First Sunday after Christmas: December 31, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. John Forbis , OHC
First Sunday after Christmas - Sunday, December 31, 2017


To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. John Forbis

This is how it began for me,

By John Forbis, OHC 

God spewed me
out of his mouth
and commanded me
to howl a cosmos.
 
All I knew was one sound,
not even a word.
But then I found
my voice.
 
Or was it God’s?
for neither God nor I
had ever
spoken before.
 



Then I spoke again
and could not stop speaking.
The darkness began
to roll, swirl and swell.
 
Then waters
gathered,
boundaries
fixed.
 
Circles in the deep
layers of crust
were shaved,
contours smoothed.
 
I hummed and purred
while matter was
caressing itself
awake.
 
What came next
God called gift.
 
He molded
and branded himself
into a creation
with outlines and limits.
 
God wanted identity.
Or was it identification?
 
So he asked this of me.
And it was too much to ask.
I had no experience of rejection, suffering,
death or birth.
 
The closest
I had ever
come to life
was wind and mist.
 
Yet, I knew who was asking.
 
The rhythm
of his heartbeat
still lingers
in my ears. 
 
So I conformed
to the womb in which
he placed me,
returned to the darkness.
 
Once born,
I knew
I would have to
go there again.
 
But bellowing
as I do with
all of those
who need the
 
plain grace and truth
of a single vowel,
my death which is life
will not be overcome.

Christmas Day: December 25, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

Christmas Day - Sunday, December 25,2017

NEW! Listen to Br. Robert preaching

Br. Robert James Magliula

Today is the day and everything is in place. We know the hymns. We know the readings. We know the whole story so well that we can tell it by heart: the star, the shepherds, the angels, the baby. Because it is so familiar we can forget the strangeness and power of this story. We are here to settle into a mystery, to follow a star to Bethlehem and gather around a manger. In our time, we make the journey with a sense of vulnerability and insecurity which is not unsimilar to the conditions of life in first century Palestine.

  
Christmas, at it’s heart, is a festival of vulnerability. This birth sheds light not only on what has been birthed in us, but also what has not. It’s a time when some are weighed down by the burden of old losses, even in the face of the audacious declaration that the heart of the universe loves us so much that it comes to us to beat in a vulnerable infant.

In a recent article, Sr. Joan Chittister quoted Joan of Arc who said, “How else would God speak to me if not though my imagination”. Her article went on to say that God speaks to all of us through our imagination. That’s what our imagination is for. She wrote, “Imagination is learning to see beyond what we have to what could be.” The mystery of today’s feast is best entered through our imagination.

Each of us has a picture of what that infant looks like. Well, today is the day to close our eyes and reach into that picture, and take him into our arms. Examine his fingers, count his toes, and say to yourself, “This is God in my arms.” Feel his breath, feel his warmth spreading through those swaddling clothes. This is what God has decided to look like, and all for love of us. Shocking, isn’t it? To behold the Creator of the Universe dependent on the kindness of creatures. Sure, we know the story by heart, but do we hear God’s message for us today?

In the first place, a baby is---in the best of worlds---evidence that a love affair has taken place. That’s certainly the case with this particular child. God has loved humankind from the moment we were thought up. But the relationship had been a rocky one. In the beginning God figured that paradise would be enough for us; God gave us everything and hoped for the best. But we wanted more than everything. So God gave us something more concrete by initiating a covenant of mutual fidelity to be our God and for us to be God’s people. But we were not faithful.

So God gave us more guidelines in the Ten Commandments, but we broke them. God then took another step by simplifying the covenant to loving God and our neighbor. But even that was too much.

The history of our love affair with God is the story of our repeated frailty and God’s forgiveness. Every time the distance between us has threatened to end the relationship, it is God who steps across the breach, taking on more of the burden, until with the birth of this infant, God accepted it all. God came to where we were, to be flesh of our flesh. All we had to do was to believe that we were loved enough for God to live and die as one of us.

Christmas has a way of exposing a paradox in the human condition. We desire to be loved, yet we find it so hard to allow ourselves to be loved. We organize our lives around the pursuit of love, but in the one place where it is offered unreservedly, we pull back and obsess over a thousand other details in our lives. Once we have sufficiently sidetracked ourselves, we renew our desperate attempts to find love, inevitably looking in all the wrong places. The love manifested in the Incarnation does not deny our separateness, our humanity, our frailty, or even our aloneness. In the Christmas story, we see God become helpless, become like us, become subject to the tensions of growth, become flesh so that we might have the confidence to recognize that we have the stuff it takes to become like God.

Love sheds light on people and situations. Luke’s narrative is flooded with a light generated by love, light overcoming darkness. But as we know from our own lives, we do not always welcome the light. Light changes things. Light makes us see parts of ourselves and others that we’d rather not see. It can frighten and anger us to be reminded that we are not perfect, not in control, not invulnerable. Light reveals truth, and truth is usually a blow to the ego, since there is nothing we can do to win, earn, or deserve the love that it offered. It is an extravagant gift, given freely despite our imperfections and resistance. Unfortunately, many have experienced the giving of gifts as something with strings attached causing them to step back to calculate the cost. We have only to take a realistic view of the circumstances of this birth to curb our ego and recognize our pride and fear of vulnerability.The mystery of Emmanuel---God-with-us, shows us just how far God will go to be held in our arms. This is the first part of today’s message.

The second part of the message is that in doing so, God has blurred forever the distinction between the divine and the human, the holy and the ordinary. God could have come to us as some great power more recognizable as God. Then we could have kept our distance. But God chose to come among us as an infant, and a poor one at that. Choosing flesh, God chose the lowest human common denominator and in doing so left us no escape.That’s why it is so important today to let the star show us a real child. In choosing to enter in such an ordinary way, God showed us that flesh and blood, dirt and sky, life and death, were good enough for God. More than that, God made them holy by taking part in them, and left us nothing on earth that we can dismiss as trivial or unknown to God. The very scandal of Christianity lies in the fact that it sees divinity in humanity. 

 
This feast is the commitment to life made incarnate. It is the call to see God everywhere, and especially in those places we would not expect to find glory or grace. It is also an obligation to see that everything leads us directly to God, to realize that there is no one, nothing on earth, that is not the way to God for us. The moment we can really look to everyone and everything as a revelation of God, is the time when war, prejudice, and hunger would disappear. Everything would be gift, everyone would be sacred.

 This day God has come among us as a infant and a lover, and every ordinary and created thing has become transparent with God’s glory. There is gold in the straw, myrrh in the dung, the cows smell of frankincense, and the star shows seekers from every corner of the earth where to look for God---not up in the heavens but in the wondrous muck and chaos of our lives and world. If we have the wisdom to embrace the everyday stuff of our lives, then God is born in our arms.  +Amen.

Fourth Sunday of Advent- Year B: December 24, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Roy Parker, OHC

Fourth Sunday of Advent- Sunday, December 24,2017

NEW! Listen to Br. Roy preaching

Br. Roy Parker, OHC

"Even at Christmas, when haloes are pretested by focus groups for inclusion in mass market campaigns, they are hard to see. Annie Dillard was scrutinizing the forest floor at Pilgrim’s Creek when she looked up and saw a tree haloed in light. She had caught the tree at prayer, in a moment so receptive and full, the boundaries of bark burst and its inner fire became available for awe. But seeing haloes is more than a lucky sighting. It entails the advent skill of sustaining attention, the simple act, as Dillard found out, of looking up. The optometrist swings his goggle machine before our eyes. ‘Read line four.’ Then he flips lenses through the machine until the blurred letters of line four snap into focus. But if we break our captivity to the imprisoning print of line four and look up to line one, the letter E will carry us away with its clarity and bless the smallest of markings with surrounding light. That is how haloes are seen, by looking up into largeness, by tucking smallness into the folds of infinity. I do not know this by contemplating shimmering trees. Rather there was woman, amid the crowd of Christmas, busy at Christmas table, and I looked up to catch a rim of radiance etching her face, to notice curves of light sliding along her shape. She out-glowed the candles. All the noise of the room left my ears and silence sharpened my sight. When this happens, and I recognize the visits, I do not get overly excited. I merely allow love to be renewed, for that is the mission of haloes, the reason they are given to us. Nor do I try to freeze the frame. Haloes suffer time, even as they show us what is beyond time. But when haloes fade, they do not abruptly vanish, abandoning us to the sorrow of lesser light. They recede, as Gabriel departed Mary, leaving us pregnant.”----- Seeing Haloes: by John Shea

And according to what’s given to us this morning, Christmas is also about God’s preferred mode of moving among us, about the sort of real estate God particularly fancies. In fairness, it must be admitted that the Bible presents two stories about this real estate as if God were of two minds about it. ‘The House of Cedar School,’ as it might be called, receives its first fulfillment in the epic construction of Solomon’s Temple, an edifice congruent with the regal splendor of everything else about Solomon. Its successor, a pale imitation of the first, seems an essential symbol of the return of the exiles from Babylonian captivity. From Solomon on, the so-called ‘Tent School’ of Temple construction seems unworthy of consideration, but it persists in the tradition.

It begins with King David proposing to his court prophet that it’s ridiculous for the king to be living in a house of cedar while the ark of God stays in a tent, but although the prophet immediately encourages the king’s intentions for courtesy’s sake, on second thought he emphasizes God’s preference of a tent despite David’s desire to provide a more permanent structure. What’s going on here is the prophetic reminder of the tabernacle dwelling of the holy presence, which became institutionalized in Israel’s life as the yearly Feast of Tabernacles so that, by camping out for a week, the people would not forget where they came from, a memory whose importance your therapist will emphasize.

God’s assurance to David is twofold: in the words of the prophet, “the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house” and “(one of your descendants) shall build a house for my name”; nowhere is the building material specified, and, in fact, the language here is all about the establishment of dynasty. Otherwise, the only building hint given is that a tent is God’s preferred venue, but will it be duplex, split level, or ranch; you also have Victorian, Georgian,  Federal, and Desert Revival. Then there are the commissions Joseph executed with the help of Jesus, with a large menu of possibilities. Imagine the conversations: “Son, I realize we were occupiers, but don’t you think that Philistine split-level is just the coolest?” It’s an important question for the annual Feast of Tabernacles as important as Passover for the Jewish sense of identity. Oddly enough, the preferred design is Tel Aviv Ikea, using rather inexpensive materials, which is why they came to Joseph’s shop in the first place: four two by fours, about eight feet long, (for the upright corners), four two by twos, same length, (for the roof), for the roof covering, several slats capable of supporting light tree branches. For the sides, they discovered that old bedsheets work well, and for the front, a bedsheet attached to a wire track. Leafy tree branches are placed on the roof slats, with enough gaps to observe the night stars and Ikea recommends a seven-foot cube for the construction, allowing plenty of room for guests.

All this would help Jesus remember the saying that “While God waits for the temple to be built of love, people bring stones” and reinforce the later realization of John the Evangelist that Christmas is about how God moves among us in a tent. And not only how, but why this should be preferable to the host of tourist attractions erected to supposedly house the divine presence. Why, indeed, should the Feast of Tabernacles, a kind of camp-town meeting, be so important to Israel and why should John the Evangelist make such a point that the Word became flesh and tented among us? What is this thing with tents? Something to do with the mystery of wilderness? Wilderness, and its effect upon us — which eases the hatreds, the violence, all those hard forbidden thoughts that plague us, ease them as wild things always ease heartache. Wilderness in which the undomesticated God reunites with us, and if you recall your childhood camping adventures, you might recall your tent as a mysterious vehicle for this. The undomesticated God prefers a tent of bedsheets to a house of cedar, and when the Word became flesh, Jesus preferred the tent of suffering humanity in which to move about, the Body of Christ as described by John Shea in his Prayer to the God Who Fell from Heaven.

“If you had stayed tight-fisted in the sky and watched us thrash with all the patience of a pipe smoker, I would have prayed like a golden bullet aimed at your heart. But the story says you cried, and so heavy was the tear you fell with it to earth where like a baritone in a bar it is never time to go home. So you move among us, twisting every straight line into Picasso, stealing kisses from pinched lips, holding our hand in the dark. So now when I pray I sit and turn my mind like a television knob till you are there with your large, open hands, spreading my life before me like a Sunday tablecloth and pulling up a chair yourself. For by now the secret is out. You are home.”