All Saints - Year B - Thursday, November 1, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
All Saints - Sunday, October 28, 2018

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

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

“Jesus began to weep.”  “God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”

Sometimes everything just clicks.  Sometimes there are moments when we are alive and happy in a way beyond the ordinary.  I could list decades-worth of such moments from all over the world: certainly in this place, a beach in Texas, a bar in South Carolina, the side of a highway looking at Denali near Fairbanks, Alaska, a game park in Africa, over pasta in Assisi, a seminary chapel in Toronto… 

The one thing they all have in common is that they were moments with people I love, in a beautiful place, with laughter and feasting, whether spiritual or physical.  These moments were not just about the moment, they were glimpses of a home for which my soul longs.  That’s why I didn’t want those times to end.  I could have stayed forever.  But they did end. We part ways, go back to ordinary reality.  Sometimes we say we will keep in touch, but almost always we move on, lose contact.  

Within the joy of the moment is already the sting of loss, waiting to remind me that it was only a moment.  Communion in community begun and ended tells us something about what it is to be human.  We were not made for goodbyes.  Not originally.  Goodbyes, whether in distance or death are not part of how the world was designed to work.  It is tempting to rationalize our grief as inevitable, mask the reality of it with a shrug of the shoulder and an “oh, well.”  But that is not the way we were designed to be, either.

We were designed for close, lasting, abiding communion – for moments that never have to come to an end.  And so the reality of ending and distance and death forces upon us an alien experience that has invaded the Eden for which we were made and set us wandering into a foreign land.

The Bible is wonderfully honest and powerfully poetic about our plight.  Within its narrative, we are caught between being kicked out of Paradise in one direction and the new Jerusalem of some scary apocalyptic future in the other.  What to do?  Do we bet everything on this life, cling to the tangible, to what seems secure or risk everything on a promise that sounds too good to be true?  That is an important question in the Bible, but in the meantime, we are here.  

The Bible’s answer to our present is to have us set up camp in the fierce and barren landscape of mortality and let it teach us about yearning and connection and grief and hope.  If we dare do that, dare to encounter our present condition, at times we will weep.  When our frailty and mortality are visited upon us and those we love, we let out all the contradiction and confusion through our eyes.  Thus the Bible is loaded with weeping.  From Hagar weeping for Ishmael, Abraham for Sarah, Jacob for Joseph lost and found again, Rachel for her children, Mary Magdalene at the feet of Jesus, and Jesus himself both here at the tomb of Lazarus and over Jerusalem as he enters on Palm Sunday, to name but a few.

“You have noted my lamentation; put my tears into your bottle; are they not recorded in your book?” Says the psalmist.  We know, sometimes only vaguely and intuitively, but especially in times of pain and grief, that we were made for something more, some other home, and so, caught between Eden and new Jerusalem, we all stand and lift our lament at the tomb of all the mourning and crying and pain and death that has visited us.  Perhaps God is saving our tears for something, recording their number for some future purpose.  The story does not leave us disconsolate at the grave, of course, it beckons us home.

I don’t recommend interpreting the Revelation to John literally.  It will lead to nothing but trouble, trust me.  Rather, it is sufficient to say that God, in God’s own time and in God’s own way, will bring this world to a merciful and just end and usher in the kingdom of heaven on earth.  As J.R.R. Tolkien has Frodo say in The Hobbit, “everything sad will come untrue.”  The rest of the book you can do with whatever you like.  And good luck.  

Except the reading from chapter 21 we hear today.  That is literal.  Call me a fundamentalist, I don’t care, but it better be true, it better happen.  I’ve staked my life on it being true.  The truth declared in the reading is that of the moment when the kingdom is come, Satan is destroyed, God is among us, dwelling with us forever.  

And what is the first thing that God does in this new dwelling-with-us world?  Wipe every tear from our eyes!  Of course.  However my body is to be resurrected, I take my tears with me.  My tears will go with me to the new Jerusalem.  They are the way I am known.  They are counted.  They are the record of my willingness to live, even in the face of pain and death.  And with my tears are most certainly my memories of where each came from, for whom each was shed, and then the joyful relief beyond words when I know that not one more will be added to my bottle, when we hear that every source of tears, every reason for the pain of separation and death, is gone forever.  

Tears last as long as this world lasts, because as long as this world is, there will always be something to weep about.  As the world is made new, so are our faces.  There is no grander, bolder, more triumphant language in all the Bible than this – fitting for the greatest moment in the universe - to be finally and forever and perfectly home.  And yet it is as intimate and tender as a teardrop on a grief- stained face.  

The hints in Revelation and Hebrews point to something going on, which is what we celebrate today; that those who have gone before us in death are living witnesses of us and for us, and though in God’s presence and free from sin and pain and sorrow, still awaiting the end of tears just as we are.  On that day, God, together with them, knowing every tear we have shed, wipes the last evidence of our earthly wandering, and then invites us all into a party, where with saints and heroes and family and friends and all who have welcomed the mercy of God, we enjoy at long last an endless moment – an endless alleluia of feasting, wine, laughter and memories tearlessly, painlessly, deathlessly, for ever and ever shared. 

Amen.       

Proper 25 B - Sunday, October 28, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Proper 25 - Sunday, October 28, 2018

Job 42:1-6, 10-17
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

In the name of the one God, who is lover, beloved, and love overflowing. Amen.

The days are getting darker. I mean this both literally and figuratively. And I find myself wondering, as the darkness gathers, what does hope look like?

This fall the maples have been late in catching fire. Their tardiness has coincided with the UN report on climate change, which tells us that by 2040 we will see unprecedented and violent climactic events. Faced with these new realities, we must ask when, not if, the last maple will drop its fiery leaf on this land by the Hudson.

And yet, I find that this fall, I only love the maples, this land, this world, this life harder. It is all more precious for its fragility and its impermanence.

And still, I ask, what does hope look like now?

Job and Bartimaeus both shine like stars in the night sky, by which to navigate in this gathering dark.

Today’s gospel reading presents us with two surprising words. They’re so small, you may have missed them. “Again” and “regained.” When Jesus asks Bartimaeus what he wants Jesus to do for him, he responds “Let me see again.” Similarly, when Jesus has done as Bartimaeus asks, we are told that Bartimaeus regained his sight.

The clear implication is that Bartimaeus was not always blind. Like Job, he lost something he once had, something he was probably so accustomed to he didn’t know to love it until it was gone. Until he quite literally entered the dark.

And yet, when Jesus approaches Jericho, Bartimaeus remains on the side, calling out—not for healing, but for mercy. He doesn’t rush Jesus. But neither does he sit apathetically by waiting for the healer to come along. Instead, he cries out, almost in joy, for Jesus to have mercy on him. Only when Jesus asks him specifically what he wants does Bartimaeus ask to see again.

I imagine that, however his blindness descended, however he may have raged against the loss of his sight, however he may have, for a time, despaired at this loss of light, Bartimaeus came to find peace, joy, and, assurance in the dark. I imagine that he discovered there a deeper kind of hope than he had known before.

On the eve of the Velvet Revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel wrote about what it means to hope:

Hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. […] Hope is definitely not the same as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is hope, above all, that gives strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.

Real hope, as writer and activist Rebecca Solnit points out, is always dark, because the future is forever dim. And while the darkness may frighten us, in her words, it is always the dark, not just of the grave, but of the womb. For out of the darkness emerge possibilities we could never have imagined in the clear light of day.

If the emergence of hope from the dark is true in the secular world, how much truer it is for the Christian, who bears not only Christ’s life within her, but first bears Christ’s death on the Cross. We who profess the faith of Jesus, profess, not that he died and made everything okay in the world, but that having died and risen, he now lives in us, right here and now, still working to stitch back together this fractured world.

I think that what Bartimaeus discovered in the dark is that, although he could no longer see, he could be seen, seen in the depths of his being, known and loved in the very foundation of his soul, in that darkest point within that is reserved for God alone. And in that foundational place, too deep even really to call it love, for it is so much more than that, from that deepest place is where hope is born.

Having lived and having been loved in such darkness, perhaps it wasn’t so important to Bartimaeus to see the physical world. Perhaps he had learned to live with such joy and such hope that, dark or not, the world’s beauty drew him into the life of God right here and now. And I can’t imagine that, having had his sight restored, he could ever forget the fantastic condition of being seen and known in the dark. Surely such an experience changed everything for him.

So, I return to my original question. As the darkness gathers, what does hope look like now? I don’t really know. But I do know that I don’t want to wait for the maples to die to let their beauty pierce my soul. And that, whether in darkness or in light, I will go on planting tulips each fall and dreaming of their growth through the winter months.

Rebecca Solnit reminds us that “joy doesn’t betray, but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.”

Perhaps that’s just it. Hope looks much the same as it always has. It looks like love, like tenderness, like grief, like beauty and heartache and rage. It looks like wonder. It looks like joy. It looks like a room full of people, gathered at a table, remembering the life of God that flows through us, that re-members us, so that we can re-member the world. It looks like dying, and rising once more.

Proper 24 B - Sunday, October 21, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Roy Parker, OHC
Proper 24 - Sunday, October 21, 2018

Isaiah 53:4-12
Hebrews 5:1-10
Mark 10:35-45

CHRIST CRUCIFIED, THE POWER & WISDOM OF GOD

The gospel passage is about the disciples James and John trying for a power grab at a time when Jesus has given clear warning of his fate and the only appropriate attitude for a disciple must be related to that described by the prophet Isaiah, the scenario to which Jesus alludes by saying “Among you, anyone who wants to be great must be your servant, and if anyone among you wishes to be first, they must be the slave of all. For the Human did not come to be served, but to serve and to give himself as a ransom for the community.” These words of Jesus tie him to the description of the Servant of God in the first reading, a description long revered by the community of faith: Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases . . . He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole ... By his bruises, we are healed. . . The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all ...

CHRIST CRUCIFIED, THE POWER & WISDOM OF GOD

He was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of the people ... It was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain ... When God makes his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring and shall prolong his days; through him, the will of the Lord shall prosper ... Out of his anguish, he shall see light ... The righteous one, God’s servant shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities ...

CHRIST CRUCIFIED, THE POWER & WISDOM OF GOD

Adds the Letter to the Hebrews: Because he poured out himself to death, he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors, offering up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death ... Having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, having been designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.

It would be appropriate here to cite the remarks of the Biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias who calls our attention to the placard over Jesus’ head stating that Jesus was King of the Jews, but in fact describes our transgressions — so many that they must be written in letters so tiny that one must draw very, very close to making it out, so close that one begins to realize:

CHRIST CRUCIFIED, THE POWER & WISDOM OF GOD

It would be important to dwell a bit on the opening sentence of Isaiah’s Servant Song on account of certain niceties in the Hebrew text, for whose understanding I’m indebted to Harvey Guthrie, professor of the Hebrew Bible at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To put it colloquially, the vocabulary and syntax of the verse “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases” gives the verse something like five Good Housekeeping Seals of Approval for verity and reliability. Professor Guthrie comments that even without the introductive affirmative Surely, the verse would be extremely strong in its expression of the unexpected new thing which has taken place.

This Servant Song occurs in the portion of the Book of Isaiah which describes God’s new thing and the role played in it by the conquests of the Persian king Cyrus, but the most exquisite newness of the new thing trumps conquering Cyrus and lies in the Servant’s suffering and death, bringing God’s new thing to its final completion. God’s new thing is finally not “victory” or “conquest,” but the outlasting of all victory and conquest and power by a powerless suffering and dying Servant.

The perennial struggle throughout the Bible between the description of the Servant’s fate and the desire of God’s devotees to use the imagery of kingship and victory and conquest has apparently contributed to a confusion in the text of the concluding two verses of the Song, evident in the footnotes to the Hebrew and in those of the New Revised Standard Version which comprises the lectionary. One can wonder if these final verses haven’t suffered at the hands of the happy-ending tendencies of those who transmitted the text, and of all of us, including James and John who, despite Jesus’ repeated warnings about his fate, clearly belong to the happy-ending segment of the Twelve.

CHRIST CRUCIFIED, THE POWER & WISDOM OF GOD