Easter Day, April 20, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

The Sunday of the Resurrection, April 20, 2025

• Luke 24:1-12

Click here for an audio of the sermon

“Why do you look for the living among the dead?” It’s a startling question. After all, they watched while he was tortured. They heard him cry out with his last breath. They placed his limpid body in that gash in the rock. The earth itself twisted in sympathy with his wounds.

They are not yet ready to let go. Who would be? So they come to the tomb at the quietest moment of the day, that soft time when the gauze between this world and the next is thinnest. They know he’s dead, but maybe they can glimpse the shadow of their friend and teacher moving in the distance.

Which one of us would not do the same? Which one of us hasn’t caught ourselves, in an unguarded moment, thinking “I can’t wait to tell her about this!” only to remember that our mother, or friend, or teacher is dead?

Only to have the grief cut, like a hot knife, once more. It takes a long time, sometimes a lifetime, for the soul to accept what the mind knows—that he is gone.

How absurd this needling question! Why do you look for the living among the dead? For anyone who has lost someone dear to them knows that the dead are never really dead at all. Their shades rise like mist over the river of our lives.

Maybe the soul is wiser than the mind. Maybe the stubborn clinging to the life of those we love is the soul’s proclamation of the resurrection. Maybe the soul knows what the messengers proclaim—he is not here! He is risen as he said, and he has gone before you on the way. He is not among the dead, because in Christ there are no dead. In Christ all are alive, all is life.

The empty tomb has become the womb from which new life—the life of the Crucified and Risen One—flows into the world. Tomb and womb are one, and death itself is a birthing and an unbinding.

We live today in a world of staggering loss. Loss upon loss, piled high like so many corpses on a field of battle. We will never recover much of what has gone and is going. When the maples are gone, as they almost certainly will be, we will never have them back again. When the last polar bear dies, that majestic creature will live only in memory. Even if Kilmar Garcia makes it back from El Salvador, there are many thousands who will not.

What does resurrection look like in the face of this flood of loss? How do we proclaim the good news of God in Jesus Christ as the darkness grows deeper and as the light seems further away than ever?

Like us, Jesus’ disciples knew something of the grinding violence of empire. In the face of that juggernaut, God offers the empty tomb as the proclamation of her faithfulness and love. We might see in the spaciousness of the tomb, in its largeness, an example of what it means to live the resurrected life of Christ right here and now. Perhaps we are called, like the tomb, to hollowness.

In the words of Christine Lore Webber’s poem:

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.

God does not save us from our lives or from the times in which we live. Rather, God gives us the strength to live our lives fully, to drink them to the dregs. God raises us up in the midst of our times to be witnesses to the life that really is life. God does not stop the violence of empire that bears down upon us. Instead, God gives us the assurance of a love that far outstrips all that empire can do, so that we know, deep in the bones, that though the rulers and powers of this world may kill our bodies, they cannot touch our souls.

And some of us God hollows out with new life. Hollows us to be a tomb in which to lay the polar bear and the maple. Hollows us to be a bell tolling in witness to the lives of the innocents of Gaza. Hollows us to be a throat calling out for justice, wailing in lamentation, and singing songs of hope and resistance, a throat proclaiming the great and unending alleluia of God, of life flowing from the heart of death, like the waters of Eden.

Some of us God hollows out to be a passage through which to lead God’s people from the bondage of empire into the promised land of freedom and life. Bow down to the mystery, my brothers and sisters and nonbinary siblings. Bow down in your sorrow. Bow down in your longing for a new world. Bow down in your joy and your fear and your amazement at this new thing God is doing. Bow your head to the ground, stretch out your arms in freedom and surrender. Press your heart to the ground and feel the earth rise up to meet the pounding rhythm in your chest.

In Christ there is no death—there is only the life of God poured, for a moment, into these miraculous bodies of ours and then returning at last to its source. Nothing is ever really lost. All is bound up in the love of the God who loves us into life. When they have vanished from this earth, the maples will pepper the heavens of God’s memory. The polar bear’s cry will thread the song of God’s love. The hearts of this world’s innocent dead will beat forever in the sacred heart of Jesus, joined in the great work of love and redemption that will far outlast our brief lives.

In the midst of death we are in life. Always, always new and deeper life. This is the promise of Jesus’ resurrection. We must mourn our dead and then let them go, knowing that they are now closer to us than our own breath. For the Living One has gone before us to light the way to God’s new creation, to the ever-deeper life breaking out in the midst of death and destruction like the stars in the night sky.

No matter the state of the world or our own lives, Jesus Christ is indeed risen today and every day, bringing to birth God’s great work of love. We are that work. And the work

goes ever on.  

Easter Sunday - March 31, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve

Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024

• Romans 6:3-11
  
• Mark 16:1-8
  

From St. Bonaventure:

“God is an intelligible space whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.
God is within all things but not enclosed.
Outside all things but not excluded.
Above all things but not aloof.
Below all things but not debased.
God is supremely one and all-inclusive.
God is therefore ‘All in All’”.

The word “liturgy” means “the work of the people”. Liturgy is the witness to and embodiment of the transcendence of the categories of past, present, and future into a “now”.  When were God’s mighty acts? Yes. Liturgy exists within my participation, but is not contained by it; desires my presence but is not dependent on it.  The Holy Spirit is the source and inspiration for our aliveness to Christ in our midst.  We begin when we decide to look at what is. That is faithfulness.   Mere nostalgia for the past is not faithful, nor is our work added to lives which we own and possess.  In God’s sight, all of life is liturgy - we remember and live from the source and end of human life itself.

The Easter Vigil is the liturgy of all liturgies - nothing less than the very drama of creation being made alive in its proclamation in and among us.  Darkness is its opening act as earth and sky and heavenly bodies join in.  The joke among sacristans is that the six most complicated words in the Prayer Book are,  “In the darkness, fire is kindled”.  For those of us for whom this is an annual event, a part of our identities, we cannot imagine being anywhere else doing anything else this morning.  But we can think of family members or friends who would be perplexed by this work.

In our increasingly secular culture, liturgy is odd work -  weird, inconvenient, impractical, awkward, certainly uncomfortable at times.  We do not claim to produce anything tangible, to be guaranteed to be entertained or even sufficiently distracted - we promise none of the markers of attractive ways to spend time and attention in our culture.  We do believe that something unseen and mysterious is happening.  We believe that we are touching the very source of God’ covenant faithfulness to us and for us.  We began in darkness so that we might put our bodies into the dark night that precedes dawning, set ourselves first and fully in the embrace of the blackness of death and the grave and the womb of the world,  unable to see, to move, set groping for a glimmer, a flicker of light.  We gather to begin at the time before time when the universe has not yet, but is about to be, big-banged into existence.  And as humans, we are most human, most aligned with our image-bearing vocation as creatures, when through our senses and hearts, imaginations and doubts, enter the great drama of our existence.

So the work is to be “remembered” into the story when we forget, when distractions lead us into detachment and isolation, by acting it out from darkness into light, from despondency into terror, and then to greet hope and joy.

The gospels are the first liturgies, written to instruct and train catechumens and form the faithful within their unique perspective and community.  We would think that part of that instruction would be a firm grounding in the resurrection of Jesus by preserving appearances and sayings that assure the faithful that Christ is alive and in the midst of them.  But Mark, who is already a bit odd and doing his own thing in his Gospel, gives us a different Easter morning than Matthew, Luke, and John.  

The earliest and likely first ending of the gospel of Mark is 16:8:So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.  The lectionary includes the shorter ending of verse 9: And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterwards Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.   Likely some later scribe was copying along and got to verse 8, “... for they were afraid”, and thought, “well, that’s not a very Jesus-y way to end the gospel, now is it? I’ll fix that right up.” And thus an extra verse.  There is an even longer ending of Mark that I will not get into - read it yourself if you dare and if you decide to follow it literally do it far away from me.

So after Jesus has cast out demons, healed, taught, multiplied loaves and fishes, calmed the storm, been crucified and buried - now, on Easter morning, when it is finally time to pour on the celebration and unleash the fireworks and glory and find some relief from the unrelenting conflict and struggle - Christ has conquered death and the grave!  What do we get?  So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Resist the temptation to say, “yes, but.”  Before we get there (and there are six more Sundays yet to come), we enter an awful emptiness, the yawning chasm and chaos of the absence of a dead body that every expectation, every way of seeing reality assured these women would be present in this tomb as surely as the sun will rise.  A dead body lying there on that slab just as they had left it on Friday afternoon.  It is not there. An angel announces what has happened, what to do now, and they leave.  The gospel ends there, ends with the fear hanging in the air. No appearance, no word of peace - just the ultimate cliffhanger.

This is classic Mark.  He loves to leave teaching and parables unresolved, leaving questions unanswered/ He writes the gospel as a “fill in the blank” quiz as if to say, “and now what happens?” Write your response here in the margin.  We are all part of the story, processing in real time.  For this persecuted community, many exiled from home and family, excluded from the synagogues, hunted by Romans, the fireworks of glory and triumph are not where they are.  And so for us as well.  We may believe in resurrection - believe it to be the greatest news in the greatest story ever told - but that news does not, is not intended to, wipe away our grief and sorrow or make us forget our pain.  We can have both.  We can know that both are true.  Even at the empty tomb there is fear and pain and grief yet to live.  Sometimes we can’t get to the joy and celebration just yet. Some years, some periods of our lives, we are stopped cold in the awful dark emptiness, the terror and amazement, caught between the presence of death we expected and the presence of absence which bewilders us further. 

Rather than hasten to words of peace and assurance, hasten to touch Jesus’ feet or gaze at his wounds, might there be liturgy in the space between death and glory, the nothingness, the absence, the darkness where dwells our deepest fears and trembling hopes?  Those other moments will come.  But these women, the disciples, and all of us, must receive them in our own time.  If we rush past the dark emotions we may smile and act as if it is the dawning of new creation, but our hearts will still be in the tomb.  Liturgy is language and sign and movement.  It is also silence, absence, and stillness. We may not live in the tomb, but we must enter it.  It is a necessary place, but it is not home.  When we enter the tomb, enter the emptiness, we are in that place of coming undone and thus becoming the ones in whom the risen Christ dwells.  The risen Christ can and will dwell even in our terror and darkness, he does not wait for our joyful assurance, our personal inner fireworks.  Because he has conquered death by death, he can be present to my terror and take me with him through it. 

Mark knows that we will want a more comforting ending, which is why he does not include one.  He knows we will want him to finish the liturgy; tell us what it means, what to do.  He does not.  He leaves that up to us. He lets us proceed with what is next when we are ready.  The impulse to fix the ending of Mark is understandable, but I’m glad it ends the way it does.  Leave it as it is - at the end of verse 8.  It may take a while, we may flee far in terror and amazement, too afraid to say anything to anyone.  At the other end of our fleeing is home; the far country of fear becomes peace - Christ will not abandon us - we cannot outrun him.  The center of life in the risen Christ is everywhere; his circumference is nowhere.  This is just the end of the gospel, not the end of the story.  The story continues until all things are made new.  It has a perfect ending.  We are the ending.  Amen.

Easter B - April 4, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Leo Sevensky, OHC

Easter Vigil  - Sunday, April 4, 2021

Romans 6:3-11

Mark 16:1-8

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

In a 1959 article, Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote: 

Easter is not sufficiently well understood if we think of it only as the time when we reaffirm our belief that Christ rose from the dead. That the historical fact of the resurrection is the keystone of the whole structure of Christian faith is still not sufficient reason why Easter should be the great feast that it is. ... This celebration does not merely recall the act by which we are liberated, it revives our freedom itself, in the renewal of the mystery in which we become free.

It still remains true that we do not understand Easter sufficiently well. I'm tempted to say that we don't understand Easter at all, though that is something of an exaggeration. But Easter is, I believe, less about understanding than it is about proclamation, and about the power of that proclamation to open within us, both personally and communally, a space where God can and does act in our lives. 

Fifty years ago this month, I sat in Mercy Hospital in Scranton next to the bed where my mother lay dying of ovarian cancer. I forget the exact chronology, but I’m pretty sure it was the night before Orthodox Easter, or Pascha as they call it. I was spending the night attending to my mother's needs as well as my own, keeping vigil. And to pass the hours of that long night, I got my hands on an Orthodox Christian service book for the observance of Easter. It was the midnight service of Paschal Matins. As is true of most worship services in that tradition, the text was very long and convoluted and rather obscure with all sorts of biblical and Byzantine references. But I doggedly read through it that night, spreading it out over the dark hours. Frankly, I didn't understand much of it--perhaps most of it--as my mind and my heart were understandably elsewhere. But over and over the service was punctuated by a hymn called a troparion which was repeated countless times: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.” And just the previous year, a college friend had invited me to his Russian church for Easter Matins. I knew that these words were not just recited but sung again and again.  I could hear the echo of that music as I read them silently by my mother's side as she slept fitfully. 

That long Matins service reaches a kind of climax with the reading of a sermon ascribed to St. John Chrysostom, the 4th century bishop of Constantinople.  It has in fact been adapted for use in some Episcopal churches for their own Easter vigil. The sermon begins by inviting everyone present to the great banquet of this feast, whether or not they had observed the Lenten fast, whether or not they have labored in good works.  For as the writer says: “The table is fully laden: let all enjoy it.” The sermon concludes by echoing Saint Paul (1 Cor 15:55): 

Oh death, where is your sting? 

O hell, where is your victory? 

Christ is risen, and you are cast down. 

Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen. 

Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice. 

Christ is risen, and life reigns in freedom. 

Christ is risen, and the grave is emptied of the dead. 

I found deep consolation and hope that night in this proclamation.  But what exactly did it mean in that place, at that time, to say that Christ is risen? And what does it mean to say it today? 

Like the Greeks of St. Paul’s day, we seek understanding.  But meaning is not quite the same as understanding.  It can be quite other and often much more profound.  Beyond logic and beyond arguments, meaning captures essential truths, rooted in history but echoing through eternity. And meaning can and does open a space in us where hope—that “thing with feathers that perches in the soul” as Emily Dickinson describes it—can take flight.  

There is a story which has fascinated me for decades, and which I have told many times, and which captures for me the sheer power of proclamation. It took place in Soviet Russia under Stalin's dictatorship, when persecution of the churches was especially severe. Church buildings were turned into Museums of Atheism, and the locals, peasants and intelligentsia alike, were herded in to listen to lectures about the folly of religious faith. One local Communist leader decided it would be edifying to have a debate with the old local Orthodox priest. So, the community was gathered in and the official launched into a two-hour attack on Christian faith and practice using the latest in dialectical reason, or at least what passed for reason, to repudiate soundly its claims and its message. The old priest was then brought to the podium and was ordered to respond to the official’s arguments. After a long pause, this old man of God drew himself upright and simply said in Church Slavonic Хрїсто́съ воскре́се! (Christ is risen!). And with one voice the assembly roared back Вои́стин воскре́се!  (He is risen indeed!).  Again, the priest shouted, “Christ is risen!” and back came the response, “He is risen indeed!”  And a third time: “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” And then the old priest sat down. 

Who won that debate? What was understood? What was its meaning? Of course, just saying something over and over again doesn't make it true. Unless, unless…truth is about more than rationality and life is more than linear understanding and holiness is quite something other than winning debate points.

We stand here this morning in the face of a deep mystery rooted in time but touching the very center of our lives and hopes. We stand before a mystery which has been variously described in terms of an empty tomb or the harrowing of hell, in terms of resurrection appearances and encounters with the Crucified One perhaps extending over years, in terms of the Ascension and final glorification of Jesus.  But the meaning exceeds the limitations of these descriptions and our human speech. It always will. 

I do believe that Merton was on the right track when he said that this celebration does not merely recall the act by which we are liberated. It revives our very freedom itself and renews the mystery in which we ourselves become free.  To borrow a phrase from Marcus Borg: we meet Jesus yet again for the first time.  Jesus, who is Resurrection and Life, who is Freedom and Possibility, who is Hope writ large, even at the bedside of the dying, even at the graveside, even in the face of despotic governments and human or cosmic cruelty or our own small minds and constricted hearts.  We meet Jesus who is the author and actor of a story that transcends and elevates our personal narratives, giving scope and permission and power to breath more freely and live more fully and to love more passionately and courageously and justly.

  

May this Eastertide revive in us our freedom and renew the mystery so that we may rejoice. And not only us, but people of every place and time together with the whole created order. This is the meaning of today…whether we understand it or not, whether we can make sense of it or not, whether we even feel it or not.  It is God’s wonderful work, not ours.  And that, my friends, is good news indeed.

Хрїсто́съ воскре́се! Christ is risen! Happy Easter!

Easter: The Sunday of the Resurrection - April 12, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
The Sunday of the Resurrection - April 12, 2020

Romans 6:3-11
Matthew 28:1-10

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

Augustine called the Great Vigil the Mother of All Vigils. It lets ritual and Scripture do its work on us by recounting our salvation history, unfolding our theology in an experiential way through sacred gestures and acts of ritualized memory, that cannot be exhausted or explained by words alone. The work of sacred rituals like initiation is to situate life in a larger frame, so nature, beauty, suffering, work, sexuality, and ordinary moments are seen to have transcendent significance. They give life meaning— the one thing the soul cannot live without. The integration of heaven and earth is the necessary human and spiritual task, or this world never becomes home.

This morning, as we made our way from death into hope for new life, we let the fire, light, scriptures, water, and gathered community testify to the deep truth of what is sometimes lost in translation. Paul too lets the water do the talking as he uses baptismal practice to convey his theology. There is more than what we see and do, far more than we can say or explain. That’s the truth of the sacraments and the sacramental encounter. Sacraments are gestures of both memory and hope, empowered by anamnesis---remembering. Baptismal language gives definition to the bookends of the Christian life. It marks both the beginning and the end of one’s faith journey. The paschal candle itself, the symbol of the Risen Christ, that once burned bright for a person’s baptism burns again for that person’s funeral liturgy.

The words of Paul’s Letter to the Romans comprise the most potent statement on baptism written in the New Testament. Paul interprets Baptism as an event that joins Christians to Jesus’ death and resurrection. He writes:

“All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3-4).

This understanding of baptism as the paschal mystery has dominated in the West since the 4th century. It went hand in hand with the emphasis on Easter as the most appropriate day to celebrate baptism. Across cultures initiation is always, in some form, an experience of the tension and harmony of opposites: of loss and renewal, darkness and light, death and resurrection.

Paul insists that it is dying and rising, always held together, inseparable sides of the same life, that constitute a faithful way to make sense of one’s bond with Christ. Sometimes prepositions are the most important words in a Pauline sentence. Here, the prepositions “with” and “in” are critical to following his logic. We die “with” Christ in baptism, and we will be raised “with” Christ at his coming in glory. Between now and then, however, we walk “in” newness of life. We do not die alone, and we do not rise alone. Even the five wax covered nails in the Paschal candle, recalling the five wounds of Christ, remind us that his wounds are ours and ours are his. Six separate times in this letter Paul speaks of our lives being tied up with Christ.

Paul is not naïve about the lingering reality of sin in human experience. For Paul, sin is always in the singular, and its opponent is not forgiveness but the grace of God in Jesus Christ. We are not punished for our sins we are punished by our sins. Suffering was not something Jesus did for us but part of the paschal pattern that he revealed and invited us to share. Many with privilege in the United States are missing out on the redemptive meaning of their own suffering. By trying to handle it through willpower, denial, or medication, they’ve forgotten that we do not handle suffering, suffering handles us in deep and mysterious ways that become the very matrix of new life. God used Jesus’ death to defeat the powers of sin and death.

We proclaim that Christ is risen this morning, although we know full well that we are not. We are keenly aware today of what is not yet true of the world in which we live. We struggle with the forces of evil that continue to torment God’s world. We face the certainty of our own deaths. What has changed in baptism is not the existence of sin and death, but their deadly hold over us. Not only does something die in baptism, but new life emerges. Paul talks of this new life in both present and future tenses. Resurrection is God’s final word and the Gospel’s first word. Easter announces the reality of death but announces the greater reality of life.

Matthew’s version of the resurrection story fits perfectly as the final reading of this liturgy. His Gospel is most linked to our salvation history and the developing story of God’s grace. It also parallels in narrative the darkness to light theme of the Vigil. As we gathered in darkness and moved toward the light, the story has the two women coming in the darkness and moving toward an encounter with the resurrection as the sun rises. Matthew recounts it from the women’s perspective, not only what they see, say, or do, but also what they feel. He conveys how the first Easter is exploding with excitement and urgent energy. They run with both fear and great joy.

Matthew’s point is that there is no merely naturalistic way of speaking of the resurrection. It is not about human capacities and possibilities. It is wholly about God’s capacity and determination. God acts at the boundary of life we call death and does something all together new. Angels and earthquakes are the only way Matthew can make clear that we are confronted with God’s possibilities and not our own. Having dispensed with the guards through overwhelming fear, the angel speaks reassuringly to the women, “Do not be afraid” (v.5). The even more important thing that Matthew says is that Jesus is going ahead of his disciples to Galilee, where he will meet them. Galilee, the place where he first called them, the place of his ministry where he taught the crowds, healed the sick, fed the multitudes, showed compassion on the suffering, welcomed the stranger, blessed the children, challenged the rich, announced a Messiah who would suffer, die, and be raised. The risen Jesus is to be met in the place of his once and future ministry among those where healing, feeding, teaching, and blessing will be carried on by them and those of us who come after.

For us adults today, fears can be more complex and words of reassurance harder to come by. The longer we live, the greater the sense that death eventually claims everyone we love. When an angel or Jesus says, “Do not be afraid,” it is not assurance that nothing can go wrong, because often things do go wrong. It is not assurance that everything turns out for the best, because if we are honest about it, it seldom does. Rather, it is the assurance that, whatever may happen to us, God has the power to strengthen and uphold us; that whatever we must face in the days ahead, we do not face it alone; that nothing we can encounter is stronger than God’s love; that ultimately God gets the last word; that in the end, sometimes even before the end, God’s love is triumphant. +Amen.

Easter Sunday - Sunday, April 21, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josép Reinaldo Martínez-Cubero, OHC
Easter Sunday - Sunday, April 21, 2019

Romans 6:3-11
Luke 24:1-12

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

They had hoped he would save them from the oppression of Roman domination. He had promised God’s reign of justice and peace. Now Jesus’ followers were afraid, confused, and feeling abandoned by God. They were paralyzed, and hiding in the shadows. Well, the men were paralyzed and hiding, apparently not the women!

All four gospels have unique elements in their resurrection stories.  Mark, regarded as the primary source, has only eight verses on the first Easter.  Both Matthew and Luke expand the story in their own individual directions according to their audience. And that is disconcerting to us twenty-first century humans who are so attached to facts and certainty. But the Gospels are about meaning and truth not facts.

In the case of Luke’s Gospel one of the most notable features is that it has the most women on the scene. Three are named: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, but also “the other women” were with them. Those women at the tomb are given the message of the Resurrection, and it was terrifying, but they heard it, and it made sense to them. Those women returned from the tomb, and told the apostles what they had experienced, and their words seem to the apostles an “idle tale, and they did not believe them.” The women were not heard. (And all the women in the room are probably thinking: “Ain’t that always the case!”) Those apostles were too caught up in their fears and their disillusion, not being able to reconcile Jesus’ execution with their hopes and dreams of a new world. If God could let the best of them die such a horrible death, then perhaps God was no god at all. And don’t we still ask that very thing? If God can let the horrendous sufferings, about which we all know, happen, then perhaps God is no god at all.

We want a God who will take our responsibility away from us; who will erase the messes we create for ourselves; who will save us from the times we live in, the circumstances of our lives, from ourselves. We refuse to see that in Jesus’ death, God dies.  God in, with, through and beyond us, God woman, God gay, God transgender, God black, God in prison, God raped, God the latino from a “shithole country” seeking asylum at our southern borders, God dying again and again. We forget or refuse to accept that the mystery of the Incarnation reveals that divinity is not exclusively transcendent and different from humanity. For Christians who want to grow up and take responsibility, our humanity, personal and corporate, divinized in Christ, is the instrument, and the focus of God’s salvific and liberating work.

So, here we are today, at the fundamental and nonnegotiable experience at the heart of Christian faith- the Resurrection of Jesus. As the shock slowly went away, and they came to realize that those women’s experience was no idle tale, the apostles began to realize that the tomb was indeed empty because it could not hold Jesus anymore than death could take him from them. Jesus lived in, with, through and beyond them, and his presence continued to mold them into a new reality. They began to experience Jesus after his human death in a way that assured them that Jesus, in the full integrity of his personal humanity, was alive with an entirely new kind of life. The disciples experienced Jesus as present among them, and able to interact with them. The disciples experienced Jesus as living within them. And because of this indwelling, they were now Jesus’ post-Easter body, the instrument of his presence in the world just as our natural bodies are the instruments of our human presence in the world. Jesus had done the work of God dwelling in him. Now Jesus’ followers were carrying on Jesus’ own work in the world as Jesus dwelled in them. They began to understand that death, while horrific and very real, is no longer final. Life can be lived fully. Love can be given extravagantly. Justice is the way to peace, and is worth seeking.

Saint Paul explained it to the Romans and the Corinthians, and the Gospels present it through the Easter narratives. Jesus now lives the absolute, eternal, and indestructible life of God. But his life is fully personal, truly human as well as divine, because the Risen Jesus remains fully and truly human. This is the fullness of life that Jesus came to bring, that whoever truly believes in him will have eternal life.

To be Christians is to be people of the Resurrection. More and more of us today know that Jesus did not die to save us from some fallen state. More and more of us know that Jesus did not die to appease an angry God. Jesus didn’t save us from the past. Jesus showed us that we too have the capacity to be the light of the world! We already possess the ability to evolve and become. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection show us the way to be LOVE; that power at the very heart of reality. Our call is not to leave Jesus hanging on the cross but to join him as God’s people of the Resurrection. When we finally let go of the fears that enslave us, Resurrection happens. When the Mary’s, Mary Magdalene’s, and Joanna’s of this world are heard, Resurrection happens. When we welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick, Resurrection happens. When we give voice to the voiceless, Resurrection happens. When we embody LOVE Resurrection happens again and again.

I will close with the words of the wonderful poet, Lucille Clifton:

the green of jesus
is breaking the ground
and the sweet smell of delicious jesus
is opening the house and
the dance of jesus music
has hold of the air and
the world is turning
in the body of jesus and
the future is possible

 Alleluia! Christ is Risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

The Great Vigil of Easter: April 1, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

The Great Vigil of Easter- Sunday, April 1, 2018

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC 

ALLELUIAH! CHRIST IS RISEN!
The Lord is risen indeed.

But where is he? He’s risen, but he’s not here. Did anyone else notice that?

What a strange resurrection account Mark gives us. It’s a resurrection without a resurrected Jesus. The man in the tomb tells the Marys that he is not here. He has gone ahead of you to Galilee.

And, appropriate, perhaps, for an Easter that is also April Fool’s Day, this account of the resurrection is the punchline to a joke Mark has been telling from the beginning of his narrative. At every point Jesus heals someone or performs a miracle in Mark, he says to those watching, tell no one. 

Immediately they run out and tell everyone they can find about this wonder-worker. This morning we hear the only time in Mark that witnesses are told “Go! Tell everyone!” Instead, they run away in fear and tell no one. The only real witness to the resurrection this morning, it would seem, is the tomb itself. The wound in the earth that has become the womb from which Jesus has been reborn.

Much of the Easter proclamation that runs through Paul and that the church’s liturgies and prayers have picked up centers on Jesus as the new Adam. In this morning’s gospel account, we can see that link directly. God molded the first human from the stuff of the earth and filled that clay creature with breath from heaven, Flesh and Word, Matter and Spirit, joined from the beginning.

Like the adamah, Jesus here is reborn from the very stuff of the earth, expelled from the womb that was a tomb, rising out of the ground, Flesh and Word, Matter and Spirit, truly the first born of the new creation.

And yet, he has already gone ahead of us, leaving us only the empty tomb as witness and icon of the new and abundant life of God flowing out of Eden to water the garden of the world. But how do we sing the Lord’s song in a strange and hostile land?

We live today in a world of staggering loss. Loss upon loss, piled high like so many corpses on a field of battle. And we will never recover much of what has gone and is going. When the maples are gone, as they almost certainly will be, we will never have them back again. When the last polar bear dies, that majestic creature will live only in our memories. And the next time a young black man is gunned down at a traffic stop and his life blood waters the ground, like Abel’s, will we join our cry again to the earth’s supplications?

What does resurrection look like in the face of this flood of loss? How do we proclaim the good news of God in Jesus Christ as the darkness grows deeper, not lighter, and as the light seems further away than ever?

Like us, Mark and his community knew something of the crushing violence of empire. And in the face of that juggernaut, Mark offers the empty tomb as the proclamation of God’s faithfulness and love. We might see in the spaciousness of the tomb, in its largeness, an example of what it means to live the resurrected life of Christ right here and now.

Perhaps we are called, like the tomb, to hollowness. 

In the words of Christine Lore Webber’s poem: 

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.

You see, God doesn’t save us from our lives or from the times in which we live. Rather, God gives us the strength to live our lives fully, to drink them to the dregs. God raises us up in the midst of our times to be witnesses to the life that really is life. God does not stop the violence of empire that bears down upon us. God gives us the assurance of a love that far outstrips all that empire can do, so that we know, deep in the bones, that though the rulers and powers of this world may kill our bodies, they cannot touch our souls.

And some of us God hollows out with new life. Hollows us to be a tomb in which to lay the polar bear and the maple. Hollows us to be a bell tolling in witness to the lives of children killed while they study. Hollows us to be a throat calling out for justice, wailing in lamentation, and singing songs of hope and resistance, a throat proclaiming the great and unending alleluia of God, of life flowing from the heart of death, like the waters of Eden.

Some of us God hollows out to be a passage through which to lead God’s people from the bondage of empire into the promised land of freedom and life.

So this morning let us join with all those who have gone before, let us cry out with saints and ancestors, with the River and the Oak, with the empty tomb and with the Godbearer’s womb. And let us pray to be like that tomb, a womb from which Christ may be born again and again to bring light to the gathering darkness.

ALLELUIA! CHRIST IS RISEN INDEED!

The Great Vigil of Easter - Year A

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC

The Great Vigil of Easter – Sunday April 16, 2017

Br.  Robert Sevensky

“Do not be afraid.  I know you are looking for Jesus who was crucified.  He is not here, for he has been raised, as he said. Come see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, He has been raised from the dead and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him. This is my message for you.” (Matt. 28:5-7)

We have been proclaiming the resurrection this morning with various symbols, each of which, in its own way, captures and expresses in very primal form the deep truth of our faith:  that Jesus Christ has passed from death to life, that he is risen and is, for us now, new life and new hope.  First with fire, then with spoken word and prophecy accompanied by that great natural symbol of sunrise; then with water and oil and the baptismal mystery and now with bells and song, and finally, and most intimately, with the Bread and Wine of new and renewed life.  Each symbol is powerful in its own way...and each symbol falls short of the fullness of the Truth. But each is also necessary and holy.

In the movement of our worship, the symbols move from the more external—from darkness and fire and light—to the more personal and internal, to the very consuming of our hope.  Yet it is one and the same proclamation made in so many different ways.

We may feel, by the end of it, having received our Easter Communion, that our work is done, that our Easter has been accomplished and that, for another year at least, we can rest comforted by the interiorized truth of Easter joy.  But Matthew's Gospel account of the Resurrection that we heard this morning leaves us, as do all the Gospel resurrection accounts, strangely unsettled.  

The work of encountering the living Lord is partial at best and never finished, even for those two lucky women who met with the angel at the tomb and grasped the Lord's feet. For the message from each is not: Stay here. Rather it is a directive, a command, to go ahead, ahead to Galilee.  It is there that Jesus will be encountered in his fullness.  And like them, we too are sent ahead, sent away, sent out.

Several years ago, our Deputy Bishop Visitor Stacy Sauls addressed our annual chapter meeting.  He talked about what might be the best name for this most intimate of ritual actions involving bread and wine that we are now embarked upon. The Lord's Supper? Holy Communion? Holy Eucharist? The Divine Liturgy?  The Synaxis? All these capture important dimensions of this central Easter act.  But, quite surprising, at least to me, Bp. Sauls said that the best name for what we are about this morning is the medieval one: the Mass. The name itself comes from the very final words of the gathering, when the faithful are dismissed with the Latin words: Ite missa est.  Go, it's finished, offered, sent up, sent out.  And like the offering, we too are sent, dismissed, pushed out into the world.  It's there that we will find Jesus:  “Tell my brothers to go to Galilee. They will see me there.”

Where is Galilee for you, for me?  Where is it that we are sent today in order to see Jesus in his risen state? To be companions of Jesus? To serve with Jesus.

Yes, to the church. And yes, perhaps to the monastery. But also to the workplace, with the life partner, with family, in the political arena, among the poor and the unattractive as well as among the rich and the powerful. Among the hopeless and the failures and the successful and the lost. At the end of our desired or dreamed for destination as well as when we are lost or confused or at our wits end.  Indeed, Galilee can be anywhere—it is anywhere—and  it is different for each of us and different for us at different times in our life journey. Yet it is there that we will see Jesus...and Jesus will see us.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously said:  “We are all missionaries.” We are all sent, like it or not.  Much of the time, frankly, I don't like it.  I'd rather stay put, stay comfortable and comforting—and who knows, that too may be our Galilee for a time.  But sent we are, make no mistake.  And the only hope for me and maybe for you as well is that promise that Jesus makes to us:  I am going ahead of you.  We will arrive and not find ourselves isolated or abandoned but in the mysterious company of the risen One, who has been waiting for us all along.

In his book Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, Archbishop Rowan Williams makes this observation:

“Even in the Gospels, one thing is never described. There is a central silence...about the event of resurrection.  Even Matthew, with his elaborate mythological scenery, leaves the strange impression that the stone is rolled away from a tomb that is already empty...It is an event which is not describable, because it is precisely there that occurs the transfiguring expansion of Jesus' humanity which is the heart of the resurrection encounters. It is an event on the frontier of any possible language because it is the moment in which our speech is both left behind and opened to new possibilities.”

He adds:  “...however early we run to the tomb, God has been there ahead of us.”

And so we stand in awed silence, despite our lovely liturgies. We are sent...sent to the Galilees of our lives where we will meet the Lord. This is the Lord who has gone before us and awaits us there. We are all missionaries. We have all been sent. And we need not be afraid.

Ite missa est. Alleluia, alleluia.

Deo gratias. Alleluia alleluia. 

  

Easter Vigil - Mar 27, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Joseph Wallace-Williams, n/OHC
Easter Vigil - Sunday, March 27, 2016

Romans 6:3-11 
Luke 24:1-12

"Christ is Risen... Wounds and all!

Br. Joseph Wallace-Williams preaching at the Easter Vigil.

Wounds!

I got wounds.

You got wounds.

All God’s children got wounds

When we get to heaven

We gonna shout all over God’s heaven!

Amen?

When I was younger we used to sing:

When I think of the goodness of Jesus

And all He's done for me

My soul cries out hallelujah

Thank God for saving me

The premise of the song is that if you think you will thank. So then the key to the thanking is the thinking. If you’re thinking is off then your thanking is off.

John Milton writes: The mind is its own place! And in itself it can make a heaven out of hell or make hell out of heaven. Jesus in his Resurrection shows us a different way. A different way to carry our wounds. A different way to think about the wounds we encounter in life. Those thorns in the flesh that are caused by: illness or accident. Wounds inflicted by traumatic experiences.

Our wounds may be visible to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. They may be invisible because we carry them as scars upon our: hearts, our minds, and our psyches. My suffering may not look like your suffering and her suffering might not look like his suffering, but at the fundamental, foundational level of our emotions and nerves the journey of life will lead each of us into the rawness of suffering – a place of:

Deep hurt, a grief that we just can’t seem to shake, pain that just won’t heal, rejection that we just can’t seem to get over, trauma that we dare not speak.

So you see, depending on the way we were raised and our individual personality types we all carry our wounds differently. Some of us suffer in silence: We camouflage our wounds and no one around us knows that we are bleeding slowly to death. There are those of us who bleed all over the place: Exposing our wounds, risking infection not as a badge of courage but to gain attention and sympathy by getting other personalities to commiserate with us!  Because misery loves company!

Then there are the walking wounded: Injured enough to be impaired but not enough to take us out of the game. There are the waiting wounded: Injured and caught in a chronological time warp waiting for the reversal of the condition. There are the weary and wounded: injured, tired, drained of spiritual resources; drained of enough sanity that when we actually do go to sleep we can’t get any rest. Too tired to get up and too wired to stay down. Then there are the wasted and wounded: those who have resigned to being wounded thinking that it is permanent. Thinking that it will happen again. Thinking that it is some sort of predestined punishment and so we waste away because of the wounding.

Beloved, our wounds can fester, and metastasize, and become a kind of sunglasses which we wear that colors with gloom our eyes so that when something good actually happens to us our wounds darken our vision, darken our response that naturally occurs from receiving every good and perfect gift offered day in and day out by God.  So instead of seeing the blessing we see only the wounds.

This is when our wounds get in the way. Our wounds trick us into thinking that we are somehow stuck in a scarred and marked life.

I would imagine that only a few of you have seen the movie Medea’s family reunion.

There is a wonderful song in the movie that goes like this:

As time passes by they begin to multiply

*There are wounds in the way.

Adding up secretly like the rings of an old oak tree.

*There are wounds in the way.

 Some old and some new,

all stifling, debilitating and cruel.

*There are wounds in the way.

Some are passed down from elder to youth

they don’t even belong to you

*There are wounds in the way.

As time passes through,

they begin to accrue a strange sort of value

Some that you think are worth holding on to

*There are wounds in the way

We all have wounds that are getting in the way of our living every day. Jesus unlike many of us who are far too willing to: clothed our wounds, perfume our wounds, slap a smile on our wounds and pretend our wounds don’t exist.

Jesus in the resurrection shows his wounds to his friend’s. Yes, to a group locked behind closed doors. To a group locked in by fear because the wounded tend to hide themselves or strikeout and hurt somebody like they were hurt. Yet even though they were locked in by fear and the past Jesus showed up anyway. Even though they were locked in, they could not lock out Jesus. Jesus shows up anyway and shows his wounds.

This Lent I decided to spend some time wondering why Jesus showed his wounds.

Some scholars say that Jesus showed his disciples his wounds as a way of proving his authenticity. The wounds prove that he was who he said he was. That he was the real Christ and not an impostor.

The wounds were the evidence. The telltale signs of the: real bodily, visceral, flesh and bone, body resurrection; and not just a symbolic one. The wounds were validation of his life and his teaching. You see Jesus was: not just some good guy.

Not just a good teacher. Not just a good moral compass.

This Jesus! This man who stood before them was and is really the Son of God.

Who said that he would suffer. Who said he was going to die. Who said that he would rise on the third day and he did! And so Jesus shows up and shows his wounds; his wounds which were a result of somebody else’s sins and not his.

Now ain’t that something, you were wounded not for what you did but for what somebody else did! Chew on that.

Flora Slosson Wuellner says that the wounds were the Lord’s acts of mercy and kindness.    You see, the resurrection did not blot out his wounds. The resurrection did not reverse his wounds. Jesus rose from the dead in spite of his wounding.  Jesus rose from the dead with his bruises, with his scars.

The scars themselves were a sign of healing from the wounds that had formed where his skin was ripped off from carrying his cross. The wounds were a sign of healing from the lacerations inflicted by the whip. The wounds were a sign of healing from the penetrating wound inflicted by the spear in his side. Clots had formed over the bleeding holes in his hand’s and feet. The clots indicated healing. Like the stretch marks on a woman’s body that shows that at one time new life had stretched the skin to the breaking point.

It is healed now but the scar still remains.

Jesus showed his wounds because they identify him with the human condition. That God fully entered into our daily life through his son. That God entered into the daily injustice of our world. That God passionately carries our wounds in His body, and he longs for our healing!

Beloved in the suffering of Jesus we can find all of our suffering: All of our pain is projected onto those nails. All of our brokenness is bundled into that crown of thorns.

Our tears are his tears. Our hurt is his hurt. All of our darkness is found in the darkness of Calvary where Our Lord cried out in painful agony and in that lonely tomb.

The wounds are a reminder to us that God will: never negate, never ignore,

never over intellectualize, never minimize the human condition, and that God will never be beyond our reach or our cry.

Yes, God suffered for us, and God suffers with us now! Jesus rose from the dead in spite of his wounds. The wounds of his descent did not prevent his assent. The wounds of his humiliation did not prevent his elevation.

You and I may be wounded but we are still in the hand of God. We may be weary but we are still in the hand of God. We may be wavering or worn out but we are still in the hand of God. We may have old wounds. We may have new ones. We may have opened ones or closed ones. Yet God still holds us in his hand. Our help is in the name of the Lord. God is for us; our wounds cannot abort the will of God.The wounds of his demise did not prevent his comeback! Which brings me back to where I started:

When I think of the goodness of Jesus

And all He's done for me

My soul cries out hallelujah

Thank God for saving me

Beloved, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is an invitation from God. It is a call to us that it is time to rise above our wounds. Alleluia Christ is risen! And so will you TOO Alleluia!!!!!

Easter B - Apr 5, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Scott Borden, OHC

Easter Vigil B – Sunday, April 5, 2015

Acts 10:34-43
Colossians 3:1-4

John 20:1-18

Mary Magdalene at the tomb turns to see Jesus (Rembrandt)

Alleluia - the Lord is risen! The Lord is risen, indeed! Alleluia!

How the disciples must have struggled to make any sense of this. The Lord is risen? Some two millennia have passed and we are still struggling to come to terms with it.

Jesus lives! This is an occasion of great joy, but we have to clear - Jesus lives in spite of our best efforts.

Just a few days ago we were shouting crucify. We might console ourselves that we were just actors reading a part – but that lets us off the hook too easily. There is no escaping the fact that Jesus died at human hands - hands like ours. And if we examine ourselves in the clear light of Easter morning, we will find that we still fail to recognize Jesus... still deny Jesus... still crucify Jesus. Jesus is still dies at our hands.

With not too much work I can take the Alleluia right back out of Easter... but that is not what I propose to do.

We may still be in the process of crucifying Jesus, but there is another inescapable truth – we fail... every time... its just that simple. Human hands did their best. Jesus was crucified to the very best of our ability and was good and stone cold dead - three days in the tomb. Yet the Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia. Who knew failure could be so wonderful.

Here we are on Easter Sunday - a happy bunch of failures...

But Jesus hasn’t risen just to show us we failed... It would seem that Jesus is not finished. Jesus has more to say.

In dying and rising from the dead, Jesus isn’t just demonstrating the power of God - the invincibility of God. There is a subtle but extremely important lesson. Jesus is telling us something about the persistence of God in our lives - our personal and private lives...

Lets look how Mary of Magdala finds Jesus. She has come to the tomb and found it open. This means something is wrong. She raises the alarm. Others come to her aid and investigate the scene. We have a small crowd on hand. But this isn’t when Jesus greets Mary – when there is an audience. He waits until she is once again by herself – weeping. Jesus comes to her, to each of us, in our private moments of despair. Or perhaps this is when we are vulnerable enough to be aware of Jesus’ presence.

“Don’t hold on to me” Jesus warns Mary. Is this a safety warning? And if so, who’s safety is at stake? Could Jesus be injured by Mary’s touch - or could Mary be injured by the raw power of Jesus?

Or is it something else. Is this a more profound warning. Could Jesus be warning to Mary not to hold on to what has been, to what has passed? Perhaps, in a way, Jesus is saying don’t hold on to who I have been – because I am.

This is a very powerful message for all of us who worship and seek to follow a living God. We can’t hold on too tightly to what we have known, to our experience, to our traditions – and at the same time we can’t let go. Living relationships are complicated, messy, and wonderful. I think Jesus is calling Mary to be in a living relationship, rather than to live in her memories. Jesus is calling Mary and each of us to a living relationship.

Jesus is not terribly concerned with comforting Mary. He might have said: “Why do you weep, Mary, for I am alive again and the nightmare is over. Everything will be all right.” But he doesn’t give her many comfortable words. Instead he gives her a job to do. “Go and tell the others I am ascending.”

But look at what Mary of Magdala does. She goes to the others and says “I have seen the Lord.” This is the first thing out of her mouth. This is not what Jesus has told her to say. This comes from her own heart. Jesus told her to tell them “I am ascending,” whatever that means. But Mary has seen the Lord.

Jesus dies. Jesus rises. Jesus lives and comes to us in very personal ways. And we are given this example of Mary of Magdala. Jesus comes to her in her grief, her despair, her sorrow, and asks her to do something. Jesus calls her to witness. And she does this in her own way – I have seen the Lord.

So how does Jesus find us on this joyful Easter morn?

Perhaps tired – to the point of exhaustion... We’ve been keeping vigil for a very long time... And that on top of the seemingly endless activity of Holy Week.

Perhaps sad and guilty. We’ve had time to call to mind the ways we have failed to follow Jesus and the ways that we still, to this day, continue to deny and crucify Jesus in our hearts and in our lives. We live in a world where the hungry are not fed, the sick are not cured, the defenseless are not protected...

Perhaps joyful. We know that our redeemer lives and that our sins are forgiven. That we are beloved children of God and heirs of God’s Kingdom.

It is in this mix of emotion that Jesus comes to us, asking us why we weep. Telling us not to be afraid. Warning us not to try to hold on too tightly to what we have known. To be witnesses of the love of the Jesus.

This is our baptismal covenant – we die to the old and are born again to new life in Jesus the Christ. It is, I think, not something that happens once and for all, but happens a little more each day.

Regularly we push Jesus out of our lives – maybe just for a moment, maybe for a long time. In big and little ways we crucify Jesus. Just as regularly Jesus rises and comes back to us.

This is the durable, patient persistence of God. We can do our absolute worst – and at times we do... And yet when it comes to killing Jesus we will always fail. And at times we may even be blessed to say, as Mary of Magdala says, that we have seen the Lord. Alleluia!