Trinity Sunday, Year A - June 4, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

Trinity Sunday A - Sunday, July 2, 2023

 

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

 Matthew 28:16-20

Click here for an audio of the sermon

.Love.

Today, the Feast of the Holy Trinity, is a celebration of the overflowing love at the heart of all life, of the love that is itself life and is, at the same time, the engine and fuel of life.

Over the last few weeks, during Ascensiontide and on to Pentecost, we have heard those exquisite passages from John’s gospel in which Jesus tells his disciples of the intimacy he shares with the Father, an intimacy the Spirit will draw them and us into. It is an intimacy both tender and expansive.

All that the Father has is mine, Jesus says. And when the Spirit comes, she will give all that I have to you.

It is of this intimacy, the indwelling of one with another, that Paul writes when he says that “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”

It isn’t that we weren’t the children of God before Christ. But if we are made new in Christ, then we possess everything of God, for as the letter to the Colossians puts it in Christ are “hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Take that in for a moment. In Christ you and I possess everything of God.

All that the Father has is mine, and in the Spirit, all that I have is yours. May they be one, Father, as you and I are one.

The Father pours herself into the Son, who again pours herself into the Spirit, who again pours herself into you and me and the River and the trees. One in another.

This self-emptying love of one for another neither overwhelms nor subsumes our identity. Instead, this self-emptying love completes our identity and confirms it.

When we surrender to this love, flowing into and through our lives, we become more fully who we are, not less. We become more distinctly ourselves, at the same time that we become more transparent.

Five years ago tomorrow I was ordained a priest in this very church (in the Monastery’s church just down the hill). As many of you know, I’m somewhat skeptical by nature, and I don’t have a very high clericalism. I honestly didn’t believe that I would be different after that liturgy. But I was wrong.

I prostrated myself before the bishop and the altar as we sang the ancient hymn to the Holy Spirit: “O Come Creator Spirit Come, and make within our hearts your home.”

I found that I couldn’t sing the words of the hymn. I was too overcome with emotion, and I began to cry as intensely as I ever have. But by the third or fourth verse, I had dropped down below the emotion, into a place of total stillness.

As the bishop laid his hands on my head and prayed for God to make me a priest, I had the strongest sense that I was being given back a piece of myself that I hadn’t known was missing. And, at the same time, I was being given as a gift to the church and the world. Not that my ministry was being given, but that I, the substance of me, all of me was being given as a gift.

This is how love works in and through us. In God’s mercy, we are completed and filled, given first to ourselves as pure gift, and then poured out as a balm for the world.

The comingling of gift and self-offering, of fullness and emptiness, is the flow at the heart of divine love. It is how God first created all that is—by pouring out her substance into matter—“the prodigal, squandering herself” to paraphrase Karl Rahner. It is how Jesus redeemed the world, first being given the gift of himself at his baptism, and then consenting to the pouring out of his life in love on the Cross. And it is how the Spirit makes us children of God—by first returning us to ourselves and then enabling us to empty the Self of selves in service to the world.

Bruno Barnhart and Carl Jung both believed that three was an incomplete number and that it would be more accurate to speak of the Holy Quaternity than the Holy Trinity. The Godhead, three in one and one in three, is not complete without the Fourth: you and me.

The love that flows from and is God is not quite whole without us. And here’s the rub.

What would it mean to consent to full and total immersion in the heart of love? Who would we become if we fully consented to God’s living presence within us? What would it mean for there truly to be no separation between us and God? Fully heirs with Christ to everything that belongs to the Father, which is to say, to absolutely everything.

We would be like a house with the roof blown off so the stars could shine in her depths.

In one of her last poems, Denise Levertov explores the power of desire to draw us more deeply into God:

Augustine said his soul
was a house so cramped
God could barely squeeze in.
Knock down the mean partitions,
he prayed, so You may enter!
Raise the oppressive ceilings! […]

Nevertheless,
it’s clear desire
fulfilled itself in the asking, revealing prayer’s
dynamic action, that scoops out channels
like water on stone, or builds like layers
of grainy sediment steadily
forming sandstone. The walls, with each thought,
each feeling, each word he set down,
expanded, unnoticed; the roof
rose, and a skylight opened.

We really don’t know how to pray as we ought. We don’t know how to surrender our lives, to empty ourselves so that God can fill us full again. But we don’t have to know. It’s enough to want it, or to want to want it. It’s enough to throw our desire to wind, to open our arms wide in supplication. God knows that the deepest desire of our hearts is for God. And God wants us to know that her deepest desire is for us, too. We already have the one we love most fully. Though our lives often feel like a house too cramped, our souls dwell in vast meadows under a sky of stars. Sometimes, thank God, the Spirit clues us into this reality among and within us. And when the house of our soul begins to close in on us again, we can reach out with our love for God, push out the walls and the ceilings, and punch a hole to the sky once more. Because God is good, and that is everything.

The Day of Pentecost A - May 28, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC

The Day of Pentecost, Year A - Sunday, May 28, 2023

 

Acts 2:1-21

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

John 20:19-23

Click here for an audio of the sermon

I love that voice within the tradition that reminds us that however much we study, whatever we think we know with certainty and say about God definitively, we are never doing more than pointing toward the apprehension of the mystery that even in the revelation of Christ remains mystery. “If you think you have come to understand God, it is not God that you have understood” is often how it is phrased.  Or, “if on the road you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.”  It is not that we are left ignorant, but that our knowing is unavoidably subjective and partial.  The apophatic stream of spirituality is a good balance to an abundance of language about God in that the apophatic proclaims what God is not, the utter inadequacy of language, the necessity of mystery and silence alongside proclamation and creed.

So, if you have already decided that you know what the feast of Pentecost is, what it means, then what you understand is not Pentecost.  Bridging the historical event to our world means stepping with great humility and care into the task of taking into account what the event says about God and holding those claims as the basis by which we implore the Spirit of the God who was present in the upper room.  The Holy Spirit comes to expectant and open disciples, yet on her own time and in her own way.  The Holy Spirit is not a respecter of barriers between persons and effects understanding across different languages and cultures and begins to make of many a new oneness that transcends labels and hierarchies.  The coming of the Holy Spirit is a promise fulfilled and an ultimate fulfillment that awaits us. This reality is given fresh meaning and hope. 

A bit of unpacking these ways of the Spirit…
Because Acts 2 is often characterized as a joyful coming together of divided peoples, it is good to remember that in that social context this shared understanding of separated peoples in the one Spirit would have been absurd, irrational, offensive, and dangerous.  Ethnic and racial divisions and identities gathering together and understanding one another undermines the social order and fractures a system of empire built on perpetuating rivalry and violence.  And yet both in the gathering and its shared experience of humanizing the enemy, as St. Peter explains, God’s long-promised dream of justice and neighborliness based on mutual respect and sharing is coming into being.  No longer is identity and security based on the terms of Rome - in subjugation, victimization, and capitulation - but in the divine image given by God from which all persons derive value and acceptance.  Thus the first moments of what will come to be called the Christian church are characterized by barrier-dismantling respect and equality of men and women, young and old, Jew and Gentile, slave and free.  As Paul will say later in the letter to the Galatians, those labels are no longer authoritative, but oneness in Christ is the eternal reality of human life.  And so these believers find themselves in an either/or of the story of prejudice and segregation or hospitality and reconciliation. 

Let’s apply this vision to the current state of American Christianity.  If Christians are to be known for our love for one another, our care for the outsider and needy, our welcome of the stranger, our focus on reconciliation and respect, how are we doing?  Certainly followers of Jesus live out all of these new creation ways of being in countless acts of care.  But there are also ways in which data point to the opposite: the sad realities of decline, scandal and widening and deepening polarization within and among denominations and churches.  The world of just a few years ago which was relatively familiar and stable has slipped through our fingers.  In the face of such change, some Christians are choosing to hunker down and cling to a romanticized vision of the past, ignoring or attacking the swirl of social, political, and religious change happening around us.  Others view this isolation as fundamentally unfaithful to Jesus’ call to love the outcast and victim and have decided that the church in its current institutional form is basically hopeless and that direct engagement with practical justice work is what is needed.    

The story of Pentecost gives us a way forward that is better than either being stuck in a past we cannot recover or seeking to bring about a future that is beyond our power. We can be realistic and hopeful. We can believe that the vision of Pentecost community is still relevant, still God’s dream, and acknowledge that this dream will bring suffering - misunderstanding, suspicion, rejection.  In liminal time, we are invited to grieve and hope.  Grieve what is dead and is not coming back.  Hope toward what is possible, what new opportunities unfold within our imaginations.  I saw a conversation with a bishop recently who said, “we are experiencing Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday all at the same time.”  I regularly see stories about the increase of anxiety, loneliness, depression, and isolation.  That churning of disorientation, anxiety, and excitement you feel? Welcome to the club.  There is no magic fix, no instant escape in a new structure, program, movement, or event that promises to alleviate our fears.  The gift the disciples received was about how the Holy Spirit would blow through their prejudices, their grievances, their privilege, and their entitlement to make possible a church where brother and sister were the only labels that had any meaning. From that gift, the community has an identity and purpose.

The Holy Spirit is offering us two gifts needed to be disciples in this era: expectant readiness and prophetic imagination.  In expectant readiness, we remember that the Spirit takes the initiative, the Spirit brings illumination and clarity for action, the Spirit is the reconciler and unitive power of the church.  We almost always prefer order, control, predictability, and immediacy.  When we are humble and trusting, we have to suffer the death of what we think God should do, what would benefit us, and how we can take credit.  God ushers us into the unknown and unknowable to remind us that being fragile, mortal, finite creatures is not a problem to be solved - God knows that is what we are - God made us that way! - but that it is in our very need and limit and dependence that the Holy Spirit blows in and through us - not because we are special and own the copyright - but so that we know we are earthen vessels of the holy, the treasure is sheer gift that we do not control or possess even as we are instruments of its glory.

The phrase “prophetic imagination” comes from Walter Brueggemann, who wrote in the book of the same name, “The prophet engages in futuring fantasy.  The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation…. We must do what we can to open up our imaginations to a radically different set of future possibilities…”  Brueggemann goes on to point toward the practices of prophetic hope that subvert the cosmic and social powers of division.  Generosity, hospitality, and forgiveness which continually seek to recognize and honor the human dignity of the neighbor - these are the ways we dissent from empire and declare that Jesus is Lord.  Our identity and vocation is to disrupt and subvert the forces of division and domination through acts of hopeful resistance in the power of the Holy Spirit.

We Christians believe that in the end, in a new heaven and new earth, what is now obscure will be made clear, what is now partial will be made complete, what we have not seen will be seen, what we cannot imagine will be real, and we will enjoy Christ face-to-face with brothers and sisters from every tribe and language and people and nation forever and ever.  The end that began with Christ, continued at Pentecost, and breaks into our present with fresh wind, renewed hope, awakened imagination, can continue its presence and work in us and in our world.  To the One who calls us, prepares us, prospers our efforts, and holds us in life be glory and praise, now and forever. Amen.

Easter 7 A - May 21, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

The Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year A - Sunday, May 21, 2023

 

Acts 1:6-14

1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11

John 17:1-11

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Set up Thyself, O God, above the heavens and Thy glory above all the earth.

By thine Ascension draw us withal unto Thee, O Lord, so as to set our affections on things above, and not on things on the earth. By the awful mystery of Thy Holy Body and Precious Blood in the evening of this day: Lord, have mercy. Amen.

 This prayer of the Anglican Divine, Lancelot Andrewes, reminds us that those of us living on this side of the Ascension have a choice to make. Either we can set our affections on things above or on things on earth. St. Paul, who inspired this prayer, would go further: “Set your mind on things above where your life is now hidden with Christ in God.”

Perhaps one of the most blinding errors of Christian spirituality is the neglect of this verse from Paul’s letter to the Colossians. Here in the West, Roman Catholics have tended to neglect it because they have tended to neglect the writings of St. Paul in general. Protestants have neglected it because they have allowed other Pauline topics, like justification and salvation, to eclipse it and have been largely afraid of its mystical connotations and implications. This neglect, in my mind, has distorted the meaning of the Ascension and has left us spiritually in a state of heightened expectation of what is still to come rather than in a state of heightened realization of what has already come. How many Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians obsess about the timing of the Second Coming and the details of the Rapture—all the while Christian contemplatives scratch their heads wondering what all the fuss is about! When we take Paul seriously and our faith is awakened to the full extent of what Christ has accomplished for us we begin to see that the gospel is not simply that Christ is ascended into heaven but that we are too! And yes, even now!! The work of Christ and the Spirit, of Ascension and Pentecost, is to make the eternal reality a present reality in the realm of time—in our time—so that on this very day and at this very moment the triumph of Christ in his Ascension is our triumph too and the presence of God can now be experienced, known, and enjoyed in a new Pentecostal fullness. “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

Yet, if this promise of eternal life is now available, and we are now ascended with Christ reigning in glory, the question becomes all too obvious—why do we so seldom feel like we are?!?! We say that we are currently living in the already but not yet—in the tension between the seed of this eternal life taking root in our lives and the full flourishing of that eternal life. What, I think, is so scandalous about the Church is that after 2000 years we have still realized this eternal life so little!

And that we still remain largely a product of our broken societies—anxious, fearful, self-absorbed, and tossed to and fro by the shifting winds of a culture lost at sea. What is equally scandalous is that the Church has offered so few convincing answers to this predicament. We have produced eloquently formed documents about God; we have built magnificent buildings which reveal the glory of God; but where are the actual Christians whose lives speak with this eloquence and whose lives manifest the glory of this magnificence? Why are we still more like the disciples before Pentecost full of anxiety and fear locked behind closed doors than we are like the disciples after Pentecost full of the Spirit radiating the glory of God?

Today’s first lesson from the Acts of the Apostles tells us quite explicitly what must take place for this transformation from fear to fullness to occur. If we want to move out of our prison of anxiety and fear and into a life full of God, two things must happen: we must first “come together” and then we must “pray.”

In a recent article in the Associated Press entitled, “How the American Dream Convinces People Loneliness is Normal,” Ted Anthony mentions that just this month the U. S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an American epidemic, saying that it takes as deadly a toll as smoking upon the population of the United States. “Millions of people in America are struggling in the shadows,” he said, “and that’s not right.” He cited some potential contributing forces: the gradual withering of longstanding institutions, decreased engagement with churches, the fraying bonds of extended families. When you add recent stressors — the rise of social media and virtual life, post-9/11 polarization and the way COVID-19 interrupted existence — the challenge, he notes, becomes even more stark.

Could it be that this mounting sense of isolation so many in our society are experiencing is contributing to the equally mounting anxiety and other mental health issues that so many face today? We Christians have a very powerful anecdote to this isolation epidemic—it is creating community—communities where all feel welcome and are valued as integral parts of the whole. But, even more importantly, communities whose focus is not primarily the issues we face in our broken societies—not just fighting for social justice, as important as this is— but whose primary focus is God.

And that brings us to the second point: we “come together” not just to build social bonds but to “pray.” It was while the disciples were praying that they were filled with the Holy Spirit, and it was while Jesus was praying that he was transfigured. Praying, especially praying together, is the way to move out of fear and into fullness—out of anxiety and self-absorption and into freedom and self- transcendence—and to ultimately realize the fullness of life that is the gift of Ascension and Pentecost.

To be a little more specific, since there are many ways that Christian communities can pray together—and whenever this prayer is sincere it is certainly a good thing—there is a particular form of prayer that I believe is most appropriate and effective in helping us realize our fullness of life in God.

Rather than positioning ourselves like the “men of Galilee” who stand looking up toward heaven as if the Lord is out there caught up in the clouds— relating to God solely as some objective reality far removed from us—we should position ourselves more like we often do here—coming together in quiet attention with the ears of our hearts open listening and absorbing the presence of God mediated to us in word, Spirit, and sacrament. We meditate and contemplate together not what we hope to receive but what has already been poured out upon us. We marinate in the atmosphere of God’s presence in which we have been immersed in our baptism and awaken to the reality of the new creation of God’s justice and peace. We feed on the life of our Lord and become what we eat. We are disarmed by the love which consumes us and are liberated from grasping after something we think that is missing because we now realize that all is already given. In this pregnant silence, all striving ceases, all restlessness is stilled, all disappointment forgotten, and all anxiety and fear is cast out. There is no longer any room for anything but love and light in the still place where God is all in all and where we are all one—together in God. This humble place of emptiness paradoxically becomes the place of fullness. This place of nothingness becomes the place where everything becomes possible.

In one of the most profound sections of Scripture, Chapter 17 of the Gospel of John, as we just heard, Jesus prays to the Father saying that he will soon no longer be in the world, but that we, his disciples, will remain, even as he goes to the Father. He then prays that we, his disciples, would be protected in the name that the Father has given to him, so that we may be one just as the Father and the Son are one. For John, oneness is always and only through love. It is the very reality of God which casts out fear. It is the light which drives out darkness. It is a way of being which knows no division. Jesus’ prayer is that even in this world we would know such a glorious way of being. To be protected in the name the Father gave to the Son—the name Jesus—which literally means “God’s salvation”—is to be overshadowed by the love of the Father for the Son and to exist in a bond so strong that nothing can exist but the very glory of God. The Christian community is baptized into that name and that name is now our own. We are daughters and sons in the Son—and this is most true when we come together and pray. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”

As we find ourselves approaching the final feast of Christ’s saving events, we might ask ourselves what difference has Christ’s paschal journey made for us? Are we still looking up toward heaven as if God is still far away? Or are we awakening day by day to the reality that we are, even now, in God and God is in us? This in no way should suggest that this absorption into things divine should cause us to be unconcerned about the things of this world. Rather, a true uniting of ourselves to God is the most important and most powerful source to nurture our compassion for the world. To be full of God is to be full of God’s love. And this is the surest sign that we are a Pentecostal people reigning in the Ascended Christ— that we have love for one another. Perhaps Merton said it best, “To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.” The realization of this is the great gift of contemplative prayer, and the embodiment of it is the fulfillment of our Christian call.

So, with St. Paul, “ I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”