The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 25A, October 25, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, October 25, 2026

Deuteronomy 34:1-12
Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46

Click here for an audio of the sermon

One of the most resonant spiritual themes of our Judeo-Christian tradition is the theme of the journey.  When you place the Spirit in time what you get is movement and growth—indeed, transformation.  This process of moving from point A to point B and beyond is the through-line of our sacred story…and when you widen the lens a bit you begin to see that it is the through-line of every story, sacred or not…and when you widen the lens as wide as possible you behold with wonder that it is also the story of creation itself.

On the macro level, the universe is in the process of becoming.  From the big  bang to the formation of the galaxies to the formation of this magnificent planet which brought forth life to the advent of human consciousness, we find ourselves immersed in a sacred canopy of vitality and possibility.  What is may not be determined to be exactly what it is, but there is no denying the agency embedded in creation to become, to reveal, and to disclose itself in the amalgamation of life.  On the micro level, each individual instance of life tells its own story…becomes, reveals, and discloses its own truth.  And what I find to be at the very root of the disease of our time is that too many of us have lost sight of the macro level in the obsession with our own individual stories.  We are failing to see the big picture…that we are a part of a much larger sacred story…we’re failing to see that life is invitation and participation before it can ever become the making of my own creation.  

A few weeks ago I gave a talk on “St. Benedict’s Way of Peace” after which someone posed the following question: “Would you say that the individual or the collective is more important for St. Benedict?”  He was asking this question in light of the current societal struggle in our current fraught political situation which pits individual rights against communal solidarity.  Which, for Benedict, is more important?  The answer is…both.  The problem is that we have the unfortunate tendency to separate the personal from the communal and try to justify one over the other.  But, in my mind, this is a fundamental misreading of reality—the personal and the communal are two dimensions of one reality, equally important to the whole and to the unfolding of the sacred story.  If we see our own personal story as a story unfolding apart from either my neighbor’s story or from the world’s story, we will lose our soul and our story will come to a tragic end.  But if we see our personal story as an integral part of my neighbor’s story and the story of the world as a whole, we will not just regain our soul but it will be transformed in its becoming all that it was intended to become.  To be is to be in relationship to the whole.

Today’s readings present us with insightful lessons about this fundamental spiritual theme of life as a journey, at once personal and communal.  Our three protagonists are Moses, Paul, and Jesus…each in their own way on their personal journey, yet, each acutely attuned to the larger story of which they are a part.  Moses is on a journey leading a community out of slavery in Egypt to freedom in the land of promise, Paul is on a journey spreading the good news about Jesus to foreign lands, Jesus is on a journey back to the Father.  Yet, each in their own way, with their own lives, is telling the story of Life itself and within the micro narrative of each something of the life of God (the macro) is glimpsed.  

In relation to the theme of journey, there are a number of ancillary themes which present themselves.  For instance, there are always obstacles along the way; there is always the struggle of faith to believe that you’ll actually make it to your journey’s end; there are always the lessons learned and disappointments to be accepted.  This is true of us all, no less than for Moses, Paul, and Jesus.  

Moses faced the obstacles of faithless Pharaoh and a faithless, complaining nation.  Paul faced the obstacle of a faithless community…as well as shipwreck, stoning, and lashes.  Jesus as well faced the obstacles of faithlessness and unbelief, as well as abandonment by his disciples and an ominous cross looming up ahead.  At first, Moses wanted to opt out of the journey because of his stuttering, Paul could only consider himself unworthy to be called to the journey at all because of his past sins, and Jesus had to first prove his faith by being tested by the devil in the desert. Yet, along the way, Moses is transformed from a stammering coward to the deliverer of a nation.  Paul is transformed from an zealous persecutor of Christians to a humble slave of Christ.  Jesus is transformed from a carpenter’s son crucified on a cross to the triumphant Son of God raised from the dead, which, of course, gets us as close to the heart of the macro level as possible.  The story of Life is the story of Christ.  In Christ the macro and micro come together in one perfect unfolding, and the secret to life is revealed.  If you want to know the meaning of your life, there it is.  If you want to know the goal of your life, there it is.  If you want to know the way to live your life well, there it is.

May I suggest that the necessary remedy to the heightened stress and anxiety of our age is the wedding once again of the micro and macro levels of life…of the rejoining of the personal and the communal and both of these with the cosmic.  Jesus makes just this point in today’s Gospel passage.  When tested by a Pharisee and expert in the law about which commandment is the greatest, Jesus responds with the expected answer, the Shema: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”  But then quite unexpectedly to the legalistic Pharisee adds a companion commandment that, for Jesus, is the proof that one is truly obeying the first, “And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”  Or as one young politician from Texas has been preaching on the campaign trail, “You can’t love God without loving your neighbor.”  

Love of God and neighbor, then, is the fuel for the journey as well as its destination.  God, as Trinity where the personal is communal and the communal is personal, is the paradigm of our journey.  The Kingdom of God which was the heart of Jesus’ message is the vision of a life where this reciprocating love of God to us and us to God and one another becomes the defining force of all of life…that place where there are no longer any roadblocks to love.  No more prejudice, no more violence, no more scapegoating, no more sin.  Where there is only freedom: the freedom of Love.  Is this nothing more than a dream…and an unrealistic hope?  If we only look at the small picture and get fixated on the micro level, we will soon fall into despair.  But if we have just the faith of a mustard seed, we get a glimpse of the big picture and see how far we’ve come in the great unfolding of Life and also see the Spirit of God at work in it all.  No one of us is meant to carry the whole story to its end.  Jesus has already done that!  Yet, each of our stories is crucial to bringing our common, sacred story one further step forward to its full realization.  That’s it, just one step closer to the fullness that already is.  

If we truly accept this, our own limited place within the vast expanse of the whole, we will not so readily succumb to the disappointments that now seek to hold us back from moving forward.  Moses did not enter the Promised Land…but Joshua did.  Paul did not see the good news preached to the ends of the earth…but a future generation did.  The Holy Spirit is not bound by any one person.  The mantle of one is always in search of and knows just how to accommodate itself to another.  

What, then, should be our response in the here and now as we keep our eyes open wide in faith to this sacred canopy of Life in which we find ourselves?  I take a queue from St. Benedict.  The answer is conversatio: fidelity to the life to which we have been called.  While Jesus teaches us that it is love that authenticates life, it is fidelity which authenticates love.  And love and fidelity become more themselves when they are challenged by the obstacles and disappointments which are inevitable along life’s journey…and when we steadfastly love our way through them.  He hear this in Paul’s admonition to Timothy, “stay true to your call no matter what the circumstances.”  And when the opposition comes, and it certainly will, love and fidelity coming from the Spirit, will guide us through and rewrite the script of hatred, prejudice, and violence with strokes of faith, hope, and love.  

So, sisters and brothers, we each have a story to tell…and we are each presently writing Life’s story with each passing day.  May our stories, both personal and communal, never be defined or determined by the dark and chaotic forces of Death but only by the sacred narrative of Love; the Love that is God and is Christ: God’s sign of fidelity and promise that it is Love alone which will stand at our story’s end.

The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 24A, October 18, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York

Br. Bernard Delcourt

The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, October 18, 2026

Exodus 33:12-23
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Matthew 22:15-22

Click here for an audio of the sermon

“Show me the coin.” 
That's all Jesus asks for, and it's enough to unravel the whole trap they've set for him. The Pharisees and the Herodians make for one of the strangest alliances in the Gospels; two groups that agree on almost nothing except that Jesus is a problem they'd like solved.  
The Pharisees despise Roman occupation and everything it represents. The Herodians have made their peace with Rome and profit from it. Put them in a room together on any other day, and they'd have nothing to say to each other. But a common enemy has a way of making for uncomfortable friends. 
So, they come to Jesus with flattery dripping from every word: "Teacher, we know you are sincere, you teach the way of God in accordance with truth, you show deference to no one" and then they spring the trap: "Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?" 
It's a perfect question, in the way that only a truly malicious question can be perfect. If Jesus says yes, pay the tax, he alienates every Jew who resents bankrolling the army that occupies their homeland, people who remember that this same tax had sparked open revolt a generation earlier. If he says no, don't pay it, the 
Herodians can report him to the Roman authorities as an agitator preaching sedition, and sedition against Rome had a way of ending on a cross. There is no safe answer. That's the whole design. They think they've boxed him in completely. 
And notice what they're not asking. This isn't really a question about fiscal policy or the ethics of taxation in the abstract. It's a question meant to force Jesus to plant a flag, to declare, once and for all, which side he's on, God's or Caesar's, so that whichever side he offends can be turned against him. It is a question built entirely on the assumption that loyalty has to be either-or. 
Jesus, of course, doesn't fall for it. But he also doesn't dodge it. He asks for a denarius, and right there, something quietly damning has already happened. Someone in that pious, Torah-quoting crowd produces a coin stamped with the image of Tiberius Caesar and an inscription proclaiming him the son of a god.  
Devout Jews weren't supposed to carry graven images at all, let alone one that claimed divinity for a Roman emperor. The very fact that someone can pull one out of a pocket in the Temple courts tells you these men have already made their compromises with Caesar's world. They've been carrying his currency the whole time. 
"Whose head is this," Jesus asks, "and whose title?" "The emperor's," they answer, and there's where their trap fails. "Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperors, and to God the things that are God's." 
It sounds, at first, like the ultimate diplomatic non-answer, the kind of thing a clever man says to get out of a tight spot. But it isn't a dodge. It's a much harder answer than either yes or no, because it doesn't let anyone off the hook. It hands the question back to us, 
and it will keep handing the question back to every generation that reads it: what, exactly, belongs to Caesar, and what belongs to God? 
Here's where the coin itself becomes the real sermon. A coin stamped with Caesar's image belongs to Caesar; fair enough, give it back, it was always his. But what is stamped with God's image?  Scripture already answered that question long before Matthew wrote a word of it: in the beginning, God made humankind in God's own image.  
It isn't Caesar's face that is pressed into flesh and bone. God's face is. So, when Jesus says, "give to God the things that are God's," the deepest and most searching implication of that sentence is: give God yourself. Give God your whole life, because that's whose image you were minted with in the first place. 
That reframes the entire question, doesn't it? This was never really a story about tax policy. It's a story about identity, about whose mark you carry and whose claim on you runs the deepest. Caesar can have his coins back; they were never anything but metal with his face on them. But we are not metal.  
We are not currency to be spent according to somebody else's economy. We belong, first and finally, to the God whose image we bear from the moment of our making, sealed again at the font, where water and oil mark us as Christ's own forever. 
And yet, and this is where the passage refuses to let us get too comfortable, Jesus doesn't say Caesar gets nothing. He doesn't tell his followers to renounce the world, stop paying taxes, withdraw from public life, and wait for the Kingdom to arrive on its own. He says: give to Caesar what is Caesar's. 
There is a legitimate claim that government makes on us; for taxes, for civic responsibility, for the ordinary business of living together in a society. Jesus doesn't erase that claim. What he does is put a boundary around it. Caesar's claim is real, but it is not ultimate.  Caesar's claim answers to a higher claim, and it can never be allowed to swallow that higher claim whole. 
That's the tension every one of us lives inside, all the time, whether we notice it or not. We are citizens of countries and citizens of the Kingdom of God simultaneously, and those two citizenships don't always pull in the same direction. Most days the tension is quiet, we pay our taxes, we vote, we obey reasonable laws, and none of it seems to cost us much of anything spiritually.  
But every so often, the two claims come into open conflict, and we're forced to ask, in a very concrete way, which allegiance actually governs the other. History is not short on examples of what happens when people decide that obedience to the state is simply obedience to God by another name, no questions asked. We rightly remember, with real admiration, those who found the courage to say no to that equation when it mattered most, who understood that legal is not the same thing as right, and that "my country, right or wrong" is not a creed available to people who belong first to God. 
None of us gets to opt out of that discernment by declaring the question too political for church. Jesus certainly didn't. He stood in the middle of the most charged political question of his day and refused both the easy yes and the easy no, because the real question underneath it was never really about Rome at all. It was about us, about what we're willing to render, and to whom, and why.
So here is the question this Gospel leaves sitting in our laps, right where the Pharisees' trap used to be: whose image do you bear, and what does that image cost you to honor? What have you been carrying around in your pocket, what compromises, what quiet allegiances that you didn't even notice had Caesar's face stamped on them?  
And what would it look like, this week, to give back to Caesar exactly what belongs to him, no more and no less, and to give to God the one thing Caesar was never entitled to ask for: yourself, made in the image of the living God, and claimed by him before any empire ever had the chance. 
Amen.

The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 23A, October 11, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York

Br. Francis Beckham, OHC

The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 23A, October 11, 2026

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Almighty and eternal God, so draw our hearts to you, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly yours, utterly dedicated to you; and then use us, we pray, as you will, and always to your glory and the welfare of your people; through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. 

Though it shames me a bit to say, on the surface I sort of sympathize with the first set of guests in today’s Gospel for not wanting to go to a wedding. I’ve never been a big fan of them myself. I don’t begrudge those who enjoy them, and even less those who have them. I just prefer quieter, more low-key events, where there’s less pressure to have fun, dance in uncomfortable shoes, buy gifts, and make witty toasts. Unlike at funerals, which I find generally do a pretty solid job with the food, wedding fare always hits me as pretty underwhelming – usually only a choice between dry chicken and flavorless fish, and always with a side of overcooked asparagus. And while I have been genuinely impressed by the construction of certain wedding cakes, I’ve never found any of them to be particularly tasty. 

There have been the odd exceptions, of course. In Pittsburgh, for example, and really throughout western Pennsylvania, both the entrée and cake play a distant second fiddle to the virtually ubiquitous Cookie Table. There, wedding banquets are remembered – indeed they are judged – for the variety and deliciousness of their cookies. 

First, there must be many kinds of cookies – Italian wedding, lady locks, buckeyes, lemon, pizzelles, chocolate chip, those peanut butter ones with the Hershey’s Kisses squished into the tops, snickerdoodles, thumbprints, glazed sugar, to name just a few. And, equally important, they must be good. Like, really good. Guests make multiple trips to the cookie table, piling their plates with its bounty before returning to their seats to compare favorites. Grandmas and great aunts – often the bakers of many of the cookies – continually scan the church or fire hall, critically evaluating people’s cookie choices and keeping score of whose cookies are ‘winning.’  

Second, there should be an abundance of leftovers, which are taken home in great bundles by the guests. Parents of the happy couple bring at least a small assortment into work on Monday morning, ostensibly as a little treat for their coworkers, but, in reality, just as much a flex on how awesome a wedding banquet they hosted for their kids. Criticizing a cookie table – or, worse, refusing to partake – is a public and unforgiveable affront to a family’s honor, and everybody knows it. Doing so might not get the offenders destroyed or their city burned down but, then again …

Of course, the Parable of the Wedding Banquet really isn’t about unenthusiastic weddinggoers and offended hosts. It’s actually about the very human tendency of placing our own interests and desires above others’, even going so far as rejecting Jesus’ invitation to take our places in the kingdom of God, the great Wedding Feast of the Lamb, and the tragic consequences that always result – namely, broken relationships with God and one another. 

Jesus makes no mention of a cookie table in the Parable. But it’s clear the host – in this case, a king – has laid on the first-century equivalent of a pretty good one. When he sends his slaves around to call those invited to the banquet, he tells them to make sure they mention the oxen and fat calves he’s slaughtered in preparation for them, so they understand how big a deal this is. But as we’ve heard, the guests don’t come. They don’t care about the big dinner and all the work the king has put into to making it special. They don’t seem to give any thought to the fact that a place has been set for them, and that their presence is expected and important to the king and his son. It seems ridiculous to them that they should step away from whatever it is they’re doing to enter into the joy of their own king; they have farms and businesses to run, after all. What actually does seem to matter is simply whatever will benefit them in the here and now. It’s typical human selfishness, and, unfortunately, it’s something we all do. 

I genuinely wonder what is it that lures us humans into this way of thinking and acting, to decide we are better off trying to make and serve our own banquets rather than God’s; that we, who are ourselves created, can somehow know better than the One who creates us. It’s nothing new, though. As we heard in the reading from Exodus, more than a thousand years before Jesus told the Parable of the Wedding Banquet in Jerusalem, the Israelites, impatient for Moses to return to them from speaking with God on Mount Sinai, decided it would be better for them to become gods themselves in order to make other gods, which in turn they would then worship, an exercise in absurdity even Albert Camus would appreciate. The result? Nearly destruction, if Moses hadn’t interceded for them. And, of course, two thousand years on this side of the parable, the compulsion to deify ourselves is alive and well as ever – along with the inevitable brokenness and suffering that always results from it. People really don’t change. But fortunately for us, neither does God. 

It's no surprise, then, that in the sixth century, when Saint Benedict wrote his rule for monks, it was the same familiar story. The western Roman Empire had effectively destroyed itself through centuries of pride and excess, and now the whole place was being sacked by pretty much everyone. Benedict was determined not to let his monks fall into the same disordered chaos he observed around him. They must be in communion rather than competition, seeking to serve God through one another in the monastery. Right up front, at the top of the Rule’s Prologue, he tells those listening that if they’re serious about doing God’s will, they’d better be ready to put aside their own: “The labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience,” he counsels. “This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord.” 

So, relying solely on our selfish wills leads to destruction, while offering ourselves in joyful obedience to God leads to life. The choice seems like a no-brainer. But how, actually, do we reorient ourselves wholly to living in the love of God rather than earthly gain? As the desert mothers and fathers knew all too well, abandoning the will and freeing oneself from human passions is not easy. After all, we are, it would seem, programmed to chase what we like. And the world certainly rewards us for pursuing things such as wealth, power, status, influence, respectability, and whatever else it deems ‘success.’ But for Saint Benedict, the key to true happiness is obedience to God through humility, the self-emptying of the pride we feel toward our own abilities and accomplishments. This is so we can make room for Christ to dwell more and more within us, allowing us to become the hands, feet, mouths, and ears of Jesus here on earth. 

Of course, we all know that, realistically, to be able to survive in the world it’s necessary to ‘play the game’ to some extent. But using our experienced judgement and wizened reasoning to solve problems isn’t pridefulness. Nor is applying our God-given skills to grow professionally and provide responsibly for our families greediness. And enjoying the pursuit of hobbies, art, and even cookie-craft certainly isn’t a rejection of God’s will. It’s no sin to thrive and enjoy life, and that’s not what got the original wedding guests into trouble. For them, the issue was using their will to choose selfishness over self-emptying and reject God’s better Way. That’s why I’d like to suggest that none of this is really about eliminating our own will – in fact, in pursuing such a goal, I think we may well run the risk of becoming increasingly captive to it. Rather, I have a hunch it's more about choosing to use our freedom to allow God to align our imperfect human will and desires more and more to the Divine Will from which they flow.  

Again, Saint Benedict offers a way for us to see if we’re actually doing this. He counsels the monks to test the spirits of newcomers to find out if they’re from God. We, too must check in with our own spirits every day to make sure our motives and actions are from God. “Who am I serving?” we might ask. “Is my happiness and ability to live comfortably more important to me than someone else’s?” “Do I reject the invitations of others to be in communion with them because I don’t consider them worthy of being in communion with me?” And, perhaps even more challenging, “When I do good things, is it purely out of love for God and others, or am I kind of hoping I might get noticed and rewarded for it?” For my own part, I do find that my motives for performing good works are often at least a little mixed. Does that invalidate them? Probably not, but it is a reminder that aligning my will to God’s is a life’s work.

If it all seems a bit daunting, we can return to the wedding banquet and notice who actually does end up joining in the feast. They aren’t the ones who were originally considered ‘worthy’; those people made the choice to use their privilege to self-exclude from the banquet in favor of serving themselves, with the usual disastrous consequences. Instead, those gathered in were everyone else, both the ‘good and the bad,’ echoing what Jesus had declared to the self-righteous chief priests and elders in the temple just a few verses before today’s Gospel reading. “Truly I tell you,” he warns, “the tax-collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.” They were indeed. And you know something? They still are; I’ve personally seen it happen time and time again, when those labeled as utterly unworthy have shown forth the Gospel to others in ways I’ve rarely, if ever, seen the self-proclaimed “worthies” do.

The banquet is ready, and Christ the Bridegroom has indeed prepared a place for each of us. May we find ourselves and everyone we love there, and may God’s peace be with us today and always. Amen.