Proper 12 A - July 30, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement OHC

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 12 A, July 30, 2023

 

1 Kings 3:5-12
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33,44-52

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

Lord, help us to know with assured confidence that even in the midst of our fearful lives, your are here with us...where you have always been. Amen.

According to an open letter signed by some of the leading AI specialists, artificial intelligence could pose a "risk of extinction" to humanity on the scale of nuclear war or pandemics, and mitigating that risk, they say, should be a "global priority.” The one-sentence open letter is both brief and ominous. But AI is only the latest ominous reality of a century of rapid technological development that has seen the radical transformation of societies. And while much of this transformation has been good, much, I would admit, has not served human life well and has resulted in technology’s domination over it. If you doubt this, go watch “Oppenheimer,” now in theaters. Change is a necessary and vital part of progress, but not all change is progress.

And whether change has been for the betterment or the detriment of our societies, the rapid change we’ve been experiencing in this past century has had an undeniable destabilizing effect and unleashes a host of questions about life...it’s meaning, it’s direction, and it’s end. And beyond this, we are now faced, perhaps more than ever before, with our own fragility. Human life has never been more vulnerable to the elements of nature or to the nature of our own selfish egos.

What has resulted is a growing malaise and dread about being alive. Is there ground upon which we can now stand with any assurance or hope? Is the only option now the uncertainty and insecurity of shifting sand? All the more now, then, is the church and the gospel entrusted to her necessary and vital. But perhaps our gospel message needs to be re-contextualized to speak effectively to the needs of the people of our time and to our precarious circumstances.

Christianity is about a lot of things, and we can sometimes get lost on the periphery and lose sight of the core. The heart of Christianity is the gospel: that God has not left us alone to face a world ready to destroy itself but has come near to us in Christ and has revealed to us that indeed everything IS NOT shifting sand...if we just believe, we’ll come to know that there is a reality more solid, more stable, and more assured than our minds could ever imagine. We come to know that the chaos of the world is nothing to fear because our feet now stand on the Rock that is Christ. And we come to know a God who is not afraid of chaos. On the contrary, God seems to relish chaos and specializes in using it to create wonder.

Many years ago when I was going through my own personal existential crisis, plagued by chaotic thoughts of self-loathing, self-doubt, and shame, questioning my own value, largely ignorant about who God really is or who I really am, I found myself drawn to study St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. During the weeks of this study back in the mid-nineties, my world was radically transformed. And no other piece of writing has changed me to such an extent since. In it a whole new image of God was unveiled to me...and in light of this image, a whole new image of myself began to make its assured appearance.

To put it succinctly, Paul, in Romans, is attempting to articulate the utterly unique gift and the transformative power that has been given to us in Christ. After demonstrating that everyone, Gentile as well as Jew, lives under the power of sin... and, thus, that everyone needs God to save them from sin’s domination...he then goes on to speak about this gift of salvation coming to us in the person of God’s own Son, Jesus Christ. It is pure gift. There is nothing that we can do to convince God to give it to us, for it is given solely out of God’s generous initiative. “God chose us while we were yet sinners,” as Paul puts it. Into the human heart that has been afflicted with the sickness and darkness that sin brings is imputed the grace of God that comes to us in Christ, that we receive simply by saying “yes” to this gift in an act of faith. In our baptism we die with Christ and are raised into his resurrected life and become newly created, “the old has passed away, behold all has become new.” Paul instructs us to now live according to this new created self by nurturing it and admonishes us to stop nurturing the old self. The battle between these two selves will continue but our truth is not the old self, the surface self tossed to and fro by the chaos of life...and it never really was...our truth is the deeper self, the beloved child of God, called, justified, and now glorified in God’s all-consuming presence.

Who can, now, separate us from the love of Christ? Paul is unequivocal... there is nothing... absolutely nothing... that can separate us from the all-consuming love of God’s presence. For the person in Christ, we have penetrated through the multiple layers of sand and hit ground zero... the point of pure Love... unconditioned and absolute... and the ground of our own true self, hidden with Christ in God.

This truth would inspire the 1966 poem of Thomas Merton entitled “All the Way Down,”

I went down
Into the cavern
All the way down

To the bottom of the sea.
I went down lower
Than Jonas and the whale
No one ever got so far down
As me.

I went down lower
Than any diamond mine
Deeper than the lowest hole In Kimberly
All the way down
I thought I was the devil
He was no deeper down
Than me.

And when they thought
That I was gone forever
That I was all the way
In hell
I got right back into my body
And came back out
And rang my bell.

No matter how
They try to harm me now 

No matter where
They lay me in the grave
No matter what injustices they do
I've seen the root
Of all that believe.

I've seen the room
Where life and death are made
And I have known
The secret forge of war
I even saw the womb
That all things come from
For I got down so far!

But when they thought
That I was gone forever
That I was all the way
In hell
I got right back into my body
And came back out
And rang my bell.

Merton's description of the journey into his depths borders on the terrible and horrific, but only in these depths and in confronting these horrors does the image of God within us begin to shine. James Finley writes of this poem:

“Merton leads us along the journey to God in which the self that begins the journey is not the self that arrives. The self that begins is the self that we thought ourselves to be. It is this self that dies along the way until in the end 'no one' is left. This 'no one' is our true self. It is the self that stands prior to all that is this or that. It is the self in God, the self bigger than death yet born of death. It is the self the Father
forever loves.”

This transformed self is the result of seeing the pearl of great price and selling everything for the one thing necessary. It’s the result of seeing through the lies of a fabricated, illusory existence... through the shifting sand of one’s life... and catching a glimpse, however faintly, of the dazzling rock that is Christ... and making a choice to live anchored in the eternal even while we continue to live amidst the crashing waves of the temporal. To be mature in Christ is to learn how to unlock the hidden potential of this hidden self, to plant oneself firmly in the hidden Ground of Love and to enjoy the gift of the gospel...the peace which passes understanding and the love that knows no bounds.

Then, with fearless and daring confidence, we can stand up boldly in the face of the barrage of threats to human life with which our modern world confronts us and declare with prophetic certitude: “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus my Lord.” Amen.

Proper 11 A - July 23, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC

Proper 11, Year A - Sunday, July 23, 2023

 

Isaiah 44:6-8
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

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“The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” is an episode from the original Twilight Zone series which aired on March 4, 1960.  Written by Rod Serling, the creator of the show and one of the main writers, it showcases his unflinching insight into the human condition in the form of a science fiction parable that spoke to 1960s America and, because there is nothing new under the sun, applies to our world as well.
     A bright flash crosses the evening sky. Curious, a group of Maple Street neighbors gather outside to ponder the event.  Then the strangeness commences - lights flicker, then power goes out, rumors of alien invasion creep in from the edges of the darkness. Fear rises in a slow boil.  The neighbors, so nice, so like us, grow desperate in their need to understand what is happening and reassert normalcy and control in the face of events that make no rational sense. Maybe someone knows something. Maybe someone is keeping a secret.  Guns appear, one is used to kill. The fear turns to mayhem - everyone against everyone.  The irony of the title is that the monsters never appear on Maple Street, they don’t have to - the monsters are already there - they have been there the whole time.  The fear of something monstrous outside has hooked these neighbors to become the thing they fear in order to conquer the foreign presence, and they infect each other.  As the episode ends, the camera pans out from Maple Street to a nearby hill, where we see a pair of otherworldly invaders observing the madness.
One says to the other, “Understand the procedure now?  Just stop a few of their machines, and radios, telephones, and lawnmowers - throw them into darkness for a few hours and then sit back and watch the pattern.”
“The pattern is always the same?”
“With few variations, they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves.  All we need do is sit back and watch.”
“I take it this place, this Maple Street, it is not unique.”
“By no means, the world is full of Maple Streets. We go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other, one to the other, one to the other.”
Rod Serling adds this epilogue to what we have just seen:
“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices… For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own - for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”

The irony in the episode is that the aliens understand human nature at a deeper level than the humans.  Rod Serling living in 1960 America sees the procedure in action.  The country had just come through the McCarthy era and was in the depths of the Cold War and ongoing racial segregation in the South. His call is simple and profound - we must look at what we are doing to each other and stop the slide to self-destruction.  The ones who proclaimed themselves the purifiers, the gatekeepers, the greatness-returners, employed evil language and behavior in the name of defending what they believed was right and moral.    
But Maple Street leaves us in despair, without a solution or an alternative other than the knowledge that collective prejudice and suspicion turn us into monsters. What is lacking is a larger narrative, some hopeful mode of resistance to patterns of suspicion and violence, and the promise that the world is held in loving care and is moving toward a just resolution that sets it right and sets us free.
Jesus created worlds familiar to us with surprising twists and unexpected turns.  We call them parables.  He, too, holds up a mirror, warns us about what lurks within us, but does not leave us there. He models and offers a way of being that expands the possibility of what we can hope for and beckons us to live with the memory of a future that informs how we live in the present.
Continuing from the parable of the soils we heard last week, the good growing plants that bring life are an image of we who have heard the word and put it into practice.  If the parable of the soils locates the identity of a disciple as one in whom life grows and flourishes, then the parable of the weeds and the wheat speaks of living our identity.  
This week the wheat seeds are sown, an enemy sows weeds among the wheat, both grow, and the crisis point is what to do now.  The slaves inquire about pulling out the weeds, but the landowner knows better than to do that before the wheat is ready for harvest.  He is the Christ figure, the voice of wisdom and perspective in the parable.  He can perceive what is below the surface and in the future: “Let both of them grow together until the harvest”, he tells the slaves.  The landowner loves the field. He asks the slaves to trust him.  It may look like the wheat is about to be ruined, the slaves want to fix the problem, but the mystery is that the best action in that time before the harvest is no action.  With patience, at the right time, the wheat’s full head of grain will appear and the field will yield a harvest of good food.
The surprise of the parable is that the workers are not prevented from doing evil or exhorted to do good, but restrained from doing what they understand to be good and helpful and that precisely in that forbearance is the preservation and preparation for the harvest they desire. In the world of the parable, what the slaves see is not all there is, what they fear happening is not going to happen, what looks like death is actually the only way to life.
The “let them” here is the same word sometimes translated in other places as “suffer”, “permit”, or “forgive”.  In the world of this field in its mixed state of wheat and weeds, as an image of our world, the only option available to us if we want to get any usable grain out of it is to refrain from acting on what seems good in the moment, trust a larger, longer perspective, and wait in belief that what feels like helplessness in endangering the wheat is actually faithfulness in saving it.  “Let them both grow together” is not passive resignation.  It does not mean that we ignore the weeds, pretend they are wheat, or that the wheat is to become weeds because it is next to weeds, or that the crop is ruined. What it does mean is that God alone intervenes and separates and enacts ultimate and righteous judgment.
When so much Christian language is about doing, going, success, growth, and effectiveness, this parable serves as a check and corrective on our over-inflated ideas about our roles and engages us to be cooperative participants in and witnesses to this larger and longer process of redemption that is totally designed by God, in God’s control, and unfolding in God’s time.  Most of us are not going to go out intending to harm.  But we are prone to the subtle ways we collude with evil in the voice that says, “maybe God is a little slow, maybe God needs a reminder, a push. Could we pull out a few of the weeds, please? We would feel so much better!”
The human vocation is not to eradicate evil from the world.  As good and important are our efforts to pray for, model, and declare reconciliation, healing, peace, justice, and equality, we will be doing that until the end of the age because there will be a need for it.  Domination in the name of justice, for right ends, is still domination.  Disdain and judgment toward those who we believe are wrong, who in fact may be perpetrating harm, is not justifiable because we have now added our harm to their harm.  The social frenzy of demonizing the other as if we can remain separate and untouched by the demonizing is the dynamic Jesus is naming here.  The wheat cannot untangle its roots from the weeds without killing itself.  Beware any rhetoric which assuredly points toward the guilty, the unclean, the dangerous, and promises to purify the field and guarantee a utopian world of safety and protection - the procedure is being restarted.  Robert Capon says about this parable, “The only result of a truly dedicated campaign to get rid of evil will be the abolition of literally everybody.”  
In the end, God does what only God can do in God’s way and time - is liberate creation from sin and evil and death.  In the end, the landowner gets everything and the enemy gets nothing but a lost night’s sleep.  This is a hard, but necessary look at ourselves, our power, and God’s justice.  Real power, then, is to refuse to go down with the weeds, to remember that hope is forbearance and justice is carrying on with growing in the face of that which seeks to destroy us.   It may not look like it today, we may not be able to imagine it yet, but the harvest is coming.  The wheat is going to be fine.

Proper 10 A - July 16, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC

Proper 10, Year A - Sunday, July 16, 2023

 

Isaiah 55:10-13
Romans 8:1-11
Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

 

 

Click here for an audio of the sermon

The Parable of the Sower, also known as the Parable of the Soils, is one of few parables to feature in all three synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke).

The purpose of a parable is “to tease the mind into active thought” (C.H. Dodd). And it’s OK to have several possible interpretations, even if they do not necessarily agree with one another.

So it’s a little bit of a let down that the gospelers felt compelled to give us an interpretation. Whether the interpretation was spoken by Jesus in his own time is a hotly debated issue.

Once an interpretation is authorized by no less than the Son of God, it is difficult to let our imagination come up with a variety of interpretations.

But bear with me. I will venture one few imagined interpretations anyway.

Jesus’s telling of the parable is sandwiched between the admonition to “Listen!” (3b) and the admonition “Let anyone with ears listen” (9). So we are invited to really pay attention to the possibilities of the text.

There are three potential areas of attention in this parable. Each one is rich in interpretive possibilities; the Sower, the Four Soils, the Miraculous Harvest.

First, let’s focus on the Sower. In first century Palestine, the soil was not cultivated prior to seeding. The sower cast the seed everywhere without prejudging where it would flourish. And then he plowed the field afterward to make the seed penetrate the soil. Then you had to trust God would provide the rain and wait for growth.

The next possible area of attention are the Four Soils.
- There is the hardened soil of the path,
- the shallow soil with lots of rocks right underneath (sounds like the Hudson Valley to me),
- the thorny or weedy soil,
- and the good soil.

The third area of attention in this parable is the Miraculous Yield. A reasonable cereal yield is to get four to five, maybe seven times as much grain as was sown. Jesus speaks of a thirtyfold to hundredfold yield. That kind of yield would truly be miraculous and would guarantee a super bumper crop no matter how many seeds did not come to that.

Our Sower sows with abandon, without prejudging the results. Is our Sower God or the Son of Man. His kind of sowing reminds me of Jesus saying earlier in the same gospel according to Matthew that
“[the Father] makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (Matthew 5:45)

Now, are we the seed expected to sprout, grow and bear fruit? If so, we are in less of a predicament than the seed in the parable. Compared to seeds we have options. We can sometimes change some of our conditions, or move where conditions will lead us to flourish. Fate is more malleable for humans than for seeds.

And do the four soils represent chapters of our own lives?
Have we at times not been so hardened that it was difficult to let the good news touch us?
Have we never been so troubled by adversity that we couldn’t focus on the good news?
Have the appeal of success, esteem, romance and riches lured us away from our spiritual foundations?

I do not believe we are predestined to be one or the other type of soil once and for all. God has given us agency. We can awaken and evolve. That’s part of what you are here for this morning. Letting the good news in and growing with it.

But maybe, the parable is not about us individually. Maybe it isn’t about who we are, and where we are at in our spiritual journey. Maybe this is not a call to introspection: what kind of soil am I now? Maybe this is not about our conversion of heart or metanoia.

Could it be that this parable is about more good news than most of us are ready for?
Not everyone will yield fruit thirty, sixty or hundredfold. But if enough good soil is found for the seed, this miraculous yield will more than make up for the seed that did not flourish.

Maybe the Sower isn’t so foolish after all to sow everywhere. If even a few seeds grow to this amazing fruition, the harvest will be plentiful. And if this about the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom will be available to all regardless of their yield or lack of it.

That sounds like the infinitely merciful and loving God I am in love with.

It may also be that Jesus isn’t just telling this parable.

He says it’s about rejecting or receiving the word about the kingdom of heaven. It may be that he is living this parable as he tells it.

After all, crowds welcomed his signs and his message. But few persevered in the face of adversity.

Yet, from those very few, multitudes grew to know Him. Multitudes have come to believe his message of redeeming love through the centuries. Many embody this message of love in how they live. And their lives touch many more.

They yield thirtyfold, sixtyfold and a hundredfold and they may not even come to know of it during their earthly lives. So let us not worry about what kind of seed we are. Let’s focus on spreading God’s Love.


For us to grow into fruitful disciples of Jesus, we must listen, understand, properly attend to His message, and doggedly persevere in the love of God and neighbor.

And rejection of Jesus’ message by many need not stop us coming to fruition. Encountering rejection of God’s loving message does not mean the message is wrong, or that our efforts at broadcasting it is folly. Look at the lives and deaths of Jesus and his apostles.

It simply is a fact of life, not everyone will take in the message and flourish with it. But some will. And by God’s grace, flourish beautifully and plenteously, they will.

The kingdom of heaven is like a bountiful crop produced in spite of what seem to be overwhelming setbacks.
Do trust in God’s abundance.

You are the instruments of God’s Love in the world. Do consent to God’s presence and action within you. And trust that God is crafting redemption through you, whether you know it or not.

A bountiful harvest will result from your spreading his Love broadly in the world. We don’t need to figure out, and anticipate how it will happen. We don’t need to be selective about where the Love is poured out.

We need to love God and neighbor. Let’s start with that.

Amen.