Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
RCL - All Saints C - Sunday 31 October 2010
Daniel 7:1-3,15-18
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:20-31
Each year in Grahamstown, South Africa, there is a festival of the arts. It’s modeled on the Edinburgh Festival with music, drama, street theater, the Fringe and some wonderful nonsense and great food. I always loved it.
One year, a group of South African artists presented the Chester Cycle of the mystery plays. These date from the 15th century.
The group’s staging was wonderful… the chorus were saints. They were dressed in cloth of gold and their headdresses were fashioned to look like icons. Square and standing around their heads. Every time they moved, they glowed in the lights of the theater. Heavenly, beautiful and chilling at the same time. Not of us, not at all.
Then the music started… and the musicians played garbage cans and coke bottles. While I had been enthralled by the glowing beauty of the figures, the music brought me right back to earth, to incarnation, to roughness and pain… to life. It was brilliant! Holiness and the ordinary in a wonderful mix.
This feast of All Saints is like that. It captures the heart. This celebration of all the holy women and men from all time past and all time to come surely must touch each of us. It brings awe and wonder; it brings us to our knees in humility. It makes us look at our lives and wonder if we will ever make the roll of the holy ones.
And there’s quite a bunch of them. We really only celebrate the biggies here. Scholars, bishops, monks, nuns, popes, missionaries, kings and queens, apostles, martyrs, hermits and pastors. All with credentials that bid us admire and venerate them. And I do love them – all those holy people – some of them quite surprised, I’m sure, to have a feast day.
Most of them would be more comfortable with the dustbin band and the coke bottles than the great heavenly strings… because truth to tell, most of them didn’t try to be saints. They tried to be human – fully human as the Lord they followed was fully human. Fully in love with God’s people, filled with hunger… hunger of the mind, hunger of the heart. The fled to the desert and found themselves one with each other. Living in the cloister, they became fully aware of the poor at the door. They wrote, they preached, they debated; they traveled to distant places far from their homes. They suffered, they struggled - and God claimed them. And God made them saints!
Just as God has made us saints! On this feast we don’t merely remember the superstars but also the ordinary saints who, all unbeknownst even to themselves, transform the world. You know them – the foster mothers who always have room for one more; the nurses who take on double shifts rather than leave the suffering; the teacher who labors to bring light to a student’s eyes; the teenager who befriends the odd one out in class – all of them are saints. And they are everywhere. This church is packed with them – all the company, all the time. I believe that at the loneliest place in my heart, there they are – loving and holding me. I believe that when I walk and stumble, they are there to cheer me on. I believe that when I fall into the comfort trap, they convict me. I believe that when I have no strength to act, they act for me. And when we can believe that, there is no room left for despair or paralysis of fear. It’s the incarnation – Christ present in us. In all history, in every dark place where one of us shines, where one person gives food to the hungry, where one teenager scared of his sexuality is loved and unashamed, where the exhausted single mother is treasured as beautiful, there are the saints at work; there God is praised, there Christ is born again.
So this is a feast of hope and joy. It’s also a feast of calling, of pulling us forward into the dark places where we would rather not go. Jesus makes no bones about it. He doesn’t spiritualize the blessings – it isn’t the poor in spirit he talks about. It’s the poor, the dirt poor. Their hunger is not for righteousness, it’s for food. Luke the physician reports it as he knows it. And the woes are just as down and dirty. If you have everything now, don’t expect more. Life in the incarnate Lord is not cloth of gold and living icons for most of the world. It’s garbage cans and empty bottles and grubbing for existence.
So we join the saints at the dumpsters, in the churches, in the quiet places and in the streets. This is a feast of wonder and delight and promise because the saints are here – canonized or unrecognized; prelate or your Aunt Helen; wise old men or children. All here, all hungry and thirsty, and all gathered with us at the altar for the only Word that can satisfy. All the heart of God is here.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
RCL - Proper 23C - October 09, 2010
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c
2 Timothy 2:8-15
Luke 17:11-19
Some years ago I was walking down East 109th Street from St. Edward’s Church in East Harlem, where I was the priest, toward the subway and the super at one of the buildings said hello. I stopped and said hello and pretty soon it was clear to me that he had something to say. Now if you live in New York City and one of the supers has something to say, even if he’s not your super, you should generally listen, because they know lots of useful things. He said to me that he had been watching me over the past few days and he saw that I had not been smiling much, and wondered if something was wrong. I said something noncommital. And then he said something I have not forgotten. He said, “You should be smiling because you know about the love of God. And if you can’t show it, Father, how can anyone else?” I thanked him and went on my way. It took me a while to admit to myself that I was knocked back a bit. I spent much of the rest of the day thinking about it, and when I saw him again I made sure I was smiling. I realized that day that I was one of the nine we just heard about in today’s gospel.
There were ten lepers. Ten lepers were cured. But only one turned back to give thanks, and as often happens in biblical narratives he was an outsider, the wrong sort of person. Today and every time this gospel story is read we give thanks for him. But what about the others? Because to be truthful, a lot of us are more like the nine than we are like this grateful Samaritan.
When we have problems, when we are sick, when things are not going our way, how often we sink into our situation and identify with it. Luke’s narrative shows this, actually. These people are called lepers. Just lepers. A more politically correct rendering might be something like “ten persons displaying symptoms like Hansen’s disease”. But the text is brutally realistic. In this telling they are described by their disease, as if they are their disease. Their identity for the purposes of the narrative is their leprosy. The are lepers. And as they turn away, all of them with faith enough to be cured, for they all do as Jesus tells them, the nine continue on their way. We don’t know what happened to them. But if they continued to be defined by the state of their health, they would presumably have become known as persons who were cured of leprosy, or perhaps Persons Formerly Known as Lepers. Maybe they became famous. But their identity would continue to be circumscribed by their condition.
In the moment the tenth leper turns back to thank God for the return of his health, however, Luke gives him a new identity. He is no longer just “a leper”, but suddenly, he is a Samaritan, a member of a particular human community. His ability to mingle as a normal person with others has been restored. He is now not a faceless representative of a disease but a member of a specific group of people, a part of a living people, with all that implies. He is human again. He is restored.
How many unsatisfactory categories can we put ourselves in? How many limiting labels can we apply to ourselves? We don’t have to seek far to find them.
What is the most dysfunctional aspect of the way we live our lives, the one which can define us if we let it? There is liberation in saying the word when we have been living in denial: Hi. I’m Adam. I’m a..... And then we name our addiction. Admitting to that identity is to start a journey of recovery. But it is not all we are.
What are the illnesses which constrain us in some way? We may not be lepers, but we can certainly be diabetics, cancer patients, gout sufferers, and there are times when we are so consumed by our ailments that we might as well become them. But they are not all we are.
What are the losses and failures of our lives? The jobs we did not get, or the jobs we got and lost. The friends no longer with us, the lovers, wives, husbands, family members, perhaps even children, who are gone but whose absence leaves such a gaping hole that we can hardly step over it in the morning to get on with things. Loss is real, and we can’t heal a loss until we face what it is. But it is not all we are.
When we define ourselves by what is wrong, we are reduced to something less than we actually are. If our inner sight is trained only on our dysfunction, our illness, our failure and our loss, then our sight is diminished, we see less, and our self shrivels. We pray for “it” to be cured as if “it” is the only important thing about us, and then when “it” is cured, we have been so focused on “it” we may have forgotten what else we could be. And so we go looking for another “it” to take its place.
But the tenth leper shows us a different way. That person had the focus or was given the grace to realize something wonderful has happened. It was probably an awkward and embarrassing moment, turning back, shouting, prostrating at Jesus’ feet. But in that moment the leper is given back a full human identity. And how wonderful it is that he is a Samaritan! God’s grace once again shows its power with the wrong kind of person! Maybe you’re the wrong kind of person. Maybe I am too. Maybe our wrongness is what God wants to lift up, to give to the world as a witness of grace and gratitude and restoration and wholeness from an unexpected source and from an unexpected person. Maybe the awkwardness inherent in us is what God wants.
How many times have we been given our lives back? It may be a simple way – curing a toothache that has become the unavoidable focus of our entire being while it lasted, or the resolution of some small but nagging problem. It may be something truly overwhelming – the discovery that a surgery can remove a tumor and give us years of life, or a relationship healed after years of hurt. I have to admit I’ve been given my life back more than several times, and I’m willing to bet you have too. And then what did I do when I got my life back? Most of the time, in a day or so I usually forgot all about it, and went looking for some other “it” to focus on. And when I do that, I will go on my way and not turn back to praise God. I will not make thanksgiving the center of my consciousness, but look for another incomplete identity, another way to be less than God wants me to be.
The difference between the nine lepers and the tenth is not the grace and goodness of God. God healed them all. The difference is that one of them was changed. He ceased to be a human manifestation of a problem and began to reorder his life. He put thanksgiving for his blessing in the middle of his life where his problem used to be and got back his full humanity.
I don’t remember what was on my mind that day when I met the super in the street. I can guess, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I was letting “it” take me over. I was becoming “it”. I know it wasn’t anything like the terrible disease those lepers had. But that super’s intervention was like the voice of Jesus to me. Quite apart from the quibbles about whether a priest’s behavior should present the perfect face of the community’s faith (which is often annoying to priests, but which quite a lot of people actually believe!), his question was reasonable. Why was I letting whatever “it” was take me over when the love of God was there for the taking? Go, just go, Jesus says, and the goodness of God for you will happen.
I got a big part of my life back that day. At least for that day I found the grace which allowed me to stop being defined by my problems, and at the end of that day I was able to turn around and praise God for it. I was able to move my self-preoccupation out of the spotlight and let God be there. Luke tells us that the odds are 9 to1 that we’ll slip back. And I do. But thank God for the 1.
Are we our problems? Or do we have problems? What is the center of our lives? Can we take ourselves out of the center and put God there? When our problems are resolved, can we turn in praise and thanks and remember who made us and loves us and calls us? And when they’re not resolved, can we live in the assurance of hope that the love of God is stronger than they are? Can we put “it” up against the love and call of God, and choose instead to center ourselves on God, to live in gratitude and thanksgiving? I hope so. It is the way to recovery. It is the way to full humanity. It is the way to restoration of our real identity as sons and daughters of the Most High.
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
RCL - Proper 23C - October 10, 2010
2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c
2 Timothy 2:8-15
Luke 17:11-19
Some years ago I was walking down East 109th Street from St. Edward’s Church in East Harlem, where I was the priest, toward the subway and the super at one of the buildings said hello. I stopped and said hello and pretty soon it was clear to me that he had something to say. Now if you live in New York City and one of the supers has something to say, even if he’s not your super, you should generally listen, because they know lots of useful things. He said to me that he had been watching me over the past few days and he saw that I had not been smiling much, and wondered if something was wrong. I said something noncommital. And then he said something I have not forgotten. He said, “You should be smiling because you know about the love of God. And if you can’t show it, Father, how can anyone else?” I thanked him and went on my way. It took me a while to admit to myself that I was knocked back a bit. I spent much of the rest of the day thinking about it, and when I saw him again I made sure I was smiling. I realized that day that I was one of the nine we just heard about in today’s gospel.
There were ten lepers. Ten lepers were cured. But only one turned back to give thanks, and as often happens in biblical narratives he was an outsider, the wrong sort of person. Today and every time this gospel story is read we give thanks for him. But what about the others? Because to be truthful, a lot of us are more like the nine than we are like this grateful Samaritan.
When we have problems, when we are sick, when things are not going our way, how often we sink into our situation and identify with it. Luke’s narrative shows this, actually. These people are called lepers. Just lepers. A more politically correct rendering might be something like “ten persons displaying symptoms like Hansen’s disease”. But the text is brutally realistic. In this telling they are described by their disease, as if they are their disease. Their identity for the purposes of the narrative is their leprosy. The are lepers. And as they turn away, all of them with faith enough to be cured, for they all do as Jesus tells them, the nine continue on their way. We don’t know what happened to them. But if they continued to be defined by the state of their health, they would presumably have become known as persons who were cured of leprosy, or perhaps Persons Formerly Known as Lepers. Maybe they became famous. But their identity would continue to be circumscribed by their condition.
In the moment the tenth leper turns back to thank God for the return of his health, however, Luke gives him a new identity. He is no longer just “a leper”, but suddenly, he is a Samaritan, a member of a particular human community. His ability to mingle as a normal person with others has been restored. He is now not a faceless representative of a disease but a member of a specific group of people, a part of a living people, with all that implies. He is human again. He is restored.
How many unsatisfactory categories can we put ourselves in? How many limiting labels can we apply to ourselves? We don’t have to seek far to find them.
What is the most dysfunctional aspect of the way we live our lives, the one which can define us if we let it? There is liberation in saying the word when we have been living in denial: Hi. I’m Adam. I’m a..... And then we name our addiction. Admitting to that identity is to start a journey of recovery. But it is not all we are.
What are the illnesses which constrain us in some way? We may not be lepers, but we can certainly be diabetics, cancer patients, gout sufferers, and there are times when we are so consumed by our ailments that we might as well become them. But they are not all we are.
What are the losses and failures of our lives? The jobs we did not get, or the jobs we got and lost. The friends no longer with us, the lovers, wives, husbands, family members, perhaps even children, who are gone but whose absence leaves such a gaping hole that we can hardly step over it in the morning to get on with things. Loss is real, and we can’t heal a loss until we face what it is. But it is not all we are.
When we define ourselves by what is wrong, we are reduced to something less than we actually are. If our inner sight is trained only on our dysfunction, our illness, our failure and our loss, then our sight is diminished, we see less, and our self shrivels. We pray for “it” to be cured as if “it” is the only important thing about us, and then when “it” is cured, we have been so focused on “it” we may have forgotten what else we could be. And so we go looking for another “it” to take its place.
But the tenth leper shows us a different way. That person had the focus or was given the grace to realize something wonderful has happened. It was probably an awkward and embarrassing moment, turning back, shouting, prostrating at Jesus’ feet. But in that moment the leper is given back a full human identity. And how wonderful it is that he is a Samaritan! God’s grace once again shows its power with the wrong kind of person! Maybe you’re the wrong kind of person. Maybe I am too. Maybe our wrongness is what God wants to lift up, to give to the world as a witness of grace and gratitude and restoration and wholeness from an unexpected source and from an unexpected person. Maybe the awkwardness inherent in us is what God wants.
How many times have we been given our lives back? It may be a simple way – curing a toothache that has become the unavoidable focus of our entire being while it lasted, or the resolution of some small but nagging problem. It may be something truly overwhelming – the discovery that a surgery can remove a tumor and give us years of life, or a relationship healed after years of hurt. I have to admit I’ve been given my life back more than several times, and I’m willing to bet you have too. And then what did I do when I got my life back? Most of the time, in a day or so I usually forgot all about it, and went looking for some other “it” to focus on. And when I do that, I will go on my way and not turn back to praise God. I will not make thanksgiving the center of my consciousness, but look for another incomplete identity, another way to be less than God wants me to be.
The difference between the nine lepers and the tenth is not the grace and goodness of God. God healed them all. The difference is that one of them was changed. He ceased to be a human manifestation of a problem and began to reorder his life. He put thanksgiving for his blessing in the middle of his life where his problem used to be and got back his full humanity.
I don’t remember what was on my mind that day when I met the super in the street. I can guess, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I was letting “it” take me over. I was becoming “it”. I know it wasn’t anything like the terrible disease those lepers had. But that super’s intervention was like the voice of Jesus to me. Quite apart from the quibbles about whether a priest’s behavior should present the perfect face of the community’s faith (which is often annoying to priests, but which quite a lot of people actually believe!), his question was reasonable. Why was I letting whatever “it” was take me over when the love of God was there for the taking? Go, just go, Jesus says, and the goodness of God for you will happen.
I got a big part of my life back that day. At least for that day I found the grace which allowed me to stop being defined by my problems, and at the end of that day I was able to turn around and praise God for it. I was able to move my self-preoccupation out of the spotlight and let God be there. Luke tells us that the odds are 9 to1 that we’ll slip back. And I do. But thank God for the 1.
Are we our problems? Or do we have problems? What is the center of our lives? Can we take ourselves out of the center and put God there? When our problems are resolved, can we turn in praise and thanks and remember who made us and loves us and calls us? And when they’re not resolved, can we live in the assurance of hope that the love of God is stronger than they are? Can we put “it” up against the love and call of God, and choose instead to center ourselves on God, to live in gratitude and thanksgiving? I hope so. It is the way to recovery. It is the way to full humanity. It is the way to restoration of our real identity as sons and daughters of the Most High.
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