The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 26 C, November 2, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC

The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost, November 2, 2025

• Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4
• 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
• Luke 19:1-10

Click here for an audio of the sermon

In the name of our loving, liberating and life-giving God. Amen.

Zacchaeus is very eager to see Jesus. We don’t know what his motivation is. Does he want to see a celebrity? Is he intrigued by stories about this famous healer and teacher? Does he know he needs salvation?

We do know that he has a certain humility, or at least a neglect of convention. Rich people were not expected to climb up trees in their fine apparel and make a spectacle of themselves. He doesn’t care. His desire to see Jesus trumps decency.

When Jesus comes to the sycamore tree where Zacchaeus is perched, he stops and hails him: “Zacchaeus hurry down from there! For I must stay at your house today!” I must he says. That’s quite insitent.

How did Jesus know Zacchaeus’s name? Did Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector of Jericho, have a reputation that travelled? Or did Matthew the Apostle, himself an ex-tax collector, know about Zacchaeus and had told Jesus about him? Or maybe the crowd pointed Zacchaeus out, deriding him.

The name Zacchaeus (a Latin form of the Hebrew Zakkai) means “pure, innocent.” It does not conform with our image of Zacchaeus as a hardened sinner prior to his encounter with Jesus.

Is it possible that Jesus had heard previously about Zacchaeus as benefactor of the poor instead of as a rapacious tax collector and swindler?

You see, I believe those statements that Zacchaeus makes to Jesus are poorly translated in our NRSV version of Luke’s gospel. I was intrigued to discover that in the Greek text, Zacchaeus’ statement is in the present rather than the future tense. The tense used in the Greek text is the present progressive which in his statement denotes repeated, customary practice rather than a single spontaneous act of generosity.

So, consider Zacchaeus as saying: “I am giving, as a habit, half of my possessions to the poor. And if I have cheated someone of something, I make a fourfold restitution.” This changes our perspective on Zacchaeus from an instantaneous conversion to an ongoing conversion in favor of the poor.

And notice the “if” word in the cheating statement. Zacchaeus is not admitting to fraud but is accepting that if he finds out he has defrauded someone, he does restitute what has been defrauded four times (not just an equivalent restitution but the maximum rate demanded by the Torah).

So it would appear that Zacchaeus is doing what John the Baptist exhorted tax collectors to do.  The Baptist said "Collect no more than you are authorized to do" (Luke 3:13).

This said, most Jews would still have considered tax collectors as obdurate sinners, not to mention, collaborators with the occupying Roman Empire. For in order to live, most tax collectors collected more than what Rome was demanding. That was well understood and known by the Roman authorities who cared not one bit about that extortion.

So, it is likely that the crowd assumed that Zacchaeus committed extortion as a matter of course. And maybe he did, but with his winnings he supported the poor. After all, his wealth must come from somewhere.

Jesus was known to hang out with people who were not deemed proper by mainstream Israelite society including tax collectors and prostitutes. Jesus by inviting himself to stay at Zacchaeus’s home is demonstrating that these people, these sinners, too are worthy of care and healing. And Jesus is insistent about it: “I must stay at your house today.”

And upon hearing Zacchaeus’s statement of how he conducts himself, Jesus announces Zacchaeus’s honor status as a child of Abraham. He is not to be shunned from the Jericho community despite his economically privileged and shady station in life.

What Luke the evangelist is doing in the story of Zacchaeus the pure, the innocent, is setting a contrast with the story he told just before Jesus’ arrival in Jericho. 

In Chapter 18 of his gospel, Luke told the story of the ruler (probably a religious leader) who wanted to be a follower of Jesus. He observed all the main commandments but was unwilling to go where Jesus suggested he go. 

He couldn’t bring himself to part with his belongings, to sell everything he possessed, and to give it to the poor. Jesus concluded that incident by saying: “How difficult it is for those who have money to enter the kingdom of God” (Luke 18:24b).

Luke the evangelist contrasts the reluctant religious leader with the willing secular leader, both of them rich. We get the examples of two rich people reacting to Jesus’s teaching in opposite manners.

In Zacchaeus, we get the example of a rich person who participates in the building of God’s kingdom even if he doesn’t reach the level demanded by Jesus from his follower. That is: to sell everything they own and give it to the poor. At least, Zacchaeus is giving a large part of what he owns to the poor. Potentially that giving is difficult, if not painful.

But what Zacchaeus says is his practice is sufficient for Jesus to announce: “Today salvation has happened in this house, because Zacchaeus too is a child of Abraham.” Jesus adds: “For the Son of Man came to seek and save what was lost.” By that, he underscores that even so, Zacchaeus is not perfect, nor do we need to be perfect to be saved. Making real intentional efforts toward the building of God’s Kingdom is enough, regardless of outcomes. And thank God that Jesus has come to save the lost ones because, some, if not all of us, belong in that lot.

We have a beautiful collect for the Fourth Sunday of Advent in which we pray that Jesus at his coming may find in us a mansion prepared for himself. But truthfully, how do you prepare your mansion for the coming of the Messiah? We may have fair warning and try, but sometimes Jesus just shows up and says, “Bernard, come on down. I'm staying at your place tonight.” I protest: “Lord, my house is a mess, my mansion is in shambles.”  And I hear Jesus saying: “Not to worry, we'll clean it up together.”  I hope you can hear that as well.

God’s incommensurate grace precedes our acts of virtue. God loves us first. We respond with our love in prayers and actions. And if we’re rich or comfortable, we don’t forget the poor, the apple of God’s eye.

Beloved and infinitely loving God, you shower us with graces, graces from before we were born, graces throughout our lifetime and graces beyond our lives. Give us to love the poor as you do. May we show you our love in loving them. Amen.

The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost B - November 3, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky

The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 26B, November 3, 2024

• Deuteronomy 6:1-9
• Psalm 119:1-8
• Hebrews 9:11-14
• Mark 12:28-34

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Today's gospel passage should be familiar to almost everyone here this morning. The so-called Great Commandment discourse appears in all three synoptic gospels, though each within a slightly different context and each taking a slightly different direction or turn. And we hear them every year in our Sunday Eucharist readings.
Last year we heard Matthew's rendition with its wonderful conclusion instantly recognizable to any who attended or still attend traditional language Anglican worship: “...on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”  Next year we will hear Luke’s version. While different from Mark only in minor details, it concludes with the lawyer or scribe who posed the initial question about the greatest commandment asking Jesus a second follow-up question:  “And who is my neighbor?” And that, of course, leads into what is arguably Jesus’s most memorable parable, that of the Good Samaritan with its powerful concluding advice: “Go and do likewise.”
Mark's version that we hear this morning is probably the earliest and most concise of the three. And refreshingly, the lawyer or scribe is presented as a sincere seeker after truth rather than as an adversary setting Jesus up in some kind of test or trap. Maybe we can all take heart from this. Having said this, however, I find it difficult to know what more to say about this passage that has not already been said by me or by others. Is there anything new here? Anything revolutionary? Anything transformative?
This past week saw the conclusion of The Most Reverend Michael Curry’s nine-year term as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. Bishop Michael, as he was known, was a gentle pastor and a captivating preacher. He preached here in this chapel in 2017. And a friend who heard him preach in Poughkeepsie said afterwards that it was like watching a whirling dervish in the high pulpit of Christ Church, so much so that he thought the bishop might just fly right out. I can believe that. I was present at the General Convention where he was elected Presiding Bishop and remember well the excitement and the hope that were palpable. I also attended his installation at the National Cathedral in Washington DC.  Again, it was a service of tremendous beauty, hope, and joy. Of course, Bp. Michael became an international celebrity for his sermon at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. He was, it is safe to say, not your usual Anglican divine; he was an heir to a tradition of enslavement and exclusion and a deep Christian spirituality that found accent and voice in his sermons here and around the world. For me, however, his legacy is summed up not in a new teaching, but in the new expression of an old one, just as Jesus himself and other rabbis did in their day. And that is his teaching: “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”  This axiom or formula does not tell us what we should or should not do. But it does give us a guideline, a rule, a measure to assess ourselves, our own actions or inaction as well as the dramas of our own interior life, of our own hearts. It is, as it were, the standard, the Golden Rule, for personal, social, and political life. “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”
In his living this guidance and in his fearless and unembarrassed embrace of Jesus in a church that has sometimes been reluctant to claim and own the name of its Savior and Lord, and in his work around the Beloved Community as a vision toward the Kingdom of God, Bishop Michael changed the language and heart of the Episcopal Church as one friend put it. “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.” 
But—and maybe you knew this was coming—a caveat. We need to be careful and deliberate about what we love and how we love. St. Augustine writing 1600 years ago says: “Everybody loves; the question is, what is the object of our love? In Scripture we are not urged to stop loving, but instead to choose what we love.”  Augustine is right: everybody loves. Each of us has some orienting desire which shapes our decisions, our days, our lives. For too many it is quite basic. It is the simple desire for safety, food, and housing. For many others it is the desire for power. For others financial or vocational success. Or for healthy relationships. Others perhaps hope for freedom from paralyzing fear or anxiety or depression or to be cured once and for all of one or another physical malady. Truthfully, I think many of us have several such loves, and they sometimes appear to conflict with each other. And if you are like me, you have at best only a vague awareness of what many of these are. As so the 1980 Country pop song got it right:  we are often looking for love in all the wrong places, and mostly because we don’t know what it is we are looking for.
What to do?
A quarter of a century ago, at a deeply complicated and low point in my life, I poured out my secret pain to a priest friend who is now a bishop in the Church of England. And in response he sent me one of the most helpful letters I have ever received. It consisted solely of  a long quote from the Anglican laywoman, spiritual director and writer, Evelyn Underhill (1875 -1941)  It is a prayer for wholeness :
“O Lord, penetrate those murky corners where we hide memories and tendencies on which we do not care to look, but which we will not disinter and yield freely up to you, that you may purify and transmute them: the persistent buried grudge, the half-acknowledged enmity which is still smouldering; the bitterness of that loss we have not turned into sacrifice; the private comfort we cling to; the secret fear of failure which saps our initiative and is really inverted pride; the pessimism which is an insult to your joy, Lord; we bring all these to you, and we review them with shame and penitence in your steadfast light.”
It is obviously a prayer of penitence. But it is more than that. It is a prayer for the purifying and clarification and reordering of our loves so that in the end, we might love aright, that we might love God instead of some false image that we think is God, that we might say confidently with Bp. Curry: “If it’s not about love it’s not about God” and have some degree of trust that we are not entirely deceiving ourselves. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?
Today’s passage from Mark ends: “When Jesus saw that he (the scribe) answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”  Dean Andrew McGowan of Yale Divinity School comments: “...the scribe, being in conversation with Jesus himself, is already next to the one whose presence embodies the reign of God. Of course others have also been that close, but have failed to see what was in front of them.”
May we be counted among those who are not far from the kingdom of God. Like the scribe, let us draw near to Jesus and find in him the full outpouring of God’s essential nature as Love itself…a love that clarifies, purifies, and reorders our own precious loves…and blesses them. May we discover that Love today in Scripture and Sacrament, in prayer and service and above all in each other. And in the mirror.
Amen.

Proper 26 A - November 5, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky OHC

The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 26 A, November 5, 2023

 

Micah 3:5-12
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
Matthew 23:1-12

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

I want to begin this morning by acknowledging the current situation in Israel, Gaza and that entire region that we often call the Holy Land. It is a situation marked by a complex history, competing claims, and horrendous human suffering. We must be careful in our Christian proclamation and preaching not to add to this fraught and heart-breaking situation through misinterpretation of our scriptures leading either to a fundamentalist Judeo-Christian political-religious dream on the one hand or to hateful anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism on the other.  And I say this with full knowledge that people—even us—differ regarding Zionism, Palestinian homelands, and the causes of and justifications for the terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7 and for the ongoing bombardment of Northern Gaza.  We plead: Lord, have mercy!

For the past several weeks and continuing through this month, we have been and shall be hearing passages from the gospel according to Matthew beginning in the middle of chapter 21 and continuing until chapter 25 with its Parable of the Sheep and the Goats that we will be read on the Sunday of Christ the King. These passages from Matthew’s gospel express a deep tension and conflict between Jesus and the Judean Temple authorities, sometimes so violently that I cringe when I hear them and say inwardly: “Jesus, couldn't you be a bit more diplomatic?” But we must remember that, at least according to Matthew’s timeline, these intense interactions take place in Jerusalem in the very last days before Jesus’ crucifixion. They follow on the heels of his triumphant entry into Jerusalem and his overturning of the tables of the money changers in the Temple with their implicit and not so implicit claim that he comes as the true Messiah, challenging both the dominant institutional expression of Judaism and Roman colonial oppression.

I quote, as I often do, Berkeley Divinity School Dean Andrew McGowan whose commentary offers us some helpful and necessary reminders. He writes of the “…need to contextualize the Gospels of these last two months of the liturgical year within the mounting drama of Jesus 's last days in Jerusalem. His conflict with the chief priest is not the basis for a theory of Christian-Jewish relations; it is an account, in what is arguably the most Jewish of the Gospels (Matthew), of the conflict between the Jewish Messiah and the authorities of the time.”

Again he writes: “…it is important—let's say crucial—to remember there is no conflict depicted here between Jesus and Judaism let alone between Christianity and Judaism. Jesus in this passage [Matt 22:34-46] is being presented as a paradigmatic Jew, both as a teacher of the law more effective than his interviewer, and also as the true Son of David, the Messianic King. Matthew also is clearly Jewish in belief and practice. These are conflicts within Judaism, at this point.”  It is important to stress those final words: at this point.  That will change over time, but not yet.

Verbal sparring, textual counter-interpretations, and linguistic challenges--at least those that are well-intentioned--were and remain a classic way of moving toward greater truth. This was true in Jesus’ day and remains true to this day in Talmudic studies in Judaism just as it is true in our courts of law where opposing legal teams try to uncover a fuller truth through sometimes difficult and challenging verbal engagement. We see a similar dynamic in so-called Buddhist Dharma combat where teacher and student spar with each other to uncover deficiencies or errors and to move to greater clarity.  And so it is, I believe, in these chapters of Matthew’s gospel.  Jesus respects Jewish law, and if anything, his teaching seeks to deepen and radicalize the law and its demands though a yet more demanding and interiorized command. And that is, of course, the command to love which is for Jesus at the heart of it all. It is the central and fundamental interpretative principle which governs his, and I hope our, understanding and approach.  But whatever else these passages may teach us, we must first acknowledge that they are a debate within first-century Judaism, though they often continue to echo into our own age and within our own hearts.

So what's the problem? Well, it's simple and is in no way unique to first-century Judean Pharisees, scribes or temple authorities.  It is that the controlling authorities--the teachers, the religious scholars, the experts--don't practice what they teach or preach or claim to believe. And frankly, this should not surprise us.  We are all familiar with this disconnect both within others and in ourselves.  But there is more to it than that. For the dissonance between what we say and what we do is complicated by the fact that others, society, the community honors these leaders as if this were not the case.  And these very leaders remain blind actors, wittingly or unwittingly playing the role to the hilt, including all the visible accoutrements: broad phylacteries, long fringes and ample robes. This is not a wholesale condemnation of first-century Judaism but rather a withering critique of a compromised institution (the Temple) and of many, though by no means all, of its leaders with their layers of political collaboration and moral accommodation.  And it can and does serve as a withering critique of our own institutions and our own characters.

I had to laugh when I saw that Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of today’s Gospel passage in “The Message.” He titled this section of Matthew's gospel “Religious Fashion Shows.” Listen to his, admittedly non-literal, take on the central part of today’s reading:
Now Jesus turned to address his disciples, along with the crowd that had gathered with them. “The religion scholars and Pharisees are competent teachers in God’s Law. You won’t go wrong in following their teachings on Moses. But be careful about following them. They talk a good line, but they don’t live it. They don’t take it into their hearts and live it out in their behavior. It’s all spit-and-polish veneer.
Their lives are perpetual fashion shows, embroidered prayer shawls one day and flowery prayers the next. They love to sit at the head table at church dinners, basking in the most prominent positions, preening in the radiance of public flattery, receiving honorary degrees, and getting called ‘Doctor’ and ‘Reverend.’
“Don’t let people do that to you, put you on a pedestal like that. You all have a single Teacher, and you are all classmates. Don’t set people up as experts over your life, letting them tell you what to do. Save that authority for God; let him tell you what to do. No one else should carry the title of ‘Father’; you have only one Father, and he’s in heaven. And don’t let people maneuver you into taking charge of them. There is only one Life-Leader for you and them—Christ.

The existential danger here, of course, is precisely hypocrisy, that lack of coherence between our teaching and our actions, between what we say and what we do, between who we think we are and who we truly are. That is a danger, yes, and one that applies to all of us at some level, probably at many levels. But there is an even greater danger here, one that's more insidious and damaging. And that is that we begin to believe the idealizations that others project on us and attempt to live into and serve their unexamined fantasies.  “Don't let them put you on that pedestal,” says Eugene Peterson. Don't believe and start living your life as if you were something you are not, namely, the unfulfilled and unfillable fantasies of others.  Don’t start living into their projections!  That, in my book, is the real danger.  And believe me, I speak from experience.

It's no accident that our gospel passage ends with an exhortation towards humility over against hypocrisy in both its senses, that disconnect between what we say or believe and what we do or are as well as in the sense of buying into the projections of others. Humility is the antidote to this poison.  And humility in our Christian, and particularly on our monastic, tradition is never understood as self-abasement. Rather it names the slow and sometimes painful process of growing into the truth about ourselves so that we can finally live who we are.

Trappist monk Michael Casey in his book “A Guide to Living in the Truth’ reminds us that hypocrisy is a word that refers to a play actor, a pretender, or dissembler. And humility means setting aside the mask. It is, he says: “…a kind of nakedness that allows us to be seen without the bulwarks of social conventions. We present ourselves to others transparently, in all our imperfection and vulnerability. We depend on their goodwill for acceptance and love, not on the success of our efforts at self-promotion. The fruit of humility… is naturalness. Being at home with ourselves. Being ourselves.”

It is this very naturalness, this coming home to ourselves, this liberation from the need to hide from others or from God or from ourselves behind some mask, which is, I believe, the great hope and promise of our faith.  And it is a freedom which is needed not just by scribes and Pharisees, but by all of us.  Could this be the salvation that Jesus brings?  Could it?

Proper 26 C - October 30, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo, OHC

Pentecost, Proper 26 C - October 30, 2022

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
Luke 19:1-10

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

A children's song

Zacchaeus was a wee little man 

And a wee little man was he. 

He climbed up in a sycamore tree 

For the Lord he wanted to see. 

And when the Savior passed that way 

He looked up in the tree

And said, (spoken) “Zacchaeus, you come down! 

For I'm going to your house today!

For I'm going to your house today!”

        There's more, but I'll spare you. You can Google this children's song and listen to it on YouTube. You can also purchase the sheet music for $1.99, and it comes with suggested hand gestures.

We all know the story, or at least we think we do. Here is Zacchaeus, another tax collector, one of those shady characters, collaborator with the Roman oppressors, making a living by skimming off of the taxes collected and amassing great wealth. But this is not just another tax collector. Luke tells us this was the chief tax collector. He was a pariah, an outcast in his community, but also someone given grudging respect not because of his work, but because of his power. Luke seems to delight in telling stories about tax collectors along with their unsavory fellow travelers: the prostitutes.  

The story, as most of us know and as our little Sunday school ditty tells us, revolves around a wee little man. Zacchaeus is short, of small stature, maybe even tiny. This cannot have helped his social status in 1st century Palestine. Maybe he, like other short people who, by hook or by crook, make successes of themselves--however you define success--are dismissed as having a Napoleon complex or analyzed as having deep compensation needs. All rather unseemly.

I'm short.  Not that short: I'm five foot six, though shrinking daily. But that puts me about three or four inches below the average height of males in America. I've learned to joke about that and work around it. But it is something that people who don't fit the average profile learn early in life...people who are short or obese or living with disabilities or otherwise not filling societal expectations of beauty, something that women know perhaps better than men. And there is a whole raft of social science research which documents the financial disadvantages of being short. On balance, all other things being equal, for every inch of height, a male earns something like $1000 a year. Perhaps not a huge advantage, but $6000 or $7000 or more a year can make a big difference.  Think of compound interest over a lifetime. 

There are all sorts of explanations offered for this disparity. Some see it as implicit bias. Others as a kind of deep sociobiological fact which rewards those who might be more successful in finding a mate and procreating and surviving.  Some researchers note that it is the height advantage in the early teen years which makes a difference throughout the entire life cycle, that those who are taller at, say, 13 are more likely to be involved in group activities that require strength, such as sports, and which may serve as laboratories for leadership and self-esteem and self-confidence. Or maybe they just come from families with greater access to proper nutrition.  Some even suggest that taller children are more curious and are in the end brighter than their shorter colleagues. I don't know what our brother Zacchaeus would think about all of this. I know what I think about it.

 

        But there's a bit of a fly in the ointment concerning this story of Zacchaeus that I want to share with you. In 2004, Roberta Bondi, Professor Emeritus of Church History at Candler School of Theology, published a brief reflection on this Gospel passage.  She quotes a Methodist pastor and dear friend whom she heard preach on the story of Zacchaeus. And here's the way he told it:

        “There was once a bad, rich man in Jericho named Zacchaeus who heard that Jesus was coming to town and wanted to see him very much. When Jesus arrived, however, the crowds were thick, and Jesus was short so Zacchaeus couldn't see him. Then he hit on an idea. He would climb a sycamore tree.”

        She asked the pastor how he decided that Jesus was the short one in Luke's story. He answered, “I can't prove that he was, but look it up in the Greek. You really can't tell who ‘he’ refers to. As far as I'm concerned, however, Jesus was the short one.”

 

Think about that for a minute.  As heirs to a muscular Christianity, we're quite accustomed to thinking of Jesus as not only white but, shall we say, ripped. He's tall, he’s handsome, he physically stands out in a crowd, and he speaks with a booming voice. And people listen. But there's no evidence for any of this.  It is sometimes said that God created us in God’s image…and that we returned the favor. In many ways, the same can be said of our view of Jesus.  And that’s not altogether bad.  Our mental image of Jesus almost inevitably reflects our view of ourselves and of what our culture values.  I’ve been as deeply moved by images of Jesus as an African or Asian or Polynesian or Native American as I have been of him as a White man.  But who really knows what an average Palestinian of 2000 years ago looked like exactly?  If anything comes close, I’d bet on the image of Jesus as portrayed in early byzantine icons.  Surely we need to see ourselves in Jesus, limited though we must be by the historical fact of his being a male. Yet even here, I have been moved by Christa, the controversial crucifix at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine that depicts Jesus as a woman on a cross.   

        But a short Jesus?  Somebody so small that folks in a crowd have trouble seeing him?  Could that be why he was always preaching on a Mount or from the prow of a boat?  Maybe Jesus needed a bit of a boost to be seen and heard and followed.  And as Scriptures teaches us, sometimes the Word comes to us in a still, small voice.

There’s a delightful story in our OHC history. It is related by Father Alan Whittemore who wrote a memoir of the early days of our order while he was marooned in Freetown, Sierra Leone early in 1947. It is an important record of our early members. Whittemore features the stories of some of the great men of those early days:  the Father Founder, Father Hughson, Father Sill, Father Alan, and so on. But he also includes stories of less distinguished brothers. One of my favorites is Father Louis Lorey.  

Whittemore begins his chapter with his dry, almost condescending, New England tone. He says: “God has room in his cloister for the little as well as the great. This chapter is about two ‘little ones’: Father Lorey and Father Webb. They were small in body as well as in intellectual caliber and they made an amusing spectacle when they stood together. The two were about the same height--or lack of it--but Father Lorey was old and Father Webb young; Father Lorey was fat and Charlie Webb, as we called him, was thin. But both were bald, and they both wore skull caps.” 

He talks about Father Lorey’s decades-long ministry at Saint Andrews School in Sewanee TN which the Order founded in its early days.  Father Lorey was known to the boys as ‘the teeny-weeny Father’ and was not much bigger than most of them.  He had, as Father Whittemore says, “…a simple affectionate piety and such trust in human hearts as removed all prejudices.”

Whittemore relates going on a mission to a Southern parish. The Rector had asked them to speak to the men at a neighboring prison.  One afternoon: “… after I had said my say, a bench was produced for Father Lorey to stand on. Otherwise the men could not have seen him. He clambered onto it and looked round him beaming. Then he launched forth and talked to them about their mothers, and about God's Love and His Cross. You could hear a pin fall.”

I find this deeply moving. Here is the voice of God coming from “the teeny weeny” father and moving the hearts of a very tough audience. I wonder if Jesus was like that. I wonder if Jesus needed a bench or a mountain in order to be seen or heard. But I don't wonder at the power of Jesus. Short or tall, Jesus looked up at Zacchaeus, this prominent social outcast hanging out in a tree so that he might get a look at Jesus, and called out to him: “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down for I must stay at your house today.”  

This must have come as a shock to the crowd, not to mention to Zacchaeus. Why in God's name would Jesus stay with the chief tax collector, with this collaborator, with this sinner? We don't know exactly. What we do know is that Jesus came to Zacchaeus’ house and Zacchaeus’ was changed. He was transformed. He was converted. Zacchaeus was seen by Jesus in that tree. And he was seen as something more than a collaborator and a con man.  Luke tells us that Zacchaeus stood in his house and said: “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor and if I have defrauded any one of anything I will pay back four times as much.” (Actually, the Greek says not that he will give to the poor but that he is already giving to the poor right now.)  And Jesus says, “Today wholeness, healing, salvation has come to this house. Because he too is a son of Abraham.” Maybe it’s no accident or irony that the name Zacchaeus literally means clean or pure.  Maybe Jesus saw in Zacchaeus a purity that neither Zacchaeus nor his community could ever dream of or imagine. And Jesus drew that purity out of him.

Jesus is always out visiting and calling, and we don't know when he's going to come to our neighborhood or to our house. We have a beautiful collect for the Fourth Sunday of Advent in which we pray that Jesus at his coming may find in us a mansion prepared for himself. But truthfully, how do you prepare your mansion for the coming of the Messiah? We may have fair warning and try, but sometimes Jesus just shows up and says, “Robert, come on down. I'm staying at your place tonight.” I protest: “Lord, my house is a mess, my mansion is in shambles.”  And I hear Jesus saying:  “Not to worry, we'll clean it up together.”  I hope you can hear that as well.

   

“Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he.” Maybe.  Whatever our stature, if like Zacchaeus we take a first small step, if we go out on a limb to see Jesus, if we climb the sycamore tree with our name on it, even if that tree that can sometimes look and feel like a cross…we may find that we have a house guest for the night and a mansion for all eternity. 

Pentecost 21C - Sunday, November 3, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Pierson, OHC
Pentecost 21C - Proper 26 - Sunday, November 3, 2019

Isaiah 1:10-18
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
Luke 19:1-10

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

The prophet Isaiah says, “Hear the word of the Lord....Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me.”  So there....I guess we've been told.  Luckily we no longer put much stock in animal sacrifices or even cereal offerings, but what about our incense?  We do use a lot of it around here.

Of course, we are not meant to hear this passage literally, and yes, I did take it completely out of context.  The actual point that the prophet is making is in the next verse:  “I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.”  God is not interested in our religiosity if it is not supported by a concern for justice, and care for the poor, and the oppressed.  We can't hide our sinfulness behind religious ritual or even pious prayers.  God sees right through that.  God calls us to “remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”

My guess is that most, if not all of us, are concerned for the poor and oppressed --to a point.  And it's at that point that we need to hear what the prophet Isaiah is saying today.  Can we be more concerned than we are?  Should we be more concerned than we are for those who lack the basics of life?  Well, at least none of us are as out of touch with the needs of our neighbors as Zacchaeus was.

The gospel story today tells us that Zacchaeus “was a chief tax collector and was rich.”  As we know, tax collectors were Jewish people who worked for the Romans to collect tax money to be sent to Rome.  They weren't paid, but were expected to collect their own living expenses by charging more than was owed to Rome, and keeping the rest for themselves.  If Zacchaeus was a rich man, then we can assume that he was a very skilled extortionist.  He knew how to get lots of money from people, and they resented him for it.  That's why people were so upset when Jesus paid him attention.

And it's interesting that Jesus knew who he was.  Zacchaeus wanted to see who Jesus was.  Evidently they had never met, but Jesus knew who that man in the tree was even before he was introduced.  Zacchaeus was that notorious.  And if Jesus knew who he was, he knew what kind of person he was, just as everyone else did.  But Jesus didn't preach to Zacchaeus; he didn't correct or criticize him, or even acknowledge his reputation.  Jesus simply reached out to Zacchaeus, and invited himself to “stay” at his house.  It's understandable that the people around were upset.  Why would Jesus want to stay with a tax collector? And a rich one, at that. Doesn't he know what kind of man this is?

I think Jesus knew exactly what he was doing.  His open, loving invitation to Zacchaeus caused a tremendous conversion to take place.  Now, all of a sudden, Zacchaeus is offering to give half of what he owns to the poor.  And he even admits that he might have defrauded some people, and is willing to pay them back four times as much.  Jesus' merciful approach to Zacchaeus completely disarms him and enables him to seek to do the right things regarding his neighbors.  When Jesus preaches, he doesn't speak to Zacchaeus but rather to the crowd, reminding them that Zacchaeus is “a son of Abraham,” a member of the Jewish community just as much as they are.

So let's return for a moment to Isaiah's concern about the poor and oppressed.  We don't need to get defensive about our lack of attention to the poor.  We are called, like Zaccheus, to recognize that we are all in this together, that we are all members of the human family and that we must be concerned for those who have less than we do because we owe it to them to share what we have rather than hoard it for ourselves.  Like Zacchaeus, Jesus' love and mercy for us empowers us to be loving and merciful to others in need.  We are moved to act, not out of guilt, but rather out of gratitude for all that God has done for us.

We hope that Paul might say of us what he said about the people of Thessalonika:  “your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of everyone of you for one another is increasing....To this end we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith, so that the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Proper 27 B - Sunday, November 11, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Roy Parker, OHC
Proper 27 B - Sunday, November 11, 2018

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

For a clearer understanding of the character of the scribes of whom Jesus speaks in this passage it will be helpful to give a description which will allow us a more accurate understanding of the poor widow’s contribution to the temple treasury, some culled from the Anchor Bible commentary.

In Mark, the scribes are the principal opponents of Jesus and they are frequently mentioned — twenty-two times in all,  The present instance is the only recorded example of Jesus inveighing against the conduct of the scribes, as distinct from their teaching. Although the scribes and the Pharisees are linked in the condemnation of legalism in Matthew, it is important to draw a proper distinction.

Whereas the Pharisees had an established position, and an honorable one, as interpreters of the Law and its traditions, and were also regarded as highly patriotic, the scribes as “bookmen” were regarded mainly as recorders or collectors of opinions and less authoritative than the Pharisees. As is often the case with those of lesser status, they are represented in the New Testament as not only argumentative, but given to ostentation to magnify their public image — like a classmate of mine at the Webb School in Claremont, California who, having failed to win an athletic varsity letter — a large red capital E — from his previous school, purloined one and injudiciously wore it to breakfast the day after Webb’s football defeat by the Emerson School.

Beyond the issue of ostentation, Jesus condemned the scribes in that they are held responsible for the exactions which effectively destroyed widows’ estates, all on behalf of a temple still in building and soon to come to an end. One of the salient features of Jesus’ confrontation with the scribes in Mark is the connection made between them and the temple. Though one may protest that the costs of the upkeep of the temple and its round of sacrificial observances were the concern of the clergy, Mark’s gospel firmly lays responsibility for extravagance and excess at the door of the scribes, and they are the enemies of Jesus before the clergy enter the picture. The scribes in and around Jerusalem are quite regularly associated with the clergy. Any challenge by Jesus to the temple system and its clergy is accepted by the scribes as a challenge to their standing.

In this light, we are to understand the charge that the scribes offer long prayers. Not that they are responsible for the worship and the liturgies of the temple, but that they consistently urge upon people the fundamental necessity of keeping the interminable round of observances in being. Perhaps we ought to understand the phrase for appearances’ sake not as an indication of pretense, but as a judgment by Jesus that the observances themselves were but an outward show without substance.

The narrative of the poor widow’s offering is, among other things, a continuation of the previous attack on the scribes and their part, as Mark sees it, in the whole official establishment of Judaism in Jerusalem. The judgement of Jesus is that the scribes were like leeches on the Jewish faithful and not the least of their sins was their insistence on the support of the temple system, and all that it implied, even to the sacrificing of widows’ property. Jesus does not commend the widow at all for sacrificing all she had; rather, the story should be read as a lament for a system which could end in the destitution of a widow.

Part of us is attracted to system while another part harbors an expectation which cannot be satisfied by a system, as in Tagore’s aphorism “While God waits for the temple to be built of love, people bring stones.”  This was brought home to me some years ago on a Saturday morning in Berkeley, California some years ago outside the Jesuit School of Theology. The previous evening Raymond Brown, renowned commentator on the Fourth Gospel, had flown in to give a public lecture, and I just happened to meet him that following morning. It also happened that I was to preach the Sunday sermon at a local church on John’s account of the feeding of the five thousand for which I had figured out what seemed to me  a brilliant explanation which discounted the miraculous.  On spying Professor Brown I thought, “What a perfect opportunity to get a verification of my theory.” Dr. Brown, to be sure, listened carefully, but when I had spoken he contradicted me very forcefully regarding the multiplication of loaves, “But they were expecting this!” “Well,” I thought, “back to rewrite.”

Such expectation is displayed by both widows in today’s readings, marginalized women driven to put all their eggs in the basket of God’s promise, persons acting out of the only abundance they had, an abundance of heart.  As a matter of historical interest, by the way, the advertisements our Founder distributed for his mission talks often concluded with the exhortation “Expect Much.”

When operating at the margins of possibility, you are liable to be more ecstatic than cautious and it might land you in trouble. Like Harry James’ solo on “Life Goes to a Party” in Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert described by the liner notes as “like someone rushing out onto an icy pond and discovering they ain’t got skates.” By that point in the concert, the vibe was so hot that Harry James was possessed by it. This is what Raymond Brown meant: Five thousand people possessed by the vibe of Jesus presiding at Passover — for sure they were expecting this. Once upon a time the philosopher Nietzsche came up with the insight that creation takes place in the realms of music, and so I imagine the expectation of those in the presence of Jesus at Passover might have been a kind of creating musical event, a Passover light opera.

The only formula I can offer for reconciling system with expectation is that they must constantly be wrestled together.

Proper 26 B - Sunday, November 4, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
Proper 26 B - Sunday, November 4, 2018

Ruth 1:1-18
Hebrews 9:11-14
Mark 12:28-34

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

I was recently surfing the internet and came across this headline:  “Tech Community Outraged after SQLite Founder Adopts Benedictine Code of Conduct” The first paragraph of the article reads:

“The founder of the world's most widely used database engine ignited a firestorm in the tech community after it was revealed that he had posted a code of conduct for users based on the teachings of the Bible and an ancient order of monks founded by Benedict of Nursia.”

What he had posted was Chapter 4 of the Rule of St. Benedict:  “The Tools for Good Works.”

The chapter comprises 72 exhortations or commandments, beginning with the Two Great Commandments that we heard this morning in the Gospel:  Love of God and Love of Neighbor, commandments which Jesus quotes from the Torah (Deuteronomy and Leviticus). The chapter goes on to add most of the Ten Commandments and various other behaviors or proscriptions.

Taken together they constitute a thorough moral examination of Christian living, ranging in content from observable, external actions such as relieving the lot of the poor and clothing the naked and burying the dead and not being lazy and not giving way to anger to more interior practices and dispositions that we might term habits of the heart:

• Don't nurse a grudge
• Utter only the truth from heart and mouth
• Do not return evil for evil
• Love your enemies
• Don't be a grumbler or a detractor
• Hate no one
• Don't be jealous
• Don't be proud or arrogant
• Don't love quarreling
• Don't be addicted to wine

There are even some explicitly religious directives:

• Prefer nothing more than the love of Christ
• Love fasting and chastity
• Deny yourself in order to follow Christ
• Keep death daily before your eyes
• Put your hope in God

As you might imagine, this didn't go over big in Silicon Valley...and maybe not with most of us if we are honest.  It's an exhaustive and perhaps exhausting list and would be frankly impossible—is impossible—were it not for the final 72nd tool:  “Never despair of God's mercy.”

Most of these “tools” are not commandments or laws in our usual sense—enforceable dictums--but only in an extended sense, just as the Two Great Commandments that we hear from Torah and from Jesus and which begin this list are not.  But they help me, they help all of us to better understand the content of those two great commandments. They “unpack” them for us, so to speak. And indeed the two are fundamentally and ultimately one.  Jesus invites us to acts of love...acts which are both interior and exterior, internal dispositions of the heart and external observable behaviors.  And unless we have both, cultivate both, our loving is incomplete and weak.  And so are we.

Here in this community, we are fond of quoting a line from the rule of our founder James Otis Sargent Huntington: “Love must act as light must shine and fire must burn.”  This too is not a commandment in the usual sense—a demand or directive. It is rather a description of the very nature of love.  It is not the case that we must first get our act together and then be or do something loving. Rather, it is the very nature or essence or character of love to overflow in acts of love, just as it is of the very nature or character of light to shine and of fire to burn. And this is not original with our Father Founder. St. Ignatius Loyola says as much in his Spiritual Exercises:  “Love ought to show itself in deeds over and above words.”

We rightly say that the God the Holy Trinity Itself naturally overflows in creativity revealing God and Godself in an abundance, and overflow, an outpouring of love.

And what is true of God is true of us...all of us.  All of us are lovers, though few of us love well.

St. Augustine says, “Everybody loves: the question is, what is the object of our love?  In Scripture, we are not urged to stop loving, but instead to choose what we love.”  To choose carefully and wisely and sweetly, with all our whole heart and mind and strength.

There's a quote going around on the Internet and available now in posters and note cards attributed to Pedro Arrupe, SJ, former Superior General of the Jesuits  In fact, he never said it, but—like the so-called Prayer of St. Francis—it seems to me, at least for the most part, true. You may have seen it:

Nothing is more practical than
finding God, than
falling in Love
in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.
It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in Love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.

The Tools of Good Works are finally a commentary and explication of the two great Commandments—which are indeed only one.  They teach us how to love, what love must look like, what shape and texture our loving will have.  They offer us some of the signs and signposts of love. Yes: let us be careful what we love. But let us not fail to love and to love as Christians, guarding and guiding both our hearts and our hands: “Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”

There is a postscript: SQLite ultimately had to abandon the Rule of Benedict as their Code of Conduct. It didn't meet industry standards. So they re-posted it as their “Code of Ethics,” substituting instead the Code of Conduct from Mozilla, of Firefox fame.  They note however that they and their developers nevertheless pledge to follow the spirit of the Rule of Benedict to the best of their ability and see it as a promise to their clients that this is how we will behave in our community.  They add:  “We will treat you his way regardless of how you treat us.” Not bad.  Not bad at all.

In a hundred years, when Mozilla and even SQLite are forgotten, folks will still be reading the words of Jesus and, I venture to predict, the words of our Holy Father Benedict.  We will still need a school of love, a treasury of tools of good works.  And we will need to be reminded as much as we do today: “Never despair of God's mercy.”

Finally please, if you haven't done so already: vote on Tuesday.”

Proper 26, Year A: November 5, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Roy Parker, OHC
Proper 26 - Sunday, November 5, 2017

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. Roy Parker, OHC

Significant portions of these remarks are indebted to the New Yorker magazine of October 23rd, and in their entirety appeal to your intercessory prayer and action for social justice.

The Gospel passage is Jesus’ denunciation of the exploitation of power by a social class deemed prophetic and therefore untouchable. The passage is entitled “Jesus Denounces Scribes and Pharisees,” in this instance comprising the first twelve verses of Matthew 23, but, on closer inspection, practically the entire chapter is dedicated to this indictment of those entrusted with the interpretation and application of religious law in the daily life of Palestinian Judaism, those trustees who cry “Peace” when they have something to eat but declare war against those who put nothing into their mouths.

An extraordinary series of “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” comprises, apparently, the most passionate verbal denunciation by Jesus of anyone in the Gospels. We might wonder, Why does Matthew devote practically an entire chapter to the problem, whereas the other Gospels have only a couple of verses? A good guess may be that Matthew is writing for Jewish-Christians. Therefore we’re presented with a lengthy catalog of indictments against a group whose position as interpreters and teachers of the Torah — the revealed laws upon which Israel's identity depends — confers a privilege and respect which shields it from the censure one would expect. This lengthy catalog is repeatedly marked by the phrase "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" and perhaps nowadays Jesus would have said, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, scumbags!" Each of those Woes introduces a description of how this privileged class of supposed teachers, who are actually abusers, have perverted the original life-giving revelation into something oppressive and self-serving. In fact, the starkest examples of this perversion appear to be regulations associated with the Temple, giving rise to an observation by Abraham Heschel on one occasion that the most pervasive institutional sin should be called “the sin of the sanctuary,” as true, apparently, of Christians as of Jews. That sanctuaries are a promise and possibility of a portal between earth and heaven would seem the reason.

Therefore, Jesus concludes his list of woes against the scribes and Pharisees, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often have I desired to gather your children together . . . and you were not willing. See, your (temple) is left to you, desolate, devoid of God.”

The untouchability of those associated with the sanctuary has, as we know, been compromised by a broad indictment of the priestly caste in the Western Church; it’s differently reflected in an interview between Marin Alsop, Director of the Baltimore Symphony, and Scott Simon of NPR’s Weekend Edition at the time, several years ago, when Maestra Alsop had accepted her appointment as director of the symphony. Scott Simon asked her why the symphony’s board of directors had taken so long to approve her appointment, to which she replied that in the culture of this country there remained the myth of an ultimate male authority figure casting its shadow over the legitimacy of any such female figure. In the time of Jesus, of course,  the myth of an ultimate male authority figure was writ even larger in the popular imagination.

If it’s legitimate to regard these so-called untouchables as abusers of the tradition entrusted to them, a comparison with the current revelations of sexual abuse by other male power figures may be useful as revealing just the beginnings of an undoing of the male mystique which informs American society. Furthermore, I regard the courage of the revealers as not unrelated to the passionate denunciation expressed by Jesus in the Gospel.

We talk about assault as if it were a new phenomenon as if it weren't the people in positions of authority who are so often responsible: lawyers, judges, priests, teachers, police officers, doctors, CEOs. Why do we act so shocked? The subject of sexual abuse is treated like global warming — we think that if we pretend it’s not happening, then maybe it will go away. For years - for centuries - the economic, physical and cultural subjugation of women has registered as something like white noise. Lately, it appears that we’re starting to hear the tune.

What had been a backdrop is now in the foreground; it has become a story with rotating protagonists which never seems to leave the news. Sexual harassment and assault is an issue that crosses all boundaries, political or otherwise. It's about predators in power who know that they are untouchable and the people who enable them. Thanks to mainstream feminism, victimized women have been supported to an unprecedented degree by much of the media and the public. At the same time, political backlash insures hard limits for this support. The increasing narrative clarity about male power does not always translate to progress. For women, it feels, all at once, shockingly possible, suddenly mandatory, and unusually frustrating to speak up.

We should pay attention to the dynamics that make this progress irregular: not all abusers meet with consequences, and not all women can attain firm ground. Men are still more often held to a standard of consistency than of morality. The star abusers were disgraced, in part, because of their hypocrisy; men who never pretended to see women as equals or as worthy of respect can generally just keep on as they were. There are significant constituencies in America who are not yet interested in holding men accountable for abusive behavior. And there are still huge swaths of women - the poor, the queer, the undocumented - who can’t count on the security that feminism has conferred on its wealthier, whiter adherents, or trust that their victimization would even become news.

Nevertheless, the hunger for and possibility of solidarity among women beckons. Recently, women have been posting their experiences of assault and harassment on social media. We might listen to and lament the horrific stories being shared, and also wonder: Whom, exactly, are we reminding that women are treated as second class? 

Being heard is one kind of power, and being free is another. We have undervalued women’s speech for so long that we run the risk of overburdening it. Speech, right now, is just the flag that marks the battle. The gains won by women are limited to those who can demand them. Individual takedowns and social media stories do not yet threaten the structural impunity of powerful men as a group. On one side of the issue, the moral weight is crushing, the energy vital and sincere. On the other side, there is disavowal and retrenchment. In between are plenty of people who would rather we just talked about something else. This type of problem always narrows to an unavoidable point. The exploitation of power does not stop once we consolidate the narrative of exploitation. A genuine challenge to the hierarchy of power will have to come from those who have it.