Epiphany 5 C - Sunday, February 10, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. John Forbis, OHC
Epiphany 5 C - Sunday, February 10, 2019

Isaiah 6:1-8, [9-13]
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

Oh, I get them.  Oh, I really get them, Isaiah, Paul and Peter. 

A few days ago, I was reminded of the 20th anniversary of my life profession on the front lawn of the Order’s house in South Africa.  In the southern hemisphere, February is summer, and man, was that a hot day.  I and some of my fair-skinned brothers quickly developed red faces and arms.  The lawn was sloped steeply down to a deep valley.  So I prostrated on a grass matt on a downward angle.  In many ways, a dreamlike, surreal experience.  I was kind of dazed by the whole thing, having just arrived in South Africa five months before.

Remembering this occasion, thanks to my community’s help, led me to the sudden awareness of some other anniversaries.  Four years ago today, I was in the hospital in the Western Cape of South Africa with EEG wires glued to my head measuring brainwaves 24 hours a day for a week.  Meanwhile, doctors were slowly weaning me off anti-seizure medication so that I could have a gran-mal seizure.  They wanted to determine exactly where in my brain my seizures were originating.  As my neurologist said to me, if you’re going to have seizures, you’re having them in the right place.

Why?  So that a neuro-surgeon could cut a cross-section into my brain and take out a small bit of the area that was causing them.  They sparked from a safe place on which to perform surgery.  Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of my last seizure.  I was the only one on the ward who could have the surgery.  It was too risky for the others.  So, I remember them every day since four years ago.

So why am I telling you all this?  To explain to you that God has done some magnificent things in my life!  The affect of the surgery really has shaken the pivots of the thresholds of my existence!  I have never been one to witness or testify, but I suppose I’m testifying to you now. 

And yet, my response to all of this can often be, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts! or ’Go away from me, Lord.  For I am a sinful man!”  Sometimes I can feel that these miracles are to one untimely born.  Why me and not the others on the ward?

At the same time of the amazement at “the catch of fish, I and Peter, James, John, Paul, Isaiah have taken”, we rush to the place of self-denigration, condemnation and insistence on worthlessness.  In the Message rendering of this morning’s passage from Isaiah, he claims, “Every word I’ve ever spoken is tainted – blasphemous!”  Being an epileptic since I was fourteen, I felt that I myself was tainted and therefore not even deserving of God being present in my life.  If there was any hint of God’s presence to me, I would want him to get as far away from me as he possibly could because I couldn’t be someone God would want to be around.

Yet, God broke through those defenses of self-loathing and pity and burned all the reasons for them to a stump that became a seed for new life, monasticism and being a human person who is awakened to, hears, sees, feels more than I ever remember.

And then, the man who has unclean lips and a sinner who can’t have God near him rears his ugly head.  The mind dulls, nothing is heard, I am blind to and even lose my memory of God’s intimate and thundering grace.  The remnant remains.  It wants to render me powerless, giving me license to opt-out, cop-out and not grasp freedom because I’m afraid of the responsibility.  The remnant thinks it’s protecting me … from myself and my radical transformation, from others who embrace and support me in that transformation.  It thinks it’s a shield from God who has and continues to create that transformation; to draw me out of my self-absorbed pity and condemnation and become the person he has healed me to be.

I wonder if when I am persecuting myself, I am persecuting Christ.  Violence to myself is violence to Christ executing him at Golgotha yet again or like Paul, who was Saul, seeking out Jesus’ followers and killing them.  And yet, Christ keeps giving me the grace to be who I really am, God’s child who is to be part of a grand assembly that will praise and bring God’s glorious presence to so many like me.  Despite myself, these powerful forces keep invading.  They can’t be stopped.         

Meanwhile, God begs me to use what he has awakened in me, his life, senses, sharpened awareness and acute sensitivity and compassion to keep planting seeds of his grace.  God so desires me to know that those qualities were there in me in the first place.  I just wasn’t able to understand, hear or see them while in a drug-induced stupor.  Thus, I had to not just be reborn, but born from a new seed embedded in the burnt stump of my illness, sense of worthlessness, and shame around both.

Sometimes it does have to take a hot coal searing my mouth to snap me out of my repetitive mind and heart-numbing breast-beating.  I imagine the angel who approaches me and hovers in front of me in the air with the hot coal, might roll her eyes, sigh and bring it to my lips and say, “Okay there, again this has touched your lips, your guilt has run off in fear and your sin has been incinerated.  Can we now get on with God’s work, please?”

Epiphany 4 C - Sunday, February 3, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Presentation of Our Lord - Saturday, February 2, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bob Pierson, OHC
The Presentation of Our Lord, Year C - Saturday, February 2, 2019

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

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

Today we celebrate two “feast days” if you will:  first, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, and second, Groundhog's Day.  At first glance the two events seem to have nothing in common, but in fact there is a connection.  Both celebrations have to do with the coming of the Light.  In Punxsutawny, PA, people will be watching a groundhog named Phil, so see if he sees his shadow.  If he does, we will have six more weeks of winter.  Or is it the other way around?  I can never keep it straight.  The fact of the matter is we will have at least six more weeks of winter regardless, because the spring equinox is six weeks away.  This curious event is situated on February 2nd because it's the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.

The Feast of the Presentation of the Lord is set on February 2nd because it's 40 days after Christmas, and according to Jewish tradition, that's the day that a new mother needs to present herself in the Temple for her “purification” after childbirth.  But according to Luke's account, it's also the day that Mary and Joseph bring the child Jesus to the Temple for his presentation to “be designated as holy to the Lord.”  And as Jesus is introduced to the old man, Simeon, he issues a statement which is very familiar to those of us who pray Compline on a regular basis:  “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”

Phil the groundhog sees his shadow when the light of the sun appears, and Simeon sees his salvation when the light for revelation to the Gentiles appears.  Wouldn't it be great if we paid as much attention to the coming of the light in Jesus as some of us do to the coming of the light to create Phil's shadow?  Simeon's bold proclamation is good news not just to the people of Israel but to the Gentiles, or as some translations put it, the nations, in other words, all peoples of the world.  Jesus is announced as the savior of the world by the old man in the Temple, and his parents are “amazed.”

But not everything that Simeon has to say is Good News.  He also announces that Jesus' ministry will bring “the falling and rising of many in Israel” and that he “will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed,” and he tells Mary “a sword will pierce your own soul too.”  I wonder how Mary and Joseph reacted to that news.  Were they still “amazed?”  Are we “amazed” at what we are hearing today?  As both Simeon and Anna attest, this baby is a very special child.

As the light of each day gets longer and longer, we are reminded that the Light that is Christ has come to enlighten our lives, and to cast away the shadows so that we can live in the salvation God has planned for us.  Let's make sure we recognize that Light and allow it to illuminate our lives.  The people who walked in darkness HAVE seen a great light;  so arise, shine for your light has come, a light of revelation to the nations and for the glory of God's people everywhere.