The Day of Pentecost A - May 28, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC

The Day of Pentecost, Year A - Sunday, May 28, 2023

 

Acts 2:1-21

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

John 20:19-23

Click here for an audio of the sermon

I love that voice within the tradition that reminds us that however much we study, whatever we think we know with certainty and say about God definitively, we are never doing more than pointing toward the apprehension of the mystery that even in the revelation of Christ remains mystery. “If you think you have come to understand God, it is not God that you have understood” is often how it is phrased.  Or, “if on the road you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.”  It is not that we are left ignorant, but that our knowing is unavoidably subjective and partial.  The apophatic stream of spirituality is a good balance to an abundance of language about God in that the apophatic proclaims what God is not, the utter inadequacy of language, the necessity of mystery and silence alongside proclamation and creed.

So, if you have already decided that you know what the feast of Pentecost is, what it means, then what you understand is not Pentecost.  Bridging the historical event to our world means stepping with great humility and care into the task of taking into account what the event says about God and holding those claims as the basis by which we implore the Spirit of the God who was present in the upper room.  The Holy Spirit comes to expectant and open disciples, yet on her own time and in her own way.  The Holy Spirit is not a respecter of barriers between persons and effects understanding across different languages and cultures and begins to make of many a new oneness that transcends labels and hierarchies.  The coming of the Holy Spirit is a promise fulfilled and an ultimate fulfillment that awaits us. This reality is given fresh meaning and hope. 

A bit of unpacking these ways of the Spirit…
Because Acts 2 is often characterized as a joyful coming together of divided peoples, it is good to remember that in that social context this shared understanding of separated peoples in the one Spirit would have been absurd, irrational, offensive, and dangerous.  Ethnic and racial divisions and identities gathering together and understanding one another undermines the social order and fractures a system of empire built on perpetuating rivalry and violence.  And yet both in the gathering and its shared experience of humanizing the enemy, as St. Peter explains, God’s long-promised dream of justice and neighborliness based on mutual respect and sharing is coming into being.  No longer is identity and security based on the terms of Rome - in subjugation, victimization, and capitulation - but in the divine image given by God from which all persons derive value and acceptance.  Thus the first moments of what will come to be called the Christian church are characterized by barrier-dismantling respect and equality of men and women, young and old, Jew and Gentile, slave and free.  As Paul will say later in the letter to the Galatians, those labels are no longer authoritative, but oneness in Christ is the eternal reality of human life.  And so these believers find themselves in an either/or of the story of prejudice and segregation or hospitality and reconciliation. 

Let’s apply this vision to the current state of American Christianity.  If Christians are to be known for our love for one another, our care for the outsider and needy, our welcome of the stranger, our focus on reconciliation and respect, how are we doing?  Certainly followers of Jesus live out all of these new creation ways of being in countless acts of care.  But there are also ways in which data point to the opposite: the sad realities of decline, scandal and widening and deepening polarization within and among denominations and churches.  The world of just a few years ago which was relatively familiar and stable has slipped through our fingers.  In the face of such change, some Christians are choosing to hunker down and cling to a romanticized vision of the past, ignoring or attacking the swirl of social, political, and religious change happening around us.  Others view this isolation as fundamentally unfaithful to Jesus’ call to love the outcast and victim and have decided that the church in its current institutional form is basically hopeless and that direct engagement with practical justice work is what is needed.    

The story of Pentecost gives us a way forward that is better than either being stuck in a past we cannot recover or seeking to bring about a future that is beyond our power. We can be realistic and hopeful. We can believe that the vision of Pentecost community is still relevant, still God’s dream, and acknowledge that this dream will bring suffering - misunderstanding, suspicion, rejection.  In liminal time, we are invited to grieve and hope.  Grieve what is dead and is not coming back.  Hope toward what is possible, what new opportunities unfold within our imaginations.  I saw a conversation with a bishop recently who said, “we are experiencing Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday all at the same time.”  I regularly see stories about the increase of anxiety, loneliness, depression, and isolation.  That churning of disorientation, anxiety, and excitement you feel? Welcome to the club.  There is no magic fix, no instant escape in a new structure, program, movement, or event that promises to alleviate our fears.  The gift the disciples received was about how the Holy Spirit would blow through their prejudices, their grievances, their privilege, and their entitlement to make possible a church where brother and sister were the only labels that had any meaning. From that gift, the community has an identity and purpose.

The Holy Spirit is offering us two gifts needed to be disciples in this era: expectant readiness and prophetic imagination.  In expectant readiness, we remember that the Spirit takes the initiative, the Spirit brings illumination and clarity for action, the Spirit is the reconciler and unitive power of the church.  We almost always prefer order, control, predictability, and immediacy.  When we are humble and trusting, we have to suffer the death of what we think God should do, what would benefit us, and how we can take credit.  God ushers us into the unknown and unknowable to remind us that being fragile, mortal, finite creatures is not a problem to be solved - God knows that is what we are - God made us that way! - but that it is in our very need and limit and dependence that the Holy Spirit blows in and through us - not because we are special and own the copyright - but so that we know we are earthen vessels of the holy, the treasure is sheer gift that we do not control or possess even as we are instruments of its glory.

The phrase “prophetic imagination” comes from Walter Brueggemann, who wrote in the book of the same name, “The prophet engages in futuring fantasy.  The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation…. We must do what we can to open up our imaginations to a radically different set of future possibilities…”  Brueggemann goes on to point toward the practices of prophetic hope that subvert the cosmic and social powers of division.  Generosity, hospitality, and forgiveness which continually seek to recognize and honor the human dignity of the neighbor - these are the ways we dissent from empire and declare that Jesus is Lord.  Our identity and vocation is to disrupt and subvert the forces of division and domination through acts of hopeful resistance in the power of the Holy Spirit.

We Christians believe that in the end, in a new heaven and new earth, what is now obscure will be made clear, what is now partial will be made complete, what we have not seen will be seen, what we cannot imagine will be real, and we will enjoy Christ face-to-face with brothers and sisters from every tribe and language and people and nation forever and ever.  The end that began with Christ, continued at Pentecost, and breaks into our present with fresh wind, renewed hope, awakened imagination, can continue its presence and work in us and in our world.  To the One who calls us, prepares us, prospers our efforts, and holds us in life be glory and praise, now and forever. Amen.

Easter 7 A - May 21, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

The Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year A - Sunday, May 21, 2023

 

Acts 1:6-14

1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11

John 17:1-11

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Set up Thyself, O God, above the heavens and Thy glory above all the earth.

By thine Ascension draw us withal unto Thee, O Lord, so as to set our affections on things above, and not on things on the earth. By the awful mystery of Thy Holy Body and Precious Blood in the evening of this day: Lord, have mercy. Amen.

 This prayer of the Anglican Divine, Lancelot Andrewes, reminds us that those of us living on this side of the Ascension have a choice to make. Either we can set our affections on things above or on things on earth. St. Paul, who inspired this prayer, would go further: “Set your mind on things above where your life is now hidden with Christ in God.”

Perhaps one of the most blinding errors of Christian spirituality is the neglect of this verse from Paul’s letter to the Colossians. Here in the West, Roman Catholics have tended to neglect it because they have tended to neglect the writings of St. Paul in general. Protestants have neglected it because they have allowed other Pauline topics, like justification and salvation, to eclipse it and have been largely afraid of its mystical connotations and implications. This neglect, in my mind, has distorted the meaning of the Ascension and has left us spiritually in a state of heightened expectation of what is still to come rather than in a state of heightened realization of what has already come. How many Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians obsess about the timing of the Second Coming and the details of the Rapture—all the while Christian contemplatives scratch their heads wondering what all the fuss is about! When we take Paul seriously and our faith is awakened to the full extent of what Christ has accomplished for us we begin to see that the gospel is not simply that Christ is ascended into heaven but that we are too! And yes, even now!! The work of Christ and the Spirit, of Ascension and Pentecost, is to make the eternal reality a present reality in the realm of time—in our time—so that on this very day and at this very moment the triumph of Christ in his Ascension is our triumph too and the presence of God can now be experienced, known, and enjoyed in a new Pentecostal fullness. “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

Yet, if this promise of eternal life is now available, and we are now ascended with Christ reigning in glory, the question becomes all too obvious—why do we so seldom feel like we are?!?! We say that we are currently living in the already but not yet—in the tension between the seed of this eternal life taking root in our lives and the full flourishing of that eternal life. What, I think, is so scandalous about the Church is that after 2000 years we have still realized this eternal life so little!

And that we still remain largely a product of our broken societies—anxious, fearful, self-absorbed, and tossed to and fro by the shifting winds of a culture lost at sea. What is equally scandalous is that the Church has offered so few convincing answers to this predicament. We have produced eloquently formed documents about God; we have built magnificent buildings which reveal the glory of God; but where are the actual Christians whose lives speak with this eloquence and whose lives manifest the glory of this magnificence? Why are we still more like the disciples before Pentecost full of anxiety and fear locked behind closed doors than we are like the disciples after Pentecost full of the Spirit radiating the glory of God?

Today’s first lesson from the Acts of the Apostles tells us quite explicitly what must take place for this transformation from fear to fullness to occur. If we want to move out of our prison of anxiety and fear and into a life full of God, two things must happen: we must first “come together” and then we must “pray.”

In a recent article in the Associated Press entitled, “How the American Dream Convinces People Loneliness is Normal,” Ted Anthony mentions that just this month the U. S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an American epidemic, saying that it takes as deadly a toll as smoking upon the population of the United States. “Millions of people in America are struggling in the shadows,” he said, “and that’s not right.” He cited some potential contributing forces: the gradual withering of longstanding institutions, decreased engagement with churches, the fraying bonds of extended families. When you add recent stressors — the rise of social media and virtual life, post-9/11 polarization and the way COVID-19 interrupted existence — the challenge, he notes, becomes even more stark.

Could it be that this mounting sense of isolation so many in our society are experiencing is contributing to the equally mounting anxiety and other mental health issues that so many face today? We Christians have a very powerful anecdote to this isolation epidemic—it is creating community—communities where all feel welcome and are valued as integral parts of the whole. But, even more importantly, communities whose focus is not primarily the issues we face in our broken societies—not just fighting for social justice, as important as this is— but whose primary focus is God.

And that brings us to the second point: we “come together” not just to build social bonds but to “pray.” It was while the disciples were praying that they were filled with the Holy Spirit, and it was while Jesus was praying that he was transfigured. Praying, especially praying together, is the way to move out of fear and into fullness—out of anxiety and self-absorption and into freedom and self- transcendence—and to ultimately realize the fullness of life that is the gift of Ascension and Pentecost.

To be a little more specific, since there are many ways that Christian communities can pray together—and whenever this prayer is sincere it is certainly a good thing—there is a particular form of prayer that I believe is most appropriate and effective in helping us realize our fullness of life in God.

Rather than positioning ourselves like the “men of Galilee” who stand looking up toward heaven as if the Lord is out there caught up in the clouds— relating to God solely as some objective reality far removed from us—we should position ourselves more like we often do here—coming together in quiet attention with the ears of our hearts open listening and absorbing the presence of God mediated to us in word, Spirit, and sacrament. We meditate and contemplate together not what we hope to receive but what has already been poured out upon us. We marinate in the atmosphere of God’s presence in which we have been immersed in our baptism and awaken to the reality of the new creation of God’s justice and peace. We feed on the life of our Lord and become what we eat. We are disarmed by the love which consumes us and are liberated from grasping after something we think that is missing because we now realize that all is already given. In this pregnant silence, all striving ceases, all restlessness is stilled, all disappointment forgotten, and all anxiety and fear is cast out. There is no longer any room for anything but love and light in the still place where God is all in all and where we are all one—together in God. This humble place of emptiness paradoxically becomes the place of fullness. This place of nothingness becomes the place where everything becomes possible.

In one of the most profound sections of Scripture, Chapter 17 of the Gospel of John, as we just heard, Jesus prays to the Father saying that he will soon no longer be in the world, but that we, his disciples, will remain, even as he goes to the Father. He then prays that we, his disciples, would be protected in the name that the Father has given to him, so that we may be one just as the Father and the Son are one. For John, oneness is always and only through love. It is the very reality of God which casts out fear. It is the light which drives out darkness. It is a way of being which knows no division. Jesus’ prayer is that even in this world we would know such a glorious way of being. To be protected in the name the Father gave to the Son—the name Jesus—which literally means “God’s salvation”—is to be overshadowed by the love of the Father for the Son and to exist in a bond so strong that nothing can exist but the very glory of God. The Christian community is baptized into that name and that name is now our own. We are daughters and sons in the Son—and this is most true when we come together and pray. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”

As we find ourselves approaching the final feast of Christ’s saving events, we might ask ourselves what difference has Christ’s paschal journey made for us? Are we still looking up toward heaven as if God is still far away? Or are we awakening day by day to the reality that we are, even now, in God and God is in us? This in no way should suggest that this absorption into things divine should cause us to be unconcerned about the things of this world. Rather, a true uniting of ourselves to God is the most important and most powerful source to nurture our compassion for the world. To be full of God is to be full of God’s love. And this is the surest sign that we are a Pentecostal people reigning in the Ascended Christ— that we have love for one another. Perhaps Merton said it best, “To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.” The realization of this is the great gift of contemplative prayer, and the embodiment of it is the fulfillment of our Christian call.

So, with St. Paul, “ I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”

Ascension, Year A - May 18, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josep Martinez-Cubero, OHC

The Feast of the Ascension, Year A - Thursday, May 18, 2023

 

Acts 1:1-11

Ephesians 1:15-23

Luke 24:44-53

Click here for an audio of the sermon

In his book, The Big Questions in Science and Religion (2008), Anglican theologian and priest Keith Ward writes: "We now know that, if [Jesus] began ascending two thousand years ago, he would not yet have left the Milky Way (unless he attained warp speed)." The Ascension is one of those scriptural stories that can spark all sorts of heated debates between those who passionately say they believe it happened, and in bodily form, and those who dismiss it as literary fiction or an embarrassing example of an antiquated cosmology. I tend to think these kinds of arguments miss the forest for the trees.

I am sure must if not all of you have seen depictions of the Ascension in paintings, such as the one by von Kulmbach at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in which the amazed and confused crowd looks up and all that can be seen at the top of the painting is Jesus' feet dangling through the clouds. And there’s the one by the Italian Andrea Mantegna in which Jesus is surrounded by cherubs as he is ascending. These two paintings and hundreds of others like them contrast heaven "above" and earth "below," with Jesus hovering in between.

Our ideas today about space and time are different from those in the first century, when there was a three-tiered understanding of the universe- earth in the middle, hell down below us, and heaven somewhere up above the clouds. It's tempting to contrast the out-of-date cosmology of St. Luke with the updated cosmology of contemporary physics. But I think that is misguided and not helpful. I don't expect the writer of the Gospel to have known modern cosmology. He described the Ascension within the context of the best cosmology of his day, an imperfect cosmology, which has since been supplanted by our own imperfect cosmology. It's misleading to privilege any cosmology, whether ancient or modern, as a final picture of the world for all time.

We do best to ponder the stories meaning and how we are to experience it. Before we do so, though, we must ask, “which story”? The same writer wrote slightly different versions of the story. In the Gospel, he places the Ascension just after the resurrection appearances; maybe a day or two after Easter. In the Book of Acts, he places the Ascension “forty days” after Easter. Now, I seriously doubt that the writer forgot what he had already written in his gospel when he began to write the Acts of the Apostles. But it is an indication of how these details are to be thought of symbolically rather than factually. The story serves as the bridge between the two books. It closes the book concerning the life and ministry of Jesus (the Gospel of St. Luke) and opens the book concerning the life and ministry of the early Christian church (the Acts of the Apostles).

Throughout the scriptures the number “forty” symbolizes a period of fullness or completion. In the days of Noah, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights; the Israelites traveled in the wilderness for 40 years before they reached the promised land; Moses was atop Mount Sinai for 40 days and forty nights; and Jesus fasted for 40 days in the wilderness. So when the author writes that Jesus appeared to the apostles for forty days after the resurrection, he is indicating the completion of something. The apostles are now to let go of the old way of knowing Jesus so that his empowering presence can now be experienced in a different way – from his physical presence with them, to the divine Presence of Christ with and within them.

St. Luke seems to be using symbolic space and time to describe a reality that could not at that time be expressed otherwise. A closer reading of the twenty or so allusions to Jesus’ Ascension in the New Testament seem to indicate that the writers understood the crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and even the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, as a single multifaceted mystery that the apostles seem to have experienced in chronological stages.

So, knowing what we know today, it is not helpful to think of Jesus having ascended "up" as in really far away above our heads in space. It is a beautiful story pointing to a deeper meaning. We might better understand Jesus' Ascension not as a change of location, but as his movement to a deeper dimension of reality. Jesus moved in the Ascension from being present in the realm of space and time to being present in the realm of eternity, in the transcendent heavenly realm, and as he tells us in the Gospel according to Matthew, to be with us always, “to the end of the age.” And how are we to experience the Ascension today? I leave you with the words of Thomas Merton:

“[The Ascension] is the feast of silence and interior solitude when we go up to live in heaven with Jesus: for he takes us there, after he has lived a little while on earth among us. This is the grace of Ascension Day: to be taken up into the heaven of our own souls, the point of immediate contact with God. To rest on this quiet peak, in the darkness that surrounds God. To live there through all trials and all business with the ‘tranquil God who makes all things tranquil.’”

¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! ~Amen+

Easter 6 A - May 14, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

The Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A - Sunday, May 14, 2023

 

Acts 17:22-31

1 Peter 3:13-22

John 14:15-21

Click here for an audio of the sermon

First things first: Happy Mother's Day.  Whether you are a biological mother or an adoptive or foster mother or someone who has nurtured and helped another person grow, we salute you and celebrate you today.  And I say this no matter how blessed, complicated, or disappointing your relationship with your own mother or mother figure has been or is.  Because it is very likely all three.  Nevertheless, Happy Mother’s Day.

 

The last time I preached on Mother's Day, the long first reading from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles was about the Ethiopian eunuch. I later remarked to my sister about how improbable it was to have a reading about a eunuch on Mother's Day. She thought for a moment and said, “Well he had a mother too.” So do we all.

 I’m relieved to say that the readings appointed for this Sunday are quite a bit more appropriate and indeed beautiful. But I'm not going to talk about the readings, at least not directly.  Rather, I want to focus our attention on the collect, or prayer, with which we began our liturgy:

O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: pour into our hearts such love towards you that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

 Whenever I offer this prayer, I think of a brief Friday morning reflection which the late Bishop Daniel Corrigan gave to the congregation at our monastery in Santa Barbara many years ago. He talked about the power of a few little words. If you were around in the Episcopal Church before about 1976 or so you would have heard this prayer from the 1928 version of The Book of Common Prayer where it was appointed for the 6th Sunday after Trinity. It was essentially the same prayer as we heard this morning except it said: “Pour into our hearts such love toward thee, that we, loving thee above all things, may obtain thy promises…” and so on. And this was good as far as it went. It was a reminder that we are called to love God above all things, to choose God above all things, as the royal road to fullness of life. But during the revision of the liturgies in the 1970s, three little words were added, or more accurately restored, to this prayer making it at once both richer and more relevant. And those words were: “in all things.” So that the prayer asks not simply that we love God above all things, which I hope we do, but that we love God in all things.

Think about this for a minute.  Truthfully, I find it challenging to understand or grasp what loving God above all things means concretely. I suppose there are dramatic points in life where this is clearly presented, and an opportunity is offered for us to act on this aspiration or this demand. I think, for example, of the experience of martyrs or of people who are called to choose God's way of justice and love in the face of social or political opposition, ostracism or worse. For most of us, thank God, that's not a regular occurrence. But daily, perhaps hourly, we are each asked or invited or counseled to love God in all things…in ourselves, in others, in our societal relationships, and in the whole created order: in nature, in birds and animals, in sunrises and clouds, in rains and maybe even in earthquakes and floods and volcanos.  And that is because our Christian faith teaches that all these are the creation of a good God and are themselves intrinsically good, marked by and stamped with God’s creative power and divine purpose. And this includes you and me, each one of us. No one of us exists outside of the web of this created order with all its facets of interdependence, fragility, and sacredness. Rather it and we coexist as one.  It can’t be otherwise.

It's always good to be reminded of this fundamental truth, but especially on this Sixth Sunday of Easter which, besides being Mother's Day, is also traditionally known as Rogation Sunday. Beginning in the fifth century, this Sunday and the three days that follow it preceding the great feast of the Ascension (which we will observe on Thursday) have been devoted to the blessing of crops and fields and of nature generally. In medieval Europe, and still in living memory, there were on these days processions through the fields and farms asking God to bless and provide food for the earth, for us and for all creatures. These processions also served a social purpose. In England they were known as “beating the bounds.” The procession would go to the farthest corners of the territorial parish so that people who did not have easy access to maps would know where property and authority started and ended. Today really is the Church’s Earth Day when we are invited once again to recognize, acknowledge, and celebrate the whole created order in which we are but a part, albeit a central and increasingly destructive part. For the threat of ecological disaster is very real, and in the face of our reluctance to confront this threat, we are brought up short by this Rogationtide.

Over the last quarter century there has been much written about the relationship of religion and ecology, and specifically Christianity and ecology. They are worth studying. But you would do well, if you have the time and energy, to read Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical letter Praise Be to You (Laudato Si’) subtitled “On Care for Our Common Home.”  It is a brave, compelling summons to reflection and action on the part not only of Christians but of all the peoples of the earth in the face of ecological degradation and climate change…though I must admit that it's a bit of a slow read at times. I was particularly drawn to Chapter Two of this encyclical letter on the Gospel of Creation which sets out a theological framework for climate care. The Catholic Climate Covenant summarizes this chapter with the following bullet points:

·     God created everything with intrinsic goodness.

·        Humans are uniquely created and called to exercise responsible stewardship over creation on behalf of the loving Creator.

·        All creation is a mystery the diversity and unity of which both reflect and mediate the Creator.

·        The right to private property is not “absolute or inviolable” but “subordinat[ed]…to the universal destination of goods."

·        “[The] destiny of all creation is bound up with the mystery of Christ.”

Pope Francis stresses that God's command for humans to have dominion over creation expressed in Genesis 1:28 is not exploitative license but rather, as he puts it, a vocation to cultivate and care for God's good gift of creation.

There is much else in this letter that bears mention. He critiques ‘anthropocentrism’ and the prevailing technocratic paradigm which encourages an unreflective acceptance of every technological advance based more on profit than on its effects on human flourishing.  He reminds us that while creation manifests God and may be a privileged space for encountering God, it is not itself God and it is a mistake to divinize or worship the earth and its creatures. And true to his Jesuit tradition, Francis affirms a preferential option for the poor who are most harmed by ecological degradation. He urges both public policy change as well as an individual change of heart, expressed in our willing adoption of a lifestyle driven not by “extreme consumerism” but by a vision of a simpler lifestyle where less is more. And all of this is in service of what the Pope calls ‘integral ecology,’ seeing the whole interconnected picture through, as it were, the eyes of the One who is creator and sustainer of it all.

This Rogation Sunday, this Earth Day, is an opportunity for us to take stock. Look around and give thanks for God’s creation. And as we do that, may we in our own way commit or re-commit ourselves to the cultivation of our common human vocation of caring for the earth and each other that is at the very heart of our Christian faith.  It is the very best gift that we, nurturers nurtured by our Mother Earth, can give to the generations to come.  Maybe it’s the best Mother’s Day gift ever.

Easter 5 A - May 7, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

The Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year A - Sunday, May 7, 2023

Acts 7:55-60

1 Peter 2:2-10

John 14:1-14

Click here for an audio of the sermon

The lectionary readings for the Sundays after Easter are full of instructions for disciples about how to live as Jesus taught without his physical presence in their midst. Jesus is preparing believers, including us, to consider not only his journey through death to life, but our own as well.

The setting today is the upper room in Jerusalem. Jesus and his closest friends are at the supper that will be their last together. Their hearts were torn with anxiety and fear. How does the heart feast at a banquet of disappointment and loss? What could possibly free the human heart from being troubled at such a time?

Jesus instructs: “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” Given the context, it’s not hard to understand why this text is so often used in the burial liturgy. Death troubles our hearts and we want to find some balance, stability, and harmony in the face of it.  This text, however, is about more than the afterlife. It has something to say right here and now. It’s speaks to the very circumstances that trouble our hearts. At the edge of his own grave, Jesus means to reassure his disciples that his death is not the end, but the beginning of the room he is making for them in God. The disciples are incredulous. So are we, much of the time, especially when we are frightened or threatened by change or loss in whatever form it takes.

Jesus recognizes that their hearts and our hearts are already troubled. He is not warning them or us about a future condition. He knows the troubling has already begun. None of us get through this life without a troubled heart. I don’t think we can look at the pain of the world, the suffering of those we love, or our own wounds and not have a troubled heart. At least, I hope we can’t.

 Even as he was telling the disciples to not let their hearts be troubled, I suspect that he was telling himself as much as them.  By naming what’s going on between them, he’s reminding them and us that not letting our hearts be troubled begins with looking into our hearts to see and name what troubles it? That means facing ourselves, our lives, our world. That may be the first and most difficult thing Jesus asks of us in today’s gospel. He also reminds us  that our lives and the world are not defined or limited to what troubles.

Throughout these final discourses, Jesus speaks of the experience of abiding, of indwelling: Him in the Father, the Father in Him, Him in us, us in the Father. He is telling them and us that we are not the center. It is not our success, accomplishments, position, or power. God is our center, abiding within us. So wherever we go, whatever we face, whoever we are, God is within. Regardless of what troubles, God abides in us.

He encourages them and us to not lose sight of this truth in the midst of what’s going on. When hearts are troubled and we don’t know the way we start living outside of ourselves, and when we do life is defined by and focused on external things. He’s inviting us to live from the inside out, instead of from the outside in. That’s the promise of Easter in the midst of whatever troubles our heart. It won’t take away our worries or fix our problems, but it gives us a place of stability and helps us know what to hold on to and what to let go of. It connects us to abundant life and to each other.

The world has a multitude of answers as to what will relieve our hearts. Jesus has only one: “Believe in God, believe also in me”. When John speaks of believing in his Gospel, it is almost exclusively as an outward, active, and intimate commitment with Jesus. It is a giving over, an entrusting of our whole self to God, independent of outward circumstances. Belief requires self-surrender. As those first disciples at that table were sharing the feast of loss with Jesus, he attempts to assure them that even in the face of what lies ahead, they will not be forgotten, they will not be separated. The place he is preparing for them, for us, is God’s own life.

With our post-Easter eyes, it might seem easier for us to skip to the end of the story. If we do that, we lose sight of the fact that something always dies for something new to be birthed. Birth and death are repeating cycles in the narrative of our lives. In both the delivery room and the hospice room, those present are changed. Birth and death are the bookends holding our stories of transformation. Visions of who we are and are becoming give us life, even as a previous sense of ourselves dies. In these moments we often echo Thomas in asking how we can know the way if we do not know where God is. With Philip, we claim that we will be satisfied if we can just see. As hospice chaplain and midwife to ourselves and each other, our role is to be fully present, even as we cannot see and do not know what comes next in our life.

God’s promise to abide in us, within us, to love us, to make room for us, to know and be known by us, never ends. Nothing can undo us because God has claimed and named us. That is enough to sustain and support us. That is enough to empower us to live as witnesses to that love.  

+Amen.