Epiphany 4 B - January 28, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen

The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, January 28, 2024

• Deuteronomy 18:15-20
• 1 Corinthians 8:1-13
• Mark 1:21-28

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

In the name of God, the Lover, the Beloved and the Love
overflowing.

“Jesus rebuked him saying, ‘Be silent, and come out of him!’ And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him.”

It’s easy to pass over passages like this morning’s gospel reading. It’s certainly a familiar scene. We’ve probably read or heard this gospel passage hundreds of times in the course of our lives. But it’s more than that, I think. We’re very modern in our reading of scripture. We don’t really believe in spirits in that way anymore. We’ve figured out that the demons Jesus rebukes in the gospels were really more like psychological ailments or even mental health disorders.

And then there’s the whole aesthetic element of rebuking and binding spirits. Which us good, polite Episcopalians generally lump in with things like liturgical dance and speaking in tongues. Certainly not something to be done in church, and not where other people could see you. That’s what those other sorts of Christians do. Which, by the way, has all sorts of class and racial overtones, but that’s another sermon for another day.

To deny or explain away Jesus’ rebuking of the unclean spirit is also to deny Jesus’ authority, a key word for understanding both this morning’s reading and the whole of the Christian life. The word authority derives from the root that means “creator” or “originator,” as we see clearly in its near twin author. Jesus’ casting out of this morning’s unclean spirit reveals his divine nature as the author of creation. In other words, God’s healing action is also the revelation of God’s original love poured out in creation.

You’ll notice that the spirit knows who Jesus is, even when the crowds do not. The spirit recognizes Jesus’ identity as creator and therefore bows to Jesus’ power to heal, command, and save. And it makes me wonder if perhaps that unclean spirit has a wisdom that we church-going Christians often lack.

I suspect that our reticence to focus on the rebuking of unclean spirits has more to do with our discomfort with Jesus’ authority in our own lives than it does with mere politeness or modern understandings of psychology and biology. We all suffer from various sorts of spiritual, physical, and emotional ailments. The more religious we are, the more likely we are to twist and contort our experience of God to our own ends. That’s why Jesus is always concerned in the gospels with the hypocrisy of the religious elites, which is to say with people very much like you and me.

He understands that a passion for God’s justice can very easily become judgmental self-righteousness. He knows that a reverence for liturgy and worship can turn into obsessive and pietistic compulsion. He sees how easily true compunction—which the ancient monastic writers called the “wound that leads to joy”—can entangle itself with our shame and become a bludgeon of self and others. The more religious or spiritual we are, the more we are in danger of focusing on the gift rather than the giver and of using that gift to reinforce our own sense of power and control. I’m speaking from personal experience here, folks.

Instead, Jesus constantly invites us to surrender and self-emptying. When we find ourselves caught up in self-righteous anger, pietistic compulsion, or shame masquerading as compunction, we can turn to the one who has true authority, not only over our own lives but over the spirits—however you want to understand them—that plague us.

Last year a good friend shared with me the deliverance prayer, to be used in case of spiritual emergency:

By the authority of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus

I command any spirit of [fill in the blank with your ailment]

to be bound an infinite number of times

and rendered impotent.

In the name of Jesus I cast you out

and send you to Jesus

to do with you according to his will.

I can see some of you clutching your pearls. But I assure you, this prayer has a powerful lineage and came to my friend from a very wise and gentle solitary nun who lived on a mountain nearby. This prayer may be something of an advanced technique, because it requires us to be unselfconscious enough to recognize that our ancestors may have known a bit more about spirits and God’s authority than we do. Further, it begs the question: do we really believe in Jesus’ power to save?

Scripture tell us that there is power in the name of Jesus. And if we are reticent to ask God to rebuke that which is plaguing us, we may need to ask how much we truly recognize and celebrate Jesus’ authority in our lives and our world. In the old way of putting it, the Devil is a liar. And whether we believe in a little red man with horns or some inner force of self-sabotage, the Liar whispers in our ears all the time telling us to be afraid; telling us it’s all up to us; telling us we’d be just fine if so-and-so would behave themselves. Sometimes the only way to get the Liar to shut up, is to rebuke him in the name of Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

I particularly love the second part of the deliverance prayer, though, in which you send the spirit that is plaguing you to Jesus to do with that spirit according to his will. It is too easy to think that whatever plagues us—internal or external—is somehow beyond redemption. But if Jesus is always undermining religious hypocrisy, he is also always bringing to the center for healing and integration that which was once on the margins.

Several years ago a friend sent me a quotation from Urban Holmes’ book What is Anglicanism? that has stuck with me: “One commonplace access to the chaotic powers of the earth is obscenity. […] A trivialization of the obscene is the dirty joke, whose humor is built on the incongruous and is the obverse of our fear of the dark mysteries of life associated, particularly, with the orifices of the body. […] [But] is it possible that obscenity taps an energy for mystical union?”

Is it possible that obscenity taps an energy for mystical union? The word obscene means “that which does not belong.” By casting out whatever is plaguing us and sending it to Jesus, the source of all life, we invite Jesus to heal and integrate whatever is broken or unwell. In that action, the very spirits that torment us become the gateway of fuller life in God. And in the light of Christ’s mercy we can begin to see our shame, our compulsions, our self-righteousness, and whatever else plagues us, as part of the beautiful texture of these lives God has graced us with.

You see, there is, ultimately no part of us or of this world that is truly obscene. There are no boundaries, no margins, no barriers between us and Christ the Beloved. We are already one, and we always have been.

In the words of the late John O’Donohue: “It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. […] It is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.”

Amen.

Epiphany 4 A - January 29, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

Epiphany 4 A - Sunday, January 29, 2023

Micah 6:1-8

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

Matthew 5:1-12

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

 

Lord Jesus Christ, through the gift of your Spirit and sacraments, grant us pure hearts and enlightened minds, that we may see God and be transfigured at the sight and help transfigure the world. Amen.

Simone de Beauvoir once said, “It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.” And Vladimir Nabokov once said, “Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.” 

If you took Metro-North down into the city and were to stand on any busy street corner and ask passersby, “what is your idea of a blessed life,” you would probably hear something like… “a blessed life means having more than enough;” or “being able to vacation at your place of choice…whenever you want.” Perhaps you might hear, “a blessed life is freedom from sickness and disease and from war and oppression.” What you probably wouldn’t hear would be… “a blessed life is to be poor, to suffer, or to have a loved one pass away.” Neither would you likely hear… “a blessed life is to be persecuted and shamed for being who you are and doing the right thing.” Yet, this, shockingly, is precisely what Jesus is inferring here in the Beatitudes. How are we to make sense of this?

For St. Matthew, Jesus is a new and fully realized Moses…a prophet who makes known the Word of God. Like Moses, Jesus ascends a mountain and speaks forth divine revelation and makes the heart of God known. Like all of Israel’s prophets from Moses through John the Baptist, Jesus’ message is one which seeks to reunite God’s people back to God in a bond of covenant fidelity. Throughout the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures, especially the Prophets, the heart of God is wrenched because of Israel’s infidelity and propensity to seek refuge in other gods.

Yet, Yahweh never gives up on the ones he has chosen to be his own and relentlessly pursues them. Micah writes of a divine judicial case where Yahweh’s “controversy” with Israel is stirred, where Yahweh “contends” with his chosen for her lack of fidelity even after having experienced his saving power time and time again. “O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!” There is only one hope for restoration, as far as Micah is concerned…not the offering of sacrifices but only the offering of one’s total life in doing justice, in loving kindness, and in walking humbly with God. Micah, like all of the prophets, is highly sensitized to the many ways in which Israel evaded her call to covenant fidelity. Hiding behind acts of worship had become one of the most egregious of all evasions. Hiding behind the law would become another. 

But what Jesus, the prophet of the new covenant, and Paul, the great explicator of the new covenant after him, would both proclaim with unmistakable clarity and force was that neither sacrifice nor obedience to the law, nor anything else for that matter, is really the object of God’s desire…only the human heart and the totality of one’s life. But if there is one thing that humankind has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt is that we, as a human family, are utterly incapable of remaining faithful to God and persist in our evasions. A question, then, hangs over every page of the Hebrew Scriptures…where is the ability to be true to God without evasion or compromise to come if it is not in ourselves? The answer was given emphatically…not by any human being but by God…and not in a text but in a living, breathing person…Jesus the Christ!…who showed us that doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with God was, in fact, possible…which brings us back to the Beatitudes.

The new law that Jesus preaches up on the mountaintop is, you can say, a honing in of the commandments of God previously given by Moses that would effectively eliminate all human efforts at evasion once and for all. With this law, there is no place to hide, to justify oneself, or to don a mask. Neither is there any room for complacency or compromise. It is a call to a way of life free from the deceits of the ego and the ambitions of the false self. It is, finally, a way to live fully alive in the presence of God’s fiery love—far distant from the deadening effects of the wisdom of the world.

This wisdom, the wisdom that comes from God, keeps us supple and ready, eager to give, fervent to love. Yet, it comes only at a great cost—the stripping away of our selfish wills and the humbling of our false selves…and hence why we expend every effort at evasion and devise every method conceivable at its maintenance. Yet, God’s “controversy” is stirred, and God “contends” with us and wrestles us to the ground…and thank God for this contending! That our God cares enough to demand everything of us and sometimes makes us miserable until we finally surrender! 

As I see it, the Beatitudes, and the whole Sermon on the Mount which follows…this call to be perfect just as God is perfect…is utterly impossible. The power to soar to these heights is not within us and the expectations and demands of the kingdom is a burden too heavy to bear. But this is precisely the gift of God’s demand. It is what helps us cut through the illusions of our self-sufficiency and helps us embrace our own indigence and poverty. And this alone is the place of truth and liberation. The comfort that leads to complacency is one of the greatest traps that the enemy uses to deprive us of God’s abundant life. And there are really only two ways out of the spiritual malaise which all too soon has us all walking around like soulless zombies. 

One is the moment of crisis which rattles us from our spiritual slumber, and the other is the voluntary submission of our will based on the conviction that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” Whether one or the other, both have the ability to shatter the illusions we gradually begin to believe about ourselves and our lives in this world and enlarge the heart. They awaken us to the fact that our good is never good enough and that our vocation is not to being content but to being ecstatically alive. This is precisely what the original founders of the monastic movement were convinced of…complacency leads to spiritual death, voluntary death to self leads to fullness of life. And so off to the desert they went.

We here too follow their lead and their wisdom. It is a wisdom in stark opposition to the best the world has to offer and a sure path to a truly blessed life… a life of beatitude. Particularly here in the Order of the Holy Cross…we who are consecrated to the foolishness of the cross and a crucified Messiah…we, here, are called to be a prophetic witness of life alive from the dead where the complacent state of mind is shattered to pieces and where the illusions of the good give way to the reality of the sublime.

Blessed are the voluntary poor, the meek, the just, the merciful, and those who freely choose lives of purity and peace in service to one another and to all who seek refuge in the shelter of this tent, for their’s is the kingdom of heaven.

Amen.

Epiphany 4 C - January 30, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

Epiphany 4 C - Sunday, January 30, 2022

Jeremiah 1:4-10

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Luke 4:21-30

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. 

I recently discovered something disturbing about myself. I think I have a life. 

I’ll be sitting there, reading a novel, when the bell rings for Matins, and I think “All right, in a half hour I can get back to my life.” Or ten minutes into the reading at dinner, I’ve finished eating, and I sit impatiently waiting for the last word so that I can bolt up from my seat and get on with my day. 

The trouble is, there’s no such thing as my life. My life is idolatry. There is only God’s life, and I—and you—get to participate in that life, get to hold it and embody it for a time, until we dissolve fully into it again. 

This problem may sound like a small psychological issue that, through prayer and spiritual direction and self-transcendence I could eventually overcome. But the attitude of me and mine plagues contemporary Christian spirituality as much as it does the wider culture. I often hear—and have written and preached about—the goal of Christian spirituality as transformation of the self. Sometimes we gussy it up by calling self-transformation “conversion.” But, really, the goal of Christian spirituality is self-immolation: the offering of the entire person—body, mind, and spirit—to God through Jesus Christ.

Buried in the midst of what we often read as Paul’s great paean to love we find a profound meditation on mortality and maturity in Christ and a vision of an oblationary spirituality. 

Everything is passing away, Paul warns us—everything we have will leave us. All the gifts we so treasure in ourselves, the little prizes we pile up in the storeroom of the self—prophecy, tongues, knowledge (I’m sure we could add to this list)—all will vanish like mist in the valley when the sun crests the peaks. For we know only in part, and we prophecy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end, Paul tells us. And a few lines later he repeats himself and elaborates, Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 

When we read that love is patient and kind, Paul is not goading us into trying harder to be “perfect” loving people. His is not the “nice” version of Christianity so many of us have ingested. Rather, he is trying to inspire us to a more mature understanding of and abiding in Christ. He has no interest in our shoring ourselves up with greater and greater signs of love. Exactly the opposite. We may have prophetic powers. We may have the tongues of angels. It’s all rubbish in the face of the surpassing wonder of finding ourselves in Christ, emptied, abandoned, bereft—and yet fully alive in God. 

It helps to read this passage in conjunction with Paul’s last and most poignant letter. Imprisoned in Rome, awaiting his martyrdom, he writes these words to the church at Philippi: 

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him. (Phil 3:7-9) 

For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him. 

That’s the whole gospel right there. To gain Christ and to be found in him. 

And the way is simple, if not at all easy. The voluntary offering of all that we think we have and all that we think we are—the total and free gift of ourselves to God to do with us and to be with us however God wishes. 

The interplay of losing and finding in these two passages is subtle but telling. In Paul’s language, I lose myself and everything with which I fill the self in order that I may be found in Christ. I do the losing. Christ does the finding. It really is that simple. 

The poet Kaveh Akbar puts its this way:  

It wasn’t until Gabriel squeezed away what was empty in him that the Prophet could be filled with miracle. Imagine the emptiness in you, the vast cavities you have spent your life trying to fill—with fathers, mothers, lovers, language, drugs, money, art, praise—and imagine them gone. What’s left? Whatever you aren’t, which is what makes you—a house useful not because its floorboards or ceilings or walls, but because the empty space between them.(1) 

A few years ago, I came across a wonderful and short documentary called Godspeed: The Pace of Being Known. The documentary follows an American priest who arrives in a small Scottish town to begin his ministry. He has great dreams to change the lives of his parishioners. For the first month or two he sits around his office waiting for these yearning souls to make themselves known to him. No one comes by. He soon learns that he has to get out and walk about the parish to get to know his people, and so begins a time of transformation in his life and ministry. 

Spoiler alert: the central lesson that he distills from his years walking the bounds of his parish—which, after all, is a geographical rather than an architectural term—is that we think we’re running faster and faster toward God, but really we’ve left God far behind us. We need to slow down so that God can catch up and find us. 

It’s perhaps a cliché lesson, but no more so than Paul’s soaring language of the heights of love. We move too fast, we talk too much, we stuff ourselves too full. Yes, even here. If we can’t slow down and quiet down in a monastery, what hope has the world? 

God doesn’t seem so interested in my busyness or my importance or my life. God seeks my Self (capital S) emptied of selves, so that, in my emptiness and my slowness and my poverty God can find me. When we allow that understanding—gradually and then finally—to penetrate our defenses, then we can glimpse the truth in Paul’s words: I have come to regard all things as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him. 

That, finally, is what God’s love really looks like. God is patiently, ploddingly, slowly searching for us, always waiting for us to slow down enough for God to lay a hand on our cheek, look us in the eye, and know us fully as his own. 

God’s love is patient, and it is kind. It does not insist on its own way, but it waits for us to unwind ourselves enough that we are free to lay down our lives on the altar of this world—to give ourselves a perfect offering and oblation to God. What God will do with that offering is God’s business, not ours. But we can trust that God will use it for the healing and redemption of the world. For God is good, and that is everything. 

 (1) Kaveh Akbar, “The Miracle,” in Pilgrim Bell: Poems.

Epiphany 4 B - January 31. 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

Fourth Sunday after Epiphany  - Sunday, January 31, 2021

Deuteronomy 18:15-20

1 Corinthians 8:1-13

Mark 1:21-28

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

            We began this month and this new year worrying about future leadership, which is where the Israelites found themselves in the first reading from Deuteronomy. Moses was a hard act to follow. He was unequaled as a prophet because of the displays of power he performed, and as a moral and ethical agent, summoning people to repentance, calling the community back to faithfulness to the covenant. He knew that his time was coming to a close. God informs Moses know that God would provide the leader as well as the words the leader would speak. The critical task for Israel was to hear that word. The Hebrew verb, “shema” is used three times and connotes not only hearing, but responding, listening and obeying.

Later, as a people in exile, without priest or king, it was the corporate acts of listening and obeying that created and shaped a community. The authority of the prophet was not bound by the existence of the political or religious structures that were destroyed in the chaos of the exile. The charismatic power of the prophet was an antidote to the hopelessness and despair of a people who had lost their nation. This text promises the people that God’s ongoing care for them is found in the simple fact of God’s word. God is to be found in the word uttered by the prophet. By learning to trust God’s word, the people learn to trust God.

Jesus speaks and is that Word in today’s gospel. Mark, more than any other Gospel writer, emphasizes Jesus’ miraculous power to heal. Of the eighteen miracles he records, thirteen have to do with healing, and four of those are exorcisms. Jesus goes to the synagogue to teach by healing. His gospel is a healing word and action. Mark wants to show that Jesus’ action is embedded in his word. His word is effective and powerful. It liberates from the forces of evil and makes humanity whole. No oppressive power will withstand his power. He teaches with an authority having to do with seeing justice served. All the people are amazed and perplexed in the face of this authority. This new teaching is not about information, but transformation. I think that on a personal and national level, we are poised for the possibility of transformation, even now in the midst of the crying and convulsing of an exorcism. 

Jesus’ new teaching, held up by Paul in the epistle, is a timely word for us to hear as we attempt to move forward. Eating meat sacrificed to idols hardly seems a pressing issue for 21^st century Christians, but it was in Corinth. The Corinthian church was a divided community. It had a wealthy, well-educated, sophisticated element who believed that Christians should be free to eat meat offered to idols since idols were not real, and there is only one God. The social life of the upper class revolved around frequent banquets and celebrations held in dining spaces connected to temples. They also purchased meat there for their own homes. Ordinary, less educated working people, whose incomes allowed little meat in their diets, and whose previous lives were tied to those temples, were also part of that community. Paul agrees with the first group, as far as Christians being free from the Law, but he does not take their side. He makes the point that knowledge without love, puffs up the individual, while wise and knowing love builds up the community. People who obsessively devote themselves to their own knowledge turn their devotion away from God, and in so doing they do not acquire true knowledge of God. The answer to this arrogance, in Paul’s view, is loving God in our neighbor.

At the heart of Paul’s message is a particular understanding of Christian freedom. Freedom is not the right to do as one wishes. Christian freedom is grounded in love---God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. In Christian life we become responsible for one another. That is central to what it means to be “in Christ.” For that reason, in any conflict, relationships are as important an element in decision making and behavior as are the facts of the case. Paul comes down hard on those who justify their behavior on the basis of theological arguments alone, even when he agrees with those arguments. If necessary, he says, he will become a vegetarian rather than harm those who would be hurt by him eating this meat. Paul wants them and us to know that being certain of what is right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, is not sufficient in itself, even if one’s position is correct. Love is greater than knowledge, particularly with the weaker ones among us. When we hurt others, we hurt Christ himself because we cause pain in his body, the Church. We are called to show reconciling love, and that has direct bearing on what we do and how we do it. Paul calls for unity and holiness together. Unity is easy if you don’t care about holiness. Holiness is easy if you don’t care about unity. The trick is to have both of them together. That’s what Paul is advocating. We are free to become Christ in the world to the same extent that we recognize the Christ in others, especially the last and the least. In the final analysis, it is about loyalty to Christ.

This raises questions for us about what practices we condone or condemn in relation to the cultures of secularism, materialism, and nationalism. How do we act prophetically and maintain appropriate relations in a divided society? Do we view Christ as one who teaches us to build a wall to protect the Christian community or as one who is himself the bridge to neighbors of different faiths and traditions? What is the relationship between individual freedom and the responsibility for a community’s health. Radical individualism, a hallmark of American culture, undermines community. Our Presiding Bishop, earlier this month in a moment of national crisis, asked “Who shall we be?’” He went on to say:

I want to submit that the way of love that leads to beloved community is the only way of hope for humanity. Consider the alternative. The alternative is chaos, not community. The alternative is the abyss of anarchy, of chaos, of hatred, of bigotry, of violence, and that alternative is unthinkable. We have seen nightmarish visions of that alternative.

            As we gathered as a monastic community to watch the Inauguration of our new President and listen to his message and commitment to truth, reconciliation, and unity, we felt a glimmer of hope for the possibility of a new and fuller life for all. There is much work to be done. Words matter. Facts matter. Civility matters. Law matters. Justice matters. How we approach that work will determine the outcome.

Weighed down by pandemic fatigue and anxiety, we may feel stuck in our inability to muster the energy it will take to meet the task. Beatrice Bruteau reminds us that our deepest truth is our union with God. It is the root of our reality, and from which optimism is derived. She writes:

I believe this radical optimism is the good news of the gospel and I propose that we take it seriously. . . Optimism, like pessimism, tends to be a self-justifying outlook. The more pessimistic you are, the more you are likely to fail and thus justify your pessimism. And similarly, the more optimistic you are, the more apt you are to succeed and justify your optimism. However, my optimism is not merely pragmatic. I also believe that it is ultimately, metaphysically, true because of its being radical optimism, coming from the root of our being, securely held in the Absolute Being. [1]

            Radical optimism and active hope are the keys to giving us the strength, faith, and courage to face the difficult realities that have been unveiled. Pray for our fractured and divided nation. Pray for those who share your political convictions, and for those who don’t. Pray for justice for those who live at the margins of society, and for those who by virtue of race, ethnicity, and sexual identity have been denied the fullness of opportunity and life in America.  Pray, trusting in the one God who holds us all.  

+Amen.

  [1] Beatrice Bruteau, Radical Optimism: Rooting Ourselves in Reality (Crossroad: 1993), 10, 11, 12

Epiphany 4 C - Sunday, February 3, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Rob Magliula, OHC
Epiphany 4 C - Sunday, February 3, 2019

Jeremiah 1:4-10
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30

Calls from God are scary! They disrupt our lives. It may not exactly be a voice, but a thought you can’t shake, or an idea that seems crazy or irrational. You try to ignore it, but it seems to be there again and again.

Jeremiah’s call shows us that fear, anxiety, resistance, inadequacy, and even resentment are understandable reactions to God’s call. The primal human response to any kind of change is fear. God notices it in Jeremiah and issues the Bible’s most frequent command: “Do not be afraid.” Jeremiah’s call has nothing to do with his capabilities, as Jeremiah himself repeatedly attests. Neither our achievement nor our confidence qualifies us to answer the call. Instead it is God who prepares us to live out the vocation for which we were created. While God sometimes asks us to take up roles and responsibilities for which we may feel ill equipped, often God prepares us for our calling through the interests and abilities we cultivate. Jeremiah’s story reminds us that both the calling to serve and the capacity to fulfill that calling come from God. Our excuses are often reasonable and justifiable, and our acceptance or surrender happens only after struggle. Jeremiah speaks to something many of us know; we do not choose God; God mysteriously, and even against our will, chooses us.

  Empowered by the Spirit, Jesus articulates his call with the words from the prophet Isaiah, which we heard in last Sunday’s Gospel. He came “to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and the acceptable year of the Lord’s favor”. All in Nazareth speak well of Jesus and are amazed at his words until Jesus offends them by referring to the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian, and how God had ministered to strangers and passed over them and their kind. He wasn’t telling them anything that wasn’t right in their own scriptures, only that was not how they used scripture. They used it to close ranks on outsiders, not to open them up. The minute Jesus denied their special status; he went from favorite son to stranger. His message threatened to dismantle the status quo and the stereotypes that defined their religious and social boundaries. They were incensed that one of their own had the audacity to intimate that they would not be the vessels for the unfolding of God’s new narrative. They had certain expectations of God learned over generations. Jesus overturned those expectations by asserting that God is more than their tribal deity, and that God’s sense of community was bigger than theirs.  Change is a dynamic that is unsettling and usually resisted in preference for the old, the familiar, and the routine. Jesus’ audience opted for this choice. Not only do religious people resist change, but they also see their resistance to change as a protection of the divine. So much so that they are ready to kill for it.

Christ is the one who calls, challenges, and upsets us. Like the people of Nazareth, we are filled with assumptions. We often confuse our ideas of God with God. It’s hard to swallow that our enemies are God’s friends, who belong to God just as surely as we do.  No matter how hard we try we cannot get God to respect our boundaries.  God keeps plowing right through them, inviting us to follow or get out of the way. The problem is not that we are loved any less. The problem is that these others are loved just as much as we are, by a God with an upsetting sense of community. Jesus preferred the company of misfits to that of religious people.  He cared for the stranger, and comes to us as the stranger, reminding us over and over again that while he is with us, he does not belong to us. Today our public life has broken down largely because we have begun to regard the stranger as the enemy. We sort ourselves out into tribes that are suspicious of other tribes. The variety of humankind becomes a threat, not a blessing. We forget that it is God who makes us a community and not we ourselves, and that our differences are God’s best tools for opening us up to our own conversion and the truth that is bigger than we are.

The God, we proclaim and worship, will not be domesticated, confined to our temples, or to our comfortable, well-worn narratives. This is a dynamic God whose call jars us to anger or faithfulness, and who simultaneously provides us the opportunity to partner in the creation of a new narrative. God is at work, even now, unfolding new narratives among people who are viewed as outsiders by the faithful.

Paul gets to the root of our call as Christians. The words of our Epistle come to life when we remember that they arose out of a pastoral crisis in the Corinthian Church, not as we so often use them, to prop up romanticized notions of marriage. Paul had heard that some were engaged in destructive battles with each other. They were abusing their freedom, refusing to share, scorning their neighbor’s spiritual gifts, boasting in their own, seeking recognition and jockeying for power in the church. Paul inserts this passage in his letter not to supply a pious reflection on how things ought to be, but rather to call them to account for their behavior. Everything he says love is not, they are; everything he says love is, they are not.

Paul is speaking of agape, the love embodied most visibly in God’s love for humankind in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a state of being which constitutes our fundamental relationship to God. It is not a feeling but an action. For Paul, our call and capacity to flourish as human beings is realized to the extent that we can live in the love of God. There is nothing sentimental about it. It is active, tough, resilient, and long-suffering. The call to a faithful life is one that gives testimony in word and deed to the primacy of love, the character of love, and the endurance of love. Not unlike the congregation at Nazareth, the Corinthians who heard these words most likely responded with shock and anger as well. Christians seem to have a special gift of cloaking self-interest with self-righteousness. Without love all religious talk, knowledge, and giving add up to nothing.

The love described in the Epistle was the love lived in Jesus’ ministry. The call to belong to God’s Church is to be an agent of God’s love in the world, not seeking one’s own advantage but working on behalf of others. It is the source of our greatest security, and thus our freedom to actually be patient and kind, to bear all things and not insist on our own way. It is the way God calls us to practice all our gifts. None of us reach the heights of love. All of us have room to grow into greater love.

The truth is always bigger than any one of us can grasp by ourselves.  It takes a world full of strangers and friends to tell and show us the parts we cannot see, and sometimes we want to kill them for it.  Jesus’ own tried to kill him, but he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.  That’s how it still works.  If we will not listen, he won’t try to change our minds.  He will pass right through our midst and be gone.         +Amen.

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B: January 28, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B- Sunday, January 28, 2018

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC 

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.

Into what may seem to our modern ears to be a confusing exploration of the intricacies of food and idolatry, the Apostle Paul drops these few lines of profound mystical depth.

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.

What are the boundaries between knowledge and love?

In the early Christian sayings Gospel of Thomas, Jesus echoes these words of Paul. He tells his disciples: “When you know yourself, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the children of the Living One. If you do not know yourselves, you live in poverty, and you are poverty.”

When you know yourself, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the children of the Living One. If you do not know yourselves, you live in poverty, and you are poverty.

Knowing and being known; loving and being loved.

There comes a point, it seems, when all of our knowledge fails us, and we are left utterly impoverished. No one can know God, The Cloud of Unknowing tells us. Our knowledge is too small to comprehend the Living One. But we can love God, and in that loving we can come to be known, to be comprehended.

Knowledge and love flowing into one another.

Paradoxically, it is only in allowing ourselves to become poverty that we can truly surrender to God’s all-knowing love and all-loving knowledge.

Thomas Merton speaks of this terrain deep within the human heart: “At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.” 

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.

When you know yourself, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the children of the Living One. If you do not know yourselves, you live in poverty, and you are poverty.

Beyond all of our knowledge, our self-markers, our identities, beyond the hurts and the joys, the gifts and the growing edges, beyond all of that, there is a place within us where, with the Living One we can say, simply and without ornamentation: I am

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany- Year A - Sunday, January 29, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Roy Parker, OHC
Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany- Year A - Sunday,  January  29, 2017

This morning I'd like to share with you an interpretation of the passage from the prophet Micah, an interpretation indebted to a sermon preached by Harvey Guthrie at the National Cathedral in October, 2015, on the occasion of the dedication of the Jonathan Daniels Carving in the Cathedral's Civil Rights Porch.

Jonathan Daniels was murdered on August 20, 1965 in Haynesville, Alabama for registering illegally disenfranchised African-American voters.  The selection from the prophet Micah happened to be appointed for Evening Prayer on the occasion of the Cathedral's dedication service, and we may regard it as a pairing for Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, today's Gospel, as well as a tribute to Jonathan.

To reiterate Micah's words: "(God) has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Our tribute this morning is a little lesson in the key Hebrew words of the Micah passage.

"Justice" - the Hebrew word is mishpat. "Kindness" - the Hebrew is chesed. "Walk humbly with your God" - the Hebrew is hatsna' leketh 'im eloheykah. Let's unpack those words.

Mishpat, justice, is what results when a shophet, judge, shaphats, judges. "There is strong evidence that . . . originally . . . mishpat referred to the restoration of a situation or environment which promoted equity and harmony in a community." (The Anchor Bible Dictionary)

"Justice" is introduced in Micah with ,"(Our God) has shown you . . . what is good." And what is good is defined in the preceding verses in terms of God's rescuing people from the oppression of slavery, God's caring for them as homeless refugees in the wilderness, God's provision of a home when they were homeless.

For the Bible, justice involves things like that - and so often in the psalms and elsewhere, equity for widows and orphans and the poor. Biblical justice is not retributive justice. It does not have to do with the protection of those in power through the use of violence. It is not about punishment.

Biblical justice is distributive justice. It has to do with recognition of, and provision for, the needs and rights and dignity of every human being. It has to do with being kind rather than correct. It is what God's people are supposed to do.

Which brings us to the second word of our text: chesed, "kindness." "Kindness," "lovingkindness," "mercy," "steadfast love" have all been used to translate chesed in English Bibles. No one English word captures its meaning. It seems basically to have to do with loyalty in relationships, loyalty that is considerate of and affectionate toward the sharer of a relationship. It is not used in Hebrew of "kindness" in the abstract. It bespeaks actual, steadfast, loving, merciful, kind loyalty toward another.

It is rooted in God's commitment to God's people, in God's steadfast, loving, merciful, kind loyalty toward God's human colleagues in the doing of justice. It is about the kind of relationship God wants people to have with God, and with each and all of their human sisters and brothers. It is indeed about sensitivity and responsiveness to the needs and rights of others, indeed about respecting others, but, at root, it is about affectionate, unswerving commitment to others. I propose it be rendered "compassionate solidarity."

Mishpat, "justice," chesed, "compassionate solidarity," and, finally, hatsna' leketh 'im 'eloheykah, "walk humbly with your God." In the Hebrew "humbly," hatsna', which introduces the phrase - is emphasized as the key to what the phrase is about - "humbly walk (or "go along with") your God." Not only is it put first for emphasis; it is a word that occurs only here and nowhere else in biblical Hebrew. What it actually means is pretty much up for grabs. The guesses, on the basis of sparse evidence, include "modestly," "secretly," "cautiously," "carefully." Since the oldest English translations chose "humbly," subsequent versions have fallen into line - with nary a footnote about its obscurity.

But what if Micah chose and emphasized an unknown word on purpose? The medium can be the message. How something is stated can convey as much or more than what is stated. Maybe here the point is not the meaning of a word that is obscure and unknown, but that such a word is used. If so, the verse could go like this: "What does the Lord require of you but to do mishpat, "justice," and to love chesed, "compassionate solidarity," and experiencing hatsna', - unbargained for, scary unknowns as you go along with your God." Or "to go along with God in doing what is right toward all, in having a passion for lasting human and humane relationships with God and all our sisters and brothers, and to be open to new and unknown and surprising, devastating things all that may involve.

In his study and reflection at seminary, Jonathan Daniels had learned about, and grown in commitment to, God's call to do   "justice" and to have a passion for "compassionate solidarity." That led him to respond, along with seminary colleagues, to Martin Luther King's call for people of good will to support with their physical presence, on the weekend of March 10-12, 1965, the struggle for civil rights under way in Selma, Alabama. Jonathan had gone along with God for the weekend.

But as the weekend unfolded, justice and compassionate solidarity were joined by unbargained-for hatsna' , in the form of increasing conviction that going along with God had to involve not just flying in and demonstrating, and then flying out, but staying in compassionate solidarity with African-American sisters and brothers in the struggle for justice. And so it was that doing justice, loving compassionate solidarity with God's black children, and going along with God led to Jonathan's unplanned, unbargained-for staying to share life and work with those brothers and sisters, and finally to being killed by Tom Coleman's shotgun on the porch of that store in Haynesville. He is a martyr in whom response to words like Micah's was lived - and led to death.

God is calling us to do justice that frees the oppressed and cares for all. God is calling us to compassionate and caring solidarity with all our human sisters and brothers. God is calling us to be alert to new, maybe upsetting and life-threatening, places to which doing justice and loving our ties to all may take us. Maybe such a place now is, once again, Alabama, where, having been given permission by the Supreme Court, that state seems to be dismantling the voting rights for which Jonathan and others died.

Maybe such a place now is facing up to what "Black Lives Matter" is all about - yes, in terms of police brutality, but more deeply in terms of the racism in our hearts and culture and social structures that gives permission to, and feeds, police brutality. Maybe such a place now is the hijacking of our national moral backbone by the National Rifle Association with regard to dealing with campus blood baths.

One of those weird passages in the Apocalypse, the last book of the Bible, pictures the final defeat of the ultimate evil one by God's faithful servants. "They," it says, "have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life in the face of death." The Greek translated "the word of their testimony" is ton logon tes marturias - literally, "the logic of their martyrdom."

Jesus' death and resurrection reveal a logic inextricably woven into the fabric of the universe. In that divine logic unjust and uncompassionate powers have reached their limits when crosses and shotguns have done their worst. They can go no further than death. But the meaning of Jesus' resurrection is that God can.

When a servant of God does not cling to life in the face of a cross or a shotgun, the logic of oppressive empires and racist cultures has run its course; their power and its weapons have done all they can do. But God's logic persists; God's powerless weakness - whose weapons are justice and compassionate solidarity and love - continues its patient, persistent, non-violent subversion of oppressive empires and racist cultures. Jesus does not conquer Rome, but Jesus outlasts Rome.

Presentation of Jesus in the Temple - Feb 2, 2014

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Year A - Presentation of Jesus in the Temple - Sunday, February 2, 2014

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

Simeon and holding his Savior

Today's feast marks the 40th day since Christmas. Today we celebrate the visit of the Holy Family to the Jerusalem temple to restore Mary into ritual purity and community after giving birth and to offer the sacrifice of thanksgiving and redemption for her first-born son. An otherwise ordinary act for the ordinary families of the time. But this is no ordinary trip to the temple because this is no ordinary son. This son is also the Savior of the world. Even as an infant Jesus is recognized and celebrated and worshiped. His birth is already changing things, already bringing hope. Perhaps Mary and Joseph believed they could quietly slip into the temple, make their offering, and blend into the crowd and back to their home. But with this baby good news has come for all people - there will be no blending in anywhere. Everyone will know - everyone must know - who this child is. Jesus' conception, birth, and now presentation is the inspiration of heavenly and earthly praise that only gets louder and grows farther as Jesus grows in wisdom and favor.

What moves me about this text is the way Luke uses language to evoke a moment in time, a person, the fulfillment of hope, and how that imagery draws us into the story. In the temple we meet the old man Simeon. Having waited for so long for this day, he does what Zechariah and Mary and the angels have done before him in Luke’s gospel - he bursts into song - or at least poetry - which may well have been taken up and sung by the early church even in Luke’s time in the 80s or 90s of the first century. I saw a post on Facebook by the theologian Miroslav Volf in which he recounted an exchange with a Cistercian monk: he asked the old monk “what is the secret to long life?”. The monk replied, “Well, we sing alot.”. Which raises the question "How do we respond to the wonder and mystery of the mighty acts of God?". Or to ask it another way, "Is there a better method than singing?"

It is impossible for me to read the Nunc Dimittis, Simeon’s hymn of praise to the baby Christ, outside its place in the Church’s liturgical life. The Church has used his words, along with the Benedictus of Zechariah and the Magnificat of Mary, as pillars of the daily office from the earliest preserved liturgies. We are inheritors of this tradition as we use these songs in our own Monastic Breviary to this day. In repeating these three canticles daily, we are grounding ourselves in the story of salvation: promise fulfilled, hope arrived, incarnation fully Divine and fully human, a kingdom coming and now here that upsets and topples even mighty and eternal Rome and whatever force or system in our own day that sets itself up as the solution. 

Luke is not interested in exploring the “how” of these mighty acts. He is not giving us scholarly treatises on the incarnation. He is more interested in inviting us to praise God in the “now” of them. Luke wants us to marvel and wonder and celebrate and employ all our creativity into joining the choir, in adding
our voices to the beautiful poetry of it all. And that is precisely what liturgy is designed to do, why the Church elevates these great hymns to a place of prominent repetition and meditation.

And consider the surprising irony of it all: Zechariah, struck dumb because of his lack of faith, proclaims the Benedictus as soon as his tongue is loosed. Mary, the young girl from nowhere saying “yes” to God and a life she can barely imagine, but trusting that God is present even through scandal and confusion, death and resurrection - her “yes” remains true. And today Simeon, nearing the grave, knowing that his time is short, trusting that the promise must be near, lives long enough to hold salvation in his arms and to look into the eyes of the one who will save not only Israel, but Gentiles as well - the whole world. These are the people - struggling, striving, waiting just as we are - who are teaching us how to praise, how to sing. Through their lives and help the liturgical day unfolds over and over again in this pattern of promise fulfilled, redemption recognized, and salvation seen and shared.

From time to time I am asked if I get bored repeating the same words day after day, week after week. I can honestly say that my answer is an emphatic “no”! The truth here is inexhaustible, the tender humanness and power of these words is the antithesis of boredom. If anything, they get richer and deeper with time, sharing their mystery slowly, challenging and calling forth ever more of my presence and participation. There will never come a time in this life when I totally “get it” and so I am excited to get up every day and hope to understand just a bit more, to participate in the divine story just a bit more.

Let's consider the words of the Nunc Dimittis itself. At Compline, when we sing it and come to the line “for these eyes of mine have seen the Savior”, I often ask myself “where, how, in who have I seen salvation today?”. The same Christ whom Simeon held is alive among and within us today. He is always, just as at his annunciation, birth, and presentation, making himself known, wanting to be seen
by us. My vagueness at times in answering my own question is not because Christ is hidden, but because I am not seeing, not looking at what is before my eyes with an expectancy and awareness of the offering of salvation.

Instead my eyes see what I can control, possess, use for pleasure or power or distraction - and Christ, salvation, is not seen that way. Sometimes I know the gift of a sacred moment, an encounter which clearly has the sense of the presence of Christ to it and so I can say at Compline “there was Christ, in that person, in that moment”. Other times I can reflect on the effects of an encounter that may not be known consciously. Then I can look at my character and my spiritual health and see the quiet and steady unfolding of salvation in life and relationships: By God’s grace openness to seeing and experiencing Christ moves us from:
- argument to praise,
- from competition to humility,
- from possession to generosity,
- from fear to trust,
- from despair to hope.

But this cannot happen without liturgy. Liturgy gives us the container and space to reconnect to the salvation story. When we pray faithfully and sincerely we remember again how to be in the wonder, gratitude, and openness of the Christian revelation. The purpose of gathering in this chapel as we do day by day and as you have this weekend is not to reenact some quaint cultural tradition based on myths from the distant past. It is to listen to and echo the songs of our forebears and friends - Zechariah and Mary and Simeon and Anna and all the saints - who point us to Christ among us and within us.

In the ordinariness of parents bringing their baby son to the temple for an offering, Simeon saw something greater - indeed the greatest gift of all. He is teaching us to wait and watch and see and praise. So let us use our spiritual practices wisely and faithfully and be watching and praising with Simeon - in our liturgies of hymns of the good news, in our own private prayer, in our acts of mercy in the world - all in the assurance that Christ comes and reveals himself to us - in ways we expect and ways that surprise, in the convenient and the inconvenient, in the knowable and in ways beyond knowing - yet Christ is through all and in all and with all.
Amen.