Introduction

St. Mark’s on the Campus Episcopal Church, Lincoln, Neb., celebrates the Holy Eucharist on Tuesdays at 12:30 p.m. The parish’s rector, Father Jerry Thompson, asked me to lead worship on Tuesday, June 12, 2012. The liturgy features the memorial of Evelyn Underhill, Anglican teacher.

Readings

Wisdom 7:24–8:1
Psalm 96:7–13
John 4:19–24

Homily

Evelyn Underhill, an Englishwoman, lived from 1875 to 1941. Her adult life was rich with her study, writing, and teaching about the rich traditions of the mystics in the Church. While she felt drawn to the Catholic Church, in the end, she found her home in the Anglican Church.

A hundred and one years ago, she published Mysticism, the fruit of her research into the depths of the Church’s wealth of experience and insight invested in her mystics. The book explores the ways that some of God’s people find themselves strangely and powerfully attuned to His presence in human life. It shares how they struggle, at times, to express those experiences and to share their visions of God and their passions for His presence.

A verse from today’s first reading reminds us of the powerful and mystical ties that bind God and people together: “And passing into holy souls from age to age, [Wisdom] produces friends of God and prophets” (Wisdom 7:27b, NAB).

Friends of God. That strikes me as a good way to define a mystic. A friend of God wants to spend time with Him, to hear about His life, to learn His history, to grow closer to Him, and to bring others to Him. The friends of God our Father find their holy souls alive with His Wisdom—Jesus Christ—and moved by His Spirit, so that they cannot help but be attuned and consumed by that life-changing friendship.

In her work, The Light of Christ, Evelyn Underhill writes these words about Julian of Norwich, a mystic: “Julian says at the end of her Revelations that what she received from her vision of Christ was ‘Light, Life, and Love’; everything was gathered in that; an energy to show us the Truth, quicken us to fresh vitality and fill us with adoring devotion.”

We might not think of ourselves as mystics; they seem to be spiritual sprinters and marathoners, while we are amblers and mosiers at best. But God our Father has made us His children by water and the Spirit, baptizing us into the death and life of His Son. That means we are the “holy souls” in this age, the ones into whom God passes His Wisdom. This gift makes us friends of God. As God’s friends, we are invited into the mystery, to abide in the Light, to find strength in the Life, and to share the Love of God with others.

Amen.