RCL - Proper 12C - July 25, 2010

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Scott Borden, OHC

RCL - Proper 12C - July 25, 2010

The passage we heard from Genesis has long been one of my favorite old testament stories. The nerve of Abraham negotiating with God is both astounding and inspiring. The bidding to save the city of Sodom starts at fifty righteous people. By the time we're finished, God has been negotiated down to ten...

Haggling is venerated in many cultures. Our waspy Anglican tradition isn't one of them – when we negotiate, it is through lawyers and it often signals that a relationship has been broken. But in much of the world, a shopkeeper is insulted if you don't want to haggle. Its a sign of a healthy relationship.

Clearly God is not a shopkeeper. Yet here, early on in scripture, we are more or less given a lesson in the value of haggling with God. Look at the success Abraham achieves. Look how far God moves. It signals a healthy relationship and it is a good thing.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I have the sense that God enjoys the dialogue – the haggling – with Abraham. After all, God desires to be in relationship with us.

The matching of this old testament passage with the reading from Luke is remarkable. The disciples are asking to be taught how to pray and the passage from Genesis is also a lesson in how to pray. When these two powerful lessons are combined, what are they telling us?

Abraham doesn't need any instruction in how to pray and haggle with God. Perhaps with proper instruction and preparation he would never have dared do what he did... Perhaps if Abraham had been better schooled in how to be subservient and respectful and utterly deferential, he would have been more ready to accept God's judgment against Sodom...

Abraham's is willing to be pushy in his prayer, his relationship with God. We tend to value politeness, deference, subservience, and eloquence in prayer. Abraham's example is one of speaking whats on your mind. It also happens to be a very good lesson in how to negotiate – but that is a different sermon...

Flash forward to the disciples with Jesus – “Lord teach us to pray as John taught his disciples...” The disciples must be a bit disappointed because the answer doesn't sound very much like a John the Baptist answer – John with the fasting, and the locusts, and the sack cloth... No doubt John's prayer practice also severe...

Teach us to pray the way John taught his disciples to pray... but the answer from Jesus is not severe...

Look at the simple prayer that follows. Six short lines... And this is one of those times when its hard to just hear Luke, without other evangelists whispering in our ears... According to Luke this very brief, unembellished prayer is what comes from the mouth of Jesus.

The first two lines, hallowed be Your name and Your kingdom come echo the beginning of Luke's Gospel. There the shepherds have gathered at the manger at the birth of Jesus and they say Glory to God and on earth peace – in other words: hallowed be God's name and let God's peaceable kingdom be on earth.

The third line – give us daily what we need daily. This is when my inner Abraham wants to negotiate... could we work out, for example, a yearly, or at least a monthly plan... but Jesus is truly calling his disciples, us, to live in the present, to live daily. Still, give us this weekly our weekly bread... would that be so bad? The truth is my desire for safety and security comes at a price – I am less present today and,worse, the security I gain will be at the price of someone else's security... I don't hear Jesus being willing to haggle on this.

Forgive us for we ourselves forgive everyone... Do we? Really? When the Lord's prayer breezes by 5 or so times a day in our worship we say “forgive us our sins AS we forgive those who sin against us” - which isn't quite the same. It has conditional possibilities, which I naturally love... If I don't forgive I won't be forgiven... or the method by which I forgive is the method by which I will be forgiven. Or maybe if I don't forgive right away, but savor my righteous indignation for a while and then forgive... Luke offers no negotiating room. “We ourselves forgive everyone.” I may have some work to do in this area...

And finally – do not bring us to the time of trial. If we are going to be forgiven, whats so bad about a trial? But the time of trial is not a courtroom drama. Precious metals, like silver, are tried, that is to say purified, by extreme heat – so that the silver is separated from the dross. Save us from being tried as silver is tried.

We are entitled to speak up in prayer – it makes for a healthy relationship with God and, at least according to Abraham and according to Jesus, it makes a difference in God. We may not get exactly what we want – Sodom was, in the end, destroyed. But throughout scripture we're called into relationship with God. In relationship, there is give and take... there is shared responsibility, and most of all there is honesty.

In Luke's gospel, we are called to simple, direct, immediate prayer. How are we going to live in God's kingdom today? Any desire we have to make our prayer life more complex, more eloquent, more attractive, more severe – we might want to examine where that desire comes from.

The Letter to the Colossians adds one more interesting dimension to the day. “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and deceit. Do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink... Do not let anyone disqualify you... As you have received Christ Jesus, continue to live in him.”

There are a number of ways we receive Christ – prayer and Eucharist being high on the list. Our Benedictine tradition reminds us to receive strangers as Christ and in doing so we receive Christ – we find the face of Jesus in the face of strangers (and even in the faces of those who are not strangers...). We are continually receiving Christ.

Sometimes our Christian practice seems to be designed to make us worthy to receive Christ – with an emphasis on repenting and rebuking... The truth is we are never worthy to receive Christ. Jesus doesn't come to us because we love him... Jesus comes to us because he loves us.

What I hear Paul saying is don't be so worried about getting ready to receive Christ – we've already done that. We need to be worried about living in Christ – about living in God's kingdom. Issues of what is clean or unclean are not so important. Issues of who is hungry, who is suffering, who is being deprived of justice are the things Jesus puts before us.

Paul seems to be urging us to have the courage of our convictions – even when others, devout and authoritative thought they may appear – are urging us away from our convictions. Too often in our society the way to get by and be effective is to be politically savvy. So we soften our message, take large steps back from where our heart tells us we should be, compromise in oh so many ways. In a political world, that is the way.

But is not the way of Jesus. We may, as Abraham did, negotiate with God. We certainly must engage in prayer. But once we have understood what God is calling us to do, then we must proceed and not worry about reaction of others.

Of course its more complicated than that – we are never in the position of fully understanding God. So humility must be part of the way in which we proceed. And, I believe, community must be part of the way in which we proceed.

Our world, and even our little Anglican part of the Christian Church, is filled with any number of folks ready to condemn, ready to disqualify, ready to distract. Sometimes they are armed with the gospel of prosperity... sometimes the gospel of communism, or capitalism, or consumerism... sometimes they are armed with that most dangerous non-Christian gospel of all, the gospel of the status quo.

And through the din, Abraham says go ahead and talk to God – its not that difficult. And Jesus says honor God's name and live in God's kingdom. And Paul says get on with it.

RCL - Feast of St. Benedict - July 11, 2010

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC

RCL - Feast of St. Benedict - July 11, 2010

St. Benedict's Window, Holy Cross Monastery

Originally Uploaded by Br. Randy Greve, OHC

Proverbs 2:1-9

Acts 2:42-47

Luke 14:27-33

O God, in the course of this busy life, give us times of refreshment and peace; and grant that we may so use our leisure to rebuild our bodies and renew our minds, that our spirits may be opened to the goodness of your creation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I am just back from a week's vacation on Cape Cod, and here I am preaching on the feast of our Holy Father St. Benedict. What would St. Benedict have made of a monk going away for a week's vacation? My guess is that he would not have approved.

Benedict in his Rule for monasteries is deeply suspicious of and concerned about a monk's absence from the monastery for any reason whatsoever. Chapter 50 of the Holy Rule cautions those working at a distance or traveling to be careful not to omit the prescribed prayers. Chapter 51 admonishes the monk sent on a errand not to presume to eat outside the monastery “even if he receives a pressing invitation.” And Chapter 67 tells us: “Brothers sent on a journey will ask the abbot and community to pray for them....When they get back from a journey, they should, on the very day of their return, lie face down on the floor of the oratory at the conclusion of each of the customary hours of the Work of God. They ask the prayers of all for their faults, in case they may have been caught off guard on the way by seeing some evil thing or hearing some idle talk.” Moreover: “No one should presume to relate to anyone else what he saw or heard outside the monastery, because that causes the greatest harm.”

It all sounds somewhat exaggerated, even a bit pathological, to our ears, doesn't it?

But the fact is that travel was and is inevitable and common....even in 6^th c. Italy...even among monks. So it was no accident that Benedict devoted whole chapters of his Rule to the proper reception of guests and of visiting monks. And he carefully provided rather detailed practical directives for his own monks who were setting out on a journey, including the provision of decent traveling clothes and clean underwear! Benedict would not have written about these if they were not a recurring part of his life and world, just as they are of ours.

Living in the very late ancient world, Benedict was of course keenly aware of the dangers of travel. There were the usual physical dangers: sickness, accident, theft, murder. And there were spiritual dangers as well. What if the monk became fascinated by the transient, the spectacular, and the glitzy or became obsessed with the different, the new, the exotic? What if he were tempted by a way of life that seemed more interesting, more rewarding, or more fun or was distracted from the monastic way of life or the Christian way of being?

I believe Benedict would, if pushed, acknowledge that edification and holy wonder were possible and available on the road, on the way. But for him the costs of travel outweighed the benefits. And yet there are at least two positive emphases in his Rule that are worth noting in with regard to travel.

The first has to do with Benedict's emphasis on stability, his advice to “Stay put!” This is an important reminder for the monk that it is in the enclosure of the monastery that the primary work of growth in Christian holiness occurs, that it is there that we are pushed up against our own weaknesses and foibles and our habitual patterns of evading God, ourselves and others. The monastery is, in this regard, a “school of the Lord's service” and sometimes it is a very hard school.

In his 2003 Trinity Institute address on Shaping Holy Lives, Archbishop Rowan Williams quoted Professor Henry Mayr-Harting to the effect that Benedictine holiness is “completely undemonstrative, deeply conventual, and lacking any system of expertise.” When I first read this, I was certain there was a typo. He must surely have meant to say “deeply conventional.” But no...he did mean conventual, as in “convent.” Williams continues: “...the holiness envisaged by the Rule is entirely inseparable from the common life [i.e., life together]....One of the things we have to grow into unselfconsciousness about is the steady environment of others.”

All too often we use our journeys, our vacations, our sabbath times, our days off or our time outs as escapes into fantasy and particularly into what the Desert tradition called logismoi (thoughts), those chains of fantasies that feed on themselves and remove us from the present moment, from the now. They lead not to reality but to an avoidance of the hard, ongoing and transformative work of being present, of being together, of being where God has called us and where our choices have lead us right now.

One of the fruits of the monastic value of stability, of staying put—whether in a monastery or parish or marriage or committed relationship or job—is learning about and learning to endure, learning to honor and maybe even learning to celebrate what Williams calls the otherness of the other, the sheer presence of another human being in all his or her mystery and difference and wonder.

One hopes, of course, that there is some mutuality in this, and that the daily living together of ordinary life with the same cast of characters over time can serve as a real school of self knowledge and of charity, of forgiveness and of mutual love. That's not always the case, of course. But when it happens the results can be astounding. It's a slow process, to be sure, and mostly undramatic, but it can be radically transformative. It is our road to holiness.

A second emphasis in the Rule is its implication that a monastic life well lived, well shaped, is itself so balanced that one would neither need nor want an escape. Days off? Not necessary. The round of feasts and fasts and ordinary days with their differing schedules and obligations would ideally provide for pauses that refresh and changes that restore. Retreat days? Vacations? Again, not needed. The quality and nature of the daily rhythm of prayer and study and work ought to offer rich enough fare for anyone. If the life is being lived well and is being lived fully and faithfully, there would be a gracious menu of busy days as well as days blessed with ample time for study and reflection and creative dreaming, days of hard labor balanced by days of gentle rest.

It's a lovely ideal, isn't it? But the truth is that no place, no monastery that I know of, lives up to the ideal. Even the most observant or isolated of “convents” has seem fit to make some adjustment to modernity and reality: a weekly sleep in day or late morning, a free afternoon, annual periods of communal study or refreshment, family visits, the ever-popular pilgrimage, sabbaticals and yes, even vacation weeks on Cape Cod.

The truth is that we all live in a world largely unimagined by St. Benedict. A world of 24 hour news and constant availability, of increasing work demands for those who have employment and grinding boredom and social opprobrium or poverty for many who don't. A world of information overload and of complex relationship webs, many virtual or electronic, extending far beyond six degrees of separation. A world of long lives and short fuses and of ever increasing demands and concerns, global and local and personal, that drive us to the edge of exhaustion.

And what, if anything, does Benedict and the Benedictine tradition have to offer us in the face of this reality? Certainly a caveat that we not turn our vacation time, our “free” time, into an escape from our real selves and into some fantasy that we mistake for reality. And if we are doing this repeatedly, an invitation to ask ourselves why: What is it we are running away from? As Sr. Joan Chittister says in her commentary on the Rule: “What life demands from us us the single-minded search for God, not a series of vacations from our best selves.”

Even richer, however, the Benedictine tradition offers us the concept of vacare Deo, of holy leisure, of of making an empty space for God. A monk of Pluscarden Abbey wrote some years ago that:

“The Latin phrase “vacare Deo” is hard to translate exactly in English. It has all the connotations of being vacant or empty, being at leisure, being free or unoccupied, being on holiday for God..... [And] it is astonishing how seriously St Benedict takes his monk's need for “holy leisure”. It forms an integral part of the balanced life he draws up. He assumes the necessity, daily, for several hours of silent time, without pressure, without external activity, without discernible results. And he assigns for this some of the best hours of the day, when minds will be fully awake and able to give of their best..”

I'd wager that few of us, monastics or not, are willing or able to claim such blocks of open time. We are, in fact, driven by work or our lack of it in all it permutations. Yet what Benedict offers us here is the exact opposite of work and (paradoxically) its deepest complement:

“St. Benedict is responding here not just to the demands of high Christian perfection, but to a basic human need. Aristotle rightly taught, centuries before Christ, that we work in order the we might have leisure. By this he meant that work...is never an end itself: it is never self-justifying. But leisure, holy leisure in the sense of contemplative openness to ultimate reality, is.”

We celebrate today a great man, a saint, a guide, a teacher, a fellow Christian. Perhaps the best way to honor him and to draw nearer to Christ with him this season is to learn to claim and embrace our holy leisure and to embrace it in a way that is not a flight from reality but are rather a dynamic exercise in loving curiosity and appreciative inquiry, gazing on our lives and our world for what they in fact are: the kingdom of God unfolding in our midst.

Grant, Lord, that we may so use our leisure...that we may be opened, again and again, to the goodness and wonder of your creation in us and around us and for us. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

RCL - Proper 8C - June 27, 2010

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Charles Mizelle, n/OHC

RCL - Proper 8C - June 27, 2010

The Most Important Verse “Not” In The Bible

2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14

Galatians 5:1, 13-25

Luke 9:51-62

In the name of God who calls us to celebration, who calls us to pursue community in our world, and who calls us to compassion in the midst of all human suffering. Amen!

Today’s lectionary readings are some of our richest texts on the Christian life. We began with Elisha modeling what it means to be a true disciple, a life of devotion to following Elijah, and Elisha’s reward of receiving a “double-share” of Elijah’s spirit. This text perfectly mirrors our Gospel reading.

Our New Testament reading took us to Paul’s letter to the Galatians where he reminds us that we are free in Christ, to “stand firm” in our freedom, to live by the spirit, and then that classic text where Paul compares the works of the flesh to the fruits of the Spirit.

Then we have the Gospel, the inhospitality of the Samaritans, James and John wanting to call down fire from heaven to destroy them and three would-be followers of Christ.

In fact there is so much richness in these texts the challenge for the preacher is to decide what to preach about. So you may find it odd that I have decided to preach on the text that is not here, the verse that was left out. In fact it just may be the most important verse that is not in the Bible

If your Bible has footnotes you’ll see that some ancient manuscripts insert an extra verse in today’s Gospel at Luke 9:56. When Jesus responds to James and John’s plea to call down fire from heaven and consume the Samaritans, Jesus says this: “You do not know what kind of spirit you are of, for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.”

Was it ethnic hostility on the part of the Samaritan’s that they did not welcome Christ and his traveling companions? Most likely it was. James and John exploded in rage with the desire to simply obliterate them. Hopefully they were speaking figuratively, not literally, about calling fire down from heaven. But that is little consolation given their desire for revenge. Instead of rebuking the Samaritans who rejected him, Jesus rebuked James and John who defended him. And then comes that extra verse that shouldn’t be in the Bible: “And Jesus said to them, ‘You do not know what kind of spirit you are of, for the Son the Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.’”

Here’s a quick lesson in Apologetics. We have close to 6000 ancient manuscripts of the New Testament, some of them only bits and pieces of papyrus, some of them complete books. No other ancient text, like Homer or Aristotle for example, enjoys anything remotely close to this avalanche of manuscript evidence. When textual scholars--God bless them--compare, contrast and cross-check every last one of these manuscript fragments of evidence, they reach an overwhelming consensus that the Bible we read today is a mirror image of the texts as they were originally written. It’s true, we don’t have the original documents that Luke wrote, nor do we have the original text of any New Testament writer, and there are variants among the manuscripts. But with the volume of overwhelming evidence we have we are assured that we are not reading some corrupt approximation of what the original New Testament writers wrote. We are reading the real McCoy. (If we could only have such assurance in interpreting what is written.)

Unfortunately for me, this unprecedented textual evidence leads experts to reject my favorite addition to the Bible. So where did this extra verse come from. Most likely a later copyist inserted his own gloss at a much later date. So the way to read this verse is as a one-sentence commentary on Luke’s narrative. “Jesus didn’t come to destroy men’s lives but to save them.” James and John’s rage at the Samaritans is now turned into a teaching moment by Jesus. It is the sentiment of this non-verse that the narrative hinges on. Here is where we have the shift in energy, the shift in emotion, and the change in action. In fact this entire narrative story is considered the moment of shift for Luke’s entire gospel. The reading begin’s “When the days drew near for him (Jesus) to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” From here forward, the rest of Luke’s gospel is moving toward Jerusalem, moving toward the death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Christ.

Even though I have to concede that Luke most likely did not pen this verse I can rest assured its sentiment was known to him. Fast forward to Luke 19:10 and you’ll read “The Son of Man came to seek and save what was lost.” Compare this to John 3:17 “God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world.” And Matthew 18:11 has it own textual variant “The Son of Man came to save what was lost.”

When James and John invoked divine wrath on the Samaritans, they betrayed an attitude diametrically opposed to everything Jesus said and did. Right before this story, we have the story of John wanting to stop an exorcist from healing a person because “he was not one of us”. It seems these over-zealous disciples wanted Jesus’ love, and therefore God’s love, all for themselves. They transformed the good news of God’s unconditional and limitless love for all peoples into the bad news that God had it in for them. They were the in group so they got the “good news” of Christ love. The bad news was for everyone else.

Today, we have no shortage of religionist wanting to call down fire from heaven to destroy those they see as the out group. We have no shortage of those who are angered and enraged knowing they are in the right. And there is no changing their conviction that God is on there side and against everyone else. Most likely everyone here today has been on the receiving end of this message. The good news for us is that the message and sentiment of our non-verse is as true today as it ever has been. Thomas Keating has put this one-sentence commentary of Luke’s gospel into modern language by saying “You don’t have to win over God’s love, you have more than you know what to do with.”

Today’s Gospel text is really the turning point of the entire Gospel story. Jesus has “set his face toward Jerusalem” knowing what awaits him there. His days are numbered in getting his disciples to understand the real meaning of the good news. He wants his disciples to completely understand that the words of the Psalmist are to be claimed by all--for in Psalm 56 it says “this I know, that God is for me”.

Jesus was not a religionist. He was not a theologian. And the gospel writers give us account after account that Jesus had little patience for the religionist of his day. He often had little patience for his own disciples as demonstrated in today’s gospel. He came for a single reason: to put a stop to religion being an “exclusive club” for an in-group. He came to change hearts, heal lives, to make us whole, and to help us discover we are never away from God’s love. For Jesus the only thing, the entire thing, the greatest thing is to know you are loved by God. The additional verse added to the text of Luke 9:56 is clearly spurious, but the authentic voice behind its message is unmistakably original: “the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.”

Amen!