SSJE Sermons

Br. Jonathan Maury

The Martyrs of New Guinea

Revelation 7:9-12

On this day, the Church honors the Martyrs of New Guinea who gave witness to Christ by their deaths during the Japanese invasion and occupation of New Guinea in 1942 and 1943. 333 Papuans and clergy, teachers, and medical staff from a range of denominations, men and women, were killed by the invaders. These include nine Anglican missionaries and two Papuan martyrs who died while serving the material and spiritual needs of their friends in Christ.

When war in the Pacific began in 1941, civilian populations of European descent were evacuated from Australia’s island territories. Many Christians however voluntarily chose to continue in their ministries despite the danger. The Bishop of New Guinea exhorted  his flock, writing, “If we all left, it would take years for the Church to recover from our betrayal of our trust. If we remain—and even if the worst came to the worst and we were all to perish in remaining—the Church would not perish, for there would have been no breach of trust in its walls, but its foundations and structure would have received added strength for the future building by our faithfulness unto death.”

In the Gospel of John, Jesus teaches us of the sacred trust which is Christian friendship:

“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  You are my friends if you do what I command you.”

The SSJE Rule of Life reminds us brothers that “no honor exists that could be greater than Jesus calling us his friends. The more we enter into the fullness of our friendship with him, the more he will move us to be friends for one another… The Spirit uses the demands of friendship to further our conversion; struggles are inevitable as well as rewards… Fear can hold us back.  In these struggles we have the constant companionship of Christ to give us courage and joy.”

But Christ’s faithful trust and self-offering friendship is not imparted to only a select few but to all who give themselves to Jesus in faith. Friendship with Jesus is also implicitly the call to share the same friendship and trust with all of Jesus’ friends after his example: “Love one another as I have loved you.” Christ’s circle of friendship exists to bring eternal life in union with God to all creation. As such it requires the radical acceptance of everything which the world would have us regard as “separate” or “outside.” It requires the surrender of self in ways great and small for the life of the “other” who is also God’s beloved.

Living in faithful friendship with Christ’s beloved gave courage to the martyrs we remember today and ensured the vibrant faith and devotion of Papuan Christians of all churches witnessed to the present. We honor the English-born priest Vivian Redlich who forfeited his life in order to celebrate the eucharist with his people one last time. We celebrate Lucien Tapiedi, the Papuan catechist regarded as an apostle by his people, who gave his life in defending fellow Christians making an escape from ambush by native collaborators. Lucien’s witness and love extended into the future with the conversion of his murderer to faith in Christ. The martyrs’ witness of faithful friendship later resulted in the Anglican Church of Japan’s gift of bamboo crosses erected in the parish churches New Guinea as a mark of contrition.

And now what of us who follow in the martyrs’ steps as Jesus’ friends? To what new depths and tests of our “loyalty and faith” to Christ and to one another as friends of God are we invited?

Carrying these questions in our hearts, let us ask grace to hear Jesus’ response as with open hands we receive his risen Flesh and Blood. In communion and friendship with the Martyrs of New Guinea, we even now join that “great multitude that no one can count, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”

Let us pray.

Jesus, fill us with your Holy Spirit that at our hour of faithful witness in laying down our lives in friendship we may fearlessly know what we ought to be, to say and to do. Amen.

Br. Geoffrey Tristram

The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (17C)

Luke 14:7-14

“Oh, I just love Luke’s Gospel!” So many people have said that to me over the years. And it probably is the most popular of all the gospels. I love Luke; all those beautiful stories; the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, and of course the beloved accounts of the Nativity. But this gospel, when you read it, is hard hitting and quite uncompromising. It should actually make you quake!

It’s very hard to hear, unless you are poor. It is a gospel above all for the poor. It is about about God’s love for the poor and the marginalized.  Jesus tells us quite clearly, in chapter 4, why he has come. He stands up in the synagogue and proclaims: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” Then in chapter 7, when John’s disciples come to try and find out who Jesus is, Jesus tells them to look and see what is happening: “The blind receive their sight… the deaf hear… and the poor have good news brought to them.” And then, in chapter 6, in the first of the Beatitudes, Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are poor” (not poor in spirit, that’s Matthew). “Blessed are you who are poor, yours is the Kingdom of God.”

All through Scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments, there are the poor. They are marked out, they are special, because, we are told, time and time again, that the poor are especially loved by God. God loves and is full of compassion for the poor. In the Old Testament, they are called the anawim of God. The word literally means “those who are bowed down.” They are bowed down through grinding poverty, but also in humility, in meekness and in trust and faithfulness to God. They do not have worldly wealth, so they rely on God for provision and for deliverance. They are the vulnerable, oppressed, marginalized, and God loves them. Among their number was Mary of Nazareth. God chose Mary, one of God’s beloved anawim, poor and bowed down, to be the mother of his beloved Son. Her response to this stunning news was to utter the sublime song of the anawim: “My soul does magnify the Lord…for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. He has lifted up the lowly…he has sent the rich empty away.” But there was an even greater mystery and wonder than this. For in order to save us, Mary’s son Jesus freely chose to become one of God’s anawim. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians chapter 9, “You know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.”

So when the poor man of Nazareth started to preach, his words were as provocative and as challenging as they are today. How brave Jesus must have been to make himself poor and vulnerable and then willingly to enter into the arena with the rich and powerful religious leaders. And our gospel reading today is just one episode which shows what courage he had. It is the sabbath, and he has been invited to eat a meal at the house of one of the leaders of the Pharisees. The place is full of lawyers and Pharisees, and we are told, “They were watching him closely.” This “watching” is definitely unfriendly. Just two chapters earlier, chapter 11, he was invited to another Pharisee’s house and, “They were very hostile to him, and cross examined him, lying in wait to catch him in something he might say.” And so it was with eyes wide open and with great courage that Jesus accepted their invitation, and the scene is set for conflict.

As soon as Jesus arrives, he can’t help noticing that all the guests were quickly moving towards the dining table, and started jockeying for position, grabbing the best seats, the higher up the table the better. The closer they sat to the host, the more honored they felt, and could look down smugly at those seated further away. Jesus could not remain silent. So he told them a parable. At first it sounded like he was telling them some good advice about etiquette. Be careful about placing yourself too high up the table just in case someone of clearly higher rank arrives, and the host asks you to move down to make room for him. How humiliating! And the other advantage of placing yourself lower down, is that you might have the great delight of publicly being moved up the table by the host. But as these words of Jesus begin to sink in, his listeners soon realize that he’s not giving them some tips about dining etiquette. This is a parable, and it’s about God and it’s about judgment. It’s about how in God’s Kingdom, everything is reversed. That at the judgment day, “Those who exalt themselves now will be humbled, and those who humble themselves now will be exalted.” This is the divine reversal which runs right through Luke’s Gospel. Jesus, the poor man of Nazareth is the agent of this reversal, of this divine judgment. It is this divine reversal, this divine judgment which Mary proclaims in her song of the anawim: “He has lifted up the lowly. He has sent the rich empty away.” The religious leaders must have been furious. But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He now specifically talks to them about the poor. When you give a dinner don’t just invite your friends or rich neighbors, because they can easily respond in kind. No. Rather invite the poor, including the crippled, the lame and the blind. In the New Testament, the poor are honored, as are the anawim in the Old. Luke calls them the ptochoi, and it is for them that the Gospel is such good news. That word ptochoi is a very broad word. It also means the destitute, the socially oppressed and helpless, and the marginalized. So when Luke’s Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor,” he is also saying blessed are the destitute, blessed are the socially oppressed and helpless, blessed are the marginalized. Because God loves them.

When Jesus, the poor man of Nazareth called his first disciples, he called them to a life of poverty. One of my favorite paintings is the Call of Matthew by Caravaggio. There is Jesus standing in great authority in the house of Matthew the tax collector’. There is Matthew in fine robes, sitting with his friends, counting his money, and Jesus points to him, with a magnificent and commanding gesture; “Come follow me!” As your eye moves down the picture you see the simple robe Jesus is wearing, and on his feet, worn sandals, the attire of the poor. This is the life Matthew is being called to. It is no wonder that over the centuries, the great saints from Antony of Egypt to Francis of Assisi, il Poverello, Charles de Foucauld, have felt the need to divest themselves of their riches to follow Jesus.

So what about us? If we want to follow Jesus’ call more radically, if we long to draw closer to Jesus, we can be sure it will involve some kind of poverty, some kind of self-emptying, like Jesus, some kind of renunciation and dying to self. It may involve a degree of material poverty, a denying of our selves. If you feel God is far away, and you want to awaken your life of prayer, ask yourself whether perhaps you are sated. In our consumer society we can fully satisfy all our appetites, and we can feel so full that there is no room for God. The psalmists can be a great model for us. They pray the Psalms from a place of longing, they come before God with their desire, their thirst, their yearning. Their prayer does not come from a satiated place, but from a place of emptiness and need. Perhaps we have too much, and need to divest ourselves of what keeps us from knowing our need for God. Perhaps we need to become poor, that Christ can make us rich.

And then secondly, what about those in our country at this time whom the New Testament would call the ptochoi: the poor, the destitute, the socially oppressed, the helpless, the marginalized? They are very precious to God. They are especially close to the heart of Jesus. So, in drawing near to them in some way, we also draw near to Jesus. “In as much as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.” How might we serve the poor and those who have least? Every time we read the news we can feel overwhelmed by so much suffering and injustice in our land. What can I do? Well perhaps we can start by asking, who do I know in my life now who is poor, and whom I can serve? Who do I know who is “bowed down” like God’s anawim? It may be economic poverty, or it could be that poverty of spirit has left them empty and bereft. Something has happened in their lives which has impoverished them. Perhaps they have experienced loss or diminishment. The gift of yourself, your loving care, your presence, could make all the difference. When we draw near to the poor, so we draw near to Jesus and his heart of love and compassion.

Today’s Gospel from Luke is a huge challenge to each one of us, to examine the inner movements of our hearts. Where am I still filled with pride? Where do I still jockey for position in life, still chase the highest seats? Still seek more?

Where do I neglect or shun the poor in our midst? Where do I lack compassion?

But perhaps most profoundly, how can I learn true humility from God’s poor? For I believe the deepest and most enduring truth from our Gospel today is that the seat which matters most is the one beside the least.

Br. Curtis Almquist

Charles Chapman Grafton

Revelation 5:6-10

We commemorate today Charles Chapman Grafton, one of the three principal founders of our Society of St. John the Evangelist, this in Oxford in 1866.[i] Charles Grafton was born in Boston in 1830 and he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1853. His intent to practice law was supplanted by his conversion to Christ and his vocation to the priesthood, being ordained at age 28.

At the age of 35 he traveled to England to be formed by the Oxford Movement, the Anglo-Catholic renewal within the Church of England. He knew that the glory and power of God were to be experienced not only in the resplendent prayer and worship of the church, but also manifest in the teeming needs of the poor. He saw so many faces of poverty in Oxford, in the countryside, and on the London Docks, and served people both Holy Communion, the bread of heaven, and also their daily bread.

After seven transformative years in England, he returned to the States in 1872 to become a rector here in Boston. The Civil War had just ended, but not the residual poverty of suffering and need. As a pastor he was described as an “evangelical at heart, while in belief a liberal Catholic.” Eventually he was elected Bishop of Fond du Lac in Wisconsin. Bishop Grafton with his Boston pedigree and very fine Harvard education was now in rural Wisconsin. He was serving destitute people living in agrarian poverty, white Americans and Native Americans.

A phrase which was forever on his lips was, “Press on the Kingdom!” Not God’s kingdom in heaven. That was in fine shape. “Press on the Kingdom” was about God’s kingdom on earth. His consuming passion was about God’s real presence to be manifest both within the church and through the church to the world. God’s presence, God’s power, God’s provision should change everything now. And that’s exactly what happened in the transformation of people’s lives.

Bishop Grafton was also convinced that since the church was God’s living body on earth, it must be comprised of diverse members. This devotion to the church’s essential diversity inspired his tenacious work in ecumenism, which literally attracted the world’s attention. His capacious ministry was directed to “every tribe and language and people and nation,” as we heard read from the Book of Revelation. He served as bishop for 23 years.

At the end of his life he recollected that much of his conversion had sprung from struggles with his own “imperious temperament,” which had to be humbled. And he realized his own struggle with pain and disappointment was a way of being near to Christ crucified.[ii] And that made all the difference.

Blessed Charles Chapman Grafton, whom we remember today with thanksgiving.

[i] SSJE’s principal founders were Richard Meux Benson, Charles Chapman Grafton and Simeon Wilberforce O’Neill. Father O’Neill set off on mission to Indore, India in 1874. He was truly a living sacrifice, dying there in 1882 at age 45. Father Benson served as the Superior General until 1890.

[ii] “Charles C. Grafton, Bishop and Theologian,” by the Most Rev. Arthur Michael Ramsey. Lecture at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, September 26, 1967; published in Nashotah House Quarterly Review, nd, pp 7-21.

Br. Lain Wilson

The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist

Matthew 14:1-12

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. 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. James Koester

Matthew 18:1-5, 10, 12-14

It’s been said that the Victorians invented the modern concept of childhood: idyllic, playful, and carefree. It’s only been in the last 150 years or so that the concept that children have fundamental human rights in and of themselves as individual people, and not as property or potential adults has gained any attention. While all of us here would affirm wholeheartedly the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which states that children have the rights to education, protection from harm, access to healthcare, and the right to have their best interests considered in legal matters, such was not always the case.

Before the Victorians invented childhood, children were seen not for who they were, but who they might become, or what they were able to produce. While infant mortality was seen as a tragedy, it was also a reality of life. Depending on the era, 30 to 50 percent of children died in their first twelve months. Women often gave birth to 6 children, as only 2 might live to adulthood. In a largely rural and agrarian society, children were important and taught from an early age to do simple chores enabling the household to survive. While children were undoubtably loved, and there are many examples of that in scripture, legally, until the males became of age, and the females married and bearing children themselves, their legal status was not much better than that of a slave.

It is for this reason that Jesus’ admonition that we become like children and that whoever welcomes one such child … welcomes me is so incredibly radical. Jesus isn’t here suggesting we become playful, inquisitive, and carefree. No! That’s not it at all. Jesus is telling us to become wholly dependent on the goodness and generosity of God, just as children where wholly dependent on the goodness and generosity of their families and society around them.

Such a notion of dependance is a shock to our systems. If truth be told, we don’t want to be dependent on anyone, including dare I say it, God. Sure, let’s be like children, carefree and curious, yes! But dependent, no thank you! But that is exactly what Jesus asks of us. Unless you become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

So how might we grasp exactly how radical Jesus is, when he says this. Try this on for size: At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called an immigrant, a migrant, an undocumented alien, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like this immigrant, migrant, undocumented alien, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. … Whoever welcomes one such [person] in my name welcomes me.

We live in an age when the rights of immigrants, migrants, and undocumented aliens are being taken away by the government, to the acclaim of many. Yet it is these children whom Jesus is inviting us to become like in tonight’s gospel, wholly dependent, not only on the goodness of God, but on the goodness and generosity of society around them. That is pretty radical stuff. That is pretty scary stuff. So, my question is, can we be the kind of generous society that welcomes such children into our midst? Can we become such children? The answer must be a resounding “yes,” because this is the kind of Christian society, this is the kind of Christian people, Jesus is admonishing us to be.

Unless you become … you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

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