SSJE Sermons

Br. Luke Ditewig

Matthew 9:1-8

Jesus sees faith in the friends. Matthew tells it starkly. Mark paints a picture. Four carry their friend to Jesus. Because of the crowd, they can’t get in the door. They climb up, dig through part of the roof, and lower their friend down in front of Jesus (Mark 2:1-12). See their faith: persistent, risky, and unembarrassed effort.

Imagine being the one brought, coming face to face with Jesus. I see excitement and eagerness as well as fear. What will Jesus do? I imagine shame I know well: Will Jesus accept me? Was all this effort worth it? Am I worth it?

Jesus sees faith. Jesus sees the friend brought. Seeing awe, fear, shame, and all that is, Jesus says: “Take heart” (Matthew 9:2). Have courage. Jesus reassures. Jesus reassures deeper still: “Your sins are forgiven.” You are alright with God. Then for mercy and to show authority, Jesus heals. With forgiveness, the once paralyzed walks free.

Where do you identify with this story today? How have others brought you to Jesus, pointed, lifted, encouraged, prayed? How are you seeking and encountering Jesus? For your need, your pain, how you’re trapped, what you lack – perhaps with a mix of desire, doubt, and shame.

How have you heard or are hearing Jesus’ reassurance? Take heart. Have courage. You have been forgiven. You are my beloved child. You are enough and more. You are precious.

Jesus sees you, knows your pain. Jesus knows your back story, the understory. Jesus declares forgiveness, dismisses shame, and invites moving with freedom. Name your desire and what feels stuck. Listen to Jesus’ reassurance. Take heart. Have courage. I love you.

Br. Jack Crowley

Feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul

John 21:15-19

“Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go” (John 21:18).

These are some of the final words spoken by Jesus to Saint Peter. “Someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” Jesus’ words hit us at a gut level. They hit us at a gut level because we have all experienced our own little version of what he is talking about – some notion that at some point in the past, our lives were perfect, we were carefree, and we seemingly had the freedom to do as we please. Then at some point in life as we matured, it felt like our hands got tied. We felt like we were tied down and bound to some situation, some person, some job, or some dream we desperately held on to. We said to ourselves, “If just this one thing, this one problem, was loosened from my hands, then I could really start living.” Very frequently you hear people in situations like this say that their problems are killing them, as if they were being martyred.

“Someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.”

These words are not full of sunshine and rainbows, but they are true. Jesus was warning Peter that one day he would be arrested and martyred. Tonight we remember the martyrdom of both Saint Peter and Saint Paul, two Christians who helped form the foundation of our church and were killed for their beliefs.

I know it always feels a little grim to remember the martyrs, yet it is important to remember that blood has been spilt for us to have this moment together. Blood has been spilt for our salvation, and blood has been spilt to give us a renewal of life.

Most likely, none of us here will end up being martyrs in the traditional sense. We are lucky enough to have the privilege to celebrate the Eucharist freely and openly. Many Christians in many parts of the world do not have the opportunities to do so. Most likely, none of us here will be martyrs, but we will all feel at different points like something is killing us or sucking the life out of us. We will all feel at different times like our hands are tied and we are being led somewhere we do not wish to go. We all have our own little version of martyrdom: a death by a thousand cuts instead of a crucifixion.

The great question of our lives is: What do we do with these feelings of powerlessness, hopelessness, and despair? How do we navigate through them and find God in them? How do we look for the resurrected Christ when our eyes are bloodshot?

If the martyrs have anything to teach us, it is that difficult situations are crucibles of faith. The great irony is we can find ourselves feeling the most alive, present, authentic, honest, and real when death is close at hand. We strip away whatever characters we’ve been playing, whatever customs of personality we’ve been inhabiting, and get in touch with whatever truth we continue to hold in our hearts underneath it all. Of course, this is not a pleasant process, nor is it ever clean. The formation of faith in life is inherently messy and can turn rocky at any given moment.

Saint Peter and Saint Paul were two Christians of courage. They fought the good fight and abided in their spiritual convictions through the very end. They stood in the breach of life and for the sake of God. We too must fight the good fight. Not with our fists, but with our hearts, and our minds, and our prayers. The battles of our age are spiritual battles – battles of bitterness versus forgiveness, battles of strife versus healing, and battles of insanity versus the collective wisdom our Creator has endowed us with.

We fight these good fights with every moment of our lives. It’s in the way we smile, it’s in the way we wash dishes, it’s in the way we take care of ourselves while helping others. We find God in every corner of the universe and we look for his son, Jesus Christ, in everyone we meet.

This good fight of ours is not an easy one, for sure. We will get exhausted, sweaty, overheated, and begging for a break. We’ll crave that living water with everything we have.

Saint Peter and Saint Paul did not die in vain. Here we are, two thousand years later, proclaiming our faith for all to see – proclaiming to the world our love of God and the wonders God has done for us. The good news is that God is with us every step of the way. Every fight, every battle, every time we course correct, God is right there with us. God sticks to us and we must stick to God.

Br. Curtis Almquist

The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Almighty God, you have built your Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Jeremiah 28:5-9

Matthew 10:40-42

Not so long ago someone complained to me that the church should stick to religion and keep its nose out of politics. Didn’t I agree? Well. I asked them to define their word “politics.” “Define?” they barked. And then with considerable heat and clenched teeth they lectured me how I must be blind or deaf to the nasty public discourse going on all around us if I did not know what “politics” is.

Of course, none of you heard this conversation, though most of you could imagine the points this person was making, and with many examples. They asked for my response. I pondered, and then I told them that I actually agreed with many of their points. However, I said, I thought their disdain was largely about partisan issues, which are not insignificant; but as for “politics,” I told them that if the church was not involved politically – that is, involved in conversation and action around the principled exercise of power on behalf of the people, all the people, especially those most in need – then the church was, at its best, simply a bastion of nostalgia for well-behaved, privileged people, or at its worst, the church was simply in passive collusion with the misaligned power of the privileged. I said, “The church is not a country club.”

What inspired my response were some words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “We will have to repent… not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people” (Martin Luther King Jr., “The Negro Is Your Brother”).

Our liturgy today is a prime example where politics impinge on the life, the prayer, and the witness of the church. We are confronted by the prophets. This morning we have heard repeatedly (eleven times) references to the Hebrew prophets. Our opening prayer – the Collect – names how the church’s foundation has been built upon the apostles and prophets. Our first reading from Jeremiah is all about the witness of the prophet Jeremiah and the prophet Hananiah (Jeremiah 28:5-9). Then, in our Gospel lesson, we hear Jesus speak of the important role of prophets: about our welcoming prophets (Matthew 10:40-42). Which is poignant.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the most revered twentieth-century scholar of the Hebrew prophets, said that the prophets are not primarily predictors of the future. Rather, the prophets hear and then speak in the voice of God Almighty with a moral urgency about the present moment. About now. Prophets are either “enraptured or enfevered”: enraptured with the beauty and wonder of life, and enraptured with the love and compassion of God for all of creation, for all people; or prophets are enfevered with the anger of God for justice denied those most in need.1 The Hebrew prophets react intensely to oppression, exploitation, violence, and hypocrisy. They communicate God’s sorrow, God’s anger, God’s judgment, God’s compassion, and God’s love especially for those whose dignity, wellbeing, and inclusion are denied.

Rabbi Heschel was a close friend and spiritual colleague of Martin Luther King Jr., the two of them as men of God and passionate civil rights activists. Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel walked arm-in-arm with other marchers from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. So many of the issues that Rabbi Heschel and Dr. King confronted in the 1960s are the very issues repeatedly named by the Hebrew prophets, which are issues we still face today: the disregard or exploitation of the poor; the neglect and oppression of widows, orphans, and foreigners; the corruption of the legal system; and dishonest business practices.

What to do? All of us must pray for justice. The prophet Amos says: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). We must pray for justice and provision for those most in need. And all of us must act in concert with God’s intentions.

Now I am not about to give you my list of what I think, as followers of Jesus, we each must do politically at this crucial time. There is certainly plenty to be done; however, each of us is a unique person with a unique formation. The scriptures give us the metaphor of our collectively being like a body (1 Corinthians 12:12-27). We, as followers of Jesus, are as the body of Christ, each of us uniquely representing a different body part: eye, hand, ear, foot; some of us stronger in muscle; some of us stronger in mind. Some of us write; some of us speak; some of us listen; some of us march. We are all wonderfully different, by God’s design, and so where and how we each engage with God’s desperately needy world will be different. What is it that moves you? What or who brings tears of compassion or conviction to your eyes? What breaks your heart open? That kind of passionate experience can inform what you are called to do, each of us quite a different part of the body of Christ.

But what we must not do is pretend not to know what is going on around us. And we must not presume that the world will be fixed and just fine if everyone gets with our program, if everyone looks like, speaks like, acts like, and values our values, my values. We must not corral the world by who belongs and who does not. We must not worship only our own values, which would be to create God in our own image. We must not cut out of the Bible the demanding witness of the prophets nor the inclusive love shown by Jesus, especially to the least, and last, and lost.

This week, on July 4th, we celebrate the adoption of our Declaration of Independence in 1776. That’s 250 years ago. And there is much for which to give thanks. You will know that Thomas Jefferson was the primary drafter of the Declaration, which “hold[s] these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” This is challenging language for us. “All men” created equal is not just the vernacular of the day. “All men” mostly means “all men.” (Where are the women?) And that “all men… are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These “unalienable Rights” of “all men” for “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” did not pertain to Native Americans, who would face genocide, nor to African Americans, enslaved, on whose backs our economy and our emerging nation would be built. Jefferson’s opening words in the Declaration sting, terribly.

But this is not the only writing of Thomas Jefferson. You may know that Thomas Jefferson also wrote what he called “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.”2 Jefferson cut-and-pasted Bible passages that largely focused on ethical principles: our personal responsibility for loving one’s neighbor, showing mercy, caring for the poor, fairness, humility, and treating others with respect. But not under his own roof. Jefferson was a slave owner. Over the course of his lifetime, Jefferson owned 609 slaves, from which he, not his slaves, garnered “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Like Jefferson, twelve of the first eighteen American presidents owned slaves. We must not collude with the revising of our American history to forget our past.

And we must listen to the Hebrew prophets, who were Jesus’ teachers. The prophets did not write with xenophobia, the fear of strangers. The prophets wrote with philoxenia, the love of strangers. Philoxenia, not xenophobia. The love of strangers was the way of Jesus. We must open our prayer, open our hearts, and open our actions to follow Jesus’ lead on behalf of this immensely diverse world which God so loves.

Lord have mercy.

1. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets, vol. 2 (New York: HarperCollins, 1962), 92. (Note: Reference to “enraptured or enfevered”)

2. Thomas Jefferson, The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (c. 1820).

Br. Jamie Nelson

Matthew 7:21-29

I need to start with a confession: I’ve been that foolish builder who built his house on sand.

I’m thinking back to a college field trip I went on to a Central Oregon ranch. The timing of the trip was dictated by convenience for the class syllabus rather than by the season, so it was quite early in the spring when we went. My classmates and I decided to pitch our tents in a low-lying meadow next to a beautiful little creek. Waking up at sunrise to the musical sound of the flowing water was sublime. I remember taking it all in as I drank my morning cup of coffee.

However, later that morning, big gray clouds rolled in, and a wall of rain began to fall. And it just kept coming down heavily all day.

I bet you can imagine what our makeshift campsite looked like when we returned late in the afternoon – yep, water everywhere. There were puddles of water in our tents, and the creek was a lot louder and wider than it had been that morning, far too near for comfort. We had no interest in us or our belongings getting swept away in the middle of the night.

And so we worked together to move the tents to higher ground, unstaking the pegs, carrying, restaking, drying the tent floors as best we could. Unfortunately, the higher ground was covered with gravel. We weren’t very comfortable on our rocky mattresses that second night, but at least we were out of reach of the rising creek.

The situation I found myself in would have sounded familiar to the crowds that Jesus taught this story to. The countryside of Galilee contains many canyons with seasonal streams. I imagine that a number of those canyons have sandy flat bottoms that look like an ideal place to build a house, that is, when it’s the dry time of year. But when the rains fell, flash floods could come down the canyon and sweep everything away. No, much better to build on higher, rockier ground, someplace not located in the middle of a floodplain.

This passage from Matthew about wise and foolish builders concludes Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. After sharing some well-known teachings, such as the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Golden Rule, Jesus said to the crowds, “Everyone, then, who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock” (Matthew 7:24).

In the life of Christian discipleship, discerning where to build is oftentimes an ongoing process that requires attunement to changing conditions. Sometimes a heavy storm provides immediate clarity, but it doesn’t always work that way. Rivers do not usually transform the landscape all at once. Most of the time the water’s movement is much more gradual, meandering over the seasons. Only after many years does it become fully apparent that the river’s channel has shifted.

The same can be true in our spiritual lives. We may discover that a particular way of living, praying, or serving that once brought us closer to God no longer fits where we are now. Rather than simply ascribing such situations to personal failure or foolishness on our part, we can read them as signs that the landscape has changed, that God’s invitation for us is to pull up the stakes and make our way to higher ground. And we don’t have to do it alone. One of the great gifts of Christian community is having other people around to help us notice those invitations, to point the way, and to lend a hand in moving our tents.

The rains may come, the creek may rise, and the landscape will change over time, but Jesus is always there, glad to welcome us to higher ground.

Br. Luke Ditewig

The Nativity of St. John the Baptist

Isaiah 40:1-11

Acts 13:14b-26

Luke 1:57-80

John grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness. Like Zechariah said, John grew up to be “called the prophet of the Most High,” going ahead of Jesus to prepare the way, to give knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of sin (Luke 1:76-77). John knew God was to act in a big and new way, that One was coming to usher in freedom. Who, or how, wasn’t clear, but John sprinted into his calling as forerunner by alerting, challenging, proclaiming, and inviting.

John wasn’t much to look at. One had to leave the city and go out to hear him in the wilderness. Clad in camel skin like the prophet Elijah eight hundred years before, John cried out. People listened. People came and turned and were baptized. People looked and waited for God.

John looked and waited, too, in the wilderness and in prison. John asked Jesus from prison by messenger, “Are you the Messiah, or are we to await another?” (Luke 7:19). Jesus replied, “Yes, I’m doing what you said. I’m healing and liberating, perhaps not as you expect.” Though clear and forthright in his own call, John misunderstood Jesus.1 Jesus surprised everyone, including John.

God gets our attention by coming in unexpected ways, people, and times. John came as a miracle. Elizabeth and Zechariah giving birth to John, and Mary and Joseph to Jesus, was unexpected and impossible. John and Jesus were both raised with courage amid disgrace. That included Elizabeth having been barren and Zechariah becoming mute, and both choosing the name John against family expectations.

In Acts, Paul recounts the grand biblical story, for “to us this message of salvation has been sent” (Acts 13:26). God came through frail flesh and families with improbable parents, impossible births, and wondrous stories.

God comes to us where it doesn’t make sense, where we can’t imagine what we could do, or how another could help. Today, give thanks again for how God saves and surprises you, recalling what you knew at first and came to understand more with time. Recall those who share good news. Give thanks with this harbinger of Day, this foreshadow of Light, John the Baptist, whom we remember today.

Br. David Vryhof

Trinity Sunday

Genesis 1:1-2:4

You may have learned the Bible’s story of creation, as I did, at a very young age. The story describes how God made everything – out of nothing! Each day of creation brought something new: darkness and light, earth and sky, dry land and seas, the sun and the moon, living creatures in the water and on the land, and finally, human beings, made in the image of God. Seven days: that was the period of time it took for God to make everything – out of nothing – one day at a time. On the seventh day, God rested.

At some point in your education, you likely discovered that there are scientific theories out there, such as Darwin’s theory that the world was created by an evolution of species over millions of years; from the simplest cells emerged the diversity of creatures and environments that we have today. And learning this may have given you pause, because that was not how your Sunday school teacher had explained it. The two stories seemed to contradict one another. Did it take seven days or millions of years? How did it really happen?

The original recipients of the biblical story would never have asked that question or considered this a quandary. “How” it happened simply wasn’t of any concern to them. The Israelites were not unlike their neighbors in this. Religions and cults in the ancient Near East typically had stories about the creation of the world; today, they’re called “origin stories.” The Bible describes the origin story of the Israelites. It is mythological, not scientific.

It might be helpful here to remind ourselves that Christianity is not opposed to science, but to scientism. Science is a method for studying the natural world. Scientism is the belief that natural science is the absolute best or only way to understand reality and to render truth. It asserts that the scientific method should be applied to all areas of investigation – not only to chemistry, biology, physics, and astronomy, but also to religion, philosophy, ethics, and the humanities. Scientism often dismisses non-scientific inquiries as subjective and therefore invalid. Christianity’s quarrel is with scientism, not with science itself. We maintain there is truth and meaning to be found in the Bible’s account of creation, while at the same time recognizing that it is not a scientific description.

The Israelites had their own “origin story,” as did most of their neighbors. These stories did not answer the question “how” (at least not in any literal sense) so much as much as they tried to answer the question of “why.”

Why did God create the heavens and the earth? What is the purpose of creation? And inasmuch as we are a part of the creation, “What is our purpose? For what have we been created?”

John H. Walton, professor emeritus of Hebrew scripture at Wheaton College, offers us an interesting contrast to consider. First, he directs our attention to the final chapters of the book of Exodus, which describe how God directs the construction of the Tabernacle in the wilderness. Other religions and cults of the ancient Near East similarly described the construction of their holy places. In the account of the Israelites, as recorded in the book of Exodus, it is clear that God is in charge. Each step of the construction is carried out “as the Lord commanded Moses.”

“The Israelites [did] all of the work just as the Lord had commanded Moses” (Exodus 39:42), the author tells us, and “Moses did everything just as the Lord had commanded him” (Exodus 40:16).

When all the furnishings were in place, the priests moved in to take up their stations, ready to work and to keep the sacred space. This was the second-to-last step. The last step, on the final day, occurred when the deity took its place. In other cultures, an idol was placed in the temple on this final day. In Israel’s account, we read that “the cloud – [which was the sign of God’s presence in the wilderness] – covered the tent of meeting and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle” (Exodus 40:34).

Now Professor Walton returns us to the story of creation. Each day a new creation emerges, God’s spoken word bringing it into existence. Each created thing serves a particular purpose, filling the whole cosmos with splendor and honor. In the second-to-last act of creation, on the sixth day, human beings are created. They move in and take up their stations, ready to work and to keep the sacred space. The creation is complete, and on the last day God moves in. God rests in God’s good creation on the seventh day.

Professor Walton writes, “In the ancient world, temple dedications were often seven days in duration. During those seven days, the functions of the temple would be proclaimed, the furniture and functionaries installed, the priests would take up their role and at the end, the deity would enter and take up his rest. If the cosmos is being viewed as a temple, Genesis 1 can be understood as presenting the creation of the cosmos in terms of a temple dedication.”1

What does seeing the cosmos as God’s temple mean for us? What does it reveal about why God created the heavens and the earth? First, it suggests that God created the heavens and the earth and all that inhabits them as a dwelling place for God, a place completely dedicated to worship and to the glory of God.

Why, then, did God create humankind? Because the upkeep of this Temple requires priests, especially attuned to the presence and activity of God in this sacred space. Here is a way of understanding the end for which we were created and the purpose for which we were made: we are keepers of God’s sanctuary, servants and priests in God’s dwelling place.

We were created to know God, to love God, and to serve God. Think of it: Of all the creatures God has made, only human beings have the capacity to know God. The scriptures make it clear that God wants not only to know us, but to love us, and to have us return that love. We are invited by God into a covenant of love. The knowledge and love of God prompt us to serve God, by offering God our worship, and by serving our neighbors. To know God, to love God, and to serve God: that is the purpose for which we have been made. Everything God has made is given to us to help us realize this purpose.

We are created to be the keepers of God’s sanctuary, the heavens and the earth, and all that they contain. We are to care for the creatures that move on the land and swim in the sea, the birds of the air; for the rivers and oceans, the mountains and fields; and for human beings, created in God’s own image. We are servant priests appointed for the upkeep of God’s Temple, honoring the creation and revering the image of God reflected in every person.

How then shall we live? With wonder and awe, with reverence and respect. We are to know, love, and serve God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and to use all that is given us to that end. We are to approach one another, especially those who are different from us, with curiosity and wonder, recognizing that each of us reflects the image of God and is precious in God’s sight. We are to fulfill our function as keepers of God’s creation, priests of God’s sanctuary, with respect and humility and a spirit of service, honoring the whole of God’s creation and helping it to fulfill the purpose for which God made it. Above all, we are to live in love: love for God, for one another, for ourselves, for every living and non-living thing, in order that God may be rightly praised and glorified. Embracing the purpose for which we have been created is not only the way to abundant life, but also our greatest joy.

1. The researcher noted the citation based on work by the Rev’d Meg Junista, a staff member of the Center for Excellence in Preaching, whose insights inspired much of the content for this sermon.

Br. Keith Nelson

The Feast of the Visitation

The Profession in Initial Vows of Br. Jamie Robert Nelson

Luke 1:39-56

The Visitation of St. Mary of Nazareth to St. Elizabeth is a simple but profound story about an interpersonal encounter. The younger woman, Mary, has experienced a life-changing encounter with an angelic messenger and seeks the wisdom and stabilizing presence of an elder relative and friend. The elder (unbeknownst to the younger) has also experienced a life-changing encounter with God. While we can only assume Mary and Elizabeth were close prior to this visit, the mutual self-disclosure of God’s awesome hand at work in each of their lives establishes a bond that will send ripples all the way down the history of salvation. Elizabeth will give birth to John the Baptist, the last of the prophets. Mary will give birth to Jesus, the Word made flesh.

At its heart, this is a story about the power of belonging. Elizabeth has certainly known how it feels not to belong. Her long years of infertility in a culture which considered childbearing to be a primary expression of God’s blessing positioned her outside the circle of proud mothers. Mary is still quite young, but she has been told that she will bear a child by the Holy Spirit, independently of a human father. This foreshadows her own difference, and the difference of the child she will bear. From our vantage point, that difference was both special and miraculous. In the midst of its unfolding, it was scandalous and impossible.

Consenting so entirely to God’s will and God’s plan meant that Elizabeth and Mary were both set apart in belonging so completely to God. To bear such an awesome responsibility could be a lonely burden indeed. But by God’s gracious design, they were given one another at this crucial moment in the life of each. That affirmation drew forth the song of Mary that we call the Magnificat, and still sing every day at Evening Prayer. In my imagination, the three months that Elizabeth and Mary spent together must have been just a little bit like our experience of retreat before we make our vows. In the midst of so much that, of necessity, still remains unknown, it is a time of gathering confidence and deepening self-offering. The life of a child growing within the body of its mother is a powerful image for the slow but steady emergence of a vocation. Jamie, as you know well, consecrated religious life exists in the Church to remind every baptized member of Christ’s Body that our common vocation, like that of the Teacher and Savior we follow, is self-offering.

The theological term is oblation, which the Prayer Book defines as “an offering of ourselves, our lives and labors, in union with Christ, for the purposes of God.” Oblation is a gift of self in which we hold nothing back, in the service of God and one another.

Our vows are impossible promises made in total trust that, in the act of making them, God will give the grace necessary to keep them. This happens on one public and much celebrated occasion such as today. God willing, it will be affirmed with even greater gravity and festivity in three years, should you move forward to life commitment in this community. But mainly, God gives us the grace to be faithful to our vows each and every moment that our trust is renewed and God’s mercy sought to live this joyful and demanding life.

Jamie, you have shared with us that at the time of your baptism, your parents Mary Ann and Rick gave you the name Elisabet, which means “consecrated to God,” or “God is my promise.” You wrote to me in your profession letter that “their desire was for you to choose a life lived in grateful response to God’s gift of abundant grace, no matter the form that took.” As we see again and again in scripture, names have great power to shape both our self-understanding and the unique gifts of the Spirit only we can bring to fruition in God’s world. Today, the vows you will make will be one more expression of that baptismal grace that will enable you, and us with you, to step further into the loving purposes of the one who formed you in the womb.

Like Mary and Elizabeth, you are also no stranger to walking a road that others do not understand, or living into an identity that provokes the resistance of those who cannot see what you have seen or sing with the voice you have been given. Today your family and friends, and we, your monastic family, know and love you by the name Jamie because you listened to a still, small voice – growing clearer and stronger over time – that revealed the fullness and truth of your gender identity as a man. We have marveled at the courage and self-awareness it took you to embrace that truth. Those gifts have shaped, and are shaping, this community of men in profound and, indeed, pioneering ways. I am confident that the particular way you inhabit our identity as “men of the moment,” in Fr. Benson’s expression, will continue to bless and shape the horizons of our manhood and our humanity for generations to come.

You have also blessed us in our creaturehood. We have stories of your childhood raising alpacas and building hotels for sowbugs. Today, you are a man who delights in every good, green, and creeping thing of God’s beloved earth. In a vocation whose sights can often seem trained relentlessly heavenward, your feet are planted in soil like roots, reminding us of the words of the first psalm: “They are like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither; everything they do shall prosper” (Psalm 1:3). Your passion for a living friendship with God’s creation, of which we are all a beloved part, reminds us that we are meant to be generous and generative co-creators with the God of heaven and earth.

All of us need the affirmation of companions who understand what it means to have one’s life – indeed, one’s entire sense of self – reoriented around a response to God’s call. We need trusted friends to whom we can run and say, “I know this is going to sound absolutely crazy! But… ” and to be met with the response, “That doesn’t sound crazy at all. In fact, I’ve experienced my own version of exactly what you’re describing, and it is a blessing that you chose to tell me.” It is a blessing beyond belief when we find the path God asks us to walk, and a fellow pilgrim says, “I will walk this path beside you.”

A monastery is a place where people with similar flavors of crazy – a craziness for God “wiser than human wisdom” – find they belong to one another because they belong entirely to God. Today we rejoice that you, Jamie, have chosen to offer yourself to this way of life in God’s church, under the vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience, for the next three years. We anticipate that God will continue to teach you, and us, what it means abide in him, come what may. And we pray that this place may, day by day, become more and more a refuge of hope, meaning, and joy, where you can say with confident trust, “I belong.”

Br. Jack Crowley

Mark 10: 46-52

No matter how I am feeling, the stories of Jesus’ healings always grab my attention. Happy, mad, sad, or glad – stories of healing have a way of interrupting and refreshing whatever kind of day we are having. Stories of healing often leave us with a different perspective on life, often a softer, gentler, and more compassionate perspective.

We just heard the story of the blind beggar from Mark’s Gospel. My favorite detail from this story is when the blind man asks Jesus, “Let me see again.” It is that word “again” that always gets me. It implies that at one point in the past, this blind man was able to see. Although he is blind, presumably he still has memories of what it was like to see clearly.

Personally, when I am not doing well, I often feel like this blind man. I know I am not seeing things clearly, and I know at some point in the past I was able to. I often ask not necessarily for my problems to be solved, but at least for the ability to see them clearly.

The important thing to remember is that the blind man in this story had the courage to shout out to Jesus. He shouted out in the dark. He could only go on what he could hear and feel, yet he used those instincts to pull himself towards healing.

We live in a culture that does not necessarily pull us towards healing. Instead, we are pulled more towards polarization and conflict. We are often blinded by how much there is to take in – outrages, wars, calamities, scandals. Healing can often take a backseat when it feels like catastrophe is driving.

Personally, I need the healing of Jesus to grab my attention, to interrupt whatever anxiety-filled narrative I have in my head, to hold me tenderly but firmly and tell me to orient myself towards healing. To turn back to healing when I am tempted to turn my back to the world. To see, when I would rather keep my eyes down.

Whatever you have going on in your life right now, ask yourself what it would be like to take a posture of healing. To allow Jesus to mold you, to adjust you, to pivot you into a firm yet flexible position of healing. A posture of health and sanity, breathing in fresh air and good spirit, spreading whatever love we feel embering inside us.

Pray to allow God into your wounds on a painfully personal level. Pray with that healing grace we all know in our hearts. Pray with that spirit of love and compassion that unites us in a way beyond our understanding.

Br. Curtis Almquist

Saint Augustine of Canterbury, the Ambassador

“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself… So we are ambassadors for Christ.”

— 2 Corinthians 5:17–21

In the calendar of the church we remember today a sixth-century monk named Augustine, who was Prior of a monastery in Rome. Augustine was chosen by Pope Gregory the Great to lead forty monks on a journey to England to be “ambassadors for Christ” – Saint Paul’s language – to the Anglo-Saxons. The monks arrived in Kent in the spring of 597 carrying a silver cross and an image of Jesus Christ painted on a board, their icon.

The King of Kent, Ethelbert, had married Queen Bertha, a Christian from France, and she convinced her husband to let the missionaries enter Canterbury and occupy a small, dilapidated church. The church dated from the Roman occupation of England, which had ended a century earlier.1 Augustine and his companions did not go looking for converts. They strove to assimilate into the culture with their choice of diet and lifestyle, with their language and liturgy, and with their prayers, welcoming any who would choose to join them. And it happened. Within four years the king and his retinue asked to be baptized. About this same time Augustine was ordained bishop and named the first Archbishop of the English Nation.

A surviving piece of correspondence between Pope Gregory and Augustine expresses the pope’s esteem of outliers and his respect for diversity of practice within the church. From the time of Jesus, his followers had come from many different cultures, classes, and lifestyles. Augustine’s vocation was what Saint Paul called a “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18).

I was pondering this recently as I walked in an old cemetery. All those grave markers of people with such different lifespans, from so many different ethnic, political, and religious traditions; different education and vocations; different access to privilege, or not; each one an amazing, fallible mortal who passed through this life for only a brief span of time: “earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes.”2

Did they all get it right? In terms of their religious tradition – if any – did they all believe and belove the right thing, practice life in the right way, then go to their grave? Who is to judge, unless I make myself the arbiter: my own beliefs, my own practice, my own tradition being the only way. But I am too small to be the arbiter. Are we not all?

Why not live out our lives cherishing what we believe, meanwhile bequeathing to others respect, dignity, curiosity, and humility? Children of God we all are. God is love. Of that we can be certain. In the beginning, we read in the Book of Genesis, God created life with such great diversity, such splendid, magnificent diversity in every possible way. And God called it all “good” (Genesis 1:31). In the end, the Book of Revelation, we read of “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne of God” (Revelation 7:9). Archbishop Augustine knew about this.

Blessed Augustine of Canterbury, whom we remember today.

1 Britain was under the rule of the Roman Empire 43 CE – c. 410 CE.

Br. Keith Nelson

The Seventh Sunday of Easter

In the calendar of the church’s cycle of worship, we find ourselves this morning in Ascensiontide – the ten-day period at the end of the Easter season, after Jesus’ ascension into heaven on the fortieth day and before the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the fiftieth day, next Sunday.

Just now we heard a reading from Acts that we also heard on Ascension Day – the lectionary’s version of recapping a previous episode. And in 1 Peter we heard a preview of coming attractions: The Holy Spirit is coming soon … to a monastery chapel near you!

For now, we are gathered in a strange in-between time: it is awesome, glorious, mysterious, and a bit challenging to preach about. A vocational hazard in the preaching life and in the monastic life can be overfamiliarity with things awesome, glorious, and mysterious. When that happens to me, I tend to return to my prayer journal to see what I can glean from a slightly younger, fresh-eyed version of myself.

When I was a novice, I spent a considerable amount of energy in prayer cultivating a relationship with God as a Trinity of persons. Perhaps because I was raised as a Southern Baptist, a close, personal relationship with Jesus had always come instinctively to me. But because of the insinuation of some bad theology, I had a relationship with God the Father that stood in need of healing. I am not sure I could have called my relationship with the Holy Spirit a relationship. The Spirit seemed something more like an intriguing but abstract force. So I spent time asking Jesus to show me more of his relationship with the Father and the Spirit, and I often did so by praying with art, one of the languages of prayer I have loved since childhood.

“Christ in Prayer” by El Greco (1541-1614)

The painting of Jesus with his eyes gazing upward, by the Spanish painter El Greco, could be an illustration of many moments in the gospels. But it is particularly apt for this morning’s reading from John: “After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son, so that the Son may glorify you’” (John 17:1). I found in this image an icon of Jesus’ relationship with his Father – and so a doorway into my own.

I discovered something frustrating about gazing at the face of a person I loved while his gaze was turned elsewhere. But this also provoked a curiosity to know more about whom he saw, and to see the Father through Jesus’ eyes. I recalled beautiful hikes in the woods with a beloved friend who is an avid birder. “Look! Look right over there! Do you see it?” she would squeal with glee. “Um … what am I looking at?” I would reply. Over time, these moments became opportunities to learn more than the names of birds. They were opportunities to see the world through the eyes of a friend seeing something, someone, she loved and longed for me to love.

Me looking at Jesus looking at God the Father also stirred the question: Who was this unseen Father looking at? Was he returning the gaze of his Son, or was he perhaps gazing at me – his adopted son by my baptism – somehow completing the circle?

“Christ in Silence” by Odilon Redon (1840-1916)

The second painting is by a French painter named Odilon Redon, who participated in the Symbolist movement in nineteenth-century art. These artists strove to find a visual language that could evoke the mysterious depths of human experience in a way that they felt was flattened and trivialized by naturalism and realism. Redon’s paintings are saturated in mythological and dream imagery, but he also painted many portraits of Christ. “Christ in Silence” depicts Jesus with his eyes closed, his head covered in his prayer shawl, and his hand raised to his lips. The fluid blue and gold background against the earthier hues of his face and body appears to me like a window into Christ’s interior life – the aura or ambience that emanates from his presence.

It reminds me of the words in John 3: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). I also now find it resonates for me with the words from 1 Peter: “… you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you” (1 Peter 4:14). This rest can ground us in God even in the midst of great suffering.

Praying with this painting, Jesus showed me more of the Holy Spirit by inviting me to be with him while we both closed our eyes and gazed within, gathered in God’s indwelling presence. The Holy Spirit in the space between us soon took on a more vivid life of its own. But for that to happen, I had to turn my gaze away from Jesus and trust in a different set of senses.

Odilon Redon was not a Christian, nor was he conventionally religious. Nonetheless, his paintings of Christian subjects bear witness to the deepest spiritual impulses of the human heart, the subtle movements of the Spirit in all people and indeed all creatures. As a monk of another community once said to me, “As the church, we can say with confidence where the Holy Spirit is: in our midst the Spirit has made a home. But we cannot say where the Holy Spirit is not.”

In John 17, Jesus prays to the Father, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). To know God – to be brought into a relationship of abiding intimacy – is not just the means to eternal life. The relationship is that Life itself.

The kingdom of God, this Life that is truly Life, is given to us now in part and not yet in its fullness. God’s fullness is always seeping into time as most of the world knows it, but most often in glimpses, in a gradual unfolding. That is good news, because it is given to us in the measure we can receive it; God reveals only as much of God as we can endure.

The ministry of artists is particularly appropriate to celebrate during Ascensiontide. Like the Greeks who came to the apostle Philip, we wish to see Jesus, the “image of the invisible God.” Some art has the capacity not only to reveal God or spiritual realities, but to move our gaze beyond the visible in the direction of truths that images cannot contain. Icons in the Eastern Church do this in a very intentional and programmatic way, but a venerable lineage of Western artists participates in a similar approach to sacred art. They invite us to gaze until our spirits are filled and moved, but then they say, like that pair of men in white robes: “Why do you stand looking upward into heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11).

If things awesome, mysterious, and glorious have lost a bit of their luster for you, praying with sacred art may help undomesticate familiar images of God and open a fresh perspective. Perhaps the crucified, risen, and ascended Christ is inviting you to pray your way through a museum, to search out the image of God in creative works both explicitly religious and otherwise. You may also feel prompted to gaze afresh at art made by friends or by your own hand, and to see it with renewed sight and insight.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote:

The soul at prayer should have before it a sacred image of the God-man, in his birth of infancy or as he was teaching, or dying, or rising, or ascending. Whatever form it takes, this image must bind the soul with the love of virtue and expel carnal vices, eliminate temptations and quiet desires. I think this is the principal reason why the invisible God willed to be seen in the flesh and to converse with men as a man. He wanted to recapture the affections of carnal men who were unable to love in any other way, by first drawing them to the salutary love of his own humanity, and then gradually to raise them to a spiritual love.

The ministry of sacred art trains our gaze to look for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in all people, places, and things – and to give praise to the Divine Artist, their Maker and Source.