The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost B - July 21, 2024

 Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, July 21, 2024

• Jeremiah 23:1-6
• Ephesians 2:11-22
• Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

In the name of God, the Creator, the Liberator and the Comforter.

Today’s gospel lection brings together two segments of Mark chapter 6 that frame more prominent episodes of Jesus’ ministry: the feeding of the 5,000 and the walking on water and calming of the storm. So, you’re missing the exciting bits today.

Today’s segments illustrate Jesus’ relationship to crowds. In the first instance, in the wilderness, he teaches them. In the second instance, back in Gennesaret, he heals their sick.

But before we go there, let me get something out of the way. All of my life, I have felt like I was missing a lot of points whenever the image of sheep and/or shepherds were used. Jesus’ audiences were way more familiar to sheep herding than we are. Pastoralists were everywhere to be seen with their flocks sometimes near and often in-between towns.

So, humor me. Here is “sheep and shepherds 101.”

Sheep or shepherds are mentioned over 1200 times throughout the bible. Obviously, this was a meaningful teaching image to the Israelites of Jesus’ time and centuries before that.

Sheep have been domesticated for over 10,000 years. Their domestication started in the Middle East which is the bible’s geographical context.

Over the time of their domestication, sheep lost the ability to self-regulate their flocking behavior. Small herds of wild sheep still can move about large landscapes in search of fresh grazing on their own. And they shed their coats naturally.

But domesticated sheep do not have natural leaders. They rely on the shepherd for leadership. Sheep recognize face, voice and smell of other sheep and of humans. So it is that a shepherd and his flock develop a symbiotic relationship. The shepherd keeps moving his flock, so it does not over-graze any one area of pasture. The shepherd develops calls that the sheep can interpret. Another human voice does not register in the same way.

Not only will sheep, left to their own device, over-graze an area; but individual sheep will wander away towards danger, possibly gathering a following. The shepherd keeps the flock together. When a sheep wanders regardless, the shepherd can go find it and bring it back.

Sheep can lie down and get stuck in hollows in the terrain with their legs sticking up, unable to reestablish a standing position. Shepherds can give stuck sheep a leg up.

Domesticated sheep do not shed their wool and need to be regularly shorn. 

As you can see, for their own safety and wellness, domesticated sheep can no longer be left to their own devices.

There, now you can go seek employment as shepherdesses and shepherds now.

The first part of today’s gospel lection talks about Jesus’ plan for him and the disciples after they come back from having gone on mission in pairs. They have worked hard and done wonders by the grace of Jesus while they were away. They are tired and would like to get quality time with Jesus to tell each other more about their mission trip.

Jesus, who understands the necessity for time away from the press of ministry to recharge in rest and prayer, makes a great suggestion. Let’s cross the lake and land in a wilderness where we can be on our own and renew our strength.

But by then, the crowds have become like the Swifties who track singer Taylor Swift’s jets online to know where she will be when. The crowds are hungry for Jesus’ teaching and healing. Some keen observers spot Jesus and his disciples getting in a boat and figure out where it is headed. The rumor spreads and enterprising fans of Jesus head that way by land, apparently making faster progress than Jesus’ boat.

“As Jesus went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.”

And there flounders the apostles’ hope for rest and recreation. Another sermon on this lection will need to focus on healthy boundaries in ministry to ensure resilience and durability. But we won’t go there today.

The operative phrase here is “he had compassion for them.” This is the essence of Jesus’ divinity. He sees the human condition. And as the dictionary defines compassion, He has sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings and misfortunes of others.

Jesus will consistently show that compassion throughout his ministry and up to his crucifixion.

The other salient phrase in this first part of our lection is:

“… because they were like sheep without a shepherd …”

Now you know in what jeopardy is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Jesus sees the crowds and understands he can’t shirk his vocation to lead them by teaching them.

We are not all called to be teachers, but we can be witnesses to gospel values in how we live our lives amidst the other members of the flock. The way we behave in the world speaks volumes about our values. 

Jesus puts compassion before his immediate self-interest (a well-deserved rest with his best friends). How compassionate are we in our everyday lives?

The second part of today’s lection tells the story of Jesus and his disciples returning to an urban spot of the sea of Galilee; the town of Gennesaret and its surroundings.

They are back on the mission trail. There is no avoiding the crowds this time. Even going to a wilderness failed to achieve that.

Here again, people recognize Jesus as soon as they moor the boat. Word of mouth travels like dandelion seeds in the wind. And people rushed about the whole region to bring Him their lame and sick. Jesus does not subtract himself to the pressure of his ministry. Many manage to touch him and that is sufficient for them to be healed.

Jesus’ compassion led him time and again to meet the needs of his flock whether that be teaching or healing.

We may not be miracle-workers, but we can all have a healing effect on those around us.

Has a sympathetic hand on your shoulder or your forearm ever lightened your concern or pain? Has a loving hug from a friend or a relative ever soothed you? Has a kind smile ever lifted your spirits?

We can all do that, and more, given the right circumstances. Look out for opportunities to be a healer among those you live with and encounter.

We may not all be shepherds, but we can find ways to exercise our compassion for fellow sheep. And whenever we need leadership, look up to the Good Shepherd for guidance. May he lead you to green pastures.

Amen.

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost B - July 14, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Clay Wackerman

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 14, 2024

• Amos 7:7-15
• Ephesians 1:3-14
• Mark 6:14-29

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

It's been nearly nine months since I arrived here at Holy Cross Monastery, and my gratitude for the experience extends deeper and wider than any ten-minute sermon can convey. I knew that I would have the opportunity to preach at some point, and for the past month, I have thought with great anticipation (and some anxiety) about what to say during my debut at the ambo. Brother Josep, my formator, encouraged me to incorporate some reflections on my time here.

When I opened the lectionary to today's gospel, I knew it would be a challenging task. I'm happy to report that there has been very little overlap between the beheading of John the Baptist and my internship at Holy Cross. I've witnessed no imprisonments, no executions, no lewd dancing in the refectory. Indeed it's been a rather pleasant time.

But when I look at the violence depicted in this text and the beauty I have witnessed here, the contrast gives me pause. I often ask

·.,-myself: how can such beauty and such violence exist in the same world? Is it possible to divide our attention between them without becoming utterly divided ourselves? The persistent duality is almost too much for one heart to bear, which is why I considered avoiding the tension altogether as I crafted this sermon. When I brought up the difficulty of this passage in a conversation with Br. Robert Leo, he assured me: don't lose your head over it.

So here I am today-head firmly attached-committed to working through this complex topic. On the surface, today's gospel reading is a gruesome one. It is the story of King Herod, who is a man of great power, yet seemingly powerless to the temptations around him. He makes a lofty promise to a dancing girl at a lavish banquet.

When she asks for the head of John the Baptist, he is too proud, too afraid to deny her. The consequences of his fear are tragic, and indeed violent.

The depiction of John's severed head in this passage reminded me of something I had seen last year when I worked as an English teacher in Thailand. I was volunteering at an art camp for elementary school children and I was tasked with supervising one of the activities. We supplied the students with paper and crayons and asked them to draw representations of their emotions. I strolled around the room, surveying the students' progress. For some students, happiness was a green field. For others, a clear sky. Another student sketched a meadow brimming with flowers. One student had drawn a severed head. He sat there very calmly, pressing the red marker into the page. I went to check on him, and he showed me his picture-a portrait of anger. I wish I could have asked this shy boy more about his

drawing-where had he seen this before? Were things OK at home?-but he was reluctant to elaborate, and in any event, my Thai language skills were not advanced enough to have such a discussion. Soon, it was time to share, and the students all gathered around in a circle with their pictures. It was jarring to behold: the ring of beautiful blues and greens broken by a single blood-red page.

As we discussed the drawings, I wished this one student had drawn something more agreeable. Perhaps the session would have gone more smoothly had he chosen to depict something like joy or wonder or peace, or if he had stayed home altogether. Fortunately, the other group leaders were able to address the tension. What happens when we have big, scary feelings? What can we do to manage them?

The students began to discuss their experiences, sharing what made them sad or afraid or angry, and what they could do when these feelings emerged. The conversation deepened, and despite the increasing gravity of the subject matter, the atmosphere of the room seemed to lighten, no longer burdened by the obligations of joy, positivity, or beauty. We started into the depths of the human heart in all its intractable messiness. That one child's violent drawing, which at first seemed to me an obstacle to the group connection was in fact a signpost directing to a different kind of unity, one more fraught, more intimate, more true.

It is this very truth that lies at the core of the Christian tradition-the truth that wounds are not just painful blemishes, but portals to deeper understanding. We have a tendency to cover them up in hopes of maintaining the appearance of beauty. Christ himself never advised this cosmetic approach. There is something beautiful about our image of Christ, a man often depicted as radiant with virtue, his thoughts so holy that they seem to shimmer upon his skin.

And yet this beauty comes to light only through his engagement with the profound horrors surrounding him-the devil, demoniacs, draconian rulers (oh my!). He was a man who walked the razor-thin line between the world's beauty and the world's violence, and he is calling us to follow in tow. He considered both the lilies and the lepers, the calm waters and the storm-wracked seas. His glory on Mount Tabor and his suffering on the cross are both crucial to his story, and they are crucial to ours, too.

To have a Christian attitude toward violence, one cannot shy away from it. We cannot force the discord to resolve into harmony or muffle it into silence. We must listen to it; we must arrange our lives around it. When I think back to that art camp in Thailand, I can see now that my desire to remove the child's violent drawing from the circle was itself a kind of violence. I had wanted things to go well. I'd wanted all the students to be happy. I'd wanted all their art to be beautiful. But animating all this hope was a dark paradox: the idea that beauty can exist without violence can be the very cause of violence itself. We want our gardens to be pretty, so we eliminate the weeds.

We want our homes to be clean, so we exterminate the insects. These are common practices. As history will tell us, the violence only compounds when we apply the same logic at the level of a community, a nation, or a race. This impulse is disastrous, and unfortunately enduring.

Throughout my time here, there have been several crises unfolding in the distance: the famine in Sudan, the civil war in Myanmar, and the persistent catastrophe in Gaza. During mass and chapter meetings here, we often offer intercessions for those afflicted by these tragedies. It is our way of acknowledging the severed head in the room. The life at Holy Cross Monastery is a life of abundance, but it is also a life of awareness. We know we cannot rid the world of violence, but we can at least remind the world that not all life is governed by it. Over the past nine months, I've talked to hundreds of guests about their relationship to this place. Invariably, they will tell me how much they appreciate the peace, the quiet, the hospitality, the food, the beauty, the people. And invariably, I will agree. A place like this is rare.

Many come here hoping to escape some of the stress of their daily lives, and many will find that escape. But to me, this place offers much more than escape; rather, it is an invitation to encounter the suffering of life deeply, and differently. This place does not promise to eliminate the suffering from your life, but I can promise you it will provide you with a new perspective on it, a view that includes the violence alongside the trees, the river, the meadow, the silence, and the cross.

Although violence may persist in beautiful places, so too does beauty persist in places beset by violence. For the past several months, I've been following the journalist Bisan Odwa on Instagram as she documents her experience of the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. Among the footage of hospital bombings and displacement camps, she dedicates one video to her favorite flower, the Palestinian poppy, its red petals splayed like rubies amid the rubble. The clip is profoundly moving; after all the chaos she has recorded, she takes the time to introduce her viewers to this coin-sized blossom as if to say: this too is worth noticing. Scholars speculate this flower, also known as anemone coronaria, is the very flower Christ himself referred to during the Sermon on the Mount. Those fields of destruction and the fields of the lilies are the same fields. Consider them.

To know Christ is to know that in a room full of beautifully drawn flowers, there will always be at least one severed head. And in a room of severed heads, there will always be at least one flower. To know Christ is to know these two beautiful, violent truths. To know Christ is to know you are capable, through faith, of holding them both-one in each hand.

The Feast of Saint Benedict, July 11, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve

The Feast of Saint Benedict, July 11, 2024

• Proverbs 2:1-9
• Psalm 1
• Luke 14:27–33

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

Thomas Moore, not the nineteenth century Irish poet Thomas Moore, but the contemporary author and speaker who is best known for his book Care of the Soul, wrote a book in 1994 which I read the following year. It was a memorable gift in those years.  Meditations: On the Monk Who Dwells in Daily Life, is a series of short thoughts, memories, parables, and experiences mainly focused on Moore’s time as a monk in his twenties. One memorable parable has lingered in my mind for years:

“Three monks knelt in the chapel in the dark morning hours before dawn. The first thought he saw the figure of Jesus come down from the cross and rest before him in midair. Finally, he said to himself, I know what contemplation is. The second felt himself rise out of his place in the chair. He soared over his brother monks and surveyed the timber-vaulted ceiling of the church, and then landed back in his place in the choir. I’ve been blessed, he thought, with a minor miracle, but in humility I must keep it to myself. The third felt his knees growing sore and his legs tired. His mind wandered until it came to a stop on the image of a luscious hamburger laden with onions and pickles. ‘No matter how hard I try’, said the devil’s helper to his master, ‘I can’t seem to tempt this third monk.’”

I remember being baffled by this story when I first read it almost thirty years ago.  I wanted contemplation, I wanted the miracle - or at least my image of them.  Hamburgers do not belong in prayer - they are for eating, not praying. 

It is somewhat ironic, then, that the longer I ponder and live the Rule of Benedict, the more the hamburger appears in prayer.  Does Moore have a point about the third monk?  Is the third monk onto something? 

St. Gregory the Great in his biography of St. Benedict is generally believed to be at least embellishing if not inventing miracle stories and pious legends about St. Benedict’s own miraculous powers and mystical experiences.  St. Benedict seemed to have had more than the average number of visions and miracles. At the time, those were signs of spiritual importance and power.  The Rule itself, curiously, does not put much energy into knowing secrets and floating around.  The Rule is not even that interested in a thorough discourse of what prayer even is other than prayer should be sincere and short.  He is interested in a deeper reorientation.  The whole Rule is the living of prayer.  Our every thought, word, and deed is formative for relationship with God.  And the whole Rule is prayer because the Rule describes life and life is prayer.  And life is prayer because humans live life and to be human is to be being-in-communion.  St. Benedict takes as given that as creatures made in God’s image and crowned with glory and honor this is as obvious and as natural as breathing.  Life is the divine office and the world is the oratory.  Benedict’s gift and power is in unveiling before our distorted and blurry vision the sacredness of all of life, especially those activities which in their ordinariness reflect no obvious sign of God’s presence.  We may receive the gift of more immediate or direct encounters with God if God so chooses, but those experiences are the effect of daily faithfulness, not ends in themselves; they are opportunities for humility, not possessions to be held over the heads of those not so gifted.  The ultimate unfaithfulness for St. Benedict is to go about filling a cabinet full of trophies to my deep spirituality and profound maturity.  Rather, I can hear St. Benedict saying to the first and second monks in the parable, “You have had insight into some great mystery? Great, now go work in the fields.”  “You have received a minor miracle?  Be thankful and go wash the dishes.”  “So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions."

What makes the third monk different (and I believe for St. Benedict truly holy) is an honest, earthy acceptance of his creatureliness as the ground of humility.  Moore’s language is quite precise on this point: the first monk knew something mysterious after a long search; the second monk received a miracle. But the third monk is different in that Moore says his mind wandered and came to stop on the image of the hamburger. The third monk is simply noticing, not grasping at or seeking to possess the hamburger, but noting the presence of the thought in a detached manner.  It is not that he is beyond temptation entirely, that would mean he was dead, but that he is conscious that everything belongs, he is not seeking to defend, perform, possess, or compete for or against anyone or anything in his praying.  He hears in Jesus’ admonish to give up possessions the wisdom that possession is impossible, so the deepest giving up is the illusion that I can possess in the first place.  The home toward which we are hastening is that human life where everything is received as a gift, where we are stewards of blessings not to be grasped or owned, but participated in and enjoyed.

In the Gospel reading the Lord is prodding us to take stock - estimate, consider.  If builders are thoughtful about their building supplies and kings about their troop strength, then how much more ought we to bring honest scrutiny to the realities which inform and shape our whole lives?  A conscious choice requires that our feet are planted on the ground, our ears are listening for the truth, our hearts are attuned to love.  

The greatest obstacle to conversion is my own fantasy land image of conversion. St. Benedict is allergic to any image of self or God which leads to escaping reality, rising above others, or enlisting God in my project of having the final, absolute answer to the mysteries of the divine.  As we estimate, consider, and then give up the illusions that get revealed in our honest assessment of ourselves, we find freedom - the freedom to unlearn habits of thought and action which are familiar, but which stifle our true selves.  Into our empty hands Christ places the gift of our incarnation to be celebrated and enjoyed in the abundance of the kingdom of heaven.  Eugene Peterson is channeling the spirit of St. Benedict in his paraphrase of the beginning of Romans 12 in the Message Bible: “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking around life - and place it before God as an offering.”  Amen.