Second Sunday of Christmas - January 2, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

Christmastide 2 - Sunday, January 2, 2022

Jeremiah 31:7-14

Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a

Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

The Holy Family from a creche
by Jonathan Kendall (1939-2004)

Matthew’s infancy narrative is set in the turbulence and terror of a violent history where tyrants kill children and families become refugees who flee in the middle of the night. There are no shepherds or choirs of angels but only a provident God who guides and empowers a devout, compassionate, and trusting Joseph in the most uncertain of times. Matthew is writing to a predominately Jewish audience using the Hebrew Scriptures to emphasize the prophetic fulfillment of God’s purpose. He’s less concerned about how things happened than by what they mean. In a dream, evoking the Exodus experience, an angel directs Joseph to take his family and flee to safety in Egypt. Joseph moves from promise to terror with the dreaming of one dream. The nightmare doesn’t end when Joseph wakes. The following dreams continue the oscillating pattern between hope and nightmare. 

The intense compression of Matthew’s story reveals the truth of the human situation. It shows us to be capable of passionate desire to search, find, and adore God and our massive intransigence to grace, not only in the human heart, but also in our systems of military and political power that repress with brutal violence our highest and holiest yearnings. Setting up our nativity this year, I found myself wondering if Jonathan Kendall, the artist who created our nativity, was a dreamer recognizing another dreamer, as he carved and painted the figure of Joseph. Joseph has been a focal point for me this season. Given Jonathan Kendall’s life, I found myself pondering how he expressed in wood what Matthew expressed in word.

 

Jonathan Kendall and his partner, Charles McLeod, were artists-in-residence here in the 70’s. These itinerant artists led a rather nomadic and chaotic life on the edge of society. His carving of Joseph looms large, literally, in stature and presence, over all the figures, including Mary and the Kings. I found myself wondering if his expression of Joseph’s stability and strength suggested his recognition of his own vulnerability and need for a protector. This Joseph calls all who observe Jesus’ birth to renew their hope in God’s care. Joseph dared to see things as they were and still affirmed that God was working, even within humanity at its worst. Nothing would defeat God’s promise in Emmanuel, God with us.

Joseph would have been very familiar with Jeremiah’s life and prophesy. Perhaps, it was the word God gave Jeremiah that aroused hope in Joseph. Across the centuries, Jeremiah, also in uncertain times, echoes the presence and tenderness of God amid trouble. 

“With consolations I will lead them back.” These words were spoken at a time when there was little evidence that anything remotely resembling what he hoped for would come true. Thousands of his people were already in captivity in Babylon. He was in a precarious position himself in Jerusalem because his warnings to the rulers had labeled him as an enemy of his own people. He expressed anger, weariness, fear, and frustration, yet he never gave way to a bitterness or cynicism that could have so easily been justified. Devastated by the rejection and contempt he received; he clung to hope. He summoned up the inner strength to speak of a future joy as if it were already being experienced. His fortitude, like Joseph’s, arose from their understanding of the nature of God. God was faithful. Even dangers and disasters were understood to be within the rule of God. God is all in all, not merely the God of the nice and easy parts of life. 

God demonstrates providential care especially in uncertain times, times like ours. In many ways we face what Jeremiah and Joseph faced---social turmoil, great changes, strident voices, deep divisions of thought and attitude, concern for the future----generating anger, confusion, fear, and frustration. It’s in times of crisis that meaning is challenged, decisions questioned, and doubts unearthed. It’s alarming and exhausting. It can drain hope and joy out of the present moment. In such moments, our own understanding of God is supremely important. Our vision of God shapes our character and attitudes. We will engage life according to who and what we understand God to be. God’s presence and tenderness are obvious in Jeremiah when he speaks of his people’s return home together. This is a people who have discovered compassion in their exile experience. Even in the struggle of their return, they tend those among them who are needy and vulnerable. They, like Jeremiah and Joseph, have found grace in their exile. We too are a people who are being called to discover grace and compassion in our times.

Even when our private little worlds go to dust, hope digs in the ruins of our heart for memory of God’s promise to bring good out of bad, life out of death. Hope is not just a vague feeling that things will work out when it’s evident that things will not just work out. It’s not optimism in the face of dire circumstances, nor is it founded on denial. Rather, hope is the conviction, that God is tenacious and persistent in overcoming the risks and deadliness of the world, that God intends joy and peace. Hope offers us an experience of trust that God’s presence, love, and mercy is in and all around us, regardless of circumstances or future outcome. Hope keeps life open to grace and to a future created by God rather than ourselves. Joseph and Jeremiah believed that a provident and faithful God was present in their trouble. 

When we demand any completion to history on our terms, when we demand that our anxiety or dissatisfaction be taken away, we are refusing to hold out for the full picture that is always still being given by God. Hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without full closure, without resolution, and still be content because our satisfaction is now at another level, and its source is beyond ourselves. I still find myself musing over whether Jonathan Kendall lived with that vision as he moved from place to place, leaving a trail of art behind him which kept expressing it. 

What Christ did on earth was to undergo stage by stage, the whole experience of being human, to bring the human together with the Divine in a restored relationship. Notice that Kendall has Joseph standing guard over an infant that is not passively slumbering, but one with eyes wide open, alert, present, hand raised in blessing along with Joseph’s and Mary’s, for us today on our journey home. The author of Ephesians gives assurance of God’s goodness and faithful plan for us, and the resolve to reorder us and the cosmos with righteousness and peace through the rule of this wide-awake Child. 

Oscar Romero once said that it is only the poor and hungry, those who know they need someone to come on their behalf, who can celebrate Christmas. It is precisely because we are weary, and poor in spirit, that God can touch an artist and us with hope. This is not an easy truth. It means that we do not gloss over the evils we confront every day, both within ourselves and without. Jesus, with great persistence and great vulnerability, turned the enmity of society toward a new possibility, turned the sadness of the world toward joy, and introduced a new regime where the dead are raised, the lost are found, and the displaced are brought home again. +Amen

Second Sunday of Christmas - January 3, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Luc Thuku, OHC

Christmas 2 B  - Sunday, January 3, 2021

Jeremiah 31:7-14

Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a

Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

We We have gathered yet again today to celebrate the love of God shown to us in the incarnation of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who to save us chose to be born as one of us, experience life as we do and by so doing sanctify our state and thereby make it easier for us to understand the message of salvation as opposed to the possibility of him having had to come down with trumpet blasts in all glory as we expect him to appear on his second coming. Christmas therefore serves as the second important step of the later stages of the history of salvation, after the annunciation, because it is when salvation appears on earth in human form.

The first reading we heard today from the prophecy of Jeremiah is urging us to sing aloud with gladness, to raise a shout, to proclaim and give praise and say “save oh Lord your people, the remants of Israel”. If we can remember well, Jeremiah chapters 30-34 is called the book of encouragement or the book of consolation. When the book was being written, northern Israel or Jacob was in exile in Assyria. They had been out of the land for over a century and a half, and it seemed that they were no longer God’s people. Actually by this point in history they could hardly be distinguished as a people at all. They were scattered and spread abroad and indistinguishable from the rest of the world.

God however, in the section we read this morning, is promising through Jeremiah that a time is coming when all Israel, not just Judah, but all Israel would be God’s people; His special people. A people devoted and loyal to Him. The gathering will be accompanied by weeping and repenting and this repentance will result in rest for them, walking by rivers of waters in a straight way where they will not stumble. This message may sound like it is speaking of the Israel of Old, which is by the way still not fully re-united as a nation under the true God, but it applies to us too, the new ‘Israel’ by adoption. We are living in exile in the world today enslaved by capitalism, crazy political ideologies, racism, hate and unbelief. We live at a time when Christian witness is in dire need but also very difficult to practice. The words of Jeremiah are therefore a consolation and an encouragement to us to sing the praise of God as we remember the incarnation, the second and important step in our liberation.

My tribe, the Kikuyu people, have a saying that “Guciara ti bata ta kurera”. Losely translated it says that giving birth is not as important as rearing the child. It could, and does also mean giving birth is the easier part...nurturing is the more difficult part. This applies not only to procreation but to any endeavor that one involves self into including matters of faith. One would think that Jesus as God being born in human form would make things easy especially to the parents. However, no one learns the difficulty of bearing God sooner, than Joseph and Mary. In the Gospel passage we read today from Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23. They are soon, through Joseph, warned by an angel, in a dream, to get up and be on their way to Egypt to escape Herod who was after the new born child. In that small portion that we read this morning, Joseph dreams 3 different times and acts as per instructions all 3 times!

I am always impressed by the way Joseph is presented as a discerning man. He has the ability to discern that the content of his dreams is from God and to act upon it immediately. This however doesn't just happen from nowhere.... Joseph shared the anticipatory faith of his ancestors. He knew by faith the God of Israel and as a just man, he would have meditated on the law of his Lord, on the Torah, and on the history of Israel constantly. He knew how God had acted in the lives of the first crowd of witnesses, the likes of Abel, Enock, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Moses and David and down to the last of the prophets who had all received divine approval because of their faith in the promises of God. Although Joseph died without seeing the final fulfillment of the mission of Jesus, he like the crowd of witnesses of the Old Testament believed, lived and suffered for the promised Christ. Joseph’s earthly wonderings wholly consecrated to the incarnate Messiah reveal faith as the foundation of his life. Joseph’s was an active faith and not passive resignation! Joseph could accept without full explanation, the many trials in the life of the holy family. Infused with the Spirit’s fortitude, he could leave off all his plans to serve as the caretaker of the Son of God. This comes from the realism of faith or if you like Christian Realism. Because Joseph knew the real truth of God, he had a realistic and true perspective on his own situation.

How many of us receive mesages from God but do not act on them for lack of faith, for lack of the Spirit of discermnment or for fear of being laughed at, or being thought to have gone crazy! We fail to accomplish our mission, the very mission for which we have set ourselves apart as Christians and as Religious to seek and do, because we want to be compliant with the world. In the judgemental world we live in, we can be easily shamed to think that when we live our convinctions we are not Christian enough or acceptable or even compliant enough.

 

Although Christianity is a communal religion, God calls, redeems, sets us apart, sends, uses, saves and will acomplish salvation to you and me as an Individual. Joseph demonstrates this clearly. The first time God spoke to him in a dream was about Mary’s pregnancy, he never went to consult. He just obeyed his discerned intrepretation of the dream and acted upon it. This second round after he is asked to move to Egypt, the most difficult of situations, leading his family into and out of exile in Egypt, Joseph knew to trust God. He right away acted without consultations or even seeking opinions. He just took the baby and his mother that very night and off he went. Even along the winding desert paths, the sight of Mary holding the Son of God gave him assurance in the reality of the long awaited Christ and this gave purpose to his steps and endurance in adversity. I am not trying to minimize the importance of consultation nor its place in the process of discernment and Spirituality, but the final world should come from one’s experience of God, especially where doing otherwise would be going against one’s conscience.

Can you imagine if Joseph had wasted time consulting or in indecision and Herod had caught up with them?....Yes! now can you imagine the consequences that befall the world every time you and I fail to respond to God’s directives that are whispered into the ear of our hearts, waiting for clarity or to be sure! So why seek refuge in Egypt of all places! We know Egypt was viewed as an evil place, a Godless place by the Hebrews after the incidents of the enslavement of the descendants of Jacob and the passover event. Why would God then direct Joseph to go there? Could it be to fulfil the prophecy that “out of Egypt I have called my son?” May be! Could it be that it would be hard for Herod to think that it is hard for a new born king of the Jews to be in Egypt? That is a possibility! However I believe the significance of it is to show that the kingship of the new born king is universal. Egypt too needed a Savior, Egypt too needed santification, and Egypt had a role to play for a second time in the history of salvation, by protecting the Savior of the world just as they protected God’s people from being wiped out by famine when Joseph the dreamer went there followed by his father Jacob and brothers. God’s ways are not our ways and with God all, including those whom we view as enemies or oppressers, are invited to salvation and also have a part to play in facilititating or hastening its coming!

The scriptures tell us that Jesus is the same yesterday, today and always. He is therefore still being born in the world two thousand and twenty years down the line. The Herods of this world are still hunting him down to kill him because they are afraid of the truth, of change and of criticism! Jesus is still being exiled as a refugee. The sad thing is that unlike Egypt of Old, the “Egypts” of today represented by the wealthy, mostly Christian, Western nations are turning him back at their borders to be killed and maimed. They have chosen to abdicate their role of protector and brothers’ keeper despite claiming they are led by Christian ethos. They have failed to discern what the will of God is and when it is put clearly before them, they choose not to act on it.

As Christians, we are called to be other Christs like Jesus whose birth we celebrate as well as Christ carriers like Joseph his most discerning father and gurdian. It is no easy task but the one who calls us reminds us through Paul this morning in the letter to the Ephesians, that we were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world to be Holy and blameless before him in love. We were destined for adoption as his children through Jesus according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that is freely bestowed on us in the beloved and as the beloved!

Let us pray with Paul that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the father of glory, may renew in us the spirit of wisdon and revelation as we come to know him so that with the eyes of our hearts enlightened, we may know the hope to which he has called us, what the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints are, and what is the immesurable greatness of his power for us who believe! It is only then that we can be able to look back with Christian realism and see the Emmanuel, God with us, especially as we contemplate the year just ended two days ago that was marked by adversity for all, whether more or less grave. We like all the holy people before Christ are wayfarers even as we embark on a new calendar year. But now the promise has been fulfilled. The Christ has come and with the discernment and courage like that of Joseph, we can look at Jesus who is the pioneer and perfector of our faith for he alone is our hope!

Amen.

The Second Sunday after Christmas - January 5, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
The Rev. Suzanne Guthrie
The Second Sunday after Christmas - January 5, 2020

Jeremiah 31:7-14
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
Luke 2:41-52

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

Like many Biblical authors, Luke leaves out the very things I want to know. What I want to know in this story is what Jesus and the elders in the temple talked about? What held their interest in the young boy's questions and what held Jesus' attention in the discussion that went on for days?

When scripture leaves off important stuff it is an invitation to imagine what took place.

Imagine you are twelve – on the threshold of adulthood. The Temple is deeply rooted within your soul. In infancy you were brought there and met a great prophet, and a saintly woman of deep prayer - so you are told - over and over. ( Eye roll. Mary's voice: “Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace...” “Mom! Don't sing that song again!”)

You can't imagine life without The Temple's majesty, comfort, its orientation as the center of the world and as Gateway to the Holy One.

And, the Temple is a gathering place. You have visceral memories of the journeys there traveling in caravans to festivals all the way from Galilee to Jerusalem, a time away from ordinary worries and work - your mother's anxious face looks like a girl's as she walks with old friends. Your stern, silent father laughs with the other men. You are going to where God lives, and the adults give you special sweet dates from En Gedi to eat.

Jerusalem itself is pretty exciting, but inside, the Temple! It's s a wondrous GARDEN - like the Garden of Eden! Olive wood and cedar, the bronze pillars carved with pomegranate shapes, golden palm trees, and flowers full of jewels. The lamp is in the shape of an almond tree.

And lustrous fabrics! Purple, red, and gold! And – the veil – you haven't yet seen it in the Holy of Holies - nevertheless you “see” the veil inside your dreams, for just behind the veil – the Holy One.

And space! The space within seems impossible from looking at the building from the outside. Space that takes your own prayer and draws it upward, expanding to fill the cosmos! The Temple represents the universe in its divine proportions holding secrets within secrets within secrets.

And oh, how you wish you could be a high priest – just for that one time to be in the Holy of Holies. For you are in love in God.

But just now you are brooding on a story about David the King.

The kingdom of Israel is mostly at peace, and King David looks out from his palace roof in the cool of the evening, not, this time, distracted by beautiful women bathing, but contemplating his own love of God and God's own ridiculously smitten love of him.

David says to himself, “Here I live in a palace made of cedar, but the Ark of God is living in a tent.” And negotiations for a glorious Temple begin. But God objects.

“All these years I have been moving around with my people in a tent. Have I ever asked for a house of cedar? Would you build me a house to dwell in?” (2 Samuel 7:1-7)

With this story your parents and teachers taught you, “Beware of putting God in a box.” But maybe when you were eleven years old or so, you summoned up the courage to ask, “If God doesn't want to live in a box, why do we have the Temple?”

And all the adults gasp and say, “Don't ask stupid questions.” And you sulk. And then, brood. You know about Solomon and the whole subsequent history of the Temple. Nevertheless the question doesn't go away.

So now Jesus is at the Temple for the festival. He's twelve. And rarin' to go.

Here's what I think Jesus wanted to talk about with the elders. “If God told David he didn't want to live in a box, why do we have the Temple?” (Because this would be my question. And maybe it would be yours.) Anyway, Jesus hangs around the elders, and, citing David, asks his question.

And they're off! Oh, and I wish I could listen in! Here's what I imagine.

An Elder opens, “The Holy of Holies is the center of world. The Temple is Holy because it surrounds the Holy of Holies. Jerusalem is Holy because it surrounds the Temple. And the country is Holy because it surrounds Jerusalem. And so on. This, my son, is called the Hierarchy of Holiness.”

Another Elder says, “But the Romans keep threatening to destroy the Temple, like Nebuchadnezzar did. Where is our holiness located then?”

Then, an argument about how the Romans control them by such threats, and whether those threats are empty or not. The younger ones tend to think the Romans couldn't do such a thing. The older ones have accumulated more somber memories. “This is why we appease the Romans,” says one. And then, this devolves into another unsolvable argument about politics and morality.

An Elder says, “The holy fellows over in Qumran, they have an idea that this Temple was not built to the specifications of God...”

Another interrupts “And they are constantly building ideal Temples in their heads!” Ha ha ha. Everyone laughs. “Qumran. What a bunch of crackpots.”

“But it is an intriguing idea,” says an Elder. “What if we all carry the Ideal Temple around in us all the time? What if Temple is a form, as Plato says....” but the mention of the philosopher is interrupted by a non-verbal cackle of derision.

Another Elder says, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute - many of us carry the Temple in our hearts! The Temple is a TEMPLATE of holiness, a Teacher of how to be holy in the world. The heart IS a temple – and should the Romans destroy it, and scatter us to the corners of earth, in a diaspora like our years in Babylon, we would still have the Temple, in that sense.”

“Yes,” says another. “The Temple here is stone and wood and bricks. A building built by human hands and temporal!”

“That's blasphemy,” says one old but revered and holy crank. “These very stones are holy. Are you saying they are not?”

Okay. So imagine the young Jesus from Galilee - hungry for intellectual stimulation, thirsty for God, watching with a glistening sparks in his eyes as the elders dispute among themselves in these matters.

Those literal minded against those metaphysically minded. The concrete against metaphorical. God, enclosed in the Holy Box. God, everywhere, as if enclosed, enfolded, fluid. They are all having such fun in the most playfully rabbinic way, they lose track of time until the anxious parents came to interrupt them and take Jesus home.

Jesus has twenty years to think about all these things: divine proportion, secrets within secrets, interior gardens, architectural space drawing infinite prayer from the space of your own soul, the veil, the Holy of Holies. All these things he pondered in his heart.

As an adult he loved the Temple enough to risk his life clearing the outer court of the sellers of animals and money-changers with a whip of cords. “You have made this house of prayer into a den of thieves.” (Mt 21:12-13 and citing Isaiah) And once, as his friends are admiring the Temple adornments and precincts, Jesus will say, “Not one stone will stand upon another.” (Mt. 24:1-2, Lk. 21:5-6)

And at his trial, he will be accused of saying, “Destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in three days.” (Mk 14:58)  John's Gospel adds that he was talking about the Temple of his body.

In a violent world, Jesus died of violence. And the veil of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom (Mk 15:38) as if rending its garments in grief.

The Temple was destroyed by the Romans not long after that. And a world-wide diaspora still moves on, heart by heart in a violent world.

And yet, all over the world, people sing, Joy to the World….
“...let every heart prepare him room.”

Christmas 2 - Jan 3, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. José Folgueira, OHC
Christmas 2 - Sunday, January 3, 2016

Jeremiah 31:7-14
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

The flight in Egypt

“God is in charge”

In today’s Gospel we see Joseph and Mary threatened by forces too strong for them. They are warned that Herod the Great, a famously brutal ruler, was hunting for them. Like millions of other refugees, past and present, like myself, they had to flee. God’s own Son becomes a transient, homeless, migrant, alien. Like some of us at times in our lives, they had to hurry away from serious trouble. Many of us have known what it means to be in the grip of hands too strong for us. The hands too strong for us can be external; some of us have known mistreatment and various forms of imprisonment. But very often those strangleholds are internal, the grip of fear born from past experience, from trauma or abuse, for whatever reason unmanageable. 

So here is Joseph, a Jewish carpenter by trade. And his viewpoint of it all was one of obedience and willing service, and a sense of the meaning of who Jesus was and that God was at work in redemption for His people Israel. 

The Angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. The angel does not say take thy wife and son; for though Mary was properly his wife, yet Jesus was not properly his son. 

The child is mentioned before the mother, not only because of his divine nature and office, in respect to which he was her God and Savior; but because it was the preservation of the child that was chiefly regarded, and for which the providence of God was particularly concerned.

Joseph understood that he had a great responsibility as the earthly father of this child, to protect him, to rear him, to train him up, to provide for him, and to love and prepare him for whatever was to come in the years ahead.  

This is certainly a story about whom to trust, and fortunately for us, the pagan astrologers know better than to trust the king who claims piety and faithfulness. The powers of the world can never be trusted with the good news of God’s love.

Joseph is a man of God, a man of unquestioning obedience and willing service. He is man of prayer and a man of God’s words. Through faith he recognized the hand of God in the mystery of the Incarnation, the Son of God taking flesh as the Son of Mary. Joseph is a man of action, diligent in the care of his family and ready to do the Lord’s bidding. 
Joseph fearlessly set aside his own plans when God called him “to take to the road” and to leave his familiar surroundings, his home, friends and relatives and the security of his livelihood in order to pursue a hidden mission God entrusted to him as the guardian of the newborn King. God has a plan for each of us. With the plan God gives grace and assurance of his guiding hand and care. Do you trust Him for his plan for your life? Are you willing to sacrifice your own plans for God’s plan? 
Are you willing to give God unquestioning service and to pursue whatever mission he gives you?

We can learn from all this that:
- The safest place to be is where God leads you. The Wise Men followed a star, and it led them to the Christ child, also they followed God’s instructions and they escaped Herod’s wrath. Joseph followed the Angel’s instructions in a dream, and escaped to Egypt, and also followed God’s instructions and they escaped the wrath of Archelaus.
- The safest place you can be, is in the center of God’s will. Whatever path you take in life, God knows where it will lead. How much better to follow the path that He leads you down.

God is in charge. You can always feel safe when you are living in God’s will. That’s not to say that bad things won’t happen to you. But, God is in charge. Everything that happened in the Christmas story was planned by God. You can see His hand in the Christmas story every step of the way. God is in charge.

Joseph and Mary didn’t have their baby in Bethlehem. Their dream of going back to Nazareth to live a quiet and peaceable life, were postponed for a few years. Their life was nothing they had planned or expected.

Guess what? God is still in charge. He didn’t leave Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem to go it alone. He didn’t leave them in Egypt to tuff it out. God still on the Throne. God is still in charge.

“Lord, make me a faithful servant and guardian of your truth and word. Help me to obey you willingly, like Joseph, with unquestioning trust and with joyful hope.”

Amen