Br. Charles/Julian's First Profession - 06 Apr 2011

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC, Superior
First Profession of the Benedictine Vow of Br. Julian - Wednesday April 06, 2011
Br. Julian Mizelle was previously known as Charles

In just over two weeks we will celebrate Easter. There are, of course, many ways to celebrate that great feast, from sunrise services at the Hollywood Bowl to ancient and competing liturgies in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

Here at Holy Cross we will celebrate it, as we always do, with the traditional Western liturgical rites. It will begin in darkness with the kindling of a new fire and the lighting of the Paschal candle.

Just before that great wax pillar is lit, the celebrant inscribes a cross on the candle and says the following words:

Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega. All time belongs to him and all the ages. To him be glory and power through every age forever. Amen.

It is, for me, a deeply moving moment, the very sum and substance of the Easter proclamation.

Our lives, our vocations are each written out over a brief period of years, but it is a time, a period, inscribed in a larger drama, in that eternal span of time that goes from everlasting to everlasting and which belongs wholly and entirely to Jesus Christ. It is with the proclamation of this truth that we begin our Easter observance.

Timothy Radcliffe, OP, once commented that:

The religious life [the monastic life] is perhaps in the first place a living Amen to that longer span of time. It is within the stretch of the story from Alpha and Omega, from Creation to Kingdom, that every human life must find its meaning. We are those who live for the Kingdom when, as Julian of Norwich says, ‘All will be well, all manner of thing will be well.’

And so it is for you today, Charles. Today, this day, this event, this hour finds all its meaning within that greater time and that greater story that is Jesus Christ’s and Jesus Christ’s alone.

And what a wonderful day it is. It is a day when so much of your fifty-four years comes together in a new and exciting way, in a way wherein nothing is lost and all is redeemed and set upon a yet firmer foundation and a renewed path. It is a day when all those graced choices and experiences that make up your life, that are you, are now offered to God to be transformed yet more: that experience as a young man welcoming Christ into your heart as Lord and Savior, that day where you were plunged into the cleansing waters of baptism, that day when you first fed on the Bread of Life, when you were confirmed, when you claimed the truth about your adult self, when you reached out to others in ways that went beyond your accustomed ways… and found God reaching back.

And these are only the public moments. How many more hidden, private, graced events do you bring with you to this ceremony? Each is an Easter moment, each a little resurrection. Indeed, the God who chose you long ago has done great things in you, and he is again doing something new in you… and through you, in us as well. In you, each of us is reminded of similar graced moments in our own lives, similar eastering times of resurrection and new birth. Today is a feast day for all of us.

Br. Julian signs the Benedictine Vow written in his own hand

But as we know, Easter comes only after Good Friday with its focus of the mystery of the holy and life-giving Cross. It is an event that is too little understood today, yet it is a reality that is widespread, indeed one that is everywhere.

Even as a symbol, the power of the cross is easily lost on us. Because it is everywhere around us, on our walls and towers and necks, it often becomes invisible. We get used to it. We fail to see it for what it is. We lose out on its power to shock, to challenge, and to convert.

One example. Just a few weeks ago the European Court of Human Rights ruled that crucifixes are acceptable in public school classrooms throughout the forty-seven countries that comprise the Council of Europe (an international organization with a broader membership than the European Union). The reasoning they gave for this decision is, to say the least, troubling. Quoting from the Guardian:

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that crucifixes are acceptable in the continent’s state school classrooms, describing them as an ‘essentially passive symbol’ with no obvious religious influence. In its judgment… the court found that while the crucifix was ‘above all a religious symbol’ there was no evidence that its display on classroom walls might have an influence on pupils.

One is left breathless or despairing—or both—at this claim. But the sad thing is: it may be true.

I think of the story that circulated a few years of the English girl who went into a jeweler’s shop seeking to buy a cross for her necklace, at that time an essential element of punk rock couture. She was shown some very simple crosses in gold and silver. But she demurred. She wanted one, as she put it, “with the little man on it.” That little man… Jesus.

We have in many places and in many ways entered into the post-Christian era.

And yet the cross of suffering is everywhere, and it is everyone’s lot. It has been yours, Charles, as you well know, as it has been mine, and it has been and is that of every person present here today. And yet we know that our Lord Jesus accepted the cross—his cross and ours—so that he might taste most deeply our human pain and bear the shame, and take away the sin and redeem the suffering. How he does this is, of course, the great mystery of our faith. That he does it is the great hope on which all our other hopes are founded.

In the intersection of those arms of the cross, all contradictions meet and are reconciled: time and eternity, the vertical and the horizontal, here and everywhere, past and future, now and eternity. But it is a reconciliation that is bought at great price, where the old is sometimes gently, but no less often vigorously, refashioned and sometimes yanked out, where our many defenses are disarmed and the heart is opened to the endless work of reformation. It is frequently dirty work, hard work, humbling work, amazing work. It is God’s work in us and through us. It is the precious fruit of our obedience and surrender to that eternal story that stretches from Alpha to Omega.

In his Rule written in 1900 for the Order of the Holy Cross and referencing the story of Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28, our Founder says:

The ladder of the cross is planted firmly within the walls of a religious house and angels pass up and down that stairway. Our house is a house of God; let us strive to make it for ourselves the gate of heaven.

What a wonderful image. The cross as ladder, as stairway, as bridge, as passageway, as a royal road, indeed the royal road. Angels are indeed on it, but oh, in what strange and often disturbing disguises. And there too is God, waiting expectantly and patiently and joyfully for you and me and each of us here today to climb that ladder. Let us climb it together. Let us climb it as brothers and sisters.

One more thing. Charles, you have elected to adopt a new name. In the community from now on you will be known as Br. Julian, at least after we get the hang of it… though I imagine you will always be Charles to your family and old friends. Taking a new name is a sign, a sacrament, and a reminder of the change and growth that God is working in you and through you, a sign of a new emerging identity. Many cultures and societies and faith traditions do this. But always remember: this is not your final name or even your true name. Hold dear the words of Revelation 2:17: “To everyone who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it.” God, and God alone, knows your true name, and in God’s good time that too will be revealed to you.

So we receive today your solemn vow to follow the monastic way of life for one year. But of course your intention—like ours—is that, unless it becomes strikingly clear over the next several years that this is in fact not your path, we are headed together for life. Bound for life. Life with Christ. Life in Christ. Life through Christ.

Charles/Julian… God is with you in this adventure. Your family is here with you. Your friends are with you. Your brothers are with you.

Come, let us climb that ladder. Let us together embrace that cross. Let our faces and our hearts be turned toward life… fullness of life, life lived in faith and joy and courage and peace and risk.

The Father delights in such a life. So do we all. May it be yours and ours, each of us here today. Always.

Amen.

Lent 3 A - 27 Mar 2011

The Church of the Transfiguration, New York, NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
Lent 3 A - March 27, 2011

Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42

What an extraordinary story we’ve just heard. Jesus, on his way north from Jerusalem to Galilee, passing through Samaria, a place most Jews would avoid, a sort of religious wasteland. Jesus and the remarkable, chatty lady he meets at the well. The therapeutic, almost clinical, conversation they have about her married life. Their banter about religious customs. The mysterious dialogue about water. And then the salvation moment for her entire community. How extraordinary.

Practically the first thing one learns in Sunday School about the culture of the New Testament is that Jews and Samaritans don’t get along. That’s the required background for understanding the parable of the Good Samaritan. So it is perhaps a little surprising to find Jesus and this lady chatting away, and that surprise is a reaction worth holding on to. This is one of those Bible stories which gets more complicated as you pay attention to it. Not only did Jews and Samaritans not get along: Jews actively despised Samaritans as collaborators who had interbred with the enemy during the occupation after the fall of Israel. Samaritans had strange customs. They worshiped on the wrong mountain. The Jews thought them unclean and treated them that way.

And this woman is strange. Drawing water was women’s work, and it had attached to it a lot of gendered significance. Women would come together in groups to the well, in their sisterly solidarity catching up on the news, commenting on the day’s events, checking up on the children, supporting each other, in their gossip implicitly upholding the village social morality. But John makes a point of telling us that the woman at the well is alone. Women generally would draw water in the cool of the morning or early evening, because hauling water is heavy work, not to be done in the heat of the day. John makes a point of telling us that she is there at noon. Is she alone and at the well at the wrong hour because she is being shunned, because of her irregular life? Men and women in first century Palestine generally did not talk socially with each other unless they were related and at home. In fact, women rarely left home at all, and certainly not unaccompanied. And yet here she is, surprised by Jesus’ request for water from her, but ready to engage a perfect stranger, all alone, out in public. She is clearly the wrong sort of person, in the wrong sort of place, doing the wrong sort of thing. And yet Jesus unfolds for her the secret mystery of his identity: "I am he, the one who is speaking to you." This to an unclean Samaritan, excluded by the other women of the village, with a scandalous marital history, living in sin, with no evident regard at all for what is proper. And not only is this woman a member of this despised group, the Samaritans: she is not even a successful Samaritan. She is the despised among the despised. And yet, how remarkable: Instead of sinking into depression, anger or worse, she bears her burden, literally and figuratively: Excluded from the sisterhood? She picks up her water jar every noon anyway and walks off to the well alone, ready to encounter what may come to her, ready for Jesus. An amazing woman.

But wait. There is more that is strange in this story.

The Old Testament lesson today tells us of the thirsty Israelites in the desert, nagging Moses about water. Those needy, pesky Israelites, always thinking about themselves. But who is thirsty in the story from John? This passage makes me think of the saying in Matthew: “Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple--truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward." (Mt 10:42) Who is giving the cup of water to whom? Is Jesus one of the little ones in this story? Is he the thirsty Israelite depending on God’s grace for what his life needs as he travels through this desert place?

There are so many reversals in this story: The woman excluded from her community, breaking ancestral custom and the laws governing the lives of men and women. Her almost rabbinic theological dialogue with Jesus, not what one expects from a woman in her culture, even more from a woman like her. And Jesus, out of place, in humility, asking for water in the wilderness, looking for that most elemental act of human kindness, a cup of water. And in return, opening the secret mysteries of the overflowing, never-failing grace of God. To an unclean, outcast, social misfit of a woman from an antagonistic, despised outsider group.

And then the unexpected conclusion to the story: This strange woman goes into the village, the village of her social exclusion, tells the elders what has happened, and miracle of miracles: those elders listen to her, and invite Jesus to stay with them. Even if his introduction to them comes from her. And he does. And they come to believe. I wonder if the key to this story is not the ending, which has often seemed to me to be something of a non sequitur: “But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting.” Is this the harvest the disciples expected? The first fruits of Jesus’ ministry is – Samaritans? Samaritans? This is a great sign of God’s redeeming love for the whole world through Jesus Christ: the lowest of the low, the most despised and rejected are among the first to respond to Jesus’ presence and Jesus’ words. One is perhaps reminded of the prophet Jonah, sent to a place he did not want to visit, and it is there, in Nineveh, not in Israel, that people are found who listen and respond to the invitation of God. And here, as Matthew and Luke say, “Here you have a greater than Jonah.” (Mt 12:41, Lk 11:32)

Have you ever been a Samaritan? Even if you have had success in life, I am willing to bet that somewhere deep down this woman resonates with you. She does with me.

Do you remember, when you were in junior high school, how important it was to be accepted, to be part of the group? Do you remember the terror that you might be excluded? And the shame, humiliation, degradation of actually being labeled one of “them” instead of one of “us”? To work and work to be part of the right group and then to be dismissed with a cutting remark, a single word, a look: You aren’t one of the favored, one of us. You never will be. To be in the band instead of on the football team or in the cheerleading squad? Who, after all, are the homecoming kings and queens? Not first chair clarinet, I can tell you. And God help you if you are the last clarinet in the back row!

For me one of the great excitements of the story of the Samaritan woman at the well is that it shows that God’s message is not just for the victors, not for the in group that I will never really be completely at home with. Jesus comes to the well in humility and expectation, looking for that special lost one from whom he asks only what she is able to give. His openness to her opens her to him in return, and once over the surprise and shock of this seemingly inappropriate encounter, their conversation reveals her heart: What about the fact that my people are excluded, dishonored, Samaritans? What about my own irregular, failure of a life? It is to her, not to someone more seemingly worthy, that Jesus reveals his messianic secret, the inner meaning of salvation, the great good news: The burden you have to bear is no burden to God. God’s water is living water. You need never thirst again.

Who are we that God should come to us? Failed Samaritans? Who are we that God should ask of us only what we can give, even if it is a cup of water? Who are we that God should spend whole days and nights as a guest among us, unworthy as we are? Who are we that God should answer our questions, take an interest in our lives, even in our messy, serially-failing lives? Who are we that in these simple acts God should reveal to us the truth?

What grace, that Jesus in extreme humility comes to us as we carry the heavy water jars of our lives. How extraordinary that he should be the one to ask a simple gift of us, a gift we can actually give him, when we should ask what we need of him. How extraordinary that he should find in us a community from which he begins to build the kingdom.

May we be like that woman: failed Samaritans, yes, but possessed of the strength of character to encounter the stranger at the well, to engage him fearlessly, to perceive in ourselves the change he offers to us, and then the courage to tell our community. And may our communities, very likely Samaritans all in the eyes of the truly righteous, have the grace and courage of spirit to invite him in, to listen and to hear, and then to say with them: This is truly the Savior of the world.

Lent 3 A - 27 Mar 2011

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC
Lent 3 A - March 27, 2011

Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42

Come to the well

Lord help us follow your example of reconciliation; help us reach out to the Samaritan woman in our life; help us do God’s will as our daily worship. May we all contribute to the harvesting of your fields, to the building of your Kingdom. Amen.

*****

In last week’s gospel, Nicodemus, an insider of the dominant religion came to find Jesus by night and struggled with the teachings he was offered.

This week, in the middle of a hot day, Jesus reaches out to an outsider. He offers her the wellspring of eternal life, no less; if only she will ask him for it.

These two passages, Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman, are linked in meaning by the good news that “...God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Both Nicodemus and the Woman at the well, came to believing in Jesus, even if by different journeys.

This week’s gospel reassures us that no one will be denied who will believe in Jesus. Jesus “gets us.” He fully understands all that is good and all that is sinful in us. In full knowledge, he reaches out and desires us to be saved with him, in him and through him.

*****

But let me set the scene of today’s passage. As Jesus ran into increasing resistance from religious authorities in Judea, he decided to eschew confrontation and to continue his ministry in Galilee.

Now, the shortest route between Judea and Galilee goes through Samaria. Most Jews would have preferred the longer route which would have avoided Samaria altogether.

You see, Jews and Samaritans had a centuries-old, intense dislike for each other. In a nutshell, Jews reproached Samaritans for having lost their Jewish integrity; their religious and ethnic purity. But Jesus deliberately chooses to travel through Samaria.

Christ encounters the woman at the well - Richard Serrin

Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well shows us God's desire to free us, each one of us, into a life of integrity; a life in truth and spirit. There is so much in this encounter that speaks to me. This morning, I’d like to focus on reconciliation and worship.

Reconciliation and worship are two great ways to accept Jesus’ invitation to salvation. Let me tell you a bit more about what I see in today’s gospel about these two aspects of the spiritual journey.

*****

First, it is reconciliation that Jesus brings to the woman at the well. The Samaritan woman is invited to face herself as she is, there and then. She is invited to be fully known as she truly is, without social pretenses.

And she is invited to ask for the gift of grace; the well of living water springing up to eternal life. She is invited to step into her own salvation. All that is needed is accepting to be fully known as she is, and to believe.

And it isn't just anyone that Jesus invites in this way; the gender, the social status and the ethnic origin of who he invites shows that God has little interest for our human boundaries of separation.

The apostles, when they return from their errands into the city, are flabbergasted that Jesus would be speaking with a woman, a Samaritan woman and a compromised Samaritan woman, at that!

But, Jesus shows that God's message is for all; for Jews and non-Jews alike; for people in good standing and for outsiders. God doesn't need to choose the most prestigious and privileged amongst us for salvation to be wrought.

The Samaritan woman goes on to become an evangelist in bringing her own people to God.

The disciples too are invited to step out of their own cultural boundaries here. Jesus shows them an enlarged mission; their harvest will extend beyond the Jewish people, starting with those Samaritans they grew up to despise.

*****

Through the events of his meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus also teaches us about true worship. True worship is not linked to a place, be it the temple in Jerusalem or anywhere else. True worship is the lives we live with God, in truth and spirit. True worship is our lives lived in integrity with God.

You see, worship is that, which we do, that embodies our values. By showing up in church this morning, for example, you are demonstrating that you give value to the word and the will of God. Our presence here for the liturgy is a common understanding we have of the word "worship."

But everything we are, and everything we do, can embody what we give value to. When you insist in your relationships on being truthful, respectful and loving, you are worshipping God in God's creatures. When you are re-using, recycling and generally reducing your use of physical resources, you are worshiping God in God's creation, for instance.

All of Life can be worship. Living our lives in truth and spirit is worshiping God in all we are, and all we do. We worship God when we live life as if everything we do mattered.

*****

And Jesus, the Christ, the anointed one, tells us where to look to find the sustenance for our life with God.

Reconciliation and worship start where we meet the Living God; in our innermost heart, in the quiet of willingly being present to all that is.

And there, we are to ask, to receive, and to accept the gifts of God: the well of living water that will spring to eternal life and the food of doing God's will.

But asking, receiving, and accepting are each important steps of this movement of the heart. Grace is never forced on us. We have to make ourselves available to it (possibly with some help).

The Samaritan woman does not seem to have walked to the well feeling ready and able to accept grace, that day. And yet, in her, little by little, Jesus created the room for her to receive grace. Trust that Jesus is making that room for grace in you and move in to live from there.

*****

Jesus starts all of these important teachings, by reaching out to a single person; one person whom, by all conventions, he's supposed to not even speak to. Could this person be me, or could it be you?

I believe salvation starts with our own self. I need to accept to know myself as fully and lovingly as God knows me. I need to build relationships where we aim to know each other as truthfully as God knows us. Salvation starts with any one person you interact with in truth and spirit; it starts with yourself, with God, with any of God’s children.

*****

So hear what the Samaritan woman's story has to tell us.

Through Jesus, God wants us, each of us, all of us, to be reconciled to him, to ourselves and to each other.

We are invited not to harden our hearts with earthly preoccupations but to let the living water spring to eternal life in us.

We are invited to be fed in worship; to be fed in doing God’s will through all of what our life is made of.

Come to the well and let Jesus refresh you. God so loves you.

Amen.

*****

Note: this sermon comes from my re-editing of a similar sermon I preached on the same gospel in 2008 at St Boniface, Sarasota, Florida.