The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost B - October 27, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York

Br. Robert James Magliula

The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 25 B, October 27, 2024

Jeremiah 31:7-9

Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52

No one chooses to be blind. Bartimaeus gives the obvious answer to Jesus’ question when he says: “My teacher, let me see again.” This Gospel holds a universal story that every one of us experiences even if our physical vision is 20/20, because it’s about more than physical seeing or blindness. I think perhaps the deeper question we need to ask ourselves is whether we really want to see.

Do we really want to see the reality of our lives, who we are and who we are not? Do we really want to see the needs of our neighbor or the marginalized? Do we really want to see the injustices around us? Do we really want to see who Jesus is and not just who we want him to be? True seeing is more than simply observing with our physical eyes. It implies relationship and a deeper knowing. Such seeing is not without risk. If we really want to see, then we must be willing to change and be changed. We must be willing to leave behind what is to receive what might be.

Sometimes that risk is too much so we turn a blind eye. This is not a physical but a spiritual condition. For most of us life is neither all seeing nor all blindness. It was that way for Bartimaeus too. Remember, Bartimaeus asks to “see again.” At the end of the story, we are told that he “regained his sight.” He had known darkness, and he had known light. He had vision, and he had been blind. Both are a reality for Bartimaeus and for us.

We can identify our own life when we see his life in three stages. First, Bartimaeus can see, then he is blind, sitting and begging on the roadside. Finally, he regains a new and different way of seeing. This is a pattern of spiritual growth we see throughout the Scriptures. Richard Rohr describes it as Order, Disorder, and Reorder. Every original Order includes an initially threatening Disorder, which morphs into and creates a new Reordering, and we begin all over again. Every one of us has lived this pattern. It’s the Paschal Mystery, a story of life, death, and resurrection. We grow spiritually by passing beyond some perfect Order, through an often painful and seemingly unnecessary Disorder, to an enlightened Reorder.

Jesus, by his life, death, and resurrection, offers us a clear vision of what true life looks like. To the extent we do not share that vision we are blind. As tragic as blindness is, the greater tragedy is when we cannot even recognize that we are blind. Bartimaeus knows he is going nowhere, and his life remains unchanged. Every day he holds out the cloak of his blindness and begs. Like him, we stumble our way through life believing that this is as good as it gets. We’re content to sit by the roadside and beg, letting life pass us by. We can feel stuck, more like a spectator than a participant. How and what we see determine the world we live in and the life we live. At some point all of us sit cloaked in darkness, unable to see.

The darkness fills and covers us. Maybe it’s about exhaustion or indifference. Sometimes it’s the darkness of grief and loss. Sin and guilt blind us to what our life could be. Other times we live in the darkness of fear, anger, or resentment. Doubt and despair can distort our vision. Failures and disappointments darken our world. Maybe the answers and beliefs that once lit our way no longer illuminate. There’s no clarity. We hide in the shadows neither wanting to see nor to be seen. Perhaps the deepest darkness is when we become lost to ourselves, not knowing who we are.

It doesn’t matter what caused Bartimaeus’ blindness. What matters is that he knew that he was blind. He held his blindness before Christ believing and hoping that there was more to who he was and what his life could be. It was out of that knowing, believing, and hoping that he cried out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” That’s the cry of one who abandons themselves to God. The one who cannot see cries out to be seen. It is that cry that stopped Jesus in his tracks.

“Call him here,” Jesus said. With that calling misery meets compassion. He stands before Jesus who asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?” That is the question for every one of us who have ever sat in darkness. It’s the question Jesus asks us over and over, again. “What do you want me to do for you?” This question offers a turning point, a new beginning. It asks us to look deep within our self, to face what is, and name what we want.

The thing about sitting in darkness is that at the time we can never see what’s coming. The most Bartimaeus could do was to be faithful in his darkness, to not run away from it, but to cry out in hope. And that’s true for us. We are no strangers to the feeling of being depleted with nothing in reserve, when life overwhelms, and we wonder how or if we’ll get by. It’s important for us to reflect on what we have done with that experience, or what that experience has done with us. Those times are a necessary part of our spiritual journey. They are the ways in which we mature and come to ourselves. They are our gateway to fullness of life. I am not suggesting that God causes those times, but that God does not waste them, that God wastes nothing of our lives – not our blindness, not our sitting by the roadside, not our begging, and neither should we.

In Mark’s Gospel the Bartimaeus story immediately precedes the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. It concludes with this: “Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way” (Mark 10:52). Theologically, Mark is telling us that if we are to follow Jesus on the Way, we all will need new sight, new vision, to see, understand, and follow. What do you want Jesus to do for you today? What is the thing you need today that will open your eyes to see yourself, others, and all of creation as beautiful and holy? What is the thing you need today that will allow you to throw off the cloak of blindness and take you from sitting and begging by the roadside to following Jesus on the Way? +Amen.

Proper 25 A - October 29, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Francis Beckham OHC

The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 25 A, October 29, 2023

 

Leviticus 19:1-2,15-18
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 “Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. Amen.”

These words of Jesus as recorded in Saint Matthew’s Gospel, so familiar to us in the Bible, the Lectionary, and – of course – the Book of Common Prayer, summarize not only the commandments, but the entirety of Jesus’ instructions to all who follow in the Way: past, present, and still to come.

Indeed, if we were to lose every part of the Gospel save for this single passage, we would still be able to live as followers of Jesus. That’s because there honestly isn’t anything more that needs to be said about Jesus’ teaching. We exist solely to love, because we were created completely out of love. And not only to love, but to love with our entire incarnational being: our hearts, our souls, and our minds.

There are, of course, other parts of the Gospel that could similarly stand on their own – the Sermon on the Mount, for example. But what those other sections have in common is that, at their cores, they are simply expositions of the greatest commandment proclaimed in today’s reading.

Jesus makes this declaration in response to a question craftily posed by a lawyer (or scribe) representing an assembly of the Pharisees. The question isn’t asked as a sincere request for teaching, but for the sake of trying to trap Jesus, to trick him in to tripping up, as it were, and making a response that could be construed as blasphemous or, better yet, dumbfounding Jesus and making it impossible for him to offer any answer at all, thereby utterly discrediting him and bolstering the Pharisees’ own image and agenda.

It’s a bold move, considering that, in this chapter of Matthew, Jesus happens to be right in the middle of a hot streak of shutting down various opponents. A few verses back, he had brilliantly avoided both blasphemy and tax-evasion by declaring “Repay to Cæsar what belongs to Cæsar and to God what belongs to God” when questioned whether it is lawful to pay the census tax. A little later, the Sadducees had a go at him, posing a seemingly impossible – and, frankly, ridiculous – question about marriage in an attempt to use Jesus to demonstrate their perceived notion of the fallacy of the resurrection of the dead. Instead, he proceeds to put their lack of understanding of both the Scriptures and the power of God on full blast, astonishing the crowds by his teaching. Both the Sadducees and the Pharisees would have done well to follow the time-tested maxim of trial attorneys: Never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.

Of course, they really thought that they did know the answers. At least, they knew the answers as they related to their understanding of the Law as heard in the reading from Leviticus. In all three exchanges – the question about paying taxes, the resurrection of the dead, and the greatest commandment – influential groups attempted to use their self-serving interpretations of the Law for the purpose of manipulating public opinion, discrediting an opponent, and bolstering their own influence and grips on power. And it should have worked. After all, these were the most highly educated religious elites in Jerusalem, whereas Jesus was, at best, a charismatic, but almost certainly illiterate and impoverished, upstart preacher from way out in the boondocks – and, for that matter, only one of many such preachers who were active in first-century Palestine.

But while the cards must have seemed hopelessly stacked against Jesus in the eyes of the Sadducees and Pharisees with all their learning, prestige, and power, he had something they lacked; Jesus had understanding of the simplest, yet most profound, Truth: that the entirety of the Law of God is the Love of God, and that all services rendered in the name of God – whether preaching, teaching, praying, parenting, studying, engaging in daily labor, or performing acts of mercy, charity, and justice – must be carried out in absolute love of God and those beloved of God, which is everyone.

Anything we try to do apart from God’s love is destined to fail. The Pharisees’ lawyer demonstrates this by putting Jesus to the test according to an interpretation of the Law designed to serve the love of earthly power rather than the divine Love of God. In other words, sin. But we can hardly demonize him for it. After all, we all do it. In my own life – both before and after entering the monastery – I have continually struggled to model my actions, thoughts, approach to relationships, ideas, perceptions, and attitudes according to the Love of God as revealed in the life and example of Jesus of Nazareth. Fortunately, even when I’m at my most self-serving, the Spirit manages to nudge me back on track (even if only briefly), usually by the example of someone else: Another monk observed pausing to hold open a door for someone carrying a box; a world-wearied guest seen taking time away from the rat race to focus on God for a few days rather than on work, school, or the general stresses of life.

The reason these things are such effective reminders of God’s love is that it’s all the same love. We all share one love with God and with each other. When we see it happening in someone else, it immediately looks and feels familiar (or, at least, irresistibly desirable). It sparks a reaction in the deepest parts of ourselves. Just as we all breathe the same air, so too are we all sustained and nourished by the one Spirit of God moving and stirring within us. It’s only when we decide to strike out on our own, away from God and against other people – those we know and those who will remain unknown to us until the heavenly banquet – that we struggle to experience that holy breath, that love of God. And we can never separate ourselves from other people without separating ourselves from God. But it is always a self-imposed exile; God never cuts us off. And by God’s grace, we always have the possibility of coming to our senses, and choosing to draw in air, sometimes consciously, at other times involuntarily through desperate, spastic gasping. If we choose otherwise then, deprived spiritually and physically of the life-giving love that fills every being and corner of Creation, we will perish.

Our own time is no different than the one in which Jesus and the first followers lived. Powerful rulers, institutions, and ideological forces still seek to feed their own passions for power and idolatrous wealth. And the methods have hardly changed, either: namely, attempting to blind people to the love of God present within all of us with deception, lies, fear-mongering, violence, and bigotry. Yet, in the midst of a culture fixated on division and death, Jesus assures us that we always have the option – and, indeed, the duty – to choose the Law of Love; in doing so, we fulfill not only the Law, but also our own shared and wonderfully interwoven destiny with God and one another.

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

Proper 25 C - October 23, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

The Rev. Samuel Kenedy

Pentecost, Proper 25 C - October 23, 2022

Sirach 35:12-17
2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18
Luke 18:9-14

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.

Our gospel lesson for today contains one of Jesus’ better-known parables.  In fact, one commentator I looked to for help with the sermon rued just how well known and how well-understood the parable is after some 2000 years of reflection on it by the church, and devoted rather little space to it in his commentary. And while nothing we hear today may surprise us, I think this story can serve as a reminder of the message of mercy and hope  that sits at the very heart of Luke’s Gospel.

Our lesson for today picks up after Jesus has begun his final journey to Jerusalem.  This journey in Luke’s Gospel begins with the healing of a group of lepers and then launches into a series of teachings from Jesus about the nature of the Kingdom of God. In the section in which we find ourselves today we find Jesus describes some of the characteristics of life in this Kingdom to help us begin to understand what are the values, the deep rhythms of wisdom that uphold the kingdom of God? What is a Kingdom-dweller’s life supposed to look like?   In last week’s lesson, Jesus taught his disciples about perseverance in prayer, and then this week he further describes some of the essence of Kingdom life by telling a story that is also couched in the imagery of prayer.  Admittedly, it starts out sounding a bit like one of our “a rabbi, a priest, and an imam walked into a bar” jokes, but in the end pierces right to the heart of the Gospel message.

In this story, Jesus tells us that “two men went up to the Temple to pray” – this would have resonated with his listeners as they were journeying with Jesus to do precisely the same thing at the Feast.  One of the men in Jesus’ story was a Religious leader and the other a tax collector.  Our Tradition has wrongly conditioned us to have a bit of an allergic reaction to any mention of Pharisees in the Text, and to think of them as the villains in any story that they may appear.  We would do well to remember that in Jesus’ day, unlike our own, tax collectors were considered far more villainous and suspect than religious leaders.  

But, as you’ve been paying attention to Luke’s narrative style in this Gospel, you are likely already suspecting an inversion of sorts in the moral order of the story.  This is something we know Luke loves to do this in his Gospel -- take our expectations about how the world works and then stand that moral order on its head  -- we think of the Beatitudes or the Magnificat as examples of this.  It’s a sort of extreme literary disorientation therapy that knocks us off our feet to then reorient us to Kingdom values.  Well, if that’s what you came to the text expecting, you won’t be disappointed here.  Jesus does precisely that.

So we’ve got these two fellows on their way to the temple, and the respected religious leader gets there and, I have to hand it to him, at least he doesn’t beat around the bush.  He gets right to the point. “God, I thank you… that I am not like other people.  And just in case God has forgotten who these “other people” are that he should evidently be concerned with, our fellow at prayer is ready to list them off, “robbers, villains, adulterers, -- or even like that guy – the tax collector.”

Now, while this is incredibly relatable and entertaining precisely because it’s so relatable, it’s also clear that this man is not really praying -- at least not to God.  Some of our English translations help tease that point out a bit more than others.  One reads, “The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself.”  This isn’t prayer.  It’s projection.  And that projection is just one element of a framework that helps that leader feel secure in who he is and in his standing in his community and relationship with God.  But as secure as he might feel in that moment, all of that projection is just a thin veneer of plaster over a thick, wall of desperation deep in the human soul.  

It's not just this poor religious leader who does this. We humans are all experts at building frameworks like these to help ourselves feel secure and included.  In fact, one of the fastest ways for us to build a facsimile of community is to first get clear about who we are not like, and build our community over and against the identity of another.  We see silly and rather innocuous examples of this way of creating community all the time.  What’s a quick way to build some rapport with fellow Rotarians? Well, poke fun at the Lion’s Club, of course, and if you’re a fledgling Lion’s Club member what do you do to feel more at home?  Well, crack a few jokes about the Rotarians.

This example of course is rather benign, and we know that kind of behavior is a bit silly even when we engage in it, but the striking thing is that it works.  More seriously, however, as humans, we tend to build cultures and religious communities through these mechanisms of individual and collective “othering” and scapegoating.  Theologian James Alison writes, “We know of no ethnic group anywhere on the face of the planet, no gang in the periphery of any major city which is not inclined to build its unity at the expense of a social other.”  The problem, of course, is that this “othering” is anything but innocuous -- and is the very seed of the division and violence we see all around us.

Perhaps it’s the universality of this tendency to “scapegoat” and “other” that leads Luke to address this story to a unique cast of characters.  In all the rest of his Gospel the groups or individuals engaged in conversation with Jesus are ones we can easily identify: Jesus’ disciples, a group of Pharisees, the young ruler, and so on.  But this story is addressed “to some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else” and it’s quite likely we are supposed to imagine this group as being comprised of both some of his disciples and some of the pharisees.  And if we think about it, this group cuts across every set of diametrically opposed pairs we could hope to name.  And if I’m honest, it cuts a path right to the core of my own heart more often than I would like to admit.

The reality is that the greatest danger to the manifestation of the Kingdom of God in our midst isn’t this cast of villains that the religious leader points to: robbers, evildoers, adulterers, and tax collectors.  In some sense he might as well have been listing Natsha, Boris, and Moriarty, because the real villain he has to face – the real villain I have to face -- is the part of me that is willing to participate in creating a cast of “others” to exclude so that I can feel secure – at least for a moment --  on the inside.  

But in the Kingdom of God, relationships and communities are formed in a radically different way.  Jesus teaches and then inaugurates through his death and resurrection a very different way of being together as humans -- a way of being together in which there is no need of a social other as there’s no scarcity of belonging that we have to compete for.  And as we drop our projections and desperate attempts at creating a place for ourselves over and against another we can finally begin to discover who we are and get relaxed into becoming who we were made to be.  The priest and theologian James Alison has an analogy for this experience that I’ve found helpful and memorable.  He compares this abundance of belonging in the family of God and its effect on one’s soul to the experience of being gently and steadily loved by a kind older relative, “Aunt Mildred,” as he calls her.  Alison contrasts spending time with her and it’s effect on the soul with the experience of meeting with a potential employer for a job interview.  In the job interview we find ourselves in competition for a limited resource – the job – and we are competing with a host of other candidates we suspect are infinitely more qualified than we are.  We don’t know the interviewer, and aren’t entirely sure what the criteria are that they will use to judge us.  So, he writes, we go “as smartly dressed as we can manage, with as polished a CV as the bounds of honesty will admit, and all the wrinkles of our life’s history ironed out.”

This is radically different from spending time with dear Aunt Mildred, where after our visit find ourselves a bit more relaxed, a bit more settled in our own skin, and a bit more free to love.  How is this possible?  Alison writes, “Because we know that Aunt Mildred likes us and wants what is good for us.  So when we are with her we don’t need to impress her, or convince her of our worth.  In fact we can let our masks down and allow ourselves to be teased and our little foibles to be giggled at.  You know her enough to know that she is trustworthy, not out to “get” you and won’t hold things she learns about you against you.”  THIS is a bit like the experience of being loved in the family of God and how it slowly does its work of transforming our hearts and frees us from the perceived need to compete with others for standing, belonging, worth, and value.

And the tax collector in this story?  Well, he seems to get this.   Jesus tells us that his prayer is in resonance with the wisdom of the Kingdom, and it is he who leaves the temple justified, at peace and in harmony with God.  

What is this prayer of his? It is quite simple.  And is one the desert Mothers and Fathers would recommend to us as the heartbeat of our own prayer lives: “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

  

Note that he doesn’t project or point to an external cast of villains or extenuating circumstances.  He just stands squarely, as he is and asks for the mercy that we all need and that God is ever so ready to pour out upon us.  And just as the religious leader’s projection and “othering” is the seedbed for division and violence, the tax collector’s honest prayer for mercy can be the seedbed of hope and healing in our lives and in our midst.

May God, have mercy on us, my beloved fellow sinners.  In the name of God: Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing, Amen.

Proper 25 B - October 24, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert James, OHC

Proper 25 B - Sunday, October 24, 2021

Jeremiah 31:7-9

Hebrews 7:23-28

Mark 10:46-52

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

The Bartimaeus story in Mark concludes a short travel narrative that bridges Jesus’ Galilean ministry to his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The encounter itself serves as a concluding bookend to a section in which blindness is a unifying theme. It begins with restoring the sight of the blind man at Bethsaida, and then confronting the spiritual blindness among his closest disciples who seem either unwilling or unable to accept the radical and subversive claim of God’s inbreaking kingdom revealed in the prediction of the betrayal, suffering, and death of Jesus. On his way to Jerusalem, Jesus seeks to cure their blindness and ours. 

Our passage begins as Jesus is on his way out of Jericho, which is only about 15 miles down the road from Jerusalem, with half the town tagging along. A local and known blind beggar, Bartimaeus, cries out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” This is the first time that anyone, but a demon or a disciple has called Jesus by this title. In proclaiming Jesus, Son of David, he is alluding to the Messiah who is the Davidic king that will restore Israel. This is borne out in the following chapter with Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem. 

Those surrounding Jesus discouraged Bartimaeus from seeking him. They make it difficult for this outsider to get close. However, he is not dissuaded by their rude rebukes. Despite Jesus just talking to the disciples about the first being last, Mark reports that none of the disciples raised any objection when Bartimaeus is ordered to be quiet. Only when Jesus calls him do they offer encouragement. Jesus doesn’t upbraid them for their blindness to someone in need. He simply lets them be. By him having them call Bartimaeus, he points the way for them to be the disciples they need to become. 

Bartimaeus refuses to be defined by his circumstances or the judgements of others. He persists until his shouts are recognized. His persistence sets in motion a wave of mercy, blessing, and change. Jesus calls him. Those around him call him. They become witnesses to and vessels of mercy. The cry of need that caused Bartimaeus to be shunned becomes the occasion for them all to glimpse God’s final intention for all of creation. This glimpse is the miracle. It is what turns our vision to what really matters, pointing beyond the one before us to the One who created all for love’s sake. Bartimaeus throws off his cloak, his most treasured possession, springs up, and comes to Jesus with great hope and disarming clarity. 

Mark locates the power of this encounter in the initiative of Bartimaeus. He calls out. He comes to Jesus. He articulates his desire. Jesus enables the process by asking, “What do you want me to do for you?” It’s not a rhetorical question. He wants to hear Bartimaeus say exactly what he wants, exactly how much he believes Jesus can do. Bartimaeus speaks straight from the heart: “Teacher, let me see again.” Jesus heals him immediately with a word. No mud, no spittle, not even a touch. “Go, your faith has made you well.” “Go”, Jesus tells him, but he doesn’t go. He decides on the spot that Jesus’ way is his way and follows him to Jerusalem. There’s no ambivalence. He’s not only able to see physically but is also granted the grace to see the way of salvation. He’s held up as a model of Christian discipleship.

Physical blindness is something that most of us cannot imagine, what it’s like to live in darkness, or having learned to do that, what it would be like to suddenly see, to have to make sense out of color, depth, distance, perspective, and all those things that most of us take for granted. A book titled Space and Light by Marius von Senden records strange and moving interviews with people who were born blind and received their sight through the first successful cataract surgeries. Not everything was beautiful for these patients. For many, the change they experienced was overwhelming, depressing, and frightening. Some longed to return to the dark safety they had known. After being rescued from a life in the dark, after being hauled into the light and presented with a world full of color, depth, movement, space, sights---it can feel like too much.  

Often for us, change, seeing things about ourselves and others, can trigger the same reactions. The world turns out to be much bigger than we thought, bigger and more complex. We see ourselves for the first time, making us self-conscious. We can choose to stay where we are. We can sit in the familiar dark where all the edges are rounded off so that we will not hurt ourselves, where we need only what keeps us in the dark. We can feel that there is no sense getting our hopes up; no sense seeing ourselves in another way. It can feel safer to stay with what we know, concern ourselves with what is within our reach. 

On one level this is a story about one man who wanted out of his personal darkness. It’s a story that holds clues for those who want the same thing. This is a kingdom story, and we want it for our own: to encounter Jesus, to be called to him, to find words to tell him what we want, and to be made whole. To trade in our spiritual blindness so that we can see again---see ourselves, our world, Jesus clearly, without shadow. What a leap of faith: to cry out, spring up, and ask for our heart’s desire. Are we willing to learn, like Bartimaeus, our way around the obstacles and through the newness of it, into the mystery of it? Are we willing to see everything there is, the good along with the bad, the beautiful along with the ugly---in ourselves, in others, in the world? Having regained our sight, we may, like Bartimaeus, see that our way may no longer look as appealing as Jesus’ way which leads to Jerusalem, through a garden, past a cross, to an empty tomb. 

Take heart, get up, he is calling you.  

+Amen.

Pentecost 20C - Sunday, October 27, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Pentecost 20C - Proper 25 - Sunday, October 27, 2019

Sirach 35:12-17
2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18
Luke 18:9-14

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

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

Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and who regarded others with contempt. Who trusted in themselves that they were righteous. And who regarded others with contempt.

Does that sound like anyone you know?

If you answered “yes” and the person you’re thinking of is anyone other than yourself, this story is for you. Don’t worry, it’s for me, too. For all of us. Because we all, especially those of us in churches and monasteries, need to be reminded regularly of the dangers of trusting in our own righteousness.

Like the Pharisee in this parable, we all set ourselves apart. We literally and figuratively stand by ourselves and thank God for all the ways we are not like other people. Now, most of us probably went immediately to the political. I thank God that I don’t think it’s acceptable to keep children in cages. I thank God I don’t fly a Confederate flag. I thank God I am aware of the impending environmental collapse.

But when you live in a monastery and operate a large guesthouse, you come to see that contempt is often much subtler and therefore more insidious than the political reading our current context makes so easy. Of course, we show contempt to those who differ with us politically, but contempt strikes closer to home, as well. And when it does it has the same effect on us as on the Pharisee in this parable: it isolates us. Or, rather, through our contempt and our trust in our own righteousness, we isolate ourselves from God and one another.

Let me tell you a story.

I have recently given up meditating. Now the secret is out. I’m a bad monk. And you shouldn’t listen to anything else I have to say. It’s all a lie.

Nevertheless.

If you can believe it, it was actually my spiritual director who told me to stop. She even went to so far as to order me to put my meditation cushion in a closet so that it would stop taunting me.

The problem was that my prayer had become work, and not in the Benedictine sense of ora et labora. In the striving, grasping, trusting in myself that I am righteous sense of work. Without my knowing it, I had come to feel that if my prayer didn’t feel onerous, if it didn’t take me away from something I’d rather be doing, then it wasn’t really prayer. If I actually enjoyed it, if the activity brought me pleasure, then it must be the opposite of prayer. 

My meditation, which had once led me deep into my longing for God, had become a stumbling block, something I could point to to say “See, I’m a good monk. I’m working hard. I’m choosing to do this thing that isn’t bringing me any joy, because this is what prayer really looks like.” Oh, and by the way, thank God I’m not like those people who think prayer is all butterflies and rainbows. I know the truth. Prayer is hard. It requires commitment. It isn’t about feeling states or consolation. Bring on the dark night!

Never mind about beauty, generosity, warmth, and pleasure, which are all a sign of God’s goodness and a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.

As so many of us do, in our various ways, I had fallen prey to the modern-day version of what Martin Luther called “works-righteousness,” which is to say, to the heresy that we can save or heal ourselves by our own actions. We cannot. The good news of Jesus Christ is that we don’t have to.

When we trust in our own righteousness, we make an idol of our strength. We come to worship, not God, but ourselves and our own distorted sense of what we and the world need. We rely on rules and distinctions and self-improvement schemes. And like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable, we set ourselves apart, standing far away, both from those we regard with contempt and from God, who makes her home in the imperfect fragility of the human heart. 

Really, I think, we regard ourselves with contempt, and so we try to make ourselves good and pure enough for God to draw near. What a foolish project. For God has already drawn near. And all of our groping toward God is really God’s urging within us, God’s longing for us, flowering in our desire for God. You see, God is already at work within us, bringing to fullness the plan of our salvation, our healing, and our flourishing. Our own striving usually gets in the way.

Let me tell you another story. This one is from Cardinal Basil Hume, who late in his life recalled the cookie jar in his childhood kitchen. His mother told him that those cookies—they were English, so they called them biscuits, I’m sure—were for teatime only. And that if he took a cookie at any other time, God would see. Finally, as an old man, he realized that his mother was partially right. God was watching him. But if he had taken a cookie, God would have said to him, “Here, son, have another.”

Despite all we tell ourselves, and all we have been told, we don’t need to be good for God to love us. God is good, and that is everything.

Prayer, and life, need not be all toil and rule and discipline, though those certainly have their place and time. Beauty, warmth, and pleasure can as easily draw us into the heart of the one who made and sustains us. Sometimes God is even inviting us to sit in bed, wrapped in the warmth of a quilt, with a cup of coffee in our hands and a cat at our feet, and to call that kind of resting attention prayer enough. 

And if we enjoy ourselves while we’re at it, we, too, might find God saying to us in whatever way we most need to hear it, “Here, my dear one, have another.”

Proper 25 B - Sunday, October 28, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Proper 25 - Sunday, October 28, 2018

Job 42:1-6, 10-17
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

In the name of the one God, who is lover, beloved, and love overflowing. Amen.

The days are getting darker. I mean this both literally and figuratively. And I find myself wondering, as the darkness gathers, what does hope look like?

This fall the maples have been late in catching fire. Their tardiness has coincided with the UN report on climate change, which tells us that by 2040 we will see unprecedented and violent climactic events. Faced with these new realities, we must ask when, not if, the last maple will drop its fiery leaf on this land by the Hudson.

And yet, I find that this fall, I only love the maples, this land, this world, this life harder. It is all more precious for its fragility and its impermanence.

And still, I ask, what does hope look like now?

Job and Bartimaeus both shine like stars in the night sky, by which to navigate in this gathering dark.

Today’s gospel reading presents us with two surprising words. They’re so small, you may have missed them. “Again” and “regained.” When Jesus asks Bartimaeus what he wants Jesus to do for him, he responds “Let me see again.” Similarly, when Jesus has done as Bartimaeus asks, we are told that Bartimaeus regained his sight.

The clear implication is that Bartimaeus was not always blind. Like Job, he lost something he once had, something he was probably so accustomed to he didn’t know to love it until it was gone. Until he quite literally entered the dark.

And yet, when Jesus approaches Jericho, Bartimaeus remains on the side, calling out—not for healing, but for mercy. He doesn’t rush Jesus. But neither does he sit apathetically by waiting for the healer to come along. Instead, he cries out, almost in joy, for Jesus to have mercy on him. Only when Jesus asks him specifically what he wants does Bartimaeus ask to see again.

I imagine that, however his blindness descended, however he may have raged against the loss of his sight, however he may have, for a time, despaired at this loss of light, Bartimaeus came to find peace, joy, and, assurance in the dark. I imagine that he discovered there a deeper kind of hope than he had known before.

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 darkness 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 Bartimaeus discovered in the dark is that, although he could no longer see, he could be seen, seen in the depths of his being, known and loved in the very foundation of his 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 is where hope is born.

Having lived and having been loved in such darkness, perhaps it wasn’t so important to Bartimaeus to see the physical world. Perhaps he had learned to live with such joy and such hope that, dark or not, the world’s beauty drew him into the life of God right here and now. And I can’t imagine that, having had his sight restored, he could ever forget the fantastic condition of being seen and known in the dark. Surely such an experience changed everything for him.

So, I return to my original question. As the darkness gathers, what does hope look like now? I don’t really know. But I do know that I don’t want to wait for the maples to die to let their beauty pierce my soul. And that, whether in darkness or in light, I will go on planting tulips each fall and dreaming of their growth through the winter months.

Rebecca Solnit reminds us that “joy doesn’t betray, but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.”

Perhaps that’s just it. Hope looks much the same as it always has. It looks like love, like tenderness, like grief, like beauty and heartache and rage. It looks like wonder. It looks like joy. It looks like a room full of people, gathered at a table, remembering the life of God that flows through us, that re-members us, so that we can re-member the world. It looks like dying, and rising once more.

Proper 25- Year A- October 29, 2017

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

Proper 25 - Sunday,October 29,2017

NEW! Listen to Br. Aidan preaching

Br. Aidan Owen 

In the end the only thing that matters is love.  To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.
  

Proper 25 C- Sunday October 15, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero,OHC 

Proper 25 Year C- Sunday, October 15, 2016

St. Maximos the Confessor

Seventh century Christian monk, theologian, and scholar St. Maximos the Confessor wrote: 

"The person who has come to know the weakness of human nature has gained experience of divine power. Such a person, having achieved some things and eager to achieve others through this divine power, never belittles anyone… Like a good and loving physician, God heals with individual treatment each of those who are trying to make progress."

In today’s gospel reading of the parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector, the Pharisee lifts himself up by belittling, and pointing the finger at others. He is not like those sinners, thieves, adulterers or the tax collector. His religious narcissism is a form of spiritual self-justification. In today’s society, we use many tactics to justify our self worth: intelligence, talent, alma mater, career, political views, where we live, experience, piety. 

Living without self-justifications makes me feel vulnerable, and my worst tactic for that self-justification is often self-righteousness. But day-by-day, as I continue working on my own slow conversion, I experience little glimpses of what it is to live liberated from the need of self-justification. As I come to accept that through grace God accepts me fully and unconditionally, I do not, for any reason, need to prove myself, point the finger or judge others.

The tax collector, standing far off, prays for forgiveness. “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” He returns to his home justified. Jesus’ statement at the end is quite clear: if we exalt ourselves, we will be humbled; if we humble ourselves, we will be exalted. It is a frequent theme in the teachings of Jesus. The last shall be first, and the first shall be last. Any who want to be my disciples must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. Whoever wants to be first must be servant of all. You also must wash one another's feet. Those who wish to save their lives must lose them. All those who humble themselves will be exalted.

It is a theme blatantly ignored in a culture that rewards self-promotion and celebrates success; in a culture where self-promotion bleeds into other-demotion; in a culture where in order to get to the top others are pushed down or out. It is a message lost in an election season of division, demonizing hatred, and disconcerting violent acts. The words of the Pharisee are timeless and his goal is as current as the morning paper. But any time we fall prey to the temptation to point the finger at other groups, we will find God on the other side. 

With weeks of divisive rhetoric during this horrendous presidential campaign season, we can offer an authentic and visible witness of the God who lifts the lowly and humbles the haughty. But, let us be careful not to start pointing the finger at the Pharisees of our time, lest our prayer becomes, "Dear God, I thank you that I am not like other people: hypocrite, overly pious, self righteous, or even like that Pharisee. Dear God, thank you for teaching me that I should always be humble."

The Pharisee misses the true nature of his blessing. He has trusted in himself. His prayer of gratitude may be spoken to God, but it is really about himself. He locates his righteousness entirely in his own actions, accomplishments, and being. He has turned his piety into golden calf, and has worshiped it as an idol. The tax collector, on the other hand, knows that he possesses no means by which to claim righteousness, and therefore places his hopes and claims not on anything he has done or deserved but entirely on the mercy of God.

This parable is not about self-righteousness and humility as much as it is about the grace of God who alone can judge the human heart, and who determines to justify the ungodly. At the end of the story, the Pharisee leaves the Temple and returns to his home righteous. This hasn't changed. The tax collector, however, will leave the Temple and return home justified. This parable is about finding ourselves, over and over again, with nothing to claim but our dependence on God's mercy. 

When this happens, and we are able to let go of our human-constructed divisions, then we can stand before God aware only of our need for what some weeks back Br. Robert James described as “the ridiculous nature of God’s grace, and our call to live in it.” It is a call to acknowledge our sins and to know we are forgiven. It is also a call to accept God’s grace, and to move into the arena of sanctification, and being blessed to be a blessing to others. Then, we can move from "God have mercy on me a sinner!" to "By the Grace of God, I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me" (1 Cor 15:10) The Grace of God. This is what the tax collector receives. It is available to the Pharisee as well, but he sees no need for it.  ~Amen

Proper 25 B - Oct 25, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Sr. Shane Phelan, CMA
Proper 25 B - Sunday, October 25, 2015

Job 42:1-6, 10-17
Hebrews 7:23-28 Mark 10:46-52

Job

Today’s readings seem so reassuring.  They offer us the promise that we long for.  God rewards Job for his righteousness.  Jesus heals Bartimaeus, who then follows him on the way.  What good news!  God is faithful and powerful.  Happy days are here again!

Our passage from Job comes at the very end of the book.  Commentators agree that the beginning and the end of the book were written separately from the long contest that occupies most of the book.  In the beginning, God bets Satan that Job will be faithful no matter what.  He lets Satan take everything from Job: his children die, his livestock dies, he contracts painful diseases.  He is bereft.

Job’s friends come by to “comfort” him, to be “helpful” by telling him what to do.  They insist that he must have sinned, and that if he confesses he will be restored.  Job stands in the truth that he has done nothing to deserve what has happened.  He will not curse God, but he will also not pretend a repentance he does not feel.  God eventually overwhelms him, reminding him who is God and who is dust, but the issue of justice is not resolved.  God never answers Job’s challenge.

Clearly, someone could not stand this dangling ending.  So we get the final chapter, where Job’s fortunes are restored.  Ironically, the author apparently agrees with Job’s friends about what God is like.  He wants us to forget the mysterious, awful, even capricious nature of God in favor of a Disney God.  

That Disney God is always around to tempt us.  When we focus on Jesus’ healing and teaching and forget the cross, we’re in Disneyland.  When we celebrate the messiah and reject the despised and rejected one, we’re in Disneyland.

But I’m not in Disneyland.  I’m in a haunted house, surrounded by ghosts.  Job’s sons and daughters crowd in around me.  With them are all the victims of trauma, all those who can’t forget or be forgotten.  What sort of restoration, what sort of healing, follows from trauma like Job’s?

On the way to raising four children, my mother had five miscarriages.  We carry a genetic defect that causes this.  My sister has two living children, but she has never forgotten Benjamin, who she lost at five months.  Her daughter has not had children yet, but she has lost one.  And I, when I was young, miscarried the only child I was to carry.  For years after that I would imagine my daughter.  I would count the years and think, “she would be in high school now.”  Then college, then law school.  (I don’t know why law school, it just showed up.)  Finally I stopped counting.  I eventually had a liturgy to put her to rest, the child I never knew.

Do you think Job was restored as good as new?
Do you think his wife recovered, having ten more children?
Do you think that Holocaust survivors got over it, that veterans get over it if they come back and find good jobs?

Are you over it?

29 months after Hurricane Katrina, Deacon Julius Lee stood in his yard in New Orleans and said  “The storm is gone, but the “after the storm” is always here.”  Already residents were feeling pressured to move on, to get over it, to show the world that things were normal.  But trauma does not just move on.  Trauma lives on.

In her book, Spirit and Trauma, Shelly Rambo listens to trauma in Scripture and in theology.  Following the growing field of trauma studies, she looks at the ways that trauma lingers and asks how that might shape our understanding of Christian life.  She suggests, I think rightly, that our resurrection story can too often become like Job’s happy ending, suppressing the memory of trauma that the disciples would have experienced. 

Resurrection can’t just meaning getting over the cross.  The cross haunts the Christian imagination, as it must have haunted the disciples even after seeing the risen Christ.  And Bartimaeus’ healing would not mean that his years of suffering were erased.  We do not simply get over our histories.  Bartimaeus has built a whole world around the loss of his sight.  He has spent years shunned or ignored; in fact he is told by the crowd to be quiet even when Jesus appears.  He has strength of will and desire, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t scarred.

So what is his life like on the road, in the wake of his healing?  I imagine he might be a bit suspicious of those who suddenly warm up to him.  Like the friends who return to Job, these new friends might have some work to do to prove their friendship.  And in the midst of their shared excitement and joy on the road, Bartimaeus will have fears and anxieties that the others will not share.  He has knowledge of the world in a way that those who have always seen do not.  Like Jesus, he has scars to mark his trauma.  They just aren’t always visible.

So the happy ending may not be the faithful ending.  It’s not faithful to the reality of human life, or of the ways we encounter God.
Where is God when children are gunned down at school, or die of drug overdoses?  
Where is God when some have no food or shelter, and others walk by them on their way to their BMWs?  
Where is the resurrection in our inner cities?  

Rather than a story of triumph, perhaps the story we need is a story of remaining, of enduring and sustaining.
We are in the hands of a God who is beyond our understanding.  

Job’s story reminds us that creeds and doctrines are not the heart of our faith.  At the heart of our faith is an experience, an encounter with God in Christ.  This encounter can be exhilarating, but it can also be terrifying.  
And, like any true encounter, it is transforming.  The real presence of God exceeds our Disney imagination, even the imagination of our worst fears.  

God is beyond comprehension, but not beyond relationship.

Job’s strength lies in his authenticity.  He does not pretend or try to “be good.”  He does not mouth pieties in order to placate God.  What, after all, can happen to him now?  Job is out on the vast sea of God, beyond nice phrases, and he has nothing but his fidelity.  
But out there, with nothing in the way, he can find God’s presence.  He remains, he endures, and he is transformed.

We owe it to ourselves, to one another, to our children to speak the truth about God. God stands with us in suffering and injustice, but not as one who would magically erase the effects of sin.  God endures with us, and promises to abide with us if we abide with Her. Better than a fairy tale, this opens us to real healing, real insight, real discipleship.  

May we never settle for easy answers, but demand mercy and healing.  
And may God grant us more than we can ask or imagine.

Proper 25 B - Oct 28, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
The Rev. Elizabeth Broyles
Proper 25, Year B - Sunday, October 28, 2012


Jeremiah 31:7-9
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52

Mercify, Jesus, Son of David, mercify !

That is a more accurate translation of Bartimaeus’ cry today, according to one Biblical commentator.  We don’t have such a word in our language.  Be assured, though, that mercy is a verb in this passage.

Mercify me!

Would that we could all know what we need of Jesus-- and cry out-- this nakedly.

Try it on for size.

Mercify!  Mercify me!

If that doesn’t work for you, try the more familiar cry:  Help me!  God help me!  We all have times when we cry this—but usually not in public.

Bartimaeus knew what he needed—knew what he longed for.  Jesus heard him over the din of the crowd, stopped in his tracks, and asked him “What do you want me to do for you?”

It is rare, in our intercessions when we gather, to hear someone pray for what he or she needs.  We pray for peace in the world, healing for people near and far, and for the planet.  We give thanks, but we rarely ask anything for ourselves.

Why is that?  Do we fear what people will think if we ask?
Is it because we think if we don’t ask, we can hide the depth of our need--our desperation?
Is the vulnerability to much to ask?
Or do we simply not know what we need, really?

I confess I do not know the answer, except to say I don’t pray out loud for what I need—with you—either.

It is curious.

We worship a tremendously generous God. We follow a ceaselessly compassionate Jesus, and yet we are shy about speaking out about what we need from Christ with each other.

We hear, often, “Ask and it shall be given you,” yet we are reticent in our asking.

I wonder what would happen in me, in us, in the world about us if we were willing to be as naked in our need as Bartimaeus?  I wonder what would happen if we were to take a page out of his book, and cry out, unabashedly, for Jesus to mercify us?

The Anglican in me wants to say quickly that perhaps it does not need to be spoken.  Maybe the cry in our hearts is enough. Surely, if that is what we are able to manage, God in her infinite mercy will respond.  That is true.  I know, though, that I am not going to get off the hook that easily.  The question that came as I prayed over this text was “What would happen if we cried out our need?”

We would be seen.  Hallelujah?  Oh no?  Probably a little of both.  There would probably be both relief and mortification.

I suggest that seeing and being seen in our need is a way to throw off our cloaks like Bartimaeus and  come face to face with Christ in each other.  Seeing and being seen in our need is a way to shed the illusion that among us there are those who are helpers and those who are helped, as if there were two distinct categories of people.

Each of us has a place in us—deep in, for some; near the surface for others—we each have a place of longing to be asked “What do you want me to do for you?”
Each of us also has the capacity to be Christ to another in that vulnerability.
Not for all, but for some.

When those two meet, there is a moment of heaven on earth—as there was when Jesus walked here, as there is any time people are loving and responsive to need.

Mother Theresa spoke of this when she said:
We all long for heaven, but we have it in our power to be in heaven with Christ at this very moment.  But being happy with Him now means:

Loving as he loves
Helping as he helps
Giving as he gives
Serving as he serves
Rescuing as he rescues
Being with him twenty-four hours
Touching him in his distressing disguise.

I would add:  being loved, being helped, receiving, being served and yes, even being rescued.

Sometimes we meet Christ in his distressing disguise in others; sometimes in the mirror.  Sometimes we don’t see at all.

With Bartimaeus we can ask, straight out, “My teacher, let me see again.”
Let me see my neighbor’s need AND my own.  Let me join hands with them to be part of Christ’s healing power in the world on both sides of the equation.
Let me be healed and a healer. We are called to deeply mutual relationship.

When we are willing to have our eyes opened we see, more and more, with the eyes of Christ—the eyes of love.  We see ourselves and others more clearly and
it shapes our communities, our churches, our world.  As we respond, in love, we ask more and more “what would love do!?”

Love lets its eyes open to see need:  the world’s and our own.
Love revels in all being able to partake of the abundance of creation.
Love creates right relationship between peoples of all stripes, fostering freedom to live—out loud!
Love gives birth to justice.
Love celebrates the best of what it is to be human.

We can be part of the renewal of this kind of seeing and loving in the world: in our families, in our communities, in our churches and in our workplaces—and beyond.

I want to take this far for us.  As the elections draw near, I wonder what it would be like if our country cried out its need, instead of being insistent on its strength and power, its right-eousness.

Instead, I read in the news this week that UN observers of our electoral process have been threatened with arrest if they come to close to the polls in one of our states.  My first response was shock:  I had not known that the UN observers have been present at some of our elections since 2002.  I am distressed, but not shocked that they aim to be here.  It does not take a particular political leaning to see that our political system has huge cracks in it.  We are in trouble.

I wonder what it would be like if this news was taken as a wakeup call for us—an international mirror—instead of a threat or an insult.

I wonder what it would be like if we, as a people, were to realize and admit our need.  I wonder what it would take for us to cry an honest prayer for help. I hope we are getting close, but I fear we are not ready to be mirrored by those who can see us more clearly than we can sometimes see ourselves.  We have not yet asked to see again.  Instead, we plow along.  In our names, our nation continues its warring ways.  Our manner of responding to violence is often more violence.  Our consumption-based economy crashes in on itself and we experience the impact of grave ills that give birth to strife and destruction here and abroad.

Is this all we are?  No—not by a long shot.  We bring many gifts and blessings to the world’s table.  Our faults and dis-ease are decidedly not all we are, any more than Bartimaeus was only a “blind man.”  But unless we take the log out of our own eye we dare not try to help anyone else with the splinter in theirs.

My hope is that soon we will see.  Soon we will know how to take our place as one nation, among others, that has a great need to be part of a true global partnership. My prayer is that we will join together to foster relief of suffering throughout the world.  Until then, may people of faith—all faiths—pray for peace and concord to come.  May we speak the truth of our need for change in love.  May we continue to be balm for this wounded and wondrous world by continually asking “what would love do?” and doing it.

Mercify us, Lord Jesus, and let us see again.  AMEN.