tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43645792430364530222024-03-17T05:13:56.023-04:00Adam's monk thoughtsAdam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.comBlogger140125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-40048379922653591012024-03-11T11:41:00.001-04:002024-03-17T05:13:24.145-04:00Thomas Curtiss, Jr. RIP - St. Mark's Church, Glendale CA<p>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. <br /></p><p>Thomas Curtiss, Jr. RIP<br />4 November 1941 - 23 December 2023 <br />Wisdom 3:1-5, 9; Psalm 100; Revelation 21:2-7; John 14:1-6<br />St. Mark’s Church, Glendale CA: March 9, 2024<br />The Rev’d. Dr. Adam D. McCoy, OHC <br /><br /> 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.<br /> 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. <br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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. <br /> 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.<br /> 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. </p><p> 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.<br /> 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. <br /> 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?<br /> 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. <br /></p>Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-18604394733802024852024-01-16T10:54:00.000-05:002024-01-16T10:54:13.523-05:00Sermon - Epiphany 2B - Grace and St. Peter's, Baltimore<p>Epiphany 2B<br />Grace and St. Peter’s Church, Baltimore<br />14 January 2024<br />Adam D. McCoy, OHC<br /><br /> “Samuel! Samuel!” ... “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”<br /> 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?<br /> It seems to me that our lessons this morning provide three templates, three models, for the inbreaking Word in our lives.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.”<br /> 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. <br /> 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.<br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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.<br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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.<br /><br /></p>Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-21336783251262791702023-01-15T10:59:00.001-05:002023-01-15T13:49:26.469-05:00Sermon for Epiphany 2A: Holy Cross Monastery<p> Epiphany 2A: 15 Jan. 2023<br />Holy Cross Monastery, West Park NY<br />Isaiah 49:1-7; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42<br />Adam D. McCoy, OHC</p><p></p><p>It is published on the Holy Cross Monastery sermon blog: https://ohclectionary.blogspot.com/<br /></p><p></p><p>The recorded version can be found here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/129046/12045735 <br /><br /> 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. <br /> 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.<br /> What can we make of all this narrative indirection? <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> So what to do? Well, as this story John tells suggests, there is a way. <br /> 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. <br /></p>Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-9464311844451228952022-07-18T12:19:00.011-04:002022-07-18T12:19:59.948-04:00Funeral Sermon for The Rev'd. Donald Austin Stivers<p> 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.</p><p>The service is available on Vimeo. The sermon starts a little after minute 39:</p><p>https://vimeo.com/730754240 </p><p><br /></p><p>Donald Austin Stivers RIP<br />10 May 1924 - 28 June 2022 <br />Isaiah 25: 6-9; Psalm 121; Romans 8:14-19, 34-35, 37-39; John 6:37-40<br />Trinity Church, Santa Barbara CA: July 16, 2022<br />The Rev’d. Adam D. McCoy, OHC<br /><br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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.” <br /> 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. <br /> 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! <br /> 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.<br /> 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. <br /></p>Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-76213186306445159412021-12-27T14:00:00.007-05:002021-12-27T14:48:51.579-05:00Preaching at St. Cecilia's, Palm Springs. <p> 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.<br /></p><p>https://www.facebook.com/SaintCeciliaCatholicCommunity/videos/640521047074357</p><p>The sermon begins a moment or two after 17:20.</p><p></p><p>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:</p><p>https://www.facebook.com/SaintCeciliaCatholicCommunity/videos/1363701140715295</p><p> The sermon starts at 22:15 or so. The volume was a little low so you may need to turn it up a bit. </p><p></p><p>The first sermon I preached at St. Cecilia's was on July 25, Proper 12, Pentecost 9: the feeding of the five thousand.</p><p>https://www.facebook.com/SaintCeciliaCatholicCommunity/videos/343998260730556</p><p>The sermon starts at 15:25.</p>Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-16357452553198163162021-11-22T09:42:00.004-05:002021-11-22T09:58:26.229-05:00Christ the King: A Meditation on Power<p>Christ the King<br />21 November 2021<br />Grace and St. Peter’s Church, Baltimore<br /></p><p>Proper 29B: Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14<br />Psalm 93, Revelation 1:4b-8<br />John 18:33-37</p><p></p><p>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.<br /><br /> 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 <i>divi filius</i>, 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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? <br /> 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. <br /> 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.<br /> 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. <br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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. “<i>Fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te</i>”, from the first paragraph of the first chapter of Augustine’s <i>Confessions</i>. “You have made us for yourself, and so our heart is restless until it rests in you.” <br /> 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.<br /> The persons we wish so desperately to trust are not in fact divine. They are not God.<br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> The powers we find in this world are awesome. But they are not God.<br /> 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.<br /> This is the One who Is. Ultimate. To Whom we are drawn by our restless hearts.<br /> 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. <br /> 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.<br /><br /></p>Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-73394863806823841062021-11-22T08:45:00.002-05:002021-11-22T08:46:39.431-05:00Anglican Values 9: Church and State<p> Anglican Values 9: Church and State<br /><br /> The Christian faith has had an ambivalent relationship with official power since its earliest days. In any monarchy, which is what the Roman Empire in fact was, any religion which calls its central figure a king, traces his line back to the founding royal figure, calls his expected triumph a kingdom, and looks for that kingdom to be manifested in our time and in this world, is throwing down a challenge to the existing authorities. An interesting recent approach to New Testament interpretation traces this theme of engagement with Roman power. Warren Carter, The Roman Empire and the New Testament: A Essential Guide (2006) is a good introduction. <br /> In fact the Christian faith was for almost three centuries a movement divorced from this world’s power. Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 recognized Christianity as a legitimate religion, and the rest of that century can be read in the light of the consequences the Church moving into the seats of power. From that point on, Christianity held power and at the same time was power’s severest critic. Over time every state in Europe and many in North Africa and western Asia came under the banner of the Cross. Which raises the question, How can the state exercise its power through force and be Christian?<br /> Our own Anglican tradition, as is true also of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, has always been deeply embedded in this issue. The conversion of England was in many ways a top-down affair. The Venerable Bede’s charming story from the 600's of King Oswald accompanying St. Aidan as his translator on that monk’s missionary journeys has an underside: What is the message when the king is backing up the preacher? Power is evident here. The church in England has always been deeply involved with the monarchy, long before Henry VIII and his famous marital career. <br /> Henry did not intend to create a new church; in fact he loved late medieval Catholicism. His issue was whether the Pope had a right to interfere with a political question: in an absolute monarchy, providing an heir was the most important work the monarch could perform. It was not personal. Without an heir, the inevitable struggle for power could well ignite a civil war. The last civil war had come to an end only in 1485. But once the door was opened to one issue, many others followed, and the English church entered the Reformation. This struggle did not end until Elizabeth, some 30-plus years later, defined the nature of the Church of England, embedding the Church in the English state. Since then, the Church of England has been the religious face and voice of a state which, at least in its official self-definition, embodies Christian virtue and values in its public policy.<br /> All Anglicans share this history and heritage. Anglican churches in countries still nominally under the Crown do not suffer much of an identity crisis in this regard. But in the United States, as well as in other places not subject to the monarchy, Anglicans have had to find another way. The American Revolution made it impossible for clergy and laity alike to swear loyalty to the King and continue their ministry in the new situation. How to be loyal citizens of the new republic and faithful Christians in our Anglican tradition? Our church found its way through this dilemma by creating a self-governing system in our General Convention, in which the Church is independent of the state, abandoning all official connection to public power.<br /> But interestingly, one thing did not change. The Church of England’s assumption that it acted on behalf of the public, enshrined in the official status of that church, morphed into an American Anglican assumption that public issues were also issues which the Church had a right, even a duty, to engage in. The Episcopal Church has always felt a responsibility to weigh in on the questions of the day: slavery in the leadup to the Civil War; the needs and rights of working men and women; the conditions under which the poor and disadvantaged live; the beginnings of an American colonial empire in the Philippines and the Caribbean; the entry of the nation into a world war; civil rights; ecology and climate change; immigration, to name only a few. As a church we act as though the nation is waiting with bated breath for our latest official statement on public issues. It isn’t. In fact, the Episcopal Church is now quite small, and has lost the importance it once had as the religious expression of many American political and other leaders. Nonetheless, although as a Church we are relatively powerless, we continue to act as though what we say and what we do matter. Our church has found numberless ways to put its values into practice. <br /> In the face of smallness and what seems at times to be irrelevance, I believe that this continuity of Anglican/Episcopal engagement with public issues is a clear sign of one of the unique values of our Anglican heritage: Even when we are not sitting in the seats of power, we think it is important to proclaim and do what we think the teachings of Jesus are, and to proclaim and do what we believe the voice of the Gospels tells us. And to do it even when it seems it doesn’t matter, because in the light of what Jesus tells us about the Kingdom of God, small things do matter.</p>Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-49646701845957295062021-04-10T06:29:00.002-04:002021-04-10T07:21:39.872-04:00Br. Thomas Schultz, OHC - Requiem Sermon<p>I preached at the Requiem for Thomas Haines Schultz, OHC</p><p>Trinity Church, Santa Barbara, CA, April 9, 2021<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p><p>Zoom video recording. The sermon begins about 10 minutes in: <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://vimeo.com/535013687&source=gmail&ust=1618135881443000&usg=AFQjCNGvImdexOS5wCW8Myh9eTvYCrUprw" href="https://vimeo.com/535013687" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">https://vimeo.com/535013687</a></p><p><span style="color: #888888;"><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;" /></span></p><p><span> </span>Very often one of the joys of preparing a homily for a requiem is the discovery that the life of the person being celebrated is much more complex than might have been thought at first. Undiscovered or long-forgotten aspects of education and early employment, areas of special interest, hobbies, quirks of behavior and character, early ambitions serving as unlikely platforms for later pursuits: all of these serve to broaden our view. In the Order of the Holy Cross, Roy Parker was originally going to be a mechanical engineer. Nick Radelmiller was an accomplished water color artist who traded much of that energy to try to learn to play the cello, as best he might. Fr. Parsell was shipwrecked off the coast of Africa during the Second World War. Fr. Hughson wrote a book on pirates. We love to find multiplicity in our brothers.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Like all of us, Tom had his quirks of behavior and character as well. He was not an ambitious leader. He was not much given to researching solutions to problems. He was not a managerial type, though he did a pretty good job as Prior of Berkeley for some 16 years. He willingly did whatever he was assigned to do, but did not himself seek to expand those tasks or make them his own. He was especially happy when people helped him out. He liked cooking the same thing over and over. He loved clothing from REI and baggy pants with many pockets and Tilley hats and large plastic shoes. He either could not or would not learn how to use a cell phone or a computer or an Ipad. He loved little containers to carry things in. He loved pictures of icons. He loved driving our little Smart car around town. He loved shopping trips to CVS for little things. He loved a good gin and tonic or two on Sunday nights.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Sometimes we reflect on the complexities of the lives of people we knew. Alongside the quirks that made them human, we discover multiple facets which need to be viewed together to see them whole. But in some people we find a deep simplicity of character. And when that simplicity is rooted in their search for God, we find something wonderful, something profound, something holy. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Tom Schultz was that kind of person. All his life what he wanted was to be a monastic priest. He discerned that call early, took counsel with his priest and bishop, followed their advice, went to college and then to seminary, got ordained, and joined our monastic community. In addition to Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, NY, he was variously active in our monasteries in Bolahun, Liberia; Grapevine, Texas; Tower Hill, South Carolina; Berkeley and then Santa Barbara, California. Which sounds like a career. But the word career, in the sense of an upward path of jobs and responsibilities, does not really describe Tom. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>His approach to stability was old school: he waited until the Superior told him he was to move. Then when he got there he would set out making personal contacts through his priestly and monastic work: especially with spiritual directees and penitents coming for confession, people drawn to him because there was something in him and in their interaction with each other that opened up to them the presence and love of God. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>He really wanted to stay where he was, wherever that was at the time. I can’t count the number of times he told me that he felt he had just begun to feel rooted in a place when he “had” to move. This was especially true for him at Tower Hill in South Carolina and Incarnation Priory in Berkeley and then here in Santa Barbara. He felt he was not a stable monk because of the times he had moved. But actually, the second half of his life, from 1977 on, was a study in monastic stability. He was in South Carolina for 15 years and in Berkeley for another 18, then in Santa Barbara for 13 more. How many of us have such “instability” in our lives? In each case the reason he had to “leave” was that the community had decided to close those monasteries. But he felt those moves deeply and personally. In each case, he had to leave that holy place around which were centered those wide circles of friends he had created with his quiet confidence in the presence and love of God. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Tom went through several stages in his journeys into spirituality. He studied each of the ways he was drawn to and tried to put them into practice, within OHC’s monastic framework. When I first came to know him in 1973 he was transitioning from the severity of Carmelite practice to Russian Orthodoxy. Augmented by a late blooming interest in Buddhism, he remained on the orthodox path for the rest of his life, loving it especially for its quiet depths of hesychastic mysticism. He deeply admired holy men and women of that tradition, especially their conscious choice of the path of holiness and their attempts to live a daily life devoted to it. I remember once his delight when I shared with him an online video of Fr. Gabriel Bunge which followed Bunge’s daily life in all its visual particularities. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I think Tom really wanted to be a starets. He wanted to live a quiet holy life as a spiritual elder, enjoying the support the monastic community gave him, becoming a personal center of holiness. He wanted, through his monastic life and friendship, to bring people into the presence and love of God.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The presence and love of God. This, I think, was the center of Tom’s faith: that God is always present and that God’s love is pouring out on us always and everywhere and in such abundance that we can hardly imagine its depths. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Our readings this morning express this quality of Tom’s faith, a life lived in the loving presence of God. From the Book of Wisdom: “Those who trust in him will understand truth, and the faithful will abide with him in love, because grace and mercy are upon his holy ones, and he watches over his elect.” From the Gospel of John: “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” And from the First Letter of John: “When he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Abiding, a place being prepared for us. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Being watched over, cared for. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Discovering our true identity, which is to be like God. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Seeing God as God really is.</p><p>That was Tom’s life. It can be ours as well. </p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-595907439593401192020-09-13T14:04:00.006-04:002020-09-13T14:37:37.426-04:00Forgiveness<p>Sunday, 13 September 2020, Pentecost XV, Proper 19A</p><p>All Saints Episcopal Church, Beverly Hills, CA</p><p>This sermon is available as a video online, starting at 17:47: <br /></p><p><a href="https://vimeo.com/457319292?fbclid=IwAR3fZOtbSfWUNJb4p-uQ1erg2KgMMF7onFKXZ0bWJT8fktYh0gMD8LZtKRs">https://vimeo.com/457319292?fbclid=IwAR3fZOtbSfWUNJb4p-uQ1erg2KgMMF7onFKXZ0bWJT8fktYh0gMD8LZtKRs</a> </p><p> <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It is a joy to be with you today, sharing the Word of God with the All Saints, Beverly Hills community. I am so glad to be with you. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We have heard two stories from scripture this morning: the first, a principal turning point in the story of Joseph, and the second, Jesus’ other parable of the talents. Both are about forgiveness, forgiveness in extreme situations, forgiveness that comes with a cost. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The story of Joseph is a miracle of narrative subtlety. It is quite the longest single story in Genesis, taking up fourteen of the fifty chapters of Genesis. It has always been understood as a working out of God’s mysterious providence in human affairs, and Joseph himself has always been understood as an embodiment of wisdom, who through his suffering and then in his prosperity, saves his family, secures their heritage, and alters the affairs of nations. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The story of Joseph is embedded in the narrative of his father, the patriarch Jacob. It begins in Genesis, chapter 37, in what seems a quite simple statement: “Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan.” But things in scripture are never simple. The closer you look, the more interesting they become. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, in her brilliant, midrash-based commentary on Genesis, The Beginning of Desire, tells us that the word “settled” - va-yeshev in the Hebrew - indicates a desire on Jacob’s part for a peaceful, stable, settled life after the tumults of his earlier years. That is the story he is telling himself. But it is not the story that God is telling. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To Jacob’s disappointment and sorrow, he finds nothing settled at all. His eleventh son, Joseph, turns out to be a problem - loved by his father above his brothers, Joseph is seventeen years old, and full of himself. He dreams that his brothers are to bow down to him, and instead of holding this sort of premonition in his heart, as Mary later would, he boasts of it to them, his narcissism setting in motion the whole train of his tumultuous life. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>His brothers decide they have had enough of him, and want to kill him. But after arguing about it, they decide to sell him into slavery instead. And so they do. Or so it seems: the actual text is a syntactic muddle: the deed itself seems to be done by a group of passing merchants. And when the brothers tell their father what happened, they don’t really tell him, but they show him Joseph’s famous coat covered with blood and let Jacob make up a story for them: He was killed by a wild animal. Something worth noting here, something perhaps relevant now: The origins of this act of slavery are couched in ambiguity. You can’t quite pin it down. So the brothers conspire to construct a narrative that makes the act seem socially acceptable, that deflects their own guilt. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And so Joseph’s life goes on: his work increases his master’s wealth; his sexual virtue leads him to prison; more dreams foretell the future; he once again brings profitable service to his master; then his final rise to the highest possible power. His family has noticed, and as families sometimes do, they get back in touch with their prospering relative. But of course, there is a problem. As the brothers say to each other when they are about to meet Joseph, “What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?” What if, indeed. Eventually the bill comes due. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Another thing worth noting here: It is not until the power dynamic has shifted and the former slave is now in charge that the brothers confront their guilt. Because they have to. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And here is where the story becomes even more interesting. There are several stories being told by different people here. The brothers’ story among themselves and with their father, based on their shifty construct of the original deed, shored up by a made-up, but socially maintained, narrative, has now collapsed, and their only hope is a full and frank confession. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The story Joseph told himself about himself, as we all do, might well have been a version of Gotcha! He certainly has justification for it. And perhaps he has told himself that story before. But in fact he changes both stories, first by craftily ensnaring his brothers deeper into their guilt, and then by graciously letting them off the hook: “Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.” Joseph chooses to avoid revenge, but rather he brings out the truth with a firmer awareness of its horrible consequences, and then, instead of vengeance, he chooses to build up their life together. In fact, Joseph is in the place of God. Joseph chooses to move from death to life, and in choosing wisdom, chooses good. And in doing so he starts in motion the whole future of his family, the nation they will become, and ultimately the salvation of us all. <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In some ways the parable of the forgiven and unforgiven debts from Matthew is simpler. The people in it are hardly complex. There is something reductive about the characters in this story, which is, after all, on one level about money, and money can at times diminish human complexity to mathematical terms.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Jesus tells the story in response to a question about forgiveness: How often should I forgive? Seven times? No, says Jesus: seventy-seven times. Jesus takes the question out of the realm of legalistic calculation – I’m off the hook if I refuse forgiveness on the eighth time. I’m keeping track, writing it down in my little personal grievance ledger: Ahah! You’ve reached the limit! Or, perhaps, I’ve reached my limit with you. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>But Jesus, as he does so often, moves away from legalism and into the territory of eternity, by using the rhetoric of exaggeration, of absurdity, of essentially infinite numbers: Not seven but seventy seven, or in the older translations, seventy times seven. In other words: Stop keeping track. Stop basing your interactions with each other on piled-up grievances and begin to live another life, the life of infinite love.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We see this absurdity even more clearly in the parable itself. Some scholars think the talent was not so much a unit of money but a financial concept: Approximately 20 years’ wages for an ordinary worker making about one denarius a day. 20 years’ wages was perhaps the usual working lifetime in those days. The ancient economy and ours are wildly different in almost every aspect, but let’s try to get some idea of what Jesus is getting at. In our California economy the minimum wage for businesses with more than 25 employees, which presumably would apply to the king in this story, is $13.00 an hour. A five day, 40 hour week yields the worker $520. Assuming full employment through the year, an annual wage of $27,040. Twenty years is $540,800. A cool half a million or so per talent. The servant owes 10,000 talents: 5 billion, 408 million dollars. Put this against the 100 denarii owed by the second servant. 100 days’ wages. At California’s minimum wage rate of $104 a day, 100 days comes to $10,400. Not an impossible sum for some of us perhaps, but one which any minimum wage employee would be hard put to cough up on demand. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>As I said, Jesus uses here a rhetoric of absurd exaggeration: The king forgives the first slave a debt of perhaps five and a half billion dollars, simply because the servant asks. That same slave not only does not forgive a debt of perhaps some $10,000, but throws the second slave into prison until he pays. Which of course is next to impossible if he is in prison. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The contrast could not be greater. An almost infinite debt is freely forgiven. A far smaller amount is not. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Who are we in this story? The king, who takes on an almost incalculable financial loss in his compassion for the first slave? The first slave, a high-level management type, whose work has been a disastrous failure, who begs for and receives forgiveness and then viciously turns on the second slave, a simple workman on day wages? The second slave, an ordinary working guy who has got into debt and can’t pay it off? The other slaves, who are outraged at this injustice and bring it to the attention of the king? </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The story is about forgiveness. God forgives as the king forgives. Who should we strive to be like – God who forgives without counting the cost? The first slave, who turns viciously on someone in his debt the minute he thinks he is settled and secure? The second slave, whose situation is in fact hopeless? I would suggest that we are invited to consider ourselves as potentially all three, to ask ourselves, not only what should I do in the future, but what have I actually already done? Have I forgiven? Have I received forgiveness? How many times have I needed to be forgiven? How many times do I need to forgive? Who close to me needs my forgiveness?</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And, Jesus says, the consequences are real. There are consequences for not forgiving. Jesus is asking us to choose which model we should follow. As Joseph says to his brothers, “Am I in the place of God?” The surprising answer is, Yes. You were sold into slavery, thought dead, and yet here you are. You have the capacity to choose – to act out of anger, to make real your fondly-nursed and imagined acts of revenge, or to choose another path, one with unknowable results but openness to a fruitful future - to act as God acts, in the full light of reality and truth, knowing this will start another story as unpredictable as the one it grew out of, but with wisdom choosing what will bring life.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Human life is full of restlessness. We all tell ourselves Jacob’s story of a settled life, a story that cannot really be. There is always another Joseph and his brothers waiting around the corner. Injustice is always potentially the fruit of generosity. But in the midst of all life’s uncertainty we are invited to act as God would act. As Avivah Zornberg says,</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“In this world, what is most needed is not fear, which deprives man of initiative beneath the sleepless eyes of God, but love – the capacity to act in a world where absolute clarity is not attainable.” (p. 278)</p>Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-85102947128187993372019-06-24T20:39:00.000-04:002019-06-24T21:07:15.694-04:00Trinity Sunday 2019Trinity Sunday, 16 June 2019<br />
Grace and St. Peter’s Church, Baltimore<br />
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In the early 1960s I was an awkward, skinny 14 or 15 year-old paperboy for the Las Vegas Sun. In those days paperboys donned an odd garment with big pouches front and back, folded the newspapers and secured them with rubber bands, filled the pouches and trudged along the prescribed route, throwing the paper with more or less accuracy toward the front door. It was a repetitive activity, and left your mind free to roam.<br />
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My family had moved to Las Vegas a year or so earlier from a small college town in southeastern Washington State so that my father, an Episcopal priest, could start a new congregation. To say I was unhappy would be a gross understatement. Pullman was an intellectually and culturally rich place for a young teenager, and Las Vegas was not. I took refuge in a small circle of friends and in the liturgy, memorizing the Communion service from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. I repeated its eucharistic canon like a mantra, over and over as I walked along. <br />
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It was about 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning. The air was cool, the streets were quiet, and I was walking along the north side of West Riverside Drive as it neared the Tonopah Highway. There were three or four houses in a row in which lived a set of Mormon families, all of them named Stewart. One did not inquire too closely in early 1960's Las Vegas just precisely how people were related, but one did wonder. As I passed the third house, I was overcome by a sense of comforting goodness, a sense that the entire universe was actively enfolding me and everyone and everything else in an indescribable warmth of acceptance, purposeful movement forward, and happy outcome. I knew in that moment what Julian of Norwich had already discovered: that the whole world is a small thing, as I was a much, much smaller thing, in God’s hand, intensely loved, and that all would be well.<br />
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That experience has never left me.<br />
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I begin with an experience this morning because I believe that, even if we do not realize it, our faith is always grounded in our experience. God is always with us, always breaking through our shell, always leading, guiding, accompanying, comforting, encouraging, opening us to new possibilities. And sometimes God’s presence breaks through in our lives. As I try to unfold some of the mystery of God this morning, I hope your own experiences will present themselves to you.<br />
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Experiences like ours, but from long ago and far away, have been remembered and written down and achieved canonical form in the Holy Scriptures, in theology and in the histories of the people of God. It is wonderful to read and study them. But it is even more wonderful to find them alive in ourselves.<br />
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I link theology and our experience of God because when we think of God we are really thinking about reality, our reality. When we articulate our own human experiences, our growing knowledge of the nature of the world, our histories, and our imaginations about the world we live in, we are always looking for Something More. We can’t always easily put it into words, and when we do, later, after time passes, we usually discover how limited our words, our descriptions, our analyses were. But still we are impelled to do it. Not everyone gives the word God to these attempts. But whether our vocabulary is secular or sacred, we are all urged toward the same ineffable greatness and mystery.<br />
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In our own religious tradition our experiences seem to fall into threes, which we might call beginnings, encounters, movements.<br />
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What are the principles of existence? Why is there something instead of nothing? What is the nature of the energy which brings it all into being? Is there a direction, a telos, as Aristotle would call it, or is it all simply accidental process? Is there a purpose? In our traditions, Jewish, Christian and Muslim alike, we call this God. As Christians we call it God the Father. <br />
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How does this divine directionality translate itself into concrete reality? How does it make this directionality physical and operative in the world? How is God’s intentionality made incarnate, so that the universe structures itself, follows and reflects God’s rationality, from simple addition to complex mathematics, through all the scientific disciplines, each of whose growing body of knowledge carries us more and more profoundly into the mind of God? In our tradition we call this the logos, the Word. Its first incarnation is the universe itself, but there are others. Angels, seen at first as human but afterward understood to be That One himself among us for a brief but unforgettable intervention. The High Priest emerging from the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement, for that moment Yahweh himself in flesh before his people. Jesus Christ with us in the flesh not for a moment but for a lifetime. Jesus in whose cross and sacrifice we glory, taking his flesh and blood mystically into ourselves at the eucharistic table, invited as we are to share his life, his actual life given for us so that we may be with him, and in him, and through him, one with the Father. All this is God the Son, ever begotten through all time, choosing our human form to sit at the right hand.<br />
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And what is this wind that tingles our ears, ruffles our hair, pushes us from behind, whispers breaths of possibility and draws us on? What is this irresistible energy, this fire of all-consuming love which from time to time seizes us and moves us, propels us into something new, warms our hearts and kindles in us a strange and unaccountably empowered daring to act as if God’s love is true, and in doing, finding that it is? What is this enfolding warmth and assuring kindness speaking now to a person who does not want to be a prophet, now to an overworked mother, now to an unemployed young man on the street, now to one weary in years, now to a lonely 14 year old paperboy, now to me, now to you? The energy of divine comfort and assurance, of divine imagination and possibility, of divine purpose, finding a place, perhaps all unknown, in our days and lives? This we call the Holy Spirit, eternally proceeding, eternally enlivening, eternally drawing us on to the next great thing that God has prepared for us, if only we will enter into his gifts to us.<br />
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This we believe is the structure of reality, not simply as a thought system of our own construction and our own choosing, but the first principle of the universe itself, the laws of mathematics and physics and astronomy, of time and space, of the expanding universe, indeed the life of the One from whom and by whose mind and restless, creative and saving energy we believe comes all the purpose of what is. The Trinity is our religious description of the way things are.<br />
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And if the Trinity does describe the way things are, why should we be surprised if we are occasionally seized by the Spirit, lifted into the life of the Son, and drawn into the loving purpose of the Father, if only for a few moments. How wonderful to find all that as we trudge along the humdrum paths of our lives’ paper routes. God is there, and everywhere, waiting and wanting us to open our eyes to the glory all around us. Even now. Even here.<br />
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I hope and trust that we all have had experiences of God, and that we will have more. That we will find the Father’s creative purpose for us, that we will meet the Son as God enters into our world and our lives, that our hair will be ruffled and our hearts comforted and warmed and our vision uplifted and confirmed by the Holy Spirit. That we will be borne aloft before the throne of God and invited into the endless Alleluia of praise for the love of God, Who has brought all things into being and set them in motion for inexpressible Good.Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-53611438572862089712018-07-03T14:17:00.003-04:002018-07-04T13:00:29.245-04:00Lectio Divina - Mark 5:21-43It was my privilege to preach this sermon on Sunday, July, 2018, at <a href="https://smvsf.org/">The Church of St. Mary the Virgin in San Francisco</a>. Thanks to them for their gracious welcome, and to our Berkeley Associates, Tom and Nancy Bickley, for the hospitality that made my visit there possible.<br />
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The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, San Francisco <br />
Sunday, July 1, 2018 <br />
Adam D. McCoy, OHC<br />
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Pentecost 6B, Proper 8: Wisdom 1:13-15, 2:23-24 <br />
Psalm 130, 2 Corinthians 8:7-15, Mark 5:21-43<br />
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What a joy it is to be with you in this beautiful historic church! It shows such care and love in both its buildings and in your ministries. In an earlier time I spent five years of my life off and on in the Bay Area, at Incarnation Priory, the monastery of the Order of the Holy Cross in Berkeley, and at CDSP, in both the 1970s and 1990s. It is so good to be back. Thank you for inviting me.<br />
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One of the reasons I’m here this morning is to bring you the message of monastic life in our Church, and I thought, what better way to introduce monastic ways to you than to share our experience of today’s gospel with an ancient monastic practice called <i>lectio divina</i>. <i>Lectio divina</i> means divine or spiritual reading. Using this practice monks, and many other persons as well, approach scripture not simply as a text to engage the intellect, but as the living word of God. The expectation is that we will encounter the text as it is and incorporate it into ourselves as God’s word. And in that process we will meet God’s living message to us now, today, as we are in this moment. <i>Lectio divina</i> has four simple steps: studying the text, meditating on it, praying through it and in contemplation letting it act on us. It converts and transforms and transfigures us as we enter into it and it enters into us.<br />
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In what follows I will be using a stream of consciousness approach. As I tell you what happened to me, let yourself imagine yourself into <i>lectio</i>. <br />
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First we <b>read and study</b> the sacred text just as it is, without editing it to fit our own preconceptions, using whatever resources we possess to gain a better understanding. As we do so, what do we notice? What jumped out at me was this: In today’s gospel there are two intertwined stories. A little girl is dying and a woman is afflicted with unstoppable bleeding. These are both life and death situations. But some differences also leap out at me. The girl’s father is a person of importance, standing in the community - and unlike most of the people Jesus meets in his public ministry he is given a name - Jairus. The woman is not given a name. Also, unlike Jairus’s daughter, she seems to be of little or no consequence. Jairus approaches Jesus with social propriety, man to man, as that culture would expect. But the woman does not stand on ceremony. Jairus is decorous, while the woman is not. He politely invites Jesus into his social space, asks him to come to his house. The woman perhaps has no social space, and in her need seizes the opportunity of the moment. She violates Jesus’s personal space by grabbing his cloak.<br />
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As I studied the passage, I learned that there are some cultural issues here which I knew about but was not aware of at first. In first century Palestine respectable women do not interact with men outside their kinship group in public. But this woman does, and this suggests that she lives outside normal social structures. Mark tells us that she has lost everything in her search for health. Perhaps she has no home to invite Jesus into. In Jewish ritual codes, to have physical contact with a menstruating woman renders a person unclean. As does touching a corpse. But then I notice that Jesus neither makes an issue of the gender rules of his day, nor does he rebuke the woman for the purity code violation when she touches his cloak. Jesus simply asks who did it, and why, and then instead of condemning her, he praises her for her faith. And likewise he does not draw back from the dead girl’s body, which would also render him ritually unclean..<br />
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And finally, study reveals how Jesus reacts to the two situations. When he raises the little girl he doesn’t do anything very special. He deflects miracle talk, even downplays what has happened, by saying she isn’t dead but sleeping, and endures the laughing scorn of the people around him. But his reaction to the healing of the desperate woman is quite different. Here we are in the presence of something strange, eery, mysterious. Jesus feels power going out of him, an almost physical experience. The raising of the girl is played down, but the healing of the desperate woman is the occasion of a most wonderful public demonstration of miracle craft!<br />
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So, in <i>lectio</i>, we let the text encounter us in its own integrity. We read it to understand what it itself tells us. We let its uniqueness jump out at us. I have given you what I noticed this time. As you read it you perhaps noticed other things, and so very likely so will I the next time I encounter it. But from what we notice in this moment will come the surprising Word.<br />
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The next step is to <b>meditate</b> on the text. What comes to us when we let these two intertwined stories, and what we have noticed in them, play in our mind? What does it bring us to think? For me: These are two contrasting women, one safely hidden in the home of her respectable family, the other out on her own. But Jesus is not bothered by the gender stereotypes of his time. Nor is he bothered by the violations of convention they present to him. Nor is he bothered by the difference in their social status. Jesus moves with confidence through both situations. He is equal to the needs of both of them. Maybe these are good news Mark wants us to hear. If the point of these stories is not simply reporting an event, or inviting us to think that in similar situations we can assuredly expect the same result, what is the point? The first is simply information, and the second will likely not happen. Jesus did not come to change the natural laws of the created universe. Maybe this story is presenting some marks of the kingdom of God: It doesn’t matter who we are. God is not confined or restricted by our conventions and boundaries. God recognizes our faith when we act from our deepest needs. God does not seem to mind when we get too close. God is not deterred when people make fun of what is going on or even refuse to see what is happening. God is compassionate. God invites us to bring our needs to him. <br />
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And so these meditations lead to the third step: <b>prayer</b>. Jesus, let me see my needs and bring them to you. Jesus, what is dying in my life? Can it come to life again? Can that little daughter of my soul grow again? Can a future come from what seems lost, over, finished, done, dead? Jesus, help, me make room for that desperate person inside me. Let her lose her inhibitions so she can reach out and touch your healing power. Jesus, help me not be ashamed to admit that I too am desperate, that I also may have invested too much in what doesn’t work. Jesus, help me get over being embarrassed that I am in some ways, perhaps in many ways, hopeless, homeless, destitute, bleeding out my life, looking for your power to heal me. Jesus, help me know that I too am that little girl, that father, those jeering bystanders, that crowd following you through town, that desperate woman. I am one with them. Let me touch you. Touch me. Look at me. Talk to me. Raise me up. Give me my life again.<br />
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And finally, <b>contemplation</b>. Resting from the text, from its images and questions and patterns, resting from the mind’s work, resting from the words sent from the heart. Resting quietly in the Word as we have experienced it. Sitting quietly as it does what it will. Who am I now that I have lived into this text, this meditation, this prayer? Am I the same as I was before? I hope not. Quiet down now. Let that ineffable something be in me. Let me be in it. The daughter, the father, the crowds, the woman, Jesus in the middle of it all.... Hush for a moment. What do I feel? Is something new in my heart? Can I just sit still for a moment and let it be? <br />
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But often these four processes, studying the text, meditating on it, prayer, contemplation, do not always happen in sequence. Suddenly something elbows its way in, out of the art of the sequence that I am now in: The daughter, the daughter, the daughter: That dying little girl has a family, a home, a father. She is by definition a daughter. But the woman has lost everything, has risked everything. And so what does Jesus call her? He calls the dying girl simply <i>talitha</i>, little girl. But he calls the desperate woman Daughter, something he calls no one else in the whole Gospel of Mark: Daughter, your faith has made you well. Daughter. Your faith has not only made you well, but gives you a new father, a new family, a new home.<br />
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What is it like to have Jesus look at you and say, Daughter? Jesus, may I be your daughter? May I be your son? May I join your family? May I come home with you?Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-28728258606536203362018-04-25T21:39:00.000-04:002018-04-25T21:49:46.945-04:00The Good Shepherd[s]Preached at St. Edmund's Episcopal Church, San Marino, CA<br />
Fourth Sunday of Easter <br />
April 22, 2018<br />
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John 10:11-18, Psalm 23<br />
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Available to listen to at the St. Edmund's website:<br />
<a href="https://saintedmunds.org/sermons/">St. Edmund's Sermons</a><br />
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As perhaps you have gathered by now, today is Good Shepherd Sunday. It is, among other things, a day on which Christians are called to reflect on ourselves both as followers and as leaders, both as sheep and as shepherds in Christ’s flock, because as adults we understand that sometimes we are called to lead and sometimes we are called to follow. And each of us in the course of our lives will be called to both.<br />
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The problem with the image of sheep and shepherd, however, is that we are not sheep. Sheep are kept for their economic benefits: wool, milk which can be made into cheese, and meat. Fleecing people, milking them, devouring them, is exploitation. Right thinking people don’t admire human exploitation or the people who practice it. But of course it happens all the time. The news is full of examples every day. So maybe the image is more apt than we think it is. People can be gullible. They can be tricked. They can be drained of their resources and left by the side of the hard pathways of a not very tender world. It can be dangerous to be a sheep without a shepherd.<br />
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One of our culture’s ideals is the independently successful person. Who does not admire the woman or man whose intelligence, dedication to education and to learning their craft, whose hard work and honesty create prosperity and respect, who makes wise choices, builds a stable family and home, and is a dependable, trustworthy and generous member of the wider community? Isn’t that what we all want to be, what we want our children to become? Is that not the hope of a serene and secure old age? Not all of us succeed completely. In fact, very few if any of us do. The truth is, none of us is as self-sufficient as we think we would like to be. <br />
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Sheep, at least the domesticated kind, cannot survive all by themselves. They need help finding water, pasture, sheltered places for the night. They need to be defended when hungry predators come looking for them. They need guidance and protection. And in this respect people and sheep are very similar. Most of us do not always see the path in front of us clearly. Most of us need help finding our way in the world, learning what is truly worthwhile. We all need protection from the dangers of life. And when we are young all of us, and when we are old, most of us, need to trust the goodness, wisdom and kindness of others. The general job description of shepherd has many faces and takes many forms. There is a constant demand for good shepherds.<br />
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If we have been fortunate we have been blessed by many good shepherds in our lives. In our early years we have needed caring parents and relatives, teachers, youth and activity leaders, mentors who made the time to introduce us into a wider world. Then as adults we look for spouses, friends, colleagues and guides to help us through the intricacies of our complicated world. We need people who will spend their energies to establish and strengthen the institutions we value and depend on. We need generous souls who spend countless hours at unseen tasks to build up what is good for the benefit of others, as well as people whose positive public lives are plain for all to see. I am sure each of us can make a list of such people, and if we let our imaginations drift a bit, as they sometimes do during sermons, perhaps we can recapture their unique presences in our lives: not only what they did but who they were, what they looked like, sounded like, even smelled like. They helped create the world for us and we are who we are because of them.<br />
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One of mine was my grandmother, my mother’s mother. She was from a family that arrived on these shores in 1705 but among themselves still spoke a form of Swiss German well into the twentieth century. They were Calvinists of the firm backbone sort, who favored plain churches and plainer worship, who had serious ideas about what was right and what was not, who had a Bible by the bed that was read as the day ended and as the next day began. My grandmother was formal, always wore a dress, even in the kitchen, and never seemed to break a sweat, no matter how hot a Western Pennsylvania summer day might be. On special occasions she seemed a bit like a battleship in full sail. But never an unkind word from her about anyone. She was all smiles and sugar cookies and a safe and understanding something I could always return to. She was a rock for an awkward little boy who needed one. From her I learned to trust that the somewhat scary righteous goodness, the solidity of God, was also the kindness, the gentleness, the generosity of God.<br />
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Good sheep need good shepherds, and we have all found ourselves in their care at different times of our lives. But good shepherds also depend on their sheep. Think of that other good shepherd story, the one where the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to go in search of the lost sheep. We tend to pay attention to that one wandering sheep and forget that the shepherd trusted the rest of them to carry on while he went searching. There is a wonderful interchange going on in that story, one in which the integrity, the good character of the flock allows an unusual event to occur without dispersing it. What is it like to be in a flock like that, to be known, cared for and protected, to realize the essential goodness of that special relationship, to enter into the mutual love between shepherd and flock? It gives us a sense of belonging, of solidarity, of security and confidence in what is happening now and in what the future will bring. I imagine that when he told his good shepherd stories, Jesus was inviting the people who were listening to him into a new kind of relationship with God through himself: goodness of every sort overflowing from God’s righteousness, flowing into still waters of a refreshing stream in the midst of green pastures where we can lie down, not in want any more, but in abundance, security and peace.<br />
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Because I believe that is what God wants for us: the Good Shepherd, his beloved Son, leading us to the right pathways, pathways that lead to the beautiful place. Those pathways will indeed also take us into the valley of the shadow of death, but we need fear no evil. <br />
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For us there always have been and always will be such valleys. Life is defined by them: we enter life in one dangerous place and leave it in another, and in between there are many more. We need rods and staffs and good shepherds who know how to use them along the way. But God’s promise is that we will never lack them if the Lord is our shepherd. <br />
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And more than that. So much more: banquets of delight, tables of abundance, even in the face of our anxieties, troubles, dangers and distress. Along the way our shepherds sometimes face danger for us, sometimes danger costly to themselves. But we are promised: God is with us, it is God’s work the shepherds of our lives are doing. And we need to love them for it. <br />
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And to what end? The magnificent banquet, the oil on the head, the overflowing cup, goodness and mercy following us, every day, every day. The promise given to each of us is that if we enter the great journey together, following and then leading and then following again as we are called, both sheep and shepherds and sheep again together, we will come to that great home of warmth and love and generous smiles and overflowing tins of sugar cookies, and the love of God, which has been leading us and feeding us and protecting us and waiting for us the whole time, in a thousand ways and with a thousand faces, each of them single and irreplaceable facets of the vast illuminated mosaic of the overflowing, inexhaustibly abounding love of God. <br />
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<br />Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-69021210171314981492017-08-31T11:46:00.001-04:002017-08-31T11:52:40.375-04:00A Monastery SummerThis summer has been a challenge for us here at Mount Calvary Monastery. A challenge which I believe we have met rather well.<br />
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Summer for us began with our annual trip to the Chapter of the Order of the Holy Cross at Holy Cross Monastery, West Park NY. At that Chapter we said thank you to Robert Sevensky, our Superior for the last nine years, and elected his successor for a six year term, Robert James Magliula. Rob came to us after a distinguished career as a parish priest in upstate New York. He was stationed for some time at Grahamstown, South Africa, but has not spent much time in California. We are encouraging him to fill that gap as soon as he can.<br />
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At that Chapter Br. Bob Pierson, part of our community here for some three years, was asked to move to West Park to be the Novice Master for that community. We gave our community's blessing and sent him on his way on Sunday, July 16. He drove a rented car east, stopping on the way to visit family and friends. We wish him every joy and success in that important ministry. Tom, Will and I form the community here now.<br />
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Which obviously presents some problems: How can three guys, one in each decade advancing from the 70s through the 80s and into the 90s, keep things humming along here at Mount Calvary? Because they have been humming! Our retreat ministry is steadily growing, both in numbers and in the spiritual intentions of our retreatants. We made a list of the things the three of us can't do and decided to fill those gaps with a rearrangement of present staff duties, and the addition of a Tuesday cook and an evening and weekend dishwasher. And what do you know? It is working! Welcome Sascha, a retired television producer who loves to cook, and Socorro, who was our dishwasher before but who had to leave to help her parents, and whose situation has now improved.<br />
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Our appeal last fall did well, but not so well that we didn't have to rearrange projects. We now have a new hot water system for the Guest House, a new (and much larger) grease trap for the food services area, and new roofing on the patio pavilions behind the Guest House. We decided to put off the woodpecker holes for the time being and to rearrange the work on the Cottage. When that work is done in early October the Cottage will be insulated, have a new and more private bathroom, bigger and better doors, and air conditioning. In addition we repainted and recarpeted the Priest's Suite in the Guest House. And the icing on the cake: We decided to repaint the Chapel, made necessary by a heating system filter malfunction. The big change there is a lovely new white color on the ceiling to replace the flat bone white there before.<br />
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The repainting and recarpeting was done during our 10-day silent retreat, not ideal but necessary because of our active retreat ministry schedule. Nevertheless, the three of us enjoyed our time of quiet, praying the Daily Office and Eucharist in temporary but quite pleasant space in the Guest House library room.<br />
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The weather this summer has been mostly cool, usually in the 70's. Only this week has it begun daily to reach into the 80's. We are conscious of how blessed we are to be suffering only an occasional peak into the low 90's when so many others are in the 100's. In fact, some retreatants , like a pastor from Bakersfield, decided that a week of retreat here during the heat was a very good idea!<br />
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The Lord has looked with favor on us this summer, turning challenges into blessings! <br />
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<br />Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-24311794340575573012016-08-26T21:43:00.003-04:002016-08-26T21:43:41.872-04:00What is a monastery for?Note: I originally wrote this in two posts for the Prior's Blog on the <a href="http://mount-calvary.org/">Mount Calvary Monastery website</a>, and then edited it for our monastery newsletter's Summer 2016 edition. I thought it might reach a slightly different audience by offering it here.<br />
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What is a monastery for? <br />
<br />People have been writing about this question for at least 1,650 years, if you date the beginning of setting and answering the question with the Life of Anthony by St. Athanasius shortly after the saint’s death in 356. It is a very considerable body of literature! And it seems presumptuous to write more about it! <br /><br />A monastery is “for” creating a place and a style of life to allow both the monks and our guests to pursue closeness to God seriously. Any- one can do this anywhere, of course, and many people do it in their daily lives without monasteries and do it better than we do.<br /><br />Monks need to be with other people who want to do the same thing and so we try to create a place and a way of living to facilitate it. Maybe we need it because we are fallible, not especially strong, or because we are not very heroic and need mutual encouragement. At any rate, what we do is build places and styles of living that facilitate rather than hinder the pursuit of God. <br /><br />So what do monks do? <br /><br />We work. We pray. We study. We try to practice the Benedictine bal- ance of all three. Everything about our life is supposed to lead us into God’s presence, to encounter God. Our work makes this economically possible for us. Our studies prepare our minds for this encounter. <br /><br />But most of all, our prayer directs our hearts to God. Like Christians everywhere, we pray the Lord’s Prayer, remember the needs of the world and others, turn to the Lord in joy and sorrow and contrition. We share the Body and Blood of Christ. We sit in silence to meditate and contemplate in the presence of the triune God. Just like every practicing Christian. <br /><br />But monastic prayer has another component, and it is what makes monasteries what they are. <br /><br />Several times a day we pray the opus Dei, the work of God. This is not especially personal. We recite the Psalms, listen to the Word of God, spend some silent time together in the presence of what we have recited and heard, and collect its themes in a prayer. For centuries this was done eight times a day. Many monasteries, in response to our clock-centered and work-centered culture, now gather four times a day. <br /><br />These services are laid out in advance: which psalms, which lessons, which prayer, how much silence. This might seem to leave little room for the movement of the spirit, but anyone who does this kind of prayer knows that the spirit is moving in the mind and heart, but in a special way. <br /><br />One of the oldest Christian theologies of Scripture is that all of the Bible is the Word of God: what God is actually saying to the world, as complex as that is. If we want to come close to what God is saying to us, Scripture is the place to go. And the way to do it is to listen. <br /><br />What monks do is set our own concerns aside and listen to Scripture unfiltered. No preacher or teacher or commentary. Just the words of God. The Word of God. We allow ourselves a great privilege: speaking the Word through our own mouths when we recite the psalms. Hearing the Word read by one of us. As though we are worthy to say the psalms and as though we are worthy to read the Word, to be the mouth by which it enters the world and the ears which are ready to <br />listen to it. <br /><br />In monastic tradition the psalms are the very thoughts and prayers and reflections of Jesus himself, Son of Man and Son of God. When we recite them, we are inviting the resurrected Jesus to enter us, to utter his thoughts and prayers and reflections through us. It is a kind of incarnation, if we let it happen. And if we do, we are putting ourselves close to God. <br /><br />Benedict begins his Rule with a pregnant word: Obsculta. Actually, Benedict begins with three words: Obsculta, o fili. Listen, O son. These words have a sequence, a causality. Listening to the Word creates a re- lationship. If we listen to the Word, if we make that Word our words, we will enter a new relationship. We will be sons. And daughters. <br /><br />So. That’s really what monks do. Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-9046110656488061352016-02-14T13:42:00.001-05:002016-02-14T13:57:44.264-05:00Lent 1 - The Temptation in the WildernessLent 1C - 14 February 2016<br />
Luke 4:1-13<br />
Preached at Mount Calvary Monastery, Santa Barbara CA<br />
Adam D. McCoy, OHC<br />
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Matthew, Mark and Luke all begin Jesus’ public ministry with the temptation in the wilderness. Together with the baptism it is the “formation event” of the story they tell. It sets the scene. So it is interesting to ask what the underlying theme of this story is, since it is a foundation for everything that will follow. <br />
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In the temptation story the devil plays on the importance of Jesus’ identity: Son of God. It has just been given to him, in the two passages which immediately precede the Temptation story: the baptism of Jesus and his genealogy. They form a sort of triptych at the beginning of Luke's narrative of Jesus’ ministy: all three focus on Jesus’ identity as Son of God. At his baptism the voice from heaven says, “You are my beloved Son.” The genealogy which immediately follows traces Jesus’ human lineage back though all his patriarchal ancestors to “Adam, the son of God”. In these temptations the devil tests Jesus in what it means to be Son of God. <br />
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The devil picks three particular temptations: food; power over “kingdoms”; risk taking. Are they perhaps connected to who Jesus is and what he is going to do?<br />
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As the devil presents them, the temptations are outrageous, because they depend on who we and the devil know Jesus is: Son of God: bread from stones; total power; safety from foolish and dangerous actions. Each of these temptations tries to lure Jesus into cashing in on his identity as God’s Son, to get things for himself: resources for himself; power for himself; his own personal exemption from the consequences of his actions. <br />
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In our monastic Bible study yesterday Timothy pointed out how the story of the temptations in Luke ends: the devil will be back: always there will be another time. But perhaps this is not the first time they have contended. The devil seems to know Jesus already. <br />
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Maybe this is a drama which has been going on for a long time. Maybe the theme these temptations portray from Jesus’ human life apply to the relationship of the Word of God to the world the Word has created. Maybe they represent the ancient struggle between God and what is against God that has been going on since time began. And what is the theme of that drama? Humility - the love and action of God for the benefit of his creation, for us and for all he has made, which is the power and glory of God. The devil wants to corrupt that, to turn the power of God away from the love God has for the Other into self-glorification. <br />
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In his ministry Jesus will act in all three categories: resources; power; protection. Jesus feeds the people in the wilderness; he claims jurisdiction over the kingdom of the demons and proclaims a new kingdom, the Kingdom of God, to replace the kingdoms of this world; and he takes life-threatening risks when he encounters authorities and when, in his proclamation of the new kingdom, promises to displace them.<br />
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The difference between what the devil holds up to Jesus and what Jesus actually does is: the place of the self. The devil urges Jesus to feed his own needs, claim his own power, act outrageously to test his own self preservation. But Jesus refuses this temptation. <br />
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Instead of acting for himself, Jesus does these things for others: providing what others need; acting with power to overthrow the demonic powers of the world by healing others; putting himself at risk to proclaim a new Way for the world. As he does so, Jesus shows how the Word of God has acted since the beginning of creation: acting to create and sustain the world. In this Jesus shows who God is: self-emptying to create a reality that has its own life, loving that life so much that God loves and pours out God’s self in never-ending and always-replenishing love, with abundance without measure. Jesus shows us the secret of God: self-emptying humility. <br />
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Jesus’ call into the desert to be tempted is a bedrock basis of the life of monks of whatever type. Is it for ourselves alone that we go apart to come close to God? Is it for ourselves alone that we arrange our lives as best we can to conform to the love of God? Is it for ourselves alone that we arrange our hearts to constantly claim that love? It is not just for ourselves, or rather, we as selves are built up as we follow the example of Jesus: we find ourselves when we act for others first. That is the humility of Jesus. He is glorified because he became one of us, because he used what he had to build up a new kingdom centered on God’s immeasurably self-emptying love, because he risked his own life, not recklessly throwing himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple but allowing himself to be lifted up from the earth by others on the instrument of shameful punishment and death, which is now the sign of life. <br />
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So monks, and the rest of us too, should be humble, just as Jesus was humble. In the tradition of the desert fathers and mothers we find this: <br />
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Amma Theodora said that neither asceticism, nor vigils nor any kind of suffering are able to save, only true humility can do that. There was an anchorite who was able to banish the demons; and he asked them, "What makes you go away? Is it fasting?" They replied, "We do not eat or drink." "Is it vigils?" They replied, "We do not sleep." "Is it separation from the world?" "We live in the deserts." "Then what power sends you away?" They said, "Nothing can overcome us, but only humility." Amma Theodora concluded by saying, "Do you see how humility is victorious over the demons?"<br />
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Humility is what is different in what the devil tempts Jesus with and in what Jesus actually does. How might we follow him into the desert, to find that the devil already knows us? How might we meet our own temptations to magical, imaginary self-glorification with humility, and in that humility find the victory that lets us look for, find and serve?Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-73302751224632614072015-12-25T13:24:00.002-05:002015-12-25T13:39:08.247-05:00Christmas Eve 2015Mount Calvary Monastery, Santa Barbara<br />
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I offered this last night at our 8:00 pm “Midnight” Mass. Perhaps more a reflection of lectio than a full-blown sermon.<br />
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Thoughts on Luke's story of the birth of Christ:<br />
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<b>1. Political background: </b><br />
Luke’s story of the birth of Jesus is located in a specifically political environment: The census of Caesar Augustus. Why should a government take a census: to control, to impose its will effectively from the top down, to make effective, practical policies possible. <br />
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But for the people of Israel, and for the people of the new community of believers who will come to be called Christians, looming behind the Roman census is that other great census – the census of David (2 Sam 24). <br />
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David’s census displeased God. So David was told to choose one of three punishments: "Shall seven years of famine come to you in your land? Or shall you flee three months before your enemies, while they pursue you? Or shall there be three days' plague in your land?” David chose the plague and 70,000 men died. It is almost the last thing he does as king: 70,000 people die for his rational governmental act. Not how you want the curtain to go down on your reign.<br />
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Power, the power of government, even the power of the very best of kings, which by definition acts in and for the “world”, is deeply ambivalent in this story. 70,000 people: If that’s what happens with the best of kings, what’s in store for us? Something awful is looming, this seems to say. And what’s the way out of that? Luke places this joyful story in a context of foreboding.<br />
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<b>2. Social background: </b><br />
Luke’s story of the birth of Jesus takes place in the world of “us” and “them”: Coming home to Bethlehem, looking forward perhaps to contacting relatives long unseen – no one takes them in. Aren’t they family? To come home and no one takes you in. <br />
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Compare John 1:9 ff: Read this with Luke’s story in mind: “The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”<br />
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Doesn't that sound like the story outline for Luke's nativity? <br />
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Who isn’t receiving him? His “own” – family, kin. <br />
Who is receiving him? Shepherds – anonymous, poor, strangers, outsiders, “other”.<br />
And what about the light? <br />
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<b>3. The way Luke’s story is told:</b><br />
Luke’s story of the birth of Jesus has a meaningful structure, a framework: It begins with an act of power – the power of the state – and ends with another act of power – the opposite of the world’s power, as far away from Caesar Augustus as you can imagine – God’s power, which is so very, very different. Both acts of power encompass all the people. But to very different ends!<br />
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<b>4. Monastic silence before the Word:</b><br />
Br. Timothy has told us that the Carthusians keep a special silence on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day – silent so that the Word might reach them. Silence is a kind of powerlessness – to keep silent is a refusal to define, to comment, to exchange, to assert one’s self. It allows the other to speak. In fact, it removes our privilege as those who might speak. <br />
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Silence is a joining the powerlessness of Jesus. By it we are entering in to the reversal of all things that is Luke’s great theology of God’s action: by turning things upside down God is bringing his Kingdom. <br />
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<b>5. What sort of messages might these thoughts on Luke’s story of the birth of Christ bring?</b><br />
Well - maybe these: <br />
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Action is important. But good political and economic and military organization – the tools of the powerful of this world – are not guarantees that God’s kingdom will come. No matter how fine your intention, it might just blow up in your face. It is a good thing – and in fact inevitable – that we should try to understand the proclamation of the Word of God in practical ways and construct programs to put it into action, but it is well to remember David and his census. <br />
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The people we thought are “our” people may not be the ones who know who people really are, who know what is really going on. They – we – may not be the ones who recognize who is a Word Bearer. Humility might be a consequence of this realization.<br />
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Where we find the Word of God WILL be a surprise. As God’s people we should be on the watch for its arrival. But we may not be very well prepared to recognize it. It might be embedded in people we don’t think much of. In Jesus’ time the Judeans didn’t think much of the Galileans - not learned and sophisticated like us, but rude, ignorant, not up to date, superstitious country people, perhaps a little simplistic about things. Galilee is where Mary and Joseph were from. Who might such people be now? <br />
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And for monks? <br />
Maybe our gift is a different gift from the busy folk of the world. <br />
Maybe silence in the face of the Inbreaking Word is our gift. <br />
Maybe our silence allows us to try to trust God more than we trust ourselves. <br />
Maybe our silence lets us be daring in who we let in. <br />
Maybe, just maybe, we will hear the Word. <br />
If we join in solidarity with those who have no voice in this world of power, maybe we too can see the great light and hear the angels praising God: Glory to God in the highest, and peace to people on earth.<br />
Maybe that’s the gift monks can give at Christmas time.Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-77690204441319960382015-10-15T14:17:00.001-04:002016-02-14T14:05:39.753-05:00Ralph Martin, SSMIn the early 1920's the Order of the Holy Cross began its now almost century long ministry in Africa by opening a mission station in Bolahun, Liberia. In the 1970's it was thought best to indigenize that work, comprising a large church, schools, medical clinic, a village for people with Hansen's disease, and other good works. Time for Liberians to run their own institutions! As the Order pursued this policy -- which was a process that took many years rather than a single event -- the idea arose of an African novitiate. In the early 1980's this led to the Order's second African establishment, Philip Quaque Monastery in Cape Coast, Ghana. A few years later an Anglican seminary was started in Cape Coast, named for St. Nicholas. The OHC community was involved with the seminary from the outset, though the monastery and the seminary pursued their separate goals. The first head of St. Nicholas was Ralph Martin, SSM, who has just published a remarkable autobiographical memoir.<br />
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Ralph Martin, SSM, <i>Towards a New Day: A Monk's Story.</i> (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2015). <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0232531633/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=desktop-1&pf_rd_r=1HSJ3FX71YE9PK5AGDKZ&pf_rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=577048787&pf_rd_i=desktop">Available from Amazon.co.uk</a> at a much more reasonable price than US Amazon. <br />
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Born, educated and ordained in Canada, Ralph Martin joined the Society of the Sacred Mission in 1957. SSM had been founded in 1893 by Fr. Herbert Kelly, who desired to educate young men of the working classes for the ministry of the Church of England. This was a significant development, as many (perhaps too many) of the clergy were not from that social milieu and so the Church's life among working people was not as vibrant as it should have been. Fr. Kelly is a fascinating character in himself, and the Kelham story is told well by Alistair Mason, <i>SSM: History of the Society of the Sacred Mission</i> (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1993). <br />
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The great work of Fr. Kelly and SSM was the foundation and operation of one of the great seminaries of the Anglican world, Kelham, in Nottinghamshire. The Church of England, battered in the 1960's from many sides, decided it had too many seminaries, and in 1971 Kelham was closed.<br />
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Martin's description of his early years at SSM is a classic of the I-enter-the-monastery genre of writing. If the reader knows what is coming, the writing is poignant, and left me almost in tears. <br />
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What a wonderful gift SSM and Kelham were, not just to the Church of England, but to Christianity in general. It is interesting to compare Martin's account to Richard Holloway's Kelham days, in his autobiographical <i>Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt</i> (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2013). <br />
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Ralph Martin's early years in SSM took him in many interesting directions, but led ultimately to almost a decade as Provincial of SSM in the UK (1973-1981). This occurred in the wake of the closure of Kelham and its internal troubles, and must have cost Martin a great deal. He steered the community in new directions, which envisioned a broader concept of community life. When his term was done, he began a remarkable career of ministries which took him to Japan, Ghana, back to the UK, Kuwait, Rome, Lesotho and Australia. In all of those places his ministries were exemplary, and to read his accounts is to gain a glimpse of what a wonderful thing missionary monasticism can be in our age.<br />
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When OHC established Philip Quaque Monastery in Cape Coast, Ghana, the Prior was Christian Swayne. Christian learned that the Ghanaian church wanted to start an Anglican seminary in Cape Coast. He and Martin were old friends, going back to early Canada days. So Christian wrote Martin asking him if he might be interested in heading up the seminary project, and the project began.<br />
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The seminary was a real string and baling wire operation in the beginning, and the anecdotes Martin tells are absolutely wonderful, giving a vivid picture of the early days of an important church institution. OHC and the seminary were not the same by any means, but OHC people are prominent in the account of the seminary: Christian himself, Bonnell Spencer, who in his late 70's taught history and created the library from scratch, Boniface Adams, Leonard Abbah, and many others. It is a priceless, brilliant word picture of a bit of OHC's history. And all told with a generous and cheerful eye to human achievement with divine help in the midst of seemingly insurmountable difficulties.<br />
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This is a wonderful book. Wonderful because of the light a central participant in its history sheds on a great Anglican monastic community. Great because of the picture it paints of vital Anglican Christian life in so many parts of the world. But most of all, inspired in the character who tells his own story. Ralph Martin is a shining exemplar of Christian discipleship, of monastic life well led, of profound and effective faith pointed toward the Kingdom.Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-79299566025536436482015-10-07T10:28:00.002-04:002015-10-12T15:56:58.973-04:00Oliver Sherman Prescott<a href="http://anglicanhistory.org/usa/osp/">Oliver Sherman Prescott</a> is one of the most interesting priests in the history of the Episcopal Church. The Anglo-Catholic movement has had more than its share of characters, and surely Prescott stands in the front ranks of the colorful and controversial. Jervis S. Zimmerman, an old friend of the Order of the Holy Cross, has written the first book-length study of Prescott, and it is a most welcome addition to the study of the Episcopal Church, of the Tractarian, Ritualist and Anglo-Catholic movements, and of Anglican religious orders.<br />
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<i>An Embattled Priest. The Life of Oliver Sherman Prescott: 1824-1903.</i> (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2012.) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Embattled-Priest-Father-Sherman-Prescott/dp/1477254854/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1444225706&sr=8-1&keywords=zimmerman+jervis">Available from Amazon.</a><br />
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Prescott was a few years older than Charles Grafton, and was in some ways his mentor. Born into a well-to-do New Haven merchant family, he was educated at Trinity College, Hartford and Yale before attending General Seminary. He was an early adopter of ritualist practices, and ritualism became his life signature. From the beginning of his ministry he was constantly in trouble with bishops and others over these practices. Prescott never stayed very long in any of the churches he was called to lead. He seems to have been a prickly person, easily drawn into controversy, of an Anglo-Catholic type I remember from my youth but not so easily found now: rejoicing in being "advanced"; knowing what others did not, could not, or would not know; pushing situations to the edge seemingly just for the fun of it; playing word games in official correspondence with bishops and other church dignitaries; seeing the trouble they are in as some sort of proto-martyrdom for the cause. <br />
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Be that as it may. Prescott came under the pastoral oversight of Levi Silliman Ives, Bishop of North Carolina, himself a rare specimen. Sent to a small church in the western part of the state in 1847, Prescott there became involved with the first experiment in Anglican religious orders for men, the Society of the Holy Cross at Valle Crucis, NC. That did not last long, but had an effect. At Charles Grafton's urging Prescott joined the Society of St. John the Evangelist, which led him in 1875 to become Rector of St. Clement's, Philadelphia, certainly the most ritualist Episcopal parish in the U.S., where his most publicized trials occurred. He resigned in 1881.<br />
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Prescott took final vows in SSJE in 1870 and was released in 1882. He went west. "West" in those days encompassed Wisconsin, and he was involved in the process that led to Grafton's election as Bishop of Fond du Lac. But even with his old friend he could not avoid controversy, and they parted ways after Grafton's election as bishop. Prescott's final years were in the care of another religious order for men, the Brothers of Nazareth.<br />
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Prescott's life is important because of his role in late
Nineteenth Century ritualist controversy, and deserves attention, in
that his adult activity stretches from before Newman's conversion almost
to the end of the century. He encompasses all the phases of the Oxford
Movement, from Tractarian to Ritualist. He was not a great thinker or
writer, but rather a man of action, willing to take on in his own work
the transformation of the Church.<br />
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Fr. Zimmerman's work is an outstanding example of delving into original sources. He is a master of archival research, and has brought to light much that is new and informative about Prescott. His account of the turmoil at St. Clement's and Prescott's part in the breakup of SSJE in 1882, is, together with Eldridge Pendleton's account, likely to be a definitive resource for that most important event.<br />
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One small correction might be made. Several times reference is made to retreats led at St. Clement's, at the second of which OHC's Fr. Huntington and Fr. Dod made up their minds to form a religious community. The leader of those retreats was Canon <a href="http://anglicanhistory.org/england/wjknox_little/">William John Knox- (not King-) Little</a> (p. 71 and 83).Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-29243642869491343562015-10-03T11:04:00.002-04:002015-10-07T18:56:25.176-04:00Charles Chapman GraftonRecently four books relevant to the study of Anglican monasticism have appeared. I have read three of them and am now reading the fourth, and thought I would share some thoughts about them. This is in a way a promotion, and I am happy to do so, because I think the study of Anglican monasticism deserves more attention both by the reading public and by scholars.<br />
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Eldridge H. Pendleton, SSJE, has written a wonderful short biography of Bishop Charles Grafton, which I heartily recommend. But first a word about Eldridge. He died less than two months ago, <a href="http://ssje.org/ssje/eldridge/">on Aug. 26, 2015</a> . Eldridge joined SSJE in 1984, and in the thirty years of his monastic life made a deep impression on many people. He was a beloved spiritual director and advisor to many, many serious seekers after God. He is deeply missed, and I am sure he is with the Lord in glory.<br />
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<i>Press On, The Kingdom: The Life of Charles Chapman Grafton</i> (Cambridge, MA: SSJE, 2014). It is available from <a href="http://www.blurb.com/b/5724972-press-on-the-kingdom">Blurb.com.</a><br />
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<a href="http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/">Charles Grafton</a> was one of the three founding members of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, together with Richard Meux Benson and Simeon Wilberforce O'Neill. They began community life together in 1865 and made their vows in 1866, in Benson's parish in the village of Cowley, near Oxford.<br />
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He was born in Boston in 1830, educated at Boston Latin School and Harvard Law School, became active in the faith as a young man, and was confirmed at the Church of the Advent in Boston in 1851. He was eventually ordained and with Oliver Sherman Prescott, a fiery ritualist Anglo-Catholic, was drawn toward the idea of a religious community for men. Since this did not then exist in the Anglican world, he went to England to meet people moving in that direction, and there he joined Benson and O'Nell in the Cowley adventure.<br />
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His understanding was that Fr. Benson and the nascent community intended SSJE to establish an American branch, and so when the opportunity arose for him to return to the U.S. he did so. He eventually became the rector of the Church of the Advent, but left SSJE in 1882. He remained at the Advent until 1889, becoming Bishop of Fond du Lac, in Wisconsin, shortly afterward. His many works included the foundation of the Sisterhood of the Holy Nativity, the re-establishment of Nashotah House seminary on a firm footing, the solidification of his own diocese, poor and unstable when he began his ministry there, decades of leadership of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, whose principles are now the basis of Prayer Book Episcopalianism, and pioneering ecumenical work with the Orthodox world. He died, full of honors, in 1912.<br />
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The property where Mount Calvary Monastery is now located was founded and developed by his Sisterhood of the Holy Nativity in Santa Barbara in the early 1950's. Even though the direct inspiration for the former St. Mary's Retreat House was the work of our own Fr. Karl Tiedemann, OHC, it is in a sense an indirect foundation of Bishop Grafton.<br />
<br />
Pendleton shows in a clearly, compellingly written traditional biography -- that is, a biography which begins at the beginning and ends at the end and encounters the events of the subject's life in the order in which he himself met them (as not all modern biographies do) -- the course of Grafton's remarkable life.<br />
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Two virtues, beyond its wonderful writing, stand out in particular. First, Pendleton tells, perhaps for the first time, the unvarnished story of the breakup of SSJE in the early 1880's. Grafton was doubtless the precipitating agent. But Pendleton writes candidly about the interaction of other members of SSJE in it as well. In particular he describes the breakdown of the relationship between Fr. Benson, with his authoritarian ways, and Fr. Grafton, whose determination was as inflexible as Benson. Pendleton's work is the more remarkable in that he does not let Benson's subsequent deposition as Superior and his eccentricities anachronistically control the narrative. He quotes liberally from correspondence and shows how the events of 1882 unfolded in their contexts. SSJE is to be commended for opening its archives and shedding light on this complex series of events.<br />
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The second great virtue of this work is that Pendleton resurrects Grafton as a person. Grafton wrote voluminously but there is not a lot of self-disclosure in his works. Lacking this, the portrait of him here shows well his great energy, capacious mind and sophisticated understanding of the Church. His was a great spirit, but of a type which might not find much sympathy today. Pendleton reminds us that the church always stands on the shoulders of people of other ages, of other understandings, whose lives, when presented by a sympathetic, learned and skilled author, can shed light where once there was obscurity.<br />
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A book well worth reading!Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-71312333617503739882015-08-30T13:57:00.004-04:002015-08-30T13:58:07.000-04:00Dealing with anger -- and other thoughtsI was privileged to preach at All Saints Episcopal Church in Oxnard, CA, on August 9. I thought the sermon might be of interest as if makes reference to the Desert Fathers tradition about how to handle the sins/emotions/thoughts/<i>logismoi</i> that were such a preoccupation. And still are.<br />
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All Saints Episcopal Church, Oxnard CA<br />
Proper 14B<br />
August 9, 2015<br />
Adam D. McCoy, OHC<br />
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From the fourth chapter of the letter to the Ephesians, which we have just heard: “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.”<br />
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Many years ago, in the early 1970s, more than 40 years ago now, when I joined the Order of the Holy Cross at our monastery on the Hudson River in New York State, I found myself taking my turn cooking and cleaning in the kitchen. In those days we did not employ a cook, but since we had a lot of novices - more than thirty at that point – we did it all ourselves, preparing and serving three meals a day for forty or so members of the community and for anywhere from ten to thirty guests. One of the brothers in first vows was in charge, and he told us what to cook and how he wanted it cooked, down to the small details. I think he loved his job, because he really liked telling people what to do. He supervised every detail of the cooking and the serving, and then he supervised every detail of the cleaning up. He liked a tidy kitchen. His kind of tidy.<br />
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Not all of the novices who worked under his care enjoyed the experience. Most of us already had some experience cooking and cleaning and didn’t especially care for Brother’s hovering presence as we prepared the food. Nor did we especially care for his meticulously demanding instructions about cleaning up. Nor for his sometimes sarcastic remarks about our work. He was an enthusiastic follower of the diet plans of Adelle Davis, who preached a low fat, low sugar diet as the way to avoid cancer. Brother constructed our menus according to her rigorous principles, and not everyone in the community rejoiced in them. I must confess that when she died of cancer in 1974, some of us were not slow to draw a lesson from her ironic end.<br />
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This is all a long prologue to one fateful day. I forget exactly when it was. I forget the exact causes. I forget what had been cooked and served. In fact, forgetting was a good thing in this case. I do recall that it was during the final cleanup of the kitchen. I suppose Brother had been especially overbearing about something. I can imagine that I was likely not being my most charming, helpful, humble self either. At any rate. Temperatures rose. Words were exchanged. And exchanged again. Louder and louder. Pots flew through the air. Pans followed them. Heads were narrowly missed. Doors were slammed. <br />
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The next day when I returned to work in the kitchen, all was quiet. Too quiet. Brother appeared. He came over to me, put his arm around me, and said, “Well, let’s get on with it then.” And then quoted the very verse from Ephesians we have just heard. He left the monastery eventually and I stayed, but we have remained friends to this day. <br />
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“Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger.” I learned an important lesson that day. As good as we may try to be – and after all, I was training in the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and not doing a very good job of the obedience part – as good as we may try to be, anger, and other dangerous emotions, will happen. But they do not have to define our relationships or control our lives. <br />
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The ancient desert fathers and mothers in the monastic tradition knew this too. They, like Ephesians, connected it with the devil. Anger, and other harmful things, will overtake us. And if we give in to them, tempers will flare, words will be exchanged, pots and pans will be thrown, doors will be slammed, and relationships will be damaged. <br />
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The desert fathers and mothers called things like anger, pride, envy, greed, sloth, gluttony, and lust “passions” or “thoughts”, and much of what monks and nuns did then and do now is to learn what our passions, our “thoughts”, are, to recognize them when they arrive, to know how they work in us in general, and more importantly how they work in me, to know which of my buttons they push, which well-worn paths they follow, which bad habits they evoke. And then, surprisingly, how to call them each by name when they arrive, know what they’re up to, and like a perfect host with an unwelcome guest, to know just where to put them so they won’t cause any more trouble till they decide to go away. Consciousness – awareness of who we really are and what can happen if we let ourselves be controlled – is the first thing. “Putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.” Know the truth about our own lives so that we can speak truth to each other. And as we grow in self-knowledge, the knowledge of the passions we are drawn to, the evil thoughts which come unbidden into our minds, we can grow also in the ability to keep from harming each other. “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”<br />
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How can we find the energy, the capacity to do all this? Our gospel reading this morning points the way. Jesus tells us, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” We will find what we need by taking Jesus into our life, taking his life into our life. If we want to live a Christlike life, we cannot do it on our own steam. But we can do it if we take His life into our lives. <br />
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There’s no way I could put away my anger in that kitchen all by myself, and I didn’t, and neither did Brother. I exploded and so did he. And if we had left it there, it would have grown, making the next day worse and God knows how bad the day afterward would have been. But by not letting the sun go down on it, by dealing with it using the tools Christ gives us, we can pick up and start again.<br />
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One other interesting detail in today’s gospel catches my eye: Jesus compares the bread of his flesh to the manna the Israelites found on the ground in the wilderness during their Exodus out of Egypt. Moses told the Israelites not to store up the manna for the next day, but to eat it on the same day it appeared, trusting God to give them what they needed fresh every day. Ephesians tells us “do not let the sun go down on your anger”, in other words, use the grace God gives us at the time it is given. The bread Jesus gives us from his own flesh is like the daily bread we ask of God in the Lord’s Prayer. Manna stored in jars became wormy, and so does the grace of forgiveness we are given if we don’t use it right away. Eat today’s manna today. Do not let your anger linger till tomorrow. The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. Give us this day our daily bread. <br />
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“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”<br />
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As the saying goes, “You are what you eat”.Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-39951880273405314512015-04-23T20:56:00.001-04:002015-04-23T22:41:11.234-04:00Jury Duty 2The jury finished our work on Tuesday afternoon. It was fascinating to be a part of. And now I can talk (and write) about it.<br />
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We were sitting in judgment on a personal injury case, under California civil law. A young fellow driving a very large adapted pickup-type vehicle, part of a convoy on the way to a job, changed lanes, with a subsequent collision with a much smaller compact car. Both vehicles ended up horribly tangled at the side of the road, the truck on top of the car, with gasoline dripping down into the car. It was a miracle both drivers survived. <br />
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The woman driving the car suffered severe injuries to her left leg and pelvis. Though she can now walk again (with difficulty) and suffered no cognitive loss, her life is changed forever by this accident. The young man driving the truck died a bit more than a year ago of unrelated causes, and so there wasn't an equality of evidence for the defense.<br />
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The jury found him negligent and awarded actual past and estimated future medical damages. It also awarded money for pain and suffering, though not anywhere near what the plaintiff's attorney had asked. Under California civil law only 9 of 12 jurors need to agree to reach a verdict. Also under California law we had to completely disregard insurance as a factor, which is certainly different from what I encountered in civil cases in New York<br />
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I was impressed by the care with which the jury approached the decisions. I was also interested that what we found determinative was not what either set of lawyers spent most of the time on. They spun out quite elaborate reconstructions of what must have happened, since there were only two real witnesses to testify to it: the plaintiff herself and an employee of the company the offending truck belonged to. He spoke only Spanish, and was called by the plaintiff and examined in a very formal way: the lawyer read a statement sentence by sentence he had made in his deposition and after each sentence asked if he had said it. Yes or No. His testimony was not helpful to the defense, even though it was the company he worked for. The lawyers also spent a long, long time going over the plaintiff's injuries and likely upcoming surgeries.<br />
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But the jury was primarily interested in whether the man driving the truck broke the law as written. We decided he did. I tried hard to hear his side of the case as presented by the defense, since he couldn't speak for himself, but unfortunately for the defendants there just wasn't much evidence there. He changed lanes in a way he should not have. Everything else flowed from that.Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-47044412359893837132015-04-18T23:35:00.001-04:002015-04-23T21:45:26.815-04:00Jury DutyI haven't posted for quite a while. No apologies. A lot has been going on.<br />
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You can catch some of my thoughts on the Prior's Blog at the Mount Calvary website:<br />
<a href="http://mount-calvary.org/category/blog/">http://mount-calvary.org/category/blog/</a><br />
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After living in Santa Barbara a little more than a year and a half I was called up for jury duty. I have been called before, several times, in Orange County, when I was in Anaheim, and in New York City, when I lived there. But never picked. Somehow I always escaped. It may have had something to do with having been a police chaplain for the Anaheim Police Department, since they usually asked whether prospective jurors had any significant relationship with the police.<br />
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At any rate, that question didn't come up. There was no particularly good reason I should ask to be excused except that I had other not at all unusual things to do, which is not, I take it, actually a good reason to ask to be excused. So on Wednesday, April 8, 100 or so who were called showed up and were winnowed down to 40 or 50 after the judge, who was surprisingly lenient, let all but one of the people go who asked. There I still was. And to my surprise I was called to the jury box. And then the <i>voir dire</i> began. And again, nothing knocked me out. <br />
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I guess I was a little happy to have been called and chosen. The little boy who was always last to be chosen for the baseball team (bad eyes and uncoordinated; and was only chosen because everybody had to be) was finally on the team. Oh joy. I guess.<br />
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So for more than a week, 5 1/2 days of testimony, there we are. I can't talk about the case except to say that I am on a jury, so I won't. Both sides have now rested their case, we have been instructed by the judge, and the closing statements of the attorneys begin Monday. Who knows how long they will take. And then the jury will deliberate. <br />
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Maybe we'll be done by Monday late afternoon. Maybe not. Stay tuned. <br />
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<br />Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-40309093842588229962014-09-13T22:42:00.000-04:002014-09-13T23:28:40.004-04:00Blest are the pure in heartI preached this sermon at the funeral of my sister-in-law, Mary McCoy, yesterday, Friday, Sept. 12, at St. Christopher's Episcopal Church in Boulder City, NV. She and my brother Duncan were married 43 years. I was the best man at their wedding, and Mary was a good friend all that time. She was a wonderful person, and died too early, aged 66, of ovarian cancer. Duncan is a city councilman in Boulder City and both he and Mary are greatly loved and respected there. St. Christopher's was filled and overflowing. Mary's mother, now 98 years old, was in the front pew with Duncan and Duncan and Mary's daughter Elizabeth. It was a joy to know Mary and a privilege to be present at her death, and to preside and preach at her funeral.<br />
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Wisdom 3:1-5, 9<br />
Psalm: 121 <br />
Revelation 21: 1-7 <br />
Gradual Hymn: 656 Blest are the pure in heart <br />
John 10: 11-16 I am the good shepherd <br />
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From the book of Wisdom: “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God.”<br />
From Revelation: “I will be their God and they will be my children.”<br />
From the Gospel according to St. John: “I know my own and my own know me.”<br />
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And from the hymn we just sang: “Blest are the pure in heart, for they will see our God. The secret of the Lord is theirs; their soul is Christ’s abode.”<br />
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Each one of these sacred texts points to a special relationship which people can have with God. To be in God’s hand. To be a child of God. To be God’s own, known by God and knowing God. To be pure in heart, to see God, to know God’s secret, to make a home in the human heart for Christ.<br />
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Deep down, isn’t that what everyone wants? Like a trusting sheep or a beloved child, to be protected through our lives, and to know we have a special relationship with God. But also to see and to know, with all that defines and guides and shapes a person who wants to see and wants to know. <br />
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A person with purity of heart combines these two great spiritual qualities: trust in goodness and striving to see and to know. <br />
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A person who is pure in heart fundamentally trusts that ultimate reality, the source of what is, which some call God, is good for her. She finds herself to be at home in her world, loves the people into whose lives she is born, loves what she finds in the wider world as she grows up, looks for and finds worthwhile work to do with her life, finds the right person to share her life with, and then launches out into the deep waters of adult life. That trust that she is in a good place, secure and worthy of her best efforts, that she is, in religious language, in the hand of God, that she is a child of God, is the source of her strength and solidity as she herself becomes a foundation for her family, for her friends and for her community. Not everyone calls this trust in the goodness of the realities of life faith in “God”. God does not need to be named to be present. No matter what a person calls it, this is faith in what is real, life-affirming, life-giving, life-sustaining, and a person who lives with integrity in her life in this sense shines goodness all around like a lamp that cannot be hid. Mary Elizabeth Lee McCoy had this kind of faith, as anyone who knew her will tell you. She loved her world, her family, her work, her friends, with a steady flame of love that all who knew her well came to depend on, who found in her light and joy and peace. <br />
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A person who is pure in heart is also a person who seeks to know. There is a purity in the person who pursues the truth, and when the truth is found, places it in a context of love. Truth can be beautiful, awesome, inspiring. Knowing the truth really can set you free. Pursuing a lifelong path of learning opens the mind to wider horizons, and also commits a person to honesty. But we know that truth and honesty can be used not only to grow the soul, but can also be used as weapons, both in the greater issues of life and in the little everyday things that seem insignificant but which actually define people’s lives together. A person who is pure in heart seeks truth and when it is found, wraps it up in love, so that it is not an instrument of personal power or a weapon but a building block for something great and good. Such a person by following the truth in love begins to imitate God’s love, which is both true and kind, both honest and loving. I have watched Mary Elizabeth Lee McCoy for more than forty years and I can honestly say that she was a person who was always looking for the truth, and a person who when she found it, had a gift of wrapping and presenting that truth with kindness, awareness of the fragility of a situation, tact and consideration. I cannot count the number of times I would be on the phone with my brother Duncan and at a certain point in his discourse, from somewhere in the background there would be this kind but clear voice that would say, “Duncan...”, calling the conversation to a slightly different channel. She was wise and she was kind, and she drew something better out of what was going on. <br />
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What I am saying is that even though Mary Elizabeth Lee McCoy was not a conventionally practicing religious person, she trusted the life God gave her, with all its gifts and promises and challenges, and she looked for and to a large extent found truth, and was able to communicate it with love.<br />
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We encounter people to whom the gifts of trust and truth and love, the gift of purity of heart, are given and we think, What a remarkable person she was. And she was. I believe Mary Elizabeth Lee McCoy was blessed, was pure of heart. <br />
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She was not perfect. But no one of us has to be perfect to love and trust that the life we have been given is good and worth living well. No one of us has to be perfect to keep looking for the truth and when we find it give it to others with love. <br />
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Praise God for Mary’s life. Praise God for the family she was born into and the family she created. Praise God for the good which flowed from her trust and from her truth. She is in the hand of God. She is truly a child of God, known by and knowing God, even though she would not often call the source of the goodness of her life God. And even though she would not often use the names, the secret of the Lord was hers. Her soul was Christ’s abode. Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-27943141425918769012014-09-09T10:22:00.002-04:002014-09-09T10:22:57.646-04:00A New People: Sermon for Pentecost 13I was privileged to preside and preach at All Saints' Episcopal Church, Oxnard CA, this last Sunday: English at 9:15 and Spanish at 11:15. I share the English text of the sermon with you:<br />
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Exodus 12: 1-14<br />
Romans 13: 8-14<br />
Matthew 18: 15-20<br />
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Today’s lessons seem quite different from each other, but actually they all center on a very important theme: how God is creating his new people, saving us and showing us the Way.<br />
The lesson from Exodus is the story of the first Passover. It describes how each family of the people of Israel is to sacrifice and prepare a lamb, doing two things: First, they take some of the blood of the lamb and smear it on the doorposts, so that when the angel of the Lord comes to execute judgment on the people of Egypt he will pass over the houses of the families of Israel. Second, each family shares a meal of the meat of the lamb to prepare them for the journey, the Exodus, they are about to begin. They are saved by the blood of the lamb and they are bound together in a ritual meal of the flesh of the lamb. These will become important symbols for all Christians. We are saved by the blood of the lamb, Jesus Christ, who is the Lamb of God. And we share the eucharistic meal of the body and blood of that Lamb, Jesus Christ.<br />
In the Gospel this morning, Jesus tells us how we should live together as a people. He knows that sins against each other are inevitable among human beings, even among those who are washed in the blood of the Lamb and fed at His table. So he gives us instructions on how we should deal with those sins. First of all, we should not pretend that we do not harm each other through our sins. We do. We have done so in the past, and we will do so in the future. Pretending nothing has happened, hiding the truth, only makes it worse. The thing to do, he says, is to confront it directly. The first thing to do is to go quietly to the person who has hurt you and point it out. How many times have we said or done something that has hurt someone else and we don’t even realize what we have done! It may be that simply pointing it out is enough. Have you ever had someone tell you how you have hurt them, and you didn’t even know it? It is like a dagger through the heart! In many cases, that is enough. But if it isn’t, then Jesus suggests a graduated approach. First one or two, then an internal church meeting, if the matter is really important. <br />
I think that the real point of this process, though, is in the sentence: “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Remember what Jesus said to Peter? The very same thing! Jesus is telling us something incredible: that the power to determine the values of life is being trusted to the people of God. Into the hands of the new people of God is being given this divine power. The Church, the new Israel created in the blood of the Lamb and given strength for the journey in the new Passover meal of the eucharist, is trusted by God to discern and proclaim the truth and to reconcile those who stray away and hurt each other through sin.<br />
In our reading from Romans this morning St. Paul takes this a step further: How do we actually live day by day with each other once we have become God’s new people, his new Israel on the way out of Egypt to the Promised Land? How do we move from conflict resolution to life together? “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” Move away from the impersonal kinds of relationships that are defined by the law, what we should not do, and by business, using the metaphor of debt and payment, to define how we live with each other. Move toward a personal relationship, defined by love. “Love your neighbor as yourself.”<br />
We are saved by the Passover blood of Jesus Christ, and strengthened by the eucharistic meal for our journey, our Exodus. Let us understand that we have been set apart by God as his people. We are invited by Jesus to live in honesty, truth and charity with each other. We are empowered to discern and proclaim the values God wants us to practice. We are called by God to love each other as we love ourselves. <br />
And this is all the more important because we don’t have all the time in the world. Things are moving more quickly than we think. Don’t delay. We should start living right now as if the Kingdom of God has already started.Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4364579243036453022.post-44693285250526740642014-08-10T16:31:00.003-04:002014-08-10T16:40:13.152-04:00Two Miracles: Sermon for Pentecost 9I preached this morning at Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara, and as it was a written-out sermon, I thought I would share it.<br />
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10 August 2014: Pentecost 9, Proper 14A<br />
Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 <br />Psalm 105, 1-6, 16-22, 45b <br />Romans 10:5-15 <br />Matthew 14:22-33 <br />
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One of the things that struck me about the lessons today is how both the story of Joseph and the story of the walking on the water upset the normal expectations of life. In each of them there is danger and in each of them a miracle occurs, and something new grows out of each of them: in the case of Joseph, in his faithfulness through his terrible troubles the new people of Israel are made possible. In the case of walking on the water, the new Israel, the Church, and her faithful members, will find a way forward through terrible troubles that are still to come. <br />
In order to get through our lives with some sense of equilibrium we often create an artificial sense of how things function. We look for stability, permanence, predictability. It isn’t so much that our personal experience is stable, permanent or predictable, but that there is an expectation that it ought to be. Having this ideal helps us smooth over reality, simplifies our nonreflective preconscious expectations. Families ought to behave a certain way, nurturing their futures, and when they don’t, in our constructs of likely consequences we expect terrible, irreversible results. Nature ought to behave a certain way, so we live in the expectation that it will, and when it doesn’t, we gird ourselves in disaster response for what will surely follow. But these two stories overturn both our “normal” expectations, and open our eyes to something new from God.<br />
Families ought to behave a certain way. Brothers ought to love each other. It’s a rough and tumble kind of love, the way that brothers often do love each other. They give each other a hard time but when push comes to shove they unite and support each other. Except in today’s story, when push comes to shove, Joseph is shoved in a big pit in the earth and only escapes being murdered by his brothers because a slave trading caravan passes by. So what might be the Brady Bunch actually turns out to be more like Roots. Joseph is carted off to be a slave in Egypt. His brothers probably think that’s the last of him. Our normal expectation would be that both Joseph’s life and his family’s happiness have been destroyed. <br />
But the Joseph story is not just about the treacherous and savage behavior of brothers to each other, a replay of Cain and Abel, an instance of René Girard’s theory of violence, a setup for family systems therapy for millennia to come. It is about how God is using human behavior to create a people for himself. Joseph accepts the reality of his situation and does the best he can with it, which in the end is very good indeed. His faithfulness and hard work lead him from the pit to the palace, and along the way he acquires great wisdom, including the wisdom of forgiveness, a wisdom which surely can only come from God. His brothers return, this time in great need, and instead of using his new power to punish them, he sets his family on a new path, which will ultimately lead to the Exodus, the Covenant, and the Promised Land. <br />
The normal expectation of what would likely happen was overturned by a miracle: God brought the nation of Israel into being out of jealousy and homicidal intention. St. Paul says to us this morning, “The word is very near us”. The word was very near Joseph. That word brought the future for the salvation of the world out of that sordid family drama. <br />
The miracle of Joseph is at the end of the story, after his years of toil, insecurity, and danger as a slave, a miracle which ultimately produces a people for God. Our gospel story this morning is structurally the mirror image of the Joseph story. The miracle is at the beginning and points to a future of insecurity and danger for a people of God just being brought into being. <br />
Peter sees Jesus, leaps out of the boat, and begins to walk on the water. For the moment he disregards the conventional wisdom about water, so intent is he on the presence of the Word of God to him. But, we say, people can’t walk on water. Crucified people don’t rise from the dead. Twelve guys can’t just bring a new people into being because they think they can. Except they do.<br />
The people called to follow Jesus, the Word of God, can’t possibly navigate the uncharted waters of the future by themselves. We know this, because we are those people today. We are beset – we have always been beset, which is one way to read church history – with who knows what kinds of uncertainties and dangers. Why try anything new? The world we know conspires to defeat every good effort. Our future is like deep water in a storm in the dark. We can’t possibly keep walking forward, let alone on water. Except we do. <br />
In my former parish in Anaheim there was a feeding program. It came into being because a few people listened to the word of God one morning in church, when Matthew 25 was read aloud: Feed the hungry, it said. The word was close to them. They didn’t have much money, and there weren’t many people to do it. But they did it. They scrounged supermarkets for food, raised small amounts of money for milk and meat, talked their friends into helping, served the meal on the church china for hungry, homeless people, who used those dishes as carefully as if they were their own prized possessions, and for almost fifteen years every Monday night a couple of hundred hungry people sat down to a meal served to them by people who already had enough. There were deep water and storms along the way. But they always kept the word before them: Feed the hungry. They walked across that water every Monday night. I am sure you can tell me stories like that about Trinity. Because God is always calling us to cross the water. God is always lifting us up out of the pit. <br />
Both these stories tell us that the way we see things is not the way God sees them. To the eyes of the world what happened to Joseph was surely the effective end of his life. Except that it was really just the beginning. To the eyes of the world the way things usually are can’t be transcended, especially in stormy times, distress and chaos. Except that those times are precisely the times when we can find the way through which God offers us in faith, finding firm footing not in our expectations and fears but in the Lord. <br />
These miracles show us to keep our eyes fixed on the future. God will make possible what now seems impossible. When your whole world turns upside down and all seems lost, like Joseph keep on working, make the most of what you have, use the wisdom that comes to you. Who knows what God has in mind in the end. When the night is dark and stormy and the Lord just isn’t there, don’t be distracted by what in fear seems “normal”, by what is raging all around, like Peter was. Look through the storm and see Jesus calmly walking toward you. With your eye fixed on the Lord, who knows what you can do? <br />
The Word is very near you. Adam D. McCoy, OHChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10489047630767772393noreply@blogger.com0