The First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday, May 31, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve

The First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday, May 31, 2026

• Genesis 1:1-2:4a
• 2 Corinthians 13:11-13
• Matthew 28:16-20

Click here for an audio of the sermon

The first rule of preaching on Trinity Sunday is no analogies.  The Holy Trinity is not to be compared to a three-leaf clover, water, or, alas, an egg.  This is not a problem-solving occasion.  The Trinity is not a math equation on how God can be three and one at the same time.  The Trinitarian formula of the early church, summarized in the Nicene Creed, emerged after a long struggle that perplexed the first theologians as much as it might perplex us.  It required pushing language to the edge of what language can do - naming the reality, yet not going too far in seeking to explain the how of the reality.  They sought to faithfully apprehend the nature of God as revealed in Jesus Christ - a revelation in the world which changed reality.  Yes, we speak of one Being in three Persons, not separate, subordinate, or hidden, but language, as necessary as it is, can at best create a rhetorical guard against outright heresy, not define the essence of the mystery.
In The Roots of Christian Mysticism, Olivier Clement writes,
“In their expositions of the Trinity, St Basil and St Maximus the Confessor emphasize that the Three is not a number (St Basil spoke in this respect of ‘meta-mathematics’).  The divine Persons are not added to one another, they exist in one another: the Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father, the Spirit is united to the Father together with the Son and ‘completes the blessed Trinity’ as if he were ensuring the circulation of love within it.”  
The scripture readings for today all speak of the human community participating in the communion of God whose life is relational and sharing.  The divine image mentioned in Genesis chapter one is relationality and identity in and through connection and union with God and one another.
We are not observers of a narrative today.  We are on the inside of the mystery.  This is the one feast (with the possible addition of All Saints Day) of the year not referenced to a historical event.  As a highly sense-oriented person who loves the concrete symbols of liturgy, today is notable for the absence of a visual.  Today there is no manger or mountain or cross or empty tomb.   Some aspects of reality are just simply beyond the categories of the physical world.  The Holy Trinity points us beyond history, beyond time and space to celebrate an eternal and cosmic reality revealed to us as mystery.  
Christian formation too often prioritizes the intellect at the expense of other modes of perception.  Most of us have grown up with the expectation that assenting and conforming to doctrine took priority over the inner experience of the presence of God.   In our enlightened and scientific age when learning is reduced to data and information exists more to be possessed than appreciated, we are in danger of flattening the human experience into heads on sticks, mere data processing centers who evaluate right and wrong, good and bad, in and out, with no larger vision of a story, a mystery beyond what can be grasped, that is not meant to be understood with the brain but delighted in with the spirit.  Jesus is less dogmatic in that way than we tend to be.  He more often walked around and observed and asked questions than insisted on a set theology or yet more rules.  In our tendency to explain and possess, we descend into a mechanization of faith and disenchant the universe.  Trinity Sunday is the call to re-enchant the world with the practices of wonder, adoration, exultation, and sheer delight.  Those are as important to our growth as information and theology.
It is good and right to believe in the Trinity as the truth about God, but that belief must be more than “it is true”  - check the box and move on.  The mystery of the Trinity calls forth questions about how we relate to Christian truths and whether our intellect is the best or only way of relating.  Our imagination is a better tool than our intellect.  
While visual analogies are inadequate, perhaps there is a sensory way to enter into the mystery.  Jeremy Begbie, a priest and musician who has dedicated his vocation to the theology of music, has been a helpful voice in approaching and appreciating the mystery of threeness in oneness.  Our eyes cannot perceive three colors in one as separate.  Mix colors together and they mush into something that loses their individual differences.  But we can hear three in one. Perhaps, says Begbie, part of the spiritual power of music is that more than one sound can be fully distinct in our ears at a time and the very relationships of sounds create something new.  The Trinity, he says, is musical sympathetic resonance, the closest thing our senses can experience to three in one.  Music is a beautiful expression of how theology transcends the limiting categories of control, certainty, and protection and ushers us into the joyful freedom of uniqueness within difference, structure and spontaneity that unfold mystery, wonder, and trust.  Liturgy is musical, whether we are singing or not, because it is participatory - it is the incarnation of being creatures made in the image and likeness of God.  And because the Christian life is liturgy, perhaps we can discover ways to play our way into God’s delight with the instruments of our lives as a reflection of the Trinity.
Blessing and honor, thanksgiving and praise, more than we can utter be to you, O glorious Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, by all angels, all mortals, the whole creation, for ever and ever. Amen.

Maundy Thursday, April 2, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve
Maundy Thursday, April 2, 2026

• Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14
• 1 Corinthians 11:23-26
• Luke 22:14-30

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Liturgy is the means by which we are renewed in faith in the present moment by remembering salvation history.  Days of remembrance are ever the same and ever new.  Into this remembrance, this history, we bring our present lives - griefs and hopes as well as the longings of people whom we remember who are hungry, who live in places of war, who are victims of oppression - Christ is with them and us in this moment.   We share in the hope of the apostles and saints through the ages who groan for salvation - for life in the reign of justice and peace that is promised and in which we share even as this world is passing away.  

Once again, the witness of Christ in his passion is proclaimed to our lives and to the world as the heart of our Lord’s self-emptying love for us.  But that witness raises questions.  What does Maundy Thursday have to do with today?  Does the Jesus movement have anything to say to our nation and world which are volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous?  How might remembering our stories inform our disagreements about the meaning of justice and freedom in this political atmosphere?  Many are processing how to cope with the time faithfully.  It is stressful.  We seek relief, resolution.  And where there is chaos, there is temptation.

Before us in our collective life are two great temptations.  One is to become zealots and fight for our side.  The other temptation is to tune it all out.  Some Christians have succumbed to the first temptation - they know who is right, who is wrong; they know the country needs defending from its enemies, whatever the means.  Jesus is cast as the sword-wielding warrior who will come to bring divine wrath on the enemy.  Some have given into the second temptation and view their faith as a defense against the call of the moment, a vacuum untouched by outside events, a way to go numb, regress into a bubble of isolation and illusory safety.  Jesus here is cast as the detached mystic, only concerned with the life of the soul.  So which will it be?  Catastrophize or opt out?  Is there not another way?  Yes, yes there is, actually. It is staring us in the face.

Jesus has spent four days in the temple teaching and confronting the corruption of the oppression system with pointed and confrontational language and action.  The tension has been building, the plot forming, the opportunity has come.  In the garden, tonight, they will enact their plan to destroy this dangerous troublemaker from Galilee.  Jesus knows what awaits him.  Perhaps he considered saving his own life with violence or sparking the rebellion against the Romans that some around him wanted.  I wonder if Jesus was tempted to slip away under cover of darkness toward Bethany or Emmaus or Jericho -wait until tempers cooled, keep a low profile in the countryside until Jerusalem was safe.  

In the upper room, Jesus is a marked man.  He knows this is his last night, a final few hours with the disciples before everything changes.  We are gathered on this night to remember what he did and why it matters.  We remember what he did not do.  He did not fight.  He did not leave.  Instead, he shared a meal.  He prioritized relationships.  He gave us bread and wine - his very self in perpetual remembrance.  Our call is as simple and revolutionary as that -a steadfast focus on what is ultimate and our allegiance to Christ:  When the zealots declare that the sword is the way, we gather around a table.  When the church seduces us into factions and divisions, we gather around a table.  When the politicians want to sell us strife and blame, we gather around a table.  We do not fight.  We do not escape.  We gather, we receive, we celebrate, we remember.   We answer the chaos around us by being stable, reliable, orderly, and clear in our identity and our calling. 

This gathering is no mere sentimental routine.  When we gather, we participate in making present the outward and visible sign in bread and wine that declares Christ is alive and present and is the way to the life we most long for.  Sacraments are not additives to life; they are windows into the very nature of reality.  This gathering meal we call the Holy Eucharist is the sign that love will triumph over hate.  The forces of division and malice may have their days, but those days are numbered; evil is marked for destruction.  How like Jesus that it is a table of remembrance and sharing - even while the forces of tyranny and violence were right outside - a table that becomes the way the world is changed, that new life and new community come into our world?  

Every time we gather in a Eucharistic community, we are committing to do what Jesus did in the face of anger and despair, when tempted to rage or escape.  We are disrupting the fundamental structure of empire. Coming to the table is our act of renunciation of the forces of evil and division, it is declaring that we will not be defined by or aligned with the demonic powers of cruelty in word or action.   Jesus' way to relate to the powers of evil is to expose, renounce, subvert, but never retribution, never harm.

When you come to receive Holy Communion, you are choosing life and resolving that you will not be bowed in fear or provoked to vengeance. 

God exists in an “eternal now”.  This is how in speaking about the Holy Eucharist we speak of one table, one offering, one priest.  Here the Church is what it always and eternally is - one.  At the table we join heaven and earth, past and future, this old earth and the new heaven and new earth into one singularity of the gift that is eternally offered to us and through us as long as the sun and moon endure.  This is a foretaste of heaven where there is no conflict and no hiding.  But we must meet the requirements to come - we open our hands empty and stand side by side with brothers and sisters.  We belong to one another, and any other story about who we are is a lie.  Our testimony is that we are still here.  We are not leaving.  Christ is our vindication.  We come to the table again and again because we are hungry and this is where we are fed, and the Lord who loves us is happy to feed us with himself abundantly and eternally.  Amen.

The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 8, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve
The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 8, 2026

• Isaiah 58:1-9a, [9b-12]
• 1 Corinthians 2:1-12, [13-16]
• Matthew 5:13-20

Click here for an audio of the sermon

We are salt.  We are light.  Our human gift is to enhance flavor, to burn brightly.  Jesus does not say, “you have salt and light”.  He does not say, “you are salt ‘if’”.  He does not say, “you are light ‘if’”.  He lists no condition, no cost, no possible revocation.  This is a proclamation from the one who created us.  Dare we believe the announcement Jesus makes that inherent in every human is the divine zest that awakens taste, the holy fire that warms and reveals?  The implications are staggering.  

What follows this announcement are warnings. You are salt - but don’t lose your saltiness.  You are light - but don’t hide the light you are. The immediate truth to be spoken after proclaiming who we are is the danger of polluting or hiding who we are.

God creates us out of love to reflect divine life.  Christ warns us out of love so that we would preserve and live what we are.  Notice the nature of the relationship.  The Christian life is a dance between delight and danger, gift and warning, grace and responsibility.  Only God can create, and God has.  And in that very creation God risks giving us to use as we decide a glory and honor, we have neither earned nor deserved in ourselves.  In return, we are invited to reflect back the dignity of being human, to make every moment the sacrifice of gratitude and self-offering.

We are salt and light purely by God’s grace. Acting like it is on us.  Christ can give us our essence, make us salt and light.  He cannot force our will.  He cannot make us live who we are.  He can invite, admonish, even warn us about our choice, but he cannot make it for us.  He points to the dangers of choosing pollution and hiding so that we might be alert to what is at stake and take our responsibility as seriously as he does.  

What if we say yes to who we really are?  We actualize salt and light by prophetic words and deeds.  God has made us live in a generous, respectful community with one another as brothers and sisters.  And as a new humanity the barriers and dividing walls have come down and we are one.  Yet enmity and violence persist.  We encounter within us and around us systems and patterns that normalize harm, prejudice, and bigotry.  Salt and light make us aware of the harm we do and the harm done in our names.  Salt and light in us enlighten us to recognize evil and injustice and the temptation to compliantly conform to their ways.  And by being salt and light, we can say, “no, I will not comply”.   Being salt is waking up, looking around, paying attention to reality - not the party line, not propaganda, but what is actually true.  Light is exposing, illuminating, and revealing what is hidden and unnamed.

Now we see the importance of the warnings.  This proclamation of Jesus about who we are sets us in this cosmic wrestling against evil.  This identity will cost us something.  No wonder we rationalize a little sand in our salt, just a small basket over our light.  But our salt is made salty, our lights meant to shine bright, exposed.   Bland darkness is lifeless.  Zesty light is laying down my life.  Those are the choices - I offer myself to Christ as I decide to wake up and tell the truth or I play it safe, exist but not really live.  

The warnings are for us because the pressure of our internal fear and external danger are powerful enough to get us to reject our identity.  Around us what scripture calls principalities and powers, spiritual evil, systemic injustice, violence and prejudice, are the manifestations of the rejection of salt and light.  After a group, an ideology, a movement has polluted its salt and hidden its light, the very notion of what it means to be human gets gnarled into an ugly thing.  Evil fills the vacuum where the salt and light were meant to be.  And this vacuum recoils from the thing it once was and rejected.  The evil powers of this world cannot stand the presence of salt and light.  These powers make friends with blandness and worship darkness and call it holy.  It rules with the fear that lives in it.  It says, “conform, and we’ll let you live.”

Abbot Anthony, who lived from 251-356 said, ‘A time is coming when people will go mad, and when they meet someone who is not mad, they will turn to him and say, “You are out of your mind,” just because he is not like them.’

Jesus calls those who follow him to receive the identity and capacity to resist and subvert the powers of evil so that the life of the kingdom of heaven will be lived in us and known in all the world.  Salt and light are dangerous.  They are noncompliant, unyielding, and unbowed in the face of the flat darkness that would deaden our souls.  So do not comply.  Do not complacently adjust to anything inhuman.  Be intolerable to injustice.  Be unavailable for lies.  Be uninterested in the call to conform to the ways of this world at the expense of your soul.  Some around you may choose to be bland.  You are seasoning.  Be seasoning instead.  Some around you may choose to stay in the darkness.  You are light.  Shine your light.   This is scary.  Fear means we are alive; we want to keep living, but fear does not get to decide what makes us human.  We are salt.  We are light.  Go and season life.  Go and shine fire. Amen.

The First Sunday of Advent, Year A, November 30, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve
The First Sunday of Advent, November 30, 2025

• Isaiah 2:1-5
• Romans 13:11-14
• Matthew 24:36-44

Click here for an audio of the sermon

He had a vision.  Jesus spoke to him - gave him the date (dates, two, actually).  He said he was one billion percent certain.  It was his mission now to share this great vision, this direct voice, with the world.  Christians must prepare now.  And thankfully we are not preparing in theory, preparing in a metaphorical way, but preparing for a date, a date certain.  Pastor Joshua heard from Jesus about the rapture, when Christians will be snatched up and away into heaven and the tribulation will commence, conveniently without us.  September 23 OR 24, 2025 were the dates - one of these days is when the rapture would happen.  “About that day or hour no one knows” Jesus says in the gospel.  But that does not mean we will not know about TWO days, just not THAT day, but one of these days!  What good is a vision if kept to oneself?  No good at all!  On to YouTube he goes, describing in detail what Jesus said, even how he looked, and the need to prepare.  Viral sharing and commenting commence, and, since it is 2025, a general stir is created among those Christians for whom the rapture is a sure and certain hope.  What else could “caught up to meet the Lord in the air” possibly mean?  True believers quit jobs, sell cars and furniture, and prepare.  Last time I checked, pastor Joshua had updated the new dates of the rapture at least twice, this time not creating quite as much stir or as many views as with the original video.  It seems that misremembering the details of a vision of Jesus that many times negatively affects one’s credibility.
This is not new, of course.  Even the disciples, in the very moments before the Ascension, ask Jesus, “Is it now?”  It is the Lord’s fault, I contend.  Ask us to watch and wait for something to happen with no date, no prelude, no way to access any concrete information about when it will happen.  Watch and wait.  Just watch and wait.  Can we have a clue?  No.  A little hint?  No.  What if we pray very sincerely to know the time, will you tell us?  No. And don’t ask me again.  I don't even know.  It’s not fair.  It leaves open too many possible misunderstandings and false predictions - manipulation and deception.  Perhaps better to announce the date and let us sort it out when it gets closer, maybe an hour before.  What we have now is too vague - it’s not practical.  It’s not helpful.
We begin Advent with the confession that we are not generally a highly formed culture of waiting, especially of open-ended, don’t-know-how-long-we-will-have-to-wait-or-what-we-are-waiting-for kinds of people.  Just note the lifting up of Christmas trees after Halloween and all of the hustle and bustle which has already commenced.  When viewed at the surface, Jesus’ seemingly contradictory insistences on the need to be alert and the impossibility of knowing exactly what we are being alert for tie us up in logical knots.  His principal focus, however, is the presence of God in the human heart which enters us into a different way of knowing, an altogether mysterious and foreign realm of “already and not yet.”  We begin by remembering that we will not “figure it out” by thinking more or be “better” at Advent by trying harder.  What we enter, if we dare, is a realm beyond time, a process that moves, but at its own pace and in its own way, that can only be thwarted by insisting on looking outside ourselves and ignoring the blossoming of readiness growing in our souls.  Waiting and watching are not problems that are solved by more data, they are ways of being which usher us into God’s time that is beyond our limited notions of past, present, or future.
Scheduling the Parousia is God’s job.  Being ready is our job.  Jesus helps us by an example of what being awake is NOT.  He says that the people of Noah’s time were in an unconscious trance of the everyday and ordinary.  What happened yesterday is what will happen today.  What happened today is what will happen tomorrow.  Boy, those are some dark clouds, but it has rained before.  Wow, this is some heavy rain, but I’m sure it will stop soon.  Their lives were a kind of entitlement of continuity that rendered them unable to perceive the nature of the flood that had commenced.  When the soul loses touch with meaning and wonder, the spiritual life animating us and the world, it loses the expectation that life can change, that something new might happen, that this world is passing away.  “And they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.”  Their ignorance of and indifference to their own condition and the condition of the world around them is the cautionary warning of what NOT to become.
Readiness is a slippery state.  It’s like humility - as soon as I know how humble I am, I am no longer as humble as I think I am.  Watchfulness is always becoming.  It is something like the acknowledgement that fresh insight, deeper understanding, fuller presence is always being offered to us and called forth out of us.  I have a picture in my office of a sign posted on a tree in a wood that says, “You are NOT almost there.”  This inner dynamic becomes a gift to the world - a precious and dangerous gift.  Once we are willing to see, we can perceive the nature of the principalities and powers at work among us.  We can name the systems and structures of evil and we can also reveal gratitude at the beauty and joy of life.  Joy and peace and justice break forth in our world as we are faithful in our call to be stewards of making straight paths where no path seems possible.  Christ will come on the last day, for sure.  But it is also true to say that every day is the last day, every day is the day of judgment, every day reveals the quality of our presence and our engagement with announcing the urgency of the moment - life is short, time is passing, we are promised no certain number of future days, we can take nothing for granted, we continually rely on and entrust our lives to God who made us and who will receive our souls back we know not when.  When in response to the travails in our country people say, “it can’t happen here”, “things will go back to normal” I wonder if it is the equivalent of saying, “Boy, those are some dark clouds, but it has rained before.”  “Wow, this is some heavy rain, but I’m sure it will stop soon.”  Is that not the same denial and avoidance used in Noah’s day?  The myth of normalcy can still sweep us away, blind to the reality of the moment.  Salvation is waking up and finding refuge in the Ark that is Christ, our only hope.
  The glory of salvation is that God’s promise is salvation in - in these bodies, in this world, in this time.  Not from them, but in them.  Not escape, but renewal.  One of the classic jokes in my family is that my father once asked my mother whether she wanted to be buried in a casket or cremated.  Her response was, “I don’t know, surprise me.”  Come and surprise us, O Lord, with aliveness today and life in the age to come beyond all we can ask or imagine. Amen.

The Feast of the Anniversary of the Dedication of the Monastic Church of Saint Augustine, October 5, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve
The Feast of the Anniversary of the Dedication of the Monastic Church of Saint Augustine, October 5, 2025

Click here for an audio of the sermon

A holy place consecrated for prayer and praise is a place of signification - a place in and of and for the world but set apart from it.  This church welcomes and sends, comforts and disorients, offers solace and action.  It is a place of liberation and a sign of disruption.

For St. Benedict, the oratory as the place of prayer and only prayer and is the heart of what I call his cosmology.  In the Rule, the oratory discloses what the world is, namely the nucleus of a created glory given as a gift to enflesh our quest toward God - a God who is present everywhere and at all times.  The oratory is not a different kind of creation, but its purpose and function is as the lens through which the world is interpreted.  In his vision of an integrated life in God, St. Benedict sees the oratory as a kind of ancient Roman gymnasium - building muscle and stamina that is used in the “ordinary” moments of temptation and humility outside the oratory.  Prayer in the place of prayer is practicing what is real so that monks might live at all times from that reality and none other.  Remember Brother Lawrence centuries later who writes in The Practice of the Presence of God that for him there was no difference between the church and the kitchen where he worked.

This church is a place of liberation because what we do in it contains the power to free us from our illusions by our encounter with the reality that is God.  We enter through these doors often in a jumble of inner voices and motivations, patterns and programming: earn acceptance, find safety, be better, do more, find peace, be worthy.  Illusions take energy to maintain, they are heavy burdens.  In the invitation to be present, honest, and vulnerable with God and by practicing that way of being here, our burdens are lifted and we find rest.  And by practicing that liberation, we remember that it is available anytime and anywhere.  So this sacred place is for us and our growth.  We need places built and set aside and preserved for explicitly religious activities in order to reveal to us that our whole lives and all we do is set aside for explicitly religious activity.  Of course we are beset by external illusions as well.  As life in the 21st century is more and more saturated with information and noise and distraction, we are invited to be unburdened by the cacophony of voices to preserve an inner stillness and quiet.  We remember God’s presence and care amidst the swirling chaos.  The first call is to enter the rest and open to God’s compassionate mercy.  

We are invited into a grander vision of the world, not merely a pause from our old world.  Liberation is allergic to nostalgia; it is averse to passivity.  Our business is awakening to the present moment, not enshrining the past or numbing the world, however tempting those are.  This is a deeper reality, not an alternate one.  In the psalms, sometimes the psalmist is caught up in the glory and beauty of God and lets us share in that ecstasy.  Sometimes the psalmist asserts faith in God and tells God about the Philistines that are coming down the road. They’re big and there are more of them than there are of us and we need help.  Both are prayer because both are awakened to the reality of the present.  This is the place to start to name the world that is in all its glory and horror and offer it up to God in gratitude and intercession in sighs and tears.  We abide in the truth which is where God lives with us.  

This church is a place of disruption.  The Gospel account of the Lord’s cleansing or purification of the temple is a cautionary tale that we be vigilant against the creeping corruption of religiosity in form but not meaning - habit without presence, routine without growth, proclamation without encounter.  It is good to care about our liturgy and the solemnity and beauty of our worship, but the moral test is in whether we are growing in love toward one another.  The purpose of the form is to awaken our hearts to God.  The liturgy is a means to express our devotion, not a replacement for it.  For Christ, the temple is a womb in which love for God is continually birthed in love for neighbor.  The sacrifice of praise and care for the other go hand in hand.  Christ disrupts our hearts of stone to give us hearts of flesh.  He comes with the unblinking gaze of fiery love into our hearts to seek out our motives and devotion and to expose the inner moneychanger and overturn his table.  This church is a dangerous place.  Here I discover a God who is unwilling to accommodate my desire to avoid or hide who I am or get by with a mere performance that is not sincere.  No program of self-defense is safe here.

Just as we are not made for the sabbath, but the sabbath for us, in a like manner we are not made for the church, but the church is made for us.  In the temporal stuff of stone and wood it points to the true and lasting temples of the Holy Spirit which are our own bodies.  The building will return to the dust, but we will be raised.  So, these walls are the womb of resurrection life.  We see the art - icons, crucifix, statues, windows as through a glass darkly.  We look at them, but they point to us and beyond us to the mystery of the new heaven and new earth always just about to burst forth.  We enter this holy place, but we do not really exit.  We will only really exit at death.  In the meantime, we continually pass through, continually born out into the wonder of God’s cosmic sanctuary, the altar that is the universe.

Being in this holy place never gets old.  It is at times joyful, disturbing, boring - but never old.  I am continually thankful and express how beautiful and good it is for me to be in you.  And the church replies. Yes, it talks back.  It says, “yes, but even more beautiful and even better than you being in me is that I am in you.” Amen.

The First Sunday in Lent C, March 9, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve
The First Sunday in Lent - March 9, 2025

• Deuteronomy 26:1-11
• Romans 10:8b-13
• Luke 4:1-13

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Lent is the summons to renewal, repentance, and transformation.  And whether we have observed Lent for decades or this is our first time, the invitation is the same - examine ways of being that are incomplete, inadequate, dead, and go deeper.  We begin at the beginning: what is the spiritual journey?  What is life in God?  Is it the pursuit of a state of blissful separation from the slings and arrows of lesser existence?  Is it an escape plan from trials, suffering, anxiety?  Is the purpose of gathering here to be protected from all that happens outside these walls, enclosed safely and securely in God’s care, even if for an hour?  Are we escaping something or changing something?  Are we being comforted or empowered?  And as we look at the state of the country, do we circle the wagons or storm the gates?  

The life of Jesus of Nazareth was neither withdrawal nor attack, which were the dominant strategies of his day as well as ours.  He did not flee the realities of life under Roman occupation.  He did not align with the zealots who fought it.  His life is a new thing, a new template for human life as trust in God which he called the kingdom or reign of God.  His temptations in the wilderness have the power to reorient us out of the twin dangers of denial and enmeshment.  

The wilderness is the place of exposure, vulnerability, wildness.  In the Bible, the outside is often a symbol of what is going on inside.  Trust in God is summoned in the raw, untamed place of the land and the heart.  This is not a comfortable retreat that is interrupted by the pesky presence of the adversary.  Conscious and prayerful solitude in God’s presence brings up temptations. Presence is a free choice and temptation accompanies all free choices.  There is no freedom without the presence of temptation.  Compulsion is not freedom.  Authentic presence to God in myself is chosen, never automatic.  Real choice by definition includes the option of saying, “no” to that presence.  So the option of resisting God, of avoiding God, of going unconscious rather than being present to God must appear if the “yes” to God is to be authentic.  We can discern from the reading that Jesus was authentically present to God because he was tempted.  

I do not imagine that a being with horns and a pitchfork appeared to him in the wilderness and began to offer him something appealing.  The temptations came from his own conscience.  It somehow occurred to him that he could change stones to bread or rule the earth or perform some spectacular sign to impress the masses.  These ideas appealed to him.  In his wrestling with the nature of his message, the nature of authentic love and humility, of power and transformation, the alternatives appear.  Why not change the stones or worship the devil or throw himself off the temple?  Good questions.  Jesus faced the temptations as temptations.  He related to them, not from them.  He did not avoid or attack.  He discerned and made a choice.  

What is new in Jesus is the source and nature of his renunciation of the temptations.  The gospel gives us Jesus’ reply to these thoughts.  Jesus does NOT say, “I can’t change these stones to bread because that would be wrong. I am not allowed to do that. I am not bad, but good, and I must, must make good choices at all times, no matter what, no matter how hungry I am.”  In reply to this and the other two temptations, he recalls something greater than what the devil offers.  He rejects the temptations because they are illusory.  He can see that they are both appealing and illusory.  The temptations are a quick fix, but they are too small, too transitory.  Jesus is committed to cosmic, eternal things.  In renouncing temptation, he affirms who he is - he chooses to be himself.  He is the faithful and obedient Son, and from that identity he discerns and chooses.  He does not become himself because he resists the temptation. He resists because he knows who he is.

This manner of understanding the inner meaning of the story makes it applicable to us.  For those of us who are good, moral, churchgoing types, our temptations are probably not going to come as theft, robbery, assault, murder, adultery, etc…. Our temptations will usually come in more subtle and venial kinds of sin: inordinate pleasure, greed, materialism, judgment, self-righteousness, apathy, coldness of heart, failure to love as we could.  Remember that in prayer is temptation. In temptation is the awakening to the choice of our identity.

We face our temptations as temptations, not denying or running away, not averse to the wounded parts of ourselves, but facing all that we are.  You and I have sinned in part because the sin provided something that appealed to us, some means of getting something we wanted.  It worked, for some brief moment, anyway.  And so we have violated ourselves and one another and rejected God’s love.  The will to act contrary to God, which is contrary to ourselves, resides within us.  I am not wholehearted all the time.  I am good at inventing temptations for myself.  I have no problem rationalizing my way into why the temptation is actually a good idea.  The temptation sounds just fine.  I sometimes want to be someone else, with more power and autonomy, access to the quick fix and the instant gratification, especially if there is a chance I can get away with it.

We can avoid temptation - at least most of them.  It is possible, but costly.  We can choose to repress our human desires, disengage from the responsibilities of freedom and choice, find false solace in a pseudo-spirituality of legalism and denial.  This is the core temptation of good people - to fixate on our own self-image of goodness to such an extent that we lose contact with the potential for sin, and so lose our freedom.  It is possible to look and even outwardly act holy, but not be fully human.  What this dangerous path denies is the deeper truth under the temptation.  Because we become our choices, our individually custom-fitted temptations are clues into who we are and must continue to choose to be.  We do not grow in holiness by becoming less human, less free, but by freely choosing to trust God in the face of temptation because that is who we are.  

Jesus as the model fully-human One obeyed the Spirit and went into the wilderness.  He faces temptation as the obedient Son. Because he knows he is the beloved, he chooses to act as the beloved.  Our wilderness temptings will expose our false identities and confront us with the full reality of what it means to be human.  Denial and avoidance is a refusal to be fully human.  The presence of temptation does not make us less human.  Temptation awakens us to the cost of freedom.  Ignoring our sinful desires does not make them go away.  It is not sinful to think about what I could get by sinning.  A good self check-in question is, “what do I want?”  For Jesus, the answers were bread, power, and fame.  Now ask, “what do I want under what I want?”  What is the gold under the temptation?  For Jesus, the deeper commitment was fellowship and obedience to his Father through self-giving, sacrificial love.  And because he knew and was united to that, he could renounce bread, power, and fame.  Fear can be converted into faithful service.  Lust into healthy intimacy.  Greed into vulnerable simplicity.  Vengeance into prayer for enemies and wrongdoers.  What do I want under what I want?  

The wilderness is the space to undergo the stripping of our illusions and the unmasking of our false self-images.  We neither withdraw nor attack.  In facing our full humanity, we can choose to be fully ourselves.  In this stripping, God gives us back to ourselves in full divine image - made of love and blessing while also capable of hate and cursing, made to reflect glory, yet often choosing to deny that glory - and in it all never separated from the love that sees and knows us.  Give us the grace, Lord Christ, to be real and truly who we are and the power to always choose to be who you have made us to be. Amen.

The Second Sunday of Advent C - December 8, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve
The Second Sunday of Advent, December 8, 2024

• Malachi 3:1-4
• Philippians 1:3-11
• Luke 3:1-6

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Every year in early November, a local radio station changes its usual music format to Christmas music.  I know this because when I am driving somewhere, I will occasionally surf the radio and land on this station. I scan the stations based on what is not commercials.  It may just be me, but since the presidential election and in the context of ongoing political division, as the fabric of civility is tearing and many relationships are fracturing, I feel more dread than usual (and I usually feel a lot). When I lit upon this station a few days ago, I was surprised to note that not only was I cheating by listening to Christmas music before Christmas, but I did not even enjoy cheating.  I was actually repulsed by it.  Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole singing to me about mistletoe and tree tops glistening and sleigh bells in the snow made me want to drive the car into a light pole.   It is like having a DJ at a funeral reception.  Perhaps in more optimistic times the themes of abundance and togetherness, peace and goodwill that come through so many of these songs are in harmony with the cultural moment, but not now.  At that moment it all rang hollow and empty. I pushed the power button and turned it off.
Pumped into our blood from every media entry point is the lure of commercialism that promises we can conjure the emotions we believe we are supposed to feel - “be merry”, “celebrate”, “holly jolly”, the songs hypnotize us over and over.  Their prescription for our discontent is that if we are experiencing grief or loss, fear or dread, conflict, strife, anxiety about the future of our families, churches, politics, then another cup of cheer will fix everything - or at least we can forget about our and the world's problems - at least for a while.  And that is the best we can hope for.  The capitalistic system is a dealer in Christmas as escapist fantasy.  Sorry, Bing, but not all our days will be merry and bright, nor will all our Christmases be white.  Life does not work that way.
If we are to faithfully prepare room in our hearts for the coming of God incarnate, and if that preparation can open us to welcome that coming with great joy, then we are in need of something more substantive than nostalgia and sentimentality.  Divine discontent, which is what I think I was experiencing at that moment, is discontent at quick and shallow fixes.  This is a good thing and can actually prepare us for deeper conversion.   Advent is the opposite of escapist fantasy.  That is why it is usually awkward.  Primed as we are for the standard fare of instant gratification, the church sets us unflinchingly inside the tension, the contradiction of the reality of hope and salvation alongside the reality of sin and suffering.  Can joy come from a contradiction?  The proclamation of salvation ought never ask us to cheer up, get over it, feel what we do not feel, deny reality, believe what we cannot quite believe - that is mind control, not good news. What is on offer is the invitation to dwell in Christ with all our thoughts and emotions, our doubts and pains, our expectations and hopes and to be fully, deeply, knowingly engaged in our actual life experience.  
What, then, does joy really mean?  Am I doomed to be Scrooge forever, or could my association with joy as an external mood, mere emotion, be inadequate?  The Collect and the epistle lesson for today give us some profound wisdom on this question.  The Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent asks God for the grace of repentance which prepares the way for greeting with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer.  In the reading from Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians, which is included for this Sunday because of its mention of joy, Paul writes, “I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now.”  Both the Collect and Philippians root joy in God’s activity and our choice to recognize and participate in good work blooming in and around us. Joy is the gift of the glimpse of God’s goodness which has begun to set the world right. We receive joy when we stop; stop acting, numbing, avoiding, or pretending and start opening, anticipating, and receiving.
Saint Paul’s joy for the community in Philippi came from his care for them and his trust in the power of the gospel.  What he saw and knew was the triumph of the grace at work in their hearts. No Caesar, no empire, no violence, no persecution or chain or martyrdom (try as they might across the centuries) no division, no scandal, no heresy could thwart the power of God to effect good in willing hearts.  Those things harm and are tragic, but they are no obstacle to Christ.  When he saw that, joy flowed up out of him in the lavish, unbounded love of Christ who will never leave us or forsake us.  He never denies or minimizes his suffering, he is still in prison.  He never presents life in Christ as a program to escape reality. His joy is in the truth that the suffering cannot, will never, quench the power of that presence and mystery. “This present suffering is not to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us”, he writes to the Romans.
Joy is the effect of offering and entrusting our lives and the life of the world to the one who is its source and end. Our source intends our flourishing and growth and our end is bound up in an end to all suffering and crying and pain.  Let not the power of joy be cheapened by its cheap imitations - it is a gift much richer than mere cheerfulness and positivity. It is honest and real, includes melancholy and sadness, grief and loneliness, but gathers up our longing and cries, our blessings and riches - indeed our whole lives - into the promise of the redemption of the world.  The deepest, most soulful peace and fulfillment we can experience is that the unstoppable goodness of God in our lives is more wondrous and beautiful than we can imagine and will be ours for eternity.
So, we may not feel as cheerful this year.  The groanings of the world - in creation, in our bodies, in our care for each other - these groans and sighs and tears last for a time.  We must groan when we need to groan.  But only new creation is ultimate and is our hope and home. In the foretaste of that promise now and to come, we rejoice.  In our patient endurance, in our faithful witness, joy beckons in and over it all.   Grieve, but refuse to despair; be discontented, but continue to bear witness to the gospel; lament, but guard against becoming bitter.  Welcome joy when it emerges in you - do not stifle it. But know that it may come at a time and in a way that does not follow a schedule.  It may surprise you.  Greet it openly and humbly when it appears - it is a precious gift from God. Amen.

The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost B - October 13, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve
The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 23 B, October 13, 2024

• Amos 5:6-7,10-15
• Hebrews 4:12-16
• Mark 10:17-31

Click here for an audio of the sermon

“Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”
Christ has come to inaugurate the way of life, which he calls the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. He inaugurates through power.  His power is the power of love. He expresses love in the way he invites and liberates; in his surrendering and suffering love.  He does not inaugurate by domination and never uses power over to impose, coerce, or control.  The way of life comes in freedom, or it does not come at all.  His freedom in inviting meets our freedom in responding. Each of us chooses to enter or we do not enter at all.  He calls forth the desire in every human heart for meaning, hope, community, purpose, and promise and reveals that this very desire has its source and end in God.  Being created by God and for God, we discover our true identity, our true home in responding to the invitation to follow the way of life and receive the gift of life, real life.  We bear the divine image and no substitute identity will ever satisfy.  Jesus appeals to our goodness, enlivens our longings, and illuminates the obstacles within and around us on the path to life. The gates are always open to any who will hear the call to repent, be liberated, be unburdened from the weight of attachment to the transitory and the temporal, and come. 
 Christ welcomes so-called “sinners” into the way of life.  In the gospels, they almost always know their need, seek him out.  Many in the out groups seek out Jesus, touch him, call to him, cry to him, interrupt him, get in his way as they discover in him the power to restore their dignity and their hope.  He relieves their pain, reconciles them from their status as outcasts, as unclean and sends them joyfully back into community and connection. For those of us who in some way or at some time have been outsiders or the victims of prejudice and judgment and met by a Christ who loved and accepted us, we know that the power that brought life to the lepers and demon possessed, the prostitutes and tax collectors, can and does bring power today in the hearts of so many who experience harm.
The gospels also include another kind of conversion story.  The so-called “insiders” are invited into the way of life as well.  In the religious culture of Jesus’ day, the religious elites, the rich, those with positions of power thought of themselves and were believed to be blessed by God - they had arrived into the realm of the “converted” because they were not “sinners” or “unclean”.  These are often, but not always, those who are scandalized, confused, or, because he represents a threat, oppose Jesus.  For Jesus, “no” is an answer. Today’s gospel is a story from this second group.  This man sees the world through the lens of his status and wealth. Eternal life is a possession like all my other possessions and I can obtain it like I have obtained all my other possessions - by some act, or price, some access to improving my insider status.  He is not in need of the same kind of compassionate, healing touch that the leper or demon-possessed need. His pain is more in his heart than on his skin.  His isolation is more spiritual than social.  His sense of emptiness hidden and buried under the illusions that his possessions can satisfy.  Yet, even if the awareness is only a glimmer, the ache of dissatisfaction only a faint echo that appears in the silence of the night, he still desires real life.  The desire is inescapable, relentless, haunting the edges of his storehouses and treasure chests, refusing to leave him alone.  He is in need. He has money. He will satisfy his need like he has satisfied every other need. Jesus surprises him. Jesus’ response is about to send him away in shock and grief.  
Entrance to life costs.  The kingdom exacts a price.  In our myriad delusions about our identities and our own programs for individual happiness, we keep ourselves outside, resist life.  We may believe we desire life, but not act in ways that lead to life.  Jesus presents no utopian vision of instant bliss. The way to the kingdom is a narrow, difficult, and winding way.  We may seek to avoid the difficulty and search for an easy road, for cheap grace. We may desire entry through power or status, money or education.  We may rely on seeking moral goodness or conformity to social norms of purity for special access.  These are dead ends that seduce us into believing we have capacities we do not actually have, means to negotiate what we want at a sale price.  But Christ in his grace brokers no shortcuts, no exceptions, no earning or deserving our way in by what we have or do.  The way to life is not a philosophy, an ethic, or the accumulation of good deeds. It is surrender, emptying, death and resurrection. Whatever I bring with me to the entrance to life to get me in are the very things I must leave in order to be made ready for entrance.  Entry is a continual process.  I am always only beginning to enter the kingdom - never arriving, never possessing its fullness in this age.  Therefore the way to life is a scandal, a crisis, and a gift. The crisis is to surrender whatever appears as essential to meaning in order to receive the true gift which is the actual fulfillment of meaning.  We are all too eager to fixate on the instant, the easy. Jesus warns that these are illusions which in fact are obstacles to the most valuable way of being, obstacles to real life.
As modern listeners the temptation is often to hear the text in order to get an answer or to follow an instruction - bridge the meaning into our world by reducing the story into mere moralisms, yet more performing and achieving and being good. Such a response misses the deeper truth.  Life is discovered not in having, but in belonging. And we cannot be attached to anything and receive the gift of belonging at the same time.  Jesus says, “It is you I want for myself, not anything you may accomplish. I will not rest until all of you is enlivened by love and grace and you abide in the fullness of your glory as beloved sons and daughters made in God’s image.” We enter life by allowing the burning away of all that cannot enter, until we walk through with empty hands, claiming no rights, hiding nothing.  It is precisely by owning up to and inhabiting our void that we are offering ourselves up to God’s mercy. The invitation to this man and to us is what Eugene Peterson calls a centered, submissive way of life.  He writes,
“Americans in general have little tolerance for a centering way of life that is submissive to the conditions in which growth takes place: quiet, obscure, patient, not subject to human control and management. The church is uneasy in these conditions. Typically it adapts itself to the prevailing American culture and is soon indistinguishable from that culture: talkative, noisy, busy, controlling, image-conscious.” 
So this other kind of conversion, the conversion of those of us who enjoy some level of possession and status and goodness, is to be utterly stripped, dispossessed, emptied, made void, plunged into the terrifying emptiness, consumed by God’s love, offered up to God’s mercy, and then given away. Self-sufficiency, the impulse to dominate, hoard, defend, control all die on the cross with Christ.  Then the seeds of life - searching for good, receptive soil in which to root - will appear green and full. We will become generous, free, receptive people so that we might enjoy the riches of God’s goodness in God’s good world more abundantly.  Then we will receive good things as gifts to be shared. 
“Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age…and in the age to come eternal life.” Amen.

The Feast of Saint Benedict, July 11, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve

The Feast of Saint Benedict, July 11, 2024

• Proverbs 2:1-9
• Psalm 1
• Luke 14:27–33

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

Thomas Moore, not the nineteenth century Irish poet Thomas Moore, but the contemporary author and speaker who is best known for his book Care of the Soul, wrote a book in 1994 which I read the following year. It was a memorable gift in those years.  Meditations: On the Monk Who Dwells in Daily Life, is a series of short thoughts, memories, parables, and experiences mainly focused on Moore’s time as a monk in his twenties. One memorable parable has lingered in my mind for years:

“Three monks knelt in the chapel in the dark morning hours before dawn. The first thought he saw the figure of Jesus come down from the cross and rest before him in midair. Finally, he said to himself, I know what contemplation is. The second felt himself rise out of his place in the chair. He soared over his brother monks and surveyed the timber-vaulted ceiling of the church, and then landed back in his place in the choir. I’ve been blessed, he thought, with a minor miracle, but in humility I must keep it to myself. The third felt his knees growing sore and his legs tired. His mind wandered until it came to a stop on the image of a luscious hamburger laden with onions and pickles. ‘No matter how hard I try’, said the devil’s helper to his master, ‘I can’t seem to tempt this third monk.’”

I remember being baffled by this story when I first read it almost thirty years ago.  I wanted contemplation, I wanted the miracle - or at least my image of them.  Hamburgers do not belong in prayer - they are for eating, not praying. 

It is somewhat ironic, then, that the longer I ponder and live the Rule of Benedict, the more the hamburger appears in prayer.  Does Moore have a point about the third monk?  Is the third monk onto something? 

St. Gregory the Great in his biography of St. Benedict is generally believed to be at least embellishing if not inventing miracle stories and pious legends about St. Benedict’s own miraculous powers and mystical experiences.  St. Benedict seemed to have had more than the average number of visions and miracles. At the time, those were signs of spiritual importance and power.  The Rule itself, curiously, does not put much energy into knowing secrets and floating around.  The Rule is not even that interested in a thorough discourse of what prayer even is other than prayer should be sincere and short.  He is interested in a deeper reorientation.  The whole Rule is the living of prayer.  Our every thought, word, and deed is formative for relationship with God.  And the whole Rule is prayer because the Rule describes life and life is prayer.  And life is prayer because humans live life and to be human is to be being-in-communion.  St. Benedict takes as given that as creatures made in God’s image and crowned with glory and honor this is as obvious and as natural as breathing.  Life is the divine office and the world is the oratory.  Benedict’s gift and power is in unveiling before our distorted and blurry vision the sacredness of all of life, especially those activities which in their ordinariness reflect no obvious sign of God’s presence.  We may receive the gift of more immediate or direct encounters with God if God so chooses, but those experiences are the effect of daily faithfulness, not ends in themselves; they are opportunities for humility, not possessions to be held over the heads of those not so gifted.  The ultimate unfaithfulness for St. Benedict is to go about filling a cabinet full of trophies to my deep spirituality and profound maturity.  Rather, I can hear St. Benedict saying to the first and second monks in the parable, “You have had insight into some great mystery? Great, now go work in the fields.”  “You have received a minor miracle?  Be thankful and go wash the dishes.”  “So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions."

What makes the third monk different (and I believe for St. Benedict truly holy) is an honest, earthy acceptance of his creatureliness as the ground of humility.  Moore’s language is quite precise on this point: the first monk knew something mysterious after a long search; the second monk received a miracle. But the third monk is different in that Moore says his mind wandered and came to stop on the image of the hamburger. The third monk is simply noticing, not grasping at or seeking to possess the hamburger, but noting the presence of the thought in a detached manner.  It is not that he is beyond temptation entirely, that would mean he was dead, but that he is conscious that everything belongs, he is not seeking to defend, perform, possess, or compete for or against anyone or anything in his praying.  He hears in Jesus’ admonish to give up possessions the wisdom that possession is impossible, so the deepest giving up is the illusion that I can possess in the first place.  The home toward which we are hastening is that human life where everything is received as a gift, where we are stewards of blessings not to be grasped or owned, but participated in and enjoyed.

In the Gospel reading the Lord is prodding us to take stock - estimate, consider.  If builders are thoughtful about their building supplies and kings about their troop strength, then how much more ought we to bring honest scrutiny to the realities which inform and shape our whole lives?  A conscious choice requires that our feet are planted on the ground, our ears are listening for the truth, our hearts are attuned to love.  

The greatest obstacle to conversion is my own fantasy land image of conversion. St. Benedict is allergic to any image of self or God which leads to escaping reality, rising above others, or enlisting God in my project of having the final, absolute answer to the mysteries of the divine.  As we estimate, consider, and then give up the illusions that get revealed in our honest assessment of ourselves, we find freedom - the freedom to unlearn habits of thought and action which are familiar, but which stifle our true selves.  Into our empty hands Christ places the gift of our incarnation to be celebrated and enjoyed in the abundance of the kingdom of heaven.  Eugene Peterson is channeling the spirit of St. Benedict in his paraphrase of the beginning of Romans 12 in the Message Bible: “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking around life - and place it before God as an offering.”  Amen.