Proper 12 A - July 30, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement OHC

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 12 A, July 30, 2023

 

1 Kings 3:5-12
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33,44-52

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

Lord, help us to know with assured confidence that even in the midst of our fearful lives, your are here with us...where you have always been. Amen.

According to an open letter signed by some of the leading AI specialists, artificial intelligence could pose a "risk of extinction" to humanity on the scale of nuclear war or pandemics, and mitigating that risk, they say, should be a "global priority.” The one-sentence open letter is both brief and ominous. But AI is only the latest ominous reality of a century of rapid technological development that has seen the radical transformation of societies. And while much of this transformation has been good, much, I would admit, has not served human life well and has resulted in technology’s domination over it. If you doubt this, go watch “Oppenheimer,” now in theaters. Change is a necessary and vital part of progress, but not all change is progress.

And whether change has been for the betterment or the detriment of our societies, the rapid change we’ve been experiencing in this past century has had an undeniable destabilizing effect and unleashes a host of questions about life...it’s meaning, it’s direction, and it’s end. And beyond this, we are now faced, perhaps more than ever before, with our own fragility. Human life has never been more vulnerable to the elements of nature or to the nature of our own selfish egos.

What has resulted is a growing malaise and dread about being alive. Is there ground upon which we can now stand with any assurance or hope? Is the only option now the uncertainty and insecurity of shifting sand? All the more now, then, is the church and the gospel entrusted to her necessary and vital. But perhaps our gospel message needs to be re-contextualized to speak effectively to the needs of the people of our time and to our precarious circumstances.

Christianity is about a lot of things, and we can sometimes get lost on the periphery and lose sight of the core. The heart of Christianity is the gospel: that God has not left us alone to face a world ready to destroy itself but has come near to us in Christ and has revealed to us that indeed everything IS NOT shifting sand...if we just believe, we’ll come to know that there is a reality more solid, more stable, and more assured than our minds could ever imagine. We come to know that the chaos of the world is nothing to fear because our feet now stand on the Rock that is Christ. And we come to know a God who is not afraid of chaos. On the contrary, God seems to relish chaos and specializes in using it to create wonder.

Many years ago when I was going through my own personal existential crisis, plagued by chaotic thoughts of self-loathing, self-doubt, and shame, questioning my own value, largely ignorant about who God really is or who I really am, I found myself drawn to study St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. During the weeks of this study back in the mid-nineties, my world was radically transformed. And no other piece of writing has changed me to such an extent since. In it a whole new image of God was unveiled to me...and in light of this image, a whole new image of myself began to make its assured appearance.

To put it succinctly, Paul, in Romans, is attempting to articulate the utterly unique gift and the transformative power that has been given to us in Christ. After demonstrating that everyone, Gentile as well as Jew, lives under the power of sin... and, thus, that everyone needs God to save them from sin’s domination...he then goes on to speak about this gift of salvation coming to us in the person of God’s own Son, Jesus Christ. It is pure gift. There is nothing that we can do to convince God to give it to us, for it is given solely out of God’s generous initiative. “God chose us while we were yet sinners,” as Paul puts it. Into the human heart that has been afflicted with the sickness and darkness that sin brings is imputed the grace of God that comes to us in Christ, that we receive simply by saying “yes” to this gift in an act of faith. In our baptism we die with Christ and are raised into his resurrected life and become newly created, “the old has passed away, behold all has become new.” Paul instructs us to now live according to this new created self by nurturing it and admonishes us to stop nurturing the old self. The battle between these two selves will continue but our truth is not the old self, the surface self tossed to and fro by the chaos of life...and it never really was...our truth is the deeper self, the beloved child of God, called, justified, and now glorified in God’s all-consuming presence.

Who can, now, separate us from the love of Christ? Paul is unequivocal... there is nothing... absolutely nothing... that can separate us from the all-consuming love of God’s presence. For the person in Christ, we have penetrated through the multiple layers of sand and hit ground zero... the point of pure Love... unconditioned and absolute... and the ground of our own true self, hidden with Christ in God.

This truth would inspire the 1966 poem of Thomas Merton entitled “All the Way Down,”

I went down
Into the cavern
All the way down

To the bottom of the sea.
I went down lower
Than Jonas and the whale
No one ever got so far down
As me.

I went down lower
Than any diamond mine
Deeper than the lowest hole In Kimberly
All the way down
I thought I was the devil
He was no deeper down
Than me.

And when they thought
That I was gone forever
That I was all the way
In hell
I got right back into my body
And came back out
And rang my bell.

No matter how
They try to harm me now 

No matter where
They lay me in the grave
No matter what injustices they do
I've seen the root
Of all that believe.

I've seen the room
Where life and death are made
And I have known
The secret forge of war
I even saw the womb
That all things come from
For I got down so far!

But when they thought
That I was gone forever
That I was all the way
In hell
I got right back into my body
And came back out
And rang my bell.

Merton's description of the journey into his depths borders on the terrible and horrific, but only in these depths and in confronting these horrors does the image of God within us begin to shine. James Finley writes of this poem:

“Merton leads us along the journey to God in which the self that begins the journey is not the self that arrives. The self that begins is the self that we thought ourselves to be. It is this self that dies along the way until in the end 'no one' is left. This 'no one' is our true self. It is the self that stands prior to all that is this or that. It is the self in God, the self bigger than death yet born of death. It is the self the Father
forever loves.”

This transformed self is the result of seeing the pearl of great price and selling everything for the one thing necessary. It’s the result of seeing through the lies of a fabricated, illusory existence... through the shifting sand of one’s life... and catching a glimpse, however faintly, of the dazzling rock that is Christ... and making a choice to live anchored in the eternal even while we continue to live amidst the crashing waves of the temporal. To be mature in Christ is to learn how to unlock the hidden potential of this hidden self, to plant oneself firmly in the hidden Ground of Love and to enjoy the gift of the gospel...the peace which passes understanding and the love that knows no bounds.

Then, with fearless and daring confidence, we can stand up boldly in the face of the barrage of threats to human life with which our modern world confronts us and declare with prophetic certitude: “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus my Lord.” Amen.

Proper 11 A - July 23, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC

Proper 11, Year A - Sunday, July 23, 2023

 

Isaiah 44:6-8
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

Click here for an audio of the sermon

“The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” is an episode from the original Twilight Zone series which aired on March 4, 1960.  Written by Rod Serling, the creator of the show and one of the main writers, it showcases his unflinching insight into the human condition in the form of a science fiction parable that spoke to 1960s America and, because there is nothing new under the sun, applies to our world as well.
     A bright flash crosses the evening sky. Curious, a group of Maple Street neighbors gather outside to ponder the event.  Then the strangeness commences - lights flicker, then power goes out, rumors of alien invasion creep in from the edges of the darkness. Fear rises in a slow boil.  The neighbors, so nice, so like us, grow desperate in their need to understand what is happening and reassert normalcy and control in the face of events that make no rational sense. Maybe someone knows something. Maybe someone is keeping a secret.  Guns appear, one is used to kill. The fear turns to mayhem - everyone against everyone.  The irony of the title is that the monsters never appear on Maple Street, they don’t have to - the monsters are already there - they have been there the whole time.  The fear of something monstrous outside has hooked these neighbors to become the thing they fear in order to conquer the foreign presence, and they infect each other.  As the episode ends, the camera pans out from Maple Street to a nearby hill, where we see a pair of otherworldly invaders observing the madness.
One says to the other, “Understand the procedure now?  Just stop a few of their machines, and radios, telephones, and lawnmowers - throw them into darkness for a few hours and then sit back and watch the pattern.”
“The pattern is always the same?”
“With few variations, they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves.  All we need do is sit back and watch.”
“I take it this place, this Maple Street, it is not unique.”
“By no means, the world is full of Maple Streets. We go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other, one to the other, one to the other.”
Rod Serling adds this epilogue to what we have just seen:
“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices… For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own - for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”

The irony in the episode is that the aliens understand human nature at a deeper level than the humans.  Rod Serling living in 1960 America sees the procedure in action.  The country had just come through the McCarthy era and was in the depths of the Cold War and ongoing racial segregation in the South. His call is simple and profound - we must look at what we are doing to each other and stop the slide to self-destruction.  The ones who proclaimed themselves the purifiers, the gatekeepers, the greatness-returners, employed evil language and behavior in the name of defending what they believed was right and moral.    
But Maple Street leaves us in despair, without a solution or an alternative other than the knowledge that collective prejudice and suspicion turn us into monsters. What is lacking is a larger narrative, some hopeful mode of resistance to patterns of suspicion and violence, and the promise that the world is held in loving care and is moving toward a just resolution that sets it right and sets us free.
Jesus created worlds familiar to us with surprising twists and unexpected turns.  We call them parables.  He, too, holds up a mirror, warns us about what lurks within us, but does not leave us there. He models and offers a way of being that expands the possibility of what we can hope for and beckons us to live with the memory of a future that informs how we live in the present.
Continuing from the parable of the soils we heard last week, the good growing plants that bring life are an image of we who have heard the word and put it into practice.  If the parable of the soils locates the identity of a disciple as one in whom life grows and flourishes, then the parable of the weeds and the wheat speaks of living our identity.  
This week the wheat seeds are sown, an enemy sows weeds among the wheat, both grow, and the crisis point is what to do now.  The slaves inquire about pulling out the weeds, but the landowner knows better than to do that before the wheat is ready for harvest.  He is the Christ figure, the voice of wisdom and perspective in the parable.  He can perceive what is below the surface and in the future: “Let both of them grow together until the harvest”, he tells the slaves.  The landowner loves the field. He asks the slaves to trust him.  It may look like the wheat is about to be ruined, the slaves want to fix the problem, but the mystery is that the best action in that time before the harvest is no action.  With patience, at the right time, the wheat’s full head of grain will appear and the field will yield a harvest of good food.
The surprise of the parable is that the workers are not prevented from doing evil or exhorted to do good, but restrained from doing what they understand to be good and helpful and that precisely in that forbearance is the preservation and preparation for the harvest they desire. In the world of the parable, what the slaves see is not all there is, what they fear happening is not going to happen, what looks like death is actually the only way to life.
The “let them” here is the same word sometimes translated in other places as “suffer”, “permit”, or “forgive”.  In the world of this field in its mixed state of wheat and weeds, as an image of our world, the only option available to us if we want to get any usable grain out of it is to refrain from acting on what seems good in the moment, trust a larger, longer perspective, and wait in belief that what feels like helplessness in endangering the wheat is actually faithfulness in saving it.  “Let them both grow together” is not passive resignation.  It does not mean that we ignore the weeds, pretend they are wheat, or that the wheat is to become weeds because it is next to weeds, or that the crop is ruined. What it does mean is that God alone intervenes and separates and enacts ultimate and righteous judgment.
When so much Christian language is about doing, going, success, growth, and effectiveness, this parable serves as a check and corrective on our over-inflated ideas about our roles and engages us to be cooperative participants in and witnesses to this larger and longer process of redemption that is totally designed by God, in God’s control, and unfolding in God’s time.  Most of us are not going to go out intending to harm.  But we are prone to the subtle ways we collude with evil in the voice that says, “maybe God is a little slow, maybe God needs a reminder, a push. Could we pull out a few of the weeds, please? We would feel so much better!”
The human vocation is not to eradicate evil from the world.  As good and important are our efforts to pray for, model, and declare reconciliation, healing, peace, justice, and equality, we will be doing that until the end of the age because there will be a need for it.  Domination in the name of justice, for right ends, is still domination.  Disdain and judgment toward those who we believe are wrong, who in fact may be perpetrating harm, is not justifiable because we have now added our harm to their harm.  The social frenzy of demonizing the other as if we can remain separate and untouched by the demonizing is the dynamic Jesus is naming here.  The wheat cannot untangle its roots from the weeds without killing itself.  Beware any rhetoric which assuredly points toward the guilty, the unclean, the dangerous, and promises to purify the field and guarantee a utopian world of safety and protection - the procedure is being restarted.  Robert Capon says about this parable, “The only result of a truly dedicated campaign to get rid of evil will be the abolition of literally everybody.”  
In the end, God does what only God can do in God’s way and time - is liberate creation from sin and evil and death.  In the end, the landowner gets everything and the enemy gets nothing but a lost night’s sleep.  This is a hard, but necessary look at ourselves, our power, and God’s justice.  Real power, then, is to refuse to go down with the weeds, to remember that hope is forbearance and justice is carrying on with growing in the face of that which seeks to destroy us.   It may not look like it today, we may not be able to imagine it yet, but the harvest is coming.  The wheat is going to be fine.

Proper 10 A - July 16, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC

Proper 10, Year A - Sunday, July 16, 2023

 

Isaiah 55:10-13
Romans 8:1-11
Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

 

 

Click here for an audio of the sermon

The Parable of the Sower, also known as the Parable of the Soils, is one of few parables to feature in all three synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke).

The purpose of a parable is “to tease the mind into active thought” (C.H. Dodd). And it’s OK to have several possible interpretations, even if they do not necessarily agree with one another.

So it’s a little bit of a let down that the gospelers felt compelled to give us an interpretation. Whether the interpretation was spoken by Jesus in his own time is a hotly debated issue.

Once an interpretation is authorized by no less than the Son of God, it is difficult to let our imagination come up with a variety of interpretations.

But bear with me. I will venture one few imagined interpretations anyway.

Jesus’s telling of the parable is sandwiched between the admonition to “Listen!” (3b) and the admonition “Let anyone with ears listen” (9). So we are invited to really pay attention to the possibilities of the text.

There are three potential areas of attention in this parable. Each one is rich in interpretive possibilities; the Sower, the Four Soils, the Miraculous Harvest.

First, let’s focus on the Sower. In first century Palestine, the soil was not cultivated prior to seeding. The sower cast the seed everywhere without prejudging where it would flourish. And then he plowed the field afterward to make the seed penetrate the soil. Then you had to trust God would provide the rain and wait for growth.

The next possible area of attention are the Four Soils.
- There is the hardened soil of the path,
- the shallow soil with lots of rocks right underneath (sounds like the Hudson Valley to me),
- the thorny or weedy soil,
- and the good soil.

The third area of attention in this parable is the Miraculous Yield. A reasonable cereal yield is to get four to five, maybe seven times as much grain as was sown. Jesus speaks of a thirtyfold to hundredfold yield. That kind of yield would truly be miraculous and would guarantee a super bumper crop no matter how many seeds did not come to that.

Our Sower sows with abandon, without prejudging the results. Is our Sower God or the Son of Man. His kind of sowing reminds me of Jesus saying earlier in the same gospel according to Matthew that
“[the Father] makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (Matthew 5:45)

Now, are we the seed expected to sprout, grow and bear fruit? If so, we are in less of a predicament than the seed in the parable. Compared to seeds we have options. We can sometimes change some of our conditions, or move where conditions will lead us to flourish. Fate is more malleable for humans than for seeds.

And do the four soils represent chapters of our own lives?
Have we at times not been so hardened that it was difficult to let the good news touch us?
Have we never been so troubled by adversity that we couldn’t focus on the good news?
Have the appeal of success, esteem, romance and riches lured us away from our spiritual foundations?

I do not believe we are predestined to be one or the other type of soil once and for all. God has given us agency. We can awaken and evolve. That’s part of what you are here for this morning. Letting the good news in and growing with it.

But maybe, the parable is not about us individually. Maybe it isn’t about who we are, and where we are at in our spiritual journey. Maybe this is not a call to introspection: what kind of soil am I now? Maybe this is not about our conversion of heart or metanoia.

Could it be that this parable is about more good news than most of us are ready for?
Not everyone will yield fruit thirty, sixty or hundredfold. But if enough good soil is found for the seed, this miraculous yield will more than make up for the seed that did not flourish.

Maybe the Sower isn’t so foolish after all to sow everywhere. If even a few seeds grow to this amazing fruition, the harvest will be plentiful. And if this about the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom will be available to all regardless of their yield or lack of it.

That sounds like the infinitely merciful and loving God I am in love with.

It may also be that Jesus isn’t just telling this parable.

He says it’s about rejecting or receiving the word about the kingdom of heaven. It may be that he is living this parable as he tells it.

After all, crowds welcomed his signs and his message. But few persevered in the face of adversity.

Yet, from those very few, multitudes grew to know Him. Multitudes have come to believe his message of redeeming love through the centuries. Many embody this message of love in how they live. And their lives touch many more.

They yield thirtyfold, sixtyfold and a hundredfold and they may not even come to know of it during their earthly lives. So let us not worry about what kind of seed we are. Let’s focus on spreading God’s Love.


For us to grow into fruitful disciples of Jesus, we must listen, understand, properly attend to His message, and doggedly persevere in the love of God and neighbor.

And rejection of Jesus’ message by many need not stop us coming to fruition. Encountering rejection of God’s loving message does not mean the message is wrong, or that our efforts at broadcasting it is folly. Look at the lives and deaths of Jesus and his apostles.

It simply is a fact of life, not everyone will take in the message and flourish with it. But some will. And by God’s grace, flourish beautifully and plenteously, they will.

The kingdom of heaven is like a bountiful crop produced in spite of what seem to be overwhelming setbacks.
Do trust in God’s abundance.

You are the instruments of God’s Love in the world. Do consent to God’s presence and action within you. And trust that God is crafting redemption through you, whether you know it or not.

A bountiful harvest will result from your spreading his Love broadly in the world. We don’t need to figure out, and anticipate how it will happen. We don’t need to be selective about where the Love is poured out.

We need to love God and neighbor. Let’s start with that.

Amen.

The Feast of Saint Benedict - July 11, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josep Martinez-Cubero, OHC

The Feast of Saint Benedict, July 11, 2023

Proverbs 2:1-9

Psalm 1

Luke 14:27–33

 

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Today we celebrate the feast of Saint Benedict, the father of Western monasticism, who is most known for his rule, which we know as “The Rule of Saint Benedict”. It is a document he seems to have worked on throughout the duration of his life. It is also, clearly, a product of his own monastic conversion, which happened within an already existing tradition. Benedict’s Rule is heavily influenced by the writings of John Cassian, another monk before his time, who is noted for his role in bringing the ideas and practices of Christian monasticism from the East to the early medieval West.

The Rule of Saint Benedict also shows to have been mostly the editing and reworking of an earlier and very severe monastic rule called “The Rule of the Master”. But what Benedict adds, omits, rearranges, and revises from The Rule of the Master shows a remarkable mastery of right measure, and discretion. The Rule says we should eat, but not too much. We can drink but not too much. We have to sleep, but not too much. You must work, but not too much. Benedict even regulates the times for prayer, so there has to be an end, and then you work or study. How did he develop this sense of right measure, moderation, and discretion? What was Benedict’s formation?

Most of what we know about Saint Benedict comes from the second book of the Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great, written about sixty years after Benedict’s death. The work is a combination of hagiographical sketch and miracle stories, but there are things in it that we can receive as… factual approximations. At any rate, as readers of Scripture, we know that something does not need to be factual to be true. In fact, if we read any document written before the Age of Enlightenment literally and not deeply and carefully, we will very likely not find what is true.

Nevertheless, the first time I read “The Life and Miracles of Saint Benedict” when I was a novice, I strongly felt it had been a phenomenal waste of my time. I thought it was utterly absurd and useless. But God has a sense of humor, so years later, when I was studying in Rome, one of the first classes of the Monastic Formator’s Program was titled “Saint Benedict and the Dialogues”. I think Saint Benedict would have had much to say about my grumbling and rolling of my eyes when I found out we would be studying “The Life and Miracles of St. Benedict”. And because God will also humble us, the class turned out to be extraordinary, and one of the most significant classes I experienced in that already outstanding program. Fr. Mauritius Wilde, OSB guided us in tracing St. Benedict’s spiritual development as an archetype for our own spiritual development.

The literary genre of “The Life and Miracles of Saint Benedict” is called “Exemplum,” which means “example” or “model”. The genre was widespread in the Middle Ages. Exemplum is a form of story in which the protagonist, through a certain behavior and series of actions, has achieved a certain result, usually corresponding to the salvation of the soul. These stories were written for teaching, enjoyment, and motivation. The key for us today is to read the story creating a metaphorical interpretation that gives meaning to our spiritual journey.

In the case of The Life and Miracles of Saint Benedict, it is not helpful to read any part of the book wondering if a miracle presented actually happened. What’s beneficial is to read carefully, to go deeper, and to try to extract meaning in the story, and to see Benedict the human being. Benedict was not born our holy father Benedict. He was a human being who was vulnerable, broken, and weak. He went through stages of temptation, trials, growth, and development, but also setbacks. His was a journey that serves as a model of these stages in our own lives.

Benedict was born around the year 480, in central Italy, to a noble family. We always hear that Benedict went to Rome to study, but St. Gregory tells us that he was sent to Rome to study, presumably by his father, who wished him to have a good education. But in Rome, Benedict was turned off by the excesses of the Roman society of the time. So, Benedict’s journey becomes about the process of detachment necessary to gain self-knowledge and do God’s will, as opposed to meeting family’s expectations. And this desire was very likely there before he went to Rome. He renounces his father’s inheritance, letting go of financial security, and thus entering a vulnerable stage in his life.

Leaving everything behind, he travels about 40 miles to Affide, a place at the foot of a mountain. We read in the Dialogues that his childhood nurse goes with him. After some time and a series of events, Benedict secretly escapes from her, which indicates she may have come against his will. But this action shows a weakness is young Benedict’s character. The courageous and compassionate thing would have been to face his nurse and say he wanted to be without her. In our monastic vocation it is necessary to detach from family and even to let go of certain relationships. But the process of detachment must always happen in love. And detaching does not mean cutting off!

From Affide, Benedict then travels to Subiaco, where he lived in a cave as a hermit for three years. There, he remained concealed from the world, except for a deeply caring monk named Romanus from a nearby monastery. He represents the formator. The cave represents Benedict’s novitiate, his “fuga mundi”.
 
“Fuga mundi” is the traditional monastic terminology for the detachment from the world that happens when one enters the monastery. “Fuga” literally means “flight”. There are biblical reasons for why flight from the world is not healthy. God created the world, so it is good. The incarnation also shows us that we are to embrace the world, because “God so loved the world.” At the same time, it is OK to want to detach from the dominating values of this world: lack of justice and morality, contempt towards those who are different, total environmental indifference, consumerism, greed, and the thirst for privilege. Past the novitiate, the symbol of a monk’s “fuga mundi” is the monastic cell, our cave, if you will, where we go to learn about our deepest self so that we can know God. Fr. Mauritius also taught us that the other symbol of the “funga mundi” for a monastic is the habit. It is our statement to the world that we choose different; that things do not need to be the way they are. The desire to want to flee the ways of the world can be justifiable and useful, but we can’t stay in our cave forever. There are times when the habit must come off and we must leave our monastic cell.

There is another anecdote in the Dialogues that shows how Benedict struggled before he began to ponder and eventually master a sense of right measure, moderation, and discretion. Romanus would regularly set aside as much bread as he could from his own daily portion, and would secretly leave his monastery, and take the bread to Benedict. There was no path leading to Benedict’s cave from the monastery, which was at a higher altitude. So Romanus would tie the bread, and a little bell to the end of a long rope and lower it over the cliff. The little bell would let Benedict know when the bread was there, so he could come out and get it.

The story tells us that one day, as the bread was being lowered, the “ancient enemy of humankind,” threw a stone at the bell and broke it. Who is this “ancient enemy of humankind”? The easy answer would be the devil! That is, if we think of the devil as an external little red man with horns and dressed in red! In that case, bad is external- out there! This leads us to point the finger: “If that Brother wouldn’t behave that way… If he wouldn’t say the things he says sometimes… If they wouldn’t allow him to do those things… I would not be feeling this way…” But this “ancient enemy of humankind” is within us. The “ancient enemy of humankind’ who threw the stone at the bell was Benedict! And why did he do so?

One of the temptations of “fuga mundi” is going to extremes. Benedict has the illusion that he can live with absolutely no help from anyone. This kind of religious extremism turns our vocation to be about our ego and not about God. For Benedict, the temptation he must flee from is himself and his fixation on detachment. Yes, we need to let go and let God, but God sends us help through others. Our deepest nature is communion and communication. God as Trinity is communion. Life with God has to do with communion. Benedictine monasticism is communal. A Benedictine monk seeks God alone… in community! It is life in community and the mutual obedience, and the dealing with others that comes with it, that leads us to God. It is no wonder that Benedict went on to found twelve communities of monks before settling in Monte Casino in the mountains of Italy where he lived in a thirteenth monastery as abbot with other monks.
 
So, it seems to me that a big part of the Benedictine call is to be passionately caring (like Romanus!); to be compassionate, loving, and patient towards our own struggles because it is the only way we can be compassionate, loving, and patient towards the struggles of others. We do this trusting that God desires for us to evolve into the fullness of the image in which we are made. Our Holy Father Benedict, pray for us. ¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! ~Amen+

Proper 9 A - July 9, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

Proper 9 A - Sunday, July 9, 2023

 

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67
Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all who truly turn to him.

COME unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.  St. Matt. xi. 28.

    So God loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  St. John iii. 16.

    Hear also what Saint Paul saith.

    This is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be received, That Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.  1 Tim. i. 15.

    Hear also what Saint John saith.

    If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the Propitiation for our sins.  1 St. John ii. 1, 2.

I'd venture to guess that these words in this form have not been uttered in this Chapel for well over 50 years. But if you were raised as an Anglican or Episcopalian or came into this Church before about 1970 you would recognize these sentences immediately. Universally known as the Comfortable Words, they were a part of every celebration of the Holy Communion for centuries beginning in the 1500s, and not only in the Anglican tradition but in other Reformed traditions as well. Placed after the confession and absolution of sin and before the start of the great Eucharistic thanksgiving, they set the context for all that both went before and followed.

The meaning of the English word ‘comfortable’ has changed over the centuries. It's not so much about being put at ease as one might be in a recliner in front of the television or enjoying the breezes of summer in a hammock under the trees. Rather the word comfort, as its etymology suggests, had to do with strengthening and upholding. It's in this light that these words provide comfort: they strengthen and uphold us in our faith.

The first of these comfortable words or sentences we hear at the end of today’s Gospel passage:

“Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

It’s on these words that I’d like to reflect this morning, albeit very indirectly. Today we are in the fifth and final of our so-called Contemplative Days, days of silence with a reduced worship and work schedule that we observe several times in the year. We have found them to be very popular among our friends who are searching for a radical, if temporary, change in the rhythms of daily living. I'm not certain how we ended up naming this practice Contemplative Days. I think it was the invention of a previous guest master who is no longer with our community. It's a catchy name and has a certain cachet. It seems everybody wants to be a contemplative now, at least for a while. The hospitality sector has certainly enticed people on vacation packages with popular images that many associate with contemplation of one sort or another…images of the ultra-thin woman sitting in a yoga posture expensively, if scantily, clad in a tropical setting. Or the couple sitting on a dock staring over the waters, gazing in the middle distance, holding hands. Or the red mountains of Sedona best enjoyed with a healthful probiotic beverage in hand. And truthfully even monasteries have used such visual propaganda. You know the image: the hooded monk sitting under a large tree and holding an enormous volume, preferably printed before 1500. 

But it all leaves me wondering: what does it really mean to be contemplative? It may involve silence though not necessarily. It may involve solitude, though not necessarily. It may be a way of praying, but again not necessarily. When push comes to shove, it must somehow be a way of living, of being. If it’s not that, who cares? For me a handful of characteristics mark contemplative living. The first is the demand to live with attention and awareness. One of the Desert Fathers said: ‘Unawareness is the root of all evil.” I think he was right. And it is my own refusal to pay attention to the world and others and to engage in the challenging discipline of honest awareness—about myself, my community, my relationships, my world—that keeps me from living a more fully contemplative life, a more fully Christian life.

I believe that a contemplative life is one lived in time and that takes time seriously. That takes time to do what is necessary and takes time to recognize what is not just unnecessary but an evasion or a dishonesty. The best advice I ever got about contemplative living came from the late Winifred Osta who worked in our kitchen years ago. I was rushing around as was, and is still too often, my wont. And Winifred would simply tell me: Robert, you’re rushing too fast. I know it’s not always a practical or welcome observation nor particularly profound, but for me to act as if I had all the time in the world was a powerful antidote to my penchant to get things done fast and well. When we bless the candle at the Easter Vigil we say:

To God belong at all times and all seasons. They are only lent to us. Until we understand that, until we practice that we will never live contemplatively.

The third mark is the dynamic of work in its broadest sense. To live contemplatively is to work at something with our whole being and to lose ourselves in it, if only occasionally. It may be as simple as preparing a meal for oneself or a loved one or as dramatic as rescuing a child or a nation in peril. Admittedly, for many people, work is drudgery…without apparent meaning or just reward. But to live contemplatively is to learn to see in our own work, however menial or unproductive or limited, and in the work of others a dignity that befits the children of God. At the entrance to our guesthouse is a stone with the Latin motto Ora et Labora…Pray and Work…often used as a handy summary of Benedictine spirituality. Both prayer and work are very ordinary and yet very necessary. Together they constitute a privileged path to sanctity.

The fourth and final characteristic of contemplative living comes directly from today’s Gospel where Jesus says: My yoke is easy and my burden is light. The truth is: we are all yoked. That is, every one of us is connected to each other, to the creation and to God. And we all bear burdens. And if we are fully human, we share each other’s burdens. Our goal as Christians is not to be unyoked or unburdened, but to be furthered yoked and at the same time to welcome and accept the burdens that our rightfully ours, sharing them with others as they share theirs with us. Perhaps we are so weary so often because we are carrying the wrong burdens or laboring under yokes of our own creation and not those that God allots or allows for our true human flourishing. If the true contemplative knows anything, it is this: that we are all in this together. There is no other way.

Attention, time, work, burden bearing/burden sharing: this for me is contemplative living. Simple, ordinary, challenging, holy, life-giving.

Let the final words be those of Jesus as channeled through Eugene Peterson’s popular paraphrase The Message:

"Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me - watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly."

Amen. Or as Peterson would put it: Oh, yes!

Proper 8 A - July 2, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

Proper 8 A - Sunday, July 2, 2023

 

Genesis 22:1-14
Romans 6:12-23
Matthew 10:40-42

Click here for an audio of the sermon

In the name of the One God, who creates us, saves us, and makes us holy. Amen.

Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife.

Andrew McGowan, the dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, writes in a recent newsletter that the binding of Isaac “is about sacrifice in the sense that the Noah story is about navigation or the Parable of the Sower is about agriculture. […] The flood, the seed, the knife, are more than incidental, yet neither are they the point.”

I have to both agree and disagree with Dean McGowan. As with the Cross, the medium is, in some sense, the message. And, as with the Cross, the story of Abraham’s—attempt? Intention? Tearful but necessary submission?—to sacrifice Isaac is baffling and shadowy and impossible to reduce to a single, much less a satisfactory, meaning. Still, I won’t take the preacher’s easy out and say, “It’s all a mystery,” though as with everything of God, it is, in the end, a mystery.

It’s so easy to wonder what on earth Abraham was thinking. How could he be so misguided as to drag his son—who, by the way, is not his only son, though he does keep saying that—up the mountainside with the intention of killing and burning him. But, remember, this is the same man who disguised himself as his wife’s brother in Egypt, nearly bringing her to rape and who, as we heard last week, cast out his first son, Ishmael, and his mother into the wilderness with nothing but a water skin. These actions—or misdeeds, to call them by their proper name—make his exodus from Ur of the Chaldees seem positively reasonable.

Abraham is, if nothing else, a man who listens for the voice of God and who, when he thinks he hears that voice, does not hesitate to act. He is also a man who demonstrates the danger of the charismatic leader unchecked by a community grounded in faith and discernment. This is a threat ever present in our church today, which is in danger of becoming an echo chamber of progressive political action at the expense of the Gospel mandate to love and to welcome those whom we would call our enemies.

I recently heard another a priest say that fascists should not be welcome in our churches. That, in fact, banning fascists from our churches is a sign of moral clarity and purity, a needed beacon of what we stand for in a dark and frightening world. And yet, I wonder if our world would be a little less dark and frightening if we could listen to, learn from, and yes, even love, those whose political or social beliefs we find abhorrent. Surely, the Church should be the place where such hospitality of spirit is not only possible but expected.

If Abraham had had such a community with whom to test the spirits that spoke to him, would he so blithely have cast out his first-born son and his mother into the wilderness? Would he have loaded Isaac with the wood?

And what of that young boy and the load he bears? Did his arms ever set down the burden of those logs? Or, like the wood of the Cross, did they mark him and set him apart for the rest of his life? I once told a friend about the scars my father’s absence had left on my life. He said to me, “Be grateful your father wasn’t around. Mine was, and he was a horror.” Would Isaac have said the same? Did Ishmael get the easier road, cast out though he was?

And then, of course, we must ask, where is God in all this mess?

A spiritual director once told me that experiences of evil, neglect, or suffering are often, paradoxically, initiations into God. Sometimes the darkness is so threatening that only the light of God’s love, surrounding and suffusing us, can save us.

It is surely God’s voice who cries out “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him!” Many artists have portrayed this moment with an angel clad in light standing behind Abraham, grasping his wrist, his arm raised high above the boy, knife in hand. But I recently came across a different image of this scene. In this one the angel stands between Abraham and Isaac, the knife lodged in the middle of her chest, protecting the boy. I thought “Yes, this is the God we have in Jesus.”

The God who stands between the violence of the world and our innocence. The God who bears the weight of the Cross to save us and set us free. The God who loves us beyond loving, and who makes a shelter of his own body for the outcast and a lighthouse of his love to guide us home through the storm.

Whatever else this story tells us, it tells us that we need to be that lighthouse for one another. We need to show one another the way back, when we have lost our way, as we all do. We need to stay one another’s hands and stop one another’s mouths. And sometimes we need to step in front of the knife, to expose the futility of the fire and the knife.

However he carried this moment with him, Isaac certainly went on to live a faithful life, though much quieter than his father’s. He settled, married, and had children whom he loved deeply and freely. He showed God’s faithfulness, not in grand acts of exodus and vision, but in quiet steadfastness, in stability and solidity.

We don’t know if Isaac saw the vision of the angel of God, standing in front of the knife. But whether he knew it or not, God saved him. And whether we know it or not, God saves us in every moment of every day. Not by preventing harm from befalling us and those we love—though we understandably wish it were so—but instead by putting his body and his love between death and our souls.

For in each of us, no matter how hurt or hurtful, there remains a part untouched by evil. “A point,” in the words of Thomas Merton, “untouched by sin and by illusion, […] which belongs entirely to God, […] which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.” And, I would add, incapable of being harmed or shattered by another’s brutality. This is the place where Christ lives in us. This place, hidden with Christ in God, is the foundation of all authentic prayer and all authentic Christian community.

The story of Abraham and Isaac exposes our deep need of one another. We must challenge one another’s delusions. We must support one another’s healing. But most of all—we must welcome and love one another, most especially when it is hardest to do so, just as Christ has welcomed and loved us. There is no such thing as individual salvation. It’s all of us, or none at all.

Perhaps the Good News lies in the fact that our salvation, and that of Abraham, Isaac, Hagar, Ishmael, Sarah, and all those we think don’t belong in our churches or our communities doesn’t rely on us at all. For God is good, and that is everything.

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