Holy Cross Monastery Sermons

Thursday, April 2, 2026

Maundy Thursday, April 2, 2026

Br. Randy Greve
Maundy Thursday, April 2, 2026

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Liturgy is the means by which we are renewed in faith in the present moment by remembering salvation history. Days of remembrance are ever the same and ever new. Into this remembrance, this history, we bring our present lives - griefs and hopes as well as the longings of people whom we remember who are hungry, who live in places of war, who are victims of oppression - Christ is with them and us in this moment. We share in the hope of the apostles and saints through the ages who groan for salvation - for life in the reign of justice and peace that is promised and in which we share even as this world is passing away.

Once again, the witness of Christ in his passion is proclaimed to our lives and to the world as the heart of our Lord’s self-emptying love for us. But that witness raises questions. What does Maundy Thursday have to do with today? Does the Jesus movement have anything to say to our nation and world which are volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous? How might remembering our stories inform our disagreements about the meaning of justice and freedom in this political atmosphere? Many are processing how to cope with the time faithfully. It is stressful. We seek relief, resolution. And where there is chaos, there is temptation.

Before us in our collective life are two great temptations. One is to become zealots and fight for our side. The other temptation is to tune it all out. Some Christians have succumbed to the first temptation - they know who is right, who is wrong; they know the country needs defending from its enemies, whatever the means. Jesus is cast as the sword-wielding warrior who will come to bring divine wrath on the enemy. Some have given into the second temptation and view their faith as a defense against the call of the moment, a vacuum untouched by outside events, a way to go numb, regress into a bubble of isolation and illusory safety. Jesus here is cast as the detached mystic, only concerned with the life of the soul. So which will it be? Catastrophize or opt out? Is there not another way? Yes, yes there is, actually. It is staring us in the face.

Jesus has spent four days in the temple teaching and confronting the corruption of the oppression system with pointed and confrontational language and action. The tension has been building, the plot forming, the opportunity has come. In the garden, tonight, they will enact their plan to destroy this dangerous troublemaker from Galilee. Jesus knows what awaits him. Perhaps he considered saving his own life with violence or sparking the rebellion against the Romans that some around him wanted. I wonder if Jesus was tempted to slip away under cover of darkness toward Bethany or Emmaus or Jericho -wait until tempers cooled, keep a low profile in the countryside until Jerusalem was safe.

In the upper room, Jesus is a marked man. He knows this is his last night, a final few hours with the disciples before everything changes. We are gathered on this night to remember what he did and why it matters. We remember what he did not do. He did not fight. He did not leave. Instead, he shared a meal. He prioritized relationships. He gave us bread and wine - his very self in perpetual remembrance. Our call is as simple and revolutionary as that -a steadfast focus on what is ultimate and our allegiance to Christ: When the zealots declare that the sword is the way, we gather around a table. When the church seduces us into factions and divisions, we gather around a table. When the politicians want to sell us strife and blame, we gather around a table. We do not fight. We do not escape. We gather, we receive, we celebrate, we remember. We answer the chaos around us by being stable, reliable, orderly, and clear in our identity and our calling.

This gathering is no mere sentimental routine. When we gather, we participate in making present the outward and visible sign in bread and wine that declares Christ is alive and present and is the way to the life we most long for. Sacraments are not additives to life; they are windows into the very nature of reality. This gathering meal we call the Holy Eucharist is the sign that love will triumph over hate. The forces of division and malice may have their days, but those days are numbered; evil is marked for destruction. How like Jesus that it is a table of remembrance and sharing - even while the forces of tyranny and violence were right outside - a table that becomes the way the world is changed, that new life and new community come into our world?

Every time we gather in a Eucharistic community, we are committing to do what Jesus did in the face of anger and despair, when tempted to rage or escape. We are disrupting the fundamental structure of empire. Coming to the table is our act of renunciation of the forces of evil and division, it is declaring that we will not be defined by or aligned with the demonic powers of cruelty in word or action. Jesus' way to relate to the powers of evil is to expose, renounce, subvert, but never retribution, never harm.

When you come to receive Holy Communion, you are choosing life and resolving that you will not be bowed in fear or provoked to vengeance.

God exists in an “eternal now”. This is how in speaking about the Holy Eucharist we speak of one table, one offering, one priest. Here the Church is what it always and eternally is - one. At the table we join heaven and earth, past and future, this old earth and the new heaven and new earth into one singularity of the gift that is eternally offered to us and through us as long as the sun and moon endure. This is a foretaste of heaven where there is no conflict and no hiding. But we must meet the requirements to come - we open our hands empty and stand side by side with brothers and sisters. We belong to one another, and any other story about who we are is a lie. Our testimony is that we are still here. We are not leaving. Christ is our vindication. We come to the table again and again because we are hungry and this is where we are fed, and the Lord who loves us is happy to feed us with himself abundantly and eternally. Amen.

Sunday, March 29, 2026

The Sunday of the Passion/Palm Sunday, March 29, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

The Sunday of the Passion/Palm Sunday, March 29, 2026

Isaiah 50:4-9a

Philippians 2:5-11

Matthew 26:14- 27:66

Click here for an audio of the sermon

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world. Amen.

As a self-confessed liturgy nerd and a closeted anglophile, my eyes were glued to my computer screen this past Wednesday as I watched the installation service of the Most Reverend and Right Honorable Dame Sarah Elisabeth Mullally as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury. It was a deeply beautiful and moving service, filled with joy and tenderness. And of course, with glorious music and Anglican pomp and ceremony. But for me the most touching point came at the very beginning when the new Archbishop was welcomed at the West door of the Cathedral.

Three children from a nearby school met her there saying: We greet you in the name of Christ. Who are you and why do you request entry?

The archbishop replied: I am Sarah, a servant of Jesus Christ, and I come as one seeking the grace of God, to travel with you in his service together.

The children then asked: Why have you been sent to us?

The archbishop again: I am sent as Archbishop to serve you, to proclaim the love of Christ and with you to worship and love him with heart and soul, mind and strength.

Then the children asked: How do you come among us and with what confidence?

And the archbishop simply said: I come knowing nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified, and in weakness and fear and in much trembling.

The children then invited her and us saying: Let us then humble ourselves before God and together seek his mercy and strength.

“I come knowing nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” These are, of course, words echoing those of Saint Paul, and if we are to be servants of Jesus Christ, they need to be our words as well. But these are not easy words. They are perhaps the most difficult words in scripture, especially for us contemporary folk.

Recently the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts developed a revised service for Palm Sunday, a revision allowed as well in this Diocese of New York. The revised service changes the focus totally to the triumphal entry of our Lord into Jerusalem and moves the reading of the Passion narrative to the very end of the service…indeed, to after the service. And it makes the reading of the Passion narrative entirely optional. The intention behind this change is not unworthy. It recognizes that our Passion narratives, each different from the other, have often been used or misused to promote anti-Judaism. And it provides a pastoral note explaining the reasoning behind this change, a pastoral note worth reading aloud:

“On Palm Sunday it is a tradition to proclaim the passion narrative so that Jesus Christ’s love for all is made clear. Over time, this narrative has been used to promote anti-Judaism. The responsibility for the suffering and death of Jesus Christ cannot be attributed, in either preaching or teaching, indiscriminately to all Jews of that time, nor to Jews today. The Jewish people should not be referred to or represented as rejected or cursed by God, as this claim cannot be found in Scripture. Christians must remember that Jesus, his mother Mary, and his early disciples were Jewish. We must affirm the long-standing teaching of the church that Jesus Christ entered into suffering and death by his own free will as a sign of God’s saving and reconciling love to the world.”

I get it. We know that it wasn't accidental that Jews in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere felt the need to be especially vigilant and perhaps invisible during the Christian Holy Week when pogroms and other forms of anti-Jewish violence became more common. But I do wonder whether avoiding these difficult texts, these Passion narratives, is the best way to engage them. Could there be other reasons operating here? Dean Andrew McGowan of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, reminds us: “…we actually have no immediate access to the events of Holy Week other than via these texts. Other versions of this story we offer will be our creations and mirror our sensibilities.”

Could it be that our sensibilities include a real desire to avoid or forget the cross in all its scandal? Are we any different from those mentioned by Saint Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians who find the cross a scandal, a folly and an embarrassment? The Reverend Vincent Pizzuto, a theology professor and pastor of Saint Columba’s Episcopal Church in, of all places Marin County, argues that this may be the deep truth about us. And not just us but American Christians generally. What the American church wants today, he says, is spiritual uplift, divine intimacy, ‘emotion devotion’--but please, God, not the cross. Anything but the cross. He continues: “Don't we, after all, secretly find all that gibberish about sin, divine wrath, judgment, suffering, sacrifice just foolishness from a bygone age? Vestiges of an archaic (even barbaric) worldview from which all of us undoubtedly bear some collective moral responsibility to unshackle the church in favor of a more enlightened values not centered on the cross but sanitized of it?” He quotes the famous line from Richard Niebuhr’s 1959 book The Kingdom of God in America: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” I doubt that Niebuhr, as wise as he was, could have foreseen churches which leap over Good Friday or who exalt a so-called ‘creation spirituality’ which has no place for the cross.

The cross is a scandal precisely because it holds up a mirror to the human heart. And, as Father Pizzuto says: “… what the cross will reveal with ruthless honesty is that the line between good and evil is never between us and them, but traverses straight through every human heart."

I'm not saying that we are more church-y or advanced because we read Matthew’s Passion narrative here this morning. It's easy even here, maybe especially here, to glide over the historicity and nitty gritty of it and make it a piece of light opera. Nor are we more advanced if we have a nicely developed theology of the cross, because in truth there are many theologies of the cross. Just as each of the gospel narratives of the Passion has its own theology of the cross--today in Matthew the cross is presented as fulfillment of prophecy, on Friday when we hear John's Passion we encounter a theology of the cross as glorification. There is no one theological explanation of how the great act of Godly love that we celebrate this Great and Holy Week leads to life and light and hope. Certainly not— forgive me—a literal substitutionary theory of the atonement. There will always be questions and divergences about the meaning of the cross, but not about its power to transcend time and help us see ourselves and our present world in its light, transforming that world and being ourselves transformed through it and by it, and being liberated and saved by its mysterious Truth.

Then the children asked: How do you come among us and with what confidence?”

And the Archbishop replied: “I come knowing nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified, and in weakness and fear and much trembling.”

We must all come this way, or else we shall never arrive at all.

Amen.

Sources:

McGowan, Andrew. “The Passions of our Lord Jesus Christ—March 24, 2026” https://abmcg.substack.com/p/the-passions-of-our-lord-jesus-christ

Pizzuto, Vincent. “Passion Sunday—April 13, 2025” https://www.vincentpizzuto.org/post/the-overture

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

The Annunciation of our Lord Jesus Christ to the Blessed Virgin Mary, March 25, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

The Annunciation of our Lord Jesus Christ to the Blessed Virgin Mary, March 25, 2026

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Listening to the Infancy Narrative from Luke’s Gospel in snippets may be necessary for liturgical worship but much is missed when we don’t see the whole canvas on which Luke paints his grand, programmatic overture. But when we do see the whole, we begin to appreciate Luke’s rhetorical and theological strategies. And, in this case, what stands out among them all are the series of contrasts he makes between the birth of John and the birth of Jesus. His point is clear: while comparisons with John are understandable, they ultimately and woefully fail because in Jesus God is doing something utterly unique…something no one has ever seen before…not even dared to imagine.

Between the two birth stories many elements are shared: the angelic visitor, the proclamation, the overcoming of a human deficiency (age and barrenness in the first instance, youth and virginity in the second), and a sign to legitimate the prophecy. Because the form of the angel’s statement in each case is so similar, the difference in content concerning the identity and role of the respective children attracts the reader’s eye. John will be great before the the Lord, but Jesus will be Son of the Most High. John will prepare a people, but Jesus will rule the people. John’s role is temporary, Jesus’ kingdom will never end. John is to be a prophet, but Jesus more than a prophet: he is Son of God. John will be “filled with the Holy Spirit,” but the overshadowing of the Spirit and Power will make Jesus “the Holy One.” The full meaning of these epithets become clear only in the course of Luke’s narrative, but from the start the reader is prepared to see in Jesus something far more than a Davidic king.

Luke expands his theological vision by also drawing contrasts between Zechariah and Mary. In contrast to Zechariah, we notice, Mary holds no official position among the people, she is not described as “righteous” in terms of observing Torah, and her experience does not take place in a cultic setting. She is among the most powerless people in her society: she is young in a world that values age; female in a world ruled by men; poor in a stratified economy. Furthermore, she has neither husband nor child to validate her existence. That she should have found “favor with God” and be “highly favored” shows Luke’s understanding of God’s activity as surprising and often paradoxical, almost always reversing human expectations.

Mary’s mode of response is more positive than Zechariah’s. Instead of his “how shall I know,” which is a demand for proof, Mary simply asks how the promise might come true in the light of its obvious roadblock, her virginity. When the angel makes clear that not human actions but divine power will effect this birth, she responds in obedient faith as powerful as the response spoken later by her son in the garden before his death, “let it be with me according to your word.”

Finally, there is the contrast in signs. Zechariah is struck mute, but Mary will magnify the Lord in song.

Yet, even as this overture comes to an end and the themes have been clearly introduced, no human ear will be prepared to hear or apprehend the chords struck and melodies developed by the Gospel’s end, and we, too, will sit awestruck like Mary before Gabriel wondering how can this be?

The Annunciation of Our Lord Jesus Christ by the angel Gabriel to Mary, the maiden of Nazareth is, then, about the total subversion of all norms and customs and paradigms. Nothing that has come before can contain this new thing that God is about to do. Except two things…a faith that is open to discover new wonders and an imagination wild enough to contain it. And its Mary, not Zechariah, who serves as our guide to this expansive faith and wild imagination.

Mary, then, is the archetype of how God’s new thing, God’s kingdom, comes into our world and establishes itself. Several points can be made to help us follow her example and live into this archetype.

First, we should be open to surprises from God. Pope Francis used to always say that God is full of surprises. So, we need to develop a contemplative gaze so that we don’t let them pass us by. Mary had that contemplative gaze and open heart that didn’t let this divine theophany pass her by.

Second, we should listen with humble reverence to what God is trying to tell us. “Listen, my son, to your master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” To listen humbly with a burning desire to know, to understand, and to put what we hear into practice is the proper posture of the Christian disciple and monk.

Third, we should never allow our circumstances to limit the power of God. Though Mary knew she was a virgin, she had a faith that God was bigger than her circumstances and not constrained by her limitations. “For nothing will be impossible with God.”

Fourth, it is not a lack of faith to seek clarity like Mary. It is a lack of faith to doubt the power of God like Zechariah. Reason should be a handmaid to faith, not its substitute.

And fifth, we should consent whole-heartedly to the mystery of God’s message and come to know the implications of it through pondering it in our hearts.

Through the movement of this five-fold process a uniquely Marian spirituality is developed. Every Christian is called to be a God-bearer and to birth the divine life into our world. We do this just like Mary did through this process of openness, deep, reverential listening, faith in God’s power, the acknowledgment of our own limitation, and the contemplation, or, in this case, gestation, of God’s word.

Yet, this Marian spirituality remains part of the overture to Luke’s programmatic prophecy. The story to be told is not ultimately about her. The events of her life, at this point in the story, foreshadow a similar, yet altogether greater, event about to unfold.

The two other lessons for today’s feast point also to this utterly new thing that God is doing, not just in Mary but more specifically in Christ. Hebrews quotes Psalm 40, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me…. Then I said, ‘See, God, I have come to do your will.…’” The old order of worship is abolished in the establishment of the new in the offering of the body of Jesus Christ as a sacrifice for sin once for all. Isaiah captures the utter newness of what God wants to do when God insists on giving King Ahaz a sign: “Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.”

The feast we celebrate today is the feast of new beginnings. But, let’s be clear, it’s new beginnings of a very special kind. This is not about renewal; nor about reform. This is about the birthing the unimaginable…about putting human ingenuity and control aside and letting God be God. This isn’t just another feast that marks the changing of the seasons of time. The Feast of the Annunciation is more like a turning point in history…the turning point of time itself. For here, in the womb of this humble maiden, the eternal, transcendent, all-holy God bears a human face…to be seen, known, and embraced…but, also, with the possibility of being despised, rejected, and spat upon. In the Annunciation, God becomes Immanuel in daring, vulnerable immediacy, and the Word becomes flesh, and God speaks directly to the human heart.

What will the human response be to this appearing? This is the fundamental question which each of the Gospels pose to those who read them. Luke, here in the Infancy Narrative, as he will do throughout his two-volume work, interrogates us with this question. Will we be like Mary who responds in humble faith? Or will we be like Zechariah who doubts, only to come around after much rationalizing? Or will we be like those to come who will reject him altogether? For, as he will soon put forth in Simeon’s address to Mary, “Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel….”

Today different paths ahead now open up before us in this feast of the turning of time, and Mary and her Son show us the way to proceed forward. Luke’s Gospel, his good news to us, is that heaven and earth are becoming one in this new, decisive in-breaking of God to humankind…and God is in search of some who will give their unequivocal fiat, their whole-hearted “yes” to this summons. God’s power plus our “yes” equals a new creation…one where the dust of the earth is transfigured and can bear the face of God. Will you dare to believe? Will you, too, out of the dust of your life come to bear the face of God?