Palm Sunday - March 28, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Luc Thuku, OHC

Palm Sunday  - Sunday, March 28, 2021

Mark 11:1-11

Isaiah 50:4-9a

Philippians 2:5-11

Mark 15:1-39, [40-47]

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Today we gather to celebrate the beginning of the commemoration of Holy Week, also called the Great Week by the Eastern Churches. It is called the Great Week because great things happened during this particular week in the history and execution of our salvation. The deeds, with the exception of the resurrection, are however only GREAT when we put them in the perspective of salvation  otherwise they were horrible. A human being who is also God is betrayed by a friend and killed with the consent of religious authorities by civil authorities with the approval of the masses. It is all about pain and suffering and that is not something we would ordinarily call great! 

It also painfully reminds us that humanity has been two faced since time in memorial… the crowds that shouted “hosanna blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” shouted with equal enthusiasm “crucify him” before a week went by!

In the first reading from Isaiah, we heard a portion of the so called  ‘Song of the Suffering Servant’. We heard the prophet fussing or lamenting, trying to make sense of some painful realities, in this case exile. If we are able to make sense or grasp the message of this text, which is, that even righteous people suffer for no fault of theirs, then we will be able to start having an idea why Jesus had to die, and a horrible death at that, and also our own sufferings especially those that come our way for no fault of ours. However, although the idea of righteous suffering is prevalent in our passage this morning, the emphasis is on the cost of being a faithful disciple or servant, and God’s vindication of the servant’s obedience or faithfulness. 

The passage from Isaiah reminds and tries to focus us on the fact that when we were called by God, we were called to faithfuness and that the communication of God’s intention is fundamental to, or the core of, our calling. We therefore should listen attentively to God for the message and then use our tongues to convey it to support the weary. We may ask who the weary are that need a word from the servant of God…on top of the poor, the sick, the lame, the hungry, the widow, the orphan, the prisoner and the ones we know well; the weary also include people who see no purpose or meaning in their life, people who think their work is in vain, people who are in the depths of despair, people who see no reason to continue in their labor. Above all the weary are sinners…people like you and me at some point in time! They are people who see their sin and their shame, they are people who know that they are, or feel, alienated from God and exiled from His presence, people who know their unworthiness, people who admit they don't do the right they really want to do.

Although Isaiah does not tell us what the word for the weary is, Jesus, the obedient servant of the sovereign Lord does tell us that the word is REST. He tells us in Matthew 11:28 “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest”. The rest he is speaking about, though, has nothing to do with relaxing in bed, or on an armchair sipping wine, or on a hammock with a book or newspaper, or soaking in the sun on a beach in Hawaii for eternity. It is believing in him and following him and as we heard in today's lengthy gospel passage, that path is rocky and may, or will, lead to death!

We should keep our ears open to both those whom we serve and to God. This is the character of obedience because we are not our own. This however will produce suffering. Prophets do advocacy work on behalf of the marginalized and at the same time try to encourage or give hope to the suffering. They find themselves sandwiched between the oppressor and the oppressed and this may lead to resistance from the powerful and even from those who suffer. Suffering in this context is a result of speaking truth to power and is therefore not passive. We are called to resist violent oppression because acting otherwise makes us and the survivors we are advocating for in the name of God, lose their human dignity.

Jesus whom we follow gave the message he has entrusted to us with boldness. He gave the message in the face of opposition and ridicule but that did not deter him from giving a word of rest to the weary, to sinners and all. Once again as servants of the Lord, like Jesus, we are called upon to speak boldy with an instructed tongue in the face of ridicule, mockery, opposition and death. We should never be afraid to speak the truth regardless of what the itching ears of our audience wants to hear, regardless of the hostility of the worldly powers and authorities! Even if death becomes our end, the God who calls and sustains us will vindicate us and our death will not be in vain. Suffering and/or shame does not have the last word. With God on our side, the expected result is victory despite how bleak a situation looks. 

Some peole are tempted to think that Jesus used his divine nature in a selfish way to escape pain but that was not the case. Like the rest of us, when he ministered here on earth, he lived by faith. By faith he humbled himself to the point of death because he trusted in God and depended on the power of the Spirit. By faith Jesus listened to God. By faith Jesus set his face resolutely towards Jerusalem. By faith he submitted to suffering and to shame. That is why Paul is urging us in our second reading today from Philippians 2:5-11, to let the same mind be in us that was in Christ who humbled himself and by so doing  God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and every toungue confess that He alone is Lord.

In the gospel which is long and loaded with information, We hear Peter being put into a corner by a servant girl with a very depressing question. The question posed to him which is best framed in John 18:17 is… “are you not also this man’s disciple?” 

For once let us shift our minds not to the response Peter gave or how many times the cock crowed, and take liberty to re-word the question to “are you this man’s disciple?”  I am suggesting we do so because it will put us in the picture and by that underline the importance and relevance of the question to us modern day disciples. “Am I this man’s disciple?”….“Are you this man’s disciple?… seriously, I mean to ask “Are you this man’s disciple?” 

This man’s disciples live by faith…This man’s disciples live with intergrity…This man’s disciples listen attentively for the word of God and convey it to the weary…This man’s disciples are humble and not full of themselves… this man’s disciples don't look down on others or walk on their heads… this man’s disciples are not egocentric and nothing is always about them….This man’s disciples don’t shout others down or discriminate in any way!   

Are you this Man’s disciple?…seriously “are you this man’s disciple?” This man’s disciples identify with the poor and the oppressed… This man’s disciples face oppression head on without fear of the consequences … this man’s disciple speak truth to power not worrying about what might happen to them…this man’s disciples don’t mind being associated or indentified with the nobodys of this world….This man’s disciples are themselves nobodys because like their master Jesus, they have humbled themselves even to the point of death. the death of self first and possibly physical death! 

Are you seriously this man’s disciple?… This man’s disciples are currently fighting racism in all of its many forms, they are fighting oppression, inequality, corruption, sexism, and are in the forefront campaigning for an equitable distribution of the covid-19 vaccines that are being hoarded by the super wealthy nations of the world while the so called third world countries are going without! This man’s disciples are calling for gun law reforms because innocent people continue to be murdered enmasse mainly in this country and elsewhere, this man’s disciples are kneeling on the roads in Burma to create a buffer between trigger happy millitary officers and innocent unarmed protesters!… are you really this man’s disciple, or are you at least willing to try to live as per the example of the master?

On Easter morning at the vigil of the resurrection, the Church will give us a chance to renew our baptismal promises. Baptism as we well know is the outward sign of an inner commitment to being a disciple. You and I have a full week during this great week, to retreat, discern and decide to re-commit ourselves or to even commit ourselves afresh to this Man’s discipleship which leads to the death of self and at times to literal death, but our vindicator lives, praised be HE, and therefore death does not have the final word!

My brother, my sister, are you this man’s disciple?

The feast of the Annunciation - March 25, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

Feast of the Annunciation  - Thursday, March 25, 2021

Isaiah 7:10-14)

Hebrews 10:4-10

Luke 1:26-38

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

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

In 1920, Rilke wrote a verse dedication to Frau Theodora van der Muhll:

The final thing is not self-subjugation

but silent loving from such centeredness

we feel round even rage and desolation

the finally enfolding tenderness.

We know the paintings so well they’re cliché. There she sits, usually surrounded by books with a lily in her hand and a feathered angel bending toward her. Sometimes she’s holding her breviary, sometimes demure, sometimes with fiery cast to her eyes. Thanks to biblical and historical scholarship, we know that Mary would have been a teenager and a poor villager. We know she had courage or was foolhardy—probably both—she was a teenager, after all. Tradition tells us that she was next to sinless, the archetypal saint, so empty of self that she could receive God’s fullness.

After centuries and centuries of interpretation and imagining the scene, it’s too easy to think of the Mary whom Gabriel greets as either a demure, faceless vessel, waiting to be filled, or the Cosmic Feminine Divine, Sophia incarnate, who knew inherently how to open herself to God’s indwelling. 

But if Jesus was fully human, then his mother certainly was, too. She was a real, historical person. She had hopes and fears. She loved and wept and twisted her hair in boredom. The demure, faceless vessel and the Cosmic Feminine Devine both rob of us of a foothold in this mysterious comingling of a human life with God’s life. 

Mary was girl who said yes to God, with whatever freedom was available to her. We know her decision produced a great number of trials. Teenage pregnancy out of wedlock; a precocious child to raise, always running off to the rabbis; watching the torture and death of her child; wrapping herself in the mystery of his rising, this one who was and was not the man she had raised.

But, of course, all those trials were to come later. For now, in this moment of Annunciation, the angel sings his ave. And Mary pours herself out as best she can. This greeting from the Holy One is the key that unlocks her heart, the sun that warms the rose of her soul, coaxing it into bloom. For now, she knows the rose’s sweetness, even as the thorns hint their sting under her thumb pads.

This pouring out of herself to God, this making herself empty and hollow was not, as Rilke points out, self-subjugation. The virtue of Mary’s response, Be it unto me according to your word, is not that she obliterated her humanity, but that, at least for the space of a breath, she allowed God to fill and surround that humanity. She became alight with herself, even as God overshadowed her.

Falling as this feast usually does in Lent, I cannot help but wonder how this experience followed Mary throughout her life. Did she hear the rustle of the angel’s wings as she stood at the foot of the Cross? As her son cried out his consummatum est, did she remember her own cry of astonishment and joy those thirty odd years before? Seeing the thorns wrapped around his brow, could she still smell the sweetness of her soul opening to God? As Jesus surrendered his Spirit, was she emptied of self once more, barren or fallow or hollowed out for God?

Every so often Good Friday and Annunciation fall on the same day, uniting into one the moment God’s Spirit took birth in Jesus and then left his body. The two poles of living and dying wrapped round each other, like the snake eating its tail.

Although this concurrence will not come again in our lifetime—the next time will be 2157—we are living in such a moment today. This year of pandemic, which has seemed an endless Lent in its way, will not resolve itself on Easter. Our joy will be tempered and quiet. The tomb may be empty, but so will most of our churches. Like those first disciples, like Mary, we will throw our alleluia out on the wind to echo in the heedless world.

It’s not only our churches that have been carved out. Our hearts have been, as well. Whether we wish to be or not, we have been hollowed, emptied of all our certainties and easy assurances. We are left wide open, waiting for God to fill us up, to be born and then reborn in and through us. What is the angel’s call to us, then?

Perhaps they are Rilke's greeting to Frau van der Muhll:

The final thing is not self-subjugation

but silent loving from such centeredness

we feel round even rage and desolation

the finally enfolding tenderness.

We don’t need to obliterate ourselves to be open to God. Like Mary we can gather round us all our courage or foolhardiness. We can speak our yes, however timorous or weary it may be today. We can trust, or even pretend to trust if that’s what we have available to us, that God will wrap us up in her finally enfolding tenderness.

Lent 5 B - March 21, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

Fifth Sunday in Lent  - Sunday, March 21, 2021

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Hebrews 5:5-10

John 12:20-33

Some of Christianity’s harshest critics accuse it of focusing too much on suffering, death, and the next life, destroying our capacity to enjoy this one. This isn’t totally wrong. A lot of fear and anxiety has been generated by the Church through the centuries, but it’s naïve to think that human beings are naturally content, or that suffering and death don’t make us anxious. No spirituality can pretend to be mature without grappling with the haunting questions of suffering and death. This was certainly raised for us this week with our brother Tom’s death.

Christianity does not apologize for the fact that within it, the most central of all mysteries is the Paschal Mystery, the mystery of suffering, death, and transformation. Christ is central, and central to Christ is his death and rising to new life so as to send us a new spirit. This is central but misunderstood and often ignored. We pay lip service but seldom try to understand what it means and how we might appropriate it within our own experience. Most human beings flourish on condition that they do not think of dying. We collude with one another in denying our mortality even in the midst of a pandemic. Spiritual teachers, including Benedict, are unanimous in telling us that freedom depends on overcoming our forgetfulness of death. Yet we fill our lives with preoccupations in order to not face death. We all have our drugs of choice in attaining this end. If we are free to look in the face of our death in the midst of life our energy can be released for trusting, hoping, and loving. In a state of denial, we postpone doing the unfinished business we need to do, thinking we have all the time in the world. When we give voice to the self that has the courage to break silence about death, it will change our life. Ultimately, I think our happiness depends on it.

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” These words of Jesus define the Paschal mystery. In order to come to fuller life and spirit we must constantly be letting go of present life and spirit. Grains of wheat must in a sense die to what they are if they are not to remain alone and fruitless. Humans must die to their love for their own lives, lest loving themselves above all else, they lose their lives and destroy themselves. Jesus both taught and illustrated this in his own life.

In our Gospel today, Jesus anticipating his death, says that his very soul is troubled, yet he does not ask to be spared, but sees in it the reason for his life. His surrender to God invites us to live in that precarious day to day dependence on God. This surrender is not the surrender of submission to an enemy, but the laying down of resistance to the One who loves infinitely more than we can imagine, the One who is more on our side than we are ourselves. 

Jeremiah’s prophesy of God’s new covenant is a harbinger for us of the good news of Jesus Christ. When the Babylonians razed the Temple and dragged King Zedekiah off in chains, the twin symbols of God’s covenantal fidelity were destroyed. Not only did the people lose power and prestige, freedom and security, they also lost the assurance of God’s faithfulness in the devastation of destruction. The prophet assures the exiled Israelites and us that our God will bring newness out of destruction and give hope where there was none. God offers us the means from within to be faithful by removing distinctions of class and privilege and writing on our heart the capacity for keeping the new covenant. With the Greek Gentile seekers who request to see Jesus, all will be drawn to him. In him we see the vulnerability of the God who meets us in our trials, ultimately liberating and redeeming us. 

This paradox of the cross is also on display in the Letter to the Hebrews which portrays Jesus and his redemptive work using the extended metaphor of the Jewish High Priest in the Yom Kippur liturgy. Jesus as high priest stands before God on behalf of humanity. His obedience in suffering leads to new life and makes him the source of salvation to those who trust in him. He stands with us not over us. He bears in his person all the cries, tears, and supplications of the people.

If we are to follow where he leads, it’s important to distinguish and choose between two kinds of death and life. There is terminal death and paschal death. The first ends life and all possibilities. The latter ends one kind of life and opens a person to receive a deeper richer form of life. The image of a grain of wheat falling into the ground and dying so as to produce new life is an image of paschal death. There is also resuscitated life and resurrected life. The first is when one is restored to one’s former life and health. The latter is not a restoration of one’s old life but the reception of a radically new life.

The Paschal mystery is about paschal death and resurrected life. It begins with suffering and death and moves on to the reception of new life and spirit. It is a process of transformation. Only after the old is grieved and let go of is the new spirit given. Jesus’ great Passover from death to life is our model, and we will soon to re-enact it liturgically from Holy Week to Pentecost. Death is marked on Good Friday, new life on Easter, grieving the old and adjusting to the new in the forty days of Easter, refusing to cling, letting go, and letting the old bless us on Ascension, and finally accepting new Spirit on Pentecost. 

We observe the paschal cycle liturgically once a year, but in fact it is a daily re-enactment since we experience many deaths in our lives. There’s the death of our youth, our wholeness, our dreams, our honeymoons, our health, our ideas of God, of monastic life, of the Church. Unless we mourn properly our hurts, our loses, life’s unfairness, our shattered dreams, and all the life we once had, we will live either in an unhealthy fantasy or an ever-intensifying bitterness. Grieving is key but unfortunately our tolerance for it is limited. It consists not only of letting go of the old, but of letting it bless us as well. It’s necessary to let our roots bless us whether they were healthy or not. We face many deaths daily and the choice is ours whether those deaths will be terminal----snuffing out life and spirit, or paschal---opening us to new life and new spirit. 

The essence of freedom is to act without fear to be who we truly are, knowing that is what is most pleasing to God, and knowing that our actions reflect what fills our hearts. Those who would see, serve, and follow Jesus will recognize him even in the weariness and worry of their paschal journey, letting go, trusting, and surrendering ourselves to the Spirit.

+Amen.

St Joseph - March 19, 2021

 Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

The Rev. Matthew Wright

St Joseph  - Friday, March 19, 2021

2 Samuel 7:4,8-16

Romans 4:13-18

Luke 2:41-52

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

“I chose the glorious Saint Joseph as my master and advocate and commended myself earnestly to him… When Christ walked this earth, Joseph was his guardian; as a boy, Jesus called him ‘father’ and obeyed his commands.  It seems to me that Christ wants us to know that in heaven he still does everything Joseph asks…

“I wish I could persuade everyone to be devoted to this glorious saint, for I have great experience of the blessings that come through him from God. I have never known anyone to be truly devoted to him and render him particular services who did not notably advance in virtue, for he gives very real help to souls who commend themselves to him.  For some years now, I think, I have made some request of him every year on his festival and I have always had it granted.  If my petition is in any way ill-directed, he directs it aright for my greater good…

“I only beg, for the love of God, that anyone who does not believe me will put what I say to the test, and they will see by experience what great advantages come from commending themselves to this glorious patriarch and having devotion to him.  Those who practice prayer should have a special affection for him always… If anyone cannot find a master to teach them how to pray, let them take this glorious saint as their master and they will not go astray.”

Saint Teresa of Avila, writing in her autobiography.  “Those who practice prayer should have a special affection for him always…”

St. Joseph has been present in a particular way in my own life of prayer for the past eight years or so, after he showed up one day while I was in the “ethnic aisle” at the grocery store.  Somewhere near the Goya products, there were all of those tall votive candles, dedicated to different saints.  And typically my eye would have gone to Our Lady of Guadalupe or some other image of Mary.  But this day it didn't.  Instead, it went straight to Joseph—to this lone, yellow candle bearing his image—San José.  I didn't think much of it at first, but I kept being drawn back inexplicably to that candle and before I could get out of the aisle it had placed itself in my shopping cart.

It didn't take long to realize what was going on, because this was not long after my dad died.  I began to realize that I felt him—my dad—in whatever aura it is that surrounds St. Joseph.  I imagine the two of them were a lot alike—good-hearted, simple, quiet men who worked hard and had calloused hands.  And I realized that I needed Joseph, and my dad, with me in my prayer.  I needed their warm-heartedness and tender, quiet support.  I bought the candle, and lit it every day beside a picture of my dad when I prayed, and I still have the empty votive glass sitting in my office.

So, with my love of Joseph, I was a little annoyed when I first looked at the Eucharistic readings appointed for Joseph today.  We’re given a Gospel text in which he is not even named.  We’re simply told that “his [Jesus’] parents,” following the Passover Festival, discovered after a day’s journey on the road, that “the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem…”  And when they finally find him at the Temple, it’s Mary, not Joseph, who speaks: “his mother said to him, ‘Child, why have you treated us like this?’”  And he submits to his parents, and we’re told that “he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them.  His mother treasured all these things in her heart.”

Hold on!  What is going on here?!  This text is all about Mary and Jesus.  Joseph is quietly, actually silently, in the background.  And then it hit me—Oh, this is the perfect text.  This is what Joseph would want, this is who Joseph is.  It’s not about him, and he knows it, and that’s exactly where his saintliness lies.

Joseph never once speaks in the Gospels.  In Matthew’s account of the annunciation, which focuses on Joseph, an angel tells him in a dream to not be afraid to take Mary as his wife, and the text says, “When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel commanded him.”  With not a word in response; he just quietly, humbly surrenders to God’s will for his life.

In the parallel texts in Luke, in which Mary discovers her role in the unfolding drama, she engages the angel.  She questions before consenting (“How can this be?”).  She sings the Magnificat with Elizabeth.  She is active and vocal and center stage.  But not Joseph.  He recognizes that it’s not about him.  This story is going to be about Mary and Jesus, and his job is to make possible their work, their role, in the story of salvation.

Sometimes in our journeys we’re asked to be Mary—we’re called to question and to sing, to stand out in front.  But sometimes, probably more often, our work is to be like Joseph’s—to quietly nod, to accept the role being asked of us, and step into the background; to be that unassuming tent pole that holds open the space in which the drama unfolds, without taking any credit.  Everyone of us has been supported in this way, at some point, by a Joseph, who may have been so unassuming that to this day we don’t know the quiet prayer and support they gave us behind the scenes.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Joseph is called “a righteous man.”  “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man…” Matthew says.  The Hebrew word here, behind our Greek text, is tzadik, a just or righteous one, and this is not a word used lightly in Scripture.  It doesn’t mean he was a “good guy.”  It means he stood in an altogether staggering order of holiness, as in “Noah was a righteous man [a tzadik], blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God.”

An understanding of the tzadikim, the righteous ones, develops in the Jewish mystical tradition that says that at any given time, there are always 36 righteous ones in the world, for whom God holds the world into existence.  It’s their hidden prayer and humility that keeps the world turning.  They’re often called the lamed vavniks, the 36, and it’s said that they are so humble that they have no idea they’re one of the 36, and they would never believe it if you told them.  So they remain essentially hidden saints.

Tzvi Elimelech Spira of Dinov, a famous Hasidic rabbi from Poland, wrote that “in every generation, there are great righteous people who could perform wondrous acts, but the generation is not deserving of that, so the stature of the righteous people is hidden and they are not known to the public; sometimes they are woodchoppers or water-drawers.”  Or, perhaps, carpenters from Nazareth.

Of this hidden vocation, carried by St. Joseph, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet writes, “Among the different vocations, I notice two in the Scriptures which seem directly opposed to each other: the first is that of the apostles, the second that of St. Joseph.  Jesus was revealed to the apostles that they might announce Him throughout the world; He was revealed to St. Joseph who was to remain silent and keep Him hidden. The apostles are lights to make the world see Jesus.  Joseph is a veil to cover Him… [The God] Who makes the apostles glorious with the glory of preaching, glorifies Joseph by the humility of silence.”

This is why St. Teresa of Avila so rightly connects Joseph with the life of prayer, with our hidden, inner life: “Those who practice prayer should have a special affection for him always… If anyone cannot find a master to teach them how to pray, let them take this glorious saint as their master and they will not go astray.”

Joseph’s quiet, humble, and absolute surrender to the Divine Will, his perfect living of the hidden life, I believe invites another reading of Matthew’s account of the angel’s message to Joseph that differs from the one most of us are accustomed to.  We’re told that “before [Mary and Joseph] lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.”

And “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man [a tzadik] and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.”  So we usually make an assumption here that Joseph plans to dissolve their betrothal because he assumes the child is “illegitimate.”  But there is another reading of these verses that I think is more in keeping with the spirit of Joseph the tzadik.  

So again, the text says that Mary “was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.”  Now Matthew’s account is told from Joseph’s perspective.  So who found Mary to be with child from the Holy Spirit?  Joseph.  Not, “he found her to be with child, and had no idea where the child came from.”  He found her to be with child from the Holy Spirit.  He believes her story from the beginning—that she, his betrothed, has become the tabernacle, the dwelling-place of God, the new Ark of the Covenant.

And in his humility, he accepts that God has other plans for her, far beyond a life in the home of a carpenter from Nazareth.  Who is he to have the Ark of the Covenant reside in his humble dwelling?  And so he’s willing to quietly step out of the story; God has bigger plans for Mary.  “But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘…do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife”—and this is usually translated with a period or a comma at this point—followed by “for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”  The meaning being something like “Don’t be afraid to take her as your wife, because the child isn’t illegitimate after all”—and so this would then be information Joseph’s getting for the first time.  But we’ve already been told that he discovered she was with child from the Holy Spirit.  And there is no period or comma in this text the Greek, which just as accurately reads, “Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife because, or on account of the fact, that the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”  

The implication being that Joseph isn’t afraid to take the child into his home because he thinks it’s someone else’s, but because he knows it is conceived of the Holy Spirit, and who is he to take such holiness into his home?  His fear is “the fear of God”—his awe in the face of this tremendous mystery—and the angel says “Do not be afraid”—you in your humility and hiddenness are in fact the very one to carry this task.

I don’t know if this is an accurate reading of the text, but I love the Joseph who emerges in this reading—his humility and surrender becomes even more consistent throughout, and I also love the assurance, that yes, God does want to dwell in a humble carpenter’s home in Nazareth—that the story isn’t moving off to bigger and better things. 

How is this assurance for each of us this morning?  That whether seen or unseen, we are all given a vital role in the drama of God’s story.  And how might we learn from Joseph, the tzadik, the hidden, humble one, in his school of prayer?  Because “those who practice prayer should have a special affection for him always…”  How might we cultivate our own inner Joseph?  Our hidden life with God? 

May we each feel Joseph’s presence, today and always, his prayer and intercession never ceasing, may we be grateful for the Josephs who have quietly supported each of us along the way—you might call one of them today, if you know who they are!—and may we not fear being unseen ourselves or fear bringing the Divine into our own humble dwellings, knowing that we, with St. Joseph, are hidden with Christ in God.

Amen.

Lent 4 B - March 14, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. John Forbis, OHC

Fourth Sunday in Lent  - Sunday, March 14, 2021

Numbers 21:4-9

Ephesians 2:1-10

John 3:14-21

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

I have made my home in the darkness, brought all my essentials, all my accoutrements, decorative objects around me, that no one else would want and of course the ones I think people envy and desire for themselves – my shame, guilt, lies I tell myself and others about myself, others and even the world; secrets, betrayals.  Here I’m safe.  No one has to know the ultimate secret … that I’m less than you or most anyone else.  Or is that a lie?  In darkness, it’s difficult to make such distinctions.  

Like we heard in yesterday’s collect for Saturday of Lent week 3, “Set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright.”  In the darkness no one has to know that I’m flat on the floor.  

In the light, all of this is exposed.  In the light I will be naked.  Jesus tells us, the judgment is “the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.  For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.”  So this sudden burst, this brilliance is the crux of the judgment of God.  It becomes our decision what we do when facing it, stand right where we are and shade our eyes?  Do we come to it and believe in it or do we remain in the darkness?  Here is where I can remain and live with my suspicions and my most prized possession … fear, the only protection I have against this exposure.  If I come to the light, God will see how I obviously don’t belong there. I’ll most surely be condemned.

Only, I have completely breezed past the beginning of Jesus’ teaching and honed straight in on the judgment.  For God so loved the world … God loved the world!  God loves the world!  That is the light.  That is the judgment.  The Son, didn’t come to condemn the world, to shine a blinding spotlight and interrogate us, but to save us!  Condemnation doesn’t belong in the light.

In the darkness, fear eventually and inevitably leads to abuses I can so easily inflict on myself, on others and the world.  Fear can become the one blight that blocks out any earthly light.  Staying huddled in the darkness, we are condemned already.  But not by God.  I condemn myself by being prosecutor and judge of myself and others.  God is not my judge.  I am.  Unfortunately, Lent can be so distorted to reflect exactly the opposite.

Lent’s purpose, I often believe, is to turn this home in which I’ve made myself most comfortable into a jail cell where I either languish through a life sentence or await execution.  Yet it is no defense against the light of God’s redemptive power and desire.  God wants to draw the world into that saving light that condemns no one.

Still, this love can be frightening.  God shows a vulnerability that I’m not used to seeing nor am I used to admitting or believing.  I’m too busy looking for a God who can exact punishment on people who I deem evil, show them who’s in charge and that they deserve what they get.  Is that another lie I’m telling myself and others about God?

Again, in the light, that lie will be exposed.  I am faced with it head-on to the point of turning my eyes anywhere else I can’t escape the betrayal of just how false my image of God really is.  Looking around me in the light, if I really open my eyes and heart, I see how God truly acts in the world and how she acts in my life. 

I am vulnerable myself.  The truth is I am incomplete and sinful as anyone else.  Not any more, not any less.  Can I accept this fact and do what is true?  Can I accept the light and come to it?  I AM part of the world that God loves, and so I’m not set apart or special.  I am loved as much as the world is, I am loved IN the world, not sequestered in the darkness.  God desires us all to come to her into the light.  

Jesus equates himself with the serpent raised up in the wilderness to save the Israelites when they looked on the snake of bronze.  The serpents who were so poisonous, so dangerous, vicious lose their power to one serpent, cast in bronze, still, trapped, inanimate.  Here is their enemy now, helpless, harmless, frozen in bronze mounted on a pole and then, miraculously the source of life for those who look upon it.  However, they must look upon what they fear most to live.

“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”  God so loved the world that his only Son allows himself to be crucified like someone to be feared, a common criminal, an enemy of the state.  Jesus offers himself to be hated, to be the light that the people hated.

He is willing to allow love to become the enemy.  He accepts the accusation of being a serpent, the resemblance of the first serpent that tempts Adam and Eve to commit the first sin.  This resemblance can be a symbol of how he can and does redeem the world throughout history, even the first serpent.  He can be the salvation who was, who is and who is to come.

But we must also see just how much love will suffer, will endure and then, eventually triumph, not by conquering, condemning, but just showing us its true beauty.  He is trapped, nailed, mounted onto a cross.  He chooses to be the instrument of God’s love and sacrifice and the object of darkness so that we can see where that darkness eventually leads.  He becomes the victim so that no one else has to.  He becomes the criminal to blast light into the darkness that creates the perfect conditions to commit the true crime – condemning a man, an innocent man to death, God’s only son.  

But the light is right here in the midst of the darkness as well.  It will not be overwhelmed or extinguished.  Christ can live in us and we in him.  I don’t have to live anymore in the house of shadows I have built for myself.  Christ certainly doesn’t want to live in there either; he wants to live in us.  

Amen.

Lent 3 B - March 7, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC

Third Sunday in Lent  - Sunday, March 7, 2021

Exodus 20:1-17

1 Corinthians 1:18-25

John 2:13-22

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

If last Sunday’s Gospel from Saint Mark, especially the words take up your cross and follow me, was the Lord’s command to the disciple, the call to individual responsibility and self-giving love, then this week’s reading from the second chapter of Saint John’s Gospel is Jesus’ response to the religious system, the corporate community. The lectionary wisely includes both kinds of encounter during Lent.  We take up our individual cross in solidarity with a community.  We end systemic and communal discrimination when we individually realize that we are complicit in it and decide to stop it.  

The repentance asked of us in Lent is both to us as individuals and as members of systems of belief and practice.  Jesus’ every act is motivated by and the expression of pure love.  That love is action in service to our deepest need at any moment; in tenderness when we are among the sick and outcast, caution when we are entrusted with status and power, and even rebuke when we use our power to exploit and abuse in the name of God. We are culturally conditioned to be in touch with our personal sins, but the communal and systemic sins often hide within norms slowly accepted. The love of Christ works toward the purpose of waking us up and orienting us toward what is true and beautiful about God and ourselves.  Just as Jesus’ love is never passive toward the lonely and outcast, so it is never neutral toward attitudes and practices of religious oppression in God’s name.  Without hearing the call to awaken and sincere turning, we slide slowly into creating a god to serve us, that suits our agenda, that preserves our security and status. If we persist in our pride, we set that god in the marketplace of our possession.  Then we are rattled awake when the tables are suddenly overturned and the currency of our self-preservation start flying.

The titles of stories in the Gospels, long having become commonplace summaries, fail us today.  The “Cleansing of the Temple” is a misnomer. No word remotely close to “cleansing” appears in the story.  The verbs are actually much more interesting than mere cleansing, and stronger: drove out, poured out, overturn.  Jesus was actually making a mess rather than cleaning up a mess.  His behavior is not intended to tidy up a slightly unseemly violation of Temple etiquette.  He disrupts the business of the Temple itself.  The story might more accurately be called “the closing of the Temple”.  If the money cannot be changed and animals cannot be purchased, then sacrifices cannot be offered and the purpose of Passover, of the building itself, comes to a screeching halt.

The people are going about business as usual. This is all just what happens at Passover.  Yet Jesus sees into the spiritual heart of people and a place.  The Temple, the meeting place of heaven and earth, the presence of God to God’s people, to all people, was intended to be an outward and visible sign of God’s covenant faithfulness, the sacrifices and rituals an expression of the obedience and thanksgiving of the people for God’s salvation.  Jesus is angered by the desecration of a place that has forgotten its purpose, grown casual about the God who has authored that purpose.  Rather than the remembrance of God’s mighty acts, of God’s steadfast faithfulness, it has descended into the mere mechanical routine of sacrifice.

Jesus is inherently skeptical toward institutions.  He knows that power in the hands of a few or one bends towards complacency and corruption.  He knows how strong is the lust toward legalism, judgment, and self-preservation that stifles the presence of the Holy Spirit.  He knows our sin takes the form of making places and objects and rituals ends in themselves.  How easily the outward and visible can replace the inward and spiritual.  And yet we need and must have structures to contain our growth.  There is no inward and spiritual grace without the outward and visible sign.  Zeal, then, is the honest willingness to see into how the outward is becoming inward, how things and words and customs are being held reverently and humbly.  

The closing of the temple is about replacement rather than abolition.  Heaven has indeed come down to earth.  God does and will meet us. But not in a building, but in Christ now in our very bodies.  The root of sin is the avoidance of accepting the gift of being God’s temple, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit within us.  The cry to repent that arises from the wrecked tables and frightened animals and scattered coins is to life, in Christ, as God’s temple.  To repent is to bring back into myself the central place of God’s dwelling and accept the invitation to be incarnate.  Jesus is saying, do not outsource to any person, practice, building, ritual, or institution the role of being God’s temple for you.  Do not give away your identity, avoid your responsibility, seek to appease God with sacrifices, worship the worship – and thus not worship God as the very place where God dwells. Where our lives have become routine, abstract, disembodied, repentance is coming home to ourselves as wondrous, sacred beings.  All the stones of all the churches ever built over two millennia cannot contain, will never possess, the value of each of our bodies.  

Amen.