The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, July 6, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, July 6, 2025

• 2 Kings 5:1-14
• Galatians 6:(1-6)7-16
• Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Click here for an audio of the sermon

I find myself drawn to the story of Naaman, the commander of the army of the King of Aram, that we heard in this morning’s Old Testament lesson from the Second Book of Kings. It's not often that we read from this book, partly because it's largely a history of battles. But it does contain the wonderful cycle of stories about Elisha, the heir to the prophet Elijah. And those stories, like those surrounding Elijah, have become models or prototypes for the lives of other holy people, particularly the saints and most especially for the life of Saint Benedict which we read in the Dialogues of Gregory the Great. It's hard to take them seriously at times, at least not as history as we understand it, but they are stories that tell us about the power of God to transform lives even through the actions of some wild and difficult people, of whom Elisha is one. I must remind myself that, whatever Elisha’s prophetic powers and ministry, he's not someone to be messed with. Let’s not forget the story of Elisha (2 Kings 2:23-24) who was being mocked by a group of boys because he was bald. Elisha simply calls two she-bears to attack and maul the boys…forty-two in all. That'll teach them to mock a prophet! Yes, Elisha is not someone to be treated lightly. And maybe neither is God. 

The story of Naaman as we have it is quite touching. Naaman is a great man, a great military leader and a Gentile. And apparently an idolater, as were all the Arameans. And we hear that he has developed leprosy. This is not what we today understand as leprosy, but rather a skin condition which renders him unclean and perhaps considered cursed. As the story develops, Naaman hears of a prophet in Samaria who could cure him of his skin disease. After a little palaver about political misunderstandings between Naaman and the king of Israel, Naaman goes to meet Elisha. Alas, he doesn't even get that far. Elisha sends a messenger to him and tells him to go wash in the river Jordan seven times and his flesh will be restored and he would be clean. Then things get interesting. Naaman is a very great man. A particularly important man. He is used to being, and expects to be, treated with attention and great care. And he's not at all happy about being dismissed by the prophet for refusing to see him in person. As he says: “I thought that for me he would surely come out and stand and call upon the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot and cure the leprosy!” Why wash in the Jordan river when Naaman had perfectly good rivers in Damascus? So, as the scripture tells us, “He turned and went away in a rage.” But his servants approached him—I would imagine very gingerly—and  suggested that had the prophet asked him to do something quite difficult, would he not have done it? Why not do something as simple as wash in the Jordan and be clean? To his great credit, Naaman overcame his anger and his hurt pride and washed in the Jordan and was cleansed. The scripture tells us: “His flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.

The story doesn’t end there and is well worth reading in its entirety. But what we read today tells us, or at least tells me, something important about faith and about life. And that is that our faith, our religion, our spirituality is perhaps something quite simpler than we usually imagine.

Not everybody is religiously obsessive or overly scrupulous. But I certainly was when I was young and probably am still to an uncomfortable extent. And my hunch is that I'm not alone in this. As a young boy, for example, I used to worry as I prayed to the Father or to the Son,  that the Holy Ghost might be a little unhappy with me because I wasn't giving Him/Her/It enough attention. I often worried about getting it right, doing it right, believing aright and sometimes even acting aright. I was on the lookout for new devotions, new paths of prayer, novel approaches to what we now term spirituality. Let me be clear: none of these concerns is bad in and of itself, though they did drive me to get a graduate degree in the philosophy of religion so that I could figure out what was indeed right and correct and therefore do it, be it, or have it as if it were some kind of possession. And I don't regret that, at least not totally. But like Naaman, I often thought that there had to be more to it, that there had to be the calling on the name of the Lord and the waving of the hands before the desired effect. But over the years I’ve come to think that maybe it's much simpler than all that. At least at its core.

It appears that all traditions at some point try to summarize the deep truth out of which they've grown. Christianity certainly has, and it should not be lost on us. If fifty years ago you had come to an Episcopal service of Holy Communion you would have heard, Sunday after Sunday, the summary of the law:

Hear what our Lord Jesus saith: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 22:37-40

There you have it. Is it enough? Yes and no. This is only the starting point, and it takes a lifetime or perhaps an eternity to unpack it, embrace it and in a sense become it, live it, be it. But if this is all you knew, it would be enough.

The Christian tradition is filled with such gems of spiritual wisdom:  “God is love.” “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”  “Believe on the Lord Jesus and you shall be saved.” Or as we heard today in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: “Bear one another's burdens, and in this way, you will fulfill the law of Christ.”  These are all touchstones of our Christian path. 

And not it’s just the Christian tradition that has such summaries. The Jewish tradition, for example, is rich with stories and tales and homely advice. One of the earliest stories paralleling Jesus’ two great commandments is that of Rabbi Hillel the Elder who lived roughly around the time of Jesus:  The story goes:

A non-Jew once came before Rabbi Shammai with a curious demand. He wanted Shammai to teach him the entire Torah while the non-Jew stood on one foot. Knowing the impossibility of such a thing, Shammai rejected him. The questioner then took his request to Rabbi Hillel the Elder. Hillel gently told him, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is its commentary. Now go and study.”

We see clearly that this summary of the law, if you will, is not an end but a beginning to be unpacked and understood and lived. “Now go and study,” concludes Rabbi Hillel. The work is just beginning, but my, what a great starting point.

In our day we might call these sayings or summaries ‘memes’ or memory devices which set us on the right road. That certainly is one of the functions of the creed that we will recite together after I finish. This year we are celebrating the seventeen hundredth anniversary of the Nicene Creed, at least in its first iteration. People often roll their eyes when we come to the creed and say they don't believe it, or they don't get it or that they can't truthfully say it. I've been there at times, but I now find the creed a precious gift to us not as a final and complete statement but, like the summary of the law given us by Jesus or the ethical teachings of Hillel, a starting point for a process that goes deeper and the deeper into the realm of the Spirit and into that process of transformation or metamorphosis that we call redemption and sanctification and wholeness.

A few weeks ago, I posted on my Facebook page an excerpt from an essay by our friend Father Martin Smith. In an article he wrote some years ago for the Washington DC diocesan newspaper, he articulates four ways of understanding or approaching what a creed might mean for us today. He likens the creed first to an entrance ticket. Originally created to summarize for converts what kind of drama baptism was going to let them into, reciting the creed admitted them to the drama. But it wasn’t the drama itself, it was just the entrance ticket. The real drama is here and now.

Second, it has been, as it were, a coin or currency of the Christian family for seventeen centuries. If for no other reason, we should honor this coin or currency passed down to us, one which has held together a disparate family across time and space and cultures and of which we too are part. 

Thirdly, Martin tells us that the creed is like the table of contents in a book of poetry. It is a list of first lines, but no one line is a whole poem in itself. For that we must dig deeper and do some hard work. And that again is the work of a lifetime, as both Rabbi Jesus and Rabbi Hillel tell us. 

Finally, Martin reminds us that the creed is a song. It is a song of God's love and of God's compassion and actions and of God's intention to bind us together as one in the face of much evil and ill will in us and around us. It is a song of resistance. And it is above all a love song. How we need such a song of loving resistance today. I used to attend a church in Boston where we always sang the creed on Sundays to a wonderful plainsong melody. We can't do that right now. But we can monotone it as is often done with the Apostle’s Creed. And since it's summer and since it's the Creed’s seventeen hundredth birthday, why don't we? So please turn in your Holy Eucharist booklets to page 2 for the text and stand. Let us to confess our hope, our faith, our love story, and our resistance in the words of the ancient creed as we sing it…and feel free to add whatever harmonies you like: 

We believe in one God…

The Fourth Sunday of Easter, May 11, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

The Fourth Sunday of Easter, May 11, 2025

• Acts 9:36-43
• Revelation 7:9-17
• John 10:22-30

Click here for an audio of the sermon

I'm afraid I have three sermons to preach this morning, so I'll try to make them short.

First, today is Good Shepherd Sunday. Every year on the Fourth Sunday of Easter we hear one or another passage from John’s Gospel and the beautiful collect or prayer reminding us that Jesus is the Good Shepherd of God's people. Truthfully, however, I know little, if anything, about sheep or shepherds. I worked one summer on a dairy farm, but it turns out that cows are rather different than sheep. And many years ago, I spent several weeks in New Zealand where it is said that there are four million people and forty million sheep. That struck me as just about the right ratio. But beyond that I have nothing to say except that we all need to be guided and protected, and in Christ Jesus God is both that director and defender.

Second, today is Mother's Day…and I know a little bit more about mothers than I do about sheep or shepherds. In fact, we all know something about mothers and mothering and nurturing even if we are not mothers in the literal sense of the term. Some years ago, I was preaching on Mother's Day and the first lesson from the Acts of the Apostles was about the Ethiopian eunuch. Later that day I was talking to my sister and mentioned this and said how odd it was that we should have a reading about a eunuch on Mother's Day. She paused for a moment and then said: “He had a mother too.” We all have a mother, whether we knew her or not, whether she was a ‘good’ mother or not, whether we had her for only a few hours or for many decades. Some of us here today are in fact mothers, whether our offspring are living or departed this life. And we honor you today. Your mothering is an embodied symbol of the nurturing and sustaining love of God. It reminds us that God is as much mother as father, as Lady Julian of Norwich and others have taught us. So happy Mother's Day to you all who are mothers. And happy Mother's Day to those of us who are the offspring of a mother, which is all of us. However complex, we like that eunuch each had a mother, and we hold her now, living or departed, in our prayers.

My third sermon for this morning has to do with memory and memorization. Memory is a central feature of the spiritual life, at least as we have received it and practice it in the Western faith traditions. So much of the Jewish roots of our lineage revolve around  remembering a history, factual or somewhat fanciful, and passing on that memory to those who come after us. It is a memory of creation and of waywardness, of enslavement and deliverance, of folly and wisdom, of getting lost and of being found again and again. In our Christian message we are reminded and urged to remember who we are and whose we are, never forgetting the great love of God who has brought us, and continues to bring us, to newness of life. Our very act of worship here this morning in this Eucharist is summarized at the pivotal point of our liturgy when we hear once again the words of our Lord: Do this in memory of me. Do this as a remembrance. Do not forget. 

Memory is strange and complex and rarely straightforward. But it is necessary. It is one of our central faculties, as the medieval philosophers called it, one of the central capabilities that makes us human. Yes, we can distort our memories, we can even remember things that never happened, but this doesn't lessen the fact that memory is important. We know how tragic the loss of memory is to those afflicted with neurological disorders such as dementia. Perhaps it's not an accident that for decades it was the practice in this monastery for each brother, upon entering the Chapel in the morning, to kneel and pray the Suscipe,  a prayer that begins: "Take, O Lord, and receive my entire liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my whole will. All that I am and all that I have, Thou hast given me; and I now give it back to Thee, to be disposed of according to Thy good pleasure.”  Our memory, our understanding, our will-- along with our emotions and our entire embodied being—are great gifts of the Creator and need to be nurtured and guided and used.

And one of the ways that our memory can be nurtured is through memorization. In his book Why We Remember (NY: Random House, 2024) the neuroscientist Charan Ranganath makes the point that the mind is more than memorization. He says:  “The human brain  is not a memorization machine; it is a thinking machine.”  True. But memorization is one of the tools that can help us to think in the broadest sense of that term to enter deeply into realities both scientific and spiritual, and to use our whole brain and our whole person.

I am thinking of memorizing today because of the psalm appointed for today which is the 23rd Psalm. Many of you probably know it verbatim. Somewhere along the way I memorized it in the King James Version: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters; he restoreth my soul….” And because I have it memorized, it's available to me at a deep level which I can revisit and explore, as it were, new levels of meaning. There is a kind of muscular memory or embodied consciousness in memorized texts which reaches beyond reading or listening and beyond ordinary linear thinking or rationality. Perhaps it was for this reason, and not just because manuscripts were expensive and in short supply, that early monastics were expected to memorize at least the entire psalter, all 150 psalms. 

There has been something of a revival of memorization. My old friend Jay Parini, a scholar and author and expert on Robert Frost recently published a book titled Robert Frost. Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart (Library of America, 2024). He notes:  “….memorization makes a poem part of our inner lives. Once committed to memory a poem is available to us for recall at any time--and the occasions for remembering it will make themselves known to us. It isn't something we have to work at.”  And last week the New York Times initiated a weeklong series of articles titled The Poetry Challenge which aimed to lead the reader into memorizing a poem by the early 20th century poet Edna Saint Vincent Mallay. I must confess I haven't had much success with memorizing either Robert Frost or the poem by Mallay, but I hasten to add that as an adolescent I did memorize a poem by her that began with these words: “Listen children, your father is dead.” I know that sounds grim, but it was an amazing poem. And it still lives in me. I’m sure every brother here can attest that the constant exposure to the Scriptures results eventually in a place where an image or phrase or passage from our sacred texts appears within us as if by magic and at just the right time. And as my friend Jay says, without our having to work at it. 

So my third sermon this morning is simply an invitation to you and to me to develop our memory through memorization. Yes, it can be a poem by Robert Frost or TS Eliot. It can be a Psalm or the Beatitudes or some other passage of Scripture. All of you already know some of them beginning with the Lord's Prayer. It can even be doggerel. In addition to memorizing Milton’s “On his Blindness” and Poe’s “The Raven” (parts of it now sadly lost) and several soliloquies from Shakespeare, I glory in and enjoy reciting a poem from Mad Magazine circa 1957 that began: ‘I think that I shall never hear a poem as lovely as a beer.”  I'll spare you the rest. See me later if you’d like to hear more.

“Remember your creator in the days of your youth,” says Ecclesiastes. “Do this in memory of me,” says our Lord. And above all, remember to call your mother today if she's still around. And, whether alive or departed, let's offer a prayer for her wherever she may be. Perhaps the Hail Mail? 

Amen. 

Maundy Thursday, April 17, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

Maundy Thursday, April 17, 2025

• Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14
• 1 Corinthians 11:23-26
• John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Click here for an audio of the sermon

As my brothers can attest, I am something of a liturgy wonk. I find reading about the development of public worship in our Christian tradition to be both fascinating and, for the most part, edifying. And this should come as no surprise. After all, I'm the kid who at the age of 12 or 13 bought four leather-bound volumes of the Roman Breviary at the local Salvation Army thrift store for 25 cents a volume. Even at that age, I could recognize a bargain. The only challenge was that the books were in Latin. So I started to study the language bit by bit. It's a long story, but I was able to swap the four volumes for the one-volume Monastic Diurnal in English. It was a swap, I’m afraid, that I'm not exactly proud of. Of course, reading about liturgies is quite different from taking part in them, though I rarely passed up a chance to attend one. And now with live stream and YouTube, one can explore an exotic array of liturgical expressions. And I confess I've done it and still do.

I was surprised then when I recently discovered a rather arcane ritual that takes place on Maundy Thursday at Durham Cathedral in the north of England. The ritual, known as the Judas cup ceremony and described in the Cathedral service leaflet, has its origins in the 14th century. It was abolished at the time of the Reformation but was reinstated a generation or so ago. The Dean and members of the cathedral chapter gather around a small table. The Dean then takes a sip of wine from the cup, one of those shallow cups without handles, and then addresses the individual members of the chapter saying to them, “One of you will betray me.” Each member replies with “Surely not I” as they too take a sip of wine from the cup mirroring the scene from the Last Supper. The description continues: “Research from theologian Prof. Douglas Davies notes how the cup used in the 14th century featured the face of Judas at the bottom of the bowl, so when monks drank from it, they could see their own faces reflected into that of the traitor.”

This ceremony, this ritual of the Judas cup, speaks directly to the ambiguity and the power of this night, especially when juxtaposed with our drinking from another cup, the cup of salvation, at the bottom of which is the image of our saving Lord. For when we look into both these cups, we see something about ourselves, truths that are perhaps diametrically opposed and from which we shrink back from acknowledging, but which nonetheless capture the tension of our human condition.

First there is the image of Judas the traitor. Judas, a member of Jesus’ inner cohort. Judas, the treasurer and money manager. Judas, who for all we know had his own history of abuse, disappointments, and woes. And at some level, each of us sees ourselves in that Judas cup. If we live long enough--and it doesn't have to be very long-- we come to know ourselves as betrayers: betrayers of others, even (perhaps especially) those close to us. Betrayers of ourselves when we fail to live up to or to  act in harmony with what we know to be our better selves, our treasured values,  our own well-being. And then of course there is the betrayal of God wherein we, at one level or another, reject God's love and the path it opens for us, most often because we're too afraid of its demands, too afraid of what it might call forth in us. Yes, the Judas cup. We know it all too well. 

But there's that other cup. I'll call it the Jesus cup. It is the cup given to us by him on this night in which he was betrayed, a cup to stare into as we drink. And the promise made with that cup lies at its bottom. It is the very image given us at the bottom of the cup. It is the image of Jesus who is himself the perfect image of God and who reminds us that we too share that cup with him, we who are made in the image and likeness of God…just as Judas was. There is a teaching in Buddhism which talks about discovering one's true face. I wonder if this cup isn't our Christian correlate. Staring into the cup of Jesus, which is the cup of suffering as well as of joy, we catch a glimpse of our own true face which we and our human society have been working to distort and mar. The good news is that we and they have not been totally successful. Our face may remain wizened by age and experience, but it is redeemed and preserved by a great love, the same love that led Jesus to the cross. It is that cross that leads Jesus to the grave and to the overcoming of death that we celebrate and participate in over these Three Great Days.

I used to worry about how we should properly celebrate these days. And being a liturgy wonk, I used to have the right answers. At first, of course, it was 16th  century Tridentine Roman ritual. Or maybe it was 4th century Jerusalem. Or perhaps it was in those exotic processions that are held to this day in Mediterranean and Hispanic cultures where hooded marchers carry larger than life-sized statues of our Lord and his Sorrowful Mother. Or was it in my youth when we buried of a statue of the dead Jesus in a symbolic tomb on Good Friday at 3:00? Or crouching under the burial shroud as in the Eastern Byzantine tradition? But whatever the way we observe these days, I think the lesson is the same: This is not something we do. This is something God does. 

Many years ago, I was on a private directed retreat and was assigned to meditate on the gospel passage of the taking down from the cross. I was encouraged to become imaginatively engaged with the passage, and as I did, I found myself increasingly anxious. There was Mary at the foot of the cross with some disciples, struggling to get the body down from the cross. People were running around helter-skelter. And there was Mary holding the body of her son. And as is my wont, I started to say: “What should I do? What should I do? I don't know what I should do.” And Mary looked up at me and said: “Why don't you just stand there and watch? Why don't you just stand there and watch?”  I've taken this advice to heart, though not, I fear, often enough. But I think it's good advice for us all as we enter this time, these days, this journey, this mystical accompaniment. Our first and primary duty is to stand there and watch. To bear witness. To see and hear and touch and taste. We don't have to manufacture a religious experience. If God wants to gift us with that, God will do so. I've learned over the years to trust that liturgy, in all its diversity and power, can carry us to where we need to go.

We're entering a strange time right now, entering what is often called liturgical time, Kairos time, God's time. It is time not measured by the clock but measured via all the actions and emotions of these days. In a sense, we now leave the calendar at  April 17, in the year of our Lord 2025, that is today, and we won't pick it up again until Easter Sunday morning, April 20, 2025, when we celebrate with another series of liturgical observances the festival of our deliverance and freedom as beloved children of God.

Some of you may remember the television series The Twilight Zone. It started airing about 1960 and went for five seasons. It's considered one of the groundbreaking science fiction/alternative fiction dramas of our age. The genius behind it was a man named Rod Serling. At the beginning of each episode Mr. Serling would offer an introduction. It changed over the years, but one of my favorite forms of it is the following: 

There is fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.

The Twilight Zone is not perhaps a perfect description of these three days, this Sacred Triduum, but it comes close. For in these days, we are cast into light as well as darkness, we are suspended between our fears and our hopes and our deepest knowing, and we are invited and encouraged to dwell there imaginatively, with loving curiosity and open hearts and minds. And by the end of this Triduum, in ways large or subtle, God will bring you and me out of the twilight and into the dawn of another Easter morning. Yes: fire, sunrise, flowers, and feasting. That’s the way it happens. And thank God that it does happen. So let us begin, my friends, let us be on our way. The Lord awaits our arrival.

The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany C, February 16, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 16, 2025

 

Jeremiah 17:5-10

1 Corinthians 15:12-20

Luke 6:17-26    

This morning preachers can hardly avoid noting the jarring differences between the Beatitudes that we have come to know and love from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew given as Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount and those that we hear this morning from Saint Luke’ Gospel. The former are familiar and warm or, at the very least, reassuring. But this morning's version is more concise and, in its way, more disturbing. Jesus, teaching from the Plain or on the level place, levels with us not only in describing who is blessed but also those who are or will be facing great woe. 

It's important to understand that these are not primarily blessings and curses. They are rather a description of the deeper reality of things and people, whether we are talking about individuals or societies, nations or cultures. They are prophetic in both senses of that term. They reveal what is in fact now the deep truth and what will be further revealed in the fullness of time, when God's reign is finally and fully established in our created order. And of that, most of us have only caught glimpses, fleeting but nevertheless life giving.

We gathered here this morning are likely numbered among those who are rich and full and filled with mirth and laughter and spoken well of.  And to us, Jesus’ words are disturbing. They are probably meant to be. On the other hand, for those millions who are numbered among the poor, the hungry, the desolate, the excluded, or those reviled for the sake of Christ, these words come as liberation and consolation and promise.

The Beatitudes, whether from Matthew’s version or Luke’s, are explicitly laid out in binary form. They describe two large categories of people or institutions or structures or ways of living. We are increasingly uncomfortable with binary thinking and often for very good reasons. But in the scriptures, particularly in those books which are classified as wisdom literature--think of the psalms for example or the Book of Proverbs or Ecclesiastes--there are only two paths, two ways forward, though they are usually described in quite general terms. They are the way wise versus the way of the foolish. Or the way of the righteous versus that of the wicked. Or that way that leads to fullness of life versus that which leads to a death.

In today's Old Testament lesson the prophet  Jeremiah introduces these binary categories in powerful language:

“Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a shrub in the desert and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.”

In contrast, there are those who trust in the Lord and not merely in their own strength:

“Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought, it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.”

The image offered us of the blessed, the happy, likens them to trees deeply rooted in ultimate reality. They are grounded.  And no matter what happens around them, they can tap into hidden life-giving streams that will see them through the vicissitudes of life. Whereas those who trust in their own strength or in the strength of others and not in God have no such deep root and cannot withstand the recurring heat and dryness of human living.

Psalm 1, the lectionary psalm appointed for today, repeats this same imagery. In fact, biblical scholars aren't sure if Jeremiah was borrowing from the psalm or the Psalmist was borrowing from Jeremiah.  It's a  psalm well worth memorizing. In six short verses it contrasts the way of those who are happy and who delight in the Lord’s law with those who are wicked and whose way is doomed. The same illustrations are served up: of the righteous who are like trees planted by streams of water  “…bearing fruit in due season with leaves that do not wither” and of the wicked who are “like chaff which the wind blows away.”  Admittedly none of this is readily apparent in our lives or the lives of others. But it is a claim upon a deeper, if hidden, truth which we need to embrace.

Our Christian tradition offers us resources that assist us both to know concretely which way to follow in our lives along with practical wisdom and techniques , if you will, on how to do it or to do it better. There is for example sacred scripture itself. There is the guidance of God's Spirit active throughout creation and in our own hearts. There is the fellowship of the saints and ancestors and the tradition of their counsels. There is the community of believers that we call church and the precious gift of human reason. And there is the practice of virtue. All of these help us to distinguish the path that leads to life from the path which leads to a dead end. And they empower us to choose and walk that right path.   

But there's a catch, as there so often is, and it's the catch which Jeremiah names as he concludes his description of the cursed and the blessed. They are words that are all too true as we know from experience: “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse--who can understand it?” The devious heart refers here, I believe, to the amazing and persistent ability we have to deceive ourselves or to let ourselves be deceived by others both as individuals and as nations and peoples. As Psalm 64 says: “The human mind and heart are a mystery.”   

I came of age in the 1960s and 1970s where there was a growing emphasis on complete self-transparency (“Let it all hang out”), absolute clarity, and ideological certitude. We made and continue to make an idol of self-knowledge.  Therapy, forms of therapeutic religion, even spiritual direction and practices of discernment have been presented to us, wrongly, as roads to clearness and certitude. I’m not saying that these practices are wrong; each of these disciplines, if used rightly, is useful in attaining greater transparency, greater clarity, and a certain manageable certitude.  But we will never know ourselves fully in this life even as we must strive toward it. Full knowledge is a matter for the heavenly vision given to us in part now but not yet in its fullness.

           The Jesuit priest, philosopher and author John Kavanaugh once asked Mother Teresa to pray for him to have clarity. She responded, “I've never had clarity and certitude. I only have trust. I'll pray that you trust.”  Even that great master of spiritual discernment, Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, said that in our discerning the most we could hope for is some degree of clarity, one that philosophers call moral certitude, by which they mean adequate evidence to act upon, but rarely if ever absolute certainty or clarity. As Jeremiah said: the heart is devious. Or as the psalmist said, it is a mystery, and we can never totally unpack it.

I remember reading an excerpt from Gateway to Hope by Sister Maria Boulding, an English Benedictine nun, which drove this point home. There she said: “We are more sinful than we know, more deeply flawed than we can recognize by any human insight; but grace works in us in the deepest places of body and spirit. We must live from our weakness, from the barren places of our need, because there is the spring of grace and the source of our strength…. When we can stand before God in the truth of our need, acknowledging our sinfulness and bankruptcy, then we can celebrate [God’s] mercy. Then we are living by grace, and we can allow full scope to his joy.”

The key to all of this is trust. To trust not in our own strength or in the strength of other mortals or in systems or kingdoms or governments, but in God. Again, as Mother Teresa reminds us: “I only have trust. I'll pray that you trust.”  At its heart and in the end, our faith is not about propositions or doctrines or creeds, though they have a role to play. Faith is trust in a God who is no less than personal  and who is eternally disposed toward us in love. And with whom we can be in relation.  More accurately, with whom we are already and always in relation, whether we know it or not.

As we offer our gifts and ourselves at the altar this morning, we will sing Hymn 635. I find the hymn tune lugubrious and its tone very Germanic, but its words are to me words of life:

If thou but trust in God to guide thee,

and hope in him through all thy ways,

he'll give thee strength with ere betide thee,

and bear thee through the evil days.

Who trusts in God's unchanging love

builds on a rock that nought can move.

 May this hymn be our prayer today whatever our faith or doubts, certainties or uncertainties might be. Let us trust the One who is both Rock and Refuge. The One who is Love itself. The One revealed to us in our Brother Jesus Christ…may His Name be praised. Amen.

The First Sunday after the Epiphany/Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ, January 12, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky

The First Sunday after the Epiphany - the Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ, January 12, 2025

Click here for an audio of the sermon

It is always tempting to conflate narratives—whether Gospel narratives or a story or chain of events from our own lives—into  one smooth harmonious account or version. And that is understandable, since we like things to fit together without hiccups.  It makes it easier for us to remember and relate the story.  And sometimes things do fit together perfectly.  But other times—perhaps most of the times—there are gaps, or lacunae as scholars often call them, which we fill in imaginatively, creatively, stubbornly so that the story hangs together. Academicians and preachers often tell us to beware of this or at least become aware of it. A few weeks ago, Brother Adam reminded us that the four gospels have widely differing birth narratives. Mark has, in fact, none. Matthew and Luke are rich in imagery, though different ones that are almost always mashed up together: angels, shepherds, no room at the inn, wise men, flights into Egypt, dreams.  And John, of course, has his cosmic origin story for Jesus as the One who is from before time and through whom and for whom all things exist. We hold all this together in our hearts, if not always in our heads.

The same thing might be said of the stories of the baptism of Jesus. Each of the gospel writers has a slightly different take on what was going on, which is not surprising since not one of them was there, and each was writing for a different audience decades after the event. Matthew has Jesus coming explicitly to be baptized by John; they have a little give and take about whether it's appropriate for John to baptize Jesus; John consents; Jesus is baptized. And as soon as he comes up from the waters the heavens open, the dove descends, and words are heard, apparently in the sight and hearing of everyone. Mark’s gospel is a lot more concise and almost blunt. It simply says Jesus came was baptized and the heavens opened, and the voice came, though it appears that it was only Jesus who heard the voice or saw the heavens open and the Spirit descending. And then there's Luke gospel account that we hear today.  What's interesting about his account is that it places Jesus firmly as part of the people. All the people were coming to be baptized. As Eugene Peterson puts it in his paraphrase: “Crowds of people came out for baptism because it was the popular thing to do.”  And there's Jesus, right in the middle of them. Strangely, not much happens for Luke at the baptism. It's only later, when Jesus is praying, that the heavens are opened and in visible form a dove comes and a voice is heard: “You are my son, the beloved; With you I am well pleased.” But heard by whom?  by Jesus? by the crowd?  Luke doesn’t say.  And just to be different, John's gospel doesn't have any baptism narrative at all but simply the Baptist’s witness that Jesus is indeed special. It is apparently he alone who sees Spirit come down on Jesus like a dove.  And that’s it.

Having said this, we might ask what is the message that Luke offers us in his story of the baptism of our Lord? There are two lessons that I take from this.  The first is that in considering any transformative or life changing experience, it's seldom if ever possible to pin it down exactly. But patterns or shapes emerge in all these gospel stories, patterns which reflect the movement of our own lives. In the case of our Lord’s baptism, it is the story of the movement from some sort of sign, whether a casual perception (let’s say a bird flies by and hovers over you) or a dramatic, even traumatic event which must be  put into words, either by ourselves or by another, and from which the change beings.  Movements in our own lives which parallel the story of Jesus are frequently through some kind of metaphorical desert and into a new  ministry or identity, which is to say, into things, often insignificant in themselves, which re-shape our lives and our person.  I think each of us here has at least one such story. 

The second message that Luke offers us in his relating of our Lord’s baptism concerns Jesus’ solidarity. And it is solidarity not with a crowd or a collective or a mob, but with a people, a society, a community.  Jesus doesn’t come to John as a stand-alone figure but as a part of a Judean people waiting, longing, looking for deliverance.   As Dean Andrew McGowan puts it in his weekly commentary:

“Jesus was baptized, according to Luke, with “all the people”…because he is one of these people, this community of Israel.

“This implies two things: first it makes Jesus’s baptism itself—as  opposed to the following revelation—mostly an act of solidarity and community, rather than something highly individual. He is baptized because all the people were coming out to listen to John and prepare for God's reign, and Jesus is taking his place among them. Second, it underlines that John's mission was not one of an individual altar call but a collective rallying-cry for the renewal and preparation of Israel as a polity of people.”

 And because John and the people (including Jesus) are filled with expectation, they are ripe for a revolution, a change of heart, a move forward into something new and unprecedented.

It is this deep solidarity with the people of his day and with us in our own day that I take away this morning. It's not that Jesus is so radically different from us—though he is different—but that he is so much one of us and is with us and in us and will remain so until the end.  And that we move toward him and his New Order together.  I never grow weary of quoting St. Benedict’s Rule (Chapter 72) where he says of monks and of everyone:  “Let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may he bring us all together to everlasting life.”   All together. That’s how it was at Jesus’ baptism. And that’s how it is for us, whether or not we recognize it.  We are together in these waters that we call life.  And we sink or swim, not as individuals but as a people, a church, a nation, a world.  Our destinies are bundled up with those of everybody, everything, everywhere.    Together.

I close on an obscure liturgical note. The feast of the Baptism of Our Lord is hardly ancient, though Jesus’ baptism remains central to the Eastern Church’s celebration of Epiphany. But for us in the West, Epiphany has become all about the wise men (Magi) and the manifestation of Jesus to the Gentiles.  Perhaps as a corrective, Pope Pius XII in 1955 instituted a feast of the Baptism of Our Lord for the 13th of January, and then around 1970 it moved to the Sunday after Epiphany. And almost all mainline churches have followed this pattern. I wonder:  Why did we need this feast? Why do we need this feast now? What does it mean today for Jesus to be in solidarity with us…and for us to be baptized in solidarity with other Christians and with people everywhere who practice some form of baptismal action, even if it's only washing their face in the morning or taking a bath or shower? There's something deeply universal in all this,  something life giving and potentially life changing. Is the work of our baptism pretty much finished…or has it only just begun…new every morning, every day?   Maybe that’s why we need this feast, this celebration, this reminder.

The Funeral of Br. Laurence Harms - December 10, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky

The Funeral of Br. Laurence Harms OHC, December 10, 2024

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Our brother Laurence Arthur Eugene Harms had a rich and productive life but not, I think, an easy one. He was born into a loving family in Rock Island IL but at age 8 developed a neurological disorder for which he had no name. It was of course narcolepsy, a condition which both limited him and shaped him for the rest of his life. It wasn't until he was 20 years old that the condition was diagnosed and given a name.  Medications were made available to help keep him awake during the day, though he never enjoyed a full night’s sleep. But despite this he was a man who was intensely interested in the natural world and it how it worked. He loved the sciences--chemistry, physics, biology and later, as we all know, astronomy--and studied at Augustana, a small Lutheran college not far from home. He had to leave college after two years to work in a factory for a year to raise funds to pay for his education. He returned to school with enough money and the new medicine which allowed him to attain his bachelor’s degree and to begin a seven-year period of teaching sciences throughout Illinois. He loved the teaching, though he often had difficulties with managing the students. So when he turned 30, he and a friend set out for California for a summer job which turned into much more than a summer job. He first went door to door selling Watkins spices and then began working with the International American Tuna Commission where a great adventure took shape: he spent three months at sea on a tuna ship during which time they caught 200 tons of tuna.

Always a devout High-Church Episcopalian, Laurence--or Gene as he was then known--heard that a monk would be in the San Diego area speaking about missionary work in Liberia. That monk was Brother Raymond Gill, OHC, who explained to the gathered crowd that they desperately needed a science teacher in West Africa. At the end of the presentation, Eugene went up to Father Gill and said: “Father you have your science teacher.”  And off he went to Liberia teaching for two years at the Holy Cross school there. During that time, he became a Companion of the Order and took the name Laurence. Laurence was an amazingly effective teacher under somewhat primitive circumstances. Perhaps because he was himself a bit slow and knew what it was to struggle, he paced himself and his students to the point that many of them excelled in the sciences and in knowledge generally.  Among his students was the future vice president of Liberia along with many who became doctors, nurses, government officials or successful entrepreneurs.

It was also at this time Laurence felt increasingly called to explore religious life as a vowed member of the Order of the Holy Cross.  He entered the community in 1962 as one of only two laymen and made his life profession in 1966.  He had struggled with the question of whether he wanted to be a monk or a teacher, and when he was sent back to Liberia as a teacher and a monk shortly after his life profession, he discovered he could be both. He stayed there seven years and ultimately spent 13 years teaching in Liberia.

Laurence loved the life there and the Liberian peoples and spoke often of the excitement of going out on trek, that is on journey through the jungle to spread the gospel while always, always respecting the variety of both indigenous and Islamic faiths that they encountered. And--those of us who know Laurence will understand this--he often got in trouble. Once while teaching in Ghana, he was expelled from the country as a CIA spy! Laurence also suffered from various tropical illnesses, including amoebic dysentery and malaria, and yet bounced back to continue his teaching, loving his students and being loved by them in return. He was to teach in the Bahamas in the mid-1970s and then again in Ghana in the mid-1980s where he was the novice master, which is hard for me to wrap my mind around except when I remember that Laurence was a man who loved people and who saw Jesus in them and walked with them along the way toward new and larger life.

Laurence loved to travel when he could. He traveled through the Middle East. He traveled to the Holy Land. And when his astronomical interests developed, he travelled around the world to experience several eclipses of the sun. Alas, when he went to the South Pacific on one such journey he totally missed the solar eclipse because he was involved in trying to set up his camera. That, too, was our Laurence.

During these decades Laurence struggled with the burdens that narcolepsy put on him. People often made fun of him when he nodded off or collapsed in a cataplexy. He was embarrassed by this and was often beset by a sense of inferiority. But his transparent welcome and simple acceptance of others helped him overcome this time and again. And he did have his resurrection of sorts. When I lived with him in Santa Barbara, he was offered medication which for the first time in his life since age 8, allowed him to sleep through the night. He said it was like becoming a new person and indeed it was.

Laurence had other challenges and setbacks. Like the other brothers living in Santa Barbara at the time, Laurence lost all his possessions in the tragic fire which burned down the monastery in 2008.  But he persevered, continuing with his astronomical interests. Many were the guests, myself included, who for the first time saw the rings of Saturn through his telescope or the near approach of the Hale-Bopp comet. He was part of the Astronomical Unit at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and took delight in its presentations and his work in the observatory. And he had a touch with fame. Once a friend of ours arranged a dinner party for him at Cal Tech and across the dining room was none other than the world renown theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking who was, as many of you know, paralyzed and rendered unable to speak by a progressive motor neuron disease. .That didn't stop Laurence who shot across the room to Professor Hawking, told him how much he admired him, then laid his hands on his head and gave him a blessing.  It was the greatest affirmation that Laurence could offer anyone, and I think Hawking, though an atheist, realized that. At least, I hope he did.

Laurence could tell wonderful, often very funny, stories about himself, and our community has its own rich store of sayings and malapropisms that came from Laurence, things like the famous liver-shaped swimming pool or the local tribe  that slaughtered half a cow for a feast. Laurence could also be forgetful. He tells the story of offering  a school of prayer in Bolgatanga, in the northern part of Ghana:

“I remember one time, I had a wonderful village there. I had a number of people, about 20 people gathered together.  I was teaching the Jesus prayer and centering prayer. So I got them all started on that and they were all centering. So then I had to go someplace, go to the bathroom, and I left and I forgot them. Here I was an hour later, and I remembered: ‘Oh my God those people are still there praying’ and I came back over an hour later and the people were still there praying. I hadn't intended more than 15 or 20 minutes, but they were so faithful that they stayed there and prayed. I learned a lesson from that all right.”

 I'm sure they did as well.

It's tempting to reduce Laurence's life to narcolepsy, or teaching, or astronomy or even origami. All of those were important touchstones for him. But behind it all and suffusing it all, transparently so, was a deep love of Jesus. Repeatedly Laurence expressed his certainty that Jesus was with him and indeed protecting him and guiding him. And given some of the places and journeys that he was on and situations he found himself in, the fact that he came through them safely makes me think he was quite right. At the end of the oral history that he shared with his family and his dear friends Karla Marie and Remy, Laurence says the following:

“God was always with me. I never doubted it that even at times when I was not happy, not on the ball, or not employed or something. God was still my friend. Some people have three: the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Some of them find God in…the Father, the Almighty. Others find God in the Holy Spirit; God is closer to them through the Holy Spirit. With me God is friend, Jesus Christ is my friend. I mean the others are as well, but the emphasis is on: he loves me and he cares for me and looks out for me as a friend would. So, you might consider that wherever you may be.”

For Laurence it was always Jesus and all for Jesus. Laurence was not a theologian by any means, but he was a man touched by God’s love who touched others with that same love. He was a man of prayer and compassion and patience and persevering hope…just like his Lord.  And we shall miss him.

Brother Laurence Arthur Eugene Harms, may you rest soundly in peace. And may you rise in glory with Jesus, your friend and guide, your protector and Savior...to Whom be glory and honor, now and forever.  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.

Saint Michael and All Angels, September 29, 2024

 Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky

Saint Michael and All Angels, September 29, 2024

• Genesis 28:10-17
• Revelation 12:7-12
• John 1:47-51

Click here for an audio of the sermon

We don't get to preach all that often here at Holy Cross Monastery.  With seven or eight or more brothers preaching on Sundays and major feasts, opportunities are limited. But here I am again assigned to preach on this feast of Saint Michael and all Angels.  It turns out that I've preached on this feast at least three times in the last decade or so. What more is there to say? I've looked at all our past sermons for this feast which are on our monastery website, including three by me, and all these sermons are interesting and provocative. It's very tempting to want to lift one and just read it.  And that would be fine…except that was then and this is now. The world has changed and we have changed, and once again we have to ask what angels have to do with us today.

Probably most of us aren’t aware of it, but we are in what is called in church circles the Season of Creation. This is an annual observance for Christians endorsed by the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch and Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the World Council of Churches and many other church bodies inviting us to focus our attention on the created order and the many environmental crises we face, particularly the climate crisis, and to reflect on what it means for us as people of faith to care for creation. The observance began on September 1st, which is the first day of the church year for the Eastern Orthodox Christians, and concludes this Friday on the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi who for us Western Christians--indeed for all Christians--draws our hearts and minds to reflect upon our embeddedness in creation.

The theme for this year’s Season of Creation is “To hope and act with Creation.”   The brief official publicity for this year’s observance reads:

“In the letter of Paul the apostle to the Romans, the biblical image pictures the Earth as a Mother, groaning as in childbirth (Rom 8:22). Francis of Assisi understood this when he referred to the Earth as our sister and our mother in his Canticle of Creatures. The times we live in show that we are not relating to the Earth as a gift from our Creator, but rather as a resource to be used.

 

“And yet, there is hope and the expectation for a better future. To hope in a biblical context does not mean to stand still and quiet, but rather groaning, crying, and actively striving for new life amidst the struggles. Just as in childbirth, we go through a period of intense pain, but new life springs forth.”

 

I admit that I have been slow to catch the import of all this while many of our brothers and sisters, particularly the younger ones, have been painfully aware of how we have abused and damaged our mother earth and how that abuse and damage threatens our own existence, the existence of a people made in the image of God. For me it has been the reality of climate change which impacting us so directly that is bringing me and many others to awareness, but of course the issues go beyond climate.  Maybe my reluctance has something to do with what Al Gore called an inconvenient truth: that as we become aware, we realize sooner or later-- some of us much later--that we must act and that this will mean change, change in the way we live, change in the way we consume, change in the way we relate to each other and to the whole created order. Yes, in our foundational story we are given stewardship of the world. But stewardship does not mean exploitation, especially not for personal gain. Nor can it be bought at the expense of distant and powerless others.  It means rather a gentle tending with mutual respect and the sharing of burdens.

There is so much to be done in this arena, and the threats that we face are so grave, that it is easy to lose hope, to feel that that we simply can't make the necessary adjustments to our lives, nor can we convince those who wield power to make those hard and costly choices. And we labor as if it were all up to us; that we must bear this burden alone, and that there is no help outside of us. It is of course accurate to say that the demands and the responsibilities are very great, and we must, each of us, begin to come to terms with them. But we are not alone in this. And here's where the angels come in.

Whatever they are, the angels represent powers greater than ourselves who work for good, who defend and protect, who serve, who promote the divine purpose, furthering God’s dream not simply for us but and for the entire universe. The angels fight for right, they are hidden messengers who both warn and encourage, who seek the good of God's creation. And they are with us in this emerging task of responsible stewardship, a task which oftentimes seems impossible. Their message to us is: “This is possible. And we are there to help.”

Over the last weeks we have been reading the Book of Job at morning prayer. There's a wonderful passage towards the end where God speaks to Job out of a whirlwind and asks: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?  Tell me if you have understanding. …On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4-7) These morning stars, these heavenly beings, have long been understood to be angels who comprise a kind of chorus encouraging God on in the primal process of creation. I like to think that they have a similar role to play today in overseeing that same creation, making sure that we don't mess it up hopelessly, that we don’t make an end of it or destroy it and ourselves. Perhaps today our invitation is to call on the angels to help us in the work creation care, calling on their aid as we begin, however haltingly, to hope and act with Creation and not over against it. That in a nutshell is my message for the feast of Saint Michael and all Angels in this year of our Lord 2024. 

I conclude with two quotations which I find helpful. The first is from the Anglican Church of Canada’s resource for feast days titled For All the Saints. It says of today’s feast:

Many good and faithful Christians find it difficult to accept the existence of angels; for them, angels have no more reality in fact than unicorns, griffins, or the phoenix. It may be true that the existence of angels is not one of the things in which Christians must believe if they want to be saved. Yet whenever Christians say the Nicene Creed, they confess that God has created “all that is, seen and unseen.” Entertaining the possibility of angels may be one way of acknowledging the sheer diversity of life, visible and invisible, that God has ordained in creation.

The second quote is a little grittier. It comes from the conclusion of a sermon our late beloved Brother Andrew Colquhoun preached here in 2011 on this very feast. Never one to mince words, Andrew says:

“Maybe I’m verging too far on superstition.

“But I don’t care. If you don’t believe in the angels, then for Christ’s sake become one.  Become a healer, and a proclaimer; become a warrior against hunger and hopelessness and evil.  Be a Light Bearer in the darkness around us.

“Do that for Love’s sake and believe me, you will find yourself on the side of the Angels…you will be Messengers of God, bearers of good tidings, protectors and lovers of God and God’s people. And the angels will rejoice!

“That’s probably good enough!”

You bet it is, Andrew. You bet it is.