Palm Sunday - Mar 20, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Will Owen, n/OHC
Palm Sunday - Sunday, March 20, 2016

The Liturgy of the Palms
Luke 19:28-40
Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29

The Liturgy of the Word
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Philippians 2:5-11
Luke 22:14-23:56

Br. Will preaching on the Passion

⧾ In the name of the Crucified One. Amen. ⧾

As I was preparing this sermon, I found myself at a loss for words or images to speak of the Passion. I’ve had that struggle, I think, because before and beyond all images of the Cross, the Cross is the shattering of images. And before and beyond all language about the Cross, the Cross is the silencing of language. To stand before the Cross and gaze on the crucified body of Our Lord is to seek annihilation—the burning away of all our assumptions and stories about ourselves, God, and the world in which we live. To pray the Cross is to consent to God’s desire to empty us entirely so that we may be filled with her life.

Dorothee Sölle, a German liberation theologian, says that we need “to learn to be empty in a world of surplus.” We need to learn to be empty in a world of surplus. What an elegant way of stating the dilemma we face as we encounter Christ’s Passion. How many of us pray this way, pray to be emptied?

I know that there is not a person in this room who does not have, encoded in their body, the effects of trauma, small or large T trauma. To live life and to love other people means to be hurt. These traumas are the gateway to emptiness. They are signposts pointing to the road that leads to the Cross, and, therefore, to Life. When these pains tap at our consciousness, we have a choice. We can choose to fill ourselves—really overstuff ourselves, which is a kind of numbing—with pills, or a drink, or food, or whatever it is that we turn to to numb the pain. Or we can choose the way of the Cross, which is the way of emptiness. We can allow God to move us deeper into our pain, to guide us into a deeper encounter with our trauma.

When we make this second choice, we find something astonishing. When we move further and further down the road of our traumas, we find Christ there, on the Cross, crucified on the Golgotha of our broken hearts, our broken lives. And when we draw even closer to Christ on the Cross in our hearts, there we are, too, hidden away in Christ’s own broken heart. When we draw that close to Christ on the Cross, we find a piece of ourselves that was never harmed, never touched by all the hurts that have afflicted us. There is a part of us that was never wounded, that remained whole and in union with God, hidden away, shielded in Christ’s heart as he hangs upon the Cross in the center of our broken, battered lives.

This Holy Week, I leave us all with the invitation to allow God to empty us out, so that we become a kind of new-hewn tomb in which to lay the body of our crucified Lord, which is our own body and the body of the world we live in. And from that place of emptiness, we will, in God’s time, know the power of her Resurrection.

Amen.

All Saints B - Nov 1, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Will Owen, n/OHC
The Feast of All Saints - Sunday, November 1, 2015

Isaiah 25:6-9,
Revelation 21:1-6a,
John 11:32-44

All Saints Day candles in Poland

⧾ In the name of God our Mother, who sings the universe into being and calls it beautiful.  Amen. ⧾

"All things
are too small
to hold me.
I am so vast

In the infinite
I reach
for the Uncreated

I have touched it,
it undoes me
wider than wide

Everything else
is too narrow

You know this well,
you who are also there"

That’s from Hadewijch of Brabant, a 13th-century Flemish beguine who wrote a cadre of mystical love poems to God that boldly convey the union with the Uncreated that is the birthright of all creation. The oneness of creation with the Uncreated is the heart of holiness and the goal of the sanctified life.

It’s quite the task to speak to the glory and witness of all the saints, by which I mean those people, known and unknown, living, dead, and yet to come whose lives, like Hadewijch’s poetry, hold up for us a model of holiness. To speak of all of the saints is really to speak of the huge and incredible—really the impossibly innumerable—ways that God’s grace moves through and in each of our lives to draw us and the world toward a more perfect wholeness and unity. To speak of all the saints is to speak of the vast and glorious work of redemption—not only of humanity but of the whole creation.

That’s why I find it particularly appropriate that we hear the apocalyptic readings from Isaiah and Revelation today. Apocalypse, as most of you probably know, simply means “unveiling,” in the case of the apocalypse in today’s texts, the unveiling of the reality of the new creation. Narratively we conceive of this unveiling as something that will happen in the future when Christ returns to make all things new. It is then, as John says, that the first things will pass away and that the heavenly Jerusalem will descend to earth. And although narratively it makes sense to speak of this unveiling as something that will happen sometime in the future, it would be more accurate to say that the new creation is a reality at all moments in time.

All creation and all redemption are one eternal movement of God’s Spirit, a movement that exists and has existed in every moment—from the creation of the universe at the beginning of time; to the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension of our Lord; to the new creation at the apocalypse—all are part of one eternally present movement of God’s Spirit. Revelation and unveiling—these are the moments when this reality announces itself to us in the midst of our human lives, when we can see, if only for a brief moment, the luminosity of our own selves and of all the created world—the shining garment of God’s body that is present in all people and all things, if we only have eyes to see.

With God’s help, those we call saints unveil this new creation in their bodies and their lives. They themselves are an apocalypse. And they show us that the new creation is born in us, not in spite of our struggles, shortcomings, and sins, but—unbelievably—through them. For the saints did not become holy despite their humanity. They became holy through that humanity. To put it another way, struggle, pain, limitation, finitude, and sin are not barriers to grace—they are gateways to new life. For our struggles connect us with our need for mercy and grace. They remind us, often painfully, sometimes humorously, that we are not self-created or self-sustaining. The more we engage our shortcomings with integrity and contrition, the more room we create for God to flood our lives with her love. The painful places in our lives are the places from which we cry out to God in longing for new life. And because of this movement, it is specifically from our so-called vices that our virtues are drawn out of us.

Saint Augustine strikes me as a poignant and powerful example of this dynamic. He struggled his entire life with his sexuality. It was the means he used to resist the influx of grace into his life. And ultimately it became the doorway to his salvation. By struggling with his sexuality Augustine came to see that below the craving for sex and companionship was a powerful, aching longing for union with God. As he allowed himself to inhabit that longing more and more fully, he allowed God to draw out of him extraordinarily moving descriptions of union, wholeness, and love. His longing, which seemed like the absence of God’s love, was actually the seed of that love’s presence. For longing contains within it a foretaste of its own fulfillment, and it draws that fulfillment nearer.

In her first novel Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson offers a scene that reads like a contemporary gloss of the biblical apocalypse:

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden. Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.

In the end I believe we will come to see that all is grace. Everything—the heartache, the laughter, the love, the longing, all our sinfulness, all our shortcomings, all our resistance—all are a part of God’s loving call of return to us. Every atom of our lives can draw out of us a yearning cry, like Augustine’s, a song of longing for God that joins with her own song of longing for us, a song that like the song that brought the universe into being, calls forth the new creation here and now. With the saints we will come to know that God’s redemptive work is being accomplished, and has been accomplished, that we are already holy, even and especially in the midst of our humanity. 

Luminous moments of apocalypse occur all around us and within us, all the time. The saints themselves are such moments. They are the living stones of a New Jerusalem, coming down from heaven to declare that God’s place is among and within her creation. We are those stones, too. With Hadewijch and Augustine, with Holy Mary and Benedict, with Blessed James our founder and Alan Whittemore, with you, and you, and you, and all of you—with the whole of creation we reach out to the Uncreated. She undoes us. Wider than wide. Everything else is too narrow. We know this well. We who are also there.

Proper 10 B - Jul 12, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Will Owen, n/OHC
Proper 10 B – Sunday, July 12, 2015

Amos 7:7-15
Ephesians 1:3-14
Mark 6:14-29

Christ seduces us and then draws us on to martyrdom

Christ seduces us and then draws us on to martyrdom.

Martyrdom often confounds us, even repulses us. Or we may look at martyrs—like Oscar Romero, for instance—as deified persons who possess a kind of holiness we ordinary people lack. And, of course, there are the ridiculous examples of martyrs. Take, for instance, the group that Brother Bede likes to refer to who claims to have as a relic the head of John the Baptist as an infant. But however we do so, we dismiss martyrdom to our own detriment. It is at the very heart of the Christian story of redemption and new life. Before Jesus is raised from the dead, he is martyred on a Cross. And he makes it perfectly clear that if we are to follow him, we must share that fate.

Christ seduces us and then draws us on to martyrdom.

Martyrdom rests on our obedience to the Word speaking in our hearts, and it is by the light of Christ that we walk the road that leads to our own death. Obedience has as its root the Latin word that means more simply to listen, and the kind of obedience that Christ asks of us is at its heart a deep listening to the Beloved speaking within us, calling us forward, whispering our name. The Beloved’s voice is often seductive. It claims us, names us, strips us like a lover. In his chapter on Obedience, Saint Benedict points out this dynamic:

It is love, therefore, that impels [obedient persons] to pursue everlasting life; therefore, they are eager to take the narrow road of which the Lord says: Narrow is the road that leads to life (Matt 7:14). They no longer live by their own judgment, giving in to their own whims and appetites; rather, they walk according to another’s decisions and directions, choosing to live in monasteries and to have an abbot over them. […] Almost at the same moment as the master gives the instruction, the disciple quickly puts it into practice […]; and both actions together are swiftly completed as one. (RB 1980, 5:10-12, 9)

As Benedict points out, the impetus for obedience and martyrdom is love, and its aim is union with the Beloved. As we listen to the voice of the Beloved, we fall in love more and more with Christ. And with that love as our foundation, we find ourselves eager to follow. We begin to find freedom in giving ourselves—our bodies and our wills—to Christ, in joyful obedience. That foundation of love is absolutely essential if we are to progress in the Christian life, but it is only the beginning, and it’s the easy part.

Christ seduces us, and then draws us on to martyrdom.

With our love for Christ as our focus, and conversion to Christ our one aim, we start down that narrow road that leads to life. And we find that it is, first of all, the road that leads to death, the death of the false, ego-driven self. The death of all our resistance to God’s in-pouring of grace. The death of our exporting of evil and hatred. If we follow Christ long enough and faithfully enough, we must eventually encounter the darkest parts of ourselves. We must face our own hatred, jealousy, and willfulness, our own lust, idolatry, and desire to kill the Other. Most of all we have to confront the ways we have lied to ourselves, the ways we continue, daily, to lie to ourselves.

The recent killings in Charleston have put flesh on this road to martyrdom for me. It would be so easy, especially if, like me, you’re a liberal white person, to condemn the killings as acts of hate, and to see their source as the evil of white supremacy taken root in a lost young man. Even as we might acknowledge and repudiate the racist history of America and the systems of white privilege and black disenfranchisement that history has produced, and even as we might rightly name and mourn our part in perpetuating those systems, we miss something essential, and essentially Christian. 

As long as we can point outside of ourselves to the source of evil, be it Dylann Roof, white supremacy, slavery, white privilege, easy access to guns, or any number of other horrors in this world, we excuse ourselves from the difficult and painful process of confronting our own hatred, our own violence, our own disgust. I don’t mean that there are not important lessons to learn about racial hatred in America from the Charleston killings. There absolutely are. And the killings also provide us with another opportunity to follow the voice of the Beloved beckoning us down the road toward martyrdom.

Most of us—I hope all of us—will never enter a church and kill people out of racial hatred. But we share more in common with Dylann Roof and other white supremacists than we want to own up to. We all have hatred within us. I mean real, hot, burning, bubbling hatred. We all have the impulse to kill, maim, and annihilate. Probably that hatred doesn’t come out as wanting to do violence to black people. But maybe it comes out as wanting those we live with to disappear utterly, entirely and violently when who they are seems anathema to who we are, maybe it comes out as a venomous clinging to our own will in the face of those who are different from us, maybe it comes out as seething rage at our impotence in the face of the world’s or our own intractable shortcomings.

Sometimes those forces are turned inward, too. Sometimes rather than wanting to kill or maim someone else, we crave our own annihilation. We seek to merge with another to the point that we disappear. Or we loathe and abuse ourselves. As surely as there are forces of light within us—and there are—there are depths of violence and hatred as well.

Deep listening to the voice of the Beloved eventually takes us to these places. With the light of Christ shining in our darkness, we are given the opportunity to see ourselves. I mean really, truly see ourselves. See the wounds and the pain, the hatred, the resistance, and the love, too. And when we do see in this way, something shatters. Our images of ourselves break apart. We break apart. It’s well known that we cannot look on the face of God and live. But neither can we look on our own truest face and live, at least not the way we’ve been living.

The encounter with self in its fullness, at this level, is its own martyrdom. In meeting the depths of our darkness, we join Christ on the Cross. The 20th-century mystic Simone Weil calls this encounter with the self “affliction,” and sees in it the gateway to union with God:

It is in affliction itself that the splendor of God’s mercy shines, from its depths, in the heart of inconsolable bitterness. If still persevering in our love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” If we remain at this point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something that is not affliction, not joy, something that is the central essence, necessary and pure […]: the very love of God. (Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd, p. 44)

When we are crucified on the Cross of our own hypocrisy, hatred, and violence, the life born in us is Christ’s life, the very love of God. Weil goes on to describe this love. It fills the whole universe, she says, and becomes the bird with golden wings that pierces an opening in the egg of the world. After that, such a soul loves the universe, not from within, but from without; from the dwelling place of the Wisdom of God, our first-born brother. Such a love does not love beings and things in God, but from the abode of God. Being close to God it views all beings and things from there, and its gaze is merged in the gaze of God. (Weil, p. 50)

When we are crucified and reborn with Christ in this way, our life, Christ’s life, is the life of and in all things, and that means that we are in all things and all things are in us. Then we see that there truly is no way to hate another without hating ourselves, or to kill another without killing ourselves. And having already died and been born into Christ, physical death holds little fear.

Finally, we see, that the way of martyrdom, the way of the Cross, is the way of seduction. Drawn on by the caress of the Beloved’s voice, we obey, we die, and we are made one body with Christ and with all the world.

Easter 4 B - Apr 26, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Will Owen, n/OHC

Easter 4 B – Sunday, April 26, 2015

Acts 4:5-12
1 John 3:16-24
John 10:11-18

God is Love is God

We live in a world filled with noise, both internal and external. Traffic, street corner preachers, and cell phone beeps and lights have become so common that we don’t even notice them. Media and advertising bombard our eyes and our psyches with pornographic images and subtle messages that we’re not good-looking enough, smart enough, rich enough. The voices of our culture and history telling us that white is right and black is criminal. We still hear those taunts from childhood bullies ringing in our ears: Hey fattie! Are you gay? Can you afford that, welfare FREAK!? And the voices, subtler still, perhaps of our parents, our exes, our old teachers telling us we’re lazy and will never amount to anything, too fat, too queer, too dumb, too too too too too much. A cacophony of insult, shame, and fear bearing down on us every moment, driving us to do more, work harder, buy more stuff.

Surrounded as we are by this relentless noise, it's no wonder we often hear God’s voice as an echo of the world’s and our own bigoted, hateful screech. God’s voice is that of a chiding parent, vengeful judge, or jealous spouse, a never-ending purgation, stripping us to the bone like carbolic acid on tender flesh, eating, picking, nagging us raw and bleeding. The truth, of course, is that life often does flay us and bring us to our knees. But while God’s voice does sometimes call to us in judgment, it does so, even then, as a lullaby or love song. It is our own voices and those of our society and the hurt people that fill it that come like a wolf in the night to drive us away from the sheepfold and into the outer darkness. But God’s voice is that of the Beloved, a siren cry calling us home from our self-imposed exile.

Like a lullaby, the voice of the Beloved coaxes us into a sleep that is really an awaking. W.H. Auden describes this process in his poem “Lullaby”:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms til break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

As we fall asleep to the voices of the world and awaken to that of the Beloved, we find that dreaming is the real reality. All we thought we knew is turned upside down and seem ridiculous. Judgment is really love. The hatred, shame, grief, and guilt that fill our lives are not barriers to God’s loving us: they are gateways. And the barren earth of our broken hearts is the fertile ground of paradise.

This voice of the Beloved does strip us, but like a lover would, softly, tenderly, urgently unbuttoning and slipping off the second skin of our personas, softening our calloused hearts with sweet, whispering sighs, coaxing us back to life until we stand naked and unashamed, like Eve and Adam first waking, filled with the breath of God. The voice of the Beloved caresses our skin like a lover’s breath, warm and insistent, stirring our desire and anticipation, and soothing our shyness. This is the meaning of that wonderful verse from Psalm 29: The voice of the Lord makes the oak trees writhe, and strips the forest bare. We are the oak trees; we are the forest. As this voice moves deeper and deeper onto, into, and under our skin, it takes us to the raw, throbbing aliveness at the center of our being, the bloody, beating heart that is at once our heart and Christ’s. This is the place where our desire for God and God’s desire for us meet, and from this place flows our truest life.

In this deepest place we know that the Beloved has always been with us, curled up next to us in our mother’s womb and still here now, beckoning us: Come home, come home, come home. Lay your sleeping head, my love, here on my chest. Listen to the thud of my heart, tapping out the drum beat of new life. Come home.

Lent 5 B - Mar 22, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Will Owen, n/OHC

Lent 5 B – Sunday, March 22 2015

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Hebrews 5:5-10

John 12:20-33

The tree of life

I’ve been thinking a lot about judgment recently, particularly as it’s come up in our Lenten gospel readings. This week’s gospel text ends by telling us Now is the judgment of this world. Now the ruler of this world will be driven out. What follows after, which doesn’t make it into the section we read today, is the admonition to walk while we have the light so that the darkness will not overtake us. That light, as we know, is Jesus, who by this point in John’s gospel has turned his face toward Jerusalem and the death he will meet there. By this point in Lent, we have also turned our faces and our hearts in that direction. We notice, too, that this bit about walking while we still have the light links this passage about judgment to the one we read last week. And this is the judgment: that the light has come into the world, and people preferred darkness to light.

When we hear about judgment, it’s hard to escape the image of judgment made famous by that great 18^th century preacher Jonathan Edwards: we are sinners in the hands of an angry God, like a spider dangling over the flames of hell. And even if we reject this image out of hand as based on an antiquated and irrelevant theology, we often try to read the scriptures as if they were law codes or how-to manuals. Okay, how do I get close to Jesus? Sell all that I have and give it to the poor. Check. Okay, how do I follow Jesus? Take up my cross. Check. How do I get God’s love? Confess my sins. Check. But the gospel accounts are not law codes or how-to manuals. No, they’re poetry. And love poetry at that. They’re full of image and metaphor and story. They’re a communication from the source of all life, a love song calling us home from our self-imposed exile. And rather than give us facts and rules, they are meant to convey the incomparable and unbearable prodigality of God’s love for the world. Incomparable because we can’t make any sense of the scope of God’s love with human reason. And unbearable, because God’s love demands a death and a surrender so total that we resist it with everything that we have and are.

Seen in the context of a love poem, judgment ceases to be something fearful and terrible and becomes a supreme act of love, drawing us ever closer to the abundant life that flows from Christ Jesus. Judgment is nothing other than an honest exposition of reality, in this case the reality that God knew and loved us completely even before the creation of the universe and that God continues to do so now, despite the manifold ways that we resist and attempt to sabotage or manipulate that love. In the light of judgment all our resistance to God’s love is exposed and our death is required. We cannot stare into the face of love without dying, and our hearts cannot make space for God’s love without breaking open.

In the exposing light of God’s judgment we see our brokenness for what it is. We glimpse both the depth of God’s love for us and the reality of how often we have made ourselves and others small to escape that love. This is a painful process. When I started visiting the monastery, I would often sit down with one particular brother. As he shared his own experience, he talked a lot about the love he’d known in his life, about God’s love for him and God’s love for me, and his own love for me. My eyes filled with tears. He said to me, “it hurts to be loved.” Not a question, but a recognition. Yes, it does. It hurts to know ourselves loved without having earned it or deserved it, for no reason at all other than because we exist. The revelation of that dynamic through the light of love—that’s all judgment is.

We cannot earn God’s love, nor do we need to. God’s love for us is more fundamental than the air we breathe, closer than our heartbeat. Seeing the reality of God’s love for us and the ways we resist it allows us to take responsibility for our own broken hearts and to move more deeply into them. When we move into those broken hearts we will find Jesus there: Jesus on the Cross, on the Golgotha of our broken hearts. He has been there all along, and we never knew it. He’s been there, hurting as we hurt, loving us from the beginning to the end of all existence, inviting us to join him in his death, in our deaths, the death of all our running away, all our resistance, all our insistence on earning love, all our self-will, the annihilation of our false self, so that we may join him in the abundance of his life.

Drawing on an image reminiscent of our gospel text today, the fourth century poet and hymnodist St. Ephrem the Syrian, in one of his poems on virginity, says that the Tree of Life, in the midst of the Garden of Eden, “saw that Adam had stolen” the fruit and “sank into the virgin ground / and was hidden / —but burst forth and reappeared on Golgotha.” Seen in this way, the Cross is none other than the Tree of Life that once grew at the center of paradise. It grows up out of the ground once more to cradle the body of Christ. When that precious body touches the dead wood of the Cross, the Cross bursts forth into fruit and flower, revealed for what it truly is: that Tree of Life. Another Orthodox theologian, David the Invincible, writing two hundred years after Ephrem, picks up the theme: “Blessed are you, Holy Wood, crowned by Christ, / that grew on earth, yet spreading your arms rose / above the arches of the highest heavens, / and brought forth and carried upon yourself / the imponderable fruit! / […] You flowered in the stock of Israel / and the whole earth was filled with your fruits.”

Just as the dead wood of the Cross becomes for us the Tree of Life, so the light of God’s judgment reveals our broken hearts to be the new Golgotha, sanctified places where Christ dwells eternally within us, bearing the fruit of new and abundant life, fruit for us and fruit for the world. This is the meaning of resurrection; this is the new life God promises us; and this is the awesome power of God’s love for us and the whole creation—not that our hearts will never break, not that we will never know death, but that through our hearts breaking and through our own dying to ourselves, the very places within us that are most barren and empty will become the fertile ground of our and the world’s most abundant life. This Lent, in the light of God’s loving judgment, may we, like that grain of wheat, die and rise to bear fruit for the world.

Epiphany 3 B - Jan 25, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Mr. Will Owen, Postulant

Epiphany 3 B, Sunday, January 25, 2015

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

The calling of  Peter and Andrew

It’s a little cruel, and some might even say providential, that we postulants have been given these Epiphany texts on Jesus’ calling of his first disciples to preach on. And try as I might to escape it, I cannot avoid the questions and assertions about vocation that our Gospel reading today raises. Our readings today are all about vocation, about how we respond to the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ. And yet, when we really look closely at them, they’re not about vocation in any of the ways we typically think of it.

Our Gospel begins with Jesus’ call to the people of Galilee to repent. He comes telling them that the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is near, repent, turn back to God, leave behind all that stands between you and your salvation. And then the text continues with an account of a specific call Jesus gives to Andrew and Simon and then to James and John: follow me. Follow me and I will make you fish for people. It would be so easy to read these texts and hear Jesus telling the general crowd to ask forgiveness for their sins and these specific people to become disciples, or, read through our ecclesiastical lens, to become the first bishops of the church that we are now a part of. Everything within me screams out WRONG. Or, if not wrong, then at least woefully incomplete. Much, much too simple. Much, much too easy. And much, much too small.

You see, Jesus’ call to Andrew and Simon, to James and John, to the people of Galilee, and to us here today is nothing less than the call to new, abundant, and transformative life in God. It is nothing less than the call to salvation, to wholeness in Christ.

Take that in for a moment. Wholeness. Transformation. Full and total healing and renewal. New and abundant life. Life itself. Life. That’s a pretty radical statement, that God wants nothing less for us than total and complete healing.

This vision of vocation is completely unreasonable. To talk of healing, salvation, and vocation in this way is to come dangerously close to becoming that person walking down the streets of New York crying out “Alleluia! There is good news in Jesus Christ!” As Brother Roy so astutely pointed out in his sermon on radical hope during Advent, what most offends us reasonable folk in these evangelists and evangelicals is their utter and unreasonable certainty that God will make them and all things new again, indeed, that God is already doing that.

My first semester of seminary, I had to take introductory theology. At the end of the lecture on Christology—the theology of Christ—one of the students asked our professor about the Resurrection, something he hadn’t even mentioned. The professor got a large smile on his face, started chuckling, and said, “You’re in seminary now, people. You’ve got to leave all that resurrection stuff behind. You can’t let your faith turn you into a stupid person.” Although this professor’s response was deliberately provocative, in essence he only described what most of us do every single day: we resist, nay even deny, that which is unreasonable and, in this age of scientific progress and inquiry and secular humanism and atheism, that which is utterly indefensible. If we cannot give a reasonable accounting of the faith that is in us, then we don’t even try.

And yet, what good is a salvation that is reasonable? The evil that fills our world is anything but reasonable. Child sexual abuse is not reasonable. A third of all black men in America in prison is not reasonable. Abandonment, addiction, miscarriages, marriages falling apart, the loneliness, self-doubt, and shame that so often fill our lives—none of it is reasonable! And if we settle for a vision of salvation that is reasonable, then we have lost, and evil has won.

Sometimes, I think, we’re so afraid that evil actually has won that we can’t bear to hope for new life. Because to hope for new life and not to get it might devastate us even more than we have already been devastated. It’s as if we’ve been locked in a dark basement for years and years, so long that we have forgotten what light looks like, so long that even the faintest ray of sunshine is painful to our eyes. We become afraid that the daybreak from on high that is God’s flooding into our lives will annihilate us. And so we tame the Gospel, and we make it small.

The truth is that this inbreaking of God is painful. It cracks open our hearts, splits them right in two. And that breaking of our hearts is a good thing, a necessary thing. For only with our hearts broken open do we have enough room for the love that God wants to bring into our lives and for the love that God wants to call forth from us. Only with broken hearts can we begin to heal this hurt and hurting world we have been given to be a part of.

The good news is that the Kingdom of God is near at hand, the time is fulfilled. We are continually given the opportunity to respond in a new way, to turn back from our fear and to embrace the Gospel of New Life in Jesus Christ. As many times as we say no, God continues to say yes. Saying yes to new life is our true vocation as Christian people. I don’t believe God ultimately cares whether we’re doctors or monks or fishermen, whether we’re married or have kids or live single or celibate lives. It’s not that none of this matters—of course our relationships and our jobs can contribute or distract from the fullness of our lives—but God’s call to us is so much bigger than we could ever imagine in our reasonable minds. God’s call to us to hope for wholeness in Christ Jesus. May we walk this path together in freedom and in love.