Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Scott Wesley Borden, OHC
RCL - Christmas 1 - Sunday 28 December 2008
Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7
John 1:1-18
If you listen to ads for companies like Kodak and Hallmark, they will tell you that Christmas is a time for making memories... Of course what they really mean is that Christmas is a time for buying lots of their stuff to mark and store those memories.
Christmas is certainly a time for memories, of remembering - but that remembering is not limited to the sentimentality of cards and photos.
We remember friends and loved ones with gifts, we remember the poor and needy with love and charity, we remember joyful times past and painful times past. Most of all we remember the coming of Jesus - God among us - the Word in human flesh living among us.
I’m not quite enough of a Scrooge to say X-Boxes and greetings cards have no place in Christmas. But I do believe that a pile of stuff stuffed under a tree distorts our idea of what it means to give just as Kodak Moments distort what it means to remember.
We’ve developed a rather literal and linear concept of remembering. Perfect memory gets all the details in all the right spots with all the right implications. Fond memories - well for those we know we’re making little adjustments to reality... softening up the hard edges - but that’s OK... its still linear and literal.
Our literal, linear approach to memory isn’t the only way of remembering. Its certainly not the ancient way of remembering.
Remembering, in some sense, is the opposite of dismembering. It’s the putting together of things, people, times, events... Dismembering is destructive; Remembering is constructive, even creative.
Our modern literal and linear approach to remembering greatly inhibits the constructive and creative possibilities. A literal and linear approach to remembering is no more helpful or healthy than a literal and linear approach to scripture.
The Celtic peoples had a wonderfully rich way of remembering that involved creativity and artistry. The Celts, for example, remember dialogues between people like St Patrick and Jesus. Its almost laughable from a literal-linear perspective. Patrick and Jesus lived centuries apart and in very different parts of the globe. But surely Patrick was, in some sense, in dialogue with Jesus. So why not remember it?
The Gospels give us a bit of a push not to be too literal and linear in our remembering of the birth of Jesus. Matthew and Luke both tell the story - except they don’t tell the same story. In Matthew, Jesus is born at home. There is an astrological event - a star. And the mysterious Magi who come from a distant land bringing exotic gifts. In Luke Jesus is born on the road, as it were. Mary and Joseph are traveling. We have a stable and a manger and shepherds. Its quite common to have shepherds and kings gather around the manger. Our kings are making their way to the creche even at this moment. But in the literal, linear world, those Kings will never arrive that creche. The shepherds and wise men will never meet - any more than St Patrick and Jesus meet...
I think the Gospelers are giving us permission to remember the story as we need to, not to try to reconstruct it as ancient history.
Now, more than at any other time of year, we remember that Jesus, the Word of God, takes on human flesh and dwells with us. Its not a long past, locked-in-time, linear memory. Our encounter with God in human flesh is a real re-membering; a living relationship. And as we all know, relationships take work.
The sweet simplicity of Greeting Card spirituality and Kodak Moment memories will not support a rich and deep relationship - not with our loved ones, and certainly not with Emmanuel - God with us.
The Gospels are revolutionary - and remembering them sentimentally takes the revolution right out. Matthew and Luke begin their revolutionary talk at the moment of Jesus’ birth. We remember shepherds and wise men...
We need to remember that this little child at the center of it all could claim the same divine birthright as the emperor. This little child with no money and no power, exceeds the mightiest ruler of the most powerful empire on Earth. Remembering that faithfully and actively will inevitably put us in conflict with the social, industrial, political, and economic empires of our day.
But today we’re remembering John. John begins his revolution a little differently. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...” well that leaves me scratching my head a bit, but it doesn’t seem too revolutionary.
“He was in the world... yet the world knew him not.” Nothing revolutionary there - just a sad fact that is arguably as true now as it was 2000 years ago.
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us... The law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus.” Well there is a revolution... a revolution of grace and truth rather than a revolution of power and might.
How do we remember this revolution - how do we put it together in our lives and our time?
That is the question at the center of being a follower of Jesus. How do we live out the Gospel? How do we honor our baptismal covenant? If we are looking for simple, easy to follow, step by step instructions, we better find another Gospel... and a different God.
A revolution of grace and truth... I find that I can’t remember grace without also remembering forgiveness. By God’s grace I am saved and by that grace I am led to God’s kingdom - not in some future way, but in a re-membering way. God’s grace re-members my life here and now. God’s grace teaches my heart to sing and releases me from fear, and allows me to see things I would otherwise be blind to, to borrow from a well loved hymn.
And I find that I can’t remember truth without remembering justice - because truth requires justice, while injustice requires lies. Just take a little time today to think about a few of the lies we tell in order to rationalize injustice.
The world in which God took on human flesh was a troubled world, a violent world. Jesus calls us to follow - that sounds nice until we remember that Jesus was executed by the state. Remembering the birth of Christ is a revolutionary and dangerous act.
We still live in a troubled world, a world filled with darkness, violence, deceit, and despair, but a Christmas built around remembering suffering and heartbreak is not going to be popular. “O Come All ye faithful. Suffer with the suffering. Bleed with the wounded. Cry with the brokenhearted”
A Christmas built around misery and strife is not true to the Gospel - the good news.
Jesus doesn’t call us to suffer. Jesus calls us to heal suffering. Jesus doesn’t call us to be afflicted. Jesus calls us to heal the afflicted; to protect the week; to visit the sick and the imprisoned. That is what Christmas is - the re-membering of our selves as the Body of Christ. The re-membering of this world with the grace and truth that come from our relationship with Jesus, the living God.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Thursday, December 25, 2008
RCL - Christmas Eve - Wed 24 Dec 2008
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHCRCL - Christmas Midnight Mass - Wed 24 December, 2008
Isaiah 9:2-7
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14
"Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace among those whom he favors!"
This is the first Christmas since 1992 that I have not overseen a Christmas pageant as a parish priest. The young participants in Christmas pageants always range from the enthusiastic, who want their parts, who look forward to them, who learn their lines and where to stand and what to do, to those who are basically conscripted, by domestic forces one does not oneself wish to witness, and whose dramatic presence is no less interesting to the observer for being coerced. There is nothing quite as wonderful as watching a sullen nine year old shepherd torn between the desire to look as bored as possible or actually break loose and shock, and the desire to reach home in one piece. Bless them all.
But since this is my first all-adult Christmas in 17 years, please indulge me a bit. I love retelling the story of the manger and the shepherds and the angels and the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes – so much nicer-sounding than bands of20cloth! But tonight I want to tell a story about another first Christmas – the first time Luke’s story was told openly, when it was first published, so to speak. Because that proclamation was a ticking time bomb to the ancient world. Luke’s Gospel is the promise of the real hope of glory and peace. Luke’s Gospel is about power, about ultimacy: what is real, what matters, what the world is about and what the world is for. It is about and for the love of God. It is not about and for politicians, governments, empires, and what the world calls great.
Luke’s gospel was probably published sometime in the mid-70s to the late 80's of the first century of the common era, for a Christian public who would appreciate his mastery of the Greek language. They seem to have been fairly sophisticated people, who knew pretty much what was what. This Gospel was a public proclamation of a new Glory and a new Peace, to proceed from the real ruler of the world, the real Son of the Divine, who was not in any respect like the power that ruled the political world. It is a sophisticated theology of God’s power in an imperial world. It is also a great work of art, clothing a profoundly transforming message in an unforgettable story that everyone who hears it immediately understands at its deepest level.
The Christian gospel was a new gospel, because there was another, secular=2 0and official gospel promulgated by the Roman government. That gospel proclaimed that the Divine Order had bestowed its favor on the imperial regime, which had brought peace and stability and prosperity to the parts of the world fortunate enough to be under its control. And the proper response to that favor was to praise and give glory to the emperor and all he stood for.
Luke starts his story of Jesus’ birth by placing it firmly in the imperial realm. With a reference to the rule of Caesar Augustus, and a display of dignitaries and titles that establish a governmental aura to the story, he makes the connection to the world of imperial authority clear. With the mention of Augustus, the first emperor, most hearers of that era would bring to mind the name of the present emperor, and then perhaps reflect on the ups and downs of imperial rule since its establishment a century or more before. They might reflect that the glory of the imperial state was a peace bought at a staggeringly high price by brutality and cunning in equal parts by Augustus and maintained by his successors, the decent emperors, Tiberius (mostly) and Claudius, and the mad emperors, Caligula and Nero. Their dynasty collapsed amid the confusion of the years 68-69, when four emperors reigned after Nero was driven from Rome.
The current ruling family of the 70's and 80's and 90's, contemporary with Luke’s Gospel, was a family whose name w as Flavius. The Flavians were brought to the throne by their successful prosecution of the war against the Jews. Their victory in Judea was the single most traumatic event in Jewish history until the Holocaust: The conquest of Jerusalem and the capture and destruction of the Temple ended forever the immemorial sacrificial worship offered by Israel to God. The Flavian steps to the throne were through pools of Jewish blood. The imperial regime of Vespasian and his sons had devastated both ancient Judaism and incipient Christianity.
There were three of these Flavian emperors. Vespasian was by all accounts a great general, a competent emperor, and a good old boy from the country with a mind like a steel trap, like so many successful despots. He was succeeded by his two sons, Titus, whom many thought gracious and who died too soon, and the paranoid Domitian, whose madness and cruelty the historian Suetonius tells us was such that “At the beginning of his reign, he used to retire into a secret place for one hour every day, and there do nothing else but catch flies, and stick them through the body with a sharp pin.” Before long it would not just be flies. He covered the walls and floors of his palace with marble polished like mirrors so he could see if someone was trying to kill him. He liked to start his letters with the salutation, “Our lord and god commands so and so.”
If y ou ever saw the emperor, you would shout Doxa! Glory! You would publicly praise the peace that his family had brought, even if that peace was bought at the price of the disappearance of your nation, your family, and your hopes. But not everyone was convinced. I can just hear the desolated Jews and Christians, still mourning the loss of the Temple, muttering to themselves when out of earshot, as yet another imperial rescript is read, the first century equivalent of “Some lord. Some god.”
But Luke’s account of power is entirely different. The angel’s proclamation is Glory and Peace. Not glory to emperors, but to the one who makes, and unmakes, emperors. And the angel makes this announcement not to the rich and powerful who are called to witness the imperial presence, but to shepherds, the lowest class of workers, those who really can’t find much else to do but look after the animals.
Mark’s Gospel uses the word for peace, eirene, only once. Matthew uses it four times. But Luke uses it fourteen times. Peace is a major theme for Luke. The birth of Jesus is the beginning of the restoration of peace, of shalom, not just to Israel, but, in the unfathomable generosity of God, to the whole world, including the Romans and their unspeakable emperors.
Luke’s gospel is a refutation of the theology of the world=2 0of imperial power. The babe whom Mary has brought forth is obscure, by the usual standards illegitimate, poor if not destitute, humble. How many like him have been born, lived and died, only to be forgotten, even after a generation or two by their own families. He is Everychild.
But it is this seemingly ordinary child who is to be the one who bears the real glory. It is from this obscure and humble baby that the real peace is to proceed. It is he, not an emperor or even a family of emperors, who will really transform the world. His peace will come not at the price of tens and hundreds of thousands of deaths and who knows how much desecration and treachery, but at the cost of his own life alone, into whose hands in an hour one morning the imperial regime will pound nails and whose side it will pierce with a lance. His life is the gift freely offered for real peace.
This is real glory. This is real peace. Not the propaganda of a political regime dabbling in its own divinization, but the real thing.
Luke offered then and he offers us now the real hope of Christmas. I think those who heard Luke’s Christmas story for the first time would have opened their eyes in joy. I think they would have understood Mary’s prophetic role. I think they would have understood Joseph’s heroic and necessary nurture of this new and fragile li fe, even at the risk of his own honor as a husband and as a man. I think they would have understood why God chose the outcasts of the working world to be the human audience for the great inbreaking event of the transformation of the world. I think they would have understood why it was in a stable and not in a palace, why it happened on the road to people trying honestly to obey some incomprehensible bureaucratic regulation, as all ordinary people have to do. Most of all I think they would have understood who this story was aimed at, and why.
How wonderful that God, who made the world from nothing, can bring to nothing the pretensions of an empire. How wonderful that this baby, who seems at first to be nothing, can be the beginning of the real Peace, the real Glory.
Br. Adam McCoy, OHCRCL - Christmas Midnight Mass - Wed 24 December, 2008
Isaiah 9:2-7
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14
"Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace among those whom he favors!"
This is the first Christmas since 1992 that I have not overseen a Christmas pageant as a parish priest. The young participants in Christmas pageants always range from the enthusiastic, who want their parts, who look forward to them, who learn their lines and where to stand and what to do, to those who are basically conscripted, by domestic forces one does not oneself wish to witness, and whose dramatic presence is no less interesting to the observer for being coerced. There is nothing quite as wonderful as watching a sullen nine year old shepherd torn between the desire to look as bored as possible or actually break loose and shock, and the desire to reach home in one piece. Bless them all.
But since this is my first all-adult Christmas in 17 years, please indulge me a bit. I love retelling the story of the manger and the shepherds and the angels and the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes – so much nicer-sounding than bands of20cloth! But tonight I want to tell a story about another first Christmas – the first time Luke’s story was told openly, when it was first published, so to speak. Because that proclamation was a ticking time bomb to the ancient world. Luke’s Gospel is the promise of the real hope of glory and peace. Luke’s Gospel is about power, about ultimacy: what is real, what matters, what the world is about and what the world is for. It is about and for the love of God. It is not about and for politicians, governments, empires, and what the world calls great.
Luke’s gospel was probably published sometime in the mid-70s to the late 80's of the first century of the common era, for a Christian public who would appreciate his mastery of the Greek language. They seem to have been fairly sophisticated people, who knew pretty much what was what. This Gospel was a public proclamation of a new Glory and a new Peace, to proceed from the real ruler of the world, the real Son of the Divine, who was not in any respect like the power that ruled the political world. It is a sophisticated theology of God’s power in an imperial world. It is also a great work of art, clothing a profoundly transforming message in an unforgettable story that everyone who hears it immediately understands at its deepest level.
The Christian gospel was a new gospel, because there was another, secular=2 0and official gospel promulgated by the Roman government. That gospel proclaimed that the Divine Order had bestowed its favor on the imperial regime, which had brought peace and stability and prosperity to the parts of the world fortunate enough to be under its control. And the proper response to that favor was to praise and give glory to the emperor and all he stood for.
Luke starts his story of Jesus’ birth by placing it firmly in the imperial realm. With a reference to the rule of Caesar Augustus, and a display of dignitaries and titles that establish a governmental aura to the story, he makes the connection to the world of imperial authority clear. With the mention of Augustus, the first emperor, most hearers of that era would bring to mind the name of the present emperor, and then perhaps reflect on the ups and downs of imperial rule since its establishment a century or more before. They might reflect that the glory of the imperial state was a peace bought at a staggeringly high price by brutality and cunning in equal parts by Augustus and maintained by his successors, the decent emperors, Tiberius (mostly) and Claudius, and the mad emperors, Caligula and Nero. Their dynasty collapsed amid the confusion of the years 68-69, when four emperors reigned after Nero was driven from Rome.
The current ruling family of the 70's and 80's and 90's, contemporary with Luke’s Gospel, was a family whose name w as Flavius. The Flavians were brought to the throne by their successful prosecution of the war against the Jews. Their victory in Judea was the single most traumatic event in Jewish history until the Holocaust: The conquest of Jerusalem and the capture and destruction of the Temple ended forever the immemorial sacrificial worship offered by Israel to God. The Flavian steps to the throne were through pools of Jewish blood. The imperial regime of Vespasian and his sons had devastated both ancient Judaism and incipient Christianity.
There were three of these Flavian emperors. Vespasian was by all accounts a great general, a competent emperor, and a good old boy from the country with a mind like a steel trap, like so many successful despots. He was succeeded by his two sons, Titus, whom many thought gracious and who died too soon, and the paranoid Domitian, whose madness and cruelty the historian Suetonius tells us was such that “At the beginning of his reign, he used to retire into a secret place for one hour every day, and there do nothing else but catch flies, and stick them through the body with a sharp pin.” Before long it would not just be flies. He covered the walls and floors of his palace with marble polished like mirrors so he could see if someone was trying to kill him. He liked to start his letters with the salutation, “Our lord and god commands so and so.”
If y ou ever saw the emperor, you would shout Doxa! Glory! You would publicly praise the peace that his family had brought, even if that peace was bought at the price of the disappearance of your nation, your family, and your hopes. But not everyone was convinced. I can just hear the desolated Jews and Christians, still mourning the loss of the Temple, muttering to themselves when out of earshot, as yet another imperial rescript is read, the first century equivalent of “Some lord. Some god.”
But Luke’s account of power is entirely different. The angel’s proclamation is Glory and Peace. Not glory to emperors, but to the one who makes, and unmakes, emperors. And the angel makes this announcement not to the rich and powerful who are called to witness the imperial presence, but to shepherds, the lowest class of workers, those who really can’t find much else to do but look after the animals.
Mark’s Gospel uses the word for peace, eirene, only once. Matthew uses it four times. But Luke uses it fourteen times. Peace is a major theme for Luke. The birth of Jesus is the beginning of the restoration of peace, of shalom, not just to Israel, but, in the unfathomable generosity of God, to the whole world, including the Romans and their unspeakable emperors.
Luke’s gospel is a refutation of the theology of the world=2 0of imperial power. The babe whom Mary has brought forth is obscure, by the usual standards illegitimate, poor if not destitute, humble. How many like him have been born, lived and died, only to be forgotten, even after a generation or two by their own families. He is Everychild.
But it is this seemingly ordinary child who is to be the one who bears the real glory. It is from this obscure and humble baby that the real peace is to proceed. It is he, not an emperor or even a family of emperors, who will really transform the world. His peace will come not at the price of tens and hundreds of thousands of deaths and who knows how much desecration and treachery, but at the cost of his own life alone, into whose hands in an hour one morning the imperial regime will pound nails and whose side it will pierce with a lance. His life is the gift freely offered for real peace.
This is real glory. This is real peace. Not the propaganda of a political regime dabbling in its own divinization, but the real thing.
Luke offered then and he offers us now the real hope of Christmas. I think those who heard Luke’s Christmas story for the first time would have opened their eyes in joy. I think they would have understood Mary’s prophetic role. I think they would have understood Joseph’s heroic and necessary nurture of this new and fragile li fe, even at the risk of his own honor as a husband and as a man. I think they would have understood why God chose the outcasts of the working world to be the human audience for the great inbreaking event of the transformation of the world. I think they would have understood why it was in a stable and not in a palace, why it happened on the road to people trying honestly to obey some incomprehensible bureaucratic regulation, as all ordinary people have to do. Most of all I think they would have understood who this story was aimed at, and why.
How wonderful that God, who made the world from nothing, can bring to nothing the pretensions of an empire. How wonderful that this baby, who seems at first to be nothing, can be the beginning of the real Peace, the real Glory.
Monday, December 22, 2008
RCL - Advent 4 A - Sun 21 Dec 2008
Mariya uMama weThemba Monastery, Grahamstown, South Africa
Br. John Forbis, OHC
RCL - Advent 4 B - Sunday 21 December 2008
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Romans 16: 25-27
Luke 1: 26-38
For me, this is a nail-biting morning. This season, all the Scripture readings, even the great theological events afterward seem to hinge on this morning. God through Nathan plants the seed of a promise to David of what will the future of his line will be. It is not necessarily about kings enthroned in great palaces but it will be about a lasting dynasty. The Benediction in Romans, possibly not even written by Paul, talks about a mystery that has been kept secret for all this time being revealed, something building up and kept under cover because it is so risky and powerful, everything that all the prophets have been speaking about, all that the Jews have longed for and now broken wide open for the Gentiles, not necessarily the “chosen” ones. All this points toward a young woman probably not older than her teens in a remote village of no account in Galilee called Nazareth. Nothing particularly remarkable about her. She is betrothed to a carpenter. But so much hinges on her actions this morning, even what she says. And under even the most difficult state of affairs – if she were to become pregnant, how could she possibly explain such a situation? who would believe such an outrageous story?
If she came to us today in person and told us this story herself, we would think she were touched, as my mother would politely say, or just plain delusional and possibly even a real threat to herself and society. Even she asks, “How can this be? Why me?” And Gabriel’s answer is even more confounding and astonishing than the initial announcement of her pregnancy. All of the genealogy, the prophesying depends on this -- a nonsensical dialogue between an angel and Mary? And then, Mary agrees to such a strange proposition? Yes, this is rather a delusional season.
Somehow it all seems safer to have me read it to you from a big book from a lectern and then have me to explain to you what I think the passage may mean to us. But I don’t think God wants us to feel that safe this morning. God wants us to be delusional like Mary, even like God himself.
At this time of year, every year, we come back to this story and every year at this time, we have the same violence, the same propping up of our fragile, decrepit, crumbling structures of greed and corruption at the expense of millions dying of war, poverty, disease and starvation. Dictators are still given free reign and lies and hypocrisies abound. Everybody is vying to make claims on something, land, money, power, and they think they are due this, they are entitled to it, they are chosen. And so who’s delusional now?
Mary is not “chosen” by God because she has a claim on something or for any seeming power or importance or entitlement on her part. Here in this village of Nazareth a young woman is visited by an angel and is offered a risky, scandalous, dangerous proposition. As Nathaniel later asks, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
She is chosen to be the bearer of the Son of the Most High not before she says “Yes, here am I. ” Her Yes makes all things possible. Her Yes allows for something new to happen. The echoes resound in the remotest corners of the earth and 2,000 years into the future. Her Yes creates rumblings and vibrations through the centuries of violence and death into now Mumbai, the Middle East, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Guantanamo Bay, the US, South Africa, even Grahamstown and even right here in this church. Because her yes means life and that life will not be overwhelmed, it resounds against the death around us.
It’s easy for me to say I can’t do anything about the world, I can’t make any change happen, but Mary’s yes quakes through my whole living space of 50 hectares and my brief portion of the last 44 years of those 2000 years and a whole new horizon opens up. With God all things will be possible even when I come so close to despair.
Sure my heart gets broken. I am devastated by what I see in this world, what we human beings are capable of destroying. I am tired of reading and hearing about the dearth of compassion and plenitude of self-interest. And I am tired and grieved of the ways I exhibit the same behaviours, my own violence, my own hypocrisy, my own selfishness and self-righteousness. All of this can surround me so much that I feel trapped and can’t act or respond. It becomes my isolation from the world. Despair is just another way of saying No.
But Mary’s Yes can even reach me. And suddenly God takes on form, substance in a womb. God becomes real. God becomes human. God is incarnate in this world. God is surely with us.
I am to live and to believe in the impossible. I could become pregnant with Christ and birth him forth into the world. But God also grants me the freedom to respond one way or the other. God will not do this without my participation. God will even risk my saying No to grant me that freedom.
And perhaps there is the true power of our yes. It comes from within our own heart changed by a God who so desires our free participation in God’s creative delusion or should I say vision.
Among many of Mary’s accolades, she is known as the mother of monks. She teaches us in the assertion of her freedom, no matter how uncertain it may be, how we can surrender to God. She exemplifies our three vows, stability, obedience and conversion to the monastic way of life. Even in the midst of incredible fear, she stays put, listens and allows God to enter into her so that she can bring forth something new, something changed, the Incarnation. But I also look to her for another reason. She does it with such humanity. Even if she doesn’t have all the answers, she is willing to become involved in possibility, in growth, in something which of its outcome no one could possibly imagine. That is what God holds out for all of us as well. Maybe not safe, but certainly life-giving because that is what is promised to us from the prophets even to now.
So here am I, a naïve, flaky white man from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, itself a rather small dorp in the US, trying to live like a monk in Grahamstown, South Africa. Can anything good come out of Carlisle? Can anything good come out of Grahamstown, South Africa? Can anything good come out of me or you?
Br. John Forbis, OHC
RCL - Advent 4 B - Sunday 21 December 2008
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Romans 16: 25-27
Luke 1: 26-38
For me, this is a nail-biting morning. This season, all the Scripture readings, even the great theological events afterward seem to hinge on this morning. God through Nathan plants the seed of a promise to David of what will the future of his line will be. It is not necessarily about kings enthroned in great palaces but it will be about a lasting dynasty. The Benediction in Romans, possibly not even written by Paul, talks about a mystery that has been kept secret for all this time being revealed, something building up and kept under cover because it is so risky and powerful, everything that all the prophets have been speaking about, all that the Jews have longed for and now broken wide open for the Gentiles, not necessarily the “chosen” ones. All this points toward a young woman probably not older than her teens in a remote village of no account in Galilee called Nazareth. Nothing particularly remarkable about her. She is betrothed to a carpenter. But so much hinges on her actions this morning, even what she says. And under even the most difficult state of affairs – if she were to become pregnant, how could she possibly explain such a situation? who would believe such an outrageous story?
If she came to us today in person and told us this story herself, we would think she were touched, as my mother would politely say, or just plain delusional and possibly even a real threat to herself and society. Even she asks, “How can this be? Why me?” And Gabriel’s answer is even more confounding and astonishing than the initial announcement of her pregnancy. All of the genealogy, the prophesying depends on this -- a nonsensical dialogue between an angel and Mary? And then, Mary agrees to such a strange proposition? Yes, this is rather a delusional season.
Somehow it all seems safer to have me read it to you from a big book from a lectern and then have me to explain to you what I think the passage may mean to us. But I don’t think God wants us to feel that safe this morning. God wants us to be delusional like Mary, even like God himself.
At this time of year, every year, we come back to this story and every year at this time, we have the same violence, the same propping up of our fragile, decrepit, crumbling structures of greed and corruption at the expense of millions dying of war, poverty, disease and starvation. Dictators are still given free reign and lies and hypocrisies abound. Everybody is vying to make claims on something, land, money, power, and they think they are due this, they are entitled to it, they are chosen. And so who’s delusional now?
Mary is not “chosen” by God because she has a claim on something or for any seeming power or importance or entitlement on her part. Here in this village of Nazareth a young woman is visited by an angel and is offered a risky, scandalous, dangerous proposition. As Nathaniel later asks, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
She is chosen to be the bearer of the Son of the Most High not before she says “Yes, here am I. ” Her Yes makes all things possible. Her Yes allows for something new to happen. The echoes resound in the remotest corners of the earth and 2,000 years into the future. Her Yes creates rumblings and vibrations through the centuries of violence and death into now Mumbai, the Middle East, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Guantanamo Bay, the US, South Africa, even Grahamstown and even right here in this church. Because her yes means life and that life will not be overwhelmed, it resounds against the death around us.
It’s easy for me to say I can’t do anything about the world, I can’t make any change happen, but Mary’s yes quakes through my whole living space of 50 hectares and my brief portion of the last 44 years of those 2000 years and a whole new horizon opens up. With God all things will be possible even when I come so close to despair.
Sure my heart gets broken. I am devastated by what I see in this world, what we human beings are capable of destroying. I am tired of reading and hearing about the dearth of compassion and plenitude of self-interest. And I am tired and grieved of the ways I exhibit the same behaviours, my own violence, my own hypocrisy, my own selfishness and self-righteousness. All of this can surround me so much that I feel trapped and can’t act or respond. It becomes my isolation from the world. Despair is just another way of saying No.
But Mary’s Yes can even reach me. And suddenly God takes on form, substance in a womb. God becomes real. God becomes human. God is incarnate in this world. God is surely with us.
I am to live and to believe in the impossible. I could become pregnant with Christ and birth him forth into the world. But God also grants me the freedom to respond one way or the other. God will not do this without my participation. God will even risk my saying No to grant me that freedom.
And perhaps there is the true power of our yes. It comes from within our own heart changed by a God who so desires our free participation in God’s creative delusion or should I say vision.
Among many of Mary’s accolades, she is known as the mother of monks. She teaches us in the assertion of her freedom, no matter how uncertain it may be, how we can surrender to God. She exemplifies our three vows, stability, obedience and conversion to the monastic way of life. Even in the midst of incredible fear, she stays put, listens and allows God to enter into her so that she can bring forth something new, something changed, the Incarnation. But I also look to her for another reason. She does it with such humanity. Even if she doesn’t have all the answers, she is willing to become involved in possibility, in growth, in something which of its outcome no one could possibly imagine. That is what God holds out for all of us as well. Maybe not safe, but certainly life-giving because that is what is promised to us from the prophets even to now.
So here am I, a naïve, flaky white man from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, itself a rather small dorp in the US, trying to live like a monk in Grahamstown, South Africa. Can anything good come out of Carlisle? Can anything good come out of Grahamstown, South Africa? Can anything good come out of me or you?
Sunday, December 21, 2008
RCL - Advent 4 B - 21 Dec 2008
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
RCL - Advent 4 B - Sunday 21 December 2008
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Romans 16:25-27
Luke 1:26-38
L'angélus - 1857-1859 - Jean-François Millet - Musée d'Orsay, Paris
The Annunciation - contemporary - John Collier
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
RCL - Advent 4 B - Sunday 21 December 2008
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Romans 16:25-27
Luke 1:26-38
L'angélus - 1857-1859 - Jean-François Millet - Musée d'Orsay, ParisThis morning at 7:04 a.m., at just about the time we were finishing the recitation of the Venite here in the chapel and repeating its lovely antiphon: “Our King and Savior now draws near, Come let us worship. Alleluia,” we were experiencing an astronomical event, though most of us were quite likely unaware of it. It was, of course, the moment of the winter solstice, that point in the yearly cycle of our solar system when (at least in our northern hemisphere) the sun's path reaches its lowest and most northward arc across the skies. The night is at its longest, the day is at its shortest and everything seems to come to a stop or a complete halt.
That’s the literal meaning of the word solstice — the sun stopping — reminiscent of what Joshua (or more accurately, God) accomplished. Or what any ordinary swimmer swimming laps or runner running an old-fashioned relay must do before reversing directions. He or she must come to a complete stop, if only for a nanosecond, before turning around and returning home. St. Basil tells us that this is a wonderful image of the path of conversion. Like the sun in the heavens or the Prodigal Son in the Gospel, we must all at some point stop before we can reverse the direction of our lives.
And it’s often this very simple but critical act of stopping which is most difficult and most unavailable to us. Can’t we just keep on going? But as much as we would wish otherwise, life is in fact radically discontinuous. It is punctuated by repeated moments of stopping, of braking, of reversal, and of change, more often like a quantum leap than a smooth bell curve. It can feel that way with the times and seasons of our lives. Welcome winter!
So much of our celebration of the Advent season and of Christmas is shaped culturally by this astronomical occurrence of the winter solstice, with its ready-made natural symbols of life and death, darkness and light, cold and warmth, activity and quiet that we associate with these days... not to mention the secular overlay of snowmen, elves, evergreens, holly, poinsettias, food and gift-giving… these latter two are obviously more deeply symbolic and sacramental than, say, Frosty or the Little Drummer Boy.
I remember my first Christmas as a Novice in Southern California. I wasn’t sure if it would be possible for me to celebrate Christmas with palm trees and an outdoor brunch. I discovered to my relief, however, that it was quite possible, thank you very much, in part because the day was still the shortest of the year and the dark was still as dark, though the temperature might be in the high 70’s.
But what, I’ve wondered, would it be like in, say, New Zealand or at our monastery in Grahamstown, South Africa, where even this association of darkness is removed and Christmas is right at the height of summer, and the daylight is at its most ample and where the preferred social activity for those who can manage it is a week at the beach. Think: Christmas in July. Where would my attention go? My body? My heart? My devotion?
I would hope it might go right back to this very familiar passage from St. Luke’s Gospel read this morning throughout the Christian world, back to this wonderful, mystic, mythic, layered, compelling, gentle story of the Annunciation which informs our theology and shapes our devotional and spiritual lives in ways that are both insistent and subtle. A woman, an angel, a pregnancy… a mystery. It’s pretty primal stuff, just like that related story of the woman, the serpent and the tree that we heard Sr. Hildegard read so beautifully last Sunday (at the monastery's Lessons & Carols service - editor's note).
Perhaps the most insistent and subtle way this shaping or formation happens for us — or at least for me— is the practice we have in the monastery of ringing the Angelus three times a day, calling to mind today’s Gospel story. It is admittedly not an ancient practice — perhaps five or six hundred years old — but there is a certain timelessness to it. If it didn’t exist, we might be forced to invent it.
All of us here are familiar with the practice. Three times a day — morning, midday and evening — we chime the tower bell in a rather complicated set of three sets of three followed by nine. And, as we also know, there are certain traditional texts connected to the ringing, the first two of which come (more or less) straight from today’s Gospel:
“The angel of the Lord brought tidings to Mary…and she conceived by the Holy Spirit.”
“Mary said: Behold I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
“The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”
Some people add the recitation of the prayer Hail Mary between each verse. Personally I find that way too many words.
The whole brief devotion then concludes with the Collect for the feast of the Annunciation: “Pour your grace into our hearts, O Lord, that we who have known the incarnation of your Son Jesus Christ, announced by an angel to the Virgin Mary, may by his Cross and Passion be brought to the glory of his resurrection”…setting today’s Gospel narrative within the great story of Salvation and Redemption from which it takes all its meaning and power and grace.
I love this devotion, this practice, this Angelus.
I love it because it invites me, wherever I may be, whatever I may be doing, to stop and recall that there is always a Bigger Picture and a larger setting than my often very narrow concerns allow. It is a reminder, a regular and (for me) necessary reminder, that God is God and I am not. I might add that I was fortunate to grow up in a city where there were many, many Catholic churches in my neighborhood and so at noon and six p.m. and yes, even at 6:00 a.m., there was a veritable choir of bells for miles around calling me to this awareness long before I could ever articulate it. The only thing sweeter, I think, is the sound of seemingly endless change ringing of an English parish church.
I love this practice because it daily reminds me of the epic sweep of our salvation history: It reminds me of Mary, the daughter descended from King David, through whom we look back to our primal parents and our Jewish heritage. It reminds me Jesus, the eternal Word and Power of God come among us in the flesh. It reminds me of the continuing, loving, saving action of God available and effective in a broken and desperate world. Who of us doesn’t need to be reminded of that daily, even hourly?
But most of all I love the Angelus because it presents in the simplest possible terms the fundamental shape of Christian life. One of my fellow novices, the late Gary Mattson, pointed this out to me years ago — and I have never forgotten it. The structure is always the same: Annunciation, Response, Incarnation. That’s how it happens, over and over again. That’s how it happens to us, to all people. God invites, suggests, encourages, perhaps even commands. We jump at the opportunity… or perhaps drag our feet, ask our questions, consider the costs and maybe squirm a bit. But ultimately — if we are wise, if we are graced, if we’re lucky — we give our consent and, with Mary, we say yes. Then the real mystery happens: God takes on flesh once again, in ways big and small, in ways predictable or stunning, in places most necessary and perhaps most feared. But the pattern is always the same: Annunciation, Response, Incarnation. It’s good to remember when the way appears dim and the going gets rough and life seems complex, because it is.
It’s also good to remember that for most of us, most of the time, the consent asked of us is to small and ordinary acts of faithfulness: the invitation to trust in this circumstance that God will be faithful; the decision to act not out of my fear or suspicion but out of hope; the possibility of risking to be vulnerable with this brother or sister; this opportunity of forgiving or accepting that we are ourselves forgiven; the willingness to fall, to fail, or to be proven the fool because that’s where God seems to be inviting us. Today. Every day.
Here we are, huddled together on this cold and snowy Fourth Sunday of Advent, on the shortest day of the year, invited once again by God. To what? To wait. To hope. To trust. To act. To love. To share. To be just. To just be.
What is it that God is inviting you or me to this morning? What is the Annunciation, the suggestion, the command, the dream today? And how shall we respond? How shall Christ become flesh again in our midst? In our community? In our society? In our hearts?
As short as it is, we have all day to ponder it, all day to pray about it, all day to rejoice in it.
“The angel of the Lord brought tidings to Mary…and she conceived by the Holy Spirit.”
“And the Word became flesh…and dwelt among us.”
Amen.
The Annunciation - contemporary - John Collier
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