Haikonic afterthoughts

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

On blasphemy against the Holy Spirit

Blasphemy: wilful
submission to delusions
of divinity

Blasphemy: pinching
out air, pressing the human
back into the clay

Blasphemy: wilful
misinterpretation of
the mercy of God

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YouTube nation/BlackLivesMatter

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

a child lies in the

grass; we tattooed her at birth;

we’ve got her number

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Year B Proper 5: bike racks and blasphemy

Posted on June 7, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

I have a bit of an independent streak, so the other day when the car dealership called to say that the car was fixed, I didn’t want to have to wait for someone else to take me over there to pick it up. It was easily within biking range. The one dilemma was how to transport my bike home once I had the car. Solution: wear the bike rack like an external skeleton and get on over there. I like to think I looked cool, like a Transformer. Of course, my family thought I was crazy, but they’re used to that.

That is almost exactly not what this passage about Jesus and his family is all about.

They thought that he had gone out of his mind. This wasn’t an idle concern. The scribes were considering him possessed, they thought that he was in league with the demons; but Jesus insisted that the spirit that galvanized him and inspired his preaching and empowered his healing work and burned with prophetic zeal – this was the Spirit of God.

And that, friends, is blasphemy, which was then and is now in some places punishable by death. So Jesus family, when they come to take him away, do so not out of embarrassment or fear of what the neighbours might say, but what the neighbours might do: they might kill him. They might put Jesus to death for the sin, the crime of blasphemy, if he goes on like he does, insisting on speaking for God. Turns out, they might have been right.

Where they were wrong, of course, was in the initial diagnosis of demon-possession and mental disease: Jesus was stone cold sane when he claimed to be one with God; the only man who ever has been.

The real blasphemy is in the scribes who claim to know the mind of God better than God, better than Jesus himself. The real blasphemy is in hearing the Gospel of Jesus Christ and claiming to know better, to know God’s mind better, and to know that it is not what Jesus says it is, quite the opposite, in fact.

The real blasphemy is in saying that we know God better than God does; that we are independently equal to God and up with God, rather than accepting our dependence upon a God who loves us, who cares for us, whom we can trust; who is, after all, dependable.

We see it back in Genesis. Adam, when God asks him why he is hiding, gets himself in a real tangle. First, he claims to hide because he is naked and afraid [not the reality tv show]; but already at the end of Genesis 2, we have told that the man and the woman were both naked and unashamed. Then, too, Adam is lying anyway: by the time God comes looking the garden, he and the woman have already made themselves clothing of fig leaves sewn together: they are no longer naked. They are afraid, and ashamed.

They are afraid and ashamed because they know that the temptation to which they succumbed was the one that put them in the place of God. The line the serpent used on the woman to get her to eat from the forbidden tree was this:

“God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil,” which honestly doesn’t sound like such a bad idea; except that we have been proving ever since that we do not possess divine sight, and that we cannot be trusted to be good with the knowledge of evil.

“What have you done?” asks God, inviting confession, and instead Adam lies. Almost the whole rest of the Bible is about the attempts that follow to restore the relationship which has been injured by the blasphemy of a woman and a man who believe that it is their place to be God, and the lies that it spawns; the lies we tell ourselves, to justify ourselves, and the lies that we tell God.

There are many ways that we set ourselves up to be God for ourselves and one another. We claim, regularly, to know the mind of God better than God knows it, and not only in the obvious, overtly judgmental ways.

We tell one another, “Everything happens for a reason,” assuming that we know how the mind of God conceives of cancer, car accidents, and child abuse, friends of Job telling the suffering to search their pain for the message that God is sending, when the Gospel tells us that all that God wills for us is healing, and comfort, and peace.

We tell one another, “God doesn’t make mistakes,” which follows on from “Everything happens for a reason,” meaning: I believe that this happened to you for this reason, and I am not mistaken, putting ourselves in the place of God, pretending to the mind of God, instead of dwelling in the heart of God, which is much kinder than our own.

A friend was a chaplain in a children’s hospital, where a child’s life was threatened by the need for an amputation – I am changing the details in order to preserve anonymity; but let’s say that the child needed to have his hand amputated, but an older, wiser relative was holding up the surgery insisting that God has a plan for this child, and God’s plan was that the child should be a pianist. How could the doctors’ diagnosis be correct, then, if it flew in the face of God’s plan?

I am not suggesting that doctors are never wrong nor exempt from their own God-complexes, but do you hear how the common phrase, “God has a plan for your life,” gets twisted into, “And I know exactly what it is, because I have the mind of God”? Even among those who believe that they are acting out of love, rather than out of shame, and fear, and denial, which must have been powerful influences in this case.

We do not possess divine sight, and we do not do so well at being good with the knowledge of evil.

The problem with claiming the mind of God, offers Jesus, is that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to receive God’s grace, to apprehend and embody God’s mercy, when we are acting like God ourselves. If we hold ourselves to be God, then we have no need of God’s comfort, and so we will fail to find it. We will fail to meet God walking in the garden if we are too busy hiding our faces because we know that they glow like God’s. From my reading of the Gospel, I do not believe that there is any such thing as an unforgiveable person or an unforgiveable sin; but we will fail to find ourselves forgiven if we lose ourselves to the fantasy that we are God, and thus have no need of this other God’s grace.

There is a solution, says Jesus. “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

Follow me, says Jesus. Find the will of God in my will. Project onto me all of your God-complexes; I will not let you down. I will embrace you like family. Trust me. Depend upon me.

Our modern, western society puts a lot of value on independence, but that doesn’t make it good theology. We are made in the image of God; we are children of God; we are not God.

You would have to be a little crazy to think you could cycle to the car dealership with the bike rack on your back. You would have to be more than a little crazy to think that you possess the mind of God, the reason for everything that happens, the trusted ability to wield the knowledge of good and evil.

It might, in the end, be safer to accept the help of Jesus, and lean on him, our brother, sister, mother, child, friend. One might say, you’d be mad not to.

Amen.

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Rolling

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

At the bus stop, a boy making noises
like a man who never learned to leave such
nonsense behind; young woman turned,
lips pressed, one hand to hip, one
hand to God I do not know him.

Children walk in the street to shelter from the
sunlight; one ducks through the hedge to the track,
picks a rock, eyes the rolling stock;
his arm is small and far away.

You drive too close; your hand could shoot from
your unrolled window, grab my wrist, wring out
your pounding frustration at What He Has Done.

I roll on, legs of lead, heart of stone, gathering
no moss. My loss.

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Trinity Sunday, 2015

Posted on May 30, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

I am not a maths person, per se. I am basically numerate: when I worked in the deli, I could make change without hesitation or error or the use of fancy modern electronics. But higher mathematics were not my area of academic pursuit. When I first heard about imaginary numbers, I found the idea quite poetic and magical. I was disappointed to be told that they really aren’t what I thought that they were. (If you’re a mathematician, I’m sure they’re still quite poetic and magical, but I was looking for the equation to describe a unicorn, or the Holy Trinity, and it just isn’t out there.)

So when it comes to the Holy Trinity, I am a whole lot less concerned with how this three-in-one, one-in-three thing might get worked out, or be expressed in a fixed formula, and more concerned with the questions of why, and what that tells us about God, and about ourselves, we creatures who live and move and have our being in such a mathematically complicated and illogical Godhead.

The readings for today try to tell us something about that relationship, but even they get tangled, trying to describe the ineffable. How do you map the variables of love, the additions and subtractions of injury and forgiveness, the multiplication of mercy, the sum of grace?

In the Gospel, Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, groping in the dark towards the truth. Jesus tells him he needs to get born again, reborn into the new light that is dawning, slowly, upon him, the knowledge of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ; which Paul then describes as the Spirit of adoption.

When I was adopted, and when many of the people I know in Ohio were, we were issued new birth certificates. The originals stayed in some government vault somewhere, darkly-inked with the details of our original births: time, place, the people present, the names given.

Our new certificates, the ones which we present to the world via the Social Security offices and the passport applications, list new details: same time and place, but the names have been changed to protect the innocent and to present to the world the legal reality that these are this child’s parents; this their daughter or son, as if born to them. We have not only been adopted, according to this narrative: we have been born again.

That’s what Paul is talking about in his Spirit of adoption speech. He is not talking about the time in front of a judge who proclaims that this child now has the same rights of inheritance, the same claim to love as any natural-born offspring of the same parents. For Paul, this is a new birth certificate, which doesn’t undo the one darkly-inked and kept in a government vault: that is still true and valid and important, very important. But it restates the relationship. It re-presents to the world the reality that is: we are children of God. We have always been children of God. This is our natural state of relationship, and it can never be undone.

Fun fact: in England and Wales, baptism as a new birth can alter the legally recognized birth names of a child, adding or replacing them with their Christian names, acknowledging and certifying that this one has been born again, born anew, as a child of God, and amending the record to show that it was ever thus.

It may be, then, that the importance of the idea of God as Trinitarianis the knowledge that our God is someone who has always embodied relationship, the love and the give and take and the dance and the updating of identity and interaction that accompanies any relationship; a God who gets it because relationship is part of who God is in God’s very being, without division, without history, without the need for legal fictions or updated records or secret ink.

God is, and God always has been, the essence of internal integrity and of openness to the other.

Without getting all pop psychology, that may also be part of the lesson to us: to acknowledge all of the different histories and characters and expressions of self that we hold in each of us, to bring them into some sort of integrity, so that we have the confidence to meet the other without those complications that come from keeping the dark ink secret inside and creating fictions to disguise our wounded lives; because we each have wounded lives.

Some of us need some help integrating those identities, facing those histories down. Sometimes, seeking help for our woundedness has been worried about as a weakness, or even faulted as a lack of faith; but no. Not at all. If the doctrine of Trinity teaches us anything it is that God gets it, God understands what it is to have more than one narrative going on in one life; God has at least three.

When we can be honest with ourselves about who we are, the scars that we carry, the dark ink, and meet God and one another with honesty and open hearts, God knows, it will show.

If the doctrine of Trinity teaches us anything it is that we have a God who supports us in our weakness, like a parent cradling the neck of a newborn baby. We have a God who has suffered the outrageous mood swings of human life that encompasses ecstasy and agony, all in one body, all in one life. We have a God who breathes through the world around us, bringing it to life, bringing us to new birth, updating and refreshing our lives whenever we need it.

We have a God who knows how hard and hurtful and wonderful and complex and imaginative and life-giving relationships can be; who knows our deep need for relationship, because we were created, born out of a God whose essence dwells in eternal relationship within and beyond itself. Imaginary numbers have nothing on the intricacy and wonder of the nature of God! And it is that wonder in which we live and move and have our being, we who have been born, and adopted, and reborn, as children forever of the living and ever-loving God.

Thanks be to God.

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Reverence

Posted on May 27, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

Yesterday
I knelt at an array of unlit candles
reading the morning prayer before the noonday sun.

“Test me, O Lord, and try me; examine my heart and my mind.”
“Do not snatch me away with the wicked and evildoers,
who speak peaceably with their neighbours,
while strife is in their hearts.”
“As for me, I will live with integrity;
redeem me, O Lord, and have pity on me.”

A thin man moving furniture asked
“Reverend: am I disturbing
you?” and I said, no,

no, noticing the air around the chairs
which he set so softly to the floor
while my soul thrashed rudely about
questions of judgement,
the washing of hands,
and innocence.

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Pentecost dreaming

Posted on May 24, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

What happens  [asks the poet] to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over –
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Those are, of course, the words of Langston Hughes, and we know the dream to which he refers, the dream he fears has been deferred.

Peter, too, speaks of dreams, when he addresses the crowd which has just witnessed the explosion of the Spirit – the rushing of wind, the fire blowing the people out of the house and into the streets, babbling and dazed.

“But this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:
And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God,
That I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh;
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
Your young men shall see visions,
Your old men shall dream dreams.” (Acts 2:16-18)

I remember as a child reading a biography of Charles Dickens, and he described the universal recurring dream of walls closing in. It blew my mind. It was the first time that I realized that dreams are not just individual, idiosyncratic events, but that they are a shared phenomenon, a common and even communal experience. Some dreams resolve in the morning; some recur night after night, defying resolution; some may divide us, but others bind us together in our common hopes and fears, our shared humanity.

The dry bones of Ezekiel’s valley had died for their dream. And you don’t get much more deferred than dead. And yet all was not lost. “Prophesy!” God told the prophet, because prophesy is a prophet’s stock in trade. Prophesy loudly enough, and even the dead will hear the word of the Lord.

Pentecost was, as we heard last week, an annual festival for the Jews, as it is for us today. Happened every year. And the falling of the Spirit upon all flesh is a theme repeated throughout the book of Acts; wherever the gospel goes, the Spirit falls, confirming the dreams of the apostles and verifying their visions, anointing with fire the new converts, setting fire to their souls so that their own dreams burn with the passion of Christ.

We see the cycle of dreaming and the deference of death; we see the cycle of prophesy and pain; we see the cycle of vision and the violence done unto it; we see it on the cross.

But we see, too, the resurrection. We see the awakening. We see the Spirit falling upon all flesh, and we do not know how many times it will take, how many Pentecosts, how many dry bones before we awaken to the kingdom of God. But we know that God is faithful, and so we dare to keep dreaming.

Another poet, a newly planted local, wrote this yesterday, after the verdict was read in the case of the officer who has been acquitted of criminal action in the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams. Rachel G. Hackenburg wrote “Awaiting the Return of Pentecost”:

At long last,
O Mighty God,
will you mercifully set on fire
all that is yours,
reducing to ash & coals
the injustices, the impurities,
while emboldening to brilliance
truth-telling tongues & fiercely-loving lives?

At long last,
O Raging God,
will you set ablaze
complacent hearts & dry bones
until there is an wholly unprecedented
conversion of stubborn perspective,
a confession of false gods,
a radicalization of love?

At long last,
O Most Wild God,
will you break mountains and send whirlwinds,
will you send us into the streets with shouts;
will you toss & turn us with nightmares,
make us blush & burn with daydreams,
make us alive in defiance of death
even now while we groan in despair?

The repetition of Pentecost, the reason it has to come back year after year after year, can be for us a sign of despair or one of hope. Either it drives a nail into the coffin of those dry, dry, tinderbox bones, or else it breathes into our dry dreams new, wet, living breath, sets fire to our souls, lifts us once more to keep living forward, looking for the kingdom of God.

It is not my place to ask anyone for patience when their dream is deferred, their vision clouded by tears, their prophecy unheard.

It is not my place to ask anyone for patience, but it is my place to preach hope, holding on to the promises of God: “O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live,” not once, but every time that it is needed to resurrect those defeated dry bones, bring colour to washed-out, worn-out visions, bring sweetness back to our children’s dreams.

Even as we remember this Memorial Day weekend those who lost their lives to their dreams of how the world should look and live, too many times over, in too many wars, still we who dream of peace hear God’s promise: “O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”

As we remember those charged with keeping the peace, and pray for peace in their own hearts, for the safety of their souls, we hear God’s promise: “O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”

As we remember the mothers who have lost children, their dreams of a future for their daughters and sons denied by the violence of systemic sin, do we dare to proclaim God’s promise: “O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live”? Do we dare not to?

As we celebrate with those in Ireland realizing the dream of marriage, lifting up love [Ireland of all places! What’s next – the Vatican?!], we hear God’s promise: “O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”

As we pray for the peace of our city – the peace that passes all understanding, not the paper-thin rustling of people looking the other way when injustice walks by – as we pray for the peace of our city, we hear God’s promise: “O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”

And so it is with hope that we remember on this Memorial Day weekend and this Pentecost Sunday our own death and burial with Christ, our own resurrection into new life, our own anointing with the Spirit of God, our baptism, which is not in the past but a present and daily call to the life of the kingdom of God; a present and daily reminder of the faithfulness of God, who puts God’s spirit within us, a recurring dream of the dignity of all people, the justice of God, that peace of Christ which passes all understanding, and the explosive tendencies of God’s holy Spirit.

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Costly

Posted on May 21, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

What if the sound of a rushing wind blows you out of the water,
running back to that place you last called home,
fallen now, weeping again by the roadside?

What if the very thought of tongues of flame raises
blisters on the back of your neck, 
raising Cain among your shattered nerves?

What if the advocate is a thin man in a shiny, nylon suit,
with bad breath and bad sucking teeth,
patting you nervously on the knee?

What if you are drunk on new wine
at nine in the morning,
or on old wine from the night before?

Then, she whispers, I will wait just beyond 
the fall of the horizon, until, spent,
you find yourself in the cold, hard light of dawn,
brooding over the empty water.

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Year B Easter 7: outside agitators and inside voices

Posted on May 17, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

The leaders in Jerusalem, religious and secular, were anticipating with no small degree of anxiety next weekend’s Festival of Weeks, or Pentecost, so called because it fell fifty (pente) days after Passover; a full week of weeks since death was cheated and life stolen out of captivity.

William Barclay explains,

“At least as many came to the Feast of Pentecost as came to the Passover. … never was there a more international crowd in Jerusalem than at the time of Pentecost. The Feast itself had two main significances. (i) It had a historical significance. It commemorated the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. (ii) It had an agricultural significance. … It had one other unique characteristic. The law laid it down that on that day no servile work should be done (Leviticus 23:21; Numbers 28:26). So it was a holiday for all and the crowds on the streets would be greater than ever.”

So the leaders in Jerusalem were nervous, because only seven times seven days earlier, at the last large Festival, a scandal had broken loose. Outside agitators had come down from Galilee (the law only commanded the presence of those living within twenty miles of Jerusalem at these Temple festivals; the Galileans could have stayed out of it, but no); they came down from Galilee and provoked the crowds into parodies of Pilate’s parades. They turned tables in the Temple courts. They raised loud protests against the complacent, perhaps even corrupt high priests, and demanded repentance, for the reign of God, they said, had drawn near.

The authorities did what they could. They arrested the ringleader, executed him publicly on the eve of the Festival, pour encourager les autres, hoped for the best. But rumours continued of a restless body, a risen leader, an immortal Messiah. The Galileans still haunted the marketplace, gathering in groups to murmur together. Outside agitators ready to wreak havoc on the Festival of Pentecost.

From the days of the Psalmists, the message has been broadcast near and far: Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. I remember seeing the signs around the city, in a dozen languages. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

When it comes to outside agitators, Jesus has to be the prime example, doesn’t he? I mean, yes, the truth of the Incarnation means that he was truly, fully human, created and born of a woman. And yet he was also God. He was in the world, and the world was created through him. He was buried beneath the earth, and he laid its foundations. He rose again, because he bore within him the eternity of life, the life that will not remain where death tries to restrain it. He ascended into heaven, because his place is within God. Talk about your outside agitator!

When he came, preaching repentance because the kingdom of God was at hand; when he travelled the countryside, far and near to his hometown; when he disrupted the dealings in the Temple, borrowed donkeys, took over upper rooms, even people’s family tombs – he was an outside agitator.

Of course, he was also the ultimate insider, the Word by whose authority all things were made; the divine image shared between each of his disciples, each of us.

You might think, with all this talk of outside agitation, that my own anxiety is somewhat elevated as we wait for the verdict in the Brelo case, and the eventual end to the Sheriff’s investigation into the death of Tamir Rice. You would be right. I am concerned. I am praying for the peace of the city of Cleveland.

And like many others, I am still trying to work out what it means to pray for the peace of the city in the wake of a Department of Justice report which shreds its record for peaceful and impartial administration of justice on the streets. Outside agitators, those DoJ investigators, every last one of them.

Let me be clear: I do not know what the verdict over Officer Brelo’s actions in the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams will be or even should be; there are some legal niceties at play which I have not fully unraveled or understood. I do have a few opinions.

Of course, whatever happens, the history and the future of the relationships that rustle through the undercurrents of our city, our county, and our country will not be fundamentally altered by one or two tragedies, by one or two indictments, by one or two reports. Tensions that run back decades, centuries, across oceans, that found their way into the prayers of the Psalmist will not be resolved in a week, or a week of weeks.

Whatever happens, we will pray for peace in the city. And whether I do so at the police memorial or whether I do so at a #BlackLivesMatter rally, I realize that I will always be in some way an outside agitator. But maybe, sometimes, that is just another word for a Christian.

Jesus prayed for his disciples, in that last night before his arrest, and he said,

I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.

Christians do not belong to the world as much as they do to Christ, and as such we will always be outside agitators. We have been given the Word of God, we have seen what the kingdom of God is supposed to look like: Christ eating with the tax collectors and the tax evaders, lepers embraced, life released. And there is no going back to the old ways of oppression, violence, the many ways in which the evil one sets snares for the unwary.

“Sanctify them in the truth,” says Jesus. “Your word is truth.” And the truth of God’s love for the world, let loose in the person of Jesus, is the ultimate agitator.

Like Jesus, becoming by his Incarnation the ultimate insider, we do not remain on the outside. Love does not stand outside of the city walls and serenade the sentries. Like Jesus, we are called, too, into the lives of those whom we serve. We are called to sit with those seeking hope, to stand with those who need raising up, to turn the tables on oppression and dereliction.

When I became a citizen of this country, a friend asked me why, and I asked her in return, “How can I claim to serve a community in which I have no voice, nor even a vote? ‘Seek the good of the city,’ says the prophet in Exile. I have to throw in my lot with the people of the city in order to love them with integrity.”

I am not going looking for trouble. God knows, trouble finds us easily enough. But I do ask that when we pray for the peace of the city, looking toward the Festival of Weeks, the Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit with great power, that we do so in the spirit of uncompromising truth, fearless compassion, merciful justice and love. That we do not become the people of whom the prophets warned, who speak peace where there is no peace. Jeremiah said,

They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,
saying, ‘Peace, peace’,
when there is no peace. (Jeremiah 6:14; 8:11)

and Ezekiel,

Because, in truth, because they have misled my people, saying, ‘Peace’, when there is no peace; and because, when the people build a wall, these prophets smear whitewash on it. (Ezekiel 13:10)

Because we are called to seek a deeper peace, one that resonates with the peace of God that passes all understanding, that keeps hearts and minds restless until they are reconciled one to another, and all to Christ.

“Protect them from the evil one,” said Jesus. “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.”

Let us go into our world armed to the back teeth only with peace of Christ. Amen.

William Barclay, The Daily Study Bible: The Acts of the Apostles, revd edn (St Andrew’s Press, 1976), 21

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Ascending

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

because the grip of

gravity cannot hold life

down when heaven waits

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