Br. Curtis Almquist

John 14:27-31a

Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid” (John 14:27).

This word “peace,” which we hear in our Gospel lesson, is not the mere absence of acrimony and conflict in the world that surrounds us. That would be the peace the world gives, which, of course, is desperately needed in our very torn world. However, Jesus is here talking about peace from the inside out. He’s talking about being at peace in the storm. This entails two things.

For one, our own inner peace comes from surrendering to the terms by which God has given us life. It is otherwise possible to live rejecting, or resenting, or regretting one’s whole life long, or to live one’s life in complaint or comparison, which is no way to live. Don’t wait until the end of your life for peace, when you hope to rest in peace. Receive now this gift of peace Jesus promises us. You may need help with this. Many people, certainly I, have needed help to receive Jesus’ gift of peace. Get help. You’re worth it. Get the help you need so that you can receive and unwrap Jesus’ gift of peace, which Jesus has promised us.

There’s also Jesus’ promise of peace for other people: the desperate need for peace for those near and those far away. This gift of peace is not a standalone. Peace for our world can only come as an outgrowth of justice. In the absence of justice, “peace” can be a form of oppression, the strong imposing virulent obedience on the weak. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.” [1]

The peace Jesus promises us is addressed in Greek with a plural second-person pronoun. Jesus is saying, “Peace I leave with you all; my peace I give to you all. I do not give to you all as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” [2] This is how we can understand the coupling of peace with justice, peace-receiving through justice-making. This is where we have agency. This is where we must act in some way within our own reach to redress, in Jesus’ name, in Jesus’ power, and in Jesus’ love, the egregious injustice that surrounds us, and “to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence.” [3] Then we – we all – can fully appropriate the gift of peace Jesus has given us. [4]

[1] Martin Luther King Jr., Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, 10 December 1964.

[2] The Greek pronoun is ὑμῖν, plural, “you all.”

[3] Martin Luther King Jr., Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, 10 December 1964.

[4] See James 2:14-17.

Br. James Koester

The Fifth Sunday of Easter

Acts 7:55-60

One of the fun things about Jerusalem is the multiplicity of holy sites scattered around the Old City. What is even more fun is that there are multiple sites commemorating the same thing. There are, for instance, two upper rooms: the Upper Room, up,[1] and the Upper Room, down.[2] In one you go upstairs to enter. In the other you descend a flight of stairs. There are two places that commemorate the resurrection: the Church of the Resurrection[3] within the Old City, and just outside, the Garden Tomb.[4] Clearly the pilgrim industry operates on the principle that if one is good, two is better.

This principle includes not one, but two places tied to the martyrdom of Stephen. Tradition holds that he was stoned outside what was once called St. Stephen’s Gate, on the east side of the city. Tradition also holds that he was stoned outside what was also once called St. Stephen’s Gate, on the north side of the city. So, we have two places, two gates, two parts of the city, both claiming to be the site of his martyrdom. Thus, we have two different meanings of the story. So, what’s the story, or rather the stories?

As you know, tradition is history, but not necessarily historical. Add theology to the mix, and you get a powerful combination of history, tradition, theology, and myth. None of this means the stories are untrue. It means there is a deeper truth than first meets the eye.

So, what of these two traditions, and what truths are they telling us?

In the first instance, St. Stephen’s Gate, now called the Lion’s Gate,[5] on the east side of the city, faces the Mount of Olives. This is the gate you go through to get to the Kedron Valley, the Mount of Olives, and beyond that, Bethany. That is significant, because mountains in scripture are places of encounter. They are places of encounter between humanity and God. When we think of mountains, we think of Mount Sinai,[6] the Mount of the Transfiguration,[7] and Mount Moriah.[8] Each of these are places of encounter, and there, facing the Mount of Olives, Stephen was stoned. And what happens just before his death? He has an encounter with the risen Lord. “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” (Acts 7:56). With that he is dragged out of the city, to this place of encounter, and stoned. As he dies, he prays, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59).

Located here, on the east side of the city, facing the Mount of Olives, the story of Stephen’s death is a resurrection story in which Stephen encounters the risen and glorified Lord.

But there is another tradition, another gate, another story.

This time Stephen’s death takes place outside a gate on the north side of the city, once, of course, called St. Stephen’s Gate, but now called the Damascus Gate. This is the gate you go through on your way north, to the seacoast, and beyond that to Damascus. It was, and continues to be, a major place of trade, as well as the beginning and ending of countless journeys. It is also the gate through which the early Christian community fled immediately after Stephen’s martyrdom. Luke tells us that on the day of Stephen’s stoning “a severe persecution began against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria” (Acts 8:1). An unintended consequence of Stephen’s death is that, in an instant, the early disciples of Jesus became missionaries, telling everyone they encountered, as they fled, what the Lord had done, and the mercy that had been shown to them.[9]

Located here, on the north side of the city, at the Damascus Gate, on a major trade route heading north to the seacoast and beyond that to Rome, the very heart of the Empire, the death of Stephen became the impetus for the church to obey Jesus’ command to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20).

Now all of this is interesting, and fun, and a little quirky. In other words, the stories of Stephen’s death are everything that appeals to me. But so what? Who cares, besides me? More to the point, why should you care? Why should you care where Stephen was stoned? Does it matter that tradition tells us he was stoned facing the Mount of Olives, or on the road to Damascus? Well, it does, and it matters as much today as it did when Luke first put pen to parchment. It matters that Stephen’s death is both a story of encounter with the risen and glorified Lord and the beginning of the church’s missionary venture.

It matters today because the narrative of Christianity, at least in this country, is in the hands of Pete Hegseth and those who would call upon God to destroy their enemies in the name of Jesus. Hegseth’s gospel is not the good news of Jesus. Yet for many it is the only news of Jesus they hear, because it is the loudest, and, rightly, they turn their backs on it.

But we have another gospel to proclaim. That gospel, Stephen’s gospel, is a gospel of forgiveness, reconciliation, and love. The day of quiet, polite, discrete evangelism is over. Our gospel, the gospel of Jesus’ love, the new life offered by his resurrection, the story of God’s mercy, and our witness to the Spirit’s renewing energies, needs to be shouted louder than the Hegseth gospel of vengeance. The time has come for us to be loud and proud that we are Christians, who, like Stephen, have seen the Lord and are prepared to head into the very heart of the empire to proclaim the good things God has done for us, even if it means stones will be thrown in our direction.

Where Stephen died matters today, because it tells us who we are: a people who know the transforming power of Jesus’ resurrection and a people who have been sent to proclaim that power in love. Say it loud, say it proud, we have a gospel to proclaim, a gospel of love, reconciliation, and mercy rooted in our encounter with the risen Jesus. And that, friends, is really good news.

[1] The Cenacle is located on Mount Zion near Dormition Abbey.

[2] St. Mark’s Syriac Orthodox Church is in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem.

[3] Also called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

[4] The Garden Tomb is located a few hundred yards north of the Damascus Gate on the Nablus Road.

[5] It is called the Lion’s Gate because of the carving of a lion’s head on one of its pillars. It is also called the Gate of Our Lady Mary because it is near St. Anne’s Church, the traditional birthplace of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

[6] Mount Sinai was where Moses received the Ten Commandments.

[7] The Mount of the Transfiguration was where Jesus was transfigured.

[8] Mount Moriah is the traditional site of the binding, or sacrifice, of Isaac and is now the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

[9] See Mark 5:19.

The Rt. Rev. Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows

The Feast of Saint John

As has become my custom in recent years, I began the first days of the year at a contemplative prayer retreat with dear friends and colleagues. On the very first day of our gathering, our retreat leader, Brother James Dowd, who leads the Contemplative Underground community out of Omaha, Nebraska, posed a question. Well, he posed many questions, but the one we were asked to journal about was this: “What made me run to Jesus?” As a runner, I loved this question. As a Christian, I loved this question even more. The context of the question was the invitation to a time of stillness. The threefold way of stillness, silence, and solitude would be the anchor of our prayer practice and retreat, and it was the reminder I needed that running to Jesus was not really about my body’s ability to run toward Christ. Rather, it was an invitation for my heart to yearn for and run toward Jesus and new life.

As we celebrate the feast of St. John the Evangelist, the patronal feast of this community, I cannot help but wonder whether this tension between running toward Jesus and the new life he offers, and the stillness that allows space to be attentive to the divine presence, is at the heart of the spiritual life.

Having logged many miles here, along the Charles River and streets in Boston, I am captivated by the image of the disciples running on that particular first day of the week. I can imagine that Mary Magdalene is just flat-out exhausted – physically and emotionally. After all of the drama of the days before, she has run back and forth from the tomb a few times: first to discover that the stone had been rolled away, and then to tell Simon Peter and John, the Beloved Disciple, of her discovery. Then, presumably, they all run back to the tomb.

When Simon Peter and John run to the tomb to see for themselves, the small detail that John outran Simon Peter always stands out for me. This is not simply a commentary on John being more fit and just faster, though I have often wondered whether Simon Peter was too weighed down by his denials and desertion at the cross to pick up the pace. We do not really know – and it is not really a competition. They were not trying to break the tape at the Boston Marathon. Though Simon Peter entered the empty tomb first, it is the steadfast, eager, and beloved disciple who would be the first to believe. I think each of these devoted followers of Jesus reveals some truths of the spiritual journey for us.

The question posed on my retreat was a reflective – backward-glancing – question: What made me run to Jesus? The question, or invitation, I want to pose today is this: What keeps us running toward Jesus? What keeps us running to tell others about the risen Christ, like Mary Magdalene? What keeps us moving with haste in the direction of the empty tomb, toward new life in the resurrected Christ, like John, the Beloved Disciple? And what happens when we are stuck and dragging our feet a little because we are filled with doubts, or questions about worthiness, or wonderment about what new life will bring, like Simon Peter?

The beauty of our gospel texts, even when they challenge us, is that they make space for the many ways we are prone to show up in our spiritual lives. We need both Mary and Martha of Bethany to mirror for us the spiritual life, with its moments for contemplation and time for action. And we need these three to remind us that there are times when we find ourselves sprinting for resurrection and new life with all the zeal of a recent convert, and other times when we are not sure whether we can really believe God’s promises and wonder whether God could really love us that much.

That caution, or the inclination to pump the brakes when confronting the possibilities of new life that Jesus offers us, has always been part of the human condition. The gospel accounts reveal that even those closest to Jesus had moments of doubt and sought to hide away. Huddling behind closed doors was an understandable response in the wake of the crucifixion and in the face of questioned faith in Jesus’ promise to rise again.

Knowing the ebb and flow of the spiritual life helps us to have compassion for those to whom we want to bring the good news, but who resist it. In our day, this caution looks like what our sister Canon Stephanie Spellers notes in her book Church Tomorrow: indifference to the spiritual life, religious trauma, giving up on God, or the individualistic tendency to isolate and avoid community – spiritual or otherwise.

But I do not know how to do this life without community. It is in community and fellowship that the promises of new life and resurrection are made known. I imagine Mary Magdalene encountering the empty tomb and running to her friends because there was no way such good news made sense alone. For most of us, believing in and living the good news of the Resurrection, of new life, of God doing something new, requires a community – even when it is just two or three. This is the essence of Christian living: we are meant to accompany one another on the journey with and toward the risen Christ.

Simon Peter reminds me of God’s patience with us when, for whatever reason, my heart is yearning for new life in Christ – forgiveness, reconciliation, a full life where I am open to seeing God’s love, grace, and mercy at work – and I hold back a little. I may want that life, and yet, knowing the cost of discipleship, the life I must lay down to fully say yes, like Simon Peter, I am happy to let someone else go on ahead.

Being a member of the Fellowship of St. John for some twenty years is one of the ways I remember that running toward Jesus is not a solitary act. This dispersed community of prayer partners, and its great cloud of witnesses on both sides of glory, attests to the necessity and gift of seeking the risen Christ with others … and it almost did not happen for me.

Prior to committing, I was on probation for a very long time – for several years. I would write to Brother Eldridge Pendleton about my struggles with wanting so much to be a member of the Fellowship, but believing my prayer life to be deficient and feeling unworthy. I was not sure my practice of centering prayer was fully in line with the Rule. I wanted to get it right or not commit at all. But in the ways that we hope God is with each of us, Brother Pendleton was patient and steadfast and clear that my desire for God in prayer – whatever form it took – was enough. Brother Eldridge, and over the years Brother Jonathan, and this community were not going to give up on me.

Just as in baptism, committing to a community that never gives up on you, like the Fellowship of St. John, teaches us how not to give up on this world and the people who might cause us to despair. This Fellowship helps us keep our commitment to seek to be like John, the Beloved Disciple – whom we ultimately remember not for his speed in running, but for his belief in the risen Christ and his ability to be still when it mattered most: to abide, to remain, and to love Jesus from the foot of the cross to the glory of the empty tomb and beyond.

What or who keeps you running toward Jesus? May they ever be steadfast with you on the journey, drawing you deeper into the heart of Christ, whose joy it is to abide, to remain, and to love each of us however we are to be found: the hesitant, the willing, and the eager. Amen.

Br. Jack Crowley

Marie de l’Incarnation

John 15:14-17

Whenever I pray with the life of a saint, I look at two things. The first is what the saint thought God was calling them to do. The second is what actually happened in their life. These two things don’t always overlap smoothly, yet somehow, saints always find a way to serve God.

Today we celebrate and pray with the life of Saint Marie of the Incarnation. When Saint Marie was fourteen years old, she told her parents that she wanted to join a Benedictine abbey. This was in France in the early 1600s, and her parents responded to her request by saying no and arranging her marriage to a silk worker. Saint Marie married and had a son. Tragically, six months later, her husband died. So in a short amount of time, Saint Marie had gone from a young woman looking to join the religious life to a teenage widow with a baby and her husband’s business to run. Certainly this was a wide gulf between what she thought God had been calling her to do and what actually happened.

We don’t have time to go into the seventy years of her saintly life and all that she did to become a saint, but the point I’m trying to make is even saints have to deal with the curveballs of life. They become saints not by quitting or resenting, but by persevering. They keep finding a way to serve God even if it’s not in the way they originally thought they would.

I think we all have our own version of this. Times when we say to God if only this or that happened, then I could really start serving you. We may even feel forsaken by God, wondering why God called us to do something and for that thing to suddenly change. It’s important to remember that even Jesus himself felt this inner turmoil.

Although it is beautiful to put our saints in stained glass windows, we must remember their inner lives were just as human as our own. They too had to deal with the same doubts, pet peeves, and anxieties we deal with. Yet somehow they transformed these into something greater, something that could serve God and others.

We don’t always have a full idea of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Yet, as Christians, we are called to do our best. No matter what form that might take, we are called to do our best, and let God handle the rest.

Br. Curtis Almquist

Saint Mark the Evangelist

Ephesians 4:7-8, 11-16

In the calendar of the church, we remember today a gospel writer named John Mark.[1] Call him Mark. Mark was not one of the original twelve apostles; Mark was among a wider circle of seventy disciples whom Jesus also appointed.[2] We know from the New Testament that Mark became a companion on missionary journeys with Paul, with Barnabas, and with Timothy.[3] We infer Mark had a close relationship with Peter, who writes about “my son Mark” (1 Peter 5:13). And according to the Acts of the Apostles, the home belonging to Mark’s mother in Jerusalem became a house church for Jesus’ followers.[4] Mark was martyred in Egypt in year 68, and the Coptic Church remembers Saint Mark as its founder and patron.

The Gospel according to Mark does not begin in eternity before all time (like the Gospel according to John); nor does Mark begin with Jesus’ infant birth (like the Gospels according to Matthew and Luke). Mark begins with Jesus’ baptism. Jesus is already an adult. Soon Jesus’ public ministry becomes shrouded in secrecy. Jesus will ask something, or listen to something, or do something miraculous, and then Jesus will say, “Don’t tell anyone.” In many instances, Jesus insists on others’ silence.[5] And it’s not just with strangers. The same pertains to his twelve apostles. Early on, Jesus asks them, “‘Who do you say that I am?’ Peter answers, ‘You are the Messiah.’ And [Jesus] sternly orders them not to tell anyone about him” (Mark 8:29-30).

Many followers were wowed by Jesus’ miraculous provision of food, by his power to heal, by his wise yet profoundly simple parables drawn from everyday life. Jesus would teach: “You have heard it said . . . but I say,” and what followed was good news about God’s love and mercy for everyone. Among those who followed Jesus were some with political aspirations. The prophets had predicted the Messiah would be the “King of Kings.”[6] Those attracted to that kind of power – including some of his own apostles – could not wait to get to Jerusalem for Jesus’ political takeover and their own ascendancy.

Hence, the secret. The secrecy is not for Jesus’ sake. The secrecy is for the sake of his followers.[7] Jesus knew his followers were not ready to know where all this was leading. Not only would Jesus face crucifixion, but his followers would probably meet a similar death. Jesus knew his followers could not take this in, so he did not talk about the cost of discipleship. Not until the end, at his crucifixion. By then, virtually all of his disciples and the multitudes who had followed Jesus had abandoned him.

And then there is the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection. Jesus had promised his followers “resurrection power,” and they got it![8] The secret was out, and so were the apostles. Saint Mark writes: “[The apostles] went out and proclaimed the good news of Jesus Christ everywhere” (Mark 16:19-20).

The postlude is there remains an element of secrecy pertaining to all of us in our personal relationship to Jesus. The secret is what we are not ready to know about what is ahead in our own life, what awaits us. We are not yet ready to know, God knows. Our own future is shrouded in some mystery. We bank our faith in Jesus – God Emmanuel, God with us – that when and how we face what awaits us, day by day and at our end, we will find the power of Jesus’ resurrection in the here-and-now. In the meantime, we are hidden from knowing more than we can live with. It’s a secrecy of love. Saint Mark discovered this, as did the other apostles, and have so many, many others down through the centuries.

Blessed Mark, whom we remember today.

[1] Except for being referred to as “John” in Acts 12:25, 13:5; 13, and 15:37, elsewhere in the New Testament he is called by his Latin surname, Mark. Mark may have been Saint Barnabas’s cousin (Colossians 4:10).

[2] Luke 10:1.

[3] Mark accompanied Barnabas and Paul to Antioch (Acts 12-13; 2 Timothy 4:11). Later tradition identifies Mark with the young man fleeing naked at the time of Jesus’ arrest (Mark 14:51–52). Saint Mark is traditionally represented as a lion, derived from Mark’s description of John the Baptist as “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness” (Mark 1:3), which artists have imagined as a roaring lion.

[4] Acts 12:12.

[5] Mark 1:39-2:5; 7:31-36; 8:22-26; 8:30-33; 9:4-9; 9:30-32.

[6] 2 Samuel 7:16 – “Your house and kingdom will endure forever before Me, and your throne will be established forever”; Isaiah 9:6 – “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

[7] Mark 9:30-32.

[8] Mark 1:50.

Br. Lain Wilson

George

Joshua 1:1-9

I have in my cell a small icon depicting an armored and caped George, astride a white horse, driving his lance down into the belly of a dragon. It’s a familiar and beloved depiction of a familiar and beloved saint.

Even leaving the dragon aside, this depiction of George places him in a kind of timeless medieval fantasy. This creates a good deal of critical and imaginative distance for us. Without translating his iconography to our modern visual idiom, George retains much of the romantic glow that he acquired in his association with chivalry.

Compare this to today’s texts. In hearing the plain, modern English, the promise of forcible dispossession or the hope that God will “strike all my enemies across the face” (Psalm 3:7) can make us distinctly uncomfortable. These words so easily enter into conversation with what we see in the world around us now.

What happens when we undertake a similar act of translation, replacing George’s lance with a machine gun, and his horse with a tank? What happens when George looks like so many soldiers from so many war zones across the globe? What emotions does this imaginary iconography raise in you?

For my part, I feel discomfort – and that discomfort is, for me, a surprising invitation.

It invites me to remember that we find God’s saints in every place and every walk of life – even, and perhaps especially – in those that we may find uncomfortable. If a tank and machine gun bring to my mind the governmental policies of military adventurism and hubris that have marked the entirety of my adult life, George reminds us that a soldier is not those policies, indeed, that no individual can contain within themselves the societal forces that affect us all.[1] We find God’s saints in the simple and faithful acts of a life lived day by day, in circumstances of chance or choice.

But that faithfully lived life may not run along with the societal current, but in opposition to it. George as a soldier would have been killed for his refusal to participate in the imperial cult rituals directed toward the emperor; his martyrdom was a witnessing to the supremacy of God, not Augustus. We will all find ourselves facing multiple and conflicting demands on our loyalties – whether in our churches or families or units or nations. George invites us to pledge our allegiance and loyalty to God and the gospel of hope, peace, and love that Jesus proclaims, and to reject those claims on them made by those promoting despair, war, and hate.

What this may mean for each of us, in our varied circumstances of chance and choice, will differ. But following George in putting God first is ultimately a simple choice. It is simple and enormously clarifying, not least because it reminds us of God’s own assurances to us: “the Lord [our] God is with [us] wherever [we] go” (Joshua 1:9) and “the one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone” (John 8:29). These assurances give us strength and courage as we face the powers of this world, who demand so much of us, with the witness of our own faithfully lived lives.

[1] Jonathan Shay puts it well, in a more specific context, in his remarkable Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (Simon and Schuster, 1994), xxiii: “There is no contradiction between hating war and honoring the soldier.”

Br. Curtis Almquist

The Third Sunday of Easter

Luke 24:36b-48

Not long ago someone sent me an AI-generated headshot of Jesus: what Jesus might have looked like as a young man in his 30s living in Palestine in the first century Anno Domini. He has warm olive skin, dark almond-shaped eyes, dark hair with a well-groomed beard, and thick eyebrows. In my travels in the Holy Land, I have seen many young men with this same facial appearance; however, here in the United States today, a man of this appearance would easily be a target for apprehension by ICE agents, I’m ashamed to say. This AI-generated Jesus looks nothing like the Jesus pictured in my boyhood Sunday School papers where Jesus looked like the local young men: very Swedish, with blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes.

There has been a perennial problem recognizing Jesus for who he was and who he is. It was happening even in his own lifetime given that he came from Nazareth. The word on the street was, “What good can come from Nazareth?” (John 1:45-46). He also did not have the right pedigree, some people asking rhetorically, “Isn’t he Joseph’s son,” Joseph who clearly was not regal. There was a problem with his mother who, according to the gossip we can imagine, had fabricated how she had gotten pregnant. And then Jesus himself, who was a normal human being . . . except he had not gotten on with life: no marriage; no vocation to speak of; certainly nothing close to the fabulous claims purportedly made at the time of Jesus’ birth. In his lifetime – I’ll call it his first lifetime, before his crucifixion – he came to be recognized as the Messiah by those who did. But the masses of Jews and Gentiles, and the occupying forces of the Roman Empire mostly saw Jesus as a problem, not an answer.

Our Gospel lesson for today is happening after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, as he joins up with two women on their walk to Emmaus, about 7 miles west of Jerusalem. They had known Jesus very well. Yet they do not recognize him for the longest while as they walked and talked together. How could that be? How could they not recognize him, his voice and language? Is it because his face and body is still so torn and traumatized by the crucifixion, and his gait so hobbled because his ankles had been nailed to a cross? Are they blinded by their grief? And it was the same earlier, near his tomb. Jesus had been mis-recognized as a gardener by his closest followers. Jesus also had appeared to Mary Magdalene, which she reported to other close followers of Jesus. They found her report unbelievable. There is the scene of the disciples huddled in that upper room where they had earlier shared their last supper with Jesus.[1] Jesus appears like a ghost. There were also the disciples who had resorted again to fishing in Galilee.[2] Jesus is preparing breakfast for them, and they don’t immediately recognize him. So it goes. Jesus is consistently not recognized.

This recurring experience of not recognizing Jesus continues to this day. In the Brothers’ Rule of Life we remind ourselves of “God’s presence and action in creation, in other people, and in the fabric of ordinary existence.” We affirm that “Christ is already present in the life of everyone as the light of the world.” And we recall that, “as our faith matures we come to recognize Christ’s hidden presence everywhere.” His “hidden presence” everywhere. That being so, where am I prone to miss discovering Christ? Where are you likely to miss meeting Christ? I recall Mother Teresa’s once being asked whether she and her sisters ever came face-to-face with Jesus in the person of the poor and dying people whom they served? Did they recognize Jesus? She answered, “Yes, Jesus is present, often hideously disguised.”

Do you remember the series of children’s books entitled Where’s Waldo? Waldo is a cartoon figure pictured somewhere on each page-after-page in scenes of people from every imaginable setting and culture. Waldo is always present, oftentimes rather disguised by distractions to our eyes. The child’s quest is to find Waldo on every page. He’s definitely there, somewhere. An adult version of this adventure is to take Jesus at his word that he is present everywhere, in everyone. Where’s Jesus? He’s definitely present, always. Where are we prone to miss seeing and experiencing him? Where do I? Where do you? What puts us off the trail? What distracts us? What blinds us because of our own background, our prejudice, or our discrimination? Jesus himself reminded us we how likely we are to see him (or to miss seeing him) among the least and the last the lost on our own hierarchy of favored people.[3] For us all, it is so important to keep bringing our blinding biases into the light for a good airing.

I remember our Br. David saying years ago that, as our Novice Guardian, David would tell a new incoming Brother that he would be given a special teacher, someone who would be a real source of revelation. David called this person “a special teacher,” because otherwise our new Brother might consider this person not an inspiration but rather an irritant or a disappointment. This kind of “teacher” is a person who triggers our negative judgment, for whom we easily feel impatient, whom we are prone to dismiss or denigrate. This is our teacher because he or she is exposing us. Look at you. You are so kind, and so patient, and so gentle, and so compassionate . . . except when you’re not, except when you have been triggered by someone who does not make your cut. Undoubtedly this other person also has their own stuff. We all do. However, understanding this other person as our teacher – who exposes us to our own stuff – is an excellent practice to carry in life. Recognizing that our own life is chock full of these teachers actually opens the door of enlightenment, even gratitude, for people we might otherwise only judge with irritation and condemnation. I find it quite helpful, humbling, which is good thing to always be on the lookout for teachers.

Christ is always present among us. Therefore, according to C. S. Lewis, “There are no ordinary people.” Lewis says we “have never talked to a mere mortal.”[4] As we interact with people throughout the day and throughout our lifetime, carrying a mindset that everyone we meet is something more than immediately meets our eyes – that God loves this person, is with them, is working in them, probably slowly – will make a world of difference, not only to other people but for ourselves. Presuming that God is at work in others’ lives, not only in our own, can convert our hard heart into a compassionate, humble, patient heart for others. One of the early members of our SSJE brotherhood, Father George Congreve, said that “the meaning of all [our] life is its capacity of receiving the infinite love of God,” then making that love “the substance of our being.” It’s about meeting Christ and serving Christ in all others.[5]

I would like to be able to end say, “So there’s that. Amen.” But I cannot. It’s not this straightforward with all the people in our lives, as you well know. Jesus himself warns of “false prophets” who come to us “in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.”[6] Saint Paul writes quite amount about “false shepherds” and “savage wolves [who] will come in among you . . . distorting the truth in order to entice [you] to follow them.”[7] These are dress-up “Messiahs” and they keep showing up.

Jesus is very clear in his saying we are not to judge, but that’s with a qualification. We certainly must use our God-given judgmental faculties all day, all of our life. This includes our judging people: whether we believe them, trust them, are willing to follow them, want to be with them. We are judging people all the day long, and necessarily so. However the judgment we are clearly asked not by Jesus not to do is damning people to hell, our making an eternal judgment on someone. That is neither our capacity nor our job. Towards those whom we find nefarious, we may need to oppose them and work against their designs. We may also pray up a storm that those whose actions and language we find morally inadmissible be stopped. However I always find it right to end those “cease and desist” prayers with a word of love: that God’s love intervene in this person’s, these persons’ lives. They are certainly not going to get better with our hate.

In our Gospel lesson today from Emmaus, Jesus was recognized in the context of sharing a meal. At the beginning of his ministry Jesus was recognized at a wedding feast. Jesus was also recognized in the miraculous feeding of the multitudes. Jesus was recognized in the meal he served, what we call the last supper. For some reason, in the context of “table fellowship” Jesus was repeatedly recognized by his immediate followers. So for each of us, there will be ways we have come to recognize and understand Jesus’ presence and power. That is good and right and trustworthy. The invitation is to open the eyes of our heart to what more Jesus is up to. Jesus is always up to more.

[1] Mark 16:9-14.

[2] John 21:1-14.

[3] Matthew 25:37-40.

[4] C. S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory (1941).

[5] George Congreve, SSJE (1835-1918) writing on “The Being of God”: Project Canterbury.

[6] See Matthew 7:15 and Luke 10:3.

[7] Acts 20:29-30, and elsewhere.

Br. Jack Crowley

John 6:16-21

The disciples saw Jesus walking on the sea . . . and they were terrified. That’s one of my favorite lines in scripture. I love it not only for the beautiful image of Jesus walking on water, but for the disciples’ reaction to Jesus. Personally, I find the image of Jesus walking on water to be one of the most beautiful images in scripture and what I love most is that the disciples’ initial reaction to this beautiful image is absolute terror.

I often ask myself how could this be? I imagine if I saw Jesus walking on water across the Charles River coming towards me, how would I react? I’d probably stop and stare, wide eyed and open mouthed. From there I have no idea what would happen.

The point I’m trying to make here is we never really know how we are going to react to God, especially when God is at work in the particular circumstances of our life. When we see Jesus crossing the waters of our own little rivers inside our minds, it will probably scare us at first. We all have our own little boat we are trying to navigate and then to see this man walk sure footedly when we are trying our best just to stay afloat, well you can see why people’s reactions to God vary all the way from violence, indifference, to worship.

We never really know how we are going to react to God and we also never know how other people are going to react to God. When you look at the life of Jesus, sometimes crowds of people wanted to throw him over a cliff and other times crowds of people wanted to anoint him king. Sometimes crowds of people cheered his arrival into the city with shouts of hosanna, and other times crowds of people shouted crucify him. When it comes to what to do with God, we human beings can be all over the place.

The great challenge we have as Christians is how to maintain an even keel. How do we keep our heads while the world around us goes crazy? How do we keep our eyes focused on what matters, and not lose ourselves in the terror? How do we maintain a spirit of love and compassion, and not fall victim to cynicism, hopelessness, and resentment?

We answer these questions with our lives. We rarely answer these questions in one big dramatic way, instead we answer these questions in ten thousand little ways. We answer these questions in how we smile, how we look each other in the eye, and how we nod with an understanding that our human experience of the divine is beyond expression. We answer these questions in how we forgive, how we move on, how we heal, how we bring peace to conflict, and how we bring joy to the brokenhearted.

There will not be background music as we work out our salvation. There will be the mundane sounds of cars, coughing, and air conditioning. Yet the music we will feel in our hearts will be better than anything we’ve ever heard before.

Br. Jamie Nelson

John 6:1-15

Opinions about serving leftover food can be polarizing. Many people enjoy eating leftovers, and many people just don’t.

Where do you stand? Are you someone who likes dining on a remix of last night’s dinner, or do containers of leftover food tend to sit forlornly in the far back corner of your fridge until they’re only suited for the compost?

Based on the story we heard just now, Jesus sounds like he belongs to Team Leftovers. Here’s why I say that.

In today’s gospel, a child’s generous sharing of a meagre five loaves of bread and two little fish was enough to miraculously feed a crowd of five thousand hungry people. Not only that, but the meal was enough that all could eat until they were satisfied, and yet there was still more that remained. Jesus directed the disciples to “gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost” (John 6:12). When they did so, they filled 12 baskets full of leftover bread.

What would you do with 12 baskets of leftover bread?

That’s a lot of bread to use. You could do all your favorite stale bread recipes and then some. You could cook up French toast for breakfast, take a sandwich in your lunch, serve garlic toast with supper and still have plenty to make bread pudding for dessert. However you slice it, that’s more than enough.

I don’t know what recipes Jesus and his crew of friends might have made with the leftover bread, but I do know this: he intended for it to be used. No crumb was thrown out, no piece was written off as too insignificant to save. Everything was gathered up and used for good.

Some of you here might have known our Brother, Bishop Tom Shaw. He died in 2014, long before I entered the monastery, so I never knew him personally. But my elder Brothers have passed down a phrase he liked to say: “God is frugal.”

God is frugal. Not miserly, but creative and unwilling to waste what could be reused for good.

God finds a way to make use of leftover bread, and of the leftovers of our lives. Nothing is useless in God’s ever-unfolding vision. Not the missed opportunities, not the unused gifts, not the abandoned career paths, not the half-finished chapters of our stories.

We carry around pieces of ourselves that we may label as our failures or, at the very least, no longer relevant to the people we’ve become. But God finds a way to make use of those leftovers. Jesus says to us, gather up what is left. Hang onto those pieces as you live your story today. Listen carefully. Perhaps what remains can be used now, perhaps it’ll be carried with you for years until the right time comes to serve it. But that time will come, when that stale bread is just what you need to serve in order to live out your calling as a follower of Jesus.

Later on in this same gospel chapter, John chapter 6,  Jesus proclaims, “I am the Bread of Life. . . . This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” (John 6:48, 51).

Through the leftover bread of our lives, the fragments gathered up to fill 12 baskets of stories, may the redeeming love of our ever-frugal God be revealed and proclaimed in our midst.

Br. David Vryhof

Acts 4:32-37

This early Christian community was on fire! Having just experienced the wild chaos of Pentecost, they are filled with the Spirit, aflame for God! Here’s how Luke describes them:

Luke’s portrayal has been a model for Christian communities, including monastic communities, for almost two thousand years. It continually calls us to reflect on our own communities – at home, at church, in the workplace, as a nation and as citizens of the world. I don’t have to tell you that its message is sorely needed today, when selfishness abounds and putting ourselves first is so strongly encouraged.

So what are we to do? What must be our priorities? How are we to live in this upside-down kingdom that Jesus and his Church proclaim?

Here is the first thing: we must heed the cries of the poor; we must attend and respond to their expressed needs. We know how deeply God cares for the poor and how often Moses, the prophets and Jesus called us to give aid to the forgotten and marginalized. How can we hope to enter this kingdom unless we commit ourselves to listen and to act on behalf of those who are desperately poor in our nation and our world? How can we say we are followers of Jesus if we ignore the cries of those who have stumbled and fallen in life’s race?

A few years ago at the Seattle Special Olympics, nine contestants, all physically or mentally disabled, assembled at the starting line for the 100-yard dash. At the gun, they all started out, not exactly in a dash, but with a relish to run the race to the finish and win. All, that is, except one boy who stumbled on the asphalt, tumbled over a couple of times and began to cry. The other eight heard the boy cry. They slowed down and looked back. Then they all turned around and went back. Every one of them. One girl with Down’s Syndrome bent down and kissed him and said, “This will make it better.” Then all nine linked arms and walked together to the finish line. Everyone in the stadium stood, and the cheering went on for several minutes. People who were there are still telling the story. Why? Because deep down we know this one thing: What matters in life is more than winning for ourselves. What truly matters in this life is helping others win, even if it means slowing down and changing our course.

“Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 18:3)

These children have a message for us, just as this small Christian community has a message for us today. They encourage us to pay attention to the needs of those who have stumbled in life and are looking for a helping hand. They teach us to put aside our own interests for the sake of others; to refuse to lay up for ourselves treasures on earth when we are surrounded by human need. They encourage us to slow down, to notice, to feel compassion, and to turn back to make sure everyone is welcome, everyone has a place, everyone is treated with the same dignity and respect that we would wish for ourselves.

Heeding this counter-cultural call to subject our own interests to the needs of others is never easy, but it is the way to true joy. If you have given freely to the poor, and especially if your gift has cost you something – time or money or personal sacrifice – you will know how satisfying it is to stretch beyond ourselves to aid others.

This is the way to life, to joy, to love. Proclaim it and act on it, that your life will be a witness to the generosity and loving compassion of God.