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St. Gabriel and All Angels

Sermon on the celebration of Low Sunday, the First Sunday after Easter

Today we continue to celebrate Easter as today is in the Octave of Easter. Actually, we will be celebrating the high festival of Easter for several more weeks.

We do this because the message of Easter is immense. The majesty and beauty, the fullness and omnipresence of God is so beyond words, and yet all words point to it. This takes time to assimilate in the fullness of its glory.

Christ’s teaching is threefold.

The first is:

• The creation, the universe, is;
• But in it’s Being it is a loving place;
• And the way to become one with all that lives is to find a way within one’s self to surrender, open and accept that all situations are an expression of that love;
• And then from within one’s self to express that love by embracing everything that comes into our lives.

The second is:

• Physical death is an illusion. Real life lies within each of us, in our innermost hearts, in the spirit.
• We each have the power to overcome physical death and live in that eternity, in the full sunshine of that spiritual life.
• And not just after we leave this physical body, but also while we still wear it, use it and live in it.
• This is the message of Easter.

The third is:

• In His humanity He shows us the way to walk this path of spirit;
• He shows us the way to be that perfect Divine Love;
• And He affirms through His life, death and resurrection that life is much, much more than just this physical body and its needs and desires.

In these ways, Christ turned on the Light of Life in an age of darkness and fear. And that Light still shines brightly to this day.

By walking the path with Christ, we can direct that Light, which is Universal Love without conditions, to each challenge that we face.

Sometimes we have to find love for our self. Sometimes we have to find love for another. Sometimes we simply have to accept what is.

That Love is present in its totality and in it’s immensity, in each atom, in each breath, in each silent gap between our thoughts. We simply have to turn our attention to it and it will grow and overflow in us.
Christ incarnated to teach humanity an essential truth: that the spirit is all that we really are; that giving, expressing and being love, and staying connected with our Divine Father is the sole guiding principle of life in a human body.

For Liberal Catholics, the Resurrection is a rich and immediate experience; for the full connection with God in consciousness is always possible in each moment.

Resurrect means to bring to attention once again, to awaken or manifest, and to remember That which we have always been and already are – the Divine Universal Consciousness – which we know as Love.
We know the Christ Consciousness as Love because we can appreciate it more clearly and concretely that way in our state of physical manifestation.

And that is the technique Christ gave us: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your mind, and with all your soul; and to love your neighbor as yourself.

Sermon the celebration of the Fifth Sunday after Easter

Today we celebrate the 5th Sunday after Easter.

As we can see from the readings (Acts of the Apostles 2:22 and Mark 16:9), Christ is giving the disciples their charge – go into the world and tell the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.

This pretty much marks the end of the Easter season and the beginning of a whole new phase in the life of the early church and in our liturgical calendar, as next week we celebrate the Ascension.

Despite their difficulty in accepting the truth and immensity of Christ’s love and His union with the Father, He is sending them out.

He clearly has good reasons for doing this:

• To spread the word of the new truth across the known world;
• And to help the disciples attain the fullness of their own faith.

Telling the story of Christ’s life, death, resurrection and perfect love makes the pathways of the spirit firm in them.

I think we have to remember that Christ’s teaching is all new to them. They have grown up believing on the God of their fathers, a distant, sometimes angry God and not often a loving God.

• Christ makes very clear that He and His Father are one, as are the disciples with Him. This in itself is not that easy to absorb - a man who is not different from God - and also not separate from each of the disciples.
• Christ’s obvious love for them and for even those who put him to death - again very immense ideas.
• Declarations of the universal (not limited to the Jews only), unconditional and abiding love of the Father – this is so new that the disciples’ difficulty in accepting it is not so unexpected.
• And now with Jesus’ resurrection and graphic demonstration of the unity and immensity of the Father’s love and grace, to not only Christ, but to all men everywhere – the implications would be difficult for anyone to even fathom in the few short days in which this all occurred.

So he sends them out, with the Holy Spirit, to proclaim His story, His Gospel, to all men. He had to send them out to sort out these mind-blowing experiences for themselves; and off they went.

I think it is easy to see that:

• Having to formulate these totally new ideas in their minds;
• Come to grip with the truth of Christ’s life;
• Speak it out to others;
• These are designed by Him to make that life, that unity with Him, at last whole and complete in the disciples’ lives.

So let’s telescope forward to today, to ourselves. What is the message for us?

In our own time we too must come to grip with these facts of the life, death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.

We too must face the truth that we are not separate from Jesus Christ, that we are not separate from God the Father, and that we are not separate from one another. It is as if we are but tiny cells in the large organism, the larger Life that is the whole-ness of creation.

We too must face the truth that every living being is within each of us.

We too must accept that we are love and our only charge is to use that love unconditionally to find our way home.

I would like to close with quote from Rumi, called "Losing the way":

What wisdom was this, that the Object of all desire
caused me to leave my home joyously on a fool's errand,
so that I was actually rushing to lose the way
and at each moment being taken farther from what I sought -
and then God in His beneficence made that very wandering
the means of my reaching the right road and finding wealth!

He makes losing the way a way to true faith;
He makes going astray a field for the harvest of righteousness,
so that no righteous one may be without fear
and no traitor may be without hope.
The Gracious One has put the antidote in the poison
so that they may say He is the Lord of hidden grace.