Monastic Spirituality 1986

Today I ran across a piece I wrote for a series of articles on monastic spirituality for the OHC (more or less) quarterly publication in the Autumn 1986 issue.  It joined articles by Bernard Van Waes, Robert Hale and Bede Thomas Mudge.  I didn't seem to have a word processing document of the original , and the OCR function on my older Canon scanner wasn't up to the job of transcription, so I typed it again.  I think it is accurate.

It is a product of my early fervent monastic self -  I was 39 at the time, 12 years in OHC, 7 in life vows, Prior of Mount Calvary since 1981.  In other words - lots of water still to flow under my bridge, but the product of a self that now seems to me to be energetic, idealistic and ready for life's adventures.     

The Voice of God is a Living Voice
Adam D. McCoy, OHC
1986

    Solitude, silence, scripture, sacrament, celebration, community: these and the Vows of Conversion of Life, Obedience, Poverty and Celibate Chastity, are primary components of monastic spirituality.  They are disciplines, ways to train the soul to achieve the monastic desire: to give all one has and to follow the Lord.  The monk is a person who takes the Gospel call literally, and gives his life as totally to God as he is capable.  These disciplines have evolved over centuries and are full of the wisdom of thousands of lives given to God in the monastic way, and therefore they are a well-worn path for any who follow the Lord in the monastic way.
    The monk is most of all a person who listens for the voice of God: in scripture, in tradition, and also in truth, wherever found, in study, in science, and in the wisdom of human experience as well as through religion.  The voice of God is a living voice, and so the monk who listens to that voice must be a very contemporary person.  The monk is also a person who, after he has heard that voice, acts.  Both action and contemplation are part of monastic spirituality.  Often the uncomprehending world, and sometimes the uncomprehending Church, endorses an apparently passive contemplation.  But when the monastic life issues in action, often evangelically radical action, it may be disapproved.
    There is power and danger in monastic, indeed any real Christian, spirituality.  There is power because the person comes to know himself in reality, loved, redeemed, able to act not as a fantasy self but as he really is: a Bernard, a Mother Teresa (both Avila and Calcutta). And that self, acting together with God’s intention, sets the world afire.  There is danger because God is not satisfied with the world as it is, and truly evangelical action frequently upsets entrenched power, whether it is economic or political power, or the power of entrenched but alienated selves.
    The Gospel call is not unique to monastics, nor is the action issuing from it.  But the monastic path is unique.  Monastic spirituality is for those who are called to abandon themselves to the love of God as completely as they are capable, to listen to his voice of truth, and to make their lives instruments of truth.  Monastic vows create the existential condition for this abandonment, and the disciplines of monastic spirituality train one to hear the voice of God.  But in the end, only the living fire of love and desire for God creates the monk, the one who is monos, one, single, whole, completely, uniquely attached to the Lord.

Thomas Curtiss, Jr. RIP - St. Mark's Church, Glendale CA

Tom was a dear friend of many years. I presided at his marriage to Charles Neeley nine years ago.  It was my privilege to preach this homily at Tom's funeral.  Thanks to Fr. Mark Weitzel, the Rector of St. Mark's, for a lovely service.

Thomas Curtiss, Jr.  RIP
4 November 1941 - 23 December 2023
Wisdom 3:1-5, 9; Psalm 100; Revelation 21:2-7; John 14:1-6
St. Mark’s Church, Glendale CA: March 9, 2024
The Rev’d. Dr. Adam D. McCoy, OHC    

      Thank you, Tom and Sandy, for those lovely words about Tom.  As you did, I have been thinking about who Tom was.  Each one of us here will have our own ways of remembering him.  For me, Tom was a person of loyalties.  Loyal to his family and its heritage.  Loyal to his education, especially to his beloved Yale.  Loyal to the Marine Corps Reserve, and to the men he led and served in the Vietnam War, though he rarely talked about the war or about them.  Loyal to the Law, both in its ideal forms and in its actual practice, and loyal to the many families he helped in the arrangement of their affairs.  Loyal to the Episcopal Church, in its faith and practice, and in his many roles in it both at the parish level and for the Diocese.  For his service to the Church he was made a Lay Canon of the Cathedral.  Charles tells me that Tom reclaimed his faith as an adult Christian in the Episcopal tradition right here at St. Mark’s, so many years ago.  How fitting that we are back here with him again today.
      And loyal to himself as a gay man.  I first came to know Tom when we both served on a diocesan committee in the mid 1980s.  The committee was considering the qualifications of a young man who wanted to be ordained, and who was openly and unapologetically gay.  Tom and I discovered we both were appalled by the bigoted opposition to him and worked together - successfully - to approve his vocation.     
      I’m sure Tom had his doubts and uncertainties, as we all do, but he was, to me at least, a man who was secure, proud, loyal to and happy in the many ways he had been called to be.
      In listening to the scriptural lessons just read, it may have occurred to some of us that the people we’re hearing about are holy people, saints even.  “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God” from Wisdom.  The heavenly courts filled with the redeemed in the new Jerusalem assembled before the throne of God.  Those for whom dwelling places in the Father’s house have been prepared. [I do prefer the older translation of that passage: “In my Father’s house are many mansions”.  There seems to have been some downsizing going on, from mansions to dwelling places.]  And we may have wondered - are we making a saint out of Tom?  Because he was, like all of us, not quite perfect.  We can all think of our favorite Tom stories.
      These same readings are included in the Prayer Book service for all whom the Church celebrates at the end of their lives.  Not just for the perfect.  Not just for the holy.  But for all of us.  Those readings are not descriptions of who we are.  They are aspirations of who we might be.  They are hopes of who we might become.  
      They are anticipations of the mercy of God, looking down on us, knowing everything about us, every little bit of us, every circumstance of our lives, each and every choice we’ve made and all their many  consequences, as well as all the possibilities foreclosed by those choices.  God sees and knows what we want to be and who we present ourselves as, and also who we actually are, whether we know who we really are or not.  God sees it all.
      And the wonder is that, seeing it all, God loves us.  God knows every smallest movement in our lives toward what is good: every smallest act fulfilling our duties to our families, to those who educate and mentor us, when we serve our wider communities, when we serve others in the work we are called to do.  And in every one of these acts it is our faith that we are called to cooperate with God in building up a better world.  God sees not only our faults and mistakes and sins and crimes but also all the steps we take toward what is good and wholesome and right and just.  God sees it all and I want to think God puts his finger on the positive side of our judgment scale.  

     God is love.  God wants us to live in love, love both imagined and felt but also acted: Love made real through what we do.    And this love is more than duty.  It is also in our joy.  In my experience of him, I know Tom took joy in his dogs, in his cats, in his fish.  He took joy in his friends.  He took joy in reading about military history.  And Tom loved a good fight.  He took joy in work well done, especially in a complex legal situation he had brought into fruitful order.  He took joy in the traditional worship of the Episcopal Church.  He was a fervent Anglophile, loving the ways of that actual and, perhaps, somewhat imagined, heritage.  But he also took joy in the growth of the Church among Hispanic people who did not share that heritage.  He took joy in his house as  a lovely expression of a traditional style of life.  He took joy in good food and good drink.  He took joy in his lifelong relationship with the wonderful man he married.
      God loves us for our duties, but also for our joys.  How much love each of us can bring into the world through our joys!  Our joys are infectious. They can light up the rooms of our lives and warm the hearts of those around us.  They can fill our spaces with light and hope and possibilities.  God loved Tom for his joys as well as for his loyalties, his duty done and done well and the joy and delight that filled Tom’s life.  A welcome awaits all of us into the fellowship of the righteous, among the throngs before the Throne, among the inhabitants of the mansions prepared for us, with duty well done and with joy, if we will but enter in.  
      And what of us?  What loyalties are we called to?  What duties have we done.  What duties still await us?  Perhaps we can still refresh and renew and do well what calls to us.  And what joys do we enter into?  What seizes us with pleasure, with happiness, even with ecstasy?  Can we share them with each other?  Do they show forth our integrity, our confidence in the life God has given us?  Can we live with light and warmth and affection and humor and delight?
      Let us build something good out of our lives, as Tom built good out of his.  That is God’s call to us as we remember this lovely man today. 

Sermon - Epiphany 2B - Grace and St. Peter's, Baltimore

Epiphany 2B
Grace and St. Peter’s Church, Baltimore
14 January 2024
Adam D. McCoy, OHC

    “Samuel! Samuel!” ...  “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
    At some level in our lives we all want to be like the child Samuel: We all want to hear the voice of the Lord call us, really call us, call us by name.  We all want the Divine Word to come to us, to tell us who we are and what our life is for, to set us on the path of God’s intention for us.  The story of the child Samuel is not just the story of the historical prophet who will transform the history of his nation, but it is also a pattern for all of us.  We all deep down hope that our parents have yearned for us to be conceived and born so that through us good may come into the world, good in their lives, good through our lives, and good for the world we live in.  We yearn for the Word to anoint us and set us on the path God sees for us.  But where and how can that happen?
    It seems to me that our lessons this morning provide three templates, three models, for the inbreaking Word in our lives.
    The first is a temple.  The temple at Shiloh, where Eli was the priest, was the place where the Tabernacle, the movable tent home of Yahweh, the original Holy of Holies, came to rest after the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites.  It was Israel’s most sacred place before the great Temple of Solomon was built in Jerusalem.  A place you came to to find the presence of God.  In fact, in the way of all temples of antiquity, it was literally the house of God, the place where God was known to come and stay when God was with his people.  A holy place which in time was built up, elaborated, made beautiful, designed by the most talented architects and craftsmen that could be found, the best artists known using the best possible wood and stone and metal.  The best musical instruments that could be had - and in time restored.  A place where the finest liturgists and musicians in the land could lead the people who came to it in worship.  In fact, a place very much like Grace and St. Peter’s today.  A place that draws us to it by its evocation of the beauty, harmony and grace of God.  A place where, if anywhere, we might come and worship and pray and then be quiet and hear the Divine Word speak to us.   A place whose beauty and spiritual power is necessary in our world and necessary for our lives.
    The Gospel lesson today speaks of a second template for the inbreaking of the Divine Word.  Nathanael meets Jesus, who anoints him as “an Israelite in whom there is no deceit”.  Nathanael asks Jesus how he knows him and Jesus says, “I saw you under the fig tree.”  The Word of God came looking for Nathanael before Nathanael went looking for the Word.  Under the fig tree.  Not in a great temple, not in the Tabernacle, but under a tree, a tree which in time may bear fruit.  Nathanael, without deceit, pure of heart, is surprised and blurts out his recognition of Jesus: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God!   You are the King of Israel!”  And Jesus predicts for Nathanael the blessing of Jacob, received as Jacob slept on a stone pillow out in the middle of nowhere: “You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
    The inbreaking of the Divine can happen anywhere.  In a temple or out in the middle of nowhere.  On a stone pillow.  Under a tree.  Anywhere in fact.  You can be walking along with your friends and the Word of God can just walk up to you, tell you that you’ve been seen and noticed and found worthy and speak to you and the heavens can open and the angels can ascend and descend in a perfect interchange of heaven and earth, of divine and human.  It can happen right before your very eyes.  And it can visit when we least expect it.  Wherever we are.  In a rocky field.  Under a tree.  When It chooses us.  
    But we have to be ready.  Like little Samuel, we need to wait patiently and both listen and respond.  Like Nathanael, we need to be receptive, uncluttered, focused, without deceit.
    And so, St. Paul.  As the old joke goes, Moses comes down from the mountain with the tablets.  I have good news and bad news, he says.   The good news is that there are only 10.  The bad news is that adultery stays in.  This passage is one of the not-fun parts of St. Paul.  Not that consorting professionally with sex workers is something everyone wants to do, but here St. Paul seems anti-physical, anti-sex, anti-body.  Severe.  Judgmental.  Grim.  
    In fact, however, St. Paul is being just the opposite.  Temples are holy places, places where the Divine comes to dwell.  God’s presence and Word can break into the lives of ordinary people when they are without deceit, when they are ready, any time, any where at all.  And so St. Paul tells us that our bodies - not just our minds and thoughts and ideas and intentions but our whole selves, including our actual physical bodies - our bodies are temples of God.  They are earthly places in earthly time and earthly space where God can come and find us and tell us who we are and what we can do with out lives and open our eyes and ears to see God’s energies enter the world and our energies be drawn into God’s holy of holies.  We need to be ready to hear when God speaks to us and we need to be ready to answer.  
    Our bodies can be holy temples, ready for the presence of God even in the stoniest, the seemingly hardest and driest parts of our lives.  They can be like Jacob’s pillow.  They can be like Nathanael’s fig tree.  St. Paul is not talking about not having fun.  He is talking about the transfiguration of our lives.  He is talking about the worth and beauty and dignity of our actual, physical nature, which begins with our bodies.
    I don’t know about you, but I have never been entirely confident in my body.  And the older I get the less confident I am about it.  I think I used to be stronger and more graceful than I am now.  But in truth, back then I was already a bit neurotic about my body.  And I am not entirely proud of everrything I have done, either.  I suspect the same is true of us all.   I sense that most of us don’t always feel that our physical lives are likely places where transcendent divine energies may be encountered.  Perhaps in a beautiful church.  Perhaps in the desert or in a garden.  But not perhaps in the totalized physical, mental, emotional, conscious selves we carry about with us.  
    But that is precisely what St. Paul is telling us.  The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.   One of us.  In all our weakness, One of us.  The Word is looking for a place to live and hoping that our life will be that place.  The Word has seen us and loved us and is coming to meet us as we are, where we are and how we are, hoping that we will put away our deceit and be ready to meet with an honest and ready heart.  Our lives can be His temple.  Our lives can be the rock on which the ladder of the angels can be firmly planted so they can ascend and descend upon the Son of Man.  
    We are called to be free of deceit and as beautiful as we can be made to be.  Ready for the Word to speak.  And ready to say, Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.

Sermon for Epiphany 2A: Holy Cross Monastery

 Epiphany 2A: 15 Jan. 2023
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park NY
Isaiah 49:1-7; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42
Adam D. McCoy, OHC

It is published on the Holy Cross Monastery sermon blog:  https://ohclectionary.blogspot.com/

The recorded version can be found here:  https://www.buzzsprout.com/129046/12045735

    Today’s gospel gives us the evangelist John’s account of the Baptism of Jesus.  I’ve always thought there is something a bit “off” about it.  The accounts of Jesus’ baptism in the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, are all straightforward narratives of the baptism, differing somewhat in details but each telling what happened from an eyewitness point of view.  But John is different: he gives us a curiously roundabout story, full of indirection.  John the Baptist tells us the story.  But he does not tell us the story of the baptism itself.  Rather, he tells us what he saw: “the Spirit descended from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him.”   This is a very economical text, so even more curiously, in this very compact narrative, the Baptist tells us twice - twice! - “I myself did not know him”.  “I myself did not know him”.  A point is being made here, a point about knowing.  He only knows who Jesus is because he saw the Spirit in the form of a dove.    
    In John’s gospel the action of the baptism isn’t actually told, but is referred to indirectly.  John the Baptist did not know who Jesus was until he, John, saw the dove descending.  And the next time he sees Jesus, it is at a distance, as Jesus is walking by, in an almost cinematic scene, the two great men passing but not actually meeting.
    What can we make of all this narrative indirection?  
    John’s gospel begins with the famous line, en arche en ho logos, which every seminarian hopes will be on her or his Greek translation exam.  In the beginning was the Word.  So we ponder the Word, the Word which is the light that is coming into the world. The Logos itself absorbs our attention.  But remember what happens when the Word, the light, comes into the world: “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.  He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.”  The gospel of John is talking about receiving, about recognizing, about knowing.  The tragedy of the world is in not recognizing, not knowing the One who is its own creator, who is the Word on which its very existential order is based, and so not receiving Him.   
    The story of the baptism of Jesus by John in the Jordan is a real life example of what it means that the world – the world including all the best people in it, even John the Baptist, whom Jesus later calls the greatest of all the prophets – the whole world, including the righteous part of it – is simply not capable of knowing, of recognizing, the Word when it comes.   
    With this theme announced, John’s gospel immediately introduces John the Baptist, the herald of the coming One, whose prophetic sign is to be out in the desert, crying out in the wilderness.  Preparing the way for His coming and baptizing God’s people into their new entrance into God’s promised land.  Into a new life, a new beginning.  And, embodying the prologue’s statement about not knowing, not recognizing, John the Baptist himself does not know who the Logos is when he comes.  Twice - twice - the Baptist tells us, “I myself did not know him”.  “I myself did not know him”.  He knows him only because of the sign from heaven, and then they do not even meet.  This telling, far from being straightforward, is a miracle of indirection.  It is a description of the world we live in.  It is a description of our existential reality, our not being capable of knowing, of recognizing, God’s presence among us without God’s intervention.     
    John’s account of the baptism of Jesus could be an illustration of the gospel’s insight into how the Logos enters into our world: How indirect it can be, how it is not immediately apparent even to those of us who are eagerly waiting for its appearing among us.
    What can we make of this?  Is it simply a narrative for us to puzzle over?  Is it John the evangelist’s way of dealing with John the Baptist, famous in his own time when Jesus was hardly known?  It is those, clearly.  But there is something else here as well.
    One of the things seriously observant religious people, and I hope that we here this morning  qualify in this, do is to read and meditate on scripture.   One form of that, of course, is lectio divina.  We read the text as it is, try to understand it in its own context, and then let the text move us in meditation, contemplation and prayer.  It is astonishing how often even passages that seem the least promising end up opening us to new light, new life, new beginnings, new entrances into God’s promised land for us.
    What draws people to faith?  I would venture that while people are searching for community, while they desire the simultaneously rational and emotional and ecstatic satisfactions of beauty, while they hope to build peace and justice, the primary thing they yearn for is assurance of God’s existence, assurance that the world we live in is God’s world, that our lives matter in an ultimate sense, that God is real and present to us.  Please forgive me, in this I am speaking of my own experience and generalizing it to all of us, but when we find God in our own lives, that finding is usually far from a straightforward story.  It is usually by indirection: the unexpected, or perhaps entirely ordinary, appearance of things in our lives that brings God’s presence to us.  Jesus was apparently one of the undifferentiated crowd of people come out to the Jordan to be baptized.  John the Baptist he did not know him - until the Spirit revealed Jesus to him.  
    I suspect there is a strategy in telling this story to us the way John’s gospel does.  The Baptist and his disciples are standing in for all the people of God, all who are waiting for the Word, waiting for the light, to come among us.  We are like John the Baptist.  We want some sure sign that God is coming into the world.  We hope and we pray for God’s coming, and for the fruit of God’s presence among us in a renewed community, in beauty, order, peace, justice, and in our ecstatic union with the divine.  But it does not come on our schedule.  It does not come in our expected categories.  We don’t actually know what or who it will be, what form our encounter may take.   Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we may already be traveling with the Lord and do not know it until we invite him into our actual lives to share a simple meal.  He may come to us as a thief in the night, completely unexpected.  As in the parables, Jesus tells us that we will find God present in the ordinary.  We need to open our eyes to see and our ears to hear what the Spirit is filling and transfiguring right here and right now.  While we, like John the Baptist, may be ready, even eager, for the inbreaking of the Word, we have no idea what it will look like or how it may happen, or who may embody it.  
    So what to do?  Well, as this story John tells suggests, there is a way.  
    Get ready.  Go out into our own wilderness.  Realize who we are: God’s people.  Focus on God’s promise.  Be honest about who we have become and heed the cry to change.  Get down into the river.  Wade in the water.  Let it roll over us.  Watch for the sign of God’s presence.  We don’t know yet exactly how but we need to be ready, to be open to the unexpected.  The Word will come.  The light will shine in the darkness.  And then, when we are called, follow.    

Funeral Sermon for The Rev'd. Donald Austin Stivers

 It was my privilege to preach at the funeral for Fr. Don Stivers, a wonderful priest and longtime Associate of OHC.  The funeral was at Trinity Church, Santa Barbara.  For many, many years Don presided at the Wednesday eucharist at Mount Calvary.  He his wife Floss and his children Michael and Margi were/are dear friends of the community.

The service is available on Vimeo.  The sermon starts a little after minute 39:

https://vimeo.com/730754240  

Donald Austin Stivers RIP
10 May 1924 - 28 June 2022
Isaiah 25: 6-9; Psalm 121; Romans 8:14-19, 34-35, 37-39; John 6:37-40
Trinity Church, Santa Barbara CA: July 16, 2022
The Rev’d. Adam D. McCoy, OHC

      Early in 1944. Donald Austin Stivers, 19 years old, born and brought up in Geneva, NY, was drafted into the Army, together with hundreds of thousands of other young men.  His outfit was at Camp Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia, and he was in the hospital.  Lt. Fr. John Baldwin, OHC, the chaplain, visited him, prayed with him, invited him to attend Mass, then taught him to serve.  Donald was deeply moved.  He wanted to be like Fr. Baldwin.  He wanted to be a chaplain.  In his kind way, Fr. Baldwin directed his ambition to a wider sphere.  As Don later wrote, “I remembered what Father Baldwin said.  ‘When you see a need the Lord is calling you to serve him.’”  The seed of Don’s vocation was planted.      
      Instead of a chaplain Donald became a Battery Clerk.   Typing lists.  Filling out forms.  A bureaucrat filing the endless paperwork the armed forces ran on.  Somewhere in northern France, in the late summer of 1944, this company clerk was with the Battery Commander.  A young private was brought in, who had been found drunk and cleaning his gun while on guard duty.  Drunk and disarmed.  Weak, foolish, irresponsible.  The penalty for that offense could be to be shot. The clerk drew up the charges, brought them to the Commander for his signature.  Then the clerk asked, Perhaps the army might be  too busy liberating Paris to be concerned about such small matters.  With wisdom about such things, the Commander said, “See if you can find the regulation that would tell us what to do.”  Somehow the clerk never found that particular regulation.  Almost a month later, so much time had passed that  a smaller action was called for, one which could not apply the death penalty.  The private pleaded guilty to his offense before a Special Court-Martial presided over by the Commander.  He was sentenced to a month’s pay and three months confinement.  He thanked the clerk for “saving his skin”.  “I didn’t do anything,” Don said.  “That’s what I’m thanking you for.”  Wise as a serpent.  Innocent as a dove.
      From our Gospel reading: “And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me.”  Don Stivers helped save that weak, foolish, irresponsible lad.  Helping to save.  One story of many like it in his wonderful book The Chaplain’s Assistant.  Don Stivers decided to give his life to cooperate in God’s saving work, to help God not lose us, us who are also so weak, so foolish and so irresponsible. 
      Don joined the Army a boy and left the Army a man - a man with a calling.  He finished his education, was ordained, met and married his dear Florence - Floss to those who knew her - and reared two wonderful children, Michael and Margi, who are with us today.  He took Fr. Baldwin’s advice and opened his eyes to see that every need we see is a call from God.   A trained counselor, a musician, a serious student of theology, a youth leader, and much more. 
      His longest ministry was 25 years as the priest at All Saints, Irondequoit, NY, in the Diocese of Rochester.  But instead of moving up the ladder and on to a bigger place, something drew him on a different path.  In 1979 he came west, to minister to two hurting groups of Christians.  He  answered the call to be the priest at St. Christopher’s Church in Boulder City Nevada, which had been wrenched apart by the controversies of the time.  For three years his gentle, skillful ministry helped heal that damaged flock.  And then he was called to the Church of Christ the King in Goleta, recently shocked by the sudden death of its beloved first Vicar, and brought his enormous theological and pastoral wisdom to that place of grief.      
      Don, good priest that he was, chose the lessons for his own funeral.  I think we may be sure they express his faith and the way that faith shone forth in his life.  The prophet Isaiah speaks to us of God’s promise of the great feast for all peoples, when death is swallowed up forever, and our tears, the tears of all of us, will be wiped away.  The mountain where that great feast will take place is like the mountains in Psalm 121, which promise God’s protection, even in our sleeping and our waking, in our going out and our coming in, in all the smallest details of our lives.  St. Paul’s great ecstatic revelation of the true nature of things tells us that all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God, heirs of God, co-heirs with Christ.  We are all of us invited into God’s family.  And our Lord himself tells us, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.”
      Don Stivers was a eucharistic evangelical.  Which is to say that he believed deeply in the clear, simple Christian faith: First, that in Jesus, God came down, became one of us, lived and healed and taught and broke bread with us, suffered and died with us, and now from the right hand of the Father invites us to join him in the great Resurrection life.  And second, that Christ’s invitation to us is to join the fellowship of the redeemed at the Great Table, the unfathomably unexplainable yet always beckoning fellowship of the undivided Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit, inviting us into their very life, into their very communion each with the other. Don believed in his place at the altar, and cherished every opportunity he had to offer the great privilege of that eucharistic invitation. 
      Don Stivers’ life was one of faith and hope.   But the picture of Don’s life and ministry would not be complete without one final piece: He was energetic and determined.  He had a will of iron.  Clothed in kindness and generosity to be sure.  But he never lost sight of what he wanted to accomplish.   I suspect anyone who drove with him - which is to say, anyone who was in the car when he drove - knew this in a very immediate way.   This force of will formed him from his earliest years and gave him a wonderful strength of conviction.  I have no doubt that there are family stories about the strength of his will.  I hope so. It is a wonderful thing to be part of such a life!
      We all of us look for the path to a useful life in the service of God’s promise and invitation, in whatever form it is offered to us.  We want to save.  But we also need to be saved. That poor lost young private stands for all of us.  We all of us can be weak, foolish and irresponsible, but then, by the strangest combinations of unexpected holy events and holy energies, we also can be brought into the possibility of new life.  Whatever does God see in us?  Why would he invite us into his innermost life?  But He does.  Our lives can be set in new directions and we can be given a place in the family of God.  The needs we see and the needs we have are God’s call to us:  A hospital visit, an invitation issued, can become the occasion of a life-changing friendship.  Mercy has many faces.  Who would have thought that one of them would be a piece of bureaucratic work left undone?   The kindness of a wise superior can become the occasion of a life saved which could have been lost.  Churches in conflict or laid low with grief: all these can occasion the blessed healing love and life of God.
      Every human life is a mystery.  We think we know each other.  We think we know ourselves.  We think we have a grip on what God wants.  But God sees more in us than we can see.  God’s love breaks in, God’s love breaks open our plans, God’s love sends us in different directions, God’s love involves us in each other in ways we can hardly imagine, let alone understand.  This was, I think, a secret key to the mystery of Donald Austin Stivers’ life.  It can be ours as well.               

Preaching at St. Cecilia's, Palm Springs.

 Here is a FaceBook video of the sermon I  preached last Sunday, Dec. 26, 2021,  at St. Cecilia's Catholic Community in Palm Springs.  The pastor is Fr. David Lynch, and the deacon is his wife Sharon Talley.  They were members of St. Michael's, Anaheim CA when I was Rector there in the 1990s. They were observing the Feast of the Holy Family.

https://www.facebook.com/SaintCeciliaCatholicCommunity/videos/640521047074357

The sermon begins a moment or two after 17:20.

I have discovered that it is possible to retrieve older sermons recorded on FaceBook as well.  Here is one I preached at St. Cecilia's on August 29, 2021.  It was a baptism.  I preached a bilingual sermon on baptism, which I offer here:

https://www.facebook.com/SaintCeciliaCatholicCommunity/videos/1363701140715295

 The sermon starts at 22:15 or so.  The volume was a little low so you may need to turn it up a bit. 

The first sermon I preached at St. Cecilia's was on July 25, Proper 12, Pentecost 9: the feeding of the five thousand.

https://www.facebook.com/SaintCeciliaCatholicCommunity/videos/343998260730556

The sermon starts at 15:25.

Christ the King: A Meditation on Power

Christ the King
21 November 2021
Grace and St. Peter’s Church, Baltimore

Proper 29B:  Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14
Psalm 93, Revelation 1:4b-8
John 18:33-37

This sermon is available as a FaceBook stream on the page: "Grace and St. Peter's, Baltimore" on Nov. 21, 2021.  The sermon begins just after the 28 minute mark.

    In today’s gospel Jesus says “My kingdom is not of this world.”  Kings and kingdoms are about power.  Pilate is looking for Jesus to assert the power he as a Roman governor understands: the power of the state,  an assertion of legitimacy against the emperor who calls himself divi filius, son of the divine, who rules by force and fear of force.   Jesus however is asserting a different kind of power: not of the forces of this world, but the power of ultimate reality.
    Power and religion are always intertwined.  Whether it is about public righteousness, the law and the state, or about personal righteousness, interpersonal behavior or interior striving, religion by its nature stakes a claim to define what is good  and promote it, to declare what is evil and oppose it.  In our public lives it defines what is good and just.  And it invites us in our private lives and in our private concerns, our small selves, so partial, so of the present moment, so pressing to us now but also now passing away, it invites us as well to the same encounter with the eternal.  This is the power of natural religion, the collective human wisdom of the ages.
    Ancient people, and not just ancient people, have always been on the lookout for the power of the eternal, looking for it to break in.  In fact, it’s a little bit like birdwatching.  Someone reports the sighting of an unusual specimen, like the fabled red crested tee-too-wit, seen only once in the last 45 years, in a mulberry bush, down by the shore.  The birdwatchers rush out to see this great thing.  Those first at the site see it, but it is a shy thing, and flies away.  Or like the dead eagle that falls on the head of the boy Claudius, foretelling his unlikely promotion to emperor in the tv production of I Claudius.  Looking for phenomena.  Looking for the inbreaking of power, from above.
    From the beginnings of human consciousness we all have been watching carefully to see what is happening, what succeeds and what fails, what we can understand and control and what we can’t, and asking, What power is making this happen?  What does it mean to us now?  How can we get on the good side of whatever it is?  
    Where did our ancestors find this ultimate, eternal power?  By observing how the powers around us operate.  The powers of nature: the alternation of light and dark; the sun, the moon and the stars; the course of the year with its seasons moving from warmth to cold and into warmth again; the mysterious ways plants and animals grow, flourish and die, and then regenerate, reproduce to life again; the weather, sometimes delightful and sometimes violent; the sea with its winds and storms and currents and tides; the powers of human interaction: love in its many forms, and lust and hatred and war, with all their mysterious energies; health and disease; wisdom and folly; birth and death.  Some of these powers follow patterns which we can learn by patiently watching and come to understand them  But what of the ones we can’t understand?  Those we name, we honor them, we identify our needs in whatever department these deities might be, and we take those needs to them in sacrifice and supplication.  Then we watch and see if we have been heard.  
    This is not just ancient human behavior.  We still behave this way.  And as more and more of the phenomena of nature are understood by careful observation and reason, we come to think that our need to connect to what is ultimate can be left behind in the graves of our less enlightened ancestors. We think we can use our skill and understanding to bring about a better world.  We come to think that we hold the keys to ultimate reality.  We think we are God.
    But the need to connect with an ultimate power, an ultimate reality, is deeply human.  It does not go away.  It is there even if we don’t believe in God or the gods.  Rather it changes.  It secularizes.  The desire for what is good, for what is better, for a better life for ourselves and those we love and care for, drives our politics, our economics, our legal systems.  It is so powerful that we construct more and more all-encompassing systems to bring about these good ends.  We tell ourselves that when we strive for power we are striving for what is good in order that it may be better.  And because it is better, we can use that power to bring about that good.  Even when it seems that force is needed.   
    This mysterious connection, beginning by wanting what is good and ending with all-encompassing coercive forces, comes from a restless desire for what it better, married to the conviction that if we only apply ourselves we can surely bring it about.  In Jesus’ time it was called the Empire.  It now goes by other names, among which which are the ones we don’t approve of  - authoritarianism, fascism, communism, but there are other names as well, all of them claiming ultimacy, claiming total allegiance.  We think we are God.
    In this process we also want to invest our leaders with almost divine identities, as the ancients did with Caesar.  We are not content that they simply be people who have been given responsibilities and are as answerable to the ultimate as any of the rest of us.  We unthinkingly, unconsciously exalt them.  We want to exalt them, but when the prove unworthy we’re deeply, deeply disappointed.  And they are glad to accept this invitation to quasi-divinity: pharaohs, kings, emperors, captains of industry, prime ministers, presidents, the great and the good of every age, all who would wield power welcome their divine promotion.  But this is not the way of God.
    We strive for the good, the better, the best.  We search for it, hoping to find it, and when we think we have found it, we invest ourselves in it.  This active yearning and striving is deep in every human heart.  St. Augustine puts it best: “Our souls are restless” he says. “Fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te”, from the first paragraph of the first chapter of Augustine’s Confessions.  “You have made us for yourself, and so our heart is restless until it rests in you.”  
    We keep restlessly looking and looking for what cannot be found in the things of this world.  We genuinely want the things of this world to work good for us.  But as wonderful and bountiful and good as the things of this world are, they are not ultimate.  They will all fail, now or later.  They are not God.
    The persons we wish so desperately to trust are not in fact divine.  They are not God.
    The systems we build to achieve what is good will fail.  At best they are strivings.  At worst, their coercions in fact lead us in the opposite direction of the good.  They are not God.  
    In time, we will know all about the mysteries of nature.  In time those mysteries will yield to the patient efforts of science and reason.  They are not ultimate.  They are not God.      
    The powers we find in this world are awesome.  But they are not God.
    The great breakthrough of the Hebrew, Christian and Muslim understandings of reality is that while we can learn from the powers of this world, while we can name them and honor them and learn and follow their wisdom, they are not ultimate.  Only God is ultimate.  God who stands outside of our reality, who encompasses it all but is not determined by it.  Who nevertheless reaches out to us and to our world with the compassion of a parent, with the ardor of a lover.
    This is the One who Is.  Ultimate.  To Whom we are drawn by our restless hearts.
    Jesus’ royal legitimacy is categorically different from that of Pilate and the world.  Christ’s kingship is not political.  It is not based on force or fear.  His kingdom stands outside the present moment and circumstance, holding up standards of goodness as plumblines of comparison for our efforts, bringing our efforts to the hope of ever higher goodness and to the judgment of our failures and cruelties.  
    This king is the Word through whom all that is has come to be, and he draws all he has made to himself by the attraction of his truth and beauty and harmony.  He never forces but waits in patience for everyone, everything, to respond to his invitation of goodness and generosity, to the great wedding banquet He has been preparing for us since the dawn of time.  He is willing to wait in patience as long as time exists.  He is willing to suffer to bring us all to Him.  He is even willing to suffer death for what is good and for what is right in order to bring us all and all that is to share his kingdom.  He rules the world with love.