October 19, 2020
Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB

Order in the Court!

Order in the Court!

Listen! These readings today are like an episode of Judge Judy. Not that I ever watch Judge Judy but my mother loves Judge Judy and so I have to be exposed to the lady’s rather severe code of justice whenever I’m home for a visit. 

Here they are today in the Gospel, these bruisers fighting over grandpa’s silver dollar collection or grandma’s secret recipe book. 

Tell my brother to share the order of which leads Judge Jesus to offer a long spiel on rich guys, harvests, barns, grain deposits, eschatological futures, whatever. 

I wish Paul could have extended a little clarity, but, alas, no. Ruler of the power of air, give me a break, just call the devil the devil. 

Nature, children of wrath, children of this world. Who knows how it’s supposed to all work out? What we need is a little: 

Order in the Court!

Order in the Court!

There are days, when the readings muddle more than they clarify, and like a decent court hearing, what we really need is to get to the core of the thing. 

Welcome, the psalm:

The Lord made us; we belong to him.

You know it really is that simple. He made us and we belong to him. 

So simple like the sharp edge of a sword

Like a still, ripple-less pool. 

Like frost on a wintry morning. 

The Lord made us; we belong to him.

And of course, we wish we could observe this simplicity in our lives, but we have to make things so complicated, don’t we?

We must confound ourselves and confound others in our Byzantine elegance which only degenerates into Gordian knots of sophistry. 

The Lord made us; we belong to him. 

Can we follow that I wonder?

If we follow that, truly follow it, I would say there is only one verdict for Judge Jesus:

Case closed.  And, of course, infinitely open.

Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

October 11, 2020
Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB

On the 17th of March of this year, we prayed together, as a full community for the last time in this chapel. On that day, our unity was taken from us by a silent thief who believed also it had the power to take our sense of well-being, but more importantly had the power to take away our sense of community. That enemy did not take those things away. 

Today, as a community, we return to this chapel with confidence for the future and faith in one another and in God. And so I am reminded very forcefully of the words of St. Paul to the Philippians in today’s second reading: 

I can do all things in him who strengthens me. 

I am reminded of these words because so often, my brothers and sisters, we think we can’t. How many of us in these past months, really how many of us in our lives lived large have not despaired?

Perhaps we thought we had reason for despair. We lost our freedoms. We lost our hope for the future. We lost our sense of health, all vanishing like smoke in the face of sickness and perhaps worse, endless bad news. 

So many of us may have felt we had lost our sense of solid ground, of the assurances that we have in the world around us. This country, this state, this Church, this seminary used to stand for something but now they seem lost, wandering aimlessly across an empty waste. 

Perhaps we are feeling helpless in the current political circus, or in the ever-diminishing moral fiber of a nation that once stood for something very different, something very positive and hopeful. 

And perhaps personally, closer to home we feel that emptiness in ourselves, that shell in the pit of our stomach that just doesn’t know what’s next, that has lost purpose, lost hope, lost a sense of security. 

There are a lot of reasons to feel lost. St. Paul knew that. Paul knew hunger. He knew exclusion. He knew pain. He knew persecution. He knew all of those things but he also knew something else, something more important:

I can do all things in him who strengthens me. 

The Christians of the early Church needed to know that. The Jews were for centuries a people for whom God was a veiled God, a God forever incorporated into the reality of the Law. And the Gentiles, they too were an imprisoned people, incarcerated by their own hopes dashed against the rocks of political expediency. They needed an ideal to live for and they heard it preached in the message of Christ in the words of Paul:

I can do all things in him who strengthens me. 

Brothers and sisters, like our fathers and mothers of old, we need ideals today more than ever. In our postmodern, post epistemological mélange of intergenerational, globalizational, hyperbolical virus-saturated reality, we need to remind ourselves that there is something that lasts, something unfettered that stands in the midst of life’s many storms and so …

I can do all things in him who strengthens me. 

That ideal shelters us in a time when the deconstruction all around us begins to take its toll, when we begin to believe the lies that people tell us, that our social order tells us, that even our fellow Christians sometimes tell us. Lies of hate, lies of segregation, lies of false witness.

I can do all things in him who strengthens me. 

That ideal upholds us as we faint in the heat of ever-pressing fictions about ourselves, our value as persons whether that value is outside in attitudes and beliefs, or within in our secret sin, in cloaked feelings of worthlessness, in pains yet unnamed, perhaps unknown

I can do all things in him who strengthens me. 

That ideal liberates us when we feel bound, when we feel unable to overcome our personal demons, our heaviness of spirit, our delusions of grandeur.

We have all been there, are there

We have known alienation

We have known separation.

We have known quarantine 

We have known slavery in one form or another but the words of St. Paul still ring true:

I can do all things in him who strengthens me. 

And brothers and sisters, it is true 

We are not bound on journeys alien and alone

In Jesus Christ, in his blood, in his sacrifice, in his passion, in his selflessness, in his gift, in his redemption, in his salvation, in his grace, we have been healed and set free. 

Caught in the trap of our own desires, our communal self-direction, our personal satans,

He found us, he raised us up, he enkindled new life in us, he brought us to the crest of Calvary and proclaimed to a dying, gasping world from his cruciform throne. Watch. Watch and see true love, true devotion, true sacrifice. It is still possible, probable, palpable.

And he gave us this example casting his gaze down from the wood of that cross. If you want to live, trust in me, cast your cares on me, and watch me become an outcast for you so that you can live with integrity and the dignity of the children of God

In the shadow of the cross the veil tears in two, the chains of repression fall away and so …

I can do all things in him who strengthens me. 

That is our answer to threat. That is our answer to despair. That is our answer to this damned virus.

So what must we do?

Nothing so heroic as the sacrifice of the Lord, and more heroic

We must become people of thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is that ideal which augments the sacrifice of Christ and draws us full round into his paschal mystery

Thanksgiving is at the heart of who we are as Christian men and women. It completes us, it acknowledges our healing, it sets us free from the isolation that contaminates our souls like the menace of virus

Thanksgiving is the ability to give God the glory, give him the honor, give him the supremacy in our lives and in our world

Thanksgiving is the only way we can authentically be

We must live in the promise of St. Paul:

I can do all things in him who strengthens me. 

And so, here we are restored to this place

We come here united as one to worship him, to acknowledge him as Lord and Giver of Life.

The people of the Church, you and I have a great cosmic drama to perform. It is the love story between God and the world and so, we come here to bow down to his majesty, seated in glory on this altar, the glory of the simplicity of the bread and wine.

Bread and wine, no, Body and Blood shining out from this altar, bursting forth from the confines of accident to announce the good news to all:

We are together and we know, I know:

I can do all things in him who strengthens me. 

October 9, 2020

Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB

I received an emergency text from a buddy of mine yesterday, a Fr. So and So at 3:57 in the afternoon wishing me a happy feast day in advance and cleverly asking what I would say about St. Denis if I had to preach to a pack of little boys. I responded that in fact I did have to preach to a pack of little boys, and a couple of very nice ladies and here is what I would say:

Once upon a time a long, long ago in a land far, far away called, improbably, France there lived a bishop, a priest and a deacon. This is true and not the beginning of a really bad Fr. Jonathan joke. 

The priest and the deacon were improbably named Rusticus and Eleutherius. I don’t know which one was which and it probably doesn’t matter that much. They had to be real because no one would make up the names Rusticus and Eleutherius. If they were made up they would be called something like Bill and Tim. The bishop, their co-worker in the vineyard was named Denis, like the menace but with only one “N”. He was a good bishop and R and E were good at whatever they did. They went to this country called France and they preached and did good things and many of the people who lived there, particularly in the city called Paris, were converted, and became Christians. Now, this made the local ruler, who was called, well, I don’t know what he was called and it really doesn’t matter, but he was very angry because he really, really did not care for Christians or anyone with improbable names and so he had the three of them hunted down and put on trial. It wasn’t much of a trial and they were, of course, found guilty of subverting the good order of France, which is a real irony if you think about it. They were taken up to a hill called, well I don’t know what it was called then, but later it became known as Montmartre, the hill of the martyrs, so you know what’s about to happen. They sent a brute with an ax. I think he was called Beelzebub. They were executed, first R and E had their heads cut off and that was the end of them. Then Denis had his head cut off. It should be noted he was still wearing his miter at the time. Now Denis, one “N” was having nothing of this business and decided even before having his head cut off that he would not have been caught dead on Montmartre or whatever it was called then, so he immediately got up, with blood spurting out of his neck, felt around for his head, the miter was still on it, picked up his head and walked away. He just left, head in hand and walked twelve miles to a place called, well, I don’t know what it was called then but today it’s called St. Denis. He took up his head and walked. There is a great deal more to the story, but after the head in hand business, everything else is pretty much downhill. Now of course there is a moral to this story, which I would like to say is don’t get caught with your head cut off, or don’t get caught dead in a bad part of town, but it’s really more like this: If you wish to serve God, you have to be willing to go all the way. 

Now, Fr. So and So: That’s what I would say to a pack of little boys and a couple of very nice ladies about Saint Denis. Good luck. 

October 4, 2020
Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB

One thing seems certain. Where the Bible and vineyards are concerned, there is just not a lot of Good News. 

Consider Ahab and Naboth, thanks to Jezebel, that real estate deal went south fast.

Think of the situation we encounter in Isaiah this morning. 

He spaded it, cleared it of stones,

and planted the choicest vines;

within it he built a watchtower,

and hewed out a wine press.

Then he looked for the crop of grapes,

but what it yielded was wild grapes.

Very unpredictable.

There is some thought among Jewish scholars that Eden was more of a vineyard than a garden. 

There, the landowner’s plan seems to have been for naught. And we recognize that scene, don’t we? God created the world good, but soon the tree bore rotten fruit and the naked tenants went wild as soon as the apple core, or the grape pips hit the bushes.

If we follow Jesus in the Gospel today, wild and wicked tenants seem to be the norm in vineyards, not Good News. 

And, of course, we know those wild and wicked tenants don’t we?

We hear of their exploits daily. 

They are the terrorists that run rampant over the face of the earth 

They are the tyrants who refuse the good advice of history and run rampant over populations

They are members of tribes and mobs who use the name of God as an excuse to hate others

Or perhaps we respond to something more esoteric?

They are great scholars and brilliant minds who claim to know the truth but cannot seem to live the truth.

They are so-called prophets whose only message seems to be a message of death and ill will. 

Or perhaps they are something closer to home: The priest who disappoints us under the close scrutiny of a quarantined rectory, the seminarian whose attraction to the internet means that he cannot remain pure and chaste, or even honest or the ideological shepherd who leads the sheep astray with promises of political certainty from the pulpit on Sunday.

These wild and wicked vineyard workers are in the news but they are also here among us. They are also here within us.

And what is the effect of their wickedness?

They make us cynical with their constant carping. 

They make us anxious. And they make us doubt

They make us doubt ourselves, doubt the world, doubt the Church, doubt the seminary.

They make us fearful and we know them, don’t we?

They ask us questions: 

How can we go on thinking about the evil in the world and live?

How can we go on thinking about the evil that resides in the vineyard of our hearts and lives and live?

Now we can go back for a moment to St. Paul. What did St. Paul say? As we stand in the midst of the vines, his words are so powerful and so timely. 

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable,

whatever is just, whatever is pure,

whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious,

if there is any excellence

and if there is anything worthy of praise,

think about these things.

And we know those things too, don’t we, when we think about them, we know them. 

When we shut out all of those cynical, negative voices, we know them. 

When we have time to reflect in the course of our fevered tour of the vineyard, we know them

Brothers and sisters, read the tragic Gospel again. Yes, there is trouble in the vineyard. Yes there is persecution and pain and death there, but what did Jesus say:

Jesus said to them, "Did you never read in the Scriptures:

The stone that the builders rejected

has become the cornerstone;

by the Lord has this been done,

and it is wonderful in our eyes?

We are that cornerstone. Brothers and sisters that is what the Lord is calling us to:

We are that cornerstone. Let us be strong in these vineyard days with the strength that can only come from the assurances of the Gospel. No matter where we turn, among the vines, we can only find the truth of our lives in the truth that is Christ Jesus. Let us be strong in the reality of what God has afforded for us

Let us be strong in the honesty of your lives. This is who I am. This is my past. These are my sins. These are my parents, my education, my school. The vineyard did not always produce good grapes, but let us be strong enough to recognize that past, mourn that past, and acknowledge that past and then put that past away. Place it gently, reverently in the bottles of memory and bury it in the cellars of the earth. We must now plant new vines

Let us be strong and dare to live fully in this community even in times of trouble and quarantine. Let us dare to be strong enough to acknowledge the strengths of your brothers and sisters in this vineyard here, and their weakness. Dare to acknowledge your own strengths and your own weaknesses. I think we do well with the weaknesses but less well with the strengths. Own your talents. Celebrate the vine that is you and that God has so generously created and be strong

Let us be strong, realizing that your strength, your power may be that of Paul, that of Christ, and comes in humility and challenge. Let us be strong to face the demons of the world. There is no power in this world that cannot be overcome by our understanding the presence of God in our lives. How do we know that power? It is expressed in tears, tears that flow from mourning of all the things we have lost in recent times and tears that spring from the fountain of God’s love in joy

That presence is known in mildness, the mildness of temperament that comes to us as docility, our ability to listen and to learn and it comes to us in the boldness of proclamation. Brothers and sisters the Gospel must be proclaimed and we must be bold in its proclamation. Timid evangelists have no place in the vineyard of our world today, drowning as it is in the cacophony of sinful voices speaking lies, falsehoods that even turn the ears, the hearts of God’s people away from the message of salvation. Choking as it is on the clutching tendrils of the vine of ugliness and lies. In all of that we are called to proclaim the presence of God in the vineyard.

That presence of God is realized in powerlessness, for the last shall be first and the first last. Perhaps we know it most sincerely in being like our own stupid landlord, the Lord God, who has faith in his vineyard even when the tenants prove to be wild grapes. Perhaps it is expressed most profoundly there because, the savior of the world is the Son who was killed by wicked tenants and we are his followers. We are his people, immolated as we might be, must be on the pyre of frivolity and public opinion, challenged and tried as we might be, as we must be on the vine that, in time, in time, forms itself wildly into the shape of a cross

God has called us to this reality

God has called us to this vocation

God has called us … period

And if that is so and it is so: If that is so, then the powers of those wicked tenants, those interlopers in our world are no power at all. And …

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable,

whatever is just, whatever is pure,

whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious,

if there is any excellence

and if there is anything worthy of praise,

think about these things.

September 29, 2020
Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB

They were called the Alabama Angels because they originally hailed from Paradise, Alabama, a tiny town outside of Tuscumbia of no real importance except in being the village naissance of the angels. Of the team, there were three, first was Big Smooth Dorf, although he was really named Mikey, He was called Big Smooth in part because of his gentle personality and in part because of his having the condition of alopecia universalis. Big Smooth was the brawn. Second was Chambliss, also known as Gabe Dorf. Chambliss was the voice of the gang, although he never uttered a single word except the expression: “Roll Tide”. Finally, there was Rafe Dorf. Rafe was the brains of the group but in all truth they were not known for their intellectual prowess in the least, rather more for their problem-solving skills as the Alabama Angels were a Holiness Gang. 

It might interest the casual inquirer to learn what a holiness gang was. These types of religious thugs are seldom seen in the modern world, and indeed had not been seen in Oxford, Mississippi for many generations until the arrival of the Alabama Angels from Paradise. Rather than engaging muscle and, by extension, violence as the key to problem solving, they relied on prayer and song as the key to changing recalcitrant hearts. In their mission, however, it didn’t hurt that Big Smooth was eleven years old and weighed over 200 pounds. 

The holiness gang had recently been hired in Oxford by no less a personage than the renowned, Mr. Taylor Steggs, the seven year old prodigy and genius of which much had been heard and told in lore extending all the way to Paradise, Alabama. Mr. Taylor Steggs had need of the gang because he was presently under the persecution of a formidable adversary, none other than Miss Katy Krutchfield of the Calhoun County Krutchfields. Yes, that’s right, she was a Calhouner and, how, you may wonder did she come to be associated with such an illustrious person as Mr. Taylor Steggs? It all began when Mr. Taylor Steggs, in a moment of pure ecumenical abandon decided to invite Miss Katy Krutchfield of the Calhoun County Krutchfields on a date to Petit’s Petting Zoo, which of late had been advertising the advent of new baby goats. He invited and she accepted but it must be admitted that the romantic encounter was doomed from the beginning, not only because of the wild disparity in their social standing but also because of false advertising. The “baby” goats were in fact, quite antiquated old goats, it being rumored that one of them was actually spied smoking a cigar behind their pen. To make a long story short, in the course of their date, one of the old goats decided to “sprinkle” Miss Katy Krutchfield of the Calhoun County Krutchfields. She cried, Mr. Taylor Steggs was mortified and it became known that the Calhoun County Krutchfields did not take these matters lying down. Miss Katy Krutchfield sought revenge in a Calhoun County kind of way, she waited every day after school for Mr. Taylor Steggs to make his way home, she waylaid him, and she beat him roundly. In other words, Mr. Taylor Steggs needed protection from the violent affront of a seven-year-old little girl. Hence the necessity of the Alabama Angels. 

The first meeting took place at the local playground, a habitat natuerel that Mr. Taylor Steggs had not been known to frequent. The meeting went well. Mr. Taylor Steggs paid his money, Rafe pocketed it. Big Smooth grunted and Chambliss cried: “Roll tide” and they were off. Mr. Taylor Steggs had no idea what happened next. It was rumored that the Alabama Angels encountered Miss Katy Krutchfield of the Calhoun County Krutchfields and “reasoned” with her, meaning they prayed over her and sang hymns from the Heavenly Highway Hymnal. The rumors stated the Angels sang a number of hymns but it was “Have a little talk with Jesus” that won over the sin-hardened heart of Miss Katy Krutchfield of the Calhoun County Krutchfields

Whatever the story it certainly made Mr. Taylor Steggs a happy man. He was never bothered again by Miss Katy Krutchfield of the Calhoun County Krutchfields. In fact, neither she nor the Alabama Angels were ever seen in Oxford after that and while it is not known precisely what happened to them, many years later, Mr. Taylor Steggs was in Memphis on business when he spied a couple in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, a man and his wife, one of which looked forever like a fully grown Miss Katy Krutchfield of the Calhoun County Krutchfields and the other? Well, he didn’t look like anyone Mr. Taylor Steggs knew but when the man saw him, he turned toward him, winked and said: “Roll Tide” before the two strolled off arm in arm fully aware that where angels are concerned, love always wins out over power.