the Holy Cross Sermons blog

Epiphany 3 B - Jan 22, 2012

2012-01-22T14:32:00.001-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
Epiphany 3 B – Sunday, January 22, 2012

Jonah 3:1-5, 10
1 Corinthians 7: 29-31
Mark 1:14-20

Sisters and Brothers, the time is now. The kingdom of God is breaking into our lives.
Now is the time to turn back from wayward pursuits.
Now is the time to see all the good that is at hand, if only you turn to God.

Let nothing come before the love of God.
Don’t let relationships fall apart because of God; but don’t let any of them claim the order of your life.
Don’t forget your abiding concerns for the sake of God; but don’t let any of those concerns sing out of tune with your love for God.

Today’s three passage of scripture talk about conversion and alignment with God.

*****

First, our reluctant and crotchety prophet Jonah has finally made it to Nineveh. He has walked through a third of the megalopolis of Nineveh. He walks with a proclamation of doom. It’s not his style to use mellifluous rhetoric to appeal to conversion. And yet, already king, people and animals are turning to the God that Jonah didn’t even say a word about.

The story of this mass conversion tells us more about God than about the inhabitants of Nineveh or about Jonah.

To God, there are no outsiders. And God is responsive to all. The undeservedly self-righteous Jonah disapproves of God’s mercy. Why forgive these loathed Ninevites, thinks Jonah.

The Ninevites are overlords of the Israelites. Their people have subordinated the Israelites into an exile of servitude. No matter; God pays attention to their turning away from their sins. God forgives them and repeals the punishment that Jonah proclaimed with obvious schadenfreude.

God’s forgiveness of the Ninevites is a blow to the Israelites. They, the chosen people, have been found undeserving, and now they live to see how gentiles receive God’s recognition. As Jesus will say, God is able of … stones to raise up children to Abraham (Luke 3:8).

*****

In your life, today, who are your Ninevites? Is there any group of people you’d rather not find under God’s pinions? Is it possible, that whatever their faults, they have already found God’s forgiveness -- and deserve yours?

*****

Secondly, the apostle Paul suggests in several places of First Corinthians that the imminence of the end of time is his own opinion, not God’s teaching. However, as is often the case, in preaching one meaning, the preacher opens the way for the Spirit to say what she must.

Paul asks us to live as though the end of evil, the appointed time, is imminent. Paul asks us to be undividedly about this in-breaking of God’s time.
He is not requesting to dump all our commitments but he is demanding that we put them in right perspective to the love of God. No concern or relationship of ours, whether good or bad, is to bear over our commitment to God. That injunction is valid for any moment in the course of time as created by God.
Because, at any moment, God is close at hand. At any moment, the fulfilment of God’s purpose is ongoing.

*****

In your life, today, what overbearing concerns abide in you? Are they blinding you to God’s purpose in your life? How do you put God first and foremost while being faithful to other important relationships? This latter question is one that monks in formation often ask themselves.

*****

And finally, Jesus confirms it; the time is fulfilled; the time is now. If He calls you -- and He IS calling you -- leave aside whatever seemed so very important and yet stands in the way, in His Way.

Jesus is not calling us to new tasks (although there will be those too), but Jesus is calling us to a new identity. And it is a costly identity. This identity of disciple requires an unswerving loyalty. This identity demands a trust that, what will be broken in acquiring it, was not worth keeping whole.

*****

When I first heard my call to become a monk -- and I had tried to have tin ears for a while -- my first reaction was: “Wow, that’s great, Lord! How about I make myself available to this nifty vocation in 2 years, 3 at the most?”

I had recently reinvented myself in a new career that I loved. I had started my own business. I was thriving. And, as any good entrepreneur, I had a business plan.

It needed a couple more years to come to fruition. What’s 2 years, in God’s time?
Well, imagine John and James telling Jesus that they’ll follow Him when they have met the fishing quota they have promised their father...

God’s time flows in strange curves; not like our sequential, rectilinear, measured projection of time. God’s desire for you can make two years seem like an eternity to... God. God knows when the time is fulfilled. And when God knows it; the time is now!

Eventually, having cleaned my ears, I heard it: “Get thyself to this monastery, now.” OK, OK. Off I went; but not before starting to tear apart this very identity I had invested so much into. And my attachment to my glorious business plan was only a symptom of that mistaken identity.

*****

Today, I ask you: What is God’s desire for you? How are you resisting that desire? Can you ask God to tip you over into His desire? Can you pray that? When He calls, can you answer “I’ll be out in a minute!” -- rather than in 2 years, in 5 years, when my dog will die, when my roommate will move out.

Discipleship doesn’t come cheap. But rejecting our true identity as disciple of Jesus is the costliest loss of all.

Pray that you will not mistake the sirens’ song for the voice of your destiny. Listen for God. Seek a loving balance amongst the concerns and relationships of your life. And, when he calls you, hear yourself saying like Eli: “Speak, for your servant is listening.” (1 Samuel 3:10)

May you lean into the embrace of the living, loving God.

Amen.

Epiphany 1 B - Jan 8, 2012

2012-01-08T10:24:00.001-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY --- Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
Epiphany 1, Year B, Baptism of Christ - Sunday, January 8, 2012

Genesis 1:1-5
Acts 19:1-7
Mark 1:4-11

St John the Baptist Baptizes the People, by Nicolas Poussin, French, 1635

The Baptism of Christ - Seven Mysteries

Our texts this morning are short. The first is the beginning of the creation story in Genesis. The second is the odd and interesting story of the baptisms in Ephesus, where Paul found disciples of Jesus who were still practicing the baptism of John the Baptist. And the Gospel is the story of the baptism of Jesus by John. Their brevity makes them accessible, easily grasped as stories, to all who hear or read them. They are straightforward narratives. At least they seem straightforward. But as we ponder them they come to be steeped in associations which lead us deeper into the Scriptures, and the deeper we go, the more mysteries we find. These are not mysteries to be solved, like detective novels or mathematical problems, but experiences we are invited to enter, through which we are led to places we might not have expected to go.

This morning I want to share some of my mysteries of this story in Mark with you, and see where they might lead. And I gratefully confess that my guide for this journey has been the excellent commentary on Mark by Francis Moloney.

In order to do so, I am afraid we will need the first three verses of Mark, which I took the liberty of adding to today’s Gospel. I am sure the composers of the Lectionary won’t mind a little bit more of St. Mark this morning.

A first mystery: Mark’s Gospel begins “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ”. St John’s Gospel famously begins with en arche en ho logos, and we immediately associate that, as we should, with the beginning of Genesis: “In the beginning (en arche) God created the heavens and the earth.” It is less noticed and it is worth considering that Mark’s first word is also arche. The beginning. A coincidence of grammar? Perhaps. But one of Mark’s characteristics as an author is that as often as not he uses allusions to scripture, a phrase or even just a single word, to set off a chain of associations. This is made easier because the Scriptures for him and for the Early Church were the Greek translation of what the Church came to call the Old Testament, the Septuagint, which Jews and Christians alike believed to be as inspired as the Hebrew. The story Mark tells will stand on its own, but when we “get” his scriptural references, our participation in the story is enriched. So Mark’s use of arche as his first word should at least alert us that something about creation might be happening.

A second mystery: In the short space of the first three verses of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is given three titles: Christ, or the anointed one; the Son of God; and the Lord. Embedded in the first eleven verses of Mark are also three other oblique but important references to Jesus’ power and divinity. First, in the ancient world, an euangelion, a gospel, or good news, as we translate it, was a proclamation of a military victory, a political triumph or the birth of a royal heir, and that is the word used for the proclamation of Jesus. Second, John says that he is waiting for someone “more powerful than I”. The Greek word for “more powerful” is ischuroteros, a word regularly used as an attribute of God. And third, John is introduced with a simple “it happened that”, usually translated as “appeared”: egeneto. The same word is also used of Jesus, but look at the difference: “egeneto en ekeinais tais hemerais elthen Iesous”: “it came to pass that in those days Jesus came”. So many more words: our “in those days” doesn’t quite capture the majesty of the Greek, with its redundant “the” and “those”. Jeremiah (31:33) uses this form, “in those days”, to introduce the Day of the Lord. Joel uses it of the pouring out of the Spirit on all mankind “on that day” (3:1). And Zechariah says, “In those days ten men of every language will take a Jew by the sleeve and say, “We want to go with you, since we have learnt that God is with you” (8:23). Jesus is not only Messiah, Son of God, Lord, but he himself is the euangelion, the proclamation of divine power as the world understands it; he is ischuroteros, the one who bears the attribute of power of the God of Israel; and he is himself the Day of the Lord the prophets have waited so long for.

A third mystery: The place of John the Baptist. A place in time. Old Testament prophets usually pointed back to the covenant of the LORD with Israel. But John points forward to the Lord. John is the hinge between the past and the future: “I baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” There was the past and there will be the future. But what of that pregnant moment in between, where John actually lives? And another place, this one his social location: “I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals”. According to the rabbinic commentaries, “untying the master’s sandals was the one demeaning task never required of a Hebrew servant” (Moloney p. 35). Mark expresses indirectly the unique nature of John: the one who looks both backward and forward, the one who is both greatest and least. As our Lord says in Matthew (11:11), “Of all children born of women, a greater than John the Baptist has never been seen; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he is.” This mysterious figure dislocated in time and human relations is the one who brings Jesus to the Jordan.

And so, the mystery of the baptism, the movement, and the vision, and the voice, three mysteries which are really one great mystery.

As Jesus ascends from the water, the Spirit descends in the form of a dove. The words echo each other in English as they do in Greek: anabainon and katabainon. Ascend and descend. The upward and the downward movements are simultaneous, a cosmic dance. Jesus emerges out of the water and the Spirit like a dove descends upon him. Water? A dove? The first dove we meet in Scripture is the dove Noah releases from the ark, which brings back the olive branch to show that the earth has begun to emerge from the chaos of the waters. Mark is the first to associate the dove with the Holy Spirit. And Mark’s implied comparison, the Flood and the Baptism, is also striking. But who is Jesus in this comparison? Jesus is not Noah. He is not the one who sent the Spirit-dove. Jesus is the one who is emerging from the water, cleansed, purified, ready for new life. The one with power, the incarnation of the Day of the Lord, is himself the one in whom life will return and in whom the new covenant will be written. And again, ascending and descending: Jacob’s ladder, which itself opens heaven to allow the angels of God to ascend and descend, a figure which John’s gospel ( 1:51) reports of Jesus: “ you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”

As Jesus comes up from the water, he sees the heavens torn apart. In Genesis (7:11), the heavens are opened to begin the great flood, and Isaiah (24:18) envisions the opening of the heavens as part of the apocalypse at the end of time. But Ezekiel, the prophet to whom God gives the vision of heaven and the throne of God, (1:1) says that his ministry began with a rending of the heavens: “In the thirtieth year, on the fifth day of the fourth month, as I was among the exiles on the bank of the river Chebar, heaven opened and I saw visions of God.” Three fruitful associations: The beginning of the act of cleansing of the world; the beginning of the end of days; and a prophet standing with those exiled from Israel, on the banks of a river, seeing visions of God. Standing behind all these, though, is a greater rending. God begins the first creation by separating the light from the darkness, and then by creating a vault to separate the waters, the waters above the vault and the waters below the vault, and the vault is called heaven (Gen. 1:6-8). Before the waters were separated the Spirit hovered over the deep. Has the Spirit been absent, or been disregarded, or even banished, from the first creation? Is the Spirit now returning as the heavens are torn apart, in the Baptism of Christ, to the waters below the vault of heaven? Is the creation being remade, refashioned, made new?

And the voice: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." A sign of God’s favor, surely. A cause for rejoicing. But what pleases God so much? Perhaps the clue is in the description “the Beloved” - ho agapetos. This is the adjective God himself uses to describe Abraham’s son Isaac, and which God’s angel uses twice again as they approach the top of Mount Moriah for the sacrifice (Gen 22:2; 12). What wondrous love is this? we might ask.

Mark’s first eleven verses open to us a world of astonishing scriptural sophistication, quite different perhaps than we may have thought at first about this seemingly simple narrative. These mysteries open to us the Baptism of Jesus as the culmination of the yearning of creation, the patriarchs, the prophets, Israel, indeed the whole world, since the beginning of time. We see John the Baptist as the representative of all that has gone before, standing in the timeless moment before the One-who- will-be-called rises up out of the water. Once he does, once he rises, everything has changed. The world is no longer separated into a Spirit-filled heaven and a bereft earth, because the heavens are torn apart and the Spirit pours down, lighting on the head of Jesus, ready to fill the earth, beginning at Jordan. The creation is about to be transformed by him whose gospel of power is announced and whose redemptive, beloved Sonship awaits.

And so, the seventh mystery: We are invited into the mystery of Jesus’ Baptism, the same mystery he enters into. We are not invited to be John the Baptist, standing, watching, witnessing, but not joining. We are called to follow Christ down into the water, and then up, to meet the Spirit descending upon us, even us. May we go down into the water. May we rise in Baptism. And as beloved sons and daughters, may we follow wherever it leads.

Christmas - Midnight Mass - Dec 24, 2011

2011-12-25T19:21:00.001-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY --- Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Christmas, Year B - Saturday, December 24, 2011

Isaiah 9:2-7
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14(15-20)

The creche 2011 in the Visitors Gallery in our Saint Augustine Church

Picture credit: George

I love this night. I love the mystery and wonder.

This is not a night for scholarly insights about the theology of the Incarnation. It’s not a night for arguing about doctrine. It’s not a night for cynicism or carping about the possibility or impossibility of miraculous birth.

It’s a night of wonder and of things beyond understanding.

It’s a night that calls us to put our doubts and resentments aside for a while and let the wonder and the message of peace take over. This is the holiest and most mysterious of nights. This night we forget everything but the miracle of the Baby and the wonder of the Holy Family and the Shepherds. It’s a night to listen for angels and to put aside for a little while all the things that bring us down.

The minister of the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh read a poem to us every year on Christmas. I read it every Christmas. Perhaps you know it? John Betjeman wrote it…

The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hookers Green.

The holly in the windy hedge
And round the Manor House the yew
Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that the villagers can say
'The church looks nice' on Christmas Day.

….

And girls in slacks remember Dad,
And oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children's hearts are glad.
And Christmas-morning bells say 'Come!'
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

(you can find the whole poem here).

This has been a hard year for so many people – too many wars, too much economic hardship, so many disasters – earthquakes, floods – people still out of work – our government striking poses and not seeming to do much else.

We need a break. This is a good night to focus on the miracle and the hope that Christ brings – Peace on earth – goodwill for God is pleased with us. It’s good to fall into the softness of the Mother’s breast and be nourished; to be like children for a moment – children full of trust and love and spontaneous laughter.

But let me tell you one little story to put in your minds and hearts… a young mother who is a friend of mine wrote to say her little boy was Jesus in the manger scene at their lessons and carols. She said “He was adorable but he wouldn’t stay in the manger!”

Brothers and sisters, neither will this One!

Happy Christmas!

Advent 3 B - Dec 11, 2011

2011-12-14T14:18:00.002-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY --- Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
Advent 3, Year B - Sunday, December 11, 2011

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
John 1:6-8, 19-28

Poets, writers, artists, and preachers get ideas and inspiration from unusual or surprising sources. For me, the idea or inspiration for this sermon came as I was at the photocopy machine in our mail room on Friday. I had been thinking about today's readings for some time, wondering what my take on them might be... or perhaps better, what their take on me should be. And I looked up and saw posted on the bulletin board an Advent calendar published by Morehouse and edited and designed by two friend of our community, Jay Sidebotham and Susan Elliot.

Like most things on bulletin boards, I had pretty much ignored it, despite its poster size. But as I was waiting for my copying to finish I thought: why not see what the message is for today? And here's what it said:

Get ready for this coming Sunday. Read the gospel ahead of time. It's John 1:6-8, 19-28. Imagine that you were asked the question that John the Baptist was asked. How would you answer? What would you have to say? WHO ARE YOU?

Not a bad way to enter in to today's Gospel passage: Who are you? Who indeed are you?

St John baptizes the people
painted 1633-35 - Nicholas Poussin - Getty Center, Los Angeles

If we were asked that question, there are any number of normal and expected ways that we might go about answering it. We might focus on genealogy or even genetics, on nationality, ethnicity or social class, on sex or sexual orientation, on education, health, physical attractiveness, marital status, certainly job or profession, perhaps income and wealth or lack of it, and even religion. These are all part of the picture, of course, all components of our identity.

But I wonder: Do they get to the heart of things? Does any of these, or any combination of these factors, capture with any degree of accuracy the mystery of you or me or adequately express who we are? I think not. Too many things are left out, and they are precisely the things that matter most about you and me, that define us most deeply and most richly.

It is helpful to examine how John the Baptist went about answering the question. He begins by stating clearly who he is not: “I am not the Messiah.” This he knows for a fact. And then the questions start: Are you Elijah? No. The prophet? No. It all sounds a bit like a skit from Monty Python. But in fact this is the way people, you and me, go about finding out who we are. It happens by considering and eliminating or saying “No” to various possibilities throughout our lives... and this often at the questioning or challenge of others, friends and foes alike.

Finally, John comes to a place where he sees more clearly and is able to talk about his identity: “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.” We might say that in this sentence, in this statement, John has discovered and given voice to his identity, to his vocation, to his deeper and truer self. John finally had an answer, or at least the first stage of an answer, to that perennial and troubling question: Who are you? Who am I? It is an answer that will deepen over time and be refined in the fire of life. But John seems to have found his true self.

Something very similar happens in the life of our Lord. In his case it is not others who ask, it is Jesus himself. “Who do people say that I am?” he asks his friends. “Elijah,” they answer, “... or one of the prophets.” “And you, who do you say that I am?” And here Peter makes his confession: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And here Jesus comes to know fully, perhaps for the first time and with startling clarity, who he is and what he is called to. It was the community of others who knew him well that made it possible for Jesus to understand more fully who he was and what he was called to. And perhaps for the first time he is able to accept that more fundamental and primary statement of his identity that came to him from the Father at his baptism: “You are my beloved Son, my beloved child.”

What is true of John the Baptizer and of Jesus is true also of us. What is most central to us and to our identity is approached by and appropriated through listening... to ourselves first but also to others: their questions, their counsel, their reactions. But most of all this happens by listening to God.

And what does God say both in Scripture and in tradition about you and me, about who we are?

• In Genesis 1:26, God says: ” Let us make humankind in our own image, according to out likeness.”
• In Psalm 8:4-5, God says: “...what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.”
• Indeed in Psalm 82:6 the Holy One says: “You are gods, and all of you children of the Most High...” What an amazing claim, and yet this is the truth about you and me. This is the deepest truth and the most profound answer to that question posed in today's Gospel: Who are you?

Our late Br. Douglas Brown loved to tell a story about the late Byzantine world. In that society, images of imperial authority were treated with great respect, and when the emperor himself could not be present at an imperial function, his image was escorted in with great pomp and ceremony, with heralds shouting out to the crowd: “Make way for the image of the emperor. Make way for the image of the emperor.” Once a rabbi watching this ceremony from the sidelines, observing the elaborate ceremony, commented: “Before every human being goes an army of angels shouting: “Make way for the image of the image of God. Make way for the image of the image of God.” The story is apocryphal of course, but not the quote. It is from the Talmud, that great compendium of Jewish wisdom.

Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said: "A procession of angels pass before each person, and the heralds go before them, saying, 'Make way for the image of God!' (Deut. Rabbah, 4:4)

This is true of you and me, of course. But it is true also of the person ahead of us at the checkout line and of the homeless person at the street corner; it is true of the corporate executive and the abused child; of the mentally handicapped man and the nurse and the solid citizen and the single parent and the addict and... well, true of just about everybody, saint and sinner, near at hand and far away, long ago and now and as far as we can see into the future. Images of God — that's who we are.

On this foundation, on this truth, all the rest is built. And in this, we can all rejoice. And from this fact much is demanded and expected of us: lives lived in deep mutual respect, where violence has no place, where hatred is given no foothold, where justice is pursued and mercy and love. Because that's how one treats the image of God. We can do no other, we God-worshipers, we the community of the redeemed, we Christians.

St John the Baptist
Valentin de Boulogne (lived 1591–1632) - private collection

Then they said to him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us.” (John 1:22)

Advent 2 B - Dec 4, 2011 - Scott

2011-12-06T05:01:00.001-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY --- Br. Scott Borden, OHC
Advent 2, Year B - Sunday, December 4, 2011

Isaiah 40:1-11
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8

Here we are on the second Sunday of Advent – a season that prepares us for Christmas. The problem is that there are really two very different events coming – so different as to be almost incompatible – and to add to the confusion, we call them both Christmas. For clarity sake, I'll call one of them “Secular Christmas” and the other “Sacred Christmas.” That will give you a pretty clear idea of where I'm going...

For Secular Christmas, Advent is more properly known as “shopping days until...” Secular Christmas is really just a consumption binge with a slightly altruistic marketing plan. Secular Christmas has absolutely everything to do with carnality and absolutely nothing to do with incarnation.

The work of Advent does nothing to enhance Secular Christmas and, more importantly, Secular Christmas contradicts Advent in oh so many ways. It would be tilting at windmills to try to rid Advent of the incursions of Secular Christmas. But to the extent we can keep these two things called Christmas separate in our minds, the more we can do the work of Advent and be present to the sacred incarnation that is coming.

Secular Christmas is an appealing, delicious, feel-good confection. Sacred Christmas is the beginning of a life-changing encounter – complex, challenging, frightening... Secular Christmas makes us happy. Sacred Christmas makes us whole.

Advent is not a happy, comfortable time of waiting in excited anticipation... trying to guess what is under the tree... of stockings all hung by the fireplace with care... The Liturgy of St James has a better instruction: “Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand...” Advent is a time of preparing to be made new, to be made whole.

Today, and in all of Advent, our attention is directed toward John the Baptist. When it comes to discomforting, feel-bad thinking, you can't do much better than the Baptist... except perhaps Isaiah... And wouldn't you know it, Isaiah is the other great voice we are called to listen to in Advent.

Lets start in Isaiah – “a voice crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.” These words are so thoroughly wrapped around the coming of Jesus that the context fades away. But the message from Isaiah is complex.

“Speak tenderly to Jerusalem... she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins... People are like grass – which withers and dies.” We are prepared to hear Isaiah is talking about the birth of Jesus – but Isaiah is not willing to restrict himself to that.

Our Jewish brothers and sisters understand Isaiah very differently. Isaiah really is talking about Jerusalem, about the people of Israel, not about some far-future coming of Messiah. His message is one of devastation. The reason to speak tenderly to Jerusalem is that she is to be destroyed. The pending destruction of the city symbolizes the destruction that is to fall on God's chosen people, the people of Israel.

After the destruction of Jerusalem, Isaiah is a powerful voice to a people who have been devastated, to a culture that has been shattered, to a nation that has been mortally wounded. Speak tenderly... This is a tenderness borne of extreme sorrow.

“Every valley shall be raised up and every hill brought down...”

When I was a young, the great Adirondack Northway was under construction – and valleys were raised up and mountain tops were brought down and rough places were smoothed over to make a highway that truly seemed worthy of the Lord. Somehow in the hazy innocence of youth it seemed to me that this is what Isaiah was talking about: some optimistic, modern, vast construction project.

But Isaiah is not talking about construction. He is talking about a destruction... on a massive scale... a cataclysm... Everything stable in the world, even the mountains and valleys, is about to be torn apart. Chaos and destruction are in the offing.

After the chaos, then we can take courage... then we can raise our voice... then we can proclaim that God comes in might... after the entire world has been turned upside down. It is courage born of extreme sorrow, extreme humiliation.

Pretense has been stripped away. Arrogance has been stripped away. The feeling of entitlement that comes with being God's particularly chosen people has been stripped away. Identity has been stripped away. And somehow, in the face of all that loss, we manage to breath again, to live again, to love again. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem...

John picks up where Isaiah leaves off – a voice in the wilderness crying get ready for the coming of the Lord.

As it happens, at the time of John, Jerusalem is again on the eve of destruction. By the time John's words have been recorded in the Gospels, Jerusalem has been sacked... the nation of Israel is in tatters... the temple, the very house of God, has, once again, been destroyed. John the Baptist referencing Isaiah the Profit is ominous foreshadowing, to say the least.

This is the context of Advent – of waiting for Emmanuel. For lovers of the status quo, it is a terrible time. And when I look in my own heart I find that there is a great lover of the status quo in me. I suspect I am not the only one here with that attachment.

Later today in this very church our Vespers will be centered on Bach's Cantata Number 36. In the opening chorus a voice calls us to lift our voices, our thoughts to heaven to meet the Lord. And then another voice says “stop where you are... the Lord is coming to Earth to meet you where you are.”

In our cultural stories we have a repeated story about parents coming home when the kids are not ready – when the kids have been acting really badly. It can be innocent as in Dr Seuss's “Cat in the Hat”, or it can be more adolescent as in “Ferris Bueller's Day Off” or “Risky Business”. But its the same story – with no adult supervision, the kids do exactly what they know not to do and then the car with Mom and Dad is coming up the driveway... they are going to be caught, certainly punished, perhaps grounded for life... Yet somehow, miraculously, the mess gets cleaned up just before the parents walk through the door.

Advent. We have had the run of the place and we have acted in ways that we know are exactly wrong. Children are allowed to suffer and even starve. Injustice and corruption are abundant. We beat our plowshares into swords. We take the widows mite to build grand palaces for the rich and privileged. And, as the Cantata says – God is coming to meet us on earth... the car is pulling up the driveway...

Our treasure shows where our hearts are – and that is on Wall Street and in executive suites, in the weapons of war, in the temples built to the false god of consumerism. Surely we don't believe God can look at this and say anything that sounds like “well done good and faithful servants.”

Let all mortal flesh keep silence and with fear and trembling stand.

Advent. We are called to keep awake. To make ourselves ready for the time when God takes on mortal flesh and dwells among us. Are our hearts, our homes, our neighborhoods, our nation in a proper state to receive God?

We will have to face the trap of our own attachments, our own delights, our idols and golden calves. The preparation of Advent, at least in part, is to see that we are a people not just in the wilderness, but that we are enlarging the wilderness... We are a people who not only sit in darkness, but in many ways we are responsible for turning out the lights... We are not called to despair, but to make a highway in this dark wilderness fit for God.

Shopping Days and Secular Christmas tell us that things are really good and sweet and wonderful and that we can build a better world just by doing even more of the same. That is a lie that does indeed contain some truth – there is great beauty all around us.

But we are every bit as broken as the Israel that Isaiah addresses. We are in the wilderness. We desperately need God's light to shine in our world, in our hearts. We anesthetize ourselves with stuff so that we don't know how much we need someone to speak tenderly to us.

Facing the reality that we are in darkness is part of the work of Advent. And realizing that God takes on human flesh and dwells with us... speaks tenderly to us... forgives us.. lovingly brings light into our world so that we don't have to remain in darkness is also the work of Advent.

Amen.

Advent 2 B - Dec 4, 2011 - Bernard

2011-12-06T04:42:00.001-05:00

Trinity Episcopal Church, Williamsport, PA --- Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC
Advent 2, Year B - Sunday, December 4, 2011

Isaiah 40:1-11
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And here we are, you and I; lucky enough to be here; lucky enough to hear that good news.

What is the good news? God was, is and will always be with us.
Jesus came and lived amongst us.
Jesus lives in you and in me.
Jesus will manifest himself to all, for us to live together forever.

In Advent, we yearn, we long, we anticipate and we prepare for Jesus arriving among us.
We yearn for the Beloved who was with humanity about 20 centuries ago.
We long for the Beloved who is being formed in our hearts today -- if we consent to it.
And we anticipate the manifestation of the Beloved to all of creation, in the time beyond time, in the time beyond evil.

Are we willing to participate in that good news? Are we willing to prepare ourselves and the world for that Kingdom? “Your Kingdom come. You will be done.”

Really? How? How are we preparing for the celebration of Christ; not only on December 25 but every day of our life? How are we preparing to celebrate the Beloved for all eternity?

*****

John the Baptist, the forerunner of the Beloved, gives us a clue: repent, and be forgiven. To repent comes in two movements of the heart.

First, look at yourself with a keen, honest, unbiased eye. Don’t judge yourself. Just look at yourself and see what is. Do you see anything that turns you away from God? Do you find anything that keeps you procrastinating from God’s embrace? Do you recognize that pile of excuses reaching to the rafters? Look at yourself and ponder. What keeps me away from your Love, Lord?

Then, when you have faced what is in the way, turn around, consent to God’s loving gaze into your heart and ask for forgiveness. Throw yourself into the embrace of God’s forgiveness. And trust that you will receive the help you need to keep walking in the right direction, whether you know that direction or not.

Just in case you missed it, there was no intermediary step between your introspection and your turning to God. There is no need to turn into an athlete of virtue, willfully trying to fix everything that is wrong with you and the world, before you deem that you deserve forgiveness.

Remember -- Good News! -- Jesus already came to us and redeemed you and me from sin; He didn’t wait for you to get rid of sin first.

Make no mistake, you will need to amend your ways and empty yourself to be filled by God, but you won’t be able to do that until you earnestly ask God to play on your team. Turn to God; receive the forgiveness freely offered; trust God to help you achieve God’s dream for you which you cannot do alone.

And know, that as long as you turn to God one more time than you turned away, you’re in the right direction. This repenting business is likely to be more than a once off occurrence. No cheap grace here.

*****

How else do we prepare to celebrate the Beloved today, every day and for all eternity? Well, we stop, we breathe and we remember whose we are.

We live in God’s creation and that involves time and space as we experience them. But does God experience time? And if so, what is it like to God?

We live in a sequential time. We imagine that time moving in one direction along a straight line. And we pretend controlling that time by measuring it. Some call that human experience of time Chronos.

When we live with God, we can have glimpses of God’s time, sometime referred to as Kairos. It is a time that flows in curvaceous directions and at various speeds. It is a time that is felt in quality more than quantity. It is a time of “already” and “not yet” occurring simultaneously.

*****

Advent is a time of the liturgical year that lends itself to considering God’s time. In Advent, we wait for the arrival of Christ at what we consider three different points of our timeline:

First, we await the commemoration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth in first-century Palestine as the historical marker of our liberation from sin and death,
Second, we await the return of Christ at the end of time. And we should look again at what that phrase might mean; “the end of time”,
And Third, we await the birthing of the Christ within. We are each individually amidst the pangs of Christ being born, nurtured and fully formed in our own heart.

And yet, I believe that in God’s experience of time these three events are woven together in a rich tapestry of time we don’t even begin to understand. In a way, these three events we await in Advent are arriving simultaneously in God’s experience of time. They all interact with one another and affect their outcome. Jesus opened up the Kingdom of God for all of us when he lived with our brethren. The Kingdom of God is close at hand.

What it takes to be there is to complete what Native Americans have called the longest journey a human can travel. And that is the journey an insight makes from the mind to the heart.

So this Advent, stop, breathe and remember whose you are. You too are the Beloved of God and the Kingdom is within you if you let your heart open the doors your mind can’t grasp.

*****

I said we should look for a moment at the phrase “the end of time.” I admit I don’t know what it means. But I want to share with you that I suspect it has more to do with a renewed sense of time, a time more akin to God’s time and a time freed from the clutch of evil. I see the end of time as the end of all evil brought about by God through his Beloved and all his beloved.

*****

So, in Advent, Christians prepare themselves to be with the Beloved more intentionally. They prepare themselves for Christmastide and beyond. They prepare themselves in joyful and truthful turning to God. They prepare themselves in slowing down to remember whose they are and what kingdom they are citizens of. They prepare themselves to remain more often and more fully aware of the abiding presence of the loving God in themselves, in each other, and in all creation.

If this sounds good, let’s consider being Christians again this Advent. We will prepare ourselves to live in the Kingdom of God at Christmas and forever more. We will put ourselves in God’s hands as instruments for a renewed creation in the midst of what is and what is to come. The timeline can seem fuzzy and that’s OK. You’re in God’s hands, you’re in God’s time.

Have a blessed Advent.

Come Lord Jesus, Come!

*****

Advent 2 B - Dec 4, 2011 - Julian

2011-12-06T04:39:00.001-05:00

St John's, Kingston, NY --- Br. Julian Mizelle, OHC
Advent 2, Year B - Sunday, December 4, 2011

Isaiah 40:1-11
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8

An Advent Wilderness

It is a real joy for me to be with you today; to join you in worship and to share in this holy season of Advent. Honestly, St. John’s feels like my second spiritual home. I know so many of you from the Monastery, from the Education for Ministry program, and your work and ministry with Angel Food. And now you’ve welcomed me to your pulpit, you’ve welcomed me to share my journey in Contemplative Prayer, you’ve welcomed me like family. It is a spiritual bond that I truly treasure.

It is as if we are working backwards through Advent this year. Last Sunday our Lectionary pointed us to apocalyptic events and Christ second coming. Today we have the opening prologue to Mark’s gospel and there are no birth stories to linger at.We meet not one but two prophets speaking to us from the wilderness. This backward movement through the days of Advent may strike us as odd but it will ultimately point us toward the coming of the Christ child. It does point us toward the manger where we will get our first glimpses of light, life and love. It does point us toward new hope, peace, and joy.

But before we arrive at the foot of the manger we must first go through the travail of the wilderness. The wilderness, which can seduce us with its beauty and its majesty, has many faces. In one part of the country it is dense with forest and lush vegetation which delight all of our senses. In another part of the country it is stark and barren and seems to purge us of any affectation. All the while it holds a grandeur that takes our breath away. If you have ever visited some of our great National Parks out west, especially those in southern Utah, you know of the grandeur of which I speak. The wilderness is a place of wonder and exploration. It is also a place of respite and rejuvenation. Unless, of course, we become lost in it. Then it is transformed into a place of dread and terror. A place where all hope can be lost. The wilderness is a place that supports life only if we possess the survival skills necessary to navigate its mysteries. Without those survival skills we are at the mercy of a disinterested, even hostile, environment.

On this second Sunday of Advent the calm of our lives is startled awake by voices from the wilderness. With Isaiah we hear one crying out for the construction of a passable route through the desert; then from an entirely different time, even a different desert, we hear the voice of John the Baptist, our wild and wooly prophet, giving us an unsettling call to repentance. In fact, any honest look at all three of our scripture readings this morning bring us face to face with the issue of repentance.

Trust me, no guest preacher wants to go into a parish his first time and preach on repentance. Any homiletical professor will tell you there is no surer way to loose you audience. Mere mention of the word cause most people to roll their eyes back, shut down their hearing, or brace themselves for an olde time religion that is as worn out as its name. Apparently our attitudes and feelings about repentance are about as popular as they were in the time of John the Baptist and Isaiah: they only preached about it when they were out in the middle of nowhere.

What does this have to do with Advent? Everything! While our calendars may suggest that Advent is the season of preparation for the celebration of the Nativity, the Advent readings broaden our view and insist that we are really preparing for the coming of the reign of God in our lives. This backward march that begins with the second coming of Christ and ends on Christmas Day at the manger points us to the mystery of Advent. A mystery that links the historical coming of the promised Messiah with the coming of Christ into our own hearts and the coming of Christ again at the end of all time. A mystery that will ask us to pause and look into our hearts, our real and honest selves.

We are being called to prepare for a time when kindness and truth will meet, when justice and peace will kiss, when truth will spring out of the earth, and justice will look down from heaven. Now these are phrases that normally make us think of when the world “out there” will finally be set right by God. But I am talking about the world “in here”. I am talking about when kindness and truth will meet “in here”. When justice and peace will kiss “in here”. No I’m not talking about when the wars of distant lands will cease, I’m talking about the wars that rage within our own thoughts will cease. The conflicts, the wounds, the troubles, the hurts, the disappointments, the fears, the self loathing, the self hate—because this is the wilderness that most of us find ourselves lost in today. This is the wilderness where the good news of Christ cries out to touch and change our lives.

Advent is a time serious road construction—and we all know the joy that brings. Isaiah is not describing minor repairs, such as filling in potholes or repairing curbs. He is calling for major reconfiguration of the terrain: filling in valleys and leveling mountains; smoothing rugged land and rough country. He is calling for serious transformation of the landscape of our lives. It is a call to go in a new direction. Or as Fr. Thomas Keating so lovingly tells us it is a call to change the direction from where you are looking for happiness. That is how he defines repentance. It is when we get to that place where we say “this isn’t working anymore” and we turn around and go a new way.

One day I was on my way to Woodstock and came upon road construction and was detoured onto unfamiliar roads. Now I know this must be a guy thing but for some reason I thought I could figure out a better route than where the detour was sending me. After about 45 minutes of going in circles and ending up where I began, still blocked by road construction, I decided I would follow the detour signs. You know what the definition of insanity is? Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome. How many times in our lives have we been trapped by this? It is not really the definition of insanity but it defines the human condition we find ourselves captive in.

This past week I found myself captive of an unexpected wilderness. It was by no means how I had envisioned I would spend my first week of this blessed time of Advent. A season I regular refer to as my favorite time of year. My wilderness sent me off to jury duty. And by wilderness I really don’t mean the interruption that jury duty brings. Changing plans, rearranging schedules, not having time to use it as I want to. I’m not even referring to the drudgery we all feel by the need to perform our civic duty, that task of doing something we “should” when we honestly would rather not.

The wilderness I’m speaking of is when you are called to step out of your own life and into the lives and events that belong to another world. A world where tragic things happened and a series of events have transpired all culminating in bringing a roomful of strangers together in a courtroom. So my first week of Advent was not filled with times of Contemplative Prayer, saying my Rosary, joining my monastic community in our daily celebration of the eucharist, not even joining in the daily office to chant the Psalms. My first week of Advent did not give time for the spiritual reading I had planned or the practice of spiritual disciplines that I look forward to in this blessed season. By Friday I was dry, parched, empty. Mentally exhausted, spiritually drained I said God “why?”. Friday evening I walked out of the court house in uptown Kingston and found myself standing right in front of a monument to Sojourner Truth. That great abolutionist who marched up the very steps of that court house and won the right to a trial which resulted in the return of her son from a slave owner that had hauled her son all the way to Alabama. She got custody of her son back and spent the rest of her life to bring an end to slavery and injustice. The inscription on the monument quotes Sojourner Truth speaking from her own wilderness: “I talk with God and He talks with me”.

“I talk with God and He talks with me”. That is a divine relationship at its very purest. That is the conviction of one who has turned around and walked in a new direction to find her happiness. That is one who went through the wilderness with the only survival skill that will bring you through it: clutching God’s hand. That is one who made a new path and toppled mountains of injustice, even the injustice she found within herself and found the light, life and love within the manger of her own heart.

“I talk with God and He talks with me”.
Have a blessed Advent. Amen.

Advent 1 B - Nov 27, 2011

2011-11-27T16:12:00.001-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY --- Br. Julian Mizelle, OHC
Advent 1, Year B - Sunday, November 27, 2011

Isaiah 64:1-9
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Mark 13:24-37

Living In-Between

On this first Sunday of Advent, as the Church begins its telling of the Christian story once again, our Gospel reading tells us to “keep awake”. Honestly, this command to keep awake I find to be a bit annoying. Most of us do not need to be told to keep awake during Advent. We are already operating in a state of sleep deprivation. Instead of being accused of being asleep we are more likely to be accused scurrying through the rush of holiday shopping, parties, and to-do list, being highly over-scheduled, and burning our Advent Candle at both ends. There’s endless shopping, gifts to prepare, parties to plan, travel arrangements to make, lots of extra cooking and baking. Squeezed in to our already busy lives will be Christmas pageants, Cantata’s and Lessons and Carols. The joy of being with family and friends is a gift but it is also a stress. Visiting relatives and in-laws mean extra work and somehow it all has to get done. The pressures of the holiday season will be over-shadowed by a constant reminder of how many shopping days left until Christmas morning. In case you’re wondering you have 27 days and about 15.5 hours. So it occurs to me that the real pastoral action needed for most of us is not to be told to keep awake, but to pass out sleeping pills with chamomile tea to minister to our over-caffeinated, stressed out selves.

The fact that we are exhausted and stretched to our physical limits is not just a reality of Advent and Christmas -- it’s a reality of our lives all year long. Sleep, or the need to get more of it, has actually made it onto the list of spiritual disciplines. This is simply recognizing that it is hard to progress spiritually when we’re exhausted. James Bryan Smith in his book “The Good and Beautiful God” says that the number one enemy of spiritual formation today is exhaustion. Many retailers opened their stores this past Friday (Black Friday) at midnight Thursday. Some even pushed their opening hours earlier and opened on Thanksgiving Day. We’re loosing the sanctity of setting aside a holiday as a time of resting from our busy lives.

Our culture is caught up in a mad rush of busy-ness that is pointed toward Christmas morning, but it is not pointed toward the coming of the Christ child. We may not be physically asleep; quite the opposite actually. But in our wakefulness to the realities of the holiday rush we can fall asleep to the spiritual season of the coming Christ. So on this first Sunday of Advent Mark’s gospel gives us a wake-up call by telling us that the coming of Christ is both near and at hand. But which coming of Christ does Mark’s gospel point us to? Advent is a special season indeed linking the historical coming of the promised Messiah with the coming of Christ into our own hearts and the coming of Christ again at the end of time.

Our lection this morning is known as the little apocalypse and is filled with references to the end of all time. Not unlike many today the Disciples wanted Jesus to give them a date. They were ready to mark their calendars. So Jesus gave them a metaphor -- the Fig Tree. A fig tree would be a well known reference point for someone living in a Mediterranean world in the first century. When we encounter figs today they tend to be mashed inside a moist little biscuit. But for us, is the sign to the end of the age really to be found in a comfort food cookie? I think not.

For us this is a metaphor pointing to a paradox. The wake up call in Mark’s gospel is calling you and me to awaken to paradox. In fact, it is one of the most important paradoxes found in the Gospel. It is the paradox of already but not yet.

It is the already but not yet drama of how we live our life with God.
Christ has already been born but not yet has the world come into His light and love.
Already Jesus has established the means for our relationship with God, but not yet do we live in complete union with God.
Already the Prince of Peace has come but not yet have we learned to end our wars.
Already Christ has taken our wounds but not yet have we been able to let them go.
Already the realm of God is evident all around us, but not yet is God’s realm fully established in this world or even in our hearts.
Already God’s economy is at work, but not yet have we moved our hope from Wall St.
Already God has filled the earth with plenty but not yet have we learned to share it with all.

Jesus was telling His disciples, and through this gospel text He is telling us, we are the one’s living “in-between” His first coming and His second coming. This already but not yet paradox is how Mark’s gospel breaks right into our lives today speaking to us who live in-between. Mark’s gospel is not an apocalyptic message for those left behind, it is an apocalyptic message for those left between. For those living in this challenging meantime between the already and the not yet.

Just like the fig tree that knows how to respond to the seasons of the year Advent calls us to a season to go within. All of nature moves deep inside and all living things have dug their roots deep into the earth for sustenance and protection. We too are invited to turn inward during this blessed time of preparation for the Lord’s coming. This is the season to let Christ be born anew in our hearts, in our minds, in our souls. This is the season to live fully into the reality that although Christ was born in human weakness, He manifested His divinity to the world. This is the season to open our hearts to His spiritual coming in our inmost being where Christ is born anew and to let His light shine within us. This is the season to wait and watch for His final coming at the end of time where He will manifest His glorified being through all creation.

As I was preparing my own heart for the Advent season I was going through my journal and came upon an entry I had written years ago. The entry has the simple title of “Three Questions”. I’m not for sure what impressed me to write it down at the time. But today I would tell you that the Holy Spirit knew I would need it at this point in my life. I have taken these 3 questions and placed them on the inner tabernacle of my heart. It is as if they sit in the cradle of my being, the Holy Spirit working them through me as He knows best. I don’t even try to provide an answer to these 3 questions. I am simply letting them be within me, allowing my heavenly friend to engraft them into my life. I will journey with them these next 4 weeks of Advent. They will be my guiding star leading me to the cradle of my Lord. I share them with you in invitation for you to journey with them during this season of Advent.

What needs to be forgiven?
What needs to be healed?
What needs to be celebrated?

Three questions that hold and carry us through the paradox of already but not yet of our lives with God. Three questions that stand with us in solidarity (quite literally) in this in-between place of our Christian journey. Three questions that we can welcome keeping awake with through this holy season of Advent.

Have a Blessed Advent! Amen!

Proper 28 A - Nov 13, 2011

2011-11-15T19:09:00.001-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY --- Br. Roy Parker, OHC
Proper 28, Year A - Sunday, November 13, 2011

Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30

Right away I ought to say that the talents of which the Gospel speaks are not the abilities with which we usually connect the word, but rather a standard weight of money of a large value; minor point of clarification.

In the Sundays leading up to Advent we’re treated to a series of Gospel parables concerned with the judgement of ethical behavior by one who gives the means to live wisely, absents himself and eventually returns to see how we’ve done, presumably to prime us for the season of Advent.

Today’s parable is a stern warning against choosing death when life is offered, in this case choosing to do nothing with a talent of money when given you on the basis of your known ability to use it productively. The servant cites the merciless character of the master as the cause of inaction, but the master describes the servant’s forfeiture of native ability as an act of cowardice, a vile and worthless choice.

The story is intended as a stern warning, and if warning and incentive is the principal object lesson for a first century audience, a peremptory condemnation into outer darkness will presumably cut it.

Yet we ought to remind ourselves that the Synoptic Gospels from which it comes must also be measured against the Fourth Gospel, that of the glorified Christ, the Christ who insisted he came not to condemn the world but to save it, and the Christ who defends the adulteress against the vengeance of a misogynist society.

So, let’s rely on the greatness of God to develop a larger ending to the story and let’s cast it in a more inclusive mode.

The parable is a cautionary tale about one in such terror of the master’s mercilessness as to become oblivious to the qualification which gave her the talent. She was deemed worthy of the talent , deemed capable of putting it to productive use; she was capable, she definitely was capable. In the story she could have added in language we’re more accustomed to, “I was so terrified on account of my abusive family history that I forgot who I was and what I could do, so I went and hid your talent in the ground out of sheer desperation. Mister, the most unbearable misfortune is when you lose yourself in that way, when you realize it and even reproach yourself, but you just can’t help it.”

And then there’s what could be called ‘The Workshop Syndrome,’ assuming the master distributed the talents at the same time, the one-talented servant - let us call her Sally - would have regarded her colleagues’ larger number as indication of their superior abilities which fed back to further undermine her self confidence, disempower her.

Sally, for goodness’ sakes, needs a life coach who actually would not address the psychological trauma but rather appeal to a more compelling vision than fear, something she cares about enough to take just one step for its sake, the courage for which comes from another place, enabling a trembling mortal to move forward and bringing along its own progress, step by step, as day follows night.

Those with whom I’ve been privileged to share the experience of bottoming out and resurrection speak of a courage which seems rooted in a god, a god beyond god, who appears when god has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. For a Christian believer the abiding vision when all else has vanished is typically the image or imagination of Christ crucified, as if produced by an unsuspected capacity in themselves , and this god beyond god brings a knowledge of their death and resurrection with a chemical edge which can practically be tasted.

Such bottoming out and resurrection is how we can understand the exclamation of the Apostle Paul: “Hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly... God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. . . much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.” (Romans 5:5 ff.)

The initial backbone of today’s Gospel seems to have been fear-based, about something the culture imagined as the wrath of God, but we’ve seen that it’s possible for the wrath of God to be obliterated by a larger truth which we experience as unearnable grace, to which the tradition testifies, of which Paul once again exclaims in his letter to us today: “God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that . . . we may live with him.” (1 Thess. 5:9-10)

Proper 27 A - Nov 6, 2011

2011-11-06T13:56:00.002-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY --- Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Proper 27, Year A - Sunday, November 6, 2011

Amos 5:198-24 --- 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 --- Matthew25:1-13

Preaching rotas have a way of tripping me up – so do lectionaries. I’d like to have a bit more leeway. You know… Oh, I don’t like this gospel, let me pick another that’s more comfortable. One that won’t kick up so many questions. One that won’t go against what my mother taught me about sharing, for example. As in, “If you don’t give these young women some of your oil, I’ll be very disappointed!”

Picture credit: Frank Starmer

These strange passages of Jesus’ discourses are not the kind of Christianity most of us want. We had a friend in South Africa who said that what the Church desires is Christianity Lite. Non-disturbing, comforting, reassuring following the meek One who loved children so much! Who told us to be like children. (By the way, anyone who thinks that means being nice and eager to share, doesn’t know children!)

In our efforts to keep things nice, we often just don’t read what is there. We see what we want to see. And what we seem to want is for difficult truths to go away or at least to simplify. So we pick and choose. This part fits my ideas, I’ll keep that. Oooh, this is not nice, it must be wrong.

I don’t mean that all portions of Scripture have the same weight for us. Cultures have evolved, ethics have matured, and so on. The Levitical laws do not all apply in our faith tradition. We don’t keep kosher. We may not stone adulterers. You might get pork for lunch.

But some aspects of the Bible speak of things that are immutable, unchanging. The things which deal of justice and God’s righteousness which is love are not always palatable to our ears.

The words of the prophet Amos are among those. After putting the people squarely among those who perpetrate what they condemn in others with regard to the poor, he tells them this… don’t expect the Day of the Lord to raise you up. None of your efforts at righteousness will count for anything because you trample the poor and take from them levies of grain; you tax them but don’t pay any yourselves. (oops, did I just say something awkward?) You do all the “God” things and neglect the godly things. You preach morality; you sacrifice, you sing all the right songs, you pronounce yourselves God’s people but until justice flows like rivers and righteous concern for the poor and needy pour out, I do not hear you.

So the prophet calls us to live as God’s people must. Not with outward show but with inner love. And that won’t come about automatically. It takes practice. It comes from an open heart that doesn’t seek its own wellbeing but seeks the righteousness of God – that is, a righteousness that streams from love and spends itself in justice.

So to the ten bridesmaids! Not a clear story of redemption at all, I don’t think. Why didn’t the five prudent ones share their oil as out idea of politeness and propriety would demand? What about if someone asks for your shirt, give him your coat, too? What’s happening here?

I don’t believe this passage is about going to heaven or even being ready for the second kept out? Is heaven, then, all about good behavior?

And it’s certainly not about good manners or being good boys and girls. What Jesus is calling for in these last days is for his disciples to be prepared for whatever might come. Being a bridesmaid isn’t just about a pretty frock and parties. If the lights went out, nothing could happen. This is a story about faithfulness and commitment. Life in the kingdom, comes with responsibility. The wise ones knew this. They had prepared themselves with the hope and expectation of what was coming. They couldn’t give away the oil because it was the oil of long perseverance, the oil of faithfulness. Not something that can be dispensed automatically.

Jesus calls us to life in a kingdom that fully demands response. Christianity Lite is for comfort, for pleasant Sunday mornings. Or pleasant weekends in the monastery. Life in the kingdom calls us to be ready for the demands of being truly human as Jesus the Christ was. Life in the kingdom comes fraught with danger and the weight of being the people who do justice and love mercy.

There’s really no time for Christianity Lite. Look around us. Look at the desperation in the world; look at the hunger in the eyes of people. Face the unrest and fear humanity faces. Consider economies based on war and greed. Nothing soft will be sufficient to the challenges of love.

Look into the face of Christ and it will become clear as the Day.

All Saints - Nov 1, 2011

2011-11-01T15:49:00.003-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY --- Br. Scott Wesley Borden, OHC
All Saints - Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Revelation 7:9-17 --- 1 John 3:1-3 --- Matthew 5:1-12

All Saints

It is hard approach All Saints Day without having to pass through its much celebrated, and much distorted, prelude – All Hallows Eve, better known as Halloween. Mischief and mayhem, ghosts and goblins, and above all – as much candy as anybody can stomach... These are the stuff of Halloween, at least in secular American culture.

Halloween, with its focus on what you can get, makes a mockery of our religious tradition. But sometimes our religious traditions need to be mocked...

The roots of Halloween, and of All Saints Day for that matter, are a bit obscure, though it appears that Celtic spirituality played an important role in the start of both traditions.

It is hardly surprising that Celtic tradition, with its very high regard for those who have gone before and far less linear approach to time, would peculiarly honor saints. The custom of All Saints seems to have spread eastward from Ireland.

And its not so surprising that in the enterprising and poverty-ridden Celtic lands, somebody figured out how to make money along the way. Perhaps starting in Scotland, poor people went about on the eve of All Saints asking for money. In exchange for some cash, they would pray for the souls of your loved ones in purgatory. An All Hallows Even tradition is born... Halloween also appears to have spread east, and then west, from Ireland and Scotland.

Add some Reformation and some ingenuity by American candy makers to the mix and today we have substituted candy for coins and any idea of prayer, for souls in purgatory or anywhere else, has flown out of the equation altogether.

Yet here we are, faithfully keeping All Saints Day, which has come from humble Irish roots to be a principal feast of the Church.

The focus on souls in purgatory, or on ghosts and goblins, or just on candy, makes an interesting prelude to this feast. At best, it seems to call us to focus on what we can do for these pour souls, whatever poor souls we may have in mind. At worst it seems to focus us on what we can get – who can get the most and the best candy.

But the focus on what we can get, rather than what we can give, may in fact be the right preparation for All Saints Day, as counter intuitive... as unchristian as it may appear.

Bernard of Clairvaux, that is Saint Bernard... notes that our praise, glorification, and celebration can mean little, if anything, to the saints. Earthly honor, he observes, can be of little value next to Heavenly honor. He concludes that the saints have no need of us. According to Bernard: “When we venerate [the saints], it is serving us, not them.”

And that, for Bernard, is exactly why we should venerate saints (including, of course, Bernard himself).

As Bernard sees it, venerating the saints, calling them to mind, inspires us to want to be in their company – to want to be like them. Ultimately we want to join the saints not in their communion with each other, but in their communion with Jesus, with God.

So a bag stuffed with candy may not be exactly the desired outcome, but a person stuffed with spirit may be the spiritually evolved cousin of that trick-or-treat bag...

We are taught that it is more blessed to give than to receive, but when God, or the Saints of God, are offering gifts, it is surely better to be ready to receive. On All Saints, more than any other time, we are called to open our hearts to the gifts that we receive from the saints. And to the extent that we are preoccupied with what pious gifts we can bring and solemn liturgies we can produce, we are just getting in the way.

So who are these saints anyway?

In the early church it was not so complicated to become a saint. All you needed was enough enthusiasm at the time of your death in the great congregation and you were acclaimed a saint. A spontaneous process, of course, doesn't sit well in a hierarchical system, so as the Church became more powerful and more centralized in the middle ages, a more controlled process of ordering saints came into use.

There has been a little bit of a tempest in the teapot of the Episcopal Church recently over the publication of “Holy Women, Holy Men.” It appears that a great effort was made to be more inclusive and more representative in who we honor as a saint in our calendar.

Including JS Bach sits well with me – no greater musician has ever written for the Church, but Henry Purcell seems a bit more iffy. Ralph Adams Cram, architect of our little church, was surely an inspired builder who's buildings still enliven the spirits of others, yet I'm not sure his life is particularly inspiring, or even particularly interesting. There is no question that John Calvin has had a huge impact on countless Christians, but I suspect he would be among the first to ask to have his name removed from a list of saints.

For me, the great service provided by Holy Women & Holy Men is that it calls us to think differently about saints. Our natural tendency is to want to call somebody a saint because they deserve the honor. But as Bernard of Clairvaux notes, our honor is of no value. That is not the point of having someone in the calendar.

Perhaps what we need is a greater embrace of Halloween – the image of standing before the saints with our goodie bag in hand asking for a treat may be the best approach to All Saints Day. Maybe I need to be more like the innocent child searching for treats than a sophisticated adult deciding who is, or is not worthy of sainthood.

Does Bach inspire me in the way that Patrick, or Columba, or Martin Luther King do? I really don't know, but he does inspire others. I do know that, much as I admire the work of Ralph Adams Cram, he surely does not. But the simple wisdom of Halloween is that I don't linger at the places where the treats don't work for me. I just move on.

Wyston Hugh Auden is somebody who may not actually be on anybody's list of saints – though a more inspired and inspiring poet in English language would be hard to find. His poem, “A Hymn to Saint Cecelia,” the patron saint of musicians, describes the relationship with saints as only a truly inspired and gifted poet can.

“Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions to all musicians, appear and inspire. Translated daughter come down and startle composing mortals with immortal fire.”

I pray for Cecilia to appear to me. I pray for John and Charles Wesley to appear to me. For Martin Luther and Martin Luther King. For Benedict, Scholastica, and James Huntington and W.H. Auden. The list goes on and on.

They don't need me – I need them. I need their strength, their vision, and their ability to startle me out of the cocoon of my own ego. God grant us all the wisdom and humility to open our hearts to receive the gifts that the saints around us so freely offer.

Amen.

Proper 26 A - Oct 30, 2011

2011-10-30T14:13:00.006-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY --- Br. James Michael Dowd, OHC
Proper 26, Year A - Sunday, October 30, 2011

Joshua 3:7-17 --- 1 Thessalonians 2:9-13 --- Matthew 23:1-12

On Humility

This morning's Gospel, among other things, is one of the great “monastic” passages in the Bible. Jesus' call to humility is a theme that all of the most important monastic writers spent a good deal of time with from the earliest days of our tradition.

Chapter Seven of the Rule of Benedict is totally devoted to the idea of humility. In it, our father Benedict teaches us that there are twelve steps of humility and begins the chapter with this quote from St. Luke, actually found twice in that Gospel, and also found in today's passage from St. Matthew: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

In both Gospels (Luke and Matthew), Jesus tells different stories to communicate this essential truth. In all cases, however, he is speaking about various aspects of Jewish culture and society in First century Palestine. As I was reflecting on this morning's Gospel passage, I found myself pondering how this applied to the Rule of Benedict and to our lives here in the monastery as we live it today.

And it's in the introduction of Chapter Seven, entitled, by the way, “On Humility”, that I found some answers to these questions. Benedict uses the image of Jacob's Ladder to set up his discussion regarding monastic humility. He writes about the monk's body and soul as being the sides of the ladder and the divine summons being the various rungs of humility and discipline for the ascent. The monk descends the ladder by being prideful and ascends the ladder by being humble. The higher you ascend that ladder, the closer to heaven you get.

Picture credit: Albert Houthuesen

Now this was a theme used by many of the Monastic and Church Fathers in the Sixth century and for several centuries before, but I think it might be hard for us to connect with in our own time. The verse, however, in this section of the Rule that absolutely grabs me, and that has real repercussions in my life is this: “When the heart is humble, God raises it up to heaven.”

Brendan Freeman is the Abbot of New Melleray, a Trappist Abbey in Iowa. Recently he released a book collecting some of his homilies and Chapter Talks and in one section he reflects on this theme of the heart. Allow me to quote to you a passage:

Formation in the monastic life is formation of the heart. Once we have found our hearts, we move from the effort of prayer, the work of prayer, from strenuous prayer to self-acting prayer. The heart has two meanings. It is the center of our being and the point of meeting between each of us and God. Two do not exist in this place, but only One. Our prayer becomes Christ's prayer.

Abbot Brendan's phrase “once we have found our hearts” is so moving to me. It seems to me that Christian formation – be that monastic or non-monastic – is about finding our hearts. If we are one with God in that place, in our hearts, then that is where the spiritual journey must, by definition, lead us. And Benedict teaches us that when the heart is humble, God raises it up to heaven, that is, to Himself.

So, what does it mean to be humble? To have a humble heart? Well, in the Carmelite tradition, St. Teresa of Avila teaches us from the 16th century:

I was once pondering why it is that our Beloved is so fond of the virtue of humility. Without it ever having occurred to me before, this thought suddenly came to me: It's because God is supreme truth. To be humble is to walk in truth.

Now Benedict and Teresa and virtually every other monastic writer up until the second half of the Twentieth century often wrote about how wretched and awful we all are. But if being humble is to walk in truth, then we must have a full understanding of who we really are in the context of an eternal life which already began for us at our conception. And so, yes, we must know, for example, those areas in which we are weak, damaged, sinful, fearful and lacking faith. But to walk in truth is also to know those areas in which we are good, holy, whole, trusting, loving, and charitable.

If we are truthful with ourselves, we know that many, if not all of those things I just listed are true about ourselves. God already knows the truth about us. He knows that truth because he created us in his own image and likeness and longs for us to know him as our Father. Our journey is to discover that truth so that we can move closer to becoming one with God. So that two no longer exist in our hearts, but only One.

For us, in the Twenty-First century, “the truth” has become reduced in some circles to simply a psychological understanding of ourselves. And the psychological understanding of the human mind is a great gift that God has revealed to us over the course of the last hundred years or so. But it is only part of the the truth - seeking that we are called to do. In fact, knowing ourselves and reflecting on our own psyches, environment, families, social, political and economic situations can teach us a great deal about ourselves.

But the bottom line is that all of that information is only that: information. To be a Christian in formation is to be a Christian in prayer. To be a Christian in prayer means not that we are exalted, but that we have willingly humbled ourselves in truth, so that Christ can unite us with himself as he prays within us. It is Christ's praying within us that brings us to the heights of exaltation, to heaven, to God our Father.

The Christian never arrives at The Truth. Rather, the Christian journeys within a context of truth, learning more and more about themselves and in the process about God. The Church, representing the entire Christian community makes this same journey of truth on a communal basis. That truth is revealed in prayer. A prayer of the heart. A prayer of Christ's heart.

The goal of prayer is to help us to arrive at a place of silence. There are certainly many different prayer techniques and different techniques are appropriate for different people. But the goal is all the same: silence.

God leads us, as he led Joshua into the Promised Land. On the banks of the River Jordan, he and all the people ritually prepared themselves so that they could enter the Promised Land thus exalting their people. Our way to the Promised Land is the silent way. Silence is a way of being that places us in right relationship with God. It is a knowledge that in our silence before God, we are exalted because only then are we able to hear Christ praying within us. Uniting with us in an eternal love that carries us up that ladder to heaven, to God who is our Father.

AMEN.

Votive for the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

2011-10-30T13:25:00.000-05:00

Holy Cross Priory, Toronto, Ontario
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC Superior
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Votive Mass of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

This morning at Matins we remembered the life and witness of Bp. James Hannington and his companions who were martyred for their Christian faith in 1885 in what is now Uganda.

James Hannington

As is often the case, the situation there was complex. Colonial powers (English, French, others) were moving into the country and the young kabaka or king, Mwanga, was alarmed. He feared that the new religion these Christian missionaries were introducing would bring down the wrath of the ancestors. He feared a rapidly changing social order. He feared the elimination of his royal powers and privileges. And so he responded with violence. He ordered the bishop and his party killed. The next year he had many of his own pages tortured and burned alive for their faith because they would not or could not conform to ancient tribal customs. Still others were eliminated. Mwanga, the king, was between 16 and 18 years old when all of this took place.

Mwanga was in no sense an innocent. But neither was he a monster. He was someone caught up in a political and social upheaval whose response, driven by fear, was both immoral and ineffective, but not, unfortunately, surprising. He did, by the way, go on to lead several insurrections against the British and late in his life converted to the Anglican faith.

As we do on feasts of martyrs, we began this morning’s service with the invitatory, setting the theme for the feast. It was: "Christ calls the faithful to embrace his cross. Come let us adore him."
I have said these words regularly for over 25 years. But this morning I was struck by the ambiguity of the invitation. Exactly whose cross are we being invited to embrace? Christ’s... or our own?

The answer, of course, is both... always both. And in saying this we come up against the mystery of suffering. For in all genuine suffering — whether we recognize it or not — the thin membrane or veil or curtain between Christ’s life and our own is pierced, pulled aside, or, in the words of scripture, torn from top to bottom. The one cross — Christ’s — is certainly not the same as the other — yours or mine. But in the wonderful economy of God, they each illuminate the other, concretize and enflesh and give meaning to the other.

This was true for Bp. Hannington and his companions in 1885 when in the midst of the complex marriage of British colonialism and Christian evangelism he saw the image of the cross of Jesus shining through.

The bishop’s last words: "Go tell Mwanga that I have purchased a road into Uganda by my blood" are a ringing testament to the Christian hope, that out of death, and paradoxically through death, comes life, new life, larger life.

This was true for those Ugandan martyrs the following year. Though they may not have been able to express it as eloquently as did the bishop, but they knew that they had been called to a greater loyalty, to a greater king, one whose claims trump the demands and desires of a frightened young tribal chieftain, indeed of any human monarch or ruler or power

This was true for Archbishop Janani Luwum who in 1975 went to his death in Uganda as a witness to justice and Christian charity in opposition to the mad dictator, Idi Amin.
And it is true for us here today.

Of course we pray that we may be spared. And like Jesus, we neither desire nor intend nor orchestrate our own sufferings. To do so would be madness. But like Jesus and like the martyrs, we embrace the sufferings that are sent us when they cannot be averted. We freely say: Yes. We even, dare we say it, embrace them.

"Christ calls the faithful to embrace his cross."

Our own crosses take many shapes, many forms: physical or emotional suffering, diminishment, betrayal, limitation, failure, and ultimately death. But the cross of Jesus has power to illumine and suffuse with meaning and hope these dark corners.

It is important to remind ourselves that we don’t have to like our crosses. But to embrace, to say yes, is to acknowledge and consent to a wholly other order. It is to confess to ourselves and sometimes to others and occasionally even to the world that yes, even here, God is not absent. It is to confess that even here — perhaps especially here — God can be found. Even here, in sharing with Jesus the often painful predicament that is the human condition, we are not abandoned or left alone.

Our morning worship climaxes with the recitation of the Benedictus, the Canticle of Zachariah. Its antiphon for the feast of martyrs includes the following words of encouragement: “These are the ones who have come safely through the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

The cross of Jesus that we celebrate today is the source and symbol of that wondrous cleansing. It is, in all its scandal, a promise that suffering and death do not have the final word. The final word for Jesus, for the martyrs and for us is always: Life. Life into death. Life through death. Life beyond death.

At our midday service today we prayed: “Happy are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb.” This Eucharistic meal is not yet that supper in its all its fullness... but it is a foretaste. Let us feast together now, confident that what we share here will strengthen us and lead to embrace, to consent, to say yes, to the cross and to life.

“Christ calls the faithful to embrace his cross. Come let us adore him.”

Proper 25 A - Oct 23, 2011

2011-10-23T09:37:00.000-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY --- Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
Proper 25A – Sunday, October 23, 2011

Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18 --- 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 --- Matthew 22:34-46

Matthew situates today's gospel passage at the beginning of Jesus' last week. Only yesterday, Jesus made a triumphal entry into Jerusalem, seated on a donkey, treading palms and coats thrown on the ground.

In only four days, Jesus will die the infamous death of a crucified. At this stage, the spring is still being wound up that will burst into tragedy before the Passover even begins.

It is Monday. Jesus is teaching. And several religious factions seek to challenge him into dishonor. He will win every challenge. And we can imagine that this only heightened his opponents' desire to do away with him.

*****

Last Sunday's Gospel reminded us of the Pharisees' challenge to Jesus about paying taxes to the Empire. The lection of today alludes to a second challenge; this time, from the Sadducees, and about the resurrection of the dead.

Today's third challenge seems mild in comparison. Maybe it is even a genuine question, not a trap. Maybe a Pharisaic opponent was so allured by Jesus' masterful response to the two earlier challenges that he just had to ask a most important question to Jesus. Maybe.

The Greek text of that question could be rendered into "Teacher, what sort of commandment is of great import?" This would have been a critical question for a Pharisee.

They were religious practitioners who tried to obey every commandment in the Torah. That’s no less than 613 commandments (248 positive injunctions and 365 prohibitions, to be exact). Many would have entered into discussions as to which commandments were the heaviest and which were lighter.

*****

Jesus answers this last challenge succinctly and with authority. He quotes scripture. He puts a hierarchy in his answer.

"`You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.'
This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

The first part of Jesus' answer is a quote from Deuteronomy (6:5). It is said by our Jewish brethren as part of their most cherished prayer, the Shema.

The second part of Jesus' answer is a quote from Leviticus (19:18). We read that passage this morning.

I shall come back to these commandments, if only too briefly -- for all of our religion should flow from their combination.

*****

The second pericope in today's gospel reading seems puzzling to modern readers. This part about David and Messiah. I believe that it is an integral part of Jesus' response to the three challenges that Matthew has described in this chapter of the gospel.

These challenges all attempt to strip Jesus of any authority to teach. Their sequence shows all the worry that Jesus' opponents feel. They don't want anyone to get any ideas that this young rabbi might be the Anointed One of God, the Messiah. He doesn't fit their bill, therefore he can't be genuine in their minds.

But in Jesus' rhetorical question to his challengers, he introduces the idea that a Davidic ancestry is irrelevant in identifying the Messiah. Once more with scripture at the ready (this time Psalm 100:1 allegedly composed by David himself), Jesus undermines the Messianic expectations of his challengers.

Jesus continues to drive home to them that the Messiah is so much more and so different than the Messiah they have neatly boxed for their political and religious convenience.

So, Jesus crushes verbally three onslaughts from his opponents and, having demonstrated his natural authority, he crushes their preconceptions of the Messiah.

How many of his hearers did have a conversion experience that day and understood Him to be Messiah? Not enough to stop the dynamic that would put him on a cross by week's end.

*****

Now back to the two commandments that the Messiah teaches us are of greatest import. In these two commandments, Jesus gives us a summary of his mission and ministry. The two commandments interpret one another and the two need to stand together.

In a more hebraic rendering from the Greek text, they read:

"`You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your being, and with all your intelligence.'
This is the greatest and first of the mitzvoth. And a second is like it:
You shall love your companion as yourself.'
On these two orders hang all of Torah and the inspired ones."

The aim of our life is orient all of our being and all of our existence towards God. In so doing, we are to love as God loves.

*****

And what does God love? God loves all of creation, with no exception. We are to love all that God loves.

Now, all is all. We are not allowed to exclude anything or anyone, not even our enemies. As Matthew reports Jesus saying earlier in his gospel: "God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous."

We are even to love God's sun and God's rain. We are to keep no part of creation out of our love and concern. It all hangs together in the loving hands of the Creator, we are not to consider any of it as disposable or beyond our care.

*****

We are to love as God loves - without discrimination. We are to love what God loves - everything. Because God is the source of all Being and God loves all of God's creatures.

By the way, love of self is included in all this but it is not emphasized; rather it is assumed it should be there. Self-hate is not like God’s Love. Self-absorption is not like God’s Love. But I am deeply lovable and loved and so are you.

So, we are to love like God; we are to love everything, everyone and indiscriminately. This is a big God. This is a big Love. We are going to need to keep stretching. But it is better than to stick around within the box where we'd like to keep a God more to our proportions, one who loves as I love, one who loves what I love.

As W. Paul Young, author of "The Shack" once wrote: " The only reason that God is ever in a box is because God wants to be where you are."

Step out of your box, Love the God who awaits you there and let your Love expand divinely.

Amen.

Proper 23 A - Oct 9, 2011

2011-10-09T12:19:00.003-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Adam D. McCoy, OHC

Proper 23 A - Sunday, September 18, 2011

Exodus 32:1-14
Philippians 4:1-9
Matthew 22:1-14

I suppose we have all been invited to weddings we weren’t sure we wanted to attend. People we don’t know especially well, business and professional connections, distant relatives whose lives have diverged from ours, children of friends we have more or less lost touch with. It isn’t that we don’t wish the happy couple well. We do. We always do. But it’s what surrounds it – the travel, the gift, the strangers we find ourselves placed next to, the loud music at the dinner or party that makes it impossible to talk to the strangers even if we find each other interesting, the Sunday-best clothes we need to wear. The general sense that everything had better go close to perfect or else. So much work for such a short ceremony.

Shortly after I became rector of my first parish, I agreed to preside at a wedding for a colleague who had an emergency. I didn’t know the couple or their families. In fact, I didn’t know a soul involved. It was all planned. I arrived for the practice the night before. The service and celebration were at a lodge – Elks, or perhaps Moose, or maybe Oddfellows – which had a nice hall and a lovely garden, well watered, lush and green. The ceremony was to be in the garden. The theme of the wedding was country and western. The young people were charming, as were their parents. But the arrangements were in the control of a wedding coordinator, a formidable lady who in another era could easily have been a colonel in the ladies’ division of the Waffen SS. She led us through the event with terrifying assurance. The principal challenge was that the garden space was not very deep, and so she let us know that it was vitally important that as the bridal party walked down the aisle, they do so deliberately, stepping slowly, to savor the music and the moment. Everyone practiced walking in to “Oh my love, my darling, I hunger for your kiss”. It must have taken at least 10 minutes to get everyone in, though it seemed much, much longer. I could see the humor in some eyes, and the anxiety in others’, as this lady practiced her craft on us. She had thought of everything. Except the space for the actual wedding.

Late the next afternoon all assembled in their wedding garments. The shoes were what interested me. The men’s cowboy boots had fairly narrow heels, and the women wore white pumps with alarming stiletto heels. The wedding director had sequestered the party behind a door so they could not be seen, nor could they see. The music began. “Oh my love, my darling”. The first bridesmaid and groomsman started slowly up the turf grass aisle, waiting step by step as instructed. The stiletto heels started to sink into the turf. Step by step, each step a little more urgent. As successive couples entered this went on and on, ever more holes being punched in the turf, until there was hardly a solid space for the bride’s heels at all. I learned that day there’s a kind of movement you have to make to get your heels out of turf. Then came the standing in line for the actual promises. Not only stiletto heels sank ever deeper in the turf, but so did the small, sharp heels of cowboy boots. I did what I could to shorten the agony, but there’s only so much you can do to shorten the marriage service, especially when the bride’s little sister is reading St. Paul's 13th Chapter to the Corinthians. Love is patient I thought was especially appropriate. Fortunately, the young people had caught onto the humor of it and they were actually enjoying it, and the bride was the best sport of all. There was lots of goodnatured laughter and the dancing later seemed to take on the special step they’d all just learned. But the wedding director was beside herself. Her fixed smile at the end of the service, if turned toward the west, over the sea, could have frozen the state of Hawaii.

We often think the worst thing that can go wrong with a well-planned wedding is some sort of social faux pas, a gaffe that embarrasses everyone and perhaps jinxes the marriage. Perfection is the goal. And so we think of the unfortunate guest who didn’t have his wedding garment on, and pity him, shocked at the king’s violent response. But of course, weddings are never just about the couple, and they are not just about getting the social niceties correct. They are about the community that comes together around the couple. A wedding is an anticipatory celebration of the future, and the couple being married is the symbol of that future – new life growing out of their love, new possibilities for the community emerging from their union. It is the joining of families, and so parents and relatives surround the couple, creating a new constellation of relationships. The guests are not just witnesses but participants in this renewal of communal hope, so a guest who flaunts the customs puts his or her ego needs before the needs of the community. To be inappropriate is an insult .

This being the case, it is interesting to me in our gospel story today that the young man being married is hardly mentioned, and the bride not at all. The story of this wedding, as is often the story about weddings, is about the parents and the guests. What is important here is the social reality that this wedding represents. This is not a private ceremony at a small lodge in Orange County, California. It is a royal wedding. It is not about the private joy of two families and their anticipation of a new and better future, but represents the future course of a nation, the continuance of the legitimate governing order, prosperity and possibility for everyone. We focus on the guest who came in the wrong clothes. But let’s look at it from the point of view of the king for a moment.

A king would invite the great and the good, as the British would say. The rich and powerful and well connected would all be expected to attend and honor the king by their presence and their gifts. They represent the people, who are present by proxy. But something is seriously wrong in this kingdom. None of the great and the good show up. It’s as though there’s been a revolution and the king somehow didn’t get the memo. It is, of course, an extreme, even preposterous, situation, the kind Jesus loves to use to draw a vivid picture. What if the king gave a party and no-one came? Except this is worse. This wedding is about the continuation of the king’s legitimate rule after he is gone, through his son and his son’s children. These people aren’t just being socially rude. They are rejecting the king’s right to be their king. And so he reacts, with political violence. He eliminates the powerful and invites instead the powerless, the poor, the people of the street, both good and bad. They are all made welcome. The king finds in ordinary people the legitimacy for his rule and its continuation through his son.

I think we can figure out what this parable is referring to without too much difficulty. In remembering and writing down this story of Jesus the early Church is telling itself a story about itself, about why God has rejected his chosen people and replaced them with the riffraff of the rest of the world, Greeks, Romans, barbarians, the good and the bad, none of them part of the original covenant. But here they are, all of them, invited to the feast, dressed up and having the time of their life at the party they never thought they would even see from outside the windows of the hall, let alone as honored guests. What a surprise! What a turnaround! What a joy! To be the king’s invited guests at the wedding symbolizing the new life of the kingdom! Perhaps they are all rehearsing the wedding song of the lamb for that other great celebration yet to come.

All except one. One who doesn’t understand. Or doesn’t care. Or is caught up in his own self-centered world. Who sees no reason to change when she receives the invitation. Who doesn’t realize that he is called to something new and wonderful and different, to something that she needs to respond to, to say yes to, to change himself for. One who came to this event of a lifetime dressed as if she were going to the market to buy a fish for dinner. But this is the transforming event of a lifetime, and he is not responding.

We are told in the commentaries that wedding garments were provided, as ties used to be ready in the old days for negligent customers at restaurants of a certain sort. No one needed to be embarrassed. The host’s generosity covered – literally covered – the shortcomings of the guests. All were made worthy, all were equally prepared for the wedding banquet. This person has evidently refused to show respect for his host, for his king. What a shame for her. What a shame for us all if we misunderstand our invitation.

The truth is, we are the riffraff of the rest of the world. We are the powerless, the poor, the people of the street, the good and the bad. As St. Paul says, How many of us were powerful when we were called? How many of us were rich, or well esteemed in the eyes of the world? God has chosen us for his celebration because others more worthy than we refused to come. What can we do except put on our best clothes, or trust that when we get to the wedding hall, garments will be provided? Then we can all march slowly in, learning to walk gracefully even if our heels start sinking into the turf because we really don’t know anything at all about where we’re going and what it’s like. If we truly welcome the invitation to the kingdom, we’ll smile and laugh and shout for joy together with that wonderful couple and their friends. And maybe there will be a wedding garment for the one who thought she was in control but wasn’t.

It took her a while to get over herself, but in a little while she changed her icy smile for warmth. She realized she wasn’t really dressed right for the wedding. She changed her attitude, put on her wedding garment, and joined the dance.

picture credit: La Vida Creations

Dedication of our church - Oct 4, 2011

2011-10-04T16:50:00.000-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Roy Parker, OHC

Feast of the dedication of our monastery church (Saint Augustine) - Tuesday, October 4, 2011

1 Kings 8:22 - 30
1 Peter 2:1 - 5, 9 - 10
Matthew 21:12 - 16

I’ll begin with a parallelism between a passage in Second Samuel and the Gospel text which illuminates Jesus as the fulfillment of the idealized David in the tradition. In Second Samuel 5, this account of Jerusalem made the capitol of the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah. “The king and his men marched to Jerusalem against the Jebusites... who said to David, ‘You will not come in here, even the blind and the lame will turn you back, -- thinking, ‘David cannot come in here.’ Nevertheless David took the stronghold of Zion... David had said on that day, ‘Whoever would strike down the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack the lame and the blind, those whom David hates.’

Therefore it is said, ‘The blind and the lame shall not come into the house.’ According to Matthew, “Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple... The blind and the lame came to him in the temple and he cured them... the children (were) crying out in the temple, ‘Hosannah to the Son of David.’ ”

Not only do we have this dramatic alteration of David’s history as a man of blood, but an equally dramatic upset of what the tradition esteems as acceptable for a temple offering -- for hear this description from the Book of Malachi: “If I am a master, where is the respect due me?" says the Lord of hosts to you, O priests, who despise my name... When you offer blind animals in sacrifice, is that not wrong? And when you offer those that are lame or sick, is that not wrong?”

The blind and the lame came to Jesus in the temple and he cured them, because in another place he says to the clergy, Go and learn what this means: I desire mercy and not sacrifice. Well, we, lame and the blind, as we might be, are totally acceptable to the Son of David who desires to heal us in his mercy and we give thanks for this house in which it occurs to some extent in the hosannahs sung with childlike confidence day by day.

Ever since I sang with a shape-note choir in San Pedro, CA several years, a day when the polyphony seemed to lift us off the ground, I’ve been enamored of Alexander Schmemann’s emphasis of the importance of such music to the liturgy when he says that it’s only truly possible to mention angels and archangels when the music has lifted us from the earth to that extent, which takes some time, such a feast as mends in length.

And this, it seems to me, is why a tent is mysteriously woven into this blessed structure for which we give thanks. Solomon’s dedicatory prayer is clear that the building itself cannot be the whole story: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house...” and when David, Solomon’s father, proposed such a house, the prophet reminded him that the God of Israel was a tent-dweller while John the Evangelist states that the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us while observant Jews will also do something of the sort for Succoth.

The tent is a kind of reminder or balance for the church or temple structure, born out by a photo contest about prayerful gatherings in Jubilee magazine some years ago in which, amidst many an extraordinary church interior, first prize went to a picture of gathered Bedouin in a tent.

In his letter just read to us, Peter urges us to allow ourselves be built like living stones into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. In the construction of Solomon’s Temple the rock had to be quarried off-site because in the Ancient Near East it was unacceptable karma to use iron tools within the sacred precincts. However, shaping was possible on-site with softer implements of antler and wood, for example, and if Solomon were building the Arches National Monument in Utah, wind alone with plenty of time would have sufficed.

I imagine that we ourselves are being shaped on-site, as it were, by a host of skillful means basically at the service of ego-disablement, and, like the Arches National Monument, requiring a lifetime. To allow oneself to be built into a spiritual house resembles the Centering Prayer adage: "To intend to consent to God’s presence and action within."

When I underwent the training to become a presenter of Centering Prayer a few years ago, Bonnie Shimizu, the leader of the workshop, told us about The First Saturday Practice Day which used to be held at the Center in Snowmass, Colorado. On the first Saturday of every month the public was welcomed to the Center for several hours of Centering Prayer practice in the inviting meditation hall. Those unfamiliar with the method were taken aside at the beginning for brief basic instruction.

We thought, What a wonderful thing to try at La Casa de Maria in Montecito, CA, and, so, out went the publicity. Well, First Saturdays have become one of La Casa’s most desirable events, getting on the average of thirty meditants per month, and the remarkable testimony about the day so often given is how the group practice supports and carries the practice of each person. It would, I imagine, be like this blessed space serving as both quarry and temple.

Our group practices have the power to shape each of us into a living stone and so long as we’re living stones our design cannot be frozen, our blueprint is ever developing. But along with the ego-disablement implicit in this, we’ll remain mindful of Bernard of Clairvaux’s arresting summation of the process in describing the four stages of love:
1. (least perfect) The love of self for self’s sake;
2. (better) The love of God for self’s sake;
3. (better yet) The love of God for God’s sake; and
4. (most perfect) The love of self for God’s sake -- the very best building material of all.

Getting ready for a festive Vespers (incense will burn!)

Picture credit: George R. at "George Visits Holy Cross" blog

Saint Michael and All Angels

2011-09-29T18:36:00.000-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC,

Saint Michael and All Angels - Thursday, September 29, 2011

Genesis 28:10-17
Revelation 12:7-12
John 1:47-51

Next year will be my fiftieth anniversary of ordination – fifty years of pastoring, praying and preaching. And this is the first time I remember preaching about the angels!!!

That feels odd because Scripture is full of angels… from the Garden of Eden to the garden in Revelation. Angels with Abraham, angels with Lot, Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Uriel. Hosts of them at the Birth of Jesus. They appear to kings, to the poor. They glorify God in heaven and tromp the earth. They are fearful and beautiful. Some are righteous and some are crooked. They bear good news and they mutiny and rebel.

How come I’ve never preached on them? Well, we’ve become so rational and so intellectually elite that we scorn such quaint ideas. Unless, of course, we’ve gone off the deep end and into that place where people see angels everywhere… guarding their cars, in the garden like gnomes and fairies, or hovering over babies.

We don’t become angels when we die; they don’t get their wings when a bell on a Christmas tree rings; Della Reese and John Travolta are not angels! Nor do we become angels when we die. Cherubs were never babies.

We’ve given up the angels! We have let them go to those we call superstitious or the naïve. We have turned them into shadows of themselves and stolen their power. The mystery and beauty have become suspect.

But Scripture shows us beings with power. Maybe that’s why we don’t mention them. We don’t quite understand what they’re all about. They’re messengers. They speak for God...and so we fear them. Each instance of their appearing seems to be imbued with awe. They don’t look different, but their power and presence means that they usually have to start their messages with “Do not be afraid.” Fearful and wonderful!

I think most faiths have the equivalent of our angels – beings from the heart of the Divine power who testify and challenge and protect the created universe.

It’s sad that we ignore them and I miss them. Especially now, I miss them. Now when other powers are rampaging in rage and arrogance and blindness through the world.

Michael, Archangel, we need you! We need your righteous sword that will cast down injustice and war-mongering. Defy tyrants. Stand in darkened rooms where children are raped and protect them. Raise your hand against wife beaters and bullies. Give power to the weak; strength to the afflicted.

Gabriel, Archangel, who stood before the Maiden and announced a Savior, speak again! Speak of the One who comes to dark and empty places in the human soul. Call us back! Proclaim the freeing Word that gives hope to the hopeless and joy to the mourners. Announce the coming of the One who restores and makes new.

Raphael, Archangel, spread healing in famine ridden Africa and in Asia; and in our military hospitals, in half-way houses, and under the bridges where homeless people shelter. Fight for an end to endemic illnesses; bring nourishment to the people starving needlessly. Teach us to spend our resources on life not on death.

Uriel, Archangel, you stand in God’s Presence where there is only Light. Shine Light in our darkness. This world is subsumed by the darkness of greed in business, in government. Light must shine on the needs of the poor; on prisoners and addicts.

Angels in all your hosts, strengthen our voices to glorify the Redeemer, to speak to and for the lonely and voiceless. Guard our children, cradle the sorrowful. Shine, for God’s sake shine!

Now maybe that’s too outlandish for belief. Maybe I’m verging too far on superstition.

But I don’t care. If you don’t believe in the angels, then for Christ’s sake become one. Become a healer, and a proclaimer; become a warrior against hunger and hopelessness and evil. Be a Light Bearer in the darkness around us.

Do that for Love’s sake and, believe me, you will find yourself on the side of the Angels…you will be Messengers of God, bearers of good tidings, protectors and lovers of God and God’s people. And the angels will rejoice!

That’s probably good enough!

Saint Michael Archangel

Picture credit: Saint Michael Parish, Bedford, MA

Proper 20 A - Sep 18, 2011

2011-09-18T09:57:00.002-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. James Dowd, OHC

Proper 20 A - Sunday, September 18, 2011

Jonah 3:10 – 4:11
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16

Picture credit: Watton On The Web

The Dove of Truth

In the Name of Mercy, Love, and Truth. Amen.

Over the years of my professional life I had the good fortune of developing friendships with three different different people who worked in human resources and two other people who worked on negotiating teams for unions. And in all five cases, I think I know exactly how each would have responded to Jesus if he told them the parable we just heard. Unfair! They would have cried. The HR types would have thought that story was terribly unfair to management, while the union types would have felt that it was unfair to labor.

And by human standards they would be right. Management should not be expected to pay people for work that was not done, and Labor would agree that it was unfair to the person who worked a full day to get paid the same as one who worked for one hour. But Jesus, as the culmination of all the prophets, was not your ordinary man. He was, in fact, here to teach us once and for all about God's infinite mercy.

This is a lesson we seem to need to learn over and over again and Scripture is filled with the stories of God's mercy. One of my favorite stories in the Hebrew Scriptures is that of Jonah because I can so relate to him. This is not the perfect prophet who hears God's call, responds brilliantly, and is remembered for his holiness. No, this is a prophet that certainly does hear God's call, then argues with God, flees from God, ignores God, gets himself thrown overboard by a bunch of pagan sailors who are actually more faithful to God than he is, ends up in the belly of a very large fish, makes a little retreat in that belly, prays quite fervently, gets spit up on land, argues some more with God, finally agrees to do what God was asking him to do all along, calls the people of Nineveh to repentance, ends up sitting outside of town sulking – and all this in just three chapters where our story this morning picks up. Now that is a prophet I can relate to. In fact, it is a prophet I have been wrestling with for a while now.

Jonah is perhaps the most problematic of all the prophets from a historical perspective. Time, place, setting all seem somewhat confused, to say nothing of the fish. Jewish legend teaches that Jonah was the little boy of the widow of Zarephath, raised from the dead by the Prophet Elijah. His name, Jonah, means “Dove” and the first verse of the book tells us that his father's name is Amittai (Amatay)which means The Truth. So Yonah ben Amatay is “Dove, son of The Truth.” Now to a Christian that sounds especially holy. But to ancient Jews that name might have evoked laughter or perhaps an ironic smile, for a dove in this context was one that flitted about from “truth” to “truth” with small “t's”, and occasionally landed on the Truth, with a capital “t”. I would argue that Jonah's message for God's people is so important, so profound, that a Christian interpretation of his name has ultimately prevailed, as a kind of prefiguring of the Son of Truth who was still to come.

The reason I feel so connected to Jonah has to do with his constant wrestling with God. He is a character that Sholem Aleichem could have written and was perhaps inspired by. This ancient Tevye was forever bargaining, arguing and running from God – only to return, in order to obey God's call, and then to ask one more question, to pose one more challenge.

Our story this morning picks up with the fact that Jonah, having been spit up on land has finally gone to Nineveh and walked across that great city announcing God's judgment that will be reigned down on all living creatures within its confines.

And here it is important to know something about Nineveh. The ruins of Nineveh lie directly across the Tigris River from Mosul in present day Iraq. In fact, Mosul' suburbs still cover much of those ruins. Now during Jonah's life, Nineveh was a major Assyrian city, though not its capital. By the time the Book of Jonah was written, however, Nineveh was the capital of Assyria. This was no ordinary capital of an alien state or even an enemy state. This was the capital of an Empire which was the dire enemy of the Jewish people and one so evil that is has been compared to the Berlin of the Nazis. Genocide, mass enslavement, torture, desecration of religious sites and the most vicious ways of killing people in an agonizing and grotesque way are some of the highlights of this Empire.

So Jonah and the Chosen People had good reason to fear the Assyrians, and even understandable reasons for hating them. God tells Jonah to proclaim to the people of Nineveh that “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” Jonah's resistance to proclaiming that message was not out of a lack of faith or even fear. His resistance, having been steeped in the faith of his forebears, was due to the fact that, at least in this case, God's word was probably not going to be any good. Jonah rebelled against the fact that God, being who he is, would not guarantee the destruction of Nineveh. He knew God to well. To be sure, if the people of Nineveh did not repent, then God could be counted on to destroy that wicked city. But if the people chose to repent, then God would most likely show mercy to even these most evil Assyrians.

In our time the Hebrew Scriptures often get a bad wrap. People like to write off this beautiful collection of inspired texts as “God's way to smite everyone down.” But in fact, for those steeped in the faith, they hear the Hebrew Scriptures as filled with God's attempt to inspire repentance on the part of the people so that he can share his mercy. This would of course culminate with the Incarnation, Passion and Death of Christ as God's penultimate attempt to call to us, plead with us, beg us to repent of our own evil ways.

Well, even before that, the people of Nineveh not only heard God's call as proclaimed by Jonah, but heeded it as well. For forty days they repented, wore sack-cloth, sat in ashes, and even had their animals do the same. God was so pleased with his Assyrian children that he forgave them and showered abundant mercy upon them. And this really ticked off Jonah.

So he marched himself out of town, sat down to sulk, then told God off. Jonah rails at God for being too merciful, slow to anger, overflowing with love and totally forgetting that he had said anything about punishing the Ninevehites. And it is God's response to the crabby Jonah that is so moving to me: “Should I not” God says “be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from the their left?”

And there it is: God knows we are ignorant of his ways. We do not know our right from our left. We know justice, He knows mercy. We want revenge, He wants mercy. We have sin, He has mercy. Mercy. Mercy. Mercy. The entire Judea-Christian tradition might well be summed up with that word: Mercy. God is desperate to share his mercy, so desperate that he would send his own Son to make mercy Incarnate. To live mercy among us, to die in mercy for us, to rise with mercy so each of his brothers and sisters might do the same, those 120,000 Ninevites being just the tip of the iceberg.

But to live into God's mercy requires repentance, be that on an individual basis or a communal basis. Repentance is defined by New Testament scholars with the Greek word metnoia, which translates as “understanding something differently after thinking something over.” It implies a turning around or heading in a different direction. Thomas Keating, the Trappist monk, says that Jesus’ call to “repent is an invitation to grow up and become a fully mature human being.” The word repentance has a negative connotation for many people. In an earlier time in our lives it may have been used as a club to beat us over the head. But repentance, if we take Father Keating’s definition, calls us to be adults. To turn around and face the reality of our situation, the reality of our sin.

And what is the definition of sin? Plainly put, sin is the willful separation of humanity from God, ignoring God, behaving in ways that are not God-like. Biblical sin is very often much more communal, rather than personal. Certainly personal sin does occur, but so much of the focus in the Ancient mindset was communal. So, for example, Jonah wasn't concerned with the king's sin, he was concerned with how the entire city of Nineveh had separated themselves from God? By committing intense and outrageous violence against people all over the the present day Middle East and Central Asia, was how those Ninevehites had separated themselves from God. But eventually, these people heard Jonah's message from God and turned themselves around.

And with all this wrestling with Jonah and with God that I have been doing of late, I cannot help but wonder what Jonah would say to us, to the community of Americans, if he were sent to us to speak God's word right here, right now in September of 2011. From the time of the earliest European settlers in Jamestown, Santa Fe, or Plymouth, we Americans have fancied ourselves a Christian nation, one that has been set apart – the city on the hill. And yet, if we were to spend some time looking at our history, and certainly to these last ten years, I wonder if we could really claim that our right hand knows what our left is doing.

It seems to me that Jonah might know that we are in great need of God's mercy. While not the Assyrian Empire, in September 2011, the Unites States is currently this world's Empire. In these last ten years, we have reigned down violence on nations throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, on the innocent and guilty alike, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, women, and men, in a quest to protect ourselves from a handful of terrorists. We continue to be willing to look away as some of God's children are tortured in the name of our security. The American Empire is fueled by oil which enslaves our own people to its use and to supporting on-going war in the oil producing regions of the world.

I think Yonah ben Attay, Dove, son of the Truth, would point us to Jesus, the Son of God and would call us to turn away from our idols of oil, weapons, and Empire. Yonah ben Attay would, I think, turn us to repentance, to worship the one true God who is so filled with life and mercy. And I think he would turn us away from those lifeless and merciless idols which can only lead to enslavement, torture, and a merciless death.

In all my wrestling with this I hear a very faint echo that seems to be getting stronger: “Should I not” God seems to be asking “be concerned about America, that great country, in which there are more than 300 million persons who do not know their right hand from their left?” Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, God calls to us. Mercy is God's invitation to us – right here, right now, today. Thank God, his mercy endures forever. AMEN.

Holy Cross Day - Sep 14, 2011

2011-09-15T18:42:00.006-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Scott Borden, OHC, Prior of Holy Cross Monastery

Holy Cross Day - Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Isaiah 45:21-25
Galatians 6:14-18
John 12:31-36a

Some days in our Church calendar leave me a conflicted... I suppose as a member of the Order of the Holy Cross, this day, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, perhaps should not be one of them... but it is.

There is much that is wonderful and glorious in the history of Christianity, but nobody will be shocked if I also say that there is also much that is vile and wicked. Some of the very best in human nature has been drawn out, encouraged, and nurtured by the Church. And some of the very worst in human nature has, sadly, found encouragement in the Church as well. Our history is surely mixed.

So days like today, that lend themselves to a triumphant celebration make me nervous. Yes we have much to celebrate, but we also have much for which we can only hang our heads in shame.

The Gospel reading for today sounds a note of caution: “Now is the judgment of this world... the rulers of this world will be driven out...”

The discomfort that I feel hangs right on that bit of Gospel. For when we sing triumphant hymns and celebrate, too often, for me, it has the flavor of this world – triumph defined in human terms.

Yet at the same time, Jesus was very clear. We must celebrate as those at a wedding banquet must celebrate – a miserable, dour Christianity is just as dominated by this world as a Christianity that lacks retrospection and remorse.

This is the conflict I carry into my thinking about today – the exaltation of the cross must be a wedding banquet and a time for reflection and remorse.

It gives me great comfort that, as a member of the Order of the Holy Cross I have another vast tradition to strengthen me – the Benedictine tradition. That tradition calls me to stability and to balance. Stability requires me, as uncomfortable as I may be, to stay and wrestle with my discomfort. And balance assures me that the tension between celebration and remorse is healthy and appropriate – to leave out either end of the spectrum would be to loose balance.

Early Christians didn't have the symbol of the cross in such a prominent place as we do. In their day we would have seen more fish than crosses. Seeing crosses as often and is as many places as we do anesthetizes us to the horror in front of us. The plain meaning of the cross is brutal and horrific.

We no longer use crucifixion as a means of killing those we wish, in the name of justice, to kill. Were Jesus executed by the state of Texas, we might have a syringe, the tool of lethal injection, as the symbol of our faith... Or New York of the 1960s would have given us the electric chair... If Jesus had been executed a hundred years ago we might be looking at the hangman's noose or the rifles of a firing squad... Churches in France might be littered with representations of guillotines. In England there might be stakes with kindling piled around.

If we try to imagine any of those symbols above and behind this altar, perhaps we get a glimpse of how the cross might have spoken to those early Christians. It is traumatic and discomforting.

In exalting the cross, we are taking something that is brutal, painful, deadly... and resurrecting it in a most hopeful and life giving way... Of course, we don't do that... God does that.

Part of my discomfort with today has to do with looking back. We don't see the true horror of the cross as a cruel human tool. The cross in human hands, our hands, is an abomination. Only through God's redeeming love can it show love. We need to look back in honesty. The story of the cross is the story of redemption being possible for the most evil of things. We loose a great deal if we let the true depth of that evil slide out of the picture. For we are no different than the crowds who called for Jesus to be nailed to the cross... no different than the public servants who dutifully executed the task.

The other part of my discomfort has to do with looking forward. Jesus calls us to take up our cross and follow. But I have the sense that, starting perhaps with Emperor Constantine and continuing to my own life, too often we take up the cross and lead rather than following. Hymns like “Lift High the Cross”, which I happen to love, enhance this danger. They make us feel very good about raising up the cross, and along with that comfortable, good feeling, comes the temptation to carry the cross in directions that feel good and comfortable... But Jesus does not lead us in feel-good, comfortable ways.

It is very easy, as humans, to beguile ourselves into thinking the cross is leading us exactly where we wanted to go in the first place... It is quite convenient. It is quite sinful.

When members of the Ku Klux Klan, in our fairly recent history, burned crosses as a weapon of racial hatred and terror, they were following their own desires. They were not following the Cross of Jesus. Anders Breivic, the mass killer in Norway, who claims to be some sort of Christian, was surely following his own heart, not the Cross. From this point in history we can look at the Crusades and say that, how ever well intentioned, however faithful those who who went, they were not following the Cross of Jesus. In our Anglican tradition, the reformers who brutally killed their opponents (and that includes all sides) were not following the Cross.

We could develop a never ending list of times when we, human beings, Christians, have taken up our cross and gone exactly where we wanted to go, not following Jesus, but following our own hearts. But the only list that is important for me is the list of when I have forced the cross to take me where I want to go rather than where Jesus leads.

That is half the story. It must be faced. We dishonor this day if we do not bring to mind our failures and our frailty, if we do not confess and humbly repent.

The other half of the story is the endless list of times when people did take up their cross and follow... often at great personal cost... even to the point of death. Martin Luther King springs to mind. And Dietrich Bonhȍffer. Oskar Schindler and Oscar Romero. Constance and her companions. Hundreds of rescue workers on September 11th. Various Holy Cross brothers and countless Franciscans and Benedictines. Some acts were heroic. Others were tiny, hardly-noticed, faithful acts.

We could develop a list that never ends when we, human beings, Christians, have taken up our cross and faithfully followed without regard to cost or comfort. And in honest humility I have to be prepared to make my own list of when I have been a faithful follower. Not to do so dishonors the day.

The power of the cross is this: that something so loathsome and so detestable can be transformed by God into something so wonderful. It is death and resurrection.

That is the transformation that we need, that I need in my heart – that I can die to this world and be resurrected to God's Kingdom – not as some far off, fantastic, future thing, but here and now. Through God it is possible.

Let us walk in the light of Jesus, taking up our crosses and having the humility to follow.

Proper 19 A - Sep 11, 2011

2011-09-15T11:26:00.001-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Sermon for 9/11

Br. Clark Berge, minister general of SSF

Proper 19A- Sunday, September 11, 2011

Exodus 14:19-31

Romans 14:1-12

Matthew 18:21-35

Let us pray: Compassionate God, as we gather today, we open our hearts to you and askfor the help and guidance of the Holy Spirit, recognizing that there are onlytwo feelings. Love and Fear. There are only two languages. Love and fear. Thereare only two activities. Love and fear. There are only two motives, twoprocedures, two frameworks, two results. Love and fear. Love and fear. (Adaptedfrom Michael Leunig, A Common Prayer, HarperCollins Religious, Sydney, 1990)

What a great joy to be gathered here today with friends andpeople of faith; to be reading Scriptures about forgiveness and sharing the Sacrament,being assured of God’s forgiveness and commissioned to be ambassadors ofreconciliation. This is the only context I can bear to think about 9/11. Thehurt is still there, and we pray for all who died, all who suffer grief ordisability because of the attacks on New York and Washington DC—all thewounded. We pray for them and hold them in our hearts. Politicians have to balance Americaninterests and the authority of pollsters against their re-election chances whenthey talk about these events. Inevitably it becomes “us against them.” It is so easy to fall into that. Yet we arecalled to live differently as Christians. Embracing our pain, is there still room to love our enemies?

In the Exodus passage for today we are reminded God is verymuch active in human history, working in our midst to bring us out of slaveryinto freedom. Not everyone has moved beyond believing God takes sides in humanconflict (that is a big part of the rhetoric from both Al Qaeda and someWesterners). But we must never lose sight of God’s action that is to free usfrom all the things that enslave us—capitalism, Islamism, “Christian-ism”,Marxism, liberalism, conservatism—and all the other “—isms.” God is activelyleading us into a land of new possibilities for the human spirit. I say thatwith confidence because God has continued to lead his people through obstacles,from the Red Sea onwards, leading us to freedom. The evidence has mounted overthe ages and God’s methods have matured. From drowning Pharaoh God gave his onlySon. God raised the stakes. There is nothing God won’t do to set humanity free.

The reality of 9/11 is that a terrible thing happened. Welive with the question: how will we prevent it from happening again in America,in Britain, in India, in Pakistan, in Sri Lanka, in Israel, in Palestine, inIraq, in Zimbabwe, in south Africa, in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Norway, Syria,Northern Ireland,, Colombia, Mexico, Bali, the Solomon Islands, Japan…I’ve onlyjust started on the list. Who can think of a country that does not commemoratea tragedy where bombs exploded, innocent and not-so-innocent people died? Howcan we prevent such things from happening?

What would happen if we stopped judging each other, as Paulsuggests in this morning’s reading from Romans? I am not talking about“anything-goes” or suspending justice, but what if we humans started expectingthe best of each other? What if we committed ourselves to a nonviolent responseto whatever provocation? Not just you and me, but what if everybody made this commitment?Of course it won’t happen spontaneously. I won’t happen quickly. But I wonderif the perceived odds prevent us from even trying it at all? Alternatives canbe taught, as the SSF Formator’s learned at our conference in the SolomonIslands last year the Alternatives to Violence Project. Do we cringe from beingcalled naïve? Spreading the message ofnonviolence means working with whomever we can. It means refraining fromviolent thinking and action. It means being willing to keep on with it even asit seems more and more futile. Because what else can we do—us Bible-reading,Sacrament eating people? Can we go fromAltar to armory? Some have had to, and some still do. But as Religious, wedon’t have to promote a diminished Gospel, a fear-based message.

The Gospel we have been given teaches love and forgiveness.Love is the opposite of fear. Love compels us to forgive our enemies. Jesusrejected violence and forgave his persecutors. That is the story that continuesto inspire people throughout the ages. How many tims we fail at this is not thepoint. Rather the point s how often we dust off and try again. Love never ends.It is never too late to do the loving thing.

So today, as we remember 9/11, Christians using the CommonLectionary around the world hear the message from Matthew—how often should Iforgive? Matthew frames the question in terms of forgiving brothers and sistersin the Church, but Jesus’ story is definitely not “churchy.” Forgiveness frees us from retaliation.Forgiveness makes the human spirit shine. It shows the active, death-defying,all-powerful presence of god—that spiritual power of forgiveness shining in thehuman breast is a pillar of fire shining in the darkness of our confusion andhatreds, our pettiness and our fully justified reasons to annihilate eachother. The only way to stop it, I sense from Jesus’ teachings and example, evenas he hung from the cross, is to forgive.

What are the stories that make you squirm and re-evaluateyour life? What are the stories that make you pray: “Oh God, I wish I could belike that: like Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement, Mother Teresa, Dr.Martin Luther King, Gandhi?” Central to their stories is compassion,forgiveness, and a commitment to non-violence, we hear of love overcoming fearand hate. Their stories shape, for me, everything the Gospel stirs up in me.Jesus said things, Paul taught long ago, but these men and women show how itcan be done today, in the face of horrendous modern evil. They show us that welive in a reality defined and infused with love.

We’re God-loving, Bible-reading, Sacrament-eating,world-serving people: what other reality is there?

Today is 9/11 and some say it is about Islam and terrorism.I want to close by reminding us of some people I have recently added to my listof inspiring people who make me squirm, the Trappist monks of Tibhirine, whosestory has become famous recently with the release of the film “Of Gods and Men.” If you have seenthe film, you know Christian de Cherge was prior of Notre Dam de l’Atlas, asmall monastery in Algeria. He wrote a lot about Islam and Christianity. Onething he wrote was that “Forgiveness” is one of the names for God in the 99praises of God. We know St. Francis loved that prayer and captured it forFranciscans in his Divine Praises, joyfully repeating the names of God: “Youare forgiveness…you are love…you are joy.” Anticipating his death, Christian wrote a letter to be opened in theevent of his death. Terrorists in Algeria killed him and several other monks.

Ifthe day comes, and it could be today, that I am a victim of the terrorism thatseems to be engulfing all foreigners living in Algeria, I would like mycommunity, my Church, and my family to remember that I have dedicated my lifeto God and Algeria.

Thatthey accept that the Lord of all life was not a stranger to this savage kind ofdeparture; that they pray for me, wondering how I found myself worthy of such asacrifice; that they link in their memory this death of mine with all the otherdeaths equally violent but forgotten in their anonymity.

Mylife is not worth more than any other—not less, not more. Nor am I an innocentchild. I have lived long enough to know that I, too, am an accomplice of theevil that seems to prevail in the world around, even that which might lash outblindly at me. If the moment comes, I would hope to have presence of mind, andthe time, to ask for God’s pardon and for that of my fellowman, and, at thesame time, to pardon in all sincerity he would attack me.

Iwould not welcome such a death. It is important for me to say this. I do notsee how I could rejoice when this people whom I love will be accused,indiscriminately, of my death. The price is too high, this so-called grace ofthe martyr, if I owe it to an Algerian who kills me in the name of what hethinks is Islam.

Iknow the contempt that some people have for Algerians as a whole. I also knowthe caricatures of Islam that a certain (Islamist) ideology promotes. It is tooeasy for such people to dismiss, in good conscience, this religion as somethinghateful by associating it with violent extremists. For me, Algeria and Islamare quite different from the commonly held opinion. They are body and soul. Ihave said enough, I believe, bout all the good things I have received here,finding so often the meaning of the Gospels, running like some gold threadthrough my life, and which began first at my mother’s knee, my very firstchurch, here in Algeria, where I learned respect for Muslims.

Obviously,my death will justify the opinion of all those who dismissed me as naïve oridealistic: “Let him tell us what he thinks now.” But such people should knowmy death will satisfy my most burning curiosity. At last, I will be able—if Godpleases—to se the children f Islam as He sees them, illuminated in the glory ofChrist, sharing in the gift of God’s Passion and of the Spirit, whose secretjoy will always be to bring forth our common humanity amidst our differences.

Igive thanks to God for this life; completely mine yet completely theirs, too,to God, who wanted it for joy against, and in spite of, all odds. In this ThankYou—which says everything about my life—I include you, my friends past andpresent, and those friends who will be here at the side of my mother andfather, of my sisters and brothers—thank you a thousand fold.

Andto you, too, my friend of the last moment, who will not know what you aredoing. Yes, for you, too, I wish this thank you, this “A-Dieu,” whose image isin you also, that we may meet in heaven, like happy thieves, if it pleases God,our common Father. Amen! Insha-Allah!

(TheMonks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria. John W. Kiser, St. Martin’s Griffin, NewYork, 2003, pp. 244-246)

Proper 16A - Aug 21, 2011

2011-09-04T19:05:00.000-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
Proper 16A - Sunday, August 21, 2011

Isaiah 51:1-6
Romans 12:1-8
Matthew 16:13-20

As all the brethren know, I have just returned from two weeks away. I left, as I always do, with a small library of books I intended to read: David Brakke’s Athanasius and Asceticism; another book on asceticism, Margaret Miles’ Fullness of Life, which I should have read when it came out in 1981; two recent compilations of essays on the Venerable Bede; and Harold Bloom’s latest work of literary criticism, The Anatomy of Influence. I always do this: I pack the books I ought to read. I know I will return a much better person if I read them all, and I never do. I crack them, read a chapter or two, and then, somehow, mysteriously, move onto something else. This time I read two books which were actually a lot more fun: Jonathan Yardley’s wonderful short essays on neglected classics called Second Reading, and John Julius Norwich’s just-published narrative romp, Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy. If you want the serious history of the popes, of course, you have to go to the Germans, someone like Bernard Schimmelpfennig, who thinks it is terribly important that the reader understand that the likelihood that Peter ever even got to Rome at all is practically zero. He dissects the papacy like a coroner dissects corpses, looking for evidences of foul play.

Norwich is not of the Schimmelpfennig school. He nods his head to the grim truth that much has been lost to us in the mists of time. But he loves to evoke the living reality, so he tells the stories, and there are a lot of good and juicy stories to tell. The papacy has been around in one form or another going on two thousand years, and its story is a fascinating narrative with a cast of hundreds in the starring roles and thousands surrounding them. The Vatican officially lists Benedict XVI as number 265, and that doesn’t count the numerous popes of disputed title. There are lots of saints and quite a lot of remarkable and admirable men on that list. But there are also more than a few scoundrels, and some stories that will curl the hair of the most ardent proponent of the See of Rome. My personal favorite among the flagrantly ambiguous reigned from 1492 to 1503. Alexander VI, the first Borgia pope, was a great administrator and diplomat, a patron of the arts and of learning, and devoted to his family. He was a man of enormous charm which he used to great and positive effect at some quite dangerous and difficult moments. But as greatly charming persons sometimes are, he was also possessed of dubious personal holiness and habits of life. Among the four publicly acknowledged children by his mistress Vanozza dei Cattanei, all of whom he provided for in quite a grand way at the expense of the Church, was the irrepressible Lucrezia. I recommend Norwich to you to fill in the details.

“You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” Whatever construction later ecclesiastical theory put on this statement, and it is the key scriptural basis for the primacy of the successors of Peter, it is clear that the early church thought that the Lord’s words to Peter were central to its self-understanding. Something essential about the leadership of the Church is indicated by the exchange between Jesus and Peter. Something worth looking at.

Jesus is asking his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. “But who do you say that I am?” And Peter, without any hesitation, answers, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." An amazingly rich and complicated exchange, using in such a short space three of the most loaded titles in all of scripture, about which commentary has swirled and proliferated likely since the moment this conversation was uttered. Indeed, the first commentary on it comes from Jesus himself: The one who has identified Jesus as Messiah and Son of the living God is the rock on which the Church will be built. That is how important Peter’s statement is.

I find it interesting that Jesus uses the word rock here, and also that the early church remembered it and made it central. Remember the parable of the two houses, one built on sand and the other on rock? The one built on sand is swept away. The one built on rock outlasts the storm. Jesus wants his movement to continue long after he is gone. But he seems to be worried that it won’t last, that it will be built on a false foundation. The church requires rock for its foundation. It may be, as later was taught, that the rock is the character of Peter, and it may be that his official successors will inherit his strength of character and immovability. The colorful story of Peter’s successors shows that some were rocks and some, well, not so much. Yet mysteriously, the church endures.

But I wonder if Jesus’ statement is not about something more direct in his exchange with Peter. The rock to which Jesus refers can be interpreted as Peter’s confession, that Jesus is Messiah and Son of the living God. This is what calls forth the Lord’s declaration. Perhaps Jesus is suggesting that if a leader wants to follow in Peter’s steps, it is Peter’s confession that provides the strength and solidity, the genuineness, the integrity on which the church can continue to be built. What matters in a leader of the Church may include being a good administrator or a good diplomat, or a person devoted to his or her family (and what family doesn’t have its ups and downs!). But what makes Christian leadership genuine is that the leader points to Jesus of Nazareth and declares to all who may care to hear that it is this one – not some other – who is the one anointed to bring in the kingdom of God, that is to say, this is the one who is the answer to how we should order our lives, individually and collectively; that it is this one – not some other – who bears the divine nature in human form, that is to say, this is the one who shows us what it ultimately real.

The rock solid foundation of the Church is its understanding of who Jesus really is. Leaders who truly follow Peter, who are genuine rocks on whom the church is built in every age, indeed in our own age, are those who say with unequivocal certainty that Jesus is the one who brings in the kingdom and shows the true nature of God to us.

In eight days, on August 29, the list of official nominees for the election of the 16th Episcopal Bishop of New York is to be announced, and exactly two months later the Convention will vote, and, one hopes, elect. There are many qualities which one can desire in a bishop of a diocese as large and as complex as New York. We have had good administrators, diplomatic personalities, and men devoted to their families, though not all of them quite as colorful perhaps as Alexander VI. Whoever is elected will need many gifts, but more gifts will be needed than any one person can possess. Inevitably he or she will lack some important ones, and in ten years or so it will be clear what they are.

But there is one gift this new Bishop, in fact every bishop, in fact every Christian leader, in fact, every serious Christian, must absolutely possess. When asked the question, Who do you say that I am? by the Lord, or when asked by others, Who is Jesus?, that person should be one who, with Peter, can say with unequivocal certainty who Jesus is: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." And mean it. And understand it. And interpret it to others. And put it into effective practice in this time and in this place. And build the church on it.

Proper 14A - Aug 7, 2011

2011-08-07T12:38:00.004-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Proper 14A - August 7, 2011

1 Kings 19:9-18
Romans 10:5-15
Matthew 14:22-33

In 2003 I woke up in Rome one morning about 3:00. I thought I’d slept funny on my left arm. It was floppy. I rubbed it to bring the circulation back but it didn’t come. So I took a shower, put on my habit (one handed) and about 5:30, knocked on the door of a monk from Peru who spoke only Spanish. There followed a pantomime – me flopping my arm and he taking my blood pressure. Then, general mayhem. A few of us piling in a small car and heading off to a hospital emergency ward. I won’t go into sordid detail but having no Italian and no English speakers around was a tad disconcerting. And in Rome hospitals, you fend for yourself. Finally, we unearthed an old English nun who translated: Father, you’ve had a stroke!! My worst fear of all illnesses confirmed. But a funny thing happened (to quote Brother Christian) immediately, I felt calm and knew that I would cope.

When I was in the hospital, two of the nuns from the Formators’ program came to visit me. They asked me what psalm I’d like them to read to me and I asked for Psalm 29…. The Voice of the Lord --- and in the Temple of the Lord all are crying, “Glory!

They finished. We were quiet. And then they said, “Why on earth do you like that psalm?” I tried to explain that I was comforted by the “Glory” in the midst of everything falling down and blowing away but I don’t think they got it. I still love that Psalm – Thursday second week Matins and First Class Matins.

It comes to me when I read about Elijah and his experience. Frightened, hiding and in flight, he knows God at the still center of all the chaos in his life. And he knows he must go on into whatever lies ahead. This account of the storm and Jesus walking on the water gives the same numinous feeling. I have no desire to rationalize the experience away. It transcends all normal understanding. It must only be received. It calls for unbelievable bravery from Peter. His testing of the “ghost” bounces back with Jesus’ invitation… “Come on!”

And all goes fine until he looks down!! Fixed on the stability of Jesus he does the impossible. But, distracted, he sinks. And Jesus takes him by the hand. No tragedy. He doesn’t drown. He’s warned to hold on to trust.

Not a bad word for these days. There’s so much stormy around. Government is at low ebb morally; the economy here, awful as it is, protects us from the starvation of the world. Seen any photos of children from Somalia lately? Wars feed wars; the planet is suffering.

Life and its experiences often take us into the storm - sometimes of our own volition and sometimes by circumstances. Illnesses, job losses, broken relationships can feel very stormy. Nor are storms always awful. They can be majestic and freshening –restoring balance and giving nourishment, watering things.

Our Order is going through that kind of storm right now. We’ve stepped out into school raising in Grahamstown. Here at Holy Cross Monastery we have a Prior of the new generation and he’s knocking walls down. We are looking to start an internship program for college age people who will work out in the neighborhood. We’re hoping to found a food pantry. And at the center, the still point, Jesus is holding out his hand saying,
Come!”

The response of the faithful to storms of any kind is, I believe, to live on. I think we‘re doing that. In all times of life we are called to respond to Jesus’ invitation to come and we will do just that. Any move to hunker down in the boat and shelter is to miss the Glory, to lose out on the vigor of faithfulness Jesus calls us to. Doubt right now is cowardice. Jumping out of the boat into the storm is elation and faith.

I get seasick on boats anyway!

Proper 13A - Jul 31, 2011

2011-07-31T14:36:00.002-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Scott Borden, OHC
Proper 13A - July 31, 2011

Genesis 32:22-31
Romans 9:1-5
Matthew 14:13-21

How intriguing it is that today's passage from Matthew seems to have Jesus wanting to be on retreat – he crosses a lake in a boat to get away from the crowd. The crowd follows him anyway. The same thing always seems to happen to Jesus when he tries to get away. Everybody comes along... Yet here we are on retreat – and what crowds are following us?

The story of the feeding the multitude, or the story of the loaves and fishes, is so important that it turns up in every Gospel. Matthew and Mark even tell the story twice... so there are six stories of feeding the multitude – each with their own particular emphasis.

Matthew does some rather abrupt editing in this particular section. In the previous passage Jesus has been in Nazareth and has just learned about the beheading of John the Baptist. When he learns of this, Jesus departs in a boat. For literalists this must present a challenge as there is no lake anywhere near Nazareth... Nonetheless, Jesus withdraws by boat to a deserted place. That's where today's passage begins.

Although we don't read the passages of the beheading of John the Baptist and Jesus feeding the multitude together, they do seem to have some synergy. I think we are meant, in some way, to have Herod in mind as Jesus feeds the multitude.

John the Baptist looses his head, as it were, in the context of a dinner party. Herod entertains lavishly and to outrageous excess. The indulgence is so extreme that the request by his own daughter to have an innocent man executed and the head brought on a platter just enhances the entertainment. That is the context of Herod feeding people.

And Jesus, in this deserted place full of people, has a very different sort of dinner party. No preparations have been made. Food has not been planned. Caterers have not been contracted. The practical-minded disciples want to send the crowd away, not because they are stingy, but because if the people don't get to the town and its market in time, they won't eat.

Jesus calmly calls on the crowd to sit. They take stock – 5 loaves of bread and two fish are on offer. That is one loaf for every 1000 men (women and children apparently eat for free...). This dinner could not be more different that the one a few paragraphs ago at Herod's palace... No violence or decadence... nothing lavish or excessive, not even much food... just people being fed.

The story is about a miracle – no doubt. But what, exactly, is the miracle?

For some, the miracle is the super-natural multiplication of the bread – sort of like Moses' burning bush which was not consumed but remained undiminished: so the bread, though eaten, miraculously is not diminished. In fact there seems to be more by the end of the meal than there was at the start. This certainly one common way to read the story.

Others argue that the story has to do with hoarding and sharing. Everyone in the crowd, no doubt, had something in their pocket – these folks weren't idiots after all. They didn't leave home with nothing. So they all shared from their modest means and the result was abundance. Some criticize this reading because it seems to do away with the miracle... everything is naturally explained. But I think getting people to act in a community-minded way is a miracle. Just look at our politics of today if you think this type of sharing was easily accomplished.

Being a good, post-modern sort of monk, I don't think we have to choose between these interpretations. I think there is truth in both of them. And I think there is still something else of a miracle in the way Matthew tells this particular story.

Jesus gives a simple command to the disciples. When they suggest he send the crowd away, he says no. Jesus says to the disciples: “You feed them”. And, with a little negotiation, the disciples obey. A very important miracle is lurking in this little exchange. The disciples have established quite clearly that they can not possibly feed this crowd – its not a case of doubt, but of reality. Five loaves, even five modern Bread Alone Bakery pound loaves (let alone the smaller flat breads that would have been available then) could not really adequately feed the disciples, let alone the crowd.

You feed them... and in the face of all logic and reason, the disciples obey. Without God's help they can not succeed. Nobody begins to build a tower without estimating the cost... Nobody starts a war until they get a good estimate on the size of the opposing army... The disciples have done their homework. They set out knowing they can not, on their own, succeed.

That is the miracle of discipleship... the miracle of faith... In faith, we, just a handful of middle-aged and older monks, can build the Kingdom of God. We can do it with God's help.

This, for example, is the miracle of the Holy Cross School being built in South Africa even as we speak. Our tiny little school is the educational equivalent of five loaves and two fish in the face of thousands and tens of thousands in need. In a logical world, it can only fail. In a God's world it can only succeed.

Can a dozen or so monks in a quaint monastery in the mid-Hudson valley change the world? We don't have the energy, the money, the influence... And Jesus calmly says “change the world.” We need the miracle of discipleship... the miracle of faith.

We also heard part of the story of Jacob from the book of Genesis. The story of Jacob fascinates me because Jacob is really, as my friends in the city would say, a schmuck. He has lied and cheated his way into power through a terrible conspiracy with his mother. He deceives his father and defrauds his brother. He seems like the last sort of person on earth that God would want to work with...

And yet here he is in the passage we heard, fearfully returning to face his brother Esau. He sends his wives and children on ahead for safety sake and remains by himself. Jacob then spends the night wrestling with a man – an unidentified man. By dawn, neither has prevailed. So the stranger uses some extra bit of force and puts Jacob's hip out of joint. Yet Jacob holds firm to the stranger, demanding a blessing. We never learn the stranger's name, though Jacob says he has seen God face to face in the encounter.

Charles Wesley wrote a most wonderful hymn – Wrestling Jacob, based on this scripture passage. Its familiar first lines are “Come, O Though Traveler Unknown. Whom still I hold but can not see.”

The final stanza didn't make it into our modern hymnody... we don't seem to have space in our lives for hymns with 18 or 20 verses... but here it is: “Lame as I am, I take the prey, Hell, earth, and sin with ease o'ercome, I leap for joy, pursue my way, and as a bounding hart fly home, Thro' all eternity to prove thy nature, and thy name is love.”

In my own way, I'm like Jacob: Weak, sinful, inadequate. Surely God can find a better servant than me. In our own ways, we are like the Disciples: we don't have the resources or the means to get the job done.

And yet Jacob is who God chose to wrestle with. And the Disciples are who Jesus calls on. And, to paraphrase Charles Wesley, lame as we are, we accept the call – our helplessness and weakness answered by God's strength and love.

Amen.

Feast of St Benedict - Jul 10, 2011

2011-07-12T12:45:00.005-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Feast of St Benedict (transferred from July 11) - Sunday, July 10, 2011

The Associates in retreat have been steeped in monasticism this weekend. Following the saints of the Desert… holy ones who, if the truth were told, were a little nuts – not that nuts is necessarily crazy! Who in their right mind would walk away from everything to go live in an empty place with no distractions to do nothing but pray? Not many. Even then, there were not many but they were lovers of God. We’ve got the stories gathered together and they make a sizable collection but they were a small portion of people in the grand scheme of things.

Perhaps what would surprise them more than anything else is that a group of fairly comfortable folk in a yet to be discovered continent two thousand years after them would be gathered to hear their wisdom. They had not the grandiosity to dream like that. Single minded and simple in their longings, they lived their lives out in love with God.

They paved a way that disciples have walked since then and will continue to walk.
Benedict whom we celebrate today was in his own time, such a one who fled… they called it “fuga mundi”- flight from the world.

You probably have heard Benedict’s story. He was a disappointment to his middle class parents, I’m sure. A college dropout who left the greatest known city to go live in a cave in an isolated valley to think and “find himself.” And there he sat, trying to get away from what appeared to him to be an evil and sick world.

He didn’t get away with it! Shepherds came to the holy man… the poor of the area always hunger for what is beyond… they know their need.
And so the people gathered… from the cave, our saint began to live with the seekers and finally left Subiaco, winding up next to the highway at Monte Cassino. His monastery is right by the way to Rome, the center of the (somewhat) civilized world of the day. And there he finally stopped, grew old, and died.

What is wonderful to me is that Benedict didn’t seem to have a five-year plan. He didn’t write a book on the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Monks”; he wrote a reflection steeped in Scripture of how to live together in a strange and often hostile world so that the Kingdom of heaven would be evident. We call it “The Rule”. I’m not sure what he called it, or if he even gave it a name. But he did lay down so clearly a human journey into the heart of God. And his call has become the norm for monastic life. And even more – a guide for mothers with teenagers, for postmen, for nurses, for teachers and students, for grandparents and in-laws – for anyone who is longing for a closeness with God, a life rooted in Christ.

Benedict calls us away from the spurious security of a life based on standards that don’t really last and gives a glimpse of life together. Life bound up in common prayer, common ownership; life shared and growing.

The Gospel passage for today had me a bit stumped. It always has stumped me in the past. Jesus seems to be calling us to be crafty. The tower, the army are symbols of security. But then he does what he does so well, he shows up that security for the sham it is. “Therefore – and I think he means “but” – if you don’t give up all of that misplaced trust, you won’t follow me. If you want to build towers and gather forces, do it, but if you want to follow me carry the cross. That’s another stumper! What is the cross?

I heard a man once describe his mother-in-law as “just a cross I have to bear!” I’m sure his mother-in-law could have reversed the sentiment. But the saints of the desert, Benedict the saint of Nursia, our James of Haddington, Massachusetts, the Associates of the Holy Cross, the wild men of OHC, and all the odds and sods of history who have walked this way, in cloisters or out of them, know better. The cross is no burden – it’s the treasure buried in the field we sell everything to get, it’s the pearl of great price in our lives. It pulls us into God’s love and sends us back to our true community, the community of the faithful people, the community of God’s hungry and poor, the stranger at the door. The desert fathers and mothers thought they could escape and disappear but they didn’t for here we are, chewing on their wisdom and humor; their wonderful grasp of reality. Benedict thought he would escape but God thought differently. He didn’t die in that cave but in the house by the roadside where travelers and pilgrims were sheltered and fed.

We are no different. This holy place is not a shelter but a way station on the journey for thousands of pilgrims.

Armand Veilleux, a Canadian Trappist* said…

If someone comes to the monastery because he finds the world is sick and evil and he wants to leave it and find his salvation in the cloister, it would be better to send him back to the world and help him to love this sick word as God loves it.

Benedict likes that! Believe me!

Holy Father Benedict, pray for us.

______
* abbot of Notre Dame de Scourmont monastery in Belgium

Proper 9A - Jul 3, 2011

2011-07-03T20:00:00.005-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
Proper 9A - July 3, 2011

Zechariah 9:9-12
Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

I returned earlier this week from a six-day silent directed retreat at the Jesuit Center in Wernersville, PA. I went there rather exhausted after our Order’s Triennial Chapter meetings seeking both rest and direction…rest for my body and my mind and my spirit and direction for the exercise of my ministry and work in the Order. I am happy to report that I got some of both, though I discovered that my needs were perhaps deeper than I had realized and my inner resources thinner than I had imagined.

As is the custom at such retreats, you meet with your director as a group on the first night and he or she then lays out the shape of the week, arranges times for daily private conferences, and offers words of welcome and encouragement. Normally the director also offers you some passages of Scripture to pray with and encourages you to articulate to yourself and to God what it is you desire, what it is you want or hope for or need from the Lord, or in the language of Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, to ask for the graces that you desire. I had already been thinking about what it was that I wanted or needed, so that part came easily. But what struck me were the Scripture passages that my director, Fr. Jack, offered us. In addition to the usual suspects such Psalm 139 and Isaiah 55, there was the passage from today’s Gospel reading:

“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 is such a familiar passage. We hear it sung regularly at Compline. And when I came into the Anglican tradition some years ago, it was still being recited, at least in part, at every celebration of the Holy Communion. I knew it by heart. And I couldn’t keep my mind or my heart off of it. I kept repeating it:

“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 became my mantra for the week.

I remembered how often I had told people visiting our guesthouses for a period of retreat: “Take time to rest. You probably don’t realize how tired you are.” And guests often reported how for their first or second day, all they seemed to do is sleep, taking naps, dozing on a bench, staring in the middle distance. Is it prayer, they might ask? I don’t know. But call it what you will, it is certainly “grace,” a gift from God for tired bodies and troubled hearts and restless minds.

Whatever else Jesus is doing in this busy chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel, he is surely calling out to all who are just plain tired…those tired of working so hard trying to make ends meet or to put bread on the table, those tired of looking for health or happiness, those tired of attempting to live lives that are at least a little bit just or patient or loving, those tired of trying to be good or good enough, those trying to be holy, trying to be human. And he certainly calls out to those who are just tired of being tired, inviting them especially to lay it down for a while, and rest in him. He is, in other words, calling out to us, to each one of us here this morning.

He calls out and says, “Take my yoke.” We know that in the world of Jesus, taking the yoke was a technical term, referring to submitting oneself in obedience to a teacher or to a way of life. The Hebrew Bible speaks of the yoke of Torah and the yoke of the Kingdom, not to mention the political yoking or subjugation that was constant in the tumultuous and often violent world of the ancient Near East. Taking the yoke is a way of talking about becoming an obedient follower, a student, a disciple, under the direction and discipline and tutelage of a master.

“And learn from me” he adds, “for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls.” We learn that the rest we seek for our souls is to be found in the imitation of Christ. Do I want rest for my soul? Do you? Then do like Jesus, be like Jesus. Do we want soul rest? Then be gentle and lowly of heart like him. Not pushy or aggressive and proud, but meek and unpretentious and humble. Who knew? But now we know. Lord have mercy!

So he adds: “For my yoke is easy and burden is light.” This too surprises. Jesus is on record in Matthew’s Gospel as criticizing the religious teachers of his day for laying heavy burdens on others, that is, imposing religious or ritual or social obligations that seem impossible or worse, prove soul deadening. Not that we Christians have ever done anything like that in our history or experience, right? Yet note well: Jesus is not promising us a easy time of it, an easy way up and out, an easy life…just an easy yoke, one that makes the inevitable burden bearing that is part of every human life that much more tolerable and efficient.

I think it true to say that we are all yoked. That is, every one of us is connected to each other, to the creation, and to God, sometimes in close and immediate ways, sometimes more distantly. We all bear burdens, and if we are truly human, we share each other’s burdens. But it is also true to say that one can only bear so much. I think of St. Augustine who once said: “Everyone loves. The question is, what is the object of your love? In Scripture we are not urged to stop loving, but instead to choose what we love.” In the same way, we might say: Each of us is yoked, each of us is burdened; that’s part of the human condition. But be careful what you are yoked to and burdened with. Many, it is true, have no little or no choice in this. But how many of us are exhausted because we are carrying the wrong burdens or unnecessary yokes of our own creation or ones that in fact belong to another…and in the process avoid the authentic and unique burdens that are ours alone to bear? How often do we bear what is not really ours to bear because we were taught to do so by parents or teachers or religious authorities and still seek, perhaps unconsciously, their approval…or perhaps we need to feel wanted or useful…or we remain fundamentally un-attuned to and out of touch with our own psyches with their rich and insistent and legitimate demands? How many of us are weary and heavy laden with stuff that is not rightfully ours, wasting energy and creativity and leading us to exhaustion and resentment?

I am reminded of Jesus telling us to take up our cross and follow him. How often have I attempted to carry someone else’s cross—whether they wanted me to or not—or invented whole new crosses not of God’s devising or approval, and refused the saving dynamic of taking up my own unique cross and bearing it with some degree of grace and endurance and even beauty?

There is an extraordinary literature of biblical scholarship on this passage, as there is on all the texts of our Holy Book. It is worth exploring…at least some of it is. But what I found most helpful and moving in my reading was the devotional treatment of this passage by the popular Scottish Biblical scholar of half a century ago, William Barclay. In his commentary on this passage, he tells a story about Jesus, precisely the kind of imaginative engagement that Ignatius of Loyola would encourage for anyone approaching Scripture as a platform to prayer. Barclay says:

“The word easy is in Greek chrestos, which can mean well-fitting. In Palestine, ox-yokes were made of wood; the ox was brought, and the measurements were taken. The yoke was then roughed out, and the ox was brought back to have the yoke tried on. The yoke was carefully adjusted, so that it would fit well, and not chafe the neck of the patient animal. The yoke was tailor made.

“There is a legend that Jesus made the best ox-yokes in all Galilee, and that from all over the country people came to him to buy the best yokes that skill could make. In those days, as now, shops had their signs above the door; and it has been suggested that the sign above the door of the carpenter’s shop in Nazareth may well have been: ‘My yokes fit well.’ It may well be that Jesus is here using a picture from the carpenter’s shop in Nazareth where he worked throughout the silent years.”

Imagine that: Tailor-made yokes. Bespoke. Custom designed and fitted. One crafted just for you, and one created just for me, and another designed specially for the person next to you. And all to be worn as lightly and as comfortably as possible until that day when they are finally removed from our necks and we are put out to pasture.

Well, I’m afraid I’m getting carried away with the metaphor. So why don’t I just end by reading again these “comfortable words” from the marvelous paraphrase of Eugene Peterson’s The Message, though I admit they sound a bit like a late night commercial:

“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.”

May God grant it swiftly. And let us say, Amen.

Nativity of John the Baptist - Jun 24, 2011

2011-06-28T15:40:00.008-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
The Nativity of John the Baptist - Friday, June 24, 2011

Isaiah 40: 1-11
Acts 13: 14b-26
Luke 1: 57-80

“Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” (Matt 11:11) So says our Lord of John the Baptist. John is the forerunner, who calls Israel out to the Jordan to wash themselves clean so that they may join God in making Israel new again. John points the people to a new Exodus, and to a new Moses, who is not John. John is the greatest of the prophets of Israel, for in him come together Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah and Jeremiah, if not all the rest as well. It is the calling of a prophet to point the way and let God bring it in. Every prophet did, and every prophet does. And so does John.

John’s birth is Samuel’s birth: a barren woman close to God; a husband who loves her so much that once his duty is done he recedes from the picture; an infant known to be holy from the moment of his conception; a child dedicated from his first breath to the service of God; a young man who supplants his elders as he proclaims God’s word to the people. And what is the word of this new Samuel? A new day is dawning, the old is passing away. From the shambles of the past God will raise up a new leader for his people, a new David.

John’s life is Elijah’s life: living in the desert, the camel hair garment and leather belt, the locusts and the wild honey. But not just the life-style: John has adopted Elijah’s mission as his own. Israel has gone off the track and must be called back to her Sinai purity. Brood of vipers, he calls them, unworthy of their descent from Abraham. Israel’s leaders are corrupt, beyond corrupt: they are wicked. Ahab’s wife Jezebel’s arrogant, haughty, self absorbed cruelty has only one match in Scripture, and it is Herodias, nursing her own shame at the scorn John the Baptist has for her. Jezebel could not kill Elijah, but the vicious Herodias gets the Baptist, his head served on a platter as a grisly after dinner spectacle. But does she really win?

John’s proclamation is Isaiah’s proclamation: “"The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'" (Matt 3:3) Comfort, the prophet proclaims. The end of your imprisonment is coming to an end. All the things of the world die like the grass of the field, but the word of God is forever. God is coming, a fierce warrior who is also a tender shepherd. Fear not, Israel. Return to the Lord, for the time is now.

John’s vocation is Jeremiah’s vocation: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.... today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” (Jer 1:5, 10) Jeremiah announces the end of Israel as they knew it, and so does John. Will they listen to Jeremiah? Some of them, but mostly not. Will they follow? Yes, but only a few. Will it make a difference? The prophet hopes so, but we know better. It is not God’s plan that Israel escape captivity and re-establish political sovereignty, but rather she is to be reshaped as a witness to the world of God’s mercy, justice, law and love, in ways unforeseen by Jeremiah. And so with John. Did they listen? Yes, quite a few. He was noticed. Did any follow? Yes, including some of Jesus’ disciples, and perhaps even Jesus himself. Did it make a difference? In a way, yes: John certainly upset the ruling classes. The historian Josephus wrote about him, which is more secular, outside notice than Jesus got. But was what happened what the prophet John thought would happen? Did he think Israel would be reshaped as a witness to the world of God’s mercy, justice, law and love in ways unforeseen by him?

I think he did. I think he knew the teachings and the history of the prophets of Israel. And this is what made him the greatest of the prophets: He led the people out to the Jordan, to the new Red Sea, to prepare them for the new Exodus, and then watched as a new Moses led them forth. As a new Samuel John prepared a new king for them, as the new Elijah John called them from apostasy, as the new Jeremiah John prepared them for their coming exile from the world they knew, as the new Isaiah John promised them God’s renewed creation.

The whole movement of the prophets, from the earliest times before Israel even knew Yahweh to Herod’s temple in John’s own time, the third to be built atop Mount Zion, the greatest religious building of the ancient world, and so ambivalent a symbol, built by such a crafty collaborator, calling out for renewed prophecy from the Lord.... the whole prophetic history, the whole prophetic identity, is summed up in John the Baptist.

An angel announces him. A miracle conceives him. His father’s voice goes silent while his mother’s voice proclaims her cousin Mary as she bears the greater one: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb,” which countless millions say daily with Elizabeth to Mary in praise. The child John’s birth is six months to the day before the Nativity of Jesus, the forerunner in his birth as in his ministry, as in his death.

This child: conceived of the will of God, dedicated to God in the womb, so finely tuned to the Word of God that when still in his mother he leaps for joy when the Word comes near. The prophetic life of Israel, which will reshape the world toward God’s justice and mercy for hundreds, for thousands of years to come, the prophetic life of Israel is now incarnate in this child, whose life will prepare the way of the Lord, preparing Israel, preparing us, to open their eyes, our eyes, so that they, so that we, may see the dawn from on high which is breaking upon us, so that we who have sat in darkness and the shadow of death will see light, and so that at long last our feet may be guided into the way of peace.

Corpus Christi - Jun 23, 2011

2011-06-28T15:40:00.007-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother James Michael Dowd, OHC
Corpus Christi - Thursday, June 23, 2011

Deuteronomy 8:2-3
1 Corinthians 11:23-29
John 6:47-58

Revolution in a Loaf of Bread

Several years ago, I was blessed to have spent a bit of time in central Italy and found myself, very early in the morning, on a beautiful spring day, in the town of Orvieto. Now Orvieto was originally a medieval walled town at the top of a not very high mountain and in the center of that town is found the Cathedral of Orvieto which was begun in the fourteenth century.

Orvieto's Cathedral plays a prominent role in the Roman Catholic observance of Corpus Christi which is one of the Cathedral's most important festivals of the year. In fact, within the Cathedral is the Chapel of the Corporal which contains the Corporal of Bolsena which was at the centerpiece of a miracle which is reported to have occurred in 1263. The story surrounding the miracle involved a traveling priest who had stopped in Bolsena – a village near Orvieto, and celebrated the Mass. The priest, however, is reputed to have doubted the truth of the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, and while consecrating the host, it began to bleed on the corporal – creating an image of the face of Christ.

At the time I was visiting Italy, I was in the process of being received into the Episcopal Church, having been raised Roman Catholic. Well, you can imagine the ire and fervor that rose up within me as only a new convert can summon. There we were, being led around by a tour guide, being taught what was nothing more than medieval mythology. We were filled with tales of great Corpus Christ processions to commemorate this so-called miracle and throughout the tour, it seemed that all I could think of was, which – and how many of the Thirty-Nine Articles did this particular story violate.

So imagine my surprise when, just a little later that spring, back home in New York and listening to the Sunday announcements of the upcoming events, I heard it stated that my new Episcopal parish was celebrating a High Mass followed by Benediction on none other than the feast of Corpus Christi the following Thursday.

You see, I am what the sisters liked to call a Vatican II baby. I was literally born during the height of the Second Vatican Council and remember the “changes” as they were so often called not as “changes” but as the norm. So, in fact, as a Roman Catholic, I had never been to Benediction, the Feast of Corpus Christi had been de-emphasized, and all the carrying-on with processions and the like was a distant memory I heard about only from older Catholics or read about in books.

I was taught that the Eucharsit was a shared meal and that the only context it had any real meaning in was that meal. Yes, Catholics still reserved the Sacrament, as most Episcopalians do today. And yes, appropriate “respect” was to be paid to the Reserved Sacrament by genuflecting as you pass by the Tabernacle. But that was it. No Benediction, no processions, no Holy Hours. Nothing so “pre-Vatican II.”

But I also believed something in the secret of my heart that all those post Vatican II teachers and priests did not seem to believe anymore – or at least would not admit to. That secret involved my prayer while receiving the Eucharist or venerating it in the Tabernacle. That secret involves mystery and myth and leads to revolution, all of which is contained in the Eucharist.

When folks start throwing around “facts” about the Eucharist my skin begins to crawl and I desperately want to get out of that conversation mode, and get into a praying mode. Whether it is someone saying that they know for certain that the Eucharist has been transubstantiated, or transignified, or contains the Real Presence, or is just bread and wine symbolizing Christ's Body and Blood, I find myself thinking, 'please, can't we just pray into the Eucharist.”

Praying ourselves into the Eucharist, whether that is during the Mass or in front of the Blessed Sacrament, is an invitation to the central myth of our faith.

Now I've used the word myth several times already and at this point I probably need to explain what I mean by that. The word tends to frighten people in the context of the modern world because it can contain, in common usage, a sense of falsity or untruths, if not outright lies. We have come to believe that myths are stories, legends, often geared to children or more “simple” people than we like to think of ourselves as.

But I am using the terms myth in a more classic sense of the word as updated by the late Joseph Campbell. Campbell, the great twentieth century thinker and educator, has had an enormous influence in helping contemporary humanity, especially in the developed world, to regain an understanding of the role of myth and mystery in our lives. From the Enlightenment forward, our great thinkers, including our theologians, have insisted, rightly so, on using historical, scientific, linguistic, and archeological evidence to search for the meaning of life. This approach has helped us tremendously.

But we humans so often throw out the baby with the bath water. And in this case, the baby was the important role that myth plays in our lives. But Campbell says that what we should be seeking is not the meaning of life, but that what we should be seeking is “an experience of being alive.” That's what a myth is. Not fact, but Truth. A Truth that gives us an “experience of being alive.”

And having an experience of “being alive” sounds a lot like the Gospel passage that we have read this morning. In those short eleven verses, just listen again to the invitation that Jesus offers each of us for the “experience of being alive.”

“I am the living bread which comes down from heaven.”
“Anyone who eats this bread will live forever...”
“...the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.”
“I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life within you.”
“Anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life...”
“He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I live in him.”
“As I who am sent by the living Father myself draw life from my Father...”
“...so whoever eats me will draw life from me.”
“...Anyone who eats this bread will live forever.”

We want, it seems to me, to be desperately able to define the meaning of the Eucharist and we have done that from so many different points of view. But when we are factually trying to understand the meaning of the Eucharist, all we can seem to come up with is a loaf of bread and a cup of wine, to which we then ascribe a particular theological point of view. But when we attempt to have an experience of the Eucharist, then we find ourselves plunged into the great mystery that is Christ's gift of himself to each one of us.

For what we are called into is mystery. We are, as a people, famished, desperately starving and dangerously parched and we long for an experience of life. An experience of the life that dwells within us. And the life that dwells within us is the life of Christ. Jesus invites us to draw life from him, just as he has drawn life from the Father. And the mystery that he has given us for the source of that life, are bread and wine, his body and blood.

The invitation into that mystery is available to us here in the monastery in the daily celebration and reception of the Eucharist, in the veneration of the Blessed Sacrament in the Tabernacle, or in the occasional rite of Benediction. That invitation is not an invitation to discover the meaning of life. It is an invitation to actually experience being alive.

When we enter into the mystery of the Eucharist, however we do that, we enter into an experience of God from whom we draw life. But being alive has consequences. Entering into the mystery of the Eucharist is to begin a revolution. A revolution of conversion, a revolution of loving our enemy, a revolution of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner. When we enter into the mystery of the Eucharist, that revolution allows us to have an experience of life that comes from the very source of life itself. I am not talking here about the “mystery” of a bleeding host. I am talking about the deepest, most profound mystery of our lives - and that is God.
God's invitation to us is an invitation to allow God to live within us. Feeding our starving souls with himself, God invites us into God's life, a life that is filled with mercy, love, peace, hope, and mystery. A great deal of mystery. AMEN.

Easter 5 A - May 22, 2011

2011-05-24T15:21:00.004-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Julian Mizelle, OHC
Easter 5 A - May 22, 2011

The Way Forward

Acts 7:55-60
1 Peter 2:2-10
John 14:1-14

Well, in case you missed it, yesterday was May 21st -- the end of the world. Billboards have dotted the American landscape, along with t-shirts and leaflets stating the Bible guarantees it, buses painted with “The End of the World” messages from bumper to bumper, and of course all of those “believers” shouting over bullhorns in the public square that the rapture was to occur on May 21st. A visit to the website of “judgementday2011.com” earlier this week touted sale prices for t-shirts because there were only a “few days left”.

The May 21st movement within the far right evangelical community has at its center Harold Camping of FamilyRadio.com and his ability to decipher the hidden secrets of scripture about the end of time. However, this is not the first time Harold Camping has set a date for the return of Christ. He first predicted Christ return on September 6, 1994. How did he know Christ would return on this date? He equated the 2000 pigs mentioned in the 5th chapter of Mark’s gospel as 2000 years. Then following a complicated numbering scheme arrived at September 6, 1994. That of course didn’t happen so banking on the short memory of his followers he set a new date: May 21, 2011. Harold Camping is not alone in the field of prophecy pundits. Jack Van Empe has set a date in 2012. And there are other prophecy pundits who have set dates in 2014. And what is their motivation for such prophetic announcements? Could it be connected to the over $80 million in donations FamilyRadio.com received in the years 2005 to 2009?

Here’s the truth of the matter. There is absolutely no evidence in the Bible whatsoever, nary a clue, as to when Jesus Christ will return. There is no scripture in the Bible that can reveal the date of the Second Coming. Furthermore, all prophecy pundits have one characteristic in common. They are 100% wrong 100% of the time. Now if you are sensing that I have some energy on all of this you’re right. These charlatans (and that is what they are) who are dominant in some portions of American Christian culture are robbing thousands of the true message of Christ, His words, the true meaning of the Gospel. When the Evening News, NPR, CNN and host of other media outlets cover these stories as viable news it sidetracks the real dialogue that needs to be heard on Christ love, and on His works of mercy and justice, taking care of the poor, feeding the hungry, and ministering to the sick. As I have heard one commentator put it “the hucksterism of Left Behind/Rapture theology causes us to lose the meaning of consecrated life through the pursuit of justice and peace.”

There have been countless news stories of individuals and families giving up their jobs, liquidating their assets and savings and it is heartbreaking to hear. There are hundreds if not thousands of people who awoke to the reality of this Sunday morning who will now have to find a new way forward. That way forward lies right in today’s Gospel.

The 13th through the 19th chapters of John narrates the last 24 hours of Christ earthly life. Our reading today falls right in the middle of what is known as the Johannine Farewell Discourse. Jesus knows His passion is eminent and it is through these farewell discourses that Jesus does all He can to prepare his disciples for what lies ahead, for life after tomorrow. So He begins with reassurance, He begins by setting aside their fears, which is always the beginning place of any true work of God, by saying “Do not let your hearts be troubled”. John has his own ordering of the events of passion week. By the time we get to today’s reading Jesus has already washed his disciples feet, predicted Judas’ betrayal, and Peter’s denials, and He has called on His disciples to “love one another”. What he is really doing is preparing His disciples for what their lives will look like once he has departed from this world and returned to His Father.

As it is throughout much of the Gospel of John the dialogue is pushed forward through a series of questions. The first question actually comes in the preceding verses from Peter: “Lord, where are you going?” Then Thomas ask how they can know the way to where Christ is going if they do not even know the destination. What the disciples are failing to grasp is that Jesus is telling them that the Father IS the destination. The next question comes from Philip asking Jesus to show them the Father. Jesus’ response only confuses them further by saying you’ve already seen the Father by seeing me.

At the heart of this discourse Jesus makes one of the most profound statements of His entire 3 years of earthly ministry. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” This is not exactly an ecumenical/inter-faith statement, nor did Jesus intend it to be. On the surface it sounds like Jesus is being completely exclusive. This is a powerful statement, even for us in our time. But to a Jew, living in the fist century, living in the Jewish homeland it held a life altering revelation. Jesus took 3 of the great foundational conceptions of Judaism and made the tremendous claim that in Him all 3 found their full realization.

The Way

Jesus says “I am the way.” Following the way as a path to God goes all the way back to Moses. In fact we could probably trace it all the way back to Abraham. God said to Moses “...you shall not turn to the right or to the left. You must follow exactly the path that the Lord your God has commanded you.” Moses told the Israelites not to turn aside from the way that God had commanded them to follow. Much later in Jewish history Isaiah says “This is the way; walk in it”. The Psalmist writes: “Teach me your way O Lord”. And what is most telling is the name by which the very first Christians became known by in the Book of Acts: they were followers of The Way. So for Jesus to make the claim to His disciples of being the way was telling them that He was the embodiment of all that they sought. Even more literally He was saying I am the embodiment of life with God. He wasn’t giving them a set of directions on how to find God. He wasn’t handing them a road map or a set of formulas. He told them I AM God. And I assure you it wasn’t lost on Peter, Thomas and Philip that Jesus used the very name of God that God spoke to Moses...I AM. And it shouldn’t be lost on us.

The Truth

Jesus said “I am the way and the truth” and in doing so identifies Himself with the Psalmist who wrote: “Teach me your way O Lord, that I may walk in your truth”. Just as in our day, first century Palestine had its cache of prophecy pundits and those claiming to know the truth. What made Jesus different? He embodied truth. Jesus wasn’t the next empty johnny-come-lately truth claimer or moralist. There is an unlimited number of names that I could pull from recent headlines of would be moralist and truth-claimers who fell from their pedestals. And the common thread in all of their downfalls was greed and lust. But lets be honest. We don’t need the sensational stories from headline news. Most of us need look no further than our own circle of friends, or our own families, and yes, even our own lives to recognize the failings of truth. An adulterer who claims purity, a greedy person who claims generosity, a domineering person who claims humility, an irascible person who claims serenity, an embittered person who claims love--it all makes one completely skeptical of truth. Yet Jesus claims with unequivocal authority I am truth. And His disciples recognized that Jesus really lived the truth he taught. They saw in Him the reality of truth. Only Jesus could make such a statement. There has never been anyone before or since who could say I am truth.

The Life

Jesus said “I am life”. A first century Jew would know that in Proverbs, holding the wisdom of Solomon, such verses as: “whoever heeds instruction is on the path of life” or “You show me the path of life”. What Solomon discovered that made him so wise is that the end game in the Jewish faith of following the way and seeking truth was to find life. And what makes Solomon’s words so wise to us today is that in the final analyses what we are always seeking more than anything else is life.

Was Jesus discounting the great faiths of the world, some of them older than Christianity? Was He making an exclusive statement telling his disciples they had made it into the ultimate “in-group” and all others were left behind in the out group? NO! He simply met his questioners, Peter, Thomas and Philip, right where they were and spoke to them in a language they would understand. He told them I AM the embodiment of Torah. I AM the way to follow, I AM the truth you seek, I AM the life you desire.

Now I would like to set a date. It is the only date we need ever set. It is the date we proclaim each and every day with the Psalmist saying: “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.” It is today that Jesus tells us He is the way because He is our access point to God’s promise of life. It is today that Jesus tells us that He is life because he has brought His gift of life to the world. Let us this day choose Jesus as our way, let us choose Jesus as our truth, let us choose Jesus as our life.

Amen

Br. Andrew's Sermon for Br. James' Life Profession - 28 Apr 2011

2011-04-28T14:26:00.001-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Br. James Michael Dowd's Life Profession - Thursday, April 24, 2011

Acts 3: 11-26
1 Peter 1: 3-9
Luke 24: 36b-48

What a great time for a Profession of the Vow for Life! The octave of Easter.
This holy time when life is at the highest point of triumph. Death has tried its best and has been defeated. One Sabbath day of rest between crucifixion and resurrection and all fear is beaten down. Life blossoms and fruits. God has said “Yes!” absolutely to life.

There’s an image that has kept coming to me as I have been praying about this sermon and I have to tell you about it… when I first started my CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) residency I was on call one night. That involved making rounds on all the floors. I got to Obstetrics and checked in. “Anything going on?” The nurse said “There’s just one woman in labor… it won’t be very long now.” I remarked that I had never seen a birth. She said “Wait a minute” and left. Pretty quickly she came back with a scrub suit and said that the patient’s husband wasn’t willing to go into delivery with her and she would like the chaplain! Oh!!

I did as I was told and trembled my way to the mother’s bed. She grabbed my hand, kissed it and thanked me. “I don’t want to be alone and my husband is afraid.” I thought “you think he’s scared?” Just then they came to wheel her into the delivery room and I was dragged along ruing my bravado.

Well, she did great. I didn’t faint. The baby was born. on the 25th of September… the mother’s own birthday, the doctor’s birthday and my younger son’s birthday. So we all sang Happy Birthday and the baby responded…. He howled and then he peed all over us!

I know that’s a pretty earthy story for this solemn occasion. But so is our Gospel reading. Jesus tells the disciples to look at his tortured flesh and believe. He then asks for something to eat because ghosts don’t do that. This is a living Lord… not an ethereal concept. There is no mistaking the reality of his appearance. No chance is given to explain it away to themselves as a wishful thought or a grief conjured manifestation. Here is the Lord embodied and transformed. New life. Earthed yet transcendent.

And from Acts we read that Peter and John react to the surprise of the crowds after they had healed the crippled man by asking why the crowd is surprised. What did they expect? What else could life in Christ bring but immersion in the living of life and its restoration to wholeness?
Our faith is not a philosophy, not a finely worked out way of walking through life unscathed, sheltered and immersed in one’s own spiritual development. It is rooted in the earthiness of the Incarnation. It is humanity glorified but still human.

And although much of the world will ask why you, James, want to “bury” yourself in a monastery, we all know better. Today when you make your profession you do not die to life, you do not remove yourself from the pain of your fellow human beings; you do not become indifferent to the world God has planted us in.

Making your commitment does not mean retreating from life – dying to self, yes! Giving up your own willfulness and selfishness, yes! Monasticism is a call to enter fully into life with all its joy and all its grief. What happens today is that the labor you have been going through for fifty years will come to fruition finally. And just as that mother’s labor I spoke about was inexorable, irreversible, so is yours now.

James Michael you are being born yet again. Not into a sheltered existence but into a life that will take you deeper into the joy of your humanity and yet render you more and more vulnerable to the sufferings God’s children undergo. If you are faithful there will be no escape.

Benedict tried to escape at first. The cave at Subiaco seemed like a good idea for a while but the more he tried to withdraw the more the poor and the lost beat a path to his door. And finally, there at Montecassino his monastery guarded the road to the city he had fled from. It became a shelter and a beacon to the weary and the wanderer.

Benedict’s story is a great one. And it is the story of every monk. It is the story of being drawn by God’s love until the heart fills and overflows and the cloister cannot contain it. It’s not a story of escape or gentle piety. It’s a story of walking on into the full, messy humanness of life. It’s about perseverance and not turning back. It’s about trying to incarnate the love of Christ in this earthy mess we call life.

James, no one needs to teach you to love the poor. You are no stranger to the streets. And yet you give yourself to a life of seeking God that requires stability and labor. Today you claim a life that will be so abundant, so earthy, and so blindingly full that you will never rest again if you listen.
Today you are being born as a finally professed monk of the Order of the Holy Cross. Our roots are not genteel. Our Founder stood against the injustice which grinds down the poor. We don’t draw back. We keep our doors open, we venture out, but we always come home…home to our community, to our life together rooted in Christ.

This is your monastic day of birth. I trust you will be more circumspect in your response to the gift of life than that baby boy was those years ago! You will undoubtedly howl. But know you have come home. Alleluia!

Easter Sunday -24 Apr 2011

2011-04-24T10:32:00.002-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Easter Sunday - April 24, 2011

Colossians 3:1-4
John 20:1-18

On Palm Sunday as we began this Holy Week, Brother Robert preached and in his sermon he said something that hit home with me… talking about the Apostles’ Creed he called it “…the barest outline of a cosmic drama that will take us an eternity to comprehend.” I’ve thought about that all week.

This morning we have done some numinous things – standing in the cloister where so many have prayed for more than a century, lighting the new fire, stealing the flame and passing it along. We’ve listened to eternal promises; words that are evocative and almost magical. Words that have sprung from the mouths and hearts of people of vision and rare understanding of the ways of God. We began with the story of the creation of the cosmos and our place in it and proceeded through our wanderings and fallings to this time of mystery and miracle.

We sang a love song to the Light – an ancient melody that recounts God’s chasing after a people and a universe that so often turned away – a song of love bounding back and forth from God to us and back again.

And after the sun rose, we’ve renewed our promises of baptism and washed our faces in the holy water we made when we plunged the Light into the same water and called on the Holy Spirit for sanctification.

Not all of the above are rational acts! We’ve stopped short of painting ourselves blue and jumping over the fire! But we have recognized powerful holy images and memories that go far beyond what our minds can easily grasp. We have allowed our longing for beauty and union with God to soar beyond West Park and Holy Cross Monastery, beyond diocese and Church, beyond the skies and the stars into the cosmic wonder of God’s creative longing that we call Trinity.

Heart boggling as well as mind boggling! Who can plumb the depths of all this?
None of us, I feel.

I love all that wonder, all that connection like a river that flows through the cosmos. I am speechless in the face of that power of the love of the Creator. I am amazed that it is so. And that should be enough for anyone.

But it’s not sufficient for me. Wonder, silence, amazement are not enough. They give me chills but they don’t take me far enough. They can let me off the hook.

They don’t put food on the table of the poor; they don’t penetrate the loneliness of the widow; they don’t push me beyond the mystery to the new Life Christ brings to all by the Resurrection.

That’s why I love this story from the Gospel. A story of another garden and a broken hearted woman and a working man. A story about a cry of emptiness and longing and a fear that grief will never be relieved. A story of a spoken Word that brings more wonder than we can ask or imagine. The man speaks a name and all the cosmos reels with new life.

The Christ speaks and in his speaking he says the right thing. The thing the woman must hear. The thing all of creation longs to hear. He speaks her name and she is recognized and restored.

This is the beginning for us of the Holy – this is when we hear beyond the stars and the galaxies and the seas and the winds, this is when we hear who we are and who we are to be. And hearing, this is when we know Christ lives and we are alive in him. And the call goes further and further. If I am risen in Christ then I must speak the name; the name of love to all the unlovely; the name of nourishment to all the hungry; the name of recognition to the anonymous lost. The name of God to God’s beloved. That is wonder, that is awe, that is love. That is enough! Alleluia!

Good Friday - 22 Apr 2011

2011-04-24T10:30:00.003-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam D. McCoy, OHC
Good Friday - April 22, 2011

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:1-25
John 18:1-19:37

Every year on Good Friday I look out at the congregation and hope that there is someone there who is hearing the Passion for the first time. I wonder what it would be like to hear it as something completely new, to be caught up in its drama with no preconceptions, to meet its characters and hear its words and feel its emotion completely fresh. Is that person here today?

What is the power of the Passion story? Is the power in the retelling of the final moments of Jesus of Nazareth, with its memorable characters, words and actions? Is the power in its superb narrative, stripped to the bone, so to speak, stark and plain, leaving, as the best stories do, room for our imagination to insert ourselves into the action? Is the power in the figure of Jesus, at once humble and exalted in John, whose words and deeds reveal more than just glimpses of the presence of God? Is the power in that man, whom we have grown to love, brought to a grisly and terrifying end, which cannot help but move even the stoniest heart? Is the power of the passion in the art of the story? Or is its power in something greater than art? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and ... yes.

Because this is a story of power. It is a story with power, and a story about power, and a story that confers power.

What sort of power would an early Christian find in this story? Imagine an early Christian assembly, before the Gospels were published, before St. Paul had written his letters, before the stories of the disciples were gathered into collections and shared, in a time when the community was telling the story to itself from memory. The Lord is risen, His life is the life of our community. We really don’t know how. We hardly have words to describe why we believe, although Isaiah is a good guide. But at the center of our faith is this mystery: Jesus showed us the power and the wisdom and the life of God and died precisely because of who he was and what he did: God was in what he did and was in him. And the death he died was not the end but the beginning. What he said and did is still alive and growing, and in ways we have a hard time putting into words, there is a new power loose in the world because of him. The story of his death is the story of life. And it transforms the lives of those who begin to live in the power of his story.

As early Christians we would also understand that the story is about power. Power is real in the world. We all live with it every day. But the reality of power has been transformed by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the Passion narrative, the world’s power realities are personified by Pilate, but they are true of power the world over. The world’s power is a hierarchy, up and down. The one with the power is above, and acts upon those with less power. It is his business to get up in the morning, hear cases, make decisions, and supervise their implementation. Power, in fact, is work, in all its scheduled banality. It is the work of deciding things about other people according to the larger story of power of the system this person represents. It is also the worry that it will lose its place if it slips up. Today’s agenda is the same as every day’s: Public tranquility so that money may be made so that taxes may be collected so that the powerful may be glorified. Really, there’s nothing personal here. In the Passion story Pilate is urbane, even witty. He enjoys a bit of banter with Jesus, and at least at first doesn’t seem to mind much that Jesus gets the better of him. But the obscenity of this urbane chatter is in the fact that it doesn’t matter: There is a loser and a winner here, and the loser will be dead before sundown. Cat and mouse. Clever word games in the antechamber of death.

Except to the early Christian, the joke is on Pilate, the joke is on all the holders of the world’s deadly levers of power. Because God’s power is not like theirs, and God’s power will win. We do not need to be without hope as we are used by the powerful of the world for their gain and for their glory. There is another glory, another use to which our lives can be put: we are not raw material for the exploitation of our betters, but each of us is made for God’s glory, for a life in God beyond human imagining.

And because the Passion is a story of power and a story about power, it is also a story that confers power. People who have heard about, seen and understood what God’s power is and how it works and what it is aiming for are no longer easily fooled by the other kind. When told to bow down to that power as if it is God, they will ask rather what is the good it confers on its subjects. When told to pay taxes without murmuring, they will ask what public benefit public money is used for. When advised to reverence persons in high places, they will inquire of their virtuous life and whether they dispense impartial, righteous justice. In other words, they will give to the power of this world its rightful place: an instrument of God for the good of all, not a means for the glorification of those who possess it. When people begin to live in the realm of God’s power, we cast off the fear that poisons self worth, and stand and walk as God wished us to from the beginning.

You will notice that my pronouns are shifting from they to we. We are not early Christians. We don’t have to be. The power of the Passion story is still as much at work in our own day as it ever has been. In fact, it is hard to find anyone at all, Christian or not, who does not already know the outlines of this story. And why is that? Because the power of this story is that it is true. The power of goodness, righteousness and justice rests on a stronger foundation than greed, violence and tyranny, whether goodness, righteousness and justice are labeled “God” or not, and that’s the truth. And at a very basic level the world has learned this truth. It springs up in unlikely places and does inconvenient things to people who thought they were born to rule. The weak who die for good are never lost in God. The Passion of Jesus Christ is truth for everyone.

So we listen to the words of Jesus to Pilate once again this year, fearing what is to come, feeling the pain and the suffering he will shortly endure, but also knowing the truth about power. Oh the irony of the eternal dialog of the Word of God with the word of the world: "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." And the one who does not belong to the truth has only a witty question in reply: "What is truth?" And then, as a detectable anxiety creeps into Pilate’s voice, as he perhaps senses something else is going on here, and tries to get others to take the responsibility from him, he finds he really has no power except the power of death, unless he wants to betray his masters. Which he will not do. Which is his tragedy, and the tragedy of all in power who follow Pilate’s path.

The power of the Passion story is not the power of public order and exploitation administered with the threat of death, but the power of truth: Power, real power, is from God, does God’s will, and builds God’s kingdom. God’s power is built from below and side by side, not from above. Those with the least are the favored of God. The one who told us and showed us and then died for us when we started to hope we could live in God’s kingdom is the one with the power, power so different from what we are used to we can hardly find words for it. We can’t really define it, or even describe it. And since we can’t reduce it to a set of propositions, that’s why we tell the story.

Palm Sunday - 17 Apr 2011

2011-04-17T13:32:00.002-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC Superior
Palm Sunday A - April 17, 2011

Isaiah 50:4-9a
Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 21:1-11

Next week at about this time we will gather around a bowl of water in our Chapter Room and be asked several questions:

Do you reaffirm your renunciation of evil and renew your commitment to Jesus Christ?
Do you believe in God the Father?
Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God?
Do you believe in God the Holy Spirit?

And we will answer the first question with the words: “I do.” And the others we will answer with the words of the Apostles’ Creed, which constitutes the ancient baptismal confession of the Christian faith. They also constitute the first part of what we have come to call the Baptismal Covenant, about which we hear so much nowadays in the church. Unfortunately, most of the time the Baptismal Covenant is discussed, these first four questions that comprise the greater part of that covenant are ignored in favor of the final questions about what we shall do and how we shall live, thus ignoring the fact that our actions are based on and are a response to our faith, rather than vice-versa, though of course the influence ultimately goes both ways.

We have had a bit of a conversation over the past few years here at the monastery about what exactly this sixth Sunday in Lent, this last Sunday before Easter, is and how we ought to observe it. There seem to be varying or competing emphases. On the one hand, we all know today as Palm Sunday, the day that celebrates the triumphal and rather ironic entry of Jesus into Jerusalem several days before his death. He does enter triumphantly, acclaimed by the populace, but riding on an ass…not your usual imperial symbol of authority, though one freighted with prophetic meaning. It is an ancient commemoration.

But today is also known as the Sunday of the Passion, the day on which the narrative of the suffering and death of Jesus is solemnly read in the churches. This, too, is an ancient observance. And as is often the case in the history of Christian worship, meaning gets layered onto meaning and ritual onto ritual. The strong emphasis on the entry in Jerusalem can be traced to the churches of Gaul and Spain. The equally strong emphasis on the solemn reading of the Passion story goes back to the Roman church. Over the course of centuries, they were combined into what is, for some, a profoundly moving emotional juxtaposition and for others, an impossible liturgical conundrum.

Let me suggest yet a third way to approach this day that inaugurates our entry into Holy Week. It too is ancient, so ancient in fact that it has pretty much disappeared. It goes back to the early days of Christianity, when converts to the faith were prepared for up to three years for Holy Baptism, which generally took place at the all-night Easter service. In those days, worship was usually secret or at least guarded, often for very practical reasons given the real threat of persecution in a hostile world. Only baptized Christians were admitted to the weekly Holy Communion service itself. And even those preparing for Holy Baptism would be dismissed immediately after the biblical readings and sermon. Only the faithful were to be present for the celebration of the sacred mysteries.

After a very long and demanding process of screening and instruction, those ready for Baptism would gather on the Sunday before Easter—today—and would be formally taught the Apostles’ Creed in a ceremony known as the traditio symboli, the delivery of the creed. The text of the creed was carefully guarded in those days, and there were all sorts of prohibitions against writing it down or sharing it with the uninitiated. But on this day, the bishop would teach it to the baptismal candidates phrase by phrase and expound on its meaning, so that when next week came, they could make their public profession of faith and be baptized.

What I find interesting is that this is likely the one and only time that most of these converts to the faith would ever hear the creed said aloud. The creed was not a part of the Sunday gathering or daily worship. It was, if you will, too sacred. The candidates were expected to commit it to memory then and there and then meditate upon it daily henceforth in their hearts. It was to be the framework by which all their subsequent life experience was to be understood.

We’ve come along way from that ancient practice. We say the creed daily, we print it in our service books and leaflets, and of course you can Google it and read all about it. I suppose that’s a good thing.

But the truth is many folks just don’t like creeds. They find them intrusive or exclusive, and perhaps they make them uncomfortable. Many see them as tests: you sign on here, you assent, or you don’t belong. And that, I think, is an unfortunate, and at best, a partial understanding.

Our friend Martin Smith in his book Compass And Stars has a wonderfully brief and solid reflection on the nature of creeds. I have shared it with countless people.

In the first place, he reminds us that the creed is the baptismal symbol, a Latin word that means a token or counter: “…like the stub of a theater ticket which is not the performance but will take us to where the performance is” in the words of Northrop Frye. The creed may be the entrance ticket to the Christian world, the Christian life, but we must not confuse the ticket with the performance itself. At best it is a good reminder of just what play we’ve chosen to be part of and what theater and what stage is ours.

Secondly, Martin suggests that the creed can be best understood as something like the list of first lines that you might find in the table of contents of a book of poetry, a kind of collection of first lines or chapter headings of our faith. They are not the final words, but the first words, words that have the power to set us off on a remarkably creative journey of spiritual discovery.

Finally, as Martin says: “The creeds are not official confessions of faith or catechisms so much as songs of defiance and the jubilant celebrations of tremendous mysteries.” In that regard, creeds are better sung than recited.

Today is the Sixth Sunday in Lent, the beginning of Holy Week, the Sunday of the Passion, Palm Sunday. But it is also the Sunday of the Creed, the day when our ancestors in the faith were given the words of the baptismal profession to memorize and then to use as the container and interpretive framework of the new life into which they were being ushered. We today could do worse than to enter this Holy Week with the words of the Creed that we will profess next Sunday echoing in our ears, opening us to their fulfillment in our individual and shared experiences during this Holy Week and in the coming years. They are words that give us the barest outline of a cosmic drama that will take us an eternity to comprehend. They are the first lines of a story that we will be editing and revising throughout our lives this week and the next and the next. They are our song.

And since they are our song, please stand now and join me in rehearsing again and singing aloud our baptismal faith. Harmonize if you’d like. And know that God will bring us to his Easter. He always does.

The Apostles’ Creed

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit
and born of the Virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.

Lent 5 A - 10 Apr 2011

2011-04-10T12:25:00.006-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Scott Borden, OHC
Lent 5 A - April 10, 2011

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45

This Gospel story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is a challenging story in a number of ways. There are any number of miracle stories in the Gospel, and they are usually told in a specific way – the miracle occurs and then there is a discourse about it – in modern parlance, we get to process it.

In this story, we get all the discourse before hand, then the miracle happens. The ending of the story is abrupt and unsatisfying. There is no processing. Lazarus comes out of the tomb... the end... It appears we are meant to “pre-process” the miraculous raising of Lazarus.

Jesus is informed how sick his dear friend Lazarus is, but in spite of the fact that he loves Lazarus very much, he is unconcerned. The illness does not lead to death, he says. Eventually Jesus decides to return to Judea, where Lazarus lives, or by now we should say lived... All the disciples know its dangerous. Thomas offers the helpful suggestion that they should all go to die with Lazarus – foreshadowing? Sarcasm? Gallows humor? Or just a way of adding to the uncomfortable nature of this story...

We arrive at Bethany to learn that Lazarus is not just dead, he is, as the Munchkins say in the Wizard of Oz, really most sincerely dead... 4 days dead. The common cultural understanding at the time was that the soul departed the body on the 4th day, so John is making sure we understand that not only is Lazarus dead – his soul has gone to heaven. He's completely gone.

Jesus meets Martha – the active sister of the Mary/Martha duo, who has, true to form, come to meet him. Mary, true to form, has stayed home... Martha pretty much accuses Jesus of letting Lazarus die. “If you had been here, he would not have died... but nonetheless, we're happy to see you...” And in case we didn't get it the first time, Jesus has the same conversation with Mary when she comes to him.

The disappointment, the anger, the frustration of this encounter just keep growing. Jesus seems to have wanted a private time with Mary, Martha, and the disciples. But instead he now has a crowd of strangers following Mary to share this intimate moment. And, as they say... it will all end in tears... Mary is crying... the crowd following her is crying...

It gets to Jesus. In the translation of the Bible we use, we're told that Jesus is greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. In most English translations the nature of Jesus' disturbance appears to be sorrow – after all his beloved friend has died. But if we were German Lutherans, we would be learning that Jesus became angry and indignant, not sorrowful. Roman Catholics would be learning that Jesus was perturbed and troubled.

Jesus wept – that much we know. But what was the nature of those tears?

Jesus knows that Lazarus will live. When he was telling the disciples that Lazarus was dead, he said he was glad for their sakes – this was a chance for their faith to be strengthened. Tears of sorrow for Lazarus don't make sense.

John, adds another detail that argues against a sentimental interpretation of those tears. The crowd that has gathered around Mary, John calls them “the Jews” – though we must remember everyone in this entire story is a Jew – the crowd says “see how he loved him.” They interpret these as tears of sorrow for Lazarus – and for John, the crowd always gets it wrong, always misinterprets, always misses the truth. If they believe that Jesus is crying because he loved Lazarus, who is now dead, then we can be pretty sure this is not what John wants us to believe...

Jesus wept. As I reflect on this, the shortest sentence in the Bible, I find another thought enters my mind: Jesus still weeps. I may not know exactly why Jesus wept with Mary and Martha and the crowd, but I know lots of reasons why Jesus still weeps. Many of them were in the litany that opened our service.

Jesus weeps because after 2,000 years of Christian worship, we are still fighting wars, still beating our plowshares into ever more fantastic swords, still making war, not peace.

Jesus weeps because we are still neglecting widows, orphans, the unwanted, the marginalized. Jesus weeps because justice is denied to many of God's children, education is denied to many of God's children, medical care is denied to many of God's children, food is denied to many of God's children.

Perhaps Jesus looks at the tomb and measures the crowd around him, including his disciples and his dear friends Mary and Martha, and thinks “these people just don't get it, they do not know my ways... they are too attached to the things of this world.” And he weeps bitter tears, tears of frustration and anger... the same tears that Jesus still weeps.

There is a hymn, one of my favorites, “O Master let me Walk with thee.” We sang it here just a few days ago. But the version in our hymnal has been sanitized... four lines have been omitted:

The first two:

O Master let me walk with thee before the taunting Pharisee;
Help me to bear the sting of spite, the hate of men who hide thy light.

Well that is a pretty good hymn verse – at least I think so... but its not so different from many others. It don't mind that it gets omitted. But the next two:

The sore distrust of souls sincere who cannot read thy judgments clear,
The dullness of the multitude who dimly guess that thou art good.

This verse, especially the last line, arrests me: who dimly guess that thou are good. This dull multitude that has gathered around Mary and Martha have made some guess about Jesus, about God, but they don't really know. They are not prepared to change their lives, let alone lay down their lives, for the Gospel of Jesus. Those souls sincere, that multitude – that's us... that's me...

When Martha and Jesus have their encounter Jesus assures Martha that Lazarus will live. And Martha says, sure, in the resurrection at the last day. Jesus responds “I am the resurrection and the life...” I hear that as a compound thing, but its really two things. Jesus is future, the resurrection, and present, the life. Martha is trying to look ahead to the future, to resurrection, and Jesus is bringing her back to the present, to life; just as Jesus is bringing Lazarus to life.

Certainly a great deal of Christian thought is tied up with salvation, with resurrection, with the future. Jesus is the resurrection. Jesus is also the life, the here and now, the present. We do OK with the resurrection part... its life where we get into trouble.

I can't help but reflect on the other Lazarus – we meet two in scripture. The other Lazarus is the miserable beggar outside the rich man's house. He has nothing but suffering in this life, and is rewarded in the next. Its easy to dimly guess that things will be made right in the next life and so we can slide a bit.

But that is not what the other Lazarus is telling us. The other Lazarus is telling us that how we live our lives is terribly important. That other Lazarus is directing our thoughts toward how we live in this world. It is not OK that we allow our present-day Lazaruses to suffer assuming that they will be rewarded in the next life.

This Lazarus, the one we meet today, is pretty much absent from his own story – he's dead for most of it, right up to the end... but its life, not resurrection, where this Lazarus is directing our attention. It is the living who give God praise, and at the end of this story, Lazarus is again among the living.

I find Ezekiel pointing us in the same direction. He prophesies to the dry bones and says God will open the graves, breathe life back into the bones, and they will become not just living people, but God's people – as Ezekiel says, “you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act.” If God will act, than so must we. We must act in ways of Godliness and righteousness.

The future is never in doubt – not for Lazarus and not for us. Jesus is the Resurrection. But Jesus is also the the life – will we live in that life? Will we do more than dimly guess that God is good?

The season of Lent is about asking questions, about examining ourselves, about challenging assumptions. It is through introspection, through self examination, through honest prayer, and through community, that we can step out of the dim multitude weeping with Mary and stand with Lazarus, alive in Christ Jesus. Amen.

Br. Charles/Julian's First Profession - 06 Apr 2011

2011-04-07T12:57:00.004-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC, Superior
First Profession of the Benedictine Vow of Br. Julian - Wednesday April 06, 2011
Br. Julian Mizelle was previously known as Charles

In just over two weeks we will celebrate Easter. There are, of course, many ways to celebrate that great feast, from sunrise services at the Hollywood Bowl to ancient and competing liturgies in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

Here at Holy Cross we will celebrate it, as we always do, with the traditional Western liturgical rites. It will begin in darkness with the kindling of a new fire and the lighting of the Paschal candle.

Just before that great wax pillar is lit, the celebrant inscribes a cross on the candle and says the following words:

Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega. All time belongs to him and all the ages. To him be glory and power through every age forever. Amen.

It is, for me, a deeply moving moment, the very sum and substance of the Easter proclamation.

Our lives, our vocations are each written out over a brief period of years, but it is a time, a period, inscribed in a larger drama, in that eternal span of time that goes from everlasting to everlasting and which belongs wholly and entirely to Jesus Christ. It is with the proclamation of this truth that we begin our Easter observance.

Timothy Radcliffe, OP, once commented that:

The religious life [the monastic life] is perhaps in the first place a living Amen to that longer span of time. It is within the stretch of the story from Alpha and Omega, from Creation to Kingdom, that every human life must find its meaning. We are those who live for the Kingdom when, as Julian of Norwich says, ‘All will be well, all manner of thing will be well.’

And so it is for you today, Charles. Today, this day, this event, this hour finds all its meaning within that greater time and that greater story that is Jesus Christ’s and Jesus Christ’s alone.

And what a wonderful day it is. It is a day when so much of your fifty-four years comes together in a new and exciting way, in a way wherein nothing is lost and all is redeemed and set upon a yet firmer foundation and a renewed path. It is a day when all those graced choices and experiences that make up your life, that are you, are now offered to God to be transformed yet more: that experience as a young man welcoming Christ into your heart as Lord and Savior, that day where you were plunged into the cleansing waters of baptism, that day when you first fed on the Bread of Life, when you were confirmed, when you claimed the truth about your adult self, when you reached out to others in ways that went beyond your accustomed ways… and found God reaching back.

And these are only the public moments. How many more hidden, private, graced events do you bring with you to this ceremony? Each is an Easter moment, each a little resurrection. Indeed, the God who chose you long ago has done great things in you, and he is again doing something new in you… and through you, in us as well. In you, each of us is reminded of similar graced moments in our own lives, similar eastering times of resurrection and new birth. Today is a feast day for all of us.

Br. Julian signs the Benedictine Vow written in his own hand

But as we know, Easter comes only after Good Friday with its focus of the mystery of the holy and life-giving Cross. It is an event that is too little understood today, yet it is a reality that is widespread, indeed one that is everywhere.

Even as a symbol, the power of the cross is easily lost on us. Because it is everywhere around us, on our walls and towers and necks, it often becomes invisible. We get used to it. We fail to see it for what it is. We lose out on its power to shock, to challenge, and to convert.

One example. Just a few weeks ago the European Court of Human Rights ruled that crucifixes are acceptable in public school classrooms throughout the forty-seven countries that comprise the Council of Europe (an international organization with a broader membership than the European Union). The reasoning they gave for this decision is, to say the least, troubling. Quoting from the Guardian:

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that crucifixes are acceptable in the continent’s state school classrooms, describing them as an ‘essentially passive symbol’ with no obvious religious influence. In its judgment… the court found that while the crucifix was ‘above all a religious symbol’ there was no evidence that its display on classroom walls might have an influence on pupils.

One is left breathless or despairing—or both—at this claim. But the sad thing is: it may be true.

I think of the story that circulated a few years of the English girl who went into a jeweler’s shop seeking to buy a cross for her necklace, at that time an essential element of punk rock couture. She was shown some very simple crosses in gold and silver. But she demurred. She wanted one, as she put it, “with the little man on it.” That little man… Jesus.

We have in many places and in many ways entered into the post-Christian era.

And yet the cross of suffering is everywhere, and it is everyone’s lot. It has been yours, Charles, as you well know, as it has been mine, and it has been and is that of every person present here today. And yet we know that our Lord Jesus accepted the cross—his cross and ours—so that he might taste most deeply our human pain and bear the shame, and take away the sin and redeem the suffering. How he does this is, of course, the great mystery of our faith. That he does it is the great hope on which all our other hopes are founded.

In the intersection of those arms of the cross, all contradictions meet and are reconciled: time and eternity, the vertical and the horizontal, here and everywhere, past and future, now and eternity. But it is a reconciliation that is bought at great price, where the old is sometimes gently, but no less often vigorously, refashioned and sometimes yanked out, where our many defenses are disarmed and the heart is opened to the endless work of reformation. It is frequently dirty work, hard work, humbling work, amazing work. It is God’s work in us and through us. It is the precious fruit of our obedience and surrender to that eternal story that stretches from Alpha to Omega.

In his Rule written in 1900 for the Order of the Holy Cross and referencing the story of Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28, our Founder says:

The ladder of the cross is planted firmly within the walls of a religious house and angels pass up and down that stairway. Our house is a house of God; let us strive to make it for ourselves the gate of heaven.

What a wonderful image. The cross as ladder, as stairway, as bridge, as passageway, as a royal road, indeed the royal road. Angels are indeed on it, but oh, in what strange and often disturbing disguises. And there too is God, waiting expectantly and patiently and joyfully for you and me and each of us here today to climb that ladder. Let us climb it together. Let us climb it as brothers and sisters.

One more thing. Charles, you have elected to adopt a new name. In the community from now on you will be known as Br. Julian, at least after we get the hang of it… though I imagine you will always be Charles to your family and old friends. Taking a new name is a sign, a sacrament, and a reminder of the change and growth that God is working in you and through you, a sign of a new emerging identity. Many cultures and societies and faith traditions do this. But always remember: this is not your final name or even your true name. Hold dear the words of Revelation 2:17: “To everyone who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it.” God, and God alone, knows your true name, and in God’s good time that too will be revealed to you.

So we receive today your solemn vow to follow the monastic way of life for one year. But of course your intention—like ours—is that, unless it becomes strikingly clear over the next several years that this is in fact not your path, we are headed together for life. Bound for life. Life with Christ. Life in Christ. Life through Christ.

Charles/Julian… God is with you in this adventure. Your family is here with you. Your friends are with you. Your brothers are with you.

Come, let us climb that ladder. Let us together embrace that cross. Let our faces and our hearts be turned toward life… fullness of life, life lived in faith and joy and courage and peace and risk.

The Father delights in such a life. So do we all. May it be yours and ours, each of us here today. Always.

Amen.

Lent 3 A - 27 Mar 2011

2011-03-28T14:37:00.003-05:00

The Church of the Transfiguration, New York, NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
Lent 3 A - March 27, 2011

Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42

What an extraordinary story we’ve just heard. Jesus, on his way north from Jerusalem to Galilee, passing through Samaria, a place most Jews would avoid, a sort of religious wasteland. Jesus and the remarkable, chatty lady he meets at the well. The therapeutic, almost clinical, conversation they have about her married life. Their banter about religious customs. The mysterious dialogue about water. And then the salvation moment for her entire community. How extraordinary.

Practically the first thing one learns in Sunday School about the culture of the New Testament is that Jews and Samaritans don’t get along. That’s the required background for understanding the parable of the Good Samaritan. So it is perhaps a little surprising to find Jesus and this lady chatting away, and that surprise is a reaction worth holding on to. This is one of those Bible stories which gets more complicated as you pay attention to it. Not only did Jews and Samaritans not get along: Jews actively despised Samaritans as collaborators who had interbred with the enemy during the occupation after the fall of Israel. Samaritans had strange customs. They worshiped on the wrong mountain. The Jews thought them unclean and treated them that way.

And this woman is strange. Drawing water was women’s work, and it had attached to it a lot of gendered significance. Women would come together in groups to the well, in their sisterly solidarity catching up on the news, commenting on the day’s events, checking up on the children, supporting each other, in their gossip implicitly upholding the village social morality. But John makes a point of telling us that the woman at the well is alone. Women generally would draw water in the cool of the morning or early evening, because hauling water is heavy work, not to be done in the heat of the day. John makes a point of telling us that she is there at noon. Is she alone and at the well at the wrong hour because she is being shunned, because of her irregular life? Men and women in first century Palestine generally did not talk socially with each other unless they were related and at home. In fact, women rarely left home at all, and certainly not unaccompanied. And yet here she is, surprised by Jesus’ request for water from her, but ready to engage a perfect stranger, all alone, out in public. She is clearly the wrong sort of person, in the wrong sort of place, doing the wrong sort of thing. And yet Jesus unfolds for her the secret mystery of his identity: "I am he, the one who is speaking to you." This to an unclean Samaritan, excluded by the other women of the village, with a scandalous marital history, living in sin, with no evident regard at all for what is proper. And not only is this woman a member of this despised group, the Samaritans: she is not even a successful Samaritan. She is the despised among the despised. And yet, how remarkable: Instead of sinking into depression, anger or worse, she bears her burden, literally and figuratively: Excluded from the sisterhood? She picks up her water jar every noon anyway and walks off to the well alone, ready to encounter what may come to her, ready for Jesus. An amazing woman.

But wait. There is more that is strange in this story.

The Old Testament lesson today tells us of the thirsty Israelites in the desert, nagging Moses about water. Those needy, pesky Israelites, always thinking about themselves. But who is thirsty in the story from John? This passage makes me think of the saying in Matthew: “Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple--truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward." (Mt 10:42) Who is giving the cup of water to whom? Is Jesus one of the little ones in this story? Is he the thirsty Israelite depending on God’s grace for what his life needs as he travels through this desert place?

There are so many reversals in this story: The woman excluded from her community, breaking ancestral custom and the laws governing the lives of men and women. Her almost rabbinic theological dialogue with Jesus, not what one expects from a woman in her culture, even more from a woman like her. And Jesus, out of place, in humility, asking for water in the wilderness, looking for that most elemental act of human kindness, a cup of water. And in return, opening the secret mysteries of the overflowing, never-failing grace of God. To an unclean, outcast, social misfit of a woman from an antagonistic, despised outsider group.

And then the unexpected conclusion to the story: This strange woman goes into the village, the village of her social exclusion, tells the elders what has happened, and miracle of miracles: those elders listen to her, and invite Jesus to stay with them. Even if his introduction to them comes from her. And he does. And they come to believe. I wonder if the key to this story is not the ending, which has often seemed to me to be something of a non sequitur: “But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting.” Is this the harvest the disciples expected? The first fruits of Jesus’ ministry is – Samaritans? Samaritans? This is a great sign of God’s redeeming love for the whole world through Jesus Christ: the lowest of the low, the most despised and rejected are among the first to respond to Jesus’ presence and Jesus’ words. One is perhaps reminded of the prophet Jonah, sent to a place he did not want to visit, and it is there, in Nineveh, not in Israel, that people are found who listen and respond to the invitation of God. And here, as Matthew and Luke say, “Here you have a greater than Jonah.” (Mt 12:41, Lk 11:32)

Have you ever been a Samaritan? Even if you have had success in life, I am willing to bet that somewhere deep down this woman resonates with you. She does with me.

Do you remember, when you were in junior high school, how important it was to be accepted, to be part of the group? Do you remember the terror that you might be excluded? And the shame, humiliation, degradation of actually being labeled one of “them” instead of one of “us”? To work and work to be part of the right group and then to be dismissed with a cutting remark, a single word, a look: You aren’t one of the favored, one of us. You never will be. To be in the band instead of on the football team or in the cheerleading squad? Who, after all, are the homecoming kings and queens? Not first chair clarinet, I can tell you. And God help you if you are the last clarinet in the back row!

For me one of the great excitements of the story of the Samaritan woman at the well is that it shows that God’s message is not just for the victors, not for the in group that I will never really be completely at home with. Jesus comes to the well in humility and expectation, looking for that special lost one from whom he asks only what she is able to give. His openness to her opens her to him in return, and once over the surprise and shock of this seemingly inappropriate encounter, their conversation reveals her heart: What about the fact that my people are excluded, dishonored, Samaritans? What about my own irregular, failure of a life? It is to her, not to someone more seemingly worthy, that Jesus reveals his messianic secret, the inner meaning of salvation, the great good news: The burden you have to bear is no burden to God. God’s water is living water. You need never thirst again.

Who are we that God should come to us? Failed Samaritans? Who are we that God should ask of us only what we can give, even if it is a cup of water? Who are we that God should spend whole days and nights as a guest among us, unworthy as we are? Who are we that God should answer our questions, take an interest in our lives, even in our messy, serially-failing lives? Who are we that in these simple acts God should reveal to us the truth?

What grace, that Jesus in extreme humility comes to us as we carry the heavy water jars of our lives. How extraordinary that he should be the one to ask a simple gift of us, a gift we can actually give him, when we should ask what we need of him. How extraordinary that he should find in us a community from which he begins to build the kingdom.

May we be like that woman: failed Samaritans, yes, but possessed of the strength of character to encounter the stranger at the well, to engage him fearlessly, to perceive in ourselves the change he offers to us, and then the courage to tell our community. And may our communities, very likely Samaritans all in the eyes of the truly righteous, have the grace and courage of spirit to invite him in, to listen and to hear, and then to say with them: This is truly the Savior of the world.

Lent 3 A - 27 Mar 2011

2011-03-27T09:38:00.004-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC
Lent 3 A - March 27, 2011

Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42

Come to the well

Lord help us follow your example of reconciliation; help us reach out to the Samaritan woman in our life; help us do God’s will as our daily worship. May we all contribute to the harvesting of your fields, to the building of your Kingdom. Amen.

*****

In last week’s gospel, Nicodemus, an insider of the dominant religion came to find Jesus by night and struggled with the teachings he was offered.

This week, in the middle of a hot day, Jesus reaches out to an outsider. He offers her the wellspring of eternal life, no less; if only she will ask him for it.

These two passages, Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman, are linked in meaning by the good news that “...God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Both Nicodemus and the Woman at the well, came to believing in Jesus, even if by different journeys.

This week’s gospel reassures us that no one will be denied who will believe in Jesus. Jesus “gets us.” He fully understands all that is good and all that is sinful in us. In full knowledge, he reaches out and desires us to be saved with him, in him and through him.

*****

But let me set the scene of today’s passage. As Jesus ran into increasing resistance from religious authorities in Judea, he decided to eschew confrontation and to continue his ministry in Galilee.

Now, the shortest route between Judea and Galilee goes through Samaria. Most Jews would have preferred the longer route which would have avoided Samaria altogether.

You see, Jews and Samaritans had a centuries-old, intense dislike for each other. In a nutshell, Jews reproached Samaritans for having lost their Jewish integrity; their religious and ethnic purity. But Jesus deliberately chooses to travel through Samaria.

Christ encounters the woman at the well - Richard Serrin

Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well shows us God's desire to free us, each one of us, into a life of integrity; a life in truth and spirit. There is so much in this encounter that speaks to me. This morning, I’d like to focus on reconciliation and worship.

Reconciliation and worship are two great ways to accept Jesus’ invitation to salvation. Let me tell you a bit more about what I see in today’s gospel about these two aspects of the spiritual journey.

*****

First, it is reconciliation that Jesus brings to the woman at the well. The Samaritan woman is invited to face herself as she is, there and then. She is invited to be fully known as she truly is, without social pretenses.

And she is invited to ask for the gift of grace; the well of living water springing up to eternal life. She is invited to step into her own salvation. All that is needed is accepting to be fully known as she is, and to believe.

And it isn't just anyone that Jesus invites in this way; the gender, the social status and the ethnic origin of who he invites shows that God has little interest for our human boundaries of separation.

The apostles, when they return from their errands into the city, are flabbergasted that Jesus would be speaking with a woman, a Samaritan woman and a compromised Samaritan woman, at that!

But, Jesus shows that God's message is for all; for Jews and non-Jews alike; for people in good standing and for outsiders. God doesn't need to choose the most prestigious and privileged amongst us for salvation to be wrought.

The Samaritan woman goes on to become an evangelist in bringing her own people to God.

The disciples too are invited to step out of their own cultural boundaries here. Jesus shows them an enlarged mission; their harvest will extend beyond the Jewish people, starting with those Samaritans they grew up to despise.

*****

Through the events of his meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus also teaches us about true worship. True worship is not linked to a place, be it the temple in Jerusalem or anywhere else. True worship is the lives we live with God, in truth and spirit. True worship is our lives lived in integrity with God.

You see, worship is that, which we do, that embodies our values. By showing up in church this morning, for example, you are demonstrating that you give value to the word and the will of God. Our presence here for the liturgy is a common understanding we have of the word "worship."

But everything we are, and everything we do, can embody what we give value to. When you insist in your relationships on being truthful, respectful and loving, you are worshipping God in God's creatures. When you are re-using, recycling and generally reducing your use of physical resources, you are worshiping God in God's creation, for instance.

All of Life can be worship. Living our lives in truth and spirit is worshiping God in all we are, and all we do. We worship God when we live life as if everything we do mattered.

*****

And Jesus, the Christ, the anointed one, tells us where to look to find the sustenance for our life with God.

Reconciliation and worship start where we meet the Living God; in our innermost heart, in the quiet of willingly being present to all that is.

And there, we are to ask, to receive, and to accept the gifts of God: the well of living water that will spring to eternal life and the food of doing God's will.

But asking, receiving, and accepting are each important steps of this movement of the heart. Grace is never forced on us. We have to make ourselves available to it (possibly with some help).

The Samaritan woman does not seem to have walked to the well feeling ready and able to accept grace, that day. And yet, in her, little by little, Jesus created the room for her to receive grace. Trust that Jesus is making that room for grace in you and move in to live from there.

*****

Jesus starts all of these important teachings, by reaching out to a single person; one person whom, by all conventions, he's supposed to not even speak to. Could this person be me, or could it be you?

I believe salvation starts with our own self. I need to accept to know myself as fully and lovingly as God knows me. I need to build relationships where we aim to know each other as truthfully as God knows us. Salvation starts with any one person you interact with in truth and spirit; it starts with yourself, with God, with any of God’s children.

*****

So hear what the Samaritan woman's story has to tell us.

Through Jesus, God wants us, each of us, all of us, to be reconciled to him, to ourselves and to each other.

We are invited not to harden our hearts with earthly preoccupations but to let the living water spring to eternal life in us.

We are invited to be fed in worship; to be fed in doing God’s will through all of what our life is made of.

Come to the well and let Jesus refresh you. God so loves you.

Amen.

*****

Note: this sermon comes from my re-editing of a similar sermon I preached on the same gospel in 2008 at St Boniface, Sarasota, Florida.

Annunciation - 25 Mar 2011

2011-03-25T19:05:00.004-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. James Michael Dowd, OHC
Annunciation - March 25, 2011

Isaiah 7:10-14
Hebrews 10:4-10
Luke 1:26-38

The Annunciation of Our Lord

Back when I was a Postulant, which isn't that long ago but seems like a century or so, I was walking down the middle-house hallway one winter's day with Brother Reginald, who was my Novice Master, heading over to the refectory for our mid-day meal. When you walk from the church toward the guest house at that time of day in winter, the sun comes right through the window of the door at the end of the hallway which leads outside. That window is shaped as a rectangle and at just the time we are normally headed to dinner during the winter, the shaft of light that comes through that window shines down onto the floor as if it were a beam of light coming from the heavens.

As we were walking over one day, I said to Reginald: “every time I see that light coming through the window, I think of the Annunciation.” To which he replied: “Oh Lord, please tell me you didn't send me another pious one!” Somewhat shocked, I responded, “no, you don't understand, it looks like so many paintings I've seen of the Annunciation in which a beam of light is coming through the window and shining on Mary you know – as the symbol – of you know...” and as my face turned red and my voice trailed off, Reginald just rolled his eyes and said: “Oh God, pious and twisted!”

The Annunciation may be my favorite feast of the entire year. It is filled with meaning and history for me – and, I think, for all of God's people. It has certainly been artistically studied in many a painting, as I was trying to tell Reginald. One of my favorites is by the 15th Century Florentine painter Filippo Lippi, who actually painted three different depictions of the Annunciation. One of them, my favorite, has the Virgin Mary inside her home, with the Angel Gabriel greeting her. The unique aspect of this painting is that coming through the window, apparently directly from heaven are the hands of God releasing the Holy Spirit, symbolized by a dove, with a ray of light coming directly from God's hands and the Holy Spirit.

I just love it that God's hands are breaking through our atmosphere in order to right things with humanity, and indeed, all of creation. And make no mistake about it, that is exactly the story that we tell on Annunciation. It is a story that begins with two people, Adam and Eve; continues with another, the Virgin Mary, and has an ending that all God's people can participate in. The main character, of course, is the Triune God who created all those people in the first place, redeems them, and calls them to be one with him at every opportunity.

If the painting tradition of the Western Church is my favorite way to picture the Annunciation, it is the spirituality of the Eastern Church that is my favorite way to understand the Annunciation. St. Athanasius of Alexandria put it simply when he said “the Son of God was made man, so that man might be made a god.” This process is called theosis and is a central piece of Orthodox monastic spirituality.

Athanasius tells us that God “deified men by Himself becoming man” and “being God, he has taken to him the flesh and being in the flesh deifies the flesh.”
So what does this mean for our lives? Maybe nothing...maybe everything...

Let's go back to our story, beginning with Adam and Eve. Now these first two prototypes of humanity were created as perfect human beings. That does not mean they were God. It means they were perfect human beings, fully alive, created not in our colloquial sense of “I'm only human” but rather as the highest form of God's creation. These perfect beings were those who God intended to become the stewards of creation, who would be able to create great art and literature, who would sing God's praises throughout the day, who would love one another and live in a peaceful and just way with each other and with all of creation. That's being “perfectly human” – not “only human.”

But another aspect of being perfectly human is God's gift of free will. In order to have a legitimate relationship, which God desires of humanity, there must be free will. You cannot force someone to love you no matter how hard you try. If God had attempted to force love out of Adam and Eve there would have been a false note to that love, and nothing false can come from God.

You'll remember that while living in the Garden, Adam and Eve were totally naked but suffered no shame. This symbolized a complete openness and vulnerability to each other, to all of creation, and to God. But having free will allowed Adam and Eve to begin to question their life in the Garden, their lack of understanding of good and evil, and even their relationship with God.

The vulnerability that Adam and Eve initially lived into so freely, ultimately became quite frightening, as it is to many people. And having free will, they began to think to themselves “why is it that God is the only one who has knowledge of good and evil. I'd like that knowledge too. If I had that knowledge I'd be in a stronger position and then I would be able to take care of myself – and not rely on God.”

Not allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to God, and the desire to be in a stronger position than even God, with the intended result of being able to “take care of ourselves” is, I believe, the root of all sin – personal and communal. When we refuse, usually out of fear, to trust God in a completely vulnerable way, we find ourselves in a state of what the Greek Church calls amartia which is a state of being off-kilter or “not right” and this can lead to our becoming ashamed of our own figurative nakedness before God. This leads to an acting out of all manner of sin, destroying any semblance of a relationship with God. This is exactly where our story of Adam and Eve picks up. Despite being given everything they could possibly need, they wanted something more, without even knowing what it was they wanted.

And so thus began a process of dehumanization that would lead to Cain murdering his brother Abel, a foretaste of the hatred, massive violence – tribe against tribe, nation against nation, torture, terrorism, and the destruction of innocent life at all stages, that would grip all of God's creation in a vice of unbearable degradation. Now, without the benefit of a Garden filled with more than enough to eat, humanity had to toil in back-breaking ways just to find enough food to survive. Poverty, disease, malaise, hopelessness, all would contribute to the dehumanization of humanity and the destruction of God's creation.

Over time, this dehumanization would take its toll on all of humanity, but there was a faithful remnant, the Jewish people who, on their good days, would remember God's faithfulness in leading them out of slavery and into a land of their own while constantly calling them to care for the widow, the orphan and the stranger among them. At times when they were not so faithful to God's call, prophets would rise up and remind their people, in no uncertain terms, that their role was to be faithful servants of God, that even in their darkest hours they were to remain faithful to God because God would guide them into a way forward. This would require the people to be once again, naked before God – vulnerable and open to God's love. To be perfect human beings.

One such person would exist in all of Israel, Mary of Nazareth. A young girl, really, who was so open and vulnerable to God that she could allow herself to believe the nearly unbelievable words of the Angel Gabriel. Unlike the Eve of the Garden, this new Eve, Mary of Nazareth, because of an intense life of prayer, would be able to stand before God totally naked, without shame and with great vulnerability. The Eastern Church is fond of telling the story about Mary spending her early years in the Temple studying the Scriptures and praying constantly. In the West, the tradition teaches that it was at home with her parents, St. Anne and St. Joachim that she learned to study the Scriptures and to constantly pray. The details don't really matter, what does matter is that Mary was able to accept God's Word as enough for her. She had so committed her life to waiting on the Lord and listening in the silence of her prayer, that when the Lord called she was able to respond “be it done to me according to your word.” And in believing that God's Word was enough for her, the Word, quite literally, became enfleshed in her.

And that is what St. Athanasius was talking about. It is the spirituality of theosis, which has been defined in several ways, but the definition that I most respond to states that theosis is the “participation in the life of God.” And for humanity to participate in the life of God, ultimately achieving full union with God, God had to act first, breaking through our atmosphere and sending his Son, Jesus the Christ, to begin the process of re-humanizing us. God's radical act of Incarnation even outdid the original act of Creation. For now, God's ultimate goal was to allow us to reclaim our perfect humanity by showing us just how holy a human being could be.

Jesus, the Son of God and equally the son of Mary would, through the power of his Incarnation, take on our flesh so that we could know what it was to be re-humanized – that is, made in the image and likeness of God as perfect human beings.

And this is why the Blessed Virgin Mary is seen as the model for monastics, and indeed for the whole Church. Mary did not leave home in order to do great things, to become a prophet or a judge of Israel. Mary prayed, ceaselessly. She waited on the Lord, with total patience. She listened, no doubt, with the ear of her heart. She allowed herself to be totally exposed to God, standing naked before the Holy Spirit with a profound level of trust in God and in the belief that God had created her to be a perfect human being. And when she did that, she then became available to the Holy Spirit, sent by God, to enflesh the Son of God in her.

At Vespers this evening, the lesson is taken from the Prologue of St. John's Gospel and begins with verse nine: “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” That is why that light coming through the window of the door is so meaningful to me. With his Incarnation, Christ has broken through our atmosphere and made himself available to all God's children. This is our call: To respond to the Ultimate Love is a call to totally empty our beings of all the dehumanization that has been put on us by ourselves or others. And to put on the perfect humanity that God created us with – a humanity filled with light, a humanity that works for peace, lives justly, loves friend and foe alike, and, most of all, prays without ceasing and in total nakedness and availability before God. It is a humanity that is able, because God was willing to humble himself in the Incarnation, to respond – finally – to the invitation to love God that is offered to us so freely by God. Do that, and just wait and see how God enfleshes himself in you.

AMEN.

Lent 2 A - 20 Mar 2011

2011-03-20T09:29:00.002-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Charles Mizelle, n/OHC
Lent 2 A - March 20, 2011

Genesis 12:1-4a
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17

Love Wins!

In the name of God who calls us to celebration, who calls us to pursue community in our world, and who calls us to compassion in the midst of all human suffering. Amen!

When you grow up in a family of Baptist preachers you hear a lot of stories from the pulpit. One of the most memorable for me was hearing W. A. Criswell preach at a preaching conference at First Baptist Church, Jacksonville, FL., my hometown. Criswell was known as the prince the preachers. He had pastored First Baptist Church in Dallas, TX for over 50 years before retiring. And the occasion of hearing him preach in my home town of Jacksonville in February 1988 turned out to be his last sermon. The story is one of simple old time religion and two mischievous boys who got ahold of the preachers Bible and glued some of its pages together. The preacher got up to the pulpit, opened his Bible, and began reading from Genesis the story of Noah. “...and in those days Noah took unto himself a wife”, then turning what he thought was one page continued reading, “and she was 15 cubits broad, 35 cubits long, made out of gopher wood, and dopped on the inside with pitch”. The preacher then held up his Bible and said “my brothers and sisters I’ve never read that before in the Word of God but if that is what the Word of God says then I believe it!” And with those words a 3000 seat church auditorium, filled with Baptist preachers from all over the country, nearly exploded as they leaped to their feet, raised their hands, applauded and shouted AMEN! to the proclamation that if God’s Word says it, it’s true. For me, there was never more powerful of a moment of what it means to be a Bible-believing, God-said-it-I-believe-it-that-settles-it, kind of Christian. And this story has remained for me a powerful example of how reading scripture literally can get you into big trouble.

And in today’s Gospel we have another example of getting into trouble through a literal hearing of the God’s Word. A Pharisee, named Nicodemus, seeks out an audience with Jesus by coming to him under the cover of night. We don’t know a whole lot about Nicodemus but the text gives us enough clues to tell us he was truly a spiritual seeker. He broke ground with his fellow Pharisees to even risk having a private conversation with Jesus and this is most likely why he came in the darkness of night. Nicodemus is a man torn in two directions. He acknowledges the divine nature of Jesus but he is also unsettled by him. His fellow Pharisees have marked Jesus as trouble and a renegade. I wouldn’t say that Jesus’ reception of his night-time visitor was exactly pastoral. Nicodemus opens the conversation by complimenting Jesus: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God”. And Jesus responds with an off-the-wall comment completely out of left field: “I tell you know one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above”. Poor Nicodemus is knocked off center and bewildered. He exclaims “how can this be, how can you re-enter your mother’s womb and be reborn?” by which Jesus responds with a statement designed to completely destabilize Nicodemus: “no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and spirit”.

This story is our source for the phrase born-again Christian. And it is also the source of the most beloved scripture (and probably the most well-known) in all of the Bible. John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that He gave His only son.” A story and a text so familiar to us we’ve lost the ability to hear its message in our hearts. Cynthia Bourgeault calls Jesus’ statement of needing to be reborn as the Christian equivalent of the famous Zen koan, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”.

We are only in the third chapter of John but keep reading and you’ll see that Jesus took great joy in paradox and riddle and seemed to love leaving folks scratching their heads. Our modern theologians try to put this in context by framing Jesus as a Wisdom teacher. In many ways Jesus does fit the mold of a wisdom teacher but His intent goes much deeper. Jesus’ discourse on being born again, being born of water AND spirit, and being born from above was not just targeted at Nicodemus, nor the Pharisees, nor just the first century church. It’s target was the egoic mind and the human condition. It’s target is to throw us off kilter and destabilize our tight-knit, everything-fits-into-its-proper-place world. It’s target is to force us to go back and rethink our entire understanding of who God is and how we are in relationship with God.

Jesus could have just as easily said, “Nicodemus, if you want to enter God’s Kingdom you are going to have to go back to the very beginning, back to square one, and start all over. Where is the beginning? Well in the Biblical narrative it is in Genesis, the book of beginnings, where we go from creation and God saying “it is good” to the fall of Adam and Eve. It was in the fall where man’s sense of self became separated from God’s presence, where man’s identity with God was lost and where man started to develop his own programs for happiness, fulfillment and meaning. And ever since then God has been calling us back to return to our home in God, to our identity in God, to our place of rest in God, yes, even calling us to be born again.

The difficulty for us lies in the reality that this process of being born again is not an easy one. It is so much more than a formulaic prayer designed to give us an assurance of heaven and after-life management. It is a process of transformation and conversion, here and now. It is a process that will even involve pain at times. John of the Cross called this the dark night of the soul or the night of sense. Let’s take another look at John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” Believes is the key word here because it is a word of consent. What Jesus is really saying to Nicodemus is “do you give your consent for God’s work and action to transform you?” Do you say “yes” to the dying of the false self? Do you say yes to changing the direction of your life and all of the programs you’ve created to find happiness. Do you say yes to allowing God to remove the obstacles in your life that block the flow of God’s grace?

As we move with Jesus through these 40 days of Lent we will soon journey with him in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is in this Garden where Jesus prays in complete brokenness, to the point of sweating drops of blood, asking God if this “cup” can be taken away from him. What is in this “cup” that is so agonizing to Jesus? God was asking Jesus to drink from a cup that no other human would have the capacity to swallow the dregs held in that cup. All of humanities brokenness, all of the pain, all of the evil, all of the holocaust, all of apartheid, all of the Gadhafi’s and Fred Phelp’s in this world, all of the devastating earthquakes and tsunamis, all of the suffering, all of the addictions, all those who have been abused, all of the injustice of all time was in that cup and Jesus said “I’ll drink it!” Why? Because God so loved the world. That is what Jesus is saying to the Nicodemus’s in each of us: Nicodemus you can’t really hear me right now, you don’t have the capacity to understand yet what I’m saying but Easter morning is coming where you’ll come out of your dark night and into the light of day AND LOVE WINS!

Love gets the final word. Love is the consummation of this birthing process. Yes there will be grief and wounds along the birthing canal but Nicodemus will you believe? Will you say yes? Will you give your consent to God’s process of transformation and conversion? Will you be reborn?

We have good assurance that Nicodemus did say yes to Jesus’ call to new birth. We do not hear from him anymore in this dialogue but I am sure he left with much to ponder. But we’re not done with Nicodemus. He reappears in the Gospel narrative and joins Joseph of Arimathea in taking Jesus’ body down from the cross. It was Nicodemus who brought 100 pounds of spices and the linen to wrap the body of his Lord for burial. Nicodemus is no longer afraid, he is no longer moving under the cover and darkness of night. He has come into the full light of day, working openly in front of his fellow Pharisees, doing the very thing that is certain to make them very angry. They were done with Jesus. But not Nicodemus.

For God so loved the world. And God so loves the Nicodemus who lives in all of us. And in the end God’s Love wins.

Lent 1 A - 13 Mar 2011

2011-03-13T12:25:00.004-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Lent 1A - March 13, 2011

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
Romans 5:12-19
Matthew 4:1-11

We used to tell a story in Scotland of the minister who was preaching to his flock… “There you are, you miserable sinners. The day will come when you sinners are roasting in the terrible flames of hell and you will look up to God and say, ‘O Lord, we didna know; we didna ken.’ And the Lord in his infinite love and mercy will look down upon you and will say, “Aye, well ye know now!”

I must own to a feeling that so often this is the message we present in Lent- even unconsciously - Of a need to placate a God whose judgment is harsh and demanding. If I meditate on my evil ways and wretchedness with enough fervor and self-denial, I can be ready for redemption – my readiness depends on me and my efforts.

We latch on to this from our first reading today – it seems to set the stage. Adam, Eve and the subtle, evil serpent… the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – and the apple. Because of the sin we’re all neck deep in trouble.

But the creation story in Genesis doesn’t talk about evil in Hebrew – that’s English. What the story talks about is the choice between Tov and Ra. And that’s quite different.

Tov is good as in “pleasant” – Mazel Tov/Good luck – not really morally good. It’s the also the inner voice that calls us always into community with God – into right relationship with the Creator and one another.

Ra is more difficult to define, because there are many different ideas about it. It is not a desire to do evil in the way we normally think of it in Western society: a desire to cause senseless harm. It’s more the desire to satisfy personal needs (food, shelter, sex, etc.) without regard for the moral consequences of fulfilling those desires.

Ra is not a bad thing. It was created by God, and all things created by God are good. The Talmud says that without the ra (the desire to satisfy personal needs), “man would not build a house, marry a wife, beget children or conduct business affairs.” But the choice of ra can lead to wrongdoing when it is not controlled by tov. A bit confusing? But in a nutshell it would say that while there is nothing inherently wrong with hunger, it can lead you to steal food or into greed.

People have the ability to choose which impulse to follow: the tov or the ra.”

So choosing the ra means that I come first – my needs, even if they are absolutely fair needs, can make me choose away from God. The choice doesn’t necessarily imply that I will do evil things; the choice means that I forget who I am. The crafty serpent says, “You will be like Gods”, and that’s too much to resist. It was too much for the new humans who in the story didn’t even know what it was to be human; it’s too much for me. And so the story goes on – humanity, made in God’s image, choosing something less; choosing to be small Gods; moving from the Center to emptiness and shame. Denying their humanity, they look at one another and see only shame. And there follows the story of our struggle and wanderings in the wilderness of choosing to be less that God created us to be. Through exile and God’s longing; through the prophets and the wisdom words, God calls and calls us back.

And Paul points us to the fact that we are in a pickle not because God put us there but because we continually choose distance and separation. By one person the separation was chosen… we choose it.

So we come back to the infinite love and mercy our Scottish preacher fumbled so badly…God acts and Jesus, the God/Man calls us another way. Jesus brings us by love into a new life. And by his faithful obedience and choosing he opens the way for me to choose again – to live in Tov.

In the Gospel, the tempter, the tantalizer, offers the same thing the serpent offered the first human… “Come on, be like God… change these stones; take charge of the world; use some flash, some glamour. Choose!” And Jesus says “No” – he chooses – as he will all the way – he chooses to be true to who he is. The True Man… the true image of the Father. The one who listens and says, “Yes!” And he calls us – his ragtag army right away from selfish self-protection into the dangerous ground of Love. Right to the needs of the hungry, the least of these. Right into the wideness of God’s mercy and love.

Perhaps this Lent we can choose aright. Perhaps this Lent we can give up our self-absorption and offer the fast that God has pleaded for. Perhaps, as true humanity we can touch the untouchables; feed the ones who are starving because of our carelessness; give up some of our amplitude to the ones we have diminished by our choosing ourselves over God’s aching, loving heart. Perhaps when the sun rises on Easter, we can embrace the light and stand naked and pure and not ashamed any more.And God in infinite love and tenderness can look at us and say - Ah, well you know now!

Epiphany 7 A - 20 Feb 2011

2011-02-20T10:33:00.004-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Scott Borden, OHC
RCL - Epiphany 7A - February 20, 2011

Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18
1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23
Matthew 5:38-48

Today we find Jesus in Matthew's Gospel in a rather contrary mood... We have heard one thing, but Jesus is here to tell us something different... This section of Matthew begins with Jesus saying “do not think that I have come to abolish the Law...” and then sharing a series of 6 antithetical reflections: You have heard it said do not murder, but I say don't even think about it... You have heard it said do not commit adultery, but I say... and so on.

On a purely superficial level, it appears that Jesus, true to his word, is not doing away with the law, but is, rather, delivering a new type of “hyper-law” - far more demanding than that old law ever was. Under this new notion of law, even poor Jimmy Carter had to cast himself an adulterer... I dare say, none of us are safe.

And so we come to today's reading of the good news... You have heard it said an eye for an eye, but I say if someone strikes you on the right cheek, offer them the other cheek as well. If they want your coat, give them your cloak as well. If they demand one mile, go two...

There is a major shift in the nature of Jesus' antithetical offerings. But I'm not sure they are getting any better... I'm almost certainly going to end up an adulterer and a murderer... now I have to be ready to be beaten up and stripped naked... Dale Carnegie would have a few things to say about this approach that Jesus is taking to winning friends and influencing people...

What on earth is Jesus up to? What can we do to make sense of these teachings?

Jesus may not have come to abolish the law, but Jesus is no lover of the status quo.

The law, in faithful Jewish observance, was as lofty as you could get. Knowing the law, loving the law, following the law was as devout and Godly as you could be. There was no greater love of God then a profound and careful observance of the law.

And along comes Jesus saying, essentially, that the law is far from the highest ideal – it is the lowest common denominator... it is the absolute bare minimum... Jesus is demanding something much more complete than adherence to the law.

Look how provocative Jesus is being: Every antithesis begins “You have heard it said...” That's shorthand for you have heard it said in holy scripture: If Jesus were to begin his challenges with “The Bible says one thing, but I say something else” just imagine the discomfort he could generate in a good “Bible-believing” Sunday congregation church...

I think that is just exactly what Jesus wants to do. He is creating maximum discomfort among the maximally pious crowd. Jesus is preaching to the choir, as it were, but the sermon is not the desired message.

In a sense, what Jesus is saying is “I haven't come to end the law – but I have come to end the way you think about the law... the way you live the law.”

Just in case we've forgotten what is at the heart of the law, the Lectionary gives us this wonderful passage from Leviticus: You shall not defraud, you shall not slander, you shall not hate in your heart any of your kin... you shall not take vengeance, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. That is the law and it is surely beautiful.

And along comes Jesus: You have heard it said you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy – but I say love your enemies and pray for your persecutors...

Jesus makes an interesting leap in this statement. Scripture, in Jesus time, was the Hebrew scripture we know as Old Testament. And none of Jesus' listeners would, in fact, have heard from Hebrew scripture that they were to hate their enemies – Hebrew scripture does not have any such command. To be sure, Hebrew scripture talks about God hating the unrighteous, but the faithful are not called to hate. Jesus knows that.

I have to wonder if it was the case at Jesus time, just as it is today, that some folks are very certain about what is in the bible, and they are just as certainly wrong.

I suspect, for example, a lot of good and faithful Christians would not flinch if I made the following statement: “The Bible says love the sinner, but hate the sin...” It's a phrase that probably traces its roots to St Augustine, but not to scripture. Yet its freely bandied about in religious circles and so it “sounds” plausible. Or if I asserted that “The Bible tells us that God helps those who help themselves.” Such an assertion might draw little protest from many a congregation – though the quote actually has its roots in Aesop's Fables, not in scripture... In scripture, God helps those who have no other help.

Is Jesus messing with the devout? You have heard it said... hate your enemies. We all have probably heard that said, or something close to it, but Jesus is quoting something other than proper Jewish tradition – and I think that may be part of his purpose. Some of what we take for law is just not, as we learn in Porgy and Bess, necessarily so...

Jesus may be working to rattle some of our assumptions, but that is incidental. The real purpose seems to be rattle our conclusions. The real effect is to change our way of life.

In this Epiphanytide, we have been preparing for the Gospel with a fragment of a hymn by Ephrem of Syria. The hymn reflects on the way in which incarnation speaks of God's grace. Incarnation doesn't speak of God's glory – for there isn't anything particularly glorious about being born a fragile, human child. It doesn't speak of God's might, for it is a powerless act. It doesn't speak of God's infinite nature, for it is very finite. But it does speak endlessly of God's grace.

And that is what I find in today's Gospel. Jesus, fully human, calling us to be more fully human... calling us to be more filled with God's grace. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

The reading ends with an ominous sounding instruction: Be perfect, as God in heaven is perfect. Using the word “perfect” is a bit jarring. In this entire Gospel passage Jesus has rather firmly established human imperfection. If we have thought about murder or adultery, then we are the same as murderers and adulterers... so where is this idea of being perfect coming from?

If perfect means a spotless living of the law, then we are doomed.

But perfect has a second meaning – a richer and more complex meaning... the meaning of wholeness or completeness.

We use the word in this way these days normally in a negative context – we talk about a perfect idiot, or a perfect disaster, or a perfect storm, for example. But you get the idea.

This is what Jesus is talking about – Jesus is calling us to be wholehearted, complete, and total in our love of God and, at the same time, our love of God's creation, most especially of our fellow human beings.

This idea of perfection is a process more than a destination. After all, a perfect idiot is perfect because he keeps getting better at it... he is improving the process of being an idiot...

Now doesn't that give us something to aspire to...

Jesus cuts right to the heart of what it is to be a follower, of what it is to be faithful. We must be prepared to change how we understand our tradition. We must be prepared to change the way we respond to others by being ever more willing to respond in a way of sacrifice and love. The way to a deeper and more loving relationship with God is through a deeper and more loving relationship with our brothers and sisters – realizing that everyone is included in that category of brothers and sisters...

Jesus has liberated us from a human ideal of perfectionism and replaced it with the Godly ideal of perfect wholeness. And so let us be perfect.

Epiphany 6A - February 13, 2011

2011-02-14T07:57:00.003-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC

RCL - Epiphany 6A - February 13, 2011
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Matthew 5:21-37

From today’s Gospel: “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” What were the people who put together the lectionary thinking, placing this Gospel so it would always occur near the 14th of February? Happy Valentine’s Day!

Today’s Gospel does raise the question: Just exactly what is the good news here? The awfulness of families and fellowships fighting with each other? The vicious consequences of lust? The nastiness of divorce? The ugliness of false speaking? The people evoked in Jesus’ discourse this morning are too close to people we know, and perhaps too close to ourselves, for comfort. And his judgment is so harsh! The council; the hell of fire; fines that wring the last penny out of us. Bodily dismemberment. Words leading us into the power of the devil. Strong stuff. And all that in the Sermon on the Mount, just verses away from Blessed are the poor in spirit! How can we take away some nourishment from this stew of conflict and vice?

I think the first two readings today give us some help. They give us a couple of lenses with which to view today’s Gospel.

In the lesson from Deuteronomy Moses addresses the famously difficult Israelites as they are preparing to enter the Promised Land. He wants them to understand that what they are undertaking as they cross the Jordan is not simply entering into another phase of Life As Usual, but into a new relationship with God. God is not evicting the people already in the land of Canaan just to give his people a cushy new home, where they will not have to work hard or be anxious, with all that milk and honey flowing on every side. They are not the spoiled children of a nouveau riche father who wants them not to have to go through all the hardships of life. Rather, they are being shown the way to something new and wonderful, but also to something quite rigorous and demanding. The Law is the path to life for them, and they must choose it and keep it in order to be worthy of the gift he has prepared for them. Life with God involves making the right choice: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.” Our first lens is making the right choice.

In our second lesson St. Paul addresses the famously difficult Corinthians. He says, in effect, that they need to grow up. If the Israelites of Moses’ day have a tendency to self-indulgence and forgetfulness, the Corinthians are known for their jealousies and their quarrels. They apparently have not learned very much about the Gospel, even though they have had the best possible teacher. They are still operating by the standards of the secular world, what Paul calls the flesh. They have been prepared: Paul planted and Apollos watered. But Paul and Apollos want to see some growth. Which only God can give. Paul is impatient. It’s not hard to tell how impatient he is. “I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready”, he says, and you can hear the sarcasm. When will these people grow up, already? Our second lens is growing up, becoming adults.

These passages teach us that we are to come to an understanding of who we really are: Not spoiled children of an indulgent god who has adopted us to give us a free ride, but chosen witnesses to God’s righteousness, shown by the choices we make in our lives. Not infants satisfied with spiritual pabulum, still being fed milk, dependent and unaware and self-centered like babies, but grownups ready for God’s truth, for the adult faith of a God who respects human life so much that he lived it and died it himself. God wants us to takes responsibility for ourselves, which means making the right choices. God wants us to grow up, which means leaving childish behavior behind and thinking and acting like adults.

Which brings us back to this morning’s Gospel, in which Jesus addresses the famously difficult ...... us, since we have been included in the audience of the Sermon on the Mount. This is a proclamation for grownups, for grownups who have the capacity to make the right choices. Jesus says, in effect, Have integrity, because some actions in life are so serious that they can permanently harm you, or even ruin you. And he gives four concrete, and quite painful, examples from daily life.

Conflict has consequences. Violence does not begin when blows are exchanged, but long before, when we despise each other, when we say hurtful words. And it is not enough to paper over the damage with apologies. We need to get back behind our pride, to be willing to take the first step toward reconciliation, as humbling as that may be. Not to do so can cost us everything in the end.

Sexual transgressions, adultery, violating someone else, destroying our own committed relationships by unfaithfulness, do not begin with the sexual act. That act began when we allowed desire to grow into thought, and thought into intention. What begins as an illicit but also rather pleasant and tempting idea can grow until in our delusion we act on it and that act destroys everything in its path. In his hyperbolic way Jesus envisions the totality which such a disaster can wreak in our lives and seeks the most graphic image of that damage: The destruction of the body itself. Better to cut these thoughts off at their beginning than to suffer the consequences of acting on them.

In Jewish culture at the time of Jesus, men could divorce their wives pretty easily, and apparently did. But Jesus calls those men on the carpet and lays out the consequence: Breaking that sacred relationship exposes your wife to social shame and ostracism. It can ruin her life. Just because you can do it does not mean you should. That action can destroy your wife. The question we might ask of ourselves today is, I think, not just about divorce in the strict sense, but also about power. Who has the right to ruin someone else’s life? When a person who has power harms a person who does not, is he (or she) not responsible for what happens to the one who has been harmed?

Why do you need to make grandiose claims for your promises? Is it because your own word is not sufficient? In the ancient world in general, and in this Israel was no different from any other ancient culture, you backed up your words with oaths by invoking whatever was most sacred, with the general idea that the divine power would enforce their intention, at your expense, if you failed to live up to what you promised. But Jesus asks, What is wrong with your own word? Should you not be trustworthy in and of yourself? Why do you need to drag heaven or earth or Jerusalem or your own head to witness for you? Is it because your plain word is really not worth anything by itself? Isn’t that your problem? Be a person of integrity and you don’t need extravagant oaths. Say yes or no and mean it.

Live in harmony with the people in your life. Don’t take advantage of other people because of what you want. Remember the consequences of hurting people less powerful than yourself and don’t do it. Be a person of integrity.

Make the right choices. Be an adult.

Epiphany 3A - January 23, 2011

2011-01-23T10:22:00.002-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Charles Mizelle, n/OHC

RCL - Epiphany 3A - January 23, 2011

Isaiah 9:1-4

1 Corinthians 1:10-18

Matthew 4:12-23

Just An "Ordinary" Sermon

In the name of God who calls us to celebration, who calls us to pursue community in our world, and who calls us to compassion in the midst of all human suffering. Amen!

I’m finding Epiphany to be a rather complicated season. It’s about 3 Kings (who weren’t actual Kings) following a star (that astronomers have never identified and don’t think actually existed) showing up with some not-so-practical-gifts (I can hear Mary now saying I’ve got a newborn here, couldn’t you have brought diapers? what am I to do with frankincense?). But the complication with Epiphany is that it is layered and complex. Epiphany is also the celebration and observance of the Baptism of Christ AND it is when we commemorate Christ first miracle at the start of His earthly ministry: the wedding feast at Cana and the turning of water into wine. Three very significant events in salvation history, spanning 30 years of the life of Christ, three events that really don’t seem to have much of a link.

And today we name this Sunday the “Third Sunday of Epiphany”. But in reality what that really means is that we are in the third Sunday of Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time is that time of year when the Church is neither preparing for or celebrating Christmas or Easter. In Advent we prepare for Christmas and in Christmas we celebrate God-With-Us in the Incarnation. In Lent we prepare ourselves for Holy Week and going through it we emerge in Easter, celebrating the resurrection of Christ life in us. In a way we define Ordinary Time by what it is not: it is not Advent or Christmas or Lent or Easter. It is not therefore, the time when the Church is directly engaged with the preparations and celebrations of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Now we protestants want to turn Epiphany into a season. We have Christmas-tide and we have Easter-tide. But the idea of Epiphany-tide just never caught on. Some theologians want to elevate Epiphany to a greater feast than Christmas. After all it is when we come to understand the Incarnation as an event of God coming for all humankind, Jew and Gentile alike. But the decorations are gone, the simplicity of our Chapel has returned and we wear green to mark that this really is just ordinary time.

In addition to defining Ordinary Time by what it is not we can just as well define it by what it is: it is the season that makes up over half of our Church year—up to 34 weeks each year. It is the time, just like Peter and Andrew in today’s Gospel reading from Matthew, where we are called to follow Jesus. It is the time we take the birth, death and resurrection of Christ and live fully into its reality in the here and now of our daily lives. It is a time of being formed in Christ. It is a time of formation and conversion. It is a time of living into God’s call on our lives. It is a time when we take our Incarnation and Resurrection celebrations and work to make a difference in the world. It is also a time of repentance.

Repentance—now there’s a word we really don’t like. Actually its a word we can’t stand. What an inconvenient time for Jesus to say to us “repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near”? Doesn’t Jesus know that the idea of repentance makes us uncomfortable and this is no place to begin a new work? Starting here is a sign of sure failure. Wouldn’t it had been a wiser choice for Christ to begin by telling us God is love? And how can we call this ordinary time if we are going to kick it off in such a non-affirming way by saying we need to repent?

It is no liturgical accident that after Christmas and Epiphany and before Lent and Easter that Jesus tells us to repent and follow Him. And for the next four plus weeks we will be hearing Jesus preach from The Mount where He will unpack for us just what the Christian life is and if we choose, how we will be converted by it. It is also no accident that it is in these weeks of Ordinary Time where we loose so many would-be followers of Christ. We’ve all seen it. The pews are packed out for Christmas and Easter services. It is a joyous time of celebration, we even get new outfits to mark the occasions. But after the feast are over and we are back to our green season of Ordinary Time, where are all those people?

When the reality of the Christian life sets in and we start talking about things like repentance, following Christ, changing the way we live, being formed to become more like Christ the crowds thin out. If you pay attention when you read through the Gospel narratives you’ll see the same dynamic at work during Christ earthly ministry. When the wine was flowing and people were getting fed and healed the throngs were magnificent. But when Christ started talking about changing your ways, doing justice, changing your heart, and putting your money where your faith is, those throngs became a small handful of people. Later we’ll even see that Peter, the very one called to follow Christ in today’s Gospel ends up denying Christ 3 times when it meant his own life would be put on the line.

When it comes to all things Christians are known for talking about the concept of sin and repentance is so highly charged it is like stepping into a field of land mines and IED’s. Quite frankly it’s toxic to bring up the idea of repentance in almost any context. In our post-modern, post-critical, even post-christian world we have gone out of our way to extricate repentance from both our religious practice and our moral culture. I have a friend who refuses to sing the great hymn Amazing Grace. She said to me in no uncertain words one day “I’m not a wretch saved by grace! I’m not a wretch at all and I won’t sing those words!”

It is absolutely true that the more than 100 references in scripture about repentance have been used to clobber those we dislike and to brow-beat those we judge. There is an entire genre of preaching that is about delivering the bad news before you give the good news. And in order to gain entrance into their church fold one must sufficiently prove an experiential encounter with Christ that is heavy laden with repentance. It all reminds me of the adage I overheard a Brother saying “We haven’t seen a good smiting in quite some time now”.

Jesus was completely sensitive to this. And when He says “repent” He is neither brow-beating us nor judging us. We are just so hyper-reactive to hearing the word repentance that it stops us from being able to hear the rest of His statement: “for the kingdom of heaven has come near”. Jesus is saying I have something better, I have that which will last, I can give you true peace and joy and fulfillment, real happiness. Jesus is saying you don’t have to die to go to heaven. It is near right now. And you can have it in this life if you want it. But Christ is actually saying something even deeper. He is answering the eternal question of what is real, what is it all about, where can we find truth. And what is His answer. Turn around and enter God’s Kingdom.

The word for repent in Greek is metanoia and it means to think differently, to turn around, to change the direction in which you are going. Fr. Thomas Keating says that what Jesus is really doing is inviting us to change the direction in which we are looking for our happiness. From the moment we are born our psyche is hard wired to seek fulfillment of our needs and desires. Security, affection and control dominate our endless search for fulfillment. The predicament of the human condition is that it doesn’t take very long for us to make a mess of our lives in how we go about seeking security, affection and control. As soon as we think we are secure circumstances change and we become very insecure. The affection and love we long for is never completely satisfied. And for being in control...forget it...no matter how much you think you are in control life’s taskmaster will be there to show you’re not in control and you never were in control.

Those who seek power to gain security, affection and control only find they never have enough power. Those who seek wealth to gain security, affection and control live in fear of never having enough. Those who claw their way to the top of the corporate ladder are never satisfied with the view from the top. Framing the act of repentance as letting go of our endless need for more, doing an about face in what we hold important, changing the direction in how we look for happiness and fulfillment is much more than a new age recast of old fashioned religion.

Repentance is answering Christ’s call to conversion that you don’t need the latest gadget but that the local food pantry needs your time and resources. Repentance is answering Christ’s call to conversion that instead of clawing your way up the corporate ladder you’ll claw your way down to the local prison and befriend someone who has never known what it means to have someone else truly care about them. Repentance is learning you can live on less so you can help relieve the suffering of those who go without.

Last week I heard Christ call to repentance in an unexpected moment. As an introduction for a presenter/speaker at the Trinity Institute Theological Conference a short video was shown. The video profiled a community in Nigeria that quite frankly looked poorer than poor. No paved roads, shabby buildings, classrooms poorly outfitted, poorly lit. Plain tattered clothes and cars so old I would have a hard time trusting them. But as poor as they were in “things” and commodities they were rich in joy, love, happiness. They weren’t just smiling for the camera but their joy they knew deep within simply shone through. When I noted this juxtaposition between the wealth of America and the seeming lack of Nigeria another person correctly noted that they are sad for us. They are sad that we have so much yet lack real happiness and fulfillment. They are sad for us over our complicated, frantic and unsatisfied lives. Little did I know that a simple film, profiling a village in Nigeria would be Christ whisper to me for repentance in simplicity and a return to what is really important.

I grew up in a faith tradition that preached a lot on repentance and always offered an altar call as an opportunity for one to change their ways. My step-father, a very prominent Baptist preacher, loved to goad me about my “strange Episcopal ways”. One day the goading was why we Episcopalians never have an altar call. I must have tired of the teasing because after a moment of silence I just looked at him and said “you know, we Episcopalians have more altar calls than the Baptist”. “No you don’t” he replied. I said “yes we do!”.

Then I explained to him that every time we come together to celebrate the Eucharist we have an altar call. It is a time were we make a decision to follow Christ. We physically walk in an new direction. It is an act of metanoia, of turning around and going in a new direction. The very act of partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ is an act of opening ourselves to the Holy Spirit and entering a process of conversion.

That was the last time he teased me about altar calls. But you know its true that in a few moments when we gather around this altar behind me we will be yielding the Christ’s call to turn and go in a new direction for our happiness and fulfillment. It is even an act of turning over our needs of security, affection and control and letting it go. It is our acknowledgement that this Sunday is no ordinary time at all.

Amen

Epiphany 2 A - 16 Jan 2011

2011-01-16T19:57:00.004-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. James Michael Dowd, OHC
RCL – Epiphany 2 A – Sunday 16 January 2011

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

A Prophet in our Midst

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This Sunday, I am quite mindful of the fact that, as a nation, we are celebrating Martin Luther King Day and have found myself thinking back to 1986, when Martin Luther King's birthday first became a national holiday. At the time, I was working in Virginia, at what shall remain a nameless company, and they refused to make Dr. King's Day a company holiday. Many of the employees were not pleased with this and expressed their anger to management. This was not received well, we were all accused of just wanting another day off, and they told us that if we called in sick that day we had better have a doctor's note or there would be serious consequences to pay. It became clear to me in that moment, that the managers responsible for that decision had not really “internalized” the message of Dr. King!

Several of us were having lunch one day in early January, talking about this, and I'll never forget one of my co-workers approach to this dilemma. Cathy was one of the secretaries in the office and said that she really could not afford to lose her job, so she wasn't going to call in sick, but she would take a vacation day that Monday – which would then be deducted from her two week vacation – because Dr. King deserved at least that much respect from her. She said that she would stay home in the morning, read her Bible and read some of Dr. King's speeches. And then, in the afternoon, she had plans to work with a church group that ministered to poor children. So much for just wanting another day off! But then she added one more point when she said that what we really needed to do was to pray for all those managers who were so misguided. After all, she said, they are also God's children and just needed a little extra help. It seemed to me that she had “internalized” Dr. King's message.

Her response to all of this so impressed me that I have hoped to internalize Dr. King's message as much as she had, and more importantly, to learn to live that message throughout my life. Cathy's statement that Dr. King deserved at least that much respect from her is the piece that made the deepest impression on me. I have thought about that over the years and have wondered why that particular sentence was so memorable to me. Finally, this week as I was preparing the sermon, and, in particular, thinking about our reading from the Prophet Isaiah, I think I have come to understand why that notion was so important to me. And to explore that notion, I would like to talk with you about the reading from the Prophet Isaiah.

To refer to this reading as being from the Prophet Isaiah is a bit misleading. In fact, this reading is taken from the Book of Isaiah, but is from that section of the book that is referred to by Scripture scholars as Second Isaiah. This Isaiah most likely lived about two hundred years after the first Isaiah and is thought to have been modeling himself on the original.

The passage that we heard this morning is a beautiful description of this second Isaiah's call from God, in which he says that “the Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mothers' womb he named me.” And that the Lord formed him “to be his servant” so that God could give his servant, this Prophet, as “a light to the nations, so that God's salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

And this passage, I think, tells us a great deal about the nature of a prophetic call. A true prophet is one that holds up the light to the nations of “God Among Us” and invites all of God's creation into the gift of God's salvation. A true prophet is one that speaks to his or her own people, in the context of his or her time. But true prophets also speaks to all of humanity across time. And this is one of the reasons why I so love the Book of Isaiah. For the first thirty-nine chapters we have the original Isaiah proclaiming God's Word and calling the nations to the light that will be called Immanuel. Beginning in chapter 40, which, again, takes place approximately two hundred years later, we have a second prophet being called forth by God to once again call the people to return to God's saving ways; and issuing the invitation from God for all of humanity to enter into God's way of salvation. Both Isaiah's dealt with specific issues of their day, while both also speak to all of God's creation throughout the course of Salvation History. This is why the prophets get, deservedly so, our respect. And this is why, I believe, Dr. King also deserves our respect, and why Cathy's comment resonated with me so many years ago. This man was different. He was not just the heroic leader of a political cause, he was one of God's greatest gifts to America, a prophet raised up in our midst, named Martin.

The Prophet Martin certainly spoke to the people of this country in the mid-Twentieth Century, communicating first with African-Americans and then reaching out to European-Americans, refusing to believe that we could not all be one. His insistence on equality for those children of God who had been systematically left out, was not only a call for justice for African-Americans, but was also a call to repentance and salvation for European-Americans. And on that front, though much work is still necessary, much progress has been made. And in doing so, both African-Americans and European-Americans were brought that much closer to a realization of the Kingdom of God. But the Prophet Martin also speaks to our generation and, undoubtedly, generations to come, both here in the United States and across the world about the eternal issues of justice, non-violence and love.

And that brings me to the events that occurred in Tucson eight days ago. In the aftermath of the murderous rampage in that shopping center, all kinds of nonsense was spewed forth by both the right wing and the left wing media and politicians. But, thus far, I have read little commentary on the greater issue that drove that rampage and any number of other rampages that are carried out day by day throughout the United States.

So while early speculation has centered on the mass media and a few politicians, I would rather like to look at our American culture as a whole, because it seems to me that our culture needs some examining. Everywhere we Americans turn we have been taught that violence is the answer to all of our problems. We imagine ourselves as always wearing the white hat of the Western, while whoever is the “other” wears the black hat. Therefore, it is acceptable to eliminate that “other” by any means necessary.

We have so embraced this notion that we have made violence and the weapons of violence into our own American golden calf. In our foreign policy, on-going war has become the norm and simply shifts from country to country at the whim of a few people. In our judicial system, the response to violent crime is to match that violent crime with more violence in the executioners chamber. In our medical clinics, the response to an inconvenient pregnancy is to abort the child. In our homes, the response to difficult economic situations, addictions, and other family problems is an unprecedented level of violence against mostly women and children. Even in our entertainment, when ostensibly we are relaxing, the level of violence on television, in the movies, in video games, and on the Internet, is sickening. With all of this violence, both legal and illegal surrounding him, is it any wonder that a psychologically disturbed loner would open fire on a group of people that included children and old women?

We are not isolated individuals living in a vacuum. If we claim to be Christians, then part of that claim is that we are all of one body – Christ's Body. When one fails, we each receive an F. When one is suffering, we are all in pain. The media cycle seems to have turned again and we are desperate to label the perpetrator in Tucson as a “nut.” Well, if that is true, then we are all “nuts.” While individual responsibility is a real and important thing, the environment in which we live has consequences. The hand that fails to reach out in a gesture of love and acceptance is felt as a slap in the face. That slap is multiplied exponentially in an environment in which violence is not only tolerated, but often lauded as good.

We Americans seem to want it both ways. We want to claim that we are a Christian nation and yet, so often, it seems that Christ is not the one we worship. Rather, violence and the tools of violence are the false gods that are worshiped by many in our country.
For example, within a few days of the violence in Tucson, the Gun Owners of America, a special interest group dedicated to the “protection” of the Second Amendment, put out this statement to ensure that no politician would stand up for any type of sensible gun control:
“These politicians need to remember that these rights [to guns] aren’t given to us by them. They come from God. They are God-given rights. They can’t be infringed or limited in any way.” (The New York Times 1/14/11)
God given rights? The Prophet Martin would often reminded people of what the first Prophet Isaiah had to say about what God's people should do with their weapons and their ways of violence:

They shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more. (Is 2:4)

If we truly desire to be a nation of Christians, we might be well advised to take the teachings of the Prophet Isaiah to heart. And we would also be well advised to take the teachings of the Prophet Martin to heart as well, who told us:

I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism. I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things...as maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who dreamed a dream of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we will be able to go out and change our world and our civilization.
(“The Power of Non-violence” delivered at U.C. Berkeley 6/4/57)

There is only one way to change our world, our civilization, and that is to follow Jesus. My guess is, like those first apostles, Jesus is inviting each of you, in your own circumstances, to come and see where he lives. Jesus lives in each and every person – friend or foe, ally or enemy – all those women and men we are to call sister and brother. He lives in each of our hearts and calls us day after day to live in peace with him in the persons of each of our brothers and sisters. He calls us to smash our idols of violence and the tools of violence, and to worship the one true God of Justice, Prince of Peace, Spirit of Love.

And how do we do that? Well, it seems to me that the way Cathy spent that first Martin Luther King Day is a good way to begin: Pray for your perceived enemies, read your bible, study holy texts, work for peace and care for the poor. May God give us the strength to do just that.

AMEN.

Epiphany - 06 Jan 2011

2011-01-06T16:55:00.004-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
RCL – Epiphany – Thursday 06 January 2011

Isaiah 60:1-6
Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12

What a strange feast today… not straightforward… a mixture of events and images almost designed not to fit together. The stable, the Jordan, the wedding… all linked and all revealing God in distinctive ways.

The account from Matthew of the coming of the Wise really doesn’t have to be expounded. The picture is on so many Christmas cards – even the cheap ones! The Magi are probably Zoroastrian astrologers; their gifts symbolize royalty, divinity and death. But Matthew knew how to write a good story. And so, in the middle, the suspense builds – the warning by an angel comes to the Magi and in their obedience, they go home by another way.
All of that is dramatic and tantalizing. Exotic and mysterious. Inspiring poets and musicians, artists and pageant directors all trying to get their imaginations around it.

But add in the Baptism and the wedding at Cana and things get more complex. I love the antiphons on the gospel canticles today – especially our Matins which knits all the pieces together in a wonderful way. Where do we see God’s power in these epiphanies? I think it’s in the paradoxes.

We’ve romanticized the predicament of the Holy Family that often slips by in this story. The Magi come to this uprooted couple who are about to be refugees. Joseph has a nightmare – breaking out in sweat in the realization that he must take Mary and the Child to safety. Throwing things in a sack and plodding off to only God knew where.

No more angels; no more shepherds. No comfort of a warm stable. No more mysterious strangers with strange gifts.
Here Mary and Joseph face terror – alone, unsupported, moving into an unknown world where they don’t speak the language. Where they will be undocumented; no relatives, nothing familiar. Only the strangeness of a foreign land and the suspicions of the locals.

They’ve become people to turn your back on. Welfare folk. You can hear the voices because they are still repeating the same things: Are they even properly married? Why didn’t they stay in their own place? Just coming here to be a drain on our already struggling economy. Do they expect us to get their brat into school? Maybe he can get odd jobs – she could clean houses.
King of the Jews? God enfleshed in a dirt poor mewling kid?

And the Baptism – what do we have here? The crowd of seeking desperate people looking for any comfort… and a solitary working man of no great note from a disreputable village comes forward. The desert dweller John and the Carpenter have a word and the Word is spoken – This is my Son, the Beloved! But what about the scholars, the Torah Jews, the people who have kept the law. The ones you could expect to produce the Awaited One, Messiah. Not chosen!

And finally, the wedding scene. This wedding of poverty with cheap Manischewitz that runs out doesn’t seem like a disaster worthy of a miracle to us but I got some insight into that in South Africa. The fear of the shame of running out puts families in panic. We saw if most at funerals. Two deaths back to back can put a family under never to get out from under again. The shame is profound – it marks the family forever. These people weren’t careless – they wouldn’t have been. They were just were poor. And Jesus shows compassion and in that compassion we see God’s glory.

So where has God appeared? Not with Herod. Not with the religious leaders. Not with the people of plenty. But at the bottom of the heap.
Where do we look for God today? Surely not in the smirking of politicians; not in the boardrooms where greedy hands are gleefully rubbed over tax cuts for the rich; not with the intelligentsia. Maybe in the street outside an unfinished building in Newburgh where not so long ago we shared the Body and Blood? Maybe in the wake of our sisters Heidi and Monica in one of the townships among the very poor? Maybe here where so many broken hearts come for healing? Who knows? But not usually where we’d expect. God is fleshed out in the most unlikely surprising places and in the heart.
So we keep our eyes open and our hearts ready. Perhaps, who knows, we might be epiphanies.

Sermon for Br. Robert Magliula's Life Profession - 01 Jan 2011

2011-01-04T18:07:00.007-05:00

Mariya uMama weThemba Monastery, Grahamstown, South Africa
Brother Robert Sevensky, OHC
Feast of the Holy Name - 01 January 2011
Life Profession of Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC, prostrate at the foot of the altar,
as a symbol of full self-giving to God through the monastic profession.

This past February I had the great privilege of attending the annual Benedictine Abbots' Workshop in Oceanside, California. The principal speaker was Dr. Michael Downey, a Roman Catholic layman and theologian. His theme was the Holy Trinity and its relationship to community, communion, and contemplation

His thesis was somewhat surprising. And that is that, far from being the most abstract and general of Christian beliefs, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is in fact the most practical and important teaching of our faith, important for the theologian, to be sure, but important also for the ordinary believer and, most particularly, for the monastic. And not for the reasons that I or most of us might have expected.

The central mystery of the Christian life and faith is the Trinity because it shapes and models and guides the way we relate to ourselves and to each other and to the whole created order. But the point of entry into the mystery of the Trinity is very concrete, very tangible and very revolutionary. And that point of entry is the self-emptying of God in Jesus Christ, what theologians, using the Greek word from today's reading from the Letter to the Philippians (2:5-11) call kenosis.

If we are to understand and savor the mystery of God and be brought into union with the Triune God, we begin not from some kind of abstract reasoning about the nature of the infinite or the attributes of perfection, but from an event—the event—in human history: the folly of the cross. According to Downey, the divine mystery rests not primarily in God's inscrutability but in the astonishing claim that God should appear in such a fashion—poor, weak, vulnerable—both then and now. It is a mystery we ponder at this Christmas season and one that we will continue to ponder through Holy Week and Easter and throughout eternity. We speak of a God who does not take away human wanting or longing but of one who is present precisely in and through our human desiring. We speak of one who knows us in our suffering and brokenness and who, emptying self of the divine nature, embraces this humanity, so that we might put on and share that divinity. As an antiphon sung over and over this Christmastide puts it with uncharacteristic exuberance: “Oh wondrous exchange! Christ became a human child so that all the children of Eve might become gods.”

Kenosis, the self-emptying of God in Jesus Christ, is in fact the gateway to theosis, that is, the gateway to being ever more shaped and molded into the image and likeness of God.

But if kenosis, God's self-emptying, is the key to understanding the mystery of the Trinity, it is also, according to Downey, the key to understanding the mystery of monastic life. That central dynamic of the monastic adventure which we call conversatio morum, conversion of life, is none other that what the author of the Letter to the Philippians proclaims: “Let the same mind be be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” And to put on the mind of Christ is to be emptied of self.

But what does kenosis look like? It is difficult to describe inasmuch as it is slightly different for each of us. Each one of us must be emptied in a slightly different way, a way uniquely adapted to our own personality and sinfulness and giftedness. The best description I have been able to find of the process comes from the pen of the popular Catholic theologian, Ronald Rolheiser:

“Scripture says that in Christ, God offers a love so pure, so self-effacing, so understanding of our weaknesses, so self-sacrificing and “self-emptying”, that it's offered without any demand, however veiled, that it be recognized.... To “self-empty” in the way Jesus is described as doing means to be present without demanding that your presence be recognized and its importance acknowledged; it means giving without demanding that your generosity be reciprocated; it means being invitational rather than threatening, healthily solicitous rather than nagging or coercive; it means being vulnerable and helpless, unable to protect yourself against the pain of being taken for granted or rejected; it means living in a great patience that doesn't demand intervention, divine or human, when things don't unfold according to your will; it means letting God be God and others be themselves without having to submit to your wishes or your timetable. Not an easy thing at all, that's why we've sung Jesus' praises for two thousand years for doing it, but that's the invitation.”

That's the invitation to which you, Robert James, are responding today and one that we must all respond to in one way or another. Today, Rob, you enter yet more deeply and definitively into the mystery of that kenosis that is yours and Christ's.

Br. Robert James Magliula,
signing, on the altar, the instrument of profession written in his own hand.
In the foreground, is the profession cross he was to receive from the Superior.

Liturgically it seems a most appropriate time time for you to do this. We are gathered here on New Year's Day, the Feast of the Holy Name, halfway between the feasts of the Nativity and the Epiphany. I am reminded of a tradition that we have at West Park of placing the figures of the Magi, the three wise men, hundreds of meters away from the Christmas creche. Slowly over the course of the twelve days between the Nativity and the Epiphany they make their way, and I'm often startled to find one peering out at me from behind a doorway or resting in apparent exhaustion on a guesthouse sofa. And somehow, as if by a miracle, they arrive at the stable just in time for First Vespers of the Epiphany.

And I think then of the T. S. Elliot's early poem, “Journey of the Magi”

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey;
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
….
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Rob, you yourself have had a long journey and, at times, a cold coming of it. From your teen years hoping to be a member of the Xaverian Brothers, a Roman Catholic religious community, to leaving them in order to find your truer, more authentic self, to your training and work as an artist, art therapist, counselor, hospital chaplain, and beloved parish priest for seventeen years; seeking human love, finding it, and then losing the beloved, and still always, always journeying on. And like the Magi in Eliot's poem, you have no doubt heard the voices saying that this was all folly. But like them you've pushed onward. Like them you've had your turning points, your disappointments, your triumphs, your beginnings and your endings and your new births. And like them, you found the place you were seeking. To quote the poet once more: “It was (you may say) satisfactory.”

What strikes me today, Rob, is how you've ended up back with your first love, that deep desire to serve God and be yourself in a religious order, in a monastic community. How vital and necessary it was that you left the Xaverians forty years ago. And how vital and necessary it was to have experienced life in all its sweetness and splendor and pain. And how very vital it is that you have come to this day...the day of your solemn monastic profession.

Six years ago, on January 3, 2006, you submitted your spiritual autobiography as part of your process of applying to enter the Order of the Holy Cross. I know it is a confidential document, put permit me to quote a few sentences from your conclusion.

“After my time in the community [as an Oblate of Holy Cross Monastery], I have no illusions about what I am getting into. Even so, as messed up as our humanity can get, I have glimpsed the kingdom in those moments of care, love, humor, and support that erupt in community, often when least expected. As imperfect as we all are in our loving, we commit ourselves to keep at it, knowing that it is God's love that undergirds all our efforts, whether they succeed or fail. I want to spend the rest of my life being part of this venture.”

Rob, all of us gathered here today as well as those who know you and love you but can't be here today, want you to be part of that venture as well. Your brothers in the Order want it. Your family wants it. Your friends want it. Your former parishioners want it. William wants it. The children here want it. The Church wants it. And above all: God wants it. God wants you. God desires you. You and none other.

Let me quote one final time from the poet T. S. Eliot, since he says it so well:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we have started
And know the place for the first time.
….
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

So Rob...Shall we begin?

He did it!
Br. Rob celebrating his profession with good friend
and presider at the profession mass, The Rev. Janet Vincent,
rector of St Columba's, Washington, D

First Sunday of Christmas

2010-12-28T16:43:00.004-05:00

Mariya uMama weThemba Monastery, Grahamstown, South Africa
Brother Daniel Ludick, OHC
First Sunday of Christmas - 26 December 2010

Isaiah 63:7-9
Hebrews 2:10-18
Matthew 2:13-23

Br. Daniel Ludick, OHC, with his sister, on May 08, 2010,
the day of his Life Profession of the Benedictine Vow.

“Love is a disgusting four letter word scratched out on a public toilet wall!” This is a free translation from a poem that Breyten Breytenbach, the well-known Afrikaans poet and activist, wrote while he was in exile in France in the 1970’s. “Love is a disgusting four letter word scratched out on a public toilet wall!”

We have just yesterday celebrated the birth of Jesus. Just yesterday, and already today he is a refugee, fleeing into exile. And he is going into exile because he was born in a time of fear and hatred and corruption and injustice.

Why does this sound so familiar?

In my more cynical moments, I think there is a whole list on that toilet wall that includes hope, justice, faith and charity. And perhaps those words are just graffiti on a toilet wall instead of the walls of our hearts, where they belong, because we have also exiled Jesus to another country or place. An old monk in our Order said that we cannot deal with Christ and his Gospel commandments in the here and now, so we have shot him off into the future so that we do not have to deal with all that stuff in the here and now. Stuff like; love God above all else and your neighbor as yourself.

How easy it is for us to exile Jesus. Jesus himself said when we meet the other, and feed them or clothe them; we do it to him also. But by not doing these things Jesus is exiled and turned into a refugee the world over, day by day. And why? Because love and hope and charity and justice have also been exiled to a toilet wall.

How are we going to get those words off that toilet wall and into our hearts and the heart of the world and turn them into actions of redemption for all of us? I suggest we could do it by looking our neighbor in the eye and saying to them; “Here is a cup of cold water for your thirst, a jacket for the cold and a piece of bread for your hunger.”

Or perhaps also through humility?

Michael Casey writes that faith, hope and charity (or love) are the drivers of humility. Humility links us to exaltation in God. Faith, he says, gives us the insight to perceive the workings of Providence in the practical realities of daily life. He continues to say that hope enables us to endure present incompleteness and difficulties in the confident assurance that all things work together unto good. He concludes by saying that charity (love) makes us forgetful of the self, it makes us willing to give others priority and makes us sincerely seeking God, who is the ultimate focus of all our loves.

Mary and Joseph are prime examples of this kind of humility. Mary’s saying yes to conceiving and bearing Jesus and Joseph's saying yes to marrying her anyway, despite the taboos of his day, and to take his family into exile on the strength of a dream.

With this as the example of what happens when we say yes, the end result is not pleasant, but we can be sure of clarity of vision and a heart that will be able to deal with what we see around us.

In the same way that Jesus’ exile did not stop when he was exiled with his family, the slaughter of the children has never stopped and continues unabated in our time. Matthew refers to Jeremiah in the retelling of Rachel’s wailing and loud lamentation for her children when he describes the killing of the children by Herod in the hope of killing Jesus. We have to become the Rachel for our generation and call the world’s attention to the horrors that are going on day by day. We must weep and lament when the most vulnerable of God’s children are sacrificed for war and greed and corruption.

We must get faith and hope and charity and love and justice back onto the walls of our hearts so we can have the strength to rise up against the Herods of our time and to say to them that they will not have any more of our children for slaughter! We have to work together to bring and sustain life where others plot death and destruction. And in the promise of the Gospels, it will be in these struggles that we will find life.

And this life keeps alive our hopes for Christmas.

Also in this hope is the presence of God in the same way that he was constantly present with Jesus and his family while they were in exile in Egypt. Knowing that God is present with us when we hear the cries of sorrow and pleas for justice, and even in our own cries of sorrow and our own pleas for justice and knowing that nothing can keep God away from us.

Too many parents are wailing and lamenting today and like Rachel, they refuse to be consoled because they have lost their children to slavery, to rebel armies as child soldiers, and as we have again recently seen in our own country, to child pornography. And we sitting here have so many examples right on our own doorsteps right here in Grahamstown.

Young, innocent martyrs, simply because Jesus is in their midst.

Today’s Gospel tells us that Christmas is not as pretty as we think it is, but we rather learn that this world can be very dangerous and it can be very cruel and life can be, and often is, subject to plots and schemes orchestrated by power hungry and corrupt, greedy people; the Herods of the world. And this is especially true if you are a child.

How can we, as followers of Jesus, have compassion for the Rachels of today? Perhaps we can share the love of Christ with them just by walking with them in their wailing and lamentation?

Yet we are always given hope, as we see again in the return of Jesus and his family from exile. We see that the Herods of this world do not prevail. Sooner or later they lose their power or they die. As we remember Jesus today and the dangers he faced as a refugee in exile, may we also remember all the children of this world who have been, or more importantly, are right now, as we sit here, being abused, tortured and murdered, or are fleeing their homes.

When we have love and charity and justice inscribed in our hearts, that will be when Christ will be back from his exile into the future and in our midst. And all the Herods of this world will be no more and our hope will be fulfilled.

And that is worth celebrating during the season of Christmas and all other seasons.

Amen

RCL - Christmas 1 A - 24 Dec 2010

2010-12-25T16:34:00.000-05:00

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
RCL - Christmas I, Christmas Eve, Friday 24 December 2010

Isaiah 9:2-7
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14(15-20)

There are a lot of pairs, of sets of two, in the nativity stories. There are two people, Mary and Joseph, obviously. There are two towns: Nazareth and Bethlehem. There are two divine announcements: the archangel Gabriel’s conversation with Mary announcing that she will be with child by the Holy Spirit, and the angel who appears in a dream to Joseph, telling him to name the child Jesus. There are two worlds of hospitality for the traveling couple: the world of ordinary human hospitality which is closed to them on that fateful night, and the world of animal agriculture, which finds room for them. There are two witnesses to the birth of Jesus from the wider world: the wise men from the East and the shepherds recruited by yet another angel, both come to honor the newborn babe. The magis’ encounter with Herod testifies to two worlds of power, one which is hostile to God’s purposes and one which eagerly seeks to cooperate with them. There are two journeys, one to Bethlehem to cooperate with one government’s bureaucratic census and another to Egypt to protect the child from another government’s tyranny. There are two sets of children: Jesus, who is protected, and the little boys of Bethlehem, all of whom two years old and under are killed by Herod’s troops.

And there are, of course two stories of the nativity, one in Matthew, centered on Joseph, and the other in Luke, with Mary as its focus. We often conflate them to produce a single story, which is useful for the Christmas pageant, and also for the créche, where by the time Epiphany comes, both shepherds and magi will stand as witnesses to the Christ child together. Scholars often set them against each other, looking for inconsistencies as proof that the accounts of the birth of Jesus are simply stories. But I think the two are complementary, like a diptych, a double-panel painting. They relate to each other: Each separately is beautiful, but taken together, they suggest something more than either is alone. The structure of a work of art, a story, even a gospel, even two gospels considered together, can tell us a lot. In this case, pairs of things, twos, are significant. We might ask ourselves why the early Christian community chose to represent the birth of Jesus with so many contrasting pairs, beginning with two stories. There may be a message there!

We can’t look at all of our pairs tonight, but we can look at one set, one that I haven’t mentioned yet.

I think there are two points of view, like two sides of our diptych, about Mary and Joseph. The first panel of the diptych carries a theme of simplicity, poverty, humility, social disapproval, exclusion. The second panel represents the theme of daring, of risk, of the fulfillment of the hopes of Israel.

So for our first panel: Neither Mary nor Joseph is a significant person in the worldly sense. Joseph is a workingman, and presumably Mary is from a similar social background. They seem to have little money and few connections, or else they would have been welcome somewhere in Bethlehem. They are content with a place among the animals, which perhaps not everyone might have been. They are perhaps not the poorest of the poor, but they are certainly not far up the ladder. Their temporary shelter is with animals out in the back shed. The first people who find out about the birth are poor shepherds, who do what poor people do because it is all they have to give: they come to visit.

Mary is engaged but not yet married when she hears God’s call to her. She answers and she becomes pregnant, not letting the almost certain social disaster which awaits her deter her. Such women in that society could be stoned for adultery. Joseph’s honor is on the line if he marries an already pregnant girl, but he too answers God’s call and provides a home, a family and legitimacy for Mary and her child. Their situation is tenuous, to say the least. God’s action is in the midst of the humble and troubled of the world, and he has chosen them as his agents.

And our second panel? Mary and Joseph are named for important biblical characters. The name of Mary harks back to Miriam, the sister of Aaron, whose short song celebrating the crossing of Israel over the Red Sea is thought by many to be the oldest text in the Bible: She “took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. And Miriam sang to them: ‘Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.’ (Exodus 15:20-21) Think of Mary’s song, the Magnificat:

He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’ (Luke 1:51-55)

Miriam is called a prophet in Exodus. Mary’s song is of a piece with Miriam’s: It is exultant, fierce, even frightening. It rejoices in God’s forceful, irresistible triumph for his people.

Joseph of Nazareth is named for Joseph, son of Jacob, foolish in his youth with his coat of many colors but wise in his old age. Sold into slavery by his brothers (talk about social exclusion!), he lives a life close to God, and through his dreams brings prosperity and even salvation to the Egyptians. He is the great wisdom figure in the scriptures. Like him, Joseph of Nazareth is brought to the point of disgrace and led by God through dreams to a place of wisdom that builds a great future for his people and the wider world.

A name often gives meaning to the person who bears it, particularly in traditional cultures. What might Mary and Joseph have thought of themselves, of their purposes in life, as they considered their namesakes? It is at least worth considering that the nativity stories reflect their actual characters. According to Luke, at Gabriel’s word Mary plunges straight into the unknown, welcoming her newborn child as the one who is to lead Israel in a new exodus. According to Matthew, Joseph accepts God’s explanation of Mary’s mysterious pregnancy and through his wise, generous and paternal actions gives nurture to Israel’s future salvation, and the salvation of more than Israel. Mary and Joseph both incarnate the deepest meaning of the lives they are called to recapitulate. Miriam’s cry of victory becomes Mary’s Magnificat. The first Joseph’s dreams of deliverance and prudent preparation for hard times to come become the second Joseph’s dreams leading to home and family and then another act of deliverance as the family flees for safety into Egypt. Joseph and Mary each represent the purposeful acts of human beings who dare to use their own lives to cooperate with God’s purpose.

So two pictures, side by side: on the one side, the simple peasant couple in trouble; on the other, a seemingly apocalyptic consciousness, steeped in the scriptures and the collective memory and expectation of Israel. Which is it? Can it be both?

And why not? Perhaps your mind has raced ahead. Is not the nativity the bringing together of two different natures, the human and the divine, in the Incarnation? If God can become man, why should not a simple peasant girl be the second Miriam, celebrating a new Exodus? Why should not Joseph of Nazareth recapitulate the prudent wisdom of Joseph son of Jacob, creating a future for his own people and others as well? Perhaps all the pairs are telling us something: Bringing together two to make them more than either. The magi and the shepherds, after all, both arrived at the manger for the same reason: to witness to the one who has reconciled man to God.

The one whose birth we celebrate tonight is very human: a powerful healer, a wise and discerning teacher and prophet, but from the back of the behind of nowhere, despised and rejected, true to his family in so many ways. And he is also the Word of God, the only begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth, who will accomplish the expectations and hopes, not only of Israel, but of all the world. The two are one in Him.