The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 8, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve
The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 8, 2026

• Isaiah 58:1-9a, [9b-12]
• 1 Corinthians 2:1-12, [13-16]
• Matthew 5:13-20

Click here for an audio of the sermon

We are salt.  We are light.  Our human gift is to enhance flavor, to burn brightly.  Jesus does not say, “you have salt and light”.  He does not say, “you are salt ‘if’”.  He does not say, “you are light ‘if’”.  He lists no condition, no cost, no possible revocation.  This is a proclamation from the one who created us.  Dare we believe the announcement Jesus makes that inherent in every human is the divine zest that awakens taste, the holy fire that warms and reveals?  The implications are staggering.  

What follows this announcement are warnings. You are salt - but don’t lose your saltiness.  You are light - but don’t hide the light you are. The immediate truth to be spoken after proclaiming who we are is the danger of polluting or hiding who we are.

God creates us out of love to reflect divine life.  Christ warns us out of love so that we would preserve and live what we are.  Notice the nature of the relationship.  The Christian life is a dance between delight and danger, gift and warning, grace and responsibility.  Only God can create, and God has.  And in that very creation God risks giving us to use as we decide a glory and honor, we have neither earned nor deserved in ourselves.  In return, we are invited to reflect back the dignity of being human, to make every moment the sacrifice of gratitude and self-offering.

We are salt and light purely by God’s grace. Acting like it is on us.  Christ can give us our essence, make us salt and light.  He cannot force our will.  He cannot make us live who we are.  He can invite, admonish, even warn us about our choice, but he cannot make it for us.  He points to the dangers of choosing pollution and hiding so that we might be alert to what is at stake and take our responsibility as seriously as he does.  

What if we say yes to who we really are?  We actualize salt and light by prophetic words and deeds.  God has made us live in a generous, respectful community with one another as brothers and sisters.  And as a new humanity the barriers and dividing walls have come down and we are one.  Yet enmity and violence persist.  We encounter within us and around us systems and patterns that normalize harm, prejudice, and bigotry.  Salt and light make us aware of the harm we do and the harm done in our names.  Salt and light in us enlighten us to recognize evil and injustice and the temptation to compliantly conform to their ways.  And by being salt and light, we can say, “no, I will not comply”.   Being salt is waking up, looking around, paying attention to reality - not the party line, not propaganda, but what is actually true.  Light is exposing, illuminating, and revealing what is hidden and unnamed.

Now we see the importance of the warnings.  This proclamation of Jesus about who we are sets us in this cosmic wrestling against evil.  This identity will cost us something.  No wonder we rationalize a little sand in our salt, just a small basket over our light.  But our salt is made salty, our lights meant to shine bright, exposed.   Bland darkness is lifeless.  Zesty light is laying down my life.  Those are the choices - I offer myself to Christ as I decide to wake up and tell the truth or I play it safe, exist but not really live.  

The warnings are for us because the pressure of our internal fear and external danger are powerful enough to get us to reject our identity.  Around us what scripture calls principalities and powers, spiritual evil, systemic injustice, violence and prejudice, are the manifestations of the rejection of salt and light.  After a group, an ideology, a movement has polluted its salt and hidden its light, the very notion of what it means to be human gets gnarled into an ugly thing.  Evil fills the vacuum where the salt and light were meant to be.  And this vacuum recoils from the thing it once was and rejected.  The evil powers of this world cannot stand the presence of salt and light.  These powers make friends with blandness and worship darkness and call it holy.  It rules with the fear that lives in it.  It says, “conform, and we’ll let you live.”

Abbot Anthony, who lived from 251-356 said, ‘A time is coming when people will go mad, and when they meet someone who is not mad, they will turn to him and say, “You are out of your mind,” just because he is not like them.’

Jesus calls those who follow him to receive the identity and capacity to resist and subvert the powers of evil so that the life of the kingdom of heaven will be lived in us and known in all the world.  Salt and light are dangerous.  They are noncompliant, unyielding, and unbowed in the face of the flat darkness that would deaden our souls.  So do not comply.  Do not complacently adjust to anything inhuman.  Be intolerable to injustice.  Be unavailable for lies.  Be uninterested in the call to conform to the ways of this world at the expense of your soul.  Some around you may choose to be bland.  You are seasoning.  Be seasoning instead.  Some around you may choose to stay in the darkness.  You are light.  Shine your light.   This is scary.  Fear means we are alive; we want to keep living, but fear does not get to decide what makes us human.  We are salt.  We are light.  Go and season life.  Go and shine fire. Amen.

The Presentation of our Lord, transferred, February 3, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

The Presentation of our Lord, transferred, February 3, 2026

• Malachi 3:1-4
• Hebrews 2:14-18
• Luke 2:22-40

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Senex puerum portabat: puer autem senem regebat: quem virgo peperit, et post partum virgo permansit: ipsum quem genuit, adoravit. 

It was in the early 1970s, probably 1972, that I first heard these words. They were sung to a setting written by the great Renaissance composer and court musician William Byrd (1540-1623) at the Church of the Advent in Boston on the Feast of the Presentation. I was captivated by the music, a motet that weaved in and out with its various lines and finally resolving. It was stunning. But even more captivating for me were the words themselves:

An old man held up a child

yet the child upheld [or ruled] the man. 

The child the Virgin bore while yet remaining a virgin, 

this child she had borne, she adored.

The text itself is an ancient antiphon for First Vespers of today’s feast as well as part of the gradual chant at the mass. It comes to us from a sermon of Saint Augustine. And it is pure poetry.  

Spanning centuries, the medieval mind delighted in words and dwelt in them in a way that it is almost impossible for us now, overwhelmed as we are by words and images and music and noise and false news and social media. As LP Hartley famously reminds us, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." And in that different country, that other world, words were scarcer and were attended to with greater attention and even greater receptivity and creativity. So it is with this motet, this antiphon. There is a palpable delight in the juxtapositions and the surprising paradoxes that are articulated. An old man holds a child, yet that child upholds the old man, and not just the old man but the entire universe. The Virgin bears a child yet remains a virgin and adores the one who made her though she had given him birth. It's more than just clever word play. It points rather to the astounding power of God to shape and reshape our minds and our hearts to see in new and more faithful ways. That may be the truth of Lectio Divina, a practice which I find so elusive. That may also be the truth of poetry which I find equally elusive. It is the realization that what appears at first sight is not the whole story; it's not even the true story. Something more mysterious and profound is going on. It is, if you will, mysticism in verbal form.  And it takes time to unfold.

Some years ago, we simplified our 1976 Monastic Breviary, and this Feast of the Presentation was drastically revised. The antiphons, which were always notoriously difficult to sing, were eliminated. But it’s worth listening once again to the poetic truths they embody and to consider the invitations, they offer us to enter into the mysterious and archetypal depths of this feast.

So, the antiphon on the Magnificat of First Vespers: 

“O wonderful interchange! The creator of mankind, taking upon him a living body, deigned to be born of a virgin, and proceeding forth as man, without seed, has made us partakers of his divinity.”

Chew on that for a while!

Or the antiphon on the Benedictus:

“When you were marvelously born of a virgin, then were the scriptures fulfilled; you came down like rain into a fleece of wool, to bring salvation to all mankind: we praise you, O our God.”

Can you imagine a better prayer, a holier acclamation?

Or my favorite, the antiphon on the Magnificat at Second Vespers:

“In the bush, which Moses saw unconsumed, we acknowledge the preservation of your glorious virginity; holy mother of God, intercede for your children.”

Mary, the Burning Bush!

Today's feast marks the conclusion of the Nativity or Christmas cycle, a cycle largely based on the infancy narrative of Saint Luke’s gospel, those first two chapters of Luke which shape both our popular devotion and our theology. Most of us admit that these chapters are not historical in the way we understand that term today. They are, if you will, legends or great mythic narratives which point beyond themselves not to historical details—though they are there too—but to profound theological, doctrinal, and dogmatic understandings. They are all about God with us, Emmanuel, the Holy One pitching a tent and dwelling among us in the person of Jesus and in the Spirit's power. And in this way, they bring us to a more adequate expression of the truth and not its diminishment.

But to understand these events celebrated today, dwelling in scriptural texts such Simeon’s canticle Nunc Dimittis that we sing each night at Compline or in these wonderfully poetic antiphons which come to us from over a millennia ago, we need to let go, at least provisionally, our need for logical certitude and historical accuracy and inhabit for a time the realm of the poet or artist or artisan or mystic. 

 And so today we walk with Mary and Joseph and the Baby into the Temple. We meet Anna the prophetess. We watch Simeon, aged though he is, pick up the Child just as we carried burning candles in procession. We listen to Simeon’s song. We hear of a sword piercing a mother's heart. And with journey with the family as they get on with their lives, as best they can, moving to Nazareth and making a home there…a home fit for a King.

An old man held up a child, but the child upheld the man. So, it is with us. The child whom the woman bore while remaining a virgin, this child she adored. So must we, so must we.  Saint Augustine says: “Simeon, the old man, bore Christ the Child; Christ ruled the old age of Simeon... Christ was born, and at the old age of the world the desire of the old man was fulfilled. He who found a world broken with age came to an ancient man.”   And still, he comes to us today.

I close with a quote from a contemporary Jesuit writer, Joseph Koczera:

“The old man carried the child, but the child ruled the old man. Borrowed from his sermon of Saint Augustine, this verse pithily sums up Simeon’s place in the history of salvation. It may seem strange to think of a tiny infant “ruling” over anyone, yet it was the expectation of the Messiah's coming that served to order and govern Simeon’s life. We all have our hopes for the future, and we may find that our lives are governed by expectation. What is the consolation that we await, and what do we hope to see or encounter before we make our own Nunc Dimittis?” 

Good question.  Happy feast.

And if you get the chance today, listen on YouTube or Spotify to Byrd’s motet Senex Puerum portabat or one of the other settings of it by Tomas Luis de Victoria or Giovanni Palestrina.  You won’t regret it.    

The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 1, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Adam McCoy

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany

• Micah 6:1-8
• 1 Corinthians 1:18-31
• Matthew 5:1-12

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

Who is blessed?

On entering the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, turn left and you will soon enter the Ancient Greek and Roman rooms.  They are filled with works of art which depict the human form in almost unimaginable states of perfection.   Most are adolescents and young adults, at the height of their strength and agility and good health.  I am always tempted to think, how much better they look than I and most of the people I know do.  It must have been a true golden age!  And then I reflect on the actuality of their time: A third to a half of all children died as infants.  How many surviving freeborn boys died in war or from war wounds or the diseases that follow conflict?  How many were worked to an early death if they were not born free?  How many women, free or enslaved, died in childbirth?  How many of those who escaped those fates were struck with illnesses for which there was no cure?   It was a world in which that statuesque perfection was attainable by very few, and those few for only a brief shining moment before age and infirmity arrived for them. 

The great beauty of ancient art did not represent the actuality of its age, but rather, reflects a perfection they believed existed in the realm of the divine and the hope that some few of us might achieve, if ever so briefly, some reflection of the divine.  So put aside those of us who don’t or can’t.  Concentrate on the winners.  Their view of reality was one of a deeply imperfect creation for the most part cursed in one way or another with the gods in their perfection looking down on our struggles, toying with us, laughing at us, waiting for us to give them something in the often vain hope that we might escape the disaster waiting for us just around the next corner.  That we might escape our usual, all too usual, reality.  So, we hold up to ourselves images of perfection to attract ourselves to what might be humanly possible.  But in fact, because so few ever approached that perfection, and so many more, most in fact, were left unnoticed by the wayside, that beauty is heart breaking.

We may look on this and think how much better we are than they were.  After all, we have made great strides in childbirth practices, in medicine, in working toward human equality.  And that is true.  Perhaps not so much progress in avoiding war.  But is it not also true that we still hope for a perfection, of looks and beauty, of charm and popularity, of professional success, of financial well-being, and celebrate it when we think we see it?  What else is celebrity culture?  What else is our endless sacrifice of effort and money on the many altars of self-improvement, of ladder climbing?  If we have success, how do we feel about those left behind, those who cannot climb much higher?  How do we feel if we ourselves, despite our best efforts, are not quite beautiful, not very popular or successful, not rich?  If in fact we are quite ordinary?  Or worse?  Is there perhaps something a little off about these hopes in the face of our realities? 

The uncomfortable truth is that the world we live in is imperfect.  The idea that we might achieve statuesque perfection and all it represents is almost always a false hope.  Fortunately, some few do briefly achieve it.  It is in itself a good thing to strive after health, beauty, strength, agility and prosperity.  But if we place our hope in achieving those good things and judge ourselves and others as deficient when we don’t get them, we ignore and devalue the life we actually have. 

The truth is that God actually seems to love our human world in its imperfections and failures as much as in its apparent successes.  God seems to love us just as we really are.  We can be improved, and that is good, but all of us are already and always loved. The dying infant and the dying mother.  Exploited, underfed and overworked people, free and unfree alike.  Young men and women injured and dying in the battles of war and childbirth.  Unhealable injuries, untreatable diseases.  The injustices of human systems of every kind.  Our worth is not just in success, but in living good values in our lives, in loving each other as God loves us, and in putting that love to work in the real world we live in.  Everyone alive is living in God’s love.  And if, God be praised, we do achieve some success, the ancients were right: it is a gift from God.  But that success is not our own as a possession: it is ours to share.

 Perhaps someone now is thinking, hasn’t he moved from the particular blessings Jesus pointed out?  I confess it: I believe Jesus is giving us a representative sample of people who are blessed, a sample which can be enlarged, not an exclusive list.  His point is that a life lived with humility, mercy and honest trust and hope but still resulting in what the world thinks is a disastrous failure - that life is in fact loved by God and can look forward to God’s enduring love at the final judgment.

And so, consider the Beatitudes.  “Blessed are” translates the Greek “makarioi hoi”.   Makarios means not just blessed in the religious sense, but fortunate, lucky, winners.  And who are these winners in the celestial lottery?  Humble people.  People who have lost someone or something.  People who don’t put themselves forward in life.  People who want right and good and justice.  People who when they have the opportunity to take revenge, don’t.  People who put God first and themselves last in their lives.  People who stop fights, refuse violence, find ways to bring people together.  People who are willing to suffer when doing the right thing brings them harm.  People who are willing to be publicly identified with these values, with God’s values, and to be disrespected, and even harmed, for doing God’s work.

Jesus is telling us what God’s values are.  They are not the values which “the world” thinks will get us ahead in life.  In our imperfect world, what we used to call a fallen world, humility, loss, deference, putting right ahead of self-advancement, letting people off the hook, valuing peace over victory, willingness to “take it”, are not values which will guarantee us success in the cutthroat business of self-advancement.  They just don’t.  And they won’t.   That’s an uncomfortable truth.  Choosing God’s way is really risky.  It’s not a really good career move.

But what it is, is an alignment with reality.  Jesus is telling us what God’s values are - that every life is of value, every life is loveable, the lives of the world’s losers just as much as its winners.  Jesus is recommending that we rearrange our perception of things.  That we organize our social interactions so that God’s values will be held up, learned and practiced as diligently as are the arts of self-advancement.  That we redefine what human success is and can be.   That we create human communities in which God’s love is the standard of our own values.  But how to do that?  How to even start?  Three suggestions.

First: Bird watchers study the appearance, the calls, the habitats, the flight patterns of the birds they want to identify.  They quietly wait for one to appear and then they just watch, learning about the bird.  Perhaps we can do the same with virtue.  Is there someone living this beatitude life?  Quietly watch and learn.  But they’re not birds - they and we are both human.  Watch and learn and then do it ourselves. 

Second: Don’t be too surprised to learn that we too are eligible to be loved.

Third: Are we willing to admit that the talents and successes we might enjoy are gifts from God, to be shared? 

In other words, are we willing to see our weaknesses, our utter ordinariness, our failures, not as sources for depression but opportunities for God’s love to seek us out and find us?   Are we willing to seek out and find others who need this love of God? 

Be blessed.  Be happy.  Be lucky.  Be loved.   

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany, January 25, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany, January 25, 2026

• Isaiah 9:1-4
• 1 Corinthians 1:10-18
• Matthew 4:12-23

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Some of the most fascinating people we encounter in the Bible are the prophets of the Old Testament.  To be a prophet was not an envious thing, and few in ancient Israel would likely have told their parents that they wanted to be prophets when they grew up.  Because to be a prophet meant that you would place your life in the balance…that you would be despised by many and appreciated by few.  And your life may very well become the target of those who felt threatened by you…and those people were often the ones with the power to, at a whim, remove your head.  

Prophets were the conscience of Israel.  They held up the people of God to the standard of the law and the covenants.  They were the voice calling for fidelity and uncompromising commitment.  They pointed out sin and wickedness with clarity and precision and exposed the secrets of the heart before the discerning gaze of a righteous God.  

But there was another function of the prophet that those prone to apocalyptic visions of doom and gloom often overlook…the prophet was also a visionary who saw things that most others failed to see.  This vision into the future was marked by a vision of what could be in spite of what actually is.  This wasn’t a denial of reality but the conviction that reality is not a fixed, determined constant but open and malleable, able to be moved in directions that sometimes are surprisingly new.  In other words, prophets were those who stood up in the midst of an anxious, fearful people trapped by the threatening visions of the immediate reality before them and dared to see a way-out giving hope and courage to move a people forward into freedom.

The context of the first four verses of Isaiah chapter 9, our Old Testament reading today, is a bleak historical situation in which Israel (the small northern kingdom) is facing a brutal attack from the superpower Assyria.  Prophecies of judgment for sin are present.  But even though Israel has gotten herself into this mess in which she now finds herself, her God will not ultimately forsake her but, through Isaiah, promises a messiah, a coming Child, a Wonderful Counselor, a Prince of Peace, who will bring light and lasting peace to a land devastated by darkness and war.  The yoke of burden she now bears will be broken and she will know the salvation of God as on the day of Midian.  But what was the day of Midian?  The day of Midian refers to the decisive victory of Israel, led by Gideon in Judges 6 and 7, over the oppressive Midianite army, symbolizing God’s powerful deliverance from bondage.  Isaiah highlights God’s faithfulness to Israel in the past in order to offer faith and hope to her now in her current crisis: though all you see now is darkness and deep gloom, a liberating light is about to dawn once again!

What is at stake here not the power of Israel or even her faithfulness, or not, toward her God.  What is at stake is the power of God and God’s faithfulness to Israel.  A prevailing question tucked in the back of Israel’s mind has always been: have we sinned so greatly that our God will finally give up on us and leave us to become prey to our oppressors?  This was a nagging question with which she had to contend throughout her history.  This is, unfortunately, true also of many in the Christian church whose beliefs about God are determined more about what they do than upon who God is.  But have we really heard the gospel?  Have we really understood it?  

St. Paul says he has come not to baptize but to preach the gospel…and not with eloquent words so as to empty the cross of its power…for the message about the cross is the power of God to save.  What does this mean?  It means that when we look upon the crucified messiah, we see the revelation of God in its purest form.  The cross is the revelation of the unfathomable and unhinged love of God gratuitously given in total freedom without coercion or constraint.  It is love unconditional, unrestricted, and unlimited.  It is the peak of the glory of God, where the light of God’s love shines brightest.  It is a disarming folly, a most unexpected and unimagined declaration of the wisdom of God that communicates something absolute and all-determining.  It declares that you are infinitely loved no matter what you have done, no matter where you have been or where you come from, no matter what you look like or how you speak, no matter what you have or don’t have, no matter what you can do or can’t do.  You are the beloved of God and God sees you and knows you and God’s desire for you in not ever condemnation but only salvation.  And in this declaration of love comes the confirming, vivifying Spirit that was always within, but it now felt and known.  So that now, even though darkness may seem to prevail, a light has shown, and we know that this light will ultimately cast out this darkness.  All this flowing out from the wounded side of our crucified God.

And then another question arises: how do we live into this light?  How do we allow the light of God’s love shine out through our lives?  This happens for us just as it happened for Jesus…and just as it happened to those he first called to follow him.  

Notice that, in today’s Gospel, just after Jesus first hears of John’s arrest, he withdraws to Galilee.  Jesus had just gone down from Galilee to Judea to be baptized by John and is subsequently driven by the Spirit into the wilderness down there in southern Palestine to be tested by the devil.  It is immediately after this that Jesus hears about John being arrested.  The Gospel seeks to communicate that the age of John is coming to an end…that the path has been paved and that it is now time for Jesus to become the fulfillment of what John, with his baptism of repentance, began.  So, he withdraws to his hometown of Nazareth in Galilee to begin to tell his own story.  But notice, he leaves Nazareth and goes to the land of Zebulun and Naphtali, which would have been just north of Nazareth.  The point being, as we will also see in those he will soon call, the withdrawing from what is familiar, the detaching from what is custom, in order to hear and discover a deeper truth about oneself and to give oneself the time and space to reconstruct a life on this new foundation.  It plays itself out in Jesus’ call to Simon and Andrew and to James and John…leaving their parents and their livelihood in order to hear and discover something new…in this case, something profoundly new.

This call of Jesus to follow him…to be driven into the wilderness, away from family and the familiar customs which can so often hijack our minds and keep them bound in subservience to those customs, is quintessentially a monastic call.  We hear the Lord call us to come apart with him, leaving everything behind.  And in that place of the stripping of the old self we begin to hear and discover a new self, a deeper and more secure self that begins to reveal itself not by our ascetical efforts or our “perfect” monastic observance, but only by our unencumbered, contemplative listening…and hearing…the divine voice saying, “You are my beloved, with you I am well pleased.”  It is in that voice and that voice alone that the light of God’s glory erupts in and through our lives.  It is in that voice alone that the power to cut through the lies and illusions of our old self lies.  And it is only after every other voice has been silenced that we can hear it and know it and then begin to live it.  Everything else about the monastic life to this is secondary.  Without this…the personal knowledge of God’s love for us…a root of bitterness will likely soon spring up.  

It might be important, here, to point out how John and Jesus were both similar and different.  They both entered upon the public stage preaching…and they preached on a similar theme: repentance.  But where John stopped, Jesus continued.  While John focused on repentance, Jesus focused on what this repentance could lead to: the presence of the kingdom of heaven in the here and now.  This was unique from the message of John…and, for that matter, from what anyone else had ever dared to preach.  Jesus’ message was as clear as it was shocking: the hoped for time of God’s salvation has come…it is here…it is now.  And the question which confronted the first disciples who heard this shocking message also confronts us: will we leave the old behind…without looking back…and focus all our heart and mind on the one leading us into the great unknown?  Will we trust this voice, this experience, this deep longing of our hearts?  Brothers (and sisters), let us indeed trust it because that is the only place where the great transformation of our lives…and of all of life…can take place…where the epiphany of our true selves hidden in Christ can shine out and offer the world a way through the darkness. 

The Second Sunday after the Epiphany, January 18, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC

The Second Sunday after the Epiphany, January 18, 2026

• Isaiah 49:1-7
• 1 Corinthians 1:1-9
• John 1:29-42

Click here for an audio of the sermon

In the name of God, the Lover, the Liberator and the Life giver. Amen.

"Come and see."
With these three simple words, Jesus extends an invitation that echoes through the centuries and reverberates in this church today. It is an invitation not merely to observe, but to experience; not simply to learn about God, but to encounter the living presence of the Divine in our midst.

In today's gospel, John the Baptist stands at the Jordan, and as Jesus approaches, John proclaims, "Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" This is no ordinary introduction. John recognizes something in Jesus that others might miss—the fullness of God dwelling in the fullness of a human person. This is the great mystery of the Incarnation that we contemplate during this Epiphany season: that God has chosen to make the divine presence known not in distant thunder or burning bushes alone, but in human flesh, in a person who walks dusty roads, who gets tired, who seeks out the company of friends.

Jesus is the ultimate manifestation of God. In him, the invisible becomes visible, the infinite becomes intimate, the eternal enters time. As John testifies, "I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him." The Spirit that hovered over the waters at creation now rests upon this man from Nazareth. In Jesus, we encounter not a messenger from God, not merely a prophet speaking about God, but God's own self, present and active in the world.

This is the scandal and the glory of our faith: that God would choose to be so vulnerable, so accessible, so completely present in human form. The fullness of God—all that is holy, all that is love, all that is creative and redeeming power—dwelling in the fullness of a human person. Not partially human. Not pretending to be human. Fully God and fully human, without division or separation. In Jesus' joy and sorrow, in his compassion and righteous anger, in his prayer and his silence, in his teaching and his touch, God is made manifest.

But here is where our gospel passage takes a remarkable turn, one that speaks directly to those of us who have dedicated our lives to seeking God in intentional community. After John points to Jesus, two of his disciples begin to follow. Jesus turns to them and asks, "What are you looking for?" In typical Hebrew fashion they respond with their own question: "Rabbi, where are you staying?"
"Come and see," Jesus replies.

This invitation is at the heart of the monastic vocation, isn't it? We come to places like this not because we have all the answers, but because we are looking for something. We come with questions in our hearts; with longings we can barely articulate. And Jesus' response is not to hand us a doctrine or simply a rulebook, but to invite us into relationship, into presence, into the experience of staying with him.

The text tells us they remained with him that day. The Greek word used here is meno—to abide, to dwell, to stay. It's the same word Jesus will use later in John's gospel when he tells his disciples, "Abide in me as I abide in you." This is not a brief visit or a casual encounter. This is the beginning of a transformed life, rooted in staying close to the source of all life and love.

What happens when we accept Jesus' invitation to come and see, to stay and abide? Andrew discovers something so extraordinary that he cannot keep it to himself. He rushes to find his brother Simon and announces, "We have found the Messiah!" Notice that Andrew doesn't say, "I have found the Messiah." He says "We have found." Already, in these first hours of discipleship, there is a recognition that the experience of encountering Christ is communal. We discover God together.

This brings us to a profound truth that we embody here in our life together: we are often manifestations of God to one another. Andrew was a manifestation of God to Peter, bringing him to Jesus. John the Baptist was a manifestation of God to his disciples, pointing beyond himself to the Lamb of God. In our monastic community, in our worship, in our work, in our moments of recreation and rest, we are called to be Christ to one another, to reveal the divine presence through our words and actions, our listening and our love.

But this manifestation of the divine extends even beyond the human community. The more-than-human creation speaks of God's presence as well. John saw the Spirit descending like a dove — the natural world bearing witness to the holy. In this monastery, surrounded by wildlife and natural beauty, we know this truth intimately. The rhythm of the seasons, the persistence of growing things, the songs of birds at dawn, the silence of snow — all of creation is shot through with divine presence, reflecting back to us the glory of the Creator.

God is present everywhere. This is the radical claim of our faith. There is nowhere we can go to escape God's presence, as the psalmist reminds us. If we ascend to heaven, God is there. If we make our bed in the depths, God is there. If we dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there God's hand leads us.

But more than this—and here is the mystery that can sustain us through all of life's challenges—God is present deep in our heart and soul. We cannot be separate from God and Jesus, no matter how far we wander, no matter how lost we feel. The same Spirit that descended upon Jesus at his baptism dwells within us through our baptism. We are temples of the living God, sacred spaces where the divine presence abides.

This is why contemplative practice is so central to our life together. In silence and stillness, we descend into the heart where God already dwells. We don't create God's presence through our prayer; we simply become aware of the presence that has been there all along. As St. Augustine prayed, "You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you."

When Jesus looked at Simon and said, "You are to be called Cephas"—Peter, the rock—he was seeing not just who Simon was in that moment, but who he would become through the transforming power of God's presence. Jesus sees us with the same penetrating love. He knows our deepest identity, the self we are becoming, the image of God being revealed in us day by day.

"Come and see," Jesus says to us still. Come and see what God wants to teach you. Come and see what God wants to gift you. The invitation is open, always. It is an invitation to experience rather than simply to understand, to abide rather than simply to visit, to be transformed rather than simply to be informed.

In our life here, in this community dedicated to prayer and presence, we are responding to that ancient invitation. We have come. We are seeing. We are staying. And in our staying, in our faithfulness to the rhythm of prayer and work, in our openness to being Christ to one another, we become part of the great chain of witnesses that stretches back to Andrew and Peter, to John the Baptist, to all who have pointed beyond themselves and said, "Look, here is the Lamb of God."

May we continue to accept Jesus' invitation to come and see. May we recognize him in one another and in all of creation. May we abide in his presence, knowing that we can never be separated from his love. And may we, like Andrew, be so transformed by our encounter with Christ that we cannot help but share the good news: We have found the one for whom our hearts have been searching all along.
Amen.

The Holy Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, January 1, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Francis Beckham, OHC

The Holy Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, January 1, 2026

• Numbers 6:22-27
• Galatians 4:4-7
• Luke 2:15-21

Click here for an audio of the sermon

“O God, our Governor, how exalted is your Name in all the World!” Amen.

The feast of the Holy Name of Jesus is one of several observances on the Church’s calendar known as “feasts of our Lord.” Others include the Presentation, the Transfiguration, the Nativity, and, the biggest one of them all, the Sunday of the Resurrection, or Easter Sunday. Like these other special days, the feast of the Holy Name helps us to meditate on and better understand a specific aspect of Jesus of Nazareth’s earthly life and teachings. Feasts of our Lord, as well as the feasts of the saints, invite us to pause and reflect on the unique role each of us plays in fulfilling God’s vision for the Church and the world. After all, Jesus’ first-century ministry was for our benefit, not his, and his special feast days help us see how we can become partners in that ministry right now in our own time and place.

But what’s really in a name? I mean, why the name ‘Jesus’ specifically? As with all names in the Bible, Jesus’ is rich in meaning and indicative of God’s particular job for him in the greater scheme of things. In Saint Luke’s Gospel, the assignment of Jesus’ name, which means “The Lord Saves” in Hebrew and Aramaic, is revealed to Mary by the Archangel Gabriel during the Annunciation. And so, right from the beginning, the naming of Mary’s child carries an important sacramental significance, and hints about what the future has in store for him.

Jesus’ name is no less meaningful today than it was back then. As probably all of us can attest, just hearing the name of Jesus is sure to evoke some kind of emotional response. Its mention can just as easily summon powerful memories based on how it’s been used with and around us (and possibly even against us) in the past. If Jesus’ name has been used rightly to teach us about love for God and neighbor, generosity of spirit, mercy, and service toward others, the memories are likely mostly positive ones. Sometimes, though, Jesus’ name is used wrongly, and then the memories around it aren’t usually so good, such as when it’s appropriated to incite fear or justify greed, domination, and violence. These are frankly blasphemous ways of using Jesus’ name, and today’s feast reminds us of our duty to restore it to its true, divinely appointed purpose of proclaiming God’s unconditional love for everyone.

In Sermon Fifteen on the Song of Songs, the twelfth-century monastic reformer, mystic, and early Cistercian, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, reflects on this transformative message of love inherent in the name of Jesus, saying:

“In some mysterious way the name of [God’s] majesty and power is transfused into that of love and mercy, an amalgam that is abundantly poured out in the person of our Savior Jesus Christ. The name ‘God’ liquefies and dissolves into the title ‘God with Us,’ that is, into ‘Emmanuel’ … Servants are called friends in this new way, and the Resurrection is proclaimed not to mere disciples but to [beloved sisters and] brothers [of Christ].”

As we can see in this quote, Saint Bernard marvels at God’s willingness – eagerness, even – to forgo majesty and power by dwelling with us humans in the person of Jesus. The utterly ineffable – and, ultimately, unnamable – Eternal God becomes true flesh and blood, fully relatable, and definitively namable. In short, the entire mystery of the Incarnation becomes accessible to us in the name of Jesus.

So, too, as we have heard and sung this morning, does the psalmist marvel at God’s desire to draw all of us into the fullness of creation, the source and summit of which is God’s own name; and, amazingly, to entrust us as stewards and heirs of the Divine Wonders, the greatest being the Divine Name itself. Truly, in spite of all our flaws, each of us by our very existence is shown to be utterly, undoubtedly, and unconditionally loved by God. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.

But Jesus’ name isn’t meant simply to be a statement or even a summary of deeper truth, though it certainly is both of those. Rather, just as Jesus of Nazareth Incarnates and shows forth in his person our very God, Jesus’ name in its very self is an outpouring of his ongoing ministry among and through us. Using the example of oil, a basic and multifunctional staple of twelfth-century life, Saint Bernard goes on to expound on the efficacy of the Holy Name, saying:

“The likeness between oil and the name of [Jesus] is beyond doubt … I hold that the likeness is to be found in the threefold property of oil: it gives light, it nourishes, it anoints. It feeds the flame, it nourishes the body, it relieves pain: it is light, food, medicine. And is not this true too of [Jesus’] name? When preached it gives light, when meditated it nourishes, when invoked it relieves and soothes.”

When I stop and reflect on these words of Saint Bernard, I’m amazed at how true they really are. I can think of times when Jesus has been preached as the Way of Love, and I have seen God, those around me, and even myself in a new and gentler light; when I have managed to quiet myself in my cell or in the woods or by the river and meditated on Jesus as a devout Jewish mystic with a profoundly personal experience of God burning within him to be shared, I have indeed been renewed and nourished in my own spirit; and when I have uttered the name of Jesus the Great Physician in times of sickness, despair, brokenness, and trouble, I have never failed to feel the healing balm of Gilead at work deep within my sin-sick soul.

The name of Jesus, which is poured out by God as a source of healing, truth, and light in the world, is a reminder for each of us of our vocation to be sharers of that Good News; we are all siblings and partners of Jesus, not merely disciples and certainly not slaves, and so we are both commissioned and empowered to join in Jesus’ ministry of proclaiming the message of God’s love, and to do so boldly and joyously in the name of the one who first taught us. And, having received the Name of Jesus as our inheritance, we may, like the shepherds in Luke’s Gospel, glorify and praise God for what we have heard and seen.

But, it’s important that I add just one more thing. For as wonderful as all this may sound, we all know that sometimes it’s a lot easier said than done, especially when we’re weighed down by life, or struggling with challenging circumstances. And if that’s where any of us finds ourselves this morning (or this week, or this decade), that’s okay. When singing Glory to God in the Highest happens to feel just a bit too much, then simply doing as Mary does is enough for us, treasuring all these words as best we can and pondering them in our hearts.

As we begin the Two-Thousandth Twenty-Sixth Year of our life in Christ together, I pray that the peace and goodness of God, who indeed dwells among and within us as Emmanuel, be upon and remain with us. May each of us discover, feel, and share forth the light, nourishment, and healing beauty of the Most Holy Name of Jesus. Amen.