THE PEACE OF THE HEAVENLY JERUSALEM

A SERMON FOR THE 14th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

A couple of years ago I had a dream.  Usually I can’t remember even the dreams I had last night, but this one I remember vividly.  In this dream, I was standing with an old friend of mine in front of a great range of mountains.  It was early evening, and the sun was starting to set behind the mountain peaks before us. It was the time of day when people usually stop their work and go home to rest.  And yet, a very strong interior voice told me I needed to climb up the mountain that towered before me.  No reason was given, and yet, in my dream, I knew this to be the voice of God.  And so I told the friend who was with me what we had to do.  Of course, he was full of objections, and very reasonable objections they were too, but finally he agreed to accompany me, and together we started up the mountain path. I won’t bore you with the details of our climb—let’s just say there were many forks in the road where we picked one path over another and simply hoped for the best it was the right one; and then, finally, as we approached the summit of the mountain, the path narrowed to the point where we had to climb up an extremely steep and narrow gravel path, where the rocks kept sliding from under our feet and we were in great danger. And yet that interior voice told me to go on, to persevere, and we managed to reach the top.

Here, hidden among the mountain peaks, we found what I can only describe as a palace, a huge imposing building that was accessible by one of those alpine cog railways like the one that takes tourists up the Matterhorn.  It turned out that the palace was serving as an art gallery, but when we met the owner, he told us he needed to sell the place, and offered us this enormous palace for only $12,000.  “It’s going to need a lot of work,” he said.  We were very happy because we had been looking for a place to set up a monastery for our Guild of St. Peter ad Vincula.  Providence had guided us to the perfect place, where the monks would be able to take care of the place properly and live a life of seclusion far from the world of mammon in the valleys below.

And then, of course, I woke up to the world of reality.  And when I awoke, it was with a thud of disappointment.  Not because I realized the dream wasn’t real and we didn’t have a palace.  No, the disappointment was in myself.  Because I knew that in real life there was very little chance I would have heeded that interior voice and climbed up a mountain at that time of day with neither food nor water, no hope of shelter in the night, and for no apparently good reason. Sometimes, you see, Providence asks us to do things that seem very imprudent on the face of it.  And nearly every time we hear that quiet yet persistent voice of God, we come up with every reason under the sun why we shouldn’t pay attention to it.

“O ye of little faith,” says our Lord in today’s Gospel.  “Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat?  or What shall we drink?  or Wherewithal shall we be clothed?  Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness: and all these things shall be added unto you.”  

Now I’m not saying that prudence is not important.  On the contrary, it’s one of the most important of the virtues, and one that we must cultivate and practice if we are to make the right decisions and choices in life.  We need to make those judgments, and yet we also need to rely on God’s Providence too, to “provide” for us (which is what the word means).  That doesn’t mean that we should just sit home every day and pray, thinking that God will take of everything we need.    Reliance on Providence is not to be confused with feeling entitled to God’s help.  No—we must go to work to earn money for our daily bread.  Then we must take that money to the store and buythat bread, we have to bring it home, and slice it, and put peanut butter and jelly on it, and put it on a plate and bring it to the table.  Our dinner plates are not just going to appear miraculously before us when we sit down for dinner.  

Obviously, we must take the normal steps in life that allow us to survive and live normally.  But we must never place these “normal steps” above the kingdom of God.  First serve God.  Base everything else on this first duty.  Listen to the main things God prompts you to do in life, base your major decisions on what will best serve the spiritualinterests of yourself and your family.  Then just follow through on your decision and don’t look back.  Chances are that if you do, not only your spiritual but also your physical needs will be provided for—you’ll have a job so you can afford your bread, you’ll have the transportation to get to a store and buy it, you’ll have the good health to eat and enjoy it.  Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.  And even if God knows that being deprived of some of these things would be to your spiritual benefit, if you’re unemployed, or living a frugal life on food stamps, or if you don’t have good health or whatever, then Providence will still provide you with the graces necessary to endure your hardships.  Indeed your very hardship is in itself a grace, a gift from Providence to encourage us to rely more on God alone.

After all, prudence may be a virtue, but faith is an even higher virtue.  In fact it’s one of the three cardinal virtues, along with hope and charity.  We have to subordinate our prudence to our faith in God, knowing he will not give us crosses we cannot bear, knowing he will not ask of us to wage battles we cannot win.  Sometimes, even with every human expectation of failure, we must take up the cross that he, God our Father,gives us, fight that battle that hesends us into, with supreme faith in God’s ability to help us achieve the victory he sets for us.  If the task comes from God, we had better embrace it, no matter how imprudent it may seem.  And above all, we must always act with supreme love of God, a love that is often imprudent, as love so often is.  But this love of God should inspire us sometimes to throw caution to the winds and begin our apparently fruitless trek up the mountain, carrying the cross of Jesus on our back.

Whether we find good things at the top of the hill or not, ultimately it doesn’t matter.  For if we hear that still, small voice of God, and if we abide by the promptings of his Divine Providence, we shall be serving him, we shall be serving God and not Mammon, and in that fact alone we shall find peace.  We shall be seeking first the kingdom of God, and working for our divine Master.  Even if the hill we climb turns out to be our Calvary, and we are nailed to the cross we carry up it, we will sooner or later find in death our palace, the palace of the heavenly Jerusalem, the house of God and gate of heaven.  It is this heavenly city that is our ultimate reward for relying on God’s Providence, so let us repeat the words of Psalm 126 and make it our daily prayer: “O pray for the peace of Jerusalem; they shall prosper that love thee.  Peace be within thy walls, and plenteousness within thy palaces.”