Fifth Sunday of Easter - Sunday, May 19, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
Fifth Sunday of Easter - Sunday, May 19, 2019

Acts 11:1-18
Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

Our gospel today picks up as soon as Judas is sent out. His betrayal may be the most famous one in all history, not only because of whom he betrayed, but also because of who he is---not an enemy outsider but one of the inner-circle, who has been with Jesus from the start. Betrayal by an intimate destroys trust, it robs the past, and it deadens the heart.  In Dante’s Inferno, the lowest circle of hell is reserved for such a one.  Throughout the centuries Judas has been a classic example of scapegoating for all who have denied their own tendency to betray themselves, those they love, and God.

The ingenious Hebrew ritual from which the word “scapegoat” originated is described in Leviticus 16. On the Day of Atonement, a priest laid hands on an “escaping” goat, placing all the sins of the Jewish people from the previous year onto the animal. The goat was then beaten with reeds and thorns and driven out into the desert. It was a vividly symbolic act that helped to unite and free people in the short term. Instead of owning their sins, this ritual allows people to export them elsewhere—in this case onto an innocent animal.

The French philosopher and historian René Girard (1923–2015) recognized this highly effective ritual across cultures and saw the scapegoat mechanism as a foundational principle for most social groups, including monasteries. The image of the scapegoat powerfully mirrors and reveals the universal, but largely unconscious, human need to transfer our guilt onto something or someone else by singling that other out for unmerited negative treatment. This pattern is also seen in our private, inner lives.

We seldom consciously know that we are scapegoating or projecting. In fact, the effectiveness of this mechanism depends on not seeing it. It’s automatic, and ingrained. Sadly, God has been used to justify violence and hide from the parts of ourselves and our religions that we’d rather ignore. The Scriptures rightly call such ignorant hatred and killing “sin,” and Jesus came precisely to “take away” our tendency to commit it—by exposing the lie.  Jesus refused to stand above or outside the human dilemma. He refused to be the one to scapegoat and instead becomes the scapegoat personified. He dramatically exposed the fact there is no such thing as redemptive violence by refusing the usual pattern of revenge by teaching us that we can follow him in doing the same. Violence doesn’t save; it only destroys—in both short and long term. He replaced the myth of redemptive violence with the truth of redemptive suffering. He showed us on the cross how to hold the pain and let it transform us, rather than pass it on to those around us. The interaction with Judas at the last supper anticipates it.

In the case of Judas, we tend to think of him as a fringe member of the group. If anything, he is the most trusted of the twelve---the one in charge of the money to feed them and the poor.  For three years the twelve did everything together, including hearing Jesus’ teaching and seeing his miracles. Just before today’s gospel, Judas has had his feet washed by Jesus with the others.  If Judas were really the odd one out, the others would not have had to look around and ask when Jesus was talking about which one would betray him.

The wisdom hid in this story is that the Church has far less to fear from outsiders than from insiders.  We are much more likely to encounter the enemy within our midst than in the world beyond our doors.  To understand Judas and our reaction to him is to understand the shadow side of the church where we have it in us to betray those we love.  But it is not possible to understand Judas without understanding Jesus as well, because Judas does not act in a vacuum. Jesus makes choices too, choices that may change the way we see the one Judas made.  Was Judas a villain or just a pawn? Was it greed, or was it disappointment that Jesus had not turned out to be the kind of Messiah Judas had hoped he would be? Did Judas believe that he had been betrayed? Jesus’ instruction: “Do quickly what you have to do”, sounds more like an assignment than a choice.

Whatever Judas’ degree of guilt and whatever his motive, it is extremely important to note that Jesus identifies his betrayer by feeding him, after having washed his feet. Knowing who Judas is and what he is about to do, Jesus bathes and feeds him.  Jesus never held himself back but went on giving himself away to the one who would give him away because his faithfulness did not depend on anyone but himself.  When he dipped the morsel into his cup and handed it to Judas, he not only revealed who Judas was, he also revealed who he was---the One who feeds his enemy, who goes on treating them as friends, loving them to the end.

Jesus gives them and us a new commandment---that they and we love one another as he loved Judas, and will love them and us, even after they and we have denied and abandoned him. Having Jesus as a model undoes all the limits. Love asks for everything. It does not calculate the cost. In John’s theology, Jesus is present through the love of the disciples. To live in Jesus is to love and to love is to live in Jesus. That is how people will know who they and we are. Of everything he taught them, and teaches us, this is crucial: love for one another, not knowledge, piety, or good works, will be the one true mark of discipleship. Followers of Christ are meant to be the visible compassion of God on earth. We are not simply to use words to tell people about the meaning of the cross and resurrection; we are to love one another as a way of embodying the truth that Christ reveals through his death and resurrection.

This episode with Judas sheds light on our understanding of the Eucharist as well. His presence at the Last Supper is our lasting reminder that this is a meal not only for the good, the right, and the faithful.  For Christians it is the ongoing touchstone for the spiritual journey, a place to which we must repeatedly return in order to find our face, our name, our absolute identity, who we are in Christ, and thus who we are forever. The Eucharist tells us that, in some mysterious way, we are not just humans having a God experience, we are God having a human experience. The One at the head of the table, broken and poured out, whose faithfulness does not depend on ours, and whose death-defying love knows no end, gives himself to us, offering to feed us again and again. He is the food and drink that saves our lives, thawing our frozen hearts by taking them into his own.

+Amen.

Easter 4 C - Sunday, May 12, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC
Easter 4 C - May 12, 2019


Acts 9:36-43
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30

When Jesus calls himself the Son of the Father and yet one with the Father, he is giving clear primacy to relationship over being as a separate reality. “The Father and I are one.”

Who we are is who we are in the ever-active Creator. That is our meaning and our identity. Jesus says to his listeners, “The Father and I are one.”

And this Oneness is the model of who we are too. In this Season of Easter can we awaken to this everlasting truth? Christ gives us eternal life, and we will never perish. No one will snatch us out of His hand.

*****

Further in the gospel according to John, Jesus says:

“The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17:22-23)

The three persons of the Trinity are not self-standing and smugly independent of one another. They are inter-dependent. They are in a relationship. That relationship is one of continuous self-emptying and of creative outpouring of love. The three persons of the Trinity are not independent beings. They are One.

*****

Neither are we Humans independent beings. Nor is any part of creation an independent being. All Creation exists in radical relationship; from galaxies to sub-atomic particles.

We are all unique and differentiated, yes.
Yet we don’t exist outside of relationship with everyone else and everything else in the universe. We are One.

To the Western mind, it is so important to be self-made and independent. Our ego likes that idea and is attached to all sorts of stories that tell how different my being is; how I am separate;
how I am better than that mineral, that plant, that animal,
how I am better than those other human beings.

The Oneness of all is a challenging concept to the ego. That is one of the reasons contemplative prayer is a helpful mode of growing spiritually. It calms the ego and can give the soul an experience of oneness.

Our personal relationship with God is important, for sure. But that relationship to be truly with God cannot isolate us. We cannot be in relationship with God entirely on our own. We are in God relationship within communities. And ultimately, our communities, in concentric circles englobe this whole planet and this whole universe.

*****

The essence of God is Being. I Am that I Am. Each creation is a unique manifestation of beingness. Each of us is a manifestation of the divine.

And yet, we are One in God, as Jesus and his Father are One, as Jesus is in each of us, and the Father is in Jesus. We can say I am with I Am.

God is. And God is relationship itself. With Richard Rohr, I would name salvation as simply the readiness, the capacity, and the willingness to stay in relationship.

As long as you show up with some degree of vulnerability, the Spirit can keep working.

Self-sufficiency makes God experience impossible! That’s why Jesus showed up in this world as a naked, vulnerable one, a defenseless baby lying in the place where animals eat.

Talk about utter relationship! Naked vulnerability means I’m going to let you influence me; I’m going to allow you to change me.

In the life of Jesus, God shows us how willing God is to relate with us as we humans are. And Christ is in relationship with each one of us as we are. There are no conditions on this relatedness. It is. But we get to choose how active we are in this God relationship.

The Way of Jesus is an invitation to a Trinitarian way of living, loving, and relating — on earth as it is in the Godhead. Self-emptying and outpouring love.

We are intrinsically like the Trinity, living in absolute relatedness. To choose to stand outside of this Flow is the deepest and most obvious meaning of sin. Do I choose to neglect my relationship with God or do I willingly and actively engage in this Flow?

We call that Flow Love. We really were made for love, and outside of it our souls wither very quickly.

*****

Father, Mother, help us to learn and to live that we are One, as You are One;
help us know of your presence in us;
help us keep giving consent to your action in us;
Help us do the works that we do in Your name, that we may testify to You in our being, in our doing (and sometimes even in our speaking).

Amen.

Third Sunday of Easter - Sunday, May 5, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Third Sunday of Easter - Sunday, May 5, 2019

Acts 9:1-6, (7-20)
Revelation 5:11-14
John 21:1-19

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

+ In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen. +

Our attachments will destroy us.

Whatever we cling to becomes a kind of rope to bind us and bring us before the judge, as surely as Paul did the early Christians. It’s easy to see how we make idols of our fear, our pain, our desire to have what we want, when we want, as we want. But our so-called “good” qualities can just as easily, and much more subtly, become links in the chains that bind us. Our desire to be good, to be right; our sense of justice and our outrage and injustice; our striving for spiritual gifts; even our love of the people and places that form the foundations of our lives—all these and more can numb and paralyze us, lock us into place like thicket of brambles.

Peter and Paul, the two great pillars of the early Church, and, for that matter, of the Church today, learned what we must all learn if we are truly to become Christians. We must, to paraphrase Tolstoy, learn to renounce the fantasy of a freedom that is not real and to embrace a dependence that we do not feel. Or, as Dorothee Sölle so beautifully put it: we must learn to be empty in a world of surplus.

We could all live the rest of our lives as good, loving Christians, which is to say as people who profess the name of Jesus and avoid at all costs the demand that name makes on them. Or we could consent to our total dependence on the one whose very name is Love. And we could allow that One to guide, correct, empty, and fill us however and whenever we need to be guided, corrected, emptied, and filled.

Part of the problem for those of us who call ourselves Christians today is that the story is too familiar. It doesn’t often blind us with its radiance. It wasn’t familiar for Peter, and it wasn’t familiar for Paul. And so they have something of an advantage on us.

Walking down the road to Damascus, on his way to persecute more of the early followers of Jesus, Paul was overcome by a light so bright it revealed the blindness in which he had been living. He knew he must change his life. And so he did, never turning away from that light again, so that he could write to Timothy, “I am already being poured out like a libation. […] From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give on that day, and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.” (2 Tim 4:6-8)

Peter had denied his friend and lord three times before that friend’s brutal death. And so his joy at Jesus’ appearance colors around the edges with regret and longing and a love so poignant we can’t help but be swept up in its wake. He’s so overcome that he loses his sense and puts his clothes back on before lunging into the water to touch Jesus. He, too, knows that he must change his life. And he does, never again denying the One who fed him bread and fish on the shore of the lake, witnessing to the transforming love of the Resurrected One, even in his own death on a cross.

In their encounter with the Risen One, both of these men recognized that their entire lives would have to change. But still they consented to those changes. They still said their “yes.” And they renewed that yes every day of the rest of their lives, until they could, when it counted, pronounce their greatest “yes” and die in witness to the love of the one who had already died and risen for them.

And how could they lay down their lives? Because they had already given those lives back to the one who had given them in the first place and who had renewed them day by day.

All this talk of death may seem somewhat macabre, but it isn’t. Surrender to God, the willing return of one’s life to source of life is the consummation of the greatest love story we know. This death and the new life in the spirit it enables begin and end in love.

Father Alan Whittemore, perhaps the greatest mystic our Order has produced, had much to say of this topic in an essay he wrote on the real reason for becoming a monk or a nun. I quote at length:

The real reason, the only truly sufficient reason, for becoming a monk is to be crucified. That is what happens. The religious life is a contrivance of the Divine ingenuity whereby the soul may be crucified with Christ. The vows are the nails with which we are nailed to the cross. Incidentally we may spend many years in the religious life before the full significance and the dreadful pain of these nails is brought home to us.

That all sounds very grim. But it is true. Do not attempt to become a monk or nun unless you intend from the bottom of your heart to surrender yourself wholly to Jesus, to hang up with Him on His Cross in perfect submission to the will of the Father and on behalf of the souls of [all].

Still, there is a beautiful secret which I have saved to the last and which makes all the difference in the world. It does away with the grimness and renders of the religious life the dearest, sweetest, blessedest thing in all the world. The religious life is a love affair.

All souls are invited to become the brides of Christ. But the religious does not wait for the life beyond the grave. He steals a march on the others. 

Earlier in this chapter I gave several reasons for becoming a monk or nun. Did you notice that I omitted that which many folk outside the religious life imagine to be the true one? I have the feeling that most people think that monks or nuns were “disappointed in love.” 

Perhaps some of them were. God has many means of drawing souls to Himself. All I can say is that, though I have known a great number of monks and nuns very intimately, I never have happened to strike one who came to the cloister because he or she had been disappointed in love. 

On the other hand, I have known very many—please God, it is true of all of them—who were successful in love beyond all dreams or imagining. For they have heard in their hearts the whispering of the perfect lover. And it has been their deepest passion and their joy to surrender themselves to Him unto death, even the death of the Cross.

What Father Whittemore has to say of the monk or nun is equally true of all who would bear the name of the Crucified and Risen One. Bound up into the great love affair with God in Christ, we find that the choice to surrender all our lives to the one who poured out his life for us, who pours it out still, is not dreary after all. It is the most beautiful way we could live, the best and, really, the only way, to enter the flow of divine love within and all around us.

It is, finally, only love that enables our response of love. Jesus comes to each us in the most ordinary and the most extraordinary moments of our lives, reach out his scarred hands to embrace us, and says to our souls, “Yes, I love you more than these. I love you more than your fear. I love you more than that your joy. Now come, follow me.”