Lullaby for the end of the world

Posted on November 12, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

This Sunday’s readings are a little apocalyptic; whether one reads Daniel and Mark, or Hannah’s proto-Magnificat, change is in the air, and much of it alarming. Jürgen Moltmann believes that the Christian should not be afraid of the end of the world or its order, since, “Whether this world will come to an end, and whatever that end may be, the Christian hope says: God’s future has already begun. With Christ’s resurrection from the catastrophe of Golgotha the new beginning has already been made, a beginning which will never again pass away because it issues from the victory over transience.” (Jürgen Moltmann, In the end – the beginning: the life of hope (Fortress Press, 2004), 48)

*

In the hospital where I used to make my rounds, they would play a little piece of Brahms’ Lullaby over the speaker system whenever a new baby was born. It was a reminder, a necessary reminder in the face of pain, and in a place often of deep suffering, that new life was among us, and promised another, more hopeful narrative for this day.

When the music would play, I saw nurses stay their foot in midstep, and smile for a moment. I saw patients who were in on the “secret” snuggle themselves a little closer. I saw orderlies and relatives, too busy and too anxious to take a whole moment glance up at the speaker, in passing, in understanding. I saw doctors too frantic with the pain and the panic before them purse their lips, tense their backs against the onslaught of hope – “Not now!” – and the release, the relenting that followed, more often than not. Of course, it was harder when the death and the life were in the same place, balanced on the plane of existence that wavers between them, but cannot hold them together.

I watched our chaplain supervisor tell a wiped-out intern, “Go bless a baby;” her own medical practice.

The Lord said to Daniel, “There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence.” Jesus warned, “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” And he himself went through such anguish as bad as any imagined – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – and yet from the tomb was delivered.

And when he, at whose birth angels sang “Glory,” was once more drawn forth, what music did they play, and do we still hear its echoing?

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Year B Proper 27: the widows and the stewardship sermon

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

What a gift these readings are in the season of stewardship campaigns! They have a lot to say to us about trusting in the providence of God, about sharing, about giving, about the rewards of a faithful offering. What a gift!

The problem that I kept coming back to, reading these stories this week, with elections going on and election campaigns going on and on and on, with four full seasons to go before an end is in sight – anyway, the problem that I kept coming back to is that we recognize well enough the scribes who devour widows’ houses; we know that our systems are skewed towards the rich and powerful as much as ever, and we know that it is easy for those removed from poverty to overlook the individual stories of loss, destitution, and despair that those systems promote. We know that this is not the way that the kingdom of God needs to be organized. We have heard Jesus time and again promote the least and the last above the important and the rich. We hear his commendation of the poor widow and her mite-y gift. We know that this is not how we tend to respond in our everyday lives.

I’m going to say this, even though it might get me into a little bit of trouble, but it has been bothering my mind: nowhere in the Bible, that I can find; nowhere in the prophets or in the teachings of Paul or in the sayings of Jesus has the kingdom of God ever been described as a trickle – those with ears to hear, let them hear. The justice of God, the providence of God, the grace of God does not trickle down, so that no one even notices the difference. It comes like a rushing flood, like a thundering flood. It changes everything. I could quote from our new Presiding Bishop’s sermon from last Sunday; that this movement of God, in Jesus Christ, turns everything upside down, which is really right-side-up.

So if we are going to make a stewardship sermon out of these two women, these two widows, a byword in the Bible for the last and the least; if we are to take them as an object lesson and an example, let’s begin again with Elijah. We know, we know from experience, that a miracle is not always available. Even Jesus, referring later to the story of Elijah, is given to remark that “there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon” (Luke 4:25-26).

What happened to all of those widows to whom Elijah did not go? What happened to their sons and daughters, when the drought lasted three and a half years and the famine was fierce? We cannot always depend upon receiving a direct and personal miracle of our very own, especially if it must come at the expense of our neighbours. And if it did, what would we do then? Whom would we invite to share in our own, private miracle?

And then there’s that widow at the Temple, a model of faithful giving, of generous dependence upon the providence of God. More proactive than the widow in Zarephath, she doesn’t wait to cook a last meal and die; she actually gives away the last that she has to live on, and walks away. But there is no longer any famine in the land, and she lives in a system where the religious duty of the people; not only the religious duty but the way of life of the people is to take care of widows and orphans. It would bring shame upon her neighbours to see her go hungry. No matter what she has given away; she will be fed tonight. Her neighbours, her temple, her people, all will be Elijah to her, and her oil will not run out.

There are definitely themes that we can pick up from these stories and carry over into our own stewardship prayers and discernment. We can ask whether we are sufficiently trusting of God’s providence. We can look at our abundance and our poverty and wonder out of which do we offer God our treasure and our trust, and with whom do we share it. We may also wonder how we approach the problems of stewardship in times of famine, or dependence, or under the shadow of scribes who devour widows’ houses.

The story of the two women – the one in Zarephath and the one in Jerusalem – both are stories not only or even about money or possessions, but about relationship. The widow to whom Elijah comes makes the choice to share her last meal with a stranger, rather than let him die alone, just out of sight of herself and her son. The widow at the temple makes the choice to add her little coins to the treasury of the many, in order that they might do some good, since they are too little any more for her to live on. Both women look beyond themselves and their immediate situations, even in dire straits and destitution, to consider their relationships with the world around them, the world that God has made for us to dwell in. It is a world in which the poor and needy, the last and the least are not merely the consumers, but they are the chief donors of charity; it is a world turned upside down, which is really right-side-up.

If you want to read a great and accessible book about Christian economics, I recommend William T. Cavanaugh’s Being Consumed. Here’s what he has to say, in a nutshell, about our relationship to our material goods (and they are goods; insofar as all that God has made is good).

In the Christian tradition, the use of material things is meant to be a common use, for the sake of a larger body of people. We do not help each other as individuals but as members of one another. According to Paul’s famous image (1 Cor. 12), we are all members of the same body, the body of Christ. … “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (12:26). The reason that we do not cling to material things is precisely because of our attachment to others. We must constantly be ready to relinquish our claim to ownership, and to use our goods for the common good of the whole body.*

Our stewardship, how we use the time, talents, treasure with which we have found ourselves, one way or another; our stewardship is not about the bottom line, or the budget, or the by-laws. It is not about the electricity bill or the building. It’s not even about the food pantry and the community meal and the people who come in day by day looking for a small personal miracle. I mean, of course it is, but that is not enough. Not really.

Because our stewardship is not about us and our stuff. It is about us and our relationships: our relationships with our stuff, with each other, with our neighbours, with our God. Our stewardship is about building up the body of Christ. It is seeing and recognizing and praying for and working towards and truly desiring the kingdom of God.

What we do here, in our own little temple, is a microcosm of the change we want to see in the world. It is a foretaste of the flood of justice rolling down like a mighty river. If we do it right, it is a sign, a sacrament, a visible, tangible marker of the movement of God, of Jesus, among the people of God, laying the foundations for a movement that will turn the world upside down, which is really right-side-up.

Amen.

*William T. Cavanuagh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Eerdmans, 2008), 52-53

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On a Wednesday

Posted on November 4, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

On Wednesdays, I think about my mother.
Arise, shine, for your light has come,
the daily morning prayer declares, on a Wednesday.
I hear my mother calling, “Rise and shine!”

Arise, shine, for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has dawned upon you.
I see my mother breaking eggs into a pan, yellow
sun set upon a liquid horizon. She sings
some operatic nonsense in a language
neither of us understands.
Her face dances with the music.
I wish I could show you her smile.

My mother would not cook eggs on a Wednesday.
Towards the end, she rarely sang.
Arise, shine, for your light has come.
The glory of the Lord has dawned upon you.

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All Saints: life unbounded

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

I was away all last week at a “Writing Pastors” conference. It was great. It did not leave a whole lot of time for sermon writing, but this is the gist of what was said this morning…

There was some controversy, a certain amount of disagreement in the earliest church, about whether or not Lazarus would die a second time, or whether he might have cheated death’s one and only chance to claim him. It would be strange to find him wandering the earth still; it would be a cruel kind of healing, don’t you think? to be set loose to live beyond his sisters’ care, beyond his Lord, beyond all reckoning.

There must have been a change in Lazarus, when he came out of the tomb. “Unbind him!” Jesus tells his friends, because his movements are hampered by the winding clothes, the shroud, the swaddling clothes of the dead. Jesus’ instruction is practical, so that Lazarus can walk, and move. It is also shocking, and even frightening. Martha has already warned of the stench. It is a fearful moment, removing the bandages to expose the raw face of Lazarus, alive.

In the next chapter, Jesus returns to Bethany and Lazarus is living with his sisters, and the Pharisees plot to kill him, because his life is an affront to them. They are afraid to live in the presence of such a sign of Jesus’ power.
We do not hear of Lazarus again.

I’m going to tell you of another controversy, the church not knowing what to do with its dead, and those who live on in memory. A couple of weeks ago, the Church of England issued an apology to an anonymous person who had been abused by one Bishop George Bell, back in the 1950s. Old news, you might say; but the person, who was a little child in the fifties, reported the crime in the 90s and was given the brush-off by the church’s representative of pastoral care and compassion. Not until the past two years was the story taken seriously.

The reason I bring this up on All Saints’ Day is that George Bell is in our book of commemorations, our family history of holy women and holy men. He is celebrated on the anniversary of his death, October 3rd. You can look him up.

The controversy, then, is how to deal with saints who have not only clay feet, but great, raw, ugly cracks running right through the heart of them. How then do we remember them?

One of the problems is that Bell was so bound up in systems of sin, of protection, of powerful blindness to grace and the blinkered imprisonment of power – no one called him out. No one unbound him.

And Jesus wept.

There may be names in the litany that we read today that hold conflict for you. If so, it is alright to weep for them; Jesus weeps with you.

The Pope, on his recent visit to this country, named a saint in one Junipero Serra, a Franciscan friar and missionary who is credited with bringing the Gospel to the west, and accused of some of the atrocities of colonialism, oppression of the native peoples, and brutality. Those who defend the choice to canonize him point to the systems in which he lived. No one called him out, taught him better. No one unbound him.

“No one is good but God alone,” Jesus told one man. And he wept.

Last week, Heather Cook was sentenced to seven years in prison for killing a man, Thomas Palermo, while driving drunk. At the time, she was the Suffragan Bishop in Maryland.

The church is messy, its people are a mess, its saints are no better than they ought to be.

And it is in this messy, smelly church that today we invite Michael Bruce Curry to take his place as Presiding Bishop. The service itself might be, for some, a sign of the slight unloosening of our winding cloths, a little unbinding of the cords that, what, ten years ago? would have kept an African American man from taking that seat. A little bit of wiggle room.

And in the church today, with those at the National Cathedral and countless others, we will renew our baptismal covenant, that call to life unbounded.

In the first part we place our trust in Jesus, who calls us out of death, and the tomb, and the waters that run over us in the river. We believe in God, in Jesus Christ God’s Son, in the Holy Spirit. We hear the call of Jesus. We even believe in the resurrection of the dead, in the communion of saints, in life unbounded.

And in the second part, drawn out and called forth, we begin the unwinding, unbinding, with God’s help. And it is frightening, to uncover the stench of our own sin, the times when we have not respected the dignity of every human being, when we failed to see Christ in all people, and we are unwinding and unbinding with God’s help, spiralling into a fresh, clean, living skin, life unbounded.

There are two parts to the story. There is the call of Jesus, “Lazarus, come out!” There is the dead man walking, new life calling him forth, a new beginning. Then, only then begins the unbinding, the unwrapping of the layers of death and sin, the gift of newness, of surprise and of unbounded life beneath all of those layers. It starts with a little bit of wiggle room, and it continues, to unwind and unbind, until Lazarus is fully seen and all present know that he is really and truly alive: “and let him go,” says Jesus; into life untethered.

Jesus wept; but not for ever. He knows the truth of new life, life untethered, life unbounded, and that is what he gives to Lazarus, and that is what he offers to the Pharisees, to the communion of all the saints, and that is what he gives to each of us.

“See, the home of God is among mortals,” speaks the vision. “God will dwell with them as their God; they will be God’s peoples, and God’s own self will be with them; God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

Life unbounded, known in the communion of saints, our gift in baptism, our legacy to find and unwind for ourselves, for one another, for the sake of Christ.

Amen.

October 31, 2019: This post has been updated four years after the fact to remove a negative attribution using the adjective “Pharisaical.” I apologize for having used language that is damaging, even dangerous, to my Jewish siblings and I am trying to eradicate it from my writing where I find it.

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Lazarus, unbound

Posted on October 31, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

Feeling the ground with his hands,

touching the soil with his feet,

kissing the earth, Lazarus,

unbound, raises his face to see

his friends retreat – in fear

they have let him go – 

stares at Jesus with eyes

too dry to weep.

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Louisville Seminary

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

sun striking chapel
bells call to morning prayer
unanswerable

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Security alert

Posted on October 27, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

Count seconds between
eruptions; dog howl fear strikes:
cell phone lightning storm.

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Year B Proper 25: What do you want?

Posted on October 25, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

“What do you want me to do for you?”

When I heard Jesus asking this of Bartimaeus, I was struck by the coincidence that two Sundays in a row we have heard basically the same question.

“What is it that you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked James and John last week. “What do you want me to do for you?” he now asks Bartimaeus, the bold blind man who will not be quelled by the crowd, who will be heard by the Son of David, the Messiah, who will use his faith to find his saviour.

It’s a really good question, because it goes to the heart of the matter. It is not a wish-fulfillment flannel – “What do you want most in the world?” It demands relationship, it demands discernment of the resources at hand, of what can be done, what should already have been done for ourselves, what might be: “What do you want ME to do for you?” asks Jesus.

I know a Christian physician who says that he uses this question to get to the heart of the visit that his patient makes to his office. The patient might have a million different concerns; but there is a reason that he has come to this doctor on this day. There is something that she thinks this person can do for her, which no one else can provide, and it is finding out what that thing is that can be a challenge, tuning in among all the static. Asking, “What is that you want ME to do for YOU?” can help both parties focus, and can help with the process of healing.

One of the aspects of wisdom that this physician had learned from Jesus was not to take for granted the insight that he already had into the other person’s needs. Bartimaeus is waiting by the side of the road for Jesus to pass by, and he calls out for mercy. Of course, we think, he wants his sight, he wants healing, and we are right. But Jesus has to ask, because he is not a mercy dispensing machine. This is about relationship. This is about what you need from me, what I need from you, specifically. It is about seeing the person in front of you.

When I was working my hospital chaplaincy internship, I learned to ask the question a little differently. I could sit in a patient’s room for an hour, listening to their stories, hearing their complaints, their pain and their sorrow. I could wrap it all into a prayer at the end, lifting to God the concerns I had heard; or I could ask, “What is it that you want Jesus to do for you? What do you want to pray about today?”

Pretty soon I learned that this was where the healing visit really began. A patient facing an arduous orthopaedic surgery really wanted to talk to God about her teenager, about his struggles, her fears for his safety, his sanity, his life. Another was afraid to go home. Yet another wanted God to get on and take her to heaven right now, where all of her loved ones already lived; they came to her in her dreams.

I learned to ask the question earlier in the visit, so that we could get to the point while I still had time to sit and listen as the patient finally and faithfully articulated just what it was they wanted Jesus to do for them.

So by now, if you are anything like me, you are sitting in your pew, lifting up items from your deepest needs and desires, weighing them and sorting them, deciding whether they rise to the level of what you want Jesus to do for you; whether you dare ask for them, or whether they are things you should have done already for yourself. In a crisis, it is easy to know what to ask.

“Jesus, my little daughter is at the point of death.” “Jesus, if you will, you can make me clean.” “Jesus, they have run out of wine.”

Some things are not ours to ask, as Jesus tried to tell James and John.

Others are things that Jesus has already done for us: “Save me!”

And so I want you to take a few moments now, if you feel safe doing so you may close your eyes, and see Jesus standing right in front of you, asking you, “What is it you want me to do for you?”

Do not listen to the voices of the crowd shouting you down. They don’t know what they are talking about; Jesus calls you to stand before him.

If you are so inclined, you may want to write something down. Otherwise, hold it in your heart.

“What is it that you want me to do for you?”
…
However you use this time, this prayer, this encounter with Jesus, I encourage you, as the week goes on, each time you pray to revisit that question, to spend a little time standing face to face with Jesus, who is asking, “What do you want me to do for you?”.

Take some time to find out what it means for your relationship with Jesus, to ask and to answer that fairly fundamental question honestly. To seek Christ’s company in the heart of your life, in your deepest needs and desire.

Do not be discouraged by the voices that would shout you down; persevere in prayer. Hear instead the shouts of encouragement:
“Take heart; get up, he is calling you.”

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Middle age

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

Three, even two years ago, my shoulder didn’t burn, my hip didn’t pop,
my knee didn’t stab me in the back halfway round the supermarket.

Since the spring, we have been on cooler terms,
tending to the necessities with icy politeness, my body and I,
feigning ignorance of the Damoclean stalactites,
our mutually assured destruction, gathering overhead.

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Year B Proper 24: glory

Posted on October 18, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” (Mark 10:35-37)

Thomas Merton stood on the corner of Fourth and Walnut Street in Louisville, and he had a vision, in which he realized, he says, that he loved people; all of the people; that they were his people, and he was theirs.

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes; yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. … I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.*

James and John had it partly right, when they asked to be with Jesus in his glory. Of course, they had it partly wrong, as well, and Jesus set them straight.

What we miss in the telling of this story this Sunday is that the twins are responding directly to Jesus’ latest warning to his disciples that their journey to Jerusalem, to the seat of God’s glory, by tradition; that their journey to Jerusalem will end in ignominy, and insult, and death.

They were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them; they were amazed, and those who followed him were afraid. He took the twelve aside again and began to tell them what was to happen to him, saying, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again.”

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “We want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” (Mark 10:32-35)

And you have heard the rest.

If we read them with a cynical eye, we might think that James and John are looking for some kind of trade-off: Ok, we’ll follow you through all of this unpleasantness in Jerusalem, IF you will guarantee us our reward on the other side.

It could be simple naivete: Ok, so it’s going to get unpleasant in Jerusalem, but then after three days, when you rise again, then comes the glory, right? and we kick out the Romans and take our places in the palace, at your left and right hand.

What they have failed to notice, apparently, despite all of their days and weeks and months on the road with Jesus, is that he is already shining with the glory of God. They were on the mountaintop, when he was transfigured into dazzling light, with Moses and Elijah at his left and right hand, by the way – and still they are waiting for the glory. Waiting in the presence of Jesus Christ for the glory of God. Do you see the irony?

They are sitting in the presence of the living Lord, Jesus Christ, waiting to enter into the glory of God.

You may find it strange if I say that we are living in an age of glory. We are not blind to the problems and pitfalls of the present day: the spitting and insults, the death and destruction, the unpleasantness, the condemnation that comes from the religious people and the Gentiles. We know the way of the cross. We have seen its suffering, even if we have escaped its baptism ourselves.

Still, we live in the presence of the living Lord, Jesus Christ, who died, and who lives, and who is seated at the right hand of God (which presumably answers the question of who is sitting at his own left hand, if we choose to take the seating arrangements literally). We live in the presence of Christ, in the knowledge of the kingdom of God that has drawn near, that does break in with all of its glory – if we have eyes to see it.

As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. … member[s] of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.*

Last month, at the end of the community meal, some of the volunteers gathered to celebrate the completion of a twelve-month cycle since the meal was relaunched last September. It was a bit of a weary gathering, after all of the cooking and serving and especially the washing up, and there was a certain amount of grumbling about who had stayed to help and to celebrate, and who had ditched before the clean-up was over. We probably sounded a bit like those disciples, gathered around Jesus and still grumpy with James and John and the long road to Jerusalem left to travel.

But there was a celebration. There was cake, and conversation, and there was prayer in the falling darkness, light in the deepening shadows.

There were also two little boys, who have become regulars at the meal. The youngest is so proud to write his own name on his name tag each time! They sit with their family and eat as many seconds as they think they can get away with. The boys had heard on the grapevine that the volunteers were staying on afterwards, and that there would be cake, so they trailed around after the other guests had left, looking for something to do to be of help, some service they could offer so that they might be counted among the volunteers. They found an empty coffee cup to bring to the washing up window.

Of course, we gave them cake. They sat in the narthex eating it as we gathered in the chapel. They were in no hurry to leave that night. And as the candles were lit, and the hymn of light was lifted into the evening, the youngest crept into the chapel, and slid into a chair, and one of our volunteers slid along the row and held out her hymn book so that he could follow along, and he did, and it was a glorious way to end the day, joined together in service to one another, and in celebration and in prayer offered through Christ, with cake.

There is the glory that is to come. There is the kingdom that is to come; and there is the here and now, life lived in the presence of the living Lord Jesus Christ, and it is glorious, and there is no waiting for it, no line, no exceptions.

We live our little lives full face in the glory of God, whether we recognize it or not.

Thomas Merton, caught up by glory on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville:

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God … This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.  … It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely … I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.*

James and John got their question wrong only because they forgot that they were already sitting at the right and left hand of Jesus in his glory, Jesus Christ who is the glory of God.

May you see your own glory, given to you by the love of God, in whose glorious image you are made.

Amen.

_________

* Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Crown Publishing Group, 2009), 153-6

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