Br. David Vryhof

The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 15C)

Isaiah 5:1-7

The message of Christianity is a message of love. We declare that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:16) and that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” to rescue us from death and grant us new life (Jn 3:16). We believe that Jesus, the Son of God, “became flesh and lived among us” (Jn 1:14) to reveal to us the God of love, the God he knew and loved intimately from before all time, and that he summoned us to live in loving union with God and with one another, serving and caring for one another with genuine affection. In Christianity, the message is all about love.

The Scriptures that are at the heart of our faith have a lot to say about love, but the love of which they speak is not always a warm, cuddly love. Love, when it is rooted in truth, doesn’t always wrap us in its arms and protect us. Sometimes it does the opposite: it exposes us, confronts us, and makes us uncomfortable. Jesus spoke the truth in love – to his disciples, to the religious and secular leaders of his day, and even to his enemies – and it wasn’t always pretty.

We see that “tough love” at work in our first lesson today. Isaiah 5 begins as a love song – not about Isaiah’s love for God, but about God’s love for his as-yet-unidentified “vineyard.” We are told that God (the “beloved”) showered his love upon this vineyard: selecting a fertile hillside, cultivating the soil and clearing the land, planting the very best vines, building hedges and a watch tower to protect it from human and animal invaders, and digging a winepress where the grapes could be processed into wine and stored for future use. In creating this vineyard, the beloved spared no effort or expense; he did everything possible to guarantee a fruitful crop.

But here the love song turns sour. After all that loving attention and hard labor, God expected his vineyard to yield abundant and flavorful grapes – but he finds instead that it has produced wild grapes – sour, inedible, “stinking” grapes.

In his disappointment, he asks, “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” (v. 3). There’s no good answer to that question, no good reason why the object of God’s love would yield repulsive, stinking fruit.

It seems the only thing to be done is to destroy it and this, it seems, is what God intends to do. But this is a metaphor and now its meaning is made clear. “The vineyard is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting” (v. 7). In other words, YOU – Israel and Judah, God’s chosen people – are the vineyard that produced these stinky grapes!

The rich and juicy grapes that God wanted were justice and righteousness; instead, what God discovered was the exact opposite. Instead of justice God found bloodshed; instead of righteousness he found the cries of the oppressed.

Seminary Professor Scott Hoezee describes the context in which Isaiah is writing:

“Israel had a form of justice, but it was justice for the few, the wealthy, the lucky “winners” of society. Most of what the upper crust had was ill-gotten gain; it was built upon the shed blood of the poor. Some of the people looked very righteous, very pious – they went to the Temple, observed the Sabbath, prayed now and again. Yet their ears were deaf to the cries of distress which God’s ears picked out very easily. Instead of being the locus of justice, the Temple became a shelter for the elite whose walls were used to keep them from hearing the cries of the needy.”[i]

This is a message of love that undoubtedly made its hearers uncomfortable, and that should make us just as uncomfortable. To what extent has the Church become “a shelter for the elite whose walls [are] used to keep [us] from hearing the cries of the needy”? What else – the pace of our lives? our obsession with technology? our consumerism and materialism? our political infighting? our decision to put ourselves and our needs first? – what else might be keeping us from “hearing the cries of the needy?”

What is the “justice and righteousness” that God was looking for? It is clear throughout the Hebrew Scriptures that justice involved far more than punishing criminals. Crimes carried punishments in ancient Israel, of course, but the “justice” that Isaiah and the prophets spoke about had to do with dealing fairly with others and protecting society’s most vulnerable members.

The “righteousness” that the prophets called for was not about pious behavior; it was about “doing right” towards the weakest members of society.

One phrase occurs again and again throughout the Scriptures: “the widow, the orphan and the alien.” Moses and the prophets made it abundantly clear that God was especially concerned with women who had lost their husbands, with children who had lost their parents, and with the “strangers within your gates,” immigrants and refugees who had lost their homes and their homelands. These people could easily fall through the cracks. The prophets insisted that God cared passionately about them and that it was the duty of the people of God to care for them and protect them.

In his prophecy Isaiah names several specific ways in which Judah perpetrated injustice: (1:23) they failed to defend the cause of the widow and orphan, (1:29) they coveted and stored up wealth for themselves, (3:14-15), they oppressed the poor, (5:23) they acquitted the guilty and deprived the innocent of their rights. These acts of injustice are the stinky fruit to which this parable refers.

The words of love here are sharp and direct. They pierce the conscience and expose the hidden depths of the soul. “I wanted you to produce the rich fruits of justice and righteousness on earth;” God says, “that is why I worked so hard on your behalf. But you failed to fulfill my purpose. You chose to live only for yourselves. You neglected the poor and the vulnerable. You turned your back on the stranger and ignored the cries of the needy.”

What then shall we do, as privileged as we are?

The first thing is to train ourselves to be mindful of the needs of the neglected. To consider their plight. To question and resist the forces that contribute to their oppression. To look for opportunities to align ourselves with their cause.

The great spiritual leader of India, Mahatma Gandhi, once suggested that when we consider any course of action we should first imagine a very poor person and ask ourselves, How will this action affect them?

In our community’s Rule of Life we admit that “the security we enjoy as a community makes us strangers to the precariousness and destitution that are the lot of the poor.” It goes on to suggest that because of this, “we must continually watch for signs that God is calling us to live and work with those who endure the hardships of material poverty. Even when our work among God’s poor is limited in scope we should be their allies in every way.” The Rule calls us to “ruthless self-examination as to our real solidarity with the poor.” It insists that “we are to commit ourselves to advocacy for the poor, and the struggle to restore to them their just share of power and the bounty of God.”[ii]

This, friends, is the standard by which we, too, will be judged. Recall the words of Jesus:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory… he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats… (T)he king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me…”

When the righteous ask when it was that they did this, the king will reply,

“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Mt 25:31-46)

As we said at the beginning, “It’s all about love.”

[i] Scott Hoezee, Commentary on Isaiah 5:1-7; Center for Excellence in Preaching.

[ii] The Rule of the Society of St John the Evangelist, p.15.

Br. Jamie Nelson

Matthew 19:13-15

In this gospel passage, parents bring their young children to be blessed by Jesus.

Initially, the disciples try to shoo the children away. Perhaps the gatekeeping disciples want to protect their teacher’s time and energy for meetings with people they deem more important. Conversations like the ones that Jesus has with a group of religious thought leaders and with a wealthy prospective disciple, the two events which bookend this story in the text.

However, Jesus stops the disciples, saying, “Let the children come to me and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.”[1]

What does it mean when Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven belongs to young children and to the people like them?

Jesus is reminding his followers and us that the kingdom of heaven will look much different than the vision of it we can dream up with our earthly ideals of self-made success, pride, and accomplishment.

Children in Jesus’s culture had no political power or social status, thus making it easy for them to become invisible, ignored, and to be deemed insignificant by the disciples in this story. Yet they were welcomed and blessed by Jesus all the same. They didn’t earn Jesus’s attention or love, but he freely gave it anyway.

The children who Jesus welcomed and blessed were too young to contribute much productive labor towards earthly ideals of success and accomplishment. They were dependent on others to put food on the table and to keep a roof over their heads. Yet Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven belongs to them and to those like them.

Who are those like them? The children who Jesus welcomed and blessed were, in many ways, like another group of people in Jesus’s time and before, the people referred to in the Hebrew Bible as the anawim, meaning “meek,” “lowly,” or “humble.”[2]

They were people who because of poverty or marginalization, had little power themselves, and chose to put their trust and hope in God’s mercy and justice. They were people like today’s psalmist, who penned the first line of Psalm 16: “Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge.” They were people like Jesus’s mother Mary, whose words of trust and hope in God we proclaim each night at Evening Prayer as we chant the Magnificat.

Who are the anawim in our world today? They might be from families displaced from their homes by fires, floods, war, or humanitarian disasters. They might be refugees and asylum seekers at our borders, or ordinary people caught up in political battles over immigration. They might be vulnerable or marginalized people of all sorts, overlooked by the powerful, yet powerfully loved by God.

Whoever they are, Jesus is clear: “Let the children come to me and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.”

So how to pray with this story? Here’s one suggestion:

One of the riches of the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer is the Baptismal Covenant, which includes five invitations for how Christians are called to live out our faith.[3] The liturgy includes these lines:

To which we respond, “yes, with God’s help.”

With God’s help, as you live out your baptismal vocation today, say yes to the vision of the kingdom of heaven Jesus proclaims here.

[1] Matthew 19:14

[2] ELCA Pastor Dan Erlander’s booklet Manna and Mercy (1992) introduced me to the concept of the anawim (עֲנָוִים):  http://danielerlander.com/manna.html

[3] https://www.episcopalchurch.org/what-we-believe/baptismal-covenant/

Br. Keith Nelson

The Dormition of Saint Mary the Virgin, Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ

By the time of Jesus, the bodily resurrection of the faithful at a future time appointed by God had become a significant strand in Jewish belief, especially among the Pharisees, but also among the common people. For example, after the death of Lazarus in John’s gospel, Jesus tells Martha of Bethany, “Your brother will rise again,” to which she replies, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” In addition to this pre-Christian belief in a general resurrection, there were prominent figures both within and outside of Scripture who were said to have been “taken up” into God’s presence. The prophet Elijah is the most explicit example, taken up to God at the end of his life by angels in a fiery chariot. In the case of Moses, there is room for mystery: In the book Deuteronomy, Moses “was buried in the a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, but no one knows his burial place to this day.” A non-canonical, first-century Jewish text, the Assumption of Moses, seems to imply that Moses was taken up by God after his death, but then asserts that, like him, there would likewise be a future assumption of the entire people of Israel, following the example of Moses.  Moses becomes a representative figure: in his total self-offering to God, the people of Israel have found, and will further find, the consummation of God’s purpose for them.

The pious legends that flowered among the faithful surrounding the death of Mary of Nazareth, whose principle feast we keep today, stand in deep continuity with these older Jewish traditions. Naturally, the early church interpreted Mary’s life and death through the foundational events of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Most of these accounts read like exercises in imaginative remembering. They ponder what the shape and purpose of Mary’s life must have been like after Jesus, dying on the cross, entrusted her to the care of St. John the Evangelist, and her role in encouraging the apostles and other disciples. They remember a second angelic visit by Gabriel, communicating to her that her death and reunion with her Son and Lord are close at hand. They remember the apostles, spread throughout the world preaching the gospel, snatched up by the Holy Spirit and miraculously assembled around her death bed. They remember the descent of Christ from the heavens to receive Mary’s soul into his own arms; they remember her peaceful bodily death and entombment; her bodily resurrection after three days; and finally, her being taken up into heaven, amid much rejoicing by the angelic hosts.

The assumption is almost the Marian corollary of the ascension of Jesus – with one crucial distinction. Christ’s transition into eternity is, in Greek, an “anabasis” – a “going up,” relying upon the agency of the one going – while Mary’s is an “analepsis” – a “taking up” that relies upon the agency of God.

There are several potential stumbling blocks to getting into the “moods and motivations” of this Marian feast.

The first is that it is found nowhere in the canon of Scripture. For Episcopalians, who believe that Scripture “contains all things necessary to salvation,” today’s feast may seem a little over the top, an exercise in gilding an otherwise perfectly adequate lily.

To this I might ask: When you consider all the activities you take part in on a daily basis, the relationships you cultivate, and the innocent or beautiful or edifying things you simply enjoy, how many are strictly necessary? If necessity were our only criterion for life’s endeavors, would there be music? Or art? Or poetry? What about snacks? Or birdwatching? Or kissing? Or the rest and refreshment that come from sitting and doing nothing?

Our “life of faith” should not occupy a box so far outside our so-called “ordinary life” that the same questions don’t apply. There is room for principled elaboration on the story of salvation, even if the only point is that it adds color, flavor, and texture to our souls. The Jewish tradition has called this midrash. And like midrash, such elaboration flourishes in an atmosphere of freedom, when there is room for interpretations that move in different directions; that imagine the narrative details from multiple perspectives; even stories that disagree.

Such multivalent storytelling retains its integrity because it remains tethered to the community of the faithful. If it is led by the Spirit, it always leads us back to the Gospel story, and our shared storyteller, Jesus.

Another cause for suspicion may well be the place of the Assumption in Roman Catholic tradition. It seems clear that, by the fourth century, there existed a widespread Christian belief that there was indeed something special about the death of St. Mary, and worthy of the Church’s remembrance. However, in 1950, Pope Pius XII took the step of declaring Mary’s assumption a dogma of the Catholic faith: a doctrine requiring the belief of the faithful. To many who share the Anglican heritage, as well as other Protestants, this has seemed a theological overdetermination, putting too fine a point on something essentially mysterious.

On this, I will only speak for myself. I am the type of Episcopalian who – in keeping with our Society’s tradition – has a high degree of enthusiasm for the role of St. Mary in the ongoing life of the Church. I regularly bring her my cares and concerns for the world in prayer. I ask for her loving intercession. I look to her as a model of courageous faith in times of personal challenge. I make time for my friendship with her, because from her I learn more about her Son. With her help, I become better a better disciple and friend of Jesus.

I am personally most suspicious when Mary, the mother of Jesus, becomes a mascot: a representative figure, but of only one tradition within the Church universal, or of one party within a tradition. When St. Mary becomes a patroness of scrupulous boundaries and tidy divisions among Christians, I usually ask: Is this the Mary of Luke’s magnificat? Is this the Mary who says boldly of God, “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly?” Is this the Mary from whom Jesus learned to cross the boundaries of ritual purity to touch the hearts and bodies of those deemed unworthy to participate in God’s covenant love?

And I know that there are Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians who share my suspicion, or are sympathetic to it, in whole or in part.

It must also be acknowledged that Marian mascot-making has extended itself just as easily to Protestants, for whom rejection of Marian devotion has too often meant rejection of Roman Catholics. No side is pure and blameless. Prayer for the healing of these divisions is the sacred duty of every Christian.

Just as Jesus belongs to his entire Body, the Church at all times and in all places, his human mother Mary belongs to all Christians. Mary, the mother of God, is Mary, the Mother of the Church. This title is one of the true ecumenical gifts to emerge from the second Vatican Council. If Mary is seen as a representative of the entire Church; and her death the model of a trusting, faithful, final act of self-surrender into the hands of her Redeemer; then her reunion with Christ, her Son and Lord, in both body and soul are a prefiguration. They are a promise of the consummate joy with which we shall all be crowned when God gathers all things to himself, and Christ is “all in all.”

To put it simply, if the dormition and assumption were only about a very special woman called Mary of Nazareth, then this would be a strange way to spend a Friday evening. Like every feast of the Church, the Spirit uses these mysteries to teach us something essential about our own journey into God.

In the words of Anglican theologian John MacQuarrie:

“…the Assumption is not a once-for-all event to be dated to a moment in past history, but a continuing process which is going on at this very moment…The Assumption is a ‘theological event,’ for a theological event is not tied to a moment of time. It can take effect and be present at all times. The Assumption began when there occurred the dormition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but it continues throughout the history of the Church and it will be complete only when the Church is fully united with its Lord, as the body with its Head, and his glory is manifest in all.”

Holy Mary, mother of the Church, pray for us: that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. Amen.

Br. Jack Crowley

Luke 12:32-40

Two summers ago, my Brother Lain and I went backpacking through the White Mountains. Now if you know anything about the White Mountains, you know they are beautiful and they are humbling. We experienced both.

On our last night of backpacking, it rained. It was not a gentle mist. It was a loud, thick rain. It gave new meaning to the experience of soaking in mother nature.

As I went to bed that night inside my tent on my inflatable sleeping pad, I fell asleep to that wonderful sound of heavy rain hitting every inch of my tent. I was safe, I was comfortable, and I slept soundly…until about 2:30 in the morning when a weird noise woke me up. The noise sounded like air escaping. Pssssssssss.

I was so tired from hiking and groggy from sleeping so deeply, it took me several seconds to realize that I was flat on my back against the hard wood tent platform. My inflatable sleeping pad had sprung a leak!

I panicked and spent the next twenty minutes trying to find the leak in hopes of maybe being able to patch it, but in the confines of my small tent with rain pounding all around me, I failed. I laid back down and felt my back get even damper with a mixture of sweat and the condensation on the tent floor. Suddenly, I wasn’t so warm and comfortable any more. I knew I had about three hours until sunrise. It was raining too hard to go outside, so literally there was nothing I could do. I was utterly powerless. The only thing I could do was wait and be ready for sunrise.

The strangest thing about that night was that I was oddly happy. There’s a thin space between powerlessness and freedom. That night in my powerlessness, I simply felt free to be ready for the dawn, and knew that being ready and waiting was the only thing I could do. I was so happy that I actually fell sound asleep and it was already sunny again by the time I woke up.

We spend a fair amount of our lives waiting in powerlessness. We wait for one thing to end and wait for another thing to begin. We wait for our problems to be solved. We wait for prayers to be answered. We wait for people to change. We wait and we hope that somehow God is intervening in the meantime.

Yet we all know that while we wait, we are rarely quiet. We dream and scheme while we wait. We plot out our lives like moves on a chess board. We say things to ourselves like once this thing ends, then my life will really begin. We strategize our moves as best we can, yet inevitably we come across powerlessness. Moments in our lives when there’s no momentum, no moves to make, and no more movies to imagine in our head.

Sometimes these pockets of powerlessness can feel suffocating. We may get desperate for action, any action, some juice to power ourselves out of this rut. We may feel pinned down and crucified by problems we face. We may think to ourselves I should do something.

In these moments of powerlessness, we focus so much on what we should do, that we often forget about what we should be. Consider for a moment if every time you asked God what you should do, you also asked God how you should you be? What if instead of focusing on doing actions in times of powerlessness, you focused on states of being, like being patient, being charitable, being forgiving, or even being joyful? What if for one day you thought more about how you should be than what you should do?

In our Gospel this morning, Jesus emphasizes this importance of being, especially the importance being ready for God. Being ready, not doing ready. Being ready for God no matter what the circumstance.

We all know what it feels like to be ready for God. We’ve all had some taste of it. It’s a feeling of sharpness, but not viciousness. It’s a feeling of clarity, but not arrogance. It’s a feeling of looseness, but certainly not dullness. To be ready for God is somewhere in the middle of us all, we all know it, we all have access to it, and it is up to us to seek it with God’s help.

Last summer, in fact exactly one year ago today,  I stood a few feet away from where I am right now and made my life vows to SSJE. I stood surrounded by my dear Brothers, with my ever growing Irish Catholic family in these seats, and I promised my life to this monastery.

The truth is that whole day was a joyful blur, I barely remember any of it. However, there was one line from my profession vows that has always stuck with me. That line was me promising “…that life profession inaugurates a lifetime of developing response.”

A lifetime of developing response. In other words, I will have the freedom and responsibility to practice being ready for God even when I feel stuck in a metaphorical tent. We all get that same freedom, to practice being ready for God even when, and maybe even especially when, it feels impossible.

One year ago when I made my life vows, I also vowed to be present at another ceremony here in this chapel. Hopefully this ceremony won’t happen until many, many summers from now. At that ceremony I will yet again be surrounded by my Brothers and will yet again have a hopefully even larger Irish Catholic family in attendance. At that ceremony I will be on my back a few feet from where I’m standing right now, hopefully resting comfortably in my casket.

We have a whole lifetime to practice being ready for God. This does not mean that our task is not urgent. The call of God is present, here, now, and even stronger in the most absurd, gory, and tragic circumstances of our world.

As Jesus so clearly said, the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. We have no idea what’s going to happen. We are utterly powerless over the future, waiting for that promised dawn. Yet somewhere in that powerlessness is inexplicable joy and somewhere in that powerlessness is inexplicable freedom. We all know it, we all feel it, and it’s up to us with God’s help to be it.

Br. Lucas Hall

Dominic

“The last act is the greatest treason; to do the right deed for the wrong reason.” These famous words of T.S. Eliot make plain a fairly straightforward truth: that external appearances of good, motivated by evil, are not actually good. Eliot didn’t invent this; how often the psalms decry those “who speak peaceably with their neighbors, while strife is in their hearts,”[i] or lament “presumptuous sins” and “secret faults.”[ii] How often Christ himself speaks of one’s motives, attitudes, and internal dispositions as equivalent to one’s external deeds, describing lust as adultery and hatred as murder,[iii] while insisting that those who fast and give alms while publicly advertising their piety have no reward with God, for they have already received their reward of public acclaim, which was their true intention.[iv]

This necessity of linking our good external actions and our good internal intentions is appropriate for this day, as we commemorate St. Dominic, the founder of the so-called Dominican Order, or more properly, the Order of Preachers. There is much I could say about his biography, but I will focus on a few bits; as a young priest in the early 1200s, he encountered the Cathar movement, a religious sect with gnostic beliefs, a dualistic conception of the universe that deemed physical existence as a curse and imprisonment for beings of spirit and light, and sought by fasting, prayer, and good deeds to find escape and release from the curse of physical existence. These Cathars gained a great following, often because of their great devotion. This conflict began with words, but ended with violence; Cathar sympathizers assassinated a local representative of the Pope, beginning years of retaliatory violent persecution. So this was the scene Dominic saw before him; a Church that had been morally and pastorally lax, and a sect that was very devotionally serious but had a view that rendered all the good things of God as evil, all the while cities were growing as more people moved from the countryside and old models of pastoral ministry weren’t providing the needed formation and support for these people. Dominic was concerned.

And so he launched forth with a new order, dedicated to preaching, teaching, and pastoral care. Related to monastic orders, in its devotion to prayer and penance among its members, and related to the non-monastic clergy, in its practice of outside ministry, but structured in such a way that was more flexible than either of those two other groups, to meet the dynamic, shifting needs of the local populations.

I say “needs,” but Dominic excelled at bridging the gap between our needs, plural, shifting based on context, different between individual people and even changing within the same person day-by-day, and our need, singular, universal, and for God, the ability to offer ourselves fully to God. We offer ourselves fully by offering intense action, giving our efforts to fasting and alms, works of piety and works of charity; we also offer ourselves fully by offering deep devotion, sincerity of heart, a spirit of love and affirmation that God, all that God has made, are good. It is nothing more and nothing less than the love of God with our whole heart, the love of neighbor as ourselves, in thought, word, and deed. It is the right deed, for the right reason.

[i] Psalm 28

[ii] Psalm 19

[iii] Matthew 5:21-28

[iv] Matthew 6:1-5

Br. Lain Wilson

The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Luke 9:28-36

One of the things I love most about this Chapel is the play of light and color. It changes seasonally, daily, hourly. The deep orange that appears in the afternoon, the jewel tones of the Lady Chapel, and, most importantly for me, the revealing of the faces in our clerestory windows as the sun rises. Dark texture ever so gradually gives way to brilliant color and light, and I can see the faces of our monastic forbears. These faces, these colors, are always there, but it was only this illumination that allows me to see them.

Today is the feast of the Transfiguration, when we recall Jesus’ journey to the mountaintop with three chosen disciples, there revealed to them in glory. The sign of this is visual – his changed appearance, face and clothing. The disciples, for the first time, are able to see Jesus as he truly is.

When I first encountered this story, I’ll admit I was a bit let down. I knew, somehow, that it was a big deal – perhaps clued in by the heading it got in my Bible. But the details were odd, at least to the modern, Western imagination. I remember feeling like a commercial for bleach had crept into the biblical narrative.

What changed for me was encountering the long tradition that the most important transformation in the story was not Jesus’, but the disciples’. Jesus may have appeared transfigured, but only because the disciples were made to see what was already there. Like the light through our windows, the Holy Spirit transformed the disciples to see what was there all along. To see that all that surrounded them was already charged with the glory of God.

Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann, in his extended essay from over sixty years ago For the Life of the World, called out our tendency to create divisions: spiritual vs. material, sacred vs. profane. I would add here not only how we impose lines in our relationship with God, but within our world, and between each other. Nature vs. culture, domestic vs. foreign, us vs. them. “The world is a fallen world,” Schmemann writes, “because it has fallen away from the awareness that God is all in all.”[1]

The awareness, in other worlds, that the glory of God glimpsed by the disciples on the mountaintop, was not a one-time, one-place thing – but rather a glory that suffuses creation. A glory dwelling in the silent hearts of those we meet: friends and neighbors, strangers and enemies.

Schmemann concludes: “It is only when, in the darkness of this world, we discern that Christ has already ‘filled all things with Himself,’ that those things, whatever they may be, are revealed and given to us as full of meaning and beauty. A Christian is the one who, wherever he looks, finds everywhere Christ, and rejoices in Him.”[2]

There is so much darkness in our world: so much suffering, so much hatred, so much division. The transforming power revealed in the Transfiguration reminds us that even in the darkest places, God’s glory abides. Even in the most silent hearts, God’s glory dwells. Even where divisions are most rancorous, God’s glory nevertheless is there, filling and bridging and mending all things – truly there, if only we have eyes transformed to see.

Amen.

[1] A. Schmemann, For the Life of the World (New York, 1963), 5.

[2] Ibid., 86.

Br. Curtis Almquist

Matthew 15:1-2, 10-14

Jesus was a Pharisee.[i] We cannot know this for sure; however, Jesus was not a priest, so he was certainly not a Sadducee. And given how much Jesus enjoyed dinner parties and the company of women, he was certainly not an Essene, who were monastics in the desert. And given he was not a warrior, he was certainly not in the company of the Zealots. If we presume he had been formed by the Pharisees, this helps explain why the Pharisees get so much press from Jesus, often bad press. Jesus knew Pharisees inside out.

Pharisees were very attractive to multitudes of people. They were rigorous in their observance of the Sabbath and days of festival, of tithing, and of dietary practices. They believed that bad things happened to bad people; they believed in angels; they believed in the bodily resurrection of the dead, in the coming of a Messiah, and the ingathering of God’s faithful at the end of time.[ii]  Pharisees were single-minded in their devotion to God, every day devoting set hours for study, work, and rest.[iii] They knew they were “right,” which means “righteous” in a religious sense.[iv] Especially in a time of anxiety and political unrest, the Pharisees attracted many followers. They were compelling conservatives … which may sound familiar to today.

The Pharisees’ issue with Jesus’ disciples not handwashing before meals was about spiritual hygiene. One could become spiritually soiled in a marketplace by touching an unclean person or unclean thing. That contact would render impure the food the Pharisee subsequently touched. Pharisees washed their hands before, during, and after eating, thereby retaining purity, undefiled. Clearly, Jesus knew about this handwashing practice. Jesus turns the principle of the practice inside out saying, “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.”

Jesus decries the Pharisees’ keeping up appearances, meanwhile their oblivion to what was going on inside their souls – their arrogance, their damning judgment of those not like them, their indifference to the poor and needy, the “other” people whom Jesus knew also have a place in the heart of God.

The Pharisaical movement died out, but not the fuel rod. We witness today the genocide happening in Gaza and the Sudan; the insidious racism in our own country, the forcible extraction of people who are resident aliens, the building of yet more prisons to make the unwanted disappear. People clinging to their personal power often wash their hands of poor, powerless people.

And yet there is another group of “arch conservatives” with whom I can readily identify. This other group of conservatives are those who in actuality are liberals, liberals who have little-to-no tolerance or respect for anyone who sees things differently. “Conservative liberals.”

Our baptismal pledge to “respect the dignity of every human being” means, at the very least, to listen to one another.[v] It is very difficult to listen when one is dodging stones. And we should hear Jesus’ words to “love our enemies,” which he said in a political context very similar to the upheaval in our own country and our world.[vi] Love our enemies, or at least to pray for love for our enemies. They will certainly not change-for-the-better by our hate. Alongside our prayer and our listening, we must also work for what we can do on behalf of the least, and the last, and the lowly – the anguished multitudes of our own country and our world – to redress the injustice, poverty, and unconscionable suffering which is their daily bread.

[i] The New Testament scholar, Raymond Brown, S.S.: An Introduction to the New Testament (1997), p. 80. Brown quotes Rabbi Harvey Falk in Jesus the Pharisee; A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus (1985), who sees Jesus as a Pharisee of the Hillel persuasion.

[ii] This according to Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J.: The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to Luke 1-9, (1981), p. 581.

[iii] The Order of Carmelites – www.ocarm.org/lectio – on Luke 11:37-41.

[iv] The etymology of the word “righteous” comes from the Old English rihtwis: morally right persons, just, upright, sinless, conforming to divine law.

[v] “The Baptismal Covenant” in The Book of Common Prayer (1979), pp. 304-305.

[vi] Matthew 5:43-48; Luke 6:27-36.

Br. James Koester

Hosea 11:1-11

I must confess to being caught off guard early last week when I looked at the lessons appointed for today. Much can be and has been said (including, I noted, by me!) about the readings from Colossians and Luke. What caught me off guard was that I was immediately drawn, not to either of the New Testament lessons, but by the lesson from Hosea. It’s not something I would normally be drawn to, after all, Hosea is sometimes referred to as the prophet of doom. Jokes aside, doom and gloom are not my natural tendencies. I usually try to see the best in people and situations, and not the worst.

Hosea, on the other hand, who lived and wrote about 800 years before the life of Jesus was constantly predicting doom for the people of Israel. And he had reason to do so. For decades the political, social, cultural and religious life of Israel had been in decline. Its kings were corrupt. Its inhabitants were immoral. Its priests had turned away from the worship of God. In all the land there [was] no faithfulness or loyalty and no knowledge of God….[1] It was no wonder then, prophesied Hosea, that the thief breaks in and the bandits raid outside.[2] It all came to a bitter, crushing end in 722 BC when the Kingdom of Isreal was defeated and occupied by the Assyrians setting in motion the Assyrian occupation when tens of thousands were forcibly removed from their homeland and resettled throughout the Assyrian Empire.

This is the context of our lesson from Hosea, and while the Assyrian conquest of Isreal has not yet happened, it will do so within a few years of Hosea’s prophecy, and he is saying that the defeat and occupation will be God’s judgement and punishment for their faithlessness and disloyalty.

But listen to what else Hosea says, and this is what caught me off guard:

When Isreal was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me… My people are bent on turning away from me…How can I give you up…? How can I hand you over…? I will not execute my fierce anger…for I am God and no mortal…I will not come in wrath…They shall go after the Lord…and I will return them to their homes.[3]

What caught me off guard was God’s abiding compassion for his covenant people, despite their past behaviour. I will not come in wrath says the God whose name is love, for God is love.[4] It is this divine love for God’s people which is eternal, unchangeable, and ever present that caught me off guard. Inspired by the teaching of Father Benson, we say something like this in our Rule of Life.

Father Benson has taught us that the call of God … is continuous, abiding and progressive.  Continuous, because in the communion we enjoy with God … the voice of the Spirit never ceases to call us into deeper union.  Abiding, because the wisdom of God, communicated to us …, is absorbed into our hearts never to perish.  Progressive, because God’s voice will come to us in the future ever new, calling us to fresh opportunities, and bringing gifts beyond what we know now.[5]

The struggle of course is to be faithful to our vocation to listen. As St. Benedict, says, [listen] my [child], to the teachings of a loving father, and incline the ear of your heart.[6] But this is no easy task, and Father Benson knows it. God never ceases to speak,[7] Father Benson tells us, and yet as God speaks, He requires us to listen. The voice [of God] is of no value to those who are deaf. And God speaks, to how many, alas, who never hear Him!… We must take care, then, to really listen attentively, listen devoutly, listen obediently, listen gratefully[8].

The problem for Hosea, and I believe for us, and certainly for Father Benson, is that many have stopped listening. The paradox is that while we may have stopped listening, God has not stopped speaking. God has not stopped loving. As Hosea reminded them, no matter what, the people of Isreal were (and I should add are still) God’s covenant people. [You] shall be my people, and I will be your God.[9] The same is true for us. Even when we stop listening, even when we are deaf to God’s voice, even when we find God’s voice calling us to things impossible to contemplate, we remain God’s people, grafted into the one vine through the waters of Baptism, and the call and covenant of God is continuous, abiding and progressive; eternal, unchanging, and ever present.

We live in a transactional world. That is truer today than perhaps ever before. The current occupant of the White House has, for good or ill, been described as a transactional president, whose mode of operation is if you do this, I will do that. But God’s covenant love is not transactional. It is transformational. God desires to transform us. You shall be holy, for I am holy.[10]

It is this transformational love of God which Hosea points us to, which Jesus proclaims from the cross, for God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him,[11] and which Father Benson teaches when he says, [self] melts away and the new life [of God] takes possession of it. It lives, yet no longer is itself, for it is taken quite into this divine life and joy.[12]

I was caught off guard earlier in the week, because I was not expecting Hosea to remind me how deeply God loves us and desires us to be transformed: And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.[13] Yet here we are, even when deaf to God’s word, God is not deaf to the cry of the covenant people of God.

What I wasn’t expecting last week, was for Hosea to remind me of that so profoundly.

[1] Hosea 4:1c

[2] Hosea 7:1b

[3] Hosea 11:1111

[4] 1 John 4:8

[5] SSJE, Rule of Life, Life Profession, chapter 39

[6] Rule of Benedict, Prologue

[7] Benson, Richard Meux, The Religious Vocation, Of the Call of God, page 69.

[8] Ibid, page 71

[9] Ezekiel 36:28

[10] 1 Peter 1:16

[11] John 3:16-17

[12] Benson, page 79

[13] 2 Corinthians 3:18

Matthew 14:1-12

A few years ago, on the way to a conference, I spent several free hours alone at the Art Institute of Chicago, a place I had always wanted to visit. Free to absorb the experience at my own pace, I spent nearly an hour engrossed in a series of six panel paintings by the Renaissance artist Giovanni da Paolo. They had been part of an original series of twelve for a folding altarpiece depicting the life of St. John the Baptist.[1]

Da Paolo’s vision unfolds with the narrative flare of a graphic novelist or a cinematographer. The human figures are set within strange landscapes and fantastical buildings. There are inexplicable details scattered throughout that make the entire series feel like fragments in a dream sequence. One such detail became, for me, the interpretive key to the entire work.

In the scene of John speaking to his disciples through his prison window, there in the courtyard outside sits a tired, old leopard chained to a wall, gazing forlornly over his shoulder through an archway at a distant figure in blue walking toward us through the fields.

The animal looks utterly out of place – as out of place as John, both of them wild creatures of God held captive at the whim of a cruel tyrant, surrounded by lavish testimony to one man’s ego. The line between prison and zoo is blurred by the leopard’s presence. This exotic creature from a far off land, perhaps remembered and trotted out to impress visiting ambassadors, then just as quickly forgotten. A noble beast consigned to become a barely living plaything.

And yet … the creature’s eyes still gaze toward freedom, and that mysterious figure in blue.

It is tempting to completely dissociate ourselves from Herod and his almost archetypally messed up family. But I can’t quite manage to do that. Like the figures in a dream, each character in the gospels has been placed there for a very particular reason and has the potential to impart a word of gospel truth. However disturbing, there is a Herod, a Herodias, in each of us.

The chained leopard holds many possible meanings: the spirit of the prophets denied and suppressed by the world; the obsessive pursuit of novelty at the expense of creaturely dignity and life; the soul of John the Baptist himself in animal form. But from another angle, the chained leopard may be Herod’s own conscience.

Herod is in many ways the true prisoner in the story. He is a prisoner of his own fear: “He feared the crowd, because they regarded John as a prophet.” He is a captive to his own self-aggrandizement, epitomized by the lavish birthday banquet he throws himself, at which his own daughter is put on display. He is caught between his own politically expedient decision to imprison John and the persistent experience that John has something to say that is worth hearing, a detail brought out in Mark’s version: “When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him.” He is bound by the foolishly grand and public promise he makes to his daughter. But he is not powerless. Herod is grieved, the sure sign that his conscience has up to this point remained intact, however repressed. Herod makes a choice. “Out of regard for his oaths and for the guests,” he acquiesces to the perverse demand of Herodias, and the life of an innocent man is lost.

The death of John the Baptist prefigures the death of another innocent prophet – but that is not the end of the story. In Da Paolo’s depiction of John’s execution, the leopard is gone – but the mysterious figure in blue can still be seen through the archway, roaming the fields.

The Son of Man still searches out the captive – the prisoner of conscience, or simply the conscience leashed to the wall by the chain of sin in which we are all complicit.

If today you hear his voice – harden not your heart.

[1] View online at https://www.artic.edu/collection?q=panel&categoryQuery=di+Paolo&artist_ids=Giovanni+di+Paolo

Br. Curtis Almquist

Matthew 13:54-58

Prophets were held in honor so long as they were talking about distant people, about “them.” But when prophets were in their hometown, among their own people, talking about “you,” the prophets were abhorred, and sometimes stoned to death. Jesus spoke and acted as a prophet, and that was trouble. We can distill the hometown people’s disdain of Jesus just by looking at what is now happening in our own country and elsewhere around the world.

Jesus aligned himself with the poor. Among the destitute beggars were the sick and disabled, none of whom had anything similar to Medicaid. Unskilled day laborers, migrant workers, and slaves were also among the poor. If there was a famine or a war, they starved, like the people of Gaza just now. Another social factor was hugely important for rich and poor alike: being regarded with dignity. Several days ago I visited a food pantry, and those waiting in line would not make eye contact with me.

Jesus also aligned himself with sinners. Sinners were people who could not pay the temple tax with their “tainted” money, or make a sacrificial offering, or observe the sabbath, or practice ritual cleanliness. They were held with contempt. People labeled as unclean were prostitutes, tax collectors, those charged or convicted of crimes, prisoners, and herdsmen. The uneducated or the resident aliens who did not speak Hebrew or Aramaic were caught in the trap of not being able to understand or negotiate the law. We need only look at what is now happening in our own country to people who are not proficient in English, those whose skin color is not white, those who do not have just access to sound legal representation. There is certainly no “prosperity Gospel” evidenced in anything that Jesus taught or did. He aligned himself with the misaligned.

In one of the confessions of sin we use in this Chapel, we confess our own sins and those sins done on our behalf. Quite. We must pray for the amendment of our own lives, and the same for our governmental and corporate leadership. And we must act. We must act in some way to redress the egregious poverty that surrounds us in many forms. As we heard read in The Epistle of James: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? … Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”