The First Sunday of Advent, Year A, November 30, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve
The First Sunday of Advent, November 30, 2025

• Isaiah 2:1-5
• Romans 13:11-14
• Matthew 24:36-44

Click here for an audio of the sermon

He had a vision.  Jesus spoke to him - gave him the date (dates, two, actually).  He said he was one billion percent certain.  It was his mission now to share this great vision, this direct voice, with the world.  Christians must prepare now.  And thankfully we are not preparing in theory, preparing in a metaphorical way, but preparing for a date, a date certain.  Pastor Joshua heard from Jesus about the rapture, when Christians will be snatched up and away into heaven and the tribulation will commence, conveniently without us.  September 23 OR 24, 2025 were the dates - one of these days is when the rapture would happen.  “About that day or hour no one knows” Jesus says in the gospel.  But that does not mean we will not know about TWO days, just not THAT day, but one of these days!  What good is a vision if kept to oneself?  No good at all!  On to YouTube he goes, describing in detail what Jesus said, even how he looked, and the need to prepare.  Viral sharing and commenting commence, and, since it is 2025, a general stir is created among those Christians for whom the rapture is a sure and certain hope.  What else could “caught up to meet the Lord in the air” possibly mean?  True believers quit jobs, sell cars and furniture, and prepare.  Last time I checked, pastor Joshua had updated the new dates of the rapture at least twice, this time not creating quite as much stir or as many views as with the original video.  It seems that misremembering the details of a vision of Jesus that many times negatively affects one’s credibility.
This is not new, of course.  Even the disciples, in the very moments before the Ascension, ask Jesus, “Is it now?”  It is the Lord’s fault, I contend.  Ask us to watch and wait for something to happen with no date, no prelude, no way to access any concrete information about when it will happen.  Watch and wait.  Just watch and wait.  Can we have a clue?  No.  A little hint?  No.  What if we pray very sincerely to know the time, will you tell us?  No. And don’t ask me again.  I don't even know.  It’s not fair.  It leaves open too many possible misunderstandings and false predictions - manipulation and deception.  Perhaps better to announce the date and let us sort it out when it gets closer, maybe an hour before.  What we have now is too vague - it’s not practical.  It’s not helpful.
We begin Advent with the confession that we are not generally a highly formed culture of waiting, especially of open-ended, don’t-know-how-long-we-will-have-to-wait-or-what-we-are-waiting-for kinds of people.  Just note the lifting up of Christmas trees after Halloween and all of the hustle and bustle which has already commenced.  When viewed at the surface, Jesus’ seemingly contradictory insistences on the need to be alert and the impossibility of knowing exactly what we are being alert for tie us up in logical knots.  His principal focus, however, is the presence of God in the human heart which enters us into a different way of knowing, an altogether mysterious and foreign realm of “already and not yet.”  We begin by remembering that we will not “figure it out” by thinking more or be “better” at Advent by trying harder.  What we enter, if we dare, is a realm beyond time, a process that moves, but at its own pace and in its own way, that can only be thwarted by insisting on looking outside ourselves and ignoring the blossoming of readiness growing in our souls.  Waiting and watching are not problems that are solved by more data, they are ways of being which usher us into God’s time that is beyond our limited notions of past, present, or future.
Scheduling the Parousia is God’s job.  Being ready is our job.  Jesus helps us by an example of what being awake is NOT.  He says that the people of Noah’s time were in an unconscious trance of the everyday and ordinary.  What happened yesterday is what will happen today.  What happened today is what will happen tomorrow.  Boy, those are some dark clouds, but it has rained before.  Wow, this is some heavy rain, but I’m sure it will stop soon.  Their lives were a kind of entitlement of continuity that rendered them unable to perceive the nature of the flood that had commenced.  When the soul loses touch with meaning and wonder, the spiritual life animating us and the world, it loses the expectation that life can change, that something new might happen, that this world is passing away.  “And they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.”  Their ignorance of and indifference to their own condition and the condition of the world around them is the cautionary warning of what NOT to become.
Readiness is a slippery state.  It’s like humility - as soon as I know how humble I am, I am no longer as humble as I think I am.  Watchfulness is always becoming.  It is something like the acknowledgement that fresh insight, deeper understanding, fuller presence is always being offered to us and called forth out of us.  I have a picture in my office of a sign posted on a tree in a wood that says, “You are NOT almost there.”  This inner dynamic becomes a gift to the world - a precious and dangerous gift.  Once we are willing to see, we can perceive the nature of the principalities and powers at work among us.  We can name the systems and structures of evil and we can also reveal gratitude at the beauty and joy of life.  Joy and peace and justice break forth in our world as we are faithful in our call to be stewards of making straight paths where no path seems possible.  Christ will come on the last day, for sure.  But it is also true to say that every day is the last day, every day is the day of judgment, every day reveals the quality of our presence and our engagement with announcing the urgency of the moment - life is short, time is passing, we are promised no certain number of future days, we can take nothing for granted, we continually rely on and entrust our lives to God who made us and who will receive our souls back we know not when.  When in response to the travails in our country people say, “it can’t happen here”, “things will go back to normal” I wonder if it is the equivalent of saying, “Boy, those are some dark clouds, but it has rained before.”  “Wow, this is some heavy rain, but I’m sure it will stop soon.”  Is that not the same denial and avoidance used in Noah’s day?  The myth of normalcy can still sweep us away, blind to the reality of the moment.  Salvation is waking up and finding refuge in the Ark that is Christ, our only hope.
  The glory of salvation is that God’s promise is salvation in - in these bodies, in this world, in this time.  Not from them, but in them.  Not escape, but renewal.  One of the classic jokes in my family is that my father once asked my mother whether she wanted to be buried in a casket or cremated.  Her response was, “I don’t know, surprise me.”  Come and surprise us, O Lord, with aliveness today and life in the age to come beyond all we can ask or imagine. Amen.

The Feast of James Otis Sargent Huntington OHC, November 25, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

The Feast of James Otis Sargent Huntington OHC, November 25, 2025

Click here for an audio of the sermon

When I was a novice, one of my fellow novices asked the Superior why he had stayed in monastic life. The Superior begged off the question, but the next day he found the two of us and said, “I’ve stayed because I said I would.” It has to be the least sexy answer to that question. But it is also an answer that is simple, profound, and deeply faithful. This brother, as so many others have done—as I myself have done some days—stayed in monastic life because he said he would. His vow held him, and he allowed it to do so. 

 

Today, we celebrate our Father Founder, James Otis Sargeant Huntington, who also stayed, at least in part, because he said he would. Normally we would celebrate a saint’s feast on the anniversary of their death. But the Founder died on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. It’s kind of hard to move those two. So, instead we observe his feast on the anniversary of his monastic profession, which I find rather fitting. 

 

Father Huntington was not a great founder in the typical sense. The creation of our Order was not his work alone. Nor was he the first, or even the most enthusiastic to join himself to it. He was simply and profoundly the first to stay. Nor was Father Huntington a great mystic, a great theologian, or a great reformer. He was certainly all of those things, in part. But his genius and his holiness lie in the line of St. Joseph: quiet, persistent faithfulness to the commitment and witness to which God called him. 

 

He was one of those rare people who, once he put his hand to the plow, did not turn back. I have to imagine he had his doubts. He was human, after all. He certainly knew turmoil. He lived through the Civil War, the First World War, and the beginning of the Great Depression—which certainly puts our own lives in perspective. And that’s not to mention conflicts internal to the Order in its early years, a well-documented hypochondria, suspected bouts of depression, and whatever other spiritual conflicts he almost certainly faced. Still, he stayed, he prayed, he loved, and he allowed himself to be loved. 

 

His stability in monastic life mirrored God’s own faithfulness to him. That stability provided the initial foundation for others to struggle with and live into their own monastic callings, and through that struggle and commitment to see their vow through to the end. They, in turn, are enabling us to follow their example. Stability builds on stability, like a tangle of roots and mycelia in a forest that intertwine and support one another. 

 

The vows we make, whether in baptism, marriage, monastic life, or ordination are a kind of binding, in both meanings of that word. They restrict our freedom of movement, and in so doing they allow our wounds to heal. All our rushing about from one thing to the next, all our restless searching and building only distract us from the essential movement of God’s healing love. We must, eventually, learn to be still so that God can stitch us back together. 

 

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Polonius advises his son Laertes “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, / Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.” This is great advice for the monastic life, too. Those examples of holiness you find, those virtues you come to love, bind them to yourselves with hoops of steel. I used to think this binding was meant to keep those we love close to us, but now I wonder if it isn’t just as much to keep us from running away from them. Often the closer we get to love, the harder it is to stay. Because, you see, it hurts to love. It can hurt even more to be loved, exactly as we are. 

 

True faithfulness is only possible in the face of challenge and even despair. The vow we make—obedience, conversion of my ways to the monastic way of life, and stability in the Order of the Holy Cross—only reveals its full depth when we want to run away from it. If we are living this life fully and faithfully, we will eventually want to drop it all. The flush of our early enthusiasm will wear thin, and our monastic life will eventually begin to frustrate all of our unspoken plans for happiness, domination, and control. This is a feature, not a bug. When everything in our life starts to pick at the scabs of our self-creating, we know the monastic life is doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is nothing less than to lead us into the true freedom and peace of Christ. 

 

The poet Christian Wiman captures this dynamic beautifully in his memoir, My Bright Abyss: “What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all. The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will become so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester with egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it.” (p. 29-30) 

 

We cannot bind ourselves up, for we would make the knot too loose. But together we can surrender to the work of God within and among us. We can recommit ourselves to the vows we have made and to the common life in which we have made them. We can hold out our wounded, fractured hearts to the Crucified and Risen One, who binds up those hearts and makes them whole. He will heal us. He will bind us in and to his love. He will set us free. 

 

Through his monastic life, through his struggles and his joys, Father Huntington came to know this truth deeply. It is what allowed him to persist in his stability, to remain obedient to the commitment he had made. His faithfulness was such that, even at his death, he chose not to be released from his vow. Like a bodhisattva, Father Huntington chose, even through and after death, to remain tied to us, his brothers, and to the whole world, promising always to intercede for us. At the end, he surrendered himself fully to the self-sacrificing love at the heart of God so that, as the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, he would not, apart from us, be made perfect. 

 

As such, his love, perfected in the love of Christ, remains with us, lifting us up to the heart and throne of God, lightening our darkness, calming our fears, enflaming our love. We know the way to faithfulness in the monastic life because Father Huntington first walked it for us. With his example and his love, we, too, can light the way for one another and for all those who come after us. 

The Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King, Proper 29 C, November 23, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

The Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King, November 23, 2025

• Jeremiah 23:1-6
• Colossians 1:11-20
• Luke 23:33-43

Click here for an audio of the sermon

This past Wednesday, the New York Times published an article titled “How Two Times Reporters Cover Christianity in a Polarized America.”  It was an interview by Patrick Healy with two journalists from the New York Times whose beat is religion, Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham. In one of her responses Ms. Dias commented: “I remember talking to one Christian man in politics earlier this year who was explaining to me that while, yes, he sees America as a democracy, he also ultimately sees it as a democracy inside a monarchy where Jesus is king.”   What should we make of such a statement by a politician, a statement likely shared by a significant segment of the American population? How do we talk about kings in our religious discourse and in our Christian message given our recent history of No Kings demonstrations and the frankly ambiguous evaluation of kingship in both the Old and New Testaments? Is there any place at all for talk of kings or sovereigns or empires?

I struggle with this. It's undeniable that God, the Holy One, is described as king and sovereign and universal ruler and judge throughout the long history of the Bible. It's also undeniable that of the hundreds and hundreds of references to kings and rulers and sovereigns, many--perhaps the majority--refer to bad kings and rulers and sovereigns: evil tyrants, oppressors, tribalists or nationalists, dictators, autocrats, men (almost always men!) who were violent, vindictive, selfish and deeply, deeply flawed. It seems that references to good kings are scarce, and even these are not without their own ambiguity. Think of David: a mighty king who obtained his wife by having her husband killed in battle. Think of Solomon: wise perhaps but somewhat profligate. Did he really need to build that large a temple in Jerusalem and at the cost, no doubt, of enslaved or indentured people? Jesus, too, is called king, both in scripture and certainly in the spiritual tradition of Christian worship and prayer. But what does that mean exactly? For all its triumphalism, today's feast invites us to struggle with this language and this imagery…language and imagery which can be both comforting and dangerous.

An historical footnote. Today's feast is exactly one hundred years old. Pope Pius XI created it in 1925 to counter a growing secularism and certain developments in the world political  theater. There was the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia and the beginnings of the fascist movement in Italy under Mussolini as well as various radical labor movements and a looming political settlement that was going to deprive the Vatican of the papal states which once covered most of central Italy, reducing its land holdings to a mere 121 acres in the center of Rome, the so-called State of the Vatican City.  Against these developments and others, the Pope instituted this feast as a reminder that the only real and ultimate power is that of God in Christ…though with the implication, I think, that it was the Vatican which was at the center of that power. The feast or observance was originally observed on the last Sunday of October until it was transferred in 1970 to the last Sunday after Pentecost, the Sunday next before Advent, which means the last Sunday of the Christian year. In an amazing ecumenical development, the readings that went along with the feast included in a new three-year cycle of readings—the so-called Comon Lectionary—were adopted by many Christian bodies including  Anglican churches as well as Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist and others. And with the readings came the feast. Some would say that our own current political situation in this country and throughout the world reflects the same chaos and fears that Pope Pius XI addressed one hundred years ago. I certainly share that view, at least to some extent. But again, we must ask ourselves: what is a king, a sovereign, an emperor? And can we honestly speak of God in Christ in such terms?

When I think of a king or sovereign or emperor, I think of someone  who has uninhibited, absolute power and who enjoys a lifetime appointment or tenure and who has control over large numbers of people and resources. And they are often people who wear strange apparel:  crowns and ermine robes. And they carry scepters and orbs and wear swords. As a child I was fascinated by such things. I remember looking at an old issue of the National Geographic Magazine that covered the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second in 1953. Wow, I thought. This is great. The recent coronation of her son, however, I found more than  little embarrassing with symbols and ceremonies that no longer spoke to me or to our age. But those are extras really. Let’s face it: kingship, sovereignty, imperial majesty is all about power. And most of the royal rulers of Europe and elsewhere no longer exercise such power. But others do…or hope to.

Today's readings for this Feast of Christ the King offer us a radically different vision of kingship. In today’s gospel passage from St. Luke, we are invited to see the kingship of Jesus in all his glory, though not seated on a throne, or carrying orb and scepter, or wearing fine robes and certainly not a sword or saber. Rather we see the fullness of the kingship or reign of Jesus exercised from pulpit of the cross. And what is that exercise? It is nothing less than forgiveness. In Luke's gospel that we hear today, Jesus prays, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing."  And to the criminal who asks Jesus to remember him, he says: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” And the final word is not that Jesus but that of a centurion who saw what had taken place. He praised God and said, “Certainly this man was innocent.”

If today we acknowledge Jesus as king or sovereign or ruler, it can’t be a kingship of this world, as Jesus says in St. John's passion narrative, but one which is characterized by mercy, forgiveness, a reaching out to others even in our own pain, and like that centurion, witnessing to the injustices of our world. And in the power of that witness praising God and changing our lives to become more and more agents of mercy, forgiveness, and compassion.  Just like our Savior. Just like our King. Just like Jesus.

In the second half of Lent, as we approach Holy Week, we begin our morning worship by saying or singing the invitatory: “Christ is reigning from the tree; Come let us worship.” This is the kingship of Christ. It’s not the entirety of it of course, but it is at the center, and it marks and interprets all the other images of the kingship of Christ, the sovereignty of Christ: Christ the Judge, Christ the Truth, Christ the Shepherd, Christ the Governor, Christ the victor, Christ the Lord. It is this Christ that is captured in the famous 13th century prayer of Saint Richard of Chichester which many years ago memorably became part of the musical Godspell. Saint Richard prayed: 

Thanks be to thee, my Lord Jesus Christ,
for all the benefits thou hast given me,
for all the pains and insults thou hast borne for me.
O most merciful redeemer, friend and brother,
may I know [see] thee more clearly,
love thee more dearly,
and follow thee more nearly, day by day.
Amen.

“O most merciful redeemer, friend and brother.”  That, for me, is Christ our King. And perhaps that is enough.

Christ is reigning from the tree. Come let us adore him. 

Amen.