Feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul Apostles - Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

St Peter and St Paul Apostles (transferred) - Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Ezekiel 34:11-16

2 Timothy 4:1-8

John 21:15-19

Psalm 87

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Fourth Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 8A, June 28, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 8 A - June 28.2020

Jeremiah 28:5-9
Romans 6:12-23
Matthew 10:40-42

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Three weeks ago, we painfully decided to suspend our ministry of hospitality for another several months. Welcoming retreatants in our Guest House and Monastery is one of our main ministries. Who do we get to be when our ministries change upon us?

In the last few months, we have had to explore what it means to be hospitable when dozens of new guests do not stream through our open door every week. We have worshipped without in-person visitors. We have had the great privilege of continuing to worship with our community of brothers.

We have also had to be welcoming of our moods and emotions in these times of pandemic and social upheaval. Like all our friends, families and associates, we have had to deal with fear, worry, anxiety, loss, sadness, frustration and anger.

We have had to welcome reality, in part because it offered us no choice. But we  Brothers have gotten to do it in the company of one another.

We have had to exercise compassionate welcome on these brothers of ours. We do that as a matter of course, but even more in these trying weeks and months.

And we have done a pretty good job so far, I might add.

*****

But in today’s gospel passage, Jesus calls us to be hospitable to those who visit us on his behalf.

So how do we welcome the prophets, the righteous persons and the little ones in these times? How do we welcome Jesus in each other? How will we welcome people in person again eventually? How do we welcome people in remote and mediated ways?

As welcoming others into our home has temporarily become too problematic to entertain, we have sought to extend hospitality in other ways. Most of this has occurred on online platforms be it Facebook livestream, Zoom retreats or YouTube videos. 

We have shared some of our worship. We have shared some of our prayers and some of our study. But we have also spent more quality time reaching out individually to family, friends and associates. This has happened by phone, by email, by text messaging and video-conferencing. 

I have found myself spending more time on WhatsApp with Belgian friends lately. God knows when I will be able to see them in person. I have found myself checking in on monastery associates and friends whom I would normally have seen in the Guest House at some point or another.

In a way, we have found workarounds to our missing in-person hospitality ministry. We will all be glad to go back to shaking hands and giving a hug when the time comes. But in the meantime, we are coping as best we can.

So Jesus meets us in our brothers and sisters, here at home first and foremost. But Jesus also meets us through the friend or stranger who comes to us through the internet.

*****

I liked what The Rev. Dr. Emily Townes, an African-American Christian social ethicist and theologian had to say about today’s gospel passage.

“Compassionate welcome means approaching each other through God. This is how we recognize that genuine human relationships emerge from putting the grace-filled hospitality of God’s love at the center of our lives and at the center of our relationships.

God’s hospitality teaches us that close, loving, enduring relationships are to be valued along with distant, occasional, and abrasive ones -- as difficult as the latter ones may be.

This lively, and sometimes maddening, dynamic is the welcome Jesus speaks of in today’s passage. Further, if we live into this welcome with each other, we will find the rich rewards of discipleship found in God.”

Emily Townes

*****

I appreciate The Rev. Townes’ realistic talking about hospitality. She calls it “sometimes maddening.” And we go, “Yep! Been there!” And she insists that God’s hospitality is to be embodied in even the episodic, short or even brusque interactions.

We are to practice a compassionate welcome with the lovely and the not-immediately-so-lovely people. They are all our chances to welcome Christ as he is in his immense variety and diversity.

In the months to come, may we continue to identify Christ and welcome him as he comes, even as a little one, whether that be in the mirror, through the door, on the phone line or through the ethernet cable.

*****

May we continue to enjoy the rich rewards of compassionate hospitality throughout the covid-19 pandemic and beyond.

Amen

The Nativity of John the Baptist - June 24, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

The Nativity of John the Baptist

Isaiah 40:1-11
Acts 13:14b-26
Luke 1:57-80

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Where there is death, there is hope.

So goes the often flippant, yet no less true snippet of folk wisdom. Everything changes. Everything and everyone dies. Systems fall apart; empires collapse; churches empty; winter comes, burying the desiccated petals of the summer rose under clean, white snow.

Death, as much as anything else, is a sign of God’s promise to make all things new again.

John the Baptist, the great forerunner of the morn, who leaps for joy in his mother’s womb to be near God’s incarnate Word is also the great and wild prophet of death. The scriptures point to him as the new Elijah, calling Israel back to faithfulness in God. Like Elijah and all of the Old Testament prophets, John is the archetypal wild man, the holy fool who subverts religious norms and in so doing highlights the hypocrisy and shallowness of the religious and political elites of his day and of ours.

Dressed in camel’s hair, calling his fellow Israelites to repent, eating locusts and wild honey—he is, to use Native American imagery, the coyote figure, the trickster who intentionally upends the sanctimonious behavior of those in power to expose the emptiness within polite ways. If we don’t find John offensive, then we aren’t paying attention.

John calls the people of Israel to the borderlands of their becoming. He draws them out of the city—Jerusalem—to the River Jordan. This geography is more than symbolic. As we’ve been hearing about in our Matins readings the last few weeks, the Israelites wandered in the desert, just the other side of the Jordan, for forty years. As they wandered in the desert, they encountered again and again the wildness and the wiliness of a god who demanded nothing less than their total submission. With the manna, with the water from the rock, with the giving of the law on Sinai, and in countless other small, daily movements, God provided for the necessities of God’s people. 

And when those people complained and lamented that life had been better in the slavery of Egypt, God came to see that that older generation could never enter the land of promise. Their spirits still clung to the shackles. Only the death of that generation could free the people of God to be the chosen people, living in the land of promise. In death was their freedom.

God led the people through the Jordan, baptizing them into the life of the covenant, and leading them into the freedom God had promised them. And so it is, when the people have once again taken up the shackles of empire, when they have begun to forget whose they really are, when greed and power and oppression infect their spirits, God raises up John to call the people back to the place where they were transformed from a wandering band of former slaves into the people of God. 

John calls the people away from the structures of civilization to the border of the wilderness. In so doing he entreats them to leave behind the dry husk of the domesticated gods they have been worshipping, the idols they have put in the place of God, and to open themselves once more to the transforming fire of the living God, whose wild love will not be contained within the houses we build for her. 

The world around us is crumbling. We are experiencing collectively—and many of us individually as well—a breakdown. The structures that held our beliefs about who we are, where we were headed, what was true about the world—these structures are collapsing. We are seeing—some of us for the first time—that the American dream has always been a nightmare for our black and brown brothers and sisters; that there is no capitalism apart from the enslavement of people and of the earth; that our society and our church are broken in fundamental and irreparable ways. And that more often than not we are the Egyptians, not the Israelites, more often Judas than Peter, a revelation as destabilizing to our sense of self as any that can be imagined.

We are also, many of us, finding in this season of instability, that the God we thought we knew was her own kind of idol. This revelation may feel like a betrayal, as if the life we had signed up for has suddenly, seemingly all at once, evaporated around us, revealing a wilderness of dry rock and dust where once we had a garden. And our thirst, and our fatigue, and our barrenness threaten to overwhelm us. All many of us want is to return to the warm comfort of ignorance, denial, and fantasy, to nothing less than the tender caress of numb oblivion.

John breaks into our lives today, as he did the lives of his contemporaries. He calls us away from the crumbling city, back to the place of encounter with our wild God. John calls us to slip once more into the cool and muddy water, to be washed and renewed, to die so that we can be reborn.

“Comfort, comfort, my people. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,” begins the passage from Isaiah John quotes at the River Jordan. But what shall he cry out? “All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand for ever.”

God’s faithfulness does not depend on ours. God’s love does not come to us as payment for a life well lived, or for commandments followed, or in recompense for our constancy. What a mercy that is! For we are not constant. Our lives are like the grass, sometimes lush and green and sometimes withered away to stalks. But God’s word, God’s very life, which is our life, will stand forever.

John comes, even today, as the prophet of the morning, to testify to the ever-faithful life of God, the life that comes not in spite of death or instead of death, but through death. John beckons us all to enter the dark chasm of the abyss, to take the hand of the angel of death, to lay down our lives so that God can take those lives up again.

At a certain point, we are all called to surrender to an unknown and mysterious God. In this surrender we come to learn that betrayal is a handing over from death to life; that the silence of the grave gives way to the rhythmic heartbeat of God; that the shadow of death brightens into dawn. In the surrender of all we are, or thought we were, or hoped to become to that unknown and mysterious God, God gives birth to new life within and through us, and to a life that is fundamentally God’s life even as it is our own.

May we heed John’s call. May we leave the ruins of the city and make our way, however painfully or slowly, to the borderlands of our faith. May we enter the cool and cleansing River. May we die so that God can live once more.

Third Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 7A, June 21, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. John Forbis, OHC

Third Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 7A, June 21, 2020

Genesis 21:8-21
Romans 6:1b-11
Matthew 10:24-39

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I have heard and read plenty of sermons and commentaries that preface their writings about Scriptures like this one by saying, “Well, what Jesus really meant to say was ____ or “what Jesus really means here is _____.” However, there is just no skirting around this Gospel. Jesus does not leave much for interpretation or guesswork. He is sending his disciples out like sheep in the midst of wolves. So there’s no time to mince words. What he says is what he means.

Plenty of people have called Jesus Beelzebul, especially religious authorities. If the followers are not above their teacher or slaves above their masters, they better expect the same called the same if not worse. Jesus coming into this world is not necessarily a cause for celebration for everyone. His presence in this world, the coming of the Kingdom, will meet resistance.
Jesus demands a very different mindset than all of us. If we insist on our own value systems, he poses a threat to our false sense of control and power. Lies and secrets will be revealed; what we defend as morality will be investigated and called into question. 

Those who accept and proclaim the Kingdom of God, Jesus will acknowledge to God that they are aligned to Jesus’ way of bringing peace into this world. Those who deny Jesus’ way of bringing peace are the ones left with the sword.

The choice is stark indeed. As Jesus says on the night he is arrested, “For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” Jesus doesn’t just bring a sword; he casts or throws it down before us. We can pick up the sword and perish or we can follow Jesus. But the sword is also double edged. If we choose to become disciples, then, Jesus will use the sword himself to cleave us away from our own loyalties, clan or even family if we cling to these out of fear of attacks, persecution or even death.

While we shout from the rooftops what we’re taught in the dark, many will band against us because we are threatening clans, organizations, institutions and even families. The ones who prefer to keep their means of status, wealth and power covert feed us the lies that peace means maintenance of all of these values. They bring no peace to the marginalized, the outcast, the expendables. They bring no peace to any of us. 

We who accept and refrain from crying from the housetops to expose these lies are complicit in dehumanizing not only The Other but ourselves as well. Jesus tells us, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” The kind of peace that we think we’ve maintained for millenia with a few glitches here and there is not of God, but of Satan. God is not the one who condemns us to hell. Satan does.  We have been and continue to play into Beelzebul’s hands again and again. We really have become followers of the god of dung as the Greek New Testament translates the name.

However, what if we dehumanize because we dehumanize ourselves first? We refuse to believe that God values us more than many sparrows who are so cherished by God that they do not fall apart from God’s compassion. This same God who so grieves for what we deem cheap, expendable and sacrificial counts the hairs of our head as well. When we deny this we deny the opportunity for authentic relationship with him. Jesus will deny us before God because that is the choice we have made.

After such a fearful choice, no wonder we would turn from Jesus’ way of peace and subject others or the Other to our own codes of what we would call justice — law and order. It’s the sword that we’ve chosen to pick up to our peril as a society, institutions, clans, families. Our foes are members of our own household. Our foes are us. Our foes are within our own hearts. If we recognize this, then, the sword can become the blade that cleaves us so that what emerges is a soul that can’t be killed by any resistance to our cry from the rooftops.

Exposure will happen. It’s just a matter of when. So can we really afford to remain in our safe darkness and silence? Yes, Jesus makes this decision difficult. Whether we choose to acknowledge or deny him before others, we risk death either way. Or do we? He shows us the way of forgiveness and love culminating in his Cross. The Resurrection, then, goes further to upend the mechanisms of death, contradicting the world in which peace is upheld by violence. The lies can no longer function as they once did. Violence does not triumph. Life does.

Paul tells us as much in his letter to the Romans, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” If we relegate this newness of life to just a future beyond our own deaths, then, we’re already dead … not just our bodies but our souls as well. But like Christ, we could die to ourselves, to die to the illusions of scarcity, security by oppression and the myth that those on the outside of our clan are responsible for the fear and rage that we feel as a result of that oppression. We have been buried by baptism and are now considered to be the Glory of God where we too might walk in newness of life. ALL of us walking as one community who will find our lives by losing them for the Other. Amen.

Second Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 6A, June 14, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

Second Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 6A, June 14, 2020

Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7)
Romans 5:1-8
Matthew 9:35-10:8(9-23)

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The Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.” But Sarah denied, saying, “I did not laugh”; for she was afraid. He said, “Oh yes, you did laugh.”

Many of you will be familiar with The Name of the Rose either as the novel by Umberto Eco (1980) or the movie based on the novel and starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater (1986).  The movie is, in my opinion, nearly as good as the book, and in some ways better since you get to avoid a whole lot of medieval Latin, though the critics disagree. The novel takes place in an imposing Benedictine abbey in early 14th century Italy where an alarming number of mysterious deaths are occurring.  A Franciscan friar, William of Baskerville (played by Sean Connery), is sent to investigate, and one emergent theme in the story concerns laughter.  Friar William and the Venerable Jorge, a blind and dour senior monk, engage in several impassioned debates over the role and legitimacy of laughter, all ultimately having to do with a secret text from Aristotle’s Poetics.  I won’t spoil the mystery for those of you who have not read the book or seen the movie.  But the debate is fascinating and not at all surprising for its time.    

I think it safe to say that Jorge is no fan of laughter.  He contends that laughter is a subversive power that promotes doubt, undermines authority, and upends the truth, distorting the image of God in us and making human beings look and act like monkeys.  His strongest argument: The Bible nowhere says that Jesus laughed.  And of course, he is right about that.

But Friar William, who is a kind of scientific Enlightenment precursor, is having none of it. He argues that the Bible omits many things about Jesus, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t do them or approve of them.  God, William says, “…demands that we apply our reason to many obscure things about which Scripture has left us free to decide.”[1]  Moreover, if laughter is part of our created humanity, then our fully human Lord must surely have laughed.  Further, the good friar argues, humor and laughter play a pivotal role in undermining the false authority of what he calls absurd propositions that offend reason.  And perhaps most important, laughter is among the most effective ways to point out that an opinion holds no water or that an emperor has no clothes. 

If we look to the Bible, we find precious few references to laughter. And the references that we do have do not generally esteem it highly.  For example, as we pray the psalms day in and day out, we see that many references to laughter view it primarily in terms of ridicule or scorn, as in Psalm 2: “He whose throne is in heaven is laughing; the Lord has them in derision” or Psalm 59:  “But you, O Lord, you laugh at them; you laugh all the ungodly to scorn.”  Though we do read in Psalm 126, a psalm celebrating the return from exile: “Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.”

And of course the Rule of St. Benedict speaks rather harshly about laughter and its inappropriateness in a monastic setting, though I hasten to add that almost every modern commentator stresses that the Latin used in the Rule refers to ribald, loud or boisterous laughter or outright obscenity and not the laughter that comes from joy or surprise or delight. Even our own Fr. Hughson who has the reputation of being, shall we say, severe, quotes approvingly the following ditty in noting the gales of laughter that come from the monastic common room during community recreation:

“A little nonsense now and then
Is relished by the wisest men.” [2]

I’m sure the Venerable Jorge would disagree vehemently.

So what shall we make of laughter? And why exactly did Sarah laugh?  First, let’s be clear about one thing. Sarah wasn’t the only one who laughed. In the previous chapter of Genesis, when Abraham first hears of God’s plan for Sarah and him, it says:

Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?”  (17:17)

Then Abraham immediately asks God to get real and make Ismael, his surrogate son, his covenant descendant and heir. But no, God insists: “It’s you and Sarah I’m talking about.”

We know that laughter serves many purposes. It can be a way of deriding or dismissing our adversaries, as we see in the psalms and in real life.  Most of us know what it is to be laughed at derisively and probably have engaged in our share of it.  Sometimes childhood and adolescence seem to be nothing more than a stream of either laughing at others or being laughed at oneself. And then there is nervous laughter, a mechanism designed to cover our own embarrassment or fear or discomfort.  Laughter can be polite and even required in certain social situations.  But there is also laughter that issues from joy and delight, a spontaneous bubbling forth of emotions that express and bring pleasure to us and those around us.  Laughter can be a way to build community and relationships. And it can also be contagious in the very best sense, bringing strangers together and deepening friendships.  

Laughter helps us release stress. And even at the most solemn or weighty of times—during religious rituals, at the deathbed, or in the face of less than favorable circumstances—a certain type of gallows humor can help us to cope and even open up avenues of escape via other as yet unseen routes.  And perhaps most critical, laughter can help us see the bigger picture, putting people and events and ourselves in a more adequate and truer perspective. 

And yes, laughter can heal and help reduce pain and lift our spirits, even if only temporarily.  The breathing involved in a good belly laugh releases endorphins that affect our moods and our biochemistry. And the sharing of laughter can help us feel less isolated in our pain. I have a little pill box that is engraved with the words, “Laughter is the best medicine.”  Well maybe it’s not the best medicine, but it is surely medicinal. However, I digress.

Why did Sarah laugh? And Abraham? And why do we often laugh like them, figuratively, if not actually, rolling on the ground?  I believe they laughed because they were presented with what seemed to them an impossibility: a husband a century old and a wife of ninety and the ridiculous promise of a son.  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I can hear them saying. “Is this some kind of a joke?” And indeed, it is. The very incongruity and unexpectedness of the entire proposition and its surprising, indeed outrageous, absurdity elicits laughter, just as does any good joke.  But of course, with God this isn’t a joke, or at least not simply a joke.  It is a promise made from love which surpasses all human expectation or hope.  And when that promise is fulfilled and Sarah bears Abraham’s son, the child is named Isaac, which means He Laughs.  The story continues in Genesis, chapter 21:

The Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised. Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him.  Abraham gave the name Isaac to his son whom Sarah bore him…. Now Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.”

Sarah’s hidden laughter at the door of the tent has now become public and shared. Now everyone will laugh with her and no longer at her in her childlessness.  Her joy becomes a vindication as well as a gift to the whole community and the whole world. 

In these difficult times, laughter can sometimes be scarce. In the nursing home or at an ICU bed or during a protest march, the sound is more often lament or concern or demand. But we need laughter now as well, even in these days, especially in these days. We desperately need to see the bigger picture. We need to be able to say that the emperor has no clothes.  We need to relax our tense grip, so that we can find a way forward.  Laughter facilitates that.  

God’s promise to us is Shalom, which though usually translated as Peace includes much more: health, wholeness, justice, mutuality, interdependence, right relationship. Such a promise can and does seem impossible. And we laugh, or perhaps sneer or snort or shrug our shoulders or roll our eyes. But God’s promises are nonnegotiable, and they will find their fulfillment. We need to be prepared to be both surprised and challenged. 

As one pastor prayed:

…Creator and Lord: Often when we are presented with opportunities beyond our own imagination, we laugh and disbelieve.  Sarah’s laughter is no different form our own now. When you present us with some amazing new possibility, be it love, faith, trust, or any of your many and manifold blessings, often we disbelieve.  We disbelieve because we cannot imagine success outside our own expectations. Help us Lord to see not what we can be, but to see what you would have us do, and help us to trust you, so that your will for us is successful.[3]

We need to be bold enough to imagine success outside the boundaries of our own expectations: 

• Through our lives and our ministries, however limited they may now seem.  
• In our communities and our relationships, however wide or narrow, shallow or deep. 
• In our worship and work and rest.
• And as the Great Litany so eloquently puts it: “In all time of our tribulation; in all time of our prosperity; in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment.”

Can we join with Abraham and Sarah in giving birth to one who laughs?  Can we trust that like Sarah, we will know a laughter that comes from promises fulfilled, hopes realized, transformations that will astound us?  Are we ready for a laughter that will become a gift to the whole world, such that everyone who hears will laugh with us?  

May the God, who takes delight in all created things, bless us all our laughing days.   Amen.

Corpus Christi - June 11, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Maximillian Esmus, n/OHC

Corpus Christi - June 11, 2020

Deuteronomy 8:2-3

1 Corinthians 10:1-4,16-17

John 6:47-58

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

What are you hungry for? 

I remember my mom asking me that. It would be evening, an hour or so after supper, and I would wander into the living room saying “Mom, I’m hungry.” 

And she’d say, “Okay, let’s go to the kitchen and find you a snack. What are you hungry for?” We’d open one cupboard, then another, the fridge, then the freezer. “Do you want a banana?” No. “How about some crackers?” No. “A glass of milk?” No. 

I’d stand there staring at all this food feeling hungry, but nothing on offer seemed like just the right thing. Finally, Mom would say, “Max, get one of your sisters and go play. You’re not hungry for a snack, you’re just bored.” 

I hated when she said that! Because she was always right. I felt something missing, and I always assumed it was food. Actually, I was hungry for entertainment, for companionship, or maybe just for some attention from my mother. 

What are you truly hungry for? For what do you thirst?

Corpus Christi [The Body of Christ] is the feast on which we celebrate the Sacrament of Holy Communion, the Eucharist. I find myself in a curious place regarding Eucharist these last few months. After normal life shut down due to the pandemic, people of faith suffered the sudden loss of Sunday communion. While experiments and debates have gone on around practices such as virtual communion and drive-through communion, communion in its ordinary corporate form has ceased for the vast majority of Christians since mid-March.

We monks have an immeasurable gift in the fact that our corporate daily worship goes on basically intact, though we miss our guests terribly. I confess that I am at serious risk of taking it for granted day by day, and receiving it casually, absent-mindedly, even reluctantly. I sometimes feel ashamed of my boredom and resistance to daily communion, knowing that so much of the Church aches to receive once again the Bread of Life in its sacramental form.

This has led to me to ask myself, what do I come to this Table for? What am I really hungry for? What do we seek, as a community, in receiving Christ’s self in the sacrament? And what do our fellow members of Christ’s Body seek as they look forward once again to sharing Eucharist in their own communities?

I think this time of disruption and change offers an opportunity to reconnect with the core of what we desire at this Table, and to discover new, deeper desires by which God draws us to himself. The sacrament is wonderfully multi-faceted, yet we seem prone to focus too much on one aspect or another and distort the mystery. We get comfortable experiencing it on a particular level and fail to notice what lies deeper. 

Br. Randy said a couple of years ago on this feast, “The nourishment of God brings peace and a restless longing for more.” Jesus comes to abide in us and satisfies our longing, “only to send us at the same moment onward to new searching and hollows our spiritual bellies to create anew the very appetite he himself feeds.” (Randy Greve, Sermon May 31, 2018) 

What is our appetite today? Do we hunger for forgiveness and remission of sin? That is available at this Table. But we should be careful to recognize that, while reconciliation is effected here as a prerequisite for the consummation of the feast, it is not the ultimate goal of the Eucharist. Bonnell Spencer, OHC, the great liturgical scholar of our community, lamented the almost singular focus upon redemption from sin that had come to distort the Church’s understanding of the Eucharist prior to the renewals of the 20th century. That distortion still influences us today. Fr. Spencer describes a Christian fellowship that remains stuck on sin, unconvinced of its worthiness to stand before God. He writes that for many, church had become merely “a group of seekers after God who gather to give each other encouragement and advice. God was remote…” He goes on: “As long as the members expect no more than that, the group cannot manifest the power of the risen Christ.” (Bonnell Spencer, OHC, The Sacrifice of Thanksgiving, p.67) Beneath our hunger to be forgiven and reconciled to God, we may find a deeper hunger for that abundant, Risen life. 

Do we long to worship and adore Christ? He makes himself available to be adored here in a beautifully concrete way. But true adoration will make us open to his active and inspiring life. Fr. Spencer goes on to lament the common perception at our altars of a Real, but basically inert Presence: “Christ’s presence was asserted, but it was a static presence. [Christ] did not do anything in the Eucharist; he was simply there, to be offered, adored, and received.” Fr. Spencer urges us instead to embrace a doctrine of the Real Presence “which [knows] nothing of a passive Christ…he [is] fully active through his body the Church, with all its members sharing in his activity.” (Bonnell Spencer, OHC, The Sacrifice of Thanksgiving, p. 105) This sacrament may inspire a deeper hunger in us which welcomes that overflowing activity.

Do we hunger for intimacy with Christ, for the comfort of his presence? The presence Jesus offers us is personal and deeply intimate, but it is not private. The life in you that is being fed at Eucharist is not your own, for your own private enjoyment. It is the life of the whole Body of which you and I are members. Do we hunger for an awareness of our oneness in that Body? We will feel it around this altar. But the moment passes, and the feelings fade. God gives us that experience not for our enjoyment of a spiritual high, but because God needs us to know, in the core of our being, that we truly belong to each other, so that we will have the strength and courage to do the work he has given us to do, manifesting the Reign of God in the world. We may find deeper appetites. Do you hunger for God’s Reign of perfect justice and perfect mercy?

Christ is here to satisfy all these hungers and more! And for that, brothers and sisters, it is indeed right, and good, and a joyful thing, always and everywhere, to give thanks to almighty God. We give thanks in this sacrifice of praise because we are alive; or rather, Christ is alive in us. God created the universe and calls it very good, and the Word, through whom all things were made, lives a Risen and abundant life in you and me! 

It is a joyful thing to give thanks always and everywhere. Even now! I find this difficult. How are we to give thanks, when we are still so hungry? When our fellow members of Christ’s body are starving for this Sacrament of Unity and the consolation of corporate worship? When people around the world suffering Covid-19 are starving for breath? How are we to give thanks, when people of color are starving for justice in a society that wants to pretend that racism and white privilege is a thing of the past? 

Let us give thanks because in this great mystery we are nourished and confirmed in Christ’s life. And through our surrender to that life in us, Christ will bring together his scattered flock, Christ will heal and comfort his sick ones, and Christ will proclaim justice to the oppressed.

St. Augustine said about the Eucharist: “If you, therefore, are Christ's body and members, it is your own mystery that is placed on the Lord's table! It is your own mystery that you are receiving! You are saying "Amen" to what you are. …When you hear "The body of Christ", you reply "Amen." Be a member of Christ's body, then, so that your "Amen" may ring true!” (Augustine, Sermon 272, trans. NPNF Series)

Almighty God, deliver us from the presumption of coming to your Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal. Let the grace of this Holy Communion make us one body, one spirit in Christ, that we may worthily serve the world in his name. (BCP, p.372)

Amen. 

Trinity Sunday - June 7, 2020

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

Trinity Sunday - June 7, 2020

Genesis 1:1-2:4a
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

For the visually-oriented among us, the mention of the Trinity conjures the 15th-century Rublev icon. That depiction of the Trinity conveys a silent stillness surrounding the three figures. They are not looking at, but into each other with an unqualified dignity, respect, and loving gaze. The fourth side of the table is open signaling an invitation for us to enter. As members of Christ’s body through Baptism, we participate in the divine nature and dance of the Trinity. We are not merely invited to watch the dance, but to dance the dance. We’re tempted to analyze and explain the Trinity by our intellect, but mystery can only be encountered by the heart.

God’s mystery in the Trinity rests in mutuality: three perfectly handing over, emptying themselves, and then fully receiving what has been handed over. In the Trinity, God models relationship for us as Christians and monastics. The first reading from Genesis sets the tone for how we encounter God. God is one, yet God creates, sustains, orders, preserves, provides, and loves. God blesses all creation. God engages with all that exists. Trinity is a paradigm of what it means to be human and to relate humanely to others. To say that God is Triune is to mean that God is social in nature. It is also to say that those made in God’s image are likewise intrinsically social. If we believe in a Trinitarian God, then we must hold fast to the truth that God is community—a completely loving, mutually self-giving, endlessly generative relationship between equal partners. 

The Rublev Trinity Icon

Henri Nouwen called the Trinity a “House of Love”. He wrote that in that household there is no fear, no greed, no anger, no violence, no anxieties, no pain, even no words, only enduring love and deepening trust.¹ Could that description be any further from the truth of the outer and inner world in which we find ourselves today? In his book, Putting on the Mind of Christ, Jim Marion suggests that the Kingdom of Heaven is Jesus’ way of describing a state of transformed consciousness modeled in the Trinity. The Kingdom of Heaven is a metaphor and not a place you go to, but a place you come from.  It’s a new way of looking at the world, a transformed awareness that turns this world into a different place. The hallmark of this awareness is that it sees no separation—not between God and humans, not between humans and other humans. Jesus’ teaching to “Love your neighbor as yourself” is an admonition to love the other as a continuation of our very own being. It’s seeing that your neighbor is you. There are not two individuals, one seeking to better oneself at the expense of the other, or to extend charity to the other. Each is equally precious and necessary. This is the template for the sacred alchemy of the Trinity which is imprinted on our soul.²

In Chapter 54 of Dame Julian’s Showings, we find the best description of our union inside of the Trinity. Julian writes, “God makes no distinction in love between the blessed soul of Christ and the least soul that will be saved.”³ She is saying that God can only see Christ in us because we are the extended Body of Christ in space and time. Christ is what God sees and cannot not love and draw us back into the Divine Dance of Love. Julian continues: “And I saw no difference between God and our substance, but, as it were, all God; and still my understanding accepted that our substance is in God, that is to say that God is God, and our substance is a creature in God. For the almighty truth of the Trinity is our Father, for he made us and keeps us in him. And the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, in whom we are enclosed. And the high goodness of the Trinity is our Lord, and in him we are enclosed and he in us.”⁴ True union does not absorb distinctions, but actually intensifies them. The more one gives one’s self in creative union with another, the more one becomes one’s self. This is reflected in the Trinity, perfect giving and perfect receiving.

An African proverb states: “I am because we are.” Unlike Western society, it is not the individual but the community that is of critical importance. We’re seeing this value in action right now with so many  changing their habits, lives, and livelihoods at great personal cost for the sake of the global community.⁵ An extension of this understanding can be found in that of Ubuntu.  “A person with Ubuntu (full humanity) is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good...."⁶ What Ubuntu underscores is “‘the vital importance of mutual recognition and respect complemented by mutual care and sharing in the construction of human relations.’⁷ Ubuntu is manifested in self-giving and readiness to cooperate and communicate with others.”⁸ This reminder that “I am because you are,” seems particularly important for our times, especially in this country. Even before social distancing began, loneliness, and the anxiety and depression that often accompany it, had reached epidemic proportions and I imagine those numbers will only increase with so many people being isolated by our circumstances. 

Our Epistle reminds us that Paul was no stranger to the joys and challenges of community life. He had lived with the community in Corinth for a couple of years and corresponded with them by letter on at least five occasions. He ends this painful letter with an appeal to order, mutual agreement, and peace. He offers them and us a Trinitarian perspective regarding community life. Believers do not belong to themselves, but to Christ, and relations among believers must reflect the One to whom they belong. He reminds them and us that when we cease to belong to Christ we give ourselves to inappropriate anger, destructive hatred, and perhaps worst of all for monastics, the poison of self-absorption. We revert to living from a place of scarcity, invariably protecting and defending what little we think we have or are, projecting our problem on someone or something else, rather than dealing with it in ourselves. Having someone to hate or blame is a relief, because it takes away our inner shame and anxiety and provides a false sense of innocence. As long as the evil is outside of us, we can keep our focus on condemning or changing someone else, rather than ourselves, which gives us a false sense of moral superiority and outrage. We don’t have to grow up, let go, forgive, or surrender—we just have to accuse someone else of being worse than we are. 

When we move away from the need to protect our own power, we mirror the Trinity where all power is shared, where there is no domination, threat, or coercion. Jesus took this difficult path to know the depths of suffering and yet to forgive reality for being what it is. Through great love or great suffering, the Spirit can teach us the paradox of conversion and transformation. Paul voices his assurance that we do not face this challenge alone, but with the love and grace of God, and the Holy Spirit’s power to create communion. Resurrection for us is not an isolated miracle as much as an enduring relationship. Death is not just the death of the physical body, but all the times we hit bottom and must let go of how we thought life should be, and surrender. We are going through many deaths these days. They are tipping points, opportunities to choose conversion. Death is final only for those who close ourselves to growth and new life.

Benedict insisted that we must learn to listen to what God is saying in our lives. The good zeal, the monastic zeal, commits us to human community, immerses us in Christ, and surrenders us to God, minute by minute, person by person, day after day. Benedict reminds us that sanctity is the stuff of community in Christ and that any other zeal is false. As we move forward, we need to not be afraid of darkness, of change, of uncertainty, of the things that look like they’re going in the wrong direction. Often what we face is the thing that needed to happen in order for there to be clarity. Jesus’ life and ministry reveals that God uses tragedy, suffering, pain, betrayal, and death itself, not to wound us, but to bring us to God. There are no dead ends. Everything can be transformed, and everything can be used. Trust that even when it seems that our world is moving backward—away from justice and peace. Even this tension can serve to move us in a new direction.  +Amen.

 

1 Henry Nouwen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons, (Ave Maria Press: 1987). p.19.

2 Jim Marion, Putting on the Mind of Christ, (Hampton Roads Publishing: 2000).

3 The Fourteenth Revelation, Ch. 59 (Long Text). See The Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich, trans. James Walsh (Harper and Brothers: 1961), 162.

4 The Sixteenth Revelation, Ch. 86 (Long Text), Colledge and Walsh, 342–343.

5 Laurenti Magesa, What Is Not Sacred?: African Spirituality (Orbis Books: 2013), 195. As cited by Hayes, p.45.

6 Desmond Mpilo Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (Doubleday: 1999), p.31.

7 Mogobe B. Ramose, “The Ethics of Ubuntu,” The African Philosophy Reader: A Text with Readings, eds. P. H. Coetzee and A. P. J. Roux, 2nd ed. (Routledge: 2003), p.329.

8 Magesa, What Is Not Sacred?, p.13.