RCL- Pentecost B - 31 May 2009

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
RCL – Pentecost B – Sunday 31 May 2009

Acts 2:1-21
Romans 8:22-27
John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15


In our corporate prayer as monks, we come across a prayer from Psalm 51 that seems fitting for this feast of Pentecost:

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence and do not take your holy spirit from me.
(Psalm 51:10-11)

A new day is dawning - Originally uploaded by Randy OHC

*****

God chose a most auspicious day of crowded diversity in Jerusalem to usher the body of Christ on their new and various endeavors. There was no happenstance on the day chosen for the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Christ, to take center stage.

*****

The name Pentecost comes to us from the Hellenist name for one of three pilgrimage festivals of the Jewish tradition. The Hebrew name of this festival is Shavuot. Our contemporary Jewish brothers and sisters started celebrating their version of Pentecost/Shavuot this past Friday.

Shavuot in the first century had many layers of meaning, some tracing back to Passover. On Passover -- another pilgrimage festival -- the Jewish people had been freed from their enslavement to Pharaoh. On Shavuot, they were given the Torah and became a nation committed to serving God.

Shavuot also was a festival for the first harvest of wheat and was also referred to as the festival of first fruits.

Shavuot attracted a lot of pilgrims in Jerusalem. As one of the three main festivals, it would have obligated all male Israelites within 20 miles of Jerusalem to come to the temple for worship.

Many proselytes (gentiles who had converted to Judaism) and many Israelites settled abroad would have made the effort to travel to Jerusalem for this occasion.

The reading from Acts today describes Jews who have traveled from regions as remote from Jerusalem as present-day Libya, Italy and Turkey - and remember, this is before Amtrak or JetBlue.

And for this festival of the end of grain harvests, servants would traditionally have been given leave for the day. Many servants and probably quite a few slaves would have taken this opportunity to join in the celebrations.

So, I hope you get a sense of how crowded, cosmopolitan and busy Jerusalem would have been on this day of Shavuot. Think: St Peter’s square on Easter morning or Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

*****

And most of this crowd would have communicated in a variety of languages. But the most useful to communicate with other linguistic groups than your own would have been the Koine. Koine was a common form of the Greek language.

Koine is important to mention for this feast of Pentecost for you could argue that’s the only language that would have been needed.

It was, to the first century eastern Mediterranean, what international English is today to the arena of globalization. How often nowadays do we consider that if the message has been broadcast in English, the whole world has surely heard it?

Most people would have understood a good deal of Koine. Many educated people would have been proper speakers of it. But for most of them, it would not have been their mother tongue -- with all that a mother tongue carries in emotional richness and nuance.

Pentecost was the Koine name for Shavuot because it came on the 50th day after Passover. The root of Pentecost is Pente for 5. Why 50 days? Well, one of the Passover mitzvahs (good deeds) was counting up daily a “week of weeks” until an offering of the first harvest of wheat could be made in the temple at Shavuot. Seven weeks is 49 days. Shavuot comes on the 50th day. Most Jews to this day, consider the word Pentecost does not capture what Shavuot means.

*****

So our Christian narrative of Pentecost is not happening on Shavuot gratuitously. By the way, you may ask me at dinner, to tell you a bit more on some of the shared motifs interlaced in the Jewish Shavuot and Christian Pentecost. It’s fascinating.

On Shavuot, the disciples of Jesus are hoping for a “breather” of a holiday together, but not the “breather” they’re going to get. The disciples have been on an emotional roller-coaster for about 2 months now.

It started gloriously with the festive entry of their teacher into Jerusalem. It then quickly unraveled in confrontations culminating in the arrest, torture, crucifixion and death of Jesus on the eve of Passover (of which Shavuot is a continuation).

And then, when they felt most lost, anguished and guilty, came the incredible and yet real resurrection of Jesus. But that did not constitute the happy end yet.

After his appearance and teaching to a variety of disciples, Jesus is removed into heaven, leaving the disciples at a loss once more, though a very different one this time.

Would you feel a bit stressed in their place? I reckon I would be a thorough mess of paradoxical feelings and disorientation, if I were in that Jerusalem house on the morning of Shavuot.

*****

And on that very morning, these good Jews have gathered together, supposedly to celebrate this festival as a community; a group of insiders glued together by amazing experiences.

As our Br. Randy suggested last week, they now feel “Home Alone”, without the physical presence of Jesus to exhort them to do the right thing.

He has promised them an Advocate, one who would go with them, teach them, and ultimately defend them in judgment. But for now, they are staying put in Jerusalem and going about their usual ways.

*****

And then, quite suddenly, the house seems to come alive with rushing currents of wind that howl. I imagine the house, as in a cartoon, when an explosion makes all the shutters and doors bump on their hinges and buckle as if expanding. And just as suddenly, the disciples’ heads are as if on fire. If nothing will throw you out into the streets, this probably should.

The disciples become part of the Spirit’s rush; they flow with it. And they start to converse with the crowd of onlookers in the adjacent streets who have come to see what the commotion is all about.

And whatever language it is that the disciples think they are speaking, they are heard in their interlocutors’ mother tongue, whichever that happens to be.

I imagine the disciples hearing themselves and hearing the questions and interjections that respond to them in various languages that they don’t know, and yet, now do speak, and trying to not stop to think about it, for it’s too weird for words but it is obviously working anyway.

They proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ crucified, risen and ascended in words that touch the hearts and minds of the many Shavuot pilgrims they meet.

They convey to their fellow Israelites and to the proselytes that the “Age to Come” is here and now, Peter even channels the prophet Joel to convey that.

And word gets around, in whatever language. And more locals and foreigners come running to see and hear -- in their own tongue -- what these simple Galileans have to say.

*****

And so, millennia after Babel divided humanity in misunderstanding and mistrusting entities, the moment of Pentecost gives birth to the universal church. It reverses the curse of divisiveness; not by effacing the differences but by making deep communication possible across them.

As a man who became an Episcopalian on the day of Pentecost 2000, I appreciate how the Holy Spirit, with a somewhat Anglican touch, I may add, demonstrates the effectiveness of spreading the gospel in the vernacular of the people you are reaching out to -- no matter what your language of origin may be.

*****

And so, on this day of Shavuot, God chooses to change the arena and the medium of the gospel. After freely constraining himself to the human limitations of a human life (time, space, suffering); after experiencing human life from within, as Irenaeus described in the sermon we heard last night, the Spirit chooses to give godself to the nascent church.

We now host God in our deepest self; whether we let God inform us or resist God’s inspiration. For we are still free; free to tune into the Spirit or not, but unconditionally provided-for in God’s Love. We are all sharing in the first fruits of God’s harvest in the Christ Jesus whose Spirit lives in us.

*****

So,will I let my heart, mind and soul catch fire? Will I turn to whatever neighbor is at hand and share the best news ever in a way that transcends our differences? Will you?

It’s early days yet. It’s quite soon to tell whether the Early Church, here assembled, will hear the gospel and stand up for God.

But it’s never too late to be joined to the cornerstone which the builders rejected. We can yet build up the Kingdom of God’s Love, God’s Republic of Universal Welfare.

*****

Let us pray.

May the eye of God be within you,
The foot of Christ in guidance with you,
The shower of the Spirit pouring on you,
Richly and generously.

And now that our furrow is deeply drenched in the shower of the Spirit, may our grain of mustard blossom into a tree to shelter the birds of the air.

Come Holy Spirit and cleanse our hearts with your fire.

Amen.

The Easter fire - Originally uploaded by Randy OHC

RCL - Easter 7 B - 24 May 2009

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
RCL - Easter 7 B - Sunday 24 May 2009

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
1 John 5:9-13
John 17:6-19


First I must note the liturgical oddity of this day. The calendar says today is the seventh Sunday of Easter, the season of Resurrection joy, but we celebrated the Ascension of the Lord last Thursday - the Christ of Easter is gone. And Pentecost is not for another week, so the Holy Spirit is technically not present in the fledging Church quite yet. During the Easter season we are invited into the great joy of the living Lord present with us. During Pentecost we are invited into the deepening of our understanding and faithfulness in being and living as the Church in the world in the power of the Holy Spirit. These ten days are neither - and both. The old is gone - Jesus in body is gone. But the new, the Spirit, has not yet blown through, it is not quite Pentecost yet. Where are we? Who are we? Who’s in charge? What is possible?

This is a weird in-between time in the calendar and for the community Jesus left behind. The texts don’t explain exactly what’s going on and speculating on the theology of these ten days is probably pointless. The beauty and power of the liturgical cycle is that it just gives us the awkwardness, just lets it be. If God were going for efficiency, perhaps the Ascension and Pentecost would have happened simultaneously like a relay race where the Son passes off to the Holy Spirit and says “It’s your deal now”. But that’s not what we get in the story. What we get is a kind of ten-day limbo. And in Scripture in-between times are always times to wait. Not to passively sit around doing nothing, but to actively and attentively wait in what is - to look back and remember and look forward and prepare. To use the stillness of a given period of time to take stock of where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Waiting is often harder than doing. I’m sure it is for me. On my recent pilgrimage to Italy the hardest part was not the walking, but the waiting for those behind to catch up. I was usually gung-ho in front and had to remember that we needed to stick together as a group and be patient for those who were walking more slowly. We often found ourselves standing around and waiting for nothing - everyone was here - but we had gotten so used to waiting that it was beginning to seem natural. At the Ascension Jesus asked the disciples to wait. To wait in Jerusalem for the Holy Spirit to come. That command is the overshadowing of these days. Perhaps we too are called to wait. To reflect on the lessons and insights of this Easter season and to prepare ourselves for the long march of Pentecost ahead of us - neither moving backwards or forwards but attending to both the past and the future while we stand still. We are so conditioned to find value in doing and moving forward that we forget that deep remembering and preparing requires some waiting - contentment in the power and value in being in a still place The gentle reminder that God is active in us often beyond our doing, controlling, or even conscious knowing.

The lessons appointed for today have the common theme of reflecting on and processing what has been and preparing for what is to come. It’s a time of transition when we’ve stepped out of Easter and are not quite at Pentecost.

Acts lesson: The disciples are asking How do we understand Judas’ death and how do we go forward as a community?

1 John: What does it mean to shift from being companions of Christ to those who live and proclaim His message and testify to his spiritual presence?

Gospel of John: As Jesus prepares for his glorification on the cross, he reminds the disciples of the message of the last three years and prepares them to live in reliance on the Holy Spirit as he moves toward his Ascension.

Waiting happens between things and these events in our spiritual lives are often intense, important, mysterious, and life-changing. Time is needed to properly digest the experience of the past and to again become open and receptive to the gifts of the future. Waiting is one kind of grace that is also a response to a different kind of grace. Rather than use the word “experience”, I have begun to see the power of a traditionally Roman Catholic term for encounter with God - grace. This term puts the emphasis on God as the giver rather than on me as the receiver and invites me into a posture of open receptivity rather than skeptical defensiveness. Being a witness to the Resurrection and Ascension was for the disciples a profound grace. And Pentecost was still to come. Through the rhythm of the church year and our own entering into the stories of Scripture we can share in the spiritual meaning of these events. We share in them but as much as we love them and look to them for meaning and inspiration, they are also taxing and draining graces which push the limits of our finite and weak human capacities to bear. Therein is the conflicting desire within each human heart. We do truly long for an experiential encounter with God - a grace from God - this is what we were made to do, to receive - such is the innately human yearning of every soul. Yet at the same time graces are out of our control and are, at least for me, often more terrifying than exhilarating. We can’t turn God off and on like a faucet. Particular graces of God’s presence are gifts that are to be received and not controlled. The attitude is one of gratitude and wonder, not fear and withdrawal.

What we see in Scripture is a rhythm between grace moments of enlightenment and intimacy with God and grace periods of reflection and integration. God could have had the Ascension and Pentecost be one big event but that likely would have overwhelmed the limited human capacity of the disciples to digest and process so God gave them the time and space to be able to gather themselves between graces.

While graces are God’s gift, they are gifts planted in rich soil. And the tending of the soil of our souls is our work. A waiting time such as this one allows us to check-in with our lives in God and note what’s happening. What is open in us and what is resistant? Where is peace? Where is fear? How is growth taking place? How might even deeper growth be welcomed?

No matter how long we’ve been on the Christian journey, we are always traveling into both the known and the unknown. The known is that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. The unknown is what will happen through us and in us to remind us that God’s love is close. We know what happens in chapter 2 of Acts but for us it is still the unknown and unchartered territory. We know the story but we don’t know how it will unfold anew in us. The danger of over-familiarity and comfort with the story is very real. If we get too cozy with the text we’re in trouble. If we think “Oh, yes, this again”, we’re in danger! In this waiting time let us recover a sense of wonder and freshness in our spiritual lives. Readiness for the journey is as important as the journey itself.

It’s impossible to predict the future other than to say God is and will be there. We can’t anticipate every possibility, but what we are called to do is to tend our souls in such a way that God may find a home in us, may find no obstacles to our ongoing conversion and transformation, and that our readiness, our expectancy, our openness and aliveness to God’s presence and activity is the goal toward which we strive with every moment.

RCL - Easter 6 B - 17 may 2009

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Scott Borden, OHC
RCL - Easter 6 B - Sunday 17 May 2009

Acts 10: 44-48
1 John 5: 1-6
John 15: 9-17


All this talk about love in this morning’s Gospel reading makes me think about words - isn’t that what you think of when you think of love... various words can be translated from their original language to the English word love... What aspects of love get lost in translation?

There is an old story that I grew up with. It tells us that the Eskimo language has more than 27 words for snow, while we have only one. When you grow up north of Albany, stories about other people with even more snow are important...

The story underscores the poverty of English in regard to snow as compared with the abundance of Eskimo. And my first thought is to compare the poverty of English, where we have only this one word - love - to the abundance of other languages where multiple words exist.

There are two problems with the snow story. First - it begs the question of what the word Eskimo actually refers to - and I’ll just leave that question begging... And second, and it’s a really big problem, the story is not true.

It is true that indigenous language groups found around the region now known as Alaska have many words that refer to snow. But so does English. Listen to any wintertime ski forecast and you’ll hear many words that mean different types of snow. The words mean more if you are an avid skier and less for the rest of us... but we have no poverty of words to talk about snow. So it may be a sweet and engaging story, but its basically a lie...

But back to this morning’s Gospel text - where we’re talking about love...

The Greek’s had three very different concepts that we call love. Agape, or Godly love, philia, or non-sexual affection, and eros, affection of a sexual nature. The Greeks were not at all shy about talking about eros... their ability to talk about sex is shocking to our current sensibility. And there was no reason to be shy about talking about philia. Curiously, agape was a bit vague until early Christians, starting with Jesus, more or less colonized the word.

And in English, we have just one word: Love. Just as we have a poverty of words for snow, so we have a poverty of words for love.

And, like the snow story, the love story is not true... we have many words to talk about love. We can easily talk about familial or brotherly love, sexual love, Godly love...

So why this poverty in English language scripture? Why the perversity of translators in using simply love when they could be so much more precise? For that matter, translators could just as easily use the words agape, eros, and filia - who needs translation ...

But what if it is the holy spirit, rather than perversity, that is driving the translation? What if the Greeks, including Plato, got it wrong? What if there are not three distinct forms of love - but there really is just love? What if, at its essence, all love is Godly love, agape? Sexual love is just a subset of Godly love... filial love is just a subset of Godly love. Maybe there is inspiration in this translation.

“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. I do not call you servants, but friends... love one another.”

Jesus is telling us what identifies great love - it is the willingness to sacrifice everything, including your own life, for another.

That is the love that most parents have for their children. It is the love the Martin Luther King had toward his brothers and sisters, some of whom surely did not deserve it. It is the love that leads some soldiers to die for their country. It is the love that called Jesus to lay down his life for us.

Albert Nolan in his book “Jesus Today” poses one profound and simple question: How seriously do we take Jesus?

Jesus is giving us one clear command: love each other. At the same time Jesus is putting an extremely high price on love, a price equal to our own lives.

How seriously do we take Jesus? Who or what are we willing to die for?

Sometimes we confuse risk taking with a willingness to die - and they are not at all the same. Teenage drivers often take terrible risks, not because they are willing to die for the sake of driving really fast, but because they are certain they are not going to die - they are invincible. People who climb mountains often end up losing their lives - it’s a risk they are willing to take in order to achieve a possible victory. They are willing to risk death, but not in a sacrificial way.

Gambling, risk taking, thrill seeking - these are not expressions of love. They are not expressions of a willingness to die for a friend.

This greatest of love that Jesus is telling us about, just by definition, is love for others. ... that you lay down your life for a friend. Not for a thrill, not for a cause, not for a great pot of gold, not for tremendous power, not for an ideal. For a friend.

Love people, not things. That is part of Jesus’ call to us. And love means sacrifice, including laying down our own lives.

Love, specifically some forms of sexual love, have been creating quite a stir within the Anglican communion lately. By tradition and culture we find some forms of sexual love acceptable and others not.

But Jesus tells us what is the highest form of love - and that is the love that is willing to sacrifice life for another. Its just my opinion, but I don’t think Jesus really cares about sexual orientation. Jesus cares about self-sacrificing love - the kind of love Jesus shows to us and demands from us.

Jesus gives us commands so that we may love. And what kinds of commands does Jesus give? Feed my sheep. Tend the sick. Protect the weak. Comfort the sorrowful. Love God with all your heart, love your neighbor as you love yourself, love.

Love certainly can take many forms.

Some of them: Love of money, love of power, love of control, love of safety, can not be reconciled with God’s love, for all these loves require me to put myself first. Here is where another word, like lust, might be used. Lust for power is not a subset of Godly love.

Other loves can surely be Godly: the love that we, as humans, can hold for the rest of God’s creation. The love of arts, of music, and creativity. These loves require me to be part of something bigger; not to be centered in my self. While I love a great piece of choral music as much as the next person, I don’t see laying down my life for a cantata... Its not sacrificial to love a sunrise...

How seriously do we take this Jesus? Are we willing to love enough to be ready to lay down our lives?

Its not a question we have to answer once and for all. It’s a question we have to keep asking and keep living with. Learning from the answer and allowing the Godliness of our love to keep growing.

RCL - Easter 5 B - Sun 10 May 2009

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
RCL - Easter 5 B - Sunday 10 May 2009


Acts 8: 26-40
1 John 4: 7-21
John 15: 1-8


Today is the Fifth Sunday of Easter. But if you’ve been around parishes or churches, large and small, of whatever stripe, you’ll know that the real liturgical observance today is Mother’s Day. Indeed, a Methodist friend of mine once suggested that their whole spring calendar was ordered around this feast: the Sunday next before Mother’s Day, Mother’s Day itself, the week within the octave of Mother’s Day.

Certainly in my growing up days there was a whole series of tasks and obligations and observances: cards and gifts, hand made or purchased, long distance phone calls, breakfast in bed prepared by children or husbands, Mother and Daughter Communion luncheons, special trips to IHOP or reservations for brunch made long in advance at your fanciest local eatery (with sittings at 9, 11 and 1), family reunions, and, if you lived in a Catholic milieu, May Crownings or even living rosaries!

I’m sure some of this has changed over years…but not too much.

The idea of honoring mothers with a special day, though a 19th century invention, still retains resonance and power. Sentimentality is its hallmark, of course. But there are also the not-so-hidden themes of sensuality, fertility, birthing, nurturing, nursing, teaching, protecting, comforting, loving…qualities or roles that each one of us needed—and continues to need—in order to survive, to flourish, to grow, to mature. These lie very close to the surface today. And whether our biological mother or some else filled these roles for us, they must be acknowledged and honored. They are primordial and archetypal, at once biological and psychological and social, and deeply human. And to the extent that any of us fills one or another of these roles, whether physically or in some more abstract or extended sense, we too feel part of the great wheel of existence and claim our role in the great dance of life.

This is thus a great festival of fertility, of fecundity, of fruitfulness, of generativity, of spring, of veriditas, as the mystic Hildegaard of Bingen called it referring to God’s greening power.

How strange it is, then, that we should begin our worship today with a reading (Acts 8: 26-40) about a eunuch, that quintessentially infertile, non-generative, weak, strange, defective human person. What shall we make of that?

Earlier this week I was speaking with my sister and mentioned this strange contradiction. She thought for a few seconds and said: “Well, he had a mother too.” How true! And what a key to compassion. For every one of us here today had a mother. Indeed every human being had a mother. This is the great fact that in some way makes us all brothers and sisters. We all came into the world in the same way, just as we all exit in the same way, as the author of the Book of the Wisdom reminds us.

But nevertheless, what a contrast: mother & eunuch. It is image and counter image, type and anti-type.

Let’s spend a few minutes looking at this passage.

Chapter 8 of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles recounts two stories about the apostle Philip. And both have to do with religious outsiders, those who are ritually and culturally suspect or marginal. The first story takes place in Samaria, among our old friends the Samaritans, and has to do with healing power, a certain sad magician named Simon, and the spread of the Christian gospel there. Samaritans, as we all know by now, were considered defective members of the ancient household of faith. Yet Jesus seemed to have a special outreach to them, and so many powerful lessons about the universality of the Good News are made through the tensions and contradictions of their status. We need only mention the Parable of the Good Samaritan and Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the Well.

Eunuchs were in an analogous position. They were defective in important ways, not intact, and therefore excluded from full participation in the covenant community of Israel. The Torah is quite explicit about this: “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.” (Deut. 23:1) [I’d wager this is the first time you ever heard that passage of Scripture read publicly in a church!] Eunuchs could perhaps associate themselves with the People of God, but they could not worship in the Temple itself or offer sacrifice. They could never be fully included. They could never count.

Further, this unnamed eunuch riding in his chariot is from Ethiopia, and is thus presumably a person of color, and therefore, at least on the face of it, not a member of the majority household of Israel. Double exclusion!

Yet here he is—wonderful paradox—a devout believer who, like those Roman centurions and righteous Gentiles spoken of elsewhere in the New Testament, has found in the ethical monotheism of Israel a deep and liberating truth that has grasped his heart and set him free, in spite his outcast status.

And what is reading as he travels in his chariot on the long journey back from Jerusalem to Africa? The Prophet Isaiah. According to Acts, he is reading one of the Suffering Servant passages, prophetic words that Christians almost immediately saw as referring to Jesus and offering them a key in making sense of his life and death. The passage offered Philip his opportunity to witness and explain and journey with the eunuch and ultimately to baptize him into relationship with Jesus.

But just a few columns further along in this very scroll of the prophet Isaiah, are these very surprising words:

Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say,
‘The Lord will surely separate me from his people’;
and do not let the eunuch say,
‘I am just a dry tree.’
For thus says the Lord:
To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths,
who choose the things that please me
and hold fast my covenant,
I will give, in my house and within my walls,
a monument and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that shall not be cut off.

Maybe it was no accident that this man, this euncuh, was reading Isaiah that day. He needed a word of hope, a sympathetic author, an invitation to and a promise of a future. And maybe it’s no accident that we hear this passage today, on this Mother’s Day, we who likewise need a word of hope, a sympathetic author and an invitation and a promise of a future.

It is very easy to fall into the trap of believing that we know what motherhood or parenthood or fruitfulness or fertility or generativity is. We think we know what productivity or success or status consists in. We are all too ready to measure it in others and in ourselves. And if you are like me, when you do this you inevitably come up lacking, you fall short of your own measure. But Isaiah tells that eunuch and he tells us: God has other plans, God has other measures. And of them we may know little or nothing right now. But they are more real and transformative than we can imagine.

Do eunuchs have children? Of course not.

Can eunuchs be faithful? Can eunuchs love? You betcha!

Do you or I have children? Maybe. Maybe not.

Can we each be faithful? Can we each be fruitful? Can we each love? Oh, yes!

Are there any eunuchs here this morning? You don’t have to identify yourselves. You know who you are. Maybe you are feeling dried up. Maybe you feel that your life has not been productive. Maybe you are facing infertility in one form or another. Or think yourself fruitless, deprived, or less than. Maybe you know yourself to be marginal or partial or barren or crushed or cut off. Do you ever feel that way? To you and to me, God says,

Happy Mother’s Day!

Because if you abide in God and God abides in you, you will be fruitful, fertile, green. You will have an inheritance and a progeny and an offspring that will astonish you.

Happy Mothers Day!

To you who have children and to you who don’t. To you who feel yourselves successful and you who count your life a failure in one department or many.

Happy Mother’s Day!

God is doing something great in you right now. God is inviting you and equipping you and preparing you to be exceedingly fruitful. And God can do this. It’s his job description. God is doing this, in you and me, right now, though we may know little or nothing of it nor even begin to imagine the shape of the outcome.

Happy Mother’s Day to any who hope in God’s greening, quickening power. And Happy Mother’s Day to us who for the moment have lost that hope.

Happy Mother’s Day, you who have made yourselves parents and partners, and Happy Mother’s Day you who have made yourselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven, you spiritual eunuchs.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Don’t forget to call home.

RCL - Easter 4 B - Sun 03 May 2009

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Adam D. McCoy, OHC
RCL - Easter 4 B - Sunday 03 May 2009


Acts 4: 5-12
Psalm 23
1 John 3: 16-24
John 10: 11-18


There is something profoundly attractive in the image of the shepherd when it is applied to God. In the scores of funerals I did as a parish priest I suppose there may have been a few that did not use the 23rd Psalm, but I am hard pressed to remember them. It is one of those Biblical texts that unites the faithful in a family with their friends and relatives who are not so faithful, and I have seen more than a few hard cases tear up as they read the King James version in the presence of the body of their friend or relative now called home.

And the image of the Good Shepherd: Something about the Lord seeking after you until he finds you, standing guard over you, laying down his life for you, when you are hardly conscious of your need, simply because you are one of the sheep, lost, alone and needy, something about that image draws people of all sorts powerfully as well.

What is this attraction? What is this power? Put very simply, its power is that we all, deep down, want to be part of the flock. When we are in over our heads, in trouble, wandering in the wastes, lost, we all want to be brought back to safety by that kindly Shepherd ..

At about this point in sermons about the shepherd and the sheep it is customary to point out the unfortunate side of the sheep image: Sheep, we are told, are easily led, easily distracted, not too careful about their surroundings, largely incapable of finding what they need for themselves, heedless of danger until it is upon them, in fact, none too bright. In fact, rather stupid. And so the preacher will be at pains to assure his people that they are not really comparable in every regard. to sheep, that it is just an image. But the truth is that the image of sheep for God’s people is deeply embedded in Scripture, too frequently used in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures to be so easily brushed off. If the Good Shepherd is an appropriate image for the Lord, then the comparison of God’s people to sheep is probably appropriate too. The truth of that image is borne out by its instant and universal appeal.

There is a lot we could say about the Shepherd in our readings this morning, not least in the Paschal character of the Shepherd’s self-sacrifice. But I would like to dwell on the sheep instead. I think it says something profound to us in our situation today.

The old story about the 23rd Psalm is that David wrote it when he was at the lowest point of his early life, when he was in flight from both Saul and the Philistines, hiding in the cave of Adullam in Judah. He was desperate and the way forward was not clear. But in his desperation, and perhaps because of it, David finds trust in God’s providence, such trust that he turns the image of Saul and the Philistines pursuing him to goodness and mercy following him in a pursuit that will not end. God is aggressively, militarily active in pouring out goodness and mercy, preparing the banquet, giving him a place in the divine House forever.

No wonder this psalm is so popular! It turns what looks like disaster – the world on our tail – to blessing, making God the aggressive giver of grace and good to his people in trouble. Your worst is the occasion for God’s best. The sheep is not only rescued in the 23rd Psalm. The sheep is saved, cherished, lifted up, brought home in triumph. And what is the sheep’s role? To come to understand its true position in reality: It is closest to God when it is most beleaguered, safest when most in danger, most honored when it is lowest, most securely alive when it is in the valley of the shadow of death. What can we do except step back in wonder and amazement and gratitude at such a God? What can we do but trust?

The sheep in the Gospel story are similarly served, saved by their Shepherd who risks himself to the point of death for their danger. We understand this rightly as a job description for Christian leadership, and anyone contemplating ordination or other office in the Church might well ponder its possible personal application. But what is the job description for the sheep?

Some of us, taking the cynical view of ourselves as sheep, might consider that it is our job to do what sheep do so well: to get into trouble so that the Shepherd can do what he does so well: save us. So we wander off so that he can put us on his shoulder and gently carry us home. We get into trouble, we get to the point that our enemies are pursuing us. We walk through the valley of the shadow of death, sometimes deliberately. As though our straying ways are part of His plan. This is a comfort to more than a few of us, and particularly to the mighty sinners we all know and perhaps ourselves are from time to time. We sin that grace may abound. It’s our job to be bad sheep. Baa-aa-aa-aad. Or in the words of that great song of sin and redemption, “Bad boys, bad boys, what ya gonna do? What ya gonna do when they come for you?” I’m not entirely sure that this is quite Christ’s idea, but often enough it is ours.

But for an alternative she eply job description, let’s look again at our Gospel passage. There seem to be three main requirements for the sheep:

First, the sheep belong to the Shepherd, who is not working for pay but because Shepherd is his nature, his identity: he IS the Shepherd for those sheep.

Second, the Shepherd knows his own and his own know him.

Third, the sheep listen to the shepherd’s voice, and their unity as a flock stems from knowing the Shepherd’s voice.

Belonging, knowing, listening. This is the job description of the sheep.

To be a sheep in God’s flock, you first of all need to be part of the flock. This is not too hard to do, since the Shepherd is actively recruiting sheep and is not too particular about where they come from. That delightful phrase “other sheep not of this fold” has always given hope to gentiles, pagans, schismatics, heretics, people cut off from the larger life of the community of all kinds, as well as all-but unredeemable sinners. It puts those of us already in the Christian community on notice that we are not the sole object of the Lord’s concern. But it also puts us on notice that if we want the Lord as our Shepherd, we do have to become his sheep. We need consciously to place ourselves in the Christian community and then stay there. And the essence of belonging to20the flock is to follow the Shepherd, since it is his job to lead us to the next place that has what we need. Belonging is following.

The Shepherd knows his sheep. In fact, he knows them better than they know themselves, which is why he leads them to good pasture, beside the still waters, to restore their souls. But the sheep are to know Him as well. This relationship requires knowledge. And here is the absolute necessity, the primacy of the life of prayer, of the mind fixed on God, of steadfast, persevering contemplation. What is the first and greatest commandment? To love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength, which then leads to the second, which is to love your neighbor as yourself. All followers of Christ are pointed in this direction. All need to know the Shepherd. If we wonder what good monks are for in the greater scheme of things, this should tell us.

The sheep listen to the Shepherd’s voice, which leads to unity. In our day the sheep claim to be listening to the Shepherd’s voice, but unity is not what is happening. Actually, listening is not always what seems to be going on. Different sheep claim they hear different Shepherd messages. Actually, there is a lot of proclaiming going on, and perhaps not so much listening. Have you ever listened to a flock of sheep? They ar e always bleating. They never shut up. I wonder if the Lord understood this about his followers all those years ago. Perhaps we need to put the stress in this story back onto the word listen. The job of the flock is to listen. And here I think might be the key to the phrase “one flock, one shepherd” – not a prefiguring of the ministry of the successors of St. Peter, as admirable as they may be, but an understanding that, as a class, Christian leaders talk a lot more than they listen. It may be a reminder to those folks in particular that they are part of the flock, servants of the servants, as much in need of listening as those they lead, if not more so. There is one Shepherd, and it is Christ.

Interestingly, the Rule of Benedict begins with this word: Listen. Listening is the key to salvation for monks. It is our job. There is a whole monastic technology to enable listening: silence, the twelve steps of the ladder of humility, obedience to the monastery’s leader as a father who stands for us in the place of Christ, and whose job it is to shepherd the flock safely through our trials unmolested. But for this to happen, the flock must do its part. Benedict does not like monks who talk too much, monks who put themselves first, monks who stand up against their leaders, because these behaviors, and the attitudes behind them, get in the way of belonging to, knowing and liste ning to Christ. In this the Benedictine path is profoundly counter-cultural to us, who are trained from infancy in the arts of positive self-image, self-regard, self-assertion, independence, and the whole contemporary workshop of tools to build up our self-esteem and individuality.

The Good Shepherd calls us to belong, to follow, rather than to lead, or to follow so that we might be able to lead if called to do so. The Good Shepherd call us to know so that we might be known, before we begin teaching. The Good Shepherd calls us to listen so that we might be one, before we start bleating on, daring to include and exclude as though we were the Shepherd and not the flock. Monks and our monastic life are deeply important to the work of the flock. We obey and follow in order that we might belong. We study and pray and contemplate in order to know. We are silent so that we might listen.

So, let us be good monks and follow the Lord’s job description for us. Let us be good Christians. Let us be good sheep. Let us trust Him in our dangers, in our valleys of the shadow of death, and find in that trust more than we ever dreamed possible. Let us be worthy of the Shepherd, who asks of us what we are in fact capable of: belonging, knowing, listening. And who gives his life for us in return.

Amen.