Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Richard Vaggione , OHC
Fifth Sunday of Easter Year B- Sunday, April 29, 2018
Sunday, April 29, 2018
Sunday, April 22, 2018
Fourth Sunday of Easter- Year B: April 22, 2018
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Roy Parker, OHC
Fourth Sunday of Easter- Year B- Sunday, April 22, 2018
To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.
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| Br. Roy Parker |
I’ll begin with a paraphrase from the Acts of the Apostles which was just read. Peter exclaims, “There is salvation in no one other than Jesus, for there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.” Speaking at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California several years ago, Krister Stendahl emphasized that Peter’s words were essentially love language, not intended as doctrine.
Love language, nonetheless, which informs some remarks about resurrection by John Dominic Crossan, who says, “An exclusively divine initiative — the Resurrection — (has changed) into (a) divine-human collaboration as believers are called to live the radical ethics of a new creation or a transformed life and thereby co-create with God a nonviolent world of justice and peace. That is why Jesus could tell his companions to go out and do exactly what he was doing: heal the sick, eat with those they healed, and announce that the kingdom of God had already started in that mutual sharing of spiritual and physical power — that is, in healing and eating.
The coming of the kingdom meant, as the Lord’s Prayer said, the doing of God’s will on earth — and it had already begun. So also with Paul. It was not ecstasy but accuracy which made him declare that ‘all of us with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory into another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.’ That presumes, of course, that believers are living the resurrected life that incarnates the nonviolent God of justice and peace who was revealed in Christ. We are not waiting for God to act. God has already acted and is waiting for us to react, to collaborate, to cooperate, to get with the divine program.
The ultimate claim made by the Resurrection, to put it clearly, accurately, and bluntly, is that at Easter, God’s Cosmic Clean-Up has already begun. The Resurrection-event claims that something has literally started and is therefore literally present. If it only spoke of a future event, it would be, like all such future announcements, beyond proof or disproof. But, once you announce that something has begun (in this case, God’s transfiguration of all creation), you must be able to show something. And Jesus or Paul would have accepted that challenge by saying: Come and see how our communities live. Come and see how God-in-us and we-in-God are transforming the world. Come and see how surprised we are at the way God is actually doing it.”
This admonition recalls an address to the Episcopal clergy and layfolk of the city of Boston in 1968 by the Boston City Councilor Thomas Atkins. Councilor Atkins strove throughout his life to break down barriers and become a political leader in spite of mid-century American racism. Even before entering Boston politics his career was a kind of African-American phenomenon of achievement in high school and university. After coming to Boston to study at Harvard, he became the first African-American elected to the city council and the first to serve as a Massachusetts cabinet secretary. One could catalog other accomplishments, including his persuasion of the Mayor of Boston not to cancel the James Brown concert which was broadcast live on TV the day after Dr. King’s assassination.
Councilor Atkins’ remarks to the Episcopal establishment on that day went something like this: “You know, there was a time when African-Americans strove to move out of Roxbury and into the suburbs, but that’s no longer the case, because now we feel that we’ve found community in Roxbury in a way that you white folks can’t find in the suburbs. And,” he added with a twinkle in his eye, “if you’re real good, we might let you in on our secret.” And, with Paul the Apostle, he might have added, “ . . . our secret, that is the mystery that has now been revealed to us in Roxbury, to whom God chose to make known the riches of the glory of this mystery for which we toil and struggle with all the energy that God powerfully inspires within us. Come and see how surprised we are at how God is actually doing it, and if you’re real good we might let you in on the secret.”
Jesus and Paul would have said, “Come and see how our communities live.” I’ve pondered Thomas Atkins’ unspecified remarks for a long time, and the closest I’ve come to divining their meaning was suggested to me by an elderly resident of St. Monica’s Home for Women in Roxbury to which I was chaplain at the time. Ada Seth told me a story of raising two daughters during the depths of the Depression in the 1930s, how they had to close off most of the house in the winter and live in the remainder, and so forth. Ada said that one day, out of the blue, arrived a large check from a mysterious benefactor which allowed them to expand their lifestyle. About a month later, her daughters came to her and said, “Mama, it was such fun to be poor! Can’t we be poor again?” They were not as mindful as their mother of the ghetto conditions later described by the Kerner Commission in its investigation of Dr. King’s assassination decades later, but were very aware of the enduring bonds of affection and love which accompany the interdependence, sharing, cultural richness, diversity, and such, which characterize communities living with adversity.
In 1968 the Kerner Commission established by Lyndon Johnson to examine the causes of the racial riots of the previous few summers released its report which rendered the failings of institutions and social forces that had delivered the country to that moment of racial reckoning, beginning in the Colonial era and continuing through the formation of what were then called ghettos. The report stated, bluntly, that what white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, maintain it, and condone it. The report is best remembered for its warning that, barring corrective measures, the nation would continue on its path toward becoming two societies — one black, one white — separate and unequal.
One of those weird passages in the Apocalypse, the last book of the Bible, pictures the final defeat of the ultimate evil won by God’s faithful servants. It says, “They have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life in the face of death.” The Greek translated “the word of their testimony” is ton logon tes marturias — literally, “the logic of their martyrdom.”
Jesus’ death and resurrection reveal a logic inextricably woven into the fabric of the universe. In that divine logic unjust and uncompassionate powers have reached their limits when crosses and firearms have done their worst. They can go no further than death. But the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection is that God can.
When a servant of God does not cling to life in the face of a cross or a firearm, the logic of oppressive empires and racist cultures has run its course, their power and its weapons have done all they can do. But God’s logic persists; God’s powerless weakness — whose weapons are justice and compassionate solidarity and love — continues its patient, persistent, non-violent subversion of oppressive empires and racist cultures. I do not know Roxbury at present, but I suspect the 1968 secret of which Thomas Atkins spoke had to do with the deeper secret of the Good Shepherd who, appearances to the contrary, proclaims that no one takes his life from him but that he gives his life according to his essential being as fully God and fully human, gives it as the destined means of being with us to subvert oppressive empire and racist culture, his way of taking up the life which God has written into his DNA.
Sunday, April 15, 2018
Third Sunday of Easter- Year B: April 15, 2018
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
The Feast of The Annunciation : April 10, 2018
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.
Mary is the supreme example of what happens when God is at work by grace through human beings. God’s power from outside, and the indwelling Spirit within, together result in things being done which would have been unthinkable in any other way.
In the twelve verses of today’s Gospel Mary is described as favored, perplexed, thoughtful, and afraid. She questions believes, and submits to her vocation---not with a single “yes”, but with many, as the implications of her call unfold over her lifetime.
The announcement of the enfleshment of God in Jesus which we celebrate today has been obscured and distorted over the centuries by a one-dimensional image of Mary fabricated by the Church. Much of Christianity has been negatively and uselessly trapped in guilt about being “flesh,” while the great messages of the Gospel—grace, healing, and justice—have largely gone unheeded. Obsessive guilt about our embodiment has led us to create a Mary not made of flesh.
We cannot return to a healthy view of our own bodies until we accept that God has forever made human flesh the privileged place of the divine encounter. This Creator of ours is patiently determined to put matter and spirit together, as if the one was not complete without the other. The Lord of life seems to desire a perfect but free unification between body and spirit. So much so, in fact, that God appears to be willing to wait for the creatures to will and choose this unity themselves—or it remains unrealized. God never enforces or dominates, but only allures and seduces. God apparently loves freedom as much as incarnation. God knew that only humble vulnerability could be entrusted with spiritual power—and so God hid it like a treasure in the body of Jesus.
God desires us to learn wisdom and humility from our bodies, not to repress them out of fear. Jesus trusted God’s slow process of incarnation. The result was the resurrection and the realization of eternal union between body and spirit, human and divine. The reason we have trouble with the full incarnation in Jesus is probably because we have not been able to recognize and enjoy the incarnation in ourselves.
We must begin by trusting what God has done through Mary in Jesus. We must reclaim the incarnation as the beginning point of the Christian experience of God. We must return to the Hebrew respect for this world and for all the wisdom and goodness of the body. The embodied self is the only self we have ever known. Our bodies are God’s dwelling place, God’s temple. We need to recognize our physical responses. Repressing feelings and sensations relegates them to our unconscious shadow where they come out in unexpected and often painful ways.
Trust in God is not just faith to believe in spiritual ideas. It’s to have confidence in love itself. It’s to have confidence in reality itself. God is in it; God is revealed in everything. Most of us have been conditioned to say “no”. What Mary shows us is that faith is about learning to say “yes” to the moment right in front of us. Only after we say our “yes” do we recognize that God is here, in this person, in this event, in this time. God is in all things and is available everywhere. In that moment we become God’s full work of art. In that moment, love is stronger than death, and Christ is surely risen in us. Love and life become the same thing.
We tend to do things wrong before we even know what right feels like. But mistakes do not seem to be a problem for God; they are only a problem for our ego that wants to be pure spirit. Living solely out of our ego splits us off from our body. God is an expert at working with mistakes and failure. It is no different for us than it was for Mary. In some ways it may seem simpler to obey arbitrary rules about diet or sex than to truly honor the living incarnation we are.
The extraordinary thing about Mary is her ordinariness, beginning with her full humanity. God’s favor was not earned by her good behavior. God chooses Mary because she has nothing. Mary is among the most powerless people in her society: she is young in a world that values age; female in a world ruled by men; poor in a stratified economy. She has neither husband nor son to validate her existence. That she should have found favor with God shows Luke’s understanding of God’s activity as surprising and often paradoxical, almost always reversing human expectations. Luke’s account is patterned on the annunciation scenes in the Book of Judges, which would have made excellent sense to any Hellenistic reader who was accustomed to miraculous events accompanying the birth accounts of extraordinary people.
Mary’s statement about her virginity, in light of her own incomprehension of how she could conceive, does not reflect doubt as much as amazement at Gabriel’s message. Her question is a request for information, not proof. She recognizes what all believers must recognize, that we, creatures before the Creator, are incapable, in and of ourselves, of accomplishing God’s will. We are all, in that sense, virgins. How has God’s call in our own lives violated the selves we imagined ourselves to be---transforming us from virgins who are unable to bear and birth God to the world, to creative agents with God?
Gabriel reminds Mary and us that our incapacity in and of ourselves is not the end of the story, that nothing is impossible with God. Doing God’s will is not about fulfilling requirements; it’s about a trusting relationship. When God takes the initiative, it is always a matter of love. It is not human action but divine power. Although Mary cannot comprehend the full meaning of the message, she responds as a willing partner in the holy disruption that befalls her. Her obedience is not forced. She acts freely when she offers herself.
Our life is a dance between the loneliness and desperation of the false self and the fullness of the true self. It’s not so much about what we do; it’s about what God does. God and life itself eventually destabilize the boundaries of the small self, allowing the ego to collapse back into the true self, which is re-discovered and experienced anew as an ultimate homecoming.
We cannot anticipate the ways that God will break into human history---into our history. As with Mary, the indwelling divine moves toward fulfillment in each of us in a personal and unique way throughout our lifetime with different ways and degrees of consenting to it. There are as many ways to manifest God as there are beings in the universe.
We do not create our own salvation, nor do we have the capacity to imagine the ways of God. Luke tells us in Mary’s story that not only is redemption possible; it has already happened. Because of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the holy continues to break into our lives, to bring us closer to the completion of creation and the already-and-not-yet reign of God.
As Mary discovered in her life, the spiritual journey is a path of deeper realization and transformation; it is more than a growing up, it is a waking up. It is never a straight line, but a back and forth movement that ever deepens the conscious choice and assent to God’s work in us.
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| Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC |
In the twelve verses of today’s Gospel Mary is described as favored, perplexed, thoughtful, and afraid. She questions believes, and submits to her vocation---not with a single “yes”, but with many, as the implications of her call unfold over her lifetime.
The announcement of the enfleshment of God in Jesus which we celebrate today has been obscured and distorted over the centuries by a one-dimensional image of Mary fabricated by the Church. Much of Christianity has been negatively and uselessly trapped in guilt about being “flesh,” while the great messages of the Gospel—grace, healing, and justice—have largely gone unheeded. Obsessive guilt about our embodiment has led us to create a Mary not made of flesh.
We cannot return to a healthy view of our own bodies until we accept that God has forever made human flesh the privileged place of the divine encounter. This Creator of ours is patiently determined to put matter and spirit together, as if the one was not complete without the other. The Lord of life seems to desire a perfect but free unification between body and spirit. So much so, in fact, that God appears to be willing to wait for the creatures to will and choose this unity themselves—or it remains unrealized. God never enforces or dominates, but only allures and seduces. God apparently loves freedom as much as incarnation. God knew that only humble vulnerability could be entrusted with spiritual power—and so God hid it like a treasure in the body of Jesus.
God desires us to learn wisdom and humility from our bodies, not to repress them out of fear. Jesus trusted God’s slow process of incarnation. The result was the resurrection and the realization of eternal union between body and spirit, human and divine. The reason we have trouble with the full incarnation in Jesus is probably because we have not been able to recognize and enjoy the incarnation in ourselves.
We must begin by trusting what God has done through Mary in Jesus. We must reclaim the incarnation as the beginning point of the Christian experience of God. We must return to the Hebrew respect for this world and for all the wisdom and goodness of the body. The embodied self is the only self we have ever known. Our bodies are God’s dwelling place, God’s temple. We need to recognize our physical responses. Repressing feelings and sensations relegates them to our unconscious shadow where they come out in unexpected and often painful ways.
Trust in God is not just faith to believe in spiritual ideas. It’s to have confidence in love itself. It’s to have confidence in reality itself. God is in it; God is revealed in everything. Most of us have been conditioned to say “no”. What Mary shows us is that faith is about learning to say “yes” to the moment right in front of us. Only after we say our “yes” do we recognize that God is here, in this person, in this event, in this time. God is in all things and is available everywhere. In that moment we become God’s full work of art. In that moment, love is stronger than death, and Christ is surely risen in us. Love and life become the same thing.
We tend to do things wrong before we even know what right feels like. But mistakes do not seem to be a problem for God; they are only a problem for our ego that wants to be pure spirit. Living solely out of our ego splits us off from our body. God is an expert at working with mistakes and failure. It is no different for us than it was for Mary. In some ways it may seem simpler to obey arbitrary rules about diet or sex than to truly honor the living incarnation we are.
The extraordinary thing about Mary is her ordinariness, beginning with her full humanity. God’s favor was not earned by her good behavior. God chooses Mary because she has nothing. Mary is among the most powerless people in her society: she is young in a world that values age; female in a world ruled by men; poor in a stratified economy. She has neither husband nor son to validate her existence. That she should have found favor with God shows Luke’s understanding of God’s activity as surprising and often paradoxical, almost always reversing human expectations. Luke’s account is patterned on the annunciation scenes in the Book of Judges, which would have made excellent sense to any Hellenistic reader who was accustomed to miraculous events accompanying the birth accounts of extraordinary people.
Mary’s statement about her virginity, in light of her own incomprehension of how she could conceive, does not reflect doubt as much as amazement at Gabriel’s message. Her question is a request for information, not proof. She recognizes what all believers must recognize, that we, creatures before the Creator, are incapable, in and of ourselves, of accomplishing God’s will. We are all, in that sense, virgins. How has God’s call in our own lives violated the selves we imagined ourselves to be---transforming us from virgins who are unable to bear and birth God to the world, to creative agents with God?
Gabriel reminds Mary and us that our incapacity in and of ourselves is not the end of the story, that nothing is impossible with God. Doing God’s will is not about fulfilling requirements; it’s about a trusting relationship. When God takes the initiative, it is always a matter of love. It is not human action but divine power. Although Mary cannot comprehend the full meaning of the message, she responds as a willing partner in the holy disruption that befalls her. Her obedience is not forced. She acts freely when she offers herself.
Our life is a dance between the loneliness and desperation of the false self and the fullness of the true self. It’s not so much about what we do; it’s about what God does. God and life itself eventually destabilize the boundaries of the small self, allowing the ego to collapse back into the true self, which is re-discovered and experienced anew as an ultimate homecoming.
We cannot anticipate the ways that God will break into human history---into our history. As with Mary, the indwelling divine moves toward fulfillment in each of us in a personal and unique way throughout our lifetime with different ways and degrees of consenting to it. There are as many ways to manifest God as there are beings in the universe.
We do not create our own salvation, nor do we have the capacity to imagine the ways of God. Luke tells us in Mary’s story that not only is redemption possible; it has already happened. Because of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the holy continues to break into our lives, to bring us closer to the completion of creation and the already-and-not-yet reign of God.
As Mary discovered in her life, the spiritual journey is a path of deeper realization and transformation; it is more than a growing up, it is a waking up. It is never a straight line, but a back and forth movement that ever deepens the conscious choice and assent to God’s work in us.
As it was for Mary, may it be so for us. +Amen.
Sunday, April 8, 2018
Second Sunday of Easter, Year B: Sunday, April 8, 2018
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC
Second Sunday of Easter Year B- Sunday, April 8, 2018
Sorry, no audio recording of this sermon is available .
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| Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC |
Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!
And now what? Now, let us live up to the Kingdom of God which Christ announces here and now. The Acts of the Apostles describes a Jesus movement which strives to live into the Kingdom of God as it spreads abroad. Now that the Risen Christ is with us, around us and in us, let us build the in-breaking Kingdom of God with renewed vigor here and now.
Here is what our reading from the Acts of the Apostles has to say about the budding Kingdom of God. Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.
With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.
There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.
After Jesus’ resurrection the community of his followers blossomed despite the challenges of opposition from the religious authorities and diffidence from the Roman overlords.
Our first text today was from the Acts of the Apostles. Its author, Luke, tells us of a community numbering in the thousands and animated by the dynamism and charism of the apostles. This community was fired up to live up to Jesus’ teachings. Jesus’ teachings are summarized in the golden commandment.
Luke’s version of that commandment is “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.”
How do I love my neighbour as myself if I am richly blessed with worldly possessions? These early Jesus followers did their utmost to put loving their neighbour into practice.
“...the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul” Luke tells us. This indicates a departure from the dualism of “I and Them” to move towards the non-dual engagement of “I and Us.” They recognized that their truest selves required including the other, the neighbour, in their self-love. I am loving you as your being a part of who I am, not as a separate, independent and somewhat remote reality.
In order to love their neighbor as themselves, they committed to leave no one in need. This is just as the Jewish law had commanded in Deuteronomy 15: “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbour in your land (Deuteronomy 15:11b).” But that passage of Deuteronomy suggested being liberal in lending to the poor and needy, not in outright giving. But it also asked of Israelites to be willing to forgive debts not yet repaid by the sabbath year (every seventh year). It is unclear whether the sabbath of debt was ever actually enacted on a large scale.
But the early Jesus community goes beyond lending to the needy. They move towards common property of resources. A radical move in any period of time. It is likely that they took heed of Jesus’ admonition that “Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God (Luke 18:25).” Instead of lending to the poor among them what they needed to get by, those with real estate willingly chose to sell it and offer the proceeds to the apostles for distribution as needed.
The verses following our passage tell us of Barnabas who gladly sold a field that belonged to him and brought the proceeds to the apostles. A few verses later, we hear the unhappy story of donors who pretend to give the full proceeds of their sale while holding back a fraction for themselves. They are accused by Peter and struck dead. Much emphasis then is put on being a willing, cheerful and generous giver; on not holding back for future contingencies. This is a hard act to follow for us.
The Jesus movement probably thought of Jesus’ return as a short to medium-term occurrence. They wanted to set their lives in order sooner rather than later. They modeled their lives on the life of Jesus, going beyond what the Jewish law commanded them to achieve. How can we emulate that primitive
Christian emphasis on common good in order to ensure the personal wellbeing of all?
Our culture ever more emphasizes how we should rely on ourselves to accumulate what is needed to live more than comfortably. We live in a society that nurtures the myth of total individual autonomy. We live in a society that creates and cultivates our wants well above what our actual needs are.
How do we live as Christians so that there be enough for absolutely everyone? Enough shelter, enough food, enough education, enough healthcare, enough peace for absolutely everyone. Remember that in Christ no one is excluded as not being my neighbor (Christian or not).
I think our text from Acts challenges us at two levels: in our communal lives and in our larger commonwealth. By our communal lives, I mean the closest level of our belonging: your family for most of us, or our religious community for the monks amongst us. By larger commonwealth, I mean the various levels of political organizations leading up to the whole planet.
There is a lot we can undertake in our communal lives to be more interdependent of one another. For example, how many cars do we need to ensure proper transportation of the members of our community? What kind of transportation meets our needs and preserves the environment? What kinds of foods enhance our health and the health of the Earth?
Of course, you know we monks have foregone private property to put all resources in common. We also undertake to live simply so that all may live well. It is a model that has proven itself over the centuries. It is a model that lots of new communities of intention try to follow at different levels of intensity.
But even if we don’t become monks or quasi-monks in our families or immediate communities, we can all work towards greater reliance on one another at the level of our commonwealth. At the level of the commonwealth, my earlier examples translate into systemic examples. What transportation system is needed to ensure that all, even the poorest and disabled, get to go where they need to without undue stress? What kind of food system maximizes sustainability of our regions while furthering the health of our population?
At this level, any proposal that reduces inequality and enhances a fairer distribution of resources is worth our Christian support. At all levels of life and in all areas of our common living, we can look out for the greater common good. One doesn’t need to become a monk and forego private property entirely, although that is good for those who choose it.
Look at your life and see where you can further the wellbeing of your spouse, your brother or your municipality. Many small changes can show great love.
Let us be of “one heart and soul” in loving both our neighbour and ourself and recognizing that our neighbour is an essential part of who we are.
Amen.
Sunday, April 1, 2018
The Great Vigil of Easter: April 1, 2018
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
The Great Vigil of Easter- Sunday, April 1, 2018
To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.
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| Br. Aidan Owen, OHC |
The Lord is risen indeed.
But where is he? He’s risen, but he’s not here. Did anyone else notice that?
What a strange resurrection account Mark gives us. It’s a resurrection without a resurrected Jesus. The man in the tomb tells the Marys that he is not here. He has gone ahead of you to Galilee.
And, appropriate, perhaps, for an Easter that is also April Fool’s Day, this account of the resurrection is the punchline to a joke Mark has been telling from the beginning of his narrative. At every point Jesus heals someone or performs a miracle in Mark, he says to those watching, tell no one.
Immediately they run out and tell everyone they can find about this wonder-worker. This morning we hear the only time in Mark that witnesses are told “Go! Tell everyone!” Instead, they run away in fear and tell no one. The only real witness to the resurrection this morning, it would seem, is the tomb itself. The wound in the earth that has become the womb from which Jesus has been reborn.
Much of the Easter proclamation that runs through Paul and that the church’s liturgies and prayers have picked up centers on Jesus as the new Adam. In this morning’s gospel account, we can see that link directly. God molded the first human from the stuff of the earth and filled that clay creature with breath from heaven, Flesh and Word, Matter and Spirit, joined from the beginning.
Like the adamah, Jesus here is reborn from the very stuff of the earth, expelled from the womb that was a tomb, rising out of the ground, Flesh and Word, Matter and Spirit, truly the first born of the new creation.
And yet, he has already gone ahead of us, leaving us only the empty tomb as witness and icon of the new and abundant life of God flowing out of Eden to water the garden of the world. But how do we sing the Lord’s song in a strange and hostile land?
We live today in a world of staggering loss. Loss upon loss, piled high like so many corpses on a field of battle. And we will never recover much of what has gone and is going. When the maples are gone, as they almost certainly will be, we will never have them back again. When the last polar bear dies, that majestic creature will live only in our memories. And the next time a young black man is gunned down at a traffic stop and his life blood waters the ground, like Abel’s, will we join our cry again to the earth’s supplications?
What does resurrection look like in the face of this flood of loss? How do we proclaim the good news of God in Jesus Christ as the darkness grows deeper, not lighter, and as the light seems further away than ever?
Like us, Mark and his community knew something of the crushing violence of empire. And in the face of that juggernaut, Mark offers the empty tomb as the proclamation of God’s faithfulness and love. We might see in the spaciousness of the tomb, in its largeness, an example of what it means to live the resurrected life of Christ right here and now.
Perhaps we are called, like the tomb, to hollowness.
In the words of Christine Lore Webber’s poem:
Some of you I will hollow out.I will make you a cave.I will carve you so deep the stars will shine in your darkness.You will be a bowl.You will be the cup in the rock collecting rain. I will do this because the world needs the hollowness of you.I will do this for the space that you will be.I will do this because you must be large.A passage.
People will find their way through you.You see, God doesn’t save us from our lives or from the times in which we live. Rather, God gives us the strength to live our lives fully, to drink them to the dregs. God raises us up in the midst of our times to be witnesses to the life that really is life. God does not stop the violence of empire that bears down upon us. God gives us the assurance of a love that far outstrips all that empire can do, so that we know, deep in the bones, that though the rulers and powers of this world may kill our bodies, they cannot touch our souls.
And some of us God hollows out with new life. Hollows us to be a tomb in which to lay the polar bear and the maple. Hollows us to be a bell tolling in witness to the lives of children killed while they study. Hollows us to be a throat calling out for justice, wailing in lamentation, and singing songs of hope and resistance, a throat proclaiming the great and unending alleluia of God, of life flowing from the heart of death, like the waters of Eden.
Some of us God hollows out to be a passage through which to lead God’s people from the bondage of empire into the promised land of freedom and life.
So this morning let us join with all those who have gone before, let us cry out with saints and ancestors, with the River and the Oak, with the empty tomb and with the Godbearer’s womb. And let us pray to be like that tomb, a womb from which Christ may be born again and again to bring light to the gathering darkness.
ALLELUIA! CHRIST IS RISEN INDEED!
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