Sunday, March 30, 2025

The Fourth Sunday in Lent C, March 30, 2025

Holy Cross MonasteryWest Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

The Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 30, 2025

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Christianity is currently undergoing something of an identity crisis. How can so many who claim the name “Christian” act so unlike Christ? What does it mean that so many churches are now empty on Sunday mornings? And what does it mean that, even then, so many today are searching for new ways to nurture their spiritual lives?

It was Erick Erickson, the twentieth-century developmental psychologist, who coined the phrase “identity crisis.” Before Darwin, he notes, an “identity crisis” wasn’t a thing. But in a world where everything is changing, the question of “who are we” begins to make itself known with alarming urgency. For
Erickson, without a strong sense of identity, the self will struggle to develop and mature. And this is the great challenge that faces us today: how do we find a healthy sense of identity when nearly every sector of life is defined more by a question than an answer?

Well, one way that both society and religion has sought to alleviate this disease of uncertainty and ambivalence is to retreat into the past…to that “safe space” where everything is clear, fixed, and steady…where boundaries and allegiances are maintained. But the fatal flaw of this fundamentalist retreat is that it’s based on an illusion…that life is static and fixed…and that the greatest value of life is to protect yourself from what threatens your sense of self, not what causes your self to grow.

For Erickson, the human person and societies develop into maturity through successive stages, the foundational being what he calls “basic trust.” All of the building blocks to healthy living are founded on the ability for one coming into the world to regard one’s caregiver as one who can be trusted. To the extent that we don’t receive this, we struggle through the course of our lives to find it, usually causing much damage to others along the way!

What results from this predicament are two contrasting, often competing, approaches to our life with God: one that believes that God is to be feared and obeyed above all else, the other that believes that God is to be trusted and loved above all else.

And this brings us to what I consider to be the greatest of all Jesus’ stories in the Gospels: the story of a father’s prodigal love for his wayward son. To set the context…Jesus, we should highlight, was born into a Jewish world that was decidedly on the closed, fear-based side of the ideological spectrum. Her identity was entirely wrapped up in her ability to remain obedient to the law. The religious leaders, the scribes and Pharisees, at least as they are portrayed in the New Testament, were the fundamentalists and legalists of their day. God, was, above all else, to be feared.

But, we should ask, why did so many in Judaism come to have an image of God that resembled more a despotic judge than a prodigally loving father? To put one’s finger on it, it was because Israel interpreted her near annihilation by the Babylonians as a direct result of her disobedience to the law. God’s wrath was unleashed upon her because she behaved badly, and, as a result, her leaders would develop a vision for restoration based on a hyper-sensitivity to obedience to the law. And this would lead directly to the fear-based religious sensibilities we see Jesus confront over and over again in the Gospels. It had everything to do with her inadequate image of God.

Notice what spurs the story on: “tax collectors” and “sinners” were coming near to listen to Jesus, which incensed the Pharisees and scribes. These religious leaders believed holiness to mean “to be separate from” all who are deemed sinful and unclean. How could Jesus be a holy man if he was always hanging out with sinners? This would be a direct threat to the Pharisaical system of holiness, which would threaten the identity and integrity of Israel as God’s chosen people. “We can never allow any compromise to the law to ever cause our downfall again,”in essence they say. It is to those of this fear-based, closed, transactional way of seeing God that Jesus tells his story.

On one level, the two sons represent Israel and the nations. Israel, the elder son, who has always been with God resents that the younger son, the gentiles, has not had to be placed under the same yoke of the law yet still reaps all of the benefits of being God’s son. And not just that, but God seems to take greater joy in the “sinful” son than in the “holy” son who remained “faithful” in his father’s house. The genius of the story is that Jesus subverts our expectations, as he so often does, and shocks us into seeing God in a wholly different light. In a way, Jesus is an iconoclast who tears down the idols of our bad theology and directs us
toward something far more life-giving instead. God is not a tyrant ready with whip in hand to strike us in our moment of stupidity. God is, rather, like a father who completely forgets the foolishness of his son altogether because all he can think about is seeing his son once again. “But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” No questions. No rebukes. Just running and embracing, and kissing, and, probably, not a few tears as well. All that matters is that the lost son has returned, and all that the father can do is celebrate.

At this, the elder son is enraged: “Listen! For all these years I have been working as a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command….” Notice, he likens himself to a slave and not a son. His relationship to his father was transactional based on duty, not in love based on trust. And this is what Jesus is most concerned about. We cannot truly know God unless we see God as the prodigal, loving father in this story…and place our trust in his merciful love.

Religion, which literally means to bind together, is meant to be covenantal, not transactional. One life results in singing and dancing…the other in bitter resentment.

From the moment of our birth, we begin forming images of God that will determine how we relate to God, to one another, and to the world we inhabit. There the foundation of basic trust is laid, or not. It is inevitable that there will be cracks in the foundation and that we will struggle to attain this basic trust throughout the course of our lives. What is so revolutionary about the teachings of Jesus is that his theology, his understanding of God, becomes the one thing that can heal, restore, and expose the lies that we have believed about God and about
ourselves for what they really are. No matter how warped our images of God may be and how compromised our foundation of basic trust, when we encounter the truth of the prodigal love of God as we do in this story, our lives become firmly planted on the rock of this love and the rest can just be forgotten.

This is the good news we must both live and boldly proclaim: God is to be loved more than to be feared. That the heart of God is the kind of love that knows no conditions…that is boundless, blind, and ecstatic. That our God is a God who is consumed with the thought of the sight of us…who night and day anticipates us…and that when we finally come to our senses and make our way home, loses it and overwhelms us with a nonsensical embrace. Now this is a God we can trust!
 
And this alone will take us beyond our current “identity crisis” as church and help us find the heart-beat of our faith on which to build our future. Our world, now flailing about in chaos and confusion in its own “identity crisis,” is in desperate need of a church that knows this and that lives this.

The English writer, Hannah More, expressed it this way:
“Love never reasons, but profusely gives,
Gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all,
And trembles then, lest it has done too little.”
May we this Lent come to know more convincingly than ever before this profuse, this thoughtless, this prodigal love…and may it flow freely and nonsensically out of grateful hearts that just can’t be contained. Amen.

Tuesday, March 25, 2025

Feast of the Annunciation - March 25, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

The Feast of The Annunciation, March 25, 2025
 


Sooner or later we must all surrender to an unknown God. 

Until this moment comes, most of us have a rather tame idea of God. We have an image—positive or negative or somewhere in between—based on our childhood experiences of family and church and the world. We are running from or toward or even just ignoring this God. Beautiful or horrible as these images may be for us, they remain flat, pasted on the page of some imagined reality that, ultimately, we can control and shape according to our fantasies and illusions.

If our faith is ever to mature, we eventually have to face the reality of this unknown God who comes to us, asking us to bear him into a life we cannot even imagine. We stand on the edge of an abyss—a darkness that cannot be plumbed, a relationship than cannot be fathomed, an invitation to a death that will lead to a life beyond anything we can conceive. The cloud parts, beckoning us inward to overshadow us, and we must step forward willingly into the real God.

Such is the stark reality of the Annunciation, dressed up as we often find it with lilies and silent poses of patient waiting. Mary, admittedly less flustered than I would be if an angel suddenly appeared to me, asks Gabriel a simple question: “How can this be?” To which the angel replies “The power of the Most High will overshadow you.”

It is a response ripe with symbolism and scriptural resonance. Mary’s body is the deep darkness at the beginning of creation over which the Holy Spirit hovers. She is Mount Sinai, bathed in cloud, as God conveys the Law to Moses or Mount Tabor bearing the enclouded glory of Jesus’ Transfiguration. Her womb—filled now with God’s Word becoming Flesh—is also the Cross heavy with the fruit of salvation and the Empty Tomb from which Jesus rises to new life.

In 2016 Good Friday fell, as it does occasionally, on March 25th, this Feast of the Annunciation. This won’t happen again until 2157, long after we’re all gone, God willing. This concurrence is not accidental. In patristic and medieval tradition, March 25th was thought to be the date of Jesus’ Crucifixion. Jesus was conceived and died on the same day, 33 years apart, a perfect circle joining life and death. Or, as John Donne puts it, today we see “The abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one / Of the Angel’s Ave and Consummatum est.

Many medieval images twine these two observances together, showing Mary as the fruitful vine that becomes the Cross of Christ flowering into new life. The Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood” links the two images with the tree in the Garden of Eden:
The fruit which gives life
Hangs, as we believe,
Upon the Virgin's breast,
And again upon the cross
Between two thieves.
Here, the child-bearing Virgin,
Here, the saving cross;
Both are mystic trees.
[The cross], the humble hyssop,
She, the noble cedar,
And both life-giving.
Her consent to birth and his to death finally made as one—the full circle of salvation written in the flesh of this day.

Mary could not have known, of course, where her “be it unto me according to thy word,” would take her and this life burgeoning inside her. I wonder if standing at the foot of the Cross, she heard the rustle of a wing and thought “Oh, this is the cost I agreed to all those years ago. Now, the bill is due.” I wonder if, hearing her son cry out, something inside her dropped, some long-held breath released in grief and recognition and—finally, all those years later—a surrender fully consummated.

God desires nothing less of us than everything we are or ever will be. In the first flush of infatuation, it’s easy enough to say yes, to give away our whole lives to this God who desires us and whom we desire. As the years draw on, though, the cost of our consent becomes clearer. And though we thought we knew what it meant to give our whole selves in love, we may come to see how little we understood in all our youthful bluster.

There comes a point—and likely a few such points throughout our lives—when, standing at the edge the abyss, we come face to cloudy face with this unknown and unknowable God who has been pursuing us our whole lives. We feel within the pit of ourselves the gravitational pull toward surrender. Like Mary, we consent to the overshadowing of all we are and all we have been. Through patience and, perhaps, longsuffering, we emerge from this dark baptism fully ourselves, maybe for the first time: God-bearers in a God-born world, holy Theotokoi—not from our own holiness but from the holiness of God forever infusing our bodies. This is what we were born for: to become the womb and the empty tomb, the fruitful vine and the flowering Cross. 

The emptiness that seemed to be our undoing becomes, through God’s great mercy, the very truest expression of our divine nature: the fullness of God’s love flowing through us into a hurting world.

I am convinced that this is the place of monasticism and of all authentic Christianity in our world today. We are called to bear witness (in the Greek, to become martyrs) to the love of a God who brings life out of death and whose final word is always love. In order to witness authentically to that love, we must step into the cloud of our own undoing, we must eventually choose to surrender to this unknown God who loves us into wholeness.

In 1920, Rilke wrote to a friend “The final thing is not self-subjugation / but silent loving from such centeredness / we feel round even rage and desolation / the finally enfolding tenderness.

Surrender to the overshadowing of God’s power is not self-subjugation, but consent to transformation. It is an apotheosis, a full revelation of God’s power made manifest in our own humanity. It is an allowing of God’s life to stream from our very pores. It is the recognition, even the celebration, of that finally enfolding tenderness that never can or will desert us, whatever the rage and desolation.

My brothers and sisters, let the power of the Most High overshadow you. Surrender to this unknown God and be reborn as yourself. Step into your poverty that is also your glory. Let out your be it unto me and your consummatum est. Today is the day of our undoing and our full becoming.

Sunday, March 23, 2025

The Third Sunday in Lent C, March 23, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt
The Third Sunday in Lent, March 23, 2025

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)

It was not unusual in Jesus’ time for people to think that ordeals happened to people for a reason. Either they, or their progenitors had sinned and the accident or illness that happened to them was a punishment from God.

Even in our own days, we still hear of people who proclaim that an epidemic is hitting a particular group because of their alleged sins. 

In my youth, religious leaders of various convictions proclaimed that AIDS was an expression of God’s wrath on the gay community. 

In the early eighties, in Belgium, I was what was then called and AIDS buddy. I accompanied dying AIDS patients who had been abandoned by so-called friends and relatives. The idea was that they had had it come to them and were not worthy of compassion.

Nowadays, there are still people who accuse rape victims of having provoked the violence that happened to them. Can we keep ourselves from assigning blame to victims? 

Does anyone ever deserve illness or trauma? Jesus’ response to that is a radical “No.” Jesus does not deny that victims of accidents, illnesses and disasters are also sinners. But they are not worse sinners than those who have escaped such evils. We are all sinners, you and I.

Instead of dwelling on assigning blame or guilt, Jesus is quick to turn to those who might do just that.

“No, I tell you, unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.”

Unless we repent, we will suffer ruin or destruction.

So, whether we suffer catastrophe or not, we are all subject to God’s judgment. No matter how blessed we are (or not) in our life circumstances, we are all subject to God’s weighing how well we are abiding by God’s commandments of Love.

None of us are dispensed from repentance. We all need to change our minds and hearts and turn again towards God. And not only in Lent.

The Greek word translated as repentance in our text is “metanoia.” Its literal meanings are “repentance, a change of mind, a change in the inner self.” The Hebrew equivalent often associated with "metanoia" is “shub.” It means "to turn back" or "to return," indicating a return to God and God’s ways.

In Lent particularly, the church encourages us to return to God’s ways. That requires a good bit of introspection to assess where we have strayed. Have we failed to love God or neighbor by our actions, thoughts or omissions? Have we been complicit of evil done in our name or thanks to our lack of opposition to it?

There are sins that are personal and there are sins that are systemic. We are often quick to identify our personal sins. I lied to a family member. I took was not mine to take. But it is trickier to identify how our actions contribute to oppressive systems.

For instance, how does my lifestyle contribute to greenhouse gas emissions? How does my abstaining from calling out sexist or racist comments contribute to those systems continuing to have strength in our society? 

So it takes thinking time to identify how I am enmeshed in sinful systems. But identifying how we are involved helps to figure out ways to reduce or eliminate harm-giving in our life.

And prayer is required to ask how we can return to God who says “I am the way the truth and the life” (John 14:6). You can ask God’s help in figuring out how sin is active in your life.

Then, we can decide to turn back to God’s ways rather than our self-centered ways.

But fear not. God’s judgment won’t result in retaliation on either side of death. God’s judgment will result in deeper self-knowledge and God-knowledge on our behalf. We will see how immense God’s Love is. And we will see more clearly how we had fallen short from embodying and enacting that Love in our lives.

Now, should we wait until the final judgment to find out how we are doing? Can we undertake to gain some of that clarity in self-knowledge and God-knowledge this side of death? That is an enterprise fit for Lent and beyond. You know that procrastination is not our friend.

Our gospel passage today ends with a parable about repentance and how God holds back from final judgement and helps in our returning to God’s ways.

In our parable, the fig tree is not yet bearing fruit after three annual visits from the owner of the garden. I see God represented in both the owner and the gardener in this story. I see the owner as God the creator, the judge of all. And I see the gardener as God the advocate, the redeemer of all.

The owner of the garden is keenly aware of the fig tree’s failings to date. The gardener is aware that with help, the fig tree has potential. The owner lets himself be convinced to show leniency and holds back from sentencing the fig tree to harsher treatment. But we are left with a cliffhanger. Will the tree, with the loving care of the gardener, rise to the challenge of being fruitful in a year? No time for procrastination here either.

With this parable, Jesus leaves us warned of the urgency of repentance. The place and time for repentance is our life, here and now. There is no time to waste in returning to God and God’s ways.

Today, we need to humbly, honestly and realistically look at our own ways such as they are. We need to ask in prayer for God’s insight on how our ways differ from God’s ways. And we need to ask in prayer how we can reform our ways to concur with God’s ways. Ask God for fortitude and perseverance in that endeavor. God will come forth and help you.

And remember God’s nature is to pour grace upon grace on God’s creatures. God’s judgment cuts like a two-edged sword but God is helpful, and God is forgiving. God’s nature is love and mercy, which makes God’s judgment all the stronger. God knows that following God’s ways is often hard. But God is rooting for us.

As Isaiah wrote (Is 55:7b), 

let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them,

 and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

And I leave you with a pro tip on following God’s ways. As Jesus says in the gospel according to Matthew: … if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. (Matthew 6:14).

Give us loving hearts, o God, and help us to keep returning to your ways.

Amen.