of Christ. The Beloved apostle John reveals to us that we collectively are the Bride of Christ.
We enter into the waters of baptism lost in separation. We rise to the new life of Christ as a unique individual member of the Body of Christ. We come to the altar of sacrifice only in community. As a priest I cannot celebrate the holy sacrifice of the Mass alone. At least one other person must be present.

We learn to become who God created us to be at the altar, in the family and in our service to other people. We diminish our selves as we choose separation and isolation. We become less human as we live from the place of self will. We acquire free will only as we pray the prayer Jesus taught us: heavenly Father, your will be done.

The new life is a gift of God in Jesus Christ. The new way of living this new life can produce is a choice we make in the Divine Presence of the Holy Spirit. This new way of living is the Way of Jesus Christ, the way of surrender in love, through love and for love.

Jesus never asks us to submit to the power of God. Jesus asks us and shows us how to surrender to the love of God.

The Plan of Salvation is not for us to grovel in fear before Divine Majesty. The Plan of salvation is for us to feel the loving embrace of the co-eternal Beloved. The result is for us to share what God has given us in Christ and what God daily offers us through Christ.

God gives us his unmerited favor. And so, God asks us to give that same unmerited favor to others. We do not deserve God’s favor. And others do not deserve our favor. In Christ, God pours his favor, his grace, into the souls of all seven billion human beings on this plant. It is our choice to receive the grace. And, it is our choice to be an open channel of grace. It starts when we make a monumental decision to give other people the benefit of the doubt and to offer them what God is pouring into our hearts. Grace.

The Bible is very clear. God created the heavens and the earth. God created all life including our species according to one divine principle and pattern. God has a plan for our species and a unique purpose for each of us.

The principle, the pattern, the plan and the purpose are all revealed to us and for us in Jesus Christ. In this teaching Jesus reminds us of who God created us to be. We are most human and most alive within a community of unconditional love. We cannot experience the reality of that love apart from its source. We cannot fulfill the purpose of that love in isolation.

In Christ we have been reunified with the Triune God. In Christ we are being reunified with the fullness of the human species. Christ has already accomplished these things for us. Our choice is to be who God the Father has created us to be as we become whom God the Son has given us to be.

No man is an island. We are only human as we participate in the human community. We are most fully human as we participate in the human community with the very source of our being: Jesus Christ. The unfailing promise of Jesus Christ is: where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.