Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Scott Wesley Borden, OHC
RCL - Christmas 1 - Sunday 28 December 2008
Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7
John 1:1-18
If you listen to ads for companies like Kodak and Hallmark, they will tell you that Christmas is a time for making memories... Of course what they really mean is that Christmas is a time for buying lots of their stuff to mark and store those memories.
Christmas is certainly a time for memories, of remembering - but that remembering is not limited to the sentimentality of cards and photos.
We remember friends and loved ones with gifts, we remember the poor and needy with love and charity, we remember joyful times past and painful times past. Most of all we remember the coming of Jesus - God among us - the Word in human flesh living among us.
I’m not quite enough of a Scrooge to say X-Boxes and greetings cards have no place in Christmas. But I do believe that a pile of stuff stuffed under a tree distorts our idea of what it means to give just as Kodak Moments distort what it means to remember.
We’ve developed a rather literal and linear concept of remembering. Perfect memory gets all the details in all the right spots with all the right implications. Fond memories - well for those we know we’re making little adjustments to reality... softening up the hard edges - but that’s OK... its still linear and literal.
Our literal, linear approach to memory isn’t the only way of remembering. Its certainly not the ancient way of remembering.
Remembering, in some sense, is the opposite of dismembering. It’s the putting together of things, people, times, events... Dismembering is destructive; Remembering is constructive, even creative.
Our modern literal and linear approach to remembering greatly inhibits the constructive and creative possibilities. A literal and linear approach to remembering is no more helpful or healthy than a literal and linear approach to scripture.
The Celtic peoples had a wonderfully rich way of remembering that involved creativity and artistry. The Celts, for example, remember dialogues between people like St Patrick and Jesus. Its almost laughable from a literal-linear perspective. Patrick and Jesus lived centuries apart and in very different parts of the globe. But surely Patrick was, in some sense, in dialogue with Jesus. So why not remember it?
The Gospels give us a bit of a push not to be too literal and linear in our remembering of the birth of Jesus. Matthew and Luke both tell the story - except they don’t tell the same story. In Matthew, Jesus is born at home. There is an astrological event - a star. And the mysterious Magi who come from a distant land bringing exotic gifts. In Luke Jesus is born on the road, as it were. Mary and Joseph are traveling. We have a stable and a manger and shepherds. Its quite common to have shepherds and kings gather around the manger. Our kings are making their way to the creche even at this moment. But in the literal, linear world, those Kings will never arrive that creche. The shepherds and wise men will never meet - any more than St Patrick and Jesus meet...
I think the Gospelers are giving us permission to remember the story as we need to, not to try to reconstruct it as ancient history.
Now, more than at any other time of year, we remember that Jesus, the Word of God, takes on human flesh and dwells with us. Its not a long past, locked-in-time, linear memory. Our encounter with God in human flesh is a real re-membering; a living relationship. And as we all know, relationships take work.
The sweet simplicity of Greeting Card spirituality and Kodak Moment memories will not support a rich and deep relationship - not with our loved ones, and certainly not with Emmanuel - God with us.
The Gospels are revolutionary - and remembering them sentimentally takes the revolution right out. Matthew and Luke begin their revolutionary talk at the moment of Jesus’ birth. We remember shepherds and wise men...
We need to remember that this little child at the center of it all could claim the same divine birthright as the emperor. This little child with no money and no power, exceeds the mightiest ruler of the most powerful empire on Earth. Remembering that faithfully and actively will inevitably put us in conflict with the social, industrial, political, and economic empires of our day.
But today we’re remembering John. John begins his revolution a little differently. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...” well that leaves me scratching my head a bit, but it doesn’t seem too revolutionary.
“He was in the world... yet the world knew him not.” Nothing revolutionary there - just a sad fact that is arguably as true now as it was 2000 years ago.
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us... The law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus.” Well there is a revolution... a revolution of grace and truth rather than a revolution of power and might.
How do we remember this revolution - how do we put it together in our lives and our time?
That is the question at the center of being a follower of Jesus. How do we live out the Gospel? How do we honor our baptismal covenant? If we are looking for simple, easy to follow, step by step instructions, we better find another Gospel... and a different God.
A revolution of grace and truth... I find that I can’t remember grace without also remembering forgiveness. By God’s grace I am saved and by that grace I am led to God’s kingdom - not in some future way, but in a re-membering way. God’s grace re-members my life here and now. God’s grace teaches my heart to sing and releases me from fear, and allows me to see things I would otherwise be blind to, to borrow from a well loved hymn.
And I find that I can’t remember truth without remembering justice - because truth requires justice, while injustice requires lies. Just take a little time today to think about a few of the lies we tell in order to rationalize injustice.
The world in which God took on human flesh was a troubled world, a violent world. Jesus calls us to follow - that sounds nice until we remember that Jesus was executed by the state. Remembering the birth of Christ is a revolutionary and dangerous act.
We still live in a troubled world, a world filled with darkness, violence, deceit, and despair, but a Christmas built around remembering suffering and heartbreak is not going to be popular. “O Come All ye faithful. Suffer with the suffering. Bleed with the wounded. Cry with the brokenhearted”
A Christmas built around misery and strife is not true to the Gospel - the good news.
Jesus doesn’t call us to suffer. Jesus calls us to heal suffering. Jesus doesn’t call us to be afflicted. Jesus calls us to heal the afflicted; to protect the week; to visit the sick and the imprisoned. That is what Christmas is - the re-membering of our selves as the Body of Christ. The re-membering of this world with the grace and truth that come from our relationship with Jesus, the living God.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Thursday, December 25, 2008
RCL - Christmas Eve - Wed 24 Dec 2008
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHCRCL - Christmas Midnight Mass - Wed 24 December, 2008
Isaiah 9:2-7
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14
"Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace among those whom he favors!"
This is the first Christmas since 1992 that I have not overseen a Christmas pageant as a parish priest. The young participants in Christmas pageants always range from the enthusiastic, who want their parts, who look forward to them, who learn their lines and where to stand and what to do, to those who are basically conscripted, by domestic forces one does not oneself wish to witness, and whose dramatic presence is no less interesting to the observer for being coerced. There is nothing quite as wonderful as watching a sullen nine year old shepherd torn between the desire to look as bored as possible or actually break loose and shock, and the desire to reach home in one piece. Bless them all.
But since this is my first all-adult Christmas in 17 years, please indulge me a bit. I love retelling the story of the manger and the shepherds and the angels and the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes – so much nicer-sounding than bands of20cloth! But tonight I want to tell a story about another first Christmas – the first time Luke’s story was told openly, when it was first published, so to speak. Because that proclamation was a ticking time bomb to the ancient world. Luke’s Gospel is the promise of the real hope of glory and peace. Luke’s Gospel is about power, about ultimacy: what is real, what matters, what the world is about and what the world is for. It is about and for the love of God. It is not about and for politicians, governments, empires, and what the world calls great.
Luke’s gospel was probably published sometime in the mid-70s to the late 80's of the first century of the common era, for a Christian public who would appreciate his mastery of the Greek language. They seem to have been fairly sophisticated people, who knew pretty much what was what. This Gospel was a public proclamation of a new Glory and a new Peace, to proceed from the real ruler of the world, the real Son of the Divine, who was not in any respect like the power that ruled the political world. It is a sophisticated theology of God’s power in an imperial world. It is also a great work of art, clothing a profoundly transforming message in an unforgettable story that everyone who hears it immediately understands at its deepest level.
The Christian gospel was a new gospel, because there was another, secular=2 0and official gospel promulgated by the Roman government. That gospel proclaimed that the Divine Order had bestowed its favor on the imperial regime, which had brought peace and stability and prosperity to the parts of the world fortunate enough to be under its control. And the proper response to that favor was to praise and give glory to the emperor and all he stood for.
Luke starts his story of Jesus’ birth by placing it firmly in the imperial realm. With a reference to the rule of Caesar Augustus, and a display of dignitaries and titles that establish a governmental aura to the story, he makes the connection to the world of imperial authority clear. With the mention of Augustus, the first emperor, most hearers of that era would bring to mind the name of the present emperor, and then perhaps reflect on the ups and downs of imperial rule since its establishment a century or more before. They might reflect that the glory of the imperial state was a peace bought at a staggeringly high price by brutality and cunning in equal parts by Augustus and maintained by his successors, the decent emperors, Tiberius (mostly) and Claudius, and the mad emperors, Caligula and Nero. Their dynasty collapsed amid the confusion of the years 68-69, when four emperors reigned after Nero was driven from Rome.
The current ruling family of the 70's and 80's and 90's, contemporary with Luke’s Gospel, was a family whose name w as Flavius. The Flavians were brought to the throne by their successful prosecution of the war against the Jews. Their victory in Judea was the single most traumatic event in Jewish history until the Holocaust: The conquest of Jerusalem and the capture and destruction of the Temple ended forever the immemorial sacrificial worship offered by Israel to God. The Flavian steps to the throne were through pools of Jewish blood. The imperial regime of Vespasian and his sons had devastated both ancient Judaism and incipient Christianity.
There were three of these Flavian emperors. Vespasian was by all accounts a great general, a competent emperor, and a good old boy from the country with a mind like a steel trap, like so many successful despots. He was succeeded by his two sons, Titus, whom many thought gracious and who died too soon, and the paranoid Domitian, whose madness and cruelty the historian Suetonius tells us was such that “At the beginning of his reign, he used to retire into a secret place for one hour every day, and there do nothing else but catch flies, and stick them through the body with a sharp pin.” Before long it would not just be flies. He covered the walls and floors of his palace with marble polished like mirrors so he could see if someone was trying to kill him. He liked to start his letters with the salutation, “Our lord and god commands so and so.”
If y ou ever saw the emperor, you would shout Doxa! Glory! You would publicly praise the peace that his family had brought, even if that peace was bought at the price of the disappearance of your nation, your family, and your hopes. But not everyone was convinced. I can just hear the desolated Jews and Christians, still mourning the loss of the Temple, muttering to themselves when out of earshot, as yet another imperial rescript is read, the first century equivalent of “Some lord. Some god.”
But Luke’s account of power is entirely different. The angel’s proclamation is Glory and Peace. Not glory to emperors, but to the one who makes, and unmakes, emperors. And the angel makes this announcement not to the rich and powerful who are called to witness the imperial presence, but to shepherds, the lowest class of workers, those who really can’t find much else to do but look after the animals.
Mark’s Gospel uses the word for peace, eirene, only once. Matthew uses it four times. But Luke uses it fourteen times. Peace is a major theme for Luke. The birth of Jesus is the beginning of the restoration of peace, of shalom, not just to Israel, but, in the unfathomable generosity of God, to the whole world, including the Romans and their unspeakable emperors.
Luke’s gospel is a refutation of the theology of the world=2 0of imperial power. The babe whom Mary has brought forth is obscure, by the usual standards illegitimate, poor if not destitute, humble. How many like him have been born, lived and died, only to be forgotten, even after a generation or two by their own families. He is Everychild.
But it is this seemingly ordinary child who is to be the one who bears the real glory. It is from this obscure and humble baby that the real peace is to proceed. It is he, not an emperor or even a family of emperors, who will really transform the world. His peace will come not at the price of tens and hundreds of thousands of deaths and who knows how much desecration and treachery, but at the cost of his own life alone, into whose hands in an hour one morning the imperial regime will pound nails and whose side it will pierce with a lance. His life is the gift freely offered for real peace.
This is real glory. This is real peace. Not the propaganda of a political regime dabbling in its own divinization, but the real thing.
Luke offered then and he offers us now the real hope of Christmas. I think those who heard Luke’s Christmas story for the first time would have opened their eyes in joy. I think they would have understood Mary’s prophetic role. I think they would have understood Joseph’s heroic and necessary nurture of this new and fragile li fe, even at the risk of his own honor as a husband and as a man. I think they would have understood why God chose the outcasts of the working world to be the human audience for the great inbreaking event of the transformation of the world. I think they would have understood why it was in a stable and not in a palace, why it happened on the road to people trying honestly to obey some incomprehensible bureaucratic regulation, as all ordinary people have to do. Most of all I think they would have understood who this story was aimed at, and why.
How wonderful that God, who made the world from nothing, can bring to nothing the pretensions of an empire. How wonderful that this baby, who seems at first to be nothing, can be the beginning of the real Peace, the real Glory.
Br. Adam McCoy, OHCRCL - Christmas Midnight Mass - Wed 24 December, 2008
Isaiah 9:2-7
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14
"Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace among those whom he favors!"
This is the first Christmas since 1992 that I have not overseen a Christmas pageant as a parish priest. The young participants in Christmas pageants always range from the enthusiastic, who want their parts, who look forward to them, who learn their lines and where to stand and what to do, to those who are basically conscripted, by domestic forces one does not oneself wish to witness, and whose dramatic presence is no less interesting to the observer for being coerced. There is nothing quite as wonderful as watching a sullen nine year old shepherd torn between the desire to look as bored as possible or actually break loose and shock, and the desire to reach home in one piece. Bless them all.
But since this is my first all-adult Christmas in 17 years, please indulge me a bit. I love retelling the story of the manger and the shepherds and the angels and the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes – so much nicer-sounding than bands of20cloth! But tonight I want to tell a story about another first Christmas – the first time Luke’s story was told openly, when it was first published, so to speak. Because that proclamation was a ticking time bomb to the ancient world. Luke’s Gospel is the promise of the real hope of glory and peace. Luke’s Gospel is about power, about ultimacy: what is real, what matters, what the world is about and what the world is for. It is about and for the love of God. It is not about and for politicians, governments, empires, and what the world calls great.
Luke’s gospel was probably published sometime in the mid-70s to the late 80's of the first century of the common era, for a Christian public who would appreciate his mastery of the Greek language. They seem to have been fairly sophisticated people, who knew pretty much what was what. This Gospel was a public proclamation of a new Glory and a new Peace, to proceed from the real ruler of the world, the real Son of the Divine, who was not in any respect like the power that ruled the political world. It is a sophisticated theology of God’s power in an imperial world. It is also a great work of art, clothing a profoundly transforming message in an unforgettable story that everyone who hears it immediately understands at its deepest level.
The Christian gospel was a new gospel, because there was another, secular=2 0and official gospel promulgated by the Roman government. That gospel proclaimed that the Divine Order had bestowed its favor on the imperial regime, which had brought peace and stability and prosperity to the parts of the world fortunate enough to be under its control. And the proper response to that favor was to praise and give glory to the emperor and all he stood for.
Luke starts his story of Jesus’ birth by placing it firmly in the imperial realm. With a reference to the rule of Caesar Augustus, and a display of dignitaries and titles that establish a governmental aura to the story, he makes the connection to the world of imperial authority clear. With the mention of Augustus, the first emperor, most hearers of that era would bring to mind the name of the present emperor, and then perhaps reflect on the ups and downs of imperial rule since its establishment a century or more before. They might reflect that the glory of the imperial state was a peace bought at a staggeringly high price by brutality and cunning in equal parts by Augustus and maintained by his successors, the decent emperors, Tiberius (mostly) and Claudius, and the mad emperors, Caligula and Nero. Their dynasty collapsed amid the confusion of the years 68-69, when four emperors reigned after Nero was driven from Rome.
The current ruling family of the 70's and 80's and 90's, contemporary with Luke’s Gospel, was a family whose name w as Flavius. The Flavians were brought to the throne by their successful prosecution of the war against the Jews. Their victory in Judea was the single most traumatic event in Jewish history until the Holocaust: The conquest of Jerusalem and the capture and destruction of the Temple ended forever the immemorial sacrificial worship offered by Israel to God. The Flavian steps to the throne were through pools of Jewish blood. The imperial regime of Vespasian and his sons had devastated both ancient Judaism and incipient Christianity.
There were three of these Flavian emperors. Vespasian was by all accounts a great general, a competent emperor, and a good old boy from the country with a mind like a steel trap, like so many successful despots. He was succeeded by his two sons, Titus, whom many thought gracious and who died too soon, and the paranoid Domitian, whose madness and cruelty the historian Suetonius tells us was such that “At the beginning of his reign, he used to retire into a secret place for one hour every day, and there do nothing else but catch flies, and stick them through the body with a sharp pin.” Before long it would not just be flies. He covered the walls and floors of his palace with marble polished like mirrors so he could see if someone was trying to kill him. He liked to start his letters with the salutation, “Our lord and god commands so and so.”
If y ou ever saw the emperor, you would shout Doxa! Glory! You would publicly praise the peace that his family had brought, even if that peace was bought at the price of the disappearance of your nation, your family, and your hopes. But not everyone was convinced. I can just hear the desolated Jews and Christians, still mourning the loss of the Temple, muttering to themselves when out of earshot, as yet another imperial rescript is read, the first century equivalent of “Some lord. Some god.”
But Luke’s account of power is entirely different. The angel’s proclamation is Glory and Peace. Not glory to emperors, but to the one who makes, and unmakes, emperors. And the angel makes this announcement not to the rich and powerful who are called to witness the imperial presence, but to shepherds, the lowest class of workers, those who really can’t find much else to do but look after the animals.
Mark’s Gospel uses the word for peace, eirene, only once. Matthew uses it four times. But Luke uses it fourteen times. Peace is a major theme for Luke. The birth of Jesus is the beginning of the restoration of peace, of shalom, not just to Israel, but, in the unfathomable generosity of God, to the whole world, including the Romans and their unspeakable emperors.
Luke’s gospel is a refutation of the theology of the world=2 0of imperial power. The babe whom Mary has brought forth is obscure, by the usual standards illegitimate, poor if not destitute, humble. How many like him have been born, lived and died, only to be forgotten, even after a generation or two by their own families. He is Everychild.
But it is this seemingly ordinary child who is to be the one who bears the real glory. It is from this obscure and humble baby that the real peace is to proceed. It is he, not an emperor or even a family of emperors, who will really transform the world. His peace will come not at the price of tens and hundreds of thousands of deaths and who knows how much desecration and treachery, but at the cost of his own life alone, into whose hands in an hour one morning the imperial regime will pound nails and whose side it will pierce with a lance. His life is the gift freely offered for real peace.
This is real glory. This is real peace. Not the propaganda of a political regime dabbling in its own divinization, but the real thing.
Luke offered then and he offers us now the real hope of Christmas. I think those who heard Luke’s Christmas story for the first time would have opened their eyes in joy. I think they would have understood Mary’s prophetic role. I think they would have understood Joseph’s heroic and necessary nurture of this new and fragile li fe, even at the risk of his own honor as a husband and as a man. I think they would have understood why God chose the outcasts of the working world to be the human audience for the great inbreaking event of the transformation of the world. I think they would have understood why it was in a stable and not in a palace, why it happened on the road to people trying honestly to obey some incomprehensible bureaucratic regulation, as all ordinary people have to do. Most of all I think they would have understood who this story was aimed at, and why.
How wonderful that God, who made the world from nothing, can bring to nothing the pretensions of an empire. How wonderful that this baby, who seems at first to be nothing, can be the beginning of the real Peace, the real Glory.
Monday, December 22, 2008
RCL - Advent 4 A - Sun 21 Dec 2008
Mariya uMama weThemba Monastery, Grahamstown, South Africa
Br. John Forbis, OHC
RCL - Advent 4 B - Sunday 21 December 2008
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Romans 16: 25-27
Luke 1: 26-38
For me, this is a nail-biting morning. This season, all the Scripture readings, even the great theological events afterward seem to hinge on this morning. God through Nathan plants the seed of a promise to David of what will the future of his line will be. It is not necessarily about kings enthroned in great palaces but it will be about a lasting dynasty. The Benediction in Romans, possibly not even written by Paul, talks about a mystery that has been kept secret for all this time being revealed, something building up and kept under cover because it is so risky and powerful, everything that all the prophets have been speaking about, all that the Jews have longed for and now broken wide open for the Gentiles, not necessarily the “chosen” ones. All this points toward a young woman probably not older than her teens in a remote village of no account in Galilee called Nazareth. Nothing particularly remarkable about her. She is betrothed to a carpenter. But so much hinges on her actions this morning, even what she says. And under even the most difficult state of affairs – if she were to become pregnant, how could she possibly explain such a situation? who would believe such an outrageous story?
If she came to us today in person and told us this story herself, we would think she were touched, as my mother would politely say, or just plain delusional and possibly even a real threat to herself and society. Even she asks, “How can this be? Why me?” And Gabriel’s answer is even more confounding and astonishing than the initial announcement of her pregnancy. All of the genealogy, the prophesying depends on this -- a nonsensical dialogue between an angel and Mary? And then, Mary agrees to such a strange proposition? Yes, this is rather a delusional season.
Somehow it all seems safer to have me read it to you from a big book from a lectern and then have me to explain to you what I think the passage may mean to us. But I don’t think God wants us to feel that safe this morning. God wants us to be delusional like Mary, even like God himself.
At this time of year, every year, we come back to this story and every year at this time, we have the same violence, the same propping up of our fragile, decrepit, crumbling structures of greed and corruption at the expense of millions dying of war, poverty, disease and starvation. Dictators are still given free reign and lies and hypocrisies abound. Everybody is vying to make claims on something, land, money, power, and they think they are due this, they are entitled to it, they are chosen. And so who’s delusional now?
Mary is not “chosen” by God because she has a claim on something or for any seeming power or importance or entitlement on her part. Here in this village of Nazareth a young woman is visited by an angel and is offered a risky, scandalous, dangerous proposition. As Nathaniel later asks, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
She is chosen to be the bearer of the Son of the Most High not before she says “Yes, here am I. ” Her Yes makes all things possible. Her Yes allows for something new to happen. The echoes resound in the remotest corners of the earth and 2,000 years into the future. Her Yes creates rumblings and vibrations through the centuries of violence and death into now Mumbai, the Middle East, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Guantanamo Bay, the US, South Africa, even Grahamstown and even right here in this church. Because her yes means life and that life will not be overwhelmed, it resounds against the death around us.
It’s easy for me to say I can’t do anything about the world, I can’t make any change happen, but Mary’s yes quakes through my whole living space of 50 hectares and my brief portion of the last 44 years of those 2000 years and a whole new horizon opens up. With God all things will be possible even when I come so close to despair.
Sure my heart gets broken. I am devastated by what I see in this world, what we human beings are capable of destroying. I am tired of reading and hearing about the dearth of compassion and plenitude of self-interest. And I am tired and grieved of the ways I exhibit the same behaviours, my own violence, my own hypocrisy, my own selfishness and self-righteousness. All of this can surround me so much that I feel trapped and can’t act or respond. It becomes my isolation from the world. Despair is just another way of saying No.
But Mary’s Yes can even reach me. And suddenly God takes on form, substance in a womb. God becomes real. God becomes human. God is incarnate in this world. God is surely with us.
I am to live and to believe in the impossible. I could become pregnant with Christ and birth him forth into the world. But God also grants me the freedom to respond one way or the other. God will not do this without my participation. God will even risk my saying No to grant me that freedom.
And perhaps there is the true power of our yes. It comes from within our own heart changed by a God who so desires our free participation in God’s creative delusion or should I say vision.
Among many of Mary’s accolades, she is known as the mother of monks. She teaches us in the assertion of her freedom, no matter how uncertain it may be, how we can surrender to God. She exemplifies our three vows, stability, obedience and conversion to the monastic way of life. Even in the midst of incredible fear, she stays put, listens and allows God to enter into her so that she can bring forth something new, something changed, the Incarnation. But I also look to her for another reason. She does it with such humanity. Even if she doesn’t have all the answers, she is willing to become involved in possibility, in growth, in something which of its outcome no one could possibly imagine. That is what God holds out for all of us as well. Maybe not safe, but certainly life-giving because that is what is promised to us from the prophets even to now.
So here am I, a naïve, flaky white man from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, itself a rather small dorp in the US, trying to live like a monk in Grahamstown, South Africa. Can anything good come out of Carlisle? Can anything good come out of Grahamstown, South Africa? Can anything good come out of me or you?
Br. John Forbis, OHC
RCL - Advent 4 B - Sunday 21 December 2008
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Romans 16: 25-27
Luke 1: 26-38
For me, this is a nail-biting morning. This season, all the Scripture readings, even the great theological events afterward seem to hinge on this morning. God through Nathan plants the seed of a promise to David of what will the future of his line will be. It is not necessarily about kings enthroned in great palaces but it will be about a lasting dynasty. The Benediction in Romans, possibly not even written by Paul, talks about a mystery that has been kept secret for all this time being revealed, something building up and kept under cover because it is so risky and powerful, everything that all the prophets have been speaking about, all that the Jews have longed for and now broken wide open for the Gentiles, not necessarily the “chosen” ones. All this points toward a young woman probably not older than her teens in a remote village of no account in Galilee called Nazareth. Nothing particularly remarkable about her. She is betrothed to a carpenter. But so much hinges on her actions this morning, even what she says. And under even the most difficult state of affairs – if she were to become pregnant, how could she possibly explain such a situation? who would believe such an outrageous story?
If she came to us today in person and told us this story herself, we would think she were touched, as my mother would politely say, or just plain delusional and possibly even a real threat to herself and society. Even she asks, “How can this be? Why me?” And Gabriel’s answer is even more confounding and astonishing than the initial announcement of her pregnancy. All of the genealogy, the prophesying depends on this -- a nonsensical dialogue between an angel and Mary? And then, Mary agrees to such a strange proposition? Yes, this is rather a delusional season.
Somehow it all seems safer to have me read it to you from a big book from a lectern and then have me to explain to you what I think the passage may mean to us. But I don’t think God wants us to feel that safe this morning. God wants us to be delusional like Mary, even like God himself.
At this time of year, every year, we come back to this story and every year at this time, we have the same violence, the same propping up of our fragile, decrepit, crumbling structures of greed and corruption at the expense of millions dying of war, poverty, disease and starvation. Dictators are still given free reign and lies and hypocrisies abound. Everybody is vying to make claims on something, land, money, power, and they think they are due this, they are entitled to it, they are chosen. And so who’s delusional now?
Mary is not “chosen” by God because she has a claim on something or for any seeming power or importance or entitlement on her part. Here in this village of Nazareth a young woman is visited by an angel and is offered a risky, scandalous, dangerous proposition. As Nathaniel later asks, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
She is chosen to be the bearer of the Son of the Most High not before she says “Yes, here am I. ” Her Yes makes all things possible. Her Yes allows for something new to happen. The echoes resound in the remotest corners of the earth and 2,000 years into the future. Her Yes creates rumblings and vibrations through the centuries of violence and death into now Mumbai, the Middle East, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Guantanamo Bay, the US, South Africa, even Grahamstown and even right here in this church. Because her yes means life and that life will not be overwhelmed, it resounds against the death around us.
It’s easy for me to say I can’t do anything about the world, I can’t make any change happen, but Mary’s yes quakes through my whole living space of 50 hectares and my brief portion of the last 44 years of those 2000 years and a whole new horizon opens up. With God all things will be possible even when I come so close to despair.
Sure my heart gets broken. I am devastated by what I see in this world, what we human beings are capable of destroying. I am tired of reading and hearing about the dearth of compassion and plenitude of self-interest. And I am tired and grieved of the ways I exhibit the same behaviours, my own violence, my own hypocrisy, my own selfishness and self-righteousness. All of this can surround me so much that I feel trapped and can’t act or respond. It becomes my isolation from the world. Despair is just another way of saying No.
But Mary’s Yes can even reach me. And suddenly God takes on form, substance in a womb. God becomes real. God becomes human. God is incarnate in this world. God is surely with us.
I am to live and to believe in the impossible. I could become pregnant with Christ and birth him forth into the world. But God also grants me the freedom to respond one way or the other. God will not do this without my participation. God will even risk my saying No to grant me that freedom.
And perhaps there is the true power of our yes. It comes from within our own heart changed by a God who so desires our free participation in God’s creative delusion or should I say vision.
Among many of Mary’s accolades, she is known as the mother of monks. She teaches us in the assertion of her freedom, no matter how uncertain it may be, how we can surrender to God. She exemplifies our three vows, stability, obedience and conversion to the monastic way of life. Even in the midst of incredible fear, she stays put, listens and allows God to enter into her so that she can bring forth something new, something changed, the Incarnation. But I also look to her for another reason. She does it with such humanity. Even if she doesn’t have all the answers, she is willing to become involved in possibility, in growth, in something which of its outcome no one could possibly imagine. That is what God holds out for all of us as well. Maybe not safe, but certainly life-giving because that is what is promised to us from the prophets even to now.
So here am I, a naïve, flaky white man from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, itself a rather small dorp in the US, trying to live like a monk in Grahamstown, South Africa. Can anything good come out of Carlisle? Can anything good come out of Grahamstown, South Africa? Can anything good come out of me or you?
Sunday, December 21, 2008
RCL - Advent 4 B - 21 Dec 2008
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
RCL - Advent 4 B - Sunday 21 December 2008
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Romans 16:25-27
Luke 1:26-38
L'angélus - 1857-1859 - Jean-François Millet - Musée d'Orsay, Paris
The Annunciation - contemporary - John Collier
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
RCL - Advent 4 B - Sunday 21 December 2008
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Romans 16:25-27
Luke 1:26-38
L'angélus - 1857-1859 - Jean-François Millet - Musée d'Orsay, ParisThis morning at 7:04 a.m., at just about the time we were finishing the recitation of the Venite here in the chapel and repeating its lovely antiphon: “Our King and Savior now draws near, Come let us worship. Alleluia,” we were experiencing an astronomical event, though most of us were quite likely unaware of it. It was, of course, the moment of the winter solstice, that point in the yearly cycle of our solar system when (at least in our northern hemisphere) the sun's path reaches its lowest and most northward arc across the skies. The night is at its longest, the day is at its shortest and everything seems to come to a stop or a complete halt.
That’s the literal meaning of the word solstice — the sun stopping — reminiscent of what Joshua (or more accurately, God) accomplished. Or what any ordinary swimmer swimming laps or runner running an old-fashioned relay must do before reversing directions. He or she must come to a complete stop, if only for a nanosecond, before turning around and returning home. St. Basil tells us that this is a wonderful image of the path of conversion. Like the sun in the heavens or the Prodigal Son in the Gospel, we must all at some point stop before we can reverse the direction of our lives.
And it’s often this very simple but critical act of stopping which is most difficult and most unavailable to us. Can’t we just keep on going? But as much as we would wish otherwise, life is in fact radically discontinuous. It is punctuated by repeated moments of stopping, of braking, of reversal, and of change, more often like a quantum leap than a smooth bell curve. It can feel that way with the times and seasons of our lives. Welcome winter!
So much of our celebration of the Advent season and of Christmas is shaped culturally by this astronomical occurrence of the winter solstice, with its ready-made natural symbols of life and death, darkness and light, cold and warmth, activity and quiet that we associate with these days... not to mention the secular overlay of snowmen, elves, evergreens, holly, poinsettias, food and gift-giving… these latter two are obviously more deeply symbolic and sacramental than, say, Frosty or the Little Drummer Boy.
I remember my first Christmas as a Novice in Southern California. I wasn’t sure if it would be possible for me to celebrate Christmas with palm trees and an outdoor brunch. I discovered to my relief, however, that it was quite possible, thank you very much, in part because the day was still the shortest of the year and the dark was still as dark, though the temperature might be in the high 70’s.
But what, I’ve wondered, would it be like in, say, New Zealand or at our monastery in Grahamstown, South Africa, where even this association of darkness is removed and Christmas is right at the height of summer, and the daylight is at its most ample and where the preferred social activity for those who can manage it is a week at the beach. Think: Christmas in July. Where would my attention go? My body? My heart? My devotion?
I would hope it might go right back to this very familiar passage from St. Luke’s Gospel read this morning throughout the Christian world, back to this wonderful, mystic, mythic, layered, compelling, gentle story of the Annunciation which informs our theology and shapes our devotional and spiritual lives in ways that are both insistent and subtle. A woman, an angel, a pregnancy… a mystery. It’s pretty primal stuff, just like that related story of the woman, the serpent and the tree that we heard Sr. Hildegard read so beautifully last Sunday (at the monastery's Lessons & Carols service - editor's note).
Perhaps the most insistent and subtle way this shaping or formation happens for us — or at least for me— is the practice we have in the monastery of ringing the Angelus three times a day, calling to mind today’s Gospel story. It is admittedly not an ancient practice — perhaps five or six hundred years old — but there is a certain timelessness to it. If it didn’t exist, we might be forced to invent it.
All of us here are familiar with the practice. Three times a day — morning, midday and evening — we chime the tower bell in a rather complicated set of three sets of three followed by nine. And, as we also know, there are certain traditional texts connected to the ringing, the first two of which come (more or less) straight from today’s Gospel:
“The angel of the Lord brought tidings to Mary…and she conceived by the Holy Spirit.”
“Mary said: Behold I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
“The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”
Some people add the recitation of the prayer Hail Mary between each verse. Personally I find that way too many words.
The whole brief devotion then concludes with the Collect for the feast of the Annunciation: “Pour your grace into our hearts, O Lord, that we who have known the incarnation of your Son Jesus Christ, announced by an angel to the Virgin Mary, may by his Cross and Passion be brought to the glory of his resurrection”…setting today’s Gospel narrative within the great story of Salvation and Redemption from which it takes all its meaning and power and grace.
I love this devotion, this practice, this Angelus.
I love it because it invites me, wherever I may be, whatever I may be doing, to stop and recall that there is always a Bigger Picture and a larger setting than my often very narrow concerns allow. It is a reminder, a regular and (for me) necessary reminder, that God is God and I am not. I might add that I was fortunate to grow up in a city where there were many, many Catholic churches in my neighborhood and so at noon and six p.m. and yes, even at 6:00 a.m., there was a veritable choir of bells for miles around calling me to this awareness long before I could ever articulate it. The only thing sweeter, I think, is the sound of seemingly endless change ringing of an English parish church.
I love this practice because it daily reminds me of the epic sweep of our salvation history: It reminds me of Mary, the daughter descended from King David, through whom we look back to our primal parents and our Jewish heritage. It reminds me Jesus, the eternal Word and Power of God come among us in the flesh. It reminds me of the continuing, loving, saving action of God available and effective in a broken and desperate world. Who of us doesn’t need to be reminded of that daily, even hourly?
But most of all I love the Angelus because it presents in the simplest possible terms the fundamental shape of Christian life. One of my fellow novices, the late Gary Mattson, pointed this out to me years ago — and I have never forgotten it. The structure is always the same: Annunciation, Response, Incarnation. That’s how it happens, over and over again. That’s how it happens to us, to all people. God invites, suggests, encourages, perhaps even commands. We jump at the opportunity… or perhaps drag our feet, ask our questions, consider the costs and maybe squirm a bit. But ultimately — if we are wise, if we are graced, if we’re lucky — we give our consent and, with Mary, we say yes. Then the real mystery happens: God takes on flesh once again, in ways big and small, in ways predictable or stunning, in places most necessary and perhaps most feared. But the pattern is always the same: Annunciation, Response, Incarnation. It’s good to remember when the way appears dim and the going gets rough and life seems complex, because it is.
It’s also good to remember that for most of us, most of the time, the consent asked of us is to small and ordinary acts of faithfulness: the invitation to trust in this circumstance that God will be faithful; the decision to act not out of my fear or suspicion but out of hope; the possibility of risking to be vulnerable with this brother or sister; this opportunity of forgiving or accepting that we are ourselves forgiven; the willingness to fall, to fail, or to be proven the fool because that’s where God seems to be inviting us. Today. Every day.
Here we are, huddled together on this cold and snowy Fourth Sunday of Advent, on the shortest day of the year, invited once again by God. To what? To wait. To hope. To trust. To act. To love. To share. To be just. To just be.
What is it that God is inviting you or me to this morning? What is the Annunciation, the suggestion, the command, the dream today? And how shall we respond? How shall Christ become flesh again in our midst? In our community? In our society? In our hearts?
As short as it is, we have all day to ponder it, all day to pray about it, all day to rejoice in it.
“The angel of the Lord brought tidings to Mary…and she conceived by the Holy Spirit.”
“And the Word became flesh…and dwelt among us.”
Amen.
The Annunciation - contemporary - John CollierThursday, November 27, 2008
The feast of Thanksgiving - Thu 27 Nov 2008
We are thankful for our many blog readers. At today's Eucharist (which means giving thanks), the monks offered the following prayers of gratitude:
Br. Adam, presider - I am grateful for: the wonderful people of The Church of St Edward the Martyr (NYC), and 7 wonderful years as priest there; the House of the Redeemer (NYC) and all its staff, trustees and volunteers; for our Holy Cross community in this time of stress and sorrow; for our monastic vows and life, which make us flexible to meet the future.
Br. Randy, server - I am thankful for a loving and worshipful community of faith and welcome.
B. James, thurifer - I am thankful for the six months I was privileged to live with the community at Mount Calvary, in Santa Barbara, earlier this year; and for the on-going legacy of the Order of the Holy Cross that I, and we, have all inherited from those who have gone before us.
Br. Bede, prior - I give thanks for the gift of monastic vocation, for all God has given to me and demanded from me, and for the gift of this community for companionship in the journey to God.
Br. Ronald, sub-prior - I am thankful for the gift of Life each day.
Br. Robert, superior - I give thanks for the sheer gift of existence. And especially today, for the gift of others with whom to share that existence... for the whole human family (close kin, community, friends, Associates, colleagues, benefactors, strangers) and for the whole created order (plants, insects, birds, fish, reptiles, mammals)... for the whole crazy, buzzing, God-infested lot that is the cosmos. For all that is: Thank you!
Br. Scott, assistant superior - I am thankful beyond words to live the life we live in this beautiful place - most especially for the opportunity to make music in this church. I am thankful that with the help of donors, builders, architect and others, we have been able to make this monastery almost fully accessible - my heart is filled with joy when I see people with limited mobility benefiting from the improvements we have made.
Br. Lary - I give thanks for the survival of the Brothers at Mount Calvary.
Br. Cecil - I give thanks for my family, for my brothers in OHC, for the leaders of our Order, for the staff and residents of Ferncliff nursing home.
Br. Bernard - I am grateful for the bonds of friendship amongst our brethren. I am grateful for the legacy of our departed brothers. I am grateful for the generosity of our many friends. I am grateful for our Mount Calvary Brothers being safe. I am grateful for the challenges and opportunities of difficult times.
Charles, postulant - I am thankful and grateful to live in an intentional community that turns my heart toward God on a daily basis, stretching me to grow in ways I have never conceived before.
Joe, aspirant - I am thankful for the gift of families that found it in their hearts to adopt or foster children. I am thankful for the strength and humility of discernment. I am thankful for the lives of the Brothers that have gone before us.
Guests - our guests added many more thanksgiving of their own.
The presider concluded:
Above all, we give You thanks for the great mercies and promises given to us in Christ Jesus our Lord. To Him be praise and glory, with You, O Father, and the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.
Br. Adam, presider - I am grateful for: the wonderful people of The Church of St Edward the Martyr (NYC), and 7 wonderful years as priest there; the House of the Redeemer (NYC) and all its staff, trustees and volunteers; for our Holy Cross community in this time of stress and sorrow; for our monastic vows and life, which make us flexible to meet the future.
Br. Randy, server - I am thankful for a loving and worshipful community of faith and welcome.
B. James, thurifer - I am thankful for the six months I was privileged to live with the community at Mount Calvary, in Santa Barbara, earlier this year; and for the on-going legacy of the Order of the Holy Cross that I, and we, have all inherited from those who have gone before us.
Br. Bede, prior - I give thanks for the gift of monastic vocation, for all God has given to me and demanded from me, and for the gift of this community for companionship in the journey to God.
Br. Ronald, sub-prior - I am thankful for the gift of Life each day.
Br. Robert, superior - I give thanks for the sheer gift of existence. And especially today, for the gift of others with whom to share that existence... for the whole human family (close kin, community, friends, Associates, colleagues, benefactors, strangers) and for the whole created order (plants, insects, birds, fish, reptiles, mammals)... for the whole crazy, buzzing, God-infested lot that is the cosmos. For all that is: Thank you!
Br. Scott, assistant superior - I am thankful beyond words to live the life we live in this beautiful place - most especially for the opportunity to make music in this church. I am thankful that with the help of donors, builders, architect and others, we have been able to make this monastery almost fully accessible - my heart is filled with joy when I see people with limited mobility benefiting from the improvements we have made.
Br. Lary - I give thanks for the survival of the Brothers at Mount Calvary.
Br. Cecil - I give thanks for my family, for my brothers in OHC, for the leaders of our Order, for the staff and residents of Ferncliff nursing home.
Br. Bernard - I am grateful for the bonds of friendship amongst our brethren. I am grateful for the legacy of our departed brothers. I am grateful for the generosity of our many friends. I am grateful for our Mount Calvary Brothers being safe. I am grateful for the challenges and opportunities of difficult times.
Charles, postulant - I am thankful and grateful to live in an intentional community that turns my heart toward God on a daily basis, stretching me to grow in ways I have never conceived before.
Joe, aspirant - I am thankful for the gift of families that found it in their hearts to adopt or foster children. I am thankful for the strength and humility of discernment. I am thankful for the lives of the Brothers that have gone before us.
Guests - our guests added many more thanksgiving of their own.
The presider concluded:
Above all, we give You thanks for the great mercies and promises given to us in Christ Jesus our Lord. To Him be praise and glory, with You, O Father, and the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
The Feast of James Otis Sargent Huntington - Tue 25 Nov 2008
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
The Feast of Father James Otis Sargent Huntington, OHC, - Tuesday 25 November 2008
Galatians 6:14-18
John 6:34-38
Portrait of our Founder, Father Huntington, OHC
This portrait hung in our Mount Calvary Monastery, Santa Barbara, CA
and was lost to the fire that recently destroyed that monastery
Originally uploaded by Randy OHC
On this day when we remember and celebrate the vision and work of our founder, we take stock of his legacy since his death in 1935. Seventy three years later we ask ourselves how we might boast of our Order’s accomplishments and achievements.
We boast in having a founder who envisioned an army of young men joining the Order with a passionate desire for prayer and an eager zeal for mission work. What is the reality? Well, we’re not exactly an army and not entirely young. Our community’s median age is almost 70 and the most pressing issue of the next several years will be elder care. We face the challenges of aging, the realization that many brothers are no longer able to function at their peak, and the pressures on the young able-bodied to take up their work.
We boast in a founder who envisioned monks helping plant and nurture Episcopal schools, missions, and churches that would worship God and serve the needs of their local communities. How are we doing as a denomination? According to Episcopal Church statistics, average Sunday attendance between 2002 and 2007 dropped an average of 381 persons a week. That’s losing a year’s worth of guests in the guest house every ten weeks. Active baptized membership was just above 2,350,000 in 1996 and was, at the end of 2007, 2,100,000. There were 7,305 parishes and missions in 2002, 7,055 at the end of 2007.
We boast that Fr. Huntington envisioned a community life that respected differences, valued listening, shared leadership, and strived for consensus in decision-making - a model of community that could become a witness to the wider church. How are we doing as an Anglican Communion? Four dioceses of the Episcopal Church have voted to leave the denomination in the past few months out of deep disagreement over its direction and theology. Sides are being chosen and battle lines are being drawn. Name-calling, blaming, inhibition and litigation are daily occurrences as fractures deepen - and this behavior in the same church that has prided itself on diversity of ideas and theology around a common life of worship.
And as we learn of departures, deaths and consolidations within the communities of our fellow religious in CAROA, we are drawn to wonder whether we’re becoming extinct, whether monasteries are becoming quaint museums rather than places of witness and transformation. What Fr. Huntington and others saw in the late 19th century as the beginning of a great new movement within Anglicanism by many standards of measurement is fading and dying.
It’s clear from this simple bit of fact-checking that we live in a time of profound institutional change at every level. The traditions and structures most of us grew up with are eroding and shifting. Denominational loyalty is fading. Young Christians are less concerned about the name on the door of the church than with whether the people strive to follow Christ faithfully. Every church is competing in the free market. If a community’s life and worship are rote, routine, dry, and lifeless, it will die. If it is passionate, vibrant, and built on authentic relationships, it will thrive and grow. Spiritual hunger is still innately human, however. Many unchurched are asking the big questions of faith more loudly and seriously than ever:” Is real community, meaning, commitment, and love still to be found in this world of so much hypocrisy and religious lip-service?” Does anyone really live out what they preach? Can faith, can monasteries, still be relevant and important to the next generation? Do we as representatives of the Christian tradition have anything to say, anything to offer people looking for purpose and meaning? Dare we ask for hope and guidance in these trying times?
Evelyn Underhill wrote in the early 20th century:
To boast in the cross is to live the cross-bearing life. It is to examine our hearts and minds for any thought, word, or action of apathy or decadence. It is to continually ask God and each other “What is still waiting to be converted in me? What needs to be crucified in me?” The temptation is to fit in, to be a group of nice brothers living in a nice place welcoming nice people who do nice things, smug in our own enlightened sophistication, careful neither to offend nor inspire. Our lives should be a screaming no to apathy and decadence by constantly reminding ourselves that there is more to life - a deeper community, a wider mercy, a fuller joy, a greater freedom, a darker mystery in this call, in this gift of life which we live.
We are rebels, whether we like it or not; our work is a work of revolt. We revolt when we continue to point each other and our guests to the cross. We revolt when we resist the temptation to boast in our own works. We revolt when we keep before us this act of love, our salvation and our challenge, our life and our example. We appeal to the deeper hunger and mystery at the core of every person. We are called to live and proclaim the cross as the center of the world, the tree of life and hope, especially when the illusions of the age and its form of security shift and crack, revealing their folly. People come here because at some level they long for God in their lives. The sacrifice of our own wills and desires, our revolt against every illusion of cheap happiness and instant gratification reminds us and proclaims to them that life, real life, is offered to us if we would simply choose it. By the commitment to let be crucified in us what leads to death, we live St. Paul’s hope, Fr. Huntington’s vision in the world of today - a world that needs the message of the cross more than ever. We’ve been through some traumatic losses and changes in the past several weeks. More losses and changes await us in the future. But through them all we know where our boasting belongs. When brothers come and go, when others die, when houses are closed or burn down, the cross is our hope. When churches decline, dioceses leave, bishops bicker, the cross is our vision. When money is tight, when tasks are too many and sleep is too little, the cross is our strength.
I began by boasting, or at least attempting to boast, in what we have done, and how great we are, and how neat it is that we are monks in the Order of the Holy Cross. But such nonsense is as silly as boasting in our circumcision like the Galatians!
Our boast is not in the triumph of our opinions, but the cross.
Our boast is not in our systems and traditions, but the cross.
Our boast is not in us vs. them, but the cross.
Our boast is not in our calling, but the cross.
Our boast is not in our petty allegiances, but the cross.
Our boast is not in what we have accomplished, but what Christ has done and will do in us today.
Amen.
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
The Feast of Father James Otis Sargent Huntington, OHC, - Tuesday 25 November 2008
Galatians 6:14-18
John 6:34-38
Portrait of our Founder, Father Huntington, OHC
This portrait hung in our Mount Calvary Monastery, Santa Barbara, CA
and was lost to the fire that recently destroyed that monastery
Originally uploaded by Randy OHC
On this day when we remember and celebrate the vision and work of our founder, we take stock of his legacy since his death in 1935. Seventy three years later we ask ourselves how we might boast of our Order’s accomplishments and achievements.
We boast in having a founder who envisioned an army of young men joining the Order with a passionate desire for prayer and an eager zeal for mission work. What is the reality? Well, we’re not exactly an army and not entirely young. Our community’s median age is almost 70 and the most pressing issue of the next several years will be elder care. We face the challenges of aging, the realization that many brothers are no longer able to function at their peak, and the pressures on the young able-bodied to take up their work.
We boast in a founder who envisioned monks helping plant and nurture Episcopal schools, missions, and churches that would worship God and serve the needs of their local communities. How are we doing as a denomination? According to Episcopal Church statistics, average Sunday attendance between 2002 and 2007 dropped an average of 381 persons a week. That’s losing a year’s worth of guests in the guest house every ten weeks. Active baptized membership was just above 2,350,000 in 1996 and was, at the end of 2007, 2,100,000. There were 7,305 parishes and missions in 2002, 7,055 at the end of 2007.
We boast that Fr. Huntington envisioned a community life that respected differences, valued listening, shared leadership, and strived for consensus in decision-making - a model of community that could become a witness to the wider church. How are we doing as an Anglican Communion? Four dioceses of the Episcopal Church have voted to leave the denomination in the past few months out of deep disagreement over its direction and theology. Sides are being chosen and battle lines are being drawn. Name-calling, blaming, inhibition and litigation are daily occurrences as fractures deepen - and this behavior in the same church that has prided itself on diversity of ideas and theology around a common life of worship.
And as we learn of departures, deaths and consolidations within the communities of our fellow religious in CAROA, we are drawn to wonder whether we’re becoming extinct, whether monasteries are becoming quaint museums rather than places of witness and transformation. What Fr. Huntington and others saw in the late 19th century as the beginning of a great new movement within Anglicanism by many standards of measurement is fading and dying.
It’s clear from this simple bit of fact-checking that we live in a time of profound institutional change at every level. The traditions and structures most of us grew up with are eroding and shifting. Denominational loyalty is fading. Young Christians are less concerned about the name on the door of the church than with whether the people strive to follow Christ faithfully. Every church is competing in the free market. If a community’s life and worship are rote, routine, dry, and lifeless, it will die. If it is passionate, vibrant, and built on authentic relationships, it will thrive and grow. Spiritual hunger is still innately human, however. Many unchurched are asking the big questions of faith more loudly and seriously than ever:” Is real community, meaning, commitment, and love still to be found in this world of so much hypocrisy and religious lip-service?” Does anyone really live out what they preach? Can faith, can monasteries, still be relevant and important to the next generation? Do we as representatives of the Christian tradition have anything to say, anything to offer people looking for purpose and meaning? Dare we ask for hope and guidance in these trying times?
Evelyn Underhill wrote in the early 20th century:
“The experiments of St. Benedict, St. Francis, Fox or Wesley, were not therefore the natural products of ages of faith. They each represented the revolt of a heroic soul against surrounding apathy and decadence; an invasion of novelty; a sharp break with society, a new use of antique tradition depending on new contacts with the Spirit.”The lesson from Galatians we just heard is an example of that revolt proclaimed with graphic boldness and assurance. The question in the background of the controversy with the circumcision party is “Who do you think you are, Paul?” “Who are you to tell us what to do?” In writing to the church in Galatia, Saint Paul could have appealed to his achievement, his status, his education, his missionary work, his exceptional encounter with the Lord - any of these - as the basis for his authority in the Galatian church. What he does instead is revolt. He says that the authority, the power, the call to the people of Galatia does not reside in him, but in the cross. It is not his own insights to which he appeals, but to the cross. The cross, that jarring reminder of cursed God-forsakenness, is the harrowing act of our redemption, the ultimate act of love, the call to take up our own crosses and follow Christ. Crucifixes are prominent throughout these monastic buildings on purpose, including two large ones in this most holy space. But because we are so familiar with the symbolism, it can become invisible; at least at times it does to me. For St. Paul, for Fr. Huntington, and for us, the cross must never be invisible but always in our sight. It is the constant jolt to wake up, to be alive every day, every moment, to be humble and grateful, vigilant and ready to love no matter the circumstances. It is never just a nice memory or a sentimental piece of history, it is the sole reason why we are here, why we do what we do, why we read and sing and bow as we do. While I was in South Africa, Br. Timothy was fond of saying, “This is not a rocking chair around my neck!”
To boast in the cross is to live the cross-bearing life. It is to examine our hearts and minds for any thought, word, or action of apathy or decadence. It is to continually ask God and each other “What is still waiting to be converted in me? What needs to be crucified in me?” The temptation is to fit in, to be a group of nice brothers living in a nice place welcoming nice people who do nice things, smug in our own enlightened sophistication, careful neither to offend nor inspire. Our lives should be a screaming no to apathy and decadence by constantly reminding ourselves that there is more to life - a deeper community, a wider mercy, a fuller joy, a greater freedom, a darker mystery in this call, in this gift of life which we live.
We are rebels, whether we like it or not; our work is a work of revolt. We revolt when we continue to point each other and our guests to the cross. We revolt when we resist the temptation to boast in our own works. We revolt when we keep before us this act of love, our salvation and our challenge, our life and our example. We appeal to the deeper hunger and mystery at the core of every person. We are called to live and proclaim the cross as the center of the world, the tree of life and hope, especially when the illusions of the age and its form of security shift and crack, revealing their folly. People come here because at some level they long for God in their lives. The sacrifice of our own wills and desires, our revolt against every illusion of cheap happiness and instant gratification reminds us and proclaims to them that life, real life, is offered to us if we would simply choose it. By the commitment to let be crucified in us what leads to death, we live St. Paul’s hope, Fr. Huntington’s vision in the world of today - a world that needs the message of the cross more than ever. We’ve been through some traumatic losses and changes in the past several weeks. More losses and changes await us in the future. But through them all we know where our boasting belongs. When brothers come and go, when others die, when houses are closed or burn down, the cross is our hope. When churches decline, dioceses leave, bishops bicker, the cross is our vision. When money is tight, when tasks are too many and sleep is too little, the cross is our strength.
I began by boasting, or at least attempting to boast, in what we have done, and how great we are, and how neat it is that we are monks in the Order of the Holy Cross. But such nonsense is as silly as boasting in our circumcision like the Galatians!
Our boast is not in the triumph of our opinions, but the cross.
Our boast is not in our systems and traditions, but the cross.
Our boast is not in us vs. them, but the cross.
Our boast is not in our calling, but the cross.
Our boast is not in our petty allegiances, but the cross.
Our boast is not in what we have accomplished, but what Christ has done and will do in us today.
Amen.
RCL - Christ the King A - 23 Nov 2008
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam D. McCoy, OHC
Last Sunday after Pentecost A - Christ the King - Sunday 23 November 2008
Matthew 25: 31-46
Today we are celebrating the feast of Christ the King, whose theme invites us to consider the nature of power, authority, rule: Christ in majesty. It is a moment to ponder ideas of power, our own among many others, in relation to Christ, and to place our systems of power, of whatever sort, under Christ’s judgment.
Today’s gospel passage has the ultimate place of rhetorical and narrative emphasis in the gospel; it is the culmination of the central section of Matthew, the last of the parable of Jesus. It is utterly familiar to all Christians. We have all heard it many times, and, I trust, wondered on which side of the great divide we will find ourselves. Our egotism almost always focuses our attention on our own place in this great dramatic scene, and well it should. It contains a key teaching of Christ, which cannot be missed, and it also contains the motivation for putting it into practice. It has had an incalculable effect on the social and political development of the Christian world.
But rather than flog you on the left as goats and praise you on the right as sheep this morning, I would like to pay attention to two aspects of the figure of Christ in this story, one Roman and one Jewish. They are both in the nature of explorations, not settled interpretation. But I believe they can tell us a great deal about the Christian vision of power and authority.
There is increased scholarly attention these days to the possibility that the New Testament was written as a direct challenge to Roman, imperial authority. It is an exciting field to dip into, and yields some surprising results. The Nativity stories, for example, seem at least in part to take their structure from miraculous birth narratives circulating about Julius, Augustus and Tiberius, as well as their less illustrious successors. The point would seem to be a mockery of the pretensions of imperial propaganda, saying that real divine power comes from the unexpected, the disenfranchised, the marginal, the poor, the oppressed, the meek and the weak.
The scene of today’s story is a trial, but not a trial most of us would recognize. The analogue of this trial in Jesus’ time is a first century magistrate’s court. In the Roman world, judging was done by a variety of people, but the head of government always acted as a judge. It was the job of the head man to preside in court, whether he was the mayor of a village, the governor of a province, the king or even the emperor. On the stated days he would rise early, dress himself as impressively as he could in the right robes, wait until his cohort of official bodyguards and escorts assembled, and walk in a great group to the place of=2 0judgment, a spacious place where the public could gather and watch the public’s business being done. Even the most irresponsible Roman emperors managed this fairly well, even Nero on a morning after with a hangover.
So the Son of Man arrives “in his glory”, “all the angels with him”, and sits on “the throne of his glory”. Note the superlatives here: two glories in a single sentence, seeming to say that this glory, unlike that of a mere king or emperor, cannot be surpassed. And he arrives not with just the usual retinue of paid bodyguards and political ladder climbers, but with angels, and not just angels, but all the angels. This is the court of courts, the judgment to end all judgments.
The power of courts rested then and still rests on two pillars: the undisputed law and the legitimacy of the magistrate. The court’s job is to discover the law, which might be obscure, to examine those brought before it, and to apply it with impartial equity.
But this is not an imperial court. The law discovered is not some tort or contract or criminal offense. It is, in fact, the law of God for his world, a law that conscious beings in God’s world are expected to know and will be held responsible for.
The real challenge to imperial ideology in this story is a surprise. The Roman imperial system rested on the cult of the emperor, who personified divine power effective in the world, even before formal cult worship developed. The coins of Augustus had inscribed on them the letters DF - divi filius, son of the divine one, meaning the divinised Julius Caesar. To act against the law was to act against divine power. So the emperor is present in every legal proceeding not simply as the chief magistrate but also as guarantor of the divine will. To act against the law is to act against Caesar.
This imperial ideology is turned on its head in Matthew’s parable. The principle is accepted; the divine will is to be found in the most ordinary of keepings and breakings of the law. But where is the divine one to be found? In power, intervening, coercing, judging from the throne? No. If you want to find the real emperor, you must look for him in the unlikeliest of places. You must look for him in those in need, the sick, hungry, imprisoned riffraff of the part of life respectable people do not wish to see. No wonder the imperial authorities did not like Christians. This is not simply an ethical recommendation for mutual support in the human community. It is a pointed insult to the pretensions of the government and its entire ideology. I suspect the Romans, and every other thinking person as well, knew perfectly well what stories like this meant.
Our second interesting aspect of this story is deeply Jewish. At the beginning of his book, the prophet Ezekiel has a vision of the throne of God. It is a wheeling chariot surrounded by angelic hosts, sacred animals, and complex sounds and motions, and high above, “something that looked like a sapphire; it was shaped like a throne and high up on this throne was a being that looked like a man” (Ezekiel 1:26).. The prophet is then sent on a mission of judgment to Israel.
Jewish thinkers in the first century, and before and after, were fascinated with the idea of the throne of God, and a central school of Jewish mysticism, called Merkabah, or chariot/throne, mysticism, grew up around it. Central to this mysticism is the idea that God from time to time lifts the veil to show His true nature, and that in doing so, enacts ultimate justice. With a few simple strokes, Matthew indicates that this ineffable experience is the one we are invited to imagine.
How often do we hear this parable and miss the double glory, skim past the word “all” applied to the angels, and take the throne for granted? I think that in the first century this parable would have signified to the alert nothing less than the revelation of the nature of God in Jesus Christ. This is not simply social justice in apocalyptic clothing. This is the Merkabah of God himself, about to reveal the true nature of his creation and its law. And if we failed to miss the mystic=2 0reference, it is spelled out in open court in so many words: “inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world”. The law you have kept or not kept is the foundational principle of creation and of divine activity in the world. And what is that law? To notice those in need and come to their aid. When you do that, you have found God and entered into right relation, even into union, with him. When you brush past the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the ill and imprisoned on your way to something more urgent, you are leaving God in the dust.
That is the glory. That is the throne. That is how you encounter, how you become, divi filius.
Emperors and dead ideologies, obscure prophecies about thrones, it all seems so far away, and why is Adam loading this on us so thick this morning, you are perhaps thinking. Well, this lesson is for us as well. We are still crafting ideologies of power, rejoicing when we find what we think will give us the answers. We need this reminder of God’s ideology of power. We need this reminder all the more when we think we have found the answers and won the victories. The Christian faith says, No human ideology is ultimate. Every system of power is under judgment. Remember the criteria of divine presence, and re-evaluate.
How many of our political ideologies have promised the in-breaking of the twentieth century version of divine power and justice and did not ultimately deliver? This parable’s power over the centuries lies in the uncompromising way it holds God’s values against the world’s values. Matthew’s parable is shocking in its implications. No less today than in the first century does it scandalize us. And if it doesn’t? We are worse off than we think. How much energy and craft we employ to get power, and for what? this story seems to ask. The real divine in-breaking is all around us. It is in those we wish not to see. And what if we are among them? It is worth thinking about when your world is crumbling. And more radically, would we place ourselves among the least in order to be close to God’s foundational presence in creation? Would we choose to be truly poor, truly humble?
Do you want to see the glory of God, to be caught up into the third heaven with St. Paul, who was also a Merkabah mystic? Then look to the least of these. Would you find the divine presence in the world, conforming your life to what is good and just and right? Then act with generosity and graciousness to the least of these. For they are the face of God.
Br. Adam D. McCoy, OHC
Last Sunday after Pentecost A - Christ the King - Sunday 23 November 2008
Matthew 25: 31-46
Today we are celebrating the feast of Christ the King, whose theme invites us to consider the nature of power, authority, rule: Christ in majesty. It is a moment to ponder ideas of power, our own among many others, in relation to Christ, and to place our systems of power, of whatever sort, under Christ’s judgment.
Today’s gospel passage has the ultimate place of rhetorical and narrative emphasis in the gospel; it is the culmination of the central section of Matthew, the last of the parable of Jesus. It is utterly familiar to all Christians. We have all heard it many times, and, I trust, wondered on which side of the great divide we will find ourselves. Our egotism almost always focuses our attention on our own place in this great dramatic scene, and well it should. It contains a key teaching of Christ, which cannot be missed, and it also contains the motivation for putting it into practice. It has had an incalculable effect on the social and political development of the Christian world.
But rather than flog you on the left as goats and praise you on the right as sheep this morning, I would like to pay attention to two aspects of the figure of Christ in this story, one Roman and one Jewish. They are both in the nature of explorations, not settled interpretation. But I believe they can tell us a great deal about the Christian vision of power and authority.
There is increased scholarly attention these days to the possibility that the New Testament was written as a direct challenge to Roman, imperial authority. It is an exciting field to dip into, and yields some surprising results. The Nativity stories, for example, seem at least in part to take their structure from miraculous birth narratives circulating about Julius, Augustus and Tiberius, as well as their less illustrious successors. The point would seem to be a mockery of the pretensions of imperial propaganda, saying that real divine power comes from the unexpected, the disenfranchised, the marginal, the poor, the oppressed, the meek and the weak.
The scene of today’s story is a trial, but not a trial most of us would recognize. The analogue of this trial in Jesus’ time is a first century magistrate’s court. In the Roman world, judging was done by a variety of people, but the head of government always acted as a judge. It was the job of the head man to preside in court, whether he was the mayor of a village, the governor of a province, the king or even the emperor. On the stated days he would rise early, dress himself as impressively as he could in the right robes, wait until his cohort of official bodyguards and escorts assembled, and walk in a great group to the place of=2 0judgment, a spacious place where the public could gather and watch the public’s business being done. Even the most irresponsible Roman emperors managed this fairly well, even Nero on a morning after with a hangover.
So the Son of Man arrives “in his glory”, “all the angels with him”, and sits on “the throne of his glory”. Note the superlatives here: two glories in a single sentence, seeming to say that this glory, unlike that of a mere king or emperor, cannot be surpassed. And he arrives not with just the usual retinue of paid bodyguards and political ladder climbers, but with angels, and not just angels, but all the angels. This is the court of courts, the judgment to end all judgments.
The power of courts rested then and still rests on two pillars: the undisputed law and the legitimacy of the magistrate. The court’s job is to discover the law, which might be obscure, to examine those brought before it, and to apply it with impartial equity.
But this is not an imperial court. The law discovered is not some tort or contract or criminal offense. It is, in fact, the law of God for his world, a law that conscious beings in God’s world are expected to know and will be held responsible for.
The real challenge to imperial ideology in this story is a surprise. The Roman imperial system rested on the cult of the emperor, who personified divine power effective in the world, even before formal cult worship developed. The coins of Augustus had inscribed on them the letters DF - divi filius, son of the divine one, meaning the divinised Julius Caesar. To act against the law was to act against divine power. So the emperor is present in every legal proceeding not simply as the chief magistrate but also as guarantor of the divine will. To act against the law is to act against Caesar.
This imperial ideology is turned on its head in Matthew’s parable. The principle is accepted; the divine will is to be found in the most ordinary of keepings and breakings of the law. But where is the divine one to be found? In power, intervening, coercing, judging from the throne? No. If you want to find the real emperor, you must look for him in the unlikeliest of places. You must look for him in those in need, the sick, hungry, imprisoned riffraff of the part of life respectable people do not wish to see. No wonder the imperial authorities did not like Christians. This is not simply an ethical recommendation for mutual support in the human community. It is a pointed insult to the pretensions of the government and its entire ideology. I suspect the Romans, and every other thinking person as well, knew perfectly well what stories like this meant.
Our second interesting aspect of this story is deeply Jewish. At the beginning of his book, the prophet Ezekiel has a vision of the throne of God. It is a wheeling chariot surrounded by angelic hosts, sacred animals, and complex sounds and motions, and high above, “something that looked like a sapphire; it was shaped like a throne and high up on this throne was a being that looked like a man” (Ezekiel 1:26).. The prophet is then sent on a mission of judgment to Israel.
Jewish thinkers in the first century, and before and after, were fascinated with the idea of the throne of God, and a central school of Jewish mysticism, called Merkabah, or chariot/throne, mysticism, grew up around it. Central to this mysticism is the idea that God from time to time lifts the veil to show His true nature, and that in doing so, enacts ultimate justice. With a few simple strokes, Matthew indicates that this ineffable experience is the one we are invited to imagine.
How often do we hear this parable and miss the double glory, skim past the word “all” applied to the angels, and take the throne for granted? I think that in the first century this parable would have signified to the alert nothing less than the revelation of the nature of God in Jesus Christ. This is not simply social justice in apocalyptic clothing. This is the Merkabah of God himself, about to reveal the true nature of his creation and its law. And if we failed to miss the mystic=2 0reference, it is spelled out in open court in so many words: “inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world”. The law you have kept or not kept is the foundational principle of creation and of divine activity in the world. And what is that law? To notice those in need and come to their aid. When you do that, you have found God and entered into right relation, even into union, with him. When you brush past the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the ill and imprisoned on your way to something more urgent, you are leaving God in the dust.
That is the glory. That is the throne. That is how you encounter, how you become, divi filius.
Emperors and dead ideologies, obscure prophecies about thrones, it all seems so far away, and why is Adam loading this on us so thick this morning, you are perhaps thinking. Well, this lesson is for us as well. We are still crafting ideologies of power, rejoicing when we find what we think will give us the answers. We need this reminder of God’s ideology of power. We need this reminder all the more when we think we have found the answers and won the victories. The Christian faith says, No human ideology is ultimate. Every system of power is under judgment. Remember the criteria of divine presence, and re-evaluate.
How many of our political ideologies have promised the in-breaking of the twentieth century version of divine power and justice and did not ultimately deliver? This parable’s power over the centuries lies in the uncompromising way it holds God’s values against the world’s values. Matthew’s parable is shocking in its implications. No less today than in the first century does it scandalize us. And if it doesn’t? We are worse off than we think. How much energy and craft we employ to get power, and for what? this story seems to ask. The real divine in-breaking is all around us. It is in those we wish not to see. And what if we are among them? It is worth thinking about when your world is crumbling. And more radically, would we place ourselves among the least in order to be close to God’s foundational presence in creation? Would we choose to be truly poor, truly humble?
Do you want to see the glory of God, to be caught up into the third heaven with St. Paul, who was also a Merkabah mystic? Then look to the least of these. Would you find the divine presence in the world, conforming your life to what is good and just and right? Then act with generosity and graciousness to the least of these. For they are the face of God.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
RCL - Proper 28 A - 16 Nov 2008
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
RCL – Proper 28 A – Sunday 16 November 2008
Judges 4:1-7
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30
I dedicate this sermon to my dad, Jacques Delcourt, who "God willing" (possibly his favorite phrase) will turn 80 by the end of November. I dedicate it in honor of his willingness to search and struggle with difficult ideas; a useful tool for a sociologist.
Lord, you desire that we use the gifts you have endowed us with to build up your Kingdom. Give us the faith to recognize your gifts and help us fight back the fears that may keep us from using them.
Amen.
Well, I wrote that prayer yesterday on the basis of the traditional interpretation of today’s parable. The traditional interpretation is that God wants us to use our god-given abilities to the most; and that denying our abilities or sleeping on them is sinful. I don’t disagree with that ethical statement but I disagree that that is a conclusion we can draw from today’s parable.
It’s not a bad ethical guideline to go by; it has helped generations of Christians to pull their socks up, roll up their sleeves and get to work. Unfortunately, in the process of being busy until Jesus came back, some might have lost their focus on building the Kingdom of God rather than buttressing their own earthly success.
But the traditional interpretation of today’s parable relies heavily on the idea that the Gospel was written for to speak to our context; that of readers of the Modern Times living in capitalist economies.
The traditional interpretation of our parable would seem to support the early 20th century German economist and sociologist Max Weber who wrote a series of essays titled “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”. Be a good Protestant and your ethics will make you amass capital is a proximate summary of Weber’s thesis (forgive me, my sociologist father, and my human sciences teachers, for the simplification).
*****
So yesterday, I took my prayer seriously and decided, in a very Anglican fashion, to show respect to scripture by using my gift of reason even if it ruffles the feathers of a tradition that I respect.
First, I owe you a bit of disclosure on my methods here. I have to tell you that my reading of the Bible has been transformed by an approach that could be termed contextual.
The New Testament was written in the first century and a half after the death of Jesus, in the Eastern Mediterranean. That’s a time and place -- a context -- that offered much more homogeneous living conditions to everyone than today’s complex, multi-layered and multi-faceted societies in which we live.
In Jesus’ time, most everybody is based in the agrarian economy, most people are peasants. There is no middle class as we understand it and there are very few highly powerful people. These also happen to be the rich. But money and wealth are not the standard by which one is measured; honor is. If you have a lot of honor, you might be graced with wealth; but, not the other way round.
As a result of the homogeneous life experience, the writers of the New Testament did not need to explain a lot of context to their stories. They assumed (correctly for their own time) that everybody knew the socio-economic context of their stories. And so we are left with low context stories that take a lot for granted from the reader.
As a result of all this, I now always try to find out what would have been the unstated context of the stories I read in the New Testament. I will pass on an explanation of the methods of contextual analysis here, but they are fairly well established and respected, even though their use often yields controversial results.
*****
And before I review today’s parable in light of context contemporary to its telling and its recording by Matthew, I ask you to question your own heart. When you heard the parable, did you wonder if the master’s behavior was how the God Jesus knew would behave? Did a part of you wonder about the master’s glee at capital accumulation and at his vengefulness on the clueless?
*****
In Jesus’ time, goods and goodness are seen as finite quantities. It’s like a pie, the bigger your piece of pie, the less there is for the others. That’s very much unlike our vision of permanent expansion of wealth.
I can’t help but invite you, though, to ponder if recent and ongoing events such as the economy’s degeneration and the climate change crisis don’t question the sustainability of our economic model of constant financial and material growth.
In Jesus’ time, the highest value in life was honor. Acquisition of wealth was seen as necessarily occurring at the expense of others and therefore, not honorable.
That’s why, throughout the gospels, we have the utter disdain for tax collectors (who take a cut for themselves); and for usurers (or bankers) who take a cut (or interest) on providing you with resources that you were unable to provide for from your own network of relationships. By the way, that’s a definition of poverty in Jesus’ time; not being able to take care of oneself thanks to an honor-bound network of relationships.
Often, rich people would have had slaves conduct their business. Slaves were seen as without honor anyway. They would therefore be able to conduct business to the profit of their master in ways that would have been unseemly for the master himself to do.
So, in our parable of talents, the slaves are given economic means to fructify for their master while he is away. In Jesus’ time, this would have not sat well with most of his agrarian listeners.
Absent landlords were despised as having amassed too much wealth at the expense of others and as not being present to protect and take care of their network of charges. The richer you were the more responsibilities for others you would be expected to exercise; being away was a cop-out on your honor responsibilities.
The slave who does not invest, or trade his share of wealth up, is doing the honorable thing in his social context; he is preserving what has been entrusted to him in what is recognized as the safest way. He is not participating in undue enrichment schemes that are seen to cost to the community.
This slave’s description of the master, validated by the master himself is a picture-perfect description of the dishonorable wealth-grabber in Jesus’ context. The master is described as cheating on those who sowed next to his field by encroaching on their harvest and as abusing other people’s threshing floors (where grain is separated from chaff).
The master’s suggestion that the slave should have deposited the money with bankers is also seen as shameful since it would involve usury (the use of interest).
*****
So, in the end, why is this parable present in both Matthew’s and Luke’s report of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
I don’t know the answer to this. It is worth noting that the Gospel of Matthew moves on to Jesus’ telling of how he will recognize the goats from the sheep -- how he will recognize those who helped the “least of these”.
Who is the “least of these” in our parable of the talents; the shrewd, business-savvy slaves who hit it big in trading and investing or the fearful honor-bound slave who does no harm?
I’m reminded in closing today’s sermon that any metaphor is only as good as the point it’s trying to make. If flogged like a dead horse, it ends up losing its sense.
I believe that Matthew’s rendering of the parable of the talents was a metaphor that naturally worked well for his original audience. And it led the way to the separation of the sheep and the goats in the next passage.
For present-day American listeners, it is fraught with cultural interferences; the least of which is the use of “talent” which was originally a measure of weight representing about 15 years’ worth of work.
*****
And so, why did I bother using your time to de-construct a well-loved parable and turning it on its head?
I believe it is crucially important for us 21st century Christians to re-discover our scriptures with new eyes and hearts.
I hope you will be stimulated in looking at scripture anew and letting it nourish your soul as it was intended to; but without blind faith to unquestioned tradition, or without the recourse of God-given reason. I’ll be happy to share my sources of reflection with anyone interested.
*****
Let us pray.
Lord, we are grateful for the Gospels that report your doings and sayings to humanity. Help us discern the truth and depth of your message within and through the texts that have come to us. Help us pay attention to what Wisdom is whispering to our hearts as we read and pray the Gospels. May we be graced with understanding that prompts us to right action and righteous being.
Amen.
Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
RCL – Proper 28 A – Sunday 16 November 2008
Judges 4:1-7
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30
I dedicate this sermon to my dad, Jacques Delcourt, who "God willing" (possibly his favorite phrase) will turn 80 by the end of November. I dedicate it in honor of his willingness to search and struggle with difficult ideas; a useful tool for a sociologist.
*****
Lord, you desire that we use the gifts you have endowed us with to build up your Kingdom. Give us the faith to recognize your gifts and help us fight back the fears that may keep us from using them.
Amen.
*****
Well, I wrote that prayer yesterday on the basis of the traditional interpretation of today’s parable. The traditional interpretation is that God wants us to use our god-given abilities to the most; and that denying our abilities or sleeping on them is sinful. I don’t disagree with that ethical statement but I disagree that that is a conclusion we can draw from today’s parable.
It’s not a bad ethical guideline to go by; it has helped generations of Christians to pull their socks up, roll up their sleeves and get to work. Unfortunately, in the process of being busy until Jesus came back, some might have lost their focus on building the Kingdom of God rather than buttressing their own earthly success.
But the traditional interpretation of today’s parable relies heavily on the idea that the Gospel was written for to speak to our context; that of readers of the Modern Times living in capitalist economies.
The traditional interpretation of our parable would seem to support the early 20th century German economist and sociologist Max Weber who wrote a series of essays titled “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”. Be a good Protestant and your ethics will make you amass capital is a proximate summary of Weber’s thesis (forgive me, my sociologist father, and my human sciences teachers, for the simplification).
*****
So yesterday, I took my prayer seriously and decided, in a very Anglican fashion, to show respect to scripture by using my gift of reason even if it ruffles the feathers of a tradition that I respect.
First, I owe you a bit of disclosure on my methods here. I have to tell you that my reading of the Bible has been transformed by an approach that could be termed contextual.
The New Testament was written in the first century and a half after the death of Jesus, in the Eastern Mediterranean. That’s a time and place -- a context -- that offered much more homogeneous living conditions to everyone than today’s complex, multi-layered and multi-faceted societies in which we live.
In Jesus’ time, most everybody is based in the agrarian economy, most people are peasants. There is no middle class as we understand it and there are very few highly powerful people. These also happen to be the rich. But money and wealth are not the standard by which one is measured; honor is. If you have a lot of honor, you might be graced with wealth; but, not the other way round.
As a result of the homogeneous life experience, the writers of the New Testament did not need to explain a lot of context to their stories. They assumed (correctly for their own time) that everybody knew the socio-economic context of their stories. And so we are left with low context stories that take a lot for granted from the reader.
As a result of all this, I now always try to find out what would have been the unstated context of the stories I read in the New Testament. I will pass on an explanation of the methods of contextual analysis here, but they are fairly well established and respected, even though their use often yields controversial results.
*****
And before I review today’s parable in light of context contemporary to its telling and its recording by Matthew, I ask you to question your own heart. When you heard the parable, did you wonder if the master’s behavior was how the God Jesus knew would behave? Did a part of you wonder about the master’s glee at capital accumulation and at his vengefulness on the clueless?
*****
In Jesus’ time, goods and goodness are seen as finite quantities. It’s like a pie, the bigger your piece of pie, the less there is for the others. That’s very much unlike our vision of permanent expansion of wealth.
I can’t help but invite you, though, to ponder if recent and ongoing events such as the economy’s degeneration and the climate change crisis don’t question the sustainability of our economic model of constant financial and material growth.
In Jesus’ time, the highest value in life was honor. Acquisition of wealth was seen as necessarily occurring at the expense of others and therefore, not honorable.
That’s why, throughout the gospels, we have the utter disdain for tax collectors (who take a cut for themselves); and for usurers (or bankers) who take a cut (or interest) on providing you with resources that you were unable to provide for from your own network of relationships. By the way, that’s a definition of poverty in Jesus’ time; not being able to take care of oneself thanks to an honor-bound network of relationships.
Often, rich people would have had slaves conduct their business. Slaves were seen as without honor anyway. They would therefore be able to conduct business to the profit of their master in ways that would have been unseemly for the master himself to do.
So, in our parable of talents, the slaves are given economic means to fructify for their master while he is away. In Jesus’ time, this would have not sat well with most of his agrarian listeners.
Absent landlords were despised as having amassed too much wealth at the expense of others and as not being present to protect and take care of their network of charges. The richer you were the more responsibilities for others you would be expected to exercise; being away was a cop-out on your honor responsibilities.
The slave who does not invest, or trade his share of wealth up, is doing the honorable thing in his social context; he is preserving what has been entrusted to him in what is recognized as the safest way. He is not participating in undue enrichment schemes that are seen to cost to the community.
This slave’s description of the master, validated by the master himself is a picture-perfect description of the dishonorable wealth-grabber in Jesus’ context. The master is described as cheating on those who sowed next to his field by encroaching on their harvest and as abusing other people’s threshing floors (where grain is separated from chaff).
The master’s suggestion that the slave should have deposited the money with bankers is also seen as shameful since it would involve usury (the use of interest).
*****
So, in the end, why is this parable present in both Matthew’s and Luke’s report of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
I don’t know the answer to this. It is worth noting that the Gospel of Matthew moves on to Jesus’ telling of how he will recognize the goats from the sheep -- how he will recognize those who helped the “least of these”.
Who is the “least of these” in our parable of the talents; the shrewd, business-savvy slaves who hit it big in trading and investing or the fearful honor-bound slave who does no harm?
I’m reminded in closing today’s sermon that any metaphor is only as good as the point it’s trying to make. If flogged like a dead horse, it ends up losing its sense.
I believe that Matthew’s rendering of the parable of the talents was a metaphor that naturally worked well for his original audience. And it led the way to the separation of the sheep and the goats in the next passage.
For present-day American listeners, it is fraught with cultural interferences; the least of which is the use of “talent” which was originally a measure of weight representing about 15 years’ worth of work.
*****
And so, why did I bother using your time to de-construct a well-loved parable and turning it on its head?
I believe it is crucially important for us 21st century Christians to re-discover our scriptures with new eyes and hearts.
I hope you will be stimulated in looking at scripture anew and letting it nourish your soul as it was intended to; but without blind faith to unquestioned tradition, or without the recourse of God-given reason. I’ll be happy to share my sources of reflection with anyone interested.
*****
Let us pray.
Lord, we are grateful for the Gospels that report your doings and sayings to humanity. Help us discern the truth and depth of your message within and through the texts that have come to us. Help us pay attention to what Wisdom is whispering to our hearts as we read and pray the Gospels. May we be graced with understanding that prompts us to right action and righteous being.
Amen.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Br. Robert's Eulogy for Br. William Sibley, OHC - 06 Nov 2008
St John's Anglican Church, West Toronto, ON, Canada
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC Superior
Memorial Service for William Gatewood Sibley, OHC
Thursday 06 November 2008
On the Sunday afternoon following the death of our Brother William, the artists in residence at Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, a vocal group known simply as Kairos, along with a talented instrumental ensemble, offered one of their bimonthly Bach cantatas at Vespers. As usual, they were spectacular, and the Hudson Valley music community turned out in force to hear them.
And even for someone like me, who is no great fan of Bach cantatas, the afternoon was moving and transformative. Maybe it was because it came at just the right time following the sudden loss of William and on the heels of all the grief and busy-ness that follows the death of anyone close to us. It was a welcome opportunity in the midst of a hectic week to simply sit and listen.
And I came, it seems, to a new appreciation for the genius of Bach. Even the rather severe Lutheran texts about sin and guilt and hell were strangely consoling, as was the repeated refrain: Gott is mein Freund, God is my Friend. How much I needed to hear that, as did we all.
The program continued with an exquisite Bach cello suite and, as a kind of afterthought, a work by Beethoven that I had never heard before. It was titled Elegischer Gezang, an Elegy Song, and the Kairos group offered it in memory of William. I’ll spare you my fractured reading of the very short German text. In English it reads simply: “As gently as you have lived, so have you ended, too holy for pain. Let no eye weep at the heavenly spirit’s homecoming.” It was achingly beautiful and a fitting tribute.
To be honest, however, this is hardly a text that I would have associated with William Gatewood Sibley. William lived life with bravado, with passion, with struggle, with conviction, with contradiction, even with tragedy. But gentle…? Not the William I knew.
In his homily at William’s funeral, Br. Reginald eloquently reminded us that William was a man who was driven.
* He was a man driven by a sense of justice and fairness and equality, a longing that moved him as a young man to reject militarism—he would never even talk about his two years of service in the US Army—and to become a staunch advocate for world peace and nonviolent resistance.
* He was man who grew up with a certain sense of privilege in the American South in the days of segregation and Jim Crow, and was able to see—really see—around him the effects and costs and injustice of systemic racism. He was moved to witness for racial justice and economic and social equality for all. How he would have savored the opportunity to see an African American elected President of the United Sates. Indeed, I found numerous Barack Obama buttons among his belongings, buttons that he wore with pride, even when doing so came close to crossing the line of separation of church and state so idolized in the States. And he found in his Anglican faith, and in the example of Jesus and in the power of the Holy Spirit a grounding for this work, a work he later expanded to include the legitimate rights of women and of gay and lesbian people in both church and society.
* He also found in the vowed religious life, and particularly in the Order of the Holy Cross, a way and a community that could be the container for these passions, that could channel his restless energy into productive efforts in the United States at West Park, Santa Barbara, and Berkeley; in the Bahamas; and here in Toronto, where he served as Prior for nine years, shaping to this day the ministry of the Order of the Holy Cross in this great city and in this Priory. In his own straightforward way, he encouraged his brothers in their various works and ministries and he held together many disparate characters in one household, though sometimes at great cost to himself and indeed to others as well.
William served as Superior of the Order of the Holy Cross for nine years, and during that period he was practical and matter of fact in his administration. And whatever else one might say, he was always loyal…loyal to his word and to standing by others when they were troubled or in trouble to ensure that, at the very least, they were heard and treated with as much fairness as our cumbersome system could muster. I can personally attest to that.
William’s theology and spiritual outlook changed rather dramatically over the years. He never ceased to remind us of that in countless ways, and he often came across as a rebellious child of the 1960’s. Who of us, for example, didn’t endure his cracks about “cookie worship” and the Nabisco Hour, otherwise known as Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament?
In truth, William could no longer accept the conventions and thought-forms and practices of the Anglo-Catholic faith that had first drawn him to OHC. And I often wonder if he ever succeeded in finding an adequate replacement, though his affection for the popular theological work of Marcus Borg came close.
Yet underneath the gibes and protestations—so often intended to get us to think, to be clear, to be consistent—I often detected hints of the old spiritual longings of that student who every Sunday evening traveled over to Sewanee to serve Sunday Evensong and Benediction. I wonder if it was there that William first came to know the profound mystery of Christ’s love for him, a love so intense and so personal and so redemptive that it burned within his heart to the end, leaving him pining for nothing other than God’s love for him in all his singularity. Who doesn’t long for this?
Paradoxically, it was this same Anglo-Catholic theological and spiritual heritage that he found so wanting in his later years that first led William to know that the Gospel was indeed all about incarnation…and therefore about peace and justice and equality and a wholeness that was at once personal and national, individual and social, particular and cosmic.
To know William was also to know of his personal struggles, particularly his struggle with alcoholism. All his adult life he battled with this demon. And often it appeared to triumph over his limited inner resources, leaving him lost and isolated. But always, always, he was available to others who struggled with similar addictions. His work in recovery and especially in the 12-step spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous and his fierce honesty made him a valuable guide to many, many souls.
Since his death any number of people have told me how important he was in their lives in recovery or in their movement back from a shattered and lost faith or in their search for a vocational path. I can see in my mind’s eye all those long, long conversations on the porch of Mount Calvary or perhaps here at the Priory or away on missions, with William hunched forward in a chair, surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke, reassuring a seeker, a priest, a fellow traveler that there was indeed hope, that forgiveness was indeed possible, that—yes!—life was worth living, that change was possible, if not always easy, and that it was measured out in small victories and in countless daily particular acts of grace. Because that’s how it was for William. And that’s how it is for all of us.
The Beethoven elegy sung for William concluded with these words: “As gently as you have lived, so have you ended, too holy for pain. Let no eye weep at the heavenly spirit’s homecoming.”
Too holy for pain? Not William. He had his share of pain, his own and others’. But make no mistake about it: he was holy. There was in him a hidden holiness, a holiness that came both from his great acts of witness and courage and also countless hidden, and to us invisible, acts of struggle and defeat and restoration and victory. Perhaps—probably—they were invisible and unknown to him as well. Holiness is a deep mystery, perhaps the final mystery, because it is where the infinite and creative grace of God meets the wonderful messiness of our finite and complex lives.
The Founder of the OHC says in our Rule: “Holiness is the brightness of divine love, and love is never idle; it must accomplish great things. Love must act as fire must shine and light must burn.” William was rarely idle, even when he sometimes seemed lost. He acted when he could, accomplishing more than he could know. He suffered when he had to, but was constantly looking out for the light…for the truth of God, the truth of his own life, the truth of faith and mercy and forgiveness. And in the end, this light did not fail him.
William was never, I think, a great fan of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, though they in fact agreed on many, many things and were, in their restless if different energies, more alike than different. I do believe, however, that William would have found himself in total agreement with Merton when he wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander that:
May that same God, who created and redeemed and nourished William, bring us with him into the fellowship of the saints in light!
May he rest in peace. Amen.
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC Superior
Memorial Service for William Gatewood Sibley, OHC
Thursday 06 November 2008
On the Sunday afternoon following the death of our Brother William, the artists in residence at Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, a vocal group known simply as Kairos, along with a talented instrumental ensemble, offered one of their bimonthly Bach cantatas at Vespers. As usual, they were spectacular, and the Hudson Valley music community turned out in force to hear them.
And even for someone like me, who is no great fan of Bach cantatas, the afternoon was moving and transformative. Maybe it was because it came at just the right time following the sudden loss of William and on the heels of all the grief and busy-ness that follows the death of anyone close to us. It was a welcome opportunity in the midst of a hectic week to simply sit and listen.
And I came, it seems, to a new appreciation for the genius of Bach. Even the rather severe Lutheran texts about sin and guilt and hell were strangely consoling, as was the repeated refrain: Gott is mein Freund, God is my Friend. How much I needed to hear that, as did we all.
The program continued with an exquisite Bach cello suite and, as a kind of afterthought, a work by Beethoven that I had never heard before. It was titled Elegischer Gezang, an Elegy Song, and the Kairos group offered it in memory of William. I’ll spare you my fractured reading of the very short German text. In English it reads simply: “As gently as you have lived, so have you ended, too holy for pain. Let no eye weep at the heavenly spirit’s homecoming.” It was achingly beautiful and a fitting tribute.
To be honest, however, this is hardly a text that I would have associated with William Gatewood Sibley. William lived life with bravado, with passion, with struggle, with conviction, with contradiction, even with tragedy. But gentle…? Not the William I knew.
In his homily at William’s funeral, Br. Reginald eloquently reminded us that William was a man who was driven.
* He was a man driven by a sense of justice and fairness and equality, a longing that moved him as a young man to reject militarism—he would never even talk about his two years of service in the US Army—and to become a staunch advocate for world peace and nonviolent resistance.
* He was man who grew up with a certain sense of privilege in the American South in the days of segregation and Jim Crow, and was able to see—really see—around him the effects and costs and injustice of systemic racism. He was moved to witness for racial justice and economic and social equality for all. How he would have savored the opportunity to see an African American elected President of the United Sates. Indeed, I found numerous Barack Obama buttons among his belongings, buttons that he wore with pride, even when doing so came close to crossing the line of separation of church and state so idolized in the States. And he found in his Anglican faith, and in the example of Jesus and in the power of the Holy Spirit a grounding for this work, a work he later expanded to include the legitimate rights of women and of gay and lesbian people in both church and society.
* He also found in the vowed religious life, and particularly in the Order of the Holy Cross, a way and a community that could be the container for these passions, that could channel his restless energy into productive efforts in the United States at West Park, Santa Barbara, and Berkeley; in the Bahamas; and here in Toronto, where he served as Prior for nine years, shaping to this day the ministry of the Order of the Holy Cross in this great city and in this Priory. In his own straightforward way, he encouraged his brothers in their various works and ministries and he held together many disparate characters in one household, though sometimes at great cost to himself and indeed to others as well.
William served as Superior of the Order of the Holy Cross for nine years, and during that period he was practical and matter of fact in his administration. And whatever else one might say, he was always loyal…loyal to his word and to standing by others when they were troubled or in trouble to ensure that, at the very least, they were heard and treated with as much fairness as our cumbersome system could muster. I can personally attest to that.
William’s theology and spiritual outlook changed rather dramatically over the years. He never ceased to remind us of that in countless ways, and he often came across as a rebellious child of the 1960’s. Who of us, for example, didn’t endure his cracks about “cookie worship” and the Nabisco Hour, otherwise known as Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament?
In truth, William could no longer accept the conventions and thought-forms and practices of the Anglo-Catholic faith that had first drawn him to OHC. And I often wonder if he ever succeeded in finding an adequate replacement, though his affection for the popular theological work of Marcus Borg came close.
Yet underneath the gibes and protestations—so often intended to get us to think, to be clear, to be consistent—I often detected hints of the old spiritual longings of that student who every Sunday evening traveled over to Sewanee to serve Sunday Evensong and Benediction. I wonder if it was there that William first came to know the profound mystery of Christ’s love for him, a love so intense and so personal and so redemptive that it burned within his heart to the end, leaving him pining for nothing other than God’s love for him in all his singularity. Who doesn’t long for this?
Paradoxically, it was this same Anglo-Catholic theological and spiritual heritage that he found so wanting in his later years that first led William to know that the Gospel was indeed all about incarnation…and therefore about peace and justice and equality and a wholeness that was at once personal and national, individual and social, particular and cosmic.
To know William was also to know of his personal struggles, particularly his struggle with alcoholism. All his adult life he battled with this demon. And often it appeared to triumph over his limited inner resources, leaving him lost and isolated. But always, always, he was available to others who struggled with similar addictions. His work in recovery and especially in the 12-step spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous and his fierce honesty made him a valuable guide to many, many souls.
Since his death any number of people have told me how important he was in their lives in recovery or in their movement back from a shattered and lost faith or in their search for a vocational path. I can see in my mind’s eye all those long, long conversations on the porch of Mount Calvary or perhaps here at the Priory or away on missions, with William hunched forward in a chair, surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke, reassuring a seeker, a priest, a fellow traveler that there was indeed hope, that forgiveness was indeed possible, that—yes!—life was worth living, that change was possible, if not always easy, and that it was measured out in small victories and in countless daily particular acts of grace. Because that’s how it was for William. And that’s how it is for all of us.
The Beethoven elegy sung for William concluded with these words: “As gently as you have lived, so have you ended, too holy for pain. Let no eye weep at the heavenly spirit’s homecoming.”
Too holy for pain? Not William. He had his share of pain, his own and others’. But make no mistake about it: he was holy. There was in him a hidden holiness, a holiness that came both from his great acts of witness and courage and also countless hidden, and to us invisible, acts of struggle and defeat and restoration and victory. Perhaps—probably—they were invisible and unknown to him as well. Holiness is a deep mystery, perhaps the final mystery, because it is where the infinite and creative grace of God meets the wonderful messiness of our finite and complex lives.
The Founder of the OHC says in our Rule: “Holiness is the brightness of divine love, and love is never idle; it must accomplish great things. Love must act as fire must shine and light must burn.” William was rarely idle, even when he sometimes seemed lost. He acted when he could, accomplishing more than he could know. He suffered when he had to, but was constantly looking out for the light…for the truth of God, the truth of his own life, the truth of faith and mercy and forgiveness. And in the end, this light did not fail him.
William was never, I think, a great fan of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, though they in fact agreed on many, many things and were, in their restless if different energies, more alike than different. I do believe, however, that William would have found himself in total agreement with Merton when he wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander that:
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.Today we remember William Gatewood Sibley. We give thanks to God for him. We commend him to the Father. And we celebrate that point of pure truth, that spark, that light that was and is William, whom God disposed to give to us. And now God has called that spark home: “Let no eye weep at the heavenly spirit’s homecoming.”
May that same God, who created and redeemed and nourished William, bring us with him into the fellowship of the saints in light!
May he rest in peace. Amen.
Monday, November 3, 2008
RCL - All Saints - 02 Nov 2008
Church of the Incarnation, New York, NY
Br. Adam D. McCoy, OHC
Sunday after All Saints - November 2, 2008
Revelation 7:2-4, 9-17
Matthew 5:1-12
Yesterday, November first, was All Saints Day, which we are celebrating today. In the Church’s calendar today’s date, November second, is All Souls, the celebration of all the faithful departed. The beginning of November is the time when Christians place before ourselves all the good examples of faith, when we surround ourselves with reminders that others have gone before us, have made our lives in the faith possible. And today is Commitment Sunday here at The Church of the Incarnation. I pray that you will be generous with both your treasure and your talent, because the gift of yourself, your time and your energy, is as precious as your money.
This morning I want us to think about saints – the saints of the past, and the saints we might become. There is so much holiness. All the saints of the Church, famous and not so famous. All the saints of our particular communities. All the saints of our individual lives, all the people whose holiness has drawn us closer to God. Who are your saints?
I’ll tell you some of mine and you can think of yours. In the wider Church, my favorite saint of the Church is the Venerable Bede, the eighth century English Northumbrian monk and scholar whose holy life and writing at the northern edge of the known world still shines after all these centuries.
At St. Michael’s Church, Anaheim, California, where I was Rector in the 1990's, Chuck Henderson was Treasurer for ever and ever. Perhaps you know someone like him. His financial reports to the Vestry also seemed to go on for ever and ever. But one day he listened to the Gospel, Matthew 25, and was seized by the command of Our Lord to feed the hungry, and so he started and ran a feeding program for the poor. It ran every Monday night at St. Michael’s for twenty years. His vision and dedication opened a way for dozens of church members who wanted to walk the Gospel path. It changed that church. It made St. Michael’s a light to the poor.
In the Order of the Holy Cross, I think of Br. Paul Hayes, an old African American man who came to us after years of day jobs and life on the road and destitution. Those hardships took a real and lasting toll. When he found the monastery, he first went to work in the kitchen. Eventually he joined the Order. He would sit and listen to you and God was in his face and in his words and when you left your heart was healed. I know, because I watched it happen time and time again when we were stationed together at our monastery in Berkeley. I saw spirits lifted and lives changed and vocations saved and marriages healed. I know because it happened to me.
And in my personal life I think of my maternal grandmother, Della Rebecca Mohney Marshall, a solid, daily Bible-reading Christian lady of severe old-time Protestant tendencies whose love flowed out of the kitchen she almost never left. She was full of a righteous goodness that was almost frightening in its simplicity and so profoundly attractive that you wanted to be with her all the time, and not just to eat her sugar cookies.
Who are your saints? Circles upon circles of saints around us, smaller circles opening into wider circles, until finally, in the words of the seer in Revelation which we have just heard, it becomes a great multitude that no one can count, standing before the throne of God, praising the One whose life is their life and whose love is so strong.
Holiness is a category of embarrassment to people of our time. Holiness is something that others are supposed to discern in you, preferably after you are dead and gone, not something you actively pursue. But to be holy in the here and now? To work at being holy? How presumptuous. How priggish. How boring. Saints are other people, in other times, under other circumstances. Certainly not now. Certainly not us.
And yet Jesus calls us to be holy. From the end of the fifth chapter of Matthew, which begins with the Beatitudes we just heard, Jesus says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” What a preposterous thing to say. Who can be perfect? How can we do it? Impossible.
These two texts, the Beatitudes and the “Be perfect” passage, contain two words that give us a clue to a better understanding of holiness, and our call to be holy, two Greek words that are keys to the true Christian understanding of holiness. It may not be what you expect.
The first word is “blessed”. In Greek it is “makarios”, which has a wider range than our rather anemic “blessed”. If you are “makarios”, you’re happy because you’re fortunate, because you are one of those people who always seems to land on your feet, because you’re a winner. You are plugged into whatever it is that’s running the right way. You have the right rhythm and go with the flow. Your nature is in tune with the great reality and your life is in harmony with the best energies of the universe.
So, Jesus is saying, the people who are really plugged in, who are really surfing the crest of the great wave of the universe, are the people who follow God’s values, and not the values that seem to apparent to us on our first glance. They are the people who are trodden down inside as well as out; they are the people who have lost someone dear and feel it deeply; they are the people who are humble through and through; they are the people who want what is right so much they can taste it; they are the people who are always letting others off the hook; they are the people who aren’t fooled when we want things to be complicated and do some fancy dancing around tough issues, when the issues really aren’t that complex at all; they are the people who will take a risk to stop a quarrel or a fight or even a war; they are the people who get into trouble because they would rather follow God than adopt the fad of the moment. Jesus says these are the people who are the lucky ones, the people who will win the ultimate game of life.
The second word is “perfect”. The Greek for this is “teleios”. Again, our translation is a little weak. The Greek means perfect, but not in the sense of “without a flaw”. Rather, it means something that has achieved its goal. “Telos”, from which it comes, means the goal or end or purpose of something. So a person who is “teleios” has become the person who has become one with what was purposed at his or her beginning. Clearly we can never be flawless, though perhaps there are moments when we might glimpse that happy state. Thank God for moments of bliss! But to fulfill our purpose, that we can do.
What are the purposes, the goals of our lives? Have we chosen well, or have we settled for something second or even third or fourth rate? Perhaps we might consider an upgrade. Have we worked conscientiously to achieve our goals? Have we become the person we had the potential to be?
This understanding of “perfection” is very different from the idea of flawlessness. For one thing, it is dynamic. It is a process. You are not finished until you are finished, and yet if we are engaged seriously and completely in moving toward our goals, we are in a very real sense accomplishing them already. To be practicing them is to have achieved them, though with progress still to make. That is why so many professions say that the people following the profession are “practicing” – law and medicine, to name just two. To be a practicing lawyer or doctor means that you are a lawyer or a doctor, but that you are also on the way toward greater wisdom, greater skill. So to set out seriously on the path to reach a worthy goal is already to be on the way.
I would suggest that a saint is a person who has found the true and worthy goals of his or her life and is pursuing them. If those goals are God’s goals, that person will be plugged in to God’s energy. Now I admit that this may sound a little like New Age thinking. Those who know me well would be surprised to hear me called a New Ager. But truth is truth. We were created with God’s goals, God’s purposes in mind, and we have been shown God’s agenda for his creation. These are available to us all. We can adopt them and live them. We can get with the program.
My hope for myself and for you is that we all may be saints. My hope is that we may look at our goals, revise them if we need to, and begin living as the blessed of God – that we may begin to be poor in spirit, mournful in solidarity with each others’ losses, humble in the face of reality, eager to do what is right, generous and kind and forgiving to each other, undivided in our loves, willing to calm and stop destructive conflict, and ready to suffer if need be when we do the right thing.
My hope is that we will be people whom others will look to in love and gratitude when our day is done, that among us there may be holy scholars and teachers, that among us there may be visionaries willing to work inside the Church and outside its walls to bring about good, that among us there may be holy men and women willing to be patient channels for God’s grace and love, that among us there may be adults whose love for God is a rock and a refuge for the young.
My hope is that we will be those saints.
Br. Adam D. McCoy, OHC
Sunday after All Saints - November 2, 2008
Revelation 7:2-4, 9-17
Matthew 5:1-12
Yesterday, November first, was All Saints Day, which we are celebrating today. In the Church’s calendar today’s date, November second, is All Souls, the celebration of all the faithful departed. The beginning of November is the time when Christians place before ourselves all the good examples of faith, when we surround ourselves with reminders that others have gone before us, have made our lives in the faith possible. And today is Commitment Sunday here at The Church of the Incarnation. I pray that you will be generous with both your treasure and your talent, because the gift of yourself, your time and your energy, is as precious as your money.
This morning I want us to think about saints – the saints of the past, and the saints we might become. There is so much holiness. All the saints of the Church, famous and not so famous. All the saints of our particular communities. All the saints of our individual lives, all the people whose holiness has drawn us closer to God. Who are your saints?
I’ll tell you some of mine and you can think of yours. In the wider Church, my favorite saint of the Church is the Venerable Bede, the eighth century English Northumbrian monk and scholar whose holy life and writing at the northern edge of the known world still shines after all these centuries.
At St. Michael’s Church, Anaheim, California, where I was Rector in the 1990's, Chuck Henderson was Treasurer for ever and ever. Perhaps you know someone like him. His financial reports to the Vestry also seemed to go on for ever and ever. But one day he listened to the Gospel, Matthew 25, and was seized by the command of Our Lord to feed the hungry, and so he started and ran a feeding program for the poor. It ran every Monday night at St. Michael’s for twenty years. His vision and dedication opened a way for dozens of church members who wanted to walk the Gospel path. It changed that church. It made St. Michael’s a light to the poor.
In the Order of the Holy Cross, I think of Br. Paul Hayes, an old African American man who came to us after years of day jobs and life on the road and destitution. Those hardships took a real and lasting toll. When he found the monastery, he first went to work in the kitchen. Eventually he joined the Order. He would sit and listen to you and God was in his face and in his words and when you left your heart was healed. I know, because I watched it happen time and time again when we were stationed together at our monastery in Berkeley. I saw spirits lifted and lives changed and vocations saved and marriages healed. I know because it happened to me.
And in my personal life I think of my maternal grandmother, Della Rebecca Mohney Marshall, a solid, daily Bible-reading Christian lady of severe old-time Protestant tendencies whose love flowed out of the kitchen she almost never left. She was full of a righteous goodness that was almost frightening in its simplicity and so profoundly attractive that you wanted to be with her all the time, and not just to eat her sugar cookies.
Who are your saints? Circles upon circles of saints around us, smaller circles opening into wider circles, until finally, in the words of the seer in Revelation which we have just heard, it becomes a great multitude that no one can count, standing before the throne of God, praising the One whose life is their life and whose love is so strong.
Holiness is a category of embarrassment to people of our time. Holiness is something that others are supposed to discern in you, preferably after you are dead and gone, not something you actively pursue. But to be holy in the here and now? To work at being holy? How presumptuous. How priggish. How boring. Saints are other people, in other times, under other circumstances. Certainly not now. Certainly not us.
And yet Jesus calls us to be holy. From the end of the fifth chapter of Matthew, which begins with the Beatitudes we just heard, Jesus says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” What a preposterous thing to say. Who can be perfect? How can we do it? Impossible.
These two texts, the Beatitudes and the “Be perfect” passage, contain two words that give us a clue to a better understanding of holiness, and our call to be holy, two Greek words that are keys to the true Christian understanding of holiness. It may not be what you expect.
The first word is “blessed”. In Greek it is “makarios”, which has a wider range than our rather anemic “blessed”. If you are “makarios”, you’re happy because you’re fortunate, because you are one of those people who always seems to land on your feet, because you’re a winner. You are plugged into whatever it is that’s running the right way. You have the right rhythm and go with the flow. Your nature is in tune with the great reality and your life is in harmony with the best energies of the universe.
So, Jesus is saying, the people who are really plugged in, who are really surfing the crest of the great wave of the universe, are the people who follow God’s values, and not the values that seem to apparent to us on our first glance. They are the people who are trodden down inside as well as out; they are the people who have lost someone dear and feel it deeply; they are the people who are humble through and through; they are the people who want what is right so much they can taste it; they are the people who are always letting others off the hook; they are the people who aren’t fooled when we want things to be complicated and do some fancy dancing around tough issues, when the issues really aren’t that complex at all; they are the people who will take a risk to stop a quarrel or a fight or even a war; they are the people who get into trouble because they would rather follow God than adopt the fad of the moment. Jesus says these are the people who are the lucky ones, the people who will win the ultimate game of life.
The second word is “perfect”. The Greek for this is “teleios”. Again, our translation is a little weak. The Greek means perfect, but not in the sense of “without a flaw”. Rather, it means something that has achieved its goal. “Telos”, from which it comes, means the goal or end or purpose of something. So a person who is “teleios” has become the person who has become one with what was purposed at his or her beginning. Clearly we can never be flawless, though perhaps there are moments when we might glimpse that happy state. Thank God for moments of bliss! But to fulfill our purpose, that we can do.
What are the purposes, the goals of our lives? Have we chosen well, or have we settled for something second or even third or fourth rate? Perhaps we might consider an upgrade. Have we worked conscientiously to achieve our goals? Have we become the person we had the potential to be?
This understanding of “perfection” is very different from the idea of flawlessness. For one thing, it is dynamic. It is a process. You are not finished until you are finished, and yet if we are engaged seriously and completely in moving toward our goals, we are in a very real sense accomplishing them already. To be practicing them is to have achieved them, though with progress still to make. That is why so many professions say that the people following the profession are “practicing” – law and medicine, to name just two. To be a practicing lawyer or doctor means that you are a lawyer or a doctor, but that you are also on the way toward greater wisdom, greater skill. So to set out seriously on the path to reach a worthy goal is already to be on the way.
I would suggest that a saint is a person who has found the true and worthy goals of his or her life and is pursuing them. If those goals are God’s goals, that person will be plugged in to God’s energy. Now I admit that this may sound a little like New Age thinking. Those who know me well would be surprised to hear me called a New Ager. But truth is truth. We were created with God’s goals, God’s purposes in mind, and we have been shown God’s agenda for his creation. These are available to us all. We can adopt them and live them. We can get with the program.
My hope for myself and for you is that we all may be saints. My hope is that we may look at our goals, revise them if we need to, and begin living as the blessed of God – that we may begin to be poor in spirit, mournful in solidarity with each others’ losses, humble in the face of reality, eager to do what is right, generous and kind and forgiving to each other, undivided in our loves, willing to calm and stop destructive conflict, and ready to suffer if need be when we do the right thing.
My hope is that we will be people whom others will look to in love and gratitude when our day is done, that among us there may be holy scholars and teachers, that among us there may be visionaries willing to work inside the Church and outside its walls to bring about good, that among us there may be holy men and women willing to be patient channels for God’s grace and love, that among us there may be adults whose love for God is a rock and a refuge for the young.
My hope is that we will be those saints.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Br. Reginald's Eulogy for Br. William Sibley, OHC - 28 Oct 2008
The "Last Words and Testament" of William Sibley, OHC
by Br. Reginald Crenshaw, OHC, presented at William's funeral
at Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York,
on Tuesday 28 October 2008
The last words and testament of Br. William Sibley can be summed up with this refrain from the hymn “You are the salt for the earth.” It reads, “Bring forth the kingdom of mercy, bring forth the kingdom of peace, bring forth the kingdom of justice, bring forth the city of God.”
Today we celebrate the life and witness of William Sibley. Bede Thomas in his article on William on one of the Monastery’s weblogs describes William as a “man larger than life both in the Order of the Holy Cross and the Church at large.” William has over these many years as Guest master at this monastery, as a member of the Mt Calvary community where I met him and he mentored me in my vocation process, As prior in Toronto, where for the first time I lived with him and observed how he and the community envisioned and developed the presence of OHC in Canada successfully. As superior of the Order of the Holy Cross he envisioned the Order whose core values would be that of a love of justice, a respect for every person God has made, both within and outside the community.
In his Superior’s newsletter throughout his term he included articles, about a number of issues that were designed to stimulate and enhance the perspective of the community. Throughout his life he counseled, preached to numerous persons particularly around addictive issues. And many now testify to his effectiveness in this area. He participated in the peace movement as a member of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship and in the civil rights movement, attending marches and demonstrations and other activities that demonstrated clearly where his heart was. In those early days he not only talked the talk but walked the walk. His involvements in these social justice movements demonstrated his commitment to the kingdom of mercy, justice and peace and his faith and hope that all of this work would bring forth the city of God not only in the afterlife but here on earth.
We all have William Sibley stories, I would like for you before I continue to remember your favorite Sibley story and carry it with you at least for the duration of this sermon. My favorite story is the one William used to tell the novices and to anyone who would listen how he brought me into the Order and how after I agreed he drove me home to my mother and asked her to let me join the Order. That’s not exactly what happened but he loved to tell it knowing that it would make me blush. You all I’m sure have had yours either about an event or a conversation about Theology and or politics.
In this morning reading of Romans we read: “What can we say about all this? If God is on our side, can anyone be against us? God did not keep back his own Son, but he gave him for us. If God did this, won’t he freely give us everything else?"
I can hear William now responding to these words and the words of the final sentence of this morning’s second reading from Romans: “Nothing in all creation can separate us from God’s love for us in Christ Jesus our Lord.” With a fine "that’s nice", he would ask: "But what is your Christology? How do you understand Christ?" And he would inevitably give you a homily merging the thought of Bonhoeffer, Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan and others from the Jesus seminar in one short paragraph. These were not meant to be trick questions, or to “push your buttons” though the force of his asking could and did often irritate and push buttons but for him these questions were related to his understanding of the meaning of the incarnation. That wonderful Christian doctrine that speaks of how the divine enters into human life and the material world is therefore transformed through and in the person of Jesus Christ.
The Material world of matter is joined to the divine which is the source of all creation on earth. This had enormous consequences to William for assessing behavior, how we articulated ethical issues, it defined what justice is about and, more to the point, it determined and shaped how we are to organize our communities and societies to maximize and transform humanity. And most of all for William it turned the understanding of God upside down from being a harsh judgmental and punishing parent to a savior who invited us to share in Divine consciousness and, the medium for doing that was Christ. The emphasis then was not so much Christ the divine one, but Christ the human being who raised the bar of consciousness and human potential for all of us.
I want to say to you, Mary and Richard, to you, Robert, Mary Lawrence, Stuart, and Tyler (editor: William's family), that William loved each of you very much. He spoke about each of you with pride and expressed the joy that each of you brought to his life. His sensitivity to each of your spirits was and will continue to be his connection with and to you. To my brothers Robert and Randy, William loved and admired both of you. You were a refreshing presence in his life and he expressed to me many times his appreciation for the love and support the two of you provided for him these last years. May his spirit inspire you both to reach your highest potential.
To all of us in Holy Cross, William left a legacy of core values which challenges us to live into our monastic life with honesty, integrity and love. He would wish for us my brothers that we continue not to be threatened by diversity, and to value the individual vocations and ministries among us, to love justice and work to bring it about, that we be willing to change, even and especially when it is costly. That we value God’s will and the well-being of others more than our own comfort and survival. Individually and as a community. That our monastic vow will make us givers rather than takers, that we love more not less and that we listen and give ourselves to cooperation with our brothers. And finally, that we be a community of responsible adults who deal with compassion with all whose lives we touch.
William was my friend, brother, superior. He was a compassionate, loyal and honest man. He lived life as fully as he could and because of how he lived he had to struggle as he did. William was looking for the eternal religion. He was looking for the reality behind all rites and rituals, the truth behind all dogmas, the justice behind all laws. He knew that this religion could be found in the heart of every human being. It is the law written in our hearts. This religion is known only by the soul in its depth. I believe this is what William was looking for. It’s why he kept making references to existential moments, or the ways he asked about the meaning of it all. Every human being must find the map back to God. To find that path we must learn from many traditions. That was the basis of William interfaith journey.
That’s why he was such a strong advocate for social justice, that’s why he was politically active in the church and elsewhere. He used to say that politics was the art of the possible. He really meant that. And it’s articulated in the the various “Sibleyisms” Such as “God gave the sacraments to the Church but gave the Church to the world” and others like it. But he also asked the basic question that is raised in numerous quarters today both in the church and other quarters and that is: Does the church make any difference in the world or ways our lives are lived? His answer despite bouts of depression, and his ongoing struggle with his alcoholism was Yes. Yes he said, “Nothing can separate me and us from God’s love for me and us in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Amen.
by Br. Reginald Crenshaw, OHC, presented at William's funeral
at Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York,
on Tuesday 28 October 2008
The last words and testament of Br. William Sibley can be summed up with this refrain from the hymn “You are the salt for the earth.” It reads, “Bring forth the kingdom of mercy, bring forth the kingdom of peace, bring forth the kingdom of justice, bring forth the city of God.”
Today we celebrate the life and witness of William Sibley. Bede Thomas in his article on William on one of the Monastery’s weblogs describes William as a “man larger than life both in the Order of the Holy Cross and the Church at large.” William has over these many years as Guest master at this monastery, as a member of the Mt Calvary community where I met him and he mentored me in my vocation process, As prior in Toronto, where for the first time I lived with him and observed how he and the community envisioned and developed the presence of OHC in Canada successfully. As superior of the Order of the Holy Cross he envisioned the Order whose core values would be that of a love of justice, a respect for every person God has made, both within and outside the community.
In his Superior’s newsletter throughout his term he included articles, about a number of issues that were designed to stimulate and enhance the perspective of the community. Throughout his life he counseled, preached to numerous persons particularly around addictive issues. And many now testify to his effectiveness in this area. He participated in the peace movement as a member of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship and in the civil rights movement, attending marches and demonstrations and other activities that demonstrated clearly where his heart was. In those early days he not only talked the talk but walked the walk. His involvements in these social justice movements demonstrated his commitment to the kingdom of mercy, justice and peace and his faith and hope that all of this work would bring forth the city of God not only in the afterlife but here on earth.
We all have William Sibley stories, I would like for you before I continue to remember your favorite Sibley story and carry it with you at least for the duration of this sermon. My favorite story is the one William used to tell the novices and to anyone who would listen how he brought me into the Order and how after I agreed he drove me home to my mother and asked her to let me join the Order. That’s not exactly what happened but he loved to tell it knowing that it would make me blush. You all I’m sure have had yours either about an event or a conversation about Theology and or politics.
In this morning reading of Romans we read: “What can we say about all this? If God is on our side, can anyone be against us? God did not keep back his own Son, but he gave him for us. If God did this, won’t he freely give us everything else?"
I can hear William now responding to these words and the words of the final sentence of this morning’s second reading from Romans: “Nothing in all creation can separate us from God’s love for us in Christ Jesus our Lord.” With a fine "that’s nice", he would ask: "But what is your Christology? How do you understand Christ?" And he would inevitably give you a homily merging the thought of Bonhoeffer, Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan and others from the Jesus seminar in one short paragraph. These were not meant to be trick questions, or to “push your buttons” though the force of his asking could and did often irritate and push buttons but for him these questions were related to his understanding of the meaning of the incarnation. That wonderful Christian doctrine that speaks of how the divine enters into human life and the material world is therefore transformed through and in the person of Jesus Christ.
The Material world of matter is joined to the divine which is the source of all creation on earth. This had enormous consequences to William for assessing behavior, how we articulated ethical issues, it defined what justice is about and, more to the point, it determined and shaped how we are to organize our communities and societies to maximize and transform humanity. And most of all for William it turned the understanding of God upside down from being a harsh judgmental and punishing parent to a savior who invited us to share in Divine consciousness and, the medium for doing that was Christ. The emphasis then was not so much Christ the divine one, but Christ the human being who raised the bar of consciousness and human potential for all of us.
I want to say to you, Mary and Richard, to you, Robert, Mary Lawrence, Stuart, and Tyler (editor: William's family), that William loved each of you very much. He spoke about each of you with pride and expressed the joy that each of you brought to his life. His sensitivity to each of your spirits was and will continue to be his connection with and to you. To my brothers Robert and Randy, William loved and admired both of you. You were a refreshing presence in his life and he expressed to me many times his appreciation for the love and support the two of you provided for him these last years. May his spirit inspire you both to reach your highest potential.
To all of us in Holy Cross, William left a legacy of core values which challenges us to live into our monastic life with honesty, integrity and love. He would wish for us my brothers that we continue not to be threatened by diversity, and to value the individual vocations and ministries among us, to love justice and work to bring it about, that we be willing to change, even and especially when it is costly. That we value God’s will and the well-being of others more than our own comfort and survival. Individually and as a community. That our monastic vow will make us givers rather than takers, that we love more not less and that we listen and give ourselves to cooperation with our brothers. And finally, that we be a community of responsible adults who deal with compassion with all whose lives we touch.
William was my friend, brother, superior. He was a compassionate, loyal and honest man. He lived life as fully as he could and because of how he lived he had to struggle as he did. William was looking for the eternal religion. He was looking for the reality behind all rites and rituals, the truth behind all dogmas, the justice behind all laws. He knew that this religion could be found in the heart of every human being. It is the law written in our hearts. This religion is known only by the soul in its depth. I believe this is what William was looking for. It’s why he kept making references to existential moments, or the ways he asked about the meaning of it all. Every human being must find the map back to God. To find that path we must learn from many traditions. That was the basis of William interfaith journey.
That’s why he was such a strong advocate for social justice, that’s why he was politically active in the church and elsewhere. He used to say that politics was the art of the possible. He really meant that. And it’s articulated in the the various “Sibleyisms” Such as “God gave the sacraments to the Church but gave the Church to the world” and others like it. But he also asked the basic question that is raised in numerous quarters today both in the church and other quarters and that is: Does the church make any difference in the world or ways our lives are lived? His answer despite bouts of depression, and his ongoing struggle with his alcoholism was Yes. Yes he said, “Nothing can separate me and us from God’s love for me and us in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Amen.
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