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A Family Like Mine: Biblical Stories of Love, Loss, and Longing
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Author Archives: Rosalind C Hughes
Another Pentecost
How quickly the crowd turned from Hosanna to Crucify; from hearing the miracle of the Holy Spirit poured out upon God’s chosen ones to proclaim salvation to writing them off as a dangerous and drunken mob.
But those who remained to listen learned something that day about the nature of God’s mercy, and the love of God that would go even to the Cross for us; love that would suffer in solidarity with the oppressed, the undermined, the unjustly executed, the betrayed. Continue reading
Posted in current events, holy days, lectionary reflection, sermon
Tagged Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, George Floyd, Holy Spirit, Pentecost
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Preaching Pentecost
More than 100,000 people have died in the US of COVID-19.
Nearly 360,000 people have died from the disease worldwide. Close to 6 million cases have been confirmed overall.
George Floyd died after saying, “I can’t breathe,” as a police officer knelt on his neck in Minneapolis on Memorial Day. Continue reading
Posted in current events, holy days, lectionary reflection, poetry, prayer, sermon preparation
Tagged COVID-19, George Floyd, Holy Spirit, Jesus, Minneapolis, Pentecost
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Ascending
An arpeggio rising beyond our ear, they who strum and straddle the lines between heaven and the earth, the angels incorporeal, they think us foolish to strain after touch, sight, sounds, the echo in our marrow of a descending chord … Continue reading
Posted in holy days, lectionary reflection, poetry, prayer
Tagged Acts 1:10-11, angels, Ascension, church, contemplative prayer, music
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A new creation
As the Ark drifted on the surface of creation for months, by biblical account, not for forty days, but forty days followed by one hundred and fifty days followed by a season of gradual abatement of the waters first from the uninhabitable mountain tops and only slowly to a level where a man and his family and somewhere between two and fourteen of every kind of animal in the world might have room to disembark – as life on the Ark stretched from month to month, its inhabitants must have found some sort of routine, some rhythm, some method of accounting for the days and their demands, but God knows, it cannot have felt anything like normal. And what followed, after the tide ebbed, after they all emerged, after Noah built an altar and made his sacrifice to God; what followed was a new creation, the sign of the rainbow in the sky. Continue reading
Posted in current events, sermon, story
Tagged 1 Peter 3:13-22, Acts 17:22-31, COVID-19, new creation, new normal, Noah, Noah's Ark, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, quarantine, rainbow
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Living stones
Have you ever wandered through an old graveyard, reading the tombstones, wondering about the stories that they tell? Most give little away. Many speak names, dates, perhaps a close relationship or two. … Stones have little space for ambiguity or nuance. They are hard-nosed, they get straight to the point. They do not give up extra flourishes easily. “Well loved” is the kind of distillation of a life they can support. Names, dates, and one salient detail to sum up the measure of a man, or a mother. Continue reading
Mother
Rizpah marked mother’s day as any other, sitting on her sackcloth in grim imitation of a picnic blanket, strewn about with the bones of her sons, watching hope deteriorate, refusing to let it be picked clean in the face of … Continue reading
Posted in current events, lectionary reflection, poetry
Tagged 1 Samuel 21, Ahmaud Arbery, COVID-19, mothers of the movement
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Known and unknowns
We may feel as though we are in famine from our Holy Communion. But if Christ is known to us in the breaking of the Bread, that Bread is his Body. We have seen him broken on the Cross. But even he himself told the devil, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matthew 4:4); and he is the very Word of God. Continue reading
Posted in lectionary reflection, sermon
Tagged 1 Peter 1:17-25, COVID-19, Diocese of Ohio, Easter 3, Emmaus, Luke 24:13-35, pastoral letter, public worship
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Easter 2: What Thomas saw
A sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter in 2020, preached from home. Continue reading
Posted in current events, holy days, lectionary reflection, sermon, story
Tagged COVID-19, doubting Thomas, Easter 2, mission
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Rolling stone
I like to imagine that instead of rolling the stone he turned it into bread for the birds to swarm and peck, hungry for spring time and their nests, carrying it crumb by crumb to feed their young, open-mouthed and … Continue reading
Easter 2020: empty
The tabernacle remains void of the reserved Sacrament. Our pews remain empty of our voices. The building remains empty of alleluias. But I was reminded this week that on that first Easter, it was the tomb that was empty. And that reminded me that before God created the heavens and the earth, all was empty and void. And see what God created out of that emptiness. And remember the new life that Jesus brought out of the empty tomb. Continue reading
over the water 