Kingdom of God
Between Offense and Misunderstanding – Br. Keith Nelson
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Br. Keith Nelson
Advent 3A
Isaiah 35:1-10
Matthew 11:2-11
In my senior year in college, I took a linguistic anthropology course. One lecture seemed to summarize much of my life’s experience. The topic was direct and indirect communication, and the cultural dimensions that shape our often unconscious use of one or the other in public situations.
I had spent the first nine years of my life in southern New Jersey, then age nine to eighteen in central Alabama. In very general terms, U.S. culture as a whole favors direct communication, along with countries like Germany and Australia and all of Scandinavia. But the northeastern and Atlantic states, as well as the Western U.S., especially typify direct speech. People say what they mean; clarity and efficiency are priorities; the manner of speaking is more informal. Indirect communication characterizes places like Japan, China, the Middle East, Latin America, and the south of England: places where people often infer or imply what they really mean using understatement; where avoidance of social conflict is a high priority; and where speech tends to be more formal.
Lots of exceptions apply: the individual, the context, the class, race, and gender of those speaking. But generally: New Jersey and Alabama fit those contrasting patterns. Read More
John’s Unpleasant Message – Br. David Vryhof
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Br. David Vryhof
In recent years, a prepackaged Advent series called “The Advent Conspiracy” has become quite popular in certain churches. It has the laudable goal of focusing on what’s really important in our preparation for Christmas by encouraging people to buy less, to give more to charity, and to spend time with their families rather than just spending money on them. The program seems commendable but there’s something that seems to be missing.
I wonder what John the Baptist would have thought about it. John pops up everywhere in our Advent readings and with good reason. He was the most popular preacher of his generation. Jesus claims that “among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist” (Matthew 11:11). People walked for miles just to see him, drawn by his unusual lifestyle and his dramatic, even theatrical, preaching. He was a sight to see, for sure, but they also found their hearts captured by his message. Hordes of them found themselves welling up with tears, telling God how sorry they were, and lining up to be cleansed in the River Jordan. Even those who came just to see the spectacle went home drenched with baptismal waters. Read More
Dare to Hope – Br. Lain Wilson
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Br. Lain Wilson
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 21C)
Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15
1 Timothy 6:6-19
Luke 16:19-31
When I came to the Monastery three years ago, the big television show at the time was Succession. I loved it. So when I saw that the showrunner had a movie coming out last year, I jumped on it.
Mountainhead, like Succession, is a dark satire of the contemporary ultra-ultra-rich. It’s one of those movies in the genre of “horrible people doing horrible things in a beautiful setting.” Four tech bros gather for a weekend at a mountain retreat. Fellowship quickly descends into sniping at the relative size of each others’ fortunes and disingenuous shows of empathy for a world set on fire by forces at their literal fingertips.
It’s a hilarious and horrifying depiction of power, narcissism, and inhumanity, all reinforced by the distorting and destructive effects of technology. Even the most sympathetic character is just as reprehensible as the others and, at the film’s end, we as viewers frankly aren’t left with much hope either that these men are capable of change or growth, or that they—or the forces they represent—can be a source of healing for our own fragmented world.
Like the film, our parable this morning of the unnamed rich man and the poor Lazarus reveals a society of haves and have-nots: rich and poor, those inside the gates and those without, those with power and agency and those denied both.
Both film and parable pose a similar question: where can we find hope in a fragmented world?
“He Became Poor That You Might Become Rich” – Br. Geoffrey Tristram
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Br. Geoffrey Tristram
The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (17C)
“Oh, I just love Luke’s Gospel!” So many people have said that to me over the years. And it probably is the most popular of all the gospels. I love Luke; all those beautiful stories; the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, and of course the beloved accounts of the Nativity. But this gospel, when you read it, is hard hitting and quite uncompromising. It should actually make you quake!
It’s very hard to hear, unless you are poor. It is a gospel above all for the poor. It is about about God’s love for the poor and the marginalized. Jesus tells us quite clearly, in chapter 4, why he has come. He stands up in the synagogue and proclaims: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” Then in chapter 7, when John’s disciples come to try and find out who Jesus is, Jesus tells them to look and see what is happening: “The blind receive their sight… the deaf hear… and the poor have good news brought to them.” And then, in chapter 6, in the first of the Beatitudes, Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are poor” (not poor in spirit, that’s Matthew). “Blessed are you who are poor, yours is the Kingdom of God.”
Let the Children Come to Me – Br. Jamie Nelson
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Br. Jamie Nelson
In this gospel passage, parents bring their young children to be blessed by Jesus.
Initially, the disciples try to shoo the children away. Perhaps the gatekeeping disciples want to protect their teacher’s time and energy for meetings with people they deem more important. Conversations like the ones that Jesus has with a group of religious thought leaders and with a wealthy prospective disciple, the two events which bookend this story in the text.
However, Jesus stops the disciples, saying, “Let the children come to me and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.”[1]
What does it mean when Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven belongs to young children and to the people like them? Read More
Live the Questions Now – Br. Jamie Nelson
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Br. Jamie Nelson
In today’s gospel passage, Jesus has just finished preaching the Parable of the Sower to a large crowd gathered alongside the lakeshore. When we enter the story, his disciples have come to him privately to ask why he spoke to the crowd in parables.
I wonder if the disciples’ question masked feelings of disappointment.
I wonder if they felt that Jesus’ choice of teaching tool had squandered a great opportunity. Perhaps their own plans had been for him to relate to the crowd like a politician at political rally – pumping up the people with an inspiring message and building up a base of support for his Messiah movement.
I wonder if they would have liked him to perform a miraculous healing on command. That would demonstrate credibility for his claims to messiahship.
I wonder if they were hoping to pick up a few new guys for the discipleship road crew.
But instead, Jesus left out an inspiring call to action and told the crowd a confusing parable about seeds.
So what are parables, and why did Jesus choose them as a teaching tool? Read More
The World as It Is – Br. Lain Wilson
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Br. Lain Wilson
Our gospel lesson today may sound very familiar to some of you. We heard Mark’s version of Jesus’s encounter with the Pharisees last night at Evening Prayer (Mk 2:23-28). Moreover, today at Morning Prayer we heard the account from the life of David that Jesus refers to (1 Sam 21:1-15).
These echoes are not incredibly common, and when our lectionaries line up lessons like this, I like to imagine God saying to me, “Hey, this is important! Pay attention!”
So what’s important about this encounter?
A Friend of Sinners – Br. James Koester
Br. James Koester,
Superior
Occasionally, in Scripture we catch glimpses, not only of the words on the page and what they elicit, but what in a sense lies behind those words, on the other side of the page, as it were. Today is one such occasion.
Here in Matthew’s gospel, we are treated to rather vivid images of both John the Baptist, as well as Jesus. Here we see a wild eyed, somewhat mad, prophet of the desert who came neither eating nor drinking,[1] possessed surely with a demon. We see also his direct opposite, the itinerate preacher, party animal and carefree, and probably careless, womanizer and socializer, that glutton and … drunkard, … friend of tax collectors and sinners.[2]
Clearly both John and Jesus started a lot of tongues wagging, and the talk was not complimentary. There were a great many folks who did not like what they saw one bit. The problem was that what they saw went against what they expected, and that’s what we catch a glimpse of today on the other side of the page, especially when it came to Jesus. It was impossible that this glutton and drunkard could be the long-awaited messiah. He was little more than a son gone wild. Read More
God is not in lockdown – Br. Geoffrey Tristram
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Matthew 13: 44-52When I was a parish priest in England, my church, St Mary’s, stood right in the middle of the town, and in many ways was at the center of the community. Every year on our Patronal Festival, we organized a week of celebrations, with a carnival and street market, and concerts and events taking place every day inside the church. A large proportion of the town community thought of St Mary’s as their church, even if they only worshipped there occasionally, or not at all! Many of them were baptized there, and expected to be married and buried there. We were open and welcoming to anyone who turned up.
The only other church in the town was one of the oldest independent churches in England. Its members were direct descendants of those Puritan men and women who set sail a few hundred years ago to land on these shores of New England. They took a very different view of the local community, having little to do with it, and certainly nothing to do with us. Those who worshiped with them had first assented to some very specific theological doctrines, and tended to keep themselves separate from the secular world, which they saw as essentially ‘fallen’. Read More
The End Times – Br. Jonathan Maury
Read by Br. Jonathan Maury
The Martyrs of Uganda, 1886
“For yet
‘in a very little while,
the one who is coming will come and will not delay;
but my righteous one will live by faith.
My soul takes no pleasure in anyone who shrinks back.’”
[Hebrews 10:37-38 (cf. Habakkuk 2:3-4)]
In the community’s ‘Renewal of Our Foundations’ work this year, the most revealing discovery for me, was to learn of our founder’s deep conviction that the Society’s witness and mission was taking place in the ‘end times’. I do not think that Fr. Benson believed this in the fanatical manner of millenarian, end of the world predicters. Rather I would say that Fr. Benson’s end times theology arose from his unwavering faith in the victory over sin and death accomplished in Christ Jesus. For Richard Meux Benson, I believe, the abiding presence of the incarnate, crucified and risen Jesus in the outpoured Holy Spirit of God was ‘the’ reality, continually active in every age of history. He saw each historic era as an end time, a humanly constructed ‘world’ which would abruptly change as it was confronted by the kingdom of God in the followers of Jesus’s self-offering way of love. For Benson the urgency of the Society’s witness to a ‘world which is passing away’ was paramount.
On this day in 1886, thirty-two young Anglican and Roman Catholic men were burned to death for their refusal to renounce their Christian faith at the order of the king of Buganda. Their deaths signaled the beginnings of the end for the world as it was then perceived. Read More