Easter Sunday C - Mar 31, 2013

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Easter, Sunday, March 31, 2013


Luke 24: 1-12

The Women at the Tomb - William Bouguerau (1825 - 1905)

I once heard someone remark (maybe it was me!) about the Easter Vigil that, just when you think it must be about to end, it doesn’t!

I have had time for the first year in many not to have had much to do for the Triduum.  It has been wonderful to let the liturgy wash over me and pull me in.  As always for me Lent raises up so much to think about and pray about:

• personal things like:  how am I coping with the increasing limitations in my physical life, endings and frailty and how is that God is growing old with me and more content to sit by me as a companion?  
• but also: how do we show our faith in the face of gun violence, the call for compassion in marriage equality?  What do we have to say about Syria and North Korea?  What about Monsanto?  And what about my cowardice or passivity in the face of injustices and suffering?

This Lent  has been a heavy season.  I’m ready to lighten up.  It must be getting near the end.  Time for brunch and dessert (editor's note: Easter brunch is served to our guests after the two and a half hour Easter vigil is completed).

But these three days haven’t been entirely without pressure, however.  This sermon was coming up.  So I’ve been constantly aware of this Gospel reading.  I discovered something.  The last verse, the one about Peter is a late addition.  The earliest versions stop with the statement that the apostles thought that this was just an women’s fantasy and the apostles didn’t believe the women.
  
According to the Scriptures the only people who stayed faithfully at the cross and went to tend the body of Christ were the women and their voices are not heard. They’re still not heard.

It preys on me, that… not just about those women but about all the unheard women, indeed, all the people whose voices are smothered, ignored, discounted and distorted.

Jesus was one of them –- he said over and again -– If you have ears, hear me!  And he still cries that same cry.  Sometimes it’s his own voice; sometimes it’s his sisters’ voices, his children’s, our neighbors around the world; in Mexico, in Canada, Native people everywhere – no voices. The Xhosa people around our monastery in South Africa – defeated because no one is listening. 

It’s the children of Sandy Hook; the people of Staten Island; the drunks and druggies, the whores and the old people.  The lonely and those who die forgotten.  Their voices are so often drowned out by greed and bigotry or by the noise of our blasé contentment.

It has been pointed out that Jesus’ crucifixion was just one among thousands.  Not a unique event at all.  'Just another annoying Jew who wouldn’t shut up.'  Another act of unnecessary suffering among millions.  They are all around us. 

What makes this one distinctive is that this crucifixion is the act where Humanity and Divinity hear together the tearing, the rending of the veil of separation.  And now God’s voice is made clear in the voices of the suffering of the world.

I don’t know where we dug up the idea that Jesus died to appease an angry God; I believe that in Jesus’ death, God dies.  God with us, God poor, God woman, God gay, God forgotten, God of Auschwitz, God of the barrio, God in prison, God raped, God starving. God dying again and again and again.

The Resurrection we rejoice in today only means anything at all when the Mary's are heard.  When the fear of the apostles is banished in the peace the Risen  Christ brings.  When we hear the voices and embrace the truth in broken hearted love, then Resurrection happens again and again and again.

And just when you think God’s patience must be about to end, it doesn’t.

Our call is not to leave Jesus hanging on the cross but to join him as God’s resurrected and resurrecting people in listening and giving voice to the voiceless ones. 

Christ is Risen!  Say Alleluia!

Palm Sunday C - Mar 24, 2013

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Sr. Shane Phelan, CMA*

Palm Sunday C – Sunday, March 24, 2013


Isaiah 50:4-9a
Luke 19:28-40

Shane Phelan, Companion of Mary the Apostle

The story is told that St. Teresa of Avila, on one of her many journeys, was crossing a river when she was thrown by her horse into the river. Landing with a splash, she looked up to heaven and said to God, “If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few!”

It’s not just Teresa who encounters this problem. Jesus enters Jerusalem with blessing, coming in the name of God. Soon he will be dead at the hands of imperial power, abandoned and betrayed by many of those who today pronounce the blessing. No wonder God has so few friends.

But I don’t think God is the one with the problem. I think we have a problem. We have a scandal in our midst. Our faith is centered on one who is blessed, and the blessed one is crucified. What are we to make of that?

We can call it irony, but it’s not ironic. We can call it tragedy, but it’s much more than that. We can call it paradox, which is a nice version of contradiction. But all of those evaluations of this moment rest on a mistake. There’s no irony here, no tragedy, not even really a paradox. There’s simply blessing.

But what, exactly, does it mean to be blessed? Being blessed, like being God’s friend, is both less and more than it often seems to be.

When we hear the word “blessed” in the Bible, we are actually using one word for two distinct concepts. In the Beatitudes, we hear that the poor, the humble, the sorrowful are blessed. That’s a good word. In Greek it is makarios. It means to be happy, joyous. It’s good to hear Jesus tell us that things will not always be as they are, that we can turn around and rejoice, that we will be blessed.

But that’s not the kind of blessing that Jesus gets. When the crowds cry, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord,” the word Luke uses is eulogemenos, one receiving a blessing. The Greek in turn is translating the Hebrew barakh, which means to kneel, to receive a blessing.

Blessing, in this sense, does not make the blessed one happy. It makes them holy. It marks them off, it consecrates them. Our English word, “bless,” comes from the Old German word for spattering blood on the altar. To be blessed is to be a sacrifice.

Jesus was blessed, not as one who gets to have a quiet life with a wonderful family, but as bread and wine are blessed. Jesus was marked as God’s own, as a sign of God’s power, but not for his own enjoyment.

He really meant it. He did not come to do his own will, but that of God. He was blessed.

This is such a hard truth to grasp. Throughout our history we flee from this. We want to believe that virtue brings worldly success. that if we honor God we’ll get what we want. Like a good business deal.

We want the prosperity gospel, not only for the material goods it promises, but because it makes the world line up in an orderly way. It’s not just greed or self-interest that draws us to think like this. It’s just as much the desire for a world that makes sense. We want virtue to be rewarded and injustice to be punished. We need at least the hope of order and justice in the world.

But that’s not what blessing is about. If we honor God, we will indeed find joy and peace, but not in any simple way. If we honor God, we will more likely find ourselves in Gethsemane with Jesus, praying for the peace of the world.

Being blessed means walking into the chaos of the world. It means being a sign of God in the midst of a world that defies the power and love of God.

Being blessed in this sense is not a privilege of those of us who go into places of pain to serve others. Being blessed in this sense begins with those who are there, in the center of the pain. They are the signs of God, walking in the pitiful procession that leads to the cross. We, who the world considers more blessed than they, are in fact the spectators on the journey into Jerusalem. It is the poor, the homeless, the victims of rape and violence, the addicts, who walk in that procession. Jesus rides in on a donkey, not a Mercedes. Soon Jesus will walk back out, in even humbler fashion. And he will still be blessed.

We’ve each been blessed. We were blessed at our baptism, marked as Christ’s own. We may hope for blessings of peace and happiness, but they were not guaranteed in that blessing. We were dedicated to God’s service, like the vessels we will eat and drink from in a minute. We were given to be poured out, like the wheat and the wine. We were blessed. We are blessed.

Being blessed means walking with Jesus into the places he walked into. This week we will remember him in the temple, in the prison, and in the tomb. But remembering him in those places is not enough.

Today there are others who defy the Temple, the centers of religious power that turn toward serving themselves rather than God. We need to walk with them as they call us back to true worship and service.

There are people, faces of Christ, in prison and serving those in prison. We need to walk with them, and sit with them, in the black holes of despair and anger.

There are people on their way to death, victims of state violence and victims of private exploitation to the point of death. We need to walk with them, to protest their treatment, to lift the cross from their shoulders.

And there are people carrying less obvious, yet excruciating burdens, among us and within us. We need to walk with them too.

We need to do this because we have been blessed.

We need not fear this blessing. This blessing is good news. For God goes before us and with us, leading us into places we might rather avoid. God carries us into the darkest corners of the world, and the darkest corners of our hearts. But God goes with us, and gives us what we need to walk this road. We can even celebrate, as God carries us to joy and wonder beyond our wildest dreams. But we only get there by being blessed.

In the 8th century, Andrew of Crete wrote:

It is ourselves that we must spread under Christ’s feet, not coats or lifeless branches or shoots of trees, matter which wastes away and delights the eye only for a few brief hours. But we have clothed ourselves with Christ’s grace, with the whole Christ - “for as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” - so let us spread ourselves like coats under his feet.

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.

* You can find out more about the Companions of Mary the Apostle (CMA) on their blog "Standing at the Empty Tomb."

Lent 5 C - Mar 17, 2013

HolyCross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Scott Borden, OHC

Lent 5 C – Sunday, March 17, 2013


Isaiah 43:16-21
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8

Mary washes Jesus' feet. Credit: Marina Van Den Boorn

Today's reading from the Gospel according to John presents an interesting tableau. Jesus' time in the flesh is growing short. He is, as they say, turning his face toward Jerusalem. The last supper is yet to come, but John gives us something like the last dinner party – which is not the subject of any particularly well known paintings...

Here we are at the home of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. In Luke's gospel, Mary and Martha get into a bit of a tiff at a dinner party... Martha gets upset because Mary is not helping. John tells us that once again Martha is doing all the cooking while Mary is once again at Jesus' feet. But this time there appears to be no complaint from Martha.

And John reminds us that Lazarus is the one Jesus has raised from the dead. It is pretty heavy handed foreshadowing. John is setting the stage for Jesus being raised from the dead.

John leaves the impression that there are a fair number of people at this dinner – but he doesn't give many names. Really all we know are Jesus, Mary, Martha, Lazarus, and Judas.

Two notable events take place – and its interesting that neither of them have much to do with dinner. We have to wonder if any food ever served at this dinner party.

The first dramatic event is Mary anointing Jesus' feet with expensive perfume made with pure nard. In Mark's gospel Jesus' head is anointed with pure nard, but John applies it to Jesus' feet – perhaps even more extravagant... Nard is an exotic spice oil from the far east, the foothills of the Himalayas, so it is precious. And Mary doesn't use it sparingly – she empties the container.

This drives Judas crazy. And so we come to the second dramatic event. Judas has a tempter tantrum. How could such extravagance be justified. The perfume could have been sold and the money used for the poor. Judas even knows how much money – 300 denarii.

Now money is an interesting thing. Its natural to want to know how much money we're talking about, since most of us don't deal in denarii. But it is a very imprecise question because money works differently in our economy than in the economy of Jesus time.

300 denarii, according to Google, which after all knows everything, is equivalent perhaps to about $30 dollars – a few trips to Starbucks if you like. And at the same time 300 denarii is equivalent to about 1 years wages. So while 300 denarii is not an unfathomable about of money, it is an amount not lightly spent. It is worth nothing that Mary had such a jar of nard in the first place – it tells us that Mary, Martha, and Lazarus were not poor.

But John is not so much interested in telling us about Mary as about Judas. Judas makes this big protest about what might have been done for the poor, but John tells us he is the worst sort of hypocrite. He doesn't care about the poor. He is in the habit of stealing from the common purse. He wanted the money to be contributed to the poor by way of that common purse... Hypocrisy and greed. This is not at all a pretty picture.

But lets let Judas simmer on a back burner for a few moments while we go back and take a closer look at Mary of the nard...

We encounter a number of women named Mary in scripture – sometimes its hard to keep track of just which Mary we're talking about. There is Mary, mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, Mary the Mother of James, and even a rather generic reference to “the other Mary.” Perhaps we're not really meant to keep them all separate – maybe they are supposed to blur together. For all the Maries of the Gospels are teaching us profound lessons in discipleship.

Throughout the history of the Christian Church we have struggled with the place of women in the church. But throughout the gospels, Mary, with her various faces, keeps teaching us what it means to follow Jesus in a way that has no male equal.

Here is Mary – in the Bethany edition – showing us true humble service to Jesus. And its certainly no coincidence that she is washing and anointing feet – an act that Jesus will soon perform with the disciples and we will commemorate on Maundy Thursday. Mary is ahead of the curve.

This context makes Judas all the more a scoundrel. Mary is faithfully serving Jesus while Judas is betraying. Mary is teaching us what it is to be a Christian and Judas is teaching us what it is not... The two are as far apart as can be. Judas is telling us lies while Mary is living the truth.

So back to Judas... what is that act of betrayal. Well we surely know that Judas will sell out Jesus to the authorities – that is part of the betrayal. But then we have this whole business about Judas being a thief, not really being very concerned for the poor... and this is also betrayal. We know that Jesus has a special concern for the poor – along with orphans and widows, prisoners, the sick and suffering, the outcast, just to mention a few. Judas' betrayal is not in the future – it is already happening.

Judas betrays Jesus by betraying the poor.

There is a sobering thought. I must admit there are times I have been more concerned with my own comfort than the care of the poor – and this, after all, is what John accuses Judas of. He stole from the common purse, from the poor, for his own purposes. This particular reading calls me, calls all of us, to look at our own betrayal of Jesus.

Add to this the reality that “the poor” is a sort of short hand for that whole long list of people about whom we must be concerned... that whole list of brothers and sisters for whom we must be “keeper” and we multiply the betrayal.

John, in this Gospel, is telling the faithful how they will live without Jesus in the flesh. That is our reality. So we have the humble, faithful servant image of Mary before us and the lying cheat of Judas.

I'd like to say its a simple and easy choice... except experience tells me its not. With relative frequency and ease, I have chosen Judas instead of Mary for my model. But more dramatic is the betrayal that we as a people, as a society, as a nation have committed.

I may not steal from the poor and the powerless, but look at what is done in my name, in all our names... We subsidize wealthy corporate farms and oil companies, we provide tax shelters for the extremely rich, we allow the concentration of wealth in a very few hands and the cost of doing that is that many of our brothers and sisters go without health care, live in appalling housing, face abuse and violence. Many of our aged brothers and sisters live in squalor, forced to choose between medication and nutrition. And we won't even talk about what kind of treatment prisoners receive in our jails.

Our common purse is stolen from all the time and redirected to the benefit of the rich at the expense of the suffering. Jesus is betrayed.

Yet here is another thing I know. Jesus loves Judas as much as Jesus loves Mary. And that is also how much Jesus loves each of us. Its not my failings and frailties that constitute my relationship with God. It is God's boundless love and forgiveness.

Jesus' final statement in this reading has always sounded strange in my ear. The poor will be with you always. It sounds like Jesus is saying its OK to deprive the poor of the value of the perfume in order that he be pampered because we can never resolve the issue of the poor anyway.

But that misses the point. Judas wasn't sincere in his interest in the poor. Mary was sincere in her discipleship. We know that to follow Jesus, to be sincere disciples, is to care for the poor, for the orphans, and so on. And the poor, the powerless, the oppressed will be with us always. In other words we will always have opportunities to be faithful disciples. If I blow it today... If today I choose Judas as my model, then there will be tomorrow when I pray I will choose Mary, in any of her incarnations, as my model...

Jesus is not telling us there is no hope for the poor, Jesus is telling us there is always hope for the poor, the downtrodden, the suffering, because there is always hope for us.

Lent 3 C - Mar 3, 2013

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Adam D. McCoy, OHC

Lent 3 C – Sunday, January 27, 2013

Exodus 3:1-15
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9


On Thursday, July 26, 2012, lightning hit a venerable Episcopal church in Brooklyn, designed by Richard Upjohn, Christ Church in Cobble Hill.  Scaffolding had been erected six weeks or so earlier, in anticipation of renovation of the tower.  A multi-pronged bolt struck the 16 foot northwest pinnacle of the tower, one of the four, and it and its supporting masonry crashed through the roof of the church and down through the floor, as well as through scaffolding.  Richard Schwartz, a 61 year old New York State Justice Department  economic justice antitrust lawyer, had taken shelter under the scaffolding but was hit by a pinnacle stone and died later at Long Island College Hospital. 

Was Richard Schwartz a worse offender than all the others living in Brooklyn?  Was his life or his work displeasing to God?  Did he deserve what he got?

To ask such questions seems absurd – and shows us how different our understanding of causation is than that of our Lord’s time.  There is not even a hint of the question of divine intervention in the article about it in the New York Times, of course.  But such superstitious  concern isn’t even found where you might look for it, in the Post,.  Some two thousand years ago, in our story from Luke, Jesus goes out of his way to deny the divine origin of the catastrophes of nature and of political tyranny to his own superstitious hearers.  The cruelty inflicted by the Roman governor, the havoc wrought by the instability of a building, are not instances of God’s capricious vengeance. 

Which most of us probably think gets us off the hook of God’s wrath breaking through and finding us.  Pontius Pilate was in a long line of despots who destroy the people who annoy them with hardly a second thought.  The tower in Siloam was probably badly designed, as were some of Upjohn’s towers.  There is a natural explanation for all of this.  These things happen.  Richard Schwartz just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It can all be sorted out by insurance companies and litigation. 

Except that is not what Jesus said.  He didn’t say that the people who were harmed by wicked tyranny and bad engineering were not at fault.  He did not let the bystanders off the hook.  What he said was that the people who suffered were not worse than the rest of us.  What he said was, “unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did."  Instead of innocent victims and onlookers, a few whose sins had caught them out, Everyone is potentially at fault.  Everyone sins.  Everyone is on the wrong side of what God wants.  This is not the news of victimhood.  It puts us all on notice.  We are all in it together, and unless we get our act together before God, we will all be liable.  What we want is disconnection of the “real world” from the inbreaking of the divine.  What we want is understandable causes and fixable solutions: Install a more humane governor in Jerusalem.  Re-engineer the Tower of Siloam, and make sure the builders don’t cut corners.  Check our church towers for weaknesses and restore them.  Find it, fix it, avoid lawsuits.  And most of all, don’t drag us into it personally when things go wrong.

But instead of disconnecting our daily world from our responsibilities to God, what Jesus does is radically re-connect it.  It isn’t just “them”, “those people”, the ones who died because they were in the way.  We all of us, actually, are “in the way”.  We all have the responsibility to see our reality and turn our lives around and start living as God wants us to live.  What we do has consequences before God.   What we do, who we are, matters.

Let’s follow this line of thought a little further.  What if, instead of living in a world whose demonstrable chains of material causation leave less and less room for the presence of God, we live in a world in which those same chains of causation lead us deeper into the divine reality?  What if we live in a world in which every scientific discovery leads us closer to the Word of God which created that world?  What if we live in a world in which we come to understand that every time we injure someone else we mingle their blood with our sacrifices?  What if we live in a world in which every one of our sins makes a tear, smaller or larger, in the fabric of God’s good creation?  What if we live in a world in which every time we make peace with one other person we are helping to set the world right again?  What if we live in a world in which every time we do a good deed for someone else we are re-weaving one small strand of the tapestry of creation?  What if the fruits of our lives, good or bad, are vital to the whole of what is?  We may want to be separate from God, but we are radically connected.

St. Paul tells us that the rock which gave the Israelites in the wilderness the water they needed to live was Christ.  What a strange image!  Their journey through the wilderness was made possible because Christ was with them, all the way, even though they did not know it.  What makes our lives possible is Christ.  He is the rock giving us the living water that sustains us through the wilderness.  Our lives come from him, are sustained by him.  What we do with our lives matters.  We are deeply connected with Christ, even though we do not see it or know it until later, and maybe not even then. 

Moses encountered God on the mountain, in the burning bush, was given his marching orders, and then asked at least to know His Name: “God said to Moses, "I AM Who I AM." He said further, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" God is What – or Who -- Is.  There is no separating us from What Is, from What Really Is.  The world God has made is – it Is.  The world’s very being flows from the One whom we cannot even begin to encompass in our imaginings, because to imagine is to separate, to distinguish, to use the third person, to stand aside and describe.  But God is always personally present: I AM.  The world and we ourselves are only separate from God in our imaginings.  Everything we are and everything we do is our commentary on our dependence on, our life in, the One Who Is, in whom we live and move and have our being. 

Jesus - incarnate Son of God, Word of God made flesh, through whom all things are made - Jesus knows we cannot live up to the one who made us.  We are like the fig tree.  We have been planted in the vineyard, have been allowed to grow, and now is the time for figs.  But not all of us bear fruit, and none of us bears as much as we were intended to.  For three years – an interesting number, the conventional length of Jesus’ ministry – for three years the owner of vineyard has been looking for fruit and not finding it.  But the gardener – the same gardener Mary Magdalene thought she saw at the empty tomb? – the gardener knows the tree, and begs for arboreal intensive care and for time.  There will be water, even water from the Rock.   There will be time, but that time is a time of urgency.  The time for the reparation of the fruitfulness of the world, the fruitfulness of God’s people, has arrived.  If not now, then, by the gracious love of Christ, next year is the time for the tree to bear fruit.  Next year there will be figs.