Solemnity of James Otis Sargent Huntington

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother Adam McCoy, OHC
Solemnity of James Otis Sargent Huntington, OHC - November 27, 2012 
(transferred from Nov 25)

James Otis Sargent Huntington, Founder of OHC

    Today we are gathered in celebration of the man we count as our Founder, though he never considered himself so, James Otis Sargent Huntington.  Many are the glories, many are the triumphs of his life: pioneer of the monastic life for men in our Church; tireless worker for the rights of working people and for social justice; founder and promoter of work for the poor and neglected; spiritual advisor to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people during his long ministry; a man of deep and transcendent prayer whose mere presence radiated goodness.  

    Two weeks ago or so Br. Robert circulated to the community a report of a meeting of Buddhist and Roman Catholic monks.  The monks spoke of mid-life crisis and senior burnout, disappointment and disillusion.  At the end of the discussion, the participants in that discussion realized that “To be disillusioned is to recognize the truth that I stand on no ground, to discover how dependent I have been on everything around me, to realize that everything I was looking for, had I found it, would have been a substitute.”  The reporter quoted the very wise words of Michael Casey: 

    "Monastic life is not really about self-realization, in the immediate sense of these words:  it is far more about self-transcendence. These are noble words, but the reality they describe is a lifetime of feeling out of one’s depth: confused, bewildered, and not a little affronted by the mysterious ways of God. This is why those who persevere and are buried in a monastic cemetery can rarely be described as perfectly integrated human beings.”

    Using this as a lens, I would like to look not at the glories but at some of the struggles Fr. Huntington faced, to see if we might profit by his example in facing them, as we profit by imitating him in his bright and public successes.  In this I am also thinking about that avatar of monastic life, Anthony of Egypt.  There are plenty of mighty works recorded in St. Athanasius’ biography of St. Anthony, but what we remember best, I think, are his struggles.  He and the whole desert tradition made it their primary business to discover, confront, name, struggle against, and in some measure, with God’s help, reach a point where the reappearance of their particular demons could be put in their proper perspective, and the life of the monk could be directed more and more powerfully to God.  This was Anthony’s heroism, it was the heroism of the desert, and, I would suggest, it was Fr. Huntington’s, and perhaps ours, as well.  I want to suggest five crises in his life which Fr. Huntington met and struggled with and turned to good.

    Fr. Huntington did not “found” the Order of the Holy Cross.  It arose from a conversation he had with Fr. Robert Stockton Dod, whose excitement seems to have been the greater of the two.  They were joined by Fr. James Cameron.  When the three of them began the Order’s life in the autumn of 1881, it was Fr. Dod who led the way in the formation of community life.  It was Dod who consulted the experts in England, who wrote the first Rule, and who led them in the early days.  What must Fr. Huntington’s feelings have been when, just a year later,  Fr. Dod entered into a cycle of chronic illness that turned out to be both emotional and physical.  For the next year and a half, his illness was the constant backdrop to their community life, and Fr. Cameron left a year later, in October, 1883.  By March, 1884, Fr. Dod had left as well, leaving Fr. Huntington alone of the first three.  Fr. Huntington was young - he was only 29 when Fr. Dod left - and he was strong, but what a blow.  In his later life he was occasionally troubled by the small numbers of people coming forth to join the Order and persevering, but he never let that get in the way of new exploits.

    In the summer of 1902 the Church of the Advent in Boston invited Fr. Huntington to become its Rector.  For a Boston-born-and-bred Anglo-Catholic like Fr. Huntington, could there be a more attractive prospect?  It is instructive to understand the context of that offer.  The Order had acquired the West Park property in the fall of 1899.  The hard work of planning and fund raising occupied almost three years, during which time the community prevailed on Fr. Huntington to write a new Rule.  He was reluctant to do so, but did, and it was adopted in October, 1901.  Construction began with the laying of the cornerstone in June, 1902.  Bishop Potter of New York, who had warmly encouraged Fr. Huntington in the early stages of his vocation, refused an invitation to attend, writing in utter disdain, “Once you were the head of a Brotherhood engaged in the service of the poor.  Now, I believe yours is a “contemplative” brotherhood, and you a roaming preacher.  I must own that neither your aims nor life interest us.”  During all this time Fr. Huntington had been Superior, and had borne the brunt of these great activities.  How interesting that the writing of the Rule Fr. Huntington was not at all eager to put down on paper, and that the preparation for construction of the monastery come at the same time.  And that Bishop Potter’s renunciation of Fr. Huntington is almost simultaneous with The Advent’s invitation to priestly glory.  Fr. Huntington did not answer that call for at least two months.  We can perhaps imagine the struggle in his soul, stinging from Bishop Potter’s utter disdain, uncertain of his worthiness to write a Rule, tired from the efforts to undertake construction.  In the end, he decided to stay.

    Fr. Huntington was devoted to his family.  He was in constant contact by letter and visited them often.  He was especially close to his father and mother.  His father, Bishop Frederic Dan Huntington, was in many ways the inspiration for Fr. Huntington’s vocation as an evangelist, and Fr. Huntington cannot be understood either as a person or as a religious figure without reference to Bishop Huntington.  His father died in July, 1904, followed soon after by the death of his brother, George Huntington.  Fr. Huntington seems to have borne up for two years, but in September, 1906, tendered his resignation as Superior.  The Chapter re-elected him nonetheless, 
and he consented, but soon afterward embarked on a long trip to Europe, which lasted into the summer of 1907.  When he returned, he again tendered his resignation, and this time the Chapter accepted it.  His mother, Hannah Dane Sargent Huntington, died in 1910.  Soon after that, Fr. Huntington spent a considerable time with his three sisters in Syracuse, who ministered to him.  The next winter, that of 1911-12, he went to Florida with Fr. Lorey, who seems to have been similarly afflicted, to convalesce.   These events were clearly something close to nervous breakdowns, and they coincided with the difficulties of Fr. Henry Rufus Sargent, the third member of the Order and a titanic personality.  During exactly these same years Sargent underwent a long and fairly public crisis of conscience, which culminated in his conversion to the Roman church and subsequent expulsion from the Order, the month before Fr. Huntington’s mother’s death.  Heavy times, but Fr. Huntington, wounded though he was, sought help and soldiered on.

    Just before going with Fr. Lorey to Florida for convalescence, Fr. Huntington wrote and published a series of articles on the failure of the ideal of the religious life as he had understood it.  They are depressing reading.  The background to them is what was perceived by many Anglo-Catholics of the social justice persuasion as the failure of their movement, crystallized when in 1907 the General Convention passed a canonical change allowing preaching at Sunday services by clergy who were not ordained in the Episcopal Church.  This Open Pulpit movement gnawed at Anglo-Catholics for years afterward, and was the straw that broke Fr. Sargent’s back.  It obviously laid heavy upon Fr. Huntington as well.  He lays what he sees as the failure of missionary monasticism, which, building on his father’s teaching, was his own vision, to a lack of nerve in a church now driven by a kind of  congregational life which looks to its own well-being and not to the conversion of the nation and the world.  It seemed to him the death of an ideal, and one can wonder whether so much recent death in his own life is not the emotional background to his analysis.   But he did not let the death of what he hoped for discourage him.  He writes, in peroration:

    "The virtues of the monastic state are, indeed, the virtues which characterize the Christian life everywhere, – humility, otherworldliness, obedience, self-sacrifice, purity, love.  But that which distinguishes the monastic ideal is that, according to it, these virtues are no longer practiced by each individual, living his own life, doing his own work, but they are practiced by a number of individuals who have abandoned themselves to live and act in common, as a single unified body, moved by one impulse, guided by one will."

    The fifth struggle of Fr. Huntington which I would like to point out happened at the Chapter of 1930, when Fr. Hughson and the adherents of his more “advanced”, ritualist, historicist and conservative brand of Anglo-Catholicism carried the day.   The Chapter elected Fr. Hughson Superior, and officially titled Fr. Huntington as “Father Founder”.  It was a title Fr. Huntington never wanted, knowing it to be factually untrue.  If anyone was the founder of the Order, it was Fr. Dod.  Fr. Huntington felt elevated to irrelevance, put out to pasture, made redundant.  But despite his protestations, even as the Chapter of the Order – we in the corporate sense – were sidelining him, enacting our own particular patricidal drama, the greater truth did not escape the community.  Fr. Huntington had persevered.  In face of so many struggles, many more than those we have examined this morning, Fr. Huntington had remained steadfast.  The demons of abandonment, of exhaustion, of grief, of the loss of his original vision, had been met and struggled with and recognized and named and had lost some of their power.  He was, in the late autumn of his life, not unlike St. Anthony, who emerged from the fortress of his struggle an almost-new Adam: “The state of his soul was one of purity, for it was not one constricted by grief or relaxed by pleasure, nor affected by either laughter or dejection.”  He had seemed to have lost in the struggle between his vision and Fr. Hughson’s, and so he turned that loss to good.  His last five years are a marvel of public speaking, spiritual counsel and private encouragement to multitudes of individuals who sought him out.  The fiftieth anniversary of his life profession in November of 1934 was greeted with a vast outpouring of love and praise from every part of the Church and beyond.  After his funeral in 1935, which Fr. Hughson did not attend because he was in Liberia, the Presiding Bishop called him “the best loved priest in the Episcopal Church.”

    So, what is struggle and what is glory?  Is there something problematic with a person who has great times of struggle?  Should we view such a person as a detriment to monastic life because it does not, at the moment, seem productive?  Is monastic life to be measured by our successes according to the standards of our culture?  Sometimes I wonder if the glory we gain in the ordinary understanding of glory – institutions founded, buildings built, people attracted to vocation and membership, financial and other kinds of stability – sometimes I wonder if all these are not like the simple service of a meal.  The food must be cooked, the table must be set, the dishes must be served, the mess must be cleaned up.  But the important thing is not the cook, the servers, the cleaners, but the food and the fellowship of the meal, what the food can build in the body and what the spirit can gain from friendship and conviviality.  All of what the world sees as our great work is in service of the actual lives of the monks, messy and incomplete and fraught as they are.  All in service of providing an arena for their battles, small and great, a safe place for them to meet the demons, to engage the struggle.  That is why we do all this.  

    We are always talking of being counter-cultural.  Perhaps Fr. Huntington’s life can point us the way.  Which is greater – the founding, the preaching, the writing, the counseling, the great works, or the acceptance of the struggles that his life brought him, losing companions, facing exhaustion and the temptation to escape, owing up to his own weakness in the face of grief at the death of loved ones and the loss of friends, the realization that his ideal had not triumphed, the indignity of an honor which placed him on the shelf?  I would suggest that his greatness has its roots in his struggles, that without the struggles the greatness would not have emerged, and that the greatest struggles are those he feared the most because they penetrated to the heart of his life.      The monastic life gives to monks the time and the space and the opportunity to encounter our demons and to engage in the struggles they bring.  Fr. Huntington was not diminished by engaging his struggles but rather those struggles created in him capacities for growth and for a deepened character of sympathy with others.  Could he have accomplished his great works if he had been spared his griefs?  Perhaps some of them, but perhaps only in the vigor of his youth.  Would he have been the man from whose life flowed such grace and goodness?  I doubt it.   

    I think God loves us because of our struggles.  What kind of monastic life does not have its demons?  Is a monastic life without struggle worth the effort?  In the Kingdom of Heaven, who will be marked out as the greatest among us?  Perhaps it will be those who do great things that the world can see and touch and measure and remark and praise.  But I think, in fact, the greatest among us in the Kingdom of Heaven will be those who courageously faced their demons and engaged in the struggles their life brought them.  And of those demons, those struggles, only God knows the true story.  Perhaps the greatest in God’s eyes are not the strongest but the weakest among us, as the world would account them, who only with God’s help can meet and name their demons, and who even with God’s help win perhaps only small victories.  Perhaps we should revise our estimates of each other and ask, Who among us faces their demons, who among us struggles perhaps without our even knowing?  Perhaps the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven are quite unknown to us now, but so greatly loved by God because he knows and sees them in their fullness.  

    Maybe being perfectly integrated is not the goal for monks.  Maybe the monastic goal is to put our imperfection into the heart of Christ.

Christ the King - Nov 25, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother James Michael Dowd, OHC
Christ the King - Year B- Sunday, November 25, 2012

Daniel 7:9-10,13-14
Revelation 1:4b-8
John 18:33-37

Listen to my Voice

My paternal ancestors, who came to be known as the O'Dowd clan, ruled one-fifth of Ireland, that area then known as Connaught, from the early-300's in the Common Era and for the next, approximately 1,300 years.  These same ancestors were often elected the High King and crowned at Tara, and wielded great power throughout the land and especially in the western part of that country.  King Laoghaire, of this same line, having been converted by St. Patrick himself, united the power of the clan with the true faith and thus, they were unstoppable.

Now in the early middle ages, the O'Dowd's were challenged by the O'Donnell's and the Burke's and to hold them off, the O'Dowd's erected a circle of twenty-four castles known as the O'Dowd Castles, in their seat of power, which is, today, known as the Counties Mayo and Sligo.  The ruins of twenty of these castles can still be visited today in some of the most beautiful scenery in all Ireland.

This ring of castles held off invaders from both land and sea and those O'Donnell's and Burke's were handily defeated – pushed out of Mayo and Sligo, the Holy Land of Ireland, and allowed an O'Dowd reign for several hundred more years before that nasty Cromwell, and later, that even worse potato famine either killed off or drove off into the Irish Diaspora so many of the O'Dowd clan.

And inherent in that wee tale of my ancestors is the struggle that I have with this feast, the feast of Christ the King.  My struggle is perhaps semantic, but I really do wonder about putting so much emphasis on the idea of Christ the King because I believe that there are not one, but two dangers, in a spirituality that is centered on what is, lets face it, a human understanding of kingship.

O'Dowd Castle at Easkey Pier, County Sligo, Ireland
Picture by Stefan Schnebelt

The O'Dowd tale is ultimately the story of power lost, of crumbling castles left in ruins, of a people fleeing a hideous foreign dictator and the scourge of potato blight.  You see Kingdoms collapse – always.  Kings lose their power – sooner or later – and the people are left to fend for themselves, often unable to escape brutality, torture, starvation and death.  And so that is the first problem I see with celebrating the Kingship of Christ.  As I said, it might just be a matter of semantics - though I think it is something more – but kingdoms collapse in on themselves or fall at the hand of others.  It just does not seem enough to me to say that Christ's Kingdom is different from all the rest.

The second problem for me with the Kingship analogy is not when the king has lost power, but when he has it.  Go back to that ring of O'Dowd castles.  In order to hold on to power, a king must build a ring of castles, or an iron dome, or a missile defense system, in order to keep the O'Donnell's and the Burke's, or whomever, out.  The goal of such fortification is to keep others – lots of others – out.

And then we have Jesus before Pilate.  One who will not even claim kingship, though his disciples begged him to do so, though Jewish leadership accused him of doing so, though a Roman governor inquired of him whether it was so, he just stood there and told Pilate – and us – that it is we who need to think of him as a king, but that his kingdom is not something of this world, that it is not something we will easily understand, if at all.  Jesus tells us that he just did not come to be crowned king.  He did come, he makes quite clear, for truth.  And I sometimes wonder if this feast would better serve if entitled Christ the Truth.

You see, the Incarnation turns everything, even the truth, on its head.  And the first thing it turned on its head was the nature of revelation.  The people had long been expecting a Messiah that was a warrior-king.  Generation after generation, century after century, the Jews had longed for a king that would lead them into a battle that would ultimately defeat their enemies and act as a kind of war to end all wars.  The prophets told them that this was so, at least, that's what they believed the prophets told them; and the people interpreted these revelations as just what they needed to have peace, prosperity and to live in God's presence forever.

But when God decided to incarnate Godself and to become, in the being of Christ, both God and human, the very nature of revelation – and the particular revelations of what it means to have a God who is king is thrust upside down, shaken up and then turned inside out.  In fact, most all revelations before and since the Incarnation simply have to be interpreted in a different way, because God has called us to something very different: God has called us to become part of Godself.  And to become part of God, is to at least attempt to leave behind our human ways of understanding things, and to begin looking at a new reality.  A reality – the only actual reality – from the point of view of God.

And the first thing that this new reality teaches us, I think, as I struggle with this, is that we must strip ourselves of worldly power by not calling on our army of followers, whoever they may be, to defend our little kingdoms, our little ideas, our little selves, and simply listen to Christ's voice.

As a benedictine monk, it is that last verse of today's Gospel that so grabbed my attention: “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”  Benedictine spirituality is centered on the practice of listening.  Every time we pray the Office, or worship at the Eucharist, or practice Lectio Divina, or engage in meditative prayer, we are attempting to listen to Christ's voice, to belong to the truth.  It is that, and that alone, which enables us to stand before our own Pilate and reject the lure of power, of armies, of kingship – and to accept the idea of selfless love, a love that is willing to lay down our lives for our friends.

This practice of listening enables us to open the ear of our heart, in that famous Benedictine phrase, showing us that the revelation to Daniel was correct.  Listen again to part of that first reading:

I saw one like a human being
coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One
and was presented before him.
To give him dominion
and glory and kingship,
that all people, nations, and languages
should serve him.

This revelation was correct, that is, if interpreted through the lens of the Incarnation.  In many places throughout the Gospels, Christ tells us where we could find him.  He told us to find him in the poor, the sick, the lonely, the mourning, in those who seek peace, in those who are imprisoned, in those who are lost.  What he never told us was to find him on a throne, sitting up there in heaven.  Now, go ahead, look around this church – please, look around at each other.

Do not look up to the sky, waiting for some glory to be revealed.  Find that glory, find Christ, find your King; find him in the person in this room who is most broken, sickest, poorest, loneliest, the one who is so broken-hearted over the loss of a loved one.  Find Christ your King and understand that no army, no loyal band of followers, will come rescue that person unless you do it.  Tear down your ring of castles and welcome the stranger, love the enemy, forgive the sinner.

Know that a king worth fighting for is a king worth loving for.  Know that a King worth loving for is a king worth listening to.  Listen to the truth of the Incarnation.  When God joined Godself to humanity, God did not so much lower Godself as elevate humanity.  By this elevation, God makes us an intimate part of Godself and that act, changes the nature of humanity forever.  It changes us in such a way that allows us to rise above our own sinfulness, selfishness and narcissistic tendencies so that we can see Christ our King in the O'Donnell's and in the Burke's and stand before our own Pilate, our own Chief Priest, and say to them: “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. I belong to Christ the King, and I have listened to his voice.”

Proper 28 B - Nov 18, 2012 - Leesburg, VA

St. James Episcopal Church, Leesburg, VA
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
Proper 28 B - Sunday, November 18, 2012


Daniel 12:1-3
Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25
Mark 13:1-8


Br. Robert's sermon was recorded and is available for listening at the following link:

http://www.stjamesleesburg.org/podcasts/audio20121118.mp3

Proper 28 B - Nov 18, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Scott Borden, OHC
Proper 28 B - Sunday, November 18, 2012


Daniel 12:1-3
Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25
Mark 13:1-8

A model rendition of the Herodian Temple

The 13th Chapter of Mark is an important turning point in this particular Gospel. Up to this point Mark has been mostly concerned with Jesus' actions and interactions. Now Mark's attention turns to what will happen next – what will happen after... Jesus is preparing his disciples to continue after his death. The Gospel of Mark ends, as you may recall, very abruptly. Jesus is killed and then there is only a very brief mention of resurrection. Mark, in his own way, is telling us now, before the crucifixion, how life will continue after crucifixion.

We humans have an interesting ability to reorient messages to suit our desires. This 13th Chapter of Mark smacks of apocalypse. And any time we hear anything apocalyptic, we rush ahead to the Book of Revelation and the so called “end times.”

But remember – Mark doesn't know about the Book of Revelation, nor would early readers of Mark's Gospel. Maybe apocalypse and “end times” are not the lens for the Gospel according to Mark. So if some whiff of “end times” and all the fanciful energy our modern culture puts into that particular narrative have found their way into the back of your mind, stop it.

Mark is an amazingly sparse narrator – so it's natural that we want to fill in extra details – to guild Mark's lily for him, as it were. But if we do that, we miss the actual lily with which Mark presents us.

Jesus comes out of the Temple with his disciples and this terribly important conversation takes place – in the space of just two sentences... In the first sentence, one of the disciples admires the grandeur of the Temple – how big its stones are and how big the entire edifice is. Though the disciple does not use the words, he is no doubt commenting on how rich, how powerful, and how permanent the temple structure is. This is, after all, part of the message that such structures are intended to convey.

Many of our modern buildings are designed to make exactly the same statement. Great bank buildings erected after the Great Depression were built massively and opulently – in order to assure depositors that the bank was dependable and would not, as so many banks had recently done, disappear.

What large stones and what a large building...

The second sentence... Jesus says – oh, so you think this building is big? It is going to be wiped away. The building may speak of power and permanence, but the building lies.

You may also have lurking in the back of your mind a reference like “Destroy this temple and in 3 days I will rebuild it.” But, like “end time” thinking, that's also not part of this particular story. Jesus isn't being metaphorical so much as he's being prophetic. For this very temple will, in fact, soon be destroyed.

This is the first message we have to hear: Something very big and very permanent can be wiped away in the blink of an eye. Of course we know that.

But what are our great monuments to permanence and power? What structures tell us that our way of life is safe and secure... tell us that we are protected... Jesus stands with us and tells us that these edifices are lying to us. They are not permanent. They are not powerful. They can, and they will, be wiped away.

Big, powerful, and permanent institutions, ironically, demand that WE defend THEM constantly in big and powerful ways. This is not what Jesus calls us to do. Yet how many lives have we been willing to sacrifice in the quest to protect our wealth and power and our lavish way of life?

Alright, so we've gotten this far in just the first two sentences of the passage of Mark...

There is certainly an apocalyptic quality to the passage which starts to become clear in the third sentence. Deceivers will come in my name... There will be wars and rumors of wars... Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom... There will be famines and earthquakes... And, really, we all know that these are the harbingers of the “end times.”

Except, it seems, in Mark's telling of the Gospel, Jesus doesn't know this. Jesus says: “Do not be alarmed, the end is still to come...” In other words, this isn't it...

Jesus is not talking about “end times.” He is talking about bad times. Jesus is preparing his followers for difficult days ahead. This is extremely important – because living in bad times is totally different than living in end times.

Living in end times might be terrifying, but it isn't all that difficult because you are not in it, after all, for the long run. You're in it for the ending. Living in bad times requires endurance and persistence. Job, for example, lived, for much that particular book, in bad times, not in end times. And Job persisted.

Jesus tells his disciples how to live in bad times. We stopped reading at the 8th verse, but if we kept reading for just a few more verses, we would hear that we will be dragged before governors and kings – as witnesses. The gospel, Jesus says, must be preached.

Need more? “You will be hated because of me,” Jesus says, “but the one who endures will be saved.” That is where Jesus is going in this particular discourse. We have to endure in witnessing to the Gospel.

The Gospel, the good news is not, after all, terribly obscure. Jesus asks specific things over and over from his followers. Sometimes it's phrased like “if you love me, feed my sheep.” Sometimes it is in the form of direction: “visit the prisoners, protect the widows and the orphans, feed the hungry.” And other times it is in the form of the ancient temple creed: “Love the Lord your God” – which includes the additional element to love our neighbors as ourselves. Sometimes is an observation: “blessed are the peace makers, blessed are those who are poor in heart.” And sometimes it's a mandate – “love one another as I have loved you.”

To witness to the Gospel is to express God's love in all that we do. The harder the times, I suspect, the harder the challenge; though good times surely pose their challenges as well. We have to endure.

The challenge of the Gospel is not that it is unclear or uncertain. The problem is that is is not easy. Love demands justice – for all. Comfort, security, power, wealth, the status quo all feed on injustice. The Gospel demands change.

Jesus warns us not to be led astray – there are deceivers who will come in the name of Jesus. There were false prophets in Jesus' time. There have been false prophets in the intervening centuries. And today, thanks to the amplifying power of the internet, we have an apparently limitless supply of false prophets from which to choose.

False prophets will appeal to us by saying mostly what we want to hear – wrapped in stern and moral sounding images.

For example, there is that chorus of so called preachers who appear after every disaster to tell us that its God's wrath for some wicked thing we are doing. And its fascinating that Jesus, in Mark's Gospel, seems to identify just exactly this scenario. There will be wars and rumors, there will be earthquakes and famines... but don't be alarmed.

Yet in our alarm, urged on by the false prophets, we double down on defending our status quo, our stuff, our way of life – and at the same time perpetuating injustice, failing to live the Gospel.

The next time someone begins interpreting a natural event as God's wrath – tune him or her out. When you hear of wars or rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Stick to the Gospel – to loving God and to loving neighbor.

Jesus tells us the Gospel must be preached. There is a famous quote, attributed to St Francis, but who knows... “Francis” says: “Preach the Gospel always. Use words only when necessary.” In the very actions of our lives we are able to preach the Gospel. And if our lives, our actions, don't preach the Gospel, our words are useless as a broken pot, just noise like a clanging symbol.

In good times and in difficult times we must bear witness in word and in deed – for the Gospel must be preached. That is what Jesus is telling us in the passage from Mark. God is love, and those who abide in love, abide in God. In hard times and in good Jesus calls us to endure – to persist – to abide

Proper 27 B - Nov 11, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Julian Mizelle, OHC
Proper 27 B - Sunday, November 11, 2012

Ruth 3: 1-5; 4:13-17
1 Kings 17:8-16
Psalm 146
Hebrews 9:24-28
Mark 12:38-44

The Public Face of God’s Purpose

Ruth gleaning in the fields of Boaz

In the past I have been quick to note my puzzlement over the choices of scripture readings our Lectionary makes, but this week I marvel at how they collide with our news headlines. As Americans elected not only a President for a new term, but men and women for Congress, Senators, and officials at every level of our government, scripture speaks prophetically to the Church. Psalm 146, our appointed Psalm for today, (which we chanted at Matins this morning) says “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish.” I think it very wise for us to remember, on this first Sunday after a national election, that in the entire canon of scripture there is only one reference to God laughing. In Psalm 2:4 God laughs at the pretensions of political power. 

I would like to share with you Walter Brueggemann’s poem titled “Post Election Day.”

You creator God
who has ordered us
in families and communities,
in clans and tribes,
in states and nations.

You creator God
who enacts your governance
in ways overt and
in ways hidden.
You exercise your will for
peace and for justice and for freedom.

We give you thanks for the peaceable order of
our nation and for the chance of choosing—
all the manipulative money notwithstanding.

We pray now for new governance
that your will and purpose may prevail,
that our leaders may have a sense
of justice and goodness,
that we as citizens may care about the
public face of your purpose.

We pray in the name of Jesus who was executed
by the authorities.

I proudly joined with my Brothers this past Tuesday in making a pilgrimage to our local poll to exercise the great freedom of casting my vote. And in doing so I give thanks to all of those who have answered a Godly vocational call to public service; from local school boards to Capital Hill I stand with them all in prayer. But I am also reminded by the Apostle Paul that as a Christian we each hold dual citizenship: we are citizens of this world and we are citizens of heaven. Our very Baptismal Covenant calls us to unconditional allegiance to the Gospel. And in the political arena this calls us to stand for what Walter Brueggemann calls “the public face of God’s purpose.” Our Lectionary readings this morning point us to just that public face of God’s purpose.

Psalm 146 continues in telling us “the Maker of heaven and earth” is biased on behalf of the oppressed: He feeds the hungry, frees prisoners, and heals the blind. He lifts up those who are weighed down, he defends foreigners (and I read that as immigrants), protects the orphans, and sustains the widow. Seven categories of people who each face very different challenges yet hold one thing in common. They each are vulnerable to forces beyond their control. 

If we include today’s assigned reading from 1 Kings (our alternate reading from the OT) our lectionary readings tell the stories of 5 widows. 

The book of Ruth is a story of 3 widows -- the Israelite Naomi who fled Israel to Moab to escape famine and her two immigrant daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth. After ten years in Moab, and despite Naomi’s protests, Ruth returned with her to Israel. In Bethlehem, Ruth was the foreigner from an enemy country. She was childless. She was widowed from a mixed marriage. In her culture she was one who had run out of options. Yet she vowed to cling to Naomi, to Naomi’s Hebrew people, and to their God. Ruth secured an economic livelihood for Naomi by gleaning fields among the hired hands. She ingratiated herself to Boaz, the owner of those fields she gleaned. In spite of her status as an “outcast immigrant” all of Bethlehem knew this foreign widow as a “woman of excellence.” 

Our optional reading from 1 Kings tells the story the widow Zarephath who lived at a pivotal juncture in Israel’s history. In Daniel Berrigan’s book, The Kings and Their Gods, he interprets the OT books of 1st and 2nd Kings as self-serving imperial records that portray Israel’s kings as they saw themselves and as they wanted others to see them. The unifying theme running through 1st and 2nd Kings is God favors my regime over your and God hates my enemies. To this end the Kings employ “many pathological means of political retaliation with absolute impunity, military might, revisionist history, manipulation of memory and time, grandiose agendas, economic exploitation, virulent nationalism, sanctioning it all with divine approval, legitimation by religious sycophants.” Sound familiar?

The prophet Elijah was the dissenting voice to this imperial power. But the tactic employed to dissenting voices was to silence them as unpatriotic and seditious. But that didn’t stop Elijah from facing down the political powers of his day. Elijah’s story begins with the widow Zarephath who, at great personal sacrifice, cares for him during a severe drought. This narrative of an alien widow and a Hebrew prophet offering each other mutual care accross nationalistic boundaries assumed such sacred importance in Israel’s story-telling that Jesus Himself repeated the story a 1000 years later. This story occurs in Luke’s gospel but this is the important part--the reaction of the people in the synagogue was one of outrage and furious anger. 

That God cares for widows, and that God’s people should too, is one of the most prominent themes throughout the Bible. The Greek word for widow occurs about 25 times in the New Testament alone. 

The widow in today’s Gospel reading from Mark is nameless. She dared to give an offering to the temple treasury that amounted to a fraction of a penny in the presence of many wealthy benefactors making large donations. But whereas the rich gave out of their convenience and surplus, Jesus said this poor widow has given more than all the others. Can’t Jesus add? Doesn’t Jesus know the value of two copper coins? He absolutely does. But he saw her heart and knew she had given out of her poverty. She put in all she had to live on. It was her grocery money, her rent, her gas money, her little bit of security for all of the necessities of life.

I must be honest with you in that this Gospel story has always caused me to struggle. Every time I read it, its most fundamental message seems to be saying if you really love God, if you have really given your life to God, if you are serious about being a Christ follower you will give up all financial security. I’ve never gone to Church and emptied my bank account. I never put an entire paycheck into the offering plate as it went by trusting that somehow God would work everything out. And since I find the notion of doing so just too fearful this story has always left me feeling that my righteousness is not good enough, my piety falls short. It left me feeling inadequate as a Christian. And herein lies the danger of this text.

So I’m asking some hard questions--does Jesus point to the poor widow who gives her last two coins to the temple as a model for how we should give? Or does Jesus point to her because she is a tragic example of how religious institutions can suck the life out of people? There is also a bit of irony here. If we were to keep reading the narrative of the Gospel of Mark we would read that Jesus walks out of this temple with His disciples and almost immediately tells them that this temple is about to be destroyed. “Not one stone will be left.” This poor widow has given her last cent to a doomed religious institution. The larger narrative of Mark puts Jesus at constant odds with Scribes and Pharisees, with all of temple leadership. And here He condemns them for “devouring widows houses.” The institution of the Jerusalem temple had become perverted. While the leadership leads privileged lives, widows, the poor and vulnerable go unprotected. The teachable moment between Jesus and His disciples is that when the widow dropped her last two coins in the treasury box, temple leaders should have run over and taken those two coins and given them back. Then they should have reached in for a larger sum and said “here, you need this. Let us help you out!” 

It is completely true that the widow gave from her heart. Her gift was far greater than a gift of just two copper coins. She gave the whole of her life. And I beleive that Mark uses the story of this poor widow to point us theologically to the Cross, where Jesus is heading and where He will give the whole of His life. It is also true that the Jerusalem temple represents an unjust system that harmed the very people they were called to serve. Today, this Gospel text calls to you and to me to give the whole of our lives to facing down unjust social, political and economic systems. We are called to give the whole of our lives to stand with the oppressed, the hungry, the homeless, the blind, prisoners, immigrants, and widows. The national election has finally ended but our call to put the public face of God’s purpose on this world has only just begun. 

Amen!

Proper 26 B - Nov 4, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
Proper 26 B – Sunday, November 4, 2012


Ruth 1:1-18
Hebrews 9:11-14
Mark 12:28-34

George Cattermole (1800-1868), The Scribe

Today, Mark the Evangelist tells us about a pivot time in the ministry of Jesus to his people.

In earlier pages of this gospel, Jesus and his opponents have been exchanging volleys of challenge and riposte, debating in the Temple at Jerusalem. The challengers have been Pharisees and Herodians, Sadducees and scribes.

In response to the challenges, Jesus has exposed the deceitfulness of his adversaries. They have been publicly humiliated, losing honor to the benefit of Jesus.

Jesus has demonstrated authentic authority. In the process, he has accumulated so much honor that soon, no one will dare challenge him verbally any more.

In further pages of this gospel, Jesus, using this authority and honor, will move to the verbal offensive. His enemies will eventually resort to institutional and physical violence to silence him.

*****

But just for now, there is a truce. There is this episode of mutual appreciation between Jesus and a holder of religious privilege, a scribe.

In answering the Scribe's question about “Which commandment is the first of all,” Jesus deftly uses his people's tradition. And he makes that tradition take a leap by combining two commandments in a way that very much make them one. In our Christian tradition, we call it the Great Commandment.

*****

Although this passage appears in all 3 synoptic gospels, Mark is the only one who has Jesus quote the two verses of Deuteronomy (6:4&5) that start the Shema, one of Judaism's most important prayers.

“SHEMA, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”

Shema means “Hear” in Hebrew. To a Benedictine it resonates with the “Listen” that begins the Rule of Saint Benedict. It says “Prick up your ears. Pay attention.”

*****

Today, we will walk our way through this Great Commandment step by step. First, “the Lord is one.”

We may think that that introduction is no longer needed in our days of dominant monotheism, but I claim we need it just as much as Jesus' listeners who lived surrounded by dominant polytheism.

I put it to you that even we, in this room, still adore more than one God.

Do we not put most of our time and energy into participating in the cults of money, control, appearance and seduction?

Do we not believe more readily in the precepts of science and economics than in the deepest aspirations and insights of our souls?

There are many deities around, even today.

Also, I put it to you that we still believe that our own religion, if not our own church, is the only valid one. Yet the Lord is One. How could this One God wish us to be divided and dividisive? Instead, shouldn't we be mutually accepting and appreciative of one another's perspectives?

All of humanity is still struggling mightily to love but One God and to believe in the radical oneness of all.

*****Next in the Great Commandment comes, “You shall love the Lord your God.”

This not an admonishment to right belief or straight religious practice. It is a prescription to act. And to act in the most complete fashion possible to humans; “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”

Does this prescription leave anything out to not participate in the love of God? It is the whole human being and the whole human existence that is bidden to the love of God.

Nothing that you are, and nothing that you do, or don't do, are irrelevant to your love of God.

This is a tall agenda. But then this is the tallest love we can ever aspire to.

*****And then Jesus adds another commandment to the first and he conjoins the two. This second commandment hails from Leviticus (19:18b).

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

This commandment assumes you love yourself enough to care for your essential safety and needs.

The original context of this commandment, in the book of Leviticus, would have led to a restrictive interpretation of who our neighbor is. It would have meant a kinsman or a fellow member of one's tribe.

But the full context of Jesus' predication lets us know that no one remains out of his description of our neighbor.

The canonical gospels leave us no place for exclusion.

The Evangelist John recounts what we call the New Commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you.” This takes care by the way of those who'd argue they don't love themselves to start with.

The Evangelist Luke gives us the parable of the Good Samaritan right after his own account of the Great Commandment.

And for good measure, in Matthew, Jesus extends love of the neighbor to include our enemies.

More radical inclusion you will not find.

*****

Finally, the scribe who discourses with Jesus concurs with him. The scribe even goes on to add that Jesus' combined commandment is more important than all Temple sacrifices. That is a portentous statement coming from someone who sees the Temple as his workplace, his avocation and the purpose of his life.

While our liturgies are great offerings to God and neighbor; while our liturgies are offered at personal cost of effort and time; they do not exonerate us from loving, not even monks.Jesus enjoins us to the daily work of loving the One, and loving every one, and loving oneself, with no restriction or exception.

*****

“You are not far from the Kingdom of God” compliments Jesus. “Not far” yet not fully inside that Kingdom. “Close, but no cigar!”

So how long does the scribe have to journey in order to cross the threshold and to step into the Kingdom?

As the proverb goes: “The longest journey a human must take is the distance from his head to his heart.” And this proverb assumes the heart is the right engine to move us into action.

Intellectual assent and emotional assent to Jesus' prescription do help. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your mind and with all your soul” starts the commandment.

But then it adds “and with all your strength.” We are talking about action here.

Jesus asks for our love of God and neighbor as an action, not simply as a wish or even a longing.

This love we are invited to is an active verb not a conceptual noun.

*****

So I challenge myself, and you, to examine our heart and mind and soul and strength.

Where am I fully engaged in loving God and neighbor?

And where do I need to stretch?

Whom and how do I not love enough?

Where do I judge, rather than love?

Where is my prejudice hiding (or maybe friends can tell me it's in full sight)?

What would help me to remove my own impediments to love?

What do I learn in listening to my answering these questions?

*****

Don't ask me for the answers, I'm still looking. But keep looking, and grow in loving.

You are not far from the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is close at hand.

Let love take the journey from your head to your heart and from your heart to your hands.

If necessary, let your actions start building the Kingdom, while heart and mind catch up with them. Whichever way brings you to loving God and loving neighbor as yourself, explore it.

Bon voyage! Feel free to send this neighbor a postcard.

Amen.

All Saints - Nov 1, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam D. McCoy, OHC
All Saints Day - Year B - Thursday, November 1, 2012


Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9
Revelation 21:1-6a
John 11:32-44

Fra Angelico.  The Forerunners of Christ with Saints and Martyrs.
About 1423-24. Tempera on wood.  National Gallery, London.

There are three very different pictures of holiness in our scripture readings this morning.

From Wisdom: The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God.  Surely this is the traditional understanding of the reward awaiting those who keep the Law, the reward of those who are just and upright and loving.  The reward of personal holiness, of keeping the Law and walking in the steps of God’s goodness.  But there is a certain passivity to this holiness: it is in death that God’s approval is made certain.  No hand can touch them now.  They are safe.  They are at peace.

From Revelation: I saw a new heaven and a new earth: the new Jerusalem, coming down from heaven adorned as a bride for her husband.  Death, mourning, pain are no more, for the first things have passed away.  This is active holiness, the victory of God, the goal of a religion concerned with the collective entirety of the human race, the joint hope of justice and vindication for all God’s elect.  This apocalyptic vision is of a social order restored, and it is beautiful!

But at what a huge cost: the destruction of so many people, the unimaginably vivid images not only of harmony restored, but of the battle required to win that restoration.  Revelation rightly raises questions about how the kingdom is to be restored.  Are its destructive and bloody visions really congruent with the life, the ministry and the message of Jesus?  Holiness is achieved, but may one wonder at the blood lust in this picture of holiness?

These are two clear, conventional images, traditional tableaus of the rewards and triumph of holiness.  But they are not the only images. 

Our gospel lesson today is neither passive nor violent, but combines both the individual and collective contexts of holiness in a new way: Two sisters grieving for their dead brother, calling in desperation on their friend to bring him back to them, who does so, revealing the power of God in mercy and pity, in the restoration of life lost.   

Two things to notice, perhaps:

1) The personal, family, domestic atmosphere: Mary and Martha and Lazarus are Jesus’ friends.  He stays with them when he visits Jerusalem.  This is not anonymous, general.  The dead man has a name, is their brother, is also Jesus’ friend.  Jesus must know what his death will mean to these women, widows perhaps, or unmarried, left unprotected in their social context.  This little group is a community which invites Jesus into its midst, more intimate than his fellowship with the disciples.  It is, perhaps, a picture of the early church, meeting together in homes, calling Jesus into their midst.

2) Who are the saints in this picture, besides Jesus?  It is an ordinary scene, even if filled with the drama of loss and death.  This is not a souls-in-the-hand-of-God story, comforting Mary and Martha with the consolation that their brother is with God now.  But neither is it the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven.  It is stark and raw.  Mary and Martha are portrayed in other places as getting on each others’ nerves, their home not a place of absolute tranquility.  It is in this very real, very human context that Jesus brings Lazarus back from the dead, back to the gritty reality of human life as it is actually lived.  If they are saints, they aren’t perfect yet.

So what might be the message for us here?  What does this Gospel story say about saints, about holiness?

I would venture two thoughts:

1) The human, believing community is the place where the miracle of the renewal of life takes place.  Not alone in solitary, individual righteousness, and not in spectacular, destructive glory.  It is this little community which, powerless in itself, calls Jesus into their presence, asks for his help.  And it is into this little community’s care that Jesus gives in trust the now-living Lazarus.   Weak as it is, life can be restored when the community is centered on Jesus and trusts in his power, and to this community Jesus entrusts the care of this new life: unbind him and set him free.  That is our charge as community: To seek new life in each other, to remove the winding sheets of death and set each other free.  

2) The life given back to Lazarus is not a reward for his goodness.  We know nothing about his character at all. Rather, it is the gift of God through Jesus Christ, given because Jesus loved him.  Lazarus’ new life is from Christ, in Christ.  If there is a theological point to this story – and isn’t there always a theological point to these stories? – it may be that somehow, in the community of the faithful, in the communion of saints, as it were, lives that are headed toward oblivion, the oblivion of death itself, and perhaps toward other kinds of oblivion as well. Those lives, can be called back, can be restored because, simply put, Jesus loves us.  Think of how many great saints were headed down one track and suddenly turned to start a new path: Teresa of Avila, Ignatius Loyola, Francis of Assisi, Benedict, Martin of Tours, Pachomius, Anthony, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Becket, John Donne, George Herbert, and so many others, mostly unknown to us, but not unknown to God.  The greatest of them is St. Paul himself, who describes what this experience was to him, and who gives us the words to describe the holiness which Christ gives us when he becomes our life: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” (Gal 2:19-20)

May it be so with us as well. 

May we be a community like the family of Lazarus, calling Jesus into our midst in our need, as our friend, asking him for the life the community cannot itself give but which can only come from God. 

May we know that the life we receive is in the hands of God and under His protection. 

May we know that the life we receive is the foretaste of the glory of the new heaven and the new earth, and that in that life we are called to be citizens of the new Jerusalem. 

And most of all, may we know that the life we live is not our own life, lived on our own terms and for our own purposes, but the life of Christ who lives in us.