Faith – SSJE: Recent Episodes
Faith – SSJE
Br. Lain Wilson
Matthew 13:36-43
Our Gospel passage this evening is a rare instance of Jesus explaining a parable. This is the parable of the wheat and weeds, which we heard two Sundays ago. As wheat and weeds grow together in a field, the householder orders that they be left until the harvest, when the weeds will be separated and burned, and the wheat brought into the barn. It’s a parable about patience in the face of the persistence of evil and suffering, and faith in God’s future judgment (Matthew 13:36–43).
Jesus clarifies the meaning of the parable to his disciples, and to us. But that clarity doesn’t mean it’s simple, and the urging of patience for the future doesn’t mean that we don’t have work to do in our present. If we can look toward the distant future of this world’s field, we are also directed to tend our own gardens.
We are called to survey our garden’s health, and we are called to be clear-eyed in that assessment. Where do we see weeds taking over? How have we neglected to attend to our garden?
Jesus came preaching repentance and turning back to God, not congratulating ourselves for being perfect. We all have failings. We are all burdened under the weight of sin. We will be called to take stock of our sins in the confession this evening. Don’t let yourself go on autopilot when you say these words. What failing today, what sin in this moment, weighs on your heart? Where is your garden languishing?
Part of this is about recognizing that the fates of what grows are intertwined. So as you survey your garden, learn the names of what grows there. Learn to recognize them, become familiar with them. What are your gifts that are cultivated there . . . and what are the shadows that they cast? Perhaps you have enormous capacity for work and productivity, and enormous impatience for those without. Perhaps you can have a conversation with anyone and everyone, but struggle when it comes time to listen.
Our brightest gifts cast the darkest shadows. When we can recognize them, name them, and become familiar with them, we can be more perceptive as to their impact on us and the world.
And all this – surveying our garden, recognizing what grows there – helps us to know how we may intervene. We can begin to experiment as gardeners. What happens when you water earlier in the day, or use compost?
Our Rule uses the word disciplines in this respect: the practices or habits or commitments that we can put into place, individually and collectively, to help us weather the challenges of vowed life in community. Water and sunlight are pretty high up on my own list (so I’m not all that different from a plant, really), but so too are movement and periods of solitude.
What about your own list? What factors are most important in how you show up to yourself, to God, and to the world? What disciplines – what interventions – might make your own garden healthier?
Confession, discernment, discipline: tending our gardens is hard work. But the good news is that we aren’t alone in this work. Jesus stands with us, giving us the courage to see and speak and do in the work of tending our gardens in the present, and the patience to wait with hope and faith upon the harvest of God’s future.
Amen.
Br. Lain Wilson
Isaiah 7:1-9
When I lived in DC for a decade before moving to the monastery, I had three bad cycling accidents. Not “broken-bones-and-hospital-visit” bad, but “ice-and-painkillers” bad.
The last and worst one took place about twelve miles from home. I was cycling down a path at a reasonable clip when I hit a root and went flying over the handlebars. I came down hard, cleaned myself up, and spent the next several minutes somewhat comically trying to fix a flat tire with one hand. Then I got back onto the bike and slowly cycled home.
The only reason it wasn’t a hospital-visit accident was because I was wearing my helmet. And the only reason I felt assured that I could get back home was because I was still wearing my helmet. It was a risky situation, but I trusted my equipment.
In our reading from the prophet Isaiah, King Ahaz of Judah finds himself in a risky situation. The other two named leaders, the kings of Damascus and of the northern kingdom of Israel, have aligned against the Assyrian Empire. Rezin and Pekah move against Ahaz as part of this larger conflict, with the aim of deposing or killing Ahaz and replacing him with someone more sympathetic to their cause. Meanwhile, a potential alliance between Judah and Assyria, which might offer some protection from Damascus and Israel, runs the risk of turning Judah into a client state.
Into this situation, Isaiah comes bringing a word of hope – and a warning: “Take heed, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint” (Isaiah 7:4). Rather, stand firm, trust in God: “If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all” (Isaiah 7:9).
This is one of the most important statements on the meaning of faith in the Hebrew Bible. In Isaiah, as Walter Brueggemann writes, faith is “a matter of quite practical reliance upon the assurance of God in a context of risk where one’s own resources are not adequate.”[1]
Isaiah alerts us to the flesh-and-blood quality of faith: that Ahaz’s action taken in faith can be the difference between victory, and defeat and exile. And for us, this flesh-and-blood quality of faith has practical implications for the way we navigate the risks inherent in how each of us lives our life. In how we get to work, relate to our loved ones, struggle to pay down debt, find our civic voice.
Where do you notice these risks in your own life? Where do you feel what you are or have isn’t enough for what is demanded of you?
We will all face risks in this life. And this is where Isaiah enjoins we will most need faith.
But faith doesn’t guarantee that nothing bad will happen to us. Faith doesn’t guarantee that we won’t fall, or fail, or be injured. Faith doesn’t guarantee that we won’t flip over our handlebars.
Rather, faith allows us to persist through risk and assures us that we aren’t alone in this life to face the riskiness of each day. Faith is the trust that seeming failure isn’t the end of our story. Faith not only allows us to stand, but to stand back up when we fall, to face forward with courage and confidence, knowing with bone-deep certainty that God will see us safely home.
Amen.
[1] Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 1–39 (Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 67.
Br. Lain Wilson
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30; Romans 7:15-25a
A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to spend time on Lake Hosmer in northern Vermont learning to scull, that is, rowing a single boat with two oars. If you’ve spent time in the morning looking onto the Charles River, you’ll see any number of scullers peacefully and effortlessly navigating the river.
(Peaceful and effortless did not characterize my experience.)
One of the most helpful things brought up by the coaches was the concept of “wearing the boat.” That is, treating the boat as something you put on, an extension of your body, rather than as a tool you use. Rather than gripping the oars and sitting ramrod straight on the seat, “wearing the boat” is about being light and loose, relaxed and responsive.
I can honestly say that I did not begin the week wearing the boat. I death-gripped the oars, locked my arms and shoulders, and grimaced in concentration. Every reminder to relax instead prompted microadjustments to keep myself from tipping into the lake.
Despite all this, it was a fun week, and a revealing one. It laid bare something surprising. Each time I pushed away from the dock, I found myself carrying something into the boat with me. I found myself carrying my own expectations.
Expectations that my experience with sweep rowing would translate to sculling. Expectations that I could control the boat. Expectations that I should have the capacity to learn and grow. Expectations that I would perhaps fall in love with sculling and find a new hobby. Unsurprisingly, I found that trying to “wear the boat” while being laden with the weight of these expectations led to a very awkward fit.
All of us know what it feels like to bear the weight of expectations, and this features prominently in our readings this morning.
These may be ones that we impose on ourselves, that we should behave in a certain way, do (or not do) certain things. Saint Paul, in his letter to the Romans, questions why he can’t do the good that he desires. When he knows what he should do, he ends up doing the opposite. He holds high expectations for himself and his behavior, and he finds himself constantly falling short of the mark.
I’m sure each one of you has experienced this. We all know the pressure and disappointment of falling short. Why can’t we just be strong enough to do what is right, to accomplish what we resolve? Paul identifies sin as the cause of our failure, and we can see this in our own lives as well. We can see it in the forces that steal our attention and redirect our intentions. We can see it in the social pressure to conform, to divide us and them. We can see it in a culture of shame that drives us to act in darkness, silence, and secrecy. We can see it in the sheer power of inertia and the lure to just keep on keeping on. The sobering reality of our humanity is that we are more often than not powerless before these forces.
These expectations may also be imposed on us. Jesus points to this. John the Baptist came preaching repentance, turning back to God, and was criticized for his fasting, for living what he preached. Jesus himself came preaching the bounty of God’s love and mercy, reaching down and out to all people and circumstances, and was criticized for feasting, for living what he preached. They were both consistent in their actions but didn’t meet whatever expectations others imposed on them.
“I expected better of you.” “You aren’t living up to your potential.” How many times have we heard this or something similar? It’s startling to encounter a version of yourself formed solely from the expectations of others, and to find yourself suddenly bearing its weight, dragging it along through life.
And these expectations may be those we impose on others and the world around us. The weight of our own agendas and plans and dreams, and the inevitable disappointments that can be so dispiriting. Each frustrated expectation is another blow to our desire for control and agency.
Where do you notice this weight in your own life? How have you been formed, or deformed, by the expectations you place on yourself, that others place on you, or that you yourself place on others?
Now, we can understand expectations in this way – as something that is due, necessary, or required. As the have-tos and shoulds of our lives. But both Paul and Jesus invite us to understand them differently.
What happens when, instead of seeing only failure in the expectations we impose on ourselves, we expect – that is, await with assured hope – the promise of God’s provision? “The Lord is gracious and full of compassion,” the psalmist sings. “The Lord upholds all those who fall; he lifts up those who are bowed down” (Psalm 145:8, 14).
What happens when, instead of feeling ourselves powerless, we expect the gift of God’s liberating grace? “Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25).
And what happens when, instead of dragging the weight of our own expectations, our human agendas and plans and projects, around with us, we let ourselves lay those aside and come to Jesus? “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. . . . For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28, 30).
If our expectations can cause us to handle life with an iron grip, and if their frustration all too often results in us finding ourselves unsettled and tipping precariously, Jesus invites us to relax our grip, to loosen our shoulders, to let our gaze rest easy. As I was told to try to “wear the boat,” Jesus invites us to cooperate with him in this life in an attitude of humility, surrender, and trust.
Something changed toward the end of my week on Lake Hosmer. I noticed that so many of those expectations I came in with and dragged into the boat with me were gradually falling away. I wasn’t rowing any better, but maybe every twentieth or thirtieth stroke, I felt like the boat was beginning to fit me better, that I was able to wear it more lightly. Instead of asking what I expected from myself, or others expected from me, or what I expected of the boat, I could notice for the first time what the boat expected of me. And it was simply this: to put on its lightness, to be present and easy to its minor shifts, and to let myself trust that it wanted to stay level and to go forward, to work with and not against it.
I imagine that God expects something similar from us. To put down the burdens of our own agendas and anxieties and shame, all the have-tos and shoulds that weigh us down. To lay all that aside and come to Jesus, whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light. And to let ourselves work with God, rejoicing in the freedom and grace that God has given us, and to be set alight with God’s love. Amen.
Br. Keith Nelson
The Seventh Sunday of Easter
In the calendar of the church’s cycle of worship, we find ourselves this morning in Ascensiontide – the ten-day period at the end of the Easter season, after Jesus’ ascension into heaven on the fortieth day and before the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the fiftieth day, next Sunday.
Just now we heard a reading from Acts that we also heard on Ascension Day – the lectionary’s version of recapping a previous episode. And in 1 Peter we heard a preview of coming attractions: The Holy Spirit is coming soon … to a monastery chapel near you!
For now, we are gathered in a strange in-between time: it is awesome, glorious, mysterious, and a bit challenging to preach about. A vocational hazard in the preaching life and in the monastic life can be overfamiliarity with things awesome, glorious, and mysterious. When that happens to me, I tend to return to my prayer journal to see what I can glean from a slightly younger, fresh-eyed version of myself.
When I was a novice, I spent a considerable amount of energy in prayer cultivating a relationship with God as a Trinity of persons. Perhaps because I was raised as a Southern Baptist, a close, personal relationship with Jesus had always come instinctively to me. But because of the insinuation of some bad theology, I had a relationship with God the Father that stood in need of healing. I am not sure I could have called my relationship with the Holy Spirit a relationship. The Spirit seemed something more like an intriguing but abstract force. So I spent time asking Jesus to show me more of his relationship with the Father and the Spirit, and I often did so by praying with art, one of the languages of prayer I have loved since childhood.
“Christ in Prayer” by El Greco (1541-1614)
The painting of Jesus with his eyes gazing upward, by the Spanish painter El Greco, could be an illustration of many moments in the gospels. But it is particularly apt for this morning’s reading from John: “After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son, so that the Son may glorify you’” (John 17:1). I found in this image an icon of Jesus’ relationship with his Father – and so a doorway into my own.
I discovered something frustrating about gazing at the face of a person I loved while his gaze was turned elsewhere. But this also provoked a curiosity to know more about whom he saw, and to see the Father through Jesus’ eyes. I recalled beautiful hikes in the woods with a beloved friend who is an avid birder. “Look! Look right over there! Do you see it?” she would squeal with glee. “Um … what am I looking at?” I would reply. Over time, these moments became opportunities to learn more than the names of birds. They were opportunities to see the world through the eyes of a friend seeing something, someone, she loved and longed for me to love.
Me looking at Jesus looking at God the Father also stirred the question: Who was this unseen Father looking at? Was he returning the gaze of his Son, or was he perhaps gazing at me – his adopted son by my baptism – somehow completing the circle?
“Christ in Silence” by Odilon Redon (1840-1916)
The second painting is by a French painter named Odilon Redon, who participated in the Symbolist movement in nineteenth-century art. These artists strove to find a visual language that could evoke the mysterious depths of human experience in a way that they felt was flattened and trivialized by naturalism and realism. Redon’s paintings are saturated in mythological and dream imagery, but he also painted many portraits of Christ. “Christ in Silence” depicts Jesus with his eyes closed, his head covered in his prayer shawl, and his hand raised to his lips. The fluid blue and gold background against the earthier hues of his face and body appears to me like a window into Christ’s interior life – the aura or ambience that emanates from his presence.
It reminds me of the words in John 3: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). I also now find it resonates for me with the words from 1 Peter: “… you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you” (1 Peter 4:14). This rest can ground us in God even in the midst of great suffering.
Praying with this painting, Jesus showed me more of the Holy Spirit by inviting me to be with him while we both closed our eyes and gazed within, gathered in God’s indwelling presence. The Holy Spirit in the space between us soon took on a more vivid life of its own. But for that to happen, I had to turn my gaze away from Jesus and trust in a different set of senses.
Odilon Redon was not a Christian, nor was he conventionally religious. Nonetheless, his paintings of Christian subjects bear witness to the deepest spiritual impulses of the human heart, the subtle movements of the Spirit in all people and indeed all creatures. As a monk of another community once said to me, “As the church, we can say with confidence where the Holy Spirit is: in our midst the Spirit has made a home. But we cannot say where the Holy Spirit is not.”
In John 17, Jesus prays to the Father, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). To know God – to be brought into a relationship of abiding intimacy – is not just the means to eternal life. The relationship is that Life itself.
The kingdom of God, this Life that is truly Life, is given to us now in part and not yet in its fullness. God’s fullness is always seeping into time as most of the world knows it, but most often in glimpses, in a gradual unfolding. That is good news, because it is given to us in the measure we can receive it; God reveals only as much of God as we can endure.
The ministry of artists is particularly appropriate to celebrate during Ascensiontide. Like the Greeks who came to the apostle Philip, we wish to see Jesus, the “image of the invisible God.” Some art has the capacity not only to reveal God or spiritual realities, but to move our gaze beyond the visible in the direction of truths that images cannot contain. Icons in the Eastern Church do this in a very intentional and programmatic way, but a venerable lineage of Western artists participates in a similar approach to sacred art. They invite us to gaze until our spirits are filled and moved, but then they say, like that pair of men in white robes: “Why do you stand looking upward into heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11).
If things awesome, mysterious, and glorious have lost a bit of their luster for you, praying with sacred art may help undomesticate familiar images of God and open a fresh perspective. Perhaps the crucified, risen, and ascended Christ is inviting you to pray your way through a museum, to search out the image of God in creative works both explicitly religious and otherwise. You may also feel prompted to gaze afresh at art made by friends or by your own hand, and to see it with renewed sight and insight.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote:
The soul at prayer should have before it a sacred image of the God-man, in his birth of infancy or as he was teaching, or dying, or rising, or ascending. Whatever form it takes, this image must bind the soul with the love of virtue and expel carnal vices, eliminate temptations and quiet desires. I think this is the principal reason why the invisible God willed to be seen in the flesh and to converse with men as a man. He wanted to recapture the affections of carnal men who were unable to love in any other way, by first drawing them to the salutary love of his own humanity, and then gradually to raise them to a spiritual love.
The ministry of sacred art trains our gaze to look for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in all people, places, and things – and to give praise to the Divine Artist, their Maker and Source.
Br. Lain Wilson
Preached at The Church of the Redeemer, Lexington, MA
The Sixth Sunday of Easter
Acts 17:22-31; John 14:15-21
On behalf of my Brothers of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist in Cambridge, I’m delighted to be with you all this morning. And happy Mother’s Day to everyone here, and to those watching online (including my mom!).
I’m especially delighted to be with you all on this Music Appreciation Sunday. I grew up surrounded by music. My earliest memories are filled with it. As a teenager, I sang in the cathedral choir. There, I learned what it was to be an Episcopalian. I learned the treasures of the Anglican musical tradition. Hymns and anthems continue to be one of my primary encounters with scripture and theology – including today’s gospel, which I still can’t help but hear in Thomas Tallis’s lush setting, “If ye love me.”
Music has also, in an important way, saved my life.
When I was in my early twenties, I found myself questioning my faith. Why did I believe what I believed? Did God exist? Was God necessary? Was I behaving irrationally or delusionally in clinging to belief? Wouldn’t it be better, more intelligent, more reasonable simply to let it go?
I spent a lot of time thinking, reading, and discussing this. And yet, one question persisted in the back of my mind. “What about Bach?”
“What about Bach?”
In my own journey of faith, this question was something like a lighthouse, its clear beam cutting through the storms and fog of doubts and uncertainty.
Maybe it was irrational to believe in something unseen, maybe I had doubts . . . but what I experienced in listening to Bach (and Benjamin Britten and Bill Evans and Jeff Buckley and so many other artists) was a transcendent beauty that seemed to go beyond what I could explain. Music was a place for me of encounter, shining a light to reveal the living God’s presence and activity in our world. “What about Bach?”, that annoying and persistent question, was the light that guided me home, back to my faith.
Saint Paul in his missionary activity sought to be that lighthouse, shining a light in the minds of his listeners and helping them to notice and encounter the living God. In the passage we’ve heard this morning, Paul speaks to the gathered assembly in Athens. He asks them to look anew and notice what’s there already, just in front of them. The altar, among the city’s objects of worship, may have been dedicated to a god who was unknown to them, but not to Paul. This was the creator God, the Lord of heaven and earth. This was the God active in all nations and peoples, drawing them to search, to grope, and perhaps to find. This was the God he worships, the God of Jesus Christ, in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
Paul invites his listeners, past and present, to know and encounter this living God: infinitely beyond our imagining, and simultaneously closer to us than our own skin, the ground of our being and the framework of our existence.
Each of you will have your own experience of encountering this God, present and active. It may be when you take and eat the mystery of Christ’s Body and Blood in communion. It may be when you join with the gathered voices of the rest of creation in praising our Creator, in the bleeding colors of a sunset, the magnificence of a summer thunderstorm, or the perfume of a lush garden. It may be when you recognize God’s perfections in the beauty of a mathematical equation or the impenetrable wonders of our universe. It may be when your daily work is done, and you are able to simply be in silence.
How have you come to know and encounter God? And, perhaps just as importantly, how will you be open to encountering God, who is always present, anew? The founder of our Society, Richard Meux Benson, noted that “there is no limit to what [God] will call us to. . . . As God calls us nearer to Himself, it is not merely that we may know Him more perfectly according to that manner of knowledge, or that manner of fellowship, which He has vouchsafed to us already, but He would teach us to know Him in new ways. We are to seek, and find it, from day to day.”[1]
Paul and Father Benson urge us to be open to seek and encounter God anew each day. And Jesus, in this morning’s gospel, reminds us that who we meet in these encounters, the living God present in our midst “not far from each one of us,” is Love.
Jesus gathers his friends together for a final teaching before his walk to Good Friday and Easter. “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. . . . On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them” (John 14:18, 20).
What Jesus intimates to his friends is something that we Brothers affirm in our Society’s rule of life: “the very being of God is community; the Father, Son, and Spirit are One in reciprocal self-giving and love.”[2]
God is love. Period. And this love is offered to the community of Jesus’ followers, then and now. Christ’s body – you and me and all who gather today and any days that have been or are yet to be – all gathered together into this great nexus of community, of belonging, of love.
This is so vital, because so many of the loudest voices proclaiming Jesus today may cause us to ask where the love is. We Brothers see this, and I know many of you do, too. Lifelong Christians come to us questioning not their faith but whether that faith is “Christian” anymore. Young seekers grappling with what it means to be faithful in a rapidly changing world don’t hear of a God of love and community, but of grievance, vengeance, and domination. Twenty years ago, I questioned whether Christian faith was rational; today the struggle is often about what being “Christian” actually means.
The good news is that God calls us to bear witness to what it means to be Christian in the example of our lives. We cannot encounter this living God, this One who is Love and community, and go away unchanged. We cannot meet the God whose Love abides in us without being transformed. “One soul really and truly sanctified” – made holy, as our Father Benson writes – “is capable of transmuting a whole world into newness of life. . . . The love of God shines out in the love of [us humans . . . and] there can be no limit to this love.”[3]
The good news is that if we are well and truly changed by our encounter with love, we become agents of that love. We become God’s lighthouses, our faithfully lived lives shining a light to bring others home to rest in God’s love. We become for those seeking after meaning, after purpose, after God the question that demands their attention, the example of a life transformed, the voice calling them to recognize the God of love, “in whom we live and move and have our being,” already present and ready to meet them.
Amen.
[1] R. M. Benson, The Religious Vocation, 74, 75.
[2] “The Witness of Life in Community,” ch. 4 of The Rule of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist (Cowley Publications, 1997), 9.
[3] Benson, Religious Vocation, 41, 42.
Br. Keith Nelson
Preached at the annual memorial mass for Isabella Stewart Gardner.
John 3:7-15
While I have loved drawing ever since I could hold a pencil, it was not until age eleven that I really discovered art history. One sweltering July in the air-conditioned calm of the public library in Hoover, Alabama, I stumbled upon a reading room with a brass plaque and crossed the threshold . . . like entering the wardrobe into Narnia. As I opened one enormous book after another, what I saw astonished me: whole sermons preached in images rather than words. I was listening to the Bible with my eyes. I had been baptized at the age of ten in a local Southern Baptist church, a tradition with little visual art. Art history introduced me to church history. People that had been dead for centuries past pointed me toward eternity – because of course, they were not dead, but alive and waiting for me to join the conversation.
And the one I came to love most of all was a Dominican friar known to posterity as Fra Angelico, who invited me to see not only the world through his eyes, but heaven; not some ethereal cloud remote from us creatures, but a lush garden full of dancing angels and saints engrossed in interpersonal communion.
Could I take drawing lessons from Fra Angelico in heaven? I wasn’t sure, but here was definitely a heaven worth dying and living for.
Do you remember the first moment – or perhaps the most decisive moment – when the contours of your small and individual life were opened to the far horizon of the eternal? Do you remember where you were, and in whose company, whether living or dead?
For Nicodemus, it came by night, from a young rabbi whose message both bewildered and enthralled him: “Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.” The same phrase can be translated “born from above.” In this new birth we come to know not only a fundamentally transformed perspective, but the life-altering gift of a new identity. That glimpse of eternity becomes, by grace, the sight by which we see everything else illumined. We are sent into a dark world to share that light with others.
The past does not, of itself, open the door to eternity. The horizontal timeline of history absorbs us, fascinates us, haunts or eludes us, but it is intersected by the vertical line of eternity only for those who seek it; who are bewildered and enthralled by it; whose spiritual hunger and availability to the present moment make room for the one who comes from above.
This is the one who became one of us in the flesh; who lived our life and died our death; in whom time and every timeless moment meet and intersect. “Only in time is time conquered,” writes T.S. Eliot.
We see this visually distilled in Fra Angelico’s painting of the Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin, on the cover of your worship booklet, and hanging here in this museum.
In the lower segment, the apostles gather around the deathbed of the Virgin. Christ himself takes up the soul of St. Mary, appearing as an infant, into his arms – a poignant mirror and role reversal of his own Nativity. The small contours of Mary’s life come to an end in time, a slim and humble woman in blue.
But she is now, in the words of Isabella’s beloved Dante, “figlia del tuo figlio,” the daughter of her son. In the center she dances in larger-than-life rapture amid a riot of angel musicians. And in the uppermost triangle we are pointed above. The one who ascended into heaven yet was born of her body reaches down to receive her, and the circle is complete.
In the Rule of our community, the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, we read: “Faithfulness to tradition does not mean mere perpetuation or copying of ways from the past, but a creative recovery of the past as a source of inspiration and guidance in our faithfulness to God’s future, the coming reign of God.”
Although she was enigmatically unconventional, Isabella was also deeply traditional in the best sense of that word: she knew the living presence of the past firsthand and rejoiced to invite others into that conversation. But because she was also a woman of profound faith, that conversation, in this unique place, and especially on this day, is about more than antiquarian curiosity or the consolation of institutional routines – whether those of monastery or museum.
Isabella knew that one day she too would belong to the past, but that in Christ its small contours opened out onto a broad, open place: the open tomb of Christ’s resurrection from the dead. The beloved brothers who ministered to her in life would one day be her spiritual heirs, her sons in the faith. Our friends would be her friends and her friends would be ours, celebrating a special kind of dinner party in her honor, moved to remember her but even more moved to contemplate the eternal banquet to which all shall be gathered as guests.
Happy Birthday, Isabella – and pray for us to the Lord our God. Amen.
Br. James Koester
Preached at the Church of St. Augustine and St. Martin, Boston.
The Second Sunday of Easter
John 20:19-31
Something strange is happening.
Something strange is happening. A band of terrified, grieving women and men who spend most of their time behind locked doors in fear, are changing. Their fear is changing into faith. Their terror is changing into courage. Their grief is changing into joy. And soon, no door could keep them in, and no door would be able to keep them, or their message out.
Something strange is happening, and it begins with the resurrection greeting: Peace be with you!
The story wasn’t supposed to unfold this way. Jesus wasn’t supposed to die. The crowd was supposed to acclaim him as king, and together they were supposed to chase the Romans out, and once again God’s people would be free. But Jesus did die. He died cruelly, publicly, and shamefully. And his band of followers fled in all directions in fear and terror that the same would happen to them. In their grief, terror, and fear they went into hiding, behind locked doors.
And into the midst of their fear and grief and terror came words of peace.
Peace be with you!
Something strange is happening.
It’s hard to imagine the terror this band of disciples felt after the shock and horror of it all. But we all have an inkling of what it was like, for each of us carries deep within us a primal fear: a fear of being found out; a fear of being caught; a fear of being discovered. I know I do. Today, our own inner fears are compounded by the fear in which the whole world lives. At any moment, everything could come crashing down, and I’m not simply speaking of the price of gas or groceries. And into that fear, Jesus speaks words of peace. Peace be with you!
With those four simple words, Jesus shows that death and hate and the grave cannot defeat him. With those four simple words, Jesus shows that fear and grief and terror and locked doors cannot keep him out. With those four simple words, Jesus shows that the power of God is mightier than the forces of Rome. In those four simple words, Jesus shows us that the power of God is mightier than the forces of presidents and ayatollahs. With those four simple words, Jesus shows his disciples that he is risen from the dead. Peace be with you. . . . Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.
It’s not that Thomas didn’t want to believe. It’s not even that he couldn’t believe. It’s not even that he wouldn’t believe. It’s that he didn’t dare believe. Thomas didn’t dare believe, because he didn’t want his hopes dashed and his heart broken one more time. But in a word, in a phrase, his hope was restored and his heart healed: Peace be with you. . . . My Lord and my God.
If we all know what it is to live in the fear of being caught, then we also know what it is to live with hopes dashed and hearts broken. We all know those days when we are afraid to believe, not because we don’t want to believe, or can’t believe, or won’t believe, but because we dare not believe. We too are afraid that our hopes will be dashed and our hearts broken one more time, and so like Thomas we dare not believe. And into the midst of this fear to believe, stands the Risen Lord speaking words of peace. Peace be with you!
Words have power. They have the power to hurt and the power to heal. They have the power to cast down and the power to raise up. They have the power to destroy and the power to make new. In speaking these resurrection words, we discover again the power of God, who, as Thomas discovered, has the power to make all things new.
Today all of us need to hear these resurrection words. In a world divided by hatred, fear, and war, the easiest words to utter are of anger, of threat, of hatred, of violence. But such words, as we have seen these past weeks, only cause death, sow bitterness, and create division, and crush hope. What the world, what we need, are words of hope. What we need are resurrection words. What we need is for the Risen Lord to emerge from the tomb of bitterness and hatred and utter words of love and peace. Peace be with you! When we hear those words, something strange happens. Fear is turned to faith. Grief is turned to joy. Terror is turned to courage. Hatred is turned to love. Violence is turned to peace, and locked doors, meant to keep things out, cannot now keep things in. Something strange happened that first Easter because the Risen Lord broke through the hatred and fear, and spoke words of peace changing terror into courage and grief into joy. It is those same resurrection words which the Risen Lord speaks to each one of us as he breaks down the door of separation and says to us, Peace be with you! And in those words, we can know the power of the resurrection and say with Thomas, My Lord and my God!
Br. Luke Ditewig
Ezekiel 47:1-9, 12
Psalm 46:1-8
John 5:1-18
What’s the vision? How does it help living now?
After Jerusalem was conquered, the temple destroyed, and people taken far away in exile, amid much loss and grief, God sent prophets to renew and prompt the people. God gave Ezekiel a five-chapter detailed vision of the Temple restored, where God dwells. The vision prompts looking with faith to what cannot be seen, God restoring all.
As we heard tonight, it’s not just a restored building or dwelling but water flowing from it, water that expands and deepens into a large river ankle-deep, knee-deep, waist-deep and beyond. Water, the source of life, in the desert where it is most valuable. A living river that brings the dead to life. It flows into the Dead Sea where most fish and plants can’t live and changes it into fresh water “where every living creature that swarms will live . . . and everything will live where the river goes.” Not only live but thrive and far more than usual. Healthy trees along the river bear fruit and not only in harvest season but every month. Fruit for food and leaves for healing.
It’s a bountiful, glorious vision. God will dwell in a restored temple from which living waters flow bringing new and abundant life. What image comes to your mind for such bountiful vibrancy where everything will live where the river goes? Ezekiel pulls from imagery like the Garden of Eden and like Psalm 46: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High.”
Jesus goes to a man who had been ill 38 years near a pool of water known for healing. “Do you want to be made well?” He replies: I have no one to take me to the water. Long-suffering. Resignation. Trapped. Despair. How have you experienced this?
Jesus goes to people personally and directly with mercy and compassion asking, listening, and freely giving. “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” How have you experienced such mercy and compassion?
Like water soaking into parched ground. Like fresh water entering stagnant water and restoring it fresh. “Everything will live where the river goes.” Psalm 46 says: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” Jesus comes personally with mercy. Asking, listening, and freely giving. God comes amid our loss and grief, ravaged in exile.
What’s the vision? God will heal and restore all. Cling to the vision as one way of experiencing refuge and help. We believe in the restoration! God will heal and restore all. Like water soaking into parched ground. Like fresh water entering stagnant water and restoring it fresh. “Everything will live where the river goes.”
Br. Lain Wilson
Luke 16:19-31
Today’s Gospel lesson at first glance seems straightforward: you get what you give, Scripture’s guidance is clear, therefore you should change your ways. What more do you need? I for sure don’t feel myself to be living a life like the rich man, so I guess I’m doing okay?
But when I look at the shape of my life, when I examine my own actions and inactions, my thoughts and feelings and attitudes and prejudices, I find myself, inevitably and endlessly, falling short of the mark. I may not be the rich man lording my wealth and status over poor Lazarus, but I’m not innocent.
And I could say that I, and we all, participate in inescapable systemic evil, but that just disguises a simpler truth: countless times each day, each hour, I both know and feel myself to be mired in the endless array of “little sins,” of the kind that Saint Augustine confesses and likens to birdlime, snaring us unawares with the subtlety, we might say now, of Scotch tape.[1] These little sins, in aggregate, result in a growing distance in my relationships with God, with my neighbors, with myself, and with all of creation around me.
I’d like to think of myself as a good person, and I also know and feel the truth of this sin, of this distance. Saint Paul, in his letter to the Romans, expresses this better than I can: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:18-19). This feels exactly right, and not just in my body – which is Paul’s focus – but in my imagination and attitudes and emotions – in my whole self.
I know I can choose not to be the rich man in his grossest outrages, but I also know that my own will and agency are ultimately insufficient to rise above not only the systemic evil that we all swim in, but even, and especially, my own little sins. So as I hear again this parable this morning, I receive some comfort from Jeremiah: “Cursed are those . . . who make mere flesh their strength. . . . Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord” (Jeremiah 17:5, 7). We might easily substitute “will” or “power” or “self-sufficiency” for “flesh.”
My trust – our trust – is that this “great chasm” is not fixed and uncrossable, but that Jesus Christ has bridged it, has closed the distance in our relationships. “Wretched man that I am!” Saint Paul continues. “Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25). My trust – our trust – is that God will be merciful to me, to us, sinners all, great and small, who come forth in penitence.
Amen.
[1] I am grateful to Peter Brown for sharing this modern image in a seminar decades ago.
Br. Jonathan Maury
Saint Thomas the Apostle
John 20:24-29
As this year’s Advent season draws to a close, we may well find ourselves questioning where God is present or even if God is present in the frightening chaos of our time. Yes, the Word’s coming among us in human flesh at Christmas still promises the restoration of wholeness, abundant new life and the future of divine glory for all creation. But in the midst of a fearful, world apocalypse of injustice, violence, cruelty, oppression, untruth, and greed – we may have our doubts.
It seems apt then, fortuitous even, that we should celebrate the image of Christ in Saint Thomas, the so-called “doubting” apostle. For just when the eternal Light seemed to have been extinguished, Thomas found faith and hope to be rekindled in the midst of his doubts.
If we are honest, the path to faith of “doubting” Thomas is in some measure shared by us all.
By Jesus’ choice, Thomas was brought into community of the disciples as Twelve. It seems to me, that Thomas’s charism, his particular gift of the Spirit, was to ask the questions most of the others would not or could not ask.
The “doubt” which I believe is Thomas’s gift should be understood as a component of his coming to faith. This “doubt” plays a part in coming to fullness of belief and commitment for each of us.
The seeds of hope, of faith in things not yet seen, must be sown in the soil of just such questioning and doubt. The Greek word for this doubt connotes a wavering or hesitation in faith – of belief already here. Doubt is not the negation of faith – but an integral part of the way to its fulness.
Within the community of believers and seekers, we must question, even doubt, that the promises of God in Jesus can possibly be realized in our world – and the world to come. It is only in such wavering and hesitation together that we are freed from the fear which binds us corporately and individually.
There are two places in the gospel of John, where “doubting” Thomas’s rootedness in this common sharing of faith is highlighted:
When Jesus has decided to raise his friend Lazarus from the sleep of death, his purpose will take him again to Judea, where the authorities seek to arrest and try him. The disciples – likely including Thomas – try to dissuade Jesus, doubting or hesitating with the prudence of his intended course of action. Yet it is Thomas, perceiving that Jesus will go, who says to the others, “Let us go also, that we may die with him.” (John 11)
At the supper on the night of his betrayal, Jesus speaks of his leaving the disciples and going to prepare a place for them and of his coming back to take them with him. Amid the ensuing confusion and worried uncertainty, it is Thomas alone who asks the question, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” (John 14)
To this, Jesus replies, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” Though not fully in that moment, Thomas’s questioning doubt will at last open him to faith in the relationship which God will always share with us in Jesus.
When we hear of Thomas’s skepticism at the other disciples’ experience of the risen Christ, we would do well to remember the clear trauma and despair that that Thomas carried from Jesus’s condemnation, torture and execution. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
Yet it is faith, manifested in the midst of hesitant doubt, that brings Thomas back to the company of the disciples from whom he had previously absented himself. And this return becomes the occasion for the resurrected Jesus’ to show himself to Thomas in the only way this particular disciple can truly see the One for whom he has been watching.
The same applies for us in these last days of Advent: Jesus seeks to show and give himself to each of us and to all the world – to see and know in God fulness of faith, life and hope – as Christ is continually born anew in each moment. So I ask as I invite you to ask, What doubts, wavering, hesitation, resistance, or missteps are impeding, slowing down my readiness in following Jesus and the living of my life in God?
I pray that God will reveal these things and also the abiding presence of Jesus to us in the company of others in praying, worshipping, and serving in Christ’s name. May we welcome Jesus to show himself to the eyes of our faith.
It may perhaps be in the oppressed and needy stranger, in the child of refugee parents in exile from their homeland, in seekers who are seen as outsiders – or in sharing with another our doubts and thereby giving them leave to express their own.
All these may be channels leading from doubt into faith, so that may be made ready to see Christ Jesus when he shows himself, to cry aloud with blessed Thomas, “My Lord and my God!” Amen.
Br. Lain Wilson
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
Matthew 14:1-12
Psalm 71:1-7
Last week, while camping in western Massachusetts, I experienced something completely unexpected. Two nights in a row, in the middle of the night, I was seized by overwhelming, crippling terror. I honestly don’t know if I was dreaming or awake. As I lay in my tent, I felt frozen in place, trapped, unable to move. I remember wanting to sit up, to open the rain fly and look out into the dark, but I could not move.
We all feel fear. Some may experience that same crippling terror; others, perhaps the more typical fears of failure, pain, rejection, aging, or death. We all fear something—and most of us, many somethings—and we all respond differently to those fears.
Herod is a fearful man. Matthew and Mark’s gospels both note this, and Matthew crucially adds that his fear hinders him from acting as he desires. He wants to kill John the Baptist, a thorn in his side, who is denouncing his unlawful marriage. Herod wants to kill John, but he’s afraid of the crowd, who views John as a prophet (Mt 14:5).[1]
Underlying this, I suspect there’s another kind of fear. “Fear pervades his whole life,” Plato writes of the tyrant.[2] Herod fears what all petty tyrants fear: the voice of a courageous man speaking the truth. It’s a fear that all too easily gives way to the tools of the tyrant: silencing and suppression, intimidation and violence.
Standing against him is a single, courageous man. Our text doesn’t tell us that John is afraid when facing this petty tyrant and the political theater of the court. He may or may not be afraid of the death he is heading toward. But I suspect that John, standing in the tradition of the prophets, does experience a different kind of fear: the fear of God.
The Scriptures are full of references to the fear of God, or the fear of the Lord. Proverbs notes that the “fear of the Lord is life indeed; filled with it one rests secure and suffers no harm” (Prov 19:23). In Luke’s gospel, Mary sings that God’s “mercy is on those who fear him” (Lk 1:50). This fear isn’t terror, but rather the awareness of God’s glory, the awe-filled trust in God’s faithfulness, the conviction of abiding presence, safety, and security. “For you are my hope, O Lord God, my confidence since I was young,” we hear in today’s Psalm (Ps 71:5).
But I think most important here is Isaiah’s depiction of the ideal king: “His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. . . . Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins” (Is 11:2, 5). The fear of God is an integral part of life in the Spirit—as integral as justice and righteousness and faithfulness. The fear of God is about being obedient to the true self that God has created each of us to be.
We all experience fear. There’s a lot to be afraid of. Some of that fear is healthy; most of it is not and brings out what is worst in us. The fear of God, the conviction of God’s abiding faithfulness and provision, the trust that God is our refuge through it all, offers a path of freedom through and past our fear. “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear?” the psalmist sings. “The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom then shall I be afraid?” (Ps 27:1).
What are you afraid of? What fear is freezing, trapping, or dominating you?
The fear of God offers us a path of freedom from fear so we may respond in faith, so we may act with justice, so we may be courageous in speaking truth.
As in so many other things, John the Baptist points the way.
Amen.
[1] Mark states this differently: Herod’s wife Herodias wants to kill John, whom Herod fears and protects (Mk 6:19-20).
[2] Republic 9.579e, trans. R. Waterfield (New York, 1993), 325.
Br. Luke Ditewig
Matthew 11:20-26
When saying, teaching, and showing the same thing over and over, it’s frustrating when your children, students, friends, or audience don’t listen or understand or respond or rise to the invitation. It’s hard to be ignored and misunderstood. Jesus knows that firsthand.
John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus, introduced Jesus to the crowds and baptized him. But lingering in prison and not seeing expected change, John doubted. John asked: “Are you really the Messiah or should we wait for another?” Jesus replied: Yes, I’m doing what you said. Remember Isaiah; I’m healing and liberating, just not as you expect. John, who perhaps knew Jesus best, misunderstood him.[i]
Jesus did most of his early work, including healing, calling his disciples and feeding five thousand in three little villages near each other: Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum. These people who most saw the signs and directly heard Jesus ignored him. They didn’t repent. Jesus confronts, saying: Woe. You are worse than infamous Sodom. The indifference to God is more a problem than notorious evil by their neighbors.[ii]
Then Jesus prays. “At that time,” Eugene Peterson points out, misunderstood and ignored, Jesus gives thanks: “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants.”
Jesus knows this misunderstanding and indifference do not impede God. The so-called wise and intelligent are limited to the surface. Down beneath, hidden to them, divine power surges onward. [iii] God reveals and works through infants and children through unexpecting and hidden people and means. The surface makes Jesus sad. Jesus responds and confronts. Jesus trusts and gives thanks that is God with us and grace continues.
What’s happening in your life? Which friends or family are troubling you? What evil, active or indifferent, makes you mourn? What tempts you, rational or not, to despair?
With simple, child-like faith, listen down deep: God is with us, God loves all, and God is healing. At this time, perhaps feeling ignored or misunderstood, or weighed down by grief and upset at injustice, join Jesus in deep trust that grace continues saying: “thank you.”
[i] Eugene Peterson. (2008) Tell It Slant: a conversation on the language of Jesus in his stories and prayers. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, p198-199.
[ii] Eugene Peterson, p200.
[iii] Eugene Peterson, p201-202.
Genesis 32:22-32
One of my favorite contemporary poems is “The House of Belonging,” by David Whyte. The speaker in the poem awakens one morning and ponders a series of truths in the quiet of the house he calls home – the home he has made as an adult. Here are the closing words:
This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.
There is no house
like the house of belonging.
It’s clear that the house is physical, but it has awakened something that is inseparable from the speaker. He seems to speak from a place that is both precarious, but also deeply secure in its foundations.
At this pivotal moment in the life of the patriarch Jacob, I see both the sharp edge of this aloneness and the fruit of belonging waiting to be revealed.
“Jacob was left alone … and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.”
I imagine the scene as a stage play: The stage is crowded with Jacob’s wives, their children, their maids, and with the invisible presence of Esau, the brother from whom Jacob stands self-alienated. He now prepares to meet that off-stage character, around whom so much anticipation and dread have gathered.
Jacob wants nothing more than to return home, the home from which he fled when he stole his father Isaac’s blessing from Esau by deception. In that longing and that terror, the protagonist stands alone … with a shadowy figure, whose identity is never precisely revealed.
Who is it?
The Christian scholar of Hebrew scripture Walter Bruggemann writes, “It is part of the power of the wrestling that we do not know the name or see the face of the antagonist. To be too certain would reduce the dread intended in the telling. It is most plausible that in the present form, the hidden one is Yahweh. On this way to his brother, whom he wants to appease, Jacob must deal with his God to whom he had made intercession (32:9-12) … But if it be Yahweh, we are shown something other than the promise-filled aspect of Yahweh known in the daylight … The power of the stranger is as much in his inscrutability as in his strength.”
Jewish scholar Aviva Zornberg notes that this story begins a unit of Torah readings that continues with Jacob’s reconciliation with Esau but is followed by a season of deep suffering: the rape of Jacob’s daughter Dinah by the prince of Shechem; the revenge exacted on Shechem by Jacob’s sons Simeon and Levi. The joyful birth of his son Benjamin introduces hope, only to be followed by the death-in-childbirth of his beloved Rachel and the death of his father Isaac.
In other words, the mature man Jacob faces life’s consequences rather than engineering other outcomes from the sidelines. Previously, he has survived by manipulation – borrowing or even stealing the power of others. At times consciously, but largely unconsciously, he has refused to use his own power – with all the attendant risk and vulnerability that comes with it.
That is, until he wrestles a divine antagonist, prevails over him, is wounded by him, and receives his blessing.
He becomes Israel, and from that moment onward – come what may – he “belongs to his aloneness as he belongs to his life.” He knows what he must do, with whom he must seek reconciliation, how he must endure hardship. He lives in the house of belonging, which is ultimately the heart of God.
Our Rule of Life contains only few direct references to Hebrew scripture, yet this is one of them. In the chapter “The Mystery of Prayer” we read:
“There are many conflicts on the way into the experience of divine love. Sinfulness originates in a deep wound to our humanity which hinders us all from accepting love. As the Spirit exposes it to Christ’s healing touch in prayer we shall often have to struggle with our reluctance to be loved so deeply by God. Christ himself will strive with us, as the angel strove with Jacob, to disable our self-reliant pride and make us depend on grace.”
The name given by the angel, Israel, means “one who strives or struggles with God.”
The fruit of Jacob’s struggle is a face-to-face encounter with God: “I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved.” The cost of that struggle is his limp.
The “strength made perfect in weakness” that confronts our self-reliant pride from the pages of the New Testament has its roots spread deep in the Old Testament revelations of God, with whom our ancestors in faith argued, bargained, grappled, spoke as a friend, and sometimes walked away limping, but blessed and re-named nonetheless.
Likewise, we who stand in their lineage through our Lord and Rabbi Jesus learn again and again what it means to obey God not only by acts of gentle consent, but by faithful wrestling. With him we bear the wounds where we have been nailed to his cross. The fruit is that, come sunrise, we rise with him from every tomb.
Br. Jack Crowley
Psalm 16:5-11
In any journey of faith, there is always the question of what it looks like to ask God for help. Asking God for help comes in many forms. We are all familiar with foxhole prayers. Prayers asking for help in times of overwhelming stress. There are also the day-to-day prayers of people asking God for help to just function. Other times, we approach God with a problem we think of as so complicated that no one else would ever understand.
It’s with that spirit of looking for help from God that makes me love the first half of the 7th verse of Psalm 16, our gradual psalm today. The Psalmist prays “I will bless the Lord who gives me counsel.” I’ve always loved how the psalmist is plain spoken in saying that the Lord does in fact give him counsel. The psalmist is not making a qualified, sort of, kind of, statement. It’s a bold statement that God does in fact offer counsel in our lives.
To seek, listen, and follow the counsel of God may be humbling, but it is worthwhile. It may be humbling to admit that we cannot get through life, or maybe even a single day, alone and without God’s help. However, if that is the truth for you, as it is for me, then there’s no avoiding it.
I need God’s help every single day of my life. I can stand here and deny it. I can try to live a life fueled by complete self-sufficiency. A life in which I can try to figure out every detail of every problem of every moment of my life. In my own experience, at some point this becomes unsustainable. I need God’s help. Then I desperately seek God’s counsel.
There is no shame in seeking God’s counsel. Much of our lives are spent stumbling through half understood situations – full of confusion, doubt, and anxiety. We don’t have the time or energy to understand it all. We never have the power to fully control it, even if we really wish we did.
We live our lives in the middle of seeking God’s counsel and doing our best to follow it. That is the most we can ask of ourselves and our fellow human beings. We answer the never-ending problems of our lives with the same answer we have in our Baptismal Covenant: “I will, with God’s help.”
Br. Jamie Nelson
Acts 18:1-8
In today’s reading from the Book of Acts, we hear a story about a time when the Apostle Paul faced disappointment and seeming failure in his work spreading the gospel, yet that failure wasn’t the last word for God.
We hear the story of Paul’s arrival in Corinth, a Greek city where people of many cultures, languages, and religions passed through or made the city their home.
Some of those people were Jewish refugees who had recently been expelled from their homes in Rome due to a decree of the emperor Claudius. Paul, a fellow Jew, became close with two of those refugees, a married couple named Aquila and Priscilla, and worked in their canvas and leatherworking business.
Paul worked in their shop during the week, and he spent the Sabbath in the city synagogue preaching and teaching about Jesus – an evangelism strategy he’d used with success in previous cities. But other than his friends and benefactors Priscilla and Aquila, he didn’t find much initial success sharing the good news about Jesus the Messiah to the Jewish community.
We hear that time and again, Paul’s testimony was met with opposition and resistance. Finally pushed beyond his limit, Paul responded by shaking the dust from his clothes and announcing that he was done butting heads with people in the synagogue community. Henceforth, he would preach to the Gentiles of Corinth.
Have you ever found yourself in a similar place to Paul?
A situation where you have taken time to prepare and sought wise counsel until you arrived at a sense of clarity about how to proceed, yet your best efforts just weren’t bearing fruit. Maybe it’s a situation in your work where a project isn’t going as planned due to factors outside your control. Or maybe it’s a relationship where you’ve shown up, tried your very best, and still things just aren’t working out. It’s easy to get disillusioned and ready to give up when that happens, to feel like you’ve failed.
I wonder if Paul felt like he’d failed at his God-given mission, since the very people he came to reach had turned away. But he kept on sharing the good news of Jesus, this time with Gentiles.
And then something unexpected happened: Crispus, the leader of the synagogue, the very place Paul had left in frustration, came to faith in Jesus. Not just him, but his household, and many others in Corinth. And as we know from Paul’s letters to the Corinthians sent after his departure, the church he planted became a robust Christian community.
So what can we learn about God through the conclusion to that story?
Failure and resistance don’t mean God’s not at work.
Paul may have been finished with the people he met through the synagogue, but God wasn’t. The seeds that had been planted took root beneath the soil. God continued to be at work in the community, opening hearts to Jesus.
So if you’re facing resistance and failure or something in your life isn’t unfolding the way you’d hoped, trust that God is still at work. That what feels like rejection can create a space for a new direction, that what looks like a closed door can actually be the threshold to something new.
Trust that failure and disappointment isn’t the end of God’s story for you.
Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23
Well good morning and Happy New Year! Thank you for braving the cold and joining us. I know for me, at some point a little after New Year’s, I start to say to myself…I think I’m ready for spring. Even this New England boy has his limits.
Our Gospel this morning featured the Holy Family’s great flight into Egypt. Now I must confess that this is a story I don’t think about too often. During Christmastide, I prefer to think about warm, cozy manger scenes. Yet there is something gripping about this great flight into Egypt. The image of a newborn babe and parents with their firstborn child fleeing for their lives is hard to look away from. There’s just something about a new family being in danger that makes us pay attention.
Part of what makes us pay attention to the flight into Egypt is how stressful it is. It’s a stressful story fueled by an atmosphere of violence. The threat of King Herod murdering baby Jesus is dominating. Now it may be hard for us to imagine the mindset of someone in power not only feeling threatened by a baby, but also willing to kill that baby, but that was the world that Jesus was born into, a world swirling with stress, power, and violence.
Just try to imagine how Jospeh must have felt when the angel told him he had to flee with his family or else his newborn boy would be murdered. I mean after all the drama of Mary’s pregnancy, all the way to her giving birth on the road to a healthy baby boy, ten finger and ten toes, to then being told they had to get up and go right away or else his boy would be killed… the stress of it all must have been unbearable. I don’t know how they slept at night.
I hope no one here has been in the same position that Joseph was in, but I’m sure we can all relate to that feeling of stress. I’m sure we can all relate to that feeling of stressful days leading to sleepless nights. I know I can. Nights that feel like life has you by the throat. Nights that feel like your mind is running marathons. Nights that leave you exhausted in the morning.
We need to remember that level of stress and exhaustion because we all have our own flights into Egypt. We all have our own version of fleeing from something. We all have our own version of fleeing towards an unknown destination that is anywhere but here.
Six years ago this week, I hugged my parents goodbye and became a monk here at SSJE. I remember moving into my cozy cell and thinking to myself that I was home free. I had this belief that everything from that point forward was going to get better and easier in my life. Well, I was right about the first part, things got better but not necessarily easier.
One thing I have learned as a monk is that there is no such thing as an easy life. Certainly, some days are easier than others and certainly some people’s lives appear to be easier than others, yet I think deep down we all know that no one has it easy. We all have our problems, we all have our issues, we all have our demons, we all make mistakes that haunt us.
There may be no such thing as an easy life, but that does not mean that life is not worth living. The challenges we face in our life shape us. These challenges are rough, frustrating, and unrelenting. These challenges come at us faster than we can comprehend them. We will not always have the time or energy to make sense of it all. Yet, somewhere inside of us, there is that voice, that spark of hope, that says yes, this is all worthwhile. In some unbelievable and sometimes annoying way, that voice that whispers this is all good, this is all right, and this is all holy. It’s that same voice that says yes, we are going to get through this.
In our flight into Egypt, we must keep relying on that voice of God that keeps calling us forward. We must rely upon that voice of God not only to get us through the suffering we endure, but to somehow find meaning in the day-to-day circumstances of our life. We need that meaning to fill our lives.
A life filled with meaning through God means that no part of our life is untouched by God. That includes all the nasty parts of our life. Divorces, relapses, layoffs, breakdowns, arguments, confrontations and all the other nasty stuff we’d rather never deal with. That also includes all the good stuff – all the weddings, births, reconciliations, sober anniversaries, new jobs, and tearful expressions of love. We must keep coming back to God again and again with the ever changing circumstances of our life. In good news and bad news, we must form a foundation of faith in our relationship with God.
Now of course in our flight to Egypt there will be times of doubt. Times when we will doubt if we have done the right things, times when we will doubt the quality of our own selves, times when we will doubt our ability to find God in any of it, and times when we will doubt humanity at large. In these times of doubt, look to your fears. Ask yourself what fear is fueling your doubt? Do you fear that you are not good enough? Do you fear that you are not worthy of love? Do you fear that you have not done enough with your life?
These fears can drown in us doubt. These fears can make our lives impossible. These fears can paralyze our days. We need God’s help. We can admit it, we are not strong enough on our own, we need God’s help.
We need to bring to God our fears, our doubt, our stress and all the other things that keep us up at night. We need God’s help in our journey into Egypt. There is no shame in praying out of desperation and great need.
When we get to the other side of this thing we will be stronger, we will know ourselves better, and we will be closer to God. Our journey into Egypt may take a long time, but it is worth it. May God help us all, Amen.
Luke 2:1-20
The only shepherd I have ever met outside the pages of Scripture is a Navajo elder with a heart on fire for Jesus. I’ll call him Edward.
At the end of six weeks of crosscultural ministry with Navajo Episcopalians last summer, my supervisor invited me to spend several days helping Edward tend the sheep on her family sheep-camp. I spent time in a hogan, a traditional, eight-sided, dirt-floor dwelling reserved for ceremonies. In the sweltering heat of midday and early afternoon, I sat in silence, listened to the creatures around me, prayed, and wrote about what I had learned. The rest of the time, I followed Edward around. I siphoned water for the sheep from a huge tank into long metal troughs twice a day. I accompanied Edward in his ancient Chevy pickup along a circuit of bumpy dirt trails, watching the sheep with binoculars and listening to Dolly Parton on cassette tape. At the hottest times of the day Edward would materialize in my doorway with an orange popsicle, or an ice-cold bottle of water.
And when it grew dark, Edward brought light.
I remember most vividly my first night there. I had prayed Evening Prayer at the top of a ridge overlooking a dry creekbed, and I lingered as the stars came out, followed by swooping owls and bats.
As I made my way back to the camp, I was astonished to see the ramshackle outbuildings and sheep corrals had been utterly transformed: thousands of solar-powered Christmas lights and garden lanterns, invisible by day, now laced the deepening darkness. They were the only lights for miles, as if the stars above each had a twin here below, blinking and dancing amid the chicken-wire fencing, the rusty rain barrels, and the sleeping sheep.
Through tears of unexpected joy I glimpsed Edward by my door, with a handful of electric lanterns, to make sure I could find my way.
What words could the shepherds in Luke’s gospel have used to describe this good news of great joy for all the people conveyed to them by angels? To convey their terror when the glory of the Lord shone around them? To explain the significance of the sign: a human child who is the Messiah, wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger?
We do not know what they said, but we know what they did
They made known what had been told them and then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.
They returned to the long hours of the daily rhythm; the darkness of night and the relief of dawn; the water trough and the sheep-corral; the ancient Chevy pickup and the Dolly Parton cassette tapes. But none of it was the same: the stars above now each had a twin here below that burned in their hearts. The shepherds of heaven had appointed them as angels here on earth, ordinary people with good news of great joy.
Joy is God’s purpose for us, and the enjoyment of God our highest calling.
Do you remember the last time you ate a popsicle in the suffocating heat of late July, in the sure and certain knowledge that it came to you fresh from the hand of God, whose only desire was that you enjoy it?
It seems too straightforward, too humble, too outrageous, that the primary thing God would ask of the shepherds in coming to Bethlehem would be simply to enjoy God’s presence, made flesh in the birth of Jesus. But that is precisely what we believe was made possible in a whole new way that night, and every Christmas night: that in straightforward, humble, and outrageous infant flesh, the Creator of heaven and earth would and does become enjoyable to us.
One could get the mistaken impression that Christians are concerned with anything but the enjoyment of God. Followers of Jesus can be very anxious to do all manner of other things: to serve him; to obey him; to follow him; to proclaim him; to repent and return to his teachings. In the midst of it all, we are often moved by the question: What more can I do for him?
In Christmastide, a different question serves as our guide: How can I be available to receive and to enjoy him, in the certain knowledge that this receptive joy fulfills the deepest longing of God’s heart?
But in fact, this is the question at the heart of the Christian life at all times of the year. It is at Christmas that God gives us the opportunity to return to this basic, child-like posture.
A heart filled with that receptive joy cannot keep it secret. It does not proclaim the Messiah as a duty, but spills over with the joy of knowing him, the way heat radiates from fire.
This night, we pray: O God, you have caused this holy night to shine with the brightness of the true Light: Grant that we, who have known the mystery of that Light here on earth, may also enjoy him perfectly in heaven.
If heaven brings perfect enjoyment of the Light eternal, earth is surely then our training ground for enjoying the Word made flesh here in the manger.
When we enjoy the good things of this earth as constantly unfolding gifts of a God who desires our joy, those good things teach us something real and substantial about the goodness of heaven.
Adoring Jesus here in the lowliest human form centers our senses in preparation to enjoy him face to face forever.
As a way of life, this kind of enjoyment is anything but passive. As the Anglican theologian Evelyn Underhill wrote, this is not “basking like a pious tabby cat in the beams of the Uncreated Light.” Enjoying God for the sake of God is a costly calling, because it slowly dispossesses us of the many lesser joys we confuse with God. The enjoyment of God calls us, in the words of poet T.S. Eliot, to “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”
God is simple; we prefer a complexity that matches our own. God is love; we struggle to accept being known and loved so deeply. God arrives by night; we are fast asleep. God comes as a child; we expected a capable adult who could solve the problems we created.
But knowing surrender to the enjoyment for which we were made, for even a moment, can change everything. It enables us able to act and to serve in his name with greater freedom, love, and joy. This capacity is his joy in us.
Christmas brings a kaleidoscope of emotions, and joy may not be one you are feeling tonight if you have brought your own burden of pain or sorrow or anxiety. You may want to believe this joy is for you, but the best you can do is let the joy of others bear you along.
Others would object that the enjoyment of God we celebrate tonight is a distraction. How dare we contemplate the enjoyment of God in this warm chapel on Memorial Drive when others taste only misery?
In John’s gospel Jesus assures the disciples on the night before his death, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” If there was ever a moment to deny that God’s primary purpose for our life is the enjoyment of him, it would be the day he died in the flesh and was taken from us. Yet on the eve of that moment, Jesus is quite clear: if we abide in him, come what may, his joy will make our joy complete.
I have witnessed this enjoyment of God more than once in those who are strangers to success and power as the world defines them – who have learned the secret of the enjoyment of God in the midst of unrelenting suffering.
One of them is Edward: a man who is poor; who is alone most of the time; who suffers from several chronic illnesses; who has almost no surviving family members; who has suffered the generational trauma that is the shared inheritance of Native people in a land that was stolen from them; and whose daily bread is earned by physical labor from dawn until nightfall. This same man adorns sheep corrals and barbed-wire fences and his own tiny cinderblock house with an extravagant multitude of tiny electric lights dancing and blinking in what most people would call “the middle of nowhere.”
Why?
All I can say is that, in the center of that sheep camp, there stands a ten-foot, white wooden cross. It casts a long-shadow in the burning glare of late afternoon. But because Edward’s hope is founded in the cross of God’s longsuffering love, he adorns the corner of creation entrusted to him with Christmas lights. Those lights make known the joy he has found in Jesus, even when no one else is there to see it but the sheep and the angels.
In spite of all human attempts to ignore, suppress, or destroy it – joy is God’s purpose, for us, and for all that is made. This Christmas, may our hearts burn with this good news of great joy for all people that it may spill over from our lips and from our lives, to the ends of the earth.
Amen.
Luke 1:26-38
Our reading this morning is familiar, and not just because the Annunciation is such a beloved story. It’s familiar, because we heard a lot of the same story beats, and even words, yesterday, in Gabriel’s announcement to Zechariah, which directly precedes it in Luke’s gospel. We are meant to hold the details, and differences, of these two stories in mind.
I am struck, this morning, by how differently Gabriel responds to questions about his revelations.
Gabriel renders Zechariah mute for questioning God’s power. A miraculous, late-in-life pregnancy? You should know God can do this; Scripture shows that God has done it before. Why wouldn’t you just believe?
Meanwhile, Gabriel explains to Mary how God is acting through her. With Jesus’s conception, God is doing something new, something that may require at least a bit of an explanation. An act of trust.
God comes down to meet us on our human plane, taking on human flesh. But on this human plane, that begins with an act of trust. Gabriel’s explanation to Mary is an expression of God’s trust that, in Mary, God has found someone who will participate in God’s plan of salvation. And Mary’s yes, Mary’s consent to bear God to the world, is an expression of her trust in God, her trust that God will be with her through it all—through pregnancy and childbirth, potential shame and ridicule, fear and anxiety, suffering and grief. Trust that God will be with her every step of the way, as God is with her now.
The story of the Annunciation invites us, like Mary, to participate through our own trust in God.
But I am aware, especially this morning, of the other participant in this dialogue. I am aware of Gabriel, the angel of annunciation, who bears wonderful messages of God’s saving acts in the world, all bundled up into a simple expression of trust that his message will be heard, pondered, and consented to.
If in the figure of Mary we are invited to trust in God, in the figure of Gabriel we are invited to notice in what ways we too might be angels of annunciation. To notice how we too may bear messages of comfort and courage, of peace and reconciliation, of all the ways that God is at work in our world and in our lives. And, in it all, how we too may announce God’s trust in us to be participants in God’s purposes, co-workers in God’s ongoing creation.
Amen.
Br. Jamie Nelson
Matthew 9:27-31
Can you imagine what Jesus’s Curriculum Vitae might look like?
What speaking engagements, teaching series, events, & mission statement might be included on his CV?
Let’s imagine what it might look like based on today’s gospel passage, and rest of the stories in the ninth chapter of Matthew’s gospel. In Chapter Nine, Jesus’s mission statement is clear: to heal the sick, offer forgiveness to sinners, and bring Good News of the Kingdom of God to God’s people.
So, what’s listed in the Experiences section of Jesus’s CV?
As Matthew narrates the gospel story, Jesus was quite a busy guy. Just looking at the first 30 verses of Chapter 9, Jesus:
- Heals a paralyzed man, offering forgiveness as well as healing (Matt. 9:1-8)
- Invites a social outcast and his disreputable friends to dinner, sparking the beginning of a lifelong friendship (Matt. 9:9-13)
- Teaches a group of John the Baptist’s followers about fasting, inviting them into a new form of relationship with God (Matt. 9:14-17)
- Resurrects a beloved daughter (Matt. 9:18-26)
- Heals a woman who’s been cast to the margins of society while living with a chronic illness for 12 years (Matt. 9:20-22)
And of course, as we read in today’s gospel, Jesus restores sight to the eyes of two blind men (Matt. 9:27-31).
It’s not a public or flashy healing for these two, just a moment of connection, person to person. They came to Jesus desiring mercy and healing. They followed him inside a home, and alone, without the crowds, Jesus simply asked if they had faith that he could give them sight. “Yes, Lord,” they said, and Jesus the healer touched them and opened their eyes. Through him, they saw new life, a life where they were seen and valued.
Where are you and your story found on Jesus’s CV?
Is there a moment with Jesus that has opened your eyes?
Br. Luke Ditewig
Luke 21:5-9
“All this will be thrown down.” The temple, a monumental building, glorious and beautiful fall. The prized, central, historic place of worshipping God. The temple is not God, and it will not last. People respond not surprised or upset but asking: When? Jesus replied: Don’t be led astray. Some will come saying they are the One. They will say the end is near. Don’t follow them.
And “Do not be terrified.” There will be wars and insurrections, but these don’t mean the end is soon. Grieving loss is real, important, and not to be diminished or dismissed. We will lose what we most cherish. “All will be thrown down.” We will suffer. There will be much suffering including by war. We don’t know why.
We don’t know when, but one day the end will come. Jesus who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords will fully reign overall. Because of this, though we grieve and hurt, we are not terrified. Because of this, as we lament and work to alleviate suffering, we are not terrified.
God is bigger, more expansive than we see or experience. “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Have it not been told you from the beginning?” the prophet Isaiah wrote “[God] is the one who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants, [we] are like grasshoppers. [God] stretches out the heavens like a curtain.”[i]Earthly rulers pale in comparison. God knows and holds everything. Christ came down in flesh and feels all we feel.
With that expansive and intimate perspective, what hurts today? What losses do you grieve? What injustice stirs your anger? What burdens do you bear? The God of Heaven and Christ who came down as a human and the lifegiving Spirit has not forgotten us. God has not forgotten you. God sees, hears, knows, and loves.
What are grateful for? Who have been and are good companions? How have you been surprised by courage, beauty, and grace? What unexpected word or welcome or sight recently warmed your heart? Pray all of this, your whole life, grief and gratitude, with expansive hope. Do not be led astray. Do not be terrified.
[i] Isaiah 40:21-22
Mark 8:27-38
I have always heard about the fast-changing weather in the New Hampshire White Mountains, but actually experiencing it was something else entirely. Last summer I spent about a week up in the White Mountains, beginning with three days in the Pemigewasset Wilderness. We got up to the tent site shortly before dark, and had daylight enough to summit the nearby Mount Lincoln. The evening was clear and somewhat cool, and we could see for miles in all directions—but especially north and east, toward our goal for the next day’s hike.
This is some of the most stunning scenery in New England. So naturally everything changed the next day.
Fog settled heavily on the ridgeline, and we weren’t able to see much more than a hundred feet or so in front of us for most of the morning. Peak after peak passed with little more than a gray blanket enshrouding us, oppressive and damp. It was a stunning reversal. Whereas the day before I had measured my view in miles, today it was in feet—checking the granite rocks just in front of me, looking ahead for the next blaze, the next turning. This was the same landscape I had looked down out on yesterday, but it was as though I had been transported to another place entirely.
We all face challenges, seeming reversals of what we thought we knew, radical shifts in the weather of our lives. I had one on my hike, the disciples had theirs in their daily following of Jesus, and I’m sure you’ve had your own version—maybe a crisis at work, or a challenge at home, or a seeming block in prayer. If we’re being honest, we can face these each day as we are invited into fresh encounter: “New every morning is the love our wakening and uprising prove,” John Keble writes. What I think unifies these experiences is that they pose to us three fundamental questions: What am I doing? Why am I doing it? And who am I to be doing it?
The disciples in our reading today stand at a convergence of past, present, and future. And the heart of this convergence is Jesus’s straightforward question to them: “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:29). Seemingly straightforward question.
One answer to this is what Jesus has done. Up to this point in Mark’s gospel, the disciples, and we as readers, have come to know Jesus as many different things, using many different titles. Teacher, physician, Son of Man, bridegroom, lord of the sabbath, Son of God, son and brother, son of the Most High God, prophet . . . these are all ways Jesus is addressed, or ways Jesus refers to himself, or roles he fulfills. They are all ways that the disciples might think about Jesus. They all exist as part of Jesus’s landscape of identity that his disciples may traverse and explore and come to know.
And just as the different conditions I encountered in the mountains elicited different responses—eyes raised toward the horizon on a clear evening, or fixed on the path ahead in fog and dampness—so too do these contours of Jesus’s identity challenge his disciples, and us, to respond accordingly. Jesus’s character in the Gospels is dialogic—everything he does compels us to discern and answer what we will do in response. Jesus as teacher questions established authorities and traditional interpretations of the law and invites us to appropriate afresh God’s commandment to love and accept. Jesus as prophet calls us to turn our hearts and minds and return to God. And Jesus as healer urges us to accept our power to forgive and heal the world.
But there’s a second question here: why? Why are we doing this? Why are we on this rocky path together, why do things differently? The answer to this is in the answer Peter gives to Jesus’s question: You are the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed One, Peter responds.
Jesus has already shown in his life and service that what it means to be “Messiah” is very different than his followers, as first-century Jews living under Roman occupation, may have expected. Part of that is because of what Jesus has done—teaching and healing and prophesying, challenging and questioning—but also in what Jesus says will be. And in foretelling his death, Jesus foretells not only what “Messiah” will mean for him—that he will undergo suffering, be rejected and killed, and rise again—but what response this will elicit. Just as Jesus models what it means to be a teacher or a prophet or a healer, so too Jesus models what it means to be like him in this identity: “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” A life lived not for ourselves, a radical reversal of loss and gain—this is what it means to be a disciple, and to respond to the revealing of Jesus as Messiah. Because this is a compelling truth. Jesus as Messiah is a compelling truth. This is why the disciples followed Jesus, why they accepted his commission and followed his example, even unto their own deaths.
But there’s still one other question: who are we? Doing this work, following Jesus—who does this make the disciples? Who does it make us? In our Gospel narrative, this is a question whose answer comes shortly in the future, on top of the mountain.
After trudging through thick fog, across slippery boulders and through deep mud, at the end of the third day we approached the final pair of summits: Mount Flume and, closing the loop, back to Mount Lincoln. The day had turned clear and beautiful, and coming to the top we encountered a small tour group on the path and several couples seated on the rocks, gazing across uninterrupted miles to the far horizon. I don’t know what they were contemplating, but I know what I was. That first night I had seen all that lay in before me. I was now able to appreciate all that I had come through. I was looking out from nearly the exact same spot, but I was not the same. I was changed, and so too was the view.
Three chosen disciples came to their own summit, and were changed there, further challenged by the reality of their encounter with Jesus. We don’t hear the account of the Transfiguration today, but it comes directly after this morning’s reading. Jesus ascends the mountain with Peter, James, and John, who temporarily glimpse the reality behind the reality of Jesus—that he is not just teacher and prophet and healer, not even just Messiah, but God. On top of the mountain, at the Transfiguration, these chosen disciples were changed so that they were able to have an unclouded, panoramic view of who Jesus is.
Who do you say that I am? This is who I am.
What response does this revelation compel? How can we possibly respond?
In finally glimpsing the whole of who Jesus is, the disciples, and we, are able to see who we are. Saint Paul’s letters spell it out: Sons and daughter, brothers and sisters in the household of God, members of the same Body. Fellow heirs with Christ. Through Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, made partakers in the divine life.
And perhaps something more than that. The Gospel of John goes further than Matthew, Mark, and Luke in identifying Jesus explicitly as the Word who was with God and through whom all things came into being; and if the Word, also God’s Wisdom, the “master worker” in creation (Proverbs 8:30), an “image of his goodness” (Wisdom 7:26; cf. Col. 1:15). Mary Louise Bringle, whose words we will sing in today’s closing hymn, puts it this way: “Through vaulting firmaments of time and curving sweeps of stellar space, God’s boundless Wisdom spun its web of intricate and patterned grace.”[1]
This, ultimately, is our hope and our joy, that our response to our encounter with Jesus is that we are changed, that in our encounter with Jesus we become fully who we are. If in Jesus we find our model for what we do and how we are in the world, if in Jesus we discover why we walk the hard road of discipleship, so too do we discover who we are: sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, made in the image of God, conformed to the image of Christ.
This is our hope and joy: that we are coworkers and collaborators and co-creators in God’s own ongoing creation. That we are, in the words of Wisdom herself, “daily God’s delight, rejoicing before God always” (Proverbs 8:30).
Amen.
[1] Mary Louise Bringle, “With Dazzling Light,” 2002.
Br. James Koester,
Superior
Wisdom 9: 1-6
I’ll begin this morning, not so much by putting you out of your misery, but rather to satisfy your curiosity. I’ll begin by saying there is nothing, yet, to announce. The Chapter will meet later this morning to elect a new Superior to succeed me and that of course will initiate a host of things. We anticipate an announcement going out sometime this afternoon. If we have your email address, you should receive something from us later today. If we don’t have your email address, the announcement will be posted on our web site. If you live locally, it’s possible that if you come to the midday Office, there will be a sign on the church door. Having said that, there will now perhaps be a rush on the chapel at 12:15 today!
In all of this we continue to ask for your prayers for us during this significant time of change and renewal.
The election of a new Superior marks the beginning of a new chapter in our life as a community. It’s the beginning of a new day. It’s not that things ever remain static. Things never remain the same. When we as individuals, or communities, or nations stop growing and changing, we die. Even then, in the process of decomposition, things change. Just go for a walk in the woods at Emery House, and they will show you that. Things change. People change. Monastic communities change. Nations change.
We joke in the community that when a Brother who has been living at Emery House returns here to the Monastery to live, by the time he has reached the end of Emery Lane, everything back at Emery House has changed, and it is no longer the place he left, even just 5 minutes before. The same is true today. By Evening Prayer today, and certainly by Evening Prayer on 1 September, after the installation of the new Superior, things will be different, and that’s exciting, and a little scary. But that’s life. When we stop changing, we die. The only unchanging reality is God’s eternal, and abiding love for creation, which of course includes each one of us. O give thanks to the Lord, for [God] is good; for [God’s] steadfast love endures forever.[1] This is the reality of our faith. It’s not some pious hokum, but the experience of countless women and men of faith down through the ages. Even as people, and communities, and nations have looked into what might appear to be a dark future, as people of faith, we have been able to say, the Lord is my shepherd; I shall not be in want.[2]
The reality is that all of us stand on the threshold of new beginnings. The Brothers are not the only ones facing a new future. You who are our friends, stand alongside us in this doorway. More significantly, all of us stand at the threshold of something new, as we look toward the presidential election in just over two months. Come Evening Prayer today, come 6 November, things will be different, and yet we say [fear] the Lord, you that are his saints; for those who fear him lack nothing.[3]
Knowing this, today is not a day for us, and perhaps especially for me, to look back. Rather today is a day to look forward to the future, not with dread, but with hope, knowing the promise of God is to meet us, in whatever that future holds. As the Risen Lord said to Mary Magdelene that first Easter Day, go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.[4]
For the past several months, as I have contemplated our future, this promise of the Risen Lord to meet us in the Galilee of our future, has held a significant place in my prayer. I have imagined myself walking into my future, our future, and hearing God’s promise to Joshua spoken to me, spoken to us: I hereby command you: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.’[5]
But how are we to know that God goes before us? How are we to see Jesus as we approach the shore of the Galilee of our future? How are we to make sense of it all, especially as things are changing around us? How can we live in hope, as we look into the unknown, especially if it appears uncertain, and bleak? Isn’t this just wishful thinking?
Listen again to our first lesson:
Wisdom has built her house…She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine, she has…set her table. She has sent out her servant-girls, she calls… ‘You that are simple, turn in here! …Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.’ [6]
This house, Wisdom’s house, is the house of God where the psalmist tells us, we will dwell forever.[7]This house, Wisdom’s house, is the many roomed mansion Jesus has prepared for us.[8] This house, Wisdom’s house, is the place, not only of our future, but of our present, for we already abide in that place. We have turned into Wisdom’s house. We have sat at her table. We have feasted on her bread and wine. For by feasting on Wisdom’s bread and wine, we have eaten and drunk Christ’s Body and Blood, and doing so we abide in him and he in us.[9]
We stand on the threshold of a new world, where things will be different. We stand at that threshold full of hope, expecting to see Jesus who has gone there before us. We stand fortified by Wisdom’s bread and wine, and Christ’s Body and Blood. We stand abiding in Christ, who has promised to be with us, until the end of the ages.[10]
Yes, things will be different tomorrow. They will be different for all of us. We will have a new Superior. Soon, there will be a new, or a not so new, President. No matter what the future holds for any of us, we can face it with confidence, not because we are wishful thinkers, but because we are Christians full of hope. That hope which is ours tells us that the God who promises to be with us always, will never leave or abandon us. That hope, which is the mark of a Christian, is nourished here at Wisdom’s table in Christ’s Body and Blood. So, turn in here, and feast on God’s gift of hope, as we cross the threshold into the future, where the Risen Lord promises to meet us. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.
[1] 1 Chronicles 16: 34
[2] Psalm 23: 1
[3] Psalm 34: 9
[4] Matthew 28: 10
[5] Joshua 1: 9
[6] Wisdom 9: 1 – 6
[7] Psalm 23: 6b
[8] John 14: 1ff
[9] John 6: 56
[10] Matthew 28: 8
Br. Jim Woodrum
Job 38:1-11; Mark 4:35-41
In 1947, a friend of the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein suggested that he write a piece of music based on W.H. Auden’s epic poem, “The Age of Anxiety.” Despite critics deeming the poem as Auden’s “one dull book, his one failure,” it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. The poem’s subject is four strangers who meet in a New York bar during wartime and contemplate their lives and the human condition.[i] The title of the poem evokes a theme that permeates society, both ancient and modern: anxiety. Just saying the word can make your muscles tense up.
Two definitions of anxiety resonate deeply with me. First: “an apprehensive uneasiness or nervousness usually over an impending or anticipated ill: a state of being anxious.” We’ve all experienced anxiety of this sort, say, before a job interview, exam, wedding, or while awaiting a medical diagnosis and its implications for our future. For me, I remember the anxiety of preparing a meal for thirty people for the first time, my first sermon, or getting the call that my father had suffered a fall while I was away on mission in Texas—a fall that ended his life. What is something that has caused you anxiety in recent memory?
The second definition is derived from psychology: “an abnormal and overwhelming sense of apprehension and fear often marked by physical signs such as tension, sweating, and increased pulse rate, by doubt concerning the reality and nature of the threat, and by self-doubt about one’s capacity to cope with it.” Some of us may relate specifically to this definition, especially those dealing with anxiety that co-occurs with depression, PTSD, or other neurological conditions.
Our first lesson from the Old Testament is another epic poem, akin to Auden’s, that evokes the theme of anxiety. The Book of Job recounts the story of a righteous man named Job who faces severe trials orchestrated by Satan, with God’s permission, to test Job’s faithfulness. Imagine Job’s anxiety as he loses his wealth, children, and health—even though, through it all, he refuses to speak ill of God. Throughout the book, Job and his friends engage in profound theological discussions about suffering, justice, and the nature of God. Ultimately, God appears and challenges Job’s understanding, emphasizing His sovereignty and wisdom beyond human comprehension. God asks:
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”
This line of questioning, while beautiful and poetic, is intensely articulated. As God continues this dialogue for a significant period, one cannot help but take comfort in the overwhelming evidence of God’s competence in handling all that might make us anxious. In the end, Job humbly accepts God’s wisdom and is restored, receiving double the blessings he had lost. The book explores profound themes of suffering, faith, and divine justice.
In our gospel lesson, Jesus and his disciples are crossing the Sea of Galilee when a mighty storm arises, threatening to break their boat apart. The disciples exhibit textbook anxiety—they are terrified and cry out to Jesus in their desperation. And, what is Jesus doing amidst the chaos? He’s sleeping; sleeping like a baby. They wake him and he speaks a calming word that stills the storm. He questions them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”
In the Prologue to John’s gospel, Jesus is referred to as the ‘Word of God made flesh,’ present before time began and enduring beyond its end. Jesus, the Word of God, remained a calm presence amidst the storm and continued to be so after it passed. He was with his disciples ‘in’ the storm but he was not ‘of’ the storm.
Bernstein went on to compose his second symphony, titled “The Age of Anxiety,” which premiered with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1949 under the baton of Serge Koussevitsky. Bernstein described his symphony in this way: “The essential theme of the poem (and of the music) is the chronicle of our difficult and problematical quest for faith.”[ii]
Indeed, faith could be seen as an antonym to anxiety. If anxiety is “an apprehensive uneasiness or nervousness usually over an impending or anticipated ill,” consider this definition of the word faith: “complete trust or confidence in someone or something.” A quest for faith might thus be seen as a path toward release from anxiety.
Yet, at face value, I experience this as delusive. If we’re honest, we can never be entirely immune from anxiety. When we embark on our journey of faith in Jesus Christ, we expose ourselves to the assaults of Satan, who seeks to undermine that faith. What Bernstein referred to as the difficult and problematical quest for faith (or the anxiety that is produced in that quest) is actually where our intentional commitment to faith is tested. Anxiety does not necessarily indicate a lack of faith.
Sixteenth-century theologian Richard Hooker argued that while spiritual joy often accompanies faith, it isn’t essential, and its absence can even be beneficial. He writes: “Better it is sometimes to go down into the pit with him, who, beholding darkness, and bewailing the loss of inward joy and consolation, crieth from the bottom of the lowest hell, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ than continually to walk arm in arm with angels, to sit as it were in Abraham’s bosom, and to have not thought, no cogitation, but “I thank my God it is not with me as it is with other men.’ No, God will have them that shall walk in light to feel now and then what it is to sit in the shadow of death. A grieved spirit therefore is no argument of a faithless mind.”[iii]
Richard Meux Benson, the founder of our community, put it this way: “The fallen host, although they see us involved in the realm of death, know that we are inheritors of a hope which is not theirs. They come up in every form to struggle with us. We must not expect to walk in peace in our uniform through the camp of the enemy.”[iv]
So, what can we, who live in the age of anxiety, take away from all of this? First, reflecting on our gospel lesson, I find it ironic that Jesus questions the disciples’ faith. Considering that many of them were experienced fishermen and sailors, they concluded they couldn’t save themselves from the chaos threatening to capsize their boat. They called out to Jesus, who saved them with a calming word. Perhaps when Jesus questions their faith, he’s actually asking, “Why are you anxious?”
From the disciples, we can learn to turn to Jesus in prayer first when our emotions overwhelm us, rather than trying to manage everything on our own. When we face anxiety, apprehension, uneasiness, and self-doubt—assaults from “the fallen host”—we should instinctively call on Jesus. Jesus is Emmanuel, “God with us,” who brings calm to our chaos and prevents us from being consumed by anxiety.
Second, difficult and problematical as it may be, we must be bold in confronting the anxiety which tests our intentional quest for faith. When tested, the way we can keep from being consumed by the anxiety is to counter it with charity. Nothing diminishes Satan’s power than to do exactly the opposite. When Jesus was tempted by Satan after his baptism, Jesus countered each of the devil’s temptations by acknowledging the exact opposite: “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God”; “Do not put the Lord your God to the test”; “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”[v] In following Jesus’ example, we can quell anxiety. When tempted to hurl stones at those who challenge us, be true to the image of God within you and exhibit God’s compassion, mercy, and love.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta is attributed to have said: “If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway. If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway. What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; build anyway. The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; do good anyway. You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and your God; it was never between you and them anyway.”[vi]
And last, when you’re feeling anxious, it could be that your simply hungry—or as we say these days, “hangry.” Ask God for nourishment. In a few moments, you will be invited to come forward to receive the sacrament of Christ. Bring your anxiety and offer it to God, and in return, receive a piece of bread and a sip of wine—the essence of God’s compassion, mercy, and love in the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Then, step out once again—without anxiety—not on your quest for faith, but on your quest in faith. Amen.
[i] “Leonard Bernstein at 100.” Works | Works | Leonard Bernstein, leonardbernstein.com/works/view/16/symphony-no-2-the-age-of-anxiety. Accessed 22 June 2024.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Rowell, Geoffrey, et al. Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness. OUP Oxford, 2003.
[iv] Benson, Richard Meux. A Cowley Calendar. London: Mowbrays, 1932.
[v] Mark 4:1-11
[vi] “A Quote by Mother Teresa.” Goodreads, Goodreads, www.goodreads.com/quotes/7969043-mother-teresa-s-anyway-poem-people-are-often-unreasonable-illogical-and. Accessed 22 June 2024.
For your homiletic dessert I have whipped up 500 words about one word. The word is nīké, if you enjoy New Testament Greek; or Nike, if you have ever heard of basketball. “To conquer.”
The word “conquer” makes me uncomfortable generally, and even more so when it appears in Scripture. But for those of us who place the Johannine witness at the center of our discipleship, it is a word to be reckoned with.
In our reading from the First Letter of John, we heard: “And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” (1 John 5:4-5)
Do you think of yourself as a world-conquerer?
This isn’t an isolated use of that word. In John’s gospel, we hear Jesus at the Last Supper say, “I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world, you face persecution. But take courage: I have conquered the world!” (John 16:33).
This adds shadows and highlights to the basic meaning of “conquer” in these writings. What is conquered? The world: not the earth, but the complex web of circumstances, influences, false narratives and outright lies woven by sin and our captivity to sin. Who is the conquerer? First and foremost: Jesus, the only one whose trust in God and love for us sinners was strong enough to create away forward, through, and out of the tangle and mangle of sin and death.
I’ll add one further nuance, this time from the Revelation to John, whose author makes clear use of John’s gospel. The Christian prophet John hears Jesus promise: “To the one who conquers I will give a place with me on my throne, just as I myself conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne.” (Rev. 3:21). Whatever else our world-conquering may mean, it is at heart a participation in Christ – in his divine freedom, his agency, his sovereignty, his love. It is a gift, not a possession.
Who is it that conquers but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
The world teaches that to conquer is to know, to be in the know, and to be known to be so. To possess a self-righteous certitude in our own ideological posture and the way of life that flows from it. Its modus operandi in the face of opposition is: double down; admit no fragility; captivate those who will like, follow, and subscribe; and cancel the rest.
For us, to conquer is to believe. We are told that the Beloved Disciple “saw and believed, for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” (John 20:8-9). To believe is not to first comprehend and then assent to a reasonable claim. To believe is always an act in which understanding is provisional. Believing requires the vulnerable and continual choice to place our trust in a divine Person, rather than a proposition or a posture.
To believe is to risk yielding all that we have, all that we do, all that we are to Jesus. To make this continual choice for Him a way of life until we pass through death and see him as He Is: this is what it means to conquer.
Acts 5:27-33
Psalm 34:15-22
John 3:31-36
Have you ever faced a life-or-death situation?
For many of us, the honest answer will be no. Proportionally few of us serve in the armed forces, or are subsistence farmers, or fetch water by walking down long, dangerous roads. Or do as Peter and the apostles did, defying the authorities to preach in the name of Jesus, witnessing to the truth and risking death for it (Acts 5:28-29).
What allows those facing such danger, such precariousness, to go on? Need, for sure—the need to act or harvest or fetch or preach that impels them forward. But more than that. Trust. Trust in training and comrades; trust that the earth will bear fruit; trust that the spring will provide water. Trust, as the psalmist sings, that God is near to the brokenhearted, that God will deliver the righteous out of all their troubles and will keep safe all their bones (Ps 34:18, 19, 20).
And while we may not face life-or-death situations, trust is still embedded deeply in our lives. Trust in government and economies, in safety nets and supply chains, in smartphones and airplane doors. We trust these things will always exist, that they will provide or support or protect. We trust, until something shakes that trust and reveals that we may be closer to life-and-death situations than we think. The chapter in our Rule on “Holy Death” gets at this: in our “hardships, renunciations, losses, bereavements, frustrations, and risks . . . death is at work in advance” in our lives.[1]
But if what results when trust fails—all the bad and scary parts of life—can point us toward death, so can trust that succeeds, trust in what won’t fail us. And that trust points us to a death that is not final but transformed: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life” (Jn 3:36) and “has passed from death to life” (Jn 5:24). If our daily experiences of loss and failure and frustration prepare us for the certainty of our deaths, our daily experiences of trust—and the hope and joy and love that accompany them—do so as well. The also prepare us for death, show us how death is at work in advance in our lives, but a death transformed by Jesus’s saving work: “In Christ we are still one with [the departed],” our Rule goes on, and we believe, we trust, “that we will be reunited when Christ gathers all creation to himself, so that God may be all in all.”[2]
You may not face a life-or-death situation every day. But our trust that “God is true,” that God hears our cry, that God is near to us, that God saves us, makes every day a death-and-life proposition.
Amen.
[1] The Rule of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist (Lanham, MD, 1997), 97.
[2] Ibid.
Br. David Vryhof
John 7:1-2, 10, 25-30
Each of the gospel writers has come to know Jesus and in his gospel is trying to convey his understanding to others in order that they, too, might believe in Jesus. For Mark, Jesus is the “Son of God,” proclaiming the good news that the “kingdom of God” has come near (Mk 1:1,14). For Matthew, he is “the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Mt 1:1). For Luke, he is the “Son of God” (Lk 1:35), the one whose miraculous birth was foretold by an angel (Lk 1:30-33). For John, he is “the Word” who was “with God” and who “was God” from before all time, and who has taken on himself our human nature (Jn 1:1-2, 14): “The Word became flesh and lived among us,” John tells us.
The gospel writers declare openly what they believe about Jesus’ identity, but throughout their narratives, we see people – including Jesus’ own disciples – struggling to grasp what the evangelists have already come to believe.
In today’s gospel passage from John, the question of Jesus’ identity is, once again, at the forefront. The people of Jerusalem have heard of this teacher-healer from Nazareth in Galilee and know that the authorities are trying to kill him. They wonder aloud why Jesus is being allowed to preach so openly among them. But they also claim to know him, or at least know something about him. “We know where this man is from,” they say, “[how can he be the Messiah?]”
Jesus acknowledges that they do know something about him, but he expands their understanding by explaining that he has been sent by God, and that he knows God because he comes from God (Jn 7:29). He identifies as one of them, but he also sets himself apart as one who possesses an intimate, first-hand knowledge of God. “I know [God],” he says quite plainly.
What is it like to know someone? Think for a moment of someone you know well. When we know someone, we will certainly know some basic facts about them, but we may also be able to describe their personality or temperament; we may be familiar with their likes and dislikes, their strengths and their weaknesses, the ways in which they tend to act and the sorts of things they prefer. With our most intimate friends and companions, we might go even deeper: we may know their most deeply held values, their secret hopes and fears, their sense of their own vocation or calling in life, and “what makes them tick.”
Jesus knows God in this intimate and deeply personal way and therefore claims an authority which others do not and cannot have. He, unlike any other, is from God and has been sent into the world by God. But he also makes clear that he has come to share this knowledge of God with us; he has come to reveal God’s person and God’s purposes to us.
One question we might pose to ourselves in this Lenten season is, “How well do I know God? And how well do I know Jesus?” We might reflect on what we know, and on what we don’t yet know or understand. We might consider how our understanding has changed over the years; how the God we knew as children differed from the God we knew as teenagers, and how the God of our youth differs from the God we know now.
Recognizing that there is always more to learn about God, just as there is always more to learn about our human companions, we can ask ourselves, “How am I continuing to learn about God? How am I growing in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son, Jesus? Has my knowledge of God deepened? Am I in intimate communion with God day by day? Am I growing in intimacy with God? What do I know about God’s desires, God’s values, God’s purposes in the world?”
To this end, the Church urges us to observe this season of Lent “by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word” (BCP, p. 265). Day by day, we are to draw closer to God, coming to know God (and to be known by God) more intimately. Gradually, we are becoming one with God, uniting ourselves with God by taking on God’s priorities, values and mission.
How well do you know God, and how are you coming to know God better?
Br. Luke Ditewig
Genesis 15:1-6
Luke 6:43-49
When will it happen? How much longer? What’s coming? Part of our trouble is waiting, not seeing answers or provisions as we expect.
God promised Abram a son. Years had passed. Still nothing. God comes again in a vision and says: “Don’t be afraid.” Abram says: “What? You haven’t given me a son! I’m still childless. So my heir will have to be Eliezer, a slave born in my house.” How do you hear and see the tone? Perhaps angry, blowing up and shaking his fist. Perhaps dejected and slumping with head down.
God’s response is accepting and gracious: No. My promise is true. It’s ok you’re upset. Look up and count the stars. You will receive that much. Every day, look up and remember I am with you. I will provide.
Abram believed God. Here “believed” has the connotation of ongoing, not a one-time thing.[i] Abram continued to believe. While angry or dejected, while questioning with shaking fist or slumping head, Abram believed. While waiting for years, Abram believed. Belief and trust include doubt and struggle. They are not blindly ignoring the hard. Like Abram, believing and trusting God is an ongoing reliance and assured confidence in the midst of struggle. Trust does not deny struggle but indeed names the pain with continued expectation.
“Hear us, O God, have mercy upon us, for we put our trust in you.”[ii] Pray pain honestly. Keep walking expecting provision. Look at stars or ordinary everyday images God gives you. By them, remember how you have experienced God, what you’re thankful for, what you have received, trusting God will give more good.
See stars and rest on rock.
In the Holy Land, there is much solid rock, whether exposed, under a couple inches or under ten or more feet of soil. To build, one digs down however far it takes to have the foundation of solid rock. People build in the summer when it is dry not raining, yet it is hot. It is very hard work to break through the clay and dig down to solid rock. One may be tempted to skip the harder part, yet a sure foundation is essential to survive the winter floods.[iii]
Jesus said, “I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them.” Hearing and doing Jesus’ words take great effort, like digging down through hard clay under hot sun. This parable ends Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain in Luke and another version ends the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew.[iv] Jesus ends much teaching with a call for necessary, risky, costly action.
Following Jesus is active engagement. Jesus teaches how to love, listen, be patient, forgive, and act with gentleness. Living like this, leaning into the struggle to live this way, saying a repeated “yes” to this rhythm of life is trusting, relying on God. These habits express confidence in Jesus who gives them. These patterns will help in later storms of life.
Isaiah prophesied God would give a foundation in Zion, a precious cornerstone. Many expected a literal place, a third temple. Jesus here also presents himself—“come to me”—as fulfilling that promise.[v] Writing to the Corinthians, Paul described Jesus as the foundation. [vi] Jesus both speaks words and is the Word. Hear and act, dig deep to the Solid Rock. As we shall sing: “Christ is made the sure foundation, Christ the head and cornerstone, chosen of the Lord and precious, binding all the Church in one, holy Zion’s help forever and her confidence alone.”[vii]
We put our trust in God alone. Our patterns won’t save us. Jesus does.
What troubles you today? What are you still waiting for? Dear friends, like Abram pray pain honestly. See stars or images that remind you of God’s promises. Dig deep striving daily to love, care, and serve as Jesus teaches. Rest, stand, sit, or lie down in surrender on the solid rock, Jesus Christ. In the midst of trouble, continue to trust God with us.
[i] Van Gerneren, Willem A., ed. (1997) New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, Vol 1, p432.
[ii] Our sung refrain for Prayers of the People on Tuesdays and Sundays in Lent.
[iii] Kenneth E. Bailey (2008) Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, p. 323-4.
[iv] Ibid, p. 321.
[v] Ibid, p. 327.
[vi] 1 Corinthians 3:11
[vii] #518 in The Hymnal 1982. Translated by John Mason Neale (1861) from 6th or 7th century Latin text.
Br. David Vryhof
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Romans 4:13-25
The promise first came to Abram when he was already 75 years old! God said, “I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great…. In you, all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Gen. 12:2-3). It was unthinkable even then, unimaginable, impossible, given his age and the barrenness of Sarai’s womb. But Abram believed God.
The second promise came eleven years later, when Abram was 86 years old! This time, Abram questioned God, “You have given me no offspring… [Is one of my slaves to become my heir]?” (Gen. 15:3) and God replied, “[No]. Your very own issue will be your heir… Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. So shall you descendants be” (Gen. 15:5). And, once again, Abram believed God.
But as time went on and there was still no heir, his faith wavered. Abram and Sarai decided to help God out by taking matters into their own hands. So, Abram slept with Sarai’s servant and she conceived and bore him a son, Ishmael. But this was not God’s plan.
The third and final promise came thirteen years after the second. Abram was 99 years old and Sarai 90. Still, they had not conceived. Their dream of having a child had withered over time and finally evaporated completely. They knew it was now physically impossible. They had no reasonable hope. But God insisted, “You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you” (Gen. 17:4,6). This time, Abram laughed (Gen. 17:17).
God ignored the laughter and affirmed once again that it would be just as God had said. To mark the promise, God changed their names: Abram became Abraham, the “father of nations,” and Sarai become Sarah, “princess to all.” “Your wife Sarah shall bear you a son,” God said, “and you shall name him Isaac” (which, ironically enough, means ‘he laughs’) (Gen. 17:19). “[I will establish my covenant with Isaac, not Ishmael,” God declared. “At this season next year, Sarah will bear you a son.]”
In one year, Abraham and Sarah would have a son, the son promised 25 years earlier! The covenant was renewed: God promised to be Abraham’s God, and Abraham pledged to “walk before God and be blameless.” The covenant was to last for generations to come. To formalize the covenant, God insisted on a sign: “Every male among you shall be circumcised” (Gen. 17:10). The command seems peculiar, even bizarre, to us, but circumcision was for Abraham and his household a sacramental sign, a sign that had to do with progeny, offspring, the conception of children. It would be a constant reminder of God’s promise. And for thousands of years to come, this sign would distinguish Abraham’s descendants from people of other nations and would mark them as “God’s people.”
Thankfully, we no longer consider circumcision to be a sacrament. For Christians, circumcision has been replaced with baptism, a sign which is available to females as well as to males. For us, baptism is the “outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace” (BCP, p. 857). Baptism is the sign of our covenantal relationship with God. In it, God promises to be our God, to love us and to support us and to abide with us forever. In baptism, we make promises as well. Like circumcision, the commitment made in baptism is a costly one: it requires a whole-hearted sacrifice – the offering of our bodies, minds, and spirits – all that we have and all that we are – to God. The sign of the Cross drawn on our foreheads at baptism marks us, as circumcision did for the Israelites, as God’s people in the world, God’s beloved children. It binds us with others who have made this same commitment. In baptism, we are “sealed by the Holy Spirit… and marked as Christ’s own forever.” (BCP, p. 308)
But let’s get back to Abraham, because his story has important implications for us today.
In his letter to the Romans, St Paul praises Abraham’s faithfulness: “Abraham believed God,” he writes, “and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” (Rom. 4:3). Despite all odds, Abraham received God’s promise with faith, trusting that God would somehow fulfill God’s word to him, even though it seemed impossible. “Hoping against hope,” Paul tells us, “[Abraham] believed that he would become ‘the father of many nations,’ according to what [God] said.” (Rom. 4:18) “He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead… and when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb… but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised” (Rom. 4:18-21).
Paul isn’t using Abraham as an example here; he’s not asking us to imitate him. He is instead making the point that faith puts its trust in God. He praises Abraham because Abraham trusted in God’s promise, against all evidence to the contrary. Abraham obeyed God because he was convinced that God was able to make good on what God had promised.
It’s important to make a distinction between Christian hope and optimism. Optimism hopes and anticipates that things will be better in the future; it trusts that we will somehow solve the challenges we face today. It can be a good thing, but it is different than Christian hope. The hope we have in God is not a naïve wish that tomorrow will be better; it braces itself and prepares to cope even if tomorrow isn’t better. Hope doesn’t depend on us getting our act together and fixing things. Christian hope is centered on GOD, and on what God has promised, and on the conviction that God is able to do what God has promised, even if the evidence isn’t clear or obvious. Abraham believed in God and in God’s power and in God’s commitment to do what God had promised. His faith went beyond mere optimism. It was rooted in his experience of God as faithful and true.
The Rule of Life of our community puts it this way: “Our hope lies not in what we have done for God, but in what God has done for us.” (SSJE Rule, ch. 49, p.99)
Christians “are not optimists as the common definition goes,” writes Katherine Patterson[i] “because we… must be realistic about the world in which we find ourselves. And this world looked at squarely does not allow optimism to flourish. Hope for us cannot simply be wishful thinking, nor can it only be the desire to grow up and take control over our own lives.
“Hope is a yearning, rooted in reality, that pulls us toward the radical biblical vision of a world where truth and justice and peace do prevail, a time in which the knowledge of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, a scene which finds humanity living in harmony with nature, all nations beating their swords into plowshares and walking together by the light of God’s glory.”
“Hope,” said Desmond Tutu, “is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” Once, when asked whether he was optimistic about a resolution to the Middle East crisis, Tutu said, no, he was not optimistic; but he was hopeful. His hope was in God and in God’s promise to reconcile all things in Christ.
Genuine hope looks to God; it is not focused on us. Abraham “hoped against all hope,” not because he thought himself capable of fulfilling the promise, but because he believed God was able to do what God had promised. His faith was in God.
God’s covenant with Abraham was renewed several times. In fact, the scriptures are full of covenantal renewal. Again and again, God comes to us and says, “I will be your God, and you will be my people.” Think of it: GOD promises to be your God — through hardship and calamity, if that is what life brings; in joy and in sorrow, in success and in failure, in hard times and in good times. God will be your God – always faithful, always present, always ready to do for you what you cannot do for yourself.“If God is for us,” writes the apostle Paul, “who can be against us?” (Rom. 8:31). “He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?” (Rom. 8:32) “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?…. No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8:35-39)
That is the promise of God to us. That is what gives us reason to hope, even when it is not obvious how or when our help will come. We hope in GOD, not in ourselves or in others.
This is what it means to be in covenant with God: It means that we do not walk alone. We walk with the God who has taken us by the hand and promised never to let us go. It is to that God that we offer ourselves, our souls and our bodies, wholeheartedly and forever. It is in that God that we trust.
[i] Patterson, Katherine; “Hope is More Than Happiness” in Children’s Books.
Br. David Vryhof
Mark 9:2-9
What do we make of a story like this? Jesus leads three of his closest friends up a high mountain and there he is transfigured before them! His clothes become dazzling white, whiter than anyone on earth could bleach them! Moses and Elijah, representing the law and the prophets, suddenly appear beside Jesus, speaking with him! A cloud overshadows them all, and a voice booms out of the cloud, “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him!” No wonder the poor disciples are terrified!
What do we make of a story like this that describes a theophany so extraordinary, so spectacular, so dazzling, so supernatural, that it defies logic. The whole experience lies so far beyond anything any of us has or ever will see or know, it is almost impossible to imagine.
For a few brief moments, the veil is lifted and the disciples see the radiant glory of God beaming from the person of Jesus. And then it is over, as quickly as it began.
The remarkable incident described in today’s gospel reading calls to mind the earlier story of Jesus’ baptism in the River Jordan by John the Baptist (Mark 1:9-11). There, too, a voice from heaven rumbled out of the clouds, though this time the message was directed to Jesus himself: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” It was a message of love and affirmation, which confirmed his identity as God’s Beloved Son, and signaled the start of his mission.
Here the same words are used, except this time the message is directed to the disciples: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Listen to him, indeed. Because the disciples had definitely not been listening to him.
The context of the story is this: Jesus and his disciples are on their way to Jerusalem, and along the way, Jesus has been telling his disciples plainly that he “must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31). His disciples hear what he says, but they aren’t really listening – or if they’re listening, they’re not comprehending – because as soon as Jesus utters these words, Peter “rebukes” him. Peter’s words reveal the mindset of all the disciples: they are awaiting a Messiah, but it certainly isn’t a Messiah who will “undergo great suffering” and “be rejected” and “be killed,” as Jesus has been telling them. So the voice on the mountain sets them straight. LISTEN to him!
Do they? No, not yet. They’re too busy arguing about which of them is the greatest, and whether they’ll be permitted to sit at his right hand and his left when he establishes his kingdom. So Jesus has to continue to instruct them, again and again, that the kingdom he is announcing is unlike any other kingdom and certainly unlike the kingdom they are envisioning, which is all about power. His kingdom is an upside-down kingdom, where the first are last and the last are first, and where the greatest is the one who is servant of all. It’s not about power, but about service. They don’t seem to get that, so the voice on the mountain sets them straight. LISTEN to him!
The story of the Transfiguration figures prominently in each of the three synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke. For the briefest of moments, the veil is lifted and the three disciples are dazzled by the glory of God radiating from the person of Jesus. He is aflame with God’s glory, the eternal splendor of the Father – and it absolutely terrifies them.
John’s gospel is different. It fails to record both the baptismal story and the story of the Transfiguration. This omission has long puzzled commentators. If John had known these stories, it seems reasonable that he would have included them in his gospel, since they underscore themes that are very important to him. The baptismal story in which God affirms Jesus as his Beloved Son would have illustrated dramatically the intimate relationship that Jesus had with his “Father,” which is so integral to John’s story about Jesus. And this story of the Transfiguration would have reinforced John’s conviction that Jesus came to reveal the glory of the Father and to share that glory with those who believed.
John doesn’t record the story of the Transfiguration, but he certainly sees the glory of God made manifest in Jesus. “The Word became flesh and lived among us,” John writes, “and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
The magnificent manifestation of God’s glory on the mountaintop was witnessed by only three of Jesus’ disciples – Peter, James and John. But that doesn’t mean that the others failed to see it. Jesus had been revealing God’s glory all along. Don’t you think the disciples must have glimpsed the glory of God in the face of Jesus when he welcomed strangers and outcasts? Wouldn’t they have recognized it when he forgave a woman caught in the act of adultery or when he welcomed little children into his presence or when he touched and healed lepers, blind men and beggars? Might they not have witnessed God’s glory when they saw him kneel in prayer during the long hours of the night, or when they watched him take up a bowl and towel and wash their feet, or when they witnessed him laying down his life for them, as a shepherd lays down his life for his sheep? Surely the glory of God radiated from the face of Jesus when he looked with deep compassion on the broken and needy, when he touched the rejected and despised, when he embraced and lifted up the poor and the oppressed. His disciples were no strangers to that glory.
And what about those who saw and believed in the centuries that followed? They, too, were witnesses to his glory. They, too, were touched by his story and moved by his compassion. “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace,” writes John the Evangelist (John 1:16). “No one has ever seen God,” John goes on to say, “It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (John 1:18). Over the course of centuries, billions of people have seen and known God’s glory in the face of Jesus, God’s only Son, just as his first disciples did. And their lives have been transformed.
“ALL of us…,” writes St Paul to the Corinthians, “…seeing the glory of God as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another…” (II Cor. 3:18) We, too, have been witnesses of his glory; and we, too, are being transformed by that glory into his image, into the likeness of Christ. We, too, can radiate that glory in the world – whenever we love as he loved us; whenever we stand for truth and for justice, as he did; whenever we act, like him, as agents of peace and of blessing towards others.
We, too, have seen his glory, and we, too, can be reflectors of that glory throughout the world. “Do not be conformed to this world,” then, but “be transformed by the renewing of your minds…” (Romans 12:2). “Look upon him and be radiant!” (Psalm 34:5; BCP, p. 628).
Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle
Habakkuk 2:1-4
Hebrews 10:35—11:1
John 20:24-29
What would it mean for you to have proof?
This question is in the background of P. D. James’s novel Death in Holy Orders. A theological college holds a papyrus that purports to disprove the Resurrection. Surely, if this document proves to be authentic, the inspector asks one of the priests on staff, if it is hard proof about something that had until then only been a belief, this would surely be relevant to your faith. “My son,” the priest responds, “for one who every hour of his life has the assurance of the living presence of Christ, why should I worry about what happened to earthly bones?”[1]
Earthly bones very much worry the apostle Thomas, whom we celebrate today. Bones and flesh, blood and wounds—the physicality of Jesus’s body, the fleshly reality of his friend and teacher. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (Jn 20:25) Jesus lets Thomas see and feel his body, giving him the proof he seeks. But not without a rebuke: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (Jn 20:29).
Believing without seeing, “the conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11:1)—this is how the letter to the Hebrews defines faith. We cannot receive the same confirmation that Thomas did. Whatever our desire, we cannot reach out and put our fingers into the nail wounds. We cannot encounter Jesus in the same way that Thomas did. That encounter with the risen Christ changed him.
But the fact of that encounter gives us hope that the ways we encounter Jesus are every bit as real, every bit as trustworthy, and every bit as likely to leave us changed. The experience of the apostles with the risen Jesus invites us to trust, trust in the living presence of Christ, in every hour, in every minute, of our lives. The witness of the apostle Thomas is an assurance that what we hope for, what we trust in, is not in vain.
Hope is why we persist in trust, in belief, in faith, despite whatever our eyes may not see, despite whatever our hands may not touch. Hope drives us to stand at our post, as did the prophet Habakkuk, and keep watch. We keep watch for the coming of our Lord, knowing he will surely come. He will surely come, and he is already here, a living presence in every hour of our lives.
What more proof do you need?
Amen.
[1] P. D. James, Death in Holy Orders (New York: Random House, 2001), 245.
Br. Jack Crowley
John 1:6-8, 19-28
Good morning and welcome to the third Sunday of Advent. We are just about one week away from the big day. Next Sunday, Advent four and Christmas eve will collide, and liturgical heads will spin.
Every year during this final stretch of Advent, I always love to imagine how Mary must have felt as the birth of her baby boy drew near. I’m sure Mary was filled with all sorts of emotions. I mean imagine for nine months carrying the son of God in your belly and feeling baby Jesus kick inside of you. Imagine for nine months going to bed every night knowing the savior of mankind was growing inside you.
Above all else, I imagine Mary feeling a sort of humble joy. Joy. Not just happiness, not just gratitude, not just relief, but joy. Joy and all the good that comes with it.
Traditionally on this third Sunday of Advent, we celebrate joy. You may have already noticed that our Advent wreath magically grew some roses last night at first evensong. Those roses are our reminder, in the midst of Advent, in the midst of a busy holiday season, to stop and appreciate the simple beauty of creation, to pause and give thanks and feel the simple joys of the season.
Now personally my favorite part of our Advent wreath is not the roses or the wreath itself, my favorite part is what’s below it, our Advent wreath stand. You might not be able to tell by looking at it, but that thing is heavy. Trust me. For the first few years I was here at SSJE, somehow for some reason I was always assigned to carry the stand both into the chapel when Advent started and back to our sacristy when we took down the decorations. Every year when these light, fluffy roses magically appear on top of this deceptively heavy, burdensome, and incredibly awkward to carry stand, I can’t help but laugh at the joyful miracle of it all.
Now I know that celebrating joy right now might not seem appropriate. If we were to judge the mood of humanity right now solely on the headlines, joy would be lacking. In short, the current state of world affairs is not great.
Trust me, we Brothers feel it too. We know this year it felt like it got dark especially early. We know wars are raging all across the world and even close to where Jesus himself walked. We know that this planet is in danger. We know 2024 will be dominated by yet another divisive election. Yet, here we are, gathered, together, celebrating joy.
So why do such a thing? Why celebrate joy at a time like this?
We celebrate joy because we follow in the footsteps of the prophet Isaiah. We celebrate joy because the spirit of the Lord is upon us. We celebrate joy to bring good news to the oppressed. We celebrate joy to bind up the brokenhearted. We celebrate joy to provide for those who mourn. We celebrate joy to help repair the ruined cities and to heal the devastations of many generations.
To be joyful in a time like this is not an act of delusion. To be joyful in a time like this is an act of confidence. To be joyful in a time like this takes courage.
We take heart with all those around us who suffer. We know their pain and we feel their pain. Our joy is not a dismissal of all the hardships the world is going through right now. Our joy springs from acknowledging how bad things can get while remembering how great things can be.
We celebrate joy today because as the Psalmist says, “The Lord has done great things for us, and we are glad indeed.” How many times in your life has something terrible happened to you and you’ve lashed out at God, asking why God, why? Then years later, been able to look back with more wrinkled eyes and said, oh thank God? That is why we are glad indeed, that is why we celebrate joy.
We are joyful not because we are running away from our problems, we are joyful because we are facing our problems head on with the help of God and one another. We are joyful because we follow the words of Saint Paul who tells us to “rejoice always, pray without ceasing, (and) give thanks in all circumstances.”
Now if these words of Saint Paul feel hollow this morning, I get it. I’ve been there. I’ve had plenty of Sunday mornings when I don’t want to rejoice always, when I don’t want to pray without ceasing, and when I don’t want to give thanks in any circumstance. I’ve had plenty of mornings that when the alarm goes off, I just want to say no, not today.
If your experience is anything like mine, when you think back on those dark times when prayer felt impossible or just not even worthwhile, the surprising outcome is that our relationship with God and one another somehow actually deepens in that darkness. God’s love for us is so powerful, that we somehow end up getting closer to God even when we try to pull away from God. That is the mystery of faith.
John the Baptist knew that dark mystery of faith very well. Try to imagine how he must felt, day after day, with countless waves of people coming to be baptized by John in the river Jordan. John knew in his heart of hearts that something awesome was coming. Someone, some face in that crowd of people was going to be it, the Messiah, finally arriving to save humanity.
This was just so awesome that even John himself struggled to describe it, but what he could do was get people ready for it. John the Baptist said that he was the “voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’”.
What a joy it must have been for John to finally see Jesus face to face. We here today have the opportunity to do the same. In the midst of all the suffering of the world, we still have Jesus on our hearts, in our minds, and in our prayers. As we turn this final joyful corner to Christmas, remember all of the good things you have in your life and all the good things God has done for us.
Luke 1:26-38
What if this story is all about Mary’s brain?
The beats of today’s Gospel reading are familiar to most of us. Here at the Monastery, we recount them in the Angelus, which we pray before Morning and Evening Prayer. “The angel of the Lord announced unto Mary . . .” pause, “and she conceived by the Holy Spirit.”
So much happens in that pause. And what if it’s all about Mary’s brain?
Of all the young women God could have chosen, God chose Mary. And what is the first thing we find out about her? That she hears the angel’s news, is perplexed, ponders over his words, and questions him. The first thing we find out about Mary is that she responds to God by using her own God-given faculties of reason and intelligence.
Byzantine writer Nicholas Mesarites provides a cognitive description of this episode: “The word comes to the hearing of the Virgin, and enters through it to the brain; the intelligence which is seated in the brain at once lays hold upon what comes to it, recognizes it by its perception, and then communicates to the heart itself what it had understood.”[1] This then leads Mary to question the angel to determine the truth of the angel’s words. Only after she verifies the truth does Mary gives her yes to the angel, and to God.
In this telling, the Incarnation, the putting on of humanity by God in the person of Jesus Christ, is the result of a process of perception and cognition. It’s about how Mary hears the words of the angel; how she receives them, debates them, and understands them; and how she makes and offering in return: her consent to bear God to the world.
This process is a beautiful metaphor for us, especially of our life of prayer. God’s word come to each of us in infinitely varied and subtle ways—but it doesn’t land on homogenous ground. God has made each of us to be wonderful creatures. God has equipped us with the senses not only to hear God’s word to us, but also to see, to smell, to taste, and to feel it. And God has given us unique minds to receive, interpret, and understand what we perceive. Like Mary, what we offer back is unique to each of us, our unique response to God, our unique way of bearing God to the world.
Amen.
[1] Quoted in R. Betancourt, “The Virgin’s Consent,” in Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages(Princeton, 2020), 35.
Br. David Vryhof
Psalm 27:1-6
Most preachers, when they reflect on their preaching, will find that they have a few themes that they come back to again and again. For me, one of those themes is the question of what it means to believe. I return to this theme repeatedly because I want to challenge the popular understanding that believing means holding a certain set of statements or claims to be true – statements, for example, about God or Jesus or the Bible or salvation. When we speak of believing in this way, Christianity becomes a matter of the head rather than of the heart.
We know that faith does not spare us from the pain of human existence. Believing does not guarantee that we will never have cancer, or suffer the loss of a loved one, or lose a job, or watch a business fail. Believing does not solve all our problems or make us rich or popular or successful. It does not exempt us from the experience of pain and suffering. It does not make everything right.
But it does make a difference in how we experience tragedy and loss, how we cope with suffering and pain, how we respond to grief and sorrow.
The psalmist knows what it is to believe and trust in God: “The Lord is my light and my salvation,” he proclaims, “whom then shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom then shall I be afraid?”…”Though an army should encamp against me, yet my heart shall not be afraid; and though war should rise up against me, yet will I put my trust in him.”
The psalmist believes in God. Even in the face of danger and trouble, he makes clear his resolve: “I will put my trust in [God].” Real believing is about knowing God and trusting God, even when trouble assails us. It is a quiet assurance that holds us and calms us and comforts us, and lets us know that it is all right, even when things don’t look or feel all right. As the psalmist notes, we need not be afraid.
Christian pastor and teacher Lewis Smedes tells of a visit he made to a friend who was dying of cancer. As their time together came to an end, his friend looked into his eyes and smiled. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right.” Obviously, everything was not all right. His life was ending prematurely. His wife was soon to become a widow, and his children fatherless. His body was wracked with pain. And yet, in some deep place in his soul, faith assured him that God’s grace was sufficient for him even now, in this moment and under these circumstances, and that God’s power was being made perfect in his weakness (cf. II Cor. 12:9). Like St Paul, he was convinced that no hardship or distress or bodily pain – not even death itself – could separate him from Christ (cf. Romans 8:31-39). He was finding that “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37).
Faith gives us the power to look earthly reality in the face, to acknowledge its sad and tragic edges, to feel its cruel cuts, to join the chorus of voices that have railed against its outrageous unfairness, and still to feel in our deepest being that it is good and right and a joyful thing for us to be alive on God’s good earth. Faith gives us the power to see life very clearly, to admit that sometimes it seems all wrong and still to know that, somehow, it is all right. “All shall be well,” Dame Julian of Norwich assures us, “every manner of thing shall be well.” That is the voice and experience of one who knows God and believes.
Smedes writes, “When I feel that I am loved while everything about me says I am unlovable, then I am believing, really believing. When I feel that life in this valley of death is much worth the living, then I am believing. When I feel gratitude enough to make me glad, then I am believing. When I feel that all is right with me even when everything around me is the pits, then I am actually believing.”[1]
This type of faith comes by discovery, not by effort. It is not a feeling we can manufacture. It comes to us rather as a gift, often unexpected – the simple assurance that God is God, and that if we can just be still and know that God is God, all will be well. We cannot manufacture such faith, but if we have experienced it we can recall it and trust it again and again.
Suffering is part of human experience, and we will not escape it. But we can believe, like the psalmist and like St Paul, in the steadfast love and faithfulness of God, and discover for ourselves that even when everything seems all wrong, it can still be all right.
[1] Lewis B. Smedes; How Can It Be All Right When Everything is All Wrong? p.10.
“What are you called to risk? We are beginning the long, green season after Pentecost, preparing to walk with Jesus as he travels the road of his earthly ministry. We’ll be walking with him day after day, week after week, for the next six months. What do you cling to that may weigh you down on this journey? What are you called to risk—or, perhaps better, what do you dare to risk?”
In the days after Pentecost, Br. Lain Wilson invites us to walk the Creator's good road in trust – and in risk.
John 14:1-6
We all have moments when our hearts our troubled, the kind that makes our guts churn, saps our resolve, and makes us turn inward.
We mess up. We fail. Like Peter, in the passage before today’s Gospel, we make lofty promises—“Lord, I will lay down my life for you”—only to fall short.
Or we look at what is going on around us—in our community, in our country, in the world—and we despair. We despair at our helplessness and powerlessness, at all that we know to be wrong but that is beyond us to rectify.
We are limited, fallible, frail creatures.
And that is why what Jesus says to us today is so important. “Do not let your hearts be troubled” (Jn 14:1). He promises to these limited, fallible, frail creatures a place with him in his Father’s house.
When someone says to you, “Don’t worry, no problem, it’ll be fine,” do you believe them? Do you believe this assurance was true? Or, like being told not to think about the pink elephant in the corner, do you end up focusing more and more on everything that troubles you?
The difference here is that God is speaking this assurance. It is God saying, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” It is God speaking. And when God speaks, God acts: “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made. . . . For he spoke, and it came to pass” (Ps 33:6, 9). So when God says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” God is enacting it, making it real. Jesus tells us to believe in the Father, and to believe in him—and that this assurance is true.
God is always speaking to us—in word and image, relationship and experience, memory and imagination. God is always speaking to us, and it’s up to us to learn how to listen. What makes this word real to you? Amid all that troubles your heart—what makes you believe that peace and quietude are possible? How is God speaking this word of assurance into your heart? What makes God’s word real and true for you today?
Amen.
Br. Curtis Almquist
John 20:19-31
The apostle Thomas is often branded as the stooge of the apostles – “Doubting Thomas” – but that is both unfair and inaccurate. In actuality, the opposite is true. There are two encounters in the Gospel, prior to what we’ve just heard, that shed light on the apostle Thomas. One scene was in Galilee, when Jesus first said to the disciples that he would return to Judea because his friend Lazarus had died. Very risky for Jesus. The disciples knew full well about the death threats against Jesus (and probably against them, too). Many of the disciples protested Jesus’ plan to return to Judea. But it was Thomas who really understood Jesus. Thomas pleaded with his fellow disciples not to desert Jesus but to stay with him. Thomas said, “Let us go that we may die with Him!”[i] Perhaps more than any other disciple, Thomas was prepared to abide with Jesus to the end. Thomas had been following a Messiah whom Thomas knew would suffer and die. Not true, it seems, for the other disciples.
The other scene was in the Garden of Gethsemane, just before Jesus was seized. Jesus said, “Let not your hearts be troubled…. I go to prepare a place for you… and you know where I am going….” No. No idea. It seems only Thomas had the courage to admit that the disciples were clueless. “My Lord,” Thomas says, “We do not have the slightest idea where you are going! How can we know the way?”[ii]
Jesus is then crucified. When Jesus, resurrected, first appears to the other disciples who were hiding in the Upper Room, Thomas was not with them: neither hiding his willingness nor his readiness to serve his crucified Lord. What exactly Thomas was doing that evening, when all the other disciples were huddled together, we don’t know. But given the evidence we have in the Gospel, we could well imagine that Thomas was out doing what he had always done with and for Jesus: helping, healing, feeding, speaking in the name and love and power of Jesus.
And that is a much fuller picture of Thomas. That is his story, what we know of it. After Jesus’ crucifixion, when Thomas meets up with the disciples, and they tell him their news that Jesus has appeared to them, alive, Thomas is incredulous. Thomas knows these other disciples: their arguments, their vanity, their betrayals, their blindness, their duplicity, their deafness, their hardness of heart. Could he possibly trust their report? No. Clearly not. He doubted their experience, because their experience was not his experience. With such transparent candor, Thomas says to the other disciples, “Unless I see in Jesus’ hands the print of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe. I simply cannot believe you…” As we read, it was not until Thomas had personally, physically, undeniably seen and been touched by Jesus was he, Thomas, willing and bold to respond, “My Lord and my God!”
I find Thomas a great hero because of his courage and clarity to value his own experience and needs, and to express them. He was not asking to know about Jesus; he was not banking his life on other people’s experience of Jesus. Thomas knew he needed to experience Jesus’ resurrection personally, in a way that Thomas would be able to believe. Jesus did not have monochromatic relationships with people, then and now. Jesus’ relationship with Thomas was very different from Jesus’ relationship with Peter, was very different than Jesus’ relationship with the Beloved Disciple, very different from Jesus’ relationship with Lazarus and his sisters Martha and Mary of Bethany – not to be confused with Mary of Magdala; nor Mary, wife of Clopas; nor his own mother, Mary. Jesus has uniquely personal relationships with everyone he encounters, then and now. The apostle Thomas gives us a very helpful inspiration.
As much the same as we all are with a very similar needs, common hopes, typical fears, an expected longevity, and virtually-identical DNA, there is one way in which we are not at all the same. I’m drawing on the insight of George MacDonald, a Scottish poet and minister, and a mentor to C. S. Lewis. We are not the same in our experience of God. Each and every person has an indelible and a unique relationship to God. Each person has been created and fashioned by God, like no one else. Each one of us can know and worship God as no one else can.[iii]
Over many decades, as I have had the privilege of listening to people talk about their lives and what matters to them, I have never heard the same story. As I have listened to people talk about their longing for God, their awareness of God, their experience of the love of God and power and mystery of God, every story I have ever heard has been utterly unique and real. We find in the witness of the apostle Thomas a kind of “double faithfulness”: Thomas, being faithful to his own integrity, his own experience of Jesus. Clearly, his experience overlapped with that of the other disciples, but not identically. We also see in Jesus a kind of faithfulness to how we have all been created so uniquely, and with such distinguishing experience. Jesus validated Thomas’ unique experience of him, and so he does ours. So he does yours.
Each and every one of us can know and worship God as no one else can. And for each one of us, God has a different response. Drawing again on George MacDonald: in every person there is a kind of longing, an “inner chamber” which only God can enter. There is also a chamber in God, into which none other may enter excerpt you, the peculiarly unique person you are. There is no one else in the world like you. Never has been; never will be, God knows. There is no one else in the world like you. You are precious, God knows, and God uniquely loves you. Jesus says very intimately, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me.” “…I call every sheep by name.”[iv] Jesus has your name. Jesus knows your story.
[i] John 11:11-16.
[ii] John 14:1-7.
[iii] George MacDonald (1824-1905), from An Anthology of George MacDonald, edited by C. S. Lewis (1960).
[iv] John 10:1-5; 14.
John 8:21-30
When was the last time you walked into the ocean? Or sat on the sand with the surf washing up over you? Do you remember the force of the tide, the effort needed to maintain your footing or seat, to counter the push and pull of the current against your body so that you could remain planted in the sand, firm, upright? Do you remember saying to yourself, “Okay, now, I’ve got it,” just before a wave hit you and knocked you over?
Jesus’s listeners in today’s Gospel are trying to find their footing, to find a place to stand upright. “You will die in your sins unless you believe that I am he” (Jn 8:24). His listeners are desperate, pressing Jesus for details – so desperate that, even though they don’t understand what he is saying to them, nevertheless, “many believed in him” (Jn 8:30). But the current of Jesus’s truth will be too strong for them; by the end of this chapter, these same people who believed will try to stone Jesus (Jn 8:59). Their belief is without a firm foundation, unable to brace them against the next wave.
In his commentaries on Scripture, the medieval rabbi Rashi suggests that being is defined, in a sense, by finding a place to stand.[1] And not just being – but being in relation to our creator. Before the destruction of Sodom, Abraham “remained standing before the Lord” and attempted to save the city (Gen 18:22). At Mount Sinai, Moses “stood before [God] in the breach” (Ps 106:23) to turn away God’s anger from consuming the Israelites who worshipped the Golden Calf. We ourselves pray that God will “strengthen such as do stand.”[2] In finding a place to stand, then in our belief and faith, we are necessarily placing ourselves into dialogue with God. In standing, we seek to fulfill our purpose: not only to praise and honor God, but also, having been made in the image of God, to become cocreators, to become coworkers with God.
We can stand because we trust—we trust that God was, is, and will be just and faithful to his promises. “The one who sent me is true,” testifies Jesus to his listeners (Jn 8:26). “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is right?” Abraham asks the Lord before Sodom (Gen 18:25). “Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self,” Moses implores God at Sinai (Ex 32:13). We trust that God will be faithful to us, and that God’s faithfulness will be a stable platform beneath our feet.
And what is that faithfulness? As we listen to today’s Gospel, as we think about the foundation of our own belief in God’s saving power, we are also mindful that we are preparing to enter Jesus’s final week. In Holy Week God reveals God’s promise to heal us and the world in the faith of Jesus and in his crucifixion and resurrection. “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified,” Saint Paul writes to the Corinthians, “for the message about the cross . . . is the power of God” to us who are being saved (1 Cor 2:2, 1:18). God’s faithfulness is revealed in Jesus, in whom God “has delivered us from evil, and made us worthy to stand before” God.[3] Worthy to stand.
And so, God’s faithfulness leads us to the foot of the cross. We are led to the foot of the cross, worthy to stand with Mary, Jesus’s mother, and John, his beloved friend, to witness God’s redeeming, reconciling, healing, righteous love, worthy to join them in a new family of love. We are led to the foot of the cross, and we find there, finally, firm, stable ground on which our belief may rest and rise, a place where we may stand upright before and alongside our Lord and God.
Amen.
[1] Discussion in A. G. Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (New York, 1995), 6-7.
[2] From the Great Litany, BCP, p. 152.
[3] From Eucharistic Prayer B, BCP, p. 368.
Mark 8:27-34
The gospel reading today reminds us that God’s plan is greater than our own, and that faith in our Messiah will sustain us. Peter’s understanding of Jesus’ role as Messiah is completely upended when Jesus tells of the suffering, rejection, and death that He must face in order to fulfill his mission. Peter understood the Messiah to be a great king, who would free the Israelites from Roman occupation, and usher in a golden age for his people. But God’s plan for Peter and his people would not include the things that Peter so desperately longed for, and yet, the message of our Gospel is the good news that that God’s plan for restoring a divided and broken world is far greater than we can imagine. Paradoxically, we sometimes need to let go of our previous understandings, resting in the hope that we are an intrinsic part of the unfolding of God’s kingdom.
As Christians we seek to understand who Jesus is, and to trust in His plan for us, even when it flies in the face of what we expect, or of what we want. We seek to understand in truth, and not only from our limited human perspective, so that we avoid the error of “setting our mind not on divine things but on human things,” as Jesus says when he rebukes Peter. This is not easy to digest, because it means that our faith alone is sometimes all that we have to sustain us, to guide us along the right path. A life of faith is a life of continual growth, but not necessarily in the way we want or expect. God’s way is greater than our own, and divine things will always be beyond our comprehension. We can’t truly know what God is up to in our lives, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t take part in the divine plan for the renewal of all of God’s creation.
There is an incredible power and freedom that comes with our faith that Jesus Christ is the Messiah; it allows us to approach him in prayer with the assurance that our prayers are heard, and that we never struggle in vain. We so desperately long to do God’s will—and we so desperately long for God. Our desire to do God’s will is a sure sign that we are on the right track, even if we can’t figure out all the details. To trust Jesus, to know that God will never abandon us, to know that Christ’s plan for us is greater, better, fuller than our own; is essential to a life of faith. Like Peter, we don’t know exactly how God is using us to bring about His kingdom. And like Peter, Jesus will continually reveal himself to us in greater ways, if we are open to His message. We look to Jesus, and believe that our efforts are all done in the hope of His death and resurrection, born out of a mercy that is beyond our ability to fathom. We are the sacred children of God, and we put our hope in His son, the Messiah, the savior of the world.
Br. Curtis Almquist
Mark 6:1-6
Learned people were already impressed by the knowledge of this precocious Jesus by the time he was age 12, maybe earlier.[i] Now there is something more. He is age 30 or so, and now people are asking, “Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him?”[ii] In the New Testament epistles, Jesus is named “the wisdom of God.”[iii] He is called the one “in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden.”[iv] Wisdom and knowledge. Knowledge is about one’s breadth of information; wisdom is about one’s depth of understanding. Jesus had become wise.
The English words “wisdom” and “vision” come from the same etymological root. Wisdom is a kind of deep seeing, an “in-sight,” what Saint Paul calls “the enlightening of the eyes of the heart.”[v] Wisdom is not a skill, nor is wisdom learned from a book. Wisdom is a gift from God, a seedling implanted in our soul at birth that needs to be cultivated. Here are two practices that cultivate the gift of wisdom.
For one, it is fully accepting own our life, the life to which we have entrusted. I am not in any way suggesting we be passive victims toward what is inadmissible in life, nor accepting of what must be confronted and changed for our life’s sake or others’. However from the moment of our birth until the moment of our death, there are a growing number of things in each of our lives over which we have no control and cannot change.[vi] All of which provide the alchemy for wisdom. Wisdom comes in saying “yes” to our lives for what is and for what is unchangeable.
And secondly, we may cultivate wisdom by not squandering our mistakes and losses. So much wisdom is gleaned from composting what went bad in life. Deep down inside the dark hole of failure, of wrong-doing (ours and others’), of disappointment, of grief and suffering… deep, deep down in that pit of loss is not emptiness but rather a treasure which is waiting to be mined. The name of the treasure is “wisdom.” The scriptures say wisdom is better than gold.[vii]
What was going on with Jesus during those 20 “hidden” years – between age 12 and age 30 or so – when he was nowhere to be seen? The scriptures do not say. But his growing up must parallel our own. I presume that Jesus was as lost as many of us have been, and for long stretches of time. I presume that Jesus made as many mistakes as I have, as you have, in finding his way into life. I presume that Jesus was as clueless as you were, as I was, in claiming his identity and his destiny. Lots of bumbling. Some days, some years, I think young Jesus was an absolute mess. I don’t impugn sin upon Jesus, but I do presume plenty of mistakes and lots of confusion during Jesus’ hidden years. Jesus, as an adult, was no longer just knowledgeable. Jesus’ knowledge and power were now complemented by wisdom. Wisdom tempers knowledge and power with humility and compassion. Jesus was not intimidating; he was accessible, in quite a lowly way, and he was wise.[viii] Losses in life can yield such great gain.
From the early centuries in the Egyptian desert, Abbess Syncletica, a wise, holy woman, said that “those who want to light a fire first are plagued by smoke, and the smoke drives them to tears, yet finally they get the fire they want.”[ix]Out of the refiner’s fire of life comes wisdom. It is a gift. Wisdom is cultivated over time, and is purified by the crucible of life.
[i] Luke 2:41-52.
[ii] Mark 6:2.
[iii]1 Corinthians 1:24.
[iv] Colossians 2:3.
[v] Ephesians 1:18.
[vi] The great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) prayed: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that you will make all things right, if I surrender to your will; so that I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen.
[vii] Proverbs 16:16.
[viii] “For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). “[Jesus] emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself” (Philippians 2:7-8).
[ix] Abbess Syncletica, born into a prominent family in Alexandria, Egypt, in the first century, followed the witness of Saint Anthony. She went into the desert to fast, to pray, and to receive the seekers who sought her wisdom.
Fabian of Rome
Matthew 10:24-30
Fabian, whose feast we keep today, is probably not someone many of us spend time thinking about. Somewhat obscure, at least to our mind, he’s none the less a fascinating character, who intrigues me.
Born about the year 200, probably outside Rome, he became Bishop of Rome in the year 236 as a result of a series of accidents. Eusebius of Caesarea gives an account of his election.
Fabian, we are told, was visiting Rome the day the Roman Church was gathered to elect a new bishop. Curious, Fabian joined the crowd. Eusebius goes on to say: a large number of eminent and distinguished men were in the thoughts of many, Fabian, who was present, came to no one’s mind. But suddenly, it is said, a dove fluttered down from above and settled upon his head, plainly following the example of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Saviour in the form of a dove. At this, as if moved by one divine inspiration, with the utmost enthusiasm all the people with one soul cried out “he is worthy”, and then and there they took him and set him upon the bishop’s throne.[1]
Fabian went on to become an effective bishop for Rome and was martyred in the year 250 during the general persecution of Christians under the emperor Decian.
Curiously however, at the time of his election as bishop, Fabian was a stranger to Rome; was not one of the eminent or distinguished men being considered; was certainly not a priest or deacon; and was perhaps not even baptized. His election was thus either an accident, or an act of grace. Whatever it was, it was totally unexpected.
And that is what I find fascinating about Fabian, and perhaps most intriguing about God, for God often works in unexpected ways: a king born in a stable; a criminal raised from the dead; a sip of wine and a small piece of bread that nourishes the soul; women and men given the courage to face persecution and even death; the discovery of my own worth and value, no matter what has gone before. Over and again God works in surprising and unexpected, almost accidental ways. Yet the accident of faith is no accident. It is grace. It is grace and not accident that is found in the manger. It is grace and not accident that raised Jesus from the dead. It is grace and not accident that bread and wine become Body and Blood and nourish our souls. It is grace and not accident that gives martyrs the courage to face their death. It is grace and not accident that reveals to us our worth in the eyes of God.[2] It was grace and not accident that Fabian was chosen bishop.
Many, perhaps you, reflect on the accidents of your life. Fabian, however, invites us to reflect, not on the accidents of our life, but on the grace of it.
[1] Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, 6, 29: Loeb ii, 80 – 83
[2] See Matthew 10: 29 – 30
Luke 1:39-56
Mary must have been terrified to find out that she would give birth to and raise the Messiah, who was to be named Jesus. Mary’s response to God is a trusting and faithful one: Be it unto me according to your will. She then made the difficult journey through the Judean hill country to see her relative, Elizabeth. Elizabeth, miraculously pregnant with John the Baptist, feels the baby leap for joy in her womb, and she is filled with the Holy Spirit. This moment of recognition by another person, that what the angel had told her to come, was in fact true, must have been a moment of unbelievable joy. You can almost picture Mary as a teenage peasant girl, jumping for joy as she proclaims this prayer of praise and adoration, thanking God for fulfilling His promise of salvation for His people.
For Mary there is a profound recognition that the long-awaited Messiah was coming into the world; that He was growing in her womb. In this season of Advent, we await the coming of Christmas, where we celebrate and give thanks for the birth of God as a human being, among human beings, and we also, like Mary abide in the faith of the Lord’s promise to us – the coming of His kingdom into the world, where the errors of humanity will be reconciled through the Grace of Jesus Christ.
What does it mean for us, to proclaim the same joyous prayer as Mary herself did? It’s a prayer of exultant thanksgiving, thanksgiving for the indwelling God of our salvation. Mary was literally growing God the Son in her womb, but we can humbly petition God, as we do in the Angelus – “be it unto me according to your word,” and ask Christ to increase within us. We await the coming of Jesus Christ, and we believe that when He returns He will create a new heaven and a new earth. We don’t know if we will live to see it, but like our ancestors, we maintain hope, and we spread the Good News, the hope of the Second Coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. By doing so, we allow Him to work through us to bring about His kingdom on earth – just as He did through Mary.
Mary’s response to God was an ecstatic “YES!” from the depth of her soul, trusting in God’s goodness and in the fulfillment of His promises. During this Advent season, I encourage you to pray with the Magnificat and ask yourself, “what is God asking of me?” “What is God asking me to fully embrace with joy and gratitude?” When we ask Jesus this question, and hope for a response, either as an inner knowingness, or perhaps as some external sign, we can be certain that whatever our Lord asks of us, He does so knowing that what he has planned for His children is far better than we could ever hope for or imagine. Amen
Matthew 7:21-27
In the Gospel today, Jesus exhorts both the crowd and his disciples to live a life of faith that is “founded on rock.” The analogy that Jesus gives us is to build the foundation of one’s house upon the solid rock which lays far beneath the softer levels of sandstone above it. Jesus is telling us that so much of what we believe holds up and maintains our lives and our societies, are in fact nothing more than shifting sands, that we must dig past, deeper, and deeper, until we reach the solid core of God’s deep love for us; the true source of salvation, of unity, and of life everlasting. This is the rock upon which Jesus calls us to trust in, to build our life of faith on.
Faith, is anything but easy. In this world that has fallen so far from God’s original plan of peace, generosity, and unity – where the innocent suffer exploitation and oppression, where war, violence, and abject cruelty are the lived experiences of the majority of God’s children – it’s easy to lose hope. When we feel our faith lacking, when we feel that we can’t trust in Jesus’ promise of liberation for the oppressed, when we feel hopelessness as we look at the state of the world, we must keep digging. When we read the newspaper, and our senses tell us, surely God is not here, we must maintain our faith in the Good News of Jesus Christ. If we fall prey to hopelessness, how can He use us to build up His kingdom which is to come? He needs us to fulfill His earthly mission; to continue His work.
Faith in the Gospel means that we take Jesus at His word; that we truly trust in His teachings, and apply them to our lives. The path of nonviolence, praying for one’s enemies, humility, non-judgmentalism, feeding and clothing the poor, these concrete moral imperatives bind us to one another and to Jesus Christ, in a community of faith. These concrete actions are the hard work upon which we build on God’s love, so that our prayer life merges with our lived experience. We are not powerless. There is always hope because we believe in Jesus Christ. The world we long for is the world that Jesus seeks to create through us – a world of peace, of justice, of the liberation of mankind. This is not wishful thinking: it’s His promise to us.
Living a life of faith is difficult, yet Jesus assures us that He is with us, and that to trust in him, and carry out the Will of God, will result in our salvation. Trust in Christ: cling fast to His Gospel. We must trust that our deep and abiding faith in Christ cannot fail us. Faith in Christ’s message is our rock and salvation, the foundation upon which we build our lives as believers. Lord Jesus, we pray for the grace to truly hear your voice in our lives, that we may respond with a life of steadfast faith in your Gospel, and in-so-doing, carry out your will in the world. Amen
“It seems that “softening” and “allowing” are vital elements in the practice of Christian endurance. To put it another way: there is a subtle interplay between striving and trusting, with the accent on trust. Trust calls forth a softening and allowing of reality as it is even as striving calls for a firmness or rootedness in the face of immense pressure.”
Br. Keith Nelson teases out the complex interplay of the Christian call to endurance and striving, which find their fullest expression in trust.
“Even when God’s ways are hidden from us, and God seems to be silent in the face of our trouble, we hold fast, believing and trusting in the goodness and power of God, and confident that God’s love will win out over evil. Never stop loving. Never stop believing. Never stop trusting. Work tirelessly. And never, ever give up.”
In the ongoing wake of unspeakable tragedy, Br. David Vryhof points us toward toward love, belief, trust, and hard work. Keep going.
“It is too easy to see the Resurrection in human terms, an event that reveals a God whose omnipotence is characterized by all the ways human beings conceive of omnipotence. Yes, God is big and strong and powerful. But not in the ways our hearts have been trained to conceive of such attributes.”
Br. Sean Glenn separates the power of God, revealed in the Resurrection, from those human forms of power that seek to dominate.
“Are there humble, ordinary gestures that the crucified and risen Jesus has used to show you the nature of God? Have you become distracted from the pattern of light by the dissatisfied ache for an epiphany? Jesus offers a profound reassurance and a further invitation to Philip, and to us, today: 'If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.'”
Br. Keith Nelson beckons us toward Jesus and the long, slow work of conversion as we see, in his prismatic glory, the Light of God.
“It was seeing Jesus’ body, in all its brokenness and woundedness which brought Thomas to belief. But this beautiful story is not a story of proof but a story of love. For me, the story of Thomas is not primarily a story of a sceptic who comes to believe because his list of doubts is answered; not an intellectual assent to something proven. The story of Thomas is rather the story of a man who comes to believe not because he has enough proof, but because he has actually touched the mystery of divine, self-sacrificial love.”
In this sermon on Thomas, Br. Geoffrey urges us to listen to our gut and heart, not our head, as we encounter the Lord.
“For the Christian, the resurrection of Jesus challenges the notion that death is the ultimate disaster, for in Jesus, life is changed, not ended, and death becomes not the end, but a door, not a wall, but a gate, not the end, but a new beginning.”
On All Souls Day, Br. James Koester celebrates the audacious, bold truth that Christians claim even in the face of death's reality: that the dead are raised to life.
“I was a teenager when I found it. A simple silver cross only about an inch and half tall. Plain, unadorned, simple slightly rounded arms smooth and finely wrought. I found it in a little silver shop in an old mining town in Colorado. I wore it for years, first on a little box chain, then re-strung a few times, leather cords, braided hemp, wooden beads, but always that simple silver cross around my neck. It was, beyond language, a token of great importance for me. Something that I couldn’t articulate at the time, an attraction, a reminder, an anchor ... That’s perhaps one of the first times I found the power of the cross.”
On Holy Cross Day, Br. Todd Blackham invites us to consider the protection, joy, solace, wonder, refreshment, and power of the cross of Christ.
“All of us, at one time or another, have experienced setbacks in life. Joseph’s example today inspires us to look beyond these setbacks and apparent obstacles to see and trust God’s faithfulness.”
“We can take courage to make the leap of faith when the time is right. You see, it’s one thing to be sent and it’s another thing to actually go. It’s one thing to see the works, and another to do them.”
Br. Todd Blackham encourages us to lean on the loving, prayerful support of those who have walked the path ahead of us, encouraging us to make the leap or faith, to do the works of love that we have seen in Jesus.
“How many times have I sat, head in my hands, wondering what on earth to do, being twisted and turned by the demons of doubt, insecurity, fear, avoidance, the list goes on. You have seen that in me. You have seen that in yourself. ”
Br. James Koester looks to the shadowy Scriptural figure of Joseph for guidance on how to avoid the voices that twist our hearts, listening instead for the voices that fill us with hope on God's promises.