Lent 5 B - Mar 25, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Scott Wesley Borden, OHC
Lent 5 B – Sunday, March 18, 2012


Jeremiah 31:31-34
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33

A Celtic Cross near the Monastery Church

There are many things we could disagree about when reading the Gospels, but one thing I think everyone could agree on is that there are no extraneous details...  The Evangelists didn't waste words.  Every little detail we come across in the reading from John's Gospel this morning has / is of great importance.

Take for example the very first line: “Now there were some Greeks among those who went up to worship at the feast.” It seems insignificant enough – some Greeks.  We don't learn much about them, just that they go to worship.  This festival of Passover is a Jewish festival and we might assume John means Greek speaking Jews – since they were plentiful.  But there is a different word for Greek speaking Jews, so these were not Jews, they were Gentiles.  And that is the importance of what John is telling us.

Gentiles are coming to worship with Jesus – or put the other way, this Jesus movement is not just for Jews any more.  John underscores the message: Andrew and Phillip are the disciples who interact with these Gentiles...  Andrew and Phillip were the first disciples called directly by Jesus – and the call was “Come and see.”  Now we have an approximate echo from this band of Greeks – “we would like to see Jesus...”

The early church will debate the proper place of non-Jews in the movement, but John seems to be telling us now, before Jesus' crucifixion, that all are invited.  And still today, we struggle with the radical inclusiveness of Jesus.

There is an urgency in John's narrative.  Jesus time on Earth is growing short, so he does not linger on this story.  Instead we move right along with Jesus teaching about his impending death.

Unless a seed dies and falls to the ground, it remains a single seed.  But if it dies and, presumably, sprouts into a new plant, it produces much fruit.  How the many layers of this simple story resonate with death and resurrection.  But the most fascinating thing, to me, is how different the resurrection is.  The “single” seed becomes “much fruit.”  It is not resurrected as another solitary seed.  I think this is not just telling us about proliferation, but about community.  In John's nomenclature, fruit is what we are.  But the image is perhaps a cornucopia, rather than a still life with a piece of fruit...

But we zip along – those who love their life in this world will loose it, but those who hate their life in this world will gain eternal life.  This leaves me with various unanswerable questions.  First among them – did Jesus hate his life in this world?

It is a big question for me.  Jesus does not seem to hate life in this world.  I can surely understand that he sometimes was annoyed, sometimes frustrated, sometimes angry, but I can't read the Gospels without having the impression of a warm and loving person, full of celebration – after all, we must celebrate while the bridegroom is with us.

I don't think Jesus is calling us to hate life, but rather to reject the things of this life... things that our society, our culture, our experience teach us we ought to love.  These are the idols we put in the place of God.  We can not serve two masters.

For example: I love Tudor church music.  Anybody who questions the inspired genius of Thomas Tallis is going to have a fight with me.  Hearing, or better still, singing those exquisite English and Latin anthems that sprang from his pen surely gives me a glimpse of heaven.  But it is not heaven, only a glimpse.

The drive to perform an anthem perfectly quickly becomes a powerful way to push God right out of a worship service.  If I love the things of this world, it leaves little space for me to love God and God's kingdom.

Of course, on the list of hazardous worldly affections, Tudor Church Music is at the benign end.  Further along that continuum there is money, power, greed, comfort, and on and on.  When I am falling in love with money... when I am falling in love with power...  I may not be able to stop myself, but at least at some level I know I am in trouble.  The beguiling beauty of Tudor Church Music, or whatever your pleasure may be, blinds me to the power of the attachment.

Jesus offers no qualifiers – he doesn't say those who love the “wicked” things... or those who love the things of this world “too much...”  We must be prepared to walk away from the lust for beauty as much as from the lust for power.

In Lent, especially this far into Lent, we are perhaps most aware of our need to strip away various lusts that interfere with our love of God, but Jesus puts no time boundaries on this call...  Come Easter, come the resurrection, I will still need to be learning to hate the things of this life.

Jesus continues in a more sorrowful tone – “my soul is troubled...” Jesus is clearly thinking of his pending crucifixion.  If it were me, the pain and agony of this torturous form of execution is probably what would trouble my soul, but Jesus is clearly not troubled by what is about to take place.  “Should I say save me?” No, Jesus' life and soon his death are for the glory of God.

Jesus has, just moments before, instructed us on not being attached to this life, so it it would be strange indeed if he were to pray “God spare me.”  I believe Jesus loved, and loves, very deeply.  God is love, so how could it be otherwise.  Jesus' execution will cause unfathomable pain for those he loves.  No doubt this is why his soul is troubled.  But in Jesus there is no sentimentality.  And loss is part of love.

This section of John's Gospel is pushing one powerful question before us: What does Jesus death mean to us?  Jesus is making his disciples and the crowd face this question – and here we are.

What do the events of Holy Week, which is so nearly upon us, mean for us?

Jesus says “when I am lifted from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.”

Jesus' crucifixion is often viewed through the lens of sacrifice – either a sacrifice of ransom: Jesus dies to pay the price for our sins; or atonement: Jesus suffers the punishment for our sins in our place.  Great theologians over the millennia have explored these ideas – and I must say I am no theologian.  I also have to say both these ideas of sacrifice, ransom or atonement, make me very uncomfortable – in part because of what these ideas say about God, but also, to be honest, because both ask me to consider the depth of my sin.

But here is Jesus in John's Gospel reflecting on the significance of his death and resurrection and sacrifice is not part of the reflection.  As the seed dies and is buried so that it can resurrect into abundant fruit, so Jesus dies and is buried so that he can resurrect into abundant fruit.  And when he does that, he will gather us all, sinful though we be, to himself. This is God's love triumphing over death.

Ultimately in this short Gospel passage Jesus is telling us how we will be reconciled with God.  Jesus gathers us to himself.  It is a reconciliation formed entirely of God's loving grace.

Does that mean my work as a follower of Jesus is done?  I can sit back and receive grace?

Well I can't earn grace, so in that regard there is no work for me to do.  But Jesus calls us to serve and to follow.  And in that regard there is always much work to do.

John Wesley spent a great deal of time reflecting on what it meant to be a follower of Jesus.  He described it in terms of sanctified living.  And his understanding of sanctified living is not that it brings us to grace, but that it is our joyful response to having already received grace.

We are already the recipients of God's endless and unconditional love.  How can we do anything but let that love overflow in our own lives – through love of God, love of neighbor, love of stranger, love of all creation, and, yes, love of our selves.

Amen.

Lent 4 B - Mar 18, 2012 - Br. Robert Sevensky

St. Paul’s Cathedral, Burlington, VT
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
Lent 4 B – Sunday, March 18, 2012

Numbers 21:4-9
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

The Cross lifted up by Archangel Michael

weathervane at the top of the belltower at Holy Cross Monastery

I understand that your theme this Lent here at St. Paul’s Cathedral is the desert or wilderness.  It is certainly a theme of central importance in Scriptures as well as in monastic history and spirituality.  The desert continues to be an image of purification and transformation

It is also easy to romanticize this image.  I have heard people speak of “desert experiences” or of profound solitude or even of the “dark night of the soul” as if they were things lightly to be desired, something generally pleasant and not deeply disturbing, indeed terrifying.

Last week the Archbishop of Canterbury speaking at the ancient Benedictine foundation at Montecassino in Italy addressed this, saying in part:  “…in solitude, we are led to recognize the strength and resilience of our selfishness, and the need to let God dissolve the fantasies with which we protect ourselves.  In the desert there is no one to impress or persuade; there it is necessary to confront our own emptiness or be consumed by it.”   He went on to remind us that such solitude is safely experienced and is fruitful only if it is framed by a common or shared life, one in which we learn and practice “the basic habits of selflessness through mutual service.”   The stripping away by the desert is never for its own sake; it is for the sake of a more radical service in and at the heart of God's body, God's world.

This is not easy to appreciate, even in the monastic tradition.  We find in St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries repeated warnings against murmuring, which seems to be the besetting sin of monks.  Murmuratio, a kind of low level constant complaining, is treated with great severity by St. Benedict in a rule otherwise known for its moderation and discretion. He understands how murmuring undermines a community and harms it at every level, not least by harming those who become habituated to such patterns of behavior.  It's a problem not limited to monasteries, as you well know.  One has only to be in some parishes or workplaces or families to see and feel its effects.

And it's a very old problem.  Today’s first reading from the Book of Numbers represents only the latest in a string of complaints from the very people whom Moses is leading out of bondage into freedom:  “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?  For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food (manna).”

God is frankly disgusted with the Israelites and sends fiery serpents that kill many.  Who can blame him?

But the people come to their senses and repent and ask Moses to intercede with God to remove the serpents.  What God does rather is instruct Moses to make a serpent of bronze similar to those that were killing the people, put it on a pole, and “whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.”

This is a very rich image, one inviting reflection and action.

I think of one of the brothers at my monastery who was for many years a hospital chaplain and a trainer of chaplains.  He used to tell his students that the principal pastoral task of the chaplain is to enter into the dragon's lair and name the dragon.  Whatever fear, anxiety, threat, wound or hurt the patient may be experiencing, the first work of the chaplain is to help the patient name it.

But this brother also tells how moved he was to discover in Annie Dillard's book Teaching a Stone to Talk something even more profound than naming:

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences can not locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.

Our wounds, our demons, our monsters, our fiery serpents can kill us, but they can also cure us.  And for that to happen they must be named, they must be ridden, they must be looked at in faith, as in today's lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures.

Anyone who has been in therapy or recovery or who has survived adolescence knows this.

Jesus knew it as well.  In today's Gospel Jesus expresses his understanding that, like that bronze serpent in the wilderness, he too must be lifted up and gazed upon.  And he knew that, as for the Israelites of old, that gazing will be the source of life — indeed eternal life — for those who follow him.  This same Jesus who was for many — and let's admit it, so often is for us — a source of consternation and a sign of contradiction and a stumbling block — this Jesus on the cross is also our ultimate healing and blessing.

Over the portal of our monastery in West Park, NY, is a large marble plaque with the words: Crux est Mundi Medicina.  (“The cross is the medicine of the world.”)  It's been there since 1904, though the phrase itself is from a 13th century hymn by St. Bonaventure.

Crux est porta paradisi
In qua sancti sunt confisi,
Qui vicerurnt omnia.
Crux est mundi medicina,
Per quam bonitas divina
Facit mirabilia.

In case your Latin is a bit rusty, let me translate:

The cross is the door of paradise
In which the saints put their hope,
And triumphed over everything.
The cross is the medicine of the world
Through which the divine goodness
Performed miracles.  

The great miracle, of course, is that God so loved the world...and did something about it, gave his only Son.

If we are to love God, love life, we too must do something.  And that is, we must look, we must gaze, we must stare, with eyes wide open.   We must look at the cross, that symbol of the worst that humanity can offer and see there the greatest act of self-giving love, of hope and of human-divine solidarity.  And in the light and power of that cross, we must look with eyes wide open at the demons and serpents and monsters of our own time, whether personal, familial, social, economic, or political.  We must name them and perhaps even ride them until with them and each other we come into the light and peace of that kingdom promised us in Jesus Christ.

There is in the Order of Service for Noonday in The Book of Common Prayer this wonderful collect:

Blessed Savior, you hung upon the cross, stretching out your loving arms:  Grant that all the peoples of the earth may look to you and be saved; for your tender mercies sake.

May we have the grace and the courage to look at the cross and find there eternal life not only for ourselves but for all humankind, indeed for our whole creation.  May we look up and live.

Feast of St Joseph (transferred) - Mar 21, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Julian Mizelle, OHC
Feast of St. Joseph, March 19, 2012 (transferred to March 21)

2 Samuel 7:4,8-16
Romans 4:13-18
Luke 2:41-52

St Joseph and child Jesus - an icon by Joseph Brown

exposed in our church with forsythia from the garden

Role Models

I might have been 7 or 8 years old. I might have been younger. My father came to me one day saying get in the car—we’re going to the store—I need to buy a gift. So off we went to Sears. To a small child the gift my Father picked out was dazzling; bright and shiny with lots of gizmos. I was quite excited to see it going home with us. And I waited with eager anticipation for the gift to be opened. What was the occasion? It was my Mother’s birthday. What was the gift? A bright and shinny new Vacuum Cleaner! (Well...it did say “Sears Best” on it.) Things were rather icy and solemn around our home for the next several days. I knew it was a time for me to keep quiet and lay low. But by the weekend another bright and shinny present arrived—a new television, a color one (our very first). And on Sunday evening we all set down to watch Bonanza in color. And once again there was peace in the kingdom.

The experience of seeing my Mother receive a vacuum cleaner as a gift became a powerful lesson to me that one does not show their love or honor a woman’s birthday with a household cleaning appliance. It is not a gift that says “I love you” and to this day I have never given anyone, other than myself, the gift of a vacuum cleaner.

Few of us grow up with perfect role models. Most of us feel challenged to become a role model for others. When an outstanding role model comes along in our society we want to make them a hero. Simply put, being a role model is a daunting task. But in St. Joseph I have found one who is a very powerful role model.

The scriptural record surrounding Joseph is one of powerful silence. There is not one single word recorded in the scriptures that Joseph spoke. We only know him through his dreams and actions. We know that he was a descendant of King David, a carpenter, that he shared intimacy with God through his dreams, and that he was responsive to God through what he discerned, and he was even willing to take risks through his obedience to God. Today’s Gospel reading from Luke is the last time Joseph appears in the chronology of Jesus’ life. Some 20 years later when Jesus begins his public ministry Joseph has simply been dropped from the narrative.

As I ponder the life of Joseph I am asking the question who was his role model? After all no one had ever been married to the Mother of God before. Husbands being jealous of another man have been common in all times and in all cultures. But what do you do when the other man is the God you worship. It must have been terribly conflicting for him. How did Joseph find himself and carve out an identity in such a relationship. Let’s be honest—being married to the Mother of God would simply be intimidating.

Even though the scriptural record is thin we find Joseph fulfilling his role as protector and caregiver in the Holy Family. It was through his sheltering arms that he expressed his deep love and intimacy for Mary. And it was through his obedience to God that he was able to protect the ones he loved, sacrificing his safety for theirs.

If fulfilling his role as husband, protector and caregiver to the Virgin Mother of God was not enough, Joseph also had to find his way to be the earthly father to the Incarnate Son of God, the Christ child Jesus. Today’s Gospel reading gives us the story of a precocious and independent 12 year old lad asserting himself in the temple—the same temple he would cleanse some 20 years later by throwing out the money changers. But over the years many writers have taken great license in creating stories that might have happened (or could have happened) when Jesus was a young child.

Anne Rice tells the tale of a young Jesus getting into an argument with another boy. With a sudden slip of the tongue he curses him and the child drops dead. Realizing the seriousness of what has happened Jesus simply goes over to the child's home and raise him back to life. The child’s parents, not to mention the entire village, are both horrified and mystified by these events. Joseph simply weighs how to navigate through the unexplainable behavior of Jesus. Imagine trying to parent that!

Christopher Moore, in the national bestseller “Lamb, The Gospel According to Biff, Christ Childhood Pal” (and one of my all-time favorite books) takes an even more irreverent approach. The chid Jesus is in the yard playing with a lizard. He discovers that if he bites its head off he can bring it back to life. I’ll spare you the ensuing details.

Both of these stories represent the fertile imaginations of two gifted writers. What these stories do for me is to set my own imagination in motion to imagine what it was like to parent a child who could turn water into wine, walk on water, heal diseases and ailments, and even bring dead people back to life. There was no Dr. Spock, there was no Dr. Phil, there were no parenting guru’s or manuals for Joseph to turn to on how to parent the Incarnate Son of God.

Joseph was self-effacing and humble, strong and reliable. Joseph was a role model for real manhood. He was a godly man who lived above the low expectations of common culture. And he knew the real meaning of honoring and respecting women. Most of all he loved God regardless of the cost. And as with all of the great saints, when we look into their lives, we are pointed back to the life of Christ. We see Christ nature in them. Joseph would have it no other way.

All four of the New Testament Gospelers were talented writers themselves. None of them gave us humorous or far-fetched stories of the childhood of Jesus. However we also know they wrote with an agenda. Their agenda was simply to present to us Jesus the Christ, the Incarnation of God. That fact alone would have made it difficult to give Joseph a prominent role in the narrative. What the life of Joseph does say mirrors the words of John the Baptist: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” What we celebrate on this feast of St. Joseph is the mystery of redemption and how Joseph played a significant role in God’s plan to save humanity through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. God’s redemptive work needed human agents to give their consent and their cooperation. Mary simply said “Let it be!” Joseph said nothing--he just acted and through those actions gave his consent to the divine dream of God’s loving plan.

Amen

Lent 4 B - Mar 18, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
Lent 4 B – Sunday, March 18, 2012

Numbers 21:4-9
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

Nicodemus Visiting Jesus, by Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1899

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

Today's gospel passage is too briefly situated in John's narrative to give us a full picture of what the Evangelist wants us to understand.  Allow me to give you elements of the framework in which we behold today's picture.

Last week, in the previous chapter of this gospel, we heard of Jesus visiting the temple in Jerusalem at about the time of the Passover.  Dismayed by the mercantilism that desecrates the holy place, Jesus proceeds to chase the merchants and the money changers out of the temple.

Jesus and his disciples are still in Jerusalem, when a leader of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, under cover of darkness, comes to pay a visit to this powerful young teacher.  Jesus and Nicodemus have a non-conversation about being born again, being born from above, about the Son of Man having descended from Heaven.

Today, we catch Jesus and Nicodemus in this same conversation; just as Jesus is about to talk in double entendre about his death and ascension and the meaning of his existence.

*****

But before we go there, I also need to tell you a little more about the way the community that supported John the Evangelist communicated about things of religious import.

The Johannine community for which this gospel was composed saw itself as a counterculture -- not in the sense of being in a contest for the upper hand over society -- but rather as a parallel society having to live with the world, while not of the world.  Any similarity to any person, event, or institution is not necessarily coincidental...

As any parallel society worth its grain of salt, be it a monastic community or an urban gang, for example, the Johannine community keeps a language that subverts the mainstream presentation of reality.

Irony and double entendre are legitimate ways of saying many things in one utterance and of avoiding charges of directly confronting the mainstream.

We'll see several examples in today's Johannine narrative.

*****

Let's start with "The Son of Man must be lifted up."
The verb "lifted up" refers, we know in hindsight, to both Jesus' death and Jesus' ascension into heaven.  The expression "Son of Man" which appeared a few times in the Hebrew scriptures with more generic meanings, now appears as a phrase that evokes Jesus' nature as a bridge between earth and sky, between humanity and divinity.

Here "Son of Man" contains both the descent from heaven and ascent to it.  In light of this, the phrase "lifted up" has more than double entendre; it is a multiple entendre:
- it speaks of a human being being raised above his fellow humans, even if in the process of a most demeaning execution,
- it speaks of a human being dying, in a defiant turn to glory,
- it speaks of the Son of Man raised from the dead, the first-born of a new creation,
- it speaks of the Son of God ascending back to heaven.

"The Son of Man must be lifted up."  It had to be like that, says John.

*****

After this, in a most amazing ellipse, the gospeler moves on to his most memorable verse.  Having alluded to death, resurrection and ascension, we come to meaning and purpose.

"For God SO loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life."

In this most wonderful statement, I feel the immense yearning of God for salvation.  The whole sentence seems to hang on the word "SO."  Creation and Creator yearn for one another.  They long for a deeper and ever-lasting embrace.  "That all may be One."

By giving his only Son, God gives us all equal honor status in the new creation.  We are all born once more, all born from above, as full equals.  We are born in a new kin group, no matter what family or honor status we came from.

By the way, I keep using both "born again" and "born from above" because the Greek word used by John, "anothen," has both meanings.  It was itself, no doubt, used as a double entendre.

*****

This being born to a new kin group would have spoken even more forcefully to first century Mediterranean people.  Belonging to a given kin group determined the overwhelming part of whatever honor would ever accrue to you in life.

Nicodemus' ironic question about the possibility to climb back into a mother's womb expresses a genuine puzzlement at how cards could be redistributed in a very rigid society.  How could cards be redistributed in ours, for that matter?

If you were born with a very low balance in the only valuable currency that mattered -- honor -- then joining the Christian community by being born again, and from above, gave you the undreamed-of honor bestowed by being in God's group of kin and moreover, gave you access to an egalitarian community where everyone shared the same high honor (not more, not less).

If you were fortunate enough to be among the few born to great honor, then you stood to loose a great deal of security among the mainstream of society by joining this unproven, upstart, break-away movement of israelite origin.

Unless...  unless you believed John the Evangelist and knew that eternal life was a good bargain, no matter what the price.

*****

And the price, by the way -- thanks for asking -- / was / is / still is / to believe in the Son of Man, the Son of God.  For first century Mediterraneans, believing would not have been a cognitive acquiescence to a set of dogmatic statements; rather, it would have been actions vouchsafed by community; actions that showed obedience to the will of God.

In all of his gospel, John never uses belief as a noun but always refers to it with verbs and terms of action.  So we may want to re-visit our own faith and wonder if the community at large witnesses it in our very being, in our very doing.  If not, a tune-up may be in order.

*****

Finally, eternal life starts now, today, here, with you and me.  Eternal life is life with God, in God and for God.  It will deliver life without end, if you can only imagine what that is.  But it will also deliver life abundant.  A life so rich in connection with God and Neighbor; a life so wealthy in purpose and meaning in God and Creation; that difficulties and sufferings will be part of what is glorified in you, and through you -- not part of what is wrong with your life.

Do remind me of this the next time I'm depressed because it's true even if we cannot always believe it cognitively.

*****

And who's the judge of whether you deserve eternal life?  Well, according to John the Evangelist, we have a double entendre here again.  Condemnation there is, but you get to pull it over yourself if you so choose.

God offers justification by faith.  The faith that makes you listen out for God's will whether you like it or not.  The faith that makes you step into the light and use your gifts for the building of the Kingdom.  Not in order to earn heavenly brownie points, but because you are answering in love to God's call for grace within and from you.

God shines the light, you step into its beam.  If you've ever been in a pitch dark place where even a tiny light was shone, you'll know that there is no way to ignore which way the light is.  Same here; let God shine and you with God.

*****

As the apostle Paul wrote to his Ephesian flock (2:8-10):
"For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life."

Amen.

Lent 3 B - Mar 11, 2012

Christ the King, Stone Ridge, NY
Br. Julian Mizelle, OHC
Lent 3B – Sunday, March 4, 2012


Exodus 20:1-17
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22


Three Hidden Truths of Lent

It is a real joy for me to be with you today; to join you in worship and to share in this holy season of Lent. I know so many of you from your visits to the Monastery, from Education for Ministry, from Centering Prayer and now you have welcomed me to your pulpit—you have welcomed me like family and that is a spiritual bond that I truly treasure. And I trust you all know the bond we share goes beyond me. The entire Community of Holy Cross Monastery shares a great bond of affection with you. I bring you their greetings and blessings for the Lord’s Day.

I grew up in the evangelical south in a family of Baptist preachers. You hear a LOT of stories when you’re surrounded by preachers all of the time. I’ll never forget the Sunday morning my step-father took the pulpit gleaming with pride at the completion of the church’s new nursery. It had been a long project. From the capital campaign to the construction, and now they were finally able to better meet the needs of young families with babies. Leaning over the pulpit my step-father said “I want to talk to all of the ladies here this morning. Ladies, if you will just work with me, I promise you together we will fill this nursery.” As the words fell out of his mouth he realized what he said. Turning 13 shades of red and ready to dodge the ire of husbands he wanted to crawl under the pulpit. For years, and I mean years, he got teased about this. It was a story that never died. Long after his retirement people would ask him — “So preacher, hows that nursery coming?”

Br. Julian Mizelle, OHC - portrait by Rachel Mizelle

English is a tricky language. From nuances to shades of meaning right up to double entendre’s it is easy to mis-communicate. In college I had befriended an exchange student from Korea. He so struggled with the double meanings hidden in our language. One day he came up to me quite forlorn over insulting his host at a party the night before. You see he had learned that it was a nice thing to say to someone “you’re cool!”. So when he went up to his party host and said to her, “you know, you’re not so hot!” he was shocked to discover he had totally missed on the meaning of opposites in our language.

Lent is a season filled with the language of double meanings. Ash Wednesday tells us we are nothing but dust. Then immediately we jump into scripture readings that introduce us to an angry, vengeful-sounding and wrathful God. One that calls for blood sacrifice to avenge our wretched sins. The biblical narrative lays down a law that is summarized in the Decalogue—10 commandments that no human being can ever live fully into 365 days a year throughout the decades of a lifetime. You may not be a murderer, and maybe you’ve never stolen as much as a paper clip ever in your life, but at some point you’ve coveted your neighbors donkey, or maybe it was their Jaguar.

For years I have had the habit of reading the Bible through each year. This year it just so happens that the Book of Numbers fell into Lent. Reading Numbers during Lent is not just about slogging your way through a census. But it is interwoven with stories of broken vows, wrongs against self and wrongs against others. When Moses prays to God about what to do with these individuals God’s answer comes back saying “take them outside the camp and stone them!”. It’s tough reading.

But this is the Bible. The Bible is a book filled with conflicts, paradoxes, and even historical inaccuracies. There are no glib one-sentence answers to satisfy these dilemmas. And that is precisely the point. It is by our learning to struggle with the seeming paradoxes of scripture that we learn to grow up.

Now just imagine for a moment if I had come this morning bearing a whip of cords and came into your sanctuary throwing and thrashing about the chairs, overturning every piece of furniture, yelling like a maniac, creating total chaos. (No worries Alison, I left my whip of cords back at the Monastery.) After everyone scattered and ran for cover, no doubt someone would whip out a cell phone to call 911. This is just the scene we enter in our Gospel reading this morning. Jesus was outraged and it was holy havoc. No tables were left unturned and no one was left untouched. Crashing furniture, money and coins bouncing across the floor, animals squealing and running wildly, turtledoves flapping frantically, man and beast ducking for cover. If we only read this through the eyes of our own human experience we get the message that God is angry, fierce and destructive.

Richard Rohr tells us that the Bible is an honest conversation with humanity about where power really is. All spiritual texts, including the Bible, are books whose primary focus lies outside of themselves, in the Holy Mystery. The Bible illuminates our human experience through struggling with it. It is not a substitute for human experience but an invitation into the struggle. We are actually supposed to be bothered by these texts. When God changed Jacob’s name to Israel it was because he had struggled with God. The very word “Israel” means one who struggles with God. So here is the first of 3 hidden truths I want to share with you: it is through our struggle that we come into consciousness. It is through our struggle that we wake up and grow up. It is through our struggle that we meet our real selves. We actually need the struggle.

When I hear this story of Jesus cleansing the temple I see throngs of people who have gathered for the most important religious festival of the year—Passover. They are there following their devotion. And they want to do it right. They want the right sacrifices and they want the right money to pay their temple tax. They are following the customs of their faith and the norms of their culture. They are simply doing what they have been taught to do. They are much like us traveling through this season of Lent following the rituals of Ash Wednesday, maybe giving up chocolate for 40 days, and being more penitent...seeking a greater awareness of sins. Now enters Jesus overturning the tables of our literalism, disrupting our image of who God is, using His whip of cords to cleanse our inner temple. Just when we think we understand the Christian life Jesus enters like a wild man and everything is thrown into chaos: we face a crisis in our health, someone close to us dies, we loose a job, a relationship ends, something happens and the security of normal-ness and routines abandon us.

Daniel Clendenin tells us the cleansing of the temple is a stark warning against any and every false sense of security. Misplaced allegiances, religious presumption, self-satisfaction, and spiritual complacency are just some of the tables Jesus would overturn in his own day and in ours. We so want to have it all figured out. We desperately long to control our lives, even to the extent of controlling God in our lives. And this brings us to our second hidden truth—God is not bound by our ideas of Him. God is not bound to act, behave, or function in the way we expect. God is not bound to following our conventions. He is not even bound to acting consistently to our past experiences of Him. There comes a point in the spiritual journey when God ask us to let go and let God be God—on His terms.

We have domesticated Jesus into a meek and mild Savior. Then the day comes when God enters our lives like a sledgehammer. We’re not comfortable with an angry God. We’re not even comfortable with our own anger. That’s because we’re struggling to learn that anger is a mode of connectedness to others and at its root anger is always a vivid form of caring.

Consider Job for a moment. Job is our model for a Godly life. But in a matter of days he lost all of his possessions, he lost his livelihood, he lost his family, he lost his health, he lost his image of God. The only thing he didn’t loose were 3 friends who hung around telling him that all of these horrible looses were his own fault. But would Job have learned who God really is if he hadn’t gone through the shattering experiences that brought an end to his naive conception of who God is? Would Job have met God in the whirlwind of transformation and restoration if he hadn’t passed through his own “night of the spirit.” Job needed to learn to let God be God on his own terms. And when Job did just that he not only found God, he found himself.

This leads us to our third hidden truth—one way or another God arranges the circumstances of our lives forcing us to take a leap of faith into the unknown. One way or another we have to let go of everything we know, of everything we expect, of everything we have figured out and let God be God.

When theologians consider todays Gospel reading they get weighed down arguing over where it fits chronologically into the gospel narrative. For me, that totally misses the point. Something fundamentally changed when Jesus cleansed the temple. He was shocking His followers awake and into the consciousness that how we know God would change from this point forward. The trappings of our piety only take us so far. To really know God we would need to turn within and find Him on the altar of our hearts. “The kingdom of God is within you” is the breakthrough epiphany that Jesus was acting out. A “temple not made with hands” is what He was pointing His followers to. And if the kingdom of God is within us that means we find the kingdom of God in the other: in the divorcee, in the widow, in the homeless, in the hungry, in the downtrodden, in the jobless, in the sick, in the prisoner. It means we find the kingdom of God outside the walls of sexism, homophobia, racism, classism, and yes even outside the walls of capitalism.

These are just some of the tables that I want to see overturned this Lenten season. But in all honesty it would be wrong of me to use this text as a whip of cords against my favorite injustices. Because this text is deeper than that. This is a text which calls you to take up your own whip of cords to overturn the tables of injustice in your own life. The text pushes you to imagine a Jesus entering your own sanctuary, overturning your own cherished rationalizations and driving you out in the name of God. This is a text that ask you to find God within—within the temple not made with hands. This is a text that calls you into the chaos, into new alignment, into a place of queasiness, into the unknown, into your own leap of faith where everything will change.

This is a text that calls us into our Lenten journey, into resurrection and into new life.

Amen!

Lent 2 B - Mar 4, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Adam D. McCoy, OHC
Lent 2B – Sunday, March 4, 2012

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38


From the sayings of the desert fathers:

It was said of Abba John the Dwarf that he withdrew and lived in the desert at Scetis with an old man of Thebes. His abba, taking a piece of dry wood, planted it and said to him, ‘Water it every day with a bottle of water, until it bears fruit.’ Now the water was so far away that he had to leave in the evening and return the following morning. At the end of three years the wood came to life and bore fruit. Then the old man took some of the fruit and carried it to the church saying to the brethren, ‘Take and eat the fruit of obedience’. (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, p. 85)

This story from the desert fathers is about faithful obedience, obedience and faithfulness in the face of futility. A piece of dry wood stuck in the ground in the desert. A young monk devoting every night of his life for three years to going off to get a bottle of water just to pour it on the ground. Not a hint of what he must have thought, trudging back and forth on his very short legs. What an absurdity. And then, after three years – an interesting period of time in itself – what seemed dead sprang to life. Roots, branches, leaves, flowers, fruit. Life from what was dead. Something from nothing.

Lurking in the background of this delightful story is more than just a hint of Genesis, of the creation story. Of something coming from nothing, or next to nothing. Of life coming from where there is no life, of fruit borne from a tree at the end of three years of carrying the water of life through the desert in the dark of night. Not magic, but hard work, obedience to what to others must have seemed absurd, something unheard of. And then, in the midst of the congregation, the fruit of that resurrected wood, fruit from a new Eden perhaps. Delightful.

And similarly with the story of Abraham and Sarah. An old man, a barren woman, stuck out in the desert somewhere. An impossible instruction, impossible certainly in the ordinary way of things. But Abraham and Sarah trust God, and undertake the project, as it were. I must confess, I like this story more and more the older I get. And the child of their obedience is born. I can imagine them showing off the child in the midst of the assembled family, the fruit of their old age, the child they never expected to have, the fulfilled promise of their posterity.

And lurking in the background of this story as well is the creation story. Of something coming from nothing, or next to nothing. Of life coming from where there is no life, of a child born from a couple whose bodies had passed beyond that stage of life, but who in obedience to the promise undertook what seemed absurd. Absurd and delightful. So delightful that Sarah could not repress her laughter, and so the child of promise is God-Smiled, Isaac: God smiled on his barren creation, and out of nothing brought the future, out of what seemed dead brought life.

And so our Gospel this morning. What good is a dead messiah? Whoever heard of dying and rising again? What sort of new world can come out of failure? Peter is not unlike Abraham and Sarah, like how I imagine John the Dwarf must have inwardly reacted to his abba’s instruction: How can this be? Abraham politely questions the Lord; Sarah laughs out loud; John the Dwarf, like monks in every age, probably thought his thought to himself and then, in Fr. Huntington’s polite words, treasured it up. Peter is not especially polite, like Abraham or Fr. Huntington. He doesn’t laugh like Sarah, and he certainly doesn’t put his inner thoughts on hold and get on with it, like John the Dwarf. No sir. He rebukes Jesus for what makes no sense at all. “Get behind me, Satan.” The purposes of God are fulfilled in ways that seem absurd to the world, and Peter is living very much in the world. But God asks us to have other eyes, to have an imagination, to act in obedience to what seems impossible.

Lurking behind the Gospel story is the creation story as well. Why is there something and not nothing? Because God wanted it, wants it, speaks the word, and in obedience to the word, what is comes into being. When God wills that life may transform life, he brings it out of what seems a void, the darkness of obscurity, a people off to the side of things, unimportant in the eyes of the world. His only son is born of the promise, born not in the usual way, to a mother who is, like Sarah, ecstatic at the news. Jesus labors three long years, carrying the water of life to those who do not always know what it is or respond, and at the end of it himself is on the wood planted in the ground. But the fruit that wood bears! The joy as the news is brought into the midst of the assembled family. The joy as the gathered church sees him once again in their midst, the fruit of his obedience and the love of God. What a delight!

So. We want to find our life? Lose it. Follow the Word in obedience. What it asks is absurd, we think. I’m past my time and as good as dead. The water is too far and my legs are too short. I can’t understand what is new to me. So, follow our mothers and fathers in the faith. Think our thoughts, laugh our laughs, rebuke the Lord if that’s our style. And then get on with it. God is bringing what is new out of what is old. God is bringing fruit from the dry wood, children from barren people, life from death. The creation is made new again.

As the sentence which follows our Gospel says: “I tell you solemnly, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God coming in power.”