The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 11, July 19, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 19, 2026

Genesis 28:10-19a
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

Click here for an audio of the sermon

In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the great mythologist Joseph Campbell describes the narrative pattern of the hero myth as follows:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are encountered there, and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Campbell chronicles this narrative process of the hero myth through seventeen chronological stages, each infusing the protagonist with new experiences that gradually transforms his or her character into its destined ideal: a hero who has undergone adventure, transformation, and return to become the boon, or a blessing, to those yet to undergo the journey themselves.  The “thousand faces” of the hero’s journey refers to the multiple iterations that this universal, mythic journey manifests.  Underneath, though, for Campbell, there is only one transformative monomyth of adventure, transformation, and return.

This weekend one of the most paradigmatic of these hero journeys hits the big screen in the highly anticipated adaptation of The Odyssey by the great filmmaker Christopher Nolan.  The Bible, too, is full of these hero journeys beginning with Abram who is transformed into Abraham and his grandson, who we hear about today, Jacob who will be transformed into Israel. 

Up to this point in the story, Jacob, whose name means “supplanter,” has usurped his twin brother, Esau, at every turn.  Even at his mother’s bidding, Jacob will come to assume and own his identity as a trickster all to get what was not rightfully his, his father’s blessing.  Even though a twin, he is not the first-born twin.  He is the second…and his supplanting nature is memorably depicted in the story even in his birth with his tiny hand firmly fixed on his brother Esau’s equally tiny ankle.  Ever-grasping Jacob refuses to stand in the shadow of his brother and rightful inheritor of the blessing of the father and the promise of God.  So, all of his life, he grasps and strives and connives to supplant his brother to be somebody his society and religion said he could not be.  And yet, the irony at the heart of the story is that all along Yahweh, his god, had supplanted custom and already chosen him to be the son of blessing.  But to realize this, Jacob has to go on a hero’s journey of adventure, transformation, and return.

The story today picks up with Jacob on the run, living in fear of his brother’s retribution.  It’s here in the moment of his own, personal existential crisis that he meets his match.  With a stone for his head, he lies down and dreams of a ladder connecting heaven to earth with God’s messengers, angels, ascending and descending on it.  But the message does not come from these messengers but directly from God standing right beside him.  God’s message is a message not of castigation or reproach but one of assurance and promise.  Jacob learns that his god is with him to fulfill the promise of Abraham through him, just as he so desperately desired.  As he rouses himself, his eyes are awakened to new dimensions and exclamation says, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!  How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”  For us, today, the journey ends here…but not for Jacob.  His transformation is only beginning and won’t be complete before having to wrestle with this god and be perpetually wounded in the fight.  Jacob will indeed be the vessel through whom the blessing of God flows, but it’s through a wounded, limping, humbled vessel…one who has gone through the fire and whose ego-ambition has been supplanted by God.  

But this is a lesson for another sermon in the weeks ahead, today the focus is on a very particular stage of this hero’s journey.  The truth discovered at this stage is a truth that appears again and again in the journey of spiritual maturation…it is the moment of awakening.  Ironically this happens while Jacob is asleep.  And maybe there’s a lesson in this irony…it’s only when we let go of control in our wakened life that the divine in our subconscious minds can make itself known.  And what is the revelation that here awakens Jacob?  It is the fact that his God, Yahweh, the God of the promise, is with him in this deserted place with only a stone for a pillow.  It’s the insight that it’s in the ordinary where the extraordinary is discovered and that he is now in God’s house (the literal meaning of Bethel) …that it’s when you’re worn down by running away from the thing you fear most and have to just stop over sheer exhaustion that you encounter the awesomeness of God and the gate of heaven.  

Jacob’s journey of awakening and discovery reminds me of another hero’s journey, the journey of Thomas Merton who chronicles a very similar experience.  After living about sixteen years as a Trappist monk in rural Kentucky, Merton, suffering from chronic back pain, goes to downtown Louisville to see a doctor.  While walking on a busy street corner he is suddenly stunned by what he sees.  He describes it as follows:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness….  And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun…. Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

“How awesome is this place!  This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”  Sound familiar?  

I have often wondered if anybody else on that busy day on Fourth and Walnut saw what Merton saw.  Probably not!  But why did he see it?  Was it a moment of total sovereign revelation?  I don’t think so.  Merton had spent sixteen years giving himself over to the monastic way of life and learning how to open himself up and listen deeply with the ear of his heart.  His spiritual senses were attuning themselves to the presence of God everywhere.  He was, in other words, ripe for something like this to happen.  And it did!  “The gate of heaven is everywhere” is Merton’s great insight…and he challenges us to awaken our spiritual senses to see it, hear it, taste it, touch it, and smell it in the everyday, ordinary moments of our seemingly mundane lives.  

Pope Francis used to repeatedly say that God is a God of surprises and that we never know when God is going to surprise us.  We, therefore, need to develop what he called “a contemplative gaze” so that we don’t miss those divine surprises.

So, at the heart of our journey in our life with God is found one of life’s greatest lessons.  With Jacob we must close our eyes to the world around us and “fall asleep,” as it were, to the phenomenal world and awaken to the numinous depths within.  It is there that the awesome presence of God awaits us.  We don’t have to wait until Sunday morning or a moment of crisis to encounter this presence.  It abides with us!  And with Merton we give ourselves to lives of prayer and deep listening, ever sensitizing ourselves to the “deep calling unto deep,” so that with Pope Francis we can awaken from our slumber and return to our awakened state each morning ready for the adventure in God that awaits us.  

One further lesson in the Jacob story…this process of awakening to the vision of God in the hero’s journey is not easy and comes at a price.  It’s on a very hard, uncomfortable stone that you will have to sometimes lay your head.  It’s not what we would have chosen, and it is often what we wrestle with God to accept…but it is this very stone which becomes the catalyst of awakening and is transformed into a monument to God.  

The lesson Jesus teaches us today is that in this process of transformation there are weeds encroaching on us our whole lives.  Patient endurance, putting up with the weaknesses of body and behavior, as our Holy Father Benedict memorably put it, is not just a necessary burden, it is the very virtue transforming us into someone who will one day shine like the sun.  For Jesus, and for those in him, the good news is that the adventure we’re on is one much greater than any hero’s journey…and the transformation and boon of blessing far exceeds anything previously imagined.  We’re on a journey not just of adventure, transformation, and return…we’re on a journey of adventure, transformation, and transcendence into a whole new mode of being…what he called eternal life…and that this eternal life isn’t in some far away kingdom reserved for us when we die…but in the simple, but pregnant, moments of our everyday lives.  Let anyone with ears listen!  And let anyone with eyes see…we’re all shining like the sun!

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 10, July 12, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, July 12, 2026

Genesis 25:19-34

Romans 8:1-11

Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

In the name of our Loving, Liberating and Life-giving God. Amen!

Jesus leaves the house that day and walks down to the water. The crowd that gathers is so large that he has to push off in a boat just to have room to speak, while everyone else stands crowded along the shore. And there, with the sea at his back and the fields probably visible somewhere behind the people, he tells a story about farming.

It is worth pausing on how ordinary that story would have sounded to his first listeners. Nobody in that crowd had ever tested the pH of a field or laid down seed in neat, irrigated rows. In first-century Palestine, you scattered the seed first and plowed it under afterward. You threw it across the path, across the rocky patches, into the weeds, and onto the good ground, all in the same sweeping motion, because you could not always tell in advance which parts of the field would produce and which would not. Then you waited for rain that you could not control, over a harvest you could not guarantee. Every farmer in that crowd would have been nodding along, thinking, yes, that is exactly how it goes.

So when Jesus describes seed falling on the path, on rocky ground, among thorns, and on good soil, he is not describing something strange or symbolic to begin with. He is describing an ordinary Tuesday. The strangeness comes later, in the ending, and in what the story assumes about the sower who keeps throwing seed onto ground that, by any sensible calculation, is not going to produce anything.

Notice, too, how the story is framed. It opens with Jesus saying, "Listen!" and it closes with "Let anyone with ears listen." Whatever else this parable is doing, it is asking for our full attention, not our anxious diagnosis. And it arrives in Matthew's Gospel at a hard moment: the chapters just before this one are full of misunderstanding and outright opposition to Jesus' ministry, and the chapter will end with his own hometown rejecting him. Matthew is writing to a community that knew what it was to proclaim good news and watch much of it fall on ground that produced nothing — through persecution, through poverty that scattered people from the region, through false teachers sowing confusion inside the church itself. This parable was first heard by people who needed reassurance that a disappointing public response did not mean their message was wrong, or their labor wasted.

That is where I want to start today, because it is easy to hear this parable and immediately turn it into an inventory of ourselves. Which soil am I? Am I the hard path, closed off and unreceptive? Am I the rocky ground, quick to catch fire with enthusiasm and just as quick to burn out when life gets hard? Am I choked by thorns, distracted by ambition or worry or the hundred small hungers that crowd out anything deeper? I suspect most of us, if we are honest, have been all four kinds of soil at different points in our lives, sometimes in the same week. I know that when I was young, this parable was taught to me almost entirely as a checklist for self-improvement: figure out what is wrong with your soil and fix it. It is a tiring way to hear good news, because it turns the gospel into one more thing you are failing to get right.

But look again at where Jesus puts the weight of the story. He does not linger on the soils nearly as long as he lingers on the sower and on the harvest. And when the interpretation comes, in the second half of our reading, it is offered almost as an afterthought, a clarification added because the story on its own was too open, too strange, too likely to be misunderstood. The center of gravity in this parable is not the quality of the ground. It is the character of the one doing the sowing.

Picture that sower again: walking a field, throwing seed in every direction, including places that everyone standing nearby could see were hopeless. Not one seed reserved for the good ground and withheld from the rest. Not one calculation of odds before the throw. This is not a cautious, efficient sower rationing precious seed for maximum yield. This is a lavish, almost reckless sower, acting as though there is no such thing as too much seed, no soil too far gone to be worth the risk. If you have ever been on the receiving end of that kind of extravagance — loved by someone who did not first check whether you deserved it — you know it does not feel like sound business practice. It feels like grace.

That, I think, is the first piece of good news buried in this familiar story: the parable is not primarily asking whether you are good soil. It is telling you what kind of God is doing the sowing. This is a God who does not sort us first, who does not calculate our likely returns before showering us with love. God's word goes out toward hardened ground and rocky ground and weed-choked ground with the same generosity it goes out toward the ground already prepared to receive it. Nothing about our failures — the times our hearts were closed, the times we scattered under pressure, the times ambition or anxiety choked out something truer — makes God stingier with the seed. There is always more where that came from.

The second piece of good news is that none of us is only one kind of soil, forever. The path, the rocks, and the thorns are not fixed identities assigned to certain people while others get to be the good soil. They are conditions — seasons, really — that any one of us can move through. Hardened ground can be broken open. Rocky ground can have its stones cleared. Thorns can be pulled. We are not seeds, locked into whatever patch of earth we happened to land on; we have the strange and demanding freedom to notice our own condition and to let it change. That is part of what it means to keep showing up to listen, week after week: to let something soften that had gone hard, to let roots go down deeper than the last hard season allowed.

And then there is the ending, which is the part I think we are most tempted to skip past too quickly. Jesus does not conclude with a modest, reasonable harvest. A good year for a first-century farmer might yield seven or eight times what was sown. Jesus says thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold. That is not agricultural realism; that is a promise of abundance that breaks the scale we normally use to measure return on investment. The point is not simply, keep trying and eventually something will grow. The point is that when God's word does take root, it produces far more than the effort put into it could account for. We are not meant only to endure; we are invited to expect abundance we cannot engineer or predict.

There is one more thing worth naming before we close. Paul, writing to the Romans, tells his readers that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, because the Spirit of God dwells in them. I think that is close to the heart of this parable too. The sower is not standing over us with a clipboard, grading our soil. The seed that has already been planted in us is not something we manufactured through our own discipline or worthiness; it took root because the Spirit of the very sower who planted it also dwells within us, doing the slow work of clearing stones and pulling weeds that we could never manage entirely on our own. That is not permission to stop tending the ground of our own hearts. It is the reason we can tend it without dread, trusting that the outcome was never solely up to us in the first place.

So perhaps the truest response to this parable is not anxious self-examination but something closer to trust, followed by imitation. Trust that the sower sowing in us is patient, generous, and unbothered by our rocky or thorny seasons. And imitation, because we too are sent out to scatter seed without first demanding proof that the ground is worthy. Speak the kind word to the person who seems closed off. Offer forgiveness before it is requested. Show up for the neighbor whose soil, as far as you can tell, looks like nothing but path and rock. You will not always see what grows. But the sower we follow was never stingy with the seed, and the harvest, when it finally comes, is always far larger than anyone had a right to expect.

Let anyone with ears, listen. Amen.

Benedict of Nursia, Monastic, c. 543.

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Francis Beckham, OHC

Benedict of Nursia, Monastic, c. 543.

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Let us pray. "We give you thanks, almighty God, for the Saints of the Benedictine family; and we pray that the zeal of the holy monks and nuns of the ages may inspire us to holiness of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.” Amen. 

In the 1999 comedy “Office Space,” Peter Gibbons, a young corporate drone working a soul-crushing job in the tech sector, has an epiphany. After years spent sludging through, doing “just enough not to get fired” from his job, he agrees to undergo hypnotherapy with his girlfriend in a half-hearted attempt to rescue his equally frustrating relationship. During the session, he begins to let go of attachments, worries, and cares associated with his job, his managers (he has eight, by the way, meaning that when he messes up, he has eight different people coming by his desk to tell him about it), his toxic relationship, and even the pointless expectations of the prevailing culture. This is, arguably, a healthy new outlook for Peter but, unfortunately, there’s a bit of a snag: the temporary trancelike state that enables him to see so clearly for the first time inadvertently becomes permanent when the hypnotherapist keels over from a heart attack before bringing Peter back out of it. 

Locked now into a perpetual state of hypno-bliss, Peter begins moving through his daily life completely unconcerned about anything aside from pursuing his newfound dream of “doing nothing.” Responsibilities, consequences, money, other people’s opinions about him – none of it matters to him anymore. He does continue showing up to work, but only when he feels like it. He finally asks out the pretty waitress he’s had a crush on for ages and she says yes. Bob and Bob, a pair of “efficiency consultants” brought in by the company basically to fire people, end up becoming enamored with Peter’s aloof, relaxed confidence, and – in a move that says a lot about how much corporate culture just loves rewarding incompetence – actually plan to promote him. 

Of course, the Bobs aren’t the only ones who notice Peter’s new outlook. When his burned-out work friends chide him about his deteriorating job performance and seemingly lazy attitude, he responds with surprisingly deep conviction. “We don’t have a lot of time on this earth!” he declares. “We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.” It’s a really good line. And in a real sense, it’s a line that changed my life. 

You see, during a particularly frustrating time in my early professional career, I began questioning whether the large financial services firm I worked for really had my best interests at heart the way they said they did. According to the HR material, I was one of their approximately 100,000 “most valued assets,” but I couldn’t help noticing that when we posted our first billion-dollar profit, their gratitude for us was mainly expressed by tabletop signs in the cafeteria exclaiming, “It takes a lot of zeros to make a billion!” Not surprisingly, none of those additional zeros managed to find their way into my paycheck.

Like Peter Gibbons, I knew I was a drone, but I also knew I was relatively safe. If I managed to numb myself enough, I could keep working for the company, pumping out tedious copy for marketing material, maybe getting a promotion, and hopefully retiring by the time I was seventy. But try as I might to just accept and bear it, I wasn’t happy. And that line, “We don’t have a lot of time on this earth! Human beings weren’t meant to spend it this way,” kept going through my head more and more often, until I finally decided: If I had only limited time, I didn’t want to sacrifice it to a corporation that couldn’t care less about me. I wanted to do something worthwhile with it. The pursuit of that thing would eventually lead me on a years-long journey through numerous monasteries and houses of various religious orders. But the first one was Benedictine. 

One morning at about five o’clock, in the darkened choir of a large Benedictine Abbey on the west coast, I found out for the first time what it actually takes to live a life of purpose. As the monks rose from their stalls to begin praying the office of Vigils, the precentor intoned the Invititory: “Come, let us worship Christ the Lord, we have left all things to follow him.” Then, in unison, the rest of the monks chanted the beautifully haunting line in response, repeating it several more times during the course of Psalm 95, the Venite. And I knew. 

In time, I gradually came to understand that Saint Benedict’s plan for teaching his monks how to follow Christ – to give up all things and seek God alone – was to establish the monastery as a school of the Lord’s service, a place where ordinary people come to learn how to follow the Gospel in the same way as the community of Believers described in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” This is none other than the ideal Saint Benedict invites us to strive for every day, right here, in this monastery: to hear and study the Word, to be community to one another, to share the Eucharist, and to pray for each other and for the world. 

Saint Benedict understands that the Believers in Acts are living the way they are because they have heard and embraced the Gospel of Jesus, and they are orienting their whole lives toward living as Jesus taught. Indeed, the Acts of the Apostles is a literary continuation of the Gospel of Luke, both written by the same person and intended to be read in sequence. So, they have, as Jesus proclaims in our Gospel reading from Luke today, heeded Jesus’ invitation and left all things to follow him. They are using the Gospel as their rule of life. Saint Benedict’s intention in writing his Rule several centuries later is by no means to replace the Gospel, but to help his nuns and monks follow it as faithfully as possible within the contexts of their own times and places. For fifteen hundred years, this has worked, because it is founded on one thing alone: the timeless desire of the human heart to seek, and to be found by, Christ. 

The shared vision of the Believers and Saint Benedict of simplicity and love of God and neighbor is a far cry from the fundamentally disordered obsessions of our modern social, political, and economic structures, and it was equally counter to the decadence, chaos, and violence of Saint Benedict’s time. And so, for the sake of the salvation of souls, he makes it clear that we have a solemn duty to show forth to the world that another way is possible through lives of peace and prayer. “Your way of acting should be different from the world’s way,” he tells us in the Rule. Just imagine what a difference each of us could make if we really committed ourselves, every day, to being Jesus’ presence in the world. 

As appealing as that sounds – and we should do it – Jesus himself levels with us: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” He then goes on to stress just how intentional and disciplined we must be in our quest, or else we’re sure to falter. Our towers will stand unfinished, or we’ll find ourselves making peace with oppressors to keep from experiencing persecution and ridicule. In the Rule, Saint Benedict echoes this warning in the chapter on receiving new brothers, which our community just happened to hear read yesterday: “Do not grant newcomers to the monastic life an easy entry,” Saint Benedict cautions, “[if] they promise perseverance in their stability, then after two months have elapsed let this rule be read straight through to them, and let them be told: ‘This is the law under which you are choosing to serve. If you can keep it, come in. If not, feel free to leave.’” There can be no illusions, no mitigations, and no excuses when it comes to following Christ, in the monastery or anywhere else. 

There’s one more thing to beware of. As I have moved from corporate zero to professed monk, I’ve learned that the decision to leave all things and follow Christ is, unfortunately, not really a one-and-done kind of thing. It’s easy to make; not so easy to keep. For my part, I certainly struggle with distractions, temptations, laziness, and selfish tendencies pretty much every day. Ask a monastic – especially an older one – when they decided to become a nun or monk and they’ll likely answer, “When I woke up today.” As with any committed way of life, if we’re serious about staying the course in the monastery, then always we must begin again. But Saint Benedict reassures us that, even in our human weakness, all things are possible in the One whom we seek: “What is not possible to us by nature,” he tells us,  “let us ask to be supplied by the help of God’s grace … [while] there is still time, while we are in this body and have time to accomplish all these things by the light of life – we must run and do now what will profit us for eternity.” That’s a mission statement we can all get behind. 

So then, having heard this invitation – and what, dear friends, is more delightful than this voice of the Lord calling to us? – let us set our resolve to bear our own crosses, calculate the cost, make our plans, and get about the business of following Jesus. “May we prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may he bring us all together to everlasting life.” Amen.