Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
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Many years ago, I went on a retreat to Sacred Heart Retreat Home in Colorado. It is a silent retreat home, so the only time you can speak is when you are praying at noonday Eucharist or when you are meeting with your Spiritual Director during the day. Even at meals, when there are other people around you, you are still called to silence.
This all gives the atmosphere that we are going beyond what we are, from the physical to the more spiritual. However, the two are very much connected, as my Spiritual Director there, Father Ed, showed me.
When we sat down at the start of the week, Father Ed told me to pay close attention to the food. He told me to not just eat, but to really focus on the flavor. The physical, in this case, led to a deeper appreciation of the world around us, and thus led to more spiritual insights.
Later that week, Father Ed took me through an Ignatian spiritual exercise. He told me to think about when I made it home and to imagine Jesus was there at the airport waiting for me. He asked me to think about what Jesus might say and what I might do. Would I take Jesus home to stay with me? What would that be like?
This time the spiritual led to the physical, mainly a deeper understanding of Jesus' physical nature and a way to feel closer to Him.
We often think that we should seek out the spiritual over the physical in our lives in Faith, but in fact the opposite can be true.
That is what Hebrews teaches us this morning. Jesus, the divine imprint of God in the world, should not be looked down on because of His physical nature. That nature is very important to Jesus' work in the world.
We might expect that the spiritual would be more important than the physical. But that is not the case in our reading this morning.
Towards the end of our reading from Hebrews, we have the quote from Psalm 8, the very Psalm we read this morning. And if this particular section of the reading confused you, don't worry. It's because the NRSV does a terrible job translating it.
Specifically, the NRSV translators decided to take one phrase and go against past tradition and the literal meaning of those words. Instead of "mortals" in Psalm 8, we should read, as we did in the Psalm this morning "Son of Man". And all those "them"s afterwards? We should read those as "he", which is what it is in the Greek.
Let me read you a less confusing translation from the RSV:
It has been testified somewhere,"What is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man, that thou carest for him? Thou didst make him for a little while lower than the angels, thou hast crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet."
Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him.
Now, the title "Son of Man" gained a lot of meaning from Daniel's use of it in his apocalyptic vision. It came to be understood as referring to the Messiah, the Christ. Jesus, in fact, uses this title often to refer to Himself. So what the author of Hebrews is telling us, and what you should take away from this reading, is that God didn't give dominion over the world to come to Angels, spiritual beings, but to Jesus, the Divine in human form.
We hear in Hebrews that on one hand that it is through The Son that all things were made. On the other hand, He is a human like us, and is "unashamed to call" us His siblings.
Herein lies the importance of Jesus' human nature. Hebrews says our "salvation [was made] perfect through sufferings." Specifically through His sufferings. Whenever we find ourselves in sorrow or trouble, we know we have someone to lean on. That's not because we are surrounded by spiritual beings, but because the One through whom we were created, the One who sanctifies us, the One crowned in glory in the world to come is here with us, and He is human too.
He knows what it is to suffer. He empathizes with our pain. Anything bad that we have been through, Jesus has been through the same or worse. He knows what it is like to be human.
If you walk out of here with nothing less, that is what I hope you take with you. Jesus doesn't require you to move beyond the physical into the spiritual. He died on the cross not only to sanctify you, but to let you know that He is always there with you because He knows what it is like. He knows what it is like to be human, and He will always be there with you because He knows what it is like to weather the storm.