Easter 6 A - May 25, 2014

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY 

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC

Year A - Easter 6 - May 25, 2014

Acts 17:22-31 
1 Peter 3:13-22 
John 14:15-21 

We are coming toward the end of Eastertide, and I for one am ready for it to be over, ready to move on....though of course in one sense we never move beyond Easter.  Every Sunday, every day, every breath is a little Easter, a festival of resurrection and of  New Life. 

But in the cycle of our public worship, we are drawing closer to the end of our yearly fifty-day observance of this great and central feast which points to (though it can never adequately express, much less exhaust) the great mystery of Christ alive...alive in his own being, alive in creation, alive in his Body the church, alive in us. 

This Thursday we will celebrate the glorious Ascension of Christ when the mysterious tangible bodily presence of Jesus withdraws from his disciples in order that he, the Christ, might fill all things, all time, all space, all hearts.  That he might be all in all.  If you’re free on Wednesday evening or Thursday, come join us.

But before we get there, we have yet one more blip on our church calendar: Rogationtide.  Since the early Middle Ages, the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday preceding the feast of the Ascension have been devoted to prayer and fasting and supplication—that's what rogation means.  And in particular, it has grown over the centuries into a period of prayer for the earth, days when the faithful pray to God to bless and prosper the new planting, the new crops, begging for seasonable weather, and via litanies and processions rather than surveyor's tools, marking out the boundaries of field and parish and town.  Indeed to this day there are places in Britain and beyond where the ceremony of  “beating the bounds” is held to mark the limits of the parish or municipality.  If you don’t believe me, check it out on YouTube!

Rogation Days Procession

And by extension, this Sunday, the Sixth Sunday of Easter, has come to be known as Rogation Sunday.  It is, if you will, the Church’s original Earth Day, its agricultural feast par excellence, far older than our Thanksgiving harvest festival.  We may not hear much of that emphasis in today's Eucharistic readings, but those of you who were were at matins this morning heard about jubilees and proper land use and fair labor relations. And we have been hearing off and on all month about the dependence we all have on the earth and on each other for food and water and life itself. 

I hear it most clearly in the Collect or prayer for today.  Let me read it again:

O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. 

I am quite fond of this prayer and find it a powerful reminder of who we are and what we are called to be.  In particular, I am caught up by the phrase: “...we, loving you in all things and above all things.”

There is some interesting history here. The prayer itself is ancient, dating back at least to the eighth century.  And the phrase “loving you in all things and above all things” appears in its original Latin form.  But at the time of the Reformation, the first Book of Common Prayer retained only the phrase “in all things.”  Then in the 1662 revision the phrase “above all things” was substituted.  And so it remained for over 300 years until the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer reverted to the older medieval form:  loving you in all things and above all things.  And rightly so.  For we need both, we are called to do both.  Our Christian living and our stewardship of our selves and of our world in weakened, indeed betrayed, unless we honor both.  

We are called to love God IN all things. God is never absent from God's cosmos.  Indeed, through the Spirit at creation God's being charges and infuses all the cosmic order.  And as we will say on Thursday, Christ has gone up on high to fill all things.  God dwells in the atom as well as in the supernova; in the water and the plant; in the stink bug and the bacterium, the stone and the sun and moon and sea.  God is in the groundhog and monkey and yes, in you and me.  Maybe especially in you and me—maybe not so special.  But definitely there.  So our first call and invitation and charge is to love God in all things.  

The Latin word that our prayer translates as “love” is, by the way, not the familiar first conjugation verb: amo. amas, amat...that is, the love of the emotions. It is rather the word diligere, whose root means to choose...to choose by an act of will to reverence and hold in respect and awe, to esteem.  And that is a stance we can and must take toward all creation, whatever we may or may not feel.  That is the root ecological imperative of Christianity.

But there is more.  For while we are called to love God in all things, we are also called to love God  ABOVE all things...again: to respect, reverence, esteem and hold in awe. God is present in creation, most certainly.  But God is not creation nor is creation God.  God infuses the cosmos, but the cosmos is not God.  God is the source and goal of the evolutionary process. But God is not simply to be identified with that process. God is rather its directing and delightful energy and animating principal and—dare we say it—its Lord and Master.  We Christians are not, after all, animists or pantheists...at least not officially.

So we bow in worship this morning, joining with angels and archangels, and with the whole company of heaven—and with stars, planets, molecules, atoms, primordial slime, oceans, rivers, grasses, trees, lizards, rats, spiders, snakes, lions, cats, dogs, cows, each other...worshiping the One in whom we live and move and have our being. We bow in worship before the Creator and endlessly creating One whom we name Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who transcends every reality and whose glory we can only grope after, to use St. Paul’s wonderful image from the Book of Acts. 

Today is Rogation Sunday.  And we pray today for all creation, including ourselves. We pray to become (as the Jesuits like to say) contemplatives in action, loving God in all things, choosing God in all things, reverencing God in all things.  We pray for the will and wisdom to care rightly for all things.  But we also pray to love, that is to choose to reverence and to hold in awe and deepest respect above all else the God who is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end, the source and goal of our own human longing as well as the inarticulate but no less real longing and yearning of the whole universe.  We worship the God who, in Jesus the Christ, draws our hearts and minds and bodies on high and along with us, draws this whole amazing created order.  And together we look forward to that point in and beyond time when Christ will at last be all in all.

Let us pray:

We give you thanks, most gracious God, for the beauty ofearth and sky and sea; for the richness of mountains, plains,and rivers; for the songs of birds and the loveliness of flowers.We praise you for these good gifts, and pray that we maysafeguard them for our posterity. Grant that we may continueto grow in our grateful enjoyment of your abundant creation,to the honor and glory of your Name, now and for ever. Amen. (Book of Common Prayer, p. 840) 

Easter 5 A - May 18, 2014

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY 

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

Year A - Easter 5 - May 18, 2014

Acts 7:55-60
1 Peter 2:2-10 
John 14:1-14 

Over the past thirty years, I’ve spoken Jesus’ words at the beginning of the 14th chapter of John countless times to those gathered at the edge of a freshly dug grave. At the edge of his own grave, Jesus means to reassure his disciples that his death is not the end, but the beginning of the way whose destination is the room he is making for them in God. The disciples are incredulous. So are we, much of the time, especially when we are frightened or threatened by change or loss.

The lectionary readings for the Sundays after Easter are full of instructions for the disciples about how to live as Jesus taught without his physical presence in their midst. This week’s Gospel is a part of Jesus’ Farewell Discourse preparing believers to consider not only his journey through death to life, but our own as well. As the first disciples gathered with Jesus for that farewell meal, their hearts were torn with anxiety and fear. They had been following Jesus, but their understanding of his message, vision, and mission was limited at best. They had a vision of a messianic strong man who would liberate the people from occupation, but he was about to be seemingly defeated by same oppression. 

How does the heart feast at a banquet table of disappointment and defeat? What would free the human heart from being troubled at such a time? We use this passage to comfort and support mourners. The disciples in the text find no comfort. More than Jesus’ body will perish. All that they have believed and hoped for will soon be nailed to a tree. It will be a while before they realize that death will not have the last or the lasting word. 

The world has a multitude of answers as to what will relieve our hearts. Jesus has only one: “Believe in God, believe also in me”. (14:1) In his Gospel, John speaks of believing almost exclusively not as something to which one assents inwardly, but as an outward and active commitment to a person, the person being Jesus. Luther in The Large Catechism asks what it means to have a God. His answer is,  “God is what you hang your heart upon.” The heart that is troubled is a heart not hung upon God, but rather on all the things the world peddles to soothe a troubled heart. Jesus tells the disciples in their time of uncertainty, “Hang your heart on God; hang your heart on me.”  

With our post-Easter eyes, it might seem easier for us to skip to the end of the story. If we do that, we lose sight of the fact that as the new is birthed, something dies, and that which is eternal can find its full nativity only in death. In both the maternity room and the hospice room, those present are changed---all things are being made new. Birth and death are the bookends of a shelf full of stories of transformation. 

Birth and death are repeating cycles in the narrative of our lives. Visions of who we are and are becoming give us life, even as a previous sense of ourselves dies. In these moments, even as Christ is leading us, we often echo Thomas in asking how we can know the way if we do not know where God is. With Philip, we claim that we will be satisfied if we can just see. As hospice chaplain and midwife to ourselves and each other, our role is to be fully present, even as we cannot see and do not know what comes next in our life. 

The disciples want to cling to the perceived safety of location----they want to know where Jesus is going and how to go there with him. In John’s Gospel, location is used as a metaphor for the intimacy of a close relationship. As they are sharing the feast of loss, John’s Jesus attempts to assure them that there will be a place with plenty of room for them. The relationship is going to continue even as it changes. They will not be forgotten. The place he is preparing for them, for us, in God’s own life, is eternal life. 

Instead of hearing the exclusivity of the Christian claim in John 14, consider the pains Jesus takes to assure us that we come to God by God’s initiative in Christ. We know God in that God grants us what we could never reach or even know we could or should reach. God takes us into the knowledge of Godself. In the Word made flesh, God’s self-knowledge is disclosed in the self-giving, self-emptying love that is Christ. What we know of God in Jesus Christ is that God has chosen not to be God without us. In this is love, the love that is God. 

God’s promise to love us, to make room for us, to know and be known by us, never ends. Therefore our hearts need not be troubled. God has claimed us. Nothing can undo us because God has named us. No shallow expression of faith can represent us. Christ is risen! It is enough to sustain us. It is enough to support us. It is enough to empower us to live as witnesses to that love.  +Amen.

Holy Saturday - Apr 19, 2014

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY 
Br. James Michael Dowd, OHC
Holy Saturday - April 19, 2014


Lamentations 3:1-9, 19-24
1 Peter 4:1-8 
Matthew 27:57-66

The harrowing of hades

He Descended to the Dead

Every morning at Matins, when we pray the Apostle's Creed, we pray the phrase, “He descended to the dead” as in “He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead.” And for such a bold but unexplained statement I find the way our Eastern Christian brothers and sisters understand theology a much more comfortable way to approach such a mystery.  For the Orthodox, theology is, well, an art form. It is as much about icons, poetry, hymnody, liturgy and prayer, as it is about intellect and study. It's not that they don't engage in lots of study, they certainly do. But that's not the only thing they do to seek Christ, as we might say in our Benedictine tradition. And make no mistake, theology for the Orthodox is not so much an academic pursuit, but rather the very seeking of Christ.

Now many people have told me over the years that Holy Saturday is, for them, a day of emptiness. A few will say, a day of waiting or anticipation, but most of those who have spoken to me about it say that they experience  Holy Saturday as a day that is empty. Akin, perhaps, to the day after a funeral of a loved one. And while I am not going to tell you how or what to feel today, I would like to suggest that there is another approach to Holy Saturday, an approach that is artful, prayerful, even mystical. But one that I think is available to all of us.

Within the Eastern tradition there are many approaches to the descent of Christ to the dead, or into hell as it is often termed. But it is the approach that Cyril of Alexandria takes, that most appeals to me. Cyril takes the view that Christ, after his death, descended to hell to preach to all those who were present there. And in so doing, as he says in his Paschal Homilies, Christ “destroyed hell and opened the impassable gates for the departed spirits. He left the devil there abandoned and lonely.” 

Now per-Christian hell, for the Fathers of the Church, is not how we sometimes think of it as a place where unrepentant sinners go. Rather, it is a place for the dead. For anyone who has died. In their thinking, the Fathers are divided on what the spiritual consequences of being dead before the time of Christ were, but it is clear for them that all humanity descends to this nether world of captivity.

Now let's just take that it in for a moment. Christ, having just been murdered in a gruesome way, continues to experience what all humanity experiences by descending to the dead. He descends to hell to preach to the dead. Christ's plan for salvation is not only for those who were living during his earthly life or for those who would come in the future. No, Christ's plan for salvation is for all of humanity for all time. That includes, according to Cyril, not only the Righteous Jews, but also all pagans. Those two groups, for him, represented all of humanity at the time of Christ. 

If we extrapolate out the modern understanding of what the totality of humanity consists of, that means that Christ was preaching to people who had been dead, in some cases, for millions of years. And the theological point that I think is important here is that Christ's plan for salvation is for all the living, all the dead, all those yet to be born. And Christ will stop at nothing to preach, reach, touch, save, love all of us. All of humanity. Every member of every religion, every race, every culture, every language group. Every captive. 

The Russian Orthodox monk and theologian Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, says that “Clearly, Cyril perceived the victory of Christ over hell and death as complete and definitive. According to Cyril, hell loses authority both over those who were in its power and those who are to become its prey in the future. Thus, the descent into Hades, a single and unique action, is perceived as a timeless event. The raised body of Christ becomes the guarantee of universal salvation, the beginning of leading human nature to ultimate deification.” 

What humanity experiences on Holy Saturday is something outside of chronos, chronological human time, and is better understood as being experienced in kairos, that is, a season for God to act in a time that humanity may not fully grasp. That experience of Holy Saturday is nothing less than the emptying of hell because Christ desires for humanity to turn from worshiping death toward worshiping Him, the very fountain of life. 

However, though Christ has led captivity captive and brought salvation even to the nether world, the lure of  death and hell are powerful. Even though Christ has emptied hell, he still searches among the dead, the lost, because so often we human beings seem to have some kind of proclivity to choose death rather than life, to make our own hells on earth.  Just think about the last hundred years and the way in which humanity has created its own hell by continuing to turn from worshiping God in order to worship  death: Death in the form of mustard gas, concentration camps, killing fields, lynch mobs, napalm, drones, nuclear weapons. 

From the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, to the latest drone attack that occurred in Yemen this morning, humanity has chosen, time and again,  in an unprecedented way over these last hundred years, to worship death and to create our own hells on earth, even though Christ left the devil “abandoned and lonely”. It has been a century of darkness and death.

This proclivity for darkness and death is almost beyond the explainable, yet even now, Christ will never give up on us. Just as he searched the darkest corners of hell to save every member of the human family, Christ still searches for us even as we modern humans have embraced an unprecedented worship of death. And that embrace is sadly shared by all of us. For most of us in this church, that embrace is shared primarily through ambivalence or complacency.  But that complacency allows the purveyors of death to rule our lives whether we want to admit that or not. 

And so my invitation to all of you this Holy Saturday is to listen for Christ's preaching in those areas of your life in which you might have died. Has your zeal for peace died within you? Has the virtue of love for the least brother or sister died within you? Has your greatest patience with prayer or service to the poor died within you? Listen my sisters and brothers with the ear of your heart and know that Christ preaches to that which may have died within you this day. Christ never gives up on you! Not on any of you!

And knowing that – believing that – will then give us the strength we need to accompany Christ into all the darkest places that we human beings have created on earth. Those places where we as a people have died: in the slums we have established in order to neglect the poor; in the camps we've filled with refugees we'd rather fence in than liberate; in the limousines of gun manufacturers who are laughing all the way to the bank as our children are slaughtered in their classrooms; in the factories of death that our government calls nuclear weapons laboratories. 

Let us go to those places and preach like Christ to the dead. Let us announce this Holy Saturday, that a new and different century is about to begin - a Century of Light and Life. A century in which we preach, reach, touch, save, love all of humanity.  Let us proclaim that Christ suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. That he descended to the dead. That on the third day he rose again and that he ascended to heaven. From where, this Holy Saturday, he sends us forth to preach to the dead.  Holy Saturday empty? I'd ask you to consider a different approach in your prayer today. AMEN.