The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost B - August 4, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josep Martinez-Cubero

The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 13, August 4, 2024

• Exodus 16:2-4,9-15
  Ephesians 4:1-16
  John 6:24-35

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

“What sign are you going to give us…?” The crowd asks as a Greek chorus, all speaking the same thing at the same time…When meditating on these biblical stories, I like to use an Ignatian exercise in which, every time I read it, I think of myself as a different character in the story. Thinking of myself as Jesus, my response to the crowd asking for a sign is: “Were you not on the other side of the lake yesterday when I fed THE 5,000 OF YOU WITH FIVE LOAVES OF BREAD AND TWO FISH?” And so, we give thanks that I am not Jesus!

This is the second of a five-week series of readings walking us through a single chapter in the Gospel according to John. Every three years, the lectionary invites us to spend five weeks contemplating Jesus’s self-description as “the bread of life,” or “the bread which comes down from heaven.” Last week we heard John’s Gospel’s version of the feeding of the five thousand. This week that story continues with the crowds hungry for more, and Jesus challenging them (and us) to move beyond the bread Jesus gave on the hillside to the “bread of life” that is Jesus himself. It is a provocative invitation to a deep transformation. It’s not about a shallow affirmation of Jesus as our Lord and Savior so we can get into heaven, but go on with our greed, selfishness and anxieties. And it is not about thinking of Jesus as just a super great exemplar, or guru or wisdom sage from whom we can learn some clever tricks about how to get through life. No, it is a strange-sounding invitation that requires we move from our heads into our hearts. Jesus says, “believe in me,” “follow me,” “learn from me.” And he goes as far as to say: Eat me, and never be hungry again. It is a wild invitation to radical intimacy! 

The Gospel writer presents the dialogue between Jesus and the crowd as a kind of parallel companion to the earlier dialogue in chapter four between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. The woman asks Jesus for water; in today’s story the crowd is looking for bread. Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that there is another, more deeply nourishing water, “living water.” He tells the crowd about the bread that “comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” Thinking of the water literally as physical, the woman asks for it, saying, “Sir, give me this water.” The crowd, also misunderstanding, says, “Sir, give us this bread.” And then, with an “I am” statement, Jesus declares his identity. It is a choreography of encounter, misunderstanding, and invitation to deeper consciousness. And the invitation is for us, too, to recognize the deep hungers beneath our surface hungers, and to move into deeper and more authentic forms of trust in God.

Now, to be clear, there is nothing wrong or “unspiritual” about the crowd looking for more literal bread. Of course they’re looking for bread! They’re poor, food is scarce, and they need to feed themselves and their families. And let us remember that Jesus feeds them first. He tends to their physical hunger without any reservation. But he doesn’t stop there. He asks them to probe their soul hungers too. Physical food is important, but there is another form of food, a deeper kind of nourishment essential to our wellbeing so that we can thrive, and Jesus has come to provide it. 

Jesus calls this deep nourishment “the food that endures for eternal life.” Now, Jesus does not say, “the food that gives you life after death.” Afterlife is not the subject here. The “eternal life” Jesus offers in not an indefinite survival in this world or a disembodied soul-life in some vague world outside of time, but rather, an intimate, mutual indwelling with God here and now, a life with and in God. It is the indestructible and super-abundant life of the Trinity lived in our own bodily human mortality. In other words, as Jesus presents it in John’s Gospel, “eternal life” is a matter of quality of life, not “quantity” of life- a “timeless” life of peace, beauty and grace.

At its heart, this is a story about hunger: physical, yes, and also the many other kinds of hungers that shape our daily lives. What are those hungers? From my conversations with people in vocational discernment, and people in spiritual direction I know there is hunger for meaning, for purpose, for connection and belonging, for intimacy and love. There is a deep hunger for healing of old wounds. And there is a craving for joy, and delight, and peace. I always tell people I hope they are not trying to be or desperately needing to be unique, because these are not unique hungers. They are very universal!

It’s one thing to name our hungers, but quite another to trust that Jesus will satisfy them. And very often what keeps us from that trust is shame- a sense that we could not possibly be worthy of God’s grace. The infamous, and fabulous Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber describes the shame that often keeps us from feasting on Jesus: “It’s hard to accept not just that God welcomes all, but that God welcomes all of me, all of you. Even that within us we wish to hide: the part that cursed at our children this week, or drank alone, or has a problem with lying, or hates our body. That part within us that suffers from depression and can’t admit it, or is too fearful to give our money away, or is riddled with shame over our sexuality, or cheats on taxes. All these parts of us we wish Jesus had the good sense to not welcome to his table are invited to taste and see that the Lord is good."  

The crowd in today’s gospel story is ravenous for food, for health, for a king, for righteousness, for salvation- and they desperately misinterpret Jesus, first as a potential monarch and then as a wonderworker who will show them how to “perform the works of God.” They seek control, power, protection against their vulnerabilities, and they see themselves as the proper agents of that power and control. Their trust is rooted in themselves. I don’t know about you, but it sounds very familiar to me! But Jesus is telling the crowd (and us) that when it comes to our most fundamental nourishment, we are to root our trust, not in ourselves, but in God, who loves and cares for us. This is the “work” God gives us to do: to have faith in the one God has sent to us. Jesus is the sign and the nourishment. He wants to draw us into our innermost truth- a higher, deeper, more genuine form of ourselves where we abide in God as God abides in us. That genuine form of ourselves manifests itself as a life lived according to our deepest calling with complete integrity, knowing not only who we are, but whose we are. That is the “true bread” for which we hunger. 

And that is what “faith” is really all about: not merely intellectual agreement to some particular set of claims, but a deeply relational and existential trust in a God who loves us and cares for us, and a consequent impulse to live with love, gratitude, and grace. God gives us not only our “daily bread,” but also the bread of heaven, the bread of life itself. Hearing this, we might well say with the crowd: “Give us this bread always!” ¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! ~Amen+

Proper 13 C - July 31, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

Pentecost, Proper 13 C - July 31, 2022

Hosea 11:1-11
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21

This week a professor of art education came to talk with a few of us about making art withing a monastic context. He was curious about how a monastic setting changes and shapes artistic practice and how the making process may also shape the monastic life. We talked about many things in our nearly four hours of conversation, but I kept coming back to the word “abundance.” At one point I said to him that when I’m making a quilt, for instance, I do the best job that I can within the limitations both of my skill and of the materials. I select a pattern. I choose fabrics that I think will pair well with one another. I do my best to line up the seams, to quilt the piece without any bubbles in it. The whole time I imagine, with great anticipation, what it will look like when it’s done. And yet, no matter how careful I have been, and no matter how many so-called mistakes I have made in the quilting process, every single quilt ends up being so much more than I could have imagined. The finished quilt has a life and a beauty that somehow far far exceeds whatever I have put into it. So it is with the monastic life, and, indeed with any life faithfully lived. Our little efforts at prayer, at compassion, at self-improvement, at loving those God surrounds us with—they’re paltry, really. And yet, somehow life ends up being so much vaster and more abundantly beautiful than we could ever have asked for or imagined. You see, God’s answer is always more. More life. More mercy. More love. Not in spite of our efforts, but not because of them, either. On its surface, this morning’s gospel reading seems refreshingly clear. We get none of the maddening puzzles and turnabouts that so often run through Jesus’ teachings. Greed is bad. When we focus on our possessions, we lose track of our need for God and God’s great mercy toward us. In fact, the more tuned in to our possessions we are, the more they possess us. This is a message we need today, isn’t it? We who are living through the death throes of late-stage capitalism. Who know the rich landowners, who not only store up for themselves huge sums of money and property but also the political control that goes with such riches. We who are living through the early years of climate collapse, due almost entirely to our overweening greed. And this greed is not limited to stuff. Jesus tells us to guard against all kinds of greed, indicating that greed wears many faces. John Cassian, the great pioneer of monastic spirituality, reminds us that greed “is a catchall of the vices and the root of all evil.”1 Greed lies at the root of lust, gluttony, vainglory, and pride, all of which leave us wanting more—more money, more sex, more food, more adulation. Cassian adds that “the madness of covetousness is that it always wants more than whatever a person can accumulate.”2 There is never enough to substitute for God, never enough to make us self-sufficient. Those of us who get caught up in the compulsive accumulation of more—whatever our more of choice may be—end up like the rich man in Jesus’ parable. We become fools, and God, always on the lookout for hypocrisy, exposes our foolishness and undermines our self-destruction. This parable begs an important question. What does it mean to be to “rich toward God?” Again, Cassian provides an answer: “Th[e] madness [of greed] is stopped not with wealth but with poverty.” (XXIV) Holy poverty is the answer to our compulsive grasping at food, money, sex, esteem, self-righteousness, or whatever else we cling to rather than God. The way to be rich toward God is voluntarily to dispossess ourselves of all that is not God. God invites us not only to let go our faults and sharp edges—which would be delightful, wouldn’t it?—but also the good in our lives that is self-centered rather than God-centered. This latter is much harder to relinquish and includes our perception of spiritual “progress” (whatever that is) as well as all our certainties that we are good and right and that we know the best way forward. In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton writes about this dispossession: “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. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty[…] . It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.” God reveals himself, in the face of Jesus, as suffering love, utterly dispossessed in order to draw us ever deeper into the heart of God. Jesus shows us the way of dispossession and emptiness that leads to total freedom in God. The freedom to allow God’s suffering love to flow through us to a hurt and broken world. The freedom to allow God’s mercy to fill us up and to overflow in radiant abundance. From this place, today’s reading takes on a different light. Our initial clarity about this rich landowner and his greed appears smug and self-satisfied in the light of God’s mercy. Jesus says to the young man, “Who set me up to be a judge and arbitrator?” With this question in our hearts, we can look at this foolish rich man, not with condemnation or smugness or superiority, but with compassion. Do you see how he suffers? He not only has no place to store his crops. But he has no community with which to share his abundance. He has no friends to delight his soul. He must find his companionship only in the things that surround him. He may be materially rich, but he is utterly alone. His choices have cut him off from the great abundance that surrounds him. Can we allow our hearts to break for this man, even as we decry and condemn the poverty his wealth inflicts on others? Mercy begets mercy. When we allow God to dispossess us and to draw us into the flow of suffering, merciful love, there is always more love. We can love the poor who have nothing to eat and also the rich who are so enslaved to their possessions and hungers that they enforce poverty on others. Even more difficult, perhaps, we can love ourselves and those people with whom we live, despite our very many faults and trials. No matter what we put into it, this life manages to astound us with God’s extraordinary abundance, if we have the eyes to see it. As Jesus says over and over again in his teaching, the kingdom of God is all around us and within us, and the gate of heaven is everywhere. There is no place separate from God. Even in the midst of death and suffering and heartache, and of the great anxiety of this moment in history, God’s answer is still—and always will be—more life.

Proper 13 C - Jul 31, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randall Greve, OHC

Proper 13 Year C - Sunday - July 31, 2016

Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21

The Abbey of St Scholastica in Subiaco, Italy where is found Sacro Speco, a cave where St Benedict lived as a hermit

The seeds were carefully planted. The summer brought abundant rain and sunshine. Finally, the crops were harvested and stored - a good season. The landowner was supplied with food and could rest from his labor, knowing that he and his family could eat through the winter and even beyond, such was the abundance of the harvest. The larger storehouses are a reasonable plan, a responsible way to preserve his provisions. And yet he is not called prudent, he is not praised for being careful and wise, but a fool - God calls him a fool.

As I have been engaged in Sunday supply this summer and preached on several of the lessons from Saint Luke during this Pentecost season, I have been moved again by the stories of Jesus seeking out the sick, the demon-possessed, the socially outcast and rejected and tenderly guiding them into the merciful embrace of healing, forgiveness, and community. Many of the stories have been of dramatic and obvious outward reconciliation. Luke is always interested in how Christ is present in the least and unexpected, the nobodies from nowhere who become examples of courageous faith.

As the narrative turns in the middle chapters to the challenges of obedience, to the living out of the gift of new life, Luke presents a different kind of outsider. He shifts into the description of a more insidious internal kind of isolation and alienation. This state is not the result of physical ailment or social identity, but a condition of heart attitude toward oneself, God, and neighbor. Luke goes deeper into the question of 'who is the outsider who is in need of conversion - of being brought home to self and God and neighbor?' Of course the answer is, “we all are”. In these middle chapters, with parable and teaching, Jesus looks into the human heart and reveals to us the ways in which we who seem outwardly to be the comfortable insiders can become alienated from ourselves.

Listen to what the landowner says from the lens of relationship, because that's what the parable is about - not food storage! 17And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ 18Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’

This man is rich, he is in the social in group, he has influence and success and material abundance, but relationally he is in a poor, lonely, sad hell of the isolation of his own selfishness. I, me, my, now – and death something that happens to little, common, mortal people – not him. His essential foolishness is his believing that it’s about him; the fields are his, the crops are his – even that his life is his. There is no gratitude, no sharing, no celebration. He has become his crops - locked away in a barn, safe and secure.

The lesson from Colossians is the mirror opposite vision of what human life can be. Rather than closing in on my ego, Colossians chapter 3 is a description of the opening up of myself to the gift of life that is offered by God. Dying and rising with Christ, a person is truly free when the receiving and giving of new life is rooted in the gratitude, wonder, and generosity of God's gift in giving life and power to open up to it in all the risk and vulnerability that the journey invites. The things that are above of which the author speaks are the dispositions and attitudes that allow me to recognize that everything is a gift - there is no such thing as my crops and storehouses and my life, but I am part of a bigger story that calls on me to be faithful to the part given to me and then hand on to those who come after.

Certainly the parable is a warning about the temptation to accumulate and identify ourselves with material things and the status we believe they bring – the call to generosity and simplification are always speaking to our propensity to hoard and grasp. But the parable is not as simple as “be more generous” or “have less stuff”. It speaks to the very nature of life in the face of death, of the source of identity and worth, the core question Jesus presents – “of what does my life consist?”

As a child of God, as one who is in Christ and sharing in his dying and rising, as one who values relationship and eternal things more than material things – how can I live in such a way that I am free and available and connected to myself, God, and my neighbor? Authentic conversion happens not by merely avoiding what is harmful, not by punishing myself into some external standard, but by having a bigger vision of my existence which calls forth from me and calls me forth so compellingly that I joyfully leave behind whatever gets in the way of living that vision.

I have mentioned to a few brothers the experience of visiting Sacro Speco in Subiaco two weeks ago, the monastery over St Benedict’s cave on the side of a sheer rock face. Above and below the grotto itself are layers of holy spaces cut out of the rock and painted with frescoes from the 13th to 15th century. Much of it looks as it did over 500 years ago. The guide pointed out that the frescoes on one level were over 100 years older than in the earlier level because that is how long it took to cut into the rock, shape and smooth it, and then finally paint the frescoes.

I had the image of the work being passed down through generations, perhaps within the same families. I thought about those who did the first 20 or so years of chipping and shaping and what they must have thought – here is the plan of the space, but I’ll never live to see it finished. The notion of starting something and not being able to or living long enough to see the results made me very anxious. Were I to time travel back 600 or 700 years and look ahead to the amount of work that had to be done and the time it would take, I would have said, “This is stupid. You want me to cut chapels out of solid rock? Don’t you know who I am? Can’t we just put up a sign or something?”

And the parable began to echo in my ears as me: I will say to myself ‘let’s do it now, quickly, and make sure that when it is finished I get the credit and that I am securing a place for myself.’ You fool. How often is the myth of instant gratification more important, more real, than the epic of God’s redeeming and reconciling the world in Christ. The choice that appeared before me was that either I could storehouse whatever I could grab today, OR I could leave a legacy, I could think about the lives of those who will come after, those who will remember me and us through the tangible and intangible bequest of our lives 20, 50, 100 years from now.

Faithfulness means that sometimes I reap the harvest God grows. Faithfulness also means that I may be called to plant seeds that others will tend to full fruitfulness. I stood in Sacro Speco admiring the beauty of the sacred in stone and paint that looks as if it has always been here and said ‘thank you’ to those who put in decades of prayer and work so that thousands of pilgrims could be inspired and moved by the gift of the human capacity for such wondrous perseverance and creativity because one man’s yes to God has produced a harvest of countless lives encountering the embrace of Jesus in one another. Amen.

Proper 13A - Jul 31, 2011

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.