Sunday, November 14, 2021

Proper 28 B - November 14, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC

Proper 28 B - Sunday, November 14, 2021



One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons depicts Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden.  Adam turns to Eve and says, “We are living in a time of great transition.” After the last 18 months, we may relate to their experience.  What time are we living in?  A time when over 750,000 of our fellow citizens have died from COVID-19.  Climate change, gun violence, systemic racism, the tone of political discourse and the shared trust in representative democracy beset us.  

If that were not enough, most churches are facing the challenges of aging and decline. We are beginning to realize that it is too late for “going back to normal”. The way is blocked behind us, it is closed off.  We can only move forward focused on the work of being faithful, loving communities in our stressed, divided, and violent world.  From whence cometh our help?   Do ancient biblical texts, so far removed from our culture and ways of being, have any relevance to our times? If so, what wisdom do they provide, what hope might we find in the promises of God?

Among the great gifts of sharing in the 3-year lectionary cycle of readings for the readings on the Lord’s Day is hearing afresh and being invited into Jesus’ life and teaching.  We conclude our year of St. Mark today. Next Sunday is the Feast of Christ the King with a Gospel from St. John and then readings from St. Luke during Advent to begin Year C.  So it is good to remember what St. Mark, as he has told the story of salvation, has so urgently pressed into our awareness over these many weeks.  It is a Gospel for our time, for this time, that we do well to heed.  He is honest, sometimes graphically honest, about the trials of discipleship.  

The way of Jesus is a stormy sea that involves risk and loss, fear and faith, and the laying down of false power for the way of the cross.  Yet Jesus is always present - teaching, modeling, showing the way.  St. Mark’s community is the most persecuted of the four Evangelists. They are in crisis and tumult. Writing shortly after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, the first hearers of Mark’s gospel are being treated as trouble-making heretics, estranged from family members, and seeing some of their brothers and sisters martyred.  The urgent questions which inform the telling: Why does salvation involve such pain?  What does this suffering mean? Why bother staying faithful if it costs us so much?  

Is the way of Jesus really true, really worth it?  So we come to this reading from chapter 13 with all of that in the background and with Jesus nigh upon his Passion.  His final message is that when death and destruction and collapse seem to spread unchecked around you and you are tempted to give up and lose hope, do not be surprised, but be steadfast and clear-eyed about what time it is. The reading for today regrounds us in how to be in a time like ours. It has to do with the nature of the power of evil and the power of the cross.

What might this exchange between the disciples and Jesus sound like to us in our own ways of speaking?
“one of his disciples said to him, ‘Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!”
The disciples say, “Teacher, look how lucky Yahweh is to have us!  We have the house for the Messiah, the law, the feasts, and sacrifices, and offerings - now all we need is Messiah himself!  The stage is set, the people are ready, our liberation and freedom is surely coming soon!  When the Messiah comes in power and great glory, the Romans will be struck down and we will finally be the people God has promised we will be. We will be free, mighty, and strong. Then Israel will be made great again!”

Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”
Jesus says, “People raised these stones here and assembled these great walls. People can, and will, take down these same stones. Yes, you claim the law and sacrifices and offerings - and think that in these is your salvation, that God will protect you in your corruption and arrogance and neglect of the poor.  This is not the worship God intended. This is performance. If you believe you can defeat the Romans, that God will fight on your side, then your arrogance is worse than I thought.  All of it will be destroyed. All of it.  The Messiah is here and you are doubting my way of self-giving love. The prophets of violence will have their moment, and they will be defeated. They are always defeated.”

In the baptismal liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, the candidates are asked, “Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?”  To renounce is to forsake, repudiate, disown.  The gospel requires the abandonment of the claims of the principalities and powers that violence and domination are the ways of God, is how the kingdom comes.  When we are renouncing evil powers, we are tapping into the greatest power in the universe, which is nonviolent resistance.  We do not ignore evil powers, dismiss them, seek to overcome them on our own - none of that is being awake.   The whole of the gospel of Mark can be read as a response to the zealot movement.  Jesus repeats for emphasis his refutation of this way of power and domination; if any of you want to be great, be servant of all; if you want to be first, be last of all; take up your cross, lay down your life, whoever gains life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for his sake will find it.

The earliest Christian creed was “Jesus is Lord”, which means Caesar, who called himself lord, is not.  Jesus is facing the great fears of all the times.  And the answer to fear is not domination of the other, but a journey into our own souls to the source of hope who is greater than fear and uncertainty: watch, keep alert, keep awake. Do good, love one another, and entrust the end of the age to God’s way and time.  Do not believe false claims and plans of peace and safety.  When all the fears of the day fall upon you, and the prophets of doom harass you with small facts which are either lies or false hopes, do not let them move you. Live as you have been shown. Amen.

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Tuesday, November 9, 2021

The Funeral of Richard P. Vaggione, OHC - November 9, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC

Br. Richard Vaggione's Funeral - Tuesday, November 9, 2021


Br. Richard P. Vaggione, OHC
Our brother Richard Paul Vaggione, having entered the land of light and joy, is now, with the saints, our witness in the great cloud.  He is in the nearer presence of the One who made him and loves him fully, whose compassion is endless, and whose eyes pierce into and illuminate every secret place, every sorrow and joy, every act done and left undone.  Death reveals the fullness of the union that is already ours by grace. And though his response to that union was imperfect as is ours, ever in need of the light of Christ’s presence, that union prevails, it triumphs, it overcomes the isolation within and around us and plunges us into the abyss of love.

For we who continue our course on earth and await eagerly the hour when we will graduate and pass through the gate of eternal life, our work in this liturgical work of the people is to be done, as the Prayer Book says, with “quiet confidence” until “we are united with those who have gone before…”. In that spirit of quiet confidence we give thanks for Richard’s life. We give thanks for his priestly and monastic vocations, his pastoral and academic gifts and contributions, his mind that sought understanding and offered original scholarly contributions to the life of the early church. We offer to God’s mercy our brother Richard as a sinner of your own redeeming.  

May we inter him into his resting place in the sure and certain knowledge that as his sins are put away and remembered no more, so may we, with Christ, rejoice with him in his redeemed and forgiven life. We lament the ways in which Richard was abused and harmed, an innocent victim of acts that traumatized his body and impaired his capacity for the fullness of relational presence.  We share with Christ the pain and grief of the evil done to our brother. We trust in God’s righteous vindication to bring about the only perfect and ultimate judgment.  When we are reunited, we will know a glorified Richard whose arms and legs and whole self will be made new.  As we continue our earthly pilgrimage, taking St. Benedict’s imperative to heart, “remember every day that you are going to die”, we encounter afresh the beautiful vision of St. Paul in Romans 8. Of first interest are the verses, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God…” Authentic human life is wonderfully realistic and hopeful.  The sufferings of this present time are real; the sufferings of the world, sufferings in our relationships, sufferings of our bodies. To be human is to face inevitable and unavoidable suffering.  But just as real is the glory about to be revealed, an apocalypse of eternal light and joy in resurrection.  Suffering is short and small compared with eternal rest.  St. Paul goes on to note that it isthis very creationthat is the stuff of the glory to come.  At the grave we remember that our bodies, like Richard’s body, are bound for death. But that very death is only a prelude to what is to come, a gate, not an end.  Our vocation at the grave, whose gate opens to us in our memory, is to wait with eager longing for the revealing.  When we were young, that longing was perhaps far from our minds. When we are strong and healthy and energetic, our bodies are a quite comfortable place to be.

As we age, the awareness of suffering and mortality increases, our bodies teach us how to long eagerly. As this flesh begins its long journey to the dust, bones and muscles and organs complete their earthly mission and anticipate resurrection, a new home comes into view. One of the great evils of trauma, among many, is the damage to the capacity and safety of being in our bodies.  If the body is violated, if our very physical matter is a cause of shame and abuse, how can it learn to long for its full life? Recent research in the science of mind-body connection explains how our nervous systems and thoughts and emotions and physical health all relate to each other. Consciousness is not limited to our brains.  Our stomachs have consciousness, our livers think, our hearts are aware of what is happening around us.  All of it, all of us, is alive at more than just a physiological level.  And this is, of course, what Saint Paul is getting at. It has been in the text all along.  He is assigning consciousness to matter that does not “think” in the way we imagine, yet has a knowing, a participation, in the world of creation. This longing is not about escaping creation, but about being more present in it, perceiving its full beauty which includes the physical and which is beyond a this-worldly perspective. What we see with our eyes - growth, decay, death - the cycles of nature, which, even in all their beauty, are just stuff, is not all that is there.  Glory lives in potential, it sits secretly and invisibly at the center of every living thing.  

The way home is to perceive this secret presence, even as creatures who are mortal and suffer and die. This hope - as invisible and unbelievable as it sounds - is home.  Love and compassion are the antidote to trauma. Entering our vocation to wait with eager longing heals our whole selves, restores what was harmed.  The divine image, present at creation, which plants within us a desire for connection, for discovery, for love, for home, casts us out into a world where sin and evil seem to thwart and mock that desire. So we are caught between the inescapable quest for a true home and the temptations of false ones.  The danger of separation looms large. So the second note in Romans 8: “Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ?”  

The source of our eager longing is Christ himself, who fills all things with himself. We find quiet confidence in the midst of affliction when we remember that the One who descends into every human hell we create or imagine, every human hell done to us or by us, is the very One who sits at the right hand of the Father in glory, thus filling even the place of pain and suffering with himself.  Separation can seem so very real at times, but it is an illusion.  It appears when we forget our vocation of eager longing, taking our eyes off the glory to be revealed. WIthout that grounding in our true identity our bodies will become coffins used to move our heads from place to place. Or we will succumb to the body’s every impulse and craving, becoming subservient to it rather than its steward.  The memory of our own death is all about the present moment, all about living here in these bodies with other bodies as we watch for glimpses of the glory appearing.  “All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”  May our watch at the gate of death awaken us to the truth of our identity and quicken us to finish our course so that we may pass that gate to receive its light and joy. What will separate us from the love of Christ? Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

Amen
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Sunday, November 7, 2021

Proper 27 B - November 7, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC

Proper 27 B - Sunday, November 7, 2021



Today’s Gospel lesson, traditionally titled "The Widow's Mite" or “The Widow’s Offering” is a go-to narrative for Stewardship Season at many churches. Most of us at one point or another have heard a well-meaning pastor preach a sermon on this Gospel lesson that concludes with something like: "If the poor widow can give her sacrificial bit, how much more should we give out of our abundance to further the Lord’s cause? And I have to say that I find that interpretation somewhat troubling. On the one hand, I see some truth in it. On the other hand, it seems an exploitation of such an important story for the sake of an annual budget.

Before the scene with the widow, the Gospel writer gives us an account of Jesus giving his disciples a scathing critique of the religious leaders of his time for their greed, pompous behavior, and blatant exploitation of the poor. Jesus tells his followers to "beware of the scribes". "They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers." What does this really mean? 

The Temple in Jerusalem was not only a religious institution. It was an economic institution as well with hundreds of employees. It performed many financial functions, including operating as a central bank and treasury. The priests and scribes received a cut from every Temple sacrifice and a portion of a tax collected on every first-born child. Other offerings (some of them better understood as taxes) brought in even more wealth for them, so much so that these priests got into the business of lending money. That meant they were also able to foreclose on property if the debt was not paid. And when someone died, the scribes would immediately come in to help "manage" the deceased person's property because, of course, they couldn’t let the widow do that. Widows in first century Palestine lived on the margins of society, with absolutely no social status, and vulnerable in every way that mattered. And, yes, they charged a fee for their services. And as if that weren’t enough, this kind of exploitation always ended in sanctimonious long prayers. 

In the days leading up to the scene in today’s Gospel story, Jesus has called out time and time again the hypocrisy of the religious elite and the economic and political absurdity and exploitation he witnesses around him at every turn. In a very carefully orchestrated act, he processes into Jerusalem on a donkey to mock Roman pomp and circumstance. He drives out of the Temple those who were selling and those who were buying and turns the tables of the money changers. He refuses to answer the chief priests, scribes, and elders when they question him about where he gets his authority. He tells a provocative and scathing parable against chief priests, scribes and elders about a vineyard and a murdered son. He exposes the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and Herodians on taxes by confounding them. And on a ridiculous question by the Sadducees about whose wife a widow is at the resurrection, who has been given in marriage seven times, Jesus responds that they know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. 

Given all of this, and that Jesus has just blasted the scribes for their fake and pretentious piety and the corrupt religious institution they govern, I find it hard to believe that the only point to this story is that Jesus wants us to applaud a destitute woman for giving her last two coins to the very institution he considers corrupt. But perhaps what Jesus does want is to take the focus of his disciples (and ours) away from the rich, and to really see this widow.

Jesus, whose eyes are always on the small and the insignificant, wants his disciples and us to really see this woman whose widowhood rendered her worthless and expendable, and yet, had the courage to make her “insignificant” gift with such dignity alongside the rich with their fistfuls of coins. Jesus wants his disciples and us to really see this astonishingly generous woman who trusted that her tiny gift had value in God’s eyes. Jesus wants his disciples and us to really see the true and consecrated vocation of this widow whose hands moved at that impulse of God’s love, and who really trusted the words of the psalmist:

Happy are they who have the God of Jacob for their help! *
whose hope is in the Lord their God;
Who made heaven and earth, the seas, and all that is in them; *
who keeps his promise for ever;
Who gives justice to those who are oppressed, *
and food to those who hunger.

Jesus wants his disciples and us to recognize the true and prophetic power of this woman, who with two coins that together had the value of less than a penny, demonstrated her subversive resistance to dehumanization and a holy denunciation of injustice and corruption. 

Perhaps the lesson from today’s Gospel story is for us to call out (as Jesus did) any form of religious practice or belief that manipulates the vulnerable into self-harm and self-destruction. Any practice of faith that encourages our apathy in the face of economic, racial, gender, and political injustice. But perhaps most importantly, what we can learn from the widow is that riches come, not from acquiring, but from a letting go that takes us to the border between life and death where there are no guarantees, only hope; no security, only love, and a total surrender to God, who alone suffices.

I will end with a few lines from one of my favorite poems by Santa Teresa de Ávila:

Nada te turbe,
Nada te espante,
Todo se pasa,
Dios no se muda,

La paciencia
Todo lo alcanza;
Quien a Dios tiene
Nada le falta:
Sólo Dios basta.

(Let nothing disturb you, Let nothing frighten you, All things are passing away: God never changes.
Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing; God alone suffices.)

¡Que así sea, en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! 

Amen+

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)