All Saints Year C - Friday, November 1, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
All Saints - Proper 25 - Sunday, October 27, 2019

Daniel 7:1-3,15-18
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:20-31

Throughout history humans have had a strong appreciation for and connection with their ancestors. I think the notion of oneness is what Christians were trying to verbalize when they made a late addition to the ancient Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the communion of saints.” They were offering us the idea that the dead are at one with the living. This feast of All Saints entered the Christian tradition in the 4th century with a focus on relation and remembrance. What we are up to today is recognizing our sainthood and remembering those who have gone before us---all of us joined in this communion of saints. In such company we find comfort in our losses, courage for daily struggles, and hope as we face the future together.

The passage from Ephesians offers a commanding declaration about faith and salvation. The writer declares that the church is made up of those who chose to hope in Christ. The ending prayer for the Ephesians proposes a way which God, through Christ, brings all who believe into unity---a unity in time and across time. Those who have died and those who are living are one in Christ. Those who have died are already raised and those who are living are already marked for resurrection through baptism. The oneness of all things in Christ is our inheritance as saints. We are all in this together.

We live in and through one another. We become ourselves only through a process of mutual becoming. It begins in God’s own creative, self-giving love. Our core identity rests in that divine Love that birthed us all. This kind of mutual interdependence I have sensed to be true with the death of those closest to me. We are all one, just at different stages, all loved corporately by and in God. We are saved not by being privately perfect, but by being part of the whole, part of the Body that is Christ. This echoes the biblical concept of a covenant love granted to the Jewish people as a whole, and never just to one individual.

Consider how this awareness of reality upends so many of our current obsessions about private worthiness, reward and punishment, gender, race, class distinctions, and possessions. Weighing, measuring, counting, listing, labeling, and comparing go so far. The Gospel is about learning to live and die together in and with God. The good news is that God is saving and redeeming the Whole first and foremost, and we are all caught up in this Divine Love. We are the blessed beneficiaries, the partly willing participants in the Whole. Unless and until we can enjoy this, so much of what passes for Christianity will amount to little more than well-disguised narcissism and self-referential politics. Mature religion is meant to realign what our egos and survival instincts have put asunder, namely the fundamental wholeness at the heart of everything.

The source of our disease and violence is separation from parts of ourselves, from each other, and from God. Our shadow is any part of ourselves or our institutions that we try to hide or deny. Nonviolence, weakness, and simplicity are part of the American shadow. The larger and deeper shadow for Western individuals and culture is actually failure itself. Our success-driven culture scorns failure, powerlessness, and any form of poverty. We reject vulnerability and seek dominance instead, and we elect leaders who falsely promise us the same. In the United States today, white dominant culture prizes competition, urgency, individualism, and logic. Cooperation, self-care, and community are seen as inferior. Our Gospel today incorporates failure into a new definition of spiritual success. Luke shows that Jesus is fulfilling God’s compassion by living it with the oppressed and those on the margins and convicting those who are certain that they are righteous. Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount by praising “the poor”! That should tell us how thoroughly we have missed the point of the Gospel. We avoid the very things that Jesus praises as we try to project a strong, secure, successful image to ourselves and the world. The beatitudes offer a foundation for holy living, clarifying, strengthening, and directing us in this life.

The early Church understood overcoming divisions as part of its mandate, emphasizing connectedness, oneness in Christ. Being Church means overcoming barriers. We cause so much harm and lose so much possibility by fearing our differences. Ultimate power is grounded not in rulers and authorities, but in God. Christ’s authority is evident in the church of which Christ is the head, and which shares in the fullness of salvation already, even as that fullness is being fulfilled.

To refuse the dark side is to store up the darkness. We are dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshiped its light side and refused the dark. We know the plagues of bad things in our day as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance, gun violence, imprisoning refugees, and climate change.  Daniel knew those of his day and he reminds us of God’s promise to redeem, even in the face of injustice.  It’s easy to become disillusioned and to give up hope. But for the saints, God’s ultimate stand against all evil is sealed in the death and resurrection of Christ.

Any repair of our fractured world must start with those who have the insight and courage to own their shadow, so as to tap into greater compassion and creativity to live as our True Self—which is Love. We come to full consciousness by facing our own contradictions, mistakes, and failings. There is no shortage of opportunities to discover our personal or corporate shadow, especially in a monastic community. According to Jung, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” [1] God cannot be found out there until God is first found within ourselves. Then we can naturally see God in others and in all of creation. What we seek is what we are. The search for God and the search for our True Self are finally the same search. To fail in this is to deny one’s own sainthood and to miss the purpose of life.

Paul prays for his hearers that their hearts may be enlightened, so that they may know the hope to which Christ calls them. When we see only with our eyes or hear only with our ears, we may fail to claim the hope instilled in us. To see with the heart is to imagine the future which God is preparing. As Christians we are shaped by more than our experiences; we are shaped by our hopes, by the future into which we are living, and by the convictions by which we are living. Hope is best perceived with the eyes of the heart. Hope is best lived within a hopeful community, in the company of the saints, living and departed. Our feast today invites each of us to claim our place in their company.  +Amen.


[1] C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Vintage Books: 1989), 247.

Pentecost 20C - Sunday, October 27, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Pentecost 20C - Proper 25 - Sunday, October 27, 2019

Sirach 35:12-17
2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18
Luke 18:9-14

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen.

Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and who regarded others with contempt. Who trusted in themselves that they were righteous. And who regarded others with contempt.

Does that sound like anyone you know?

If you answered “yes” and the person you’re thinking of is anyone other than yourself, this story is for you. Don’t worry, it’s for me, too. For all of us. Because we all, especially those of us in churches and monasteries, need to be reminded regularly of the dangers of trusting in our own righteousness.

Like the Pharisee in this parable, we all set ourselves apart. We literally and figuratively stand by ourselves and thank God for all the ways we are not like other people. Now, most of us probably went immediately to the political. I thank God that I don’t think it’s acceptable to keep children in cages. I thank God I don’t fly a Confederate flag. I thank God I am aware of the impending environmental collapse.

But when you live in a monastery and operate a large guesthouse, you come to see that contempt is often much subtler and therefore more insidious than the political reading our current context makes so easy. Of course, we show contempt to those who differ with us politically, but contempt strikes closer to home, as well. And when it does it has the same effect on us as on the Pharisee in this parable: it isolates us. Or, rather, through our contempt and our trust in our own righteousness, we isolate ourselves from God and one another.

Let me tell you a story.

I have recently given up meditating. Now the secret is out. I’m a bad monk. And you shouldn’t listen to anything else I have to say. It’s all a lie.

Nevertheless.

If you can believe it, it was actually my spiritual director who told me to stop. She even went to so far as to order me to put my meditation cushion in a closet so that it would stop taunting me.

The problem was that my prayer had become work, and not in the Benedictine sense of ora et labora. In the striving, grasping, trusting in myself that I am righteous sense of work. Without my knowing it, I had come to feel that if my prayer didn’t feel onerous, if it didn’t take me away from something I’d rather be doing, then it wasn’t really prayer. If I actually enjoyed it, if the activity brought me pleasure, then it must be the opposite of prayer. 

My meditation, which had once led me deep into my longing for God, had become a stumbling block, something I could point to to say “See, I’m a good monk. I’m working hard. I’m choosing to do this thing that isn’t bringing me any joy, because this is what prayer really looks like.” Oh, and by the way, thank God I’m not like those people who think prayer is all butterflies and rainbows. I know the truth. Prayer is hard. It requires commitment. It isn’t about feeling states or consolation. Bring on the dark night!

Never mind about beauty, generosity, warmth, and pleasure, which are all a sign of God’s goodness and a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.

As so many of us do, in our various ways, I had fallen prey to the modern-day version of what Martin Luther called “works-righteousness,” which is to say, to the heresy that we can save or heal ourselves by our own actions. We cannot. The good news of Jesus Christ is that we don’t have to.

When we trust in our own righteousness, we make an idol of our strength. We come to worship, not God, but ourselves and our own distorted sense of what we and the world need. We rely on rules and distinctions and self-improvement schemes. And like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable, we set ourselves apart, standing far away, both from those we regard with contempt and from God, who makes her home in the imperfect fragility of the human heart. 

Really, I think, we regard ourselves with contempt, and so we try to make ourselves good and pure enough for God to draw near. What a foolish project. For God has already drawn near. And all of our groping toward God is really God’s urging within us, God’s longing for us, flowering in our desire for God. You see, God is already at work within us, bringing to fullness the plan of our salvation, our healing, and our flourishing. Our own striving usually gets in the way.

Let me tell you another story. This one is from Cardinal Basil Hume, who late in his life recalled the cookie jar in his childhood kitchen. His mother told him that those cookies—they were English, so they called them biscuits, I’m sure—were for teatime only. And that if he took a cookie at any other time, God would see. Finally, as an old man, he realized that his mother was partially right. God was watching him. But if he had taken a cookie, God would have said to him, “Here, son, have another.”

Despite all we tell ourselves, and all we have been told, we don’t need to be good for God to love us. God is good, and that is everything.

Prayer, and life, need not be all toil and rule and discipline, though those certainly have their place and time. Beauty, warmth, and pleasure can as easily draw us into the heart of the one who made and sustains us. Sometimes God is even inviting us to sit in bed, wrapped in the warmth of a quilt, with a cup of coffee in our hands and a cat at our feet, and to call that kind of resting attention prayer enough. 

And if we enjoy ourselves while we’re at it, we, too, might find God saying to us in whatever way we most need to hear it, “Here, my dear one, have another.”

Pentecost 19C - Sunday, October 20, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. John Forbis
Pentecost 19C - Sunday, October 20, 2019

Genesis 32:22-31
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
Luke 18:1-8

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

Well, I have come to this morning to preach this sermon, and I’m still wrestling with this parable.  Nothing like a deadline to bring some kind of truce between me and Jesus … even if it is an uneasy one.

I just have to come out and say this:  This parable infuriates me.  I find it confounding.  I’ve heard it used in so many destructive ways.  The primary one is, well, you’re not getting what you want or need because you’re not praying enough for it.  Such a damaging interpretation gives Christianity a bad name.  And those who do think that way, against them, I would like to have justice.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where too often justice involves a widow with little power and influence losing her decorum and dignity to attack an indifferent, unjust judge who only cares about himself and his friends  She has to attack him because she’s desperate.  Perhaps what she’s asking of the judge is for her own survival.  The NRSV, the translation for this morning, tones down the full intensity of what is happening.  The judge does not rule in her favor just because she won’t stop bothering him.  The judge’s ruling comes from a fear that he might receive a black eye from her as the Greek expresses the action.

Although, she may have already given a black eye to his reputation.  She perhaps remembers one thing that the unjust judge forgets.  The Hebrew scriptures insist that widows, orphans and the poor are to be given particular care and preference.  So if we were to imagine Jesus’s disciples listening to this parable, they were likely scandalized by the man’s behavior.

As she keeps coming after him tenaciously; she is exposing him for who he really is.  To save his reputation, he will have to grant her wish.  This world’s justice often provokes anger and violence to come out of one who has become desperate enough to pummel even a man who has the power to rule over her life or death.  It also compels a judge to rule in one’s favor just to preserve his own skin and reputation.   

In this brief passage, the word justice appears four times.  So perhaps the question, I have to ask myself is the following:  What am I praying for exactly?  If I challenge Jesus and his parable about God, I better be clear about what I want before throwing God over for my own righteous indignation.  Such a righteousness becomes nothing more than self-righteousness, much like the unjust judge who has no fear of God or respect for people.

So what do I want?  Well I want the widow heard and given justice the first time.  I want an end to racism, sexism, xenophobia, anti-semitism.  I want those who perpetrate it to have to pay some consequences, certainly be removed from their jobs, from positions of power and influence, to be thrown in prison or even be killed if necessary.  Then, the victims can take over and bring justice to this earth.  It’s time for some payback, for them to get a taste of what they themselves have dished out, for them to get what’s coming to them. 

Oops!   Well, now I’m exposed.

It’s so human.  We see justice as punitive, payback, who wins, who loses.  But God’s justice is about forgiveness, peace, healing, reconciliation and love.  It unites us, helps us to see who we are, human, God’s own children.  No one wins, no one loses.  In God’s justice we’re all one, persecuted AND persecutors, victims AND victimizers, just and unjust, all unified by love, a love that would go as far as to endure inhumanly cruel torture and a horrible, shameful death as a criminal to expose the horrors and atrocities resulting from our version of justice.

Jesus once said, if you do it or don’t do it to the least of these his children you do or don’t do it to him.  This saying gives some precedence to the possibility that there’s much of the widow in God.  She is trying to bring us to not just cry but act for justice as well … His justice that will prevail, that has prevailed again and again and again.

Just recently, I viewed the testimony of Gwen Carr, a widow and the mother of Eric Garner who was choked to death by a police officer, at a judicial hearing on police oversight.  She appeared in a large room before many people in power, probably some just and some unjust, and expressed her experience of losing her son.

Her outcry was strong, forceful and persistent before and after that hearing.  Yet, all she asked for was for that chokehold to be made illegal again and for the police officer who did it to be removed from his job and to face criminal charges in court.  It took a long time, but eventually the officer was removed from his job.  She relieved her community of at least one killer who swore to serve and protect.

Against tremendous opposition, heartache and anger, she spoke and kept on speaking, and people throughout the world heard her.  Her granddaughter was doing the same thing until she died of a heart attack at the age of 27.  Their cry was not calling for vengeance but just simply safety and accountability.

They have become a galvanizing symbol to expose the violence and injustice of police officers who abuse their authority looking for scapegoats.  They have become the women who stood up against unjust judges in New York who did not charge the police officer for murder.  They are the voice of God who so longs and desires for a home where love prevails and not suspicion, racism and violence.

“They have taken my son’s voice away, but his mother still has a voice, and I’m going to use it as long as I have a voice.”

When the Son of Man comes, will he still find faith on earth?