Sunday, November 29, 2020

First Sunday of Advent B - November 29, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC

Advent 1 B  - Sunday, November 29, 2020



Here we are, at the beginning of a new liturgical season and a new Church year, and I, for one, am bewildered. And Jesus wants me to keep awake? What?? I’m exhausted, and to be quite honest, constantly asking in my prayer: “Where are you who brought out of the Nile the shepherd of his flock?” Where are you, God??? 

I cry with the psalmist: “O God, why have you utterly cast us off? Why is your wrath so hot against the sheep of your pasture?” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken us and are so far from our cry and from the words of our distress?” “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; by night as well, but I find no rest.” And you want me to be awake and alert? I am thankful that Scripture writers are not afraid to rage and lament and complain about God’s hiddenness. “How long will you hide yourself, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever?”

This year more than ever, I need Advent, the season that emerges when the world as we know it has changed; when things are no longer as they used to be; when a cosmic shift has taken place. This year more than ever I need to enter the Christian New Year in lamentation. I find myself with no desire for Hallmark Season’s sentiments. I need the radical honesty of Scripture: "How long will you be angered despite the prayers of your people?" "because you hid yourself, we transgressed." I don’t feel like pretending that God’s apparent silence is just fine. I mean, let’s get real, our world is not okay. We are surrounded by evil and suffering, and I want God to tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains quake at God’s presence- as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil. That’s right, this Advent, I need to have permission to express the truth of my sorrow. Our culture of denial, apathy and hedonism is just not cutting it for me. I need God to show up. I need God to restore! I am human, and when we humans stand at the thresholds where our world is shaken, we just want someone to do something about it and make it all like it used to be. Just do something. I want to cry like the prophet Isaiah cries to God in the Hebrew Scripture lesson for this first Sunday of Advent: "O that you would tear open the heavens and come down," God, will you please come down here and do something about this mess? 

I, like Isaiah, have been calling for a God who will do "awesome deeds" like making mountains quake and the nations tremble:
 
- Hearken to my voice, O Lord, when I call; bring this pandemic to an end. 
- Great is your compassion, O God, protect the most vulnerable. 
- Do not let your compassion go unmoved and give strength to all healthcare workers. 
- Lord have mercy on those who are unemployed. 
- O Lord God of vengeance show yourself to all those corrupted politicians in Washington D.C. 
- O Lord God of Hosts destroy systemic racism. 
- Rise up, O Judge of the world; give every greedy corporation their just deserts, for they trust in great wealth and rely upon wickedness! 
- Behold the affliction of your LGBTQ+ children, and deliver them from all ignorant evil doers who are full of hate! 
- Protect this wounded planet before we completely destroy it past saving; then we will be like those who dream. 
- Save us, O God, from ourselves! 

If one thing I’ve learned from praying the psalms day in and day out, week after week, as we monks do, is that it is okay to pray these prayers. Our God is a great God and I really believe that these prayers are but a fraction of God’s own dream. And yet, I know I can’t just dwell in my rage and my lamentation because during Advent, God is calling us to transform our hearts for something else. As Saint Paul says in 1st Corinthians, we "wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ." This is quite a challenge in a world that favors “press ‘enter’ and you’ll have it right now”; a world that favors end products, more than a process of transformation. Advent tells us that things worth waiting for come to be in the darkness. The Spirit of God hovered over the darkness of the deep waters, preparing to create the world. Next spring's seeds break open in the darkness of the winter soil. The child grows in the deep and nourishing darkness of the womb. 

During Advent we prepare for God, and the God who will turn up is likely to be very different from the one we expect. Our God, whose Name is everlasting and whose renown endures from age to age, chooses a womb, and the equivalent of a hick town, and a brief life, and an agonizing death on a cross. Our God is a God who wants to be seen in the destitute, the stranger, the sick and the prisoner. This is not the kind of God we tend to expect, so orienting our hearts in that direction requires serious preparation. In order to be ready to receive God as God is and not as I, in my ignorance and weakness would have God to be, I need Advent. 

So the Season of Advent has to do, not so much with where God is, and more to do with where we are. The work needs to begin not so much with what’s going on in the world, but with what’s going on in us. The truth is that we tend to see people, the world, and God, not as they are, but as we are. When I am anxious, the world is difficult, and I want to run away. When I am scared and paranoid, other people are after me and become threats. When I have a hard time loving myself and I’m filled with guilt, I may blame and judge others. When we wake up and become aware of what is going on inside of us, we don’t project it out onto other people, the world and God. 

Christ came, Christ is with us, Christ will come again is all one in Kairos, God’s time- the time of the company of saints and of eternal life. Jesus’ exhortation to “beware” is better translated from the Greek as “to perceive,” and has everything to do with opening our eyes to the revelation of Christ’s presence here and now. It is this revelation of Christ that transforms our interior life and leads us from darkness to light, and from external appearances to deep insight and wisdom. It is through this revelation of Christ that we can orient our heart to find salvation in meaning instead of achievement, in quality instead of quantity, in being instead of doing, and in the power of the God within us that can turn all of life whole and good. After all, it is only through our own transformation that we can transform the world.

May we pray and be transformed in God’s time. May we orient our heart to Christ, who came, who is with us, and who will come again. And may we all have a blessed Season of Advent. ¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! 

Amen,
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Wednesday, November 25, 2020

The feast of James Otis Sargent Huntington - November 25, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC

Wednesday, November 25, 2020

Holy Cross, West Park, New York
November 6, 1915
My dear brother: 
When I became Superior of our community two months ago, a large amount of correspondence was handed me by my predecessor in office.  Among these letters was one from you, dated November 3, 1913. In it you make some enquiries about our Community, and imply that you have, at times at any rate, had some thought of making trial of the Religious Life. 
I do not know just what information was given you, or if you felt that your questions were satisfactorily answered. And, of course, I do not know what is your present state of mind.
But two things are very clear to me. One is that the needs of the Church in our time and land cry loudly for the increase of Religious Communities, for the devotion to God in the Religious Life of numbers of men, both laymen and priests. The other is that, if a man has received from God the high privilege of entering a Religious Community, he does himself a very great – probably an irreparable – injury, and injustice, if he lightly turns away from it. Will you let me say a word to you in regard to both these points?\ 
1. The Needs of the Church 
Consider what responsibility rests upon the Church in this country. It is nothing less than the conversion of America to the Catholic faith, the uniting of all the divided sections of this great nation in a common belief in God, and a common effort to carry out His Will, as He has made and is making it known. This, I say, is the responsibility of the Church in relation to the American nation, and to the whole world. You are a member of the Church. The responsibility rests on you. What are you going to do about it? What contribution have you to make? God may have made it plain to you that His plan for you is that you should marry and bring up a family of children to serve Him, and to work for the Church and for the country. He may have called you yourself to be a lawyer, a doctor, a soldier, a merchant, a sailor, an engineer. If so, well and good. But if you have no such definite call as would preclude your entering a Religious Community, then is it not at least likely that it is in such an association that you can do the best for your Church and your country? In how many enterprises men are realizing the power and effectiveness of combination! Men join together to mine coal, to build railroads, to manufacture automobiles, to publish books, to slaughter their fellow-men.
Is it only work for God, work for souls, work for the highest interests of humanity, in time and eternity, which shall continue to be done by isolated individuals, in hap-hazard, hand-to-mouth ways, with no concerted action, no thought-out plans, no economy of effort, no leadership or statesmanlike action? For God’s sake, let’s get together!
2. Then your own needs. 
You were created for union with God, to know Him, to love Him, to share His life now and forever. To fulfill that purpose, for which you exist, you must strive to be like God, as He revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. You must aim at perfection, to be perfect as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect. That means hard work. Can you do it better alone, or with others to help you? When Our Lord was on earth, many people listened to Him and tried to do as He said. But to some His call was, ‘Follow me’. He chose some to be with Him, to live as He lived, to be strong against the world by sharing His poverty, joyful by having His friendship in a life of chastity, free by giving up their own wills in loving obedience to Him, ready to go anywhere and do anything at His bidding. 
Christ still calls some to ‘vow perfection’ by promising to follow Him in poverty, chastity, and obedience. Is He not calling you? Is there any other way in which you can be sure of ‘acquiring perfection’, of attaining to God and having Him as your portion forever? Of course it is a hard life, in some respects the very hardest. To get up before five o’clock every morning, to live on the rations given you with no choice as to your food, to pray, in chapel or in your cell, four times a day, to work under orders, to go where you are sent, to do as you are told whether you like it or not, to bear humiliation, to fast, to be ridiculed by the world, and to keep on at all this as old age arrives, and to die in harness at the end – this is not an easy life. But is it a harder life than Jesus Christ lived? And isn’t it true that those who live it wouldn’t exchange it for anything the world can give, that it is they who keep their freshness and elasticity, who have brightness in their eyes, a smile on their lips, warmth in their hearts? Is it not they who see the fruits of their sacrifices in the salvation and sanctification of other souls? 
At any rate, don’t play fast and loose with a call to be an intimate friend of Jesus Christ. If you believe He wants you in the ranks of the Religious Life, make up your mind once for all, and come as soon as He opens the way. If not, do whatever else He has for you, and may He bless and help you to do it with all your might. We shall continue to have you in our prayers. 
Faithfully in our Blessed Lord, 
James O.S. Huntington
Superior O.H.C.

I quote this letter in full because his own words say more than a paraphrase ever could.  What a passionate and inspiring summary of his life and an insightful glimpse into this remarkable man. My heart fills with hope as he paints the vision of who we are to be and what our lives here mean.  These were not just words to him.  He believed and lived this to his last day.  He is again freshly present to me in these days. He clearly and prophetically articulated the call of the Church in the modern world. He integrated personal prayer with matters of justice. He advocated for the vulnerable and marginalized.  He believed in the power of interdependent community life as the source of mission and renewal.  The specifics are different for us, but our questions are not much changed from his. 

Father Huntington was, to use a phrase from Theodore Roosevelt, a “man in the arena”.  That is what a monk is to be in his mind – no sideline spectator or armchair critic to the needs of the time, but always ready and eager to plunge in and serve.  Yet he harbored no fantasies about this life, knew full well the difficulties and the obstacles.    The struggles were plentiful (there was never quite enough money, never enough vocations).  He yearned for a wide and lasting legacy in the Church when the Order’s very existence was not guaranteed.

Saint Paul speaks in Galatians of boasting in the cross “by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” This mystical language of Saint Paul is at the front of Father Huntington’s mind in his letter.  Within the risks and unknowns was the cosmic vision of life in Christ.  Through our acts of love and service we proclaim that we here on this quiet piece of land on the shore of the Hudson River in New York, USA in the year 2020 are partnering with God for the renewal of creation, the salvation of the world in and through us.  Both Saint Paul and Father Huntington remind us that only by being crucified to the world are we living in reality, which is a deep mystery: exaltation in humiliation. Fullness in hunger. Freedom in obedience. New, resurrection life in dying to the false self.  
In her biography of Father Huntington, Vida Dutton Scudder recounts a brief but telling anecdote about him. 
“On one occasion”, she writes, “a friend, finding him plunged in deep sadness over the defeat of his earnest efforts in some specific matter, asked him how the failure of his prayers affected him. Father Huntington paused a moment. Then he said gravely: ‘I still praise God for granting the prayers of other men.’ Presently, his features illumined with a solemn glow, he added: ‘And ever, forever, I praise Him for what He is.’”
I am prone to turn saints into super-humans who could rise above unimportant emotions like sadness, whose faith in the good working of God’s good will made them immune from the fleeting concerns of us mere mortals, enraptured as they were in the heavenly vision.  But of course, great leaders such as Father Huntington are very much human, have egos – sometimes very large ones – and wills and agendas and want to get their way, which is usually a good and holy way.  James Otis Sargent Huntington did not always get his way.  The most interesting thing to learn from the lives of saints is what they did when they did not get their way. I catch myself equating thriving with doing what I want, having a certain kind of agency over my life, feeling content about that.  What I know from experience is when I feel stuck, when things do not go the way I want, when I would rather be doing something else, I do not like that very much, but it is then that growth really happens.  Let someone tell me “no” to something I really want to do, and then things get interesting.  My definition of what is important is biased. I want to see our Order grow and thrive, but I don’t want to refill the paper towels.  But it is in those times of uncomfortable growth, by God’s grace, that a deeper reality is disclosed to me – and with it a deeper invitation.  “The world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”  I cannot offer for crucifixion what I don’t know about myself, what is repressed or avoided. I cannot allow to be converted what I do not own. Being crucified to the world is not becoming numb to its joys or sorrows, but even more present to all of the experiences of life.  The paper towels are part of my conversion, too.
We are recipients of a call and as people of passion and commitment bound and vowed to reflect the reign of God and bring it to earth. Inherent in that very call is the encounter with all in and around us which inhibits and blocks the good we see and the good God desires.  If part of what we are about is to imagine what could be, dream what is not yet, work for what we will never live to see, are hearts will get cut and squeezed and wrenched and share with the saints the stifling constraints of these bodies of death because we will always come up short.  Love, and then wait for your heart to break. Then conversion really begins.
  
The sadness which Father Huntington felt so deeply so often, which we feel at various times, is human and therefore holy.  We are to welcome it, be present to it, pray with it.  But that sadness is not the end of the story. It cannot pass judgment on our work, undo our love and service.  It is real, but there is something more real than the sadness.  The bedrock under the soil of sadness, beneath the acedia, despair, desolation we experience about our vocations, our work, whether it matters, whether we are making a difference, is the crucifixion of our wills in union with the Crucified Lord.  As a soul unfurls, the capacity and availability for the breadth of human emotion and experiences blossoms.  And at the cross I lay my emotions and experiences, my gifts, my vision, my work, my plans, so it is all there crucified to me and I to it.  The needs of the Church and the world and my soul, what was done and left undone, all that is me which has been given to me by the Crucified One is offered back to the author and source, and with him laid in the tomb and there, in a wonder and beauty and mystery beyond our imagining raised new – finally and forever whole and pure and perfect.

Amen.

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Sunday, November 22, 2020

Feast of Christ the King A - November 22, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Luc Thuku, OHC

Proper 29 A  - Sunday, November 22, 2020


I don't believe in Kings! I don't believe in Presidents either! I don't believe in any kind of leadership… and if Rob and Bernard would close their ears, I don't believe in superiors either! What, you may ask, led me to this distaste?  Well, my country was colonized by a Kingdom that committed attrocities left, right and centre and the pain is still felt to this day. 

If you are hooked into the current craze on Netflix, The Crown, you also may have encountered some facts that show how dysfunctional, entiltled and ‘bordering evil’ this particular mornachy’s family is. 

We then fought for independence  and we got a president…our own man as we love to say. He was a corrupt, ruthless dictator and his successors in office have followed in his footsteps in ensuring that corruption, exploitation and intimidation are the order of the day even though we claim to be and are regarded as one of the best examples of democacy in Africa, but I believe we are a perfect example of democracy gone bad anywhere! 

As I entered early adulthood, I joined religious life seeking a home and Community, but mostly to belong, and all I got until I encountered Holy Cross, was misunderstandings, wrongful judgements and hatred that I did not deserve. In midlife, I moved to an adoptive country that I loved and at some point that country chose a president who was racist, divisive, mysygonistic, sexist, corrupt, the list goes on…things the devil himself would be ashamed of being associated with! Thankfully the worst of that era will soon be in the past and the future looks a bit promising but a lot of work is needed. 

You are justified to ask if I don’t believe in any form of leadership, why then Am I standing infront of you on the feast of a King, the Feast of Jesus Christ the King of the Universe? The answer to that is as simple as it is complex.  This is because Leadership is as inevitable as it is necessary and the choice is what kind of leadership do I want to have and not whether I should have leadership or not!…plus here and there I have encountered very pleasant leadership although it is sadly an exception and not the norm. 

A few years back in Kenya slighlty before a tighly contested presidential poll,  similar to what we just had here this month or in 2016, a meme was circulated in the internet containing a picture of Jesus Christ the King  and it said..”no matter who is elected president, Jesus Christ is still the King!” Never in America and in the entire world have we needed to hear those words than this present moment! Today’s feast is suggesting to us and celebrating a different kind of leadership than we are used to, Servant leadership! Today’s feast also celebrates intergrity in leadership, honesty, maturity and selflessness, qualities that are almost extinct in our contemporary leaders. I would, therefore, love to invite you to explore this style of leadership with me and hopefully you will be converted with me into moving from not believing or rather from tolerating kingship/Leadership into craving kingship/ Leadersip!
 
In today’s first reading that we heard from the prophesy of  Ezekiel Chapter 34 verses 11 to 16, God assures us that He himself will seek his sheep, meaning us, and rescue them from where they are scattered, gather them together and feed them, and he himself will be the shepherd. He promises to  seek the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the crippled, strengthen the weak, and the fat and strong watch over…in other words, none would be neglected! God declares at the end of verse 16 that “I will feed them in justice”! All of us or at least most of us have lived through different campaign periods by the same politicians. We have heard different promises and pledges of what and how much they will do for us but I don't remember any of them promising to feed us in justice. Although most pretend that they will serve all equally they, and we, know that the major beneficiaries of their rule are their closed circles and those who think like them, not to mention their families and cronies. 

Therefore, God promising a reign of justice for all must have been like music to the ears of the oppressed of the day…. and is still music to my ears and I hope to your ears as well. God goes further in verses 20 - 24 to declare that he himself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. We are mostly used to hearing from the scriptures about the judgement or separation being between sheep and goats, wheat and chaff, good and evil and our minds got accustomed to thinking of “us” versus “them”. Today's first reading is telling us that God will judge sheep against sheep. The strong sheep that pushes the weak sheep around with side and shoulder, thrusting with horns and by so doing take advantage of the weaknesses of the other which more or less we are responsible for. This judgment of God will therefore touch all of us because in God’s vocabulary, ‘’THEM’' does not exist. It is just ‘’US’'! 

The Gospel passage we read today continues where the first reading left to explain to us how this judgement and justice will be dished out. It will be simple and not as elaborate and graphic as some of us would want, or were promised …remember those Sunday school teachers and preachers who say our lives will be displayed as in a video/movie for everyone to see..?
  
It will simply be based on what we did or failed to do to the least of our brethren, our fellow human beings, hence we will be, or are already, judging ourselves. It will be according to the simple tasks that we carry out on daily basis. Feeding others, visiting others, comforting others, being there for others, welcoming others, loving others…is that too difficult to understand? Then I will make it simpler…

”I was a Mexican kid in a cage but you kept quiet, I was turned back at the Southern border sent back to be murdered by dictators and drug cartels but you never championed for me, I was murdered in numerous black men but you kept mum, I suffered ill health for lack of insurance but you said nothing to the policy makers,  I was jobless and called lazy when I sought social security but you breathed out no word about the system that creates inequality, I was a homosexual jailed in Uganda and elsewhere but you said nothing because out of sight out of mind was your approch to issues, I was earning less than my colleagues because I was a woman but you were okey with that, my name was blasphemed by rabid prosperity gospel pastors and ultra conservative priests who distorted my words and misquoted me but you said nothing because you didn't want to risk being seen as judmental, I was denied justice as a person of color but you never came to my rescue”…

The sad thing is that most of us will judge ourselves to damnation because we ignore the simple things and go for huge things while scripture and saints, especially Teresa of Calcutta, keep reminding us that God never asks us to do extraordinary things but to do ordinary things in an extraordinary manner.
 
In the Sundays and many of the weekdays leading up to this feastday, if you have been following the readings, be it from the liturgy of the Eucharist or the Offices, you know that many of the passages are eschatological or apocalyptic in nature. The Church does this not to scare us to submission but to remind us  that all things come to an end! We are coming to the end of this toughest of liturgical years in recent history at the end of this week. We will end what is called Ordinary time as well as begin Advent being reminded that Christ has died, Christ is risen and Christ will come again. This great truth is the reason why we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King on the last day of the liturgical year. It is a reminder to us that while we do not know the day or the hour of Our Lord's retrurn, the day is coming when time will be no more. But even when that day comes, the Lordship of Christ will continue to reign supreme because he is trully the firstborn of all creation and in every way the primacy is his. 

As we celebrate Christ’s kingship over the universe, his Divinity and his Lordship over all that is seen and unseen, it is fitting that we ask ourselves some most important questions. If we know him to be the king of the universe, the second person of the Trinity and our Divine Lord, have we trully made him the Lord over our own lives? Do we through obeying his words treat him each and every day as though he is our King and Lord? Do we serve him as King and worship him as Lord in the way that he deserves to be worshipped and served, and as the gospel reminded us we serve him by serving others especially the less fortunate? Is he the center of our lives as he ought to be if he is truly our King? 

Let us pray as Paul urges us in the second reading this morning from (Ephesians 1:15-23) that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ may give us a Spirit of wisdom and revelation of Him, having the eyes of our hearts enlightened so that we know the Hope to which we have been called to, and the immeasurable  greatness of power in us who believe , all stemming from the power of Christ’s resurrection. 

My brothers and sisters, the message today is simple; and it is this… regardless of who is in Washington or who rules in the capitals of the world, there is only one true King, Jesus Christ! As we celebrate his Kingship on this last Sunday of the liturgical year, let us recall what we said or heard as the Easter candle was lit at the Easter vigil….”Jesus Christ yesterday, today, the beginning and end, the Alpha and the Omega, all times  belongs to him, and all the ages. To him be glory and power through every age forever”!  Christ Conquers! Christ Reigns! Christ Rules! Amen 
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Sunday, November 15, 2020

Twentyfourth Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 28 A - November 15, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC

Proper 28 A  - Sunday, November 15, 2020



Today’s parable is traditionally understood in one of two ways. And I will espouse a third very different way.

*****

In one nutshell, the parable can be read as a representation of what we do between Jesus’ ascension after his resurrection and his return in glory at the end of times.

In another nutshell, the parable can be read as a championing of our capitalist economic system where fructifying your wealth to gain more wealth also gets you God’s approval.

In both of these interpretations, the parable is a positive example of what to aspire to. And it is assumed that the landowner stands in for Christ.

*****

According to the other interpretation I focus on today, Jesus uses the parable as a counterexample of what the Kingdom of God is supposed to be. He exposes instead what the dominant economic system does; it makes the rich wealthier and it impoverishes and marginalizes those who are not so adept at playing the system.

So let me show you why I entertain this third interpretation as a possible understanding of the parable of the talents. I would like to rename this story told by Jesus as the Parable of Wealth Accumulation.


*****

In Jesus’ time, economic views were very different from our time.

First, the material wealth of a society was considered as a finite amount that was distributed among everyone. The only way of getting a bigger share of the pie was to make other people’s share smaller. Those who amassed great wealth were frowned upon as less honorable members of society. It was assumed that, like tax collectors who took their cut from taxes, the rich had acquired their wealth at the expense of others. 

Honor, not material wealth was the measure of a family’s value. 

Most people would have been peasants. The economic elites would have been a small minority; mostly landowners and a small merchant class. Most people would have had no idea of how to exploit a very large opportunity in the merchant economy.

In the odd case that you would have owned a valuable asset digging a hole to hide it and preserve it was considered an appropriate risk management strategy and an honorable way of holding wealth.

Also, usury, the gaining of interest on a loan, was against Jewish law. Putting your money in deposit with a banker in order to earn interest would have been seen as spiritually illicit and dishonorable for both the banker and the depositor.

*****

Then there are the particulars of our rich man.

He’s a very rich man. A talent in this text does not refer to a God-given or an acquired capacity to do something well. Think of a talent as a currency, a very weighty currency. A talent represents the equivalent of 15 years of wages. 

To put it in perspective for us, let us think of 15 times the median annual income of a contemporary American. That would amount to a little over a million dollars!

So, our rich man has, at least, a disposable wealth of eight million dollars to give to his slaves to look after. In Jesus’ time, most great wealth would come from extensive land ownership.

And our rich man, absents himself from his lands for a long time. Enough time, for two of his slaves to double the money he has given them to take care of. We are talking about a landowner that has enough resources to absent himself from his business for several years and has enough able delegates to manage his wealth while away.

Absentee landowners were frowned upon in first century Palestine. They were considered as getting richer at the expense of the wider community, which they were. And that was dishonorable. They became relationally disinterested and disinvested from their community of origin. In the end, they were likely not to care enough for the wellbeing of those communities who supported their enrichment.

*****

So where does that leave us with this Parable of Wealth Accumulation?

I believe Jesus is showing his audience that he understands well the system of economic domination most of his auditors are struggling with. He shows the landowner to be focused on wealth accumulation and not at all on honor acquisition and maintenance. 

The landowner reaps harvests beyond the limits of his fields on the property of his neighbors. This is instead of the honorable leaving of an unharvested margin for poor gleaners to come and gather the rests of the harvest. And the landowner supports usury as a passive investment for his money instead of using his disposable wealth to make interest-free loans to those in need in his community.

The slave who was given a single talent, on the other hand, did the risk-free and honorable thing for his master. He preserved the value of the capital he was given. Was he so irresponsible to think that his eight-million-dollar master was rich enough to not need more enrichment? Was he so irresponsible to accept that managing such a large sum of money was beyond his wits?

One wonders what the master’s reaction would have been to the other slaves if their investments had been unsuccessful and they had returned less than the original capital to their master.

In the end, Jesus puts in the mouth of the master the words that describe how the “system” works. The ways of the world are that: “to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”

Tell me. Does this landowner act as the God who taught us to love one another, to love our enemies and to care for the least of us?

*****

So, I believe this Parable of Wealth Accumulation is an indictment of the economic domination system of Jesus’ time and a contrast to what the Kingdom of God is.

For present-day Americans, we would do well to consider that income and wealth inequalities have been increasing in our own society for four decades. How does our current system make the rich wealthier and not care enough for the poorer ones among us?

A good contrast to today’s parable is another parable in the Gospel according to Matthew. It is the parable of the vineyard workers (Matthew 20:1-7) where a present and engaged landowner keeps hiring workers throughout the day and pays them each a full day’s wages at the end of the day.

*****

God is not an absent landowner. God is a present and engaged grower of community as well as a grower of the fruits of the earth. Sure, God relishes our use of our God-given talents to do our share of the work. But God wants us all to be provided for according to our needs, not our greed. We can trust in God. We don’t need to enrich ourselves at the expense of others to gain independence from God.

Amen

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Sunday, November 8, 2020

Twentythird Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 27 A - November 8, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. John Forbis, OHC

Proper 27 A  - Sunday, November 8, 2020



T.S. Eliot in “East Coker” of the Four Quartets writes, “In my beginning is my end.”  If there is anything this morning’s scripture teaches us is that it is not a time to be smug.  As Amos tells us, “Why do you want the day of the Lord?  It is darkness, not light.”  W.B. Yeats comments in his poem The Second Coming:

The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep 
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Why would we want the day of the Lord, indeed?!?! 
  
Certainly, the threat of Amos, Paul’s strange language and five virgins being barred from entering the wedding banquet are reasons for uneasiness.  However, these passages raise other questions for me.  

Who is Amos really speaking to and why?  And what is Paul really speaking about?  What about the 10 virgins?  Who are they?  Who are the wise virgins and who are the foolish ones?  They are all bridesmaids, friends of the bride after all.

Perhaps the questions I am asking are beside the point.  But something tells me that dismissing them too easily might mean missing an opportunity to meet the bridegroom when he comes.  

Amos speaks to a people who are in great expectation for the Lord.  And yet, he refutes any and every claim that the coming will be pretty.  Those who escape a lion are only then to be surprised by a bear.  God takes no interest or even pleasure in their “solemn assemblies”.  The Lord will not accept anything they have to offer.  What the Israelites think is going to get them right with God ends up being exactly what God despises.  Who are God’s people now?

Paul writes to the Thessalonians “ … we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord will be caught up in the clouds together with those who have died to meet the Lord in the air …”  Quite frankly, on the day after the funeral of my father, I have absolutely no idea what this means.  It confounds me, even frustrates me.  

The foolish virgins (or in another translation, the silly virgins) compound mistake after mistake.  In their desperation, they say, “Give us some oil.”  It was a demand, not a request and they were demanding the wrong thing. They could have figured out that the light of the wise virgins or even more so the bridegroom was enough to bring them to the banquet.  Instead they went on some wild goose chase in the dark and were left outside the door.  Even more so the wise ones could have shared their light if not their oil.  It seems strange that no one thought of this.  

Sure the foolish made their decisions and showed bad judgment, but perhaps the actions of the wise virgins or refusal to act begs the judgment that Amos brings down upon the Israelites.  

The bridegroom is delayed.  Paul thought he would come during his lifetime, during the lifetime of the Thessalonian church.  He was wrong.  10 virgins expected him earlier and only 5 were prepared when he finally does come.  And Amos … well, Amos describes his coming as not something to celebrate.  

Maybe the key resides in the coming being unexpected, surprising, leaving unanswered questions, even throwing us off balance.  And so we are kept on our toes, unsettled, uncomfortable, but awake.  We are brought through Christ’s death and resurrection in Baptism itself to be people of God, and as people of God, we can no longer be people who are complacent or asleep.  We are to be unsettled people, restless people, people who keep watch with love, people who long for justice and righteousness, people who are truly alive.  And thus maybe even be people who unsettle others and ourselves as well.

In his book, The Sacred Voice is Calling, John Neafsey, a clinical psychologist and theology lecturer, who has focused much of his work on vocation and social conscience surmises, “… An uneasy conscience may be one of the best places to listen for the whisper of the Spirit that calls us to a better way.”    

Just when we think we know when the bridegroom is coming or even what he will look like, he shows us something entirely other.  This gives us the capacity to show mercy and compassion.  Righteousness is not about piety, but it is about empathy and solidarity with those who may feel they have no access to the bridegroom.  When we are living in the truth of love, then, our worship truly expresses the mystery and disruption of God’s loving grace.  This is not something that the world around us always wants to see.  So many in the world would rather snuff that light out.      

Let’s face it.  We have been in the dark and have barred our own selves from the banquet.  We are in need of guidance.  But the call in the middle of the night may not be just to meet the bridegroom, but to guide others to meet him as well.  Then, the community is whole.  Then, 10 virgins get into the banquet.  Perhaps for this we are to be prepared.

The true hope of all this apocalyptic literature is that no matter where we are or think we are, in our inadequacy, in our bad decisions and the consequences that come of those, even if we think we are in the dark and are not recognised, the bridegroom comes at any time, even at midnight, to meet us.  Justice rolls and righteousness flows like mighty waters. And we are transformed, transformed as though we were caught up into a strong current right up into the air as Paul tells us.  Christ draws us into this conversion.  The banquet is still open to us and the guiding lamp in the middle of the night as well as our own lamps can bring all of us there.  

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Sunday, November 1, 2020

All Saint, November 1, 2020, Middlebury, VT

St Stephen's Episcopal Church, Middlebury, VT, West Park, NY

Br. Rober Leo Sevensky, OHC

All Saints  - Sunday, November 1, 2020


Many of you may be familiar with the term Sacred Triduum. It is the title given in church circles to the last three days of Holy Week, specifically to the period from the evening of Holy Thursday through Easter Sunday. Triduum simply means three days, and those three days constitute a pivotal moment in the spiritual and worship life of the Christian community. 

Some years ago, the contemporary Christian writer and mystic Cynthia Bourgeault began to draw attention to another kind of sacred triduum, to what she calls the fall or autumn triduum as opposed to the spring or Holy Week one. And what she is referring to is the period that we are in the midst of right now, the three days spanning Halloween, the feast of All Saints, and the commemoration of all the faithful departed popularly known as All Souls Day. Bourgeault says that these three days: “…do in fact comprise their own sacred passage which is not only authentic in and of itself, but also a powerful mirror image of the energy flowing through the spring triduum.”  

Both periods are about the passage from death to life, a passage which is at the heart of the Christian mystical path, though the fall one is much more interior, personal and reflective, with its own peculiar perspective and tone, shaped as it is by nature and the natural symbols and events that surround us, at least in this northern hemisphere.  Whereas in spring we are comforted by signs of new life and of nature putting forth hints of new growth that help us reflect on the promise of resurrection, in the fall we see signs of passing away, of limits, of change, and of death and decay along with the poignant beauty which accompanies it and which, in a normal year, draws legions to places like Vermont to share in that yearly spectacle. 

Even as a child I was fascinated by these three days, at once magical, frightening, transformative and transfiguring. From the excitement of Halloween, wandering streets with friends dressed and camouflaged as an alter ego and well before the days of helicopter parents, to the solemnity of church on All Saints Day to our ethnic tradition of lighting candles on the graves of our ancestors on All Souls evening, there was a unity and a mystery which was palpable. 

There is of course something of nostalgia here, and not everyone has this kind of history or connection. 

But we can still ask ourselves what this fall triduum means for us today, this year, here and now. 

In preparing for this message, I came across the title of a talk by a Unitarian minister who, in speaking of these three days, used three words: scared, scarred, and sacred.  These words aptly describe this triduum not only in general but especially this year of 2020. They capture our situation and our shared journey accurately and forcefully.  

Let's start with scared.  Halloween, the first day of our triduum, is indeed scary. It's supposed to be. We confront, and intentionally so, forces and beings that seem both dangerous and beyond our control, and through our revelry and costuming we enter them, face them, and even mock them. It’s the time for gory costumes and horror movies. But this year we don't need Halloween to frighten us. God knows, we have more than enough reason to be scared at the state of things. There is of course the Covid pandemic reminding us daily of sickness, hardship, and death. And there is the national election, which is underway now, one in which the stakes are critical and whose results will be, without exaggeration, of historic proportions.  

The outcome remains uncertain, and its follow-up may well lead to violence and civil unrest. We see a body politic and a civil society deeply, deeply divided and antagonistic. And all of this of course plays out against the background of climate change and the unveiling of racial disparities and inequities that are part of a pattern of systemic racism in our nation. Yes, we are scared, and we have every reason to be.  And it's hard to see how our Halloween traditions can help us to confront these shadows and our hidden societal selves, though that is what we are called to do.  

Scared, yes. And scarred. For none of us comes through life without being wounded. And these days are now filled with a pain and grief which scars both body and psyche, soul and conscience. In this context, I think of the remembrance of all the faithful departed which is All Souls Day. We remember all those people whom we have known who have touched our lives, for better and for worse, those dear and not so dear ones who have been part of the fabric of our own story. And in remembering them, we simultaneously remember ourselves and our own process of becoming. 

There is a beautiful hymn our Episcopal hymnal appointed for burials, number 357. The words are contemporary though the haunting melody is late medieval: 

Think, O Lord, in mercy on the souls of those, who, in faith gone from us, now in death repose. Here mid stress and conflict toils can never cease; there, the warfare ended, bid them rest in peace.

Often were they wounded in the deadly strife; heal them, Good Physician, with the balm of life. Every taint of evil, frailty and decay, good and gracious Savior, cleanse and purge away.

We are all wounded by life and need the healing of the Good Physician. We are all scarred.  But remember: so is Jesus.  And his wounds have become glorious.  So, too, may ours.

And here we are today, All Saints Day, smack in the middle of this Fall Triduum, scared and scarred to be sure.  But also held up by and called closer and closer toward the Sacred, the Holy One, in whose image and likeness we are made and whose destiny is to be restored to that image and likeness in all its fullness.  What I love about All Saints Day is that it directs our gaze to men and women in whom we see glimmers—and more than glimmers—of the truth and power of that call lived out in trying circumstances, circumstances not so different from our own. We see men and women who, perhaps for the whole of their lifetimes or perhaps for just one brief, shining moment, mirrored and re-presented that creative and compassionate Love that made us and sustains us all.  In doing this, they were changed, sanctified and became for others—and I hope for themselves as well—burning and shining lights.  

God has numbered us among a vast company of believers, a cloud of witnesses whose examples and prayers encourage us to go on and to go on together, through and beyond this pandemic, beyond this election, and beyond our own uncertainties, doubts, fears and follies.  If they came safely through the great ordeal, as Revelation tells us, washing their robes in the blood of the Lamb, so can I and so can you and so can we all.

Cynthia Bourgeault ended her brief article on the Fall Triduum with these words:  “I encourage all of you who have the inclination to keep these days as best you can for this quiet but extraordinary rite of passage.”  Scared, scarred, sacred. Reflect on and face our fears.  Tend our wounds. Say aloud the names that call out to us for remembrance. Light a candle. Cultivate stillness.  Be at peace.
God is God.  Let God’s will be done…today, tomorrow, Tuesday and beyond. 

Amen.

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All Saints - November 1, 2020

 Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owern, OHC

All Saints  - Sunday, November 1, 2020



In the name of the one God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen.

The way of sanctity is a hidden way. It lies in plain sight, but only revealed to the eyes of faith. With the eyes of the heart opened through the surrender of our whole self to God, we begin to see the logic of the universe: a logic in which power is fulfilled in weakness, love is made perfect in seeming loss, and life flows from the heart of death. 

Jean-Pierre de Caussade, in a collection of talks we’ve come to call Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence, assures us that “[Sanctity] does not require miracles; [miralces] are only for the benefit of those who need such testimonies and signs. Faithful souls do not rely on them. Content in their unknowing, they leave them to be a light for others, and accept for themselves what is most ordinary: God’s order, God’s way which tests their faith by concealing, not revealing himself.” 

There are, of course, many holy souls whose examples draw us closer to God. But “hidden in the Church, too, are countless saints who are made only to shine in heaven, who shed no light in this life and who live and die in complete obscurity.”

Today we remember and give thanks for all of God’s saints—those known to us by their wonderful deeds and testimony. But also, and perhaps especially, for that band of silent witnesses known only to God, whose lives of submission and surrender uphold and sustain our pilgrimage without our ever knowing it.

This hidden way of sanctity is a way of undoing and unknowing. 

In the daily confrontation with ourselves we have the opportunity to loosen our hold on our own righteousness, our own strength, and our own assured judgment of good and evil. In so doing, we learn to rely solely on God’s goodness and God’s mercy. After a lifetime of surrender to what Caussade poetically calls “the sacrament of the present moment,” we begin to cultivate the saintly virtue of “holy indifference,” which is the conviction that, whatever the outward appearance of things, in the silence of God’s heart, God is bringing all things to their perfection. 

This task is difficult, to put it mildly. The world around us looks so dark and so frightening. And often, the world within looks just as fearsome.

It is no exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of an apocalypse and at the precipice of a holocaust. I don’t think most of us could have imagined how bad the last four years would get. And in the midst of such chaos, we might agree with Caussade that God often seems to be concealing, not revealing, herself.

John’s apocalyptic vision warns us from too easily judging God’s purpose by what we see around us. Like Paul, he knew that “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 6:12) John’s community, like ours, was surrounded with political and religious hypocrisy. They, too, saw the wicked triumph. They, too, stared into the bloody maw of an evil born of the marriage of power and religion and fed by bigotry and violence. 

But to John God unveiled—apocalpysed—God’s hidden work of salvation. God assured John, and assures us now, that however deep this present darkness, God is, even here and even now, making all things new.

Facing similar persecution in the late second century, Tertullian reminded his community that “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Where the blood of the martyrs is spilled, a new creation is born. Golgotha is unmasked as the new Eden and the Cross of Jesus as the Tree of Life.

All sanctity, which is to say all sainthood, flows from the blood of martyrdom, from the seed of a defeat that is the truest kind of victory. All those we revere for their holy lives were and are martyrs, which is to say both that their whole lives read as a living testimony to the self-sacrificing love of God and that they each, in their particular way, surrendered the entirety of themselves to God’s purpose, holding nothing back, clinging to nothing, becoming nothing so that, in them and through them, God could become everything.

Not every saint, of course, was or is called to a bloody and violent end. Many, perhaps, most of them poured out their lives in quieter quarters—feeding the poor, forming and teaching souls, proclaiming God’s favor to those on the margins, or leading lives of contemplation, quietly suffering death day after day in their cells so that, crucified with Christ, Christ might live in them.

And yet, when we start down the road to the Cross, we must accept, and even come to celebrate the fact that we may be called quite literally to lay down our lives in witness to God’s loving mercy. The time in which we live may demand such witness, not made hastily in the spirit of self-assertion but made humbly in gratitude for the enormous gift of God’s tender mercy and in service to all God’s children. Such lives, surrendered and returned to the one from whom they sprang, shine like the morning star calling us all home to God.

A little later in John’s revelation, we read that those robed in white “have conquered [the evil one] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life in the face of death.” The Greek translated ‘the word of their testimony,’ is […] literally ‘the logic of their martyrdom.’

Our brother Roy, himself a great and often hidden witness to God’s mercy, commented on this verse that “Jesus’ death and resurrection reveal a logic inextricably woven into the fabric of the universe. In that divine logic unjust and uncompassionate powers have reached their limits when crosses and shotguns have done their worst. They can go no further than death. But the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection is that God can.

“When a servant of God does not cling to life in the face of a cross or a shotgun, the logic of oppressive empires and racist cultures has run its course; their powers and its weapons have done all they can do. But God’s logic persists; God’s powerless weakness—whose weapons are justice and compassionate solidarity and love—continues its patient, persistent, non-violent subversion of oppressive empires and racist cultures. Jesus does not conquer Rome, but Jesus outlasts Rome.”

We must not hang our hope on defeating the political and religious darkness of this present age. No matter the results of Tuesday’s election, the world will still be plagued by racism and the rape of the earth and its peoples. Power and violence will still have their say. That is not to say that our political reality is inconsequential, or that we Christians being formed for sanctity should withdraw from political engagement. No, our faith impels us to witness in every area of our lives. 

But we must not put our trust in rulers nor in any child of earth. Our salvation belongs to God alone. It is for that very reason that we must never despair of God’s mercy, whatever the outward appearance of our time and place or of our own lives.

“I have learned by experience,” wrote Thomas Cranmer to Peter Martyr “[...] that God never shines forth more brightly, and pours out the beams of his mercy and consolation, or of strength and firmness of spirit, more clearly or impressively upon the minds of his people, than when they are under the most extreme pain and distress, both of mind and body, that he may then more especially show himself to be the God of his people, when he seems to have altogether forsaken them; then raising them up when they think he is bringing them low; then glorifying them when he is thought to be confounding them; then quickening them when he is thought to be destroying them.”

No, Jesus does not conquer Rome, and nor will we conquer the racist and oppressive empires that threaten our world today. But encouraged by the martyrdom of the whole host of the sanctified that surround us, God can make us into a living apocalypse a doorway to the kingdom of heaven, hidden in plain sight, through which God may enter the world to be with her people.

May it be so. Amen. 

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