The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 8, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve
The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 8, 2026

• Isaiah 58:1-9a, [9b-12]
• 1 Corinthians 2:1-12, [13-16]
• Matthew 5:13-20

Click here for an audio of the sermon

We are salt.  We are light.  Our human gift is to enhance flavor, to burn brightly.  Jesus does not say, “you have salt and light”.  He does not say, “you are salt ‘if’”.  He does not say, “you are light ‘if’”.  He lists no condition, no cost, no possible revocation.  This is a proclamation from the one who created us.  Dare we believe the announcement Jesus makes that inherent in every human is the divine zest that awakens taste, the holy fire that warms and reveals?  The implications are staggering.  

What follows this announcement are warnings. You are salt - but don’t lose your saltiness.  You are light - but don’t hide the light you are. The immediate truth to be spoken after proclaiming who we are is the danger of polluting or hiding who we are.

God creates us out of love to reflect divine life.  Christ warns us out of love so that we would preserve and live what we are.  Notice the nature of the relationship.  The Christian life is a dance between delight and danger, gift and warning, grace and responsibility.  Only God can create, and God has.  And in that very creation God risks giving us to use as we decide a glory and honor, we have neither earned nor deserved in ourselves.  In return, we are invited to reflect back the dignity of being human, to make every moment the sacrifice of gratitude and self-offering.

We are salt and light purely by God’s grace. Acting like it is on us.  Christ can give us our essence, make us salt and light.  He cannot force our will.  He cannot make us live who we are.  He can invite, admonish, even warn us about our choice, but he cannot make it for us.  He points to the dangers of choosing pollution and hiding so that we might be alert to what is at stake and take our responsibility as seriously as he does.  

What if we say yes to who we really are?  We actualize salt and light by prophetic words and deeds.  God has made us live in a generous, respectful community with one another as brothers and sisters.  And as a new humanity the barriers and dividing walls have come down and we are one.  Yet enmity and violence persist.  We encounter within us and around us systems and patterns that normalize harm, prejudice, and bigotry.  Salt and light make us aware of the harm we do and the harm done in our names.  Salt and light in us enlighten us to recognize evil and injustice and the temptation to compliantly conform to their ways.  And by being salt and light, we can say, “no, I will not comply”.   Being salt is waking up, looking around, paying attention to reality - not the party line, not propaganda, but what is actually true.  Light is exposing, illuminating, and revealing what is hidden and unnamed.

Now we see the importance of the warnings.  This proclamation of Jesus about who we are sets us in this cosmic wrestling against evil.  This identity will cost us something.  No wonder we rationalize a little sand in our salt, just a small basket over our light.  But our salt is made salty, our lights meant to shine bright, exposed.   Bland darkness is lifeless.  Zesty light is laying down my life.  Those are the choices - I offer myself to Christ as I decide to wake up and tell the truth or I play it safe, exist but not really live.  

The warnings are for us because the pressure of our internal fear and external danger are powerful enough to get us to reject our identity.  Around us what scripture calls principalities and powers, spiritual evil, systemic injustice, violence and prejudice, are the manifestations of the rejection of salt and light.  After a group, an ideology, a movement has polluted its salt and hidden its light, the very notion of what it means to be human gets gnarled into an ugly thing.  Evil fills the vacuum where the salt and light were meant to be.  And this vacuum recoils from the thing it once was and rejected.  The evil powers of this world cannot stand the presence of salt and light.  These powers make friends with blandness and worship darkness and call it holy.  It rules with the fear that lives in it.  It says, “conform, and we’ll let you live.”

Abbot Anthony, who lived from 251-356 said, ‘A time is coming when people will go mad, and when they meet someone who is not mad, they will turn to him and say, “You are out of your mind,” just because he is not like them.’

Jesus calls those who follow him to receive the identity and capacity to resist and subvert the powers of evil so that the life of the kingdom of heaven will be lived in us and known in all the world.  Salt and light are dangerous.  They are noncompliant, unyielding, and unbowed in the face of the flat darkness that would deaden our souls.  So do not comply.  Do not complacently adjust to anything inhuman.  Be intolerable to injustice.  Be unavailable for lies.  Be uninterested in the call to conform to the ways of this world at the expense of your soul.  Some around you may choose to be bland.  You are seasoning.  Be seasoning instead.  Some around you may choose to stay in the darkness.  You are light.  Shine your light.   This is scary.  Fear means we are alive; we want to keep living, but fear does not get to decide what makes us human.  We are salt.  We are light.  Go and season life.  Go and shine fire. Amen.

The Presentation of our Lord, transferred, February 3, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

The Presentation of our Lord, transferred, February 3, 2026

• Malachi 3:1-4
• Hebrews 2:14-18
• Luke 2:22-40

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Senex puerum portabat: puer autem senem regebat: quem virgo peperit, et post partum virgo permansit: ipsum quem genuit, adoravit. 

It was in the early 1970s, probably 1972, that I first heard these words. They were sung to a setting written by the great Renaissance composer and court musician William Byrd (1540-1623) at the Church of the Advent in Boston on the Feast of the Presentation. I was captivated by the music, a motet that weaved in and out with its various lines and finally resolving. It was stunning. But even more captivating for me were the words themselves:

An old man held up a child

yet the child upheld [or ruled] the man. 

The child the Virgin bore while yet remaining a virgin, 

this child she had borne, she adored.

The text itself is an ancient antiphon for First Vespers of today’s feast as well as part of the gradual chant at the mass. It comes to us from a sermon of Saint Augustine. And it is pure poetry.  

Spanning centuries, the medieval mind delighted in words and dwelt in them in a way that it is almost impossible for us now, overwhelmed as we are by words and images and music and noise and false news and social media. As LP Hartley famously reminds us, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." And in that different country, that other world, words were scarcer and were attended to with greater attention and even greater receptivity and creativity. So it is with this motet, this antiphon. There is a palpable delight in the juxtapositions and the surprising paradoxes that are articulated. An old man holds a child, yet that child upholds the old man, and not just the old man but the entire universe. The Virgin bears a child yet remains a virgin and adores the one who made her though she had given him birth. It's more than just clever word play. It points rather to the astounding power of God to shape and reshape our minds and our hearts to see in new and more faithful ways. That may be the truth of Lectio Divina, a practice which I find so elusive. That may also be the truth of poetry which I find equally elusive. It is the realization that what appears at first sight is not the whole story; it's not even the true story. Something more mysterious and profound is going on. It is, if you will, mysticism in verbal form.  And it takes time to unfold.

Some years ago, we simplified our 1976 Monastic Breviary, and this Feast of the Presentation was drastically revised. The antiphons, which were always notoriously difficult to sing, were eliminated. But it’s worth listening once again to the poetic truths they embody and to consider the invitations, they offer us to enter into the mysterious and archetypal depths of this feast.

So, the antiphon on the Magnificat of First Vespers: 

“O wonderful interchange! The creator of mankind, taking upon him a living body, deigned to be born of a virgin, and proceeding forth as man, without seed, has made us partakers of his divinity.”

Chew on that for a while!

Or the antiphon on the Benedictus:

“When you were marvelously born of a virgin, then were the scriptures fulfilled; you came down like rain into a fleece of wool, to bring salvation to all mankind: we praise you, O our God.”

Can you imagine a better prayer, a holier acclamation?

Or my favorite, the antiphon on the Magnificat at Second Vespers:

“In the bush, which Moses saw unconsumed, we acknowledge the preservation of your glorious virginity; holy mother of God, intercede for your children.”

Mary, the Burning Bush!

Today's feast marks the conclusion of the Nativity or Christmas cycle, a cycle largely based on the infancy narrative of Saint Luke’s gospel, those first two chapters of Luke which shape both our popular devotion and our theology. Most of us admit that these chapters are not historical in the way we understand that term today. They are, if you will, legends or great mythic narratives which point beyond themselves not to historical details—though they are there too—but to profound theological, doctrinal, and dogmatic understandings. They are all about God with us, Emmanuel, the Holy One pitching a tent and dwelling among us in the person of Jesus and in the Spirit's power. And in this way, they bring us to a more adequate expression of the truth and not its diminishment.

But to understand these events celebrated today, dwelling in scriptural texts such Simeon’s canticle Nunc Dimittis that we sing each night at Compline or in these wonderfully poetic antiphons which come to us from over a millennia ago, we need to let go, at least provisionally, our need for logical certitude and historical accuracy and inhabit for a time the realm of the poet or artist or artisan or mystic. 

 And so today we walk with Mary and Joseph and the Baby into the Temple. We meet Anna the prophetess. We watch Simeon, aged though he is, pick up the Child just as we carried burning candles in procession. We listen to Simeon’s song. We hear of a sword piercing a mother's heart. And with journey with the family as they get on with their lives, as best they can, moving to Nazareth and making a home there…a home fit for a King.

An old man held up a child, but the child upheld the man. So, it is with us. The child whom the woman bore while remaining a virgin, this child she adored. So must we, so must we.  Saint Augustine says: “Simeon, the old man, bore Christ the Child; Christ ruled the old age of Simeon... Christ was born, and at the old age of the world the desire of the old man was fulfilled. He who found a world broken with age came to an ancient man.”   And still, he comes to us today.

I close with a quote from a contemporary Jesuit writer, Joseph Koczera:

“The old man carried the child, but the child ruled the old man. Borrowed from his sermon of Saint Augustine, this verse pithily sums up Simeon’s place in the history of salvation. It may seem strange to think of a tiny infant “ruling” over anyone, yet it was the expectation of the Messiah's coming that served to order and govern Simeon’s life. We all have our hopes for the future, and we may find that our lives are governed by expectation. What is the consolation that we await, and what do we hope to see or encounter before we make our own Nunc Dimittis?” 

Good question.  Happy feast.

And if you get the chance today, listen on YouTube or Spotify to Byrd’s motet Senex Puerum portabat or one of the other settings of it by Tomas Luis de Victoria or Giovanni Palestrina.  You won’t regret it.    

The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 1, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Adam McCoy

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany

• Micah 6:1-8
• 1 Corinthians 1:18-31
• Matthew 5:1-12

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

Who is blessed?

On entering the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, turn left and you will soon enter the Ancient Greek and Roman rooms.  They are filled with works of art which depict the human form in almost unimaginable states of perfection.   Most are adolescents and young adults, at the height of their strength and agility and good health.  I am always tempted to think, how much better they look than I and most of the people I know do.  It must have been a true golden age!  And then I reflect on the actuality of their time: A third to a half of all children died as infants.  How many surviving freeborn boys died in war or from war wounds or the diseases that follow conflict?  How many were worked to an early death if they were not born free?  How many women, free or enslaved, died in childbirth?  How many of those who escaped those fates were struck with illnesses for which there was no cure?   It was a world in which that statuesque perfection was attainable by very few, and those few for only a brief shining moment before age and infirmity arrived for them. 

The great beauty of ancient art did not represent the actuality of its age, but rather, reflects a perfection they believed existed in the realm of the divine and the hope that some few of us might achieve, if ever so briefly, some reflection of the divine.  So put aside those of us who don’t or can’t.  Concentrate on the winners.  Their view of reality was one of a deeply imperfect creation for the most part cursed in one way or another with the gods in their perfection looking down on our struggles, toying with us, laughing at us, waiting for us to give them something in the often vain hope that we might escape the disaster waiting for us just around the next corner.  That we might escape our usual, all too usual, reality.  So, we hold up to ourselves images of perfection to attract ourselves to what might be humanly possible.  But in fact, because so few ever approached that perfection, and so many more, most in fact, were left unnoticed by the wayside, that beauty is heart breaking.

We may look on this and think how much better we are than they were.  After all, we have made great strides in childbirth practices, in medicine, in working toward human equality.  And that is true.  Perhaps not so much progress in avoiding war.  But is it not also true that we still hope for a perfection, of looks and beauty, of charm and popularity, of professional success, of financial well-being, and celebrate it when we think we see it?  What else is celebrity culture?  What else is our endless sacrifice of effort and money on the many altars of self-improvement, of ladder climbing?  If we have success, how do we feel about those left behind, those who cannot climb much higher?  How do we feel if we ourselves, despite our best efforts, are not quite beautiful, not very popular or successful, not rich?  If in fact we are quite ordinary?  Or worse?  Is there perhaps something a little off about these hopes in the face of our realities? 

The uncomfortable truth is that the world we live in is imperfect.  The idea that we might achieve statuesque perfection and all it represents is almost always a false hope.  Fortunately, some few do briefly achieve it.  It is in itself a good thing to strive after health, beauty, strength, agility and prosperity.  But if we place our hope in achieving those good things and judge ourselves and others as deficient when we don’t get them, we ignore and devalue the life we actually have. 

The truth is that God actually seems to love our human world in its imperfections and failures as much as in its apparent successes.  God seems to love us just as we really are.  We can be improved, and that is good, but all of us are already and always loved. The dying infant and the dying mother.  Exploited, underfed and overworked people, free and unfree alike.  Young men and women injured and dying in the battles of war and childbirth.  Unhealable injuries, untreatable diseases.  The injustices of human systems of every kind.  Our worth is not just in success, but in living good values in our lives, in loving each other as God loves us, and in putting that love to work in the real world we live in.  Everyone alive is living in God’s love.  And if, God be praised, we do achieve some success, the ancients were right: it is a gift from God.  But that success is not our own as a possession: it is ours to share.

 Perhaps someone now is thinking, hasn’t he moved from the particular blessings Jesus pointed out?  I confess it: I believe Jesus is giving us a representative sample of people who are blessed, a sample which can be enlarged, not an exclusive list.  His point is that a life lived with humility, mercy and honest trust and hope but still resulting in what the world thinks is a disastrous failure - that life is in fact loved by God and can look forward to God’s enduring love at the final judgment.

And so, consider the Beatitudes.  “Blessed are” translates the Greek “makarioi hoi”.   Makarios means not just blessed in the religious sense, but fortunate, lucky, winners.  And who are these winners in the celestial lottery?  Humble people.  People who have lost someone or something.  People who don’t put themselves forward in life.  People who want right and good and justice.  People who when they have the opportunity to take revenge, don’t.  People who put God first and themselves last in their lives.  People who stop fights, refuse violence, find ways to bring people together.  People who are willing to suffer when doing the right thing brings them harm.  People who are willing to be publicly identified with these values, with God’s values, and to be disrespected, and even harmed, for doing God’s work.

Jesus is telling us what God’s values are.  They are not the values which “the world” thinks will get us ahead in life.  In our imperfect world, what we used to call a fallen world, humility, loss, deference, putting right ahead of self-advancement, letting people off the hook, valuing peace over victory, willingness to “take it”, are not values which will guarantee us success in the cutthroat business of self-advancement.  They just don’t.  And they won’t.   That’s an uncomfortable truth.  Choosing God’s way is really risky.  It’s not a really good career move.

But what it is, is an alignment with reality.  Jesus is telling us what God’s values are - that every life is of value, every life is loveable, the lives of the world’s losers just as much as its winners.  Jesus is recommending that we rearrange our perception of things.  That we organize our social interactions so that God’s values will be held up, learned and practiced as diligently as are the arts of self-advancement.  That we redefine what human success is and can be.   That we create human communities in which God’s love is the standard of our own values.  But how to do that?  How to even start?  Three suggestions.

First: Bird watchers study the appearance, the calls, the habitats, the flight patterns of the birds they want to identify.  They quietly wait for one to appear and then they just watch, learning about the bird.  Perhaps we can do the same with virtue.  Is there someone living this beatitude life?  Quietly watch and learn.  But they’re not birds - they and we are both human.  Watch and learn and then do it ourselves. 

Second: Don’t be too surprised to learn that we too are eligible to be loved.

Third: Are we willing to admit that the talents and successes we might enjoy are gifts from God, to be shared? 

In other words, are we willing to see our weaknesses, our utter ordinariness, our failures, not as sources for depression but opportunities for God’s love to seek us out and find us?   Are we willing to seek out and find others who need this love of God? 

Be blessed.  Be happy.  Be lucky.  Be loved.