The Wisdom and the Power (Epiphany 3A)

 

 

The Power and the Wisdom
Homily delivered the Third Sunday after Epiphany (Epiphany 3A RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
25 January 2026; 11:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist
Mission Church of the Holy Spirit, Sutherlin (Oregon)
Readings:  Isaiah 9:1-4; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23; Psalm 27:1, 5-13

 

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

What a broken world we live in!  How low our shared political life in this country has stooped! We once had a constitutional republic grounded in the consent and participation of the governed, with checks and balances and the rule of law to prevent the abuse of power and protect the dignity and rights of every person.  I am not sure we still have it. We have let our sad and bitter divisions infect our hearts and divide us.  Whether between white and black, male and female, rich and poor, citizen and foreigner, leftwing and rightwing, republican and democrat--our divisions have made us hunker down with only our own tribe. We vilify and dehumanize those not in the tribe.  Some of us have stopped even having the pretense of following the rituals and legal niceties that once kept us from descending to the level of animals, predator vs. prey, nature red in tooth and claw. Where we once hoped that domestic security, the common good, and peace was what our 250-year old national experiment would bring us, we now hear more and more only about the need to coerce our enemies (and even our allies!), our need to attack, control, expel, or kill the people we consider threats.  It’s pretty dark out there, and hard to find grounds for hope.     

 

Today’s lessons, once again in this season of Epiphany, are all about light breaking into the darkness and the need to hope against hope for a better future. 

 

Isaiah is writing in the 730s BCE.  A new thing in history had appeared: the world’s first transnational military Empire, Assyria under its aggressive new leader, Tiglath-Pileser III, who was conquering all the Middle East. He sounds a lot like some leaders we know. Whole countries simply ceased to exist, their leaders slaughtered and populations deported far away in the name of national security and proper societal and political order.  Among the first areas in Palestine lost were the regions Zebulun and Napthali, near the Sea of Galilee, turned into an Assyrian province early on. Eventually, all of the Northern Kingdom would simply be swallowed up by the Assyrians. 

 

Isaiah says, however, there is cause for hope. “In past days, [God] brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future, he will bring splendor to … Galilee, now ruled by gentiles.  The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shone.”  This light will bring liberation: “For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian.”  Gideon’s defeat of the huge army of Midian with just 300 warriors was for these people an icon of victory against overwhelming odds. Like today’s Psalm, Isaiah affirms that God alone is the one who can give such victory and light against overwhelming odds.  Isaiah’s message is this: no matter how dark and bad things get, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. 

 

Note that Isaiah sees this future liberation as merely a “God helped our side to win” moment: the joy the newly liberated will experience is like that of people who rejoice in dividing up plunder that have taken from their dead, defeated enemies.  Nevertheless, Isaiah says have hope!

 

But is this hope a false one?  Is the light at the end of the tunnel an on-coming train? 

 

Zebulun and Naphthali, along with the rest of the North, were never reconstituted historically—they became part of the proverbial “lost ten tribes of Israel.”  Isaiah’s hopeful prophecy simply didn’t pan out.  This left a feeling of a promise not kept. 

 

That’s why the Gospel writers make such a big deal over the fact that it was in Galilee, in this very region, that Jesus began and performed most of his ministry. 

 

Matthew says that the light Isaiah saw at the end of the tunnel was not military victory over the Assyrians, who by his time had also ceased to be a nation, just like the kingdom of Israel before them.  For Matthew, the light was Christ, who, like Gideon, was victorious against over-whelming odds. His resurrection undid his unjust death at the hands of Rome, an Empire like the Assyrians.  It spells not just victory over death and sin, but also victory over the division, hatred of the other, and predatory brutality in our hearts.  That’s why his coming brings us hope, despite this brutal world.  He understands the great light seen by those who sat in darkness, the great victory against all odds, as Christ. 

 

St. Paul in today’s reading from Corinthians reading also sees Christ’s rising from death and the grave as a victory against overwhelming odds. 

 

But he also notes that even in the group that celebrates Christ’s victory, the church, there can be divisions, factionalism, and mutual hatred.  He criticizes divisions and factions in the Church based in clever arguments, appeals to wisdom and one’s favorite church leaders, as petty concern for group identity, tribalism, and sectarianism. Christ and no one else is the source of unity, Paul says. That’s why using Christ as an identity group banner —“we are of Christ!” “We are the true Christians here!”—is so wrong. 

 

Paul says true unity comes from the “power of Christ’s cross.”  “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”  A few sentences later, he adds, “[W]e proclaim Christ on the cross, a stumbling block … and foolishness” to the two main identity groups of his world, Jewish people and pagan gentiles.  But to those who follow Jesus, regardless of identity and background, he says “Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.  For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Cor 1:18, 23-25)

 

Jesus, dying on a public torture board of the Empire, is strong?  Christ, abused and outcast, is wiser than the deepest tradition of the sages?  Paul admits it: if you don’t trust in Jesus, the cross can appear only as nonsense and weakness.  But if you do have faith in him, you realize that his dying on the cross is the starting point of our hope, his since resurrection soon follows it.   

 

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that Christianity was the religion of the weak, of victims, or losers.  Its emphasis on compassion and pity, he said, simply put a guilt trip on the strong and victorious, who really had nothing to be ashamed of.  The will to power was all that mattered, not artificial concepts of sin and noble suffering.  God on the cross, for him, indeed was a god who was dead.  Any other way of seeing the cross, he said, was self-deception and foolishness.  This idea was taken up fully by objectivist writer Ayn Rand, who instead of Nietzsche’s supermen made free by the will to power conquering victim sub-humans, rather speaks of the “producers,” and “creators” of society and wealth on the one side, and “parasites” and the dregs on the other.   

 

For Nietzsche and Rand, and their followers like Stephen Miller, Alex Jones, and our current President, it’s all about the strong overcoming the weak, the winners beating the losers. It's about "really great" people, "quality" people, casting aside and excluding "losers" with no concern for any morality that might constrain them. 

 

For Christ, it’s all about welcoming, inclusion, service, and facing suffering with equanimity. It’s also about standing up abusers, specially when they clothe their abuse in the pious robes of religion and following what’s right. Most of all,  it’s about the strength found in vulnerability.  It’s about wisdom in marginalization. As Oscar Romero once taught, “only eyes that have cried can see certain things.”  It is those who sit in darkness that see the Great Light. 

 

Our confident hope is that in the end, right and justice, truth and love will prevail.  If they have not yet prevailed, that is because it is not yet the end.  The present darkness will be replaced by light. Nikos Kazantzakis, in his great novel The Last Temptation of Christ, says, “A prophet is one who, when everyone else despairs, hopes. And when everyone else hopes, despairs. You’ll ask me why. It is because he has mastered the Great Secret: that the Wheel turns.”

 

Living life as one great conflict and struggle for power is the shortest way for making life a hell on earth for everyone.  Those who live by the sword die by the sword.  A winner of the rat race is still a rat.  Nietzsche and Rand’s argument for striving to be a winner, quality people, at all costs is the death of what makes us human. The bellicose, aggressive brutality of Emperors or emperor wanna-bes, be they Tiglath-Pileser III, Tiberius, Nero, Hitler, Putin, Xi Jingping, or Donald Trump, may try all they want to destroy whole peoples, nations, and systems of law.  But what they really destroy is their own soul.  Against all this, says Jesus, “those who care only for their own life end up losing it and those who willing to give up their own life will actually win it.”

 

Sisters and brothers:  the cross is the way we follow Jesus: suffering for others, accepting shame, pain, and even death in pursuit of God’s reign and the justice it demands.  But if we seek first of all God’s reign and the justice it demands, says Jesus, all of life’s good things--prosperity, freedom, fairness--will be added to it, heaped upon it.  Christ on the cross is the power and wisdom of God.  We may want an easier, softer, more ego-flattering path.  But there is none.  On the way of the cross, we experience death and sit in darkness.  But don’t give in, and don’t give up.  Embracing and accepting the way of the cross, and sharing it with others, is the way we can get out of the rat race, out of the constant division, conflict, and turmoil.  Because on it, even as we sit in darkness, we see a great light.

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.

 

Lamb of God (Epiphany 2A)

 

Lamb of God
Homily delivered the Second Sunday after Epiphany (Epiphany 2A RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
18 January 2026; 9:30 Sung Eucharist
Ascension Lutheran Church (ELCA), Medford (Oregon)
Readings:  Isaiah 49:1-7; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42; Psalm 40:1-12

 

God, give us hearts to feel and love, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

  

When my second son David was about nine, he asked me a hard question: “Why did God have to kill his Son Jesus off to pay for our sins? Doesn’t that make him a very bad Father? Why couldn’t he have just been bigger-hearted and forgiven us when we’re sorry? Isn’t that what he expects from us?”

I tried to give an easy answer, something like that of the Evangelical Alpha Course:  God is just, and fairness demands that sin be punished.  We are all sinners.  It was God’s mercy and love that demanded that he send Jesus to suffer such punishment in our stead if only we have faith in him.  

 

David would have none of it: “If God is really boss of everything, he can make things any way he wants. So why did he make them so that he had to kill off his own Son?  It just isn’t fair to punish someone for someone else’s faults, and torturing your child to death certainly isn’t loving.”   

I replied that Jesus and the Father were one God, and so God himself was actually volunteering to die for us on the Cross because of his love.  No go: “Then why does Jesus in the garden pray, ‘Please don’t let this happen to me?’” 

 

Today’s Gospel reading has John the Baptist declaring about Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” 

 

I think many of us, when we hear those words, think that John is saying that Jesus will be a sacrificial lamb, killed by God to pay for our sins. 

 

But this understanding is wrong, whether we are talking about what the Baptist may have meant, or how the writer of the Gospel of John understood it. 

 

To begin with, a lamb was not the first animal that would have come to mind to people of that era who wanted to refer to a sacrifice:  bulls, goats, or doves were far more common as offerings.  The archetypical animal for describing an animal  victim substituted for wrong-doing was a goat, not a lamb.  The scape-goat was not killed, just driven into the wilderness. The scape-goat was not a sacrifice. 

 

And when sacrifice is talked about, it is not about punishment meted out to a substituted victim.  It is a shared meal with the deity, food and drink offering to God which in turn is offered back to the worshippers. You put your hand on the sacrifice not to transfer some kind of mystical fluid of sin or guilt, but to identify the offering as yours, to set it apart as yours. So you could share in the meal it produced.  

 

The only regular use of lamb as an image in common currency was the main dish of the Passover meal, but the kosher rules for butchering animals were in place to prevent suffering of the animals, not to cause it.  Again, the point was sharing in God’s goodness.  The meal had to be eaten completely, with no leftovers, so you were expected to invite in your neighbors to share in the meal. 

 

The image of the people of God as a flock, the sheep of his pasture was similarly common, but here it is about being gently cared for by God. 

 

Even the image of the Suffering Servant of Yahweh in Isaiah 53:7, often tied by Christians to the idea of a sacrificial lamb, is not about sacrifice.  The Servant suffers injustice without opening his mouth, like a “lamb led to the slaughter, or a sheep silent before its shearers.”   This is not about sacrifice.  It is a metaphor to describe the equanimity the suffering servant shows in the face of death.

 

Besides that, both John the Baptist and Jesus seem to have had issues with the Temple system, following the prophets’ critique of sacrificial ritual, as in today’s Psalms reading, “In sacrifice and offering you take no pleasure…; Burnt-offering and sin-offering you have not required” (Psalm 40:7-8).

 

So why would John the Baptist apply the term “Lamb of God” to Jesus?  It is an image in the apocalyptic writings that were wildly popular during his era referring a figure at the end of time who comes to set the world right.  But this is not through violently punishing the evil-doer and driving away wrong, but rather quiet, peaceful example and teaching.  After all, it is the Lamb of God we’re talking about here, not the Lion of God. 

 

And what would the image have meant for the writer of the Gospel of John?  Note the exact wording here: “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes way the sin of the world.”  Sin singular, not sins plural. In John, the “Sin of the World” is failure to recognize the true character of Jesus, God’s Logos.   In the prologue we read, “The light shines in the darkness and darkness does not overcome it. … He was in the world, … yet the world did not recognize him.  He came to what was his own, but his own did not accept him” (John 1:5-11).  Later in the Gospel, Jesus says, “And when [the Paraclete] comes, he will convict the world of sin … because they do not have faith in me” (John 16:8-11).

Thus, in the Gospel of John, the “Lamb of God who takes away the Sin of the World” is a graphic way of saying “the Revelation of God as gentle and peaceful, a revelation that drives away any misunderstanding we might have about God.” 

Just before promising the Paraclete, Jesus says where violence does come from: the ones who share the sin of the world, who reject Jesus.  “An hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God.  But they will do this because they have refused to know the Father and me” (John 16:2-3). 

There are several passages in the New Testament, especially in the Letter to the Hebrews, that are often used as proof-texts for the idea Jesus was a sacrificial victim.  But these texts use the sacrificial system of ancient Judaism as a metaphor to express the salvation they see in Jesus.  Even one of the letters in the later Johannine tradition says, “But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:1-2).  Hebrews is saying that Jesus’ death and resurrection brings us reconciliation with God, like the shalom or hattat sacrifices of the Temple. 

 

In the Alpha Course version of the atonement I tried unsuccessfully to sell my son David, Jesus had to die on the cross to “pay for our sins.”   

 

But this understanding of Jesus’ sufferings as transferred punishment to satisfy God’s offended dignity is not found as such in the Bible, but rather is a relatively late doctrine in Christian history, only really showing up in the writings of St. Anselm of Canterbury, in the twelfth century CE. 

 

The early undivided Christian Church never defined its doctrine of the atonement.   The Nicene Creed says that it was "for us and our salvation" that Christ became incarnate and “for our sake” that he was crucified.  But it does not tell us how this was the case.  Just 15 years after Jesus’ death, St. Paul quotes the tradition he had received from earlier Christians: “Christ died for our sins" (1 Cor 15:1-5), but again, does not tell us what this means.   Paul elsewhere uses more than 15 separate images drawns from all realms of life to describe what God accomplished in Jesus, such as reconciliation of estranged friends, acquittal of a crime, rescue on the field of battle, ransom from slavery or being a hostage, healing, a new creation, etc.  They include two borrowed from Temple ritual: purgation of ritual pollution through a sacrifice, and having sin covered over or taken away through a sacrifice.  It is clear that they are all metaphors, efforts to describe in limited language an act by God that was essentially one of love and reconciliation, not of vengeance or punishment. 

 

The myth of redemptive violence is common in our world today.  Movies want the good guy to blow away the bad guys and make things right.  In our foreign and military policies, we think that violence, applied in a smart and timely fashion, will fix things.  In our criminal justice, we think that executing a murderer somehow fixes things.   But violence never fixes things, never makes things wholly right. 

 

I do not believe that Jesus suffered violent punishment in our stead, to save us from getting it ourselves from an angry, vengeful Deity.   This is a twisted and wrong image, seen through the narrow and distorted lens of human limitation, that demeans and cheapens what Christ did for us.  

 

No Jesus, by taking on our mortality and suffering evil--even unjust death--along with the rest of us showed us God’s solidarity with us.  In his victory over death and what killed him, sin, he gives us the chance to follow him. As Paul says in Romans, salvation through Jesus comes from his participation in our human life and death and our participation in his death by baptism and his eternal life by living in the spirit. Not one word about substitution here, just participation. 

 

The fact is, the “wrath of God” describes more how our relationship with God feels to us when we are alienated from God than it describes God’s heart.   And it is we human beings who tend to think that violence can make things right, not God.  Jesus died because we sinful people killed him.  Our wrong-headed world that thinks that violence can fix things killed him. 

 

The season of epiphany reminds us again and again of “God in Man made manifest.”  Jesus’ resurrection shows that his non-violence in the face of horrible violence actually is the face of God.  Love is the face of God.  In this light, our Christian belief that Christ “died for us” on the Cross or “sacrificed himself for us” takes on deep meaning.  The Cross must never become some sick description of a bipolar child-abusing Deity.   When we look at Jesus on the Cross, we see God suffering right along with us, dying along with us.  We are glimpsing from the inside what it looks like when God simply loves us, heals us, and forgives us.   

 

Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the Sin of the World.     

 

Thanks be to God, Amen. 

Night Vision (Epiphany Sunday)

 

Night Vision

4 January 2026

Second Sunday After Christmas Day Year ABC

9 a.m. Sung Eucharist

Parish Church of St. Luke, Grants Pass, Oregon

Isaiah 60:1-6; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12; Psalm 72:1-7,10-14

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

One of my dearest friends once told me that he at times just could not work up faith in God.  “I was raised as a Christian and went to Church as a boy.  I was an acolyte.  I was an Eagle Scout. But when I look at the world, it’s really hard for me to believe in God.  I’d like to have a simple faith, but there just seems to be too much wrong out there to have a good and loving God behind it all.  Part of what is wrong with the world is me, I admit, ‘cuz I’m no angel.  I’d like to have faith, but seem just not able.  Does that make me a bad person?” 

 

Here was a man who had on occasion tasted God’s grace and love, but found it hard to, as he put it, “believe in God.”   Other dear friends of mine are a little more aggressive in their unbelief:  reacting to abusive Church authority or dishonesty in not acknowledging the obstacles to faith, they believe there is no such thing as God, and that faith and religion are harmful atavisms that need to be rooted out.

Today is “Three King’s Sunday,” and the scriptures we read are those appointed for the Feast of Epiphany, which will take place on January 6.  Epiphany celebrates the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles; Early Christians saw this as the manifestation of Christ to the unbelievers.   So it’s important: it talks about how it is that we recognize God at work in the world about us, how we recognize Jesus as God made manifest. 

 

Today’s Gospel tells the story of strange figures from the East arriving in Jerusalem seeking the child born “King of the Jews.”  The visitors are called Magoi (Latin: Magi).  The Greek word often describes Persian astrologers or diviners, or even Zoroastrian priests.  The word is related to our word “magician” and always is tinged with Mystery and the Occult.  Probably the best translation for it is Wizards.

 

We don’t know how many of the Wizards arrive; we usually number them as three because that is how many gifts they bring: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

We usually say they are kings because of the passages we read today from Isaiah and Psalm 72, where foreign kings bring gifts and tribute to the Ideal King of the Future. 

 

All three gifts are luxury items, and tell us more about Jesus than about those bearing the gifts.  

 

Gold is a gift one gives a king.  Frankincense is a fragrant resin of a bush originating in Yemen that is used as incense in worship, driving away the smells and thoughts of everyday life.  It is thus an offering to God.  Myrrh is another fragrant resin from Yemen, used as an ingredient in medicines and to prepare bodies for burial.  It is thus a gift to a great healer, but also a sign showing that Jesus was born not only divine but fully human and mortal, destined to die.

 

In this story, the wizards are inspired to go on pilgrimage to the West by interpreting astronomical events in light of their esoteric lore.   They do not know the details, but rather have only a general idea that somehow this star is associated with a royal birth for the strange monotheistic people called Jews.   They don’t have a clue where the birth has taken place, of who it might be.  They make the long arduous journey and arrive in Jerusalem, going to the obvious place to ask about such a birth: the royal court.  Thus they are caught up in the intrigues of a petty tyrant, Herod, who styles himself as King of the Jews but has only doubtful claim to either title.

 

The magi in Matthew are symbols of the gentile nations coming to Christ.  They are archetypes for all pilgrims.  They pursue their course based on dark hints and shadows in their lore, and find a new understanding of everything.  They pursue the dim light of a night star to the bright star of the morning, Jesus. 

 

In a way, their journey reflects the journey of faith that each of us makes.   Little glimpses of glory lead us to make a deeper commitment to pursue further light and truth.  We end up in strange places, unexpected situations.  And we turn aside to new paths as we learn more and more on the way. 

 

T.S. Eliot puts these words onto the lips of one of the Magi: 

 

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly...

 

These strange visitors had very little to go on.  Yet they set off on a long trip based on their dusty tomes of forgotten lore.  They see the star, but it is not all that noticeable or visible to those about them.  Clearly imagination is a key part of what drives them.  Eliot is probably right: these guys on occasion must have wondered at the folly of their enterprise. 

 

Those of you who have done any star-gazing know that often a star is invisible when you look straight at where it is supposed to be.  But if you avert your eyes slightly, there, in your peripheral vision, the star shines out clearly. Apparently Galileo Galilei was a master at using his peripheral vision to see all sorts of things up there that others had missed, things like the four largest moons of Jupiter and Saturn’s rings.  He helped this out, to be sure, by grinding glass lenses and putting them into a “far-sight” or telescope to help gather together more light than his own natural eye could, even in periphery. This is why the Indigo Girls, in their great hymn to seeing the subtle coincidences of life as hints of reincarnation, sing, “I call on the resting soul of Galileo, king of night vision, king of insight.” 

   

That is, I think, how faith is for all of us.  We get a little glimpse of glory and then, encouraged by others or driven by God speaking to our heart, we dedicate time, wealth, and effort to it.  More often than not, we do not come to faith by looking directly at such a thing as “Religion,” or “God.”  In fact, if we look directly it, we often are forced to admit that it is nothing that we though we saw.  Rather, we get little glimpses in our peripheral vision.  Things that once were puzzles start making sense. 

 

People who say that they somehow do not believe in God usually mean they do not believe in a guy (always a male, usually with a white beard) “out there” somewhere who interferes on occasion with matters and demands our love and worship.  (“He is, after all, a ‘jealous’ one, he!”)  This is, however, a petty caricature of the living, creating Ground of Being and Love Itself.  God is not “out there” somewhere.  God is beneath and behind all.  Luke describes St. Paul speaking to the Athenians and saying of God “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). 

 

If we try to look at God head-on, and think of God as “out there somewhere,” we diminish the idea of God.  We lose the mystery.  We jettison our insight, and reduce the object of our worship to a kind of supernatural wacky great uncle or an imaginary friend with super powers.  Such a god is not really God, but a sort of demiurge or daemon.  When we feel hurt or anguish, it is easy to feel betrayed by such a Deity.  God thus diminished is far removed from the good we see all about us, all of which comes from God directly.   

 

But again, using peripheral vision, our night vision, we get little glimpses of the Love beneath all things.  If we let ourselves follow, we find brighter and brighter clarity in our vision.  And, like the magi, we on occasion might be tempted to say, “No.  This is folly.” 

 

The key thing is following the glimpse, pursuing the glory, keeping with the sweet scent on the air, however faint. 

 

Thomas Merton taught about the art of using our night vision in faith in these words: 

 

“Life is this simple: We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows [God’s] self everywhere, in everything - in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that He is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without [God].  It's impossible. It's simply impossible. The only thing is that we don't [recognize this].” 

 

Faith is trust in this Ground of Being, who is not less than personal.  Indeed, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity teaches us that God is more than personal, and includes the social as well.   

 

I think that gratitude is the emotion that best connects us with God.  Trust is a close second.  Both of these are in fact expressions of love.  And God is, in fact, Love Itself. Love, trust, and gratitude give us eyes to see God, first in peripheral short glimpses, later in deeper and deeper glory.  

 

In prayer and meditation, try to reflect on the Beauty of God’s Holiness while feeling this love.  It helps.   

In the name of Christ, Amen.