Proper 28 B - Nov 15, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Joseph Wallace-Williams, n/OHC
Proper 28 B - Sunday, November 15, 2015

Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25
Mark 13:1-8

“Let us consider how to provoke one another to love, and good deeds, encouraging one another.” Heb10: 25

Morning-by-Morning faithfulness.  

Hope in God

In the very early stages of my discernment as to whether or not God was calling me to ordained ministry, and well into my time in seminary, I found myself faced with that dreaded question that inevitably any young seminary student who is not married or partnered is faced with on a date.  Yes!  That great dreaded question: “So tell me, what do you do for a living?”

In an attempt to come up with some witty response that would not be a flat-out lie I did a non-scientific survey of clergy I knew. I asked them for their response to the question “what do you do for a living?” Here are some of the responses:

• I’m a teacher.
• I'm in the service industry.
• I am a firefighter.
• I am a museum curator.
• I am into antiquing.
• Oh me? I work for a really old nonprofit.
• Oh, I am in the insurance industry.
• I do weddings.
• And a Rabbi friend said:  I'm in the funeral industry.

But here is the one that jumped out to me: “I am a consultant. My specialty is helping to get people out of bankruptcy.” I asked my friend to explain why she used this. She said, “Think about it. As clergy we help individuals and the Church get out of a type of spiritual bankruptcy. Like a good consultant, you speak the truth to your ‘clients’ about how they got to this place without judging them. You empower them to develop, implement, and carry out a plan that will help them immediately to begin to find their way out of un-health, and you help set them up for success in the days and years to come.”

I think my friend was spot-on. You and I, as the body of Christ, are a royal priesthood, and we are to encourage each other to live more fully and boldly our commitment to Christ.

In the letter to the Hebrews we hear, “Let us consider how to provoke one another to love, and good deeds, encouraging one another.” (Heb10: 25)

You and I know all too well that there is no such thing as life without struggle. I have met it, from one end of life to another. Over and over again, what I thought were the foundations of life have shifted and slid away from me, sometimes only changing my mental and emotional typography a little, and at other times completely shattering every given I've ever assumed into a kind of kaleidoscope of deep pain, despair, and hopelessness.

I have come, like you, through the death of loved ones, life-shaping disappointment, and rejection. When tragedy strikes, when trouble comes, when life disappoints us—as Jesus reminds us that it surely will—we stand at the intersection of hope and despair.

To go the way of despair not only colors the way we look at things and makes us suspicious of the future and those around us. It also makes us pessimistic and downright negative about the present.

It is this pessimistic, distorted view of reality that leads us to ignore the very possibilities that could save us, and worse, it leads us to want to inflict pain and hurt as we have been hurt ourselves.

But when I am in my right state of mind and can think more clearly, I realize that when I say that I am in despair and feeling a sense of hopelessness, what I am really saying is that I have given up on God. That I really don't believe that with God all things are possible. And that God really doesn't care.

Think about it—despair at its core says that I am God and if I can't do anything about this situation, then nothing and nobody can.

But if we go the way of hope, and take life on its own terms, we come to know that whatever happens God lives in it! Hope and hopefulness come from the knowledge that we do not belong to ourselves. I think the Heidelberg Catechism puts it well when it says, “Question: What is your only comfort in life and in death?" The answer begins: "That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.”

You see, contrary to popular belief, hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside of us to get better. Hope is all about getting better on the inside about what is going on outside.  It is about becoming open to the God of Newness. It is about allowing ourselves to let go of the present, and believe in a future that is soon to be but not quite yet, trusting in a God whose power working in us and through us can and is doing greater things than we can ask or imagine.  It is about holding on when life seems pointless and perhaps even a little absurd.

Yes, it is hope in things not yet seen that will bring us to the point of personal transformation, which is found at the intersection of maturity and stagnation.
Every dimension of the process of struggle may in fact be an invitation to draw from the well that is God’s deep love for us.  Hope is not grounded in the future. Christian hope—our hope knows at the core that God did not look down from a distant heaven and say, “There, there, it's all right.” But, in Jesus, God entered into the full range of our human suffering and tragedy. Jesus walked right into the fire of pain, while we ordinary human beings allow the troubles of life to twist and distort us into victims, oppressors, or a combination of the two. Jesus’ suffering shaped him into a perfect offering. And so we hope, because we have His hope.

An ancient people tell the story of the elder who was talking about struggle. The elder said, "I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is the vengeful, angry, violent one.  The other wolf is the loving, compassionate one." And the disciples asked, "But which wolf will win the fight in your heart?" And the holy one answered, "It depends on which one I feed." The spiritual task of life is to feed hope.  Hope is not something to be found outside of us.  It lies in the spiritual life we cultivate within. To wrestle with life is to be transformed into the self we are meant to become, to step out of the confines of our false securities, and to allow our creating God to go on creating in us.

Now if you have found yourself squirming and uncomfortable with my words this morning or the thought has crossed your mind, “What does he know?” Or “how sophomoric or naïve of him.” Or “how overly simplistic of him. My situation is so much more complicated than that.” Perhaps you are correct and perhaps you are actually standing at the intersection of hope in God's abundance and the darkness of despair and hopelessness. Perhaps you are in the very place right now where you need to make the decision to change your perspective and live in the abundant life God invites each and every one of us to.

Some days and long nights we cannot see the victory of Christ with the naked eye, but we can hear it with the naked ear. Beloved, the psalmist says, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will not fear, for you. O God, are with me.”

In other words, if you want to know the truth, pay more attention to the Gospel you hear than to the obsolete evil you and I see.

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 25 B - Oct 25, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Sr. Shane Phelan, CMA
Proper 25 B - Sunday, October 25, 2015

Job 42:1-6, 10-17
Hebrews 7:23-28 Mark 10:46-52

Job

Today’s readings seem so reassuring.  They offer us the promise that we long for.  God rewards Job for his righteousness.  Jesus heals Bartimaeus, who then follows him on the way.  What good news!  God is faithful and powerful.  Happy days are here again!

Our passage from Job comes at the very end of the book.  Commentators agree that the beginning and the end of the book were written separately from the long contest that occupies most of the book.  In the beginning, God bets Satan that Job will be faithful no matter what.  He lets Satan take everything from Job: his children die, his livestock dies, he contracts painful diseases.  He is bereft.

Job’s friends come by to “comfort” him, to be “helpful” by telling him what to do.  They insist that he must have sinned, and that if he confesses he will be restored.  Job stands in the truth that he has done nothing to deserve what has happened.  He will not curse God, but he will also not pretend a repentance he does not feel.  God eventually overwhelms him, reminding him who is God and who is dust, but the issue of justice is not resolved.  God never answers Job’s challenge.

Clearly, someone could not stand this dangling ending.  So we get the final chapter, where Job’s fortunes are restored.  Ironically, the author apparently agrees with Job’s friends about what God is like.  He wants us to forget the mysterious, awful, even capricious nature of God in favor of a Disney God.  

That Disney God is always around to tempt us.  When we focus on Jesus’ healing and teaching and forget the cross, we’re in Disneyland.  When we celebrate the messiah and reject the despised and rejected one, we’re in Disneyland.

But I’m not in Disneyland.  I’m in a haunted house, surrounded by ghosts.  Job’s sons and daughters crowd in around me.  With them are all the victims of trauma, all those who can’t forget or be forgotten.  What sort of restoration, what sort of healing, follows from trauma like Job’s?

On the way to raising four children, my mother had five miscarriages.  We carry a genetic defect that causes this.  My sister has two living children, but she has never forgotten Benjamin, who she lost at five months.  Her daughter has not had children yet, but she has lost one.  And I, when I was young, miscarried the only child I was to carry.  For years after that I would imagine my daughter.  I would count the years and think, “she would be in high school now.”  Then college, then law school.  (I don’t know why law school, it just showed up.)  Finally I stopped counting.  I eventually had a liturgy to put her to rest, the child I never knew.

Do you think Job was restored as good as new?
Do you think his wife recovered, having ten more children?
Do you think that Holocaust survivors got over it, that veterans get over it if they come back and find good jobs?

Are you over it?

29 months after Hurricane Katrina, Deacon Julius Lee stood in his yard in New Orleans and said  “The storm is gone, but the “after the storm” is always here.”  Already residents were feeling pressured to move on, to get over it, to show the world that things were normal.  But trauma does not just move on.  Trauma lives on.

In her book, Spirit and Trauma, Shelly Rambo listens to trauma in Scripture and in theology.  Following the growing field of trauma studies, she looks at the ways that trauma lingers and asks how that might shape our understanding of Christian life.  She suggests, I think rightly, that our resurrection story can too often become like Job’s happy ending, suppressing the memory of trauma that the disciples would have experienced. 

Resurrection can’t just meaning getting over the cross.  The cross haunts the Christian imagination, as it must have haunted the disciples even after seeing the risen Christ.  And Bartimaeus’ healing would not mean that his years of suffering were erased.  We do not simply get over our histories.  Bartimaeus has built a whole world around the loss of his sight.  He has spent years shunned or ignored; in fact he is told by the crowd to be quiet even when Jesus appears.  He has strength of will and desire, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t scarred.

So what is his life like on the road, in the wake of his healing?  I imagine he might be a bit suspicious of those who suddenly warm up to him.  Like the friends who return to Job, these new friends might have some work to do to prove their friendship.  And in the midst of their shared excitement and joy on the road, Bartimaeus will have fears and anxieties that the others will not share.  He has knowledge of the world in a way that those who have always seen do not.  Like Jesus, he has scars to mark his trauma.  They just aren’t always visible.

So the happy ending may not be the faithful ending.  It’s not faithful to the reality of human life, or of the ways we encounter God.
Where is God when children are gunned down at school, or die of drug overdoses?  
Where is God when some have no food or shelter, and others walk by them on their way to their BMWs?  
Where is the resurrection in our inner cities?  

Rather than a story of triumph, perhaps the story we need is a story of remaining, of enduring and sustaining.
We are in the hands of a God who is beyond our understanding.  

Job’s story reminds us that creeds and doctrines are not the heart of our faith.  At the heart of our faith is an experience, an encounter with God in Christ.  This encounter can be exhilarating, but it can also be terrifying.  
And, like any true encounter, it is transforming.  The real presence of God exceeds our Disney imagination, even the imagination of our worst fears.  

God is beyond comprehension, but not beyond relationship.

Job’s strength lies in his authenticity.  He does not pretend or try to “be good.”  He does not mouth pieties in order to placate God.  What, after all, can happen to him now?  Job is out on the vast sea of God, beyond nice phrases, and he has nothing but his fidelity.  
But out there, with nothing in the way, he can find God’s presence.  He remains, he endures, and he is transformed.

We owe it to ourselves, to one another, to our children to speak the truth about God. God stands with us in suffering and injustice, but not as one who would magically erase the effects of sin.  God endures with us, and promises to abide with us if we abide with Her. Better than a fairy tale, this opens us to real healing, real insight, real discipleship.  

May we never settle for easy answers, but demand mercy and healing.  
And may God grant us more than we can ask or imagine.