Advent 1 C - November 28, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Luc Thuku, OHC

Advent 1 C - Sunday, November 28, 2021

Jeremiah 33:14-16

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

Luke 21:25-36

As we well know, the term Advent comes from the latin adventus which means “to come” or “coming” or “arrival”. It doesn’t signify an event that has taken place or that will only take place in the future but an ongoing event as well, a process if you like, a coming that is ongoing.

Right from about the 4th Century AD, Christians have had this special time of preparation towards Christmas. Just like in Lent, traditionally the season of Advent was observed as a time of fasting and prayer, a time of spiritual renewal or cleansing of hearts to be able to receive the Lord.

As we begin to prepare for the liturgical and social celebration of Christmas, already commercially begun in stores, the liturgical celebrations of the coming weeks invite us to prepare for the end of time and second coming of Jesus, a theme that has been very clear in our readings during the office of Martins for several weeks before the end of the liturgical year B, just concluded.

In the Gospel passage we just heard this morning from Luke, we hear the statement “They will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory”(Luke 21:27) We know the term Son of Man refers to Jesus Christ but what does the coming of Jesus Christ really mean? 

The coming of Jesus can be understood in three ways. The first coming is plain enough and took place at a certain moment in history when the second person of the Trinity took human flesh and was born on earth, now going to almost two thousand and twenty years, as Jesus of Nazareth. This we call the mystery of the incarnation.

The second understanding of the coming of Christ is of something we await in hope. This is when Christ will return in glory at the end of time, a future event. Though a core belief of Christianity, it is a difficult subject to comprehend partly because of the trauma emanating from some misguided preaching of the event which makes it sound like an event I would rather not experience. It is stuff that has been a source of nightmares for me personally and of untold mental anguish to alot of people. On the other hand, the negligence of some preachers especially in many of our main stream and liturgical churches in the West, that do not want to hear of Judgement and eternal damnation of sinners, leave people not adequately prepared for the event through repentance. However, our liturgy especially the creed and the prayers of the Eucharist remind us constantly that it is an event that we should await with joy and hope!

There is also a third understanding of the coming of Jesus. This coming of Jesus is not a past event that is kept alive in our memories nor is it a mere expectation or imagination of a future event. By the power of the Spirit of the risen Lord, the coming of Jesus is continually being enacted even as we speak. Jesus comes in our midst as the word is proclaimed, as the sacraments are celebrated. He comes when Christian community and fellowship is practised, when the sick are being healed and prayed for, when the poor are fed and cared for, when peace is promoted and strived for, when the hopeless are encouraged, and so on, in short, when the good news that Christ lived and proclaimed in his first coming is lived by us his followers in our daily lives!

The solemn feast of the Nativity that Advent helps prepare for, and that we look forward to, should focus us to all the above three comings of Christ. It recalls the historical birth of Jesus the Nazarene even though the exact date of birth is unkown and there is plenty of controversy sorrounding the adoption of the date of the Roman feast of the birth of the Sun God to celebrate the birth of the Light of the World. I will not act as an apologist for the date of the feast nor as an opposer of having it celebrated on a so called pagan festival, although I have plenty of arguments for both sides of the debate. I will simply state the fact that a man, Jesus of Nazareth was born and his birth is rightly or wrongfully celebrated on an adopted date. However, the world was never the same again after his birth!

In the first reading we heard today, the first coming of Jesus is foretold by the Prophecy of Jeremiah. Jeremiah builds a certain expectation among the people about the coming of the Messiah who will be the son of David. “Look, the days are coming, Yahweh declares, when I shall fulfil the promise of happiness I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah” (Jeremiah 33: 14). Jeremiah was writing to a city that was in imminent danger of attack but even though the worst has not yet happened, he speaks of restoration not simply of daily life, which is very important, but also of restoration of the Davidic line which is one of the major signs of God’s favor for Israel. To a people devasted by loss, Jeremiah’s prophecy offers hope.

Like in the days of Jeremiah, our world today needs a promise of and fulfillment of happiness! We have suffered a devastating pandemic for the last two years and there is no much of an end in sight. We have lost relatives and friends, children have been orphaned, old people left with no one to care for them and all of us are feeling the weight of isolation. Even when there is a glimmer of normalcy, our conscience keeps telling us to be careful and in being careful we are robbed of joy.  We have suffered racism, sexism, violence of all sorts, bad governance. We have been used for profit by companies as our governments turn a blind eye to the exploiters…we need hapiness. Our world has been brought to its knees through corruption, People have lost jobs and livelihoods. Even animals and all of creation is yearning for relief, for joy, for happiness and therefore the promise of the coming of the Messiah, Jesus, is good news indeed!

Our Lord and Savior Jesus loves us so much to let something as sigificant as a remembrance of his birth pass without us being reminded of the second coming   also translated into Latin by Jerome as adventus from what the Greeks call the Parousia. As verse 28 of our Gospel passage this morning reminds us, “we will see the son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory”(Luke 21:28) This is the advent of faith, this is the advent of hope.

The second reading from the First letter of Paul to the Thessalonians chapter 3 verse 9-13 tells us that we must prepare ourselves for this second coming of Jesus, not so much by doing anything other than by just being open to the grace of God.  The last verse 13 says… “and may he so confirm your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless in the sight of our God and father when our Lord Jesus comes with all the holy ones”. 

When first Thessalonians was being written around AD 50, a good number of the Apostles and immediate followers of Jesus were still alive and they strongly belived Christ will return in their own life time and hence the  strong sense of the immediacy of the parousia. The first letter should therefore be read with reference to the second letter which urges the believers to “go on working quietly and earning the food they eat and never to become tired of doing what is right”(2 Thessalonians 3:12) for Christ will come at his own time and as for the coming, He will surely come (2 Thessalonians2:1-8). The immediacy of the first letter is however not diminished but put into perspective!

As we continue to wait in hope for this second coming, we continue to be supported by the word and sacraments and by our living of the gospel message and calling, which invites us to be ‘other Christs’. Jesus comes to us in a real, experiencial and tangible manner and if we open ourselves to his grace, he will support us in holiness as we await the second coming. This will reduce our anxieties and fears that are mainly associated with this coming because he constantly keeps reminding us that holiness, a word that scares many is simply LOVE. 

Spiritual Masters keep reminding us that the only moment we are assured of is the present because yesterday is gone and tomorrow…who knows? I humbly suggest then, that we make a deliberate choice of this continous, real and tangible coming of Jesus in his Word and Sacraments because it is the most important aspect to celebrate. Yes, Jesus comes to us when we are fully alive, when we are caring in love for our brothers and sisters in this global village that we live in, where my good act impacts everyone on earth and where one irresponsible act in one corner of the world affects the entire world as covid-19 and the effects of global warming are loudly shouting in our ears!

May this Season of Advent offer us yet another chance, another opportunity to appreciate the Jesus who comes. Let us contemplate this as we prepare ourselves to recognise Jesus when he comes!

Amen

Feast of James Huntington - November 25, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

Feast of  James Huntington - Thursday, November 25, 2021

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

Sixty-seven years ago today my mother’s parents married, having known one another for only six weeks. By the time my grandfather died in 2008, they had been married for fifty-four years. What may have begun in foolishness and fancy blossomed, through their commitment to one another and their life together, into a shelter from the proverbial storm, both for themselves and for countless others.

The image that returns to me whenever I think about my grandparents’ long marriage is their dining table. It was the life of their house and of our family. Every celebration, large and small, revolved around that table. Every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter found the table stretched with three leaves and an overflow card table in the living room. Everyone was welcome, and it often seemed as if everyone came and brought a guest, too—all the strays, as we came to call them, who had nowhere else to go.

In particular, I remember my aunt’s friend Sherry, so constant at our family celebrations that she was essentially an Owen. She wore these outlandish outfits that you only saw in places like Dallas—hot pink suits with wide brimmed hats. Her smile matched those hats, bright and gleaming. And she had this full-bodied laugh that warmed the air around her. Sherry had suffered a great deal of heartache and illness, and that laugh, those bright suits, and her cheerfulness belied a her physical and emotional pain. Perhaps more than any other single image, it is the icon of Sherry laughing through her pain, her open mouth half-smile half-grimace, that signifies the inheritance of that table of the marriage that sheltered it. 

The table was just a few slats of wood held together with screws and varnish, but all of life was welcome there. Every little bit of who you were got something to eat. My grandparents’ marriage was an “I do” spoken once in foolishness and unknowing and hope, but it echoed again and again around their dining table.

Today we celebrate a similar commitment our Founder, James Otis Sargent Huntington, made 137 years ago. Today we remember the promise he made in foolishness and unknowing and hope—most of all in hope. We remember in wonder and gratitude his faithful response to God’s call to leave the familiarity of his rather comfortable surroundings, to set off, like Abraham, with only a promise. Today we also celebrate the shelter and the hospitality of his promise and his faithfulness, which continues to be our inheritance here over a century later.

Now, normally, we would celebrate a saint’s feast on the anniversary of their death. But the Founder’s anniversary of death was already taken by Saints Peter and Paul. It’s kind of hard to move those two. So, instead we observe his feast on the anniversary of his monastic profession. Sometimes, as it does this year, that celebration also coincides with Thanksgiving. That bit of temporal peculiarity strikes me as imminently appropriate. For of all the Founder’s many virtues, it is his persistence in the monastic life for which we celebrate him.

Father Huntington was not a great founder in the typical sense. The creation of our Order was not his work alone. Nor was he the first, or even the most enthusiastic to join himself to it. He was simply and profoundly the first to stay. Nor was Father Huntington a great mystic, a great theologian, or a great reformer. He was certainly all of those things, in part. But his genius and his holiness lie in the line of St. Joseph: quiet, persistent faithfulness to the commitment and witness to which God called him.

He was one of those rare people who, once he put his hand to the plow, did not turn back. I have to imagine he had his doubts. He was human, after all. He certainly knew turmoil. He lived through the Civil War, the First World War, and the beginning of the Great Depression—more than enough to shake anyone. And that’s not to mention conflicts internal to the Order in its early years, a well-documented hypochondria, suspected bouts of depression, and whatever other spiritual conflicts he almost faced. Still, he stayed.

It seems 9 out of every 10 people who learn I’m a monk ask why I joined the Order. I often tell them some version of what I remember feeling at the time. But I can’t help but feel they’re asking the wrong question. In just seven years as a monk, I’ve seen six people join and ten people leave. For those who aren’t good at math, that’s a net loss, not a net gain. As Br. Rafael once said to me, “they come and they go, but mostly they go.” The interesting question, I think, isn’t why do we come, it's why do we stay?

You’ve probably heard me tell this story before. When I was a novice, one of my fellow novices asked the then Superior why he stayed. He thought about the question for day. Then he came back to us and said, “I stay because I said I would.” All of us who stay, whether in monastic life or in marriage or in another kind of binding commitment, have some version of this answer. I’m sure my grandparents did, and I’m sure our Founder did, too. There are days, or weeks, or even years when we stay because we said we would, and because, by God’s grace, that commitment still binds and nourishes us. Sometimes that is what faithfulness and trust and, yes, even holiness, look like: waiting patiently in the darkness for the stars in God’s sky to appear once more.

Then, too, there is love. Our love for God, yes, but mostly God’s love for us. I recently asked our Br. Laurence, life-professed for fifty-five years now, whether he had considered leaving the Order. He said that he had, but that, whatever might have drawn him away, “I guess I loved God more.” What are great mystical visions or theological treatises in comparison with so simple and profound a love?

Picking up on this theme, some years before Br. Laurence, Fr. Whittemore wrote in an unpublished memoir that contrary to what many people think, “The religious life is a love affair.” He continues, “I have the feeling that most people think that monks or nuns were ‘disappointed in love.’ Perhaps some of them were. God has many means of drawing souls to Himself. All I can say is that, though I have known a great number of monks and nuns very intimately, I never have happened to strike one who came to the cloister because he or she had been disappointed in love. On the other hand, I have known very many—please God, it is true of all of them—who were successful in love beyond all dreams or imagining. For they have heard in their hearts the whispering of the perfect lover. And it has been their deepest passion and their joy to surrender themselves to Him unto death, even the death of the Cross.”

On Tuesday, November 25, 1884, Father James Otis Sargent Huntington bound himself to God with the three-fold vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience. He did it entirely by himself, setting off into the unknown land of religious profession. He could not know that anyone else would ever join him in that life. But filled with love, and probably not a little foolishness, like Abraham he trusted to God’s promise. And like Abraham, God has made his offspring more numerous than the stars in the sky, for here we all are today—sheltered still in the arms of his commitment and his promise.

It is because of that promise and the love that bound Father Huntington to it, that the icon of our Order, too, could be a table, laden with the body and blood of Christ, extending out through the generations, welcoming all of us strays with nowhere else to go. A table where we can wear a smile or a grimace, where every part of us can be fed and loved and known. A table of wood and nails and varnish, yes, but one where God’s love can take flesh and grow within and around us, where that love can save us and free us. And all because one man was foolish enough to say yes.

Christ the King B - November 21, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

Christ the King B - Sunday, November 21, 2021

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14

Revelation 1:4b-8

John 18:33-37

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Some years ago, I heard the story of a preacher in Boston who prayed the Lord's Prayer thusly: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done in Boston as it is in heaven.”  We can laugh at this as a classic expression of Boston snobbery, where the Lowells talk only to Cabots and the Cabots talk only to God.  But why not pray this way? Why not pray that God’s Kingdom come and God’s will be done in West Park, or Brooklyn, or Kansas City or London or Beijing or Cape Town? Why not pray for the coming of the Kingdom here in this particular place, now at this time?

Another Bostonian, former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, is famous for having said: “All politics is local.”  And perhaps the coming of God’s Kingdom, like all politics, is also always local, situated in time and place, in the lives and experiences of concrete persons and communities.  At the very least, the Kingdom starts this way, and it is never less than local no matter how cosmic or universal or timeless it may become.

Thy Kingdom come, says our prayer, but it also emerges, beckons, invites, and develops here and now, emerging and developing and beckoning until the second coming of Christ, until the Parousia, until the end of time, until Christ becomes All in all, until the universal restoration of all things, until everything has been gathered up into the very heart of God.

The Kingdom is, of course, God’s. It is God's work, God's will, and God's crown. But you and I are co-operators with God in this great endeavor, co-workers or co-conspirators with the Holy One in this noble process. Yes, perhaps it can come without us, but I think God wants it otherwise. 

How does this happen? How do we assist God in the advancement of God's reign and the establishment of God’s Kingdom? It is quite simply by our own acts, small or great…repeated acts of love and kindness and joyful hope, sometimes very small indeed, but never, I repeat never, ineffective in this cosmic process of the establishment of God's dream for the earth and for us.

As I've reflected on this, I've returned again and again to a homely image from my high school years. I was a good student, but never great in the sciences, never a star in biology or chemistry or physics. But I remember well a classic demonstration that has probably been repeated in chemistry labs throughout the decades, if not centuries. It has to do with supersaturated solutions.  A supersaturated solution—and here I quote from the internet:

… is a solution that contains more than the maximum amount of solute [or component] that is capable of being dissolved at a given temperature. The recrystallization of the excess dissolved solute in a supersaturated solution can be initiated by the addition of a tiny crystal of solute, called a seed crystal…. Recrystallization from a supersaturated solution is typically very fast.

Superstrated solutions look like other liquids, if sometimes cloudy, and not particularly special. But they are filled with potentiality. And as the teacher or student adds one or two more grains of the chemical, suddenly a tipping point is reached, and the entire solution crystallizes, and what was once clear or cloudy liquid now is, in the twinkling of an eye, a solid. It is now changed, and it refracts light in the most marvelous ways and looks quite transformed. 

I wonder if the world we live in is not also, in some sense, a spiritually supersaturated solution, already filled to the brim and seeded by God, waiting perhaps for that one small action, that one loving deed or change of heart, that one seed of ours which contributes in an invisible but powerful way to a tipping point which has the potential of transmuting the whole thing into something quite new and remarkable.  I wonder if, when Jesus says: “The Kingdom of God is among [or within] you” (Luke 17:21) we are meant to understand this as an invitation to add the seeds of our lives, our own particular and often hidden acts of love or kindness or intentionality, large or small, which can become a tipping point for the larger entry of God's reign.  No, this or that one act might not be the seed which brings about the cosmic transformation of everything into a new creation, but it might well play an immensely critical role in laying the conditions for the possibility of the breaking in of God’s Kingdom in ways that we cannot even begin to imagine, nor would have been possible had we not acted.  If this be true—and I think it is—what an amazing and awesome potentiality it is and what holy power we share.  

In the First Letter of Peter, we read: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” (I Peter 2:9) What if we took that seriously? What if in fact we are a royal priesthood, a kingly people? And what if our royal priesthood, connected as it with Christ’s eternal priesthood, is precisely to sow seeds into the supersaturated reality of our present day, filled as it already is with invisible seeds of divine grace? And what if in doing this, we participate in the advancement of the Kingdom in all its glorious diversity and rich variety? 

We catch glimpses of or experience these seeds being sown around us all the time all the time. Last week I was at the Walgreens in Kingston, accompanying a brother from our assisted living wing as he received his COVID booster shot and flu vaccine.  He had some difficulty and needed assistance, and a young woman employee, whom I assumed to be an assistant manager, came to our help. As we were going along, she turned to me and said, “I don't know if anyone's told you this before, but you're doing a great job.” I was stunned.  It was as if I was being blessed and acknowledged without either looking for it or expecting it. I don't know what possessed me, but I just said to her: “God bless you.” And she said with a big smile: “And God bless you.” I later thought: what was that all about? No, the heavens didn't open, trumpets didn't sound, the Second Coming had not quite occurred.  But in those few remarks, unsolicited and surprising as they were, the Kingdom was advanced, and I—little ‘ole me—caught a glimpse of it on Broadway in Kingston, New York.  I realize now that I was approached that day by royal priest, a kingly woman, one of God’s own people. 

I don't know much about royalty. The model of sovereignty that I am most familiar with is, of course, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom—long may she reign—but that doesn't really say much about the royalty of Christ nor about our own royal priesthood. In today’s gospel passage from St. John's gospel, Jesus stands before a powerful ruler of this world, Pontius Pilate, and simply states: “My Kingdom is not from this world.” No, it's not, but it is in this world if not from it or of it, and we catch glimpses of it all the time if our eyes are open and our ears attentive and our hearts unguarded. This world is a supersaturated solution waiting for you and me to drop seeds of loving kindness and mercy and justice and reconciliation until that moment when the created order is crystallized and transformed into a new community or order of love and truth and wholeness: “Thy kingdom come.”

Dear royal people, dear kingly brothers and sisters, dear priests of Christ, all of us: we must do our part. Let us share boldly and unashamedly in the ministry and work of Christ our King.  Let us scatter seeds of love and hope, however we may, wherever we are, whenever we can.  God is waiting for you and me to do the next right thing.  And so is this supersaturated world. 

Amen.