Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen
The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 9, 2025
This morning’s readings are full of sinful men. And so, I would imagine, is this church. Maybe even some sinful women and nonbinary people, too. In the lectionary we have Isaiah, the man of unclean lips; Paul, the last of the apostles and one untimely born; and, of course, Peter, who begs the Lord to go away from him. This latter is such a human reaction and one I bet we can all relate to. Grace and mercy tend to overwhelm us. An encounter with the full wattage of God’s love for us is, simultaneously, an encounter with our own abject poverty. In such circumstances, we may easily find ourselves, like Peter, begging that God would leave us alone. Sometimes our own smallness can be too much to bear.
There are times when this reaction arises from compunction, which the early monastics called “the wound that leads to life.” Compunction is the understanding that all our striving will avail us nothing. That, hard as we have worked to save ourselves, we have utterly failed. But that God’s mercy has never left us, that what Peter asks is impossible—God can never go away from us, loving us as he does. Compunction sometimes appears as repentance for sin, sometimes as the sudden awareness of our own smallness in the face of beauty or love. It usually hits suddenly, the face of God unveiling itself in an apocalypse of love.
But sometimes our diffidence in the face of God’s mercy is not compunction at all, but shame and its constant companion, fear. Shame is the conviction that who we are is wrong and that, because of our fundamental brokenness, we are beyond the reach of God’s loving mercy. Shame carries with it the fear that God will do just what Peter asks, so why not push God away first? If compunction is the wound that leads to life, then shame is the seed of despair, and ultimately it can and will kill us.
Although it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference between these two experiences, we know them by their fruits. Compunction always leads to greater freedom to love and to act without self-reference or clinging. It is what leads us to lose our lives for the sake of the Gospel of Love. Shame only leads us deeper into the dark spiral of isolation and self-fixation.
If we are ever to surrender to God’s mercy and to the freedom God intends for us, we must, like Peter, encounter our absolute poverty and, through that encounter, entrust ourselves to God’s prodigal love for us. This self-abnegation is the death that leads to life. Paradoxically, it is only in fully experiencing our own powerlessness that we can enter into true freedom. Therein lies hope, even in the darkest times.
Our world so desperately needs this example of freedom through poverty. I’ve been struggling to find words to describe my inner experience over the last two weeks. I’ve finally settled on the word “bereaved.” The word “bereave” comes from the Old English bereafian, meaning “to take away by violence; to seize or rob.” That seems fitting. I feel utterly bereaved—as if the world I knew and loved has been torn away from me—from us—by a violent and malevolent force.
The truth, of course, is more complicated. Part of what has been torn away is the illusion of control and the comfort that illusion makes possible. I don’t mean there aren’t very real losses, and a seemingly endless parade of them on the horizon. I don’t have to name them—you know too well what they are. But this moment is also an apocalypse—a revelation of our poverty and powerlessness in the face of a violent malevolence that is determined to dominate and destroy. We are, collectively, faced with the reality of our total dependence upon God’s mercy. And we are challenged in our stated conviction that God brings life out of death.
In a strange and painful way, this revelation can be the beginning of our freedom and the seed of our hope.
On the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany in 2017 (that’s Year A for you liturgy geeks), Br. Roy Parker preached one of the most powerful sermons I have ever heard. I quote him here:
“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 power 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.”
When Peter chose, in the face of his own powerlessness, to surrender to God’s mercy and to follow Jesus, he did not know where that choice would lead him. He certainly stumbled along the way. Who of us hasn’t? But having surrendered himself into God’s loving care, he did not cling to a comfortable life in the face of a cross. Instead, he chose God’s powerless weakness, which is the very heart of love.
What does this choice look like today? When praying with this morning’s gospel passage, an answer began to emerge. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and the US Government failed to respond in any meaningful way, thousands and thousands of ordinary people took to their boats. In canoes, and trawlers, and yachts they navigated that drowned city searching for survivors. They literally fished for people. And as they did so, they did not ask who anyone voted for, or how much money they made, or what they thought of various religious or social issues. In the face of devastation, their own basic humanity took over, and they worked to preserve and save whatever lives they could.
My brothers and sisters, we are called to do the same today and in the coming days and years and, let’s be honest, perhaps decades. The only way the violent and malevolent forces of this world can win, is by implanting violence and hatred in our hearts. We must resist the urge to hate our brothers and sisters, no matter how harmful their choices. Hatred may make us feel powerful for a moment, but it only shields us from the powerless freedom God invites us to: the freedom to love. We must choose love, especially when it is hardest to do so. That is the self-giving way of Jesus. That is God’s powerless weakness. That is how God saves the world.
Take to your boats. Leave everything behind. Leave your certainties. Leave your fear. Leave the clenched fist of grief and rage clogging up your throat. Set out into the wreckage of this world to search for the lost and drowning and the dead. And when you find them, pull them up by their arms like that net of fish. Give them water to drink and a blanket to warm them. And sing them songs of God’s powerless weakness—whose weapons are mercy and love—and whose patient, persistent, non-violent mercy will outlast this violent malevolence that bereaves us. And held tight to Jesus, who will never leave us, we will, too.
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