Epiphany 7 C - Sunday, February 24, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Epiphany 7 C - Sunday, February 24, 2019

Genesis 45:3-11, 15
1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50
Luke 6:27-38

My earliest image of Jesus is a larger-than-life cowboy.  In Sunday School as a young boy, Jesus was the ultimate macho tough guy, the Avenger and Conqueror, a man’s man.  What I heard in church, (and surely this is partly what was said and partly my imagination), was that Jesus’ first coming was about dying on the cross for our sins – an important act that would allow us to be forgiven and go to heaven.  Yes, he was kind and compassionate.  Yes, he cares for the rejected and desolate.  But the really good stuff is coming when he returns.  The last judgment passages in the gospels and the Revelation to John were the ultimate wish fulfillment of a Jesus who was the triumphant and patriotic figure Americans in my part of the world strived to be.  We talked about a savior who loved the world.  What we wanted was a warrior who would vanquish our enemies.  The violence and chaos of the world could only be brought to an end by an equally violent Jesus – and not before.  Yes, the real Jesus was the one who would ride in from the clouds on a white horse, sword in hand, sheep and goats – line up accordingly.  This was a much more morally acceptable Jesus than the one who had already come.  We longed for Super Jesus, we charted his course, we looked for signs…  Soon he will come and rescue us!  The message was “Get saved, get ready for heaven, or good luck in the tribulation.”  There was much more language about Jesus coming back than about Jesus alive and present. The Seventies and early Eighties in my religious world were all about getting off the planet and God getting on with the great judgment as quickly as possible.  In the meantime, we could help God with that judgment part by denouncing the obviously godless:  Communists, liberals, feminists, Yankees, and all manner of foreigner.  Although we had to wait for Jesus, we had Ronald Reagan, and he was very close.

All this was happening in my young life in a culture where violence was a given, an unquestioned fact of life.  I was physically abused, family members were victims of violence, bullying was normal, fights erupted at school, the daily news of murders somewhere in Houston.  Sometimes the 20 minutes of waiting for the school bus in the morning was a drama of survival and dominance akin to “Lord of the Flies”.  Getting off the planet did not seem like such a bad idea.  On hunting trips and out in the country, to relax, we shot stuff.  By the time I was 12, my introduction to adult power was walking through thick woods with a rifle, ready to take out whatever squirrels or birds stood in my path.

Justice was quick and visible, as it should be, I was taught:  “an eye for an eye” (it’s in the Bible!), or, “he had it coming”, “servers him right”.  What got formed, then, as is often the case in parts of the South especially, was an outer shell of manners covering over a heart that had befriended a good and holy vengeance.  The morality of violence was about context – bad people had no good reasons to be violent and good people were always justified in their violence. Thankfully, as an adult, my theological world was expanded by wise pastors and professors who helped me rethink this system.  I read and heard people who took the red letters – all of them, not just John 3:16 - seriously and I began to see that Jesus was not exactly the person I had been taught he was.  Perhaps, shudder the thought, he actually meant what he said – that “love your enemies” bit included.

Jesus really means us to live the kind of generous mercy and kindness that we hear proclaimed today.  He is not taunting us with moral impossibilities.  I may not be prone to physical violence, but I continue to exorcise the violence that is present too often in my thoughts and words.  My inner cowboy image is not totally gone.  I am just more aware of how fall short I fall and how much in need of grace I am.  Jesus articulates and embodies the highest and noblest and most difficult vision of humility and relationship possible – self-sacrificial love of one and all with everything I have and even my very body if necessary.  The alternative – the only alternative - is to spiral further into fear, division, and war.  Nevertheless, we must also reckon with the violence in the Bible itself, especially that inflicted by God’s people, that continues to be a presence and voice in our tradition.  The community has struggled with the most violent verses in the psalter.  We have even excised a few verses of Psalm 137 and 139 from our breviary because of the graphic nature of the imagery.  On this side of the empty tomb, it is good to wrestle with whether even to say such things as Christians.  But we still have phrases like “let them go down alive into the pit” and “let them be food for jackals”.  If we excised all of the calls for vengeance, it would be a much smaller book.  The psalms as well as other places in scripture certainly preserve violence as God’s prerogative and purview, so if the command now is not vengeance, but love, what is going on here?  If Jesus is not the cowboy, then who is he?  Is the antidote a passive resignation to evil?  Is the command to love, offer my cheek, give my shirt, my goods, not to judge, but to forgive and give to those in need not surrender, capitulation, defeat?
There is a third way between violence and passivity that is the heart of Jesus’ teaching and example.  From theologian Walter Wink:

“But Jesus did not teach non-resistance.  Rather, he disavowed violent resistance in favor of nonviolent resistance.  Of course Christians must resist evil!  No decent human being could conceivably stand by and watch innocents suffer without trying to do, or at least wishing to do, something to save them.  The question is simply one of means.  Likewise Christians are not forbidden by Jesus to engage in self-defense.  But they are to do so nonviolently.  Jesus did not teach supine passivity in the face of evil.  That was precisely what he was attempting to overcome!”

That phrase “nonviolent resistance” is very powerful.  It releases me to be clear about my vocation.  Wink and others – (please go and read Saint Oscar Romero, Tony Campolo, Jean Vanier, and Brian Zahnd for much more on this) - have been very helpful for me on this and similar gospel teachings in helping me see that what Jesus was about is an undoing of the endemic and assumed system of violent power and oppression that was then and is now the basis of the ordering of the world, the origin of most national borders and the wars that created them.  Jesus’ project is the kingdom in which mercy and forgiveness are the basic and fundamental ways of viewing my neighbor and being toward my neighbor.  At the same time Jesus confronts and calls out the oppressive system directly and forcefully, but not with violence toward persons.  By this third way, he frees us from the extremes of either violence on one end and non-resistance on the other.  Loving my enemy is connected to calling evil the attitudes and judgments which feed and fuel enmity in the first place.

The ongoing presence of violence is rooted in our fallen state and the corresponding illusion that believes violence is the greatest possible power.  Whenever persons are entangled in this delusion, the world becomes a series of binaries: us/them, win/lose, in/out.  The greatest fear is to be weak, emasculated, shamed, cowed, conquered.  And so we continue to fight, bomb, and kill because we are in a system where that is the only source of meaning and purpose.  The great revolution of Jesus is not an acquiescence to intransigent illusions of power, but a pointing to a greater, truer power.  Mercy, generosity, forgiveness are not passive reactions to the violence we are told is ultimate, but the means to transcend the illusion of power in order to embrace the real thing.  Once I am liberated from the attitudes and labels that drive the domination system and defined by the power of love, then I do not have to use violence in order to impose control.  Violence exposes who is not free.  Oscar Romero called this “the violence of love”.  And pastor and author Greg Boyd says, “love that refuses to retaliate is the most powerful force in the universe.”  He goes on, “Our call is to trust that the foolishness of self-sacrificial love will overcome evil in the end.”

In the end. In the end.  So it turns out that the Second Coming is important after all.  Not so that we can cheer on Super Jesus to slay the wicked, but because his return to set the world right gives the perspective that makes such sacrifice today meaningful.  Our longing for a world set right grounds us in the hope of Jesus doing what we cannot do fully by ourselves.  Jesus is the Judge and King, which means I am not.  He is the Avenger and Conqueror of all that distorts and harms his creatures.  I am not.  We are freed for self-sacrificial love because we are freed from the responsibility to play God and enforce our own version of justice now.   In the meantime, in the already-but-not-yet, we love, we trust, we wait, we hope, we resist.  True, ultimate, eternal peace and justice are surely coming.  And they are also available today.  We can live as if a new way of being is coming and indeed here among and within us.  The hope of the world to come is the reason to be faithful to this day.  Amen.

Chapter Talk - Friday, February 22, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC
Chapter Talk - Friday, February 22, 2019

Every month, one of our monks leads us into reflection about the rules that guide our monastic life (the Rule of St Benedict and the Rule of James Huntington, our Founder). The monk in charge prepares a short presentation about a part of the rule, or a theme of the rule. At the end of his presentation, he gives the community questions to open up sharing about the theme chosen. Br. Josép had written notes to share, so we make them available here. We thought you too might enjoy his reflections on the Divine Office.


From the Rule of Saint Benedict, 1980 Timothy Fry, OSB Chapter 43: Tardiness at the Work of God or at Table

“On hearing the signal for an hour of the divine office, the monk will immediately set aside what he has in hand and go with utmost speed, yet with gravity and without giving occasion for frivolity. Indeed, nothing is to be preferred to the Work of God.” 

From Saint Benedict’s Rule, Patrick Barry, OSB Chapter 43: Latecomers for the Work of God or in the Refectory

“When the time comes for one of the Divine Offices to begin, as soon as the signal is heard, everyone must set aside whatever they may have in hand and hurry as fast as possible to the oratory, but of course they should do so in a dignified way so as to avoid giving rise to any boisterous behavior. It is essential that nothing should be accounted more important than the work of God.”

The Contemporary Reading of the Rule of the Order of the Holy Cross states that, the cross transcends time and space because it testifies to “the incarnate Son’s offering of his whole being to his Father in intimate and loving communion.” This act of self-sacrificing love is present to us in every Eucharist, and if we allow it, it has transformative power. Allowing ourselves “to be set aflame with that love”, and sharing in that “self-offering through our own sacrifice of praise, penance, thanksgiving, and intercession for ourselves and for the whole world, is our main ministry. The Order’s Rule also says that the Divine Office is an act of praise and of intercession, and it is central to our lives as monastics. “In the company of the saints we are interceding for all creation.”

We gather in our church five times a day for what Benedict calls the “work of God”. And what he calls the work of God is liturgy- the Eucharist as well as the Daily Office. Benedict’s Rule devotes fourteen chapters to laying out in detail the observance of liturgy, and liturgy is mentioned in one way or another in many more chapters.

In order to have any kind of authenticity, it is important to recognize and acknowledge that our spirituality as Anglican Benedictine monks is essentially liturgical. A huge part of our monastic vocation has to be to that fact; otherwise, we are just pretending or playing at it. The entire liturgical life of the church is the means by which we pass on and interpret our relationship with God and the cosmos.

Most of the input we get as Christians (theological, scriptural, homiletic, and historical) comes to us through liturgy. In liturgy the physical and spiritual come together- heaven and earth touch each other. Through the liturgy, theology is not just talked about, or thought about, but acted out, experienced, and passed on. This is done through the liturgical cycle of the church year: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost, and the observance of holy days, and feasts of saints. In the Daily Office we chant psalms, and sing canticles and hymns, recite prayers and listen to the Spirit through Holy Scripture. All of this keeps us grounded and rooted in tradition.

Our monastic life is infused with ritual. When we allow our hearts to soften and a little humility to kick in we can also encounter transformative power in these rituals, such as the reception of a postulant, the clothing of a novice, the profession of vows, the ordination of a priest, the internment of the dead, and even the Litany of Farewell for someone leaving the Order, or the Chapter of Faults. The transformative power of which the Order’s Rule speaks can be found in the gestures, physicality, and stimulation of the senses that make up our liturgical practices. We light candles, and dip our fingers in holy water, we bow, we stand, we sit, we kneel, we make the sign of the cross, we raise our hands in prayer, we listen, we give the sign of peace. On our best days, all of this reminds us that we are alive, and helps us to be engaged. It can also carry us along on the most challenging days when we might not feel like it. It is about practice, regarding all of God’s creation as sacred more than it is about my own individualistic belief, or the way I want things done so that I can stomach them. It is about embracing the mystery surrendering to the fact that we will never fully comprehend it.

We have a wonderfully rich and beautiful liturgical tradition, and as monks, liturgy is our most important daily work. The word “work” conjures all kinds of ideas that, in my opinion, apply directly to our participation in the Work of God. I did not grow up with expectations from my parents of pursuing a sophisticated career or a career that would earn me lots of money or even with their expectation that I would go to college. My mother had only three requirements for my brother and me: whatever we chose to do had to be legal, and moral, and above all, we must always work hard and perform our tasks to the very best of our abilities. One of the legacies I have inherited from her is that, whatever work I choose to do or agree to do, I do to the very best of my abilities and commit to it 100%. Whether I like the work or not is irrelevant to me. My most important work now, according to Saint Benedict and Saint James Otis Sargent Huntington is my participation in our liturgies, the Opus Dei, the Work of God.

The word “work” suggests obligation, responsibility, and repetitiveness. When we truly love our work, it often does not seem like work. Work always comes with expectations of accountability. We have choices. We either choose to be accountable to those expectations or we choose to find other work. Work may not always be interesting or immediately rewarding. Work may challenge our minds or seem trivial. We are expected to perform our work on a daily basis whether we feel like it or not. We are expected to show up and to be on time. Not doing so negatively impacts those we work with and can get us fired. We are also expected to be prepared and mentally ready for the task at hand. There are even expectations about showing up to work well groomed and not like you just rolled out of bed. We are expected to approach our work with a good attitude, with maturity, and without arrogance. We are expected to work well with others. Ideally, we bring gifts to our work. We also learn from work, and gain experience by doing it over and over again, through practice.

As a musician, I can say one or two things about practice, and one is that practice is seldom an exciting experience. Most of the time I am not transported to another realm during practice. And so it is with the Work of God. Naturally, we want prayer to make us feel good, and to leave us with the assurance that God has heard our prayer and will respond immediately. But the reality is that it does not always work that way, and we all experience times when God seems distant. And this work of God is not always an exciting experience, and I’m learning that when I actually get it right, it seldom takes me to another realm. And why? Well, because Benedictine prayer is not designed to take us out of the world to find God. That would be like a fish getting out of the ocean to find the ocean. Benedictine prayer is designed to make us realize that God is in the world all around us. The Work of God might be our work for God, but more than that is God’s work in us. If we consent to it, it brings us to the awareness that we are already sitting in the consciousness of God.

I’ll end with this quote from a sermon preached by Br. Randy back in 2014 when I was a postulant. It helped to understand how I needed to approach this new endeavor on which I had embarked:

“Even before I enter this church I dip my finger in the holy water and make the sign of the cross and say to myself ‘I am a baptized member of the Body of Christ, I am a new creation, I am loved and accepted by God, I resolve, with God's help, to live out my place in the Body and in this community with humility, obedience, love, and joy...’ With God’s help I don't wait until I understand what it means, until I know what will happen, until I feel like it. I don't say ‘this is not working for me’. I don’t demand God on my terms. I ask God to take me once again to the river, to the place of repentance, forgiveness, and community.”

Epiphany 6 C - Sunday, February 17, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC
Epiphany 6 C - Sunday, February 17, 2019

Jeremiah 17:5-10
1 Corinthians 15:12-20
Luke 6:17-26

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

In the gospel according to Luke, the paragraph just preceding our reading of this morning tells us that Jesus spent the night in prayer on a mountain. At the end of that night, he chose twelve apostles among the troop of disciples who was with him. Then they all came down on the plain.

Luke notes that Jesus was full of power and healed many among the crowd that awaited them on the level field. Full of the Spirit, Jesus then gives what is called the Sermon on the Plain which extends beyond what we read today.

Our passage today is a parallel to the Beatitudes in the gospel according to Matthew. But besides four blessings, Luke recounts a mirroring four curses that vividly contrast the rich and the poor in regard to the Kingdom of God.

*****

Less than a month ago, I got to preach to you about the Magnificat which I characterized as Mary’s revolutionary song and a socioeconomic manifesto. Well, in today’s gospel, a grown-up Jesus is making his mom proud by preaching just the reversal of fortune Mary sang about in the magnificat.

Mary sang what God is really like. God is not the least impressed by any of our pride, power, or opulence. God has mercy on those who are in awe of God. God favors those who humble themselves. God cares for those who turn from the ego boosting accumulation of wealth to the lowliness of self-denial for the sake of others.

In today’s gospel, Jesus goes further than his mother did and tells us that the rich are shamed and cursed by their attachment to wealth. It is a case of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable (from humorist Finley Peter Dunne).

*****

In Jesus’ day, ostentatious wealth was seen as proof that one had helped themselves to more than their share of the economic pie. Wealth was seen as limited and the accumulation of more wealth was necessarily at the expense of the less fortunate. To be very rich smacked of dishonesty and dishonor. This did not keep the powerful from accumulating wealth in Jesus time. Power led to wealth.

The small religious and political elites were much wealthier than the masses of peasants and craftspeople. Jesus’ listeners would overwhelmingly have been poor. There was no middle class in Jesus’ time. And the rich and powerful elites would have found his sermon distasteful if not abhorrent.

*****

In our contemporary US, wealth leads to power. For a long time, we lived (maybe we still do live) with the belief that wealth-formation is accessible to all and that extra wealth for some does not preclude wealth-formation for everybody else.

In other words we believe that the economic pie could always get bigger, and that everybody’s slice kept growing accordingly. This derives from something like a capitalist creed that enterprise, creativity and hard work are always the main engines of wealth-creation. And a belief that income and wealth are distributed according to merit alone.

This ignores that there are systemic aspects that facilitate income generation and wealth accumulation for some groups rather than those outside the privileged groups.

And if you have even a small amount of privilege because of the groups you belong to, you participate in those systems. Think of racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, to name a few.

*****

In the last few decades, systemic obstacles to income generation and wealth accumulation have worsened for many. Beginning in the 1970s, economic growth in this country slowed and the income gap widened.


Income growth for households in the middle and lower parts of the national income distribution slowed sharply, while incomes at the top continued to grow strongly.

The concentration of income at the very top of the distribution rose to levels last seen 90 years ago (during the “Roaring Twenties”).

In many of today’s corporations, the average employee "needs to work more than a month to earn what the CEO earns in one hour."

And that’s about income generation. What about wealth accumulation?

Also starting in the seventies, and accelerating since the eighties, wealth which was always more concentrated than income has started concentrating even further.

Wealth can be considered as the value of a household’s property and financial assets, minus the value of its debts.

The share of the national wealth held by the top 1 percent rose from just under 30 percent in 1989 to nearly 39 percent in 2016, while the share held by the bottom 90 percent fell from just over 33 percent to less than 23 percent.

More wealth has been accruing to the already wealthy. A shrinking part of the national wealth is accruing to the others.

And in today’s world, wealth not only provides for both short- and long-term financial security. Besides, it also bestows social prestige, and contributes to political power. The combination of wealth, prestige and political power can all be used to accrue more wealth to the rich. And it is.

The standard of living of the working and middle classes is dependent upon income and wages, while the rich tend to rely on wealth. As a result of the increasing inequality of income distribution, working and middle class folk find it increasingly difficult to maintain or improve their standards of living.

So much for our little refresher in socio-economic realities of wealth production and accumulation in today’s United States. Hopefully, it makes you realize how relevant Jesus’ blessings and curses are to today’s national conversation (or lack thereof) on economic security for all.

And today, I am not even touching the disparity of resource use between the rich and poor countries in the world.

*****

In Jesus’ blessings and woes, the fortunes of the world are turned around. The Kingdom of God provides commonweal: welfare for all without exception.

While we trust for this Kingdom of God to be fully realized in heaven, we are also encouraged to unite heaven and earth in this Kingdom.

Where our current ministry lies is in building up the Kingdom of God here and now (close at hand) so that comfort, health and economic security are available to all in a way that sustains the planet which sustains us in turn.

*****

Of course, the blessings and curses of Jesus are not meant for us to usurp God’s place and judge people’s hearts and souls. We are to love poor and rich alike.

Jesus’ curses invite those of us with more resources (yes, also many of us in this church today) to share them more broadly.

Jesus’ blessings engage us to build a just society.  That is a society where wealth distribution is more equitable. It is a society where wealth disparities don’t shame the rich in their abundance and the poor in their unmet needs.

*****

Our true wealth lies in Love; love of God and love of neighbor. As God revealed to Saint Paul:

“My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12: 9a)

As Christians we are to follow Jesus, not only worship Him. This involves loving our brothers and sisters. That love includes working towards a more just and equitable distribution of resources. How are we rich? Do we need to repent and come to share in the poor’s blessing? Pray about it. And see what actions you can undertake to bless the poor and yourself in the process.

Amen.

Life Profession of the Monastic Vow by Br. Aidan William Owen - February 12, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
Life Profession of the Monastic Vow by Br. Aidan William Owen - February 12, 2019

Song of Songs, 8:5-7; 10-14
Romans 8:18-30
Luke 15:11-24 [25-32]

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

Who chose these lessons, these Bible passages?

Well, Br. Aidan, that's who.  And if you know him at all, you can hear him and his interests and his heart all over them.  From the Song of Songs through the Paul's Letter to the Romans to the ever evocative story of the Lost Son, we are hearing themes and memes and questions that Aidan and we have pondered and wrestled with for generations.  Of course, there are no doubt more private or interior reasons for their selection that only Br. Aidan knows.  And I'd venture to say that there are other reasons or motives that even he is as yet unaware of.  Scripture is like that: we think we know what we are getting into, and then find ourselves surprised, challenged, rebuked, transformed.  We think we know where we are going with some familiar psalm or biblical passage and discover, if we stick with it long enough, that it has another, often more profound and more relevant role to play in our journey.

And what's true of Sacred Scripture is true even more so of God:  we think we finally have a handle on the Holy One only to discover that, on the contrary, it's the Holy One who has the handle on us.  How frightening, disorienting and wonderful.

And then there's vocation...the way we live out that relationship in our lives.  Chosen, we think, for good reasons, solid, apt. And then we find out  that we may not have been in the driver's seat at all.  As Paul says to the Romans:

“..those whom God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son... And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.”

That's you, Br. Aidan.  And that's us too, brothers and sisters. That's all of us here today.

The first reading today may be especially puzzling or surprising to many.  It is from the Song of Songs, a book traditionally ascribed to King Solomon.  What it is is a love song, a rather sensual and erotic love song, a dialog between the Lover and the Beloved.  But those who know something of monastic history know that this tender, racy, exquisitely lovely paean to human erotic attraction and sensual love also know that in the Medieval period, during the flowering of the monastic spirituality, it was next to  the Gospels, the most commented upon text from the Bible.  Not bad for a book of only 8 chapters!  And this is because the monastic tradition had not yet fallen into the unfortunate segregation between so-called different kinds of love—agape love, brotherly love, erotic love, contemplative love—that we find in 20th century writers.  Rather they knew that—to quote out of content—love is love.  And our love of God, our love of the True and the Beautiful, our love of the Just and Holy, follows a shape and a desire that is not foreign to the love between people, whether that of spouses or friends or scholars.  We learn about loving God by observing these loves in our world and even in ourselves. The monastics of old knew this.  And we constantly need to rediscover  it.

The Song of Songs tells us that:  “...love is as strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.  Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.”  I think it certain that the tradition saw in this love strong as death, this passion fierce as the grave the person of Jesus, whose victory over death is, first and last, a victory of love, a triumph of Life. If, as Paul says, the whole creation is groaning, it is groaning for a full participation in that victory, yearning as does Aidan,  as do we all, for fullness of Life.

In some sense, it was Br. Aidan who already wrote his own profession homily.  It is in his blog “Grounding in the Spirit” posted on January 6 and titled “planting tulips in a time of war.”  If you have not read it, I urge you to do so.  It is both a profound reflection on one man's vocation journey in dialog with a short story or dream narrative which is also his and an honest exploration of the dynamics of hope.

The title “planting tulips in a time of war” takes its weight from Br. Aidan's love of and concern for the future of the earth and the grounding and revolutionary act of planting tulips or other fall bulbs.  It is about the hope implicit in it, the outrageous character of committing small acts of beauty when the heart is breaking and the world around us and perhaps within us is falling apart.

Br. Aidan says:

“Part of the reality I live with is that...I still choose to stay.  My choice isn't painless. But it isn't difficult either. I don't chose to stay because I love monastic life, though I do love it. I don't choose to stay because I feel somehow God has ordained me for it. I don't believe in that kind of God. I choose to  stay because this is who I am. I am a monk. And not just any monk, but a monk here, in this place, on this land, in this moment of history. I stay because I cannot do otherwise.”

Could this be what St. Paul was getting at after all, with all his talk of predestination and justification and glorification?

Br. Aidan goes on:

“I stay in the monastery because it is who I am. But it is also who I choose to be. I choose to allow this land, this place, these people to claim me.” 

And:

“I also choose to stay, because not to choose is to die.”

This manifesto published a month ago rings clear today and it will echo every day in Aidan's life as it does in all lives.  I think of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the great 12th century Cistercian founder, who asked himself daily:  Bernard, what are you doing in this monastery? And he asked not an opportunity for a quick exit when the going got rough, but as a reminder, the kind of reminder each of us needs, whether the subject be monastery or ministry, profession or relationship or life story. And as an opportunity to revisit, recalibrate and recommit.  It is true of all of us:  “Not to chose is to die.”

Yes, planting tulips is a very great act of resistance.  And it would be nice if, as part of the ceremony today, we gave you tulips.  But no, instead we are going to give you a Rule and a Cross.  A Rule to remind you and us that we are partners together in this enterprise that we call monastic life, Christian life, human life.  And a small wooden Cross, you one and only possession. But we we give you that cross with the reminder that we follow not the cross but the Crucified One. He is the One who will meet you when you are still far off and run and put his arms around you and kiss you. The One who will bring out the best robe and put it around your shoulders. The One who will put a ring on your finger and sandals on your feet and will kill the fatted calf and celebrate.  Because, finally, finally you have come home.

Br. Aidan, today we all celebrate: for you, for ourselves, and for the countless people, of many faiths and none,  who dare to risk and to hope and to trust...and to plant tulips.

Thanks be to God!

Epiphany 5 C - Sunday, February 10, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. John Forbis, OHC
Epiphany 5 C - Sunday, February 10, 2019

Isaiah 6:1-8, [9-13]
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

Oh, I get them.  Oh, I really get them, Isaiah, Paul and Peter. 

A few days ago, I was reminded of the 20th anniversary of my life profession on the front lawn of the Order’s house in South Africa.  In the southern hemisphere, February is summer, and man, was that a hot day.  I and some of my fair-skinned brothers quickly developed red faces and arms.  The lawn was sloped steeply down to a deep valley.  So I prostrated on a grass matt on a downward angle.  In many ways, a dreamlike, surreal experience.  I was kind of dazed by the whole thing, having just arrived in South Africa five months before.

Remembering this occasion, thanks to my community’s help, led me to the sudden awareness of some other anniversaries.  Four years ago today, I was in the hospital in the Western Cape of South Africa with EEG wires glued to my head measuring brainwaves 24 hours a day for a week.  Meanwhile, doctors were slowly weaning me off anti-seizure medication so that I could have a gran-mal seizure.  They wanted to determine exactly where in my brain my seizures were originating.  As my neurologist said to me, if you’re going to have seizures, you’re having them in the right place.

Why?  So that a neuro-surgeon could cut a cross-section into my brain and take out a small bit of the area that was causing them.  They sparked from a safe place on which to perform surgery.  Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of my last seizure.  I was the only one on the ward who could have the surgery.  It was too risky for the others.  So, I remember them every day since four years ago.

So why am I telling you all this?  To explain to you that God has done some magnificent things in my life!  The affect of the surgery really has shaken the pivots of the thresholds of my existence!  I have never been one to witness or testify, but I suppose I’m testifying to you now. 

And yet, my response to all of this can often be, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts! or ’Go away from me, Lord.  For I am a sinful man!”  Sometimes I can feel that these miracles are to one untimely born.  Why me and not the others on the ward?

At the same time of the amazement at “the catch of fish, I and Peter, James, John, Paul, Isaiah have taken”, we rush to the place of self-denigration, condemnation and insistence on worthlessness.  In the Message rendering of this morning’s passage from Isaiah, he claims, “Every word I’ve ever spoken is tainted – blasphemous!”  Being an epileptic since I was fourteen, I felt that I myself was tainted and therefore not even deserving of God being present in my life.  If there was any hint of God’s presence to me, I would want him to get as far away from me as he possibly could because I couldn’t be someone God would want to be around.

Yet, God broke through those defenses of self-loathing and pity and burned all the reasons for them to a stump that became a seed for new life, monasticism and being a human person who is awakened to, hears, sees, feels more than I ever remember.

And then, the man who has unclean lips and a sinner who can’t have God near him rears his ugly head.  The mind dulls, nothing is heard, I am blind to and even lose my memory of God’s intimate and thundering grace.  The remnant remains.  It wants to render me powerless, giving me license to opt-out, cop-out and not grasp freedom because I’m afraid of the responsibility.  The remnant thinks it’s protecting me … from myself and my radical transformation, from others who embrace and support me in that transformation.  It thinks it’s a shield from God who has and continues to create that transformation; to draw me out of my self-absorbed pity and condemnation and become the person he has healed me to be.

I wonder if when I am persecuting myself, I am persecuting Christ.  Violence to myself is violence to Christ executing him at Golgotha yet again or like Paul, who was Saul, seeking out Jesus’ followers and killing them.  And yet, Christ keeps giving me the grace to be who I really am, God’s child who is to be part of a grand assembly that will praise and bring God’s glorious presence to so many like me.  Despite myself, these powerful forces keep invading.  They can’t be stopped.         

Meanwhile, God begs me to use what he has awakened in me, his life, senses, sharpened awareness and acute sensitivity and compassion to keep planting seeds of his grace.  God so desires me to know that those qualities were there in me in the first place.  I just wasn’t able to understand, hear or see them while in a drug-induced stupor.  Thus, I had to not just be reborn, but born from a new seed embedded in the burnt stump of my illness, sense of worthlessness, and shame around both.

Sometimes it does have to take a hot coal searing my mouth to snap me out of my repetitive mind and heart-numbing breast-beating.  I imagine the angel who approaches me and hovers in front of me in the air with the hot coal, might roll her eyes, sigh and bring it to my lips and say, “Okay there, again this has touched your lips, your guilt has run off in fear and your sin has been incinerated.  Can we now get on with God’s work, please?”

Epiphany 4 C - Sunday, February 3, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Rob Magliula, OHC
Epiphany 4 C - Sunday, February 3, 2019

Jeremiah 1:4-10
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30

Calls from God are scary! They disrupt our lives. It may not exactly be a voice, but a thought you can’t shake, or an idea that seems crazy or irrational. You try to ignore it, but it seems to be there again and again.

Jeremiah’s call shows us that fear, anxiety, resistance, inadequacy, and even resentment are understandable reactions to God’s call. The primal human response to any kind of change is fear. God notices it in Jeremiah and issues the Bible’s most frequent command: “Do not be afraid.” Jeremiah’s call has nothing to do with his capabilities, as Jeremiah himself repeatedly attests. Neither our achievement nor our confidence qualifies us to answer the call. Instead it is God who prepares us to live out the vocation for which we were created. While God sometimes asks us to take up roles and responsibilities for which we may feel ill equipped, often God prepares us for our calling through the interests and abilities we cultivate. Jeremiah’s story reminds us that both the calling to serve and the capacity to fulfill that calling come from God. Our excuses are often reasonable and justifiable, and our acceptance or surrender happens only after struggle. Jeremiah speaks to something many of us know; we do not choose God; God mysteriously, and even against our will, chooses us.

  Empowered by the Spirit, Jesus articulates his call with the words from the prophet Isaiah, which we heard in last Sunday’s Gospel. He came “to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and the acceptable year of the Lord’s favor”. All in Nazareth speak well of Jesus and are amazed at his words until Jesus offends them by referring to the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian, and how God had ministered to strangers and passed over them and their kind. He wasn’t telling them anything that wasn’t right in their own scriptures, only that was not how they used scripture. They used it to close ranks on outsiders, not to open them up. The minute Jesus denied their special status; he went from favorite son to stranger. His message threatened to dismantle the status quo and the stereotypes that defined their religious and social boundaries. They were incensed that one of their own had the audacity to intimate that they would not be the vessels for the unfolding of God’s new narrative. They had certain expectations of God learned over generations. Jesus overturned those expectations by asserting that God is more than their tribal deity, and that God’s sense of community was bigger than theirs.  Change is a dynamic that is unsettling and usually resisted in preference for the old, the familiar, and the routine. Jesus’ audience opted for this choice. Not only do religious people resist change, but they also see their resistance to change as a protection of the divine. So much so that they are ready to kill for it.

Christ is the one who calls, challenges, and upsets us. Like the people of Nazareth, we are filled with assumptions. We often confuse our ideas of God with God. It’s hard to swallow that our enemies are God’s friends, who belong to God just as surely as we do.  No matter how hard we try we cannot get God to respect our boundaries.  God keeps plowing right through them, inviting us to follow or get out of the way. The problem is not that we are loved any less. The problem is that these others are loved just as much as we are, by a God with an upsetting sense of community. Jesus preferred the company of misfits to that of religious people.  He cared for the stranger, and comes to us as the stranger, reminding us over and over again that while he is with us, he does not belong to us. Today our public life has broken down largely because we have begun to regard the stranger as the enemy. We sort ourselves out into tribes that are suspicious of other tribes. The variety of humankind becomes a threat, not a blessing. We forget that it is God who makes us a community and not we ourselves, and that our differences are God’s best tools for opening us up to our own conversion and the truth that is bigger than we are.

The God, we proclaim and worship, will not be domesticated, confined to our temples, or to our comfortable, well-worn narratives. This is a dynamic God whose call jars us to anger or faithfulness, and who simultaneously provides us the opportunity to partner in the creation of a new narrative. God is at work, even now, unfolding new narratives among people who are viewed as outsiders by the faithful.

Paul gets to the root of our call as Christians. The words of our Epistle come to life when we remember that they arose out of a pastoral crisis in the Corinthian Church, not as we so often use them, to prop up romanticized notions of marriage. Paul had heard that some were engaged in destructive battles with each other. They were abusing their freedom, refusing to share, scorning their neighbor’s spiritual gifts, boasting in their own, seeking recognition and jockeying for power in the church. Paul inserts this passage in his letter not to supply a pious reflection on how things ought to be, but rather to call them to account for their behavior. Everything he says love is not, they are; everything he says love is, they are not.

Paul is speaking of agape, the love embodied most visibly in God’s love for humankind in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a state of being which constitutes our fundamental relationship to God. It is not a feeling but an action. For Paul, our call and capacity to flourish as human beings is realized to the extent that we can live in the love of God. There is nothing sentimental about it. It is active, tough, resilient, and long-suffering. The call to a faithful life is one that gives testimony in word and deed to the primacy of love, the character of love, and the endurance of love. Not unlike the congregation at Nazareth, the Corinthians who heard these words most likely responded with shock and anger as well. Christians seem to have a special gift of cloaking self-interest with self-righteousness. Without love all religious talk, knowledge, and giving add up to nothing.

The love described in the Epistle was the love lived in Jesus’ ministry. The call to belong to God’s Church is to be an agent of God’s love in the world, not seeking one’s own advantage but working on behalf of others. It is the source of our greatest security, and thus our freedom to actually be patient and kind, to bear all things and not insist on our own way. It is the way God calls us to practice all our gifts. None of us reach the heights of love. All of us have room to grow into greater love.

The truth is always bigger than any one of us can grasp by ourselves.  It takes a world full of strangers and friends to tell and show us the parts we cannot see, and sometimes we want to kill them for it.  Jesus’ own tried to kill him, but he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.  That’s how it still works.  If we will not listen, he won’t try to change our minds.  He will pass right through our midst and be gone.         +Amen.

The Presentation of Our Lord - Saturday, February 2, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bob Pierson, OHC
The Presentation of Our Lord, Year C - Saturday, February 2, 2019

Malachi 3:1-4
Hebrews 2:14-18
Luke 2:22-40

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

Today we celebrate two “feast days” if you will:  first, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, and second, Groundhog's Day.  At first glance the two events seem to have nothing in common, but in fact there is a connection.  Both celebrations have to do with the coming of the Light.  In Punxsutawny, PA, people will be watching a groundhog named Phil, so see if he sees his shadow.  If he does, we will have six more weeks of winter.  Or is it the other way around?  I can never keep it straight.  The fact of the matter is we will have at least six more weeks of winter regardless, because the spring equinox is six weeks away.  This curious event is situated on February 2nd because it's the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.

The Feast of the Presentation of the Lord is set on February 2nd because it's 40 days after Christmas, and according to Jewish tradition, that's the day that a new mother needs to present herself in the Temple for her “purification” after childbirth.  But according to Luke's account, it's also the day that Mary and Joseph bring the child Jesus to the Temple for his presentation to “be designated as holy to the Lord.”  And as Jesus is introduced to the old man, Simeon, he issues a statement which is very familiar to those of us who pray Compline on a regular basis:  “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”

Phil the groundhog sees his shadow when the light of the sun appears, and Simeon sees his salvation when the light for revelation to the Gentiles appears.  Wouldn't it be great if we paid as much attention to the coming of the light in Jesus as some of us do to the coming of the light to create Phil's shadow?  Simeon's bold proclamation is good news not just to the people of Israel but to the Gentiles, or as some translations put it, the nations, in other words, all peoples of the world.  Jesus is announced as the savior of the world by the old man in the Temple, and his parents are “amazed.”

But not everything that Simeon has to say is Good News.  He also announces that Jesus' ministry will bring “the falling and rising of many in Israel” and that he “will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed,” and he tells Mary “a sword will pierce your own soul too.”  I wonder how Mary and Joseph reacted to that news.  Were they still “amazed?”  Are we “amazed” at what we are hearing today?  As both Simeon and Anna attest, this baby is a very special child.

As the light of each day gets longer and longer, we are reminded that the Light that is Christ has come to enlighten our lives, and to cast away the shadows so that we can live in the salvation God has planned for us.  Let's make sure we recognize that Light and allow it to illuminate our lives.  The people who walked in darkness HAVE seen a great light;  so arise, shine for your light has come, a light of revelation to the nations and for the glory of God's people everywhere.