The Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, June 24, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Scott Wesley Borden

The Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, June 24, 2026

• Isaiah 40:1-11
• Acts 13:14b-26
• Luke 1:57-80

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

Today we keep the feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist. And its fun to speculate on what the appropriate menu for this feast might be... What sort of food would John the Baptist want? To be sure, it will have to be something very simple, something with very little taste – perhaps a main course of curdled milk and a desert of locusts and wild honey...

The Baptist's notoriously somber food wishes notwithstanding, the importance of John in the Christian story cannot be overstated. He prepares the world for Jesus and is acclaimed as the greatest profit ever known. We’re part of the story too – it is a story of how we prepare our hearts and minds and bodies to receive Jesus. It is the story for much of Advent, but it is really a story for any time and for all time.

There are a number of details in Luke’s account of the birth of John the Baptist that tell us the story is bigger than John. The fact that John is not to be named after his father is a very important detail – he is, after all, the first-born child. But Zecharia is out. He is to be named John – a name which has its roots in the Greek god of water. Is this subtle foreshadowing – after all, John will baptize with water. Water is also essential to all life as we know it. This may be Luke’s way of showing us that this story touches us all, not only the faithful Jews.

In the story of John’s birth, we have one of the most moving passages in scripture - the Song of Zachariah, also known as the Benedictus. “For you, John, will go before the Lord, bringing knowledge of salvation and light to those who are in darkness. You will lead us in the way of peace.” In our monastic worship, this is a hymn we sing at the start of every day.

This is John who we meet today. The forerunner. The profit called to prepare the world for the coming of Jesus. The one who leads us to peace. But the promise of John is a little different than the reality of John. He is a profit. And he does make the way ready for Jesus. But I’m not sure he leads us in the way of peace – at least not as we think of it. And frankly, I think John’s a bit of an extremist.

He wears sack cloth and covers himself with ashes. He has a diet of locust and wild honey. He leads his followers in a life of denial and fasting. His message is a harsh one – a message of judgement. He greets people with statements like “You brood of vipers...” His judgement against Herodias, the wife of Herod, is so severe that it costs him his life. If John were with us today, I wonder if he’d want to be part of the Episcopal Church, or any Church... Given his assessment of the Herod, I wonder what he might have to say about the leaders of our day.

Many of the things that John does are things that Jesus calls us not to do. Jesus doesn’t lead his followers in this extreme way. When asked why his followers are so much less disciplined than John’s, Jesus says that we are at a banquet and so we must celebrate – something that we will do symbolically in just a few moments at the Eucharist. Most importantly, Jesus does not condemn people, not even the wife of Herod. Jesus is building a congregation of sinners, not of saints.

I do believe Jesus looks with great joy at many churches in our time, even as we struggle. For our struggle is how to be greater in our inclusion – how to draw the circle wide and draw it wider still. The inclusion of Jesus, after all, knows no bounds.

But we still need to focus on John’s story and how it applies to us.

One essential element of John’s story is that he seems utterly uninterested, perhaps even incapable of telling anything but the truth – the whole unvarnished truth. He does not have the spirit of a politician. This is one aspect of the prophetic witness of John that we need. Being polite is one of the great virtues in contemporary Christianity. We didn’t get the from John... nor from Jesus...

If we could come to regard sugarcoating the truth as sin, perhaps fewer children would starve... perhaps fewer school children would be shot, perhaps health care would be universally available in the richest country on earth.

When we begin to encounter God as part of our lives – and I think all of us come to a point where we either begin an adult encounter with God, or we walk away from faith – when we encounter God we tend to respond in extreme terms. How could we do otherwise?

We want to get rid of everything that is ungodly; clean up our lives... And we want others to do the same. We hear the same call that John heard;

build a straight pathway in the wilderness, smooth out the rough places, fill in the potholes and get rid of the wicked folks. But at some point, we learn that Jesus also calls us to a feast, not a fast. And we learn that our purpose is not to build a perfect road. Our purpose is to travel that road with our brothers and sisters and all of God’s creation.

In other words, we must learn how to have a relationship with God. This is a lifelong process. Any relationship takes time and effort to grow strong and whole. Relationships often have clumsy starts and rough patches, but over time they grow deeper and more complex. John the Baptist helps us start the relationship with God, but Jesus teaches us about the deep and abiding love of God.

That is ultimately what John was doing. Welcoming God into his life, welcoming the incarnation of God into this world, welcoming Jesus, who at that time was a highly expected stranger. There were many sets of expectations for the Savior, but they were mostly seriously off the mark. I would just point out that even these days, many of our expectations of Jesus are way off the mark.

But in our different ways we are working to welcome Jesus into our lives through the increasing of love and justice. John is called a profit of the Most High – a title none of us claim. But we are all called by our baptism to be God’s messengers. The message is God’s love. And we must remember that love and justice are eternally linked.    

The call of John the Baptist is a call to all of us through our baptism: Make the world ready, make ourselves ready, shine light in dark places, lead the way to God’s peace. The call doesn’t come from John - it comes through John. That is perhaps the most joyful piece of John’s story - the story of all of us.

God can use us as we are. We can serve as God’s instruments in spite of ourselves.

And if we are a little too harsh, or a bit clumsy, or we muddle the message a bit, it's OK. We can fall down and get back up. Because ultimately, we are messengers, not the message. The message is that God, who is love, is alive and dwells with all creation.

The Nativity of St John the Baptist, June 24, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

The Nativity of St John the Baptist, June 24, 2025

• Isaiah 40:1-11
• Acts 13:14b-26
• Luke 1:57-80

Click here for an audio of the sermon

In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen. 

In the middle of June every year, we get a little Advent. This year, the weather has even been cooperating. Today’s feast is a timely reminder that, whatever the season, God is constantly preparing the way of our return. 

This year, in particular, I’m struck by the resonance of Isaiah’s poetry: “Comfort, O Comfort, my people. […] Speak tenderly to [them.]” Oh, how we need that tenderness! How we need that comfort! In the midst of so many and great temptations to despair and fatigue—an ever expanding list these days—the comfort of God’s promise of faithfulness and return beckons all the more strongly. 

Comfort my people. Tell them that their return to me is imminent. Prepare the way of their salvation, their wholeness, their new life in me, says the Lord. 

John the Baptist, whose birth we celebrate today, and Isaiah both knew darkness and exile. Both lived in times of great chaos and upheaval, in which the very life and existence of their communities was anything but assured. Isaiah, for instance, comes proclaiming this good news of the elevation of Mount Zion precisely at one of the moments of Israel’s greatest darkness. When the Assyrian empire has decimated Jerusalem, when all that the Israelites hold dear has been ravaged and the world seems irreparably fragmented, the voice of hope sounds its clear bell. This home that has been destroyed will not only be rebuilt, but it will become a center of welcome, peace, and love for all the world. 

John comes as the morning star, the great forerunner of the morn, as that wonderful hymn puts it. He is the sign that the life that really is life is coming into the world as Jesus, our brother, our friend, and our God. And like the morning star, he comes at the darkest hour of the night as a promise that the sun will rise again. 

Before I entered the Monastery, echoing Isaiah, Br. Andrew told me, “there are no sharp edges here. Everything in the Monastery has been worn smooth through years of prayer.” It was a lovely sentiment, and just what I wanted to hear in that moment of romantic infatuation. Having lived in this community for a little while now, I can tell you that there are actually plenty of sharp edges remaining. I’ve even introduced a few myself. Not all has been worn smooth, at least not yet. 

But nor was Andrew’s comment mere sentimentality. The common life—whether in a monastery, a family, a parish, or a nation—is one of great friction. Our sharp edges are only worn down by rubbing against those of our brothers, our coreligionists, or our neighbors. Much the same can be said for the life of prayer, in which, whatever consolations may come our way, we will eventually find ourselves facing into dryness, desolation, and the fracturing of our optimism that the spiritual life will finally make us into shining examples of perfect, ordered human life. 

The great Anthony Bloom connects this stripping down to the work of prayer: 

“There is a degree of despair that is linked with total, perfect hope. This is the point at which, having gone inward, we will be able to pray; and then ‘Lord, have mercy’ is quite enough. We do not need to make any of the elaborate discourses we find in manuals of prayer. It is enough simply to shout out of despair ‘Help!’ and you will be heard.” 

He continues, “Very often we do not find sufficient intensity in our prayer, sufficient conviction, sufficient faith, because our despair is not deep enough. We want God in addition to so many other things we have, we want His help, but simultaneously we are trying to get help wherever we can, and we keep God in store for our last push. […] If our despair comes from sufficient depth, if what we ask for, cry for, is so essential that it sums up all the needs of our life, then we find words of prayer and we will be able to reach the core of the prayer, the meeting with God.”1 

The encounter with the realities of his own dark time of empire, domination, and the potential extinction of his religion and his people led John into the wilderness to fast and to pray. In the purification of his own desire, in the distilling of that desire down to its essential element—Lord, have mercy!—he became, as the eucharistic preface puts it, a burning and a shining light, drawing others away from the city toward the boundaries of their becoming. There he invited them to turn back to the Lord and to be washed clean in the waters of baptism. 

It's no accident that the movement of return and remembrance that John proclaims originates in the wilderness. It is there that the Israelites wandered after their slavery. It is there that they encountered God and that, through their trials, murmurings, and cursing God forged them into a community. It is into the wilderness that the Spirit drives Jesus after his baptism, there to be tempted, yes, but also there to be formed. For it is through his temptation that Jesus touches his deepest desire, which is for God alone. 

It is in this place of wild wandering that we come to know God and, in that encounter, to be known as God’s beloved.  

And so, it is to the wilderness that John calls—or we might say recalls—the people when they have strayed from God’s ways. And it is in the wilderness of this historical moment that we, too, must face down temptation and despair. It is in this wilderness of death and anxiety and fear that we may allow God to strip down our desire, until all we want is God. And it is from this wilderness of darkness and wandering that our hope will emerge. 

On the eve of the Velvet Revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel wrote about what it means to hope: 

“Hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. […] Hope is definitely not the same as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is hope, above all, that gives strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.” 

Real hope, as writer and activist Rebecca Solnit points out, is always dark, because the future is forever dim. And while the darkness may frighten us, in her words, it is always the dark, not just of the grave, but of the womb. For out of the dark wilderness emerge possibilities we could never have imagined in the clear light of day. 

If the emergence of hope from the dark is true in the secular world, how much truer it is for the Christian, who bears not only Christ’s life within her, but first bears Christ’s death on the Cross. We who profess the faith of Jesus, profess, not that he died and made everything okay in the world, but that having died and risen, he now lives in us, right here and now, still working to stitch back together this fractured world. 

The Israelites and the early Christian community discovered in the darkness of wilderness and exile that, although they could no longer see the way forward, they could be seen, seen in the depths of their being, known and loved in the very foundation of their soul, in that darkest point within that is reserved for God alone. And in that foundational place, too deep even really to call it love, for it is so much more than that, from that deepest place hope is born. 

John, the great forerunner of the morn, the morning star and herald of the dawn, continues to shine like a beacon of hope in the darkness of our time, just as he did in his own. His voice calls out today that though we are like the flower of the field that springs up today and tomorrow is gone, the word of the Lord—the word that is Jesus within and around us—endures forever. There is always cause to hope, because God is good, and that is everything. 

The Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, June 25, 2024

 Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Francis Beckham

The Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, June 25, 2024

• Isaiah 40:1-11
• Acts 13:14b-26
• Luke 1:57-80

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

“May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you O God, my helper and my comforter. Amen.”

Of all the things that amaze me about God, I think it’s how God uses the least likely people, objects, and events to grab my attention in meaningful ways that never ceases to astonish me. Take, for example, the fictitious Daisy Buchanan – a wealthy, shallow, self-absorbed socialite in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definitive jazz-age novel, The Great Gatsby. Daisy is frivolous, as ridiculous and one-dimensional as she is boring (to be fair, the same can be said of pretty much all the wealthy people in the novel, save, perhaps for its titular character, Jay Gatsby himself). Insulated from the everyday worries and realities of most people by her cocoon of wealth, status, privilege, and never-ending parties, she is a waster of things: time, money, space, affections, and, in one extreme case, human life. Daisy isn’t exactly somebody I’d expect to learn anything important from, yet, in one nearly memorable line, she does in fact succeed, quite by accident, in making a surprisingly insightful observation about human nature. While lazily taking tea on the grounds of her Long Island mansion on a hot June afternoon, she asks her companions, “Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it.” Regardless of anything else we can say about Daisy, this statement about our human propensity to miss precisely the thing that one is – or, at least, should be – looking for is important.

Every Christmas Eve, for example, I find myself thinking or saying, “Wow, I really missed Advent this year.” Similarly, it never fails to dawn on me each Palm Sunday that, “Gosh, Lent really flew by again.” Shocked that Christmas and Easter could somehow sneak in through the back door without having the common courtesy of at least warning me with anything more than just two entire preparatory liturgical seasons, I enter into the two principal feasts of the year feeling caught off-guard and inadequately prepared. In this way, I’m no better than Daisy Buchanan. Distracted, I often end up missing the points of things – my own ‘longest days of the year.’  

And this brings me to today’s main event: the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist (transferred). While not technically the longest day of the year, astronomically speaking, Saint John’s Day always falls within a stone’s throw of it, the summer solstice. In fact, for centuries, it was reckoned as the longest day of the year. And since the first of May, or May Day, was traditionally considered the start of summer, Saint John’s Day continues to be known in many places as Midsummer. Particularly in Scandinavia and the British Isles, bone-, or bon-, fires were lit to ward off dragons that were believed to be active in the land, poisoning wells and springs. In Germany, herbs with known medicinal properties were harvested and brought into churches to be blessed on Saint John’s Day. Children dressed in costumes and raised a ruckus to banish evil spirits, and a general atmosphere of merriment and feasting prevailed. On Saint John’s Eve, the shortest night of the year, people were as far away from winter as they could be, making Midsummer – Saint John’s Day – the feast of Summer. 

Today, in our post-industrial society, the Nativity of Saint John is often little noticed outside of church circles. But to our agrarian forebears, its timing in mid-June – three months past the Annunciation, six months out from Christmas Day, and always at least a few weeks past Whitsunday, or Pentecost – Saint John’s Day came to be closely associated with the growing season, a time of fertility and increase when the planting was over, and the harvest anticipated. It was a feast on par with Christmas and Easter. It was eagerly watched for, and never missed.

The Church has kept the Nativity of Saint John in various locations since at least 506, making it one of the oldest feasts of the Church, and one of only a very few marking the birth, rather than the death, of a saint. And, like that other great nativity, Christmas, it has traditionally been celebrated with not one, nor even two, but three masses: a vigil, a mass at dawn, and a mass during the day.  

That’s because – traditional folk and pagan elements of Midsummer aside – the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, like its very namesake, calls us to something much bigger than the feast itself, to the beginning, the birth of something new. Indeed, Saint John’s Day is meant to point us to the very thing humanity looks and longs for more than anything: the love of God, very real and imminently present in our world, as revealed through the healing and reconciling ministry of Jesus. 

“Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with

strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of 

Judah, ‘Here is your God!’”

In these words, from Isaiah, proclaimed in our first reading, we hear that longing expressed from ages upon ages; the deep, visceral desire of the people of Israel to hear the good news that God is entering into their midst. This, they watched for, and they would not be disappointed in their hope. 

But, of course, as Daisy Buchanan reminds us, it’s easy to become distracted by things that don’t matter, so that we miss the things that do. Or, worse still, we can forget that those things even exist at all. And our conscious longing and looking for God is no exception. Especially for us in this time and place, smack in the middle of summer, outside of the ‘program year’, when things like Sunday school classes, weekly bible study meetings, mid-week Eucharists, and choir practices tend to go on hiatus, replaced by hectic summer travel plans, crowded and noisy airports, and bored kids stuck at home complaining that there’s ‘nothing to do’. Add to that our general disconnectedness from the land and its cycles of growth and rest nowadays, and there’s often very little in summer that’s trying to remind us of the good news of Jesus, or of our great commission to be proclaimers of that good news. 

And that’s exactly why I think Saint John’s nativity is so important. It shakes us out of our doldrums and distractions to remind us that we each have a job to do. The changes and chances of this life are inevitable, but they aren’t the point. In our reading from Saint Luke’s Gospel, Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, proclaims from out of his joy a profound thanksgiving to God for fulfilling the promise of the ages. This passage of praise, known as the Canticle of Zechariah, or the Benedictus, is included almost universally in the morning prayer offices of Western churches, monasteries, and religious orders, including our own here at Holy Cross Monastery. It serves as a daily reminder – right at the beginning of the day – for us to notice and not forget the wonder of God’s work within ourselves and in the world around us. And, of course, to proclaim it to others: 

“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, 

for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them. 

He has raised up a mighty savior for us 

in the house of his servant David.” 

Zechariah’s words seem to want to grab us by the shoulders, shake us, and shout, “Wake up! This isn’t going to be just any ordinary day! This is the day the Lord has made! Rejoice and be glad in it!” 

But he doesn’t leave it there. Zechariah, caught up in the joy of being a first-time parent who suddenly finds himself in crazy, overwhelming love with his newly born child, begins addressing John, telling him of the amazing things he will do to bring Israel – and, indeed, everyone – closer to God, into the very reign of God, by preparing them to hear and know the Gospel of Jesus.  

“And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; 

for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, 

to give knowledge of salvation to his people 

by the forgiveness of their sins.”

Zechariah's proclamation is addressed to each of us every bit as much as it is to John. This canticle was probably first introduced into the morning prayer office by none other than Saint Benedict himself because, like Zechariah, Benedict wants to make sure his monks understand what living into the reign of God entails, which is nothing short of being prophets of the Most High and giving knowledge of salvation to God’s people by being healers of the breaches of sin and death. 

So, on this feast of the Nativity of Saint John, during this wonderful Midsummer season of growth and increase, I pray we will all join with John the Baptist in showing forth the presence and love of God in all we do – whether lazing-about our Long Island estates, chasing away dragons, or patiently biding our time in airport security lines –  living our lives in such a way that the good and saving news of God as proclaimed by Jesus may be readily perceived and embraced by all in whose presence we are blessed to find ourselves. 

May peace and all that is good be with each of us, and those whom we love, now and always. Amen. 

The Nativity of Saint John the Baptist - June 24, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Luc Thuku, OHC

The Nativity of Saint John the Baptist - Saturday, June 24, 2023

 

Isaiah 40:1-11

Acts 13:14b-26

Luke 1:57-80

 

Click here for an audio of the sermon

In 1859, Joshua Abraham Norton declared himself Emperor of the United States. Norton had made and lost his fortune in San Francisco shipping but he wanted a new identity, that is, America’s first emperor. When The San Francisco evening bulletin printed “Emperor” Norton’s announcement, most readers laughed. Norton made pronouncements aimed at correcting Society's ills, printed his own currency and even wrote a letter to Queen Victoria asking her to marry him and unite their Kingdoms. He wore royal military uniforms made by local tailors. One observer said Norton looked “every inch a king” but of course he wasn’t! We don't get to make up who we are!

 Today we Celebrate the birthday of St. John the Baptist. I do not know about you but when I hear the name John the Baptist, the first thing that comes to mind is filth; a dirty smelly man dressed in a skin tied with a rope, who does not shower and who has a bad breath stemming mainly from his diet of locusts and honey, with lice and mites from his unshaven head and beard, and on top of all that a sharp tongue! John, however, is one of the most unusual and important people in the history of our faith. He bears the titles of prophet, forerunner, and Baptist because he fulfilled all these roles. He is the only other person apart from Our Lord Jesus Christ and His blessed mother Mary whose birthdays we celebrate liturgically. For all the other saints, we mostly celebrate their feast days on the date of their death. We celebrate the birthdays of Jesus, Mary and John because of their significance in the history of our salvation. Today's feast sheds light on the significance of John as the fore runner of Christ. John is regarded as the last of the Old Testament prophets and he witnessed martyrdom while witnessing to the truth. Jesus in Matthew 11:11 says that of all men born of women, none is greater that John the Baptist! This was because he made himself least although he had all the glory in Israel and many people even considered him to be the Christ. He put himself under the shoes of the Christ and even witnessed that he was unworthy to loosen the strings of Christ’s shoes.

The birth of John the Baptist was a blessing first to his parents and then to the whole of humanity. His mother Elizabeth, thought of as barren and therefore cursed, was vindicated and henceforth regarded as blessed! John was also a blessing to his father Zechariah who was told by the angel announcing his conception that “he will be your joy and delight” (Luke 1:14). It was also for Zechariah a fulfilment of the divine promise, especially when he recovered his speech to confirm the name of the boy. For humanity, the birth of John brought joy and conversion as foretold by the mouth of the angel “ many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. Even from his mother’s womb he will be filled with the holy spirit and he will bring many of the Israelites back to the Lord their God. With the Spirit and the power of Elijah, He will go before him to reconcile fathers to their children and the disobedient to the good sense of the upright, preparing for the Lord a people fit for him” (Luke 1:14-17).

“His name will be John!”…says the angel to Zechariah before John was conceived. “His Name is John!”… confirms Zechariah to those who had attended the naming ceremony! In the gospel reading today, We hear of the birth and naming of John the Baptist. Here God’s graciousness was revealed to the world through the name given to the child. The name John means God is gracious! We are told that as Zechariah regained his speech as he named his child, all those who heard of it treasured it in their hearts. They wondered what the child will turn out to be and indeed the hand of God was with him.

My dear brothers and sisters, in our present day society where it seems like the light of Christ is dimmed, we are invited to contemplate upon the person of John the Baptist, who prepared the way of the Lord and bore witness to that one true light who is our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We are all called to reflect and bear witness to that light of Christ in bringing about true conversion to the world and a radical possession of the Kingdom of God.

We may ask ourselves how we can reflect and bear witness to Christ in our day and age. John the Baptist is our best teacher in this regard. In John 3:30, John the Baptist says that “Christ must increase and I must decrease!” We should never forget that we fell from glory through pride and that the greatest virtue that our  Lord has manifested in order to save us is his humility, the opposite of that which makes us perish. It is indeed the humility of Christ that saves us, his greatest gift that helps us find healing from our fall. The Lord himself sets up humility as a condition in order to learn anything divine. He tell us to take his yoke upon us and learn from him: for he is meek and lowly in heart (Matt.11:29). If we learn the humility of Christ, we will be able to perceive two realities, that is, the divine reality and human reality. We will perceive the presence of God in everything and in everyone and we will also perceive the falsehood in us. God has planted in us the potential to know our creator and to unite with him, and if we see God in everyone, we can honor and love every human being as ourselves. However, if we are to perceive that image in others, we need to be humble for humility attracts grace and grace is the light of life. Without humility, we remain blind and can understand nothing divine and nothing human.

The greatness of John the Baptist therefore lies in the fact that he was so humble as to be able to recognize in the humble form that the Lord assumed in order to come to us, the almighty God, the one who is. John was the only person at the time to recognize Jesus as the lamb of God and pointed his own disciples to him and these disciples eventually became the followers of Jesus and pillars of the Christian faith and of the Christian community.

In humility, there is selflessness that prepares man to receive the selfless love of God which saves and perfects. Pride is selfish and selfishness can neither love nor have communion with others, nor receive the spirit. Pride feels threatened by humility because humility is light and this light silently reveals the darkness of pride.

God’s greatness is unfathomable. He visits those who are sanctified from the wombs of their mother, like John the Baptist, but nothing prevents him from also bringing the worthy out of the unworthy, and reveal great people by healing their woundedness. We should not compare people’s journeys of faith because each is unique, but those who receive grace having been wounded by sin before, are more able to appreciate grace, humble themselves, have great gratitude and make great strides. Therefore take heart, brethren, for there is hope for us!

So what is in a name? In our opening story, Norton thought that by declaring himself emperor he had become one.  He thought a new title would make him re-invent himself and even make him popular. That never happened. It only succeeded in bringing out sarcasm and fun to those who heard about it then, and to those who read about it now. John on the other hand was named by God and lived up to his name. He pointed others to God’s graciousness and lived a gracious life. He fitted in God’s plan for him unto death.

Many of us spend years searching for who we are and wondering what value we posses. We stress trying to name ourselves and trying to create identities that most of the time alienate us, when only God can truly tell us the truth about who we are. Thankfully, God calls us sons and daughters when we encounter and develop a relationship with him through His son Jesus. John 1:12 tells us that  “to all who receive him, he gave the right to become children of God”. This identity is purely a gift. We are his beloved children “born not of human decision but born of God” John1:13.

 

Amen

Nativity of St. John the Baptist - June 24, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

Nativity of St. John the Baptist - June 24, 2022

Isaiah 40:1-11

Acts 13:14b-26

Luke 1:57-80

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen. In the middle of June every year, we get a little Advent. This year, the weather has even been cooperating. Today’s feast is a timely reminder that, whatever the season, God is constantly preparing the way of our return. This year, in particular, I’m struck by the resonance of Isaiah’s poetry: “Comfort, O Comfort, my people. […] Speak tenderly to [them.]” Oh, how we need that tenderness! How we need that comfort! I would say after Uvalde. But I could also say, after Covid, or Ukraine, or George Floyd, or or or. The ors never stop these days. One piles on top of another shutting out all the air. In the midst of so many and great temptations to despair and fatigue the comfort of God’s promise of faithfulness and return beckons all the more strongly. Comfort my people. Tell them that their return to me is imminent. Prepare the way of their salvation, their wholeness, their new life in me, says the Lord. John the Baptist, whose birth we celebrate today, and Isaiah both knew darkness and exile. Both lived in times of great chaos and upheaval, in which the very life and existence of their communities was anything but assured. Isaiah, for instance, comes proclaiming this good news of the elevation of Mount Zion precisely at one of the moments of Israel’s greatest darkness. When the Assyrian empire has decimated Jerusalem, when all that the Israelites hold dear has been ravaged and the world seems irreparably fragmented, the voice of hope sounds its clear bell. This home that has been destroyed will not only be rebuilt, but it will become a center of welcome, peace, and love for all the world. John comes as the morning star, the great forerunner of the morn, as that wonderful hymn puts it. He is the sign that the life that really is life is coming into the world as Jesus, our brother, our friend, and our God. And like the morning star, he comes at the darkest hour of the night as a promise that the sun will rise again. Before I entered the Monastery, echoing Isaiah, Br. Andrew told me, “there are no sharp edges here. Everything in the Monastery has been worn smooth through years of prayer.” It was a lovely sentiment, and just what I wanted to hear in that moment of romantic infatuation. Having lived in this community for a little while now, I can tell you that there are actually plenty of sharp edges remaining. I’ve even introduced a few myself. Not all has been worn smooth, at least not yet. But nor was Andrew’s comment mere sentimentality. The common life—whether in a monastery, a family, a parish, or a nation—is one of great friction. Our sharp edges are only worn down by rubbing against those of our brothers, our coreligionists, or our neighbors. Much the same can be said for the life of prayer, in which, whatever consolations may come our way, we will eventually find ourselves facing into dryness, desolation, and the fracturing of our optimism that the spiritual life will finally make us into shining examples of perfect, ordered human life. The great Anthony Bloom connects this stripping down to the work of prayer: “There is a degree of despair that is linked with total, perfect hope. This is the point at which, having gone inward, we will be able to pray; and then ‘Lord, have mercy’ is quite enough. We do not need to make any of the elaborate discourses we find in manuals of prayer. It is enough simply to shout out of despair ‘Help!’ and you will be heard.” He continues, “Very often we do not find sufficient intensity in our prayer, sufficient conviction, sufficient faith, because our despair is not deep enough. We want God in addition to so many other things we have, we want His help, but simultaneously we are trying to get help wherever we can, and we keep God in store for our last push. […] If our despair comes from sufficient depth, if what we ask for, cry for, is so essential that it sums up all the needs of our life, then we find words of prayer and we will be able to reach the core of the prayer, the meeting with God.”1 The encounter with the realities of his own dark time of empire, domination, and the potential extinction of his religion and his people led John into the wilderness to fast and to pray. In the purification of his own desire, in the distilling of that desire down to its essential element—Lord, have mercy!—he became, as the eucharistic preface puts it, a burning and a shining light, drawing others away from the city toward the boundaries of their becoming. There he invited them to turn back to the Lord and to be washed clean in the waters of baptism, It's no accident that the movement of return and remembrance that John proclaims originates in the wilderness. It is there that the Israelites wandered after their slavery. It is there that they encountered God and that, through their trials, murmurings, and cursing God forged them into a community. It is into the wilderness that the Spirit drives Jesus after his baptism, there to be tempted, yes, but also there to be formed. For it is through his temptation that Jesus touches his deepest desire, which is for God alone. It is in this place of wild wandering that we come to know God and, in that encounter, to be known as God’s beloved. And so, it is to the wilderness that John calls—or we might say recalls—the people when they have strayed from God’s ways. And it is in the wilderness of this historical moment that we, too, must face down temptation and despair. It is in this wilderness of death and anxiety and fear that we may allow God to strip down our desire, until all we want is God. And it is from this wilderness of darkness and wandering that our hope will emerge. On the eve of the Velvet Revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel wrote about what it means to hope: “Hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. […] Hope is definitely not the same as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is hope, above all, that gives strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.” Real hope, as writer and activist Rebecca Solnit points out, is always dark, because the future is forever dim. And while the darkness may frighten us, in her words, it is always the dark, not just of the grave, but of the womb. For out of the dark wilderness emerge possibilities we could never have imagined in the clear light of day. If the emergence of hope from the dark is true in the secular world, how much truer it is for the Christian, who bears not only Christ’s life within her, but first bears Christ’s death on the Cross. We who profess the faith of Jesus, profess, not that he died and made everything okay in the world, but that having died and risen, he now lives in us, right here and now, still working to stitch back together this fractured world. I think that what the Israelites and the early Christian community discovered in the darkness of wilderness and exile is that, although they could no longer see the way forward, they could be seen, seen in the depths of their being, known and loved in the very foundation of their soul, in that darkest point within that is reserved for God alone. And in that foundational place, too deep even really to call it love, for it is so much more than that, from that deepest place hope is born. John, the great forerunner of the morn, the morning star and herald of the dawn, continues to shine like a beacon of hope in the darkness of our time, just as he did in his own. His voice calls out today that though we are like the flower of the field that springs up today and tomorrow is gone, the word of the Lord—the word that is Jesus within and around us—endures forever. There is always cause to hope, because God is good, and that is everything.

The Nativity of John the Baptist - June 24, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

The Nativity of John the Baptist

Isaiah 40:1-11
Acts 13:14b-26
Luke 1:57-80

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

Where there is death, there is hope.

So goes the often flippant, yet no less true snippet of folk wisdom. Everything changes. Everything and everyone dies. Systems fall apart; empires collapse; churches empty; winter comes, burying the desiccated petals of the summer rose under clean, white snow.

Death, as much as anything else, is a sign of God’s promise to make all things new again.

John the Baptist, the great forerunner of the morn, who leaps for joy in his mother’s womb to be near God’s incarnate Word is also the great and wild prophet of death. The scriptures point to him as the new Elijah, calling Israel back to faithfulness in God. Like Elijah and all of the Old Testament prophets, John is the archetypal wild man, the holy fool who subverts religious norms and in so doing highlights the hypocrisy and shallowness of the religious and political elites of his day and of ours.

Dressed in camel’s hair, calling his fellow Israelites to repent, eating locusts and wild honey—he is, to use Native American imagery, the coyote figure, the trickster who intentionally upends the sanctimonious behavior of those in power to expose the emptiness within polite ways. If we don’t find John offensive, then we aren’t paying attention.

John calls the people of Israel to the borderlands of their becoming. He draws them out of the city—Jerusalem—to the River Jordan. This geography is more than symbolic. As we’ve been hearing about in our Matins readings the last few weeks, the Israelites wandered in the desert, just the other side of the Jordan, for forty years. As they wandered in the desert, they encountered again and again the wildness and the wiliness of a god who demanded nothing less than their total submission. With the manna, with the water from the rock, with the giving of the law on Sinai, and in countless other small, daily movements, God provided for the necessities of God’s people. 

And when those people complained and lamented that life had been better in the slavery of Egypt, God came to see that that older generation could never enter the land of promise. Their spirits still clung to the shackles. Only the death of that generation could free the people of God to be the chosen people, living in the land of promise. In death was their freedom.

God led the people through the Jordan, baptizing them into the life of the covenant, and leading them into the freedom God had promised them. And so it is, when the people have once again taken up the shackles of empire, when they have begun to forget whose they really are, when greed and power and oppression infect their spirits, God raises up John to call the people back to the place where they were transformed from a wandering band of former slaves into the people of God. 

John calls the people away from the structures of civilization to the border of the wilderness. In so doing he entreats them to leave behind the dry husk of the domesticated gods they have been worshipping, the idols they have put in the place of God, and to open themselves once more to the transforming fire of the living God, whose wild love will not be contained within the houses we build for her. 

The world around us is crumbling. We are experiencing collectively—and many of us individually as well—a breakdown. The structures that held our beliefs about who we are, where we were headed, what was true about the world—these structures are collapsing. We are seeing—some of us for the first time—that the American dream has always been a nightmare for our black and brown brothers and sisters; that there is no capitalism apart from the enslavement of people and of the earth; that our society and our church are broken in fundamental and irreparable ways. And that more often than not we are the Egyptians, not the Israelites, more often Judas than Peter, a revelation as destabilizing to our sense of self as any that can be imagined.

We are also, many of us, finding in this season of instability, that the God we thought we knew was her own kind of idol. This revelation may feel like a betrayal, as if the life we had signed up for has suddenly, seemingly all at once, evaporated around us, revealing a wilderness of dry rock and dust where once we had a garden. And our thirst, and our fatigue, and our barrenness threaten to overwhelm us. All many of us want is to return to the warm comfort of ignorance, denial, and fantasy, to nothing less than the tender caress of numb oblivion.

John breaks into our lives today, as he did the lives of his contemporaries. He calls us away from the crumbling city, back to the place of encounter with our wild God. John calls us to slip once more into the cool and muddy water, to be washed and renewed, to die so that we can be reborn.

“Comfort, comfort, my people. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,” begins the passage from Isaiah John quotes at the River Jordan. But what shall he cry out? “All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand for ever.”

God’s faithfulness does not depend on ours. God’s love does not come to us as payment for a life well lived, or for commandments followed, or in recompense for our constancy. What a mercy that is! For we are not constant. Our lives are like the grass, sometimes lush and green and sometimes withered away to stalks. But God’s word, God’s very life, which is our life, will stand forever.

John comes, even today, as the prophet of the morning, to testify to the ever-faithful life of God, the life that comes not in spite of death or instead of death, but through death. John beckons us all to enter the dark chasm of the abyss, to take the hand of the angel of death, to lay down our lives so that God can take those lives up again.

At a certain point, we are all called to surrender to an unknown and mysterious God. In this surrender we come to learn that betrayal is a handing over from death to life; that the silence of the grave gives way to the rhythmic heartbeat of God; that the shadow of death brightens into dawn. In the surrender of all we are, or thought we were, or hoped to become to that unknown and mysterious God, God gives birth to new life within and through us, and to a life that is fundamentally God’s life even as it is our own.

May we heed John’s call. May we leave the ruins of the city and make our way, however painfully or slowly, to the borderlands of our faith. May we enter the cool and cleansing River. May we die so that God can live once more.

Nativity of St. John the Baptist - Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bob Pierson, OHC
Nativity of St. John the Baptist - Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Isaiah 40:1-11
Acts 13:14b-26
Luke 1:57-80

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

In the first volume of her three volume work on Religious Life, entitled Finding the Treasure, Sister Sandra Schneiders says that the call to religious life, centered in love of God and love of neighbor, is a prophetic vocation.  I believe that to be true, and I want to look at our scripture readings for this feast of one of the greatest prophets, John the Baptist, to see what we can learn about what it means to be prophetic today.

First, we heard that wonderful passage from Isaiah, chapter 40: “Comfort, O comfort my people.”  Isaiah says the prophet's call is to “prepare the way of the Lord” by announcing the good tidings that the Lord “comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him.”  It's not a message of gloom and doom, but rather one of hope and joy.  “He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”  Being a prophet is announcing God's love and mercy to the world.

In the Acts of the Apostles, Paul says that before the coming of Jesus, “John had already proclaimed a baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel.”  In announcing the coming of the Lord, John's message was not gloom and doom, but rather a call to get ready, and pay attention.  It was an encouragement to leave behind our old way of life so that we can receive the New Life that Jesus has to offer.  Being a prophet is telling people to wake up to the presence of God in their lives.

And in the gospel passage, St. Luke's “Canticle of Zechariah” which we pray every day at Matins, we hear that the “holy prophets of old” announced that “we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.”  God “has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, we might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.”  Being a prophet is reminding the people of God's promises for protection and deliverance, for mercy and forgiveness.

Like John the Baptist, we are called to “go before the Lord to prepare his ways.”  We are called to “give knowledge of salvation to God's people by the forgiveness of their sins.”  The “tender mercy of our God” will break upon us, giving “light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death;” guiding “our feet into the way of peace.”  Being a prophet today is reminding the world that Jesus came “not to condemn the world” but that through him “the world might be saved.”  And the world desperately needs to hear this good news because for some reason too many people have proclaimed the bad news that “God's gonna get you,” and that's what people have believed.

You may have heard me relate the story of how I came to understand God's love for me in a church in Toronto, where I heard a verse of a familiar hymn that I had never heard before.  The hymn is “There's a Wideness in God's Mercy,” and the verse I had never heard before goes like this:

But we make God's love too narrow, by false limits of our own.
And we magnify God's strictness with a zeal God will not own.

As prophets today, we have the wonderful task of teaching people that, in the words of Richard Rohr, “We do not become good so that God will love us.  God loves us, so that we can become good.”  That is the Good News we are called to proclaim by our lives today.

Nativity of Saint John the Baptist C- June 24, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Nativity of Saint John the Baptist - Friday -June 24, 2016

 John The Baptist Icon at Holy Cross Monastery
(photo credit monk of Holy Cross Monastery)

Saying or singing the Benedictus is a big spiritual highlight of my day. Its imagery, its boldness, its hopefulness re-ground me in the contemplation of God’s acts. Especially in those moments when I am stuck in frustration and forget that I am in the epic of salvation history, the Benedictus is the declaration of the reality that what was begun at creation, declared through ancestors and prophets, and that reaches fulfillment in Christ is still happening and is moving toward consummation. The Benedictus is full of such rich words – praise, redeemed, salvation, mercy, covenant, holiness, righteousness, prophet, forgiveness, peace, light. It sounds so optimistic, as if Zechariah is rolling out a red carpet and all John has to do is say “Here is Jesus” and Israel will flock to him and worship him, the Pharisees will realize that God is love, the Romans will lay down their weapons, the Gentiles will embrace him and the world will live in peace and joy forever. Some words, however, the rest of the story, are left out of the Benedictus: repent, judgment, ax, fire, vipers, Herod, platter, beheaded, buried. Not only does everyone not believe the message, but the powers kill the messenger.

Who is John the Baptist? He was conceived in a barren womb, living in the barren wilderness, called to proclaim repentance to many who heard and believed but to many more whose hearts were hard and barren, arrested and thrown in a barren prison, executed still wondering whether his life had any meaning, whether he should look for another. I wonder if at the end he himself would have believed the words his father prayed in his presence at his circumcision.

The hope of the Benedictus laid alongside the ambiguity of John’s life presents us with a paradox. Belief in the Benedictus cannot be mere pious sentiment. If it has meaning at all, it requires entering into the realities of our lives and interpreting those realities in the light of salvation that is truly here and truly awaiting consummation. The barrenness that we experience is real. God’s promise of light in the darkness of that very barrenness is also real. John was called to embody and articulate the suffering of his life and the life of the people as the call to new life. The prophet – the truth-teller, the preparer of the way, the conscience proclaiming justice and peace – is born out of, lives in, and dies in the places of the world that appear to be most without God. We proclaim the Benedictus as reality even, and especially, where our own souls and the world around us is far from mercy, righteousness, forgiveness, and peace.

Perhaps this tension is the Christian, and especially monastic, vocation. John entered into his world as it was while at the same time embodying and proclaiming God’s dream of what could be and will be. The vocation is a movement inward and outward. He first goes to the wilderness, probably with a community of Essenes who are awaiting the Messiah, to pray and be still and listen and wait. His own heart has to be forged in the furnace of transformation in the barren place before what he says and how he is will bear fruit. In the confrontation with God he is on the road to the conversion of his self-will, his illusions, and his fears. He knows what will happen when he appears to Israel, what the Pharisees will think of him and what the Romans are likely to do to him. But he is free – he has transcended the need for human acceptance or approval. This is our inward journey. When he appears publicly he unmasks the oppressive domination system, confronts exploitative distortions of the nature of God, articulates a vision of personal and communal conversion, and embraces his role as forerunner by saying of Christ “He must increase and I must decrease”. This is our journey in community and for the church and the world. John is committed to the truth, especially in naming the evil of oppression and prejudice. His gift is in upholding a standard of real peace forged in facing hard realities that resists the wide road of passive resignation. He is an actualized, individuated person whose own mortal life is offered in the service of God’s vision of salvation.

We read the Benedictus, then, as God’s mission in and for the world through the life of John the Baptist and through our lives as well. Ultimately, salvation will fill the whole earth. On the way to consummation, as we cooperate with God, we encounter the response that John experienced. Some, by God’s grace, hear and believe. Others will not. For us all, the call to personal holiness and communal justice that burst forth in the Benedictus beckons us to action with God. In our journey to embrace life, we must stand up against the presence of whatever seeks to demean, withhold, or repress that life within ourselves and our neighbors and help the light to shine, especially in the darkest places. The Benedictus is, like the Magnificat, the announcement of a radical reorientation of the world as a community and how we live in it as individuals – a reorientation to the mystery of hope in suffering, life in barrenness, faith in unknowing, power in powerlessness.

Zechariah’s words, then, engage us in the call to live the truth that it declares about us – that we are redeemed, liberated, rescued, fearless, and those upon whom light has shone. That I am selfish, fearful, and arrogant at times reminds me of my need for this promise to be refreshed in me tomorrow and the next day and the next day. This is the journey. It is not arriving at the complete satisfaction of my longings, but the very fact of my dissatisfaction is the journey, is the beginning of prayer. Life is difficult. We can’t be whole. We are in the dark. We don’t have all the answers. None of those statements negates the invitation to a joyful life, but ground joy in bigger realities than my feelings and my understandings. Yet we are on the way to freedom and light and peace. May the birth, prayer, witness, preaching, death and joy of St John the Baptist guide us in faithful service as we proclaim the coming of salvation.