Better

Posted on September 24, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

It started out easily enough: I shaved off my hair,
my pride and my vanity, and cast it in the fire.
Trouble was, I just looked too damned good that way;

so I broke the mirror and used the shards
to prick out my eyes;
after that, it became more tricky.

Unseeing, I stumbled.
While I was down anyway,
I removed my feet.

Having involved my hands in
such violence, they, too,
had to go.

They gasped when they found me,
they covered their eyes,
they cried, ” Curse God and die!”

To remove the temptation I took out my tongue,
but the Spirit interceded with groans,
with sighs too deep for words,

my own lungs betrayed me,
the very air I breathed
had to be expelled, permanently.

At last,
only a beating heart
remained to remember how he

lifted away leprosy,
loosened legs,
breathed life in and sucked sin out,

strengthened hands
and sinews and souls,
and to wonder

when this would get better.

From this Sunday’s readings:
If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better fr you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched. (Mark 9:42-48)

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Year B Proper 20: all the questions you were afraid to ask

Posted on September 20, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

A typical conversation with a toddler turning from two to three might go a bit like this:

Let’s put on your shoes.   –   Why?

Because we need to go shopping for food.   –   Why?

So that we have food to eat.   –   Why?

Well, because it’s tasty, and it’s fun, and we need it to grow big and strong and healthy.   –   Why?

Because that’s how God made us.   –   Why?

{I’m beginning to wonder} Why don’t you ask God?   –   Why?

{Lord have mercy!} Ok. Never mind. Let’s just put on your shoes, shall we?    –   Why?

___

Jesus has gone from speaking “quite openly” about these things – about his impending betrayal, and arrest, and execution – he has gone from speaking openly to taking his disciples to one side, away from the crowds, and trying once more to explain things to them in ways that they might understand. But still they don’t understand, and worse, they refuse to ask questions, they resist explanation. They are not sure they want to hear the answers. They are anxious, and irritable, and argumentative, all because they are afraid to sit down and ask, “Jesus, what the devil are you talking about?” All because they refuse to ask, “Why?” (Mark 9:30-34)

James says,

Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and God will draw near to you. (James 4:1-3,7-8a)

Wisdom dearly bought. It’s worth noting here, by the way, that the letter of James has traditionally been believed to be the work of James, a brother of Jesus, who did not travel with his brother in his lifetime, but was converted later by an encounter with the risen Christ, and became a strong leader in the church.*

This James knew what it was like to fail to ask his brother the important questions: “Who do you think you are? What do you think you are doing? Can I help?” He had failed to draw near to his brother while he was in this life, and that must have been a source of bitter regret to him. Yet his brother, Jesus, had drawn near to James in his resurrection, and James had drawn nearer to him, and had understood what it was to find God within him, through him, with him.

It is no accident that James became an arbiter in the Jerusalem council’s disputes over inclusion and exclusion, over circumcision and uncircumcision, over who might be invited into covenant with Christ and which commandments they must follow (Acts 15*). He had learned how to ask questions, how to seek understanding, how to submit his own soul for conversion.

Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from?

If the disciples had asked Jesus a few more questions, they might have understood a few more things. They wouldn’t have embarrassed themselves into further silence debating who was the greatest. But they were afraid to ask about what they didn’t understand.

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to ask questions that we already know the answers to, or to ask only about those things we already understand. Failing to stretch our understanding leads to all sorts of trouble and violence. Ask a fourteen-year-old in Texas how much effort was made to ask and to understand his intentions in bringing his invention to school, and what the fear of asking questions led to for him and his family.

We crave connection, but we want to stay as we are. We want to understand, but we don’t want to change. We want to draw near, but we do not want to be converted. So our cravings are at war within us; and we fail to draw near to God, and we fail to notice God sidling up to us.

To be fair, there is danger in asking questions, gaining understanding, undergoing conversion.

For James, there was the danger of death by martyrdom.* For most of us, the danger is having to change our minds about someone we thought we had pegged. Change our hearts about an issue we thought we had resolved. Change our spirits from one of fear to one of joy. Not easy; not comfortable; but worth a try.

I was converted to asking questions by the questions of others, who stretched me and called me to account for myself and the faith that is in me, and encouraged me, literally gave me the courage to reach out to others when I didn’t understand, when I felt disconnected or discouraged.

The person who came to me to ask straight out, “Do you have a problem with me?” gave me the gift of the opportunity to say, “What? No! I was just so struck by what you said and that I had never thought that way myself that I had to do a lot of hard thinking and that’s what the frowny face was all about. What did you mean, anyway?”

She gave me the gift of asking me to explain myself, so that our relationship could not only limp along with sideways glances but deepen to where we could walk together, and discuss our differences and ask our hard questions. She gave me the gift of allowing me to admit that I didn’t understand her. To submit myself to God and to my fellow Christian, in faith that we are all relying on the grace of God to skate over life’s thin ice.

Since then, I have become better at asking questions, of God, of people, of myself. When I stop asking questions, I notice myself becoming more fearful, more withdrawn, more disconnected from God, from people, from myself. And I become less open to the questions of others.

Submit to God. Resist the devil, the father of fear and lies. Draw near to God, and God will draw near to you.

Part of our baptismal covenant asks that we seek and serve Christ in all persons. Seek Christ in the other. Ask the questions that the disciples were afraid to ask: Who are you? What do you mean? How can I help? And be prepared to answer for the faith that is in you. For the good of our community, our common life, for the good of our souls.

Draw near to Christ, and Christ will draw near to you.

You have heard that Jesus said we must become like children to enter the kingdom of heaven. To his silent and grumbling disciples, he said,

Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me. (Mark 9:37)

And the child answered, “Why?”

*Rainer Riesner, ”James: Introduction,” in The Oxford Bible Commentary, John Barton and John Muddiman, eds (Oxford University Press, 2001), 1255-7

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Evensong

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

evening, midweek,

overwhelmed and underprayed,

counting blessed sheep.

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Year B Proper 19: Jesus, losers, the cross, and The Donald

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

Not that Donald. That Donald isn’t keen on losers. But Jesus is a total loser, and we like him all the better for it. Don’t we?

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan!…”

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. …Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” (Mark 8:31-38)

Donald MacKinnon (aka [my] The Donald) wrote that

It is commonplace in theology to speak of the Resurrection as the Father’s Amen to the work of Christ; yet it is a commonplace to whose inwardness writers on the subject often attend too little. For if it does anything, it drives one back to find the secret of the order of the world in what Christ said and did, and the healing of its continuing bitterness in the place of his endurance. (1)

The secret of the order of the world in what Christ said is that those who want to save their life for later will lose it in the present; those who save their love for later will find their hearts hardened to stone when the moment comes; those who save their best for special occasions will watch it crumble to dust; and that those who squander their lives, their love, their best on the least, the littlest, the laughable and the loathsome; those who are not ashamed to weep for the lost and welcome the lousy, to waste their despair on the hopelessly wretched; they will be the ones who recognize life, the light of Christ, when they find it.

Those who are not ashamed to love recklessly, indiscriminately, foolishly, mortally wounded by opened hearts.

Because Jesus is a loser, betrayed by a friend that he knew he should know better than to trust, to whom he turned his cheek for another kiss.

To speak of Christ’s readiness to embrace failure and defeat is familiar in the almost casual language of traditional piety. In consequence it is easy to forget that the words should be used and should be understood as being used to state simple fact. (2)

Are we ashamed of the continuing bitterness of the world, and Christ’s endurance of it? Do we wish in our hearts that he would come down off that cross and smash it with their mallets and pile the pieces into a funeral pyre for all death and suffering, all grief and strife?

Of course; the crucifixion is a waste, and a shame. The Donald again:

It is sheer nonsense to speak of the Christian religion as offering a solution to the problem of evil. (3)

Even Jesus fell in the face of it. And yes, there is Resurrection. Thank God!

After which I refer you back to The Donald’s first comment above.

No, it isn’t easy. No wonder Peter took Satan’s side instead. Yet our hope is in Jesus, who fell on his face in the garden of Gethsemane, as human as we, and unashamed.

Shame

He is the child rolled up like a rug,
carried away in the night by parents
harried by war and fright;
he is the child that died;
he is the child that survived.

He is the earnest young man
cross-legged at the feet of his temple teachers,
a zealot with extreme dreams.
He is a radical:
                                       he is
love in a time of war; he is
laughter at a funeral;
he anoints the joyous with tears.
He despises misery and squanders charity.

He is the heart of the riot,
upsetting the apple cart,
pushing his luck.

He is the grand romantic gesture, rejected.
He has made a mockery of us all, and in
the marred, scarred mirror of his final shame,
we see that we would burn our own cross
before we would hang on it.

______________________________

(1) MacKinnon, Donald, “Order and Evil in the Gospel”, in Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays, by Donald MacKinnon, and edited by George W. Roberts and Donovan E. Smucker (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011), 96

(2) MacKinnon, “Atonement and Tragedy”, op.cit., 103

(3) MacKinnon, “Order and Evil in the Gospel”, op. cit., 92

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I had time

Posted on September 9, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

This morning,  I had time:
time to laugh, to stay, to pray,
time to waste before the day ran in
all bossy and efficient,
time to wonder and to ponder.

This morning, I had time,
primal creature, wild and untamed,
from which we like parasites
cling by our claws
for dear life.

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Creation, stillborn

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

Broken waters heave;
Spirit gasps, shrinks, shocked breathless,
breeching the shore, still.

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Out of control

Posted on September 1, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

The calendar says that there are three weeks left of summer, up here in the northern hemisphere; but today was full of autumn leaves, red and gold and fallen. Clearly, my calendar is not fully in control of the seasons.

leaf

Like most people, I have experienced many times and seasons feeling out of control. Parents learn the feeling quickly. Or maybe we just remember; children get it, too.

When smallest child was very small, she very suddenly and dramatically developed asthma. This diagnosis hit me in the pit of my stomach. Since childhood I have been haunted by my brother’s asthmatic attacks, and one particular night when all was dark and I was pretending sleep while he resisted any attempts by our mother to soothe his raw attempts at breath. “Can you die of asthma?” he asked her. I never heard a reply. That silence haunted me until that lunchtime in the doctor’s office in Singapore, with my own rasping, gasping child.

When she was still very small, I would sneak into her room at night and count her breathing.

leaf

As out of whack as it sounds, I was thinking about those days of worrisome watching when eldest cat was diagnosed with diabetes last week. The first day of injecting him with insulin, I was worried about hypoglycaemia, which, in cats, can be as strikingly obvious as a seizure, or as frustratingly vague as “acting differently.” Given that I spent much of the day tracking him down and asking him if he was feeling ok, and given what we know about the act of observation inherently changing the thing observed, especially cats …

Teaching them to drive, too. Children, not cats. All of the responsibility sitting in the passenger seat while all of the control is one seat and a million miles away.

Sometimes, it is possible to reduce the responsibility (pay someone else to teach them), or to increase control (install dual controls in the family car). Most of the time, we’re left fretting about the cat in the box.

So where does that leave summer, and my autumn leaf?

leaf

Today has been designated as a World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. One might feel a certain degree of responsibility to do one’s part for the sustainability of the planet and its seasons, without owning as an individual a great deal of control. The options to palm off our responsibility are few: cats are notoriously indifferent to reducing any kind of warming. The only way to increase our control over climate change, clean water, a cared-for creation is to own it.

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15)

Lord God, forgive us our failings. Teach us humility, our place in creation less one of control than one of service, and of love. Teach us beauty, to see and to sustain and to preserve what you have made out of wonderment. Teach us gratitude, for the food of the earth, the fruit of creation, the labour of love that is life. Help us to till and to keep your garden, to restore its glory, to return all glory to you. Amen.

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Fragility

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

part of the beauty with which we were crafted,

the genius; fragility invites gentleness.

our hairline fractures allow luminescence

to dance with infinite grace against 

the canvas of creation.

betrayed, it is our curse.

a blessing, it reveals

the resilience of love,

the heft of forbearance,

the endurance of mercy.

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Year B Proper 17: commandments vs amendments

Posted on August 30, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

It all starts out so well: “This will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!’” pronounces Moses, so full of pride and hope, who has led his people, God’s own people, to the brink of the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 4:6).

And yet, centuries later, in that very land, Jesus throws back the words of another prophet: “This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Isaiah 29:13).

Their hearts, says Jesus, are full instead with the rank growth of wickedness: avarice, adultery, deceit and envy, murder, theft; all folly. They abandon the commandment of God to hold to human tradition: and look where that leads: to sordidness, slander, pride, licentiousness; evil intentions (Mark 7:21-22).

The Ashley Madison data dump has held up a mirror to our own inclinations to put human folly before the faithfulness of God. The website, if you haven’t yet caught on or caught up, provided dating services to married people seeking actively to have an extramarital affair: paying an online company to arrange adultery, to be delivered at the convenience of their computer screen. I read one report that said that only three zip codes in the United States did not show up on the data hacked and released about the site’s customers: two in remote Alaska, and one in the New Mexico desert. Much has been made of the celebrity info and the gotcha grabs of profiles of supposed Christian crusaders like Josh Duggar and Sam Rader; but the real indictment is of a culture where a company can thrive on the tagline: “Life is short. Have an affair,” making out of infidelity a bucket-list item; making out of deceit and betrayal a game; making the kiss of Judas a thrill worth seeking.

For those whose lives have been affected by infidelity, I am sorry that this is painful. I am sorry that it is hard to wrestle with our own sin, and I am sorry that it is hard to forgive those who sin against us, and I am sorry that our hearts are breakable. Of course, I pray for the healing of those hurt by these affairs and by these games; and still I question a marketplace that thrives on such “sordidness and rank growth of wickedness” (James 1:21).

“Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!” said Moses. “This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me,” replied Jesus (Mark 7:8). If he had gone on just one verse further, we would have heard him say, “The wisdom of the wise shall perish, and the discernment of the discerning shall be hidden” (Isaiah 29:14)

Our public foolishness is not limited to adultery. This week, we watched in horror as a journalist and her cameraman were murdered on live television, one day after a fourteen-year-old took his class and teacher hostage with a gun one state over. There may be no way for us completely to eliminate the “rank growth of wickedness” within the human heart that may lead to murder; but neither is there any wisdom in giving up all discernment, and doing nothing to change a status quo in which 88 people per day are killed by guns in America. Eighty-eight people every day.

And it is simply not true to think that there is nothing we can do, that whether or not the guns kill people, the people will kill anyway. The numbers beg to differ. Women in abusive relationships are five times more likely to die at the hands of an intimate partner if that partner holds a gun, and domestic violence that involves a gun is twelve times more likely to result in death than assaults carried out with another weapon or with bodily force alone.

No, we can’t solve all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness that soils the human heart, but we can use our discernment to look for ways to reduce the risk to widows and orphans, the vulnerable, the innocent, the at risk, choosing God’s law over human traditions.

“You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition,” Jesus accuses (Mark 7:8). What would he say about our relationship to the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”; and to the second amendment?

Jesus sounds pretty cynical about the state of the nation, the state of his religion, the state of the human heart in this story. He is angry with those who would let their own pride, avarice, envy, their own folly blind them to the goodness that is in God, that God wills for us. He is angry, and he is frustrated, and he keeps on trying all the same, to open the eyes of the blind, the ears turned deaf, because he loves them.

He loves them. With all of their “sordidness and rank growth of wickedness” and hypocrisy and foolishness and willful denial of wisdom; he still loves us. He still tries to teach us right from wrong, love from hate, life from death.

Our Collect for today asks God to “Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works” (Book of Common Prayer, 233).  The letter of James exhorts us to “welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save [our] souls” (James 1:21).

Grafted, implanted, growing, the love of God, the love of Jesus Christ has the power to drive out the “rank growth of wickedness” that restricts our hearts and constricts our lives. It has the power to nourish something better, something cleaner and greener, livelier, lovelier than that list that Jesus enumerated to the Pharisees.

You’ve heard the old story that an old Cherokee man told his grandson, about the battle within the human heart between two wolves.

He said “My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all.

One is evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?…”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one that you feed”

May this wise and discerning people choose to feed, to water, to nurture the implanted word which has the power to save our souls, rather than the rank growth of wickedness.

May we remember God’s commandments before our own choice traditions.

May the good Lord Jesus continue to teach us patiently, and as often as we need reminding, the difference between right and wrong, love and hate, life and death.

In the name of Christ. Amen.

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A vain and foolish thing

Posted on August 26, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

Vain and foolish,

one would not think that with
no animal spirit, nor soul,
no mind of its own,
but an idle thing
could inspire such passion,
such pain, such tearing,
such rending of hearts,
of lives apart;

only with our consent, assent
to live under its power:

we have absolved ourselves
of discernment, of wisdom,
choosing instead the cradle of
a vain and foolish thing.

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