RCL - Proper 21B - 27 Sep 2009

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. James Michael Dowd, OHC

RCL - Proper 21B - September 27, 2009

Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29

James 5:13-20

Mark 9:38-50

Br. Randy by our massive Oak in the Lesser Cloister

Photo Originally Uploaded by Rachael Elizabeth Photography

Total Abandon

I was very much taken with our second reading from the Epistle of James this week as I began to prepare this sermon. The reading, taken from the end of the Letter begins with a series of questions: “Are any of you suffering?” “Are any cheerful?” “Are any among you sick?” In all those cases, and in many more, we are told by James, that we are to pray. As I experienced all of those questions in real time this week – I was sick and suffered (ok – suffering might be a little strong, but it was unpleasant); and I experienced real cheerfulness due to some very good news I received regarding a ministry I am involved with. And so, I thought to myself: “well, what would James say?” He'd tell me to pray. And this seems like a good thing for a monk to do, indeed for any Christian to do.

But my own personal experience, and the experiences of many people I talk to, indicates that even when a person feels truly called to pray, they often experience hesitation, or even downright resistance to actually praying. And, admittedly, I am reading into James here, but his urging people to pray sounds a bit frantic to me. Like he has had the same experience I have had. An experience that has taught me that whatever the situation, prayer is always a good thing – but sometimes, it's just so hard to bring ourselves to do. When we are sick or in sin, that is, when we are at our weakest either physically or spiritually – we should pray. But not only then. In fact, when we are at our strongest – cheerful is the word James uses – we should pray then too. Whatever the situation, God is the Lord of all and welcomes, indeed, invites prayer at every turn. And yet, all to often we resist.

One of the great blessings in my life is my family. I thank God everyday for them. In recent years, many of these blessings have been manifested in my nieces and nephews. Among my three siblings, I have eight nieces and nephews who range between the ages of four and sixteen. Now back when each of them were between the ages of about four years old and six years old, and two of them still are, they had a way of greeting me when I would visit that was unforgettable and something I will treasure for the rest of my life. It has been so meaningful to me that, often over the years, when things have been difficult – I have thought of these moments.

I'd be visiting from what must have seemed very far away and as I approached the walkway to the house or came in the front door, the kids would charge me with full abandon and dive into my arms, yelling something like “Uncle Jimmy is here!” If you ever want an experience of total, unrestrained and unquestioning love, I highly recommend this. And if you want a double dose of it – just ask a sibling to have twins, as my younger brother has.

I would be greeted with such warmth, hugs, kisses, tussling of my hair, and squeals of delight. The “Uncle Jimmy is here!” sounded as if the greatest event in human history had just occurred with Uncle Jimmy's arrival. It is unmitigated joy.

But this only happens when youngsters are between the ages of four and six, give or take. Younger than four, the children did not know me well enough and would be more cautious. Older than six, a kind of worldly maturity begins to set in, slowly, but surely. And with maturity comes reserve. And with reserve comes self-defense. And with self-defense comes a seeming need to mask our vulnerability.

Now, I have a great relationship with each of my nieces and nephews, whatever their age, and wherever they are at. These relationships have deepened over the years and are incredibly meaningful to me. Each of them are unique blessings that God has granted to me, a rather undeserving soul. But I have wondered about the loss of this type of innocence for a long time. And as I have reflected on it, I began to turn inward and to think about my own experience. What was it like for me to be standing there as one of these great kids was charging me, screaming at the top of their lungs, and diving into my arms?

Well, usually, I protected myself, physically and emotionally, asking myself in an instant, questions like “can I still lift them?” “what about my back?” “what if I drop them?” “why can't I scream with so much joy?” “why can't I tell them that I love them as much as they love me?” And on and on. I would scoop them up and hug them and kiss them – but with a tinge of that reserve, while slowly placing a mask over my vulnerability.

But somehow, the kisses and the hugs and the joy of these great children would relax me and would show me a better way. A way to be open to a love that is pure, innocent, and true; before layer after layer of protective coating begins to be applied.

That's what adulthood does to us. As we begin to age and move into the world we get hurt, we experience pain in ourselves and witness it in others, and little by little, we begin to ask ourselves questions like “can I still lift them?” or “why can't I scream with such joy?” And those very real, very difficult questions, begin to shape how we approach our relationships. And that includes how we approach our relationship with God. An approach that has a layer, perhaps several layers, of protective coating on it.

We are careful. We don't want to be hurt. We don't ask God for too much because perhaps he'll disappoint us in his seeming lack of response. We don't tell God we love him too often, because that just makes us more vulnerable. We don't sing praises to God because we just cannot scream for joy any longer. We don't confess our sins because God must be so disgusted with us. We don't even tell God when we are happy, because we probably don't deserve to be anyway. I think we tell ourselves these kind of lies all the time, because we think they keep us safe.

And that brings me back to what I think might have been James' motivation in ending his Epistle with his pleading instruction to pray. When I think of Elaina, Katie, Patrick, Emily, Matthew, Alex, Connor or Sydney charging me and diving into my arms, I think of God. I actually think that God wants to approach us like a four year old – jumping for joy, diving into our arms, hugging and kissing us with total, unrestrained and unquestioning love. With the announcement that “Uncle Jimmy is here!” and it really is the greatest moment in human history. Just because God is here, present to us.

This is, after all, what the Incarnation is: God throwing open his arms with total abandon and embracing each of us as his own. This is, after all, what the Passion is: God throwing open his arms with total abandon to lay down his life for his friends. This is, after all, what the Resurrection is: God throwing up his arms in total abandon with victory over sin and death for us. This is, after all, what the Coming of the Holy Spirit is: God throwing open our arms with total abandon so that God can pray within us.

In last week's Gospel passage from St. Mark, Jesus tells us "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me." God is a four year old. God wants us to act like four year olds: Totally open to love, joy, welcome, and with a world view that says each and every encounter with God is the greatest moment in human history. That's what James is telling us today. Pray with unrestrained abandon, like a four year old – everyday and in every circumstance. Let God throw himself at you and open your arms so wide that it hurts to receive him. Take off the mask and let yourself be vulnerable. Strip yourself of the layer upon layer of self-defense you have put on over the years. Give back to God what he first gives to you – total love in complete abandon. The only way to do that is to pray – every day in every way. AMEN.

RCL - Holy Cross Day - 14 Sep 2009

St. Andrews, Newark, NJ

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC

RCL - Holy Cross Day, September 14, 2009

Isaiah 45:21-25

Philippians 2:5-11

John 12:31-36a

The Crucifix in the Monastic Gardens at Holy Cross Monastery

Originally Uploaded by Cloister-Walk

I’ve never been to Jerusalem or to the Holy Land. And I’m not at all sure I want to go. Which is surprising. I’ve been to lots of places and generally enjoy travel. I’ve lived in Europe. I’ve been to Egypt and New Zealand and, yes, even to Canada. And my current position as Superior of the Order of the Holy Cross requires that I travel every year to South Africa. And since the advice of one of our venerable senior brothers was “Never fly direct,” it’s certainly conceivable that I could take the long way around and visit the Holy Land. But I don’t have much desire to do that.

Strange. I have a dear friend who regularly leads pilgrimages there. I have met countless people who have journeyed there, studied there, lived there. They all tell me how profoundly and irreversibly it changed the way they read the Bible and the way they hear the stories of Jesus that we have heard from our youth. To walk where Jesus walked, to bathe in the same rivers, to see the same hillsides, to know that you do in fact go up to Jerusalem and down to Dead Sea and north to the Galilee. It all gets fleshed out for them; it all becomes real in a way it wasn’t before. It’s like the difference between reading a map and actually being in a place. Both may be accurate perceptions, but they are totally different experiences, the first only a sketch or shadow of the second, helpful in navigating the terrain a little more confidently, perhaps, but pale in comparison.

I’ve also met people who’ve come back from trips to the Holy Land totally disillusioned: disillusioned by the development of the cities and the countryside, by the crowds of people, by the tourist and pilgrimage trade, by the crass commercialization of religious faith, by the dirtiness, the chaos and the political and cultural violence. They went seeking happy peasants, and what they found were people not much different than themselves struggling to make a living in one of the most emotionally and politically charged pieces of real estate in the world, a small piece of the earth claimed as sacred, as holy, as home by three world religions and by many different tribes and nations. It apparently didn’t look or feel at all like those colorful drawings we saw in Sunday school as children, and these folks came back profoundly disappointed. Whatever it is they wanted, the Holy Land could not give them.

Perhaps nowhere is this more true than Jerusalem itself, always it seems a spiritual and political hothouse—a small place, crowded, fought over, jealously guarded and deeply revered, deeply longed for and loved by generations, sung about in songs and painted by artists, written about by travelers and dreamed about for ages: “Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blessed.” “Jerusalem my happy home, when shall I come to thee?”

I fear it may be all too much to bear, too much to take in. So I stay in New York, or South Africa, or New Zealand, thank you very much.

But people do still go to the Holy Land and especially to Jerusalem and they have been going there for millennia. They go on pilgrimage. They go to be close to lands and skies and places that they have heard about all their lives and dreamed about and prayed about. They go to walk where Moses or David walked and where Mary and Jesus and the apostles and the first Christians lived. They want to be where it all happened, where Jesus taught and healed and preached and died. They want to see it with their own eyes, touch it with their own hands, hear and smell and taste and walk that place. It’s not unusual or surprising. Look at how many make their way each day to that great hole in the earth in Lower Manhattan that was the World Trade Center. They want to see it with their own eyes, to be there. And who knows why? Who can explain it?

Our feast today, the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (or Holy Cross Day), is a feast rooted in this desire of human beings to see it with their own eyes, as much as they can, as much as is humanly possible. Its origins lie in the restoration of the Christian holy sites begun in earnest in the fourth century under the Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena. They decided that it was time to locate and honor those places that were so much part of the story of Jesus, and by extension, our story as well. And no place was more central than that place where our Lord was crucified for us and where he rose from the dead—what came to be known today as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The great triumph of that effort was the popular belief that on that sacred site, the very wood on which our Lord had suffered had been recovered through a miraculous turn of events. And that wood was presented as a sign and a deep and living connection to our Lord’s saving act. That precious relic was offered for the veneration of all who came, and over the centuries they came by the hundreds of thousands to see that wood, to visit that hill of Golgotha and the nearby tomb where Jesus rested in death and rose again to life that first Easter, the whole site now covered by one enormous structure connecting these various sites and fought over by Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Armenians, Copts and other Christians for centuries. Indeed the competition is so fierce and the territorial rights so volatile that Moslem and Jewish authorities have to guard the peace to keep the Christians from fighting with each other, as regularly happens.

It is, to this very day, a chaotic scene. And people often wonder if Jesus would recognize it? And more to the point, what would he think of it? My opinion is that he’s seen it all, accepts it all, and that nothing would surprise him.

We may, of course, dismiss it. Our faith in Christ has never been dependent upon a visit to certain sacred places but rather on faith in the Lord Jesus himself. And all the layers of tradition, superstition, sectarian rivalry, and religious tourism make such places easy targets for our skepticism.

But the truth is that there is still power in such places. It is, I think, the power to see things differently, to catch an alternative view of life, to be jolted or shocked out of our usual ways of experiencing our world. It’s one of the reasons that people still go on pilgrimages. But the funny thing is, you can never predict when these moments or experiences will happen or even if they will happen at all. All you can do is be open to them, when God in his mercy uses an event, a place, a person to draw the curtain aside to let us catch a glimpse of something more, a glimpse than can be either consoling or troubling, or both.

I was reminded of this as I was reading Forward Day by Day this past week. There is a printed version, as you know, frequently available at the back of Episcopal churches, but it is also available on line on the Internet, and if you have access to a computer, you can read it and also post a personal response to the daily reflection to share with others. Last Tuesday, the reflection focused on the line from St. Marks’ Gospel about the women who went to the tomb early that first Easter: “Terror and amazement had seized them.” It was a simple and beautiful reflection about the author going with his grandson on his first roller coaster ride seeing in his grandson’s face that peculiar combination of “terror and amazement” that St. Mark described.

But what really caught my attention and stopped me in my tracks was a response of someone named Rick Meyer, from I know not where. Let me read you what he wrote:

In 1993 I visited Jerusalem and took the tour of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; it was nice but I would have liked to stay. I noticed that many people were just sitting along the side of the room up by the cross. So in ‘97 when I returned I set aside a whole day to sit and watch. There is a front stairs that everyone comes up and a back stairs were people leave. I sat on a small bench next to the back stairs. The place was jammed. After a few hours a woman came up the back stairs. She was dressed in modest clothing [eastern European] with a shawl over her head. She got on her knees and [crying] started crawling through the crowd towards the cross and the rock. People started to see her and it got eerily quiet up there as literally thousands of people moved out of her way. She moved forward, never looking up, making the sign of the cross and crying as she approached the cross. She reached in and touched the rock and reacted as though she had received an electric shock, then crying and sobbing [and never looking up] she crawled backwards to the stairs and left. It shook me up. I walked downstairs and stood in the line to go into the tomb. The floor around the tomb area is cracked concrete in bad repair. It was noisy, as thousands of people, speaking many languages, waited their turn to go in. Off to the left I saw the woman again; on her knees same as before. As people noticed her, again, it became so quiet as thousands of people moved out of her way to let her pass. She crawled as before over the broken rocks to the tomb; the priests at the tomb moved out of her way, people already in the tomb, seeing her, moved aside. As before she never looked up, making the sign of the cross, crying and sobbing. Then she backed out again, head down, crawling over the broken concrete, and was gone. We all stood in silence for a long time. I was asking myself why I wasn’t crying and crawling on my knees towards my savior. I think others were doing the same. It haunts me still.

And reading it, it haunts me too. The Holy Cross: our salvation, our hope, our redemption, our resurrection. We’ve so domesticated it, so neutralized it, become so familiar with it, that we put it on our walls and on our steeples and wear it around our necks and make feature length motion pictures abut it and paint it and sing it. But sometimes, we are simply called to or forced to worship it, that is, to come there before God’s power emptied of all glory and glorious beyond our own emptiness and like those women in the Gospel and that woman on her knees, be seized by “terror and amazement”… reduced to tears of grief for our own broken hearts and our own broken world and to tears of gratitude for the tender mercy of God who in ways that surpass our understanding, enters into all and redeems it all and transforms it all.

“I was asking myself why wasn’t I crying and crawling on my knees towards my savior…It haunts me still.”

No wonder I’m reluctant to go to Jerusalem. Who knows what I’ll find there? Who knows what or who will find me there?

But, the truth is that God is persistent and endlessly creative… and if we don’t go to Jerusalem, Jerusalem will come to us. Here we are this morning, the church of Jesus Christ, gathered in this place, in prayer around this book and this table where the mystery of Jesus’ Cross and Resurrection is being played out yet one more time for us and in us. Who knows what will happen?

Don’t be afraid, angels often say. But don’t be surprised either if some day it will be as if you too received an electric shock…and in the power of that shock, go on to live a changed life, a fuller and richer and more loving life, indeed a new life in Christ.

May today be that day—for you and for me. May every day be that day!

That is the promise and the power of the Holy Cross.

RCL - Proper 18 B - 07 Sep 2009

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Adam McCoy, OHC

RCL - Proper 18B, Sunday 07 September, 2009

Isaiah 35:4-7a

James 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17

Mark 7:24-37

The St. Francis Garden at Holy Cross Monastery

Originally Uploaded by Cloister-Walk

Today’s two Gospel stories are connected by one of the most famous geographical puzzles in scripture. If Jesus is going from Tyre, on the Mediterranean, northwest of Galilee, by way of the Sea of Galilee to the Decapolis, why does he go to Sidon first? The northwestern edge Sea of Galilee is a good 35 miles southeast of Tyre, and the Decapolis is the region stretching away from the eastern side and far beyond, a straight 10 mile shot across the water, or farther around. But Sidon is 25 miles or more north of Tyre, and by going there, you miss the best east-west pass through the hills to the valley going south. If getting from Tyre to the Decapolis in good time is the goal, a 50 mile detour makes no sense. It’s like you want to get to New Haven from West Park, so you start by going 25 miles north, toward Albany. Now that’s a challenge!

Today’s Gospel also contains one of the most disturbing of all Jesus’ sayings. You may remember how abrupt he was to the Samaritan woman at the well, in John 4, when with no polite preliminaries he said, “Give me a drink”. A privileged patriarchal male need not say please, I guess. But this is worse: A Greek-speaking Syrophoenician woman comes to him in desperation because her little daughter has a demon, and she has heard Jesus can heal. What does Jesus say to her? As with the Samaritan woman, not a single polite word falls from his lips. I don’t know where he learned his pastoral theology, but he would not get an A for this: "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." Offensive to her, and to us. When is the last time someone you respected and believed in told you that you are the lowest form of life, and in such a way as to make it clear that you need to bow down to his sort of people because you are, well, you are your sort of people, and we just can’t have anything to do with you, and in all likelihood, neither can God. And who is saying this? The Son of God no less. This is problematic, to say the least.

There are other issues in these stories as well, but these two will do for today.

One of the problems with Sunday morning scripture is that we just hear bits. We don’t listen to the larger sweep of the text. It is useful to put these two stories into context. They come directly after Jesus has fed the five thousand who were so excited that they came out to hear him in the wilderness unprepared. Famously, the disciples do not understand what is going on. Then he walks on the water, past their boat, at night. The disciples do not understand what is going on. When he gets to shore, the people find him again and get him to perform a mass healing. Then the religious authorities arrive from Jerusalem to scope out what is happening. They accuse him of breaking the laws that delineate clean from unclean. Jesus lets loose with a half-chapter diatribe against Jewish religious people who think that observing rules of ritual purity can substitute for the real cleanness of observing God’s holy law in its much larger sense.

And that is what brings Jesus, and us, to Tyre, and the annoying Greek-speaking woman, and the confusing roundabout journey, and finally to the healing of a deaf man in the Decapolis.

Mark seems to be saying that Jesus is fed up with Jewish disciples who see and see and do not understand, and with Jewish officials who are looking for nits to pick in order to derail his ministry. His success is with the crowds of ordinary people. It is the non-powerful, the badly connected, those without resource, who seem to understand. And in the Jewish world of Jesus and his ministry, there is no one religiously less powerful, no one worse connected with God, no one with less of a foothold, than a Greek speaking pagan woman, and her not even a real Greek, but a Syro-phoenician to boot! Jesus seems to have decided to give the Jewish thing a rest for a bit. If the garbled geography means anything, it means that he was taking the really long way around, spending a lot of time in Gentile territory, avoiding Jewish areas. He is represented as not wanting to be recognized, but as Mark says, “Yet he could not escape notice.” I imagine he knew this.

We know a little about the people for whom Mark wrote. We don’t know where, but we do know when, not more than a few years after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70. We know they were Greek speaking. They were almost certainly not Jewish by origin. They would have listened to the failures of Jewish disciples and officials as people who had perhaps been on the receiving end of the Jewish ritual purity stick in the early Church themselves. And perhaps they were also on the receiving end of the neo-Pharasaical leadership in the Church which St. Paul tells us so much about. At any rate, they likely would have sympathized with the Syrophoenician woman and with the deaf man in the Decapolis. They might even have taken Jesus’ insulting remark to that woman personally.

But they would also have noticed something wonderful in what follows. Far from bristling with pride and defiant self-assertion, as I imagine most of us in our culture would have been if this had happened to us, the woman accepts his description of her as a dog. She humbles herself, but without losing her native wit and energy. And then she turns it back on Jesus: "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Is this a sharp retort or an acceptance of who she is in the scheme of things – a non-Israelite, not of the chosen, but still a creature with a claim on her creator? In either case, Zing.

As Jesus does with the Samaritan woman, so he does with the Syrophoenician woman: he takes her seriously. Our translation says simply, “For saying that...” But the Greek is more interesting. Dia touton ton logon: “on account of this word”. Logos is also the ordinary term for “word”, so we shouldn’t make too much of this. But, still, there it is, this very charged word logos, with all it may have implied in early Christian tradition, right here, in Jesus’ response to her. Jesus at last has found a person who immediately accepts the truth and power of kenosis, of self-emptying, of accepting the cross that God gives. At last someone who might understand what he is up to. At last someone for whom the word of God speaks and evokes a response of creaturely humility, with the intelligence to carry her case forward and the faith not to let it go when things get rough. Jesus did not find this with his disciples, and he sure didn’t find it in the religious leadership. He had to go to Tyre. Maybe that’s why he took the long way back. Maybe he was hoping to find some more.

And he did. East of the Sea of Galilee a man is brought to Jesus by his friends to be healed. Think of the man at the pool of Bethesda who could find no one among the devout Jews there to help carry him into the water, but here the Gentiles in their caring act for their friend are putting them to shame. Jesus performs an exorcism, which Mark describes in clinical detail. He is healed. He is asked not to talk about it, but of course he does. Suddenly he can talk and then not tell people about it? Get real! And what is the upshot? It is the Gentiles of the Decapolis who first publicly proclaim Jesus in messianic terms: "He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak." Lots here for Mark’s Gentile readers to identify with, to ponder.

And what about us? Even if we are dwellers in the richest and most prosperous culture the world has ever dreamed of, we are not, most of us anyway, the Chosen People. We live in the Tyres and Sidons, the gentile Decapolis of the modern world. I wonder if we would have the courage and faith of that woman, that wonderful woman, who understood her situation with God. She had no claim, no rights, no standing in the Covenant. But she had faith that in her humility, using what God had given her, a logos-inspired intelligence, she, in taking the lowest place, would find salvation. This great woman, the first in the Gospels to understand Christ in the path of humility, to bow to him, to ask him, who himself took the form of a slave, and who will die disgraced on a cross before very long, she is the first to ask to share his table, even a crumb. She is the hero, the spiritual mother, of every one of us when we come in our own unworthiness to God’s table.

In our culture, even more in our Church, humility like hers is not widely admired. There is more talk of rights and self-respect and assertion and pride than of acknowledging our lowliness. But perhaps humility should be more widely admired, more widely imitated. It is, after all, simply an acknowledgment of the truth. We are not worthy.

Many of us say, as we come to God’s table in the Eucharist, I am not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table. Say but the word and I shall be healed.

May it be so. It is the path to salvation.