The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 27A, November 8, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York

Br. Randy Greve

The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, November 8, 2026

Amos 5:18-24
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25:1-13

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Last Sunday we learned of the crash of a small plane carrying nine persons in Florida.  They were flying from Texas to the Bahamas and encountered a storm which damaged the plane and caused a rapid descent.  The last words of the pilot were, “We’re out of time.”  Tragedies like this remind us of the fragile and arbitrary nature of human life.  Whether someone lives to be 100 and dies in their sleep or is only 20 years old like the co-pilot of that plane, our earthly sojourn is dependent on events and circumstances that we can neither control nor avoid.  The psalms liken our time to the grass of the field that is here today and gone tomorrow.  We expected to awaken this morning and expect to live through the day, but this is not promised and our last night and our last morning are coming sooner or later. 
The parable in the gospel this morning seeks to impress upon us the urgency of waking up to the passing nature of time and to be prepared for the end of this life - whether Christ returns to us or we return to him.  The word “death” never appears in the parable, although our individual deaths and the end of the world fill the scene.  The way Jesus frames the apocalypse is that death is a transition into the full reality of the meaning of our human life.  Death is the great equalizer that lays bare acts of love and acts of evil that constitute our life. Who we are and what we have done are laid bare in the next life.  In parables of crisis, the focus is on what it means to meet that moment - the coming reckoning with how we have used the life God has entrusted to us and the return of earthly life to its creator and judge.  We glimpse a world where our strategies are unmasked and our motives are exposed.  We can hide in this life.  We can lie to ourselves in this life.  But not in the next.  Whatever programs we’ve used to avoid the reality of our mortality and our accounting for it end when our hearts stop beating.  Then there is just us in the presence of the truth - the full truth about everything.
The crisis in the parable is the prospect of darkness in the moment when light is essential.  We are dropped into this scene, which is dream-like in its disorientation, with no bearings or context.  The bridegroom comes late, the oil of the foolish has run out, the storekeeper’s shops are closed at midnight, and finally the door to the marriage feast is shut before the chilling words from the bridegroom.  Finally, the Lord provides an imperative that defines a response in light of the crisis: Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.
From the parable we can deduce that keeping awake has something to do with oil, and oil has something to do with thinking ahead, preparing, and being ready.  Light is the joy of welcome to the bridegroom, the burning of the lamps the sign of what is in the hearts of these women.  Wisdom is preparing in advance for the unknown and unexpected.  Foolishness is thinking only of the immediate present with no larger perspective on what is possible.  The scandal in the parable is the lack of sharing oil.  Why don’t the wise virgins share their oil with the foolish so that all may have light to see the bridegroom when he comes?  In practical terms, ten half-fueled lamps are actually a worse idea than five fully fueled lamps, but of course there is a deeper meaning.
Jesus is speaking in the temple, and his judgment of the corrupt temple system is that it preserved the outer customs and practices of the tradition of sacrifice and sabbath and other laws while neglecting personal and communal holiness of heart and justice.  All the rule-following in the world, Jesus says, when done merely out of duty and obligation, is no substitute for love of God and love of neighbor.  Legalism, prejudice, oppression, and judgment in the name of holiness is still evil.  So, in that context, this parable is the positive redress of the temple system - a recovery of the personal agency and responsibility of authentic holiness, not the mere appearance of holiness.  The oil then becomes the symbol of human light and love that reflects the glory of God in the individual heart.  It is the symbol of the offering of life to God to become a living flame, unique and precious to each of us.
The virgins without extra oil are foolish because they falsely believe that the essence of life is transferable, that someone else’s oil of justice can count as mine, that credit for holiness can be shared. The foolish virgins represent those in Jesus’ view who lived merely through external roles and customs, believing that sufficiently oily, rather than from their own inner light.  The foolish virgins may have watched others shine, wanted to shine, knew things about shining, but in the end simply did not burn the light of love in them, for themselves.  They outsourced life.  Whether because they were afraid, entitled, or simply careless, they embody a fundamental “no” to the risk and joy and fire of being truly oneself.  
Wisdom, on the other hand, is “storing up treasure in heaven” - a mindfulness that is the character of the prudent, prepared soul who is conscious of the purpose and shortness of this life and is tending to the end and the judgment. When it comes to being who God made us to be, there is no outsourcing.  Faith is not intellectual assent to static truths.  Wisdom is faithfulness to what is given to each of us to become and express with the life God has given to us, knowing that life is short and an accounting is coming.
The crisis of the parable is universal.  We still confuse temporal and eternal. It is possible to conform to the customs, follow practices, and participate in service, but the love of the heart is absent.  The apocalypse is not only about the future, but also happening whenever we open ourselves to the presence of God and allow God’s spirit to pierce through the external to reveal the heart at the core of our being.  That is essential practice because only that heart is what lasts.  What you keep for all time is the light that shone through you to others in love.  No other person, no church, no institution, no tradition can do for you what only you can do by your own will and choice.   Our outer traditions and customs can aid our hearts in becoming alive to God, they are not a substitute for our aliveness.  Only you can shine your light as the essence of your unique self.  Nothing else can burn the flame that is your flame except you.  That is what “keep awake” is about - prepare, show up, participate, share, give, celebrate.  Those outside are the spectators, those who played it safe, who committed to the temporal, the afraid. We are called to be so fully alive and shining that Christ, who sees the heart, knows the genuine love we give and therefore knows us.  As the prophet Amos reminds us, the quality of our light is whether justice and righteousness is flowing into us and through us.  We may go to church a million times, serve on every committee, go to every event, follow every rubric, but it is meaningless to God if love is not the source and result.
We are admonished to keep awake because spiritual slumber is always seeking to seduce us into lethargy. We have been and will be tempted by the slumber of entitlement, the slumber of convenience, the slumber of comfort, the slumber of, “I’ll do it tomorrow.”  My light may be gone tomorrow.  There is no such thing as tomorrow Christianity, thus the urgent call to keep awake.  A unique, precious, and irreplaceable fire exists in each of us that is loaned to us by God to fuel and offer in the darkness.  Our invitation is to allow our hearts to catch the fire of love and reflect the glory of God.  Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis writes in his commentary on this parable, At the final moment, Christ will be looking for only one thing in me: the inimitable light that he has always wanted to kindle in me and bring forth from me, the unique flame that can flare up only if I have allowed my very heart and soul to catch the fire of his love.  Love is saying yes to the fire of love.  Love is I belong, and you belong, too.  Live in a way you can die well, and that means loving well, because love is what lives forever. Amen.

All Saints Day, November 1, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

All Saints Day, November 1, 2026

Revelation 7:9-17

1 John 3:1-3

Matthew 5:1-12

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Some of you may be aware that the website of Holy Cross Monastery has an extensive archive of sermons going back a quarter of a century. As of this week there are 1014 sermons available there, most in both text and audio formats. And of these, there are eighteen sermons preached for the feast of All Saints which we are observing today. After perusing these eighteen sermons, including one of mine, I got to wondering what more could be said. What's at the core of today’s feast? What is this communion of Saints that we speak of in our creeds? And how does that impact us by challenging us, encouraging us, and assisting us? 

After a while you can see certain themes or emphases emerging in these and other sermons and writings about the saints. One of the central themes concerns what precisely is a saint. Most of us when we hear the term think of a super Christian whose life is marked by fidelity and courage and other-directedness and love and patience and so on. It's almost as if we were talking about some category of celebrity Christian, but celebrities who instead of drawing attention to themselves point beyond themselves to Jesus and his saving mercy and transforming love. There are of course the great names of those mentioned in the New Testament—Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint Stephen, Saint Mary Magdalen, and of course Saint Mary the Virgin, mother of our Lord. And there are others that we know popularly in our culture-- Saint Patrick, Saint Valentine, St. Nicholas and St. Francis being among the all-stars. But they constitute only a minuscule part of what Scripture calls “a great cloud of witnesses” that surrounds us on all sides, supporting us by their fellowship and offering us their lives and struggles as models of holiness and expressions of hope in the face of tough and broken lives. Which is to say, all our lives. 

The Christian community has always recognized that there are countless such saints, far more than can be named or numbered. Sainthood is not limited to some process by which a particular church canonizes or includes in a calendar of commemorations one or another Christian. So it is  that we see in many of those eighteen sermons a reminder that before it was a  title for the well-known Chrisitan, the word “saint” applied to all the faithful  who struggled in good faith to be holy, that is to be restored to wholeness and  integrity and blessedness often in and through the most hidden and ordinary  of circumstances. The saints are you and me, at least potentially, at least partially. And we need to be reminded that God is not finished with us, that we are works in progress. The great saints, the lesser-known ones, and the mostly invisible ones who are part of our lives, however unrecognized, are tokens and assurances that there is a journey which leads us home… home to the very heart of God. And that we are not journeying alone.  

A second theme in several of our eighteen sermons from the online archive is a more recent observation that today we're smack in the middle of a sacred three days which has been termed the ‘autumn triduum’…three days which reflect the same dynamic as the three days that lead up to Easter.  These are, of course, Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day or the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed. Someone once described them as scared, sacred and scarred. And who of us does not know all three of these, sometimes all at once? Today we are invited to enter this thin space, if you will, where the days become shorter, the clocks are set back (hopefully for the last time) and we are made exquisitely aware of the transitoriness and the beauty of life. 

But I don't want to stop here quite yet. I want to remind us that in our recent monastic observance and in some Anglican church calendars there is also a feast called the Saints of the Old Testament. Saints aren't just Christians who knew Jesus. The saints are also those who longed for and 

worked toward the coming of Jesus Christ. Churches in both the East and the West have for centuries commemorated and celebrated the lives of our ancestors in the Old Covenant. In its compendium of saints, the Anglican Church of Canada says the following: 

“Our faith did not begin with the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, but with Abraham and Sarah, with Moses and Miriam and Aaron, with Deborah and Samuel, with holy kings like David and Hezekiah, and with prophets like Elijah and Jeremiah. We give thanks for the testimony of their lives and celebrate their faith, because they were the true forebears of Christ, who has made us partners and fellow heirs with them in the covenant of salvation.” 

And we must remember that the covenant made with Abraham and his descendants is irrevocable, and that God honors and works through that covenant to this day. 

But let's not stop there. Yes, there are saints in the Christian tradition.  And yes, there were saints of the Old Covenant. But there are also saints in other religious traditions as well as among those who subscribe to no particular faith. These are the ones whose quality of life and obedience to their conscience in what our tradition has often called the natural law or the inner moral law hold up, even for Christians, models of holy living. The early Christians often looked at the noble lives of “virtuous pagans”, people such as Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and the emperor Trajan and the poet Virgil as in some way anticipating and participating in the saving and transformative work of our Lord. And today we might well name others who were not or are not explicitly Christian, but who embody, in ways that we can't quite explain, the very best of a Christian moral outlook and a humanity and a humility that is beyond beautiful. Today we might name people like the current Dalai Lama 

or Thich Nhat Hanh or Abraham Issac Heschel or Mahatma Ghandi or Sufi poets such as Rumi or Hafez and other Islamic wali or “Friends of God”, or the Indian devotional mystic Kabir along with countless people of goodwill throughout the world who work for the welfare of others through their own vocations and careers and often at great personal cost, be it in medicine or law or rescue work or in simple faithful support of self and others. These too are saints! The late Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner called them “anonymous Christians”. This was not without some criticism… who wants to be called an anonymous anything? But it is a way for Christians to appreciate that the work of Christ is universal and reaches everyone everywhere inviting them to live lives of integrity and compassion…what our opening prayer today calls “virtuous and godly living.” That’s not the end of the story, of course, and it’s certainly not an explanation, but it is a reminder that God’s mercy and love is not the sole possession of any single religious tradition or teaching.  

The Protestant writer and theologian Frederic Buechner once wrote: 

“…the feet of saints are as much of clay as everybody else's, and their sainthood consists less of what they have done than of what God has for some reason chosen to do through them. When you consider that Saint Mary Magdalene was possessed by seven devils, that Saint  

Augustine prayed, “Give me chastity and continence, but not now,” that Saint Francis started out as a high living young dude in downtown Assisi, and that Saint Simon Stylites spent years on top of a sixty-foot pillar, you  

figure that maybe there's nobody God can't use as a means of grace, including even ourselves. 

Buechner adds:  

“The Holy Spirit has been called “the Lord, the giver of life” and, drawing their power from that source, saints are essentially life givers. To be with them is to become more alive.”

Beloved, for whatever reason, God has chosen to do something through each of us. That is the fountain of our dignity, our holiness, our healing, and our personhood. May we be blessed to dwell among the saints, among those who are life givers. For to be with them is to become more fully alive. And the more fully alive we become, the more we ourselves become life-givers.  

Called to be saints—you and me and (dare I say it?) everybody.  “Therefore, lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet….” (Hebrews 12:12). And come, let us walk together in that great company spanning the ages toward fullness of light and life and peace.  

Happy All Saints Day, my friends. Amen.

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.