Corpus Christi, June 19, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

Corpus Christi, June 19, 2025

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Feast of Corpus Christi

“In Your Bread there is hidden the Spirit who is not consumed,

in Your Wine there dwells the Fire that is not drunk:

the Spirit is in Your Bread, the Fire in Your Wine—

a manifest wonder, that our lips have received.” –St. Ephrem

My personal relationship with the Eucharist has taken many turns over the course of my life.  Born into a Roman Catholic family, I distinctly remember making my first communion in second grade.  Tellingly, I have to admit that I recall my class practicing receiving communion more than the actual ceremony itself.  As an eight-year-old, my curiosity was peaked: how will the wafer taste?  What if I drop it?  What do I do if it sticks to the roof of my pallet?  My teacher prepped us well, and the ceremony went on without a fuss.  But why do I remember the logistics of receiving communion and have almost no recollection of the meaning and significance of the reality that I was receiving?  As I look back, what was important was that I made my first communion, not that I actually entered into communion with the Body and Blood of Christ…and these two realities are hardly the same.

When I look back on my Catholic childhood, I see that I, like many others, was sacramentalized without really being evangelized.  When, at 16 I came into contact with the gospel in a way that I could more fully understand (through a Baptist friend of mine), I began to resent the fact that my Catholic upbringing, as I experienced it, put so much stock in the sacraments and so little in helping me develop my personal faith in which and on which the sacraments are based.  So, I did what many evangelicals tend to do, throw the baby out with the bathwater and focus entirely on the personal to the exclusion of the sacramental, which, I thought, had become not a means of grace but its obstacle.  

Several years go by before the next turn in my journey with the Eucharist.  Now in divinity school and studying under professors of various Christian denominations, I came in contact with both mainline Protestants and faith-filled Roman Catholics who embodied a more holistic approach when it came to the sacraments.  Faith and sacrament could be lived out where each served and enhanced the other rather than threatened it.  It was my first exposure to a both/and consciousness and my way out of the either/or consciousness that I detoured into during my evangelical years.  Up until then, I knew what it was like to have the sacraments with little to no faith.  I knew what it was like to have faith with little to no sacraments.  Now I knew what it was like to have both faith and sacraments and the fullness of the experience of Christ in the coming together of the two.

Since returning to the more sacramental expressions of Christianity, I have often thought to myself, and sometimes expressed to others, that I could never again be a part of a tradition that doesn’t place the Eucharist at the center of its life and worship.  As much as I have benefited from these more non-liturgical traditions, for me there is one glaring omission: the sacramental encounter with the real presence of Christ communicated to me in the physical elements of bread and wine.  Preaching is very important but may fail to inspire.  I may or may not feel the Spirit move amongst the congregation.  I may not have it within me to have a genuine encounter with God when I offer myself in worship.  But one thing that I know for certain is that, in the Eucharist, God encounters me.  I taste, I chew and eat, I drink and swallow, and I feel the wine burn in my belly and am confirmed that once again I am loved beyond measure.

The Eucharist is one of those Christian mysteries that is polyvalent in nature:  it means many things at the same time.  From today’s readings we see that the prototype of the Eucharist, the manna from heaven, signified God’s provision for God’s people struggling along their journey of faith through the wilderness.  It was a sign of God’s fidelity and care. 

Jesus would use these meanings and attach them to himself and his imminent crucifixion at the Last Supper.  God is now demonstrating a new kind of fidelity and care for God’s people…one that is no longer bound to the temporal realm of our wilderness journeys but one that gives us a taste of a far greater reality.  If the primary function of the manna was to get Israel out of the wilderness, the primary function of the Eucharist is to allow Christ to enter more deeply back into the wilderness, the wilderness of our lives…to not just sustain us and care for us along the way…but to transform us and to open up to us a new, deeper realm of being in the wilderness.  What the Eucharist bestows is not just physical bread and wine, but a type of bread and wine full of power and glory…the exact same power and glory which was manifested in Christ’s death and resurrection.  In each Eucharist heaven invades earth and God knocks on the door of our hearts seeking entrance.  And what God seeks is communion…a mutual sharing where human and divine become one in the gift of each to the other.  Heaven becomes one with earth and the veil between the two is rent asunder.  

What results, or at least what should result, is not a way of life that seeks to escape from our earthly, often messy, embodied existence but a life which is more capable of embodying the divine and manifesting Christ in our own earthly, often messy, existence: “The cup of blessing that we bless, it it not a sharing in the blood of Christ?  The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?”  Especially in the Eucharist, the church becomes the body of Christ, not in metaphor but in sacramental/mystical reality.  

No one has explicated the implications of this sacramental reality for the contemporary church, in my mind, more that the twentieth century Jesuit scientist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin.  Teilhard saw the Eucharist as the indispensable reality in the ongoing incarnation and, what he called, chrsitification of matter.  For Teilhard, the evolutionary impulse was something divinely inspired, fueled by the love of God…that which is taking on more and more of the divine life in its gradual unfolding.  Spirit and matter, for Teilhard, were not separate realities…there was only spirit-matter: two interdependent dimensions of one reality.  Teilhard saw all of creation as sacramental with the Eucharist being the Sacrament of sacraments.  The cosmic Christ is arising in creation, especially in the church, and especially in those who share in the Body and Blood of Christ and join their own bodies and their own blood to this cosmic Christ communicated in this Sacrament of sacraments.  Created reality reaches its climax in the Incarnation whose end is not the crucifixion, or even the resurrection, but the Omega Point when all creation is assumed and transfigured by the Body and Blood of Christ.  As he writes, “And then there appears to the dazzled eyes of the believer the eucharistic mystery itself, extended infinitely into a veritable universal transubstantiation in which the words of the consecration are applied not only to the sacrificial bread and wine but, mark you, to the whole mass of joys and sufferings produced by the convergence of the world as it progresses.”

As a true mystic, Teilhard, at this point, can’t help but burst into ecstatic prayer, one of the most profound reflections on the Eucharist that I’ve come across:  “In a true sense the arms and the heart which you open to me are nothing less than all the united powers of the world which, penetrated and permeated to their depths by your will, your tastes, and your temperament, converge upon my being to form it, nourish it, and bear it along toward the center of your fire.  In the host it is my life that you are offering me, O Jesus.  What can I do to gather up and answer that universal and enveloping embrace?  To the total offer that is made me, I can only answer by a total acceptance.  I shall therefore react to the eucharistic contact with the entire effort of my life — of my life of today and of my life of tomorrow, of my personal life and of my life as linked to all other lives.  Periodically, the sacred species may perhaps fade away in me.  But each time they will leave me a little more deeply engulfed in the layers of your omnipresence: living and dying, I shall never at any moment cease to move forward in you.  The eucharist must invade my life.  My life must become, as a result of the sacrament, an unlimited and endless contact with you, that life which seemed, a few moments ago, like a baptism with you in the waters of the world, now reveals itself to me as communion with you through the world.  It is the sacrament of life.  The sacrament of my life — of my life received, of my life lived, of my life surrendered….”

May God give us eyes to see as Teilhard saw and a like hunger to live in the same sacramental world full of God’s fire and glory.  Amen.

The Fourth Sunday in Lent C, March 30, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

The Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 30, 2025

• Joshua 5:9-12
• 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
• Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Christianity is currently undergoing something of an identity crisis. How can so many who claim the name “Christian” act so unlike Christ? What does it mean that so many churches are now empty on Sunday mornings? And what does it mean that, even then, so many today are searching for new ways to nurture their spiritual lives?

It was Erick Erickson, the twentieth-century developmental psychologist, who coined the phrase “identity crisis.” Before Darwin, he notes, an “identity crisis” wasn’t a thing. But in a world where everything is changing, the question of “who are we” begins to make itself known with alarming urgency. For

Erickson, without a strong sense of identity, the self will struggle to develop and mature. And this is the great challenge that faces us today: how do we find a healthy sense of identity when nearly every sector of life is defined more by a question than an answer?

Well, one way that both society and religion has sought to alleviate this disease of uncertainty and ambivalence is to retreat into the past…to that “safe space” where everything is clear, fixed, and steady…where boundaries and allegiances are maintained. But the fatal flaw of this fundamentalist retreat is that it’s based on an illusion…that life is static and fixed…and that the greatest value of life is to protect yourself from what threatens your sense of self, not what causes your self to grow.

For Erickson, the human person and societies develop into maturity through successive stages, the foundational being what he calls “basic trust.” All of the building blocks to healthy living are founded on the ability for one coming into the world to regard one’s caregiver as one who can be trusted. To the extent that we don’t receive this, we struggle through the course of our lives to find it, usually causing much damage to others along the way!

What results from this predicament are two contrasting, often competing, approaches to our life with God: one that believes that God is to be feared and obeyed above all else, the other that believes that God is to be trusted and loved above all else.

And this brings us to what I consider to be the greatest of all Jesus’ stories in the Gospels: the story of a father’s prodigal love for his wayward son. To set the context…Jesus, we should highlight, was born into a Jewish world that was decidedly on the closed, fear-based side of the ideological spectrum. Her identity was entirely wrapped up in her ability to remain obedient to the law. The religious leaders, the scribes and Pharisees, at least as they are portrayed in the New Testament, were the fundamentalists and legalists of their day. God, was, above all else, to be feared.

But, we should ask, why did so many in Judaism come to have an image of God that resembled more a despotic judge than a prodigally loving father? To put one’s finger on it, it was because Israel interpreted her near annihilation by the Babylonians as a direct result of her disobedience to the law. God’s wrath was unleashed upon her because she behaved badly, and, as a result, her leaders would develop a vision for restoration based on a hyper-sensitivity to obedience to the law. And this would lead directly to the fear-based religious sensibilities we see Jesus confront over and over again in the Gospels. It had everything to do with her inadequate image of God.

Notice what spurs the story on: “tax collectors” and “sinners” were coming near to listen to Jesus, which incensed the Pharisees and scribes. These religious leaders believed holiness to mean “to be separate from” all who are deemed sinful and unclean. How could Jesus be a holy man if he was always hanging out with sinners? This would be a direct threat to the Pharisaical system of holiness, which would threaten the identity and integrity of Israel as God’s chosen people. “We can never allow any compromise to the law to ever cause our downfall again,”in essence they say. It is to those of this fear-based, closed, transactional way of seeing God that Jesus tells his story.

On one level, the two sons represent Israel and the nations. Israel, the elder son, who has always been with God resents that the younger son, the gentiles, has not had to be placed under the same yoke of the law yet still reaps all of the benefits of being God’s son. And not just that, but God seems to take greater joy in the “sinful” son than in the “holy” son who remained “faithful” in his father’s house. The genius of the story is that Jesus subverts our expectations, as he so often does, and shocks us into seeing God in a wholly different light. In a way, Jesus is an iconoclast who tears down the idols of our bad theology and directs us

toward something far more life-giving instead. God is not a tyrant ready with whip in hand to strike us in our moment of stupidity. God is, rather, like a father who completely forgets the foolishness of his son altogether because all he can think about is seeing his son once again. “But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” No questions. No rebukes. Just running and embracing, and kissing, and, probably, not a few tears as well. All that matters is that the lost son has returned, and all that the father can do is celebrate.

At this, the elder son is enraged: “Listen! For all these years I have been working as a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command….” Notice, he likens himself to a slave and not a son. His relationship to his father was transactional based on duty, not in love based on trust. And this is what Jesus is most concerned about. We cannot truly know God unless we see God as the prodigal, loving father in this story…and place our trust in his merciful love.

Religion, which literally means to bind together, is meant to be covenantal, not transactional. One life results in singing and dancing…the other in bitter resentment.

From the moment of our birth, we begin forming images of God that will determine how we relate to God, to one another, and to the world we inhabit. There the foundation of basic trust is laid, or not. It is inevitable that there will be cracks in the foundation and that we will struggle to attain this basic trust throughout the course of our lives. What is so revolutionary about the teachings of Jesus is that his theology, his understanding of God, becomes the one thing that can heal, restore, and expose the lies that we have believed about God and about

ourselves for what they really are. No matter how warped our images of God may be and how compromised our foundation of basic trust, when we encounter the truth of the prodigal love of God as we do in this story, our lives become firmly planted on the rock of this love and the rest can just be forgotten.

This is the good news we must both live and boldly proclaim: God is to be loved more than to be feared. That the heart of God is the kind of love that knows no conditions…that is boundless, blind, and ecstatic. That our God is a God who is consumed with the thought of the sight of us…who night and day anticipates us…and that when we finally come to our senses and make our way home, loses it and overwhelms us with a nonsensical embrace. Now this is a God we can trust!

 

And this alone will take us beyond our current “identity crisis” as church and help us find the heart-beat of our faith on which to build our future. Our world, now flailing about in chaos and confusion in its own “identity crisis,” is in desperate need of a church that knows this and that lives this.

The English writer, Hannah More, expressed it this way:

“Love never reasons, but profusely gives,

Gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all,

And trembles then, lest it has done too little.”

May we this Lent come to know more convincingly than ever before this profuse, this thoughtless, this prodigal love…and may it flow freely and nonsensically out of grateful hearts that just can’t be contained. Amen.

The Second Sunday after the Epiphany C, January 19, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement
The Second Sunday after the Epiphany, January 19, 2025

• Isaiah 62:1-5
• 1 Corinthians 12:1-11
• John 2:1-11

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

     What does it tell us about God that Jesus’ first miracle was to turn water into wine…in fact, the best kind of wine? 

          For me, it makes sense that the church presents the miracle of Cana to us on this second Sunday after the Epiphany…this season of excess!  The season when light shines out like the dawn and a burning torch; when the desolate and forsaken receive more than they could have ever dreamed; when the decades of despair and unfulfilled hopes finally yield to a reality so overwhelming that the only image appropriate becomes a wedding feast where God shows up and becomes the source of divine intoxication!  If we Christians are accused of being boring, it’s certainly our fault, not God’s!

          When’s the last time you’ve ever heard that Christianity is about excess?  Probably never!  Not the excess of ego-centric desires that are self-destructive or the excess of things that weigh life down but the excess of Life itself that gushes forth from a place of inner superabundance and vitality…where joy just can’t be contained and where peace remains steady come what may. 

          For far too long Christianity has relegated the supernatural and superabundant life to a time and place after this life here on earth comes to an end…after the struggle here below, we’ll taste the new wine in the kingdom to come.  Heaven is not earth and earth not heaven.  Now here on earth we experience the cross, only then in heaven will we experience the resurrection.  Now is pain and suffering, only then will every tear be wiped away.  This is not the gospel!

          The Incarnation of Christ, along with the drama of his death and resurrection, ascension and Pentecost, means that heaven and earth now overlap and heaven begins before earth ends.  It means that we are now being transformed from glory to glory…that today is our wedding feast; today we are united to God; today our cups overflow with new wine!

          But, you may say, mine doesn’t!  Today I don’t feel like my life is overflowing with this joy, with this peace, with this new wine.  Today I feel dried up, depleted, against an insurmountable wall.  Instead of abounding in faith and hope, I’m struggling just to keep my head above water and stay in the game.  Well, the good news is that the truth goes deeper than our circumstances and our feelings.  Within us all, no matter how we feel at any given moment, churns a reservoir of new wine waiting to spring up and break through our feelings and make our lives an epiphany of God’s glory.

          But how does this happen?  Let us take a closer look at how it happened in today’s Gospel. 

          On the third day, John says (alerting us to the day of the Resurrection), at a wedding (where there is supposed to be great celebration), Mary, the mother of Jesus, is faced with her own set of circumstances that threaten to bring a quick end to the celebration.  “We’ve run out of wine!”  Wine, for the first century Mediterranean world, is the central sign of celebration and joy; an instrument which augments life and gives to it what we can’t conjure up for ourselves.  It’s the central sign of grace.  Two people coming together drawn by the covenantal bond of love should, in God’s eyes, be celebrated with this augmentation of life that wine provides.  It is God’s desire to make our lives into something we can’t make them into ourselves.

          Mary’s move in this dire circumstance is not to try to fix the problem herself.  She knows who to turn to, and she does: “They have no wine,” she tells Jesus.  And we’re a bit shocked by Jesus’ curt response: “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me?  My hour has not yet come.”  Have you ever asked something of God and felt like you’ve gotten the cold shoulder?  That’s probably a bit how Mary must have felt!  Yet, notice, she doesn’t throw a temper tantrum, and neither does she walk away in shy acquiescence.  No, she holds out the hope that Jesus will do what he thinks best given the circumstances…and says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” 

          Let’s not overlook Jesus’ reference to his “hour.”  In the Gospel of John, this “hour” refers to the time of his crucifixion in shame which will directly result in his resurrection in glory.  And the various signs, or miracles, the miracle of Cana being the first, all precipitate these cataclysmic events.  Jesus knows that the moment he begins to perform signs that his days are numbered.  And he does them anyway…beginning here at a wedding in Cana.

          He tells the servants to fill the depleted jars with water.  Clay jars frequently in scripture represent our lives.  Here they are depleted.  Water represents what we can put into them, one of the fundamental elements of our existence.  Water sustains life.  Wine transforms life.  And when the servants draw out what they expect to be water, they get instead water transformed…wine, indeed, the best kind of wine.  And in this climactic moment of the story, John the Evangelist, adds his parenthetical exclamation: “Jesus did this in Cana of Galilee and revealed his glory.”

          This is a story about how God sees us in our circumstances that are less than ideal and even sometimes dire.  And the story is clear: it is not God’s desire that we remain in these circumstances: dried up, empty, ready to give up.  Instead, the story asks us be follow the way of Mary into the pattern of transformation.  And here is the pattern:

•    First, we must accept the invitation to the wedding.  We have to be present where love happens.

•    Second, we must be equally present to the impossible circumstances that arise.  It’s wrong for us to expect that our lives will be free from obstacles…it is through our obstacles that God is going to reveal God’s glory.

•    Third, we need to make our requests known.  And notice here, Mary’s request was not for herself; it was for the sake of all gathered together, especially the hosts and the other invited guests.

•    Fourth, we need to have faith…trust in the word of Jesus even when you don’t fully understand him.

•    And fifth, we need to leave our request in Jesus’ hands.  We need to let it go!

This posture of faith, of hope, and of love, even when our lives are depleted, becomes the recipe for the miracle of transformation.  We’re not asked to deny the harshness of reality or to try to escape it but to journey through it into a deeper reality.

          So, what does it tell us about God that Jesus’ first miracle was to turn water into wine…indeed, the best kind of wine?  It means that if we turn to Christ in our time of need and offer to him our empty, depleted clay vessels, we can expect to be filled with grace, like Mary was filled with grace, and to taste, in this life, the excessive joy of God’s new wine.

          The prophet Isaiah, like all good prophets, sees what others fail to see.  Isaiah sees God’s children ravished by their time of desolation and exile, feeling forsaken and forgotten by God who they think may have given up on them.  But Isaiah comes with a message…good news… “you shall be called by a new name”… “You shall be a crown of beauty…a royal diadem…no more called Forsaken or Desolate, but My Delight Is in Her, and Married.”  Married to whom?  Married to God, her bridegroom who rejoices over her and cherishes and protects her and causes her to shine out like burning torches of coruscating joy and peace and charity.

          The love of God is our Epiphany.  Our old name is no longer adequate to express our newfound truth.  God’s love poured out in Christ shining and illuminating all who come to receive this love become an epiphany…the excess of God manifesting itself in our everyday lives.  Heaven shines through earth through us and by this sign we reveal God’s glory and show the way for others to follow. 

          Brothers and sisters, our dark world is depending on us to live our epiphany…or, as I like to say…to coruscate: to shine out, dazzle, shimmer, burn…with the glory of God.  To be like the first Christians in the second chapter of Acts…so full of the Spirit that they were thought to be drunk with new wine.  Maybe it will be when we start living with more of this kind of excess that those floundering about in a world of darkness will find their way to the wedding feast.

The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost B - November 10, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement
The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 27 B

1 Kings 17:8-16
Hebrews 9:24-28
Mark 12:38-44

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

          Life is full of contrasts.  The young and the old.  The rich and the poor.  The good and the bad.  The wise and the. . . not so wise.  Contrasts of color.  Contrasts of opinion.  Contrasts of personalities.  Contrasts of beliefs.  Some see these latter contrasts as life-enhancing, others as life-threatening.  Some live lives that make space for “the other,” while some live lives that dismiss, ignore, or exclude “the other.”  The tension that exists between “us and them” has existed from the dawn of time and is one of the persistent themes in both our secular and sacred writings since antiquity.  But there is one thematic contrast in our own Judeo-Christian Scriptures that may stand above all others, which unifies to whole sacred story from cover to cover.  It’s the contrast between power and weakness, between the callous heart of pride and the wide-open heart of humility.

          In the Gospel of Mark, we are in one instance presented with the self-assured scribe decked in his fine regalia basking in his notoriety and position of authority and honor.  In the other instance we are presented with a poor, defenseless widow with zero self-regard.  One is a taker, the other a giver.  One is preoccupied with a façade, the other with compassion.  One professes faith, the other lives it.

          This meta-contrast of power vs. weakness goes to the heart of the human story—and even beyond to the story of creation itself.  If the evolutionary journey of creation is one of “survival of the fittest,” embedded within our DNA is the ego drive to survive at whatever cost, even if it is at the cost of another part of God’s good creation.  Left unchecked, the ego mounts upon whatever chariot is available to conquer and to control and to dominate—all to secure the propagation of itself into the future.  It lives for immortality and can become consumed with fame, fortune, and the fantasies of its own grandiose imaginings.  The unchecked ego, then, becomes isolated, cut-off from the rest of creation exhausting itself by trying to live on its own terms, in its own fabricated reality.  And at the foundation of its bloated pride is no foundation at all.  There is nothing there but a small, insecure, frightened child masked in a sometimes presentable, often times threatening, persona expending its energy on justifying itself, on defending itself, and on asserting itself.  

          The dangers such a person or group of people that nurtures such egocentrism are obvious enough.  We see it in our civil discourse.  We see it in our politics.  If we are not vigilant, we can even see it in our religious communities.  And, alas, we see it in ourselves.  If only we all saw it in ourselves!  But we don’t, probably because it’s just too painful and uncomfortable.  And maybe the greatest danger facing us Americans at this critical time in our history is the validation, even celebration, of ego-inflation and the denigration of humility and weakness.

          It is prophetic, then, that in light of today’s current events the church in her liturgy holds up before us the dignity and honor of a poor widow.  In the world of biblical patriarchy, a woman who has lost her husband was among the most vulnerable of society.  Without a source of income, without civil recourse, without personal autonomy.  This is why the inspired authors demand particular care for widows.  They are to be provided food and shelter and even a husband, if possible.  And those who neglect and mistreat widows come under the strictest judgment.  Particularly in the prophets, the care of widows is the barometer for determining the health of the nation.  

          This all explains Jesus’ righteous indignation at the scribes who are devouring widows’ houses.  Notice the connection Jesus makes between the abuse of widows and the pomp that preoccupies the scribes.  For Jesus, they are intricately linked together in one unhealthy, unholy alliance.  The scribes religiously exploit the poor widow taking all that she had to, in effect, beautify themselves, of course, all “for the sake of the temple.”  And Jesus will not let such religious hypocrisy go by uncontested.  And so he calls them out on it.  

          The temple which the scribes were supposedly so concerned about was the place where Israel’s God dwelled on earth and the place where Israel could go to dwell with her God in prayer and find refuge and renewal.  Yet, time and again, the temple was exploited for personal aggrandizement and its purposes obscured and manipulated…and its God along with it.  Jesus, in full prophetic mode, subverts the scribes’ destructive egos by revealing where true power lies, right there in the selfless choice of a poor widow who had the ability to give all that she had, her two copper coins, to God.  There is the true manifestation of the presence of God. 

There is the true temple.

          Of course, there is more to the story.  And we hear it in today’s passage from Hebrews.  The poor widow’s gift of all that she had prefigures Christ himself who, as a priest, does not offer something outside himself, like the blood of bulls or goats, but sacrifices his own self.  The Scriptures say that he did this “to remove sin.”  Or, you could say, he did this to deal with the unchecked ego and its abuse of power.  This, then, is the good news for us today: that when God, the all-powerful, omnipotent Creator of all that is, chose to bear the divine heart to the world, it was done through one who, like a poor widow, walked the path of vulnerable humility and weakness, defenseless in the face of civil and religious power structures yet completely free from the egocentric entropy that those power structures create.  And by offering himself in total vulnerability on the cross, unleashes a power… you can say a superpower…upon the earth that alone can transfigure the calloused, power-hungry heart into a humble, open, and free heart that can give of itself without counting the cost, just like this poor, holy widow.

          Today’s other widow, the widow of Zeraphath from First Kings, teaches us another important lesson about such faith and about such a God.  So extreme was her crisis that she resigned herself to death, but she learns, through Elijah’s encouragement, that when we give of the little that we have, God’s power is unleashed and the little that we have can be turned into an unlimited source of life.  This is a truth repeated throughout the Bible, from barren womb of Sarah, to this widow of Zarephath, to the blood and water that poured out of the side of the crucified Savior.  And this truth extends beyond the Bible to us as well when our simple, yet sincere, acts of faith break open the treasury of God’s blessings and we come to know that power is made perfect in weakness.

          This has always been the church’s gospel, her good news to proclaim and live.  But, I assert that it is more crucial now perhaps than ever before that we as church understand clearly and live selflessly this gospel mandate.  Many today have deep, legitimate concerns about both the state of our country and the state of our world.  Many feel anxious and wonder if we’re heading all-too close to an irreversible precipice.  Many are confounded by the abuse of power and the legitimization of hatred and violence that has crept into our society, often at the expense of the most vulnerable in our communities.  And many feel that the distortion of reality may make it nearly impossible to find common ground between contrasting ideologies and fear the place to which this may eventually lead.  If you are among those that feel these things, and I certainly do myself, allow me to offer three Christian responses that may be helpful in light of today’s readings:

1.                 Don’t allow the contrast between your worldview and an opposing worldview cause you to demonize or dehumanize the other no matter how demonic or dehumanizing their worldview may be.  An “us vs. them” mentality will only widen the chasm.

2.                 The process toward justice and peace is a long one full of setbacks and disappointments.  So, hold to the faith that God remains God even when the clouds set in.

3.                 Never tire of preaching the gospel of our crucified Savior.  When the demonic head of hate, division, and lies begins to rear its head, and it almost certainly will, counter it with the gospel of love, unity, and truth.  And don’t just preach it, live this gospel of love in the face of hate, unity in the face of division, and truth in the face of lies.  Absorb these demonic forces in the power that God provides, and put them to death by your refusal to retaliate or propagate them. 

Love covers a multitude of sins.  

          Our Christ was consumed with a vision.  He called it the Kingdom of God.  It was a vision of a time when the demonic forces of hatred, division, and lies would be cast out completely and peace would envelop all creation.  We’re not there yet!  So, let us be consumed with this same vision and put our faith into practice and through our love for one another…all another…and our radical fidelity to the truth, let us continue to fight the good fight, not with the weapons of aggression and force but with the power that comes from God, hearts that make peace because they are at peace and hands that bless even when being cursed.

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost B - September 8, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 18 B 
Isaiah 35:4-7a
James 2:1-10, [11-13], 14-17
Mark 7:24-37

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

Proper 18, Year B

To be open:

adjective: allowing access, passage, or a view through an empty space; not closed or blocked up.

"the pass is kept open all year by snowplows”

Verb: to unfold or be unfolded; spread out.

"the eagle opened its wings and circled up into the air”

Noun:a championship or competition with no restrictions on who may compete. “Today is the men’s finals for the US Open”

Ephphatha, “Be opened.” This isn’t just a call for unstopped ears. Like so much in Sacred Scripture, words contain multitudes and so is the case here. It is a call to access, passage, and freedom. It is a call to fullness…to being unfolded and spread out. It is a call to soar unhindered…a call to transcendence. It is a call to full inclusion and a call to belonging.

In this particular context an unnamed man is deaf with a speech impediment who can’t even beg Jesus to heal him himself but depends on others to get Jesus’ attention. He is not free and has little self-autonomy…and is trapped in his own silent, speechless world. He can’t express himself and can’t hear others express themselves to him. He lives a stunted existence, blocked from the fullness of life God designed for him.

In juxtaposition, we have Jesus, “the Opened One,” who, ever since his baptism and confirmation in the Spirit’s gentle descent and the Father’s affirmation of love, is driven by the sole mission of making God’s loving presence known. He knows who he is, God’s Beloved, and this knowledge opens him to the world without partiality and with dogged determination. Scene after scene in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’ open spirit allows him to move freely in the love of God and to freely make this love known. To those bound by demons, bound by paralysis, bound by deformities, bound by sickness and disease, bound by hunger, or bound by the debilitating prejudices of others. Jesus’ openness confronts a bounded world and those whose spirits are bound meet a power to release them and to become just as open as this “Opened One.”

But, the Gospel is clear, Jesus’ open spirit did not pave a way for him

without obstacles. The same open spirit that drove him to the oppressed also caused deep concern from the religious establishment (you can say, the other oppressed who didn’t realize they were oppressed or, the “closed” ones who had no room for the radical openness of Jesus). Such a confrontation occurs immediately before the passage we hear today. So, at this point in the Gospel, Jesus is becoming acutely aware that his open spirit and the transformation that it is causing in the community may very well become his downfall. I imagine Jesus spending much time in prayer, at this crucial point of his life, reflecting on how to proceed. We don’t get much of a glimpse into his inner deliberations, but what we do get is his inner resolve that is evidenced in his continual commitment to bringing God’s transforming presence to those who need it most. And we see his strategy: to minimize the attention that these transformative encounters are causing so that he can open as many people as possible before he is captured, if that was, indeed, to be his destiny. “Tell no one” he tells the man newly released from his deafening silence. Does the man listen? Would you if the same thing happened to you? Which is precisely the point! The kind of openness that Jesus brings cannot be contained or constricted. It’s that place where you just can’t help yourself!

I see at work in this passage, and the Gospel of Mark as a whole, a

dynamism of elements that come together to create this openness, this spiritual vitality that is free and fearless. They are: the priority of silence, contemplative observation, desperate faith, judicious speaking, and transformative power. Each of these elements play a vital role in the life of Christ and characterize his spirituality of openness and how he goes about making others open.

The priority of silence. It all begins with listening…with hearing the gentle Spirit of God pronounce the divine belovedness over us. And not just once…but in developing a life of listening and hearing until this God of love resounds from within and our lives begin to reverberate this divine sounding. Like the Open Christ who possessed such self-determination to so freely and fearlessly make God’s love known in the face of such existential threats, we too follow in his way by hearing God’s solemn mantra in the silence of our hearts: “You are my beloved, you are my beloved, you are my beloved.” And as for the deaf mute, it was because he was first silent that he was able to find such boundless, open joy in being able to hear and speak.

Contemplative observation. The Open Christ was on the search. His openness was characterized by a particular way of seeing, of gazing into the reality of things and recognizing hidden pain. He read souls and, moved by an alert compassion, called those hidden pains to the light. He saw what others couldn’t because of the silent centeredness of his life and his acute attunement to the Father. Like Yahweh, he looked upon the heart and allowed himself to be determined solely by the condition of those hearts he encountered. And with the deaf mute now before him, Jesus, with his fingers in the man’s ears and his saliva on the man’s tongue, locks eyes with him and communicates everything that needs to be known through his penetrating gaze.

Desperate faith. The condition of being oppressed usually solicits one of

two responses: desperate faith or desperate self-assurance. The religious establishment had fallen into the latter and mistook their religiosity for true spirituality. Those with desperate faith, though, like the deaf mute, take what little openness they have and cry out for more. And when desperate faith encounters the penetrating gaze of God, openness happens.

Judicious speaking. In the percolating convergence of silence, contemplative observation, and desperate faith sounds the word of life. The word cannot be heard without the previous silence, it doesn’t know what to say without the observation, and it meets no fertile ground without the desperate faith. But at just the right moment your “Ephphatha” comes. Whether it was a word of affirmation or consolation, a word of correction or rebuke, or a sound of command as we hear in this instance, Jesus spoke with judicious discernment and precision. Nothing was spared or superfluous. Cor ad cor loquitur, “heart speaks to heart,” was Jesus’ personal philosophy long before St. Augustine coined the memorable phrase.

Transformative power. This spoken word releases power. As the proverb states, “To make an apt answer is a joy to anyone, and a word in season, how good it is!” And how good it is when someone who sees our hearts and feels our pain speaks our “Ephphatha!”

These elements to a vital spirituality of openness are, you may have noticed, particularly monastic. Monks and other contemplatives should be among the most open of us all, and, maybe, we should consider such openness as being one of our most precious gifts to the world. It’s seen in our radical hospitality and open doors. It’s experienced in our priority for silence and our listening with open and hungry hearts. It’s internalized in our attunement to the divine heartbeat and our observant lectio or reading of all that is around us. It’s practiced in our judicious and timely speaking. And, hopefully, it bears fruit in the transformation of our lives through our common fidelity to this resolute and radically intentional way of life.

The Cistercian monk, Thomas Keating, in his classic work on centering prayer, Open Mind, Open Heart, teaches us how to grow deeper into this open and full way of being in the world. In his Introduction, Fr. Keating sites Matthew 6:6: “If you want to pray, enter your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” On this foundational verse for a deeper life of prayer, he comments: “Notice the cascading movement in this text into ever deeper states of silence: 1. Leaving behind external tumult, the environment we may be in, and the concerns of the moment by opening the door to our inner room, the spiritual level of our being, the level of intuition and the spiritual will. 2. Closing the door, that is, shutting out and turning off the interior conversation we normally have with ourselves all day long as we judge, evaluate, and react to people and events entering and leaving our lives. 3. Praying in secret to the Father, who speaks to us beyond the sound of words.” The truth of the matter is that there are worlds within each of us that now exist behind closed doors. But through the silence and attentive prodding of our wills in love, God’s Spirit gently, sometimes dramatically, opens doors and invites us in. And from these secret places we discover new depths of being and a quality of life begins to manifest itself that is open and free—like the Open Christ—to live by the law of liberty, the unrestrained, unstoppable law of love that just can’t help itself.