The Seventh Sunday of Easter, June 1, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Adam McCoy

The Seventh Sunday of Easter, June 1, 2025

• Acts 16:16-34
• Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21
• John 17:20-26

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

Today is the seventh Sunday of Easter, after the Ascension and before Pentecost.  This Sunday marks an in-between time: we are invited by St. Luke’s Gospel and Acts into the experience of the Apostles and the earliest Church.  We are invited into the absence of the resurrected Lord from our physical midst and the not quite knowing what is coming next.  Luke frames this as a sequence of events, and his account has provided a narrative framework for the Church’s self understanding ever since: the death of Jesus, his resurrection and ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit, provide a calendar sequence which has become our proclamation, but even more, has become an identity for us.  This sequence of events has refashioned the followers of Jesus into the Church.  And we are invited in so that we can participate in the new life Christ has brought to the world.  In other words, in this view, we have our own lives and these events have their own life, both ourselves and these events independent and self-contained. In proclaiming them the Church faces the world with the choice to participate.  Or not.  But in this view, it and we are separate, needing to be brought together .  The connection between ourselves and the redemptive activity of Jesus is accomplished through individual faith and through joining the community of faith, but we always in some sense remain separate beings: the self and the faith, the self and the Church, the self and Jesus, the self and God.  This is our normative reality in the lived life of the Christian community.  It is the understanding of the self and the faith in Mark, Matthew and Luke.  

This understanding of the self as a more or less stand-alone entity is seemingly rooted in a common-sense understanding of our own reality: We are what we are and they are what they are.  The Church presents the objective events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection as a pattern for our faith and inner conversion.  She invites us to place ourselves within those saving, objective events of Jesus.  But this is not the only path presented to us in the earliest Church.  John’s gospel has a somewhat different understanding of who we are in the face of God’s invitation of love, identity and transformation.  Not in contradiction but in perspective.  

The narrative of the resurrection sequence of events in John is slightly different.  For one thing, Jesus invites the Spirit into the community of believers again and again during his earthly ministry.  And the Pentecost event happens in the first gathering of the disciples:

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side.  The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”  And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

[John 20:19-22]

No fifty days, no Ascension, no upper room.  Lurking in the background of John’s telling are the Genesis stories of creation: God’s act of the creation of human beings is to breathe the breath of life into our nostrils.  Jesus breathes on his disciples and they receive the Holy Spirit.  And I cannot help but think of that other Genesis detail of creation:  “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” [Gen 1:1-2] By directing the ever-hovering Holy Spirit to the disciples and by breathing the breath of new life into them, Jesus is beginning a new creation: his disciples are that new creation, that new world.

But having evoked the creation story, our restless minds, so unavoidably centered on our own situations, will fairly quickly begin to ask the next question: What about us?  The Genesis creation story did not have a happy ending for us.  Our first parents, or so the story goes, lost the thread, missed the point, went off on their own tangent, ignored their elemental, existential, ontological connection to their Creator, and broke that connection.  Their willful separation from God is their Original Sin, and whatever we may think of the Genesis account as a factual narrative, in fact it vividly describes our reality: We too seem to be separated from God.  

And here is where our Gospel for today enters the picture.  In John’s convoluted way he is showing us the path back.  I in them and Thou in Me:  “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.”  Jesus’ human work is to bring together followers who find new life in him.  His divine work is to make of those who follow him a new creation, a new humanity, no longer separated from God but now filled with and joined to the Father’s life through his Son Jesus Christ.  A new creation that can credibly witness to the God who made the world and loves it.

This seems easy to say: a new creation.  But perhaps not so easy to do.  How can we possibly make the leap from our existential separation from God, from our fallen nature, into unity through Christ in the Father?  Through the words and acts of Jesus, John simply states that it is possible, and urges us to do so.  And truly, we want to.  But how complex that proves to be!  So complex, we have to begin again.  As St. Paul says, “ I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” [Gal 2:20] We are invited to join this new creation, no longer separate from God but in order to live continually in the Father’s loving creativity, to love in the Son’s world-embracing heart, to act in the Spirit’s restless energy, we have to die to our present, separated selves.  Our created purpose is to live, to love and to act in God, and so to accomplish that purpose we must consciously join ourselves to God’s life.  But as we discover as each of our days unfolds, this is no simple matter.  Or rather, simple in its intention but infinite in its application.

To this process Christian traditional spiritual practice has given a name: theosis:  The process of uniting ourselves to God, inviting God in, giving ourselves to God, acting in God, resting in God, becoming one with God: “so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.”  When I first heard of theosis as a  concept as a younger person, my good sturdy Protestant soul rebelled.  Heresy!  How can I become God?  The very thought is repugnant.  I am me.  I can with great effort try to be godly but I can only approach God with fear and trembling, taking account of my very deep separation from God, my inadequacies and my failures and my sins, so very, very many of them.  But as I have grown older I have come to realize that the “I” I thought was so separate is in fact deeply contingent: my body has its own unavoidable, ineluctable connections to the physical world.  We are all part of that world and it is madness to act as though we are separate from its energies, its processes, its laws.  Our assumptions about the world and other people are permanently part and parcel of the culture we were born into, with its wisdoms born of the ages, but also with its blindnesses and its prejudices, Our minds themselves are not always “our own”, but are, as we are increasingly discovering, products of physical, electrical, chemical and genetic processes.

And so it is true of all of us: We think we are independent, separate, standing on our own two feet, but in fact, at every step we are by our very nature one with others: Others conceive us in the womb.  Others bear us into this world, feed and clean and clothe and support and teach us.  With others we all cooperate to support each other in producing what we need to live.  In the course of time, we ourselves also are called to cooperate to help create and nurture the next generations.  So in fact, John’s vision of Oneness in God is not strange at all, but profoundly natural.  We are already one with nature and one with each other.  Oneness is what we are.  John begins his Gospel with another reference to creation: “In the beginning was the Word ... All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.”  Separation of creation from God was creation’s denial of its own true nature.  In our own separateness we deny our true nature.  In this Oneness, this theosis, we are simply invited to return to what we are: Created through the Word to show forth in our own unique human way the creative energy of God’s love.  Our uniqueness as a species is that we are the conscious witnesses to that great Goodness.  Our choice is whether or not to live no longer to ourselves alone but embedded and embraced in the love of God.   That choice is our Glory.

Easter 7 B - May 12, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen

The Seventh Sunday in Easter B, May 12, 2024

• Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
• 1 John 5:9-13
• John 17:6-19

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

  A few years ago I went to a friend’s ordination to the priesthood at the Cathedral in New York. It was 2019. I’m sure you remember that four-year period we were in the middle of. When it came time for the sermon, the preacher gave a list of all the terrible things going on in the world. And when the list was done, so was the sermon. No Jesus. No God. No encouragement about what it means to be a Christian or a priest in difficult times. I was speechless. 

Even more astonishing to me was the response from my fellow clergy. In the sacristy after the service, everyone around me was talking about what a powerful sermon it had been. I wanted to shout, “But where was the good news?” I was put in mind of Friedrich Nietzsche’s great critique of Christianity summed up in the words he attributes to Zarathustra: “They would have to sing better songs to me that I might believe in their Redeemer: his disciples would have to look more redeemed!” 

There was a lot of bad news at that time. Arguably there is even more bad news today. But we Christians are called to preach, not the bad news, but the good news. We are called to proclaim the challenging message that even here and now, in the midst of sorrow and devastation, genocide and war, political upheaval and climatic collapse—even here and now Jesus Christ is risen. When the news gets worse and worse, our need to proclaim and model the joy of the resurrection is even more paramount. 

Joy is meant to be the characteristic state of the redeemed Christian. But, like its counterpart gratitude, it is hard to maintain, particularly when we believe that our joy is a product of our own action rather than a gift of the Spirit enlivening us. Of course we will be dour when we think the salvation of the world is a matter solely of political and social action and that action rests entirely on our shoulders. 

This morning’s gospel reading gives us a section of what we call the High Priestly Prayer or Jesus’ Farewell Discourse. I recently heard someone set the scene thus. Jesus is having a meal with his friends. He knows it will be the last time they are all together like this, and he just can’t bear to part with them, so much does he love them. So he keeps finding other things he needs to tell them. He is doing his best to equip them for the days and years ahead. And maybe he’s also having a little trouble letting go. I imagine we’ve all be there. 

And yet, long though it may be, this prayer of love and inspiration contains some of the most exquisitely beautiful passages in Scripture. At the heart of this morning’s passage is the verse “I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves.” 

This is what Jesus is up to: praying—interceding with his Father—so that his joy made be made complete, whole, total in us. Here is the first clue to sustaining the joy of the redeemed. It is not our joy. It is God’s joy, initiated by Jesus, and made full and complete in the Holy Spirit dwelling within and among us. 

We often use joy as a synonym for happiness. But lightness of spirit, giddiness, being carefree—these are all too anemic to be called joy. Joy is something deeper, stronger, more profound. It is a gift of the Spirit, equal parts acceptance, hope, and love. 

Christian Wiman points out that joy must contain sorrow. In fact, he calls sorrow “the seams of ore that burn darkly and beautifully in the midst of joy, and […] make joy the complete experience that it is.” (My Bright Abyss, p. 19) Joy is not a denial of reality, but an embracing of it, a drinking of reality to the dregs. 

Joy understands the limitations of our knowledge and trusts that God is working out God’s purpose in the world and in our own hearts, whatever the outward appearance. Joy is a thing of the Cross as much as of the Resurrection. 

I’m always surprised at quickly we move from the sadness and somberness of Good Friday into the celebration of Easter. That certainly doesn’t seem to have been the disciples’ experience, if we read the scriptures closely. They were afraid. They were perplexed. They were confused and astonished. So lost are they, that they often don’t recognize Jesus when he appears to them. Instead, their hearts burn strangely within them. We can only celebrate Easter morning because we know the end of the story, or we think we do. 

More and more, though, the world seems like that first Easter morning. We have seen the crucifixion of our hopes and loves. We have even laid some of them to rest. And now we’ve come to visit them and found an empty cave and a pile of clothes. We know that something has happened, something immense, something shattering. But what? 

I call to mind a section of Christine Lore Webber’s poem “Mother Wisdom Speaks”: 

Some of you I will hollow out. 

I will make you a cave. 

I will carve you so deep the stars will shine in your darkness. 

You will be a bowl. 

You will be the cup in the rock collecting rain. 

I will do this because the world needs the hollowness of you. 

I will do this for the space that you will be. 

I will do this because you must be large. 

A passage. 

People will find their way through you. 

Sometimes joy looks like being hollowed out like a cave. Sometimes joy looks like allowing the darkness to make its home in us, so that the lines between the light and the dark soften, and we come to know more clearly the unity of all things, to bear that unity in our bodies. Are we willing to be bearers of joy in broken world? Are we are willing to look at the wreck of this world and see not only the rubble but the beauty? 

Jesus prays for his joy to be made complete in us. Having ascended into heaven so that, as the letter to the Ephesians put it, he might fill all things, it falls to us to complete God’s joy. Without us, the joy, hope, and love that God means to fill the whole creation is incomplete. Take that in for a moment. God chooses to be incomplete without you and me. And that also means that the world is incomplete without our joy. 

If we are shy or guilty about being persons of joy, then why in the world are we Christians? We are people who not only believe but know in the flesh of our bodies that Jesus Christ is risen. The world needs this joy. If we are not to bear it, then who will? 

Without joy, we cannot sing the song of the Redeemed. It may be frightening to live in joy when the world prefers chaos. We may feel guilty or shy. But, to quote Rebecca Solnit, “Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.”  

Even more so for us Christians. Joy is our birthright. So call the banners. Step out of the shadows and join hands. Let the insurrection of the Redeemed begin! Amen. 

Easter 7 A - May 21, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

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

 

Acts 1:6-14

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

John 17:1-11

Click here for an audio of the sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Easter 7 C - May 29, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement

Easter 7 C - May 29, 2022

Acts 16:16-34

Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21

John 17:20-26

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

If I said that Christianity was all about power, how would you respond? I myself would feel the urge to object. Isn’t power precisely what corrupts Christian life? Wouldn’t humility, perhaps, serve to better define Christianity? To quote one very prominent ecclesiastic, “Let us turn our backs on power.” Yet, the more I actually contemplate Christian faith, religion in general, and life itself, the more I’m convinced that to turn our backs on power would be to betray life and to forfeit our relationship with God. Our lives would simply implode!

God is power! Power of a specific kind but power nonetheless…explosive, extravagant, creative power. Open up your Bible to nearly any page and you will read about a God creating the heavens and the earth, turning rivers into blood and parting seas, providing manna from heaven and water from a rock. You will read about miracles of healing and miracles of divine intervention. Or what about the Incarnation, Resurrection, and Ascension of our Lord? What are these events without power? Or the Easter story we hear today about the Apostles casting out a spirit of divination from a slave girl or the power of prayer and worship to open prison doors and break shackles? And then there is the power of God on showcase in the book of Revelation where the Risen Lord is about to come from heaven to save the saints and destroy evil once for all.

And yet the pages of the Bible are also filled with another kind of power…the power to tempt and lead astray, the power of a lie to wreak devastating consequences, the power of shame and guilt, the power to plunder and kill, the power of sickness and death.

No wonder some of our favorite stories are those about the clashing of powers…the power of good versus the power of evil. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is, in fact, the good news that God is more powerful than Satan, that life is more powerful than death. So, it is hard to deny that at the heart of life and faith is this reality of power. It is the force of life. It is the DNA of the beating human heart. The inestimable gift of God that we have received in Christ is that in Christ we encounter power completely and totally sanctified and pure, never turned in on itself, always overflowing for good. In Christ, power is purely and simply love at every turn. Never control, never manipulation. He reveals it in his healing the sick and liberating those bound by the devil; in his acts of reconciling and bringing into community those who are marginalized; in his heroic ability to endure the injustices of a world who misunderstands and rejects him and in his courage of denying himself his own right to live.

As we approach the liturgical end of celebrating the saving events of Christ in his Paschal Mystery, it is an opportune time for us to reflect on the meaning of it all and widen the scope of our vision. What was the purpose of Christ's life but to unleash upon the world a power to transform it and make it what it was always intended to be? In Christ we encounter a God who has not been deaf to those who have cried out shackled in the power of evil and One who has indeed heard and decisively answered. The answer was like nothing anyone expected but far more than anyone could have hoped. We have been given a power that liberates and transforms. Its name is Love, the only force to conquer evil and turn hearts of stone into hearts of flesh allowing them to act in the very same power of Christ himself…healing, reconciling, and bringing life to those who are dead.

Today we hear our Lord pray that we all may be one, even completely one, just as he and the Father are one…and that we may dwell in God and God may dwell in us. This grand, mystical vision boggles the mind and humbles the heart. Yet, this is precisely God’s gift to us and our destiny. The point of the Christian life is to learn how to harness this power for divine intimacy and live in its fullness. And Christ didn’t pray that we would come to experience this oneness once we get to heaven. No, he prayed that we would come to experience this oneness even now, in this life…a oneness with God that empowers us to live at one with each other.

And, most importantly, as we widen the scope, we see that at the very heart of the Paschal journey stands a bloody cross…the sanctifying, transforming instrument that takes power turned in on itself and transforms it into something divine…the power to bear the hatred of this world and to bury it in the sacrifice of one’s life.

Meekness has been defined as power under control. It comes from the Greek which referred to a wild stallion who undergoes months of training to bring its unruly strength into submission so that it can be directed to use that strength in ways that would be most effective in battle. For me, this kind of meekness is the glory of Christian power and has become the goal of my own Christian life.

When I see the gross divisions in our world, between nations, between races, even between churches…when I see violence perpetrated against fellow human beings or against the natural world in which we live…when I see how one human being can control and manipulate a nation and unleash devastating terror on thousands…and when I think of the Christian response that can finally save us from such powerful forces of evil…I think of Christ, the meek and humble Lamb of God who unleashed on the world a greater power still and am compelled to live more fully into what has already been given, the victory already won.

And so we pray…Lord of Life, who has created all that is by your powerful, life-giving Word, pour out upon us once again the power of your Spirit as we anticipate the celebration of your divine Love lavishly given at Pentecost. Take our broken, stony hearts and imbue them with life, recreating them in your divine image. Heal us, renew us, and inspire us to always act in the conquering power of your mercy and forgiveness and so reveal to a world fractured to breaking point the way to reconciliation and peace…for you are the Light that has cast out the darkness, the Lamb that has taken away the sin of the world. Come, Lord Jesus! Holy Spirit, come! Amen.

Easter 7 B - May 16, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC

Easter 7 B  - Sunday, May 16, 2021

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

1 John 5:9-13

John 17:6-19

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Why do we pray?  The simple answer for me is best expressed with the words of C.S Lewis, who wrote: “I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God. It changes me.” It just doesn’t get any truer than that for me. I pray with words and without words, through my laughter and my tears, in my hope and in my despair because my soul longs for engagement and attentiveness and connection with God. 

Today’s gospel lesson is considered by many scholars to be the highest level of mystical teaching in the entire New Testament. Jesus’ “High Priestly Prayer” in John’s Gospel is the culmination of his farewell discourse to his disciples and a beautiful prayer for unity with evocative language and complex imagery. The setting is the Upper Room following the Last Supper. Jesus has just washed his disciples’ feet. He has foreseen Judas’s betrayal and has predicted Peter’s denial. He has given his disciples some words of instruction and has promised them the Holy Spirit. 

The seventeenth chapter of the Gospel begins by saying that Jesus “looked up to heaven and said: ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you.’” “Jesus looked up to heaven.” What does that really mean? I want to propose that something much more significant is taking place in this scene than Jesus’ eyes just shifting upward. “Looking up to heaven” means that Jesus’ mind, heart, and consciousness are lifted into that spiritual realm where he is now profoundly at one with God. It is a way of saying that Jesus is entering into the heavenly realm- God’s consciousness, God’s very heart. 

I have been most influenced by James Allison, who, in is magnificent essay, “Undergoing Atonement: The Reverse Flow Sacrifice,” links this passage to imagining the rite of atonement in the First Temple. He writes:

"[T]here is the High Priest, in the Holy Place, with us outside, and he is being ministered to by Angels, he is communing with the Angels who were with YHWH at the beginning of creation. He is spending time in prayer, for it is during this period that he will expect to become interpenetrated by YHWH whom he is going to incarnate for the rest of the rite. So he will pray to become one with God, and that God will become one with him, so that he can perform the sacrifice and glorify God by making God’s people one. This is what At-one-ment is all about. Experts in these matters have long known that in John 17, where Jesus engages in a long prayer concerning the Father being in him, and he in the Father, and him praying that his disciples may be ‘made one’, we have the essence of the High Priestly prayer in the Atonement rite.” 

Jesus prays: “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.” In the idiom of the Hebrew world, the “name” of God equals the essence of God. That is why we pray, “Hallowed be your name.” Jesus has made known the divine being. He has given to his disciples “the word,” the revelation of who God is, the revelation that God has given him. The disciples would have understood that the word of God is the revelation of the being of God. The call of Jesus for us all is into a new being in which a new dimension of life is entered and through which a transcendent unity is experienced.

“And now I am no longer in the world,” Jesus says. It is clear that the gospel writer is not composing these words in the pre-crucifixion span of time, but in the time for which this book was written. In that later time the Johannine community is in the world. So he prays for them: “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” In other words, Jesus has opened a door for them into the essence of God. He asks that God keeps them in that essence now that he will no longer be physically with them. They have come to a new understanding of what it means to be human. They are, therefore, different, and the world will always hate that which it sees as different. 

“I am not asking you to take them out of the world,” Jesus continues, “but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.” According to biblical scholar, Sandra M. Schneiders, I.H.M., “world” in John’s Gospel means “a construction of reality, which is in opposition to Jesus and his own and which can be incarnated in multifarious ways… [T]his evil world pervades the natural and historical world in which we live, the good Creation of God and the struggling human beings who are torn between good and evil.” 

Jesus is not asking for a physical protection, but for a grounding and constant re-centering in God’s consciousness which is what gives us the strength to walk through pain and danger without falling apart. When we are truly grounded in God, nothing that is outside of us can finally destroy us. We are connected to that which is ultimately real and ultimately eternal. Just as Jesus was made whole and holy and set free to give his life away in love, so are his disciples, and us, to be made whole and holy and be set free to give our lives away in love."

“Sanctify them in the truth.” Jesus prayed for what the Eastern Fathers of the Church later came to speak of as “theosis,” God drawing us toward deeper intimacy, and union. This union with God is not merely a place we go to after our earthly life if we are good, but a place of deep goodness in which we naturally exist. And we experience this divine indwelling by “looking up to heaven” in prayer. In other words, Jesus modeled for us this “at-one-ment,” the lifting up of mind, heart and consciousness into the spiritual realm where we are profoundly at one with God. 

This idea that the Creator of the Cosmos resides within our being was not unfamiliar in the first century. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is the temple (John 2:19). Writing at an earlier time to the Corinthians, Saint Paul declares that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). We are reminded to come to this awareness when at the beginning of the Eucharistic Prayer we are asked to lift up our hearts, and we reply that: “we lift them up to the Lord.”

So, why do we pray? I pray because Jesus looked up to heaven and prayed. Love come down prayed. The Word made flesh prayed. May we continue to lift up our hearts to be in communion with that Source of all love. And may that Source of all love keep us ever aware of our connectedness with all that is, that we may always seek the best for all of creation. 

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

Amen+

The Seventh Sunday of Easter - May 24, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
The Seventh Sunday of Easter - May 24, 2020

Acts 1:6-14
1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11
John 17:1-11

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

We come to the last Sunday of the Easter Season, the Sunday after Ascension Day, to the peculiar experience of hearing for the third week in a row a reading from the Gospel of John set on the night before the crucifixion. These Farewell Discourse chapters are summary, preparation, and theological reflection on the death/resurrection/ascension singularity. Time becomes something other than a straight line. We have entered a realm where the chronological flow of events is less important than the eternal, ongoing truth and power of the events in the world. The historical and eternal meet and interpenetrate, the chronos time being visited by moments of kairos which change everything. 

According to our calendars, we have come quite a distance since Ash Wednesday on February 26. That date seems like an eternity ago given all that has happened in the last twelve weeks. We go into the wilderness, to the depths of our souls and the nature of our resistance to God so that we may be ready and willing to receive the medicine of salvation freely offered us. We emerge into the glory of the empty tomb and the risen and ascended Christ. The Gospel today ties together these seasons and stories of death and resurrection spanning from those dark, cold days of February (when I actually physically touched people’s forehead’s with ashes) to today. The mystery of life, death, and resurrection cycles and tumbles through our lives just as in the Gospel of John where Jesus is always the crucified, risen, and glorified One even in his earthly ministry, even, we might say, from before the foundation of the world.

All of that is context to the verses I would like to focus on this morning. Verses 9 and 10 say this,

“I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.”

Jesus speaks here of the communion between Father and Son, and elsewhere in the Farewell Discourse of the coming of the Holy Spirit. In the discourse as a whole, the life of the Trinity is always described as relational, the persons are distinct yet in and for one another. The Trinity is not an abstract idea for examination or a closed circle beyond us. The unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is the source of our being and the model of our life with God and one another. The relationship between Son and Father is not, thankfully, “on behalf of those who have been chosen over others; on behalf of those who are good enough…” But rather because of and out of their relationship we are brought into being, and by being we belong and are being given in belonging. The only qualification needed is that you are here. The belonging is inherent in our souls by awakening to its presence.

And then “I have been glorified in them.” Here is a union, fusion, participation in the dignity of each human being in the eternal and everlasting unfolding of the love and grace of God to and in all things. Our human life is the context within which the glorification of Christ is an ongoing incarnation of perfect union and utter self-giving love. The ever-being-revealed radiant being and presence of Christ is ongoing within us. That is the essence of the meaning of our human lives – to be an incarnation of the glory – that is, the perfect union and utter self-giving love of the Son in unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. In the context of the Upper Room, the soon coming arrest and execution, Jesus has little time and does not waste words. The imminence of death has a way of focusing thoughts and words to what is essential. Jesus urgently wants the disciples to be so rooted and grounded in their identity as belonging to the Trinity, that nothing will shake their belief. What is it that Jesus leaves the disciples as the Last Word, the final echo of his voice before the Passion? The glory of the Son from the Father lives on in us as individuals and community.

All of this theology is lovely, but the reason Jesus is talking this way is to inform our lives from the inside out. Living as the one in whom Christ is being glorified is the heart of the Christian vocation. Christ glorified in us is the conversion from self-will to detachment. The desire for our own glory is the source of sin and distorts and warps our identity. Detachment is knowing the difference between my glory and Christ’s glory. Christ’s glory is not about control, power, dictating the future. The allowing of Christ’s glory, the surrendering of my will to power, orients my vocation to what is ultimate and eternal. Whenever I assert my self-will, I embrace the illusion that I am independent and can separate myself from belonging to the Holy Trinity.

In A Letter of Consolation, Henri Nouwen writes to his father six months after the death of his mother on the relationship between autonomy and detachment. He is seeking to distinguish between a passive resignation and an active surrender in the spiritual life. He writes,

“It [autonomy] is the option to understand our experience of powerlessness as an experience of being guided, even when we do not know exactly where… We can see that a growing surrender to the unknown is a sign of spiritual maturity and does not take away autonomy… I am constantly struck by the fact that those who are most detached from life, those who have learned through living that there is nothing and nobody in this life to cling to, are the really creative people. They are free to move constantly away from the familiar, safe places and can keep moving forward to new unexplored areas of life.”

Even the holy possessiveness of the Trinity has a detachment that possesses and at the same time freely gives to the other.

We can hear these words of Jesus in a fresh way as we are in our own urgent time. We are in need of being rooted in what is meaningful and lasting. Our lives reflect and participate in this mystery. In aging and ultimately our own death, we live in the hope of the promise of resurrection. That hope amplifies and enriches the present moment because eternal life is now and we are preparing, storing up treasure for what awaits us. St. Benedict counsels us to live with the end in mind: “remember that you are going to die”, he says in the Rule. Like John’s bending of time, it is difficult to understand how to “remember” something that is in the future. St. Benedict is inviting us to look forward to the day when there are no more denominations, church buildings, monasteries – when the containers are gone, having been replaced by the eternal presence of the thing these structures signify and toward which they point. The expectation of fulfillment in a world where only our acts of love remain from all our days helps us hold loosely what is useful and necessary, but is still passing away. The externals are given to us to teach us the way of love.

Lately I have been in mind of Mary Oliver’s famous poetic question;

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

Well, Mary, “I plan to live it, and then to lay it at the feet of the One who made me and to whom I belong.” The prayer Jesus prayer for the disciples, praying even now for us, imagines what might happen when we are welcomed into heaven. “Tell me”, Christ will say, “did you live, did you enjoy the wild and precious gift I gave you of being alive and being you? Did you enjoy sharing my glory – in all the joys and sorrows, gifts and losses – as much as I enjoyed creating you?” Amen.

Seventh Sunday of Easter - Sunday, June 2, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
Seventh Sunday of Easter - Sunday, June 2, 2019

Acts 16:16-34
Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21
John 17:20-26

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega:

All times belong to him and all the ages.

To him be glory and power through every age for ever. Amen.

This prayer is familiar to many who attended the Easter Vigil.  It is the prayer commonly used while the priest blesses the Paschal Candle at the very start of the service and, taking its light from the new fire, heralds our Lord's Resurrection.  Here at Holy Cross Monastery it was particularly striking this year. Due to the liturgical equivalent of a “wardrobe malfunction” the fire never caught on. But our nimble altar party managed to get the candle blessed and lighted and we were off once again with our Easter observance.  Of course Christ's Resurrection did not and does not depend on our ritual actions. As Rowan Williams once said:  “No matter how early you get to the tomb, God has already been there first.”

I find myself regularly praying this formula of blessing from the Easter Vigil liturgy.  It is a bracing reminder that the course of this world and our life together in it is ultimately in the hands of Someone greater and more enduring than we are.  The whole cosmic story stretches from before the primordial beginning to the very end of time. And at the beginning of it and at the end of it and at all the times and seasons between, there is Christ, the eternal Word, creating, reconciling, healing, redeeming, transforming.  It is a prayer of a big faith, fitting our small stories into a cosmic setting and helping us make  sense of our life and times.

It is also a prayer which captures the message of the Book of Revelation, that mysterious final book of the New Testament also known as the Apocalypse of John, that is, the great unveiling.  We have, in fact, been hearing every Sunday since Easter portions of this book.  Admittedly they are the passages focused on the promise of life and light and a new heaven and a new earth and of the universal invitation to all who are thirsty to come and drink.  The sections having to do with the seven plagues and the moon turning to blood and the four horsemen riding over the earth and the bottomless pit and the bowls of the wrath of God—all the really dramatic parts—are left for another time...usually for the office of matins at seven o'clock in the morning. But whatever else it may be, the Book of Revelation assure us that God is in charge and that we can hope...for a new age and a new order of justice and peace.  It is a hope that gives us the courage to work for just such an age and such an order.


We find ourselves today in a strange period in the church year.  On Thursday we celebrated the feast of the Ascension of our Lord. Christ has returned to his Father's side, his disciples have witnessed his departure, they return to Jerusalem and they worship and they wait. What next? What happens now? What do we dare hope for or fear?  Where shall we go? What shall we do? Who are we? We are all familiar with these questions. They are constants in our human condition when we feel in between or fall between the cracks of life.  It's a situation that recurs regularly.

I want to share with you two vignettes about this experience, the experience of those first disciples in the days after the Ascension and in our own day.

The first has to do with a story that I have related many times. It's actually not my story but comes from our late Br. Andrew Colquhoun, that beloved, curmudgeonly Scotsman.  He told of one of his aunts who had a tendency toward malapropisms, getting words ever so slightly wrong with rather humorous results.  In one instance, in an effort to console someone who had suffered a difficult setback in her life, Andrew's aunt tenderly said: “God doesn't shut one door but he closes another.”  We can laugh at this, of course. But you know, this sounds pretty accurate in many cases.  How many of us know people or have ourselves been in situations where not just one but several doors closed almost simultaneously, whether they be doors of financial or educational or romantic opportunity or of physical or emotional health or of spiritual aliveness?  But it is also a truth that folks who experience this closing of the doors learn, if they are resilient and circumstances of life do not overwhelm them.  And that is that when the doors close and we are exiled to the hallway, we discover that life goes on even there.  It may take time for our inner eyes to adjust to this new and unfamiliar environment.  But we find that we are not alone there and that the conditions, while far from our dreams or desires, are bearable and sometimes even interesting in new and unexpected ways.

I wonder if this was the experience of that apostolic band of men and women who were disoriented and perhaps left bereft and grieving by the exquisite absence of Jesus from  their lives and who yet, as Luke says, “were continually in the temple blessing God.”  The doors, it seems, were closed.  All the doors. God had tantalized them and captured their hearts and minds, and fired their spirits in and through Jesus. And now they were left in the lurch...waiting. Yet even in their waiting—in their waiting together—they found the way to form a community and to worship God and nurture hope in each other.  It was a hope that was richly rewarded.  Yes, sometimes: “God doesn't shut one door but he closes another.”  But that's never the end of the story, not for those early followers of Jesus and not for us.

The second vignette is a bit more personal.  As I reflected on the Ascension this week and looked at various icons and images of the passing of Jesus into the havens, I was struck by how the men and women stand there gazing up, just as we hear described  in the Acts of the Apostles.  What were they experiencing, feeling, perceiving?  As I reflected I was taken back to 1968 when I was nineteen years old and went away to Europe for a Junior Year Abroad.  I had lived at home for my first two years of college and hearing the adventures of my high school friends now away at college or university, I was envious and longed to escape and share in similar adventures.  I saved up my money from part time jobs and summer labors and scraped together enough to live on the cheap in Belgium while studying at a venerable university.

I booked passage on a small student ocean liner, and my parents went with me to New York City to see me off.  I was standing on the ship's deck waving to them and they were on the dock waving to me.  It was just like in the movies.  And then the horns blew and suddenly I noticed that they were getting smaller and smaller.  Seriously, I don't know what I expected, but to use the language in St. Luke's account of the Ascension, they withdrew from my sight. It was so disorienting.  And at once I felt a great fear and a great freedom.  I was on my own at last.  And it felt...well, scary and full of possibilities I couldn't even imagine.

I wonder now if the experience of those early disciples wasn't something like my experience on a small ship slowly moving away from New York.  It was I that was moving, not my parents who were still there on the dock waving until I couldn't see them any longer.   And I wonder: maybe it wasn't Jesus who moved at all or ascended. Maybe it was disciples who moved..moved away from their Risen Lord so that they could experience both the challenge and the freedom and the joyous possibility of becoming the new born people of God.   What if Jesus in some real sense is still there on the Mount of the Ascension, waving to us and saying to our hearts: “Don't be afraid. I'm still with you. I'm always with you.  Now go out. Go out into the world. Go on. It's OK. Be my church. Be my body in the world. Be alive. Be the Good news that you proclaim?”

Well, this is a bit of stretch perhaps. But it seems to me that God is always stretching us to take our place in the cosmic story and to make our mark, however large and small, in the world.  And in this liminal period between the feast of the Ascension and celebration next Sunday of Holy Pentecost just as in all the in-between or liminal spaces of our little lives and our corporate history as a people and species, we are reminded: the story is larger than us and wider than us and far more vast than we can imagine.  And at its beginning and at its end and at every moment and every place in between, there is Christ, our courteous Lord...dwelling in the hallways with those for whom so many doors have been closed and waving at us from the dock.  And speaking softly to our hearts saying: “It's OK. I am with you to the end of the ages. Now go live.”

And so we pray again:

Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega:

All times belong to him and all the ages.

To him be glory and power through every age for ever. Amen.

Seventh Sunday of Easter- Year B: May 13, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC

Seventh Sunday of Easter- Sunday, May 13, 2018

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. Robert Sevensky  

During our contemplative days this past week I read a marvelous little book by an Orthodox bishop, Seraphim Sigrist, titled: A Life Together. [Paraclete Press, 2011]. It is an examination of the concept of sobornost, a virtually untranslatable Russian word pointing to the experience of unity, community and coinherence. It reminded me of the equally untranslatable African term ubuntu, which, in the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, expresses the reality: “I am because we are.”

I found particularly exciting Bp. Seraphim's reference to the passage of St. John's Gospel, Chapter 16,  that we heard at today's Eucharist.  It is a portion of Jesus' Farewell Prayer for himself and his disciples placed immediately before his betrayal and death. 

Indeed, the whole set of chapters in John's Gospel beginning at Chapter 13 and known as Jesus' “farewell discourse” has long fascinated me, and if I had to spend my time on a desert island with only a few pages of Scripture, these chapters would be among the few I would choose.  I love the noble language and the complex imagery. I love the transcendent feel of them. I love the pathos and the longing and the hope and the deep unity that they express.

But the thing is, I don't think I understand them in the least.  I feel like the disciples who, in the middle of the discourse in Chapter 16 say, “We do not know what he is talking about.”  So at least I'm in good company.

Bp. Seraphim sees in these lofty words prayed by Jesus an expression of sobornost, that profound unity of all believers and indeed of all creation. And he goes on to describe these words, this prayer, as the completion of the initiation of Jesus' apostles and all “those who believe through their word.”  Which is to say, the initiation of us all (p. 43).

Initiation rituals are present, of course, in every human society.  They generally mark and effect the passage from one stage of life to another, most dramatically in the passage from childhood to adulthood, from partial membership to full belonging, from virginity to fertility.  They are generally
characterized by social isolation, physical and emotional challenges, and by secret knowledge or power passed down to the initiate who is then expected to take up a new role in the community or tribe.

Bp. Seraphim points out two distinct characteristics of Jesus' initiation of the apostles and of us as given us in John's gospel.  First, the initiation is given not to an individual but to a whole group, precisely because the mystery into which they (and we) are being initiated is that of community itself, and specifically the church as the image and foretaste of a redeemed and reconciled humanity.  Jesus introduces this at the outset by washing the disciples' feet and showing, through symbolic action as much by words, that it is in mutual, even sacrificial, service that we find the beating heart of a new life.

And secondly, Jesus' initiation of his friends is not primarily by means of or in service of power or  knowledge, important as these might be.  Rather it is an initiation into love and for love, as we have been hearing so often these past weeks.  Jesus prays that God's love may be in us and he in us and we in him.  And in today's passage, Jesus prays for his disciples: “protect them from the evil one, protect them in your name...that they may all be one.”

Jesus still prays that for us, whispering in the Father's ear the deepest desires of our human hearts and minds, desires, and longings that we, by and large, have yet to recognize or name in ourselves, either individually or corporately.  Jesus whispers them so that God may protect and purify and deepen them and at last reveal them to us.  This is what the glorified Jesus does.  This is the work of our ascended Lord.

Which is why I love Ascensiontide.  Far from being a useless metaphor held captive by an archaic and outmoded triple-Decker view of the universe, the Ascension speaks to us of the ultimate fruits of Christ's Resurrection:  our human nature and the whole created order raised up close, close to the heart of God, never again to be separated from Divinity.  We have there the One who pleads for us, speaks to us, and works with us through his promised Spirit right now, today...urging us onward to take the next right step. Directing us in ways large and small.  And surprising us daily.

Bp. Seraphim concludes his consideration of sobornost, of Christian community and coinherence, by likening it to Indra's net. Admittedly I know next to nothing about Indra or his net.  He is an Indian deity who story has many layers and a complex history and various levels of meaning.  So let me quote the good bishop:

“...in the wonderful net of that old Indian god, there is a gem at each intersection and in each gem the reflection of every other.”

This image of the fishing net made of gems bound together by lines of mutual reflection has enjoyed a certain popularity in the last 40 years or so in the new physics or cosmology as a symbol of the intimate and eternal inter-relationship and mutual dependency of all things: people, planet, cosmos, everything.  As such it is a rich and tantalizing visual.  I am put in mind of Thomas Merton's vision that we are each of us points of light shining like the sun and reflecting all others in that web that constitutes the Real.

But, according to Bp. Seraphim,

“...we see in John 17 that the lines that join the gems of Indra's net are not merely lines of mutual reflection but rather lines of love by which each sustains and creates each in the diagram of the Glory (to use John's word here for “Spirit”), and all are created, sustained, and completed in one.”  (pp. 45-46)

Imagine that:  a universe in the truest sense of the term...cosmic unity in diversity, complexity interrelated and codependent...created and connected and nurtured and sustained:

in love 

by love

for love.

To echo Br. Aidan's Easter sermon:  Now that's an Ascension worth celebrating. 
So, brothers and sisters, let us keep the feast.

"And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit be ascribed as is most justly due, all might, majesty, power and dominion, world without end."

Seventh Sunday of Easter- Year A- May 28, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC

Seventh Sunday of Easter– Sunday May 28, 2017

Br.  Robert Sevensky

“Ascensiontide is the most liminal time of the church year. Here you learn the skill of loving God and uniting in community at a time of ambiguity and uncertainty and waiting.” 

So says our Associate and dear friend Suzanne Guthrie on her blog site, At the Edge of the Enclosure

“Ascensiontide is the most liminal time of the church year.” 

And it does seem as if, on so many levels, we are liminal, which is to say, dwelling on the threshold, living in the in between.  

I've come to believe that this is always the case for us, since we mortals all live between birth and death and (we hope) new birth, resurrection, new life. Every single one of us. But within this great in-between, there are other, more focused periods of waiting, of uncertainty, of unknowing. And these days between the Ascension of our Lord that we celebrated this past Thursday and the anticipation of Pentecost next Sunday with its pledge and promise of Holy Spirit fire and transformation perfectly express that universal spiritual and deeply human experience of waiting, with all its attendant ambiguity and incertitude and hope.

On Thursday we heard the Gospel of St. Luke describe the Ascension of our Lord. He concluded with these words:  “And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.”(Luke 24:53) It all sounds so triumphant, so settled, so reassuring, doesn't it?

But today we hear another version of the story from the Book of Acts, a passage which overlaps with what we heard on Thursday. The Book of Acts is commonly assumed by both faithful and scholars alike to be written by Luke, the author of the Gospel that bears his name.  But now he is writing a few years later.  And I'm struck by the rather different picture he offers of what happens after our Lord was drawn from the sight and physical presence of his friends and family and followers.  Luke says here, “Then they returned to Jerusalem from the Mount called  Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath day's journey away.  When they entered the city, they (the Apostles) went to the room upstairs where they were staying.  All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.”

To my ears at least, this sounds a lot less triumphant and certain and reassuring than the Gospel description, and much more tentative, uncertain and...well, liminal, which is to say, in between, here and not yet, known and unknown, yes and no...kind of like life, your life and mine. The thing is, these early friends and followers of Jesus knew the Lord and his promises, but they did not know quite what to expect or when to expect it.  So what do they do?  They hang out together day after day in what sounds like the same, safe upper room where Jesus celebrated his final dinner with his friends, until one day it explodes on them that they and the world have been set on fire: Fire for compassion. Fire for peace. Fire for love. Fire for holiness of life. Fire for conversion and evangelization and a whole New Life in a world turned upside down.  

The Archbishop of Canterbury has for the past two years invited people to join with him and tens of thousands of Christians in prayer during these nine days between Ascension Thursday and Pentecost Sunday, the first and model novena.  He says, “These nine days are a dedicated time to prayerfully wait in the 'in between' time from Ascension to Pentecost.”

He adds: “In it we choose to align ourselves with the love of God, so that those around us may come to know more of Him. May our waiting and our praying make us more open to receiving the Holy Spirit and more capable of showing the grace of God in all that we are and do.”

The suggested themes vary each day:

Between Seeking and Finding
Between Generations
Between Bystander and Game-Changer
Between Chaos and Courage
Between Breaths
Between Sunset and Sunrise
Between Despair and Thanksgiving

But they underscore the deeper truth that all of us stand in between and on the threshold: between dream and reality, between the test and the results, between jobs or boyfriends/girlfriends; between sickness and health, youth and old age;  between fidelity and betrayal; between faith and faithlessness. It's where we live. It's where God lives. 

As many of you know, in two weeks we will have a new Superior in our Order, and my title and my job and role will change. And so I find myself in between, a classic lame duck, having precious little time to accomplish anything new.  And, as is often the case with men or women who retire from one job or role, I find myself rather uncertain of what exactly I will do and, even scarier, who exactly I will be.  I think that just goes with the turf. 

And yet I am also finding a joy and consolation in this unknowing and uncertainty.  I seem to be developing hints of a perspective that sees the bigger picture, realizing that one can only do so much.  It is in truth in God's hands—it always has been—though I shall continue to do what I can.  Being in between, even in the most difficult and anguishing situations, forces us to see that, try as we might—and we must try—we are not God.  God alone is God!  And God's presence is always there, bidden or unbidden, perceived or not, working in us and through us and around us in what sometimes seem like impossible situations.  

Situations perhaps like that of the Apostles who had their friend and master and Lord taken from their sight. Like feeling abandoned. Like feeling like an orphan. Like feeling lost. 

I will not leave you orphaned, Jesus promises. I will not leave you comfortless. Wait. Wait.  I'm not finished with you yet.   You will receive power, dynamis, from on high. And you will be my witnesses. 

Meanwhile, as we wait, we would do well to heed the advice the First Letter of Peter offers: “Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. Discipline yourselves. Keep alert.”   

Alert, non-anxious disciples. Not a bad job description, not bad advice for this in between time.  Or for any time.

Amen.