Proper 21 B - Sep 30, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother Julian Mizelle, OHC
Proper 20, Year B - Sunday, September 30, 2012



Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29
James 5:13-20
Mark 9:38-50

The Mysticism of Open Eyes

In the name of God who calls us to celebration, who calls us to pursue community in our world, and who calls us to compassion in the midst of all human suffering. Amen!

Oh no! Oh no was my first reaction when I read our Gospel text for today. Of all of the gospel passages that would fall to me to preach on this one would be my last choice. This is a text that has traditionally been interpreted to be a series of warnings about male sexual purity. Cutting off hands, feet and gouging out eyes has been viewed as a double-entendre in rabbinic literature to other male body parts. The New Oxford Annotated Study Bible states that this passage is all about men behaving badly, and the reference to causing a child to stumble is really about child sexual abuse. My “Oh no” reaction is not about not wanting to address these subjects but I believe there is a better venue to do so than the pulpit.

All of my Brothers would rightly tell me that we don’t have to preach on the Gospel and that there is a reading from the Epistles and a reading from the Hebrew Scriptures that I could preach on. But at the beginning of this year I made a commitment to dedicate the year to preaching on the Gospel texts. I wanted to dive more deeply into them. And I just can’t let my commitments go that easily. So I decided to give the passage a deeper look.

We begin with demons and an exorcist using the name of Jesus who was not part of the disciples in-group. Jesus offers a corrective to the wrong thinking of the disciples with the wisdom statement “Whoever is not against us is for us.” Then we hear about stumbling blocks, causing the little ones to fall, lopping off limbs and gouging out eyes to avoid the fires of hell. And then the most obscure part of the passage is its ending: being salted with fire, having salt within ourselves so we can live in peace. 

I approach scripture with a fundamental belief that it is a living scripture and even though it was written thousands of years ago it is the thin place where God speaks to our hearts in the present moment. I understand the cultural anthropological references embedded in these verses, I understand that the society of the time was an honor/shame society, and I understand the historical context simply becomes lost in translation for our time. Yet the reason this is scripture is because it can always speak to our hearts and minds in fresh ways.

It is also good to remember when dealing with a difficult text, such as the one in front of us today, that the writer may not have been giving us a single narrative story. Our reading seems to start in the middle of something, and we seem to jump from one disjointed thought to another, ending with a metaphorical reference that holds little meaning for us. Our best conclusion in a situation like this is to know the author of the text may have been recording his memories as he recalled them. He may have never intended to give us a unified lesson. So as I prayed over this text my question became “where is God speaking to me (and to His church today) in this passage?” Am I to condone an exorcist who doesn’t follow Jesus in MY community. Am I prepared to lead one of Jesus’ “little ones?” Am I willing to cut off my hands and feet and gouge out my eyes to gain God’s kingdom? Do I have salt in myself and do I live at peace with all? 

Each of these question quickened my heart. But they also left me flat and feeling as though I wasn’t really hearing with my spiritual ear, the ear of my heart. I finally said “God, I’m missing the point...show me!” And slowly a miracle occurred...my thinking shifted. Yes, I was definitely missing the point because when I read the text I was unable to read it from the point of view of the one who was suffering the most in the passage. There is a character in this text who is rather insignificant. Not only is the character unnamed, but we only know of their existence by deducting their presence by inference. You see the disciples were upset at some stranger who was casting out demons in Christ name because he was not one of them. But what about the person who was being set free from the demon? What about the person who is broken, the person who is wounded, and in need of being made whole. Why don’t we care about them? Why did I have to read this passage thirty times before I even realized that it was the suffering person who Jesus cared most about? Because my eyes needed to be opened to see this through the eyes of those who suffer. 

When we read the Gospels with open eyes and an awake spirituality we are constantly confronted with an exhaustive portrait of Jesus of Nazareth as a figure who was consumed by the victims, by the hurting, by the disadvantaged, and by the wounded that he encountered throughout His public life. In fact, it is these very victims that speak with the real authority through these Gospel narratives. It is those who suffer who move the gospel narratives along in telling us the story of Jesus. 

Now here’s the problem: Religion, for over two millennia, has worked to focus Jesus’ life on the “sins of the other” instead of the suffering of the other. But Jesus was not consumed with sins. That was not the focus of His life. The focus of his life were those who suffer. I believe it is actually easier for us to focus on sins than it is to focus on those who suffer. Focusing on the suffering of our neighbor and the suffering of the world demands us to do something about it. Opening our eyes to those who suffer calls us to a reorientation of our theology and our spirituality. 

Didn’t the disciples understand that if someone was going about casting out demons in Jesus’ name that meant there was someone who was being made whole? There was someone who was being freed and being healed. This was the realization Jesus was pushing His disciples to when He said “whoever is not against us is for us.” As a wisdom teacher Jesus went right to the thoughts of his disciples. He knew this is where the shift must occur. Our thinking must be changed if our behavior is going to change.  And once we begin to see through the eyes of the suffering it becomes no longer possible to practice our theology with our backs turned to those who suffer. 

Simone Weil wrote in Waiting for God that “one of the principal truths of Christianity that goes unrecognized today is that looking is what saves us.” It has been called a mysticism of open eyes. It is this mysticism that gives us a proper Christian response to a suffering world. When we begin to see more, not less; when we become Samaritan’s who do not cross the road to avoid a wounded enemy; and when our prayer, our worship, our pilgrimages, and our spiritual disciplines bring us to act compassionately then we can say we are becoming more like Christ. 

The most fundamental stories and parables of scripture, stories that are engraved into the psyche of all believers, are all pointing us to this mysticism of open eyes, to being awakened from our amnesia. It is the story of the Good Samaritan, it is the story of the Prodigal, it is the story of the Exodus, and it is the story of todays Gospel text: a story calling us to compassion--that primordial sensitivity to the suffering of others and a praxis of taking responsibility for it.

Shane Claiborne calls Jesus an “ordinary radical.” The Buddhist writer Sharon Salzburg says the “most rebellious act we can take is to stand in compassion with others.” And this is what I mean by the mysticism of open eyes, of learning to see more and not less.

Chopping off our hands would certainly cause us to suffer. But it wouldn’t bring us into the kingdom of God. To enter God’s kingdom we must practice the spiritual disciplines of kenosis, the stripping of self, and we must enter into a praxis of mercy. How? Begin by asking three heart-changing questions: what am I doing that crucifies others?, what am I doing to end their crucifixion?, and what should I do so those that suffer can rise from the dead? Our response to this challenge hinges on our capacity to turn toward those who suffer, it hinges on our ability to look with open eyes and see more, and it calls us to the work of removing all of the crucified bodies and taking them down from their crosses. 

When we see through the eyes of those who suffer then we truly become salted with fire.

Proper 20 B - Sep 23, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother James Michael Dowd, OHC
Proper 20, Year B - Sunday, September 23, 2012


Wisdom 1:16-2:1, 12-22
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Mark 9:30-37

Who is Wise and Understanding Among You?

I find myself intrigued by the Letter of James, part of which was our second reading this morning, because of the question that reading begins with: Who is wise and understanding among you? As the Novice Master, I have the great joy to study once again so many of the foundational texts of the monastic movement along with our novices as together we grow in our vocations. And the section of James that we read today seems, to me at least, to be filled with monastic wisdom.

The answer to the rhetorical question that James begins with is to show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. Show by your good life. That says it all, really. It's not what we say we do, “oh, I'm a great pray-er” or “oh, I really identify with the suffering” or “oh, I'm so detached from everything, I can barely feel my own body!” No, Christianity is about showing, doing, being. When I studied for the theater, one of my favorite classes was Introduction to Play writing, in which, on the very first day you learn the most important rule about either play writing or directing: “show them, don't tell them.” And that seems like a good rule of thumb for the monastic life, indeed, the Christian life.

But it is not just about showing them. It is about showing them with gentleness born of wisdom. And James tells us what that gentle wisdom looks like. It is pure, it is peaceable, it is willing to yield, it is full of mercy and it is full of good fruits. It is, in other words, something that other Christians and non-Christians as well, can see in you.

James also tells us what gentleness born of wisdom is not. It is not envious, it is not ambitious, it is not boastful, it is not filled with lies. There is something quite practical and obvious in both of these lists – and sometimes we need that on our Christian journeys.

But it is the next question that James asks that has had me really reflecting on what it means to live a monastic life, a Christian life. I'd like to read again these few verses to you:
Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts.

If you think of troubles, conflicts, disputes, wars that rage within your own family, in your community, your parish, your workplace, in our nation this election season, or across the world, it seems to me that this could be a highly instructive lesson for any Christian to contemplate.
But it's the word cravings that most stands out to me. Cravings, James tells us, are at war within us. In fact, cravings can and do kill people – and whole groups of people. This past summer I had the great blessing of taking a vacation with my family in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. On three different occasions, I heard the same story from three different guides on various hikes. They each told us that now that eagles are protected from being hunted, the most common form of death for an eagle out west is by drowning. It seems the talons of the eagle, which are their main tool for hunting,  are extremely sharp and dig quite deeply into their prey.  When an eagle dives into a river for the purpose of hunting a fish, occasionally the fish is to heavy for them to lift out of the water and, unable to release them, the eagle is dragged under that water and drowned.

And every time I heard that story, I had to think of my own issues with craving. Craving is a theme that is very important to desert monasticism and was in the early days referred to as “the passions” or the “eight principle vices.” In the Middle Ages it would become known as “the seven deadly sins” and very often today they are described as addictions – however many there might be. The first of these cravings, passions, addictions, and the most troublesome for me, is often known as “gluttony,” which in some Twelve Step circles is known as “compulsive eating.”

And ever since my trip to Wyoming, when I think about the eagle drowning because of its own cravings, I can't help but to think of myself and in particular, my own spiritual journey. There have been times, when because of my own cravings, I have been drowning – slowly for sure – but drowning none the less.

This can be agony and it puts me at war within myself. I know that this is not a healthy way to live or a holy way to live, but there are times when the craving  overwhelms and I dive for that food that is just too heavy for me to bear. This craving has been such a consistent theme for me throughout my life that there was a time I believed that I would never be able to breathe fresh air again, that I'd drown.

Food is the weapon I choose that makes war on myself, which ultimately causes war to be waged on others as well. While I have never been physically violent with anyone, I have been known, interestingly enough, to wage that war with my tongue. And as we learned from the Letter of James last week, the tongue can set whole forests ablaze. But folks pick all kinds of poison, all kinds of passions – alcohol, drugs, sex, power, work, gambling, shopping, and any number of other addictive behaviors or deadly sins. Whichever way of looking at it you prefer, the result is the same: war rages within you.

But in fact, we are not helpless. There is a path that both our monastic forebears and the disciples of the Twelve Step movement have put forward to help us. James, in fact, enunciates the basics of these steps: “submit to God and resist the devil. And how do we do that? John Cassian, the great monastic teacher, passes down to us in the fifth book of The Institutes that the great Desert Father,  Abba Macarius, taught that submitting to God and resisting the devil was to “restrain the movements of the mind (in other words, check your emotions), forget slights, reject sadness, and disdain sorrows and setbacks – as if we were going to die daily.”

In other words, live as Jesus taught us to live. Accept the fact that we do not know when the Lord is coming or when we are going. In contemporary parlance, “live in the moment,” but not “for the moment”. When I have lived in the moment, I have never starved to death – I have never been obsessed with eating. When I live for the moment, I can't wait to get my hands on, and my mouth around, a prepackaged cupcake. The passions, those cravings that are deadly to many of us, are so much easier to be liberated from when we live in the moment, as opposed to living in some real or imagined past when we were drowning because we are so hurt, so lost, so guilty, so adrift.

The control of the passions leads us to cease making war on ourselves and on others. It is a contemplative way of being that is a journey toward health, wholeness and holiness. It is our call as disciples of Christ. And I think this goes beyond the personal to the collective. All of this has implications for not only us as individuals, but as a community, as a nation, and as the human race. Which is something to think and pray about as the shouting of the campaign season nearly overwhelms us. The eagle, our national symbol, can drown when its cravings overwhelm it. As a nation, we crave many things. As I ponder this election, I find myself thinking about that very issue for the nation: what is it that we Americans crave that might drown us? The list seems uncomfortably long to me.  As we seek wisdom and understanding, we might want to, as James says, draw near to God, for it is then that God draws near to us.  AMEN.

Proper 19 B - Sep 16, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother Scott Borden, OHC
Proper 19, Year B - Sunday, September 23, 2012


Isaiah 50:4-9a
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38


How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire – and the tongue is a fire... somehow that observation from Letter of James jumps out at me this week.

There are two things that have been on my mind this week – one quite wonderful and the other quite terrible – and both having to do with the work of the tongue.

In a few days Sr Hildegard Pleva from the Redemptoristine Community just down the road will be giving a talk here at the Monastery on Hildegard of Bingen, whom we celebrate tomorrow – and so I've been focusing on the music of Hildegard. That is the beautiful thing.

The other thing is the shocking acts of violence in the middle east – big fires – incited by burning tongues in the United States... tongues which belong to people who call themselves Christian.

“From the same mouth comes blessing and cursing” says James. We bless God in our words, but curse those whom we despise. Yet those we curse are made in God's image. As James says “it should not be so.” A spring can not yield fresh water and foul water. Its a very sobering letter.

Devout Muslims in the Middle East have been reacting this week to a so called film produced in the US. The “film”, The Innocence of Muslims, can scarcely be called a film. It is childish and incoherent... a babbling mess... laughable in almost every way. It has, as its only purpose, to offend. And in that regard, sadly, it has worked its mischief. It has produced violence and even death. I don't say this to excuse or even explain the violent mobs. But as James says, the tongue can set mighty forests ablaze...

It is not enough, I think, for faithful Christians to ignore this film. It flows from a spring of foul water and it curses those made in the image of God. It is a flaming tongue and it must be quenched with the sweet water of God's love or it will continue to set forests ablaze.

What a contrast this vile little film is to the music of Hildegard of Bingen. To watch the film is to be degraded. To listen to the music of Hildegard is to be uplifted... transported... filled with light.

Hildegard was a medieval monastic, Abbess of a Benedictine community in Germany, in the city of Bingen, on the Rhine river. She was a mystic, a prophet, a writer, a composer, as well as an herbalist and healer. She used her skills in music and verse to share her mystical visions with those around her. The spring of her creative spirit brings fourth the purest, sweetest, and freshest of water – as fresh today as it was during her lifetime, nearly a thousand years ago.

Interestingly, tongues of fire featured in her visions. She saw, according to her writings, an image of her tongue aflame, but not consumed. She took that as a directive from God – she was to share what she had seen. There is that letter of James again. The tongue can set mighty forests ablaze. James is not calling us to silence, but rather to use our tongues in Godly ways.

There is a reason why Hildegard is a saint – and why the maker of that nasty little film is not...

As followers of Jesus we have an absolute obligation to tell the good news. We must, like Hildegard, use our tongues, our skills to share the beauty and wonder of God's love – and to share it far and wide... Not to curse those we don't like, don't understand, or don't accept.

The letter of James and the life of Hildegard of Bingen make an interesting prelude to the Gospel passage we heard today. Jesus says if we want to follow him we have to leave ourselves behind. To save our lives, we must loose our lives for the sake of the good news.

This observation by Jesus has the feeling of a zen koan about it... it leads us to paradox. And the Gospel is full of paradox... dying we live... to be fully free we must become totally enslaved... saving our lives means losing our lives...

One function of a koan is to destabilize our thinking. When we think we know the answer, we stop asking the question. If we think we know what it means to be a follower of Jesus, then we are no longer concerned with learning what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

So look what happens: Jesus describes to the disciples what is to come and Peter tells him off. Imagine that... Who would ever think of doing such a thing?... Certainly none of us...

Except that we all do, every day, in ways large and small. When we, as a nation, choose to build bombs instead of healing the sick or feeding the hungry, we are clearly telling Jesus off. When we, as a religious people, worry more about building grand houses of worship than about housing the homeless, we are telling Jesus off – just as Peter did. We can all find ways in which we do this... and we all know what Jesus said to Peter...

We set our minds on human things, not divine.

And so Jesus calls us to die to self – to take our minds off human things. To destabilize our thinking... to begin to learn that our ways are not God's ways...

My human nature loves comfort, loves privilege, loves pleasure... and the truth is my comfort frequently comes from someone else's sacrifice. Peter can't stand to hear Jesus talk about the sacrifice he is preparing to make because Peter can't think about sacrificing himself. Those who would save their lives must lose them... Peter isn't there yet – and neither am I.

Perhaps the most hopeful thing Jesus says in this passage is “If any want to become followers of mine...” He doesn't say “be”, but rather “become”.

I would like to say that I am a follower of Jesus, but anyone who knows me can easily and quickly form a list of all the ways that is not true. But I can say that I am becoming a follower of Jesus – and while I may fail now and then, misunderstand now and then, and be more attached to things of this world than Godly things now and then, I am, nonetheless, a more faithful follower of Jesus than I was a year ago, or ten years ago... we won't even talk about when I was in college... I am becoming a follower day by day. I can be very thankful that God is patient...

I started by reflecting a bit on the vile little film The Innocence of Muslims and the almost unbearable transporting beauty of the music of Hildegard of Bingen and I find they still resonate with me.

The film, to the extent it can really focus on anything (and it is such a confused mess, that is a limited extent), focuses entirely on things of this world – on power and domination – specifically the desire by some so-called Christians to dominate or eliminate other faiths. It calls us to cling to life. It has not the slightest whiff of becoming anything, let alone becoming a follower of Jesus.

Hildegard lifts our eyes to Godly things. If all she did in her life was create a legacy of transcendent beauty, that would be remarkable. But as an herbalist she tended to the sick – in an era when medicine was, to say the least, primitive. She quite literally wrote the book on what herbs could be used to treat what conditions.

Did Hildegard have bad days... was she always, relentlessly uplifting... I suspect she was every bit as human as you and I. But the arc of her life teaches us what it means to leave self behind and to be becoming a follower of Jesus.

Isaiah says it so beautifully – the Lord has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. We are the teachers and at the same time we are the weary. The word that sustains is is Jesus, the very word of God. Our simple, yet lifelong task, is let go of the words that we want to speak and we want to hear, and give ourselves to the speaking and hearing of God's word.

Holy Cross Day - Sept. 14, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam D. McCoy, OHC
Holy Cross Day - Friday, September 14, 2012

Isaiah 45:21-25
Philippians 2:5-11
John 12:31-36a

    Every cross has a story to tell.  Every cross embodies a theology.  The first cross, the cross on which our Lord hung, is no longer present to us as an object – as a fragment, a relic, on our altar this morning.  But as an object which can tell us what happened and embody its meaning, alas, that cross is with us no more.  So every Christian culture has its own crosses.  Each one says something not only about the Gospel as given – what the text says – but about the Gospel received, what we think it means.  Our icon cross, from the early 1970's, by Fr. John Walsted, formerly a member of the Order, School of Novgorod adapted to the Order of the Holy Cross particularly: the Christ floating without nails, serene, seemingly without pain, surrounded by events of his life and by people special to this cross, in this place.  What does that say?  Or the crucifix on the wall, brought back from Oberammergau by Fr. Huntington: Almost life size, realistic, the suffering clear, but also somewhat stylized, and by that sylization, a bit removed from us.  What does that say?  From the crucifix in Catholic homes and the plain, unadorned Protestant cross of my childhood, to the famous and somewhat disturbing Salvador Dali crucifix, viewing Christ from above, the one angle none of us could have achieved: sub specie aeternitatis.  Because they are of us, of our world’s images, we think we understand them.  But each carries its own interpretation of the Passion, and each embodies a theory of the victory of the Resurrection. 

    This morning I want to spend some time thinking not about the Cross as an idea from the text of scripture, but about a particular cross, and see where that might take us.

    In the tiny town of Ruthwell, on the north side of the Solway firth, close to the water, southeast of Dumfries and hard by Annan, in what is today Scotland, but in what was once part of the Northumbrian Kingdom of Bernicia, is the greatest of all Anglo-Saxon crosses.  The Ruthwell Cross was probably erected sometime between 700 and 740.  It stood almost 18 feet tall for more than nine centuries, until in 1642 the General Assembly of the Scottish national church ordered it and others like it hacked down and destroyed.  The fragments lay unprotected in the church yard for 160 years and more, when they were gathered together again and ultimately restored inside the parish church.

    The Ruthwell Cross was a preaching cross.  It marked a place to which people would gather when a priest or preacher or missionary came, to instruct and teach the faith, to baptize and confirm and bless, and to preach the word to a tribal people whose life was doubtless nasty, brutish and short, but who had been captivated by this Jesus and by his good news.  No more Tiu, Woden, Thor and Freya, Saturn, the sun and the moon, though their days remain each week – perhaps just in case.  In their world of disease and deprivation and, especially, of violence on every level, violence in family life, violence in villages and among clans, violence with outsiders of all kinds, violence all the way up to the King himself, no one was safe for very long, and as for pagans, when you died, who knew what was next?  Life and the glory of life was largely about fighting and being ready to fight.  Your life was like a sparrow flying out of a stormy night into one end of a bright, fire-warmed hall and then out the other.  Who knew what came before or what awaits us after?  The Cross of Christ brought light and hope and another way to live. 

    The Ruthwell Cross itself was a teacher, both showing and speaking.   It shows the faith in a particular, perhaps unique, way: on one side there are sculptured panels of St. John the Evangelist and his eagle, the Visitation, the washing of the Savior’s feet, the healing of the man born blind, the Annunciation and the Crucifixion (probably added later), and on the other, the evangelist Matthew with his attribute, a man, John the Baptist or perhaps God the Father holding the Lamb of God, Christ treading on beasts [ref. Ps. 91: “You shall trample the young lion and the serpent under your feet”], the hermits Paul and Anthony breaking bread in the desert, and the Flight into Egypt.  One side shows the Lord’s life, and the other makes reference to Christ conquering wildness, to exile and the desert, to lonely places, of which surely Ruthwell was one. 

    But this cross not only instructs through the eyes.  It speaks.  Carved on the cross in runes  are lines from the greatest early religious poem in English, The Dream of the Rood.  The poet has a vision, a mystical experience, in which he sees a great cross surrounded by light, encrusted with gold and jewels, “stained with the flowing of blood, adorned with treasure.”  And then the cross speaks: “Thæt wæs geara iu, (ic thæt gyta geman), thæt ic wæs aheawen...  It was years ago, I still remember it, that I was hewn down...”  The cross stood out in the open elements, in the rain and the wind and the cold deserted edgelands of the Solway, speaking through the runes, speaking to all who will listen the story of the crucifixion as the cross experienced it and as the cross has come to understand it.  The runes carved on the cross pick up in fragments the narrative of the poem at its most dramatic point: 

    "Then the young Hero - He was God Almighty - firm and unflinching, stripped himself; He mounted on the high cross, brave in the sight of many, when he was minded to redeem mankind.  Then I trembled when the Hero clasped me; yet I durst not bow to the earth, fall to the level of the ground, but I must needs stand firm.
    "As a rood was I raised up; I bore aloft the mighty king, the Lord of heaven; I durst not stoop.  They pierced me with dark nails; the wounds are still plain to view in me, gaping gashes of malice; I durst not do hurt to any of them.  They bemocked us both together.  I was all bedewed with blood, shed from the Man’s side, after He had sent forth His Spirit.  I have endured many stern trials on the hill; I saw the God of hosts violently stretched out; darkness with its clouds had covered the Lord’s corpse, the fair radiance; a shadow went forth, dark beneath the clouds.  All creation wept, lamented the King’s death; Christ was on the cross.  Crist wæs on rode."

    This cross presents Christ as a vigorous young warrior, determined, forthright, brave, filled with courage, as the people for whom it was carved hoped their own sons would be, strong and resolute, fearless and ready for battle.  But this Christ is without weapons or armor or the retinue of loyal followers that any good Northumbrian warrior would have had or would have been part of.  Braver than all.  Fulfilling the ideal of their culture.  The best of the best, going to his death, his blood streaming forth, the universe darkening, covering its Lord’s body.  All creation wept.  Crist wæs on rode.  Perhaps like the poet theirs also was a mystical experience as they approached the Cross.  It changed them.  It changed their world.

    Well, that was 1,300 years ago or more.  What do we have to do with ancient Scottish coastlands, with mystical dream visions, with speaking crosses, with a form of English we no longer easily understand?  And in particular, What do we have to do with a Christ represented by an overcharged Anglo-Saxon warrior, stripping for battle, practically leaping onto the cross in a fit of testosterone-driven frenzy?  Surely this is not the Galilean peasant / healer / teacher / rabbi / wisdom figure / prophet / revolutionary we have come to know as we have studied scripture?  What does all this have to do with us?

    I would say in answer, More than we might want to acknowledge. 

    Every encounter with the Cross, indeed, every encounter with the divine at all, requires that we lay aside our present preoccupations, our day to day understandings, our busy minds, and open ourselves to something new.  To do that, we often have to move out into a desert place where there is nothing, perhaps, but the Cross.  We hope to find there the Jesus, the Christ, whom we would love to meet unmediated, as he was and in the fullness of what he is now, but who instead comes to us, who must come to us, in forms we can understand.  Their form was a warrior.  What is ours?

    Those who reconstruct the world and likely life and personality of Jesus, Crossan and Meier and Chilton and all their friends, agree on one thing about Jesus if on nothing else: He was far from passive.  He was young, he was energetic, he was purposeful and determined, and he placed himself into the last week of his life with something definite in mind.  Maybe instead of the image of a warrior we might prefer the image of the lamb, also on this cross, so peaceful and so sweet.  But scripture reminds us that if Jesus is the sacrifical lamb, he was not in the end simply the meek lamb led to the slaughter, but the lamb leading a band - a warrior band, perhaps - of 144,000, wherever he goes.   Some lamb.  Maybe, just maybe, our warrior-obsessed friends in the eighth century Kingdom of Bernicia are onto something.  Maybe the warrior image has something to it.

    Every cross has a story to tell, and no matter where it came from, it can speak to us.  Every cross speaks of more than suffering: Every cross speaks of victory.  The paradox of death conquering death, of a new energy let loose in the world through the life and death of this remarkable young man, whose death means we need no longer fear death. The powers have been rearranged, whether they are the pagan gods of our ancestors or the powers within each of us which conspire to paralyze the good we would do if we only could.  Well, we can.  If there is one message we can take from the great Ruthwell Cross and The Dream of the Rood, it may be this: This young warrior has unloosed the bonds of death, and now we are free to find his courage and strength and energy and determination in and for our own lives, to join his band of loyal followers, to feast with him in the great hall of heaven, no longer frightened sparrows flitting in and out of the light, but living in the light, his light, children of light.  No longer aliens and strangers in desert and exile lands, but the joyous companions of the Lord victorious, who has won the battle for us.

Proper 17 B - Sep 2, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
Proper 17 B – Sunday, September 2, 2012

A little cairn in the monastery meadow - a place to stop and ponder
Picture by noelle.photographie@gmail.com

Song of Solomon 2:8-13
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Does my heart, and your heart, direct me to right action most of the time?  What intentions drive my actions?  Does God's bidding, God's commandments, God's desire come into it?

Do I stop long enough to question myself in this way?  Or do I let ingrained habits, long-held customs, hallowed traditions take precedence in how I live?

Does my community have habits, customs and traditions such as those?  Do we often enough question whether they are still serving God?  Or are some of our customs serving an idolatrous conservatism that is leaking its last bit of meaning though it suits us well?

Today's gospel addresses questions such as these.

*****

Mark the Evangelist commits to writing “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” around the year 70 of the current era.  He writes the gospel mostly for non-Jews, gentiles of the Roman Empire.  His community is probably in what was then known as Syria (a larger and less defined region than the current ailing state).

Mark's gospel was written to include Romanized non-Jews into the body of believers.  It is written at a time when Christians -- as they are coming to be newly called -- are increasingly separating from the Synagogues.

Indeed Christians are more often than not seen by their Jewish brethren as too different.  They do not conform enough to the traditional Jewish codes of conduct.  They seem to threaten the integrity of Judaism.

*****

In this context, Mark remembers incidents of Jesus' life that support the importance of right relationship to tradition.  He recounts Jesus questioning the validity of human codes of conduct.  These codes, which human society evolved from tradition over time, sometimes end up stifling the spirit of the tradition they stem from.

*****

So, in today's passage, the Pharisees and some of the scribes reproach Jesus for letting some of his followers eat with defiled hands.

Now defilement is originally meant to describe the situation of priests and levites who temporarily become invalid for the performance of rites.  For instance, by coming into contact with human blood or a dead body.

That is, what is going on in the parable of the Good Samaritan.  The Priest and the Levite, on their way to serve in the temple, both take a broad sway past the left-for-dead Judean bleeding by the wayside.  They'd rather serve God in the temple than come to the help of their fellow man and defile themselves.

*****

The Pharisees pick a fight with Jesus about an extended notion of defilement.  One that includes all Jews as ministers of religious rituals; in this case, the sharing of a meal.

The few disciples who are eating with unwashed hands show a behavior that does not comply with the purity code, the so-called “tradition of the elders.”

*****

In a sweeping statement, Mark ascribes those purity behaviors to “ the Pharisees, and all the Jews.”  In fact, the “tradition of the elders” as Mark calls it was a development within the Pharisaic movement of Judaism.

When they were in exile, the Jews could no longer worship in the temple at Jerusalem.  The Pharisees then surmised that in the absence of the temple, each Jew had to act as holy as the temple priests;  and that the meals of a Jewish household were to be attended to with the same care given to the altar in the temple.

However, that level of expected sanctity left large swathes of the Jewish population out.  For most Jews, their location, their level of wealth or their profession would have made them unable to follow the fullness of the “tradition of the elders”.

Travelers such as Jesus' disciples, for example, could not have been expected to have access to ritual bathing.  Fishermen would constantly have been defiled by their coming into contact with dead animals.

In actual fact, the “tradition of the elders,” became a great way to determine who was out and who was in on being holy, or a Pharisee, for that matter.

It started from the Mosaic laws, of course.  But it elaborated many demands that, at face value, kept the laws, but in fact corrupted their spirit.  One had to be a fairly well-off urban dweller to be able to keep up with the “tradition of the elders.”

*****

Jesus does not reject the Mosaic laws on which the Pharisees developed their purity code, but he emphasizes their intent and how it should drive right action rather than legalistic observances.

In fact, Jesus refers in an indirect way to the ten commandments when he lists the evil intentions that come from the heart.  Go back to the list and you can track them back to five of the ten commandments.

It was taboo to say the ten commandments as they had been given to Moses.  But it was fine to say them in another way and/or in another sequence.  In this way, Jesus shows deference to some tradition, especially if it goes back to the foundations of the Jewish faith.


*****


So, where does that leave you and I today, you may ask?  Are we concerned by this gospel passage?  I venture we are, and in a big way.

Do we ever use legalistic or literalistic arguments to justify why our way is right and others' is wrong?

Do we ever refer to noble moral principles to justify non-assistance to those who need our help?

Do we ever keep ourselves busy with visible piety or ostentatious liturgy?  Does it come to a point where there is no space nor time left to welcome the inappropriately dressed newcomer or help the homeless hanging by the door into the sharing of coffee hour?

Do we keep our beliefs and values in the closet when they are not getting their weekly Sunday morning airing at church?

*****

What are our evil intentions of the heart?  How do we become aware of them, especially in their subtler expressions? How do we turn our heart around to God's desire?  How does that translate in actions that express God's care for the world?

*****

These are questions I ask myself as a monk.   How does my life, my daily actions express God's love for the world?  Are my best intentions only in my head while the evil intentions reside cozily in my heart and run it?  How do I reverse that order and let my evil intentions chill out and shrink in the coolness of my intellect?

*****

Today's passage offers no pat solution, but it insists that we put God's desire first, and test human traditions in that way, no matter how good public opinion has them to be.


*****

Listen carefully, the song of songs invites us to more fully entrust our heart, body and soul to God.

The voice of my beloved!
Look he comes,
Leaping upon the mountains,
bounding over the hills.

Shall I let his gaze meet mine?
And will I leap at its invitation?

To be continued... in each of our lives.

Proper 16 B - Aug 26, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Roy Parker, OHC
Proper 16 B – Sunday, August 26, 2012


Joshua 24: 1-2a, 14-18
Ephesians 6: 10-20
John 6: 56-69

The previous several Sunday Gospels have all come from the sixth chapter of John and comprise Jesus’ Discourse on the Bread of Life which concludes in today’s gospel.

The Discourse is notable in that it consists of a Wisdom version of the Bread of Life teaching and a second, distinct, Eucharistic version. The Wisdom version speaks exclusively of the bread come down from heaven and depends extensively on parallels from the Apocryphal book The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach. The Eucharistic version refers to Jesus’ flesh and blood and is thought to have been transposed from John’s account of the Last Supper which in its present form lacks a so-called Institution Narrative; Raymond Brown, the gold standard of commentators on John, considers the Eucharistic version the product of later Christian insight while the Wisdom version represents earlier tradition.

In the editing of the Fourth Gospel it was felt, apparently, that the Eucharistic version of the Bread of Life Discourse would make an appropriate companion for the Wisdom version, and vice versa. A look at underlying texts of the Wisdom version demonstrates that the Bread refers to Jesus’ revelation and teaching rather than to his flesh and blood referred to in the Eucharistic version.

For example:
As to the miracle of the Feeding of the Five Thousand which directly precedes the Discourse on the Bread of Life, the words of Amos are appropo in light of the hunger of the crowds and their search for Jesus: “Behold the days are coming when I shall send a famine on the land, not a famine of bread or a thirst for water, but for hearing the word of the Lord . . . They shall run back and forth seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.”  Further, in the Book of Sirach: “Wisdom declares

. . .Come to me, you who desire me, and eat your fill of my fruits. For the memory of me is sweeter than honey, and the possession of me sweeter than the honeycomb. Those who eat of me will hunger for more, and those who drink of me will thirst for more . . .

The one who fears God, Wisdom will nourish with the bread of understanding and give them the water of learning to drink.” To summarize, then, in the light of the Gospel passage: People will never have too much wisdom and will always desire more, and people will never hunger or thirst for anything other than Jesus’ own revelation. The Synoptic Gospels reinforce the identification of bread with teaching inJesus’ warning to beware of the teaching of the Scribes and Pharisees which he characterizes as yeast.

Jesus speaks of God’s bread come down from heaven to give life to the world and proclaims that the Son of Man is the only one who has come down from the Father, leading to the belief that Jesus is talking of himself as the bread.  But the crowd does not understand and Jesus must specifically identify himself as the bread that gives life.

This means that he is the revealer of the truth, the divine teacher who has come to nourish people with wisdom. In claiming to personify divine revelation Jesus advances beyond the preparation in the Wisdom literature. When he says that those who believe in him shall never be hungry or thirsty, he is expressing the same idea that he will proclaim to Martha grieving the death of her brother: “I am the life . . . whoever believes in me shall never die at all.”

Under all these metaphors of bread, water, and life, Jesus is symbolically referring to the same reality, a reality which, when once possessed, makes one see natural hunger, thirst and death as insignificant.

In the light of this and with the reminder that the Wisdom version of the Bread of Life Discourse is the principal foundation of this chapter of the Gospel, we make the point that what scandalizes the disciples is not concerned with Jesus‘ eucharistic flesh and blood, but with his identification of himself as the bread, that is, wisdom, come down from heaven of which one may eat and live forever.

The disciples are indignant about this and murmur even as the crowd murmured about the same claim earlier. The disciples cannot bear to LISTEN - notice that all the references in today’s passage concern hearing or believing Jesus’ doctrine; there is not a single reference to refusing to eat his flesh or to drink his blood. Since they complain that they cannot listen to his claim to have come down from heaven, Jesus asks what they will think if they see him ascending to where he was before. He uses the term Son of Man to identify himself with a figure whom both Daniel and Enoch characterize as celestial.

We have somewhat of a parallel to this earlier in John.  When Nicodemus cannot understand how one can be begotten from above of water and Spirit, Jesus calls upon the ascension into heaven of the Son of Man; for it is the ascended Son of Man who can give the Spirit. So also in today’s passage the Spirit is mentioned immediately after the reference to the ascension of the Son of Man. In contrasting Spirit and flesh here, Jesus is speaking of flesh as the natural principle in humanity which cannot give eternal life. The Spirit is the divine principle from above which alone can give life. This contrast between flesh and Spirit appears also in Paul, as, for example, in Romans: ” . . . those who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” The Synoptic parallel to the phrase “the flesh is useless” is found in the Caesarea Philippi scene of Matthew where Jesus says to Peter, “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.”

In today’s passage Jesus says, “It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” Thus Jesus is once more affirming that one cannot gain life on one’s own. If Jesus is divine revelation come down from heaven, like nourishing bread, his purpose is to communicate the principle of eternal life.  The one who accepts the words of Jesus will receive the life-giving Spirit.

Jesus never answers the question about his origins on a human plane; the words he gives are an answer, but on a theological plane. He is sent by God and he is from God, and that is how he can claim to have come down from heaven. If the disciples will desist from their murmuring, which indicates a refusal to believe, and will leave themselves open to God’s movement, God will draw them to Jesus. This is the age spoken of by the prophet Isaiah when they are being taught by God, if only they will listen.

This teaching is embodied, externally, in Jesus who walks among them, but it is also internal in that God acts in their hearts, fulfilling what Jeremiah had promised: ‘I will put my law within them, and on their hearts will write it.‘ This internal moving of the heart by God will enable them to believe in Jesus and thus possess eternal life.

God will draw us to Jesus and will move our hearts; for that matter, Jesus will draw us and will move our hearts; here’s a possibility called ‘Postulant’s Encouragement.’

This Order, and I daresay the Episcopal Church at large, has developed a certain reverence for our departed brother Alan Whittemore in recognition of his becoming in the course of his life a genuine American mystic. For this reason, toward the end of his life in the 1950’s when he lived here as a contemplative he was appointed confessor to the novitiate. His counsel to a new postulant would sometimes proceed in this vein of God’s drawing them to Jesus, a drawing characterized by cords of God’s steadfast love, which he would describe as Jesus standing before you with an inviting hand. “Imagine our Lord standing before you, holding out his hand for you to take it and follow him. Will you take it? He wants you to.” And then Alan Whittemore would say with great emphasis: “But be careful! There’s a wound in it!”