The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 18 A, September 6, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve

The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, September 6, 2026

Exodus 12:1-14

Romans 13:8-14

Matthew 18:15-20

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Our gospel is, on one level, a process for addressing faults and conflicts within the community of believers.  It is so different a way of making amends from much of our public discourse (which does not seem to care much for amends) as to seem laughably unrealistic and naive.  If we take this reading seriously, then we can ask, what does this kind of relating mean?  Where does it come from and what informs such behavior?  What kind of people are we called to be in order to actualize these practices?   So, I endeavor to reflect on just the first act: If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.
Life gathered in the name of Christ is life in truth, in reality.  Set in the midst of all manner of lies and illusions, deceit and fantasy, we are to be truth-bearers so that we can be practitioners of reality, so that truth becomes who we are.  Spiritual life is not an escape into some alternate reality; it is the entering into the essence of truth which forms all of life.  We are vowed in such a way that avoidance, excuses, rationalizations, and any other form of discernment that is not true and real find no home in us.  Our baptismal liturgy describes this identity as both renouncing the sources and systems of evil and injustice in us and around us and the affirmation of the truth of Christ’s saving power for us and through us as a body.  We practice our identities in such a way that we face what is real rather than run, name what is happening rather than deny.  
What our Lord proscribes here is the practice of our human experience within conscious community.  This way subverts the impulses of punishment and vengeance and orients power as that commitment to the good which expresses itself as for and alongside others, never over or against others.  It is actively nonviolent.  It describes what is the case about us: sometimes I perceive some aspect of the truth that you do not.  Sometimes you are aware of a reality to which I am blind.  So, we need community as the realm in which we offer the gift of our insight and receive the feedback of others.
As our desire turns into deeper acts of love and trust, we encounter our inner resistances.  We all have baggage around sin, forgiveness, and reconciliation.  We have been hurt and we have caused hurt.  Pointing out someone’s fault may hurt their feelings, or they may attack me, our relationship may be harmed.  I don’t want to be judgmental.  It’s not a big deal.  I may also discover beliefs toward my own sin: it’s easier to hide than confess, if the community knew what I had done, they would reject me.  If I am honest, some may look down on me.  These beliefs inhibit common life.  Facing truth liberates us from the besetting distortions that pollute relationships.  Hiding and avoiding might feel safe, but they are flimsy substitutes for the kinds of flourishing relationships we long for.  We must go through the resistance to experience the renewal on the other side.  Living in a community requires the willingness and capacity to live and speak truth for the sake of the health of the whole body, sometimes evoking out of us an honest vulnerability.  My discomfort bows to the greater needs of community harmony.  
This counsel is the liturgy of mercy made visible and ordinary.  The sinner is invited to act from the belief that their sin is unavoidable and real, but not permanent.  Forgiveness really does wipe the slate clean because the community believes and practices that beginning again.  It is dangerous to lead an unconfronted life.  The naming of our errant ways is a gift of grace which we can receive as such.  The truth-teller is invited to act from the belief that although real harm has been done, it can be healed, trust can be restored, and the sword of vengeance must be laid down.  A healthy community is made up of people willing to face their truth and name the truth of others in service of the good of our souls and the integrity of life together.
We are called to be ourselves without performance or pretense, which includes gifts and wounds.  Assemblies of the guarded and defended, where secrets are well-hidden and bitterness carefully concealed under a mask of mere polite friendliness is not the new creation we are made to be.  
Communities caught in the web of defending and rationalizing, blaming and avoiding will expend all their energy on preserving the illusion of independence because the fear of being truly seen and known is not safe or welcome.  Such places are a kind of self-created hell of refusing to be fully human.
What would it be like to live where every member of a community can be seen and known, and can participate in the salvation drama of falling short and beginning again without partiality and with sincere absolution?  The Lord asks us to do something that may sound strange; normalize the inevitability of sin and the beauty of conscious forgiveness and reconciliation.  Faults and failure are not threats to an integrated community, not signs to withdraw and hide - they are opportunities for vulnerable trust in the reality of being imperfect image-bearers.  Lead us into all truth, Lord Christ, and help us love one another as you love us. Amen.

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 12, July 26, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, July 26, 2026

1 Kings 3:5-12

Romans 8:26-39

Matthew 13:31-33,44-52

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Last Sunday, Brother Ephrem spoke to us about the hero’s journey, that archetypal tale which becomes a pattern for human life. He used this to illustrate the story of Jacob as well as that of Odysseus, a story of leaving home, having adventures, facing challenges, and making one’s way back, chastened and—let’s hope--a little more mature and wiser.  And we understand that this is not peculiar to Jacob or Odysseus but touches each of us. This hero myth or story is one of many models or genres that speak more generally to our human condition. There is, for example, the story of the descent into the underworld or the search for a hidden treasure or the story of a flood such as we find in the Gilgamesh Epic or that of Noah and the ark, a story of universal destruction and restoration.   

Today’s Scripture readings present us with yet more stories or symbolic lessons, messages of faith and pathways to wisdom.  There are five—count them—parables of the Kingdom in today’s brief Gospel passage.  And one folk tale…that of Solomon and his dream.  In any event, it strikes me as a folk tale.

Folk tales or, in their more condensed form, proverbs seem designed not to offer us the shape of the whole pattern of our lives but rather focus on one or two practical pieces of advice for successful living.  And every culture has them, shared with children, often quite humorous, and sometimes even bawdy.  We all know them and have been exposed to them in collections such as Grimm’s fairy tales. They are a primary tool of socialization in any society or culture.

One folktale that appears in many shapes is the tale of The Three Wishes.  And like any good folk tale it can be endlessly elaborated on though it is easily summarized. In its classic form—and with a nod to Wikipedia—it tells the story of a poor woodcutter and his wife who are struggling to make ends meet. One day the woodcutter finds the perfect tree to harvest, and just as he begins to do it a fairy or wood nymph appears and begs him not to chop down her home. In returns, she promises to grant him three wishes and he agrees. The woodcutter returns home, and as he talks with his wife about what happened, he realizes he's very hungry and without thinking he wishes for a sausage to eat. And suddenly a hot sausage appears at the table. His wife, furious that he's wasted a wish, speaks to him in anger.  And he responds in kind: “I wish this sausage was stuffed up your nose.” And as if by magic, there it is. The couple now need to decide what to do with their one remaining wish. They could be rich, they could be powerful, they could be fruitful, but alas, the sausage would still be hanging from the wife's nose. So, they decide to use their third and final wish to remove the sausage from her face.

What's the moral of the story? What do we learn from it? Maybe we learn to take our time, to not be hasty, to not act out of unexamined desires or uncontrolled emotions.  Maybe we learn that greed is not the way to go forward in life. Or maybe we learn that who we are or what we have right now is enough.

It seems to me that the story of Solomon that we hear in our first reading has something of the character of a folktale with its own moral. God appears to Solomon in a dream and says, “Ask what I should give you.” And though he is given one, not three, wishes he is faced with the difficult question of what he should ask for, what he desires. Solomon, of course, the paradigm of the wise ruler, does not ask for long life or riches or the life of his enemies but rather for, and I quote, “understanding to discern what is right.”  But my hunch is that the other things surely went through his mind. Why not ask for long life? Why not ask for riches? Why not ask for the life of his enemies? But what Solomon does request is in fact quite bigger.  In effect, he is asking for the skill to live a life which is at once meaningful and productive. And as we hear from the reading, God grants him the other things which he set aside for the sake of this larger purpose, namely that of being a wise ruler for his people. Indeed, God promises that he shall be the wisest of all mortals ever!

If this is a folktale, is there a moral? What lesson can we learn? It’s easy to draw the wrong conclusion from these stories. Perhaps you have heard it said: be careful what you wish for or be careful what you ask for or even--and deeply mistaken--be careful what you pray for.  

On the contrary, I’d like to suggest that it is well worth thinking about what it is we want or desire. It is worth naming. It is even worth praying for. Because in the very process of wanting or desiring and in examining and engaging and not censoring those desires or longings they may be refined and reshaped in ways that serve both our own true good and God's greater glory. Befriending our desires, as one writer puts it, or heeding our deepest longings and giving them space to be transformed and sharpened or perhaps even sublimated or abandoned, is a profound spiritual practice and a necessary one. Saint Augustine of Hippo who lived in the late 4th and early 5th centuries was the great saint of desire and delight and love. He knew firsthand the depths of human desires and admittedly did not always navigate them well. But he came to recognize that the only adequate object or goal of our desires is God. He is famous for teaching: “Our hearts are restless, oh God, until they rest in you.”

This saying sometimes frightens people. Does loving God with all our heart mean we can have no other loves? No. Rather Augustine talks about the right ordering of loves.  As he says: “…everybody loves but the question is, what is the object of their love.”   His advice is to examine our loves—all our loves, all our longings, all our desires—and look for what they are honestly moving deep, deep within us before the face of God.

Augustine continues: “So, am I telling you to give up loving? Not at all! If you love nothing you will become lazy dead lifeless creatures. Love, by all means; but take care what it is you love.”

This is good advice for the 5th century and for any century, especially when we realize that what we are being invited to is not the suppression of our desires but the deepening of our desires, getting more and not less in touch with them, naming them, focusing on them and even fanning them.  And in this Saint Paul tells us, the spirit helps us with sighs and groans too deep for words. It is this wordless prayer, this interior groaning, which is arena of the deepening and cherishing, the purifying and right ordering of our desires. Cherishing our deepest desires, we enter into relationship with them, and they become educated, reformed, expanded, transfigured, more adequate, all embracing and simpler.

I believe this happened with Solomon and maybe with the woodsman and his wife and their sausage.  Because this is the mystery of sanctification. We come to know ourselves.  And we come to know God, to love what God loves. We come to desire what God commands, we come to long for what God envisions and to love what God intends. And in that is our happiness, that is delight, that is freedom and that is becoming who we are.

And the moral, the lesson of this fairy tale? Don't be too worried about what you wish for or what you desire or what you ask for or long for on the inside, or what you pray for. Your very open, honest, prayerful engagement with these desires allows them to be transmuted by God’s love into something beautiful… something beautiful for you and me and something beautiful for God. 

And by the way, what do you want God to give you today?

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 11, July 19, 2026

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 19, 2026

Genesis 28:10-19a
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

Click here for an audio of the sermon

In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the great mythologist Joseph Campbell describes the narrative pattern of the hero myth as follows:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are encountered there, and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Campbell chronicles this narrative process of the hero myth through seventeen chronological stages, each infusing the protagonist with new experiences that gradually transforms his or her character into its destined ideal: a hero who has undergone adventure, transformation, and return to become the boon, or a blessing, to those yet to undergo the journey themselves.  The “thousand faces” of the hero’s journey refers to the multiple iterations that this universal, mythic journey manifests.  Underneath, though, for Campbell, there is only one transformative monomyth of adventure, transformation, and return.

This weekend one of the most paradigmatic of these hero journeys hits the big screen in the highly anticipated adaptation of The Odyssey by the great filmmaker Christopher Nolan.  The Bible, too, is full of these hero journeys beginning with Abram who is transformed into Abraham and his grandson, who we hear about today, Jacob who will be transformed into Israel. 

Up to this point in the story, Jacob, whose name means “supplanter,” has usurped his twin brother, Esau, at every turn.  Even at his mother’s bidding, Jacob will come to assume and own his identity as a trickster all to get what was not rightfully his, his father’s blessing.  Even though a twin, he is not the first-born twin.  He is the second…and his supplanting nature is memorably depicted in the story even in his birth with his tiny hand firmly fixed on his brother Esau’s equally tiny ankle.  Ever-grasping Jacob refuses to stand in the shadow of his brother and rightful inheritor of the blessing of the father and the promise of God.  So, all of his life, he grasps and strives and connives to supplant his brother to be somebody his society and religion said he could not be.  And yet, the irony at the heart of the story is that all along Yahweh, his god, had supplanted custom and already chosen him to be the son of blessing.  But to realize this, Jacob has to go on a hero’s journey of adventure, transformation, and return.

The story today picks up with Jacob on the run, living in fear of his brother’s retribution.  It’s here in the moment of his own, personal existential crisis that he meets his match.  With a stone for his head, he lies down and dreams of a ladder connecting heaven to earth with God’s messengers, angels, ascending and descending on it.  But the message does not come from these messengers but directly from God standing right beside him.  God’s message is a message not of castigation or reproach but one of assurance and promise.  Jacob learns that his god is with him to fulfill the promise of Abraham through him, just as he so desperately desired.  As he rouses himself, his eyes are awakened to new dimensions and exclamation says, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!  How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”  For us, today, the journey ends here…but not for Jacob.  His transformation is only beginning and won’t be complete before having to wrestle with this god and be perpetually wounded in the fight.  Jacob will indeed be the vessel through whom the blessing of God flows, but it’s through a wounded, limping, humbled vessel…one who has gone through the fire and whose ego-ambition has been supplanted by God.  

But this is a lesson for another sermon in the weeks ahead, today the focus is on a very particular stage of this hero’s journey.  The truth discovered at this stage is a truth that appears again and again in the journey of spiritual maturation…it is the moment of awakening.  Ironically this happens while Jacob is asleep.  And maybe there’s a lesson in this irony…it’s only when we let go of control in our wakened life that the divine in our subconscious minds can make itself known.  And what is the revelation that here awakens Jacob?  It is the fact that his God, Yahweh, the God of the promise, is with him in this deserted place with only a stone for a pillow.  It’s the insight that it’s in the ordinary where the extraordinary is discovered and that he is now in God’s house (the literal meaning of Bethel) …that it’s when you’re worn down by running away from the thing you fear most and have to just stop over sheer exhaustion that you encounter the awesomeness of God and the gate of heaven.  

Jacob’s journey of awakening and discovery reminds me of another hero’s journey, the journey of Thomas Merton who chronicles a very similar experience.  After living about sixteen years as a Trappist monk in rural Kentucky, Merton, suffering from chronic back pain, goes to downtown Louisville to see a doctor.  While walking on a busy street corner he is suddenly stunned by what he sees.  He describes it as follows:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness….  And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun…. Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

“How awesome is this place!  This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”  Sound familiar?  

I have often wondered if anybody else on that busy day on Fourth and Walnut saw what Merton saw.  Probably not!  But why did he see it?  Was it a moment of total sovereign revelation?  I don’t think so.  Merton had spent sixteen years giving himself over to the monastic way of life and learning how to open himself up and listen deeply with the ear of his heart.  His spiritual senses were attuning themselves to the presence of God everywhere.  He was, in other words, ripe for something like this to happen.  And it did!  “The gate of heaven is everywhere” is Merton’s great insight…and he challenges us to awaken our spiritual senses to see it, hear it, taste it, touch it, and smell it in the everyday, ordinary moments of our seemingly mundane lives.  

Pope Francis used to repeatedly say that God is a God of surprises and that we never know when God is going to surprise us.  We, therefore, need to develop what he called “a contemplative gaze” so that we don’t miss those divine surprises.

So, at the heart of our journey in our life with God is found one of life’s greatest lessons.  With Jacob we must close our eyes to the world around us and “fall asleep,” as it were, to the phenomenal world and awaken to the numinous depths within.  It is there that the awesome presence of God awaits us.  We don’t have to wait until Sunday morning or a moment of crisis to encounter this presence.  It abides with us!  And with Merton we give ourselves to lives of prayer and deep listening, ever sensitizing ourselves to the “deep calling unto deep,” so that with Pope Francis we can awaken from our slumber and return to our awakened state each morning ready for the adventure in God that awaits us.  

One further lesson in the Jacob story…this process of awakening to the vision of God in the hero’s journey is not easy and comes at a price.  It’s on a very hard, uncomfortable stone that you will have to sometimes lay your head.  It’s not what we would have chosen, and it is often what we wrestle with God to accept…but it is this very stone which becomes the catalyst of awakening and is transformed into a monument to God.  

The lesson Jesus teaches us today is that in this process of transformation there are weeds encroaching on us our whole lives.  Patient endurance, putting up with the weaknesses of body and behavior, as our Holy Father Benedict memorably put it, is not just a necessary burden, it is the very virtue transforming us into someone who will one day shine like the sun.  For Jesus, and for those in him, the good news is that the adventure we’re on is one much greater than any hero’s journey…and the transformation and boon of blessing far exceeds anything previously imagined.  We’re on a journey not just of adventure, transformation, and return…we’re on a journey of adventure, transformation, and transcendence into a whole new mode of being…what he called eternal life…and that this eternal life isn’t in some far away kingdom reserved for us when we die…but in the simple, but pregnant, moments of our everyday lives.  Let anyone with ears listen!  And let anyone with eyes see…we’re all shining like the sun!