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The Fifth Sunday of Easter On our wall at home, there is a calligraphied print that bears these words from the 3rd Century by St. Iraneus: “The glory of God is the person fully alive.” If I have had one mantra, one article of faith, to sustain me these past several years, it has been this single affirmation. The glory of God is the person fully alive. In all the ways I have been able to live my life fully, I believe I have touched something of the glory of God. When the writers of the New Testament reflected on all that they knew and heard about and experienced in Jesus, they searched for a word that would convey the magnetism and power and essence of his life. This word was glory. Gloria in Latin. Doxa in Greek. The word used to denote the manifestation of God’s presence. The word that in every time and place human beings have used to describe God’s majesty, and honor, and miraculous power. It was glory that radiated out of the life of Jesus, they wrote. It shone in his face on the Mount of Transfiguration. It flowed from him as he healed the sick, and cast out demons. It resounded in his preaching. It burst forth in his glorious resurrection as he appeared to his disciples. Whenever they saw Jesus, wherever they heard him and felt his presence, the first Christians experienced the glory of God. Glory in the way their ancestors the Hebrews experienced glory, in their word hod, meaning weight or heaviness. Glory as we hear it in this verse of the Psalms this morning: “For I will ponder the glorious splendor of God’s majesty.” Jesus in his life exemplified the full weight of God’s glory. And so, St. John the Divine would envision the heavenly host, sounding like peals of thunder and crying out: “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory.” In Jesus, in the words of our Gospel this morning, God had been glorified. In the fullness of his life, the full glory of God belonged. And not only this, those first believers sensed and believed and hoped that the glory that was in Jesus was now in them. They, as the Acts of the Apostles proclaims, had been set “as a light to the Gentiles, to bring salvation to the ends of the earth.” I wonder how that glory spoken of long ago touches us here and now. I wonder how that holy light reaches over the eons to the ends of the earth to shine in your heart, and my heart today. Here is a small glimmer of how that glory and light has moved in me in recent days. For most of the time I have been away from you I have been in retreat, and most of this retreat time I have been in silence in the New Camadoli Benedictine monastery in Big Sur, California. A hermitage is a peculiar kind of monastery in that the monks live in separate cells as cenobites, and come together several times a day to pray the psalms. As retreatants, we lived as the monks, and had our own separate cells. We took our meals separately and were committed to silence with the exception of joining the monks in their liturgies. The Camadolese were founded in the 11th Century by St. Romauld, who founded dozens of monasteries throughout Italy. Romould’s great ideal was to introduce the Western world to desert fathers of the early Church, endeavoring to turn the whole world into a hermitage. Now, on the surface, this may seem to you and me the last place in the world we might want to visit. But, I must tell you friends, from the moment I arrived I felt bathed in glory. My little hermitage faced out on an enclosed garden that stood 1300 feet over the shimmering Pacific ocean. There was no noise but the crashing surf beneath me, the wind as it rushed through the ancient redwoods in the distance. There was no distraction but the hawks, and hummingbirds, the fox and deer ambling by. There was nothing to do but to pray, and paint some, and join the monks in their worship. In this setting of breathtaking beauty and wonder, it brought to mind the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Nature is too thin a screen, the glory of God bursts through everywhere.” In my room there was a copy of St. Romouald’s brief rule. And his instructions were these: “Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. The path you must follow is in the Psalms; never leave it….Realize above all that you are in God’s presence, and stand there with the attitude of one who stands before the Emperor. Empty yourself completely. Sit waiting, content with the grace of God like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother gives him.” It was in paradise, these few days. I felt fully alive. And in this fullness, felt drawn into the very glory of God, manifested in the life of Jesus, and promised to each of us who follow him. And the question that stirs within me now is, if this what God intends for us, if what God truly desires for us is to be fully alive, if this is what glory is in life, how then can you and I make this the rule of our life? In what ways are we at St. Mary’s supporting and encouraging and guiding all of us into this fullness of life? In what ways are we falling short of this? Many of you remember the old Saturday Evening Post. Several years ago, an African American named Berton Braley, in verse wrote about the glory envisioned by St. Iraneus and those first Christians two millennia ago. I invite you to take these words with you, so that you may live in the fullness of life, and thereby, be drawn into the glory of God. “Oh you gotta get a glory in the work you do; O, Lord, give me a glory, is it much to give? The great, whose shining labor makes our pulses throb, O, Lord, give me a glory. When all else is gone, To those who get a glory, it is like the sun, O, Lord give me a glory and workman’s pride;
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