Feast of Saint Joseph - March 19, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

The Rev. Suzanne Guthrie

Feast of St. Joseph - March 19, 2022

2 Samuel 7:4,8-16

Romans 4:13-18

Luke 2:41-52

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Your vision will only become clear when you look inside your heart

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.                                 -Carl Jung 1875-1961

Joseph must have known, in his dream of dreams, that Mary carried the Word in her womb.

That Joseph trusted his dream, that Joseph accepted the non-rational unknown, ennobles him in humility, courage, and integrity. That Joseph changes direction overnight in a dark conversion, makes him both a mystical icon, and an icon of hope.

Because Joseph is awakened by his dream, those of us looking on can take heart. I can change direction. I can take risks. I can learn to see in new ways.

How did Joseph know to turn aside from supposed “righteousness” as he knew it, that is, to put Mary away quietly, the less violent alternative according to law, and instead, follow a dark, non-rational,  alternative kind of righteousness? Something in his life – a practice of hope, perhaps - must have prepared him to pay attention to that particular dream that night:  do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

Such a statement can make perfect sense in the context of a dream. Do not fear to take Mary as your wife, because the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. AND you will take her to Mediterranean Disneyland in Alexandria and take a ride on a flying elephant called Dumbo.
Then that baby of hers will walk on water and you'll have to go fetch him, but you too, will walk on the water and then you'll help the king of Egypt shell chickpeas.

How do you find the prescient dream within the silly dream? Joseph, like his ancestor Joseph, the beloved son of Jacob, must have trusted his dreams. Okay, maybe Dumbo and the king with chickpeas was too silly.

Dreams make sense while you're in them. But not upon waking. What is more likely, really, that Mary experienced sexual relations (most likely unwelcome) OR that she is pregnant by the Holy Spirit? I mean, really.
 
But the Messenger in the dream sweetens the message with a scripture passage pregnant with hope, already deeply familiar to the dreamer: “Look, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us."  Isaiah 7:14

But even more than his dreams, in order to embrace Mary's unusual pregnancy Joseph must have trusted not only the voice of God in the prophets, but the “through-line”  tales of reversals of power throughout story narratives from Abraham onward. First, he chose not to blame the victim – Mary, which put himself at risk of being forever an outsider. Second, he chose wild, illogical HOPE. Hope flies to hope. Hope implies action.

Rebecca Solnit, the multifaceted activist and writer says, 

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.  Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
                                                                                    Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

Joseph is the embodiment of hope.  He means to pass this hope on to his son. Imagine him cradling the little one, and singing, [first, burp the baby, then play with the baby]

Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God,
who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever;
who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry.
            The Lord sets the prisoners free;
            the LORD opens the eyes of the blind.
            The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
            the Lord loves the righteous.
            The LORD watches over the strangers;
            he upholds the orphan and the widow,
            but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.                                       Psalm 146:5-9

If Joseph could believe and hope in the Lord God's promise to execute justice for the oppressed, give food to the hungry, set prisoners free, open the eyes of the blind, lift up those who are bowed down, love the righteous, watch over strangers, uphold the orphan and widow, then he probably had the potential to believe his espoused girl could be pregnant by the Holy Spirit rather than by a bullying Roman soldier.

See Joseph's nobility in today's passage from Luke. Children are the cruelest of critics. But here is Joseph, the opposite of toxic masculinity, with the opposite of arrogance, Joseph swallows the insult, I must be in my Father's house. For his own son's sake. For his son's own emerging sense of identity. To protect  Jesus' own belief in  that “through-line” of reversals of hubris and hate.

Rebecca Solnit again,

“I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.”
                                                                                            ― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

A poor man laboring as an artisan, no doubt working for the Roman oppressors in nearby Sepphoris, Joseph drew hope from the texts of his tradition, and saw in them the opportunity to act within the crack of business-as-usual, this promise, this dream of all dreams.

The Feast of St. Joseph -- The First Profession of the Monastic Vow by Br. Luc Simon Thuku, OHC

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
The Feast of St. Joseph
The First Profession of the Monastic Vow by Br. Luc Simon Thuku, OHC

2 Samuel 7:4,8-16
Romans 4:13-18
Luke 2:41-52

Click here for an audio version of this sermon and the rite of Profession.

It seems appropriate that we celebrate a monastic profession on the feast of St. Joseph. Joseph and monastic life have much in common, not only because tradition and culture have never quite known what to make of either, but more importantly, because of the virtues Joseph exemplifies---like steadfastness, courage, compassion, hope, faithfulness, and perseverance. All are required to live the monastic life with integrity. This makes Joseph the ideal model for the monastic. These virtues have brought Simon to the place he now stands today. Desire for God is not a merely personal, or even an eccentric choice. It is a consequence of what we are as humans. We are made to meet God, and it is in this encounter that we become simultaneously fully human and fully divine.¹ The only people who are transformed by this life, are people who feel safe, who feel their dignity, and who feel loved. That’s what we try to do for one another—offer relationships in which we can change. Human beings need a combination of safety and conflict to keep moving forward in life.

As you well know, Simon, initial formation takes us outside of our familiar framework and can conjure basic questions where meaning is challenged, decisions reconsidered, and doubts unearthed. It’s alarming and exhausting. It can drain us of joy. This is true now for all of us in these uncertain times. When our private little worlds go to dust, as St. Joseph’s did also, hope digs in the ruins of our heart for memory of God’s promise to bring good out of bad, joy out of sadness, and life out of death. Hope is not optimism in the face of the dire circumstances of this pandemic.  Hope is not founded on denial. Hope is made of memories which remind us that there is nothing in life we have not faced that we did not, through grace, survive. Hope is the certainty that something will make sense, regardless of how it turns out. In a dream an angel ignited hope in Joseph; in our own conversion, we can experience the same.

Today, Simon, as you make your commitment to continue to discern your call to this life, you remind all of us that the paschal mystery of Jesus’ dying and rising is the pattern of our monastic life. The vow gives less opportunity to run away from those parts of us that God is seeking to convert and transform. Our conversion is a sign of our commitment to allow God to continue to work within us. Day by day God reveals to us more and more of the true self we are made to be.

While we come here seeking God, it becomes more and more evident that God has sought us. In the depths of the heart we hear the invitation to abide with Christ. We cannot live this life apart from abiding in the love of Christ. He is the source of our life and love and all that flows from it in community. Our monastic life is the call to the all-inclusive love of God. Love is a transforming power. It is a disciplined habit of care and concern, that like all virtues, can be perfected only over a lifetime. Giving a witness to that love, leads deeper and deeper into the meaning of being chosen by Christ, and of preferring nothing to Christ.

Before Jesus’ birth, Joseph surveyed the mess he had absolutely nothing to do with and decided to trust that God was present in it. That same trust is required of all of us today. As Benedictines, stability provides the context for faithfulness in the instabilities of life which lie ahead for all of us. Faithfulness is a prerequisite to trust and intimacy. With divine love flowing through us we can see others and ourselves in our connectedness and wholeness. The vow does not put an end to struggle. Struggle stretches us beyond ourselves. It is what leaves us open to truth, however difficult it may be to accept. Without it, our faith would be the kind that happens around us but not in us. God intends us to live together in the fragility of human imperfection. So even though we will constantly fail, it is not the final word. In this we come to know ourselves, each other, and God.

Today, we are most like Joseph, presented with situations beyond our control, tempted to divorce ourselves from it, when an angel whispers hope in our ears as it did in his: “Do not be afraid, God is here.” It may not be business as usual, or how we had planned it, but God is present here too, if we will own it.

As you continue your discernment, Simon, the more honest you are in examining your own motives, the closer you are to being yourself. The more equipped you are to distinguish the person you want to be from the one everybody else wants you to be, the more likely you are to become it. Without the honesty it takes to unmask the self, there is no hope for liberation, let alone fulfillment. When we refuse to listen to the dreams that cry within us for fullness of life, we fossilize ourselves. When we give way to the obstacles that we create for ourselves, we doom ourselves to underdevelopment.²

To make a truly life-giving discernment, we all need to squarely face what it is that gives us life. We need to speak the truth of our interests, our abilities, our desires, our boredom, our dissatisfaction—even our long-time need to satisfy others. We need the help that comes from having our confusion and despair, our disappointment and anxiety accepted and understood by those who are not themselves threatened by what we might do with our own lives. We need the acceptance and encouragement of each other so we can move beyond fear to the freedom it takes to be who we are. The power that comes with self-discovery at any age catalyzes us. It drives the young; it surprises the middle aged; it emboldens those who might be tempted to declare life over before it has even truly begun. Our fundamental obligation in obedience is to be or to become what God wills. To do what God wills is secondary. We act according to what we are, so that we can stop doing what everyone else wants us to do and begin to care more about what God has made us to do.

The Gospel gives us an assurance that we are operating inside of an abundant, infinite Love.³ Within that abundance, Simon, it’s time for you to take the next step. We give great thanks that you’ve decided to do so, as we continue this journey together.  +Amen.

1. Michael Casey, Grace: On the Journey to God (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2018),41.
2. Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening to the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
2000), 49.
3. Adapted from Richard Rohr: Essential Teachings on Love, eds. Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger
(Orbis Books: 2018), 224-225.

The Feast of Saint Joseph: March 20, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
The Feast of Saint Joseph - Tuesday, March 20, 2018


To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. Randy Greve, OHC 

He did not ask for this.  He would be the most surprised of all at the fuss made about him.  He is not a preacher – in fact he speaks not so much as a single word in the Gospels.  Nor is he a writer, a founder, a reformer, a mystic, a teacher, or an artist.  

He is an ordinary, common, carpenter in a small town.  His death, which most scholars believe happened before Jesus began his ministry – a conspicuous absence from the text being the only basis of this theory, is not worth a mention to the gospel writers.

 Even this morning’s gospel reading puts him namelessly behind Mary, who speaks for them both as they interrogate the young Jesus recently in the Temple. 

The word “saint” is characterized along two streams in the breadth of the Church.  The formal designation for the canonized or recognized – those figures of history that we rightly view with admiration and imitation, but who often seem so beyond us in their heroic sanctity as to be practically super-human.  The impulse is to reflect on the life of a St. Antony, St. Benedict, or St. Francis and find ourselves rather ordinary by comparison, even if history has embellished the reality for effect.  The weight of this definition is on what makes saints if not better, at least different, from us.  The other definition of saint, the one I grew up with, emphasizes that every Christian is a saint in the exact same sense as any other Christian – the priesthood of all believers.  The emphasis is on our common human experience and need and reception of God’s grace that enables us to love and serve at all in whatever way God calls us.  While the first definition can hold up examples for us to emulate in our own lives, it can inadvertently create a gap between “saint” and “regular Christian”.  The second approach rightly begins with our commonality, but leaves the question of how we can recognize and celebrate the lives of those with truly extraordinary gifts and character.  The irony is that the really “sainty” saints always prefer the second definition, but defined by the first.

The gift for us in the story of St. Joseph is that he transcends and reframes the categories.  He is a saint of the ordinary category who is extraordinary in the simplicity and directness of his life and purpose.  Three verbs, three moments, three decisions are of the essence of his life and heart.  The angel comes to tell him to take Mary as his wife after she is revealed to be with child.  And he does.  The angel comes again to tell him to get up and take Mary and the baby and go to Egypt to escape Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.  He does.  The angel comes a third time to tell Joseph to go back with Mary and Jesus to the land of Israel.  So he got up and went to the land of Israel.  He does not need to speak.  His actions speak volumes.  Here is his purpose and his vocation.  We don’t need any more than this.  These acts – if this was all there was - is a life of obedience and service.  All that formed and shaped his heart lead to these moments and all that followed was forever changed by his listening and acting. 

        

As we read the biographies of our departed brothers around their death dates in chapter, I am moved over and over again by the recurrence of a phenomena:  at some point in the life of each brother he heard, he got up, he met a purpose, and he gave himself in a way that served a particular need, provided an essential offering of work and wisdom for the community.  For some it was a role in leadership, especially those who brought care and calm in times of turmoil or change.  For others it was the realization that their best service was a quiet, steady, behind-the-scenes gift for keeping things going.  For all of the variety of stories and personalities, and indeed many struggled and suffered profoundly with their own issues, none of them could have predicted the twists and turns their lives would take within this community or how responding to the monastic vocation in this Order would be a source of stretch and challenge, of joy and consolation.  The only assurance was that they had each other and their common commitment to keep getting up together.  I think to myself as I hear the biographies, “It’s almost as if he were born for this”.  And of course he was.  If there are saints in our history, saints among us now, and there are, they did not and do not ask for the title, much less the trials and sacrifices that formed their holiness.

What St. Joseph and the greater cloud of witnesses remind us of today is that the virtues to which they and we aspire are formed more by our response to the calls and opportunities that come our way than by any decision to make ourselves holy in a vacuum untouched by the changes and chances of this life.  My own plan for my life is never as adventurous and deep as God’s desire and potential for my life.  We are not first formed and then declared fit to live this life.  We are like Joseph prepared for and formed in the living that reveals our hearts and ushers us into humility and conversion.  Saints are people who in fear and trembling show up in such a way as to allow the needs of their communities to evoke out of their hearts and minds and souls and strength the power to get up that is truly there waiting but that they did not know they had.  I imagine Joseph as someone who just wanted to live an ordinary, quiet, undramatic life in Nazareth being a carpenter and raising a family.  That is a good life for some, but not all.  In Joseph, God saw a longing, a love, an obedience in his soul, perhaps unknown even to Joseph, and seeing that, God said to the angel, “him.” 

Each of us entered this community with a “yes” to an open vista full of unknowns, a life that included our ideas of what we wanted to do.  The life we want is not the life we get.  Conversion begins in believing that what we get is a gift from God.  If lived faithfully, the life we get has given us joys, trials, experiences and relationships we could not have imagined.  Character and commitment are tested and revealed in the moments after we say to ourselves, “I didn’t ask for this.  This is not what I signed up for.”  Look to Joseph in those moments.  Listen for the voice.  Get up when the call is to ditch your plan.  Get up when you don’t want to.  Get up when Egypt is far away and strange and full of risks.  Get up when your exile is over and it’s time to go home.  Ordinary, simple, an act, a decision, a yes - some made once and others affirmed and repeated and re-entered over and over, day by day, moment by moment.  May it be said of us, read about us in future generations, when all that is left of us are some ashes, a name plaque, and a story on a piece of paper, that we got up, we lived our unique purpose, we shaped a future, and so were formed by God’s grace into people who can be called extraordinarily common; in other words, saints. Amen.