SSJE Sermons

Br. Curtis Almquist

Matthew 13:44-52

Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and reburied; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind…” (Matthew 13:44-48).

In the calendar of the Church, we remember today Edward Bouverie Pusey, born near Oxford, England, in 1800, where he was educated and subsequently became Regius Professor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church Cathedral. Beginning in 1833, he would become the acknowledged leader of the Oxford Movement, the Anglo-Catholic renewal of the Church of England. Pusey was a writer of tracts; however, he was a most powerful communicator as a preacher: catholic in content and evangelical in zeal for the conversion of souls.

And there was trouble. In 1843, Pusey preached a sermon at Christ Church Cathedral on the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. Of course, we here, today, would believe in Christ’s real presence in the Sacrament, and without a question; however, in Pusey’s day, this was too close to the fire of the Reformation. This was too Roman Catholic–sounding. Pusey was condemned by the Church of England authorities and suspended from preaching for two years. Meanwhile, minds and hearts were opened to what he had preached. The immediate effect of his suspension was the sale of 18,000 copies of his condemned sermon. Pusey would also write and preach about the revival of private sacramental confession, and he became a much-sought-after confessor.

Most significant to us Brothers is the introduction Edward Bouverie Pusey made to the principal founder of our community, Richard Meux Benson, who was Pusey’s devotee. Father Pusey introduced Father Benson to Father Charles Grafton who, with Benson and Father Simeon Wilberforce O’Neill, became the founders of our Society of Saint John the Evangelist in 1866.

In our Gospel lesson appointed for today, Jesus speaks of treasure to be found in the earth and sea. For Edward Bouverie Pusey and the founders of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, the Sacraments were the ancient treasures of the Church to behold, celebrate, and revere the power of God which they bequeath. And for us here, as we celebrate the Holy Eucharist in remembrance of Christ, we faithfully presume Christ’s real presence, power, and provision in ways beyond which we could ask or imagine.

Blessed Edward Bouverie Pusey, whom we remember today.

Br. Lain Wilson

Holy Cross Day

There is a fundamental and inescapable absurdity to what we celebrate today.

Part of this is the simple fact that we celebrate today something that was once a tool of state execution. The cross was a brutal presence in Jesus’ world, and in Jesus’ life. It reveals a world that was broken and unjust. In this respect, the cross of Jesus is an enduring testimony to the brokenness and injustice that persists – and has persisted throughout the centuries – in our world and our hearts.

The world, despoiled and dominated, cries out for healing. The Cross planted into the heart of creation bears witness to all the ways in which this world, because of our actions and inactions, has gone off-kilter.

Our human societies suffer in their greed and in their need; in their conflict and violence; in their fear and their uncertainty. The Cross planted into these structures bears witness to all the ways in which our relationships have gone astray.

And we ourselves. The Cross planted into our very hearts bears witness to all our personal and silent sufferings, to our sins and guilt, to our shame and grief. The Cross bears witness to all that slowly distorts us and turns us inward.

We were not created to suffer, to be in pain, to grieve, but we do. We were not created to hurt or fail or fall, but we do that as well. The Cross bears witness to all this. But that’s not the end.

The absurdity of the Cross is that this instrument of state execution has become a testimony to God’s unfailing love; God’s unfailing love, despite it all, for us and for this world. Jesus’ singular life and death, Jesus’ singular Cross, offers us a beautiful promise: that our suffering, pain, and grief are not the end of the story, but rather that Jesus’ love has supplanted them.

The beautiful promise that when we suffer, we do not suffer alone. Jesus is there with us. In that place of suffering, Jesus plants his love as a seed that he assures us will grow and help us be made whole.

The promise that when we are in pain, we are not alone in that pain. Jesus is there with us, bearing that pain alongside us. Jesus plants his love as a seed that he assures us will grow and help us be healed.

The promise that when we grieve, we do not sit alone. Jesus is right there with us, consoling us. Jesus plants his love as a seed that he assures us will grow and help us rejoice.

Jesus plants these and so many more seeds of love at the foot of his Cross, that this world and our lives might be transformed as completely as his Cross was. Their growing is the promise of new life in Jesus, and their flowers adorn Jesus’ victory wreath, crowning his triumph over all that deforms our world and our lives. Jesus has already won this victory in the eternity of God’s present. We creatures living in time hope for and will come to know this victory in our future. But that doesn’t mean we are powerless in our human present. We, too, can plant seeds.

We have power to seek reconciliation and to offer forgiveness, to do our part in making whole the ripped fabric of our communities.

We have power to show compassion and empathy, to be with others in their hurt, to do our part in the healing of the wounded.

We have the power to rejoice in the goodness of all that God has made, to do our part in attending to a universe of fellow creatures that call out for help.

We have the power, in other words, to become like Jesus. To bear the Cross planted in our very midst and to respond, not in fear or apathy or despair, but by becoming more and more like Jesus. Drawing on Jesus’ light to become children of light. Receiving Jesus’ love and bearing that gift of love to the world. Planting seeds at the foot of the Cross that will bear the graces of new life.

Amen.

Br. Keith Nelson

Genesis 50:15-21

The agrarian poet Wendell Berry wrote:

We depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.1

We are each radically dependent upon our Creator, who holds each creature in life every moment. And we are horizontally embedded in a web of dependence, one creature upon another, simply by being alive. Berry uses the poignant language of sacrament or desecration to characterize our response to both God and the creatures on whom we depend. How we live in response to the continual gift of creation may either lead us closer to or further from its Giver.

The gospels routinely use the language of indebtedness to name both our vertical dependence upon God and our horizontal dependence upon other people and creatures.

In the Palestine of Jesus, as in much of the world for much of history, the collection and payment of debt was mediated by people and objects. Bits of metal bearing a distant Emperor’s face were earned by the slow accrual of sunrises and sunsets, blistered feet and calloused hands, baskets full (or empty) of wheat.

By the precarious balance of ledgers and the caprice or benevolence of overlords, a family might sleep in peace or be sold to separate owners in chains.

Jesus invokes these experiences and structures in his teaching about spiritual indebtedness. This parable of the kingdom of heaven introduces a king who forgives a debt; a slave who does not; and the ultimate consequences. It seems designed to stretch our moral imagination to the breaking point, and then lead us through that rupture into larger Life.

During this Season of Creation, this parable invites us to examine the reality that we are both limitlessly forgiven and accountable for the consequences when we grieve the heart of God in desecrating creation. That accountability is both individual and collective as we stand before God and one another to reckon with the history of our own suffering land.

Ten thousand talents is an absurd sum of money – more money than would have even been in circulation in all of Roman Judea at the time. The absurdism of how the slave could possibly owe that sum, much less ever pay it off, sets up Jesus’ listeners for a scenario rooted in the world they know, but also fantastical. This slave then immediately runs into another slave, who owes him a hundred denarii. A denarius was a day’s wages, while a single talent was more than fifteen years’ wages. There is a maximalist contrast here between the staggering forgiveness of the king and the stunning inability of the slave to forgive a vastly smaller sum.

Recall for a moment the experience of seeing the full reality of the way you have caused suffering to another. When this reality landed fully upon your conscience, you probably asked: “How can I make this right?” Seeking forgiveness as a response to repentance is a mark of Christian discipleship. In Matthew 5, we hear, “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5:23-24).

That passage is provocative in the same way as today’s parable. It makes us ask: If I lived my life that way, how much more vividly would I feel the connection between what I offer or withhold from God and what I offer or withhold from my fellow creatures?

To live in the world is to cause others suffering – a living tissue of indebtedness, to use Matthew’s predominant image. But we must also acknowledge that this debt is distributed disproportionately. Some benefit disproportionately from the sum total of the world’s human-inflicted suffering, from the body and blood of Creation broken “ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively.”

The forgiveness of debts in this parable is a transaction between one individual and another. But what if we were to expand our self-concept to include the groups or identities of which we are a part – both presently and historically – who have not only caused suffering but been its disproportionate beneficiaries? For those of us descended from white colonial settlers, this would entail acknowledging and grieving a history of desecration before we begin to seek forgiveness.

The desecration of the land beneath our feet and of its native inhabitants are deeply intertwined. Fully honoring a liturgical season of creation as Christians and Episcopalians must entail truth-telling, grieving, and the pursuit of repair between native peoples and the descendants of settlers, just as it demands assessing the root causes of our cultural and spiritual alienation from the living earth.

The pattern written into our land has embedded us in unjust hierarchies of victimization. The pattern set by those with power is to extract and exploit resources, out of a lust for security, from the next most vulnerable group, class, gender, or nation.

This pattern of victimization is a refusal to live with gratitude to the Creator within a means sustainable for all life.

It is a pattern codified in the Doctrine of Discovery. If you don’t know the term, the Doctrine is a multifaceted theological, philosophical, and legal framework dating to the fifteenth century that defined land without the governance of a Christian monarch, and thus all indigenous lands, as “terra nullius”: no land, empty land, “finder’s keepers.”

It is a pattern directly responsible for the foundational assumptions toward land in this country and in every country founded under colonial empire: its proprietary ownership; its living or non-living status; its health and flourishing deprioritized to industrial interests; even the origin of the national and state parks system.

And it is the pattern central to the present political administration’s knowing and calculated unraveling of every major environmental protection secured in my four and a half decades of life; withdrawal from all major global collaboration with other nations to sustain planetary life; and denial of the overwhelming scientific data about the changes that will make life as we know it unsustainable.

At this point, I know: you’re probably tired of hearing these things. It is tiring preaching about them.

But before I present the alternative to the pattern, let’s stick with the grief.

The most challenging verses in today’s parable for me come at the end: “And in anger his Lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or your sister from your heart” (Matthew 18:34-35).

If you have been one of the victims of the pattern I just described – and you are a Christian – is God compelling you under pain of torture to forgive the perpetrators of this pattern?

For me, this is where the metaphor of this parable breaks down. God is not a first-century monarch, using prisons and torture chambers to motivate repentance. God suffers with and in every victim, as Jesus himself will die to show us.

To make any good news of this passage as it relates to this question, I must hold it alongside Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:23, about the counterbalancing necessity of seeking forgiveness: “If you remember that your brother or sister has something against you…” The dawning of that remembrance, and the long road to making things right, can be excruciating to the conscience. It can even feel like torture.

Sarah Augustine is a native woman and a Mennonite Christian. She uses a metaphor – a parable, really – of a priceless vase she owned filled with soil from her ancestral homeland. Her daughter broke the vase by accident, shattered it into many pieces, all the soil spilled. She asks: What does repair look like in this situation? Is repair buying a new vase and apologizing? Is repair attempting to glue together the hundreds of broken shards to make a container no good for holding anything?

The original vase and its contents are gone forever.

Her only answer is: Meaningful repair is to ask the vase’s owner, “What would repair look like if it were possible?”; then engaging in that relational process to the fullness of one’s capacity; and only then asking for forgiveness. Augustine emphasizes that this must be relational rather than transactional. Giving money may alleviate an individual’s tortured conscience, but that act alone is restitution. Healing is to be sought for in repair.

Today, and every day, we can accept the unearned forgiveness of God for the part we play in this suffering. Trusting in the forgiveness of God strengthens us to travel the road – the deepening spirals – of repair between people and land and between white settler descendants and native people.

In very different ways, the pattern of victimization outlined above impacts us all. But it is not the only pattern possible.

Astonishingly, a different pattern is still lived out vibrantly and generously by many cultures in the Global South and many indigenous and traditional cultures globally. If we dig back far enough, it is a pattern whose basic relationship to land is common to all societies, a hopeful promise that it still lives in our human ancestral memory. This pattern endows the multiplicity of others within any given circle or system with basic dignity and assumes the participation of these others in the rhythms of work, rest, lament and celebration that sustain life. To Christians in these places and among these peoples, this pattern is self-evident in the life and good news of Jesus Christ. For them, it is the pattern which not only sustains life but renders the highest glory to God.

Let us learn and relearn this pattern together.

1 Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural.

Recommended Resources

Sarah Augustine, The Land Is Not Empty: Following Jesus in Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery.

Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery.

Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account.

The Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery: www.dismantlediscovery.org

Br. Jamie Nelson

Psalm 116:12-13

Today is our monthly requiem mass, a time we dedicate to remembering the members of the Society of St. John the Evangelist who died during the month of September.

Later in the service, we will pray for them by name. But beyond their names, I want to offer now a small bouquet of the details of their lives plucked from their obituaries that we read at Compline: five were veterans of the great World Wars;1 four died during this century;2 three were known for their musical talents;3 two were sons of priests;4 and one was a talented tinkerer who could fix almost anything mechanical.5

These 11 men were much like every member of SSJE: distinct individuals in so many ways, yet similar in essentials. They served in almost every place SSJE has had a presence: in Canada, England, India, Scotland, South Africa, and the United States. Together, they tallied 380 years of professed life. I marvel at the vast expanse of that span of years saturated with prayer, worship, and service, and give thanks to God for their lives.

We give thanks to God today not just for those 11 lives, but for the lives of all the loved ones we carry in our hearts today. Death doesn’t erase relationships. Even in their absence, our loved ones are present in all the fibers of memories that have become woven into our very beings.

So how might we respond today in a way that proclaims gratitude for life’s gifts and acknowledges death’s sting? One way from our tradition is exactly what we’re doing right now – responding with the Eucharist, a word whose Greek root means “thanksgiving.” Responding with the Eucharist is a path to responding in thankfulness and praise, in trust and love, while also grieving the suffering of the cross.

A few moments ago, the Scola chanted the following lines from Psalm 116, verses 12-13:

“What shall I return to the Lord for all his bounty to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord.”

And in the epistle, we heard Paul’s words to the Corinthians, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16-17).

When we lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord, we are not just recalling the past, but are trusting that through sacramental grace, our crucified and risen redeemer Jesus and our departed loved ones are present with us, gathered around the altar, sharing in the body and blood that unites us all.

1 Wigram, Hill, Frith, Dakers, Mathis

2 Chiverton, Lennard, Mathis, Goldring

3 Chiverton, Otis, Biscoe

4 Hill, Biscoe

5 Frith

Br. Jack Crowley

The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Matthew 1:18-25

In April 1892, an illiterate dairy farmer from Ireland named Patrick Crowley boarded a steamship with his wife, Catherine, his father-in-law, Thomas, and their six children. One of their children, John Crowley, is my great-grandfather. He was nine years old when he boarded that ship, probably holding on to his mother’s hand.

One of my favorite moments in my family’s three-thousand-mile journey across the Atlantic to Boston came about halfway through the ten-day trip. My great-great-grandmother, Catherine Crowley, celebrated her forty-fifth birthday. I always try to get inside her head as she turned forty-five in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, with her father, husband, and six children by her side. Catherine had been born in 1847, a year many Irish historians call Black ’47, as it was the worst year of the Great Hunger, also known as the potato famine. I wonder how she felt in the middle of the Atlantic, most likely the farthest away from home she had ever been, dreaming of a better life for her children in these United States.

We all have stories like these, dreams of our ancestors. The dreams of loved ones we don’t get to meet this side of the thin line. Although we may not know what their faces looked like or what their voices sounded like, we know their blood runs through our veins. Their DNA is inside of us for good.

Tonight we celebrate the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I must confess I have a deep, deep love for Mary. There is no woman I talk with more than Mary. I’ve prayed with her in hospital beds, restaurants, rehabs, monasteries, airports, and especially right here in this chapel. With all our stained-glass windows, Mary is always over our shoulder, in more than one way.

Every year on this feast, I try to get in touch with that loving mystery of Mary’s life. Like our ancestors, there’s so much we don’t know about Mary, and that can feel frustrating, but what we do know is her love for us. What we do know is that Mary prays for us, she intercedes for us. She loves us.

On this day every year, I think of Mary as a baby, with her parents holding her tight. If you’ve ever held and smelled a newborn, you know how magical it is. Her parents must have radiated love that night, perhaps knowing that their child was destined for greatness.

Of course, we all know the life of Mary was not easy. As they say, the greatest tragedy in life is when a parent has to bury their own child. Mary had to endure the loss of her son Jesus. As our Rule of Life says, Mary and the Beloved Disciple stood together at the cross, being steadfast together, enduring all that others found unbearable.

I imagine that when Catherine Crowley stepped off that boat about four miles from here at the docks of East Boston, perhaps her son John in hand, she knew her son’s life was not always going to be easy in this new land. Yet perhaps it was that loving mystery that kept her going, a hope that if the life of her children, and their children after them, was even slightly better than her own, then it was all worth it.

We never know exactly what we are doing. It’s okay to admit it. Catherine Crowley probably never thought her great-great-grandson would be preaching about her at a Protestant monastery, but here we are. In my experience, when we love God and let ourselves be loved by God, the waves of our life tend to break toward love. Wherever it is we end up, it seems to be the right place. That is a mystery I can get behind, a mystery I can love.

So tonight, let’s give ourselves permission to rejoice with Mary in the radiance of the Holy Spirit. Let’s give ourselves permission to open up our hearts and pour ourselves out as an offering of love and sacrifice. Let’s give ourselves permission to love another, to heal, to reconcile, to move on, to love the past but move toward the future into that glorious mystery. Like I said, we have no idea what’s going to happen, but God is with us. Amen.

Br. James Koester

Luke 6:1-5

One of the problems with God, and if I am honest, there are many problems with God, is that God does not always act or behave like God. This is especially true of Jesus. And that’s a problem. It was a problem for many in his original audiences. It was a problem for the others as well, whether they were followers of Thor, or Baal, or Zeus, or any number of contemporary secular gurus. Indeed, it was and is such a problem, that many did, and continue to reject, not only the idea of God, but the person of God, just as Jesus was rejected, for “many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him” (John 6:66). We see inklings of this today, “Why are you doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?” (Luke 6:2).

Because Jesus does not behave the way we think God must or should, some reject him. Others recreate him, and we get Christian nationalism or the prosperity gospel. We cannot bear to have a god who does not follow the rules. Yet that is the point of Jesus. He forces us to come to terms, not with how we think God should or must act, but how God does act.

The God we see in Jesus is the God of the Beatitudes, the God of the sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth. The God we see in Jesus is the God who says, “blessed are the poor, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted” (Matthew 5:1-12). The God we see in Jesus is the one who came “proclaiming good news to the poor, freedom to prisoners, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed” (Luke 4:18). As an earlier version of our Rule said, “God has chosen the poor, the weak things of the world to confound the mighty. Think of the blessed poverty of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Calvary.”1 The God we see in Jesus is the poor man of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Calvary, and that is too much for so many. The God we see in Jesus was tired, hungry, and in pain, and that is too much for so many. Yet the God we see in Jesus was tired, hungry, and in pain so that we might rest from our labours, feast at the heavenly banquet, and rise with him on the third day, and that makes no sense for so many.

One of the problems with God, is that God in Jesus comes to us as the poor man of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Calvary. For many, that’s a problem. The thing is, God does not always behave the way we think God must or should act. Instead, God in Jesus comes to us consorting with women, touching the untouchable, and breaking the sabbath. He comes to us as the poor man of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Calvary, tired, hungry, and in pain. If that’s a problem for you, well, I’d say, that’s a real problem.

1 SSJE, Rule of Life, 1910, Poverty, chap. 8:8, p. 54.

Br. Lain Wilson

Reactivity or Relationship

Psalm 37:1-12

I’ve recently cut down on my news consumption. Part of this has been a very intentional management of my devices – disabling notifications and removing the temptation to refresh the news app. A consequence of this has been a more careful noticing of how what I consume affects me, physically and emotionally: how a headline or image spikes my pulse and makes me seethe inwardly, or how I find myself desiring or actively seeking out the safe, the cozy, the feel-good as a way of reasserting calm. I’ve been able to notice much more clearly how deforming this mode of engagement can be.

I mention this because I feel myself convicted by our psalm today, Psalm 37. Do not fret yourself. Put your trust in the Lord. Take delight in the Lord. Commit your way to the Lord. Be still before the Lord. Refrain from anger. I’m convicted because I can recognize how often I’ve found myself doing exactly the opposite – and often at the prompting of what I habitually consume.

Psalm 37 offers an invitation to step outside this current of consumption and emotional reactivity.

The psalmist doesn’t deny that there’s something wrong – there are evildoers and people who profit from wrongdoing. We can see them, we read about them, we watch them online. It’s very easy to react to this emotionally. I’m sure you have your own version: receiving a notification on your phone and feeling your blood boil. The psalmist tells us that this way of being, of consuming and reacting, is not how we were created to live. We weren’t created to be consumers, deformed by stimuli, but people transformed by relationship.

The psalmist identifies this primary relationship as between us and God: “Put your trust in the Lord and do good. … Commit your way to the Lord and put your trust in him” (Psalm 37:3, 5). This relationship, built on trust as something offered, is transformative because it demands we turn over to God the satisfaction of our own emotional reactivity, acknowledging and depending on God’s own power at work in the world. This is a powerful invitation to surrender.

Does this mean that we should become emotionally uninvolved or passive? The psalmist would disagree. The building of relationships is what enables fruitful action: “Put your trust in the Lord and do good. … [The Lord] will make your righteousness as clear as the light and your just dealing as the noonday” (Psalm 37:3, 6). Righteous, prophetic anger has a clear presence in Scripture and in our world, but it requires a solid basis in relationship. When we let ourselves lead with our own emotional reactivity, the foundation of our actions is as weak, fleeting, and changeable as those emotions themselves. But when we base it in relationship, when we let our trust in God’s power and provision be absolutely primary, we have a firm foundation, and all that we are and all that we do will have integrity.

Amen.

Br. Keith Nelson

Feast of Creation in Christ

Genesis 1-2:3

In the Palatine Chapel in Palermo, Italy, completed in 1140, a series of mosaics grace the clerestory walls. The mosaics depict the seven days of Creation. A figure is visible in each scene who bears all the conventional attributes of Jesus Christ: with his arms spread over the face of the deep, sending forth a dove; placing the sun and moon in the heavens; extending his hand in blessing over a grove of trees, a stream teeming with fish, a sky alive with birds; bearing gentle witness as Adam names the other creatures; and with a beam of light (or is it sound?) extending from his mouth to Adam’s side, where Eve springs into being.

This Christ is interested in, involved in, and related to the newborn world flourishing all around him in its first moments of existence. The one who would become the New Adam is there as the first Adam is formed from clay and breathes the breath of life. Not only there, but a divine agent of creation.

Perhaps outrunning a Southern Baptist upbringing, I used to receive such depictions of the Creation as naively anthropomorphic and uncomfortably literalist. Over time I realized, and came to celebrate, that this was a means for the ancient and medieval Church to visualize a central truth it came to cherish from very early in its development. Namely, that Jesus has been part of the Story – and the way we understand the Story of Everything – from the beginning.

Today we celebrate this astounding mystery as a new feast in the calendar of the Church: the Feast of Christ in Creation. “It is the first time in history that Christians have tried to adopt a liturgical feast ecumenically,” writes scholar Kimberly Belcher, and the first time the Western Church has adopted a feast of Eastern Church origins in more than 500 years. It rose to Western Christian consciousness when the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople suggested its use back in 1989. The Eastern Church memorializes both the beginning of the world and the start of the ancient Roman civil year on September 1, called the Feast of the Indiction since the seventh century. Patriarch Bartholomew, often called the “Green” Patriarch, advocated that it be adopted across the whole Church as a day of prayer for creation. In April, that dream and desire became a formal reality: the Consultation on Common Texts, the World Council of Churches, the Middle East Council of Churches, and several world communions formally adopted it as a feast.

We Brothers are excited at the profound possibilities opened by this milestone. Why? While Creation Day has been observed informally now for almost three decades, a Feast of Christ in Creation is importantly different. A feast day, with its own readings and coherent theology, makes some facet of God’s nature, actions, and relations to the world present to us here and now, sacramentally.

Today’s feast is multifaceted – as any worthy feast ought to be! – but those facets can be considered under four main headings: For Christians, creation is God’s creative act, in and through Jesus Christ. Creation is a Christological mystery – having to do with the nature and person of Christ. Creation is a Trinitarian mystery. And creation is sacramental and covenantal. I will only scratch the surface, and the good news is that today begins our five-week observance of the Season of Creation, with many more sermons to come.

So I’ll begin the season with the seed of a question:

When and how does the story of Jesus you first learned begin?

Chances are, in the manger at Bethlehem. The birth of Jesus of Nazareth at Christmas, when the Creator was so moved in love and longing to redeem all things that God entered time and space as a creature, makes a captivating place to begin the Story. Especially for children, and for parents of children experiencing the Story again through their enchanted eyes.

But it is not the only place one could begin the story.

The universe is estimated to be approximately 13.8 billion years old. While every explanation of how that fact is deduced very quickly shatters my brainpower, it is noteworthy that the span of time between 1 AD and 2026, seen through this lens, is so infinitesimal that it doesn’t change the first decimal place of the universe’s age.

Today’s feast moves us to contemplate the mystery of the Incarnation in light of the billions of years in which the eternal, creative Word has been speaking life into being. That Word speaks our life into being in each moment as pure gift. Through Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Giver of Life, has been guiding each being in its procession from and return to the heart of the Father.

The early Church also told a story about Jesus that began at Bethlehem but sought, and found, a prequel on a cosmic scale. In the grand scheme of things, it did so relatively quickly. This process unfolded through the transmitted memory of living relationships between Jesus and his disciples; through the early Christian engagement with Hebrew Scripture in light of that life-changing, increasingly central, collective relationship; and in its expression of that experience in the writings that would become Scripture for us.

By around the year 60, a Christian teacher could claim with reasonable consensus: “All things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17).

By around 70, when contemporary scholars believe the Gospel of Mark was written, its author would tell the story of Jesus’ disciples asking one another: “Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:41). Its implicit answer would be that Jesus’ relationship with creation issued from his relationship with God the Creator.

And by around 90, the author of John’s Gospel would produce the Prologue we heard this evening, a breathtaking synthesis of Hebrew Wisdom literature in dialogue with the Johannine community’s orally transmitted memory of Jesus and its ongoing encounter with his risen presence.

Recovering a living relationship with this Creator Christ and its full implications for the creation we share is the great task of the Western Church in our time.

How might pausing to take stock of all this in prayer and corporate worship change how we experience Christ’s presence in all sorts of places, circumstances, and persons – including nonhuman persons? How does it change how we experience creation itself – of which we are one small part, brought into being from nothing and continually sustained, in love, by God’s creative action?

There are three passages in our Rule of Life that point to concrete practices that shape this community’s relationship with Christ in Creation: our learning, our intercessory prayer and action, and our approach to mission.

In a chapter entitled “The Maturing of Our Minds in Christ,” we read:

“… we need to encourage one another to value not only reading and study but many other ways of learning, every method that helps us become more responsive in heart and mind to the whole creation. As our faith matures we come to recognize Christ’s hidden presence everywhere,” and then the quotation from Colossians I cited before.

In the chapter “The Mystery of Intercession,” we read:

“Through faith we see Christ not only in his majesty in heaven, but in his lowly presence in every creature. He suffers with and in everyone in need. Our intercession does not call down the divine presence to come to the place where we have seen a need, for the Christ who fills all things is already in that place. It is his Spirit who calls us to join him there by offering our love in intercessory prayer and action, to be used by God for healing and transformation.”

And in the chapter “Mission and Service,” we read:

“Christ is already present in the life of everyone as the light of the world. It is our joy to serve all those to whom we are sent by helping them to embrace that presence in faith.”

In revisiting and praying with these passages, I was struck by how the word faith animates all three. We begin to see how Christ might be present everywhere and in all by entrusting our hearts to him one encounter at a time, unsure of what the results may be and how much it will cost us. We learn to be present to other beings and the Source of all Being moving in them, even if the manner of that presence is utterly mysterious to us. And we come to know ourselves more deeply by gradually trusting who we are in relationship, made in the image of a God whose being is a Trinity of persons.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who so clearly knew and expressed from experience the mysterious intimacy possible between human and other-than-human creation, wrote:

I live my life in widening circles

The Feast of Creation in Christ, which we celebrate today.

Br. Luke Ditewig

The Beheading of John the Baptist

2 Chronicles 24:17-21

What gruesome stories of prophets stoned in the temple and beheaded for a banquet. I long assumed this was by accident and terrible coincidence: the king’s huge offer, the daughter running to her mother, the request, and the display.

The TV series The Chosen tells it differently, perhaps more realistically. Herodias, knowing Herod’s ways, schemed this opportunity, prompted her daughter to learn an amazing dance guided by a teacher, arranged for her dance at this banquet, and instructed her to make the request. A perfect plot. As in so many popular thriller stories, one goes to great lengths for revenge.

John was in prison for telling Herod he was wrong to marry his brother’s wife. John spoke hard truths to God’s people and to oppressive power: confess sin, return to God, and live right. We remember martyrs like John who were killed for their faith. Martyr means witness: testifying to the truth one has seen and known. Justice depends on truthful witnesses. John went to great lengths declaring what he knew, the call to turn from wrong and follow God.

Testifying to truth, bearing witness, is also to listen, see, and acknowledge another’s truth. We bear witness to hurt and sorrow, wrong and failure, dreams and heartbreak. To witness and to be witnessed is mutually vulnerable and risky. As St. Paul wrote, we are like clay jars prone to breaking (2 Corinthians 4:7-11).

Being seen, known – being witnessed – prompts healing. Being witnessed shifts our body chemistry toward repair. John prepared the way and pointed to Jesus, to God who goes to the greatest length to salvage, rescue, redeem, transform, and restore.

To what length have you gone or dreamed to inflict pain on one who hurt you?

To what length has another gone to bear witness to your truth, your pain?

How have you been blessed to bear witness?

Speak the truth. Be witnessed. Bear witness. Go to great lengths to heal. Blessed John the Baptist, whom we remember today.

Br. James Koester

John 1:43-51

I know it’s confusing. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all mention an apostle named Bartholomew (Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:14; Acts 1:13). Each time he appears in the list of apostles, it’s often right after Philip. However, Bartholomew doesn’t appear in John’s Gospel. Instead, someone named Nathanael appears, tellingly, as a friend of Philip’s. Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the Law and also the Prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see” (John 1:44-46). It is this Nathanael whom Jesus saw sitting under a fig tree and described as an Israelite without guile (John 1:47-48). This proclamation by Jesus prompts an immediate confession of faith: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” (John 1:49).

Scholars remind us that Bartholomew is a surname, meaning son of Tolmai, or as we would say, Tolmaison. We are probably talking about the same person, an apostle named Nathanael bar-tolmai, or Nathanael Bartholomew. It’s as if we had two lists of Brothers: Jonathan, David, Curtis, James, Geoffrey … or: Jonathan, David, Curtis, Koester, Geoffrey. I’m not two different people, James and Koester. I’m the same person, just two different names, James and Koester.

With that out of the way, what can we say about Nathanael Bartholomew, in whom there is no guile, as a follower of Jesus? More importantly, what can we say about ourselves as disciples of Jesus?

You will know, or I hope you know, that an apostle is someone who is sent. On that first Easter Day, when the Risen Lord appeared in the Upper Room, Jesus sent the apostles: Jesus said to them, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven … if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:21-23). Empowered by the Spirit, the apostles were sent to proclaim the gospel of forgiveness.

We hear something similar in our readings today. Deuteronomy reminds us that God will raise up prophets who will speak everything that God commands them (Deuteronomy 18:18). First Corinthians tells us that apostles become fathers to those to whom they have been sent (1 Corinthians 4:15). Jesus reminds us that the greatest must be as the youngest, and the one in authority, as the one who serves (Luke 22:26-27).

Those empowered by the Spirit and sent by God are to speak the words of God, tenderly, as a parent does to a child, and to serve as Jesus did with towel, basin, and water (John 13:1ff.).

Like Nathanael Bartholomew, you and I have been sent by Jesus, empowered by the Spirit, to speak words of forgiveness, as tenderly as a parent does to a child, and to view the world from our knees, as we perform acts of loving service. This is only possible when we know Jesus as the Son of God and King of Israel, and are known by him as women and men without guile.

Today, as we give thanks for Bartholomew, and ask for his prayers, we do so as people in the spirit of Bartholomew: without guile, confessing Jesus as Son of God, empowered by the Spirit, and proclaiming tenderly words of healing and forgiveness, as we carry out acts of loving service, looking at the world from our place on our knees.

Nathanael Bartholomew, pray for us.