Lent 4 B - March 14, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. John Forbis, OHC

Fourth Sunday in Lent  - Sunday, March 14, 2021

Numbers 21:4-9

Ephesians 2:1-10

John 3:14-21

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

I have made my home in the darkness, brought all my essentials, all my accoutrements, decorative objects around me, that no one else would want and of course the ones I think people envy and desire for themselves – my shame, guilt, lies I tell myself and others about myself, others and even the world; secrets, betrayals.  Here I’m safe.  No one has to know the ultimate secret … that I’m less than you or most anyone else.  Or is that a lie?  In darkness, it’s difficult to make such distinctions.  

Like we heard in yesterday’s collect for Saturday of Lent week 3, “Set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright.”  In the darkness no one has to know that I’m flat on the floor.  

In the light, all of this is exposed.  In the light I will be naked.  Jesus tells us, the judgment is “the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.  For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.”  So this sudden burst, this brilliance is the crux of the judgment of God.  It becomes our decision what we do when facing it, stand right where we are and shade our eyes?  Do we come to it and believe in it or do we remain in the darkness?  Here is where I can remain and live with my suspicions and my most prized possession … fear, the only protection I have against this exposure.  If I come to the light, God will see how I obviously don’t belong there. I’ll most surely be condemned.

Only, I have completely breezed past the beginning of Jesus’ teaching and honed straight in on the judgment.  For God so loved the world … God loved the world!  God loves the world!  That is the light.  That is the judgment.  The Son, didn’t come to condemn the world, to shine a blinding spotlight and interrogate us, but to save us!  Condemnation doesn’t belong in the light.

In the darkness, fear eventually and inevitably leads to abuses I can so easily inflict on myself, on others and the world.  Fear can become the one blight that blocks out any earthly light.  Staying huddled in the darkness, we are condemned already.  But not by God.  I condemn myself by being prosecutor and judge of myself and others.  God is not my judge.  I am.  Unfortunately, Lent can be so distorted to reflect exactly the opposite.

Lent’s purpose, I often believe, is to turn this home in which I’ve made myself most comfortable into a jail cell where I either languish through a life sentence or await execution.  Yet it is no defense against the light of God’s redemptive power and desire.  God wants to draw the world into that saving light that condemns no one.

Still, this love can be frightening.  God shows a vulnerability that I’m not used to seeing nor am I used to admitting or believing.  I’m too busy looking for a God who can exact punishment on people who I deem evil, show them who’s in charge and that they deserve what they get.  Is that another lie I’m telling myself and others about God?

Again, in the light, that lie will be exposed.  I am faced with it head-on to the point of turning my eyes anywhere else I can’t escape the betrayal of just how false my image of God really is.  Looking around me in the light, if I really open my eyes and heart, I see how God truly acts in the world and how she acts in my life. 

I am vulnerable myself.  The truth is I am incomplete and sinful as anyone else.  Not any more, not any less.  Can I accept this fact and do what is true?  Can I accept the light and come to it?  I AM part of the world that God loves, and so I’m not set apart or special.  I am loved as much as the world is, I am loved IN the world, not sequestered in the darkness.  God desires us all to come to her into the light.  

Jesus equates himself with the serpent raised up in the wilderness to save the Israelites when they looked on the snake of bronze.  The serpents who were so poisonous, so dangerous, vicious lose their power to one serpent, cast in bronze, still, trapped, inanimate.  Here is their enemy now, helpless, harmless, frozen in bronze mounted on a pole and then, miraculously the source of life for those who look upon it.  However, they must look upon what they fear most to live.

“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”  God so loved the world that his only Son allows himself to be crucified like someone to be feared, a common criminal, an enemy of the state.  Jesus offers himself to be hated, to be the light that the people hated.

He is willing to allow love to become the enemy.  He accepts the accusation of being a serpent, the resemblance of the first serpent that tempts Adam and Eve to commit the first sin.  This resemblance can be a symbol of how he can and does redeem the world throughout history, even the first serpent.  He can be the salvation who was, who is and who is to come.

But we must also see just how much love will suffer, will endure and then, eventually triumph, not by conquering, condemning, but just showing us its true beauty.  He is trapped, nailed, mounted onto a cross.  He chooses to be the instrument of God’s love and sacrifice and the object of darkness so that we can see where that darkness eventually leads.  He becomes the victim so that no one else has to.  He becomes the criminal to blast light into the darkness that creates the perfect conditions to commit the true crime – condemning a man, an innocent man to death, God’s only son.  

But the light is right here in the midst of the darkness as well.  It will not be overwhelmed or extinguished.  Christ can live in us and we in him.  I don’t have to live anymore in the house of shadows I have built for myself.  Christ certainly doesn’t want to live in there either; he wants to live in us.  

Amen.

Feast of the Baptism of Christ - January 10, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. John Forbis, OHC

Feast of the Baptism of Christ  - Sunday, January 10, 2021

Genesis 1:1-5

Acts 19:1-7

Mark 1:4-11

Psalm 29

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

After the riotous breach of the Capitol on Wednesday, President-elect Joseph Biden said, this wasn’t about protest, it wasn’t dissent, it was chaos, utter chaos.  I could use many other words for this event, but I know how you all feel about my getting into that. 

John Chrysostom, writes “Do you see how a person who is void of love is similar to things that are inanimate and senseless?”  On Wednesday, an angry mob was Trump’s tool, the tool of the Emperor.  His rhetoric created only an inanimate thing, a dead and death-producing thing.

All the people who stormed the Capitol building accomplished nothing, but death.  Donald Trump accomplished nothing but death.  He didn’t even change the results of the election.  5 people were killed in the riot.  16,000 people still died of COVID since Wednesday.  That toll may be up to 20,000 by the end of today...   More African-Americans will probably be brutalized or used for target practice by police officers.  Lisa Marie Montgomery and Corey Johnson are scheduled to be executed this week.

So, this Feast is important to this time in our history because it’s about beginnings, starting over.  And perhaps here is where we are called to be in the aftermath of what’s happening in our world now. 

John baptizes at the River Jordan, which the Jewish people considered the boundary to enter into the Promised Land.  It symbolizes freedom and life for God’s people and nation.  Far from the Roman Empire, people were claiming their identity free of Roman power.  Another freedom it signifies, is “repentance for the forgiveness of sins”, a new life, a new creation and freedom from sin that would have required, before, ritual sacrifices by the priests in the temple of Jerusalem.  Ultimately both institutions, the empire and the Temple, the political and religious centers of power at John’s time, fall.        

People from the whole Judean countryside and Jerusalem flock to a man dressed in camel’s hair, a leather belt around his waist and who eats a weird delicacy of locusts and wild honey, and he points them to someone else.  The one to follow John baptizes with something beyond what John can offer, and John can’t feel worthy enough to untie the thong of his sandal.  John baptizes only with water, repentance, cleansing of sin, but even he knows there’s more. 

The Holy Spirit is at the beginning when the earth was a formless void and darkness covering “the face of the deep”.Chaos?  Yes, but potentially creative chaos from which life will spring forth. The Spirit is “a wind from God” that sweeps over “the face of the waters”.  God, then, through that wind, that breath speaks a Word, a wind from which a light emerges and separates light from darkness and we have the beginning of Creation, the first day.

Moving ahead a few million years, Paul asks the Ephesian disciples if they had received the Holy Spirit when they became believers.  They replied, “No, we have not even heard of the Holy Spirit.”  They were baptized into John’s baptism.  After Paul reminds them that John compelled the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, they accepted the Baptism in Jesus and then, the Holy Spirit enters again into the world, and the twelve Ephesians speak in tongues and prophesy.

  

Receiving the Holy Spirit may not always result in a glossolalia, a proof that one is saved.  Speaking justice, peace and love is a strange language, modeled after a much stranger voice language spoken from a voice that can tear open the heavens and declare to a man from an almost forgotten village, Nazareth in Galilee, that he is loved by God. 

  

This is God’s son with whom God is well pleased.  So why would he need to come to John for Baptism?  God incarnate, the Word made flesh, one who knew no sin, submits himself to a Baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, a washing, cleansing, made new.  Baptism begins here.  But does not end here.  Before we can hear the voice of love, we definitely have some repenting to do.

Then, Baptism of the Holy Spirit is hearing the voice of love tearing into the midst of the noisy gong and clanging cymbal of death.  Baptism of the Holy Spirit tears open all that keeps us from receiving God’s pleasure, God’s holiness.   

This one man from Nazareth also submits himself to be executed on the cross to expose injustice, hatred, violence and provide a way to end them.  Christ becomes a servant, a suffering servant.  And the heavens tear open for him.  The curtain in the temple tears from top to bottom to reveal God, the Holy Spirit, Christ.  In Christ, the Trinity fiercely bonds together in a voice of love.  Heaven and earth come together with the descent of a dove, which becomes the terror that drives Jesus into the wilderness.  There he contends with another voice that tempts him to forego his vocation and become a supernatural savior who will use violence to destroy empires and emperors.   

He is not the revolutionary that we wish him to be.  He is the one who gives himself to be baptized like the rest of the Judean countryside with the water of the repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  He shows us that he is one of us, one of the many who come from outlander villages to the border of the promised land.  Jesus comes there to stand in line with the rest of us to be cleansed and receive forgiveness.   

Yet, what he does actually receive is an affirmation, a confirmation of who he is and his vocation from God.  This vocation will take all from him in a violent sacrificial death, but then he comes up for air and light and lifts us up from death into light and life.  That confirmation is a voice that can tear open heavens, tear a curtain temple in two, is on the water thundering its glory, can form, shape and bring forth light from darkness, breaks cedar trees, makes Lebanon skip like a calf and Sirion like a young wild ox, splits flames of fire, shakes the wilderness of Kadesh, causes oaks to writhe and strips forests bare.  The water with which we are baptized is infused with love more powerful than any voice of sin and death.   

We have much to repent for forgiveness.  But it doesn’t end there.  It won’t end there.  God will not allow that.  God will tell all of us, in Jerusalem and throughout the Judean countryside that we are loved.  God is well-pleased with us.  What he speaks to his Son he speaks to us, God’s own sons and daughters, God’s own.  In that affirmation and confirmation, we find our vocation.  If we love because God first loved us, if we speak God’s love, even in the borderlands away from our own centers of power, we, all of us, find our home.

Amen.