Holy Cross Monastery Sermons : 2025

Sunday, June 15, 2025

The First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday, June 15, 2025

Br. Bernard Delcourt

The First Sunday after Pentecost/Trinity Sunday, June 15, 2025

Click here for an audio of the sermon

In the name of the Lover, the Beloved and the Love ever flowing.

The Trinity is the Christian doctrine concerning the nature of God, which defines one God existing in three, coeternal, consubstantial divine persons: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit, three distinct persons sharing one essence/substance/nature.

While the biblical text doesn’t name the Trinity per se, Jesus talked about his connection with the One he called Abba, and then he promised us the Holy Spirit, who would guide us into all truth. The Trinity is evoked in scripture.

So, now that we have the theological definition of Trinity and a scriptural basis for it, what does it mean for our life in God and our love of God?

Evagrius of Pontus, a Greek monk of the 4th century who came from what is now Turkey in Asia and later lived out his vocation in Egypt, said: "God cannot be grasped by the mind. If God could be grasped, God would not be God." So don’t expect to fully grasp the mystery of the Trinity after my sermon is over.

Our faith teaches that God is One God, in Trinity of Persons in Unity of Being: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is not easy to grapple with the concept of the Trinity. God is full, rich, abundant, multiple, yet one. God is not alone. God is a collective; a community of three.

The Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier pour themselves out in love. Each receives the love and the love overflows in all of Creation. And we are not so much called to struggle with the concept of the Trinity as we are to relate to the persons of the Trinity.

If you are like me, you can relate to only one person from the Trinity at a time. And depending on circumstances, I call upon one rather than the other. Sure, some of my prayers address the Trinity as the Sacred Three, the ever One, the Trinity. But most often I call on Jesus. Next in my popularity chart is God the Creator. And apologies to the Holy Spirit but she comes in third spot nowadays.

We’re tempted to analyze and explain the Trinity by our intellect, but mystery can only be encountered by the heart. Mystery is that which cannot be apprehended by reason, but once apprehended, is not contrary to reason.

The mystery of the Trinity is a paradigm of what it means to be human and to relate humanely to others. God is always relating, within God’s self, and beyond God’s self, a love and joy so unimaginable that it cannot be contained.

Henri Nouwen called the Trinity a “House of Love”. He wrote that in that household “there is no fear, no greed, no anger, no violence, no anxieties, no pain, even no words, only enduring love and deepening trust.”

Jesus’ teaching to “Love your neighbor as yourself” is an admonition to love the other as a continuation of our very own being. It’s seeing that your neighbor is you. There are not two individuals, one seeking to better oneself at the expense of the other, or to extend charity to the other. Each is equally precious and necessary.

That is the kind of Love that goes around among the Trinity. The triune God is showing us how to empty oneself in self-giving love and at the same time being constantly replenished by God’s love.

When we open ourselves up, we move away from any need to protect our own power, we mirror the Trinity where all power is shared, where there is no domination, threat, or coercion.

To say that God is Triune is to mean that God is social in nature. It is also to say that those made in God’s image are likewise intrinsically social. If we believe in a Trinitarian God, then we must hold fast to the truth that God is community—a completely loving, mutually self-giving, endlessly generative relationship between equal partners.

True union does not absorb distinctions but actually intensifies them. The more one gives one’s self in creative union with another, the more one becomes one’s self. This is reflected in the Trinity, perfect giving and perfect receiving.

We mirror the Trinity where all power is shared, where there is no domination, threat, or coercion.

Br Christian Swayne, OHC, of blessed memory once noted that he was not much of a theologian, so he didn’t claim to know much about the doctrine of the Trinity. He described his view as just a simple view of the Trinity.

This is how he described that view: “I can love God, but I can't say I really understand God. God is simply too big and too vast. And I can say I love the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit is so mysterious that I can't say I even understand who or what the Spirit is – so I'm not really sure what I mean when I say I love the Spirit. But I can understand Jesus – Jesus the human being... I could stand next to Jesus, eat with Jesus, put my arms around Jesus, laugh and cry with Jesus. I can relate to Jesus.”

But Br Christian didn’t stop there. He said that the things he could understand, think, feel, or attribute to Jesus, he should also be able to understand, think, feel, and attribute to God and the Holy Spirit. The qualities of Jesus are, after all, the qualities of the One God in three persons.

And, more importantly, Br Christian noted, the things he could not think about Jesus, he supposed he should not think about God or the Holy Spirit either.

So, here we are, spiritual beings relating with a Triune God and one another. Living as related beings means that we seek out the voices in our midst that are not heard. It means we work through all of the barriers that seem to divide us, dismantling power systems based on hatred and domination. It means we treat the Earth, not as a reservoir of food and fuel, but as a dynamic and living organism to treasure and nurture. It means we learn to love the complexity within ourselves, having patience with the parts of ourselves that still need conversion. It means we give thanks for having been created as a part of a web of life and love that pours out of God’s own inner web of connectivity and relatedness. That’s how we live out the mystery of the Trinity in our very being.

As Br. Scott Borden said, I thank God because one of the most important theological concepts in Christianity is steeped in mystery. A mystery that we simply cannot easily explain away. And that makes our minds, formed by modernity, just a little bit crazy.

Or as Saint Paul put it, “… the foolishness of god is wiser than men.” Thanks be to God.

Glory to the Creator, and to the Redeemer, and to the Sanctifier, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.

Sunday, June 1, 2025

The Seventh Sunday of Easter, June 1, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Adam McCoy

The Seventh Sunday of Easter, June 1, 2025

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Today is the seventh Sunday of Easter, after the Ascension and before Pentecost. This Sunday marks an in-between time: we are invited by St. Luke’s Gospel and Acts into the experience of the Apostles and the earliest Church. We are invited into the absence of the resurrected Lord from our physical midst and the not quite knowing what is coming next. Luke frames this as a sequence of events, and his account has provided a narrative framework for the Church’s self understanding ever since: the death of Jesus, his resurrection and ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit, provide a calendar sequence which has become our proclamation, but even more, has become an identity for us. This sequence of events has refashioned the followers of Jesus into the Church. And we are invited in so that we can participate in the new life Christ has brought to the world. In other words, in this view, we have our own lives and these events have their own life, both ourselves and these events independent and self-contained. In proclaiming them the Church faces the world with the choice to participate. Or not. But in this view, it and we are separate, needing to be brought together . The connection between ourselves and the redemptive activity of Jesus is accomplished through individual faith and through joining the community of faith, but we always in some sense remain separate beings: the self and the faith, the self and the Church, the self and Jesus, the self and God. This is our normative reality in the lived life of the Christian community. It is the understanding of the self and the faith in Mark, Matthew and Luke.

This understanding of the self as a more or less stand-alone entity is seemingly rooted in a common-sense understanding of our own reality: We are what we are and they are what they are. The Church presents the objective events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection as a pattern for our faith and inner conversion. She invites us to place ourselves within those saving, objective events of Jesus. But this is not the only path presented to us in the earliest Church. John’s gospel has a somewhat different understanding of who we are in the face of God’s invitation of love, identity and transformation. Not in contradiction but in perspective.

The narrative of the resurrection sequence of events in John is slightly different. For one thing, Jesus invites the Spirit into the community of believers again and again during his earthly ministry. And the Pentecost event happens in the first gathering of the disciples:

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

[John 20:19-22]

No fifty days, no Ascension, no upper room. Lurking in the background of John’s telling are the Genesis stories of creation: God’s act of the creation of human beings is to breathe the breath of life into our nostrils. Jesus breathes on his disciples and they receive the Holy Spirit. And I cannot help but think of that other Genesis detail of creation: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” [Gen 1:1-2] By directing the ever-hovering Holy Spirit to the disciples and by breathing the breath of new life into them, Jesus is beginning a new creation: his disciples are that new creation, that new world.

But having evoked the creation story, our restless minds, so unavoidably centered on our own situations, will fairly quickly begin to ask the next question: What about us? The Genesis creation story did not have a happy ending for us. Our first parents, or so the story goes, lost the thread, missed the point, went off on their own tangent, ignored their elemental, existential, ontological connection to their Creator, and broke that connection. Their willful separation from God is their Original Sin, and whatever we may think of the Genesis account as a factual narrative, in fact it vividly describes our reality: We too seem to be separated from God.

And here is where our Gospel for today enters the picture. In John’s convoluted way he is showing us the path back. I in them and Thou in Me: “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.” Jesus’ human work is to bring together followers who find new life in him. His divine work is to make of those who follow him a new creation, a new humanity, no longer separated from God but now filled with and joined to the Father’s life through his Son Jesus Christ. A new creation that can credibly witness to the God who made the world and loves it.

This seems easy to say: a new creation. But perhaps not so easy to do. How can we possibly make the leap from our existential separation from God, from our fallen nature, into unity through Christ in the Father? Through the words and acts of Jesus, John simply states that it is possible, and urges us to do so. And truly, we want to. But how complex that proves to be! So complex, we have to begin again. As St. Paul says, “ I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” [Gal 2:20] We are invited to join this new creation, no longer separate from God but in order to live continually in the Father’s loving creativity, to love in the Son’s world-embracing heart, to act in the Spirit’s restless energy, we have to die to our present, separated selves. Our created purpose is to live, to love and to act in God, and so to accomplish that purpose we must consciously join ourselves to God’s life. But as we discover as each of our days unfolds, this is no simple matter. Or rather, simple in its intention but infinite in its application.

To this process Christian traditional spiritual practice has given a name: theosis: The process of uniting ourselves to God, inviting God in, giving ourselves to God, acting in God, resting in God, becoming one with God: “so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.” When I first heard of theosis as a concept as a younger person, my good sturdy Protestant soul rebelled. Heresy! How can I become God? The very thought is repugnant. I am me. I can with great effort try to be godly but I can only approach God with fear and trembling, taking account of my very deep separation from God, my inadequacies and my failures and my sins, so very, very many of them. But as I have grown older I have come to realize that the “I” I thought was so separate is in fact deeply contingent: my body has its own unavoidable, ineluctable connections to the physical world. We are all part of that world and it is madness to act as though we are separate from its energies, its processes, its laws. Our assumptions about the world and other people are permanently part and parcel of the culture we were born into, with its wisdoms born of the ages, but also with its blindnesses and its prejudices, Our minds themselves are not always “our own”, but are, as we are increasingly discovering, products of physical, electrical, chemical and genetic processes.

And so it is true of all of us: We think we are independent, separate, standing on our own two feet, but in fact, at every step we are by our very nature one with others: Others conceive us in the womb. Others bear us into this world, feed and clean and clothe and support and teach us. With others we all cooperate to support each other in producing what we need to live. In the course of time, we ourselves also are called to cooperate to help create and nurture the next generations. So in fact, John’s vision of Oneness in God is not strange at all, but profoundly natural. We are already one with nature and one with each other. Oneness is what we are. John begins his Gospel with another reference to creation: “In the beginning was the Word ... All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” Separation of creation from God was creation’s denial of its own true nature. In our own separateness we deny our true nature. In this Oneness, this theosis, we are simply invited to return to what we are: Created through the Word to show forth in our own unique human way the creative energy of God’s love. Our uniqueness as a species is that we are the conscious witnesses to that great Goodness. Our choice is whether or not to live no longer to ourselves alone but embedded and embraced in the love of God. That choice is our Glory.

Thursday, May 29, 2025

The Ascension, May 29, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Scott Wesley Borden

The Feast of the Ascension, May 29, 2025

Click here for an audio of the sermon

It's been about five months since we welcomed Jesus into the fully human life on this earth. Now we are on the other side of that event, seeing Jesus off at the ascension. We have Luke, primarily, both in the Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles to thank for this.

We don’t see Jesus in the flesh after this. Jesus has assured us that if he goes, then he will send the Holy Spirit for the next part of the journey. So, let's talk about what this may mean...But first, let's talk about the number forty.

This number turns up in scripture fairly frequently. Forty days in the wilderness for Jesus after baptism... forty years in the wilderness for the people of Israel after they escape Egypt... forty days and nights of rain for Noah... And hiding behind the scenes in today’s feast is the number forty... Jesus rises on Easter and Ascends on this day, forty days later.

It’s clear that forty is symbolic. It's just not so clear what it symbolizes. Forty was thought of as a number for reflection and change of heart – hence forty days in the desert for Jesus and forty days of Lent (exclusive of Sundays and feast days) for us.

It was an appropriate number for punishment – if you were administering lashes, forty was the maximum number permitted in Jewish law. Often, we hear of someone condemned to forty lashes minus one – for example Paul received this punishment on a number of occasions. One lash was withheld as a little insurance policy for those administering the punishment. If you miscounted your lashes, you still might not have broken God’s law...

Forty figured into pregnancy in two ways. It was thought to take forty days for the “seed” to take root in the womb (this was a pre-medical view of pregnancy) and forty weeks for the child to be formed and ready for birth. These days we think of thirty-nine as the number of weeks in a pregnancy but forty was the number used in Biblical times. Pregnancy hasn’t changed, but we start counting at a different point... And the notion of a seed taking root in the womb has gone completely.

We heard most of what Luke had to say about the Ascension in this morning’s readings.

Matthew hints at the Ascension, but just in passing on the way to the “Great Commission”. Matthew wants us to get down to the business of evangelism... of sharing the good news.

Luke is a little more patient; we are allowed to stand in awe looking up at the sky in wonder – for a short time even to worship – though Luke certainly calls us to share the Gospel as well.

Luke foreshadows the Ascension. In the twentieth chapter of the Luke’s Gospel Jesus says to Mary Magdalene: “Do not cling to me, because I have not yet ascended. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my God and your God.’” Luke is so concerned about the Ascension that he must tell us it is coming and then tell the story in both the Gospel and Acts.

As written, this is the story of Jesus literally being lifted up from the earth, through the clouds, to the right hand of God in heaven. This assumes an understanding of the universe in three tiers – the underworld, the world, and the heavens. The blue of our sky was understood to be the blue jewels that made up the floor of heaven – lapis lazuli.

Within a century or so of the Ascension, some theologians were already concerned that the “three-tiered universe” was out of date. Origen, for example, seems to have found it an embarrassment. By his time, the universe was no longer understood to be a three-tiered confection.

But here we are, on Ascension Day, a day that is built on the notion of Jesus being lifted up from tier two to tier three as a crowd watches. Do we suspend our scientific knowledge to accept the literal nature of this event? Do we swallow hard and cross our fingers as Origin might have done?

Our Brother Andrew, of blessed memory, had a fond saying. Being a good Scotsman, he loved all things Celtic. He would begin a fantastical Celtic story with a disclaimer: “It may not have happened exactly this way, but this is the truth.” Certainly, not all truth is literal.

In truth, all mythology is based on truth that is not literal. Our modern society is greatly impoverished because we want to understand anything that is not literal truth as a falsehood. We use “myth” and “lie” pretty much interchangeably. But myth and lie are not synonyms. As Br Andrew would remind us, it may not have happened exactly like this, but this is the truth.

Jesus is not the first person to be Assumed bodily. Enoch and Elijah were both Assumed. Some of the leaders of the Roman State were assumed to be Assumed. The Greeks believed that Apollonius was Assumed. And not too long ago the Roman Church determined officially that Mary, Mother of Jesus, was Assumed.

In the Zoroastrian tradition, the Hindu tradition, and Islamic tradition there is a belief that certain important leaders were Assumed.

So, nudged on by Br Andrew, I ask myself, what might the truth of Jesus’ Ascension be?

Charles King, in his book “Every Valley”, looks at how Georg Friedrich Handle created his great masterpiece “Messiah”. He describes Handle’s process as “the working out in music of a purposeful, systematic, and moral imagination of things you can’t yet see.” Handle’s purpose was not to create a pleasing setting for certain passages of scripture, but to create a space for our moral imaginations to work. Could this be Luke’s purpose as well?

Luke gives few answers about the Ascension. Did Jesus float – or was there some mechanism of lifting? What happened at twenty-six thousand feet, when the atmosphere was no longer breathable? But I have to stop myself and remember the wisdom of Br Andrew. And to allow Handel to whisper in my ear to use my moral imagination.

The Assumption of Jesus suggests an intimacy with God in Heaven that is unique. I have an expectation of Heaven after I die – I’m just not at all sure what I expect... who or what I will be in that context, or even what that context will be. Jesus, we trust, knew more... knows more. And we don’t know what Jesus knows...

We believe that our broken human nature is transformed in heaven – that strife and greed will be in us no more, that pain and sorrow will be ours no more, that as Isaiah saw, the wolf and the lamb can lie down together; that as Martin Luther King dreamed, all of God’s children can play together without hurting each other. My literal imagination can do little with these images. But my moral imagination can do much.

There is a reason for using all our imaginative abilities, moral, literal, artistic, and so forth to see, in our mind’s eye, heaven. Heaven may not be like what we see, but that doesn't mean it's not true.

I am reminded of the words of Father Daniel Berrigan, Roman Catholic Priest and powerful voice against the Vietnam war. I had the chance to hear him speak across the river at Bard College. A student asked him, given his vision of what the world could be, how he could live in the world the way it is.

Fr Berigan answered that he lived in a community, a Jesuit community, that while far from perfect still managed now and then to give glimpses of what heaven could be. And it was that vision that made it possible to live in our very imperfect world. He had a moral imagination that allowed him to see glimpses of heaven.

When the Disciples are pestering Jesus to tell them about heaven his answer is – don't worry about heaven... it’s a very big place. Worry about here and now.

When the Sadducees are trying to trick Jesus with a question about how marriage works in heaven, Jesus replies that marriage as we understand it is not a thing in heaven.

Jesus seems to be assuring them that they (and we) don’t need to have a moral imagination of heaven. We need to have a moral imagination, a moral vision, of this world, of Earth.

Just before he goes, Jesus tells the disciples to be clothed with power from on high; and after that, to share the good news of salvation with all the world. This power from on high sounds a bit mysterious, perhaps even threatening. But it is a reference to the Holy Spirit – the third person of the trinity. Jesus has been hinting about this Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Comforter, for some time. And Jesus has made clear that when he goes, then the Holy Spirit will come. This is that moment.

I don’t have a need for this story to be literally true. I do have a need to ignore, or at least discount, that part of my mind that wants to argue with the literal details. When we force things to adhere to our literal understanding, we limit them to what our minds can understand.

Perhaps the most curious thing for me about the Ascension is the urgent warning Jesus gives to Mary – do not cling to me... I hear Jesus telling Mary not to hold on too tightly to the Jesus she has known, the earthly, human literal Jesus. Doing so will inhibit her ability to welcome the Holy Spirit. And, frankly, the Jesus she will come to know is much greater than the Jesus she has known. This is the Jesus we come to know as well, if we don’t hold too tightly to what we think we know.

The person of Jesus in flesh and blood is relatable, even loveable. The amorphous holy spirit is much harder to get our arms around – literally and figuratively...

But we must let go of our images of Jesus so that we can open ourselves to the Holy Spirit who dwells in us and around us. It is faith that leads us toward this unknown region.

And this unknown region is nothing less than the land where Martin Luther King observed all of God’s children playing together... where Isaiah watched lambs lie down with lions... where John of Patmos could see twelve city gates – three in every direction... Gates that are open all day and there is no night.

It is nothing less than the Kingdom of God. It is nothing less than our home.