Year B Proper 8: Jairus, Jesus, gay marriage, and grace

Posted on June 27, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

This is an updated and expanded version of a sermon that appeared in an earlier draft form, and replaces that post.

A few short weeks ago, was Jairus among those religious leaders who thought Jesus mad, even demon-possessed, coming out of nowhere as he did to proclaim the kingdom of God drawn near, the day of salvation, the bending of the arc of justice, that ancient bow, close over the earth? After the scribes and the Pharisees came from Jerusalem to accuse him, his mother and brothers came to take him home, hide him away, thinking him mad; what part did that ruler of their synagogue, Jairus, play in that plan?

Yet now, with one of his own at risk, with his own life and love on the line, Jairus finds that the time is right, the day has drawn near, to give this good news a chance: the good news of God’s day of salvation, when the sick are healed and the lepers cleansed, the prisoners set free, and when good news is proclaimed to the poor. Jairus is converted by his own need for grace to seek and find grace in Jesus, to find the face of God in the one whom he had so recently opposed in no uncertain terms, to find Jesus.

I feel as though we’re living in a parable here. And into this parable speaks Paul:

And in this I give advice: It is to your advantage not only to be doing what you began and were desiring to do a year ago; but now you also must complete the doing of it; that as there was a readiness to desire it, so there also may be a completion out of what you have.

Friday was a complicated day. In one day, we heard joy and grief, jubilation and lamentation; but the theme of the day was most certainly grace.

At the funeral of Clementa Pinckney, pastor of Emanuel AME Church, President Obama, out of his own grief and as chief mourner of the nation, sang Amazing Grace, because, he said

As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind.Blind to racism. Blind to the outrageous proliferation of guns and gun violence. Blind, but now we see. And as we see, says Paul, and begin to desire better, so we also must complete the doing of it. We must keep our eyes open, our hearts clear-sighted, and our arms full of grace.

The Rev Gay Jennings, President of the House of Deputies, took up the theme of finishing what we started in her opening remarks to General Convention this week, when she said,

Even as we wrestle with the church’s future, we must reckon with its past. We must realize that the long, hard struggle to eliminate discrimination within the church required so much energy and vigilance, that we did not do enough to right the wrongs of discrimination, white privilege, and inequality in the world around us. This summer, especially, we must repent of that. Ferguson, Cleveland, Baltimore, Charleston – General Convention is where we Episcopalians have the ability not only to proclaim that black lives matter, but also to take concrete action toward ending racism and achieving God’s dream of racial reconciliation and justice. We can do no less.

For one legislator in South Carolina, the death of his friend was the catalyst that moved him from bright-eyed blindness to seeing in the Confederate flag an image that he could no longer endure, that he could no longer ignore. It was the personal connection which moved him from denial to grace, from grief to resolution, to complete what he had begun to desire upon the death of his friend. He was like Jairus, grieving for his own lost love.

For many of us who grew up in traditional households with rather uniform expectations of family life, it has been our encounters with the unexpected, the beloved other, the grace of difference that has moved us from suspicion, ignorance, and denial to the understanding that the blessings that we have received are owed by us to all; that we are called to share the grace that we know and learn from the grace that others offer. We have all, or mostly all, stood in Jairus’ shoes at one time or another; and it is where love has touched our lives that we have been moved us from blindness to grace, to see Jesus in the love of one another; to celebrate love as the victory of the kingdom of God.

And there is little more moving than a marriage.

In the morning, on Friday, the Supreme Court graced us with the legal means to complete the doing of that which too many have desired in vain: to marry, to respect the marriages of others, to respect the dignity of every human family. God bless us, every one!

In Friday’s decision, the Supreme Court cited the dignity of those seeking marriage for themselves and their loved ones. Our Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, responded,

I rejoice that the Supreme Court has opened the way for the love of two people to be recognized by all the states of this Union, and that the Court has recognized that it is this enduring, humble love that extends beyond the grave that is to be treasured by society wherever it exists.  Our society will be enriched by the public recognition of such enduring faithful love in families headed by two men or two women as well as by a woman and a man.  The children of this land will be stronger when they grow up in families that cannot be unmade by prejudice or discrimination.  May love endure and flourish wherever it is to be found.

And I am delighted to say our own bishop has already authorized clergy of this diocese to solemnize any legal marriage, using any authorized liturgy of the church, adapted for gender as necessary. He also notes that no cleric or congregation is required to offer such services, and so I will be consulting with our vestry to determine how best we will live out our promise of a loving welcome to all of God’s people. My prayer is that we will persevere on the path of justice, of grace, and of love; to bring to completion the work that has begun; for such is our baptismal promise to uphold the dignity of every human being; and such is our call to uphold the dignity of every human family.

For those who are grieved by Friday’s decision, I am grateful nevertheless that this same grace will still be there for us when we come to need it, for ourselves, or for our loved ones.

For like Jairus, our eyes have been opened to the grace that Jesus offers; and we must keep working to the completion for that which we desired, and not sink back into sleep; for he comes to us and says, “Child, get up,” and takes us by the hand, and offers us food and refreshment, and sends us on our way, to do what we may, knowing that we owe him our very lives, and the lives of all those whom we love. Amazing grace, indeed.

Amen.

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Year B Proper 7: partial Christianity and false peace

Posted on June 21, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

On Wednesday of last week, in a city a few hours from here, Loretta Lynch was finally sworn in as Attorney General, the first African American woman to hold the position. During the ceremony, she used a bible that had belonged to Frederick Douglass to take her oath of office.

Douglass was a remarkable man. Born a slave in maybe 1817 or 1818, he describes in his autobiography how he came to stand on the Chesapeake Bay, longing to cross over to the other side, envying the freedom of the boats set free from their anchoring chains, come whatever storms may. He finally escaped slavery, and became an eloquent and sought-after speaker on both sides of the ocean, on the subject of abolition. He wrote in an appendix to his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,

… between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference – so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. … Never was there a clearer case of “stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in.”

And indeed, Douglass did not use his eloquence only for political means, but he was also a preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Later on Wednesday, at an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, nine black men and women, descendants of Douglass in their faith and their civic involvement and their thirst for justice, for the kingdom of God; nine men and women were murdered by one who thought that they had no place there, no place here, no place in the kingdom of God.

Jesus told his disciples to get into the boat, let’s go to the other side, he said. And they ran into a storm.

Jesus is not here to lead us into harm. Praying in church is not what got those nine people killed. Racism, the direct descendant of the barbarity of Frederick Douglass’ tormentors, is the storm which surrounded them and overwhelmed them.

Jesus spoke peace to the storm, raised his voice above the wind and the waves, and even the wind and the waves obeyed him. And there was a dead calm.

But this one this one’s ears were full of the noise of racism and of hatred and of gunfire. Even in church, at prayer, this one, his middle name Storm; this one failed to hear above the noise of the storm the voice of Jesus calling, cajoling, pleading: Peace. Be Still.

Our Bishop, the Rt Rev Mark Hollingsworth, Jr, wrote this week from the road, in part,

In the futile attempt to make some sense of so senseless an act of evil, I am wanting to categorize this as an isolated act of a solitary and deranged individual. But of course I cannot separate myself from it; it is a reflection of a social system in which I am complicit, by my action and my inaction alike.

The noise of the storm that we call racism is still the background sound track to everyday life in this country. A black president swearing in a black AG on the bible of a former slave come good has not silenced the storm of hateful prejudice and oppressive privilege that still runs riot; far from it.

Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb? asks God of Job. And even the seas obey. But not us. We will not be held back, our proud flags and our preening privilege shall not be stopped like the tide. We rage on, oblivious to the commands of peace, the arms of Jesus outstretched.

Those of us who have the privilege of tuning out the noise, those of us who do not see colour, do not hear it, I’m sorry to say, are part of the problem. If we are able to ignore the storm, it may be that we are sitting in the eye of it.

The only way to remove ourselves from the storm, to stand on the side of Jesus, is to wake up, to stand up, to step up and to speak up, and not to let up until the chaos is quelled and true peace stretches out across the waters all around us, as far as the eye can see.

I am trying. I want to stay in the boat with Jesus, full of the faith that defies all fear, speaking peace to the storm, commanding peace, calming the chaos, even clinging with the disciples to his coattails. But I know that there is a part of me that still swirls away with the clouds, oblivious of the havoc that I am wreaking. And for that, I am sorry.

Meanwhile, back on the boat, words of peace flatten the waves, astonish the wind into silence. The relatives of the slain churchgoers naming their grief and their anger directly to their tormentor, the storms that rage in their hearts, and then speaking mercy, forgiveness, peace.

I can barely imagine what is must be like for that church, for Emanuel AME Church in Charleston to come together to worship this morning. But these few brave disciples have already shown us that their faith is stronger than their fear. They do not want to become a part of the storm. They would rather stay in the boat with Jesus, come what may. In voices ripped by the wind and shredded by a rain of tears, they have stood with Jesus and spoken into the face of the storm and said, Peace. Be still.

Not without anger. Not without fear. Not without grief. Not without passion. Peace is not the absence of emotion, but the presence of God.

Peace is not the absence of passion, but the presence of Christ.

There is peace to be found, with the help of Christ, by the grace of God. But it is not the false calm at the eye of the storm. It is not found in among the blustering winds but back in the boat, shoulder to shoulder with the other disciples, awake, alert, and close to Christ.

Elizabeth Eaton, Presiding Bishop of the ELCA, the denomination of the church to which this week’s shooter belongs, also wrote this week:

I urge all of us to spend a day in repentance and mourning. And then we need to get to work. Each of us and all of us need to examine ourselves, our church and our communities. We need to be honest about the reality of racism within us and around us. We need to talk and we need to listen, but we also need to act. No stereotype or racial slur is justified. Speak out against inequity. Look with newly opened eyes at the many subtle and overt ways that we and our communities see people of color as being of less worth. Above all pray – for insight, for forgiveness, for courage.

There is peace to be found, not without passion, not without work, not the false calm at the eye of the storm, but the peace of Christ which passes all understanding, which makes no sense but leave his disciples dumbfounded, asking, Who is this, that even the wind and the waves obey him?

And so let us pray for that peace, and for our part in it, using the prayer of St Francis [via the Book of Common Prayer]:

Lord, make us instruments of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let us sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is discord, union;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

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Year B Proper 6: Consider the birds

Posted on June 14, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

“Consider the birds,” says Jesus. Not here, in the passage we read today; but he says it. I was drawn to consider the birds when we read from Ezekiel, about the twig from the top of the majestic cedar tree that would be transplanted and grow to new heights, attracting all of the birds of the air to its shade and strong branches: eagles and hawks and owls. Then there’s the mustard bush, the greatest of all shrubs, which seems like a comical commendation. The very word “shrub” shrugs off majesty. It is no cedar tree. Yet it provides shelter to the little birds that live on the ground, nesting in the earth under its shade, resting in its protective shrubbery, hidden from predators and the noonday sun.

There are a lot of birds in the Bible. They seem to have a special place in the divine heart. And as I read more and more of them – the birds of the Bible – I was reminded of a book I read as a child, about the special place of birds.

“Do you know about storks? Storks on your roof bring all kinds of good luck. I know this about storks; they are big and white and have long yellow bills and tall yellow legs. They build great big messy nests, sometimes right on your roof. But when they build a nest on the roof of a house, they bring good luck to that house and to the whole village that that house stands in. Storks do not sing. They make a noise like you do when you clap your hands when you feel happy and good. I think storks clap their bills to make the happy sounds when they feel happy and good. They clap their bills almost all the time except when they are in the marshes and ditches hunting for frogs and little fishes and things. Then they are quiet. But on your roof they are noisy. But it is a happy noise, and I like happy noises.

That is all I know about storks; but my aunt in the village of Nes knows a lot about storks, because every year two big storks come to build their nest right on her roof. But I do not know much about storks, because storks never come to Shora. They go to all the villages all around, but they never come to Shora. That is the most that I know about storks, but if they came to Shora, I would know more about storks.”

So writes little Lina at the beginning of the book, The Wheel on the School, by Meindert de Jong (HarperCollins, 1954). Lina decides that the reason the storks don’t come is because the roofs are too sharp – in her aunt’s village, every house has a wheel on top, so that the storks have a safe and comfortable place to land and build their large nests. But an older woman who had lived long enough to remember the storks coming to Shora wondered if they wouldn’t also want trees, to rest in; to take shelter and shade, and to hide from prying eyes. It’s difficult for trees to grow in Shora, because of the salt spray from the sea; only one survives, and it is in a walled garden behind one of the houses. That shows, suggests the teacher, that the trees need our protection, and sanctuary from the salt sea spray in order to grow and offer protection and sanctuary to the storks. As the story continues, and the quest for a wheel, trees, and most importantly storks to stay in the village broadens and deepens, it draws everyone in, from the youngest to the oldest, and draws them together, to share their stories, their ideas, their inspirations, their abilities, their selves. They learn to give shelter and shade to one another as they seek to offer sanctuary to the storks.

And that, says Jesus, is what the kingdom of God is like. The seed, the germ of a mustard seed plant, or of wheat and barley, or the cedar tree, or of an idea, or of a story, or of friendship, of love: “Friendship,” wrote the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “is a sheltering tree.” These things can grow to great heights and breadths and bear fruit for those that need it, bring heat and flavour to life, and provide shelter and shade and rest to the birds of the air, the large and the little, the strong and the vulnerable. All share together in the bounty of the seed, the germ of the kingdom of God.

And as birds tend to do, they themselves will raise fledglings who will fly from the nest and reach new trees and shrubs and spread their seeds and the cycle start over again. All from one little seed, says Jesus.

Which might lead us to consider how careful we must be about the seeds that we plant.

If we plant weeds, they will strangle the newly sprouted seedlings before they get a chance to grow. Negativity and pessimism and prejudice and habitual self-interest, all will eat away at the root that the kingdom of God is trying to set in our hearts, and we will struggle to see it grow if our hearts are turned only to the darkness. I rarely find evidence of the kingdom of God in the online comments section of the news sites, where bitterness and bile run rampant.

If we plant thorns, they will not only keep our enemies out but they will pierce us too, close in as they grow. They soon get out of hand, even if when we plant them we think we can control them, like the habits of fear that feed on themselves and breed further fear, until we are afraid of our own shadows, our own mirror image. The kingdom of God, to my knowledge, has never been compared in parables to a thicket of thorns from which no one can escape.

And if we will sow the seeds of enmity, of violence, of oppression, of jealousy and pride, then we will find that the trees we thought to see grow into majestic cedars have all been cut down for crosses.

The good news is that no one is too small or insignificant to make a difference in the landscape in which we live. The girl in the story, Lina, was the only girl in her school: excluded from the boys’ games because of skirts and such: but she was the one who dreamt of storks and the seed, the germ of her idea got the whole village not only dreaming but acting and … well, I won’t give away the ending.

The seeds that we sow can give real and needed shelter to those that need it. When we say, “God loves you. No exceptions,” do we understand that there are people who have never heard that? There are people who have heard that God watches the fall of a sparrow but never known that God reaches out to catch them? When we say, “God loves you. No exceptions,” do we mean it? If so, we are planting seeds that shelter and shade and offer safe nesting material to all sorts of strange and familiar birds, no exceptions; and both we and they are blessed.

The cedar tree sends out eagles as messengers across the land and sea to proclaim the kingdom of God. But just like the mustard seed, the tiniest grain, even the smallest and shyest of God’s creations can branch out to offer shade and shelter to the birds of the air and the little ones that nest close to the ground, and camouflage from danger, and rest for one who leans in the little branches.

Think of a hotdog without the hope of mustard, and consider how fortunate and elevated and blessed we are to have been scattered and sown, little seeds of God’s kingdom.

Amen.

Featured photo: our own little visitor attracted by the hedgerow outside the church, napping.

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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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