The dance

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

If I were preaching tomorrow (but I am not), I believe that I would lean into the contradiction that St Paul spotlights. That it is not enough to think good thoughts and have good intentions, because sin will swirl us into its dance again and again, seductively selfish while those outside the circle strain to see the centre and the steps.

This metaphor would hardly do, except that Jesus uses it, too, of the world that wants the world to dance to its tune, the world that wants to be your world. Like a whirling circle, the only way to break free is to fall out.

This not to wallow in despair or self-denigration: St Paul, for all his miserable wretch rhetoric, appears to have a mostly intact ego, much of the time. We can celebrate that we are as beloved of God as those whom we have loved the least, despite ourselves. 

And, we find these things to be true, and self-evident, that as good as we pretend or try or believe ourselves to be, we have by design created margins and marginalized other creatures created of God’s affection. That however hard we try to resist, or pretend to resist, the music of the swirl has us tapping our feet. That we have been the ones demanding that God jig to our tune. That we have been exhausting and exhausted. And that the only hope for rest lies elsewhere, with Other-Whom. 

But when we spin out, turn away from the centre, fall out of the swirling, hectic dance, Jesus is waiting out on the margins, waiting among the wallflowers, waiting among the downcast, waiting among the injured, waiting among the lonely, waiting among the reticent, waiting among the rejected, waiting among the curious, waiting with outstretched arms to catch you up into a gentle waltz, a shared step, a loving stance. 

Who will save me from this body of death? Not 250 years of nationhood, nor even 2 millennia of religion; only Jesus. Only Jesus. Only Jesus.

Lectionary selections for July 5, 2026: Year A Proper 9
Extracts from Romans 7:15-25a

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. … I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. 

… Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Extracts from Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Jesus said to the crowd, “To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another,

‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ …

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Posted in current events, lectionary reflection, sermon, sermon preparation | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Decentering

Posted on June 29, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

My grandmother was born in the Victorian age,
half a United States of America ago
and an ocean of war and plunder away;
in the span of creation
less than the blink of an eyelash.
Such is living memory, expanding and contracting
with history and its unreliable narrators,
so confident in our declarations from the centre
of our own lives while galaxies spin and dance
to the song that echoes with a frequency
beyond our comprehending, sensed
only as a trembling nostalgia for the peace
that we have not yet learned to assemble.

Posted in current events, poetry | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

A little life

Posted on June 21, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

Heron was back at the Lake tonight,
along with ten thousand mayflies1
strewn across the surface like petals,
wings still spread as though for flight, and I,
no doubt with several pressed to my bosom
like a medieval lover with her posy.
If God so loves the sparrows2,
and has an inordinate fondness for beetles3,
then each of these, too, must be dust of the stars
in heaven’s eyes, their little lives
as long in the memory of the Divine
as yours or mine4 –
I appeal to the heron on behalf of the dead,
but they are inscrutable as ever.

  1. A highly conservative estimate. According to internet search results, Lake Erie can produce hatches of up to 87.9 billion mayflies in a single night. Compare to the number of humans; maybe around 117 billion people have ever been born (estimates do not include those little lives that never drew breath), including the more than 8 billion alive today. ↩︎
  2. Matthew 10:29 ↩︎
  3. A quote attributed to British-Indian scientist J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964), based on the inordinate number of different beetles in creation. ↩︎
  4. Apparently, mayflies are older than the dinosaurs. https://lakeerieislandswildlife.com/its-mayfly-season/ ↩︎

Posted in poetry, prayer | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

God of the sparrows

Posted on June 21, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for 21st June 2026: the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Year A Proper 7); also Father’s Day. We read Genesis 21:8-21 and Matthew 10:24-39. Featured image is © Richard Semik downloaded from Dreamstime.com

In the middle of this piece of Gospel is, to my mind, one of the most beautiful and evocative images of God – the God of the sparrows. There are approximately 1.6 billion sparrows on the earth, living on every continent, except Antarctica, which always gets a pass. The sparrow, small but ubiquitous, persistent, sometimes pestilent bird, nesting in the girders of a Walmart warehouse or the eaves of your house, most populous of birds, no bird of paradise, its life is held cheaply; yet God, the God of the sparrows, values it so highly that not one will fall from the sky except that it is caught in God’s hand. 

The promise is not that none will fall. Everything created comes to an earthly end. Yet the love and care of God knows no end, and will not fail even at the end of this life.

That promise is surrounded in our Gospel passage by some other, less reassuring language, and we’ll get to that. But as we do so, remember and consider that our anchor and our hope is the God of the sparrows, the God of almost incomprehensible love.

If in our Gospel, today is Sparrow Sunday, in the secular world, it is Father’s Day. Holidays that celebrate family relationships are fraught, aren’t they? They call into question our experience of parenting, of being parented. They can stir up grief, they can exacerbate loss, they can provoke resentment. They can also be sources of joy – if you are celebrating, I am glad for you.

There are a couple of illustrations of the complications of human family life in the readings we receive today. Let’s look at Abraham, the father of nations, the father of multiple faith traditions. He was not a great role model for fatherhood, was he? He sent his firstborn son into the wilderness, he was ready to sacrifice his second. Abraham, frankly, was not a safe man to be around, not an easy man to be the child of. If you think about it, even before Abraham, the earliest families in our ancestral faith tradition were nothing if not fraught, fractious, and dangerous.

But God, the God of the sparrows, remained faithful to Isaac, to Ismael, to Hagar, his mother. God remained faithful even to Abraham, despite all his faults. 

Jesus, during this passage of Gospel good news, has some words that may be hard for us to receive that compare the love between family members to the love that is between God the Father and the sparrows, the love that is between Jesus and God, his Father, the love that God has for us, and finds us wanting.

Is this a paradox? Only, I think, if we are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. If we look at God, the Father of sparrows, through the lens of our own experience of fatherhood, whatever that might be, we will diminish the love of God; we will shrink the vision of what God’s creative and compassionate and core of love can be. 

For Jesus to call God Father should expand our vision of fatherhood, not shrink our vision of God. 

And the family of God will not fit into our nuclear boxes. Already we know that the biblical notion of family is way broader than our most recent traditions. Read the stories. See the many and different ways of making family. Look at Jesus. Do you remember when he told those who wanted to pin him down, “’Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’” (Matthew 12:48b-50)

Jesus included all of us in his family. He includes all of us in the family of God. Do we do the same for one another? Do we do the same for those who come to us seeking recognition, seeking care, seeking forgiveness, seeking love? 

Do we judge how other people’s families are formed or set up or survive? Perhaps we should remember the God of the sparrows, and expand our imagination of connection and care, and of what constitutes family. This could be read as a timely reminder from Jesus, that it is love that makes a family, and the love of God that transcends our ties and our divisions. 

If we look at the family that God has made through the lens of our narrow divisions, we will diminish the love of the God of the sparrows; we will shrink the vision of what God’s creative and compassionate and core of love can be. If we look at the vision that Jesus shares of the family that God gathers, we see so many more possibilities.

But to address more directly the elephant in the Gospel, I don’t believe that Jesus was advising stirring up family conflict in this slightly confusing passage that we read today. I don’t believe that he means to diminish the love that is shared between family members, nor the pain that is occasioned when that love is damaged or missing. 

If you are celebrating today, I don’t believe that he means to burst your balloon. But if this is a difficult passage for you, if this is a difficult day for you, I think that what he was telling us, from that deep core of love, is that while we will fall out from time to time, while we will fall down from time to time, while all life comes to an earthly end and some never even begin, the God of the sparrows sees it all, and you are worth more than many sparrows. No one will fall without the hand of God catching us up with the compassion that passes our earthly understanding, the love of the God of the sparrows; the love that is beyond compare, and beyond our imagination.

Posted in homily, lectionary reflection, sermon | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Memento mori at the beach

Posted on June 14, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

Smoothed out by the shore, 
the rough and tumble of sea and sand, 
the bone of a water bird, its bill intact, 
eye empty and inviting. 
All trace of the violence of life 
and death has been polished away 
by the grinding mortality of time 
and this remnant left behind; 
I think of the bones that live at my home, 
covered in sinew with eyes that see, 
and wonder whether tribute or confession, 
fear of death, or love prevailed upon
some stranger on the rocks to offer
this fragile memorial to the sun.

Posted in poetry | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Trinity Sunday: playing favourites

Posted on May 31, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for Trinity Sunday, 2026

Is it wrong to have a favourite person of the Trinity?

One of the things I love about Trinity Sunday, which is always the first Sunday after Pentecost, is how we find ourselves thrown into confusion by the image of a God who is One, who is Three, who is Spirit, who is Incarnate, who has known breath and who breathed breath into being. We are tempted to try to make sense of it all, with pictures and patterns of three-leafed clovers and Celtic knots. But God is not a mathematical problem, and God – while we can see God everywhere – God will always be more than our vision can contain, or our words describe, or our hearts need.

God is more than a formula: Father, Son, Holy Spirit; Creator, Christ, Holy Ghost; Maker, Redeemer, Sustainer. God is always defying the algorithm. There is nothing artificial about God. God is always more than we can create even in our dreams.

In the beginning, Genesis tells us, before there was anything, before there was nothing, before there was even a word for nothing, there was God. And God breathed over the nothingness that had no name – Spirit – and God spoke creation into being – Word made manifest – and God created something out of nothing. Everything that is, everything that breathes, whether with lungs or leaves or through the heaving of the tides; everything has its genesis, its origin, in God.

And God continued to be with, to breathe with, to love God’s creation. God walked in the garden of Eden in the cool of the day, and burned like fire to lead the people of God out of slavery, and brooded like cloud over mountaintop moments, and brooded like a mother hen over her chicks, loving the creation that God had made. God made sea monsters and calmed storms. God had fun with creation, at least from time to time.

And God became human, lived, died, defeated death, because God loves us enough to live with us, and because God is more than our life can contain, and God gives us more life than we can imagine.

And God, the Spirit, descending like a dove, found us refuge from the Flood, found us out when we were afraid and hovering behind locked doors. And God, the Spirit, sang to us in the language of our hearts.

 It’s all there, in the stories of the Bible, and there is so much more. It is part of our DNA. It is our history and our hope, the ground of being and our glory, and it is always more than we can ask or imagine.

So when Jesus tells us to go and make disciples out of all kinds of people, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, this is at least something of what he means. Not to have all of the right answers about how God can possibly be three and one all at once, or whether it’s ok to have a favourite person of the Trinity, or fine to be totally confused about the whole thing; but to tell the stories of how God made me, a whole person, out of next to nothing. Of how God walked with you in the cool of the evening, when you needed not to be alone any longer. Of how God burned like fire within you until you could keep silent no longer, or burned like fire before you to show you the way to freedom, or sheltered you as a mother hen shelters her chicks with the strength of her feathers.  

And when Jesus told his disciples all of this, the eleven who were still with him, they worshipped him, but some doubted. Because the mountain was high and its sides were steep and their bodies hurt and they remembered the betrayal that reduced them from twelve to eleven, and the cruelty of the cross, and the fear that kept them confined behind locked doors. Some doubted.

And that was ok, too, because they were there, with their friends, with their community, and they were with Jesus, and Jesus came to them. And this was a story they would tell, too, of how when they doubted, and thought all was lost, their community held them, and Jesus promised beyond hope that he would be with them always, to the end of the age, even if they couldn’t always see it.

I don’t really have a favourite person of the Trinity. I have all of the favourites, depending on the story, depending on the day, and I know that it doesn’t really matter, because they are all One, and they surround me and sustain me and love me. You know God loves us, right? And when the world is troublesome, and life is weary, and truth is elusive, and freedom like a cloud on the horizon, God is there, in the cloud, in the fire, in the fragile feathers, in the cool breeze, God’s glory humming over all creation like the colours of the rainbow. Amen.

Posted in holy days, homily, sermon | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Incongruity (or, Fireworks at Pentecost)

Posted on May 21, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

No gentle breeze to nurse the flames
but a gust, a buffet that knocks out
other sources of power, so that
all we see is one another’s wonder
by light of a fire that reveals,
does not obliterate the features
of God imposed upon the other,
singular yet polyphonic,
inebrious yet wholly within reason,
for a given value of the word;
of that Word which is beyond all value,
which is on our lips and well
beyond our understanding.

Posted in holy days, poetry, preparing for Sunday with poetry | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Beyond the borders

Posted on May 8, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

Beyond the borders of my body lie 
a floor in need of sweeping, 
a piano that needs playing, 
a spider that I saw while making tea, 
birds that want feeding, though 
the last creature seen there was 
a long-fingered raccoon, scooping 
handfuls of seed into its joyful jaws; 
a lawn that needs mowing, 
a wound in need of healing, 
tears that need comforting, 
bombs that won’t stop falling, though 
the call to prayer echoes over rubble; 
oceans that won’t stop rising. Oblivious, 
the cat lies warm across my legs, 
as though love were all that were needed. 

Posted in current events, poetry, prayer | Leave a comment

Was it necessary?

Posted on April 3, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

We do not have Pharaoh’s excuse, 
whose heart by God was hardened, 
but from that evening in the garden 
we have pursued our own destruction. 

We cannot claim we didn’t know, 
with the fruit still sweet on our tongue. 
Was it necessary? Better ask the serpent,
ask ourselves what it would have taken to remain 
unstained by the sap and its syrupy lies? 

God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart but not ours; 
God who split the earth, poured out its dead, 
did you crack even then this heart of stone? 
Like a shell cracking open to reveal 
the seed within of good or evil, 
weal or woe, war or sweet desire. 

Posted in holy days | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The olive grove bears witness

Posted on April 3, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

They say that the pelican plucks out her feathers 
to feed her young with blood; I have never seen it, 
but I hear from the pilgrims who come to see where he 
fed our roots with prayers pulled out by the shaft. 

They came with torches; trees do not love fire. 
We shook and we swayed; we could not flee. 
We weighed in instead with our heady scent:
remember, we whispered, your roots. 

I have heard that the pelican thing is a myth, 
that it is the blood of others that colour her kiss. 
The torches of war still light up the sky. 
The pilgrims have fled and we remain rooted.

But do not imagine us helpless; we who have grown  
upon his blood and prayers these thousands of years.
We know what we saw that night, whom we sheltered. 
Remember, we murmur to all who will listen, your roots.

 

He came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. When he reached the place, he said to them, “Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done.” Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down upon the ground. (Luke 22:39-44)

Now Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place, because Jesus often met there with his disciples. So Judas brought a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees, and they came there with lanterns and torches and weapons. Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and asked them, “Who are you looking for?” (John 18:2-4)

Posted in story | Leave a comment