Proper 17 B - Aug 30, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Scott Borden, OHC
Proper 17 B – Sunday, August 30, 2015

Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Br. Scott Borden

It’s tempting to hear this Gospel passage from Mark as a dispute between the faithful and the faithless – between the disciples and Pharisees. But this is a dispute among faithful people. The Pharisees were not unfaithful – they were extremely devout, extremely faithful, just like the disciples. The issue is how they live their faith.

This passage combined with the letter of James forms a challenge for those of us today who are both faithful and devout: How do we live our faith – and more to the point, do we live faithfully in the manner of the disciples or of the Pharisees…

In Mark, Jesus calls us to listen. Jesus is emphatic: "Listen to me, all of you, and understand..." The listening part is not so difficult, but understanding…

But the Letter of James has some very useful coaching: "… be doers of the word, not merely hearers who deceive themselves." So understanding the word must involve action. Perhaps the words of Father Huntington apply: Love must act. And we know that God’s word is love.

Martin Luther famously hated this Letter of James because it seems to encourage a doctrine of works righteousness; that our salvation is somehow obtained through doing good works. For Luther it was all about God's grace being given to us in spite of the reality that we don’t earn or deserve it.

I'm happy to ignore Luther for the moment and turn instead to John Wesley. The same controversy of salvation through works or grace was still swirling nearly two centuries later, but Wesley saw a different order of things. Good works, what Wesley called sanctified living, were not a precondition of grace, but rather a response to it.

According to Wesley, when we become aware that we are the recipients of God's grace through no act of our own, we cannot help but respond in sanctified living. And the longer we live in the knowledge of God's grace, the greater our joy will be in sanctified living. We must be doers of the word, of love, because otherwise we are merely hearing the word, not understanding it. Without action, faith is dead, the words are empty. Love must act.

According to James, those who hear the word without acting are like folks who study themselves in the mirror. In contemporary terms I think James is talking about narcissism. Narcissists are interested in how things appear, and most especially in how they, the narcissist, appears. Or as a silly pop song of a few years back put it, it isn’t how you feel, its how you look… Lovers of God, followers of Jesus, on the other hand, are interested in who needs food and who needs help, not in how things appear.

It is easy to read this Gospel passage as a story of opposing groups – the good and faithful disciples and the narcissistic Pharisees. That may have been a good way to read the story – back then... But I think the richness of this story today lies not in reading it as a story about two unfriendly groups, but rather as a story of inner conflict. We are Pharisees and we are Disciples who hear and understand.

In the church today there are many who, as James says, are quick to speak; quick to judge; quick to condemn; quick to exclude, not so quick to listen... I can spot those people from miles, even oceans, away.

It’s a bit trickier when I’m the one too quick to speak, to judge, to condemn, to exclude. Once we have our mouths running, listening becomes much more difficult – even for me...

The direction of our action must be love. James tells us that our anger does not produce God=s righteousness. In my experience, my anger produces self-righteousness. Frighteningly, much of our present political discourse seems to start in anger that billows forth into self-righteousness and narcissism.

How easy it is for me to spot self-righteousness… in others... How much harder to spot my own self-righteousness. And yet it’s there – and it is not Godly. My anger does not produce righteousness. This is a humbling reality.

It’s not that we don=t get angry. Certainly there are many things in this world that should make us angry. Certainly Jesus got angry. Anger can move us to action. The problem is that anger must not direct our action. Love, God’s love, must direct our action. Otherwise the result will not be righteous.

With this letter of James ringing in our ears what happens when we go back to Mark?

It’s a fairly standard set up in Mark – Pharisees are yammering away: AYour disciples do not love God because they do not keep God’s law... they do not (insert offense here)...@ This time the offense is Athey do not wash their hands before they eat.@ (I had a 2nd grade teacher who would have quite liked these particular Pharisees...). The disciples, in the eyes of the Pharisees, are defiling themselves and thereby defiling God.

So Jesus tells us how we truly defile ourselves – not with what we eat, not by failing to follow rituals, but with what is in our heart and what comes forth out of our mouths.

We wrestle with Pharisees all the time. They are the people who know how everything ought to be done and are happy to tell us... From politicians to televangelists to health and fitness gurus and more. There is a great chorus of Pharisees chiding us for the ways we fail to metaphorically wash our hands.

Listening to the Pharisee Chorus is easy, and perhaps even fun. It provides clarity and certainty. But the Pharisee Chorus is not the choir of angels… It sings a siren song that says examine yourself, look at yourself, improve yourself, love yourself. Don’t look away from yourself.

When I examine my heart, what do you know? I have my own Pharisee Chorus which really does know exactly how everything ought to be done to please God – not only what others ought to be doing, but what I ought to be doing as well. This chorus is never helpful. It is never Godly.

The lyrics of this Pharisee Chorus are based on some sort of code, or law which defines what God does and doesn’t like – a holiness code. The duty of the Pharisee is to clarify the code, to fanatically follow the code, and at every opportunity to impose the code on others. This is what my personal Pharisee Chorus does... each of us can hear, if we listen closely, our Pharisee Chorus singing away. Listening to this chorus is narcissism. We are at the center – at the spot where God needs to be.

And we all know how big a fan Jesus was of the Pharisees Chorus...

The more we listen to our Pharisees the less we can hear Jesus... the less we can be hearers and doers of the word… the more we stand and look at ourselves in a mirror… the relationship between faith and narcissism is powerful, for they are in some ways shadows of each other. They are both forms of worship – but faith worships God while narcissism worships self.

And here is what narcissistic worship leads to: We can loudly proclaim our belief in the sanctity of family while at the same time allowing children to go without proper nutrition... We can proclaim that we believe in justice for all while accepting a legal system that completely fails entire segments of our society. We can proclaim our love of God’s creation while failing to address our addiction to burning cheap fossil fuels and thereby despoiling our planet. The list goes on and on.

We abandon Jesus in favor of human tradition. We honor God with our lips, but our hearts are far from God.

To hear God’s word is to act on it – we cannot be hearers without being doers for they really are the same, just as loving God and loving neighbor really are the same. God help us to step away from the mirror and to share God’s love with brothers and sisters.

Proper 16 B - Aug 23, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Reinaldo Martinez-Cubero, n/OHC
Proper 16 B – Sunday, August 23, 2015


Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18
Ephesians 6:10-20
John 6:56-69-31

Take up the whole armor of God

“Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.”

There is nothing on earth that could entice me to re-live 2005, the year during which I went through some very difficult experiences, one after the other. But it is one of those experiences that stands out in my memory when I read the lesson from the Letter to the Ephesians.

An employee of the church where I worked, who lived on the premises, had become addicted to methamphetamine hydrochloride, commonly known as crystal meth. I was extremely concerned about the safety of the children of the theatre program that I ran at the church. I had been aware of the comings and goings by the entrance to his apartment. We were handling the situation in no uncertain terms, but also with much care and caution. In spite of tireless efforts, warnings, and some progress through outpatient rehabilitation, the behavior continued, and the situation worsened. After much consideration, and prayer it was decided that the situation as it was, was not helping this individual, and indeed, was putting the children of the church’s programs at risk. An intervention was needed, and we needed to demand that he go for in-patient rehab. Every step was taken with an immense amount of love, concern and care for the dignity of this person. In the intervention group were two psychotherapists, one of whom specialized in addiction. They guided us on how to proceed. Unfortunately, in spite of our efforts, and wishes for a peaceful resolution, the intervention was quite messy. The individual became very violent, striking someone physically, and the police had to be called to take care of the rest of it.

The Bishop Suffragan of the diocese who had been aware of what we were going through praised our efforts, and said that, “with love we had withstood against the work of the devil”. I remember feeling instantly uncomfortable with that statement. Did she mean a supernatural force? At the time, if I was going to think about evil at all, my post-enlightenment, intellectual, liberal theology felt more comfortable thinking of it in the human realm: corrupt corporate empires or political regimes; those who get as much wealth as they can, and as quickly as they can for themselves instead of allowing for equal distribution of resources; and so on. But the older I get, the more I realize that, if I am really going to be honest and honor my Baptismal Covenant, the Scriptural understanding of evil is something I must consider very seriously, and that there is often more to our struggles than meets the eye. If we don’t see our journeys in this world as part of a much bigger story, we are surely being limited about the nature and power of evil and are also overruling a substantial part of Scripture.

According to the New Testament in general, there are cosmic powers at work all the time. The personal agent in whom these forces originate is Satan, who is determined to destroy all of God’s Creation. The gospel according to John speaks of the Prince of This World. In her book “Buying the Field”, Sandra M. Schneiders, I.H.M. explains that “World” in this context means “a construction of reality, which is in opposition to Jesus and his own and which can be incarnated in multifarious ways”. She further writes: “It is difficult for us to understand in the abstract what this ‘world’ is. Because we never see or engage it except as embodied in some person, system, ideology, institution, and so on, we naturally tend to concretize it as a place, a people, … a political party or social system, … something which we can identify and engage as if it were free standing and clearly distinct from the ‘good world’. However this evil world pervades the natural and historical world in which we live, the good Creation of God and the struggling human beings who are torn between good and evil.”

The book of Revelation speaks of the ferocious dragon with tremendous size and awesome power that is behind the beast. This dragon represents active, powerful, satanic power. Often, we cannot describe these cosmic powers exactly, but we get closer to what the author of the Letter to the Ephesians is trying to describe when we can see particular behaviors at work. For example, when a group of people will stop at nothing until they achieve the destruction of someone or some cause, or when groups of people are outcast, or their dignity and basic humanity is taken away. I believe that perhaps it is better to think of evil in terms of behaviors rather than individuals. Anyone who is so tightly connected with something that takes away his or her human freedom is not evil, but is likely being exploited by powers that are bigger than they are.

What do we do when we are faced with these forces or with individuals who have clearly been invaded by these forces? As Christians, we are clearly called to love and to forgive. But to love and to forgive does not mean that we let a perpetrator get away with wrongdoing, because, well, that really is not love. In that very sad and difficult situation at my work years ago, we prayed together, we sought advice, we stood firm, we loved, and we did the best we could. As for those who exploit others, well, the Scriptures do assure us that there will be justice, but that justice is ultimately for God to reveal, and it may not happen in our lifetime. In the meantime, we are to put on that spiritual armor of God. That armor is our Lord Jesus Christ who breaks through time and space to live in the world here and now, and who tells us, in the lesson from the gospel according to John that through his body and blood we abide in Him and He in us.  We are to fasten the belt of truth, the truth about the Word of God around our waist. Without that belt, we have no place for the scabbard, and thus no place for the sword, which is the Living Word of God itself. By putting on the breastplate of righteousness we put into practice what we believe in our hearts.

Like the Israelites in the story from the Book of Joshua, who are constantly turning to God, and then turning away, and then turning to God again, putting on the breastplate of righteousness requires that we stop compartmentalizing God to “Christian activities” in church and during spiritual practices, but then stop thinking about God if it is not convenient because we just want to be self-indulgent. When the devil is at work to fill us with doubt, and entice us with instant gratification, the shield of faith recognizes the deceptiveness of these tactics and quickly extinguishes the flaming arrows. The two edges of the devil’s sword are discouragement and doubt, pointing at our failures, our unresolved problems, or to whatever else seems negative in our lives, to make us lose confidence in the love of God. The helmet of salvation gives us confidence and assurance that our present struggles will not last forever and we will be victorious in the end. And finally, we are to pray, “pray in the Spirit at all times”, because as psalm 34 says: “The righteous cry, and the LORD hears them and delivers them from all their troubles.” 

Our Holy God in Heaven, fill us with your Holy Spirit, that we may keep your word alive in us through the teachings of Scripture. Keep us alert and ever more sensitive to the spiritual reality of cosmic powers. 

Amen.

St Mary the Virgin - Aug 15, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
Feast of St Mary the Virgin - Saturday, August 15, 2015


Isaiah 61:10-11
Galatians 4:4-7
Luke 1:46-55

The Annunciation - Fra Angelico

The danger of celebrating Mary with beautiful art is that we can easily loose touch with her flesh and blood reality -- which is exactly what makes her an example of discipleship for us. We give her special honor in our tradition because of her unique role in salvation history as the “Theotokos”, the God-Bearer. But she has an ongoing role in the church as an example of persistent faith-filled living. It’s not what she said or wrote, but how she lived---and I don’t mean the sanitized version that was cobbled together through the centuries by our fear of human sexuality, our control issues, and the male need to create God in our own image.  If we dare to see it, Mary shows us what it looks like to be fully human in loving relationship to others and to God.

I think of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation -- one of my favorites. It’s often viewed as Mary’s pure, unambiguous surrender to God and God’s plan. I can’t imagine anything further from the truth or more disheartening for us as disciples. As Gabriel delivers God’s invitation I can hear Mary response not as a submissive “fiat”, but rather as “Are you serious?” We know she was anxious, confused, and frightened. We know that she had her own plans for the future. She was engaged and about to make a new life with Joseph. But still, despite this, she said “yes”. She wasn’t saying “yes” to being an unwed teenage mother, ending her engagement, inviting the gossip of her neighbors, disgracing her family, or risking death. She was saying “yes” to God, although as a consequence of her choice, she was opening herself up to everything else with it. She trusted God enough to believe that the other stuff would be worked out. She trusted enough to take the risk.

And things only got worse. She and Joseph became refugees in a foreign land where they scratched out a living. They returned to a small hill town and raised their growing family in uncertain times under foreign military oppression. She knew the pain of grief and the vulnerability of being a widow. She understood the frustration, impatience, fear, and confusion of having a son whom she just couldn’t understand. She disagreed with his choices, his lifestyle, his friends, and his conflicts with authority. I have no doubt that Jesus was no prize as a teenager!

A few years ago, the Presiding Bishop spoke of the place Mary might play in our prayer. It resonated with me because Mary figured prominently in my thirty-day retreat. The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius are intended to draw one through the life of Jesus, his Passion, and Resurrection into a deeper relationship with God. Mary was my guide through the Passion. Jesus, quite literally, sent me to her. Initially I thought it was for me to be a companion to her. In fact he had turned me over to her care. She walked with me every step of the way to the cross. I was given the grace of entering so deeply into her pain at seeing her son’s suffering that it brought me to a whole new understanding of how we suffer in the suffering of those we love. It can feel less painful to be crucified than to stand helplessly by to watch the one you love be crucified. Perhaps that was the sword Simeon spoke of piercing her own heart. It seems to me that anyone who loves opens themselves up to being pierced. I continue to draw deeply on the experience of this mother and her son in relationship to my own mother.

Our impulse at pain is to draw in, rather than to open up. When faced with our inability to make things better, we are invited to surrender more deeply. Surrender is not devoid of other feelings. Nor do other feelings negate the act of surrendering. It is not a once and for all action. At each step, in the face of each new development, we are given the opportunity to let go a little more and sink down further into God’s embrace.

The archetypal image of human relationships is that of mother and child. It affirms our common humanity, and in this particular relationship, it affirms our common inheritance. In his letter to the Church in Galatia, Paul says that Mary’s ministry, like her son’s, was above all else to be the incarnation of the Gospel message. This mother and son are our hereditary links to kinship with God. To prove that we are sons and daughters of God, this child was born of this woman, “ so that we might receive adoption as children” (Gal. 4:5)

In the person and image of Mary we are reunited to that radical connectedness we share in our common birth and life. This was and continues to be “the greatness of the Lord” proclaimed in her song: that God is firm in the promise to our ancestors, that God has not forgotten to show mercy from generation to generation, even to our own day. This is the greatness that rejoices her spirit and ours: that in God’s greatness we are all embraced as one family. This is her eternal mission and ministry---that we might look to this image, ponder it in our imaginations until it becomes incarnate in our own lives---reunion with God, neighbor, and self as whole and as holy as the union of mother and child.

Mary has always been for me the model of a person’s love affair with God, in all its messiness, with all its rough edges and imperfections. Today we honor her by opening ourselves to the power of her witness. She has much to teach us about what it is to be fully human, and unconditionally loved by God.

On this ancient feast called the Dormition by our Eastern sisters and brothers, the final verses of Ann Johnson’s poem, Dormition, from Miryam of Nazareth: Woman of Strength and Wisdom, conjure up for us a vision of how a life of faithfulness blossoms into eternity.

Her lifetime of shadowy knowing was
          confirmed in the quieting joy.
Summoning cadences, ancient and deep,
          Echoed the call of God’s peace.

Miryam, aware, reached out.
Holding the knowledge of change, reached out.
Accepting the newness of challenge, reached out.
Reached out to begin the renewing.

Miryam embarked on the journey.
Her mind precise for the journey.
Her soul enflamed for the journey.
Journeyed to the arms of God.

In the warmth of those arms, she knew.
Ancient pathways op’ning before her, she knew.
Words of her people streamed into her heart, she knew.
Knew that her God had come home.

+Amen.

Transfiguration - Aug 6, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC

Feast of the Transfiguration - Thursday, August 6, 2015 

Exodus 34:29-35 
2 Peter 1:13-21 
Luke 9:28-36 

Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep

I once went for my spiritual direction appointment and in a moment of informal chatting as we were settling into our chairs I mentioned to my director that despite a full day of activity, after Compline I would often go to my room, and, rather than going to sleep at a decent hour, proceed to engage my brain in all kinds of interesting things.  Then when I would invariably not get enough sleep I would shuffle around in a bit of a sleep-deprived stupor during much of the next day.  Just my rhythm, I thought to myself, now let’s move on to spiritual things.  To my surprise, my sleep issue became the topic of the whole session.  God wanted to ask me something, my director gently insisted.  Why did I want to be half-awake?  Who or what was I avoiding?  Were there things I did not want to do, to face, that a stupor was a way to avoid?  Wow.  What I assumed was merely a bothersome bug in my circadian rhythm was actually also a soul issue.     

The transfiguration is recorded in Matthew, Mark, and Luke with only slight variation in the account of what happened.  However, Luke includes a line that Matthew and Mark do not.  (Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep...)  O.K., Luke often notes small physical details like this.  It’s a throwaway line that does not seem to add anything to the narrative except as an interesting human aside.  I have to say, though, that if I was with a shining Jesus on a mountain with Moses and Elijah, no matter how sleepy I was I think I would find some energy to stay awake to see that.

In a deeper sense, this sleepiness and wakefulness to the glory of Jesus with Moses and Elijah on the mountain is an important and profound symbol of the story.  Their sleepiness speaks of the forces at work in the transformative moment.  Sleep is described as a weight that is pressing down on Peter, James, and John.  There are then seven presences on the mountain – Jesus, Moses, and Elijah; Peter, James, and John and sleep.  Sleep here is a siren song to a secure and trouble-free life – just tune out, don’t get involved, keep to yourself, don’t get carried away with this religion thing.  Now of course there are times for physical sleep and our bodies need rest and slumber, but this sleep is mentioned as weighing at the least opportune moment possible, at a time when total attention is called forth.  Peter, James, and John – even in the presence of the glorified Jesus, have to wrestle with the physical and spiritual forces that would lure them to check out.

In his retreat called “Whatever Happened to Temptation”, Don Bisson discusses the particular issues in each stage of spiritual growth.  Those of us who have been formed into the spiritual life and have a fairly attuned ability to reflect on our souls do not grow out of temptation, unfortunately, it just changes shape.  The temptation of the more spiritually mature is not to some great evil, but to unconsciousness.  We can see what is going on, recognize our own resistance to growth and the hard work that lies ahead, but then, rather than stay attentive to our work, we get tempted to, in a sense, go to sleep.

Spiritual sight thrusts us deeper into an oppositional energy that weighs down on us to have us give up.  The temptation is unique to each of us.  Mine sounds something like: “it’s not worth it”, “I don’t care”, “It is not my problem”, “Leave me alone”, or, my personal favorite, “When are these people going to straighten up?”  This is a universal archetype of the spiritual life that shows up in all kinds of mythical stories of transformation.  

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companions have made a long and dangerous journey, they can see the Emerald City, it’s right there, they’ve almost made it, but the Wicked Witch has put poison on the poppies and it makes Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion (the two who breathe oxygen) go to sleep.  It takes the good witch Glinda to send the snow to neutralize the poison and wake them up so they can skip arm-in-arm to the City. The temptation to unconsciousness is particularly insidious and subtle because I can be doing all the right things outwardly, but not necessarily be engaged with my spiritual life. Then I am faced with the decision to merely conform to the system or be truly and vibrantly awake.

But what about unconsciousness is appealing?  Part of what is going on is that I am afraid of what will happen to me if I go all in with the glorified Jesus.  Looking at what I could become is overwhelming – even if it is my own growth.  I will be entering a new and unfamiliar city with Christ who will call forth from me deeper love, generosity, service, engagement, and responsibility when my ego would rather just not bother with all of that – I’m good enough as I am. 

The Christian life takes intention, purpose, energy, and action sustained through the emotional and circumstantial ups and downs of life.  Luke says “but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him.”  We will persevere in the transformative journey of becoming our real selves to the extent that our desire to see Jesus – and all that that vision entails - is greater than the temptation to shut our eyes or look away.  Do I want to stay awake and see his glory or do I want to be left alone?  Perhaps because he knows this danger, St Benedict uses lots of imperative action verbs in the Rule: listen, obey, rouse yourself, persevere, long for, seek peace, turn away from evil, build, mend, prepare, ask, hurry, progress (and that is just the Prologue)!  All of those commands are extensions of the Gospel imperative – “stay awake.”

On a practical level, some helpful guidance that I have gleaned from various sources in times of temptation:  look back at your life 10, 15, 20 years ago and realize how far you have come – growth may seem slow today but it’s obvious through the sweep of time – God has indeed graced us with attention and brought us into levels of service we scarcely could have imagined – the weight of sleep will never have the final word.  Become familiar with how temptation appears specifically for you and be prepared with a response.  Moments and times of discouragement are bound to come – we can feel the feelings without having to act out in them – being gentle and patient with ourselves is centrally human and therefore good spirituality.  When sleep weighs down on me, I ask myself “What is the next good thing to do to awaken myself and learn from this experience?”  Finally, beware what you say to your spiritual director.  And get a good night’s sleep.  Amen.