Proper 21 B - Sep 27, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. José Folgueira, OHC
Proper 21 B – Sunday, September 27, 2015

Mark 9:38-50

“Have salt in yourselves”

The look of home-made apple pie...

We struggle to be the way we think we should be. I think of a scene in a movie, about an overworked young mother, in a high-powered job. She realizes late one evening she is committed to bring a pie to her child’s class the next day. She just doesn’t have the time to whip one up, so she runs out and picks one up at the store. But it looks too... well, store-bought, too perfect. So she squishes it a bit around the edges, so it looks a little more home-made. Because heaven forbid any of the other moms would think that this woman didn’t make the pie with her own hands for her precious child’s school. We care about how we appear to others. We want to belong. We want to be approved of by those around us. And sometimes we allow the silliest things, like a pie for a school bake sale, to make us a little crazy in our desire to be seen as fine, normal, upstanding member of our community.

And in that desire, we do things that get in the way of being authentic, honest, ourselves. We squish the edges of the pie. We worry that we are not good enough, so we do odd things that we think will make us look better. In a commencement speech, the author David McCullough names this very pointedly:

In our unspoken but not subtle Darwinian competition with one another, which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality, we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point, and we are happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that is the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole.

McCullough may have named the twenty-first century phenomenon, but Jesus’s disciples were just as likely to fall into this trap as you and I are. Remember last week? In the midst of Jesus telling them the most important part of his story, that he was going to be killed by the authorities but would rise again from the dead, what were they doing? Arguing. About what? About who is more important. Completely missing the point, of course. Thinking about the wrong thing, about who appears to have most power and favor.

And Jesus loses his patience with them, as he is continuing to lose patience with them in today’s passage. I can just hear Jesus now: come on guys, how many times do I have to explain things to you before it sinks in. Ok guys let’s try this again.

They have come to him, complaining about somebody who is trying to do what they are supposed to do, to cast demons out. In other words, we thought we were the special ones who get to do this. Nobody else should get to cast out demons but us, because we are special and he is not. And the subtext is, if this guy who is not one of the special disciples does this, then maybe we are not special anymore.

And that is the sort of thing we worry about, isn’t it? What makes us special. What makes us appreciated by others. What sets us apart and makes us appear to be something more than everybody else.

Jesus is telling them, you are not special, you are not the only ones who can do these things. It’s not about the disciples anymore. It’s about everyone. Only loving me and doing the work matters, and anyone who wants to do the work in my name is invited. You need to let go of your need for ego gratification and your worry about what others think of you, and just do the work, and welcome others into the work as well. And it doesn’t make any difference, male or female, Jew or gentile, rich or poor whoever is not against us is for us. 

And then we come to cutting of body parts; what a gospel passage! This passage from Mark is just one of many reasons, I’m not a fundamentalist. As John Crossan put it so nicely, 

Just because Jesus is the Lamb of God doesn’t mean that Mary had a little lamb.

Amputations, gouging out eyes, all that sounds pretty serious. Did Jesus really meant that? Probably not. I think he was trying to drive a point home to the disciples. Sometimes we need to exaggerate to get people’s attention. The point of the lesson is that if there is anything that is causing you to stumble, to distance yourself from God, then do something about it. You need to be willing to go any length, to use any means to do something about it.  

Can you think of anything in your life that you need to get rid of? You are going to find things about yourself that get in the way of loving God. You need to do an attitude adjustment to divest yourself of those things, not because it will make you look better, but because it will make you BE better. And in being better, you will find it easier to share the burden of the work laid before you. It will not be all about you.

The thing that we need to work on are not how we appear to the world, which one of us is richer or more important or prettier, but what we do in the world, how we invite others to join us in the work of making the world a better place, a place that is what Jesus envisions for all of us. We cannot do it alone. We shouldn’t pick and chose who does it with us. And I expect that when we are done, we, like the world, will look a whole lot better, to us and to Jesus.

The Gospel reading, today, ends with some wonderful talk about salt. Let’s take those last verses apart, a bit. “For everyone will be salted with fire.” Wow! First, what does that mean, to be “salted with fire?” As I read it this time, I think it means we will be seasoned with difficulties and pain, that through difficulties and pain we will preserved and perfected, our flaws and selfishness and childishness will be burned away, and we will be transformed. Second note: EVERYONE. No exclusions, none left out. We will all have our turn, one way or another.

In confronting misfortune and injury and illness we confront ourselves, not as we wish we were or imagine we used to be, but as we are. These are the experiences that increase the acreage of our souls. To know that maybe we won’t get completely better, that we need to face some limitations, is to share what Paul called the “thorn in the flesh,” to truly know that God’s power is made more perfect in weakness. Is this not the seasoning? 

And while we would wish to avoid some of the more painful aspects - I know I would - the experience of growing and deepening would not be the same. Life isn’t hypothetical, a mental experiment. Life is lived, in all its messiness and complexity and pain. And while I would never wish misfortune on anyone, I also wouldn’t want to keep this experience of growth and depth from others who will profit from it.

And the Gospel reading goes on: “Salt is good. But if it has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.” I’ve often puzzled over these sentences, but in the context of this difficult fall, I felt a new kinship with them. Perhaps what Jesus is saying is that the very bitterness of salt, the very bitterness of experience is what makes it effective as a teacher, if experience loses its sting, how can it teach us, how can it broaden and deepen us? And how to return bitterness to experience, if that is the goal? And so Jesus says, have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another. Now, perhaps what Jesus is saying is simply that, in the Near East, sharing salt was part of a treaty relationship.

But now, I’m wondering. It could also be that by sharing the bitterness of experience we come to a new peace with one another, a peace that understands the deep ways in which we are all the same.

You see, we are all the same in our fears, in our pain. Ironically, we are all the same, too, in our isolation, in our alone-ness. We are all the same in thinking that there is no one like us. Isn’t it interesting? Our injuries may be different but we are all the same in thinking our injuries are unique. The thing that is common to all of us is the feeling that we are unique.

So, where do we go with that insight? Does it mean that we are all wrong, that we really are all the same? Well, not exactly, although we aren’t, probably, as different from one another as we think. No, we don’t all have the same injuries, but we all have injuries. 

There is quote attributed to Plato and by others to Philo: "Be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting great battle" nonetheless, and that is what we share. We are all fighting a great battle. It may be a battle against being alone, or against relationship. It may be a battle against being a victim or against someone who acts like a victim. We are all fighting a great battle.

We all have been or will be seasoned by the fire at some time in our lives which is another way of saying that we are stewards of the experiences God gives us in our lives. Learning from our experiences, good or bad, happy or sad, is practicing good stewardship with God’s gift of life to us.

Lord Jesus Christ,

who affirmed all who do good deeds in your name,

Even in the sharing of a cup of water,

Grant to us,

the wisdom to see the way forward for your people 

and this planet.

The courage to choose the right path,

and the will to share this way with others.

Amen.

Proper 20 B - Sep 20, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
Proper 20 B – Sunday, September 20, 2015


Proverbs 31:10-31
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Mark 9:30-37

"Jesus Discourses With His Disciples", James Tissot, Brooklyn Museum

In our gospel passage of today, Jesus tries to travel incognito through Galilee. It was not so easy for Jesus to have alone time with his disciples to teach them. His public teaching and his healing ministry had made him immensely popular. It made it all the more difficult for him to have time to teach his disciples beyond what he taught in public.

A good time for Jesus to teach his disciples was when they walked from one town to the next. At those times, Jesus’ disciples could have walked close to him to listen to his teaching.

Their traveling time was usually a privileged time for the disciples to learn from Jesus because they were mostly undisturbed by the pressures of expectant crowds.

It is on one such walking stage of their journey that Jesus reminded the disciples for the second time of how he would die and rise again.

Only a few days earlier, Peter had made the confession that Jesus was the Messiah. Messiah was a title loaded with plenty of expectations for the Jewish people.

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus forewarns the disciples about his death and resurrection three different times. It was a difficult message for the disciples to hear and receive and digest; and it bore repeating.

Jesus wanted them to understand how his understanding of being the Messiah was different from what Jewish tradition saw in that role.

It was not about overturning the Roman domination system to restore the integrity of a united Kingdom of Israel. Jesus’ glory would come from vanquishing sin and death.

But the disciples don’t get it. Throughout his gospel, Mark keeps portraying the disciples as having difficulties understanding Jesus and being faithful followers of Jesus.

It’s as if Mark is constantly showing us an example of what not to do to be a disciple of Jesus. The disciples don’t understand and they don’t ask for clarification.

Maybe we’re shown in the negative how we need to accept a surprising God and how we are to keep asking for insight from God to follow Jesus.

*****

Then Jesus and the disciples arrive at home base; “the house” at Capernaum says the gospel. There again, Jesus and the disciples have some time to themselves. And Jesus asks them about what they were talking about while they spread themselves out on their way towards Capernaum.

Probably, their group had elongated along the way and Jesus could only overhear the tone of their distant conversation. But he could tell there was some heat in the discussion. Maybe Jesus overheard bits and pieces of the argument which informed him of its nature. In any case, the disciples feel caught red-handed and they stay silent. They were bickering with each other about their honor status.

In an early Eastern Mediterranean society such as Galilee, people would have valued honor above all other goods. They would have monitored with minutiae how honor accrued to themselves and their family, their clan.

After the confession of Peter, the disciples now saw themselves connected with the most honor-rich person in their society, the Messiah from God. They would expect huge honor to accrue to them from being so closely connected with the Messiah.

But a puzzling question remained. Who had gained the most honor in this connection? As any Israelite of their time, the disciples wanted to know where they stood in the new honor-bound pecking order of their group. As long as the pecking order was not confirmed a group was bound to be conflict-prone until they had established the order that ensured peace in the group.

But Jesus turns the disciples’ world vision upside down once again and dismisses the disciples’ anxiety about honor. Not only is his messiahship not about military victory over the pagan occupier, but leadership according to Jesus is to be exercized through servanthood not through mastery over others.

The greek word rendered as servant in English is “diakonos.” It evokes one who runs errands and serves at the table. In an Israelite household of the time, such a servant held the least honor in the house. He had to defer to most everyone else in the household. The only other household members who had as little honor status as the servant were the young children.

So Jesus tells the disciples that they need to let go of their vicarious honor accumulation; they need to let go of seeking status. They are to seek the least honorific position of servanthood in order to be first in the Reign of God. The first will be last. The diakonos is a leader in the Reign of God.

And to illustrate his point, Jesus gets hold of a little child and takes this little child in his arms. Children were not highly valued in first century Palestine. While still a minor, a child was on a par with a slave in the honor system that governed society.

Child mortality was horrendous, 30% of children died in infancy, another 30% before the age of 6. The old age safety of having children lied in numbers not in the quality of relationship with any single child. Parents would have many children, in the hope that enough would reach adulthood to support them in their productive activities and in their old age.

And so, when Jesus picks up a child and sits it in his lap, it is not a Hallmark moment but another shocking revelation to the disciples that in order to be first, they will need to be like the humblest participants of the mainstream’s honor system.

Jesus is underlining that in order to be first in the Reign of God, we have to be willing to be servants of servants. In welcoming the humblest members of society as Christ, we are welcoming Jesus and therefore getting closer to God.

So the Son of Man, a title only Jesus gave himself, is not going to take us out of all our worldly trouble, but he is going to save us from death and sin.

We are here to build and find the Ream of God where we are, not to escape the difficulties of living, at least, not this side of death. The Realm of God is within us and outside of us. We only have to be willing participants of the Reign-in-process which vanquishes sin and death.

And we are to serve God in those whom we would normally consider ourselves superior to. In doing so, we are to value the place of the last ones, of the least ones amongst us, in order to deserve belonging with God.

*****
Lord, help me serve You in those who appear to be the least of all in our eyes. They are first and foremost in your eyes. Help us remember that you served to the very end, making the ultimate sacrifice for us. Help us to be willing and able to do that too for the love of you. Amen.

Holy Cross Day - Sep 15, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
Holy Cross Day - transferred - Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Isaiah 45:21-25 
Galatians 6:14-18 
John 12:31-36a 

The Oberammergau Cross

“We venerate your cross, O Christ, and praise and glorify your holy Resurrection, for by reason of that cross, joy has come into the world.”

There are two crosses in our monastery church, and this is often remarked upon.  One is the large wooded Oberammergau cross, a classic Western realistic representation of the crucifixion with all its pain and agony... unusual, I think, in that Jesus is still alive, though clearly suffering and dying.  The other is the large icon cross over the altar, which is also a representation of the Crucifixion, though it would seem from the vantage point of the transcendent and resurrected Christ, gazing out serenely beyond suffering, beyond death, beyond time itself.  The title over it says not: Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews, but a text from the Orthodox Palm Sunday service:  To you O Conqueror of death, we sing Hosanna.  

The two figures look at each other and face each other, though from two different standpoints or perspectives. Here we have Jesus facing Jesus!  What are they each thinking?  What do they want to or need to say to each other?  What an internal dialog that must be!  

And we here are between and in the midst of both.  Both crosses are true representations of Jesus the Christ.  And both are true representations of each one of us.  And to some extent, that internal and eternal dialog of Jesus represented by these two crosses is ours as well.  

The Icon Cross

We might say that the two crosses represent sides of the same coin, the same mystery, the same event, though they can often feel so very far apart, even worlds apart in our own experience.  And yet they work in concert, often mysteriously, to bring us to full maturity of heart and mind and soul.  Both are in some sense necessary. The first—that of pain, suffering, loss, even torment—though not perhaps willed or designed by God, perhaps grieving God even more than it grieves us, can nonetheless become, through the power of God, a vehicle of such wholeness as could not have been imagined without it. Which is a very bold claim indeed.

And yet we have all lived this claim and seen witness to it.  I myself saw and heard one just the other day.   It was the televised interview of Vice President Joe Biden by Stephen Colbert on the Tonight show.  It was all about the pain of loss and the will, determination, and power to carry on.  It struck me as more a spiritual direction session or perhaps a chaplain's visitation than a political interview....really like nothing I have ever seen on television.  I urge you to watch it!

In the interview Biden, probed and prompted by Colbert, talks about the recent loss of his beloved son Beau to brain cancer. And that leads to his reflections on the death of his wife and daughter in an automobile accident many years ago and the physical injuries sustained by the two sons who survived and his choice to raise the surviving children as a single parent and to go forward with his work, his career, with life.

The Episcopal Cafe, which contains the videos of the interview, titles their piece: “Two Irish Catholic guys talk faith, politics and life”  For before you know it, Colbert is himself talking about the death, while he was still a child, of his father and two brothers in an airplane crash.

For both of these men, devout Catholics, it was the solace of their faith—their beliefs and rituals—that  kept them going. More than that, their faith gave them the direction and  courage to take the next right  step, even when, as Vice President Biden said, the faith faded away at times.

Neither the Vice President nor Colbert mentioned the cross, at least not explicitly. But it was written all over that interview. Indeed our two crosses were there: the Oberammergau cross of suffering and loss and the struggle with despair and the icon cross of resurrection and possibility and hope.      

To die and to rise again! That is what the cross in its fullness witnesses to.

The cross, to me, conveys at least three truths

The cross is first of all a promise that God will not abandon us, a promise that God knows what it means to be human, fully human, in all its wonderful and dreadful variety and woe, and that God will somehow, some way, work to bring life out of death.  I think we mostly get this, even if we often forget it or are blind to it.

Second, the cross is a pledge, a sacrament if you will, the visible, en-fleshed, historical event that acts out God's promise of solidarity with all God's creation.  I think we get that, too, maybe a little.

But the cross—and this is difficult, maybe impossible to get intellectually or even emotionally—the cross is also the instrument, the very means, by which and through which all this happened and continues to happen to this very day.  The dying of Christ as much as his rising—and the rising of Christ as much as his dying—has changed reality forever.  And that's hard to wrap our 21st century post-modern minds around.

Our attempts to understand it theoretically with metaphors taken from the medieval feudal systems, such as substitutionary theory of the atonement, although well-meaning, leave us empty, if not frankly appalled. Maybe contemporaries like Rene Girard and his followers will be more successful with their theory of mimesis and scapegoating. I don't know.  I'm really not a theologian, even if I sometimes like to fancy myself one.

And perhaps that's why I find myself attracted over and over again to the earthy images associated with the Cross and drawn from the Patristic era and specifically from Eastern Christian liturgical texts, so rich and suggestive and creative and poetic beyond any prosaic rationality.  

How shall we understand the cross?

Crux est Mundi Medicina it says over our front door—the cross is the medicine of the world, the world's healing.

The Cross is the tree of life, reaching from the darkest depths up to heaven and uniting all in one, righting and rewriting that other story of the tree that we meet in the second chapter of Genesis, which Chrysostom calls the story of “a woman, a tree and a death.”  It is the tree that shelters us from the scorching heat and that nourishes us with fruit and clothes us with garments leading to eternal life.

The cross is Noah's ark, our vehicle of safety and deliverance.  It is Moses' rod  changing water into blood, swallowing up Pharaoh's serpents and splitting open the Red Sea  leading to our freedom from bondage. It is Aaron's rod blossoming into a new and eternal priesthood. It is the wood piled by Abraham on  Issac's shoulders as he went to witness to a total surrender to God.  It is Jacob's ladder, on which we climb to our true home.

The cross is the bridge spanning the great abyss, the battering ram that breaks down the gates of death, the chariot on which Christ the warrior King rides out of Hades, taking with him Adam and Eve and all of us, their spiritual children.

The cross is the fishhook that tricks the devil and subdues him and reels him in. It is the poison that he swallows to his own perdition and to our own liberation.

The cross is a spear against wickedness and a charm against evil.  

It is the ensign, the standard, the flag around which gather, in one united flock, the dispersed sheep of Christ, destined, as one ancient author says, for the sheepfolds of heaven.   

The cross...sheer folly to those who are on their way to ruin, but to us...the power of God and the wisdom of God.

As someone once wrote:  “The cross is our all-sufficing treasure and our never-ending reward.”

So today and tomorrow and everyday...

“We venerate your cross, O Christ, and praise and glorify your holy Resurrection, for by reason of that cross, joy has come into the world.”