The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost B - September 16, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen

Proper 19 B - Sunday, September 15, 2024 

Isaiah 50:4-9a
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38

Before I came to the Monastery I used to go to an Al-Anon meeting on Friday evenings. It was quite an eclectic group of people, the kind you can get in a 12-step meeting in New York City, and I loved it. At the end of the meeting, we’d all gather in a circle in this cramped church basement room, hold hands, and say the serenity prayer. Then we’d boisterously shout “keep coming back. It works if you work it, so work it—you’re worth it!” The last cheer is meant to end the meeting on a high note, an energetic encouragement against despair and a reminder that the program is the solution.

But there was one old-timer who didn’t like this tradition. After the serenity prayer, still holding our hands, she would chant along, “keep coming back.” Then she would say, “it works fine,” and rather forcefully drop the hands of those on either side of her. Curious, I asked her why she ended the meeting that way. She said, “we all work hard enough.”

As I prayed throughout the week with this Sunday’s gospel reading, that woman kept coming into my prayer. “It works fine,” she kept telling me, as she dropped my hand. “What works fine?” I pleaded in my prayer. What does that even mean?

We all know this story very well. It appears in all three synoptic gospels. With a few variations it follows the same pattern. Jesus asks the disciples who people say that he is, and they tell him one of the prophets. Then he asks who they say that he is. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah. Then Jesus goes on to tell them what being the Messiah actually means: he will be betrayed, tortured, and killed, and on the third day he will rise again. In all three accounts Peter rebukes Jesus and is then rebuked in turn.

There are, of course, so many layers to this story. We must all ask ourselves throughout our lives, who Jesus is for us. If we’re really wacky and creative, we might turn the question back on Jesus and ask him, “who do you say that I am?” We might meditate on what it means to take up our cross and follow. But the simplest layer of the story may be its most profound.

We watch Peter, in real time, face into the fracturing of his illusions, and in that witnessing we are invited to do the same. Peter is perhaps the best example of this process in the scriptures. He follows Jesus zealously from the beginning. In the synoptic gospels he is the first to call Jesus the Messiah (Thomas gets that honor in John). The text makes clear that Peter has a definite idea of what being the Messiah is all about—an idea that certainly does not look like betrayal, torture, and death, even if that passion leads to resurrection. Even as Jesus rebukes and corrects Peter, Peter will have to deny and betray Jesus himself, to watch his friend and teacher die on a cross, and to see him raised to life again before he can finally relinquish his fixed ideas of who God is to and for him and the world.

Like Peter, we are all invited, throughout our lives, to a process of disillusionment. We live, most of us, with fixed ideas of who God is and how God works. We are blinded by our obsessions and illusions, many of which appear to us as good and holy.

I once had a spiritual director who pointed out that we are afraid to pray dangerously. To pray dangerously, he said, was to pray for God to rid us of our obsessions and illusions. Most of us stick with very nice prayers—prayers for people’s health and wellbeing that are, in themselves good prayers, but that fall far short of praying for our own transformation in whatever ways God wants us to be transformed.

One of the great gifts of monastic life is the opportunity to be freed from the tyranny of desire. Most of the time we talk about desire as a positive force in the spiritual life, and our heart’s deepest desire for wholeness in God is a very good thing indeed. But we are all plagued with much smaller and pettier desires—wants, if you will. We want to feel comfortable. We want things to stay the way they’ve always been. We want to be certain about who we are, who God is, how the world functions. We want, we want, we want—and we allow all these little wants to guide how and who we are in and for the world. And so we make our decisions and evaluations based, not on a discernment of God’s will for us, but on what we want in any given situation. In other words, like Peter, we set our mind on human things.

Monastic life will teach you that you can get on perfectly well without having things the way you want them. Indeed, any mature Christian life will be dictated by higher ideals than what we want in any particular moment. That isn’t to say that our wants and desires are bad. Unless we allow them to dictate our lives they are rather neutral. I would love for God to be the kind of God who gave me everything I want, but that isn’t reality. Fortunately, reality is so much richer than what we want. Fortunately, God promises us transformation, freedom, wholeness, and the life that really is life—whether we want that or not.

In his book My Bright Abyss, the poet Christian Wiman warns that “What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all. The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will become so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester with egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it.” (29-30)

I think this is the deeper meaning that that old-timer was trying to convey in her cranky way. The spiritual life works fine. Our images of God, our methods of prayer, our beliefs and practices, and our wants and desires—they’re all just fine, but they’re also all a beginning, not an end. Peter had to undergo a painful process of disillusionment in order fully to give himself to God for whatever God willed. I’m sorry to say that the process is no less painful and no shorter for the rest of us. In order to become the mature, surrendering, loving people that God wills us to be, we must let go of anything at all that is not God.

There will be grief in this process. Hopefully there will also be moments of laughter, when we can see the absurdity of our self-will. It may, at times, feel like we have loaded our backpack with stones. We will certainly hear the groan of the cross as we drag it along. But if we persevere, we will find ourselves living a life freer than we could ever have imagined possible. We will find ourselves filled with the life that really is life, the life of Christ welling up within us. So keep coming back. It works fine!

Proper 19 B - Septermber 12, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

Proper 19 B - Sunday, September 12, 2021

Isaiah 50:4-9a

James 3:1-12

Mark 8:27-38

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Last week I stuck my head in Brother Aidan’s office and as we chatted about preaching, I jokingly asked, “Who do people say that I am?” Brother Aidan responded with a laugh and said, “You don't want to know.” And that may well be true.  I'm not sure I, or any of us, want to know what others really think of us, of who we are, of where we're heading, of what they see in us that we are blind to or in denial about.  And this, by the way, can apply equally well not just to those traits or characteristics of which we might be ashamed but also to those gifts or potentialities which are positive, but which also challenge us and stretch us to go further in our lives.

Jesus doesn’t seem to have the same reticence that we might have about this question. Or maybe he just screwed his courage one day and asked his followers: Who do people say that I am? Maybe he was genuinely interested or perhaps a bit confused or both. And he braced himself to hear their responses. They answered: John the Baptist; or others Elijah; And still others, one of the prophets. And Jesus followed up by asking them: Who do you--who have lived with me and around me and know me well--who do you say that I am? Peter speaks for the group, as Peter so often does, and says: You are the Christ. Well, that's one answer. But it is by far not the only answer which has been given to this question in the 2000-year-old Christian tradition.  We might begin with Peter’s answer, but we can in no way stop there. 

One of my favorite books over the years has been Jaroslav Pelikan's Jesus Through the Centuries. Published back in 1985 but still worth reading, it's a history of the Christian Church told through the prism of the way Christians in various times and cultures have answered that question of Jesus.  The chapter titles alone offer us a veritable litany of ways in which we might respond to the question: who do you say that I am?  There is Jesus the Rabbi. Jesus the light of the Gentiles. Jesus king of kings. Jesus the cosmic Christ. Jesus the true image of the Godhead. And on and on it goes: Jesus the monk who rules the world, the bridegroom of the soul, the divine and human model, the Prince of Peace, the teacher of common sense, the poet of the spirit, the Liberator. And each of us could add to that litany:  Jesus merciful Redeemer, friend, and brother, a St Richard of Chichester has it and whose hymn we just sang. Jesus our way, our hope, our life. Jesus the Fellow Sufferer Who Understands. And the list is never complete because, in ways that surpass our comprehension, Jesus is alive. And the way we understand him and relate to him and shape our individual and communal lives through him is also alive and always a work in progress with yet more to be revealed.

The two questions that Jesus asks in today's gospel—Who do people say that I am? Who do you say that I am?—those questions are related, but they are also distinct and distinctive in important ways. Consider the first question Who do people say that I am?  We might today ask how the centuries of the living experience of this man whom Peter called Messiah and his story has become distilled in the very fabric of Christian thought. And we might ask how our own experience, our own contemporary struggle to come to know and follow this man adds to and contributes to that distillation which is Christian history and theology. This distillation is a public and shared quest, and it is in that great river of tradition that we exercise in this playground of Christian life and thought.

That second question however—Who do you say that I am?—strikes  me as somewhat different. It is a question addressed by Jesus to his closest friends and followers, though it is answered by an individual. And we all struggle with our own answer to that question.  Yes, it is a question addressed to us by Jesus.  But I’m thinking that our answer to it is nobody else’s business but Jesus’ and ours.  Maybe that's why I find the question which marked popular 20th century Evangelicalism—“Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?”—so impoverished and intrusive, if not outright offensive. A question to us from Jesus meant as an invitation to exploration becomes a weapon, an interrogation, and a judgment. It seems to me that nothing is farther from the witness of Jesus or of the early church. It's nobody's business but yours and Jesus. Which in no way means that you or I are released from the obligation and necessity to, if not answer the question, at least not ignore it.  We all know how important questions are. The poet Rilke is famously quoted as saying that we must live the question, live into the question.  The very engagement with the question is at least as important, if not more important, than whatever answer or response we come up with. Because the engagement with the question is itself an engagement with Jesus Christ, and that is of course at the heart of the Christian life.

In a few minutes we will recite the Nicene Creed, as we do each Sunday and major feast day, right after the sermon, perhaps as a necessary corrective or safeguard. What the Creed sets out for us are the broad outlines of this amazing Jesus movement over the centuries, its parameters or boundaries. It invites us to, if you will, play ball in this court.  And playing ball here will be rich and challenging, interesting and rewarding, not constraining but rather containing and growing.  Jaroslav Pelikan, whom I mentioned earlier, in a 2003 radio interview with Krista Tippet, highlighted the role of the creed in our worship. I've quoted this before and I believe it's worth hearing again: 

“My faith life, like that of everyone else, fluctuates. There are ups and downs and hot spots and cold spots and boredom and ennui and all the rest can be there. And so I'm not asked on a Sunday morning, ‘As of 9:20, what do you believe?’ And then you sit down with the three-by-five index card saying, ‘Now let's see. What do I believe today?’ No, that's not what they're asking me. They’re asking me, ‘Are you a member of a community which now, for a millennium and a half, has said, we believe in one God?’”

All of which is to say that our reaction to Jesus’ question “Who do you say that I am?” is asked and explored and engaged within a tradition which is alive and, at its best, fruitful and nourishing.  And when we say, “I believe,” we're not saying that I give total intellectual assent to every proposition in this or any other document.  It is to say, however, that I desire to explore the Mystery within this framework, within this courtyard, on this ballpark and among this community of saints and sinners. And when others share the fruits of their exploration, I will listen attentively to how and where God has been acting.  And again more shall be revealed. 

Who do you say that I am? No, not me. I mean Jesus. I think if we were brave enough and honest enough to share that this morning, we would be both shocked and extraordinarily edified. And humbled. We never know where new insight will come from or where it will lead. We never know what illumination or self-disclosure God might offer.

One of my favorite stories about a surprising revelation was shared several years ago by Peter Hawkins, a professor at Yale Divinity School. Hawkins published an article, forty years after the fact, about engaging with a Ouija board, one which belonged to the poet James Merrill. He was just beginning his teaching career and was with friends and they were playing, as folks did in those days, with the board which was reputed to be a kind of oracle. You would ask a question and get an answer through the movement of a stylus or pointer, which in Hawkins’ case was an overturned teacup, which then spells out a response.  For most of us of that era, it was a mere parlor game, though considered by some to be dangerous, perhaps a dabbling in the occult or in spirit contact. Hopkins took a risk and asked the Ouija board: Who is Jesus Christ? Let me read his description of what happened: 

The cup stopped tracing circles and began to dart quickly (as if with a mind of its own) to the letters H, Y, I, S, T, H—moving faster and faster until I could hardly keep up with it, but not so fast that the friend playing scribe could not copy down the letters and then decipher the message they formed. ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’ I had asked. And the answer? ‘HE IS THE LENS IN THE DARK BOX.’

And for this budding theologian, so rational and erudite and tightly wrapped, this became the door.  Hawkins came to see Jesus in a new and, for him, life giving way:

But for me, having asked “Who is Jesus Christ?” in a highly improbable setting, he is first and foremost the lens in the dark box. He is the imaginable focus who enables me to conjure an unimaginable God. He is the human prism in whom a transcendent divine light becomes a set of shoulders overturning a table of money changers, a finger writing in the dust, a back being scourged, a voice in extremis crying out the words of a psalm. He is an aperture, an opening up of a darkness I cannot fathom. He is at once God’s question and God’s answer. He is the lens in the dark box.

Who do people say that Jesus is?  Who do you say that he is?  Are you, am I willing to live those questions, to dwell in them, to wrestle with them and be surprised by where they lead?  Are you, am I willing to live into the One whom Peter called the Messiah, the Christ of God; the One who for Peter Hawkins is at once God’s question and God’s answer; the One who is simultaneously both Mystery and Revelation, Savior and Judge; the One who is—yes—Love? 

Who do you say that I am?          

Proper 19, Year B: Sunday, September 16, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
Proper 19-  Sunday, September 16, 2018

Sorry, no audio recording of this sermon is available.

Br. Robert James Magliula

The Gospel offers the startling and inexplicable claim that Jesus of Nazareth is both human being and God incarnate. This “scandal of particularity”, as it’s called, is the claim we encounter in today’s passage from Mark. The one who came as the great liberator, the Messiah, must suffer rejection, humiliation, torture, and death at the hands of the religious and civil authorities. Jesus insists that “he must undergo great suffering”. For Jesus to bring full humanity into communion with God, he must bear the fullness of the human experience, including suffering and death.



The shadow of war between the Jews and Rome loomed over Mark’s community. When Mark wrote his Gospel, Jesus had clearly not freed them from Roman oppression and domination. Mark sets this story in Caesarea Philippi, a center of Roman colonial presence on the northern fringes of Galilee. The scene takes place sometime after Jesus had taken up with his disciples. Jesus asks the disciples what they have heard people say about who he is. Then he moves to the critical question: “Who do you say that I am?” When Peter calls Jesus the Messiah, he may have right title but the wrong understanding of what that title means for Jesus.

 We bring our humanity to our relationship with Jesus. We humans think as humans. We see him as one who will support and sustain our wants and desires and enable us to become what we want to become. If we’re honest with ourselves, we prefer Peter’s interpretation of Messiah, and we make the same protest. We want a God who will spare us from suffering and death, who will spare us the painful fullness of the human experience. But Jesus’ word to Peter and to us is that we must expand our perspective. The final scandal of this passage is Jesus’ call for his disciples to follow him on this path.

The domestication of Jesus as the Christ makes it hard to be shocked by Peter’s declaration and Jesus’ teaching about the nature of the messiah and the meaning of discipleship. Only when we’ve grasped the true meaning are we in a place to hear his call to follow. Mark, in the course of his Gospel, had Jesus clarify this to the disciples three times, and they still resisted it.  The call to discipleship is more than a lack of concern for earthly matters or a call to radical social reform. It is participation in the pattern of the suffering Messiah. Mark intended this text to move his hearers beyond information and explanation to commitment.

Our human freedom depends on knowing ourselves----which includes recognizing our limitations and what is incomplete in us. Our knowledge of our poverty can become an experience of God’s grace, mercy, forgiveness, and love. Knowing ourselves without knowing God leads to desperation and knowing God without knowing ourselves produces arrogance.

In our first lesson from Proverbs, Wisdom issues a similar warning to that of Wisdom Incarnate in the Gospel. Wisdom’s language is a strong rebuke of our cultural reflex to cast any suffering as victimhood that deserves sympathy. Persistent scoffing and hatred for knowledge exhausted her patience. Fools do not become wise through persuasion, let alone sympathy. Wisdom raises her voice: “I have called and you refused, have stretched out my hand and no one heeded” (Prov. 1:24). In our narcissistic society wealth occupies a higher place than wisdom, notoriety is more admired than dignity, success is more important than self-respect.  Our culture attempts to repress everything that reminds it of its limits and in particular the event of death, which has the power to annihilate every human delusion of omnipotence. This deprives us of the reality, that more than any other, helps us to understand ourselves, because it places life’s big questions in front of us, and brings us out of the mediocrity in which we often enclose ourselves.

Wisdom shows up in the complicated places where we live our lives. Often, she shows up in a moment of need, or crisis, or fear. When we forget about the ways of God and become mired down only in our own human ways, we often get ourselves into terrible predicaments. When we think we are beyond the basic lessons of loving justice, doing kindness, and walking humbly with God, we often end up doing and saying things we regret. When loving God and loving neighbor as ourselves are mere platitudes for us, it seems that disaster often finds us. It will always be true that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. It will always be true that we have some responsibility for what happens in our lives.

Becoming wise means learning to think carefully and act virtuously in complex situations where one is tempted to think simplistically and act recklessly. One becomes wise by learning to integrate one’s thoughts, will, and actions in faithful ways. This wisdom has very little to do with knowledge in service of power, and more to do with insight that is in service of God and neighbor.

James’ warnings about language in our Epistle are all the more pressing in our time. Error, deception, miscommunication, and disinformation have become commonplace. Defending our own viewpoints, we cease to listen to others. When we take time to listen to those we disagree with, we find ways to move beyond conflict that consumes and destroys. The fear of the Lord, which is a form of humility and reverence, is the beginning of wisdom. It is the experience of contact with a power greater than our own, before whom we give up control. 

When we find ways to honor God, we find that life can have a rhythm that feels right. When we recognize our need to forgive and be forgiven, we find a peace that is good for body, mind, and spirit. The quality of our relationships depends on the quality of our communications on a personal, interpersonal, social, and political level. Christians find the model of their communication in God’s communication to us in the Christ.

All the Gospels present Jesus as a person who, in all he says, does, and is, continues to point to the One who sent him. This gives meaning to his living and dying, making his death on the cross an act of freedom, not a destiny passively endured. Our fear of death can enslave us and prevent us from embracing the cross to follow him. The way we experience death is connected to our experience of the death of the people we love. With their death, something in us dies. But when Christians place their faith not in immortality but in resurrection from the dead, they know that their faith does not sidestep the grief of separation and death but passes through it. In Jesus, God has taken upon Godself the dramatic separation of death, making that death, not only an end but also a fulfillment. The God who calls us to life, in the same way, calls us back through death. It is not death that has the last word, as we so often fear, but God and love.  +Amen.

 

Proper 19 B - Sep 16, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother Scott Borden, OHC
Proper 19, Year B - Sunday, September 23, 2012


Isaiah 50:4-9a
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38


How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire – and the tongue is a fire... somehow that observation from Letter of James jumps out at me this week.

There are two things that have been on my mind this week – one quite wonderful and the other quite terrible – and both having to do with the work of the tongue.

In a few days Sr Hildegard Pleva from the Redemptoristine Community just down the road will be giving a talk here at the Monastery on Hildegard of Bingen, whom we celebrate tomorrow – and so I've been focusing on the music of Hildegard. That is the beautiful thing.

The other thing is the shocking acts of violence in the middle east – big fires – incited by burning tongues in the United States... tongues which belong to people who call themselves Christian.

“From the same mouth comes blessing and cursing” says James. We bless God in our words, but curse those whom we despise. Yet those we curse are made in God's image. As James says “it should not be so.” A spring can not yield fresh water and foul water. Its a very sobering letter.

Devout Muslims in the Middle East have been reacting this week to a so called film produced in the US. The “film”, The Innocence of Muslims, can scarcely be called a film. It is childish and incoherent... a babbling mess... laughable in almost every way. It has, as its only purpose, to offend. And in that regard, sadly, it has worked its mischief. It has produced violence and even death. I don't say this to excuse or even explain the violent mobs. But as James says, the tongue can set mighty forests ablaze...

It is not enough, I think, for faithful Christians to ignore this film. It flows from a spring of foul water and it curses those made in the image of God. It is a flaming tongue and it must be quenched with the sweet water of God's love or it will continue to set forests ablaze.

What a contrast this vile little film is to the music of Hildegard of Bingen. To watch the film is to be degraded. To listen to the music of Hildegard is to be uplifted... transported... filled with light.

Hildegard was a medieval monastic, Abbess of a Benedictine community in Germany, in the city of Bingen, on the Rhine river. She was a mystic, a prophet, a writer, a composer, as well as an herbalist and healer. She used her skills in music and verse to share her mystical visions with those around her. The spring of her creative spirit brings fourth the purest, sweetest, and freshest of water – as fresh today as it was during her lifetime, nearly a thousand years ago.

Interestingly, tongues of fire featured in her visions. She saw, according to her writings, an image of her tongue aflame, but not consumed. She took that as a directive from God – she was to share what she had seen. There is that letter of James again. The tongue can set mighty forests ablaze. James is not calling us to silence, but rather to use our tongues in Godly ways.

There is a reason why Hildegard is a saint – and why the maker of that nasty little film is not...

As followers of Jesus we have an absolute obligation to tell the good news. We must, like Hildegard, use our tongues, our skills to share the beauty and wonder of God's love – and to share it far and wide... Not to curse those we don't like, don't understand, or don't accept.

The letter of James and the life of Hildegard of Bingen make an interesting prelude to the Gospel passage we heard today. Jesus says if we want to follow him we have to leave ourselves behind. To save our lives, we must loose our lives for the sake of the good news.

This observation by Jesus has the feeling of a zen koan about it... it leads us to paradox. And the Gospel is full of paradox... dying we live... to be fully free we must become totally enslaved... saving our lives means losing our lives...

One function of a koan is to destabilize our thinking. When we think we know the answer, we stop asking the question. If we think we know what it means to be a follower of Jesus, then we are no longer concerned with learning what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

So look what happens: Jesus describes to the disciples what is to come and Peter tells him off. Imagine that... Who would ever think of doing such a thing?... Certainly none of us...

Except that we all do, every day, in ways large and small. When we, as a nation, choose to build bombs instead of healing the sick or feeding the hungry, we are clearly telling Jesus off. When we, as a religious people, worry more about building grand houses of worship than about housing the homeless, we are telling Jesus off – just as Peter did. We can all find ways in which we do this... and we all know what Jesus said to Peter...

We set our minds on human things, not divine.

And so Jesus calls us to die to self – to take our minds off human things. To destabilize our thinking... to begin to learn that our ways are not God's ways...

My human nature loves comfort, loves privilege, loves pleasure... and the truth is my comfort frequently comes from someone else's sacrifice. Peter can't stand to hear Jesus talk about the sacrifice he is preparing to make because Peter can't think about sacrificing himself. Those who would save their lives must lose them... Peter isn't there yet – and neither am I.

Perhaps the most hopeful thing Jesus says in this passage is “If any want to become followers of mine...” He doesn't say “be”, but rather “become”.

I would like to say that I am a follower of Jesus, but anyone who knows me can easily and quickly form a list of all the ways that is not true. But I can say that I am becoming a follower of Jesus – and while I may fail now and then, misunderstand now and then, and be more attached to things of this world than Godly things now and then, I am, nonetheless, a more faithful follower of Jesus than I was a year ago, or ten years ago... we won't even talk about when I was in college... I am becoming a follower day by day. I can be very thankful that God is patient...

I started by reflecting a bit on the vile little film The Innocence of Muslims and the almost unbearable transporting beauty of the music of Hildegard of Bingen and I find they still resonate with me.

The film, to the extent it can really focus on anything (and it is such a confused mess, that is a limited extent), focuses entirely on things of this world – on power and domination – specifically the desire by some so-called Christians to dominate or eliminate other faiths. It calls us to cling to life. It has not the slightest whiff of becoming anything, let alone becoming a follower of Jesus.

Hildegard lifts our eyes to Godly things. If all she did in her life was create a legacy of transcendent beauty, that would be remarkable. But as an herbalist she tended to the sick – in an era when medicine was, to say the least, primitive. She quite literally wrote the book on what herbs could be used to treat what conditions.

Did Hildegard have bad days... was she always, relentlessly uplifting... I suspect she was every bit as human as you and I. But the arc of her life teaches us what it means to leave self behind and to be becoming a follower of Jesus.

Isaiah says it so beautifully – the Lord has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. We are the teachers and at the same time we are the weary. The word that sustains is is Jesus, the very word of God. Our simple, yet lifelong task, is let go of the words that we want to speak and we want to hear, and give ourselves to the speaking and hearing of God's word.

Proper 19 A - Sep 11, 2011

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Sermon for 9/11

Br. Clark Berge, minister general of SSF

Proper 19A- Sunday, September 11, 2011

Exodus 14:19-31

Romans 14:1-12

Matthew 18:21-35

Let us pray:  Compassionate God, as we gather today, we open our hearts to you and ask for the help and guidance of the Holy Spirit, recognizing that there are only two feelings. Love and Fear. There are only two languages. Love and fear. There are only two activities. Love and fear. There are only two motives, two procedures, two frameworks, two results. Love and fear. Love and fear. (Adapted from Michael Leunig, A Common Prayer, HarperCollins Religious, Sydney, 1990)

What a great joy to be gathered here today with friends and people of faith; to be reading Scriptures about forgiveness and sharing the Sacrament, being assured of God’s forgiveness and commissioned to be ambassadors of reconciliation. This is the only context I can bear to think about 9/11. The hurt is still there, and we pray for all who died, all who suffer grief or disability because of the attacks on New York and Washington DC—all the wounded. We pray for them and hold them in our hearts.  Politicians have to balance American interests and the authority of pollsters against their re-election chances when they talk about these events. Inevitably it becomes “us against them.”  It is so easy to fall into that. Yet we are called to live differently as Christians.  Embracing our pain, is there still room to love our enemies?

In the Exodus passage for today we are reminded God is very much active in human history, working in our midst to bring us out of slavery into freedom. Not everyone has moved beyond believing God takes sides in human conflict (that is a big part of the rhetoric from both Al Qaeda and some Westerners). But we must never lose sight of God’s action that is to free us from all the things that enslave us—capitalism, Islamism, “Christian-ism”, Marxism, liberalism, conservatism—and all the other “—isms.” God is actively leading us into a land of new possibilities for the human spirit. I say that with confidence because God has continued to lead his people through obstacles, from the Red Sea onwards, leading us to freedom. The evidence has mounted over the ages and God’s methods have matured. From drowning Pharaoh God gave his only Son. God raised the stakes. There is nothing God won’t do to set humanity free.

The reality of 9/11 is that a terrible thing happened. We live with the question: how will we prevent it from happening again in America, in Britain, in India, in Pakistan, in Sri Lanka, in Israel, in Palestine, in Iraq, in Zimbabwe, in south Africa, in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Norway, Syria, Northern Ireland,, Colombia, Mexico, Bali, the Solomon Islands, Japan…I’ve only just started on the list. Who can think of a country that does not commemorate a tragedy where bombs exploded, innocent and not-so-innocent people died? How can we prevent such things from happening?

What would happen if we stopped judging each other, as Paul suggests in this morning’s reading from Romans? I am not talking about “anything-goes” or suspending justice, but what if we humans started expecting the best of each other? What if we committed ourselves to a nonviolent response to whatever provocation? Not just you and me, but what if everybody made this commitment? Of course it won’t happen spontaneously. I won’t happen quickly. But I wonder if the perceived odds prevent us from even trying it at all? Alternatives can be taught, as the SSF Formator’s learned at our conference in the Solomon Islands last year the Alternatives to Violence Project. Do we cringe from being called naïve?  Spreading the message of nonviolence means working with whomever we can. It means refraining from violent thinking and action. It means being willing to keep on with it even as it seems more and more futile. Because what else can we do—us Bible-reading, Sacrament eating people?  Can we go from Altar to armory? Some have had to, and some still do. But as Religious, we don’t have to promote a diminished Gospel, a fear-based message.

The Gospel we have been given teaches love and forgiveness. Love is the opposite of fear. Love compels us to forgive our enemies. Jesus rejected violence and forgave his persecutors. That is the story that continues to inspire people throughout the ages. How many tims we fail at this is not the point. Rather the point s how often we dust off and try again. Love never ends. It is never too late to do the loving thing.

So today, as we remember 9/11, Christians using the Common Lectionary around the world hear the message from Matthew—how often should I forgive? Matthew frames the question in terms of forgiving brothers and sisters in the Church, but Jesus’ story is definitely not “churchy.”  Forgiveness frees us from retaliation. Forgiveness makes the human spirit shine. It shows the active, death-defying, all-powerful presence of god—that spiritual power of forgiveness shining in the human breast is a pillar of fire shining in the darkness of our confusion and hatreds, our pettiness and our fully justified reasons to annihilate each other. The only way to stop it, I sense from Jesus’ teachings and example, even as he hung from the cross, is to forgive.

What are the stories that make you squirm and re-evaluate your life? What are the stories that make you pray: “Oh God, I wish I could be like that: like Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement, Mother Teresa, Dr. Martin Luther King, Gandhi?” Central to their stories is compassion, forgiveness, and a commitment to non-violence, we hear of love overcoming fear and hate. Their stories shape, for me, everything the Gospel stirs up in me. Jesus said things, Paul taught long ago, but these men and women show how it can be done today, in the face of horrendous modern evil. They show us that we live in a reality defined and infused with love.

We’re God-loving, Bible-reading, Sacrament-eating, world-serving people: what other reality is there?

Today is 9/11 and some say it is about Islam and terrorism. I want to close by reminding us of some people I have recently added to my list of inspiring people who make me squirm, the Trappist monks of Tibhirine, whose story has become famous recently with the release of the film “Of Gods and Men.” If you have seen the film, you know Christian de Cherge was prior of Notre Dam de l’Atlas, a small monastery in Algeria. He wrote a lot about Islam and Christianity. One thing he wrote was that “Forgiveness” is one of the names for God in the 99 praises of God. We know St. Francis loved that prayer and captured it for Franciscans in his Divine Praises, joyfully repeating the names of God: “You are forgiveness…you are love…you are joy.”  Anticipating his death, Christian wrote a letter to be opened in the event of his death. Terrorists in Algeria killed him and several other monks.

If the day comes, and it could be today, that I am a victim of the terrorism that seems to be engulfing all foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church, and my family to remember that I have dedicated my life to God and Algeria.

That they accept that the Lord of all life was not a stranger to this savage kind of departure; that they pray for me, wondering how I found myself worthy of such a sacrifice; that they link in their memory this death of mine with all the other deaths equally violent but forgotten in their anonymity.

My life is not worth more than any other—not less, not more. Nor am I an innocent child. I have lived long enough to know that I, too, am an accomplice of the evil that seems to prevail in the world around, even that which might lash out blindly at me. If the moment comes, I would hope to have presence of mind, and the time, to ask for God’s pardon and for that of my fellowman, and, at the same time, to pardon in all sincerity he would attack me.

I would not welcome such a death. It is important for me to say this. I do not see how I could rejoice when this people whom I love will be accused, indiscriminately, of my death. The price is too high, this so-called grace of the martyr, if I owe it to an Algerian who kills me in the name of what he thinks is Islam.

I know the contempt that some people have for Algerians as a whole. I also know the caricatures of Islam that a certain (Islamist) ideology promotes. It is too easy for such people to dismiss, in good conscience, this religion as something hateful by associating it with violent extremists. For me, Algeria and Islam are quite different from the commonly held opinion. They are body and soul. I have said enough, I believe, bout all the good things I have received here, finding so often the meaning of the Gospels, running like some gold thread through my life, and which began first at my mother’s knee, my very first church, here in Algeria, where I learned respect for Muslims.

Obviously, my death will justify the opinion of all those who dismissed me as naïve or idealistic: “Let him tell us what he thinks now.” But such people should know my death will satisfy my most burning curiosity. At last, I will be able—if God pleases—to se the children f Islam as He sees them, illuminated in the glory of Christ, sharing in the gift of God’s Passion and of the Spirit, whose secret joy will always be to bring forth our common humanity amidst our differences.

I give thanks to God for this life; completely mine yet completely theirs, too, to God, who wanted it for joy against, and in spite of, all odds. In this Thank You—which says everything about my life—I include you, my friends past and present, and those friends who will be here at the side of my mother and father, of my sisters and brothers—thank you a thousand fold.

And to you, too, my friend of the last moment, who will not know what you are doing. Yes, for you, too, I wish this thank you, this “A-Dieu,” whose image is in you also, that we may meet in heaven, like happy thieves, if it pleases God, our common Father. Amen! Insha-Allah!

(TheMonks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria.  John W. Kiser, St. Martin’s Griffin, New York, 2003, pp. 244-246)