Sunday, March 17, 2024

The Fifth Sunday in Lent - March 17, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen
The Fifth Sunday in Lent, March 17, 2024

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

In my prayer and preaching this Lent, I’ve been following the throughline of covenant. Our readings have told the story of God’s continual refinement of her covenant, which begins with Noah as the representative of the whole creation (very important that we recover that ecological understanding) and follows through God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah, and then in the giving of the law through Moses on Mt. Sinai. At each point along the way, the people violate this sacred covenantal relationship with God. But rather than abandon them (us), God rejigs the covenant.

This reworking on God’s part is itself a revelation of divine love. God’s promise becomes more and more specific as it moves from the whole creation, symbolized by a beautiful sign in the sky, into the stone tablets of the law. That specificity is meant, not as a prison for human agency, but as a grace that can lead to our freedom. 

Infected as we are with a radical protestant reading of Paul, we have often come to view the law, and therefore the covenant, as a dead thing in opposition to the living spirit. But, of course, our Jewish ancestors in the faith knew, just as our Jewish siblings still know, that the law and the covenant that it represents was and is a means of grace, a beautiful and life-giving doorway into the full flowering of the life of God. If they and we know the law more in its violation than in its keeping, that has everything to do with human frailty—and yet even our failure to keep the law opens us more and more to God’s abundant mercy.

This morning we hear God’s promise, given through Jeremiah, to refine the covenant yet once more: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me.” Where once God made her covenant with one person on behalf of the whole creation, now God promises to write that covenant on every single heart. Where once God mediated the covenant through law written on stone tablets, now God promises to write that law on the tablets of our hearts. Where once the elders conveyed knowledge of God to their people, now God promises to be so close to her people that everyone will know God in the innermost part of their being. God will be closer to us than our own breath, and every heartbeat will whisper her name.

Of course, we know how well that worked out. We have only to look around us at the world we have created to see that even God’s indwelling presence cannot guarantee our virtue. Even written on the tablet of our heart, the law cannot corral this restless human nature of ours. But God’s mercy is such that God chooses to leave us free to choose whether and how to respond to God’s love. So that, whether we conform to God’s way or violate it, we are steeped in mercy.

In her new book Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson writes “The old Christian theologies spoke of felix culpa, the fortunate fall. This is in effect another name for human agency, responsibility, even freedom. If we could do only what God wills, we would not be truly free, though to discern the will of God and act on it is freedom. Our human nature as fallen and our human nature as divine have a dynamic […] relation with each other, meeting at infinity, perhaps.”

Our total freedom to choose either good or evil, life or death, is perhaps God’s greatest mercy to us. Our lives and our choices are not predetermined. Yes, we know that we are all driven by instinctual forces, manipulated by past traumas and the unmet needs of our child selves, shaped by beliefs so deeply held as to be shadows on the wall of our consciousness. And yet, we are not now, nor have we ever been, predetermined or predestined. We are radically, frighteningly, and miraculously free. 

I can say with certainty that it is a miracle some of us are here today worshipping and loving and laughing and singing and not dead or in prison or drugged into oblivion. Because yes, we may be assaulted daily by the shadows of the past and the urges of our unmet longings and the compulsions the advertisers stir up in us, and yet still there remains that quiet tapping on the inner chamber of our hearts, that whisper of a voice that calls our name if get quiet enough to hear it.

Jesus himself offers us this example in this morning’s complex and rich passage from John. It’s one of the few times we hear something of Jesus’ inner thoughts. He knows that he is nearing his death and, in that death, the fulfilling of God’s purpose for him. Human as he is, he shows some reticence to accept death. But then he chooses actively to surrender himself to God’s will. That choice is not incidental. It is everything! Jesus has a choice. Like us, he has total freedom to walk away. Without that freedom, his obedience to God would be a puppet show, and his death and resurrection would mean nothing at all. His radical freedom—and ours—are the fountain from which the living waters of God’s love flow into our hearts. 

We might wonder how Jesus comes to be able to surrender himself to God’s purpose. The clue is in the voice from heaven. Each time that voice has echoes in the scriptures, it proclaims God’s love for Jesus, calling him the beloved child—first at his baptism and then at his transfiguration. By now it would see the mere echo of God’s voice in the thunder above him reminds Jesus of who and whose he is. And like the voice of a loving parent, God’s voice settles Jesus enough to choose once more the path of self-giving love.

This is the kind of obedience to which God calls us—not slavish or begrudging or tepid—but born from the sure knowledge that God loves us and wills for us our salvation and our healing. God desires nothing less than to drive the ruler of this world from our hearts and our lives, so that, like Jesus, we can lay down our lives for the world in radical and miraculous freedom. We can think of obedience as a chore, some kind of boring or difficult task that we know we need to do but would rather not. But the very fact that we can obey is itself God’s grace to us, the freedom of the children of God written on the flesh of our hearts.

I know that our lives are challenging. Often they’re boring, too. Sometimes they’re painful. And sometimes, hopefully more and more as we grow in Christ, our lives shine out with the radiance of God’s love and we hear in the thunder above us the reassurance that yes, we, too, are God’s beloved children. Our lives, in all their complexity, are God’s grace to us, and we can choose to see and celebrate and cultivate that grace, a freedom that is itself grace and opens the way to more grace. Because the more we learn to recognize God’s mercy to us, the more we come to see that everything, absolutely everything is grace. It is a miracle to be alive, my brothers and sisters. You are God’s miracle and God’s promise. 

Sunday, March 10, 2024

The Fourth Sunday in Lent - March 10, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Samuel Kennedy
The Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 10, 2024

 

Click here for an audio of the sermon



I found today’s Gospel passage to be a challenging one to work with.  It contains some of Jesus’ most well-known words — words that are beautiful, gentle, and hopeful.  But, if you are like me, it’s hard to hear them afresh and anew, given how they’ve made a near ubiquitous appearance at every major sporting event in this country for at least as long as I’ve been alive, and are so often coopted by troubled and challenging theologies of salvation.  While I don’t think one homily, especially one I’ve written, is going to be able to free this passage from its complicated cultural reception history, I hope we can even momentarily experience it for the breath of fresh, life-giving air it was intended to be.

Jesus begins this portion of his discourse with Nicodemus in a bit of a strange place — with a reference to the first lesson we heard read this morning — a relatively obscure story from the book of Numbers. In our Gospel lesson, we heard Jesus say, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

The passage from Numbers places us in the middle of the wilderness after the children of Israel’s liberation from slavery in Egypt. The people were exhausted, tired, and not shy about expressing their discontent.  “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die in this wilderness, without fresh food or water, and the food we’ve got to eat is just miserable.”  In the story as told in Numbers, God gets irritated with the people's complaining and grumbling and sends a plague of venomous serpents among them.  The serpents bite, injure, and kill many of the people.  As their suffering mounts, the people begin to beg Moses for forgiveness, and what God tells Moses to do, to free the people from their suffering — is fascinating. God tells Moses to create a serpent of bronze an image of the agent of their suffering, and if the people would but look upon the image, they would find healing and relief.  
Now the concept we see playing out in this text seems to be based upon a principle commonly held in many ancient systems of medicine where a small amount of a poisonous or virulent substance would be used to counteract a larger dose of the poison or virulent substance itself.  It’s not entirely dissimilar from the concept of vaccines where, we take a a tiny subset of that which would harm us — perhaps a few unique surface proteins from a virus, if you will, to provide us with protection from overwhelming infection.   

Fine and dandy you say, but why is Jesus referencing this principle when he is explaining the way of salvation to Nicodemus, a leader among the Pharisees?
Chapter 3 of the Gospel of John opens with Jesus describing the path of conversion as a process of rebirth.  This metaphor was understandably confusing to Nicodemus, so Jesus tried again here, to describe how the way of salvation he was proclaiming worked.

“Just as Moses lifted the serpent in the wilderness, so must the son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.  For God loved the world in this way, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him, will not perish, but have everlasting life.”  

It’s a condensed soteriology to be sure.  But before we can discuss the nature of the cure, it would be good to remind ourselves of the malady — the fiery serpents —  we are being delivered from.

A crisis of belonging has “ailed” us since the dawn of our human story — this sense of estrangement that is coupled with a longing to belong —to belong within our community, with our God, and with ourselves.    We see these tensions echoed in our sacred texts as early as the story of Adam and Eve.  A fundamental challenge that we have is that we seem to be nearly hard-wired to conceive of belonging as a limited resource, and we tend to turn our efforts to obtain that limited resource into a zero-sum competition with those around us.
One of philosopher RenĂ© Girard’s key insights was that we humans tend to build social cohesion — our sense of belonging — on the back of exclusion. And these dynamics work themselves out no matter how large or how small the community is — be it as large as a nation state or as small as a family, or a group of friends.  As rivalry and competition grow within the community (along with their attendant social tensions and, in some cases, violence) human societies will often select a scapegoat —a person or group who is blamed for the turmoil and conflicts within the community. The scapegoat becomes the target for all of that collective blame and hostility, and is often subjected to violence or expulsion as a means of purging the community of its tensions and conflicts.  

This often happens subconsciously, but the striking thing is that this process works — at least temporarily.  For a season, social cohesion and sense of safety in belonging are restored, but in the long run, this mechanism only perpetuates cycles of violence, as the social order, the “sense of safe belonging,” is maintained via cycles of ritual expulsion and violence.  The irony of building community by this mechanism is that one is never actually ever safe — subconsciously we all know that we might find ourselves selected for expulsion at the next round of sacrifice— and this leads to deep, subconscious anxiety at both the group and individual levels.

And we participate, I participate, in these patterns of scapegoating and sacrifice all the time.

“The Gospels show us that Jesus understands this mechanism,” of inclusion via exclusion; (Allison, 152-153) of maintaining social cohesion and order through expulsion, and Jesus understands that the religious and political structures of this world depend on this mechanism and therefore often unconsciously shore up these sacrificial cycles.  Through his life and ministry, Jesus lures the mechanism and these institutions into behaving according to their usual patterns, and that, predictably, gets him killed.  He dies a death of shame and suffering on the edges of the City —lifted high on the beams of a cross.  
Jesus dies, as countless others have and will continue to die — alone, expelled, and rejected. In fact, even at his death he’s surrounded by two others suffering a fate the same as his— a death on the fringes of society, having been sacrificed to the idols of shaky social cohesion and fragile political peace.
But Jesus endures this precisely in order to reveal that the whole exercise is unnecessary — to reveal to us that there exists the possibility of another way of being together. With Jesus’ reference to the story of the fiery serpents, it’s as if he is saying, “My death is going to look like the very thing that plagues you — it is going to look like one more ritual expulsion, one more sacrifice,” but, this time, because the Victim is the very wellspring of life himself, his death strips the sacrificial system of its imagined divine imprimatur allowing it to begin to wither from the roots up.

“For God loved the world in this way, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him, will not perish, but have everlasting [overflowing, abundant] life.”  

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

The only One who very rightly could judge us and condemn us via exclusion has done precisely the opposite. Instead of excluding us, he has instead welcomed us into a state of beloved belonging that is grounded securely in the unending flow of the life and love of the Trinity.
We are welcomed into the light of beloved belonging.  

As verse 21 reminds us, it is a bright, revealing light — a light where we are seen for who we are, faults and all, the good, the bad, and the ugly.  But what this light most clearly reveals is just how deeply we are loved.  And because it is the light of beloved belonging, we can stand in that light with hope and rest and freedom from fear.  And now that we are set free from the need to cast others out to secure our own place in this community, we can instead, stand like Jesus did with outstretched arms inviting others off of the sacrificial altars of our own making and into this marvelous light of beloved belonging.  If that isn’t a life that pulsates with the rhythms of eternity, I don’t know what is.
So the next time we see John 3:16 emblazoned on a placard behind home plate, may we remember that we, the real us, the us with all our faults and imperfections stand in that eternal light of beloved belonging and what it reveals most clearly is just how deeply we are loved.

Sunday, March 3, 2024

The Third Sunday in Lent - March 3, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky
The Third Sunday in Lent, March 3, 2024

 

Click here for an audio of the sermon


Growing up in a Catholic tradition which expected regular confession, generally monthly, starting at about the age of eight, I was introduced to the Ten Commandments not only in what were called catechism classes on Saturday mornings, but also through the practice of the so-called ‘examination of conscience’ which was to precede confession.  The main tool in this practice of examining your life to see ways in which you might have fallen short or fallen into sin was usually through a list of questions based on the Ten Commandments. The list was extensive and at times rather creative. Under one or another of the commandments, all sorts of sins or peccadillos were listed. For example, under the commandment which directed that we do not take the name of the Lord in vain were questions such as: have I cursed or used the name of Jesus in anger or frustration? Or have I made fun of holy things, whether it be a passage of scripture or a liturgical peculiarity. There was a certain usefulness to this exercise, but I came to realize that perhaps these many questions are not the point of the Ten Commandments, and that my anguished personal scrutiny was perhaps like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, focusing as it did on the personal and interpersonal world and pretty much ignoring totally the social, political, economic, or cultural landscape.  And really, how much unnecessary worry did I, at age eight, expend over whether I had indeed committed adultery? 

But if the Ten Commandments are not primarily a guide to personal behavior—and I emphasize the word ‘primarily’—then what is their point? Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann offers one possibility. In a podcast posted[i] earlier this past week online and titled “Strategies for Staying Emancipated” Professor Brueggemann connects the Ten Commandments to the liberation of the Hebrews from generations of slavery in Egypt. God gives the commandments to the Hebrew people through Moses towards the end of their years of wandering in the wilderness after leaving Egypt and they mark the covenant and the beginning their life as a self-defining community. If I may quote:

“… the Ten Commandments are strategies for staying emancipated once you get away from Pharaoh. This new strategy, first of all, says you have to honor God—that’s the first three commandments—to the exclusion of every idol, every “ism” such as racism, or sexism, or nationalism, or the worship of stuff that is rare or precious or attractive or beautiful or empowering.

“The new strategy means in the Ten Commandments to take the neighbor with utmost seriousness. So, the last five commandments are all about the neighbor and treating neighbors with legitimacy and dignity and viability and especially disadvantaged neighbors--not to violate the neighbor for the sake of greed.

“And between these two commandments of honoring God and taking the neighbor seriously, at the center of the Ten Commandments, is Sabbath day.  Keep Sabbath: take a break from the rat race of busyness and exhaustion and do not let Pharaoh define your life.” 

In short, for Brueggemann the Ten Commandments are a survival plan for a recently liberated people.  And long before serving for an individual’s examination of conscience, they are a social and communal document, a clarion call away from a mentality of enslavement toward survival and flourishing as a people, as a nation, as a human family, as God's children.

We could easily spend hours—or a lifetime—examining the way this plays out concretely in our shared existence. The demand to have no other God, no idol, but solely the God who liberates is a reminder that we are tempted to seek our security in what will never make for safety or for human thriving in the long run. As Brueggemann says, we are tempted to all sorts of isms. But only in understanding ourselves as journeying under the hand and eye of a liberating God will we find the security we yearn for. And by “we” I mean everyone. And the demand to treat our neighbor with integrity, to honor and preserve life and that which makes life sustainable, the demand to honor relationships and commitments, and the demand to not be enslaved by our desires are the very stuff that makes a healthy human society possible. As is the establishment of Sabbath rest that is not so much about worship as it is about refusing to be enslaved to the ethic of Pharaoh who demanded work 24/7 of his Hebrew conscripts.

All three elements, all three kinds of commandments, are necessary if this is to work. We need to be rooted and grounded in a liberating and loving God, in a transcendent vision and reality, if we're not to ignore our responsibilities to our neighbors and to ourselves. And to do this, we need time—Sabbath time—time to step back and see how this working out, time to catch our breath, and remembering that everyone else is a free person deserving of that same rest. Again, to quote Brueggemann: “These commands might be taken not as a series of rules, but as a proclamation in God's own mouth of who God is and how God shall be ‘practiced’ by this community of liberated slaves."[ii]  And we are all liberated slaves.

Yet another commentator notes that these very terse, very pointed commandments, these directives, need to be fleshed out. They're more like social policy statements than detailed action plans. Our task as human beings and as people of faith is to determine how we apply them to form societies or cultures where people can grow and flourish and where we can shape our own life within that container. There is a long history of case law or casuistry based on the Commandments. You have only to skim the next few chapters of Exodus to see example after example. And if we are awake, we are faced with its challenges daily. How do we apply the commandments in our own day? What, for example, does bearing false witness mean in a society such as ours where “truthiness” has become a substitute for truth and where fake news inundates us. What does stealing or killing or adultery mean in a society and a world where people are denied dignity, and the material means to live a dignified life, and respect for the integrity of commitments and relationships which are its foundation? And just what is coveting anyway? It has taken me a few decades to wrap my mind around that. I now understand it not as simply being attracted to someone or something but becoming fixated on it and obsessed by it, wanting it so bad that you’re willing to do almost anything to obtain it.  Our commandment doesn’t resolve this dynamic for us, of course, but it may serve to warn us: “Watch out!  You’re on shaky ground. This is not the path that leads to life, but to death.”  And not only us but our culture with its emphasis on having, using, possessing no matter what the cost and no matter what the consequences. And just so with all the commandments.

We began this morning's Eucharist with a penitential order where we heard what is often called the Summary of the Law. They are the words of Jesus as reported in Saint Mark’s gospel, though they are not original with him: “The first commandment is this: Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is the only Lord. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself.  There is no other commandment greater than these.”   How true it is that in the end all the commandments, all the advice, all the ethical guidelines, all the rules and goodwill come down to this: You shall love. You shall love God. You shall love your neighbor. As the rabbis would say, the rest is commentary and application.

And our work is cut out for us.

Amen.



[i] https://day1.org/weekly-broadcast/5d9b820ef71918cdf2004215/walter_brueggemann_strategies_for_staying_emancipated?fbclid=IwAR15SUSjvUPndG8baHs3pHwSwYXvpPSl7jthFQxUuLZ4T8Dy-5lsPjKyCJI

[ii] The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 1 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1964), p. 841