The Presentation of our Lord, transferred, February 3, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

The Presentation of our Lord, transferred, February 3, 2026

• Malachi 3:1-4
• Hebrews 2:14-18
• Luke 2:22-40

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Senex puerum portabat: puer autem senem regebat: quem virgo peperit, et post partum virgo permansit: ipsum quem genuit, adoravit. 

It was in the early 1970s, probably 1972, that I first heard these words. They were sung to a setting written by the great Renaissance composer and court musician William Byrd (1540-1623) at the Church of the Advent in Boston on the Feast of the Presentation. I was captivated by the music, a motet that weaved in and out with its various lines and finally resolving. It was stunning. But even more captivating for me were the words themselves:

An old man held up a child

yet the child upheld [or ruled] the man. 

The child the Virgin bore while yet remaining a virgin, 

this child she had borne, she adored.

The text itself is an ancient antiphon for First Vespers of today’s feast as well as part of the gradual chant at the mass. It comes to us from a sermon of Saint Augustine. And it is pure poetry.  

Spanning centuries, the medieval mind delighted in words and dwelt in them in a way that it is almost impossible for us now, overwhelmed as we are by words and images and music and noise and false news and social media. As LP Hartley famously reminds us, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." And in that different country, that other world, words were scarcer and were attended to with greater attention and even greater receptivity and creativity. So it is with this motet, this antiphon. There is a palpable delight in the juxtapositions and the surprising paradoxes that are articulated. An old man holds a child, yet that child upholds the old man, and not just the old man but the entire universe. The Virgin bears a child yet remains a virgin and adores the one who made her though she had given him birth. It's more than just clever word play. It points rather to the astounding power of God to shape and reshape our minds and our hearts to see in new and more faithful ways. That may be the truth of Lectio Divina, a practice which I find so elusive. That may also be the truth of poetry which I find equally elusive. It is the realization that what appears at first sight is not the whole story; it's not even the true story. Something more mysterious and profound is going on. It is, if you will, mysticism in verbal form.  And it takes time to unfold.

Some years ago, we simplified our 1976 Monastic Breviary, and this Feast of the Presentation was drastically revised. The antiphons, which were always notoriously difficult to sing, were eliminated. But it’s worth listening once again to the poetic truths they embody and to consider the invitations, they offer us to enter into the mysterious and archetypal depths of this feast.

So, the antiphon on the Magnificat of First Vespers: 

“O wonderful interchange! The creator of mankind, taking upon him a living body, deigned to be born of a virgin, and proceeding forth as man, without seed, has made us partakers of his divinity.”

Chew on that for a while!

Or the antiphon on the Benedictus:

“When you were marvelously born of a virgin, then were the scriptures fulfilled; you came down like rain into a fleece of wool, to bring salvation to all mankind: we praise you, O our God.”

Can you imagine a better prayer, a holier acclamation?

Or my favorite, the antiphon on the Magnificat at Second Vespers:

“In the bush, which Moses saw unconsumed, we acknowledge the preservation of your glorious virginity; holy mother of God, intercede for your children.”

Mary, the Burning Bush!

Today's feast marks the conclusion of the Nativity or Christmas cycle, a cycle largely based on the infancy narrative of Saint Luke’s gospel, those first two chapters of Luke which shape both our popular devotion and our theology. Most of us admit that these chapters are not historical in the way we understand that term today. They are, if you will, legends or great mythic narratives which point beyond themselves not to historical details—though they are there too—but to profound theological, doctrinal, and dogmatic understandings. They are all about God with us, Emmanuel, the Holy One pitching a tent and dwelling among us in the person of Jesus and in the Spirit's power. And in this way, they bring us to a more adequate expression of the truth and not its diminishment.

But to understand these events celebrated today, dwelling in scriptural texts such Simeon’s canticle Nunc Dimittis that we sing each night at Compline or in these wonderfully poetic antiphons which come to us from over a millennia ago, we need to let go, at least provisionally, our need for logical certitude and historical accuracy and inhabit for a time the realm of the poet or artist or artisan or mystic. 

 And so today we walk with Mary and Joseph and the Baby into the Temple. We meet Anna the prophetess. We watch Simeon, aged though he is, pick up the Child just as we carried burning candles in procession. We listen to Simeon’s song. We hear of a sword piercing a mother's heart. And with journey with the family as they get on with their lives, as best they can, moving to Nazareth and making a home there…a home fit for a King.

An old man held up a child, but the child upheld the man. So, it is with us. The child whom the woman bore while remaining a virgin, this child she adored. So must we, so must we.  Saint Augustine says: “Simeon, the old man, bore Christ the Child; Christ ruled the old age of Simeon... Christ was born, and at the old age of the world the desire of the old man was fulfilled. He who found a world broken with age came to an ancient man.”   And still, he comes to us today.

I close with a quote from a contemporary Jesuit writer, Joseph Koczera:

“The old man carried the child, but the child ruled the old man. Borrowed from his sermon of Saint Augustine, this verse pithily sums up Simeon’s place in the history of salvation. It may seem strange to think of a tiny infant “ruling” over anyone, yet it was the expectation of the Messiah's coming that served to order and govern Simeon’s life. We all have our hopes for the future, and we may find that our lives are governed by expectation. What is the consolation that we await, and what do we hope to see or encounter before we make our own Nunc Dimittis?” 

Good question.  Happy feast.

And if you get the chance today, listen on YouTube or Spotify to Byrd’s motet Senex Puerum portabat or one of the other settings of it by Tomas Luis de Victoria or Giovanni Palestrina.  You won’t regret it.    

The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 1, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Adam McCoy

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany

• Micah 6:1-8
• 1 Corinthians 1:18-31
• Matthew 5:1-12

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

Who is blessed?

On entering the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, turn left and you will soon enter the Ancient Greek and Roman rooms.  They are filled with works of art which depict the human form in almost unimaginable states of perfection.   Most are adolescents and young adults, at the height of their strength and agility and good health.  I am always tempted to think, how much better they look than I and most of the people I know do.  It must have been a true golden age!  And then I reflect on the actuality of their time: A third to a half of all children died as infants.  How many surviving freeborn boys died in war or from war wounds or the diseases that follow conflict?  How many were worked to an early death if they were not born free?  How many women, free or enslaved, died in childbirth?  How many of those who escaped those fates were struck with illnesses for which there was no cure?   It was a world in which that statuesque perfection was attainable by very few, and those few for only a brief shining moment before age and infirmity arrived for them. 

The great beauty of ancient art did not represent the actuality of its age, but rather, reflects a perfection they believed existed in the realm of the divine and the hope that some few of us might achieve, if ever so briefly, some reflection of the divine.  So put aside those of us who don’t or can’t.  Concentrate on the winners.  Their view of reality was one of a deeply imperfect creation for the most part cursed in one way or another with the gods in their perfection looking down on our struggles, toying with us, laughing at us, waiting for us to give them something in the often vain hope that we might escape the disaster waiting for us just around the next corner.  That we might escape our usual, all too usual, reality.  So, we hold up to ourselves images of perfection to attract ourselves to what might be humanly possible.  But in fact, because so few ever approached that perfection, and so many more, most in fact, were left unnoticed by the wayside, that beauty is heart breaking.

We may look on this and think how much better we are than they were.  After all, we have made great strides in childbirth practices, in medicine, in working toward human equality.  And that is true.  Perhaps not so much progress in avoiding war.  But is it not also true that we still hope for a perfection, of looks and beauty, of charm and popularity, of professional success, of financial well-being, and celebrate it when we think we see it?  What else is celebrity culture?  What else is our endless sacrifice of effort and money on the many altars of self-improvement, of ladder climbing?  If we have success, how do we feel about those left behind, those who cannot climb much higher?  How do we feel if we ourselves, despite our best efforts, are not quite beautiful, not very popular or successful, not rich?  If in fact we are quite ordinary?  Or worse?  Is there perhaps something a little off about these hopes in the face of our realities? 

The uncomfortable truth is that the world we live in is imperfect.  The idea that we might achieve statuesque perfection and all it represents is almost always a false hope.  Fortunately, some few do briefly achieve it.  It is in itself a good thing to strive after health, beauty, strength, agility and prosperity.  But if we place our hope in achieving those good things and judge ourselves and others as deficient when we don’t get them, we ignore and devalue the life we actually have. 

The truth is that God actually seems to love our human world in its imperfections and failures as much as in its apparent successes.  God seems to love us just as we really are.  We can be improved, and that is good, but all of us are already and always loved. The dying infant and the dying mother.  Exploited, underfed and overworked people, free and unfree alike.  Young men and women injured and dying in the battles of war and childbirth.  Unhealable injuries, untreatable diseases.  The injustices of human systems of every kind.  Our worth is not just in success, but in living good values in our lives, in loving each other as God loves us, and in putting that love to work in the real world we live in.  Everyone alive is living in God’s love.  And if, God be praised, we do achieve some success, the ancients were right: it is a gift from God.  But that success is not our own as a possession: it is ours to share.

 Perhaps someone now is thinking, hasn’t he moved from the particular blessings Jesus pointed out?  I confess it: I believe Jesus is giving us a representative sample of people who are blessed, a sample which can be enlarged, not an exclusive list.  His point is that a life lived with humility, mercy and honest trust and hope but still resulting in what the world thinks is a disastrous failure - that life is in fact loved by God and can look forward to God’s enduring love at the final judgment.

And so, consider the Beatitudes.  “Blessed are” translates the Greek “makarioi hoi”.   Makarios means not just blessed in the religious sense, but fortunate, lucky, winners.  And who are these winners in the celestial lottery?  Humble people.  People who have lost someone or something.  People who don’t put themselves forward in life.  People who want right and good and justice.  People who when they have the opportunity to take revenge, don’t.  People who put God first and themselves last in their lives.  People who stop fights, refuse violence, find ways to bring people together.  People who are willing to suffer when doing the right thing brings them harm.  People who are willing to be publicly identified with these values, with God’s values, and to be disrespected, and even harmed, for doing God’s work.

Jesus is telling us what God’s values are.  They are not the values which “the world” thinks will get us ahead in life.  In our imperfect world, what we used to call a fallen world, humility, loss, deference, putting right ahead of self-advancement, letting people off the hook, valuing peace over victory, willingness to “take it”, are not values which will guarantee us success in the cutthroat business of self-advancement.  They just don’t.  And they won’t.   That’s an uncomfortable truth.  Choosing God’s way is really risky.  It’s not a really good career move.

But what it is, is an alignment with reality.  Jesus is telling us what God’s values are - that every life is of value, every life is loveable, the lives of the world’s losers just as much as its winners.  Jesus is recommending that we rearrange our perception of things.  That we organize our social interactions so that God’s values will be held up, learned and practiced as diligently as are the arts of self-advancement.  That we redefine what human success is and can be.   That we create human communities in which God’s love is the standard of our own values.  But how to do that?  How to even start?  Three suggestions.

First: Bird watchers study the appearance, the calls, the habitats, the flight patterns of the birds they want to identify.  They quietly wait for one to appear and then they just watch, learning about the bird.  Perhaps we can do the same with virtue.  Is there someone living this beatitude life?  Quietly watch and learn.  But they’re not birds - they and we are both human.  Watch and learn and then do it ourselves. 

Second: Don’t be too surprised to learn that we too are eligible to be loved.

Third: Are we willing to admit that the talents and successes we might enjoy are gifts from God, to be shared? 

In other words, are we willing to see our weaknesses, our utter ordinariness, our failures, not as sources for depression but opportunities for God’s love to seek us out and find us?   Are we willing to seek out and find others who need this love of God? 

Be blessed.  Be happy.  Be lucky.  Be loved.   

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany, January 25, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany, January 25, 2026

• Isaiah 9:1-4
• 1 Corinthians 1:10-18
• Matthew 4:12-23

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Some of the most fascinating people we encounter in the Bible are the prophets of the Old Testament.  To be a prophet was not an envious thing, and few in ancient Israel would likely have told their parents that they wanted to be prophets when they grew up.  Because to be a prophet meant that you would place your life in the balance…that you would be despised by many and appreciated by few.  And your life may very well become the target of those who felt threatened by you…and those people were often the ones with the power to, at a whim, remove your head.  

Prophets were the conscience of Israel.  They held up the people of God to the standard of the law and the covenants.  They were the voice calling for fidelity and uncompromising commitment.  They pointed out sin and wickedness with clarity and precision and exposed the secrets of the heart before the discerning gaze of a righteous God.  

But there was another function of the prophet that those prone to apocalyptic visions of doom and gloom often overlook…the prophet was also a visionary who saw things that most others failed to see.  This vision into the future was marked by a vision of what could be in spite of what actually is.  This wasn’t a denial of reality but the conviction that reality is not a fixed, determined constant but open and malleable, able to be moved in directions that sometimes are surprisingly new.  In other words, prophets were those who stood up in the midst of an anxious, fearful people trapped by the threatening visions of the immediate reality before them and dared to see a way-out giving hope and courage to move a people forward into freedom.

The context of the first four verses of Isaiah chapter 9, our Old Testament reading today, is a bleak historical situation in which Israel (the small northern kingdom) is facing a brutal attack from the superpower Assyria.  Prophecies of judgment for sin are present.  But even though Israel has gotten herself into this mess in which she now finds herself, her God will not ultimately forsake her but, through Isaiah, promises a messiah, a coming Child, a Wonderful Counselor, a Prince of Peace, who will bring light and lasting peace to a land devastated by darkness and war.  The yoke of burden she now bears will be broken and she will know the salvation of God as on the day of Midian.  But what was the day of Midian?  The day of Midian refers to the decisive victory of Israel, led by Gideon in Judges 6 and 7, over the oppressive Midianite army, symbolizing God’s powerful deliverance from bondage.  Isaiah highlights God’s faithfulness to Israel in the past in order to offer faith and hope to her now in her current crisis: though all you see now is darkness and deep gloom, a liberating light is about to dawn once again!

What is at stake here not the power of Israel or even her faithfulness, or not, toward her God.  What is at stake is the power of God and God’s faithfulness to Israel.  A prevailing question tucked in the back of Israel’s mind has always been: have we sinned so greatly that our God will finally give up on us and leave us to become prey to our oppressors?  This was a nagging question with which she had to contend throughout her history.  This is, unfortunately, true also of many in the Christian church whose beliefs about God are determined more about what they do than upon who God is.  But have we really heard the gospel?  Have we really understood it?  

St. Paul says he has come not to baptize but to preach the gospel…and not with eloquent words so as to empty the cross of its power…for the message about the cross is the power of God to save.  What does this mean?  It means that when we look upon the crucified messiah, we see the revelation of God in its purest form.  The cross is the revelation of the unfathomable and unhinged love of God gratuitously given in total freedom without coercion or constraint.  It is love unconditional, unrestricted, and unlimited.  It is the peak of the glory of God, where the light of God’s love shines brightest.  It is a disarming folly, a most unexpected and unimagined declaration of the wisdom of God that communicates something absolute and all-determining.  It declares that you are infinitely loved no matter what you have done, no matter where you have been or where you come from, no matter what you look like or how you speak, no matter what you have or don’t have, no matter what you can do or can’t do.  You are the beloved of God and God sees you and knows you and God’s desire for you in not ever condemnation but only salvation.  And in this declaration of love comes the confirming, vivifying Spirit that was always within, but it now felt and known.  So that now, even though darkness may seem to prevail, a light has shown, and we know that this light will ultimately cast out this darkness.  All this flowing out from the wounded side of our crucified God.

And then another question arises: how do we live into this light?  How do we allow the light of God’s love shine out through our lives?  This happens for us just as it happened for Jesus…and just as it happened to those he first called to follow him.  

Notice that, in today’s Gospel, just after Jesus first hears of John’s arrest, he withdraws to Galilee.  Jesus had just gone down from Galilee to Judea to be baptized by John and is subsequently driven by the Spirit into the wilderness down there in southern Palestine to be tested by the devil.  It is immediately after this that Jesus hears about John being arrested.  The Gospel seeks to communicate that the age of John is coming to an end…that the path has been paved and that it is now time for Jesus to become the fulfillment of what John, with his baptism of repentance, began.  So, he withdraws to his hometown of Nazareth in Galilee to begin to tell his own story.  But notice, he leaves Nazareth and goes to the land of Zebulun and Naphtali, which would have been just north of Nazareth.  The point being, as we will also see in those he will soon call, the withdrawing from what is familiar, the detaching from what is custom, in order to hear and discover a deeper truth about oneself and to give oneself the time and space to reconstruct a life on this new foundation.  It plays itself out in Jesus’ call to Simon and Andrew and to James and John…leaving their parents and their livelihood in order to hear and discover something new…in this case, something profoundly new.

This call of Jesus to follow him…to be driven into the wilderness, away from family and the familiar customs which can so often hijack our minds and keep them bound in subservience to those customs, is quintessentially a monastic call.  We hear the Lord call us to come apart with him, leaving everything behind.  And in that place of the stripping of the old self we begin to hear and discover a new self, a deeper and more secure self that begins to reveal itself not by our ascetical efforts or our “perfect” monastic observance, but only by our unencumbered, contemplative listening…and hearing…the divine voice saying, “You are my beloved, with you I am well pleased.”  It is in that voice and that voice alone that the light of God’s glory erupts in and through our lives.  It is in that voice alone that the power to cut through the lies and illusions of our old self lies.  And it is only after every other voice has been silenced that we can hear it and know it and then begin to live it.  Everything else about the monastic life to this is secondary.  Without this…the personal knowledge of God’s love for us…a root of bitterness will likely soon spring up.  

It might be important, here, to point out how John and Jesus were both similar and different.  They both entered upon the public stage preaching…and they preached on a similar theme: repentance.  But where John stopped, Jesus continued.  While John focused on repentance, Jesus focused on what this repentance could lead to: the presence of the kingdom of heaven in the here and now.  This was unique from the message of John…and, for that matter, from what anyone else had ever dared to preach.  Jesus’ message was as clear as it was shocking: the hoped for time of God’s salvation has come…it is here…it is now.  And the question which confronted the first disciples who heard this shocking message also confronts us: will we leave the old behind…without looking back…and focus all our heart and mind on the one leading us into the great unknown?  Will we trust this voice, this experience, this deep longing of our hearts?  Brothers (and sisters), let us indeed trust it because that is the only place where the great transformation of our lives…and of all of life…can take place…where the epiphany of our true selves hidden in Christ can shine out and offer the world a way through the darkness.