The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 24A, October 18, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York

Br. Bernard Delcourt

The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, October 18, 2026

Exodus 33:12-23
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Matthew 22:15-22

Click here for an audio of the sermon

“Show me the coin.” 
That's all Jesus asks for, and it's enough to unravel the whole trap they've set for him. The Pharisees and the Herodians make for one of the strangest alliances in the Gospels; two groups that agree on almost nothing except that Jesus is a problem they'd like solved.  
The Pharisees despise Roman occupation and everything it represents. The Herodians have made their peace with Rome and profit from it. Put them in a room together on any other day, and they'd have nothing to say to each other. But a common enemy has a way of making for uncomfortable friends. 
So, they come to Jesus with flattery dripping from every word: "Teacher, we know you are sincere, you teach the way of God in accordance with truth, you show deference to no one" and then they spring the trap: "Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?" 
It's a perfect question, in the way that only a truly malicious question can be perfect. If Jesus says yes, pay the tax, he alienates every Jew who resents bankrolling the army that occupies their homeland, people who remember that this same tax had sparked open revolt a generation earlier. If he says no, don't pay it, the 
Herodians can report him to the Roman authorities as an agitator preaching sedition, and sedition against Rome had a way of ending on a cross. There is no safe answer. That's the whole design. They think they've boxed him in completely. 
And notice what they're not asking. This isn't really a question about fiscal policy or the ethics of taxation in the abstract. It's a question meant to force Jesus to plant a flag, to declare, once and for all, which side he's on, God's or Caesar's, so that whichever side he offends can be turned against him. It is a question built entirely on the assumption that loyalty has to be either-or. 
Jesus, of course, doesn't fall for it. But he also doesn't dodge it. He asks for a denarius, and right there, something quietly damning has already happened. Someone in that pious, Torah-quoting crowd produces a coin stamped with the image of Tiberius Caesar and an inscription proclaiming him the son of a god.  
Devout Jews weren't supposed to carry graven images at all, let alone one that claimed divinity for a Roman emperor. The very fact that someone can pull one out of a pocket in the Temple courts tells you these men have already made their compromises with Caesar's world. They've been carrying his currency the whole time. 
"Whose head is this," Jesus asks, "and whose title?" "The emperor's," they answer, and there's where their trap fails. "Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperors, and to God the things that are God's." 
It sounds, at first, like the ultimate diplomatic non-answer, the kind of thing a clever man says to get out of a tight spot. But it isn't a dodge. It's a much harder answer than either yes or no, because it doesn't let anyone off the hook. It hands the question back to us, 
and it will keep handing the question back to every generation that reads it: what, exactly, belongs to Caesar, and what belongs to God? 
Here's where the coin itself becomes the real sermon. A coin stamped with Caesar's image belongs to Caesar; fair enough, give it back, it was always his. But what is stamped with God's image?  Scripture already answered that question long before Matthew wrote a word of it: in the beginning, God made humankind in God's own image.  
It isn't Caesar's face that is pressed into flesh and bone. God's face is. So, when Jesus says, "give to God the things that are God's," the deepest and most searching implication of that sentence is: give God yourself. Give God your whole life, because that's whose image you were minted with in the first place. 
That reframes the entire question, doesn't it? This was never really a story about tax policy. It's a story about identity, about whose mark you carry and whose claim on you runs the deepest. Caesar can have his coins back; they were never anything but metal with his face on them. But we are not metal.  
We are not currency to be spent according to somebody else's economy. We belong, first and finally, to the God whose image we bear from the moment of our making, sealed again at the font, where water and oil mark us as Christ's own forever. 
And yet, and this is where the passage refuses to let us get too comfortable, Jesus doesn't say Caesar gets nothing. He doesn't tell his followers to renounce the world, stop paying taxes, withdraw from public life, and wait for the Kingdom to arrive on its own. He says: give to Caesar what is Caesar's. 
There is a legitimate claim that government makes on us; for taxes, for civic responsibility, for the ordinary business of living together in a society. Jesus doesn't erase that claim. What he does is put a boundary around it. Caesar's claim is real, but it is not ultimate.  Caesar's claim answers to a higher claim, and it can never be allowed to swallow that higher claim whole. 
That's the tension every one of us lives inside, all the time, whether we notice it or not. We are citizens of countries and citizens of the Kingdom of God simultaneously, and those two citizenships don't always pull in the same direction. Most days the tension is quiet, we pay our taxes, we vote, we obey reasonable laws, and none of it seems to cost us much of anything spiritually.  
But every so often, the two claims come into open conflict, and we're forced to ask, in a very concrete way, which allegiance actually governs the other. History is not short on examples of what happens when people decide that obedience to the state is simply obedience to God by another name, no questions asked. We rightly remember, with real admiration, those who found the courage to say no to that equation when it mattered most, who understood that legal is not the same thing as right, and that "my country, right or wrong" is not a creed available to people who belong first to God. 
None of us gets to opt out of that discernment by declaring the question too political for church. Jesus certainly didn't. He stood in the middle of the most charged political question of his day and refused both the easy yes and the easy no, because the real question underneath it was never really about Rome at all. It was about us, about what we're willing to render, and to whom, and why.
So here is the question this Gospel leaves sitting in our laps, right where the Pharisees' trap used to be: whose image do you bear, and what does that image cost you to honor? What have you been carrying around in your pocket, what compromises, what quiet allegiances that you didn't even notice had Caesar's face stamped on them?  
And what would it look like, this week, to give back to Caesar exactly what belongs to him, no more and no less, and to give to God the one thing Caesar was never entitled to ask for: yourself, made in the image of the living God, and claimed by him before any empire ever had the chance. 
Amen.

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 10, July 12, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, July 12, 2026

Genesis 25:19-34

Romans 8:1-11

Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

In the name of our Loving, Liberating and Life-giving God. Amen!

Jesus leaves the house that day and walks down to the water. The crowd that gathers is so large that he has to push off in a boat just to have room to speak, while everyone else stands crowded along the shore. And there, with the sea at his back and the fields probably visible somewhere behind the people, he tells a story about farming.

It is worth pausing on how ordinary that story would have sounded to his first listeners. Nobody in that crowd had ever tested the pH of a field or laid down seed in neat, irrigated rows. In first-century Palestine, you scattered the seed first and plowed it under afterward. You threw it across the path, across the rocky patches, into the weeds, and onto the good ground, all in the same sweeping motion, because you could not always tell in advance which parts of the field would produce and which would not. Then you waited for rain that you could not control, over a harvest you could not guarantee. Every farmer in that crowd would have been nodding along, thinking, yes, that is exactly how it goes.

So when Jesus describes seed falling on the path, on rocky ground, among thorns, and on good soil, he is not describing something strange or symbolic to begin with. He is describing an ordinary Tuesday. The strangeness comes later, in the ending, and in what the story assumes about the sower who keeps throwing seed onto ground that, by any sensible calculation, is not going to produce anything.

Notice, too, how the story is framed. It opens with Jesus saying, "Listen!" and it closes with "Let anyone with ears listen." Whatever else this parable is doing, it is asking for our full attention, not our anxious diagnosis. And it arrives in Matthew's Gospel at a hard moment: the chapters just before this one are full of misunderstanding and outright opposition to Jesus' ministry, and the chapter will end with his own hometown rejecting him. Matthew is writing to a community that knew what it was to proclaim good news and watch much of it fall on ground that produced nothing — through persecution, through poverty that scattered people from the region, through false teachers sowing confusion inside the church itself. This parable was first heard by people who needed reassurance that a disappointing public response did not mean their message was wrong, or their labor wasted.

That is where I want to start today, because it is easy to hear this parable and immediately turn it into an inventory of ourselves. Which soil am I? Am I the hard path, closed off and unreceptive? Am I the rocky ground, quick to catch fire with enthusiasm and just as quick to burn out when life gets hard? Am I choked by thorns, distracted by ambition or worry or the hundred small hungers that crowd out anything deeper? I suspect most of us, if we are honest, have been all four kinds of soil at different points in our lives, sometimes in the same week. I know that when I was young, this parable was taught to me almost entirely as a checklist for self-improvement: figure out what is wrong with your soil and fix it. It is a tiring way to hear good news, because it turns the gospel into one more thing you are failing to get right.

But look again at where Jesus puts the weight of the story. He does not linger on the soils nearly as long as he lingers on the sower and on the harvest. And when the interpretation comes, in the second half of our reading, it is offered almost as an afterthought, a clarification added because the story on its own was too open, too strange, too likely to be misunderstood. The center of gravity in this parable is not the quality of the ground. It is the character of the one doing the sowing.

Picture that sower again: walking a field, throwing seed in every direction, including places that everyone standing nearby could see were hopeless. Not one seed reserved for the good ground and withheld from the rest. Not one calculation of odds before the throw. This is not a cautious, efficient sower rationing precious seed for maximum yield. This is a lavish, almost reckless sower, acting as though there is no such thing as too much seed, no soil too far gone to be worth the risk. If you have ever been on the receiving end of that kind of extravagance — loved by someone who did not first check whether you deserved it — you know it does not feel like sound business practice. It feels like grace.

That, I think, is the first piece of good news buried in this familiar story: the parable is not primarily asking whether you are good soil. It is telling you what kind of God is doing the sowing. This is a God who does not sort us first, who does not calculate our likely returns before showering us with love. God's word goes out toward hardened ground and rocky ground and weed-choked ground with the same generosity it goes out toward the ground already prepared to receive it. Nothing about our failures — the times our hearts were closed, the times we scattered under pressure, the times ambition or anxiety choked out something truer — makes God stingier with the seed. There is always more where that came from.

The second piece of good news is that none of us is only one kind of soil, forever. The path, the rocks, and the thorns are not fixed identities assigned to certain people while others get to be the good soil. They are conditions — seasons, really — that any one of us can move through. Hardened ground can be broken open. Rocky ground can have its stones cleared. Thorns can be pulled. We are not seeds, locked into whatever patch of earth we happened to land on; we have the strange and demanding freedom to notice our own condition and to let it change. That is part of what it means to keep showing up to listen, week after week: to let something soften that had gone hard, to let roots go down deeper than the last hard season allowed.

And then there is the ending, which is the part I think we are most tempted to skip past too quickly. Jesus does not conclude with a modest, reasonable harvest. A good year for a first-century farmer might yield seven or eight times what was sown. Jesus says thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold. That is not agricultural realism; that is a promise of abundance that breaks the scale we normally use to measure return on investment. The point is not simply, keep trying and eventually something will grow. The point is that when God's word does take root, it produces far more than the effort put into it could account for. We are not meant only to endure; we are invited to expect abundance we cannot engineer or predict.

There is one more thing worth naming before we close. Paul, writing to the Romans, tells his readers that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, because the Spirit of God dwells in them. I think that is close to the heart of this parable too. The sower is not standing over us with a clipboard, grading our soil. The seed that has already been planted in us is not something we manufactured through our own discipline or worthiness; it took root because the Spirit of the very sower who planted it also dwells within us, doing the slow work of clearing stones and pulling weeds that we could never manage entirely on our own. That is not permission to stop tending the ground of our own hearts. It is the reason we can tend it without dread, trusting that the outcome was never solely up to us in the first place.

So perhaps the truest response to this parable is not anxious self-examination but something closer to trust, followed by imitation. Trust that the sower sowing in us is patient, generous, and unbothered by our rocky or thorny seasons. And imitation, because we too are sent out to scatter seed without first demanding proof that the ground is worthy. Speak the kind word to the person who seems closed off. Offer forgiveness before it is requested. Show up for the neighbor whose soil, as far as you can tell, looks like nothing but path and rock. You will not always see what grows. But the sower we follow was never stingy with the seed, and the harvest, when it finally comes, is always far larger than anyone had a right to expect.

Let anyone with ears, listen. Amen.

Feast of the Ascension, May 14, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt

Ascension Day, May 14, 2026

• Acts 1:1-11
• Ephesians 1:15-23
• Luke 24:44-53

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

In the name of God, the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love ever flowing. There is a moment in Luke's telling of the Ascension that I find quietly astonishing. Jesus leads his disciples out to Bethany, lifts his hands over them in blessing — and while he is still in the act of blessing, he is carried up into heaven. He does not finish and then depart. He departs in the blessing itself. The blessing does not end. It simply expands beyond their sight. As today’s collect puts plainly: he ascended “far above all heavens” — not to be removed from us, but precisely that he might fill all things.

 

That detail arrests me every time. Because it tells us something essential about what the Ascension actually is — and what it is not. 

It is not an ending. It is not Jesus leaving us. It is Jesus becoming, as Meshali Mitchell puts it*, "restored to full presence and access to all time and all space” and, I might add, beyond space-time. The one who was constrained by a single body in a single place at a single moment is now — by virtue of the Ascension — present everywhere, to everyone, always. The blessing that began in Bethany is still, right now, in motion. 

This is why Luke tells us the disciples returned to Jerusalem not in grief but with great joy. That is a startling response to watching someone you love disappear into a cloud. But they understood, or were beginning to understand, that they had not lost him. They had gained something far wider. What they were being given, is faith to perceive that, according to his promise, he abides with his Church on earth. The joy in their returning was not denial. It was the first fruit of that perceiving faith. 

But before the departure, Jesus does something equally remarkable. Luke tells us he "opened their minds to understand the scriptures." Notice that word: opened. And notice, too, that Luke uses the singular — not "their minds" in a diffuse, general sense, but one unified act of illumination, touching them together. Throughout the Gospel, it is the failure to understand that marks the disciples — they are confused at the transfiguration, bewildered at the passion, slow to believe the resurrection. Here, at the very threshold of his departure, the risen Jesus gives them the gift of comprehension. 

What do they come to understand? That his life is not an interruption of history, but its fulfillment. That everything written in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms — the whole long arc of God's covenant with humanity — was bending toward this. Jesus insists that his life and ministry is continuous with God's presence from the very beginning. He embodies God's deepest longing for us and for all creation. His ministry is not a new plan; it is the ancient covenant reaching its fullness. 

This is a God, we might say, who allows the triumph of love to become clear through the life and ministry of a human being who is finally tortured and killed because of the way he loves — and whom he loves. Death does not have the last word. Death simply makes terribly, luminously plain how powerful God's love is. 

Luke also reaches back, as he does so often, to frame Jesus in the company of Moses and Elijah. The image of Jesus raising his hands in blessing recalls Moses. The description of his being carried up into heaven recalls Elijah. And what those two figures have in common — beyond their appearance at the transfiguration, speaking of Jesus' "departure which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem" — is this: at the end of their ministries, they each passed the mantle to the next generation. Moses to Joshua. Elijah to Elisha. Now Jesus, in the same gesture, passes his prophetic mantle to his disciples. To us.

 

The question the two men in white robes put to the disciples is therefore not a gentle rebuke. It is a commission: "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?" In other words — the baton has been placed in your hands. You know what you have witnessed. You know the scope of God's saving love. Now: go. 

At the close of his ministry on earth, Jesus is focused on helping believers understand his life and ministry, death and resurrection, and the scope of God's saving love. He is not focused on escape routes or end-time timetables. When the disciples ask, "Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" — fishing, perhaps, for a celestial schedule — he redirects them entirely. It is not for you to know the times or the periods. What you are to know is this: you will receive power, and you will be my witnesses — in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, to the ends of the earth. 

That expansion — Jerusalem to the ends of the earth — mirrors the expansion of the Ascension itself. The particular becomes universal. The local becomes cosmic. And we are the instruments of that widening. This widening does not end — he abides with his Church on earth even to the end of the ages. We do not labor toward a distant God who has retreated beyond the clouds. We labor with one who has promised to remain. 

This lection today, puts me in mind of this prayer, commonly attributed to Teresa of Ávila: 

God of love, help us to remember that Christ has no body now on earth but ours, no hands but ours, no feet but ours. Ours are the eyes to see the needs of the world. Ours are the hands with which to bless everyone now. Ours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. 

That prayer takes on new weight when we hold it alongside the Ascension. It is precisely because Jesus has ascended — precisely because he is no longer bounded by one body in one place — that his body is now ours to offer. The universal Christ works through particular hands. Our hands. In a climate-changed, war-torn, beauty-starved world that needs blessing now, today, in this moment. 

So we do not stand gazing up at heaven — not because heaven is unreal, but because heaven is already here, pressing into every atom, every quark, every suffering face we will meet this week. The Ascension does not remove Christ from the world. It releases him into all of it. 

The blessing that began over Bethany is still extending. And according to his promise, the one who ascended far above all heavens abides still — with this Church, with every church, with every trembling heart that dares to believe — even to the end of the ages. We are living inside that promise. 

May we have the courage — and the joy — to extend it further still. 

Amen. 

*Meshali Mitchell, an author, storyteller, and acclaimed photographer wrote that phrase in her debut b ook, “Restored: Partnering with God in Transforming Our Broken Places.”