All Saints - Nov 1, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam D. McCoy, OHC
All Saints Day - Year B - Thursday, November 1, 2012


Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9
Revelation 21:1-6a
John 11:32-44

Fra Angelico.  The Forerunners of Christ with Saints and Martyrs.
About 1423-24. Tempera on wood.  National Gallery, London.

There are three very different pictures of holiness in our scripture readings this morning.

From Wisdom: The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God.  Surely this is the traditional understanding of the reward awaiting those who keep the Law, the reward of those who are just and upright and loving.  The reward of personal holiness, of keeping the Law and walking in the steps of God’s goodness.  But there is a certain passivity to this holiness: it is in death that God’s approval is made certain.  No hand can touch them now.  They are safe.  They are at peace.

From Revelation: I saw a new heaven and a new earth: the new Jerusalem, coming down from heaven adorned as a bride for her husband.  Death, mourning, pain are no more, for the first things have passed away.  This is active holiness, the victory of God, the goal of a religion concerned with the collective entirety of the human race, the joint hope of justice and vindication for all God’s elect.  This apocalyptic vision is of a social order restored, and it is beautiful!

But at what a huge cost: the destruction of so many people, the unimaginably vivid images not only of harmony restored, but of the battle required to win that restoration.  Revelation rightly raises questions about how the kingdom is to be restored.  Are its destructive and bloody visions really congruent with the life, the ministry and the message of Jesus?  Holiness is achieved, but may one wonder at the blood lust in this picture of holiness?

These are two clear, conventional images, traditional tableaus of the rewards and triumph of holiness.  But they are not the only images. 

Our gospel lesson today is neither passive nor violent, but combines both the individual and collective contexts of holiness in a new way: Two sisters grieving for their dead brother, calling in desperation on their friend to bring him back to them, who does so, revealing the power of God in mercy and pity, in the restoration of life lost.   

Two things to notice, perhaps:

1) The personal, family, domestic atmosphere: Mary and Martha and Lazarus are Jesus’ friends.  He stays with them when he visits Jerusalem.  This is not anonymous, general.  The dead man has a name, is their brother, is also Jesus’ friend.  Jesus must know what his death will mean to these women, widows perhaps, or unmarried, left unprotected in their social context.  This little group is a community which invites Jesus into its midst, more intimate than his fellowship with the disciples.  It is, perhaps, a picture of the early church, meeting together in homes, calling Jesus into their midst.

2) Who are the saints in this picture, besides Jesus?  It is an ordinary scene, even if filled with the drama of loss and death.  This is not a souls-in-the-hand-of-God story, comforting Mary and Martha with the consolation that their brother is with God now.  But neither is it the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven.  It is stark and raw.  Mary and Martha are portrayed in other places as getting on each others’ nerves, their home not a place of absolute tranquility.  It is in this very real, very human context that Jesus brings Lazarus back from the dead, back to the gritty reality of human life as it is actually lived.  If they are saints, they aren’t perfect yet.

So what might be the message for us here?  What does this Gospel story say about saints, about holiness?

I would venture two thoughts:

1) The human, believing community is the place where the miracle of the renewal of life takes place.  Not alone in solitary, individual righteousness, and not in spectacular, destructive glory.  It is this little community which, powerless in itself, calls Jesus into their presence, asks for his help.  And it is into this little community’s care that Jesus gives in trust the now-living Lazarus.   Weak as it is, life can be restored when the community is centered on Jesus and trusts in his power, and to this community Jesus entrusts the care of this new life: unbind him and set him free.  That is our charge as community: To seek new life in each other, to remove the winding sheets of death and set each other free.  

2) The life given back to Lazarus is not a reward for his goodness.  We know nothing about his character at all. Rather, it is the gift of God through Jesus Christ, given because Jesus loved him.  Lazarus’ new life is from Christ, in Christ.  If there is a theological point to this story – and isn’t there always a theological point to these stories? – it may be that somehow, in the community of the faithful, in the communion of saints, as it were, lives that are headed toward oblivion, the oblivion of death itself, and perhaps toward other kinds of oblivion as well. Those lives, can be called back, can be restored because, simply put, Jesus loves us.  Think of how many great saints were headed down one track and suddenly turned to start a new path: Teresa of Avila, Ignatius Loyola, Francis of Assisi, Benedict, Martin of Tours, Pachomius, Anthony, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Becket, John Donne, George Herbert, and so many others, mostly unknown to us, but not unknown to God.  The greatest of them is St. Paul himself, who describes what this experience was to him, and who gives us the words to describe the holiness which Christ gives us when he becomes our life: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” (Gal 2:19-20)

May it be so with us as well. 

May we be a community like the family of Lazarus, calling Jesus into our midst in our need, as our friend, asking him for the life the community cannot itself give but which can only come from God. 

May we know that the life we receive is in the hands of God and under His protection. 

May we know that the life we receive is the foretaste of the glory of the new heaven and the new earth, and that in that life we are called to be citizens of the new Jerusalem. 

And most of all, may we know that the life we live is not our own life, lived on our own terms and for our own purposes, but the life of Christ who lives in us.

Proper 25 B - Oct 28, 2012

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


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

Mercify, Jesus, Son of David, mercify !

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

Mercify me!

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

Try it on for size.

Mercify!  Mercify me!

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

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

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

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

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

It is curious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

St. Luke the Evangelist - Oct 18, 2012

Meeting of the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church, New Brunswick, NJ
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC, Superior
Feast of St. Luke the Evangelist.  October 18, 2012

Gospel: Luke 4:14-21

I was delighted to hear our Presiding Bishop say, in her opening remarks on Monday, that this gathering would attempt to live these days under the model of a Benedictine monastic community, balancing prayer, work, recreation and healthy living, an ideal which I found again in the Norms or “Rule of Life” for this body adopted for the previous Triennium.  It is a noble ideal and, like most ideals, it is one that is often approximated but rarely attained.  Yet it sets our eyes in the right direction and call us back again and again to what we hold most dear and to how we hope to live.

Monastic rules, including the famous Rule of St. Benedict, are important documents, and like all documents—including canons and resolutions and even Sacred Scripture—they are open to both misunderstanding and reinterpretation.  I was reminded of this as we heard today’s Gospel passage, the very familiar and defining story of Jesus reading Isaiah in the synagogue aloud at the start of his public ministry.

There is a similarly defining passage at the outset of Benedict’s sixth-century monastic Rule, Chapter 7 on Humility.  It is a beautiful chapter that sets before us what has been traditionally called the steps of humility, underscoring both the centrality of humility in the Christian journey and explaining how it it is attained not by climbing up but by climbing down: “...we descend by exaltation and ascend by humility.”

In discussing the so-called twelve steps of humility, Benedict begins with the fear of God, the need for obedience, for honesty and self-disclosure, for the embracing of hardships — even unjust ones — and the right use of silence and speech.  But it is advice that is couched in language that is alien or sometimes even repugnant to us.  So, for example, the seventh step of humility states that: “...a man not only admits with his tongue but is also convinced in his heart that he is inferior to all and of less value, humbling himself and saying with the Prophet: I am truly a worm, not a man.”

One of our elder brothers, upon reading this aloud at one of our daily chapter meetings, closed the book and said: “Well, there goes seven years of psychotherapy down the drain.”

And he was right... or would be, if this passage were some sort of 12-Step program, a series of prescriptions on how to behave, how to cast your eyes to the ground or avoid raucous laughter or content oneself with menial treatment.  And it would be misguided, even dangerous.

But monastic historians and scholars have discovered the deeper truth that this is not a program or set of commandments or prescriptions.  It is, rather, a description, a portrait of what happens to a person over a lifetime of following Jesus, a picture of the trajectory of growth and development that occurs in and through intentional Christian living.  Each of these “steps” then is not so much a task or a burden but is rather a mark or indicator or measure of just how far we have come in the long journey of discipleship, more obvious to others, perhaps, than to ourselves.

So it is, I think, with the Isaiah passage that our Lord reads at the outset of his ministry: anointed to bring good news to the poor, sent to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, letting the oppressed go free, and proclaiming the year of the Lord's favor.

We are tempted to see this as a program or a “to do” list — and as programs or lists go, it is a great one.  But it is much more than a program, even other than a program.  It is rather an indicator, a mark, a measure of our discipleship.  A way of noting our progress in holiness, in Christian living, in growth in grace... both individually and corporately.

These are “marks of mission,” if you will, marks of prophetic witness and above all, of conversion... the conversion of our hearts, our minds, our manners.  St. Benedict concludes this portion of his Rule on humility by teaching that the source as well as the goal of this development is the perfect love that casts out fear.  The closer we come to live in that perfect love, the more we naturally exhibit the marks of humility.  And the closer we come to live in that love, the more we come — personally and communally — to exhibit these marks of mission proclaimed in today’s Gospel naturally, as if that was what we were created for in the first place.  Because, in fact, that is what we were created for.

Last week, the Archbishop of Canterbury addressed the Roman Catholic Synod of Bishops in Rome on the topic of the New Evangelization.  Now whatever one might think of his leadership over the past ten years, I think it worth hearing him in this matter, especially on this feast of Luke the Evangelist. The Archbishop speaks at length of contemplation, that is of prayer, as the root of transformation in the self and in society.

It is vintage Rowan, from start to finish.  He concludes his talk by reminding his Roman Catholic brother (alas, no sister) bishops that: 
“...evangelization is always an overflow of something else — the disciple’s journey to maturity in Christ, a journey not organized by the ambitious ego but the result of the prompting and drawing of the Spirit in us.  In our considerations of how we are once again to make the Gospel of Christ compellingly attractive to the men and women of our age, I hope we never lose sight of what makes it compelling to ourselves, to each one of us in our diverse ministries.”

I hope this for myself and I hope this for all of us here today and for all the Church.  May we never let us lose sight of what makes the Gospel attractive to us today.  Of what converts us.  Of what empowers us.  Of what raises us up with Christ.  My guess is that it is passages such as we hear in today's Gospel that give voice to the reasons we are gathered here today.

At the very end of his talk, Dr. Williams says to his Roman Catholic audience:
“I wish you joy in these discussions — not simply clarity or effectiveness in planning — but joy in the promise of the vision of Christ's face, and in the fore-shadowings of that fulfillment in the joy of the communion with each other here and now.”

It has been said that joy is the one infallible mark of holiness.  And there has been joy here in these meetings these days, along with anxiety and curiosity and energy and challenge and engagement.  Real joy, deep joy.

It is for this joy that the world hungers and which the world desperately needs.  And it is among the Gospel's greatest gifts: joy rooted in the person and the promises of Jesus Christ and in the hope of glory through and beyond our struggles and our sufferings, our successes and failures, our institutions and our mission.

It is the pure joy of being children of God and co-heirs and fellow workers with Jesus Christ.  So that we too can say:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon us, because he has anointed us to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent us to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

This is a promise, a hope, a call rooted and grounded in love.  And whether it knows it or not, the world waits for us to live that love and spread that joy day by day.  And so we begin again.

Amen.