Trinity Sunday - May 30, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Scott Borden, OHC

Trinity Sunday  - Sunday, May 30, 2021

Isaiah 6:1-8

Psalm 29

Romans 8:12-17

John 3:1-17

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Trinity Sunday is unusual among Principal Feasts of the Church. Other feasts mark specific events in our historical tradition. Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, for example, all call us to remember, to relive specific events. This is not something that Christian Tradition developed on its own – it is part of our inheritance from Jewish Tradition. Jewish Holy Days like Passover are ways of remembering important events in the history of the Jewish People.  

In all of this combined tradition, Trinity Sunday stands out. It doesn’t call to mind an event, but rather a doctrine. To be sure, it is an important doctrine. But how do remember, in the liturgical sense, something that did not occur. I fully intend to leave that question hanging… 

In the church calendar this is really the first Sunday on which Trinity could happen. God, the first person of the Trinity, has been known to us since the beginning of time. And Jesus, the second person of the Trinity has been known to us since Christmas… more or less... But the Holy Spirit only became known to us last week – after Pentecost. Jesus promises us that as he goes, he will send another… the Very Spirit of God… the third person of the Trinity. 

Before last week, Trinity Sunday would have had a missing person… 

The Holy Spirit may be the most vague of the persons of the Trinity. Our older language of Holy Ghost might be more conducive to vague reflection. The non-corporeal nature of ghosts makes it hard to be too literal in our thinking. The third person of the Trinity does not need to be personified... 

Just as Jesus brought about a crisis, a turning point, in the way we relate to God, the Holy Spirit brings yet another turning point. If there is one God in three persons, and one of those persons is a ghost, how do we develop concrete ideas about God? I intend to leave that question hanging too. 

Trinity Sunday has an interesting place in the marking of time – something central to our church year. Here in the US, we count our Sundays for much of the year as “Sundays after Pentecost”. But just across the ocean, the Church of England counts “Sundays after Trinity”. So, in South Africa, where inclusion is a great virtue, we have both Sundays after Pentecost and after Trinity – the numbers being one off… So, a Sunday might be listed as the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost, 1st Sunday after Trinity and 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time… a trinity of counting...  

Our Roman brothers and sisters are more familiar with Ordinary Time. In the Anglican Communion it is not so prominent, but it is part of our collective tradition. And so, while I’m not exploring the questions I’ve left hanging, I’d like to explore the notion of ordinary time... the question on nobody’s lips. 

In a nutshell, Sundays in Ordinary Time are any Sunday that isn’t part of some other season. Sundays of Advent or Lent are not ordinary. But Sundays after Epiphany or Pentecost are… It’s a bit of a new concept, having come about in the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Ironically, the “reformed” churches use a numbering system more traditional than the “unreformed” church…  

I don’t have any particular devotion to Ordinary Time – at least I didn’t. But I find a rather startling alignment of our lived world and our liturgical world. The church is returning to ordinary time after Eastertide. And I can’t help but feel that the world is returning to ordinary time after COVID time.  

Now, as vaccinations become more common than not, things are beginning to open up. Restaurants, stores, theaters, even cruise ships are beginning to reappear. “In Person” church is coming back. After a worldwide pandemic I can’t think of anything more welcome than ordinary time.  

Of course, the worldwide emergency is far from over. We can begin to relax in North America and Europe, but that is not at all true for our brothers and sisters in India, Asia, and Africa. We now know what needs to be done in regard to COVID, and we have the means to do it. We just need, collectively, to have the will to do it. 

Yet as we prepare to return to Ordinary Time… to Sundays after Trinity, or Pentecost, or whatever you like, we would do well to consider what going back to ordinary might mean. 

Before COVID we lived in a world where it was ordinary for about one percent of the world’s population to own about half of all the world’s wealth. It was ordinary for that small percent to live in unfathomable comfort while even in a fabulously wealthy country like the US, many people went hungry, died because of lack of basic health care, lived in shacks, and had no access to safe drinking water or basic sanitation. That was ordinary – it was also a moral outrage. Going back to ordinary time could be a moral outrage… 

Our challenge, in coming to the end of COVID time, is to move to a new normal, a new ordinary. As it happens, the second Person of the Trinity has given us a great deal of insight into what “ordinary” should be. Think Beatitudes... 

It is easy, at least I find it easy, to get tangled up in the notion of what constitutes justice both theologically and philosophically. Achieving justice in our highly interconnected world is no simple thing. It’s nearly impossible to comprehend… just like the doctrine of the Trinity…  

But we don’t need to understand the Trinity – we need to live it. We don’t need to understand God’s justice – we need to live it. 

Some years ago, I heard our Brother Christian preach about the Trinity. Christian was notorious for four-minute sermons – and he generally could say more in four minutes than most of us could say in four hours, or even four days. 

Speaking on the Trinity Br Christian noted that he is not much of a theologian, so he doesn’t claim to know much about the doctrine of the Trinity. He described his view as just a simple view of the Trinity.  

This is how he described that view: “I can love God, but I can't say I really understand God. God is simply too big and too vast. And I can say I love the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit is so mysterious that I can't say I even understand who or what the Spirit is – so I'm not really sure what I mean when I say I love the Spirit. But I can understand Jesus – Jesus the human being... I could stand next to Jesus, eat with Jesus, put my arms around Jesus, laugh and cry with Jesus. I can relate to Jesus.” 

But Br Christian didn’t stop there. He said that the things he could understand, think, feel, or attribute to Jesus, he should also be able to understand, think, feel, and attribute to God and the Holy Spirit. The qualities of Jesus are, after all, the qualities of the One God in three persons. 

And, more importantly, Br Christian noted, the things he could not think about Jesus, he supposed he should not think about God or the Holy Spirit either. 

For example, he said, he could not imagine Jesus causing a volcano to erupt and destroy a city. And if he couldn't imagine Jesus doing that, then why would he imagine God would do such a thing. Yet we often respond to tragedies with a sentimental thought that God must have had some purpose... we just cannot understand it. 

I cannot imagine Jesus swatting an airplane out of the air, or causing an earthquake, or hurricane, or flood, or worldwide pandemic – and if not Jesus, then not God, not the Holy Spirit. 

A belief in the Trinity – in one God in three persons – liberates our ability to think about and relate to God. It’s not nearly as complicated as we want to make it. We can look to the face of God that we can relate to. That could be a different face at different times. If I’m listening to a stunning piece of music or hearing a moving poem, I’m probably going to be looking to the Holy Spirit. If I’m looking at a parent struggling to feed their children, I’m going to be leaning on Jesus. If I’m looking at stars scattered across the velvet of the night sky, I’m looking at God. 

We can’t go wrong looking at God. It is when we turn away – turn away from beauty or from ugliness – that we go wrong. St Patrick’s Breastplate proclaims, “I bind unto myself today the strong Name of the Trinity.” Binding ourselves to the trinity, like so many Godly enterprises, is a process, not a conclusion. 

If we bind ourselves to the Trinity, then we must be prepared to live in the midst of the Trinity – in the presence of God – at all times. 

There is a movement within Christian tradition to approach everything with the question “What would Jesus do?” I think a better question might be “What would I do – knowing that Jesus is right here with me, seeing what I’m seeing, holding my hand, giving me strength.”  

For me, the danger of Trinity Sunday is an apparent invitation to go into my own mind. What do I think about this doctrine?  

But the invitation of Trinity Sunday is to go out of my mind, so to speak, and into my heart where I can experience Jesus’ passion and compassion. It's not an invitation to stay in my own heart by myself – it's an invitation to open my heart.  

The Doctrine of the Trinity starts with three persons, but it doesn’t end there. Jesus tells us that we are one just as Jesus and God are one... Just as the Holy Spirit dwells in us and we in the Spirit.  

As St Patrick’s Breastplate calls us, we bind ourselves to the Trinity and that binds us to seeing God in all other person and in all of creation.  

Day of Pentecost - May 23, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC

The Day of Pentecost - Sunday, May 23, 2021

Acts 2:1-21

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

John 20:19-23

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

God chose a most auspicious day of crowded diversity in Jerusalem to usher the body of Christ on their new and various endeavors. There was no happenstance on the day chosen for the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Christ, to take center stage.

*****

The name Pentecost comes to us from the Hellenist name for one of three pilgrimage festivals of the Jewish tradition. The Hebrew name of this festival is Shavuot. Our contemporary Jewish brothers and sisters started celebrating their version of Pentecost/Shavuot last week.

Shavuot in the first century had many layers of meaning, some tracing back to Passover. On Passover -- another pilgrimage festival -- the Jewish people had been freed from their enslavement to Pharaoh. On Shavuot, they were given the Torah and became a nation committed to serving God.

Shavuot also was a festival for the first harvest of wheat and was also referred to as the festival of first fruits.

Shavuot attracted a lot of pilgrims in Jerusalem. As one of the three main festivals, it would have obligated all male Israelites within 20 miles of Jerusalem to come to the temple for worship.

Many proselytes (gentiles who had converted to Judaism) and many Israelites settled abroad would have made the effort to travel to Jerusalem for this occasion.

The reading from Acts today describes Jews who have traveled from regions as remote from Jerusalem as present-day Libya, Italy and Turkey - in a time when long-distance travel was arduous.

And for this festival of the end of grain harvests, servants would traditionally have been given leave for the day. Many servants and probably quite a few slaves would have taken this opportunity to join in the celebrations.

So, I hope you get a sense of how crowded, cosmopolitan and busy Jerusalem would have been on this day of Shavuot. Think: St Peter’s square on Easter morning or Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

*****

And most of this crowd would have communicated in a variety of languages. But the most useful to communicate with other linguistic groups than your own would have been the Koine. Koine was a common form of the Greek language.

Koine is important to mention for this feast of Pentecost for you could argue that’s the only language that would have been needed.

It was, to the first century eastern Mediterranean, what international English is today to the arena of globalization. How often nowadays do we consider that if the message has been broadcast in English, the whole world has surely heard it?

Most people would have understood a good deal of Koine. Many educated people would have been proper speakers of it. But for most of them, it would not have been their mother tongue -- with all that a mother tongue carries in emotional richness and nuance.

Pentecost was the Koine name for Shavuot because it came on the 50th day after Passover. The root of Pentecost is Pente for 5. Why 50 days? Well, one of the Passover mitzvahs (good deeds) was counting up daily a “week of weeks” until an offering of the first harvest of wheat could be made in the temple at Shavuot. Seven weeks is 49 days. Shavuot comes on the 50th day. Most Jews to this day, consider the word Pentecost does not capture what Shavuot means.

*****

So our Christian narrative of Pentecost is not happening on Shavuot gratuitously. On Shavuot, the disciples of Jesus are hoping for a “breather” of a holiday together, but not the “breather” they’re going to get. The disciples have been on an emotional roller-coaster for about 2 months now.

It started gloriously with the festive entry of their teacher into Jerusalem. It then quickly unraveled in confrontations culminating in the arrest, torture, crucifixion and death of Jesus on the eve of Passover (of which Shavuot is a continuation).

And then, when they felt most lost, anguished and guilty, came the incredible and yet real resurrection of Jesus. But that did not constitute the happy end yet.

After his appearance and teaching to a variety of disciples, Jesus is removed into heaven, leaving the disciples at a loss once more, though a very different one this time.

Would you feel a bit stressed in their place? I reckon I would be a thorough mess of paradoxical feelings and disorientation, if I were in that Jerusalem house on the morning of Shavuot.

*****

And on that very morning, these good Jews have gathered together, supposedly to celebrate this festival as a community; a group of insiders glued together by amazing experiences.

As our Br. Randy once suggested, they now feel “Home Alone”, without the physical presence of Jesus to exhort them to do the right thing.

He has promised them an Advocate, one who would go with them, teach them, and ultimately defend them in judgment. But for now, they are staying put in Jerusalem and going about their usual ways.

*****

And then, quite suddenly, the house seems to come alive with rushing currents of wind that howl. I imagine the house, as in a cartoon, when an explosion makes all the shutters and doors bump on their hinges and buckle as if expanding. And just as suddenly, the disciples’ heads are as if on fire. If nothing will throw you out into the streets, this probably should.

The disciples become part of the Spirit’s rush; they flow with it. And they start to converse with the crowd of onlookers in the adjacent streets who have come to see what the commotion is all about.

And whatever language it is that the disciples think they are speaking, they are heard in their interlocutors’ mother tongue, whichever that happens to be.

I imagine the disciples hearing themselves and hearing the questions and interjections that respond to them in various languages that they don’t know, and yet, now do speak, and trying to not stop to think about it, for it’s too weird for words but it is obviously working anyway.

They proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ crucified, risen and ascended in words that touch the hearts and minds of the many Shavuot pilgrims they meet.

They convey to their fellow Israelites and to the proselytes that the “Age to Come” is here and now, Peter even channels the prophet Joel to convey that.

And word gets around, in whatever language. And more locals and foreigners come running to see and hear -- in their own tongue -- what these simple Galileans have to say.

*****

And so, millennia after Babel divided humanity in misunderstanding and mistrusting entities, the moment of Pentecost gives birth to the universal church. It reverses the curse of divisiveness; not by effacing the differences but by making deep communication possible across them.

As a man who became an Episcopalian on the day of Pentecost 2000, I appreciate how the Holy Spirit, with a somewhat Anglican touch, I may add, demonstrates the effectiveness of spreading the gospel in the vernacular of the people you are reaching out to -- no matter what your language of origin may be.

*****

And so, on this day of Shavuot, God chooses to change the arena and the medium of the gospel. After freely constraining himself to the human limitations of a human life (time, space, suffering); after experiencing human life from within, (as Irenaeus described in the sermon we heard last night) the Spirit chooses to give godself to the nascent church.

We now host God in our deepest self; whether we let God inform us or resist God’s inspiration. For we are still free; free to tune into the Spirit or not, but unconditionally provided-for in God’s Love. We are all sharing in the first fruits of God’s harvest in the Christ Jesus whose Spirit lives in us.

*****

So,will I let my heart, mind and soul catch fire? Will I turn to whatever neighbor is at hand and share the best news ever in a way that transcends our differences? Will you?

It’s early days yet. It’s quite soon to tell whether the Early Church, here assembled, will hear the gospel and stand up for God.

But it’s never too late to be joined to the cornerstone which the builders rejected. We can yet build up the Kingdom of God’s Love, God’s Republic of Universal Welfare.

*****

In closing, let us pray with a verse from Psalm 51 that seems fitting for this feast of Pentecost:

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence and do not take your holy spirit from me.

(Psalm 51:10-11)

Amen.

Easter 7 B - May 16, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC

Easter 7 B  - Sunday, May 16, 2021

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

1 John 5:9-13

John 17:6-19

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Why do we pray?  The simple answer for me is best expressed with the words of C.S Lewis, who wrote: “I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God. It changes me.” It just doesn’t get any truer than that for me. I pray with words and without words, through my laughter and my tears, in my hope and in my despair because my soul longs for engagement and attentiveness and connection with God. 

Today’s gospel lesson is considered by many scholars to be the highest level of mystical teaching in the entire New Testament. Jesus’ “High Priestly Prayer” in John’s Gospel is the culmination of his farewell discourse to his disciples and a beautiful prayer for unity with evocative language and complex imagery. The setting is the Upper Room following the Last Supper. Jesus has just washed his disciples’ feet. He has foreseen Judas’s betrayal and has predicted Peter’s denial. He has given his disciples some words of instruction and has promised them the Holy Spirit. 

The seventeenth chapter of the Gospel begins by saying that Jesus “looked up to heaven and said: ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you.’” “Jesus looked up to heaven.” What does that really mean? I want to propose that something much more significant is taking place in this scene than Jesus’ eyes just shifting upward. “Looking up to heaven” means that Jesus’ mind, heart, and consciousness are lifted into that spiritual realm where he is now profoundly at one with God. It is a way of saying that Jesus is entering into the heavenly realm- God’s consciousness, God’s very heart. 

I have been most influenced by James Allison, who, in is magnificent essay, “Undergoing Atonement: The Reverse Flow Sacrifice,” links this passage to imagining the rite of atonement in the First Temple. He writes:

"[T]here is the High Priest, in the Holy Place, with us outside, and he is being ministered to by Angels, he is communing with the Angels who were with YHWH at the beginning of creation. He is spending time in prayer, for it is during this period that he will expect to become interpenetrated by YHWH whom he is going to incarnate for the rest of the rite. So he will pray to become one with God, and that God will become one with him, so that he can perform the sacrifice and glorify God by making God’s people one. This is what At-one-ment is all about. Experts in these matters have long known that in John 17, where Jesus engages in a long prayer concerning the Father being in him, and he in the Father, and him praying that his disciples may be ‘made one’, we have the essence of the High Priestly prayer in the Atonement rite.” 

Jesus prays: “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.” In the idiom of the Hebrew world, the “name” of God equals the essence of God. That is why we pray, “Hallowed be your name.” Jesus has made known the divine being. He has given to his disciples “the word,” the revelation of who God is, the revelation that God has given him. The disciples would have understood that the word of God is the revelation of the being of God. The call of Jesus for us all is into a new being in which a new dimension of life is entered and through which a transcendent unity is experienced.

“And now I am no longer in the world,” Jesus says. It is clear that the gospel writer is not composing these words in the pre-crucifixion span of time, but in the time for which this book was written. In that later time the Johannine community is in the world. So he prays for them: “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” In other words, Jesus has opened a door for them into the essence of God. He asks that God keeps them in that essence now that he will no longer be physically with them. They have come to a new understanding of what it means to be human. They are, therefore, different, and the world will always hate that which it sees as different. 

“I am not asking you to take them out of the world,” Jesus continues, “but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.” According to biblical scholar, Sandra M. Schneiders, I.H.M., “world” in John’s Gospel means “a construction of reality, which is in opposition to Jesus and his own and which can be incarnated in multifarious ways… [T]his evil world pervades the natural and historical world in which we live, the good Creation of God and the struggling human beings who are torn between good and evil.” 

Jesus is not asking for a physical protection, but for a grounding and constant re-centering in God’s consciousness which is what gives us the strength to walk through pain and danger without falling apart. When we are truly grounded in God, nothing that is outside of us can finally destroy us. We are connected to that which is ultimately real and ultimately eternal. Just as Jesus was made whole and holy and set free to give his life away in love, so are his disciples, and us, to be made whole and holy and be set free to give our lives away in love."

“Sanctify them in the truth.” Jesus prayed for what the Eastern Fathers of the Church later came to speak of as “theosis,” God drawing us toward deeper intimacy, and union. This union with God is not merely a place we go to after our earthly life if we are good, but a place of deep goodness in which we naturally exist. And we experience this divine indwelling by “looking up to heaven” in prayer. In other words, Jesus modeled for us this “at-one-ment,” the lifting up of mind, heart and consciousness into the spiritual realm where we are profoundly at one with God. 

This idea that the Creator of the Cosmos resides within our being was not unfamiliar in the first century. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is the temple (John 2:19). Writing at an earlier time to the Corinthians, Saint Paul declares that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). We are reminded to come to this awareness when at the beginning of the Eucharistic Prayer we are asked to lift up our hearts, and we reply that: “we lift them up to the Lord.”

So, why do we pray? I pray because Jesus looked up to heaven and prayed. Love come down prayed. The Word made flesh prayed. May we continue to lift up our hearts to be in communion with that Source of all love. And may that Source of all love keep us ever aware of our connectedness with all that is, that we may always seek the best for all of creation. 

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

Amen+