First Sunday after Christmas: December 31, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. John Forbis , OHC
First Sunday after Christmas - Sunday, December 31, 2017


To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. John Forbis

This is how it began for me,

By John Forbis, OHC 

God spewed me
out of his mouth
and commanded me
to howl a cosmos.
 
All I knew was one sound,
not even a word.
But then I found
my voice.
 
Or was it God’s?
for neither God nor I
had ever
spoken before.
 



Then I spoke again
and could not stop speaking.
The darkness began
to roll, swirl and swell.
 
Then waters
gathered,
boundaries
fixed.
 
Circles in the deep
layers of crust
were shaved,
contours smoothed.
 
I hummed and purred
while matter was
caressing itself
awake.
 
What came next
God called gift.
 
He molded
and branded himself
into a creation
with outlines and limits.
 
God wanted identity.
Or was it identification?
 
So he asked this of me.
And it was too much to ask.
I had no experience of rejection, suffering,
death or birth.
 
The closest
I had ever
come to life
was wind and mist.
 
Yet, I knew who was asking.
 
The rhythm
of his heartbeat
still lingers
in my ears. 
 
So I conformed
to the womb in which
he placed me,
returned to the darkness.
 
Once born,
I knew
I would have to
go there again.
 
But bellowing
as I do with
all of those
who need the
 
plain grace and truth
of a single vowel,
my death which is life
will not be overcome.

Christmas Day: December 25, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

Christmas Day - Sunday, December 25,2017

NEW! Listen to Br. Robert preaching

Br. Robert James Magliula

Today is the day and everything is in place. We know the hymns. We know the readings. We know the whole story so well that we can tell it by heart: the star, the shepherds, the angels, the baby. Because it is so familiar we can forget the strangeness and power of this story. We are here to settle into a mystery, to follow a star to Bethlehem and gather around a manger. In our time, we make the journey with a sense of vulnerability and insecurity which is not unsimilar to the conditions of life in first century Palestine.

  
Christmas, at it’s heart, is a festival of vulnerability. This birth sheds light not only on what has been birthed in us, but also what has not. It’s a time when some are weighed down by the burden of old losses, even in the face of the audacious declaration that the heart of the universe loves us so much that it comes to us to beat in a vulnerable infant.

In a recent article, Sr. Joan Chittister quoted Joan of Arc who said, “How else would God speak to me if not though my imagination”. Her article went on to say that God speaks to all of us through our imagination. That’s what our imagination is for. She wrote, “Imagination is learning to see beyond what we have to what could be.” The mystery of today’s feast is best entered through our imagination.

Each of us has a picture of what that infant looks like. Well, today is the day to close our eyes and reach into that picture, and take him into our arms. Examine his fingers, count his toes, and say to yourself, “This is God in my arms.” Feel his breath, feel his warmth spreading through those swaddling clothes. This is what God has decided to look like, and all for love of us. Shocking, isn’t it? To behold the Creator of the Universe dependent on the kindness of creatures. Sure, we know the story by heart, but do we hear God’s message for us today?

In the first place, a baby is---in the best of worlds---evidence that a love affair has taken place. That’s certainly the case with this particular child. God has loved humankind from the moment we were thought up. But the relationship had been a rocky one. In the beginning God figured that paradise would be enough for us; God gave us everything and hoped for the best. But we wanted more than everything. So God gave us something more concrete by initiating a covenant of mutual fidelity to be our God and for us to be God’s people. But we were not faithful.

So God gave us more guidelines in the Ten Commandments, but we broke them. God then took another step by simplifying the covenant to loving God and our neighbor. But even that was too much.

The history of our love affair with God is the story of our repeated frailty and God’s forgiveness. Every time the distance between us has threatened to end the relationship, it is God who steps across the breach, taking on more of the burden, until with the birth of this infant, God accepted it all. God came to where we were, to be flesh of our flesh. All we had to do was to believe that we were loved enough for God to live and die as one of us.

Christmas has a way of exposing a paradox in the human condition. We desire to be loved, yet we find it so hard to allow ourselves to be loved. We organize our lives around the pursuit of love, but in the one place where it is offered unreservedly, we pull back and obsess over a thousand other details in our lives. Once we have sufficiently sidetracked ourselves, we renew our desperate attempts to find love, inevitably looking in all the wrong places. The love manifested in the Incarnation does not deny our separateness, our humanity, our frailty, or even our aloneness. In the Christmas story, we see God become helpless, become like us, become subject to the tensions of growth, become flesh so that we might have the confidence to recognize that we have the stuff it takes to become like God.

Love sheds light on people and situations. Luke’s narrative is flooded with a light generated by love, light overcoming darkness. But as we know from our own lives, we do not always welcome the light. Light changes things. Light makes us see parts of ourselves and others that we’d rather not see. It can frighten and anger us to be reminded that we are not perfect, not in control, not invulnerable. Light reveals truth, and truth is usually a blow to the ego, since there is nothing we can do to win, earn, or deserve the love that it offered. It is an extravagant gift, given freely despite our imperfections and resistance. Unfortunately, many have experienced the giving of gifts as something with strings attached causing them to step back to calculate the cost. We have only to take a realistic view of the circumstances of this birth to curb our ego and recognize our pride and fear of vulnerability.The mystery of Emmanuel---God-with-us, shows us just how far God will go to be held in our arms. This is the first part of today’s message.

The second part of the message is that in doing so, God has blurred forever the distinction between the divine and the human, the holy and the ordinary. God could have come to us as some great power more recognizable as God. Then we could have kept our distance. But God chose to come among us as an infant, and a poor one at that. Choosing flesh, God chose the lowest human common denominator and in doing so left us no escape.That’s why it is so important today to let the star show us a real child. In choosing to enter in such an ordinary way, God showed us that flesh and blood, dirt and sky, life and death, were good enough for God. More than that, God made them holy by taking part in them, and left us nothing on earth that we can dismiss as trivial or unknown to God. The very scandal of Christianity lies in the fact that it sees divinity in humanity. 

 
This feast is the commitment to life made incarnate. It is the call to see God everywhere, and especially in those places we would not expect to find glory or grace. It is also an obligation to see that everything leads us directly to God, to realize that there is no one, nothing on earth, that is not the way to God for us. The moment we can really look to everyone and everything as a revelation of God, is the time when war, prejudice, and hunger would disappear. Everything would be gift, everyone would be sacred.

 This day God has come among us as a infant and a lover, and every ordinary and created thing has become transparent with God’s glory. There is gold in the straw, myrrh in the dung, the cows smell of frankincense, and the star shows seekers from every corner of the earth where to look for God---not up in the heavens but in the wondrous muck and chaos of our lives and world. If we have the wisdom to embrace the everyday stuff of our lives, then God is born in our arms.  +Amen.

Fourth Sunday of Advent- Year B: December 24, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Roy Parker, OHC

Fourth Sunday of Advent- Sunday, December 24,2017

NEW! Listen to Br. Roy preaching

Br. Roy Parker, OHC

"Even at Christmas, when haloes are pretested by focus groups for inclusion in mass market campaigns, they are hard to see. Annie Dillard was scrutinizing the forest floor at Pilgrim’s Creek when she looked up and saw a tree haloed in light. She had caught the tree at prayer, in a moment so receptive and full, the boundaries of bark burst and its inner fire became available for awe. But seeing haloes is more than a lucky sighting. It entails the advent skill of sustaining attention, the simple act, as Dillard found out, of looking up. The optometrist swings his goggle machine before our eyes. ‘Read line four.’ Then he flips lenses through the machine until the blurred letters of line four snap into focus. But if we break our captivity to the imprisoning print of line four and look up to line one, the letter E will carry us away with its clarity and bless the smallest of markings with surrounding light. That is how haloes are seen, by looking up into largeness, by tucking smallness into the folds of infinity. I do not know this by contemplating shimmering trees. Rather there was woman, amid the crowd of Christmas, busy at Christmas table, and I looked up to catch a rim of radiance etching her face, to notice curves of light sliding along her shape. She out-glowed the candles. All the noise of the room left my ears and silence sharpened my sight. When this happens, and I recognize the visits, I do not get overly excited. I merely allow love to be renewed, for that is the mission of haloes, the reason they are given to us. Nor do I try to freeze the frame. Haloes suffer time, even as they show us what is beyond time. But when haloes fade, they do not abruptly vanish, abandoning us to the sorrow of lesser light. They recede, as Gabriel departed Mary, leaving us pregnant.”----- Seeing Haloes: by John Shea

And according to what’s given to us this morning, Christmas is also about God’s preferred mode of moving among us, about the sort of real estate God particularly fancies. In fairness, it must be admitted that the Bible presents two stories about this real estate as if God were of two minds about it. ‘The House of Cedar School,’ as it might be called, receives its first fulfillment in the epic construction of Solomon’s Temple, an edifice congruent with the regal splendor of everything else about Solomon. Its successor, a pale imitation of the first, seems an essential symbol of the return of the exiles from Babylonian captivity. From Solomon on, the so-called ‘Tent School’ of Temple construction seems unworthy of consideration, but it persists in the tradition.

It begins with King David proposing to his court prophet that it’s ridiculous for the king to be living in a house of cedar while the ark of God stays in a tent, but although the prophet immediately encourages the king’s intentions for courtesy’s sake, on second thought he emphasizes God’s preference of a tent despite David’s desire to provide a more permanent structure. What’s going on here is the prophetic reminder of the tabernacle dwelling of the holy presence, which became institutionalized in Israel’s life as the yearly Feast of Tabernacles so that, by camping out for a week, the people would not forget where they came from, a memory whose importance your therapist will emphasize.

God’s assurance to David is twofold: in the words of the prophet, “the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house” and “(one of your descendants) shall build a house for my name”; nowhere is the building material specified, and, in fact, the language here is all about the establishment of dynasty. Otherwise, the only building hint given is that a tent is God’s preferred venue, but will it be duplex, split level, or ranch; you also have Victorian, Georgian,  Federal, and Desert Revival. Then there are the commissions Joseph executed with the help of Jesus, with a large menu of possibilities. Imagine the conversations: “Son, I realize we were occupiers, but don’t you think that Philistine split-level is just the coolest?” It’s an important question for the annual Feast of Tabernacles as important as Passover for the Jewish sense of identity. Oddly enough, the preferred design is Tel Aviv Ikea, using rather inexpensive materials, which is why they came to Joseph’s shop in the first place: four two by fours, about eight feet long, (for the upright corners), four two by twos, same length, (for the roof), for the roof covering, several slats capable of supporting light tree branches. For the sides, they discovered that old bedsheets work well, and for the front, a bedsheet attached to a wire track. Leafy tree branches are placed on the roof slats, with enough gaps to observe the night stars and Ikea recommends a seven-foot cube for the construction, allowing plenty of room for guests.

All this would help Jesus remember the saying that “While God waits for the temple to be built of love, people bring stones” and reinforce the later realization of John the Evangelist that Christmas is about how God moves among us in a tent. And not only how, but why this should be preferable to the host of tourist attractions erected to supposedly house the divine presence. Why, indeed, should the Feast of Tabernacles, a kind of camp-town meeting, be so important to Israel and why should John the Evangelist make such a point that the Word became flesh and tented among us? What is this thing with tents? Something to do with the mystery of wilderness? Wilderness, and its effect upon us — which eases the hatreds, the violence, all those hard forbidden thoughts that plague us, ease them as wild things always ease heartache. Wilderness in which the undomesticated God reunites with us, and if you recall your childhood camping adventures, you might recall your tent as a mysterious vehicle for this. The undomesticated God prefers a tent of bedsheets to a house of cedar, and when the Word became flesh, Jesus preferred the tent of suffering humanity in which to move about, the Body of Christ as described by John Shea in his Prayer to the God Who Fell from Heaven.

“If you had stayed tight-fisted in the sky and watched us thrash with all the patience of a pipe smoker, I would have prayed like a golden bullet aimed at your heart. But the story says you cried, and so heavy was the tear you fell with it to earth where like a baritone in a bar it is never time to go home. So you move among us, twisting every straight line into Picasso, stealing kisses from pinched lips, holding our hand in the dark. So now when I pray I sit and turn my mind like a television knob till you are there with your large, open hands, spreading my life before me like a Sunday tablecloth and pulling up a chair yourself. For by now the secret is out. You are home.”

Third Sunday of Advent, Year B: December 17, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bob Pierson, OHC

Third Sunday of Advent - Sunday, December 17,2017

NEW! Listen to Br. Bob preaching

Br. Bob Pierson, OHC  

It occurred to me just the other day that, at age 62, I have experienced Advent in a conscious way for about 55 years. That's a lot of Advent. And my approach to the season has changed a bit over the years. 

What used to be an excited anticipation of the celebration of Christmas and all those presents under the tree, morphed into a desire for a “nice” time with family and friends. And now I find myself hoping for more global things like justice and world peace and the elimination of poverty and hunger.

And as my desired outcomes have changed, I have become a bit more jaded about the real possibility that I will never fully experience what I am hoping for.


 I mean, after 55 years you would think the longed for Messiah would have come and actually set us free. Of course, as Christians we believe that the Messiah HAS come and we ARE being set free. But it seems to be happening on a different schedule than I had hoped for.

I have been praying a lot for our brothers at Mount Calvary Monastery and all my friends in Ventura, Carpenteria, and Santa Barbara, CA, this week as they have to deal with the ferocious Thomas Fire that began almost two weeks ago. I know that the fire will be put out, but I don't know when that will happen, and what will occur in the meantime. In a similar way, I believe that God will triumph over injustice and war and poverty and hunger, but I don't know when and how that will happen either.

But there are several things that I DO know. I know that the fire will burn uncontrolled unless firefighters continue their efforts to keep it at bay. While there are many aspects of the fire beyond their control, the fire fighters can make progress if they hang in there because I believe that God is with them, calming the wind and eventually sending the needed rain. They will ultimately stop the fire.

And I also know that injustice and war and poverty and hunger will continue to thrive if we do nothing. But if we do what we can, knowing that there are many aspects of the situation beyond our control, we can make progress toward a better world because God is with us, too, helping us to slowly overcome those forces that work against us.

It is this kind of faith and hope that inspired the prophet Isaiah to say, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me....he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners....to comfort all who mourn.”  Isaiah knew that Emmanuel, “God with us,” was acting on behalf of the people of Israel. And so he could say, “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God.”  He was completely convinced that “the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.”

And Isaiah was not alone in his hope. The apostle Paul had a similar hope, inspiring him to write to the Thessalonians, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”  Giving thanks in all circumstances seems very foolish unless we know that God is with us, working everything for our good. Paul believed just that, and his words call us today to that same kind of faith and hope.

And finally we have John the Baptist, the great prophet of the Messiah, who came “as a witness to testify to the light.”  What does that mean—to testify to the light? Jesus said, “I am the light of the world.”  John came to testify to Jesus, the light of the world. John'a hearers would have remembered two passages about the light from the prophet Isaiah. The first is from Isaiah, Chapter 9:  “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined. The second is from Isaiah, Chapter 60, and we will hear it on the Feast of Epiphany: “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.”

John is telling his hearers that “the light” has come, that the long awaited Messiah is in their midst. But many of them paid no attention to him. They didn't recognize who Jesus was and what he was doing for them. As we prepare to celebrate his coming into the world once again, will we recognize him? Will we let him shine through our lives to bring light to our world?

Last week, Br. Bernard began his homily with a few choruses of “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.” At the risk of looking like a copy cat, I want to suggest a different song, that supports the point that I am trying to make. It's number 490, “I want to walk as a child of the light.”  I've never thought of it as an Advent song before, but I think it fits very well. Please join me in singing the first verse of hymn number 490:I want to walk as a child of the light,

I want to follow Jesus.
God set the stars to give light to the world.
The star of my life is Jesus.
 
In him there is no darkness at all.
The night and the day are both alike.
The Lamb is the light of the city of God.
Shine in my heart, Lord Jesus.

Second Sunday of Advent, Year B: December 10, 2017

Christ the King ,  Frankfurt, Germany
Br. Scott Borden, OHC
Second Sunday of Advent  – Sunday, December 10, 2017

Br. Scott Borden, OHC 

First, let me say how glad I am to be here – and how grateful I am to John for the invitation to be part of your Advent season. Christmas, and the season that leads us to it, Advent, are inevitably joyful times. We contemplate the great mystery of Jesus taking on human flesh and coming into our world – how could it be anything but joyful? 

Well... I don't want to take all the joy out of the season, but if we experience this season as entirely joyful then we are missing something. As we prepare our hearts and minds for the coming of Jesus, I want to complicate the emotions a bit.

First, a little history that may seem tangential, but bear with me. Way back in the 1300s a hospital opened in London to serve the mentally ill. We know it as Bedlam Hospital and its reputation for chaos and despair became so great that its very name entered the English language. Bedlam is the word for uproar, confusion, mayhem... and for most of us the notion of Bedlam Hospital is frightening.

Where can this tangent lead us? Well if you were to search on a map for Bedlam Hospital (you have to use an old map) you wouldn't find it. Bedlam was not the name of that hospital. The English have a particular penchant for modifying the way words are pronounced. Bedlam is one of those agreed on pronunciations. But the hospital was properly known as the Bethlehem Royal Hospital. And that is how the tangent leads back to Advent...

Our tradition teaches that Jesus is born in Bethlehem. And then our tradition fills in some ideas of what that must have been like – O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see the lie... It came upon a midnight clear... In the bleak mid-winter... all these familiar hymns (which I must say I dearly love) fill our minds with an image of that stable in Bethlehem filled with starlight, crystal-clear air, and a sense of hushed anticipation of the great mystery about to unfold.

But let's be honest... That stable in Bethlehem was certainly more like bedlam. Stables were, to put it politely, fertile places. The air would have hardly been crystal-clear – it would have been pungent and filled with dust and insects. It's nice to think of all the animals in hushed expectation, but they didn't come to witness the event... Mary and Joseph invaded their space.

That stable in Bethlehem stood in a cultural context that was anything but peaceful and beautiful. Social order was falling apart. The so-called Peace of Rome was purchased at a very high price economically and socially. Within the community of faithful Jews, things were particularly difficult – unstable and corrupt government leaders maintained a society in which things were just-not-quite-bad-enough to provoke revolution. In that hostile space, a small and relatively powerless Jewish community had to try to get along.

We could argue that the conflation of bedlam with Bethlehem didn't start at a hospital in London, but at a village in ancient Palestine on the outskirts of Jerusalem... To torture an old Christmas hymn, how far is it to Bedlam? Not very far... Part of our work of Advent is to get our hearts ready for the coming of Jesus – to level the rough places, to make straight the highways, and prepare the way of the Lord. And when we get everything set than Jesus can come...

If that is true, then we have a very long Advent ahead of us. Our present world, like Bethlehem, is bedlam in many ways. Our rough places may be a little less rough than the Roman's, but only if we choose to tell ourselves that much of what is happening in our world is somehow somewhere else.

In Bethlehem, when Jesus was born, injustice happened at a very personal, local level. In our time injustice has become less personal – but we cannot look at the way our economy favors some and deprives others, or the way our justice system favors some and punishes others, or the way our educational favors some and fails others, and say we have had much success in building God's Kingdom on earth.

And that, believe it or not, is good news. Jesus doesn't come because we are ready. Jesus comes because we need salvation. In the good old days (which means 2 generations ago) Advent was a season of penitence... of repenting. Advent and Lent are the two big penitential seasons. It’s a bit hard to feel too penitential when every shopkeeper in the world, including the virtual world, is pumping us full of retail endorphins in order to convince us to purchase copious amounts of stuff. We're told it's how we show our love... the more we spend, the greater our love...

I find it remarkable and bizarre that "Black Friday", the day after Thanksgiving Thursday, has found its way into the larger world as, more or less, a holiday. Its history is that this day of shopping could make or break a retailer – literally, their bottom line would flip from red, meaning loss, to black, meaning profit, hence black Friday. I don't know about Germany, but all around Great Britain shop windows were filled with Black Friday sales announcements – though there is no Thanksgiving Thursday anchoring it.

It is in this cultural context that we keep Advent... that we prepare ourselves for the coming of Jesus.

But here is the thing – one of the great pieces of our Christian tradition is that it allows us to hold conflicting thoughts at the same time. When Mary is rubbing Jesus' feet with nard and some dour Scrooge says how dare you – we could have sold that stuff and had lots of money to help the poor – Jesus reminds us that this is not a binary world. We can always help those in need and, when the Bridegroom is with us, we can celebrate.

We don't have to choose just one... In fact, we must not choose just one. Jesus comes into our world in part to give us a vision of God's Kingdom. Starting in that stable in Bethlehem where representatives from all of God's creation gather to worship the creator we begin to see a world in which the powerless are not oppressed, in which widows and orphans are not forgotten, in which the humble, rather than the mighty, inherit the earth.

In this penitent season, it is good to look around and take note of where the peacemakers are not blessed, where those who mourn are not comforted, where the hungry are not fed, where the merciful not shown mercy.

But that is only half the task. We must also take note of where the peacemakers are blessed, the sorrowful are comforted, the hungry are fed, and the merciful do receive mercy.

True penitence is not just looking at what is wrong and finding ways to feel bad. It is finding ways, to tell the truth – the whole truth. The truth is that our failures of faith are great and vast... and at the same time our demonstrations of faith are also great. Our ability to share love is limitless.

As dark as this world may sometimes be, hope abides. This is not a hope that everything wrong in this world will be better in the next. This is a hope that God, in the flesh of Jesus, comes into this world.

Saint Paul tells us, the Kingdom of God is very near. We can see it. We can feel it. When we break bread together, when we share joys and sorrows, when we look at a newborn child, or for that matter a mother cat with kittens, we can see glimpses of God's Kingdom very near indeed. Whenever we see the action of love, we see glimpses of God.

Illusion keeps us trapped in the status quo, a place of greed and self-interest. And Jesus comes to set up free, to shatter our illusions. True and honest repentance in this penitential season is our best tool.

And so, Lord Jesus quickly come.

Second Sunday of Advent, Year B: December 10, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC
Second Sunday of Advent  – Sunday, December 10, 2017


To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC

Pre-e-e-pare ye the ways of the Lord.

Pre-e-e-pare ye the ways of the Lord.

“The beginning of the good news of Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God.” Mark the Evangelist comes right out with it. Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, the anointed One of God, the Son of God. This latter is also a title of the Roman Emperor that Mark is subverting to identify Jesus instead.

And Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are very good news indeed. They were gospel in the first century of our era when Mark wrote. And they are good news in the first century of this third millenary, where we receive this good news.

Peter in his epistle tells us that “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” So, in God’s time we are at the very beginning of the Christ saga. We still are the newborn church, learning to walk in the world and learning to be what God desires of humanity. We are still coming to terms with all this good news of Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God. Mark starts his gospel with an adult John and an adult Jesus. He does not need to build a genealogy or a childhood narrative. He comes right out and tells us; Jesus is the Son of God, end of genealogy.

And the John the Baptist that Mark presents is a little different than what you may recall of John the Baptist’s personality. This John doesn’t breathe fire and brimstone on his audience. He is about repentance, forgiveness and baptism. And even more, he is about pointing to the One who comes after him. His baptism is a start.

John’s baptism, is the precursor of our own baptism. And as far as we can tell, it was a novelty. Some Jews did a ritual self cleansing that involved bathing but it was an event one did alone and recurrently. There was also a baptism of proselytes, Gentiles who converted to Judaism.

But John’s plunging people into the Jordan was a baptism of repentance that happened only once and was open to all those who came forward for it (whether native Jew or proselyte). It was a baptism of transformation, healing, and belonging.

We are also told that John’s baptism happened in the wilderness and in the Jordan, two symbolic markers for Jews. The wilderness is those areas beyond the zone of influence of cities and villages. It can be equated to the desert. It is both a positive and a negative place in the culture of John’s contemporaries.

It is a positive place of God’s saving acts and betrothal with the people. It is the place where God delivered the people from Egypt and entered into covenant with them at Sinai. It is a negative place where Israel’s testing and rebellion against God took place.

The Jordan also is a symbolic place. It is the boundary between the wilderness in which the Jewish people wandered through their Exodus and the promised land in which they cross to live their covenant with God.Today, we still need to go the wilderness sometime to hear God more clearly. We need to retreat to places like this monastery or we need to retreat in the inner room of our heart to let the usual busyness of life recede and to dwell in the silence that feeds our relationship with God.

Though for most of us our baptism took place a long time ago, we still need conversion of life (you may call it repentance too). Conversion of life does not end at baptism; it starts in earnest at baptism and continues to our last breath.

John the Baptist preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. For our sins to be forgiven, we need to acknowledge them and turn our lives around from sinful ways.

You may or may not feel you have sinned. You may feel guilt at errors and omissions of your life. But dwelling in guilt does not in itself turn your life around to God. You need to give up your sins by giving them to God and letting them go to focus on the business of living your life in God’s unconditional love, as God’s instrument of love in the world. Action is needed for repentance; new action, graced action, love in action. "Love must act as light must shine and fire must burn" as James Huntington, our founder, wrote.

Or you may not feel guilt at particular actions or non-actions of your personal life. But guess what? That does not exonerate you from repentance. We each are involved in corporate sins committed in our name or with our active or passive complicity.

Let’s ask ourselves a few questions. Have we turned a blind eye to sexist, racist or exploitative behaviors? Have we made our peace with a political system that consistently favors the richest and most powerful classes of our society at the expense of the least privileged? Have we given up on protesting the death penalty, the solitary confinement of hundreds of thousands prisoners, the mass incarceration of non-white folks? Have we decided that our way of life is non-negotiable regardless of how greedy in resources and unsustainable for the planet it is? Have we decided that climate change is for future generations to worry about?

So you see, repentance is probably never over for any of us. There is always more conversion of life possible. But Jesus baptizes with the Holy Spirit. We still use the symbol of water in our baptisms, but the real action comes from the Holy Spirit who graces us with our lives and in our lives. That is good news for today too.

With the help of the Holy Spirit there is no end to the conversion of life that can occur in us individually and as groupings (from our families, to our nation and the world community). Our late Br. Ronald used to wear a t-shirt that said; “God is not done with me yet.” And God is not done with us either. And with today’s gospel, Mark is just getting started with the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. God is helping us in our conversion. Get ready for more good news in the weeks to come.

First Sunday of Advent, Year B: December 3, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Joseph Wallace-Williams, OHC

First Sunday of Advent - Sunday, December 3, 2017

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br Joseph Wallace-Williams, OHC

One day God gonna right this wrong. One day God gonna right this wrong. One day God get'cha!

The Feast of Christ the King, Year A: November 26, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Christ the King - Sunday, November 26,2017

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

I always find today, the Feast of Christ the King, to be a bit troubling and disjointed. As the collect for the day reminds us, this is meant to be a feast of the final unity of all creation. And yet, at least on the surface, today’s gospel reading is not about unity at all.

At the end of time, Matthew tells us, Jesus will return to separate, not to unite, and to send some into everlasting life and others into the outer darkness.

And then there’s the whole king thing. I went to Union Seminary, so my ears are acutely tuned for the tintinnabulation of patriarchy and empire. Even for those who don’t approach scripture from a feminist, anti-imperial standpoint, it should trouble anyone who models her life on scripture that we celebrate Christ as a king.

Scripture doesn’t have good things to say about kings. Remember when the Israelites complain about how all the other people have kings and so they want one, too? Through Samuel God lets the people know what a king will be like:

“He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle[c] and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” (1 Sam 8:11-18)

The sense of this passage is clear: kings are bad news. They only want to take from you to support themselves in luxury.

Then, of course, we have Jesus, who continually rejects kingship throughout his ministry. After he multiplies the loaves and fish, he withdraws to a deserted place, as John tells us, because he knew the people intended to make him king. Later, when Pilate asks him if he is king of the Jews, he says, “you say that I am.”

Jesus used many names and images to convey the work he was about. He is Son of Humanity, Messiah, the True Bread, Living Water, the Word, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The only time he is King is when his tormentors are mocking him. So why do we insist on using an image and a title for Jesus the Christ that he rejected?

For the early Christian communities, to call Christ King was to assert that Ceasar was not ultimate. In the context of the Roman Empire, to assert the kingship of Christ was a subversive act. But the same cannot be said of us today. We Western Christians are not living as people marginalized by empire. Far from it. We are the empire. If you don’t believe me, look around. This building, as beautiful as it is, is an imitation of an imperial meeting hall. These vestments we wear, lovely as they are, are stylized forms of imperial regalia. And the elaborate form of our Eucharistic feast, again as meaningful as it is to us, has very little of the intimate meal of Jesus’ body and blood that our early Christian forbears would have known. We often still live with the myth that the empire became Christian under Constantine. How far from the truth. The empire never became Christian. Instead, institutional Christianity became imperial.

I believe we need seriously to ask ourselves: In this context, can a feast celebrating the kingship of Christ still be a subversive act? Or does it, as a friend of mine so eloquently put it, merely draw us back into the muscle memory of empire? Is the image of Christ as a king something that can be purified to guide the Church and the world into deeper healing? Or is it an image that needs to die so that something new can be born in its place?

I suspect there is a deeper reason we celebrate this feast of Christ’s kingship. Like our ancestors the Israelites, we, too, want a king. In a world that has been and continues to be devastated by the forces of empire, by racism, hatred, environmental degradation, colonialism, sexual abuse, misogyny, capitalism, and all the rest of the evil that plagues our world, we want a king to set things right. We want a savior who will intervene and bring order to chaos, who will vanquish those who do evil (who are, not surprisingly, also those with whom we disagree). We want the final triumph of good over evil.

But this life is not an action movie. There is no hero who is going to come and save us from ourselves. While I understand the desire for that kind of saving king, it relies on a childish fantasy religion, divorced from the reality we live in. And, furthermore, it is a fantasy that is not rooted in the gospel.

Returning to today’s gospel lesson, though, we see that Jesus has in mind something far better than kings, far better even than himself as king. Jesus offers us his own heart, beating within us, his own blood flowing through us, his own breath lifting our chests, and his own sight lightening our vision. Jesus offers us his very life to be our own.

If we can begin to listen to this story of the sheep and the goats with the ear of our heart, rather than with ears trained to the imperial drumbeat, it takes on a different valence entirely. We seem to read it as prescriptive—as showing us the way to get to heaven one day—but it isn’t. It is descriptive. It reveals to us a deeper reality already present among us. This story is not about what will happen someday. Rather, it is a description of the reality of today that is hidden from our sight. The story serves a set of lenses that reveals reality right here and now.

St. Benedict, in his rule for monks, provides for the excommunication from the community of those who break the bonds of fraternity. When a monk breaks the rule or disregards his relationships to the rest of his community or to God, he is excluded from table fellowship. He must eat at a different time and in a different place from the rest of the community. To drive the point further home, the rest of the community is forbidden even to talk with him. The idea is that, by his actions, this brother has already excluded himself from the unifying fellowship of the community. His punishment, so to speak, emphasizes the choices he has made in order to show him the deeper reality of exclusion he has already enacted by his choices. At the same time, however, that brother is never left entirely alone. The abbot deputes mature and wise brothers from the community to council the errant one and to work to bring him back into the fold.

A similar dynamic is at work with these sheep and goats.

The sheep are those who already live in the beloved community, here and now, because, whether they are conscious of it or not, they live in love with Christ in themselves, the people around them, and the whole created world. They hear the shepherd’s voice calling to them in every molecule of this hurting, bleeding world. They follow that voice within themselves and in everyone they meet. They know that whatever challenges they face along the way, the voice of the shepherd is leading them back home. Furthermore, they don’t rely on their own intelligence and strength. Rather, they understand that the whole is so much greater than they are, and that the fellowship of the beloved community is itself union with God. These sheep already live in heaven, because no matter how brutalized the world they serve, there they find Christ. They are never without God, because they see and seek God in everything, all the time. They not only exclude nothing from their experience of God, but they actually move into deeper communion with the Holy One in the most extreme and horrific instances of life. In other words, there is nothing in their experience of this life that excludes the presence of Christ. Everything draws them deeper into God.

By contrast, the goats, stubborn and independent, refuse to follow any voice but their own. What they love, they call good. They are so consumed with themselves that they never realize that all the time Christ’s life is shining all around them. Like the errant brother in Benedict’s rule, the goats have exiled themselves by their own choices and by their inability to enter, here and now, into the heavenly realm. These are the ones who pick and choose their experiences of God. Who judge good and bad, and seek Christ only where it is comfortable for them to do so. These goats already live in hell, because they deny themselves communion with Christ in the world around them and the caverns of their own hearts.

The sheep know that to get to heaven, you have to go to hell, because that is where Christ lives. The goats never get to haven, because they refuse to go to hell.

We have no need to wait for some future time for Christ’s glory to be revealed. Eternity is right now, and heaven and hell surround us in every single moment. Whether we live in heaven or whether we live in hell has everything to do with our willingness to enter the wholeness of our life right this very moment. If we want to know and love Christ, we have only to look around.

Jesus doesn’t say that when we tend to the marginalized and the poor, he is sitting there, watching, smiling, and approving of our actions. He says that he is the poor and the marginalized and the outcast of the world. Not that he is with them. He is them. This is a very important distinction. And he is us, too, whenever we are weak and vulnerable and hurting.

The throne of glory of which Jesus speaks is the growling belly of an immigrant woman who has less than $5 a day to feed her family. The blood that flows through Jesus’ veins is the dirty water of our inner cities, poisoned with lead and given to poor children of color. His flesh is the scarred and desiccated coal mines of West Virginia and the soot-stained skin of poor working whites in Appalachia.

And yes, Christ’s throne is also our own hearts, broken by whatever afflictions have plagued our lives, by the shame, the fear, the abuse, the unmet longings of our own deep hearts.

But there is another call in this text as well. If we are to be the sheep who see and love Christ in the most broken people and places in this world, then we must begin to see Christ in the goats, too. Can we seek Christ in the brokenness and the disordered consumption of the empire in which we live? Can we begin to recognize empire as a pathology, to understand that the forces of empire destroy and maim the souls even of those who benefit most from its systems of privilege, commodification, and oppression? Can we see that those maimed souls are often our own, and that, Christ lives there, too? Can we depute wise and mature sheep to the goats, to bring them back into the fold?

We have no need to wait for our salvation. Our salvation is already here. We are already saved, now, in this place, already whole, already holy. We have merely to ask for eyes to see and ears to hear Christ within and all around us.

This Christ may be a king, but if he is, we must also remember that his crown is thorns and his throne is a cross. His kingship explodes every meaning of that word, and it looks nothing like any kingship this earth has ever seen. For myself, I long for a different word than king, a word yet to be uttered by human lips, a word that is more silence than speech. And I’ll pray for the ears to hear that word in the searching gaze of my human brothers and sisters, of the devastated and majestic earth we live on, and in the cave of my own heart.