Year B Epiphany 2: “the breaking of bread and in the prayers”

Posted on January 18, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve talked some about our Baptismal covenant, and as Epiphany continues, I want to dig a little deeper into those promises that we have made, and remade, and renewed.

The first seems ideal for an Annual Meeting Sunday, because it is all about community, being faithful in worship and the sacraments, and being faithful in coming together.
It’s that coming together part that many see lacking in the world today. If you’re in the kind of online lists that I am, you see essay after essay about why church attendance is declining, how mainline denominations are failing, and whether virtual church – attending online, or calling it in, is going to be either the death or the salvation of traditional religion.

Sometimes, I think they miss the point. One article I read this week said, along the way,
“The more that worship is at your church is about teaching and inspiration only, the more people will be able to substitute your church offering with digital ones.”

I wonder how the kind of worship the author is imagining fits with that promise “to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.”

I heard a sermon once about the difference between continuing to pray, and continuing in “the prayers,” the ones that have been passed down by the apostles, from Jesus’ own to us.
There is something more that happens when we come together as disciples, as apostles of Christ, than mere inspiration, as wonderful as that might be.

In the readings that we have today – setting Paul aside for now, because he seems to be having a bit of a moment – in the Samuel reading and the John, the community of faith comes into its own, and does its part valiantly to build up the kingdom of God.

Samuel is a young boy living in the house of God under the guardianship of Eli. His mother and father visit him every year; his mother makes him a new coat each time to bring to him. She must spend the year guessing how much he has grown. Samuel lives at the shrine at Shiloh because of a promise Hannah made when she was so desperate for a child, a promise to return him to the Lord, to the temple where she was praying. Once Samuel was weaned, which would be about the age of three, she brought him to the priest who had witnessed her promise and promised its fulfillment. Eli took Samuel in. His own sons grown, he started over with this young boy and raised him up to serve God.

When the young boy, Samuel, heard God calling, he didn’t know what he was hearing. It took the experience of one steeped in the traditions of the Lord, who had lived his life within a worshipping community, to recognize the voice of God, even in those days, when the word of God was rare among them, and visions not often seen.

Turn and turn about, it took the newcomer, the child, the innocent to bring before Eli the charges against his sons; to speak truth to the establishment and the power. As frightened, as young and inexperienced, as Samuel was, his was the call to offer judgment to Eli for the sake of his sons.

Without one another, without the community of the shrine at Shiloh, their church, neither of these two would have heard, or if they had heard, still neither would have recognized the word of God speaking to them, telling them their own stories, guiding their lives. They needed one another, and it was the worshipping community that brought them together.

In these days, as much as in those, the word of the Lord is rare, and visions not often seen. Of course, they can come unbidden to anyone, anywhere; but if there is no context, no tradition of hearing and seeing, of seeking God, how will they be known? How will they be interpreted? To whom will they be told? If not for the context of a worshipping community, how will our children know to listen for the Lord, to seek God, while God wills to be found?

In the Gospel, Jesus has just come from John and the Jordan. He has called Andrew, and Andrew has called Simon, who will be named Peter, and brought him along, too. Now Jesus comes across Philip, and as soon as Philip hears the call, he runs to his friend Nathanael, and brings him along: “Come and see.” Andrew and Philip each as their first response to Jesus is to turn back to their community and tell those closest to them, “We have found him.” We have found Jesus. It is their natural response, their overpowering urge to share the good news, to bring others along with them, not to follow along alone but to bring and to be and to build a community of faith. The apostles have no notion of following Jesus alone. It doesn’t even cross their mind.

Few of us are designed to be ascetics, withdrawn from the world. Each of us can, of course, listen for God and search for God alone; but I know few people, and I am certainly not one of them, who can sustain a lively, long-term prayer life without a community of faith to remind them, encourage them, to carry them through those dry times when the desert sands burn and we have to hide our faces, or turn away; to lift them clear of the rip tides when the floods overwhelm. Those who can hear the word of God over the clamour of daily living without help are rare; the clear-sighted mystic seldom seen. Most of us need one another, if we’re honest.

When I moved to Ohio, I missed my community of faith so badly it hurt. But when I started going regularly to the cathedral, I noticed that they used the same words at the fraction, the breaking of the bread, as the church we had left behind. We don’t use them often here, but you know them:

We who are many are one body, because we all share in the one Bread.

The breaking of bread, and the shared prayers were my bridge across the ocean. Knowing that my faith community was still one body with me, because we all share in the one bread, lifted me so that I could finally feel as though my head was above water; helped my heart which had got lost somewhere en route, finally to make it to the other side.

Most of us need one another to help us to find God, to hear God, to see God’s face in Jesus.

So will you continue in the apostles’ fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers?

I will, with God’s help. Amen.

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Conflict

Posted on January 13, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

Hatred slips, hypodermic, under your skin,
while love needles through your veins
to tattoo its name on your heart.

It blusters in where angels fear to tread:
“All’s fair to a soul at war,” it says.
Love demurs, “That’s not how it goes.”

Hatred launches grenades, shredding lives.
Love, shouting from the rooftops, falls
on deafened ears, slides down the drainpipe to land,
crumpled and pleading at your feet.

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The Baptism of Our Lord: profession and practice

Posted on January 11, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

Let this be quite clear to us: the killing of innocents anywhere is not a religious act, not by the definition shared by Christians, Muslims, Jews; not by anyone who understands religion as the pursuit of God, the seeking out and searching for the divine amongst us. God Almighty, God who is great, is not worshipped by carnage.

As tragic as the news out of Paris has been this week, the news out of Nigeria, where Boko Haram has massacred of hundreds of families, is perhaps beyond even our scope of understanding.

There is an argument to be made that extremism is its own religion; if we take a functionalist view of religion, then whichever values govern our lives become our religion, regardless of whether or not they worship God.[i] The Westboro Baptist Church, for example, may call itself Christian, but its practice is not one we would recognize as mimicking the values of Christ. But if the values which define our daily function are ipso facto our religion, then the bombing of an NAACP office in Colorado, which also happened this past week, might even be thought of as an act of religious violence; for some people, racism is a governing article of faith.

The religion which is practiced by any of us, by all of us, is not always the same as the religion that we profess.

All of this, as academic as it sounds, is thrown into sharp relief when we come to consider our baptism, as we do today: baptism, which forms us first as Christians. Baptism is one of the two sacraments that Jesus gave us and directly commanded us to continue; that he himself participated in and initiated for us. It was the way, from the earliest church, that new Christians entered the church, the household of all believers. We see from the encounter with the Ephesians in Acts, and even from the event of Jesus’ own baptism, the coming together of an act of repentance, of cleansing from sin, on the part of a believer, which Paul names as John’s baptism; and the grace of God freely flowing through the gift of the Holy Spirit, received by Christ and Christians everywhere.

We make baptism very safe, with our fancy fonts and our silver shells and lace christening gowns; but religion is not safe. In the baptism of Jesus, in that river, he fell down under the running water, twisted by its currents and submerged by its strong stream, the Word silenced by the Flood; and the waters of the chaos before creation witnessed once more the Spirit of God brooding over them like a dark bird; the Spirit of God seeking out Jesus like a dove, so that the moment he broke through the surface, gasped a breath, it was there to fan new life into his lungs.

That moment of crisis, when we renounce evil, the ways of the world and the devil, and turn instead to the new creation in Christ, that kingdom of God; that is a dangerous moment, when chaos swells to overwhelm, and is beaten back once more by the Spirit of the living God, beating its wings against the waves. Even when we don’t see it, in our safe, warm churches with their candles and their fonts, the struggle goes on, a strong undercurrent.

Our baptism is not a tame religious rite; it is fierce enough to equip us to deal with the conflicts of the world and its chaos, with the help of God and the anointing of the Spirit.

And this is where I left you last week; at the Baptismal Covenant which we will renew together shortly. It is a covenant in which we attempt to explain to ourselves what is happening here; in which we try to explain to ourselves what our religion is, and what it does.

We begin, yes, with the assurances of the doctrines of our faith: that the God who made creation made us all, and loves us, redeeming us from our sin and squalour, even from the pain of death through Jesus Christ; that we will be resurrected, at the last, with all the saints; that we shall know justice, and the peace that passes all understanding.

That’s where it begins; with the Creed; but it goes on, at least in the Episcopal Church. We name a covenant, a set of commitments, that both demonstrate and promise the new life that we have entered through the rushing river, echoing through the font; a set of active and proactive values on which to base our daily lives; our functional religion.

We promise to sustain ourselves and our religion by participating in the community of the church. We need that community to check our fringes, to keep us from disappearing down rabbit holes; to save us from extremism.

We promise to live out the Gospel; to live it out loud.

We promise that when we fail; not if, but when; we will repent, and return, own up, not hide away. That practice of living in community, with its fallings out and reachings out and forgivings might help with that one.

We promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons; this is the difficult one which encompasses loving our enemies, and praying for those who persecute us.

Sometimes it seems incompatible with this last: striving for justice and peace, and upholding the dignity of every human being. How can we love and pray for those who destroy the dignity of so many, for the purposes of extremism, racism, fanaticism? Only with the help of God, and the knowledge that God’s grace can turn even the worst offender to repentance; for that we can pray.

In baptism we are made new creations: whole creations, whose hearts and minds can be in concert with our hope, and our wills, with God’s help. We get to marry our beliefs to our actions, our professed faith with our professions.

In that context, some of you have asked me about Heather Cook, the Suffragan Bishop of Maryland, who has now been charged (but not convicted) with vehicular manslaughter, DUI, driving while texting, and leaving the scene of an accident, in the death of cyclist Thomas Palermo over the Christmas break. I don’t know any more about Heather Cook or about the events of that day than is shared in the media; but she herself preached a prescient sermon last fall, called “Be Prepared,” during which she reflected on that Scouting motto and its implications for moulding and honing our habits, our reactions and responses, so that when an emergency occurs, we will be prepared to respond appropriately. So that, we might say today, we will be prepared to act on our baptism, to act out our baptism. The short timeline from pulpit to press conference might conceivably illustrate how difficult it can be to practice what we profess; that none of us is defended by position or by piety from the dangers of falling short.

Each of us knows from our own lives how close beneath the surface chaos lives. That may be why, if you were wondering, we do this over and over again, season by season, making the same promises, breaking the same bread , so that we can break the surface of false religion, and breathe the oxygen of God’s love for all whom God has made. So that we can be restored, recreated, reunited body and soul, the religion that we profess with the religion that we practice; our faith with our lives; our promise with our hope.

We know from bitter experience that the chaos was subdued but not destroyed by creation; but, we remind ourselves and one another, the Spirit of God still broods over the water. The song of the dove – you know that incessant cooing of pigeons, completely inescapable and irrepressible? – the song of the Spirit still counters the clamour of bad news, if we will listen, if we will let it.

We will, with God’s help.

[i] William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. pp. 105-118

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Hearing Voices

Posted on January 9, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

“And it was,” he said, “as though the heavens opened, I swear to God; the clouds at that very moment split apart like the Red Sea rising, and the sun striking through, fell warm and heavy on my back;
no, not heavy, but as a light hand on my shoulder, bird-boned, filigreed.
It was as though my father reached out of heaven to tell me, all is forgiven; you are loved.” He sighed out, spent.
The weary-wrinkled doctor leaned back a little further in his leather chair.
“Tell me about your Mother,” he began.

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Epiphany: wise gifts

Posted on January 6, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

I wonder whether, in the clumsy and hurried packing of a small family with a small child, fleeing for their lives with the essentials and little more, listening over their shoulders for the alarm, the tramp of boots, the metallic clang of steel; in their hurry and their need and their fear, I wonder if they were able even to take with them the myrrh, the frankincense, the gold.

The magi had brought it many miles; from at least far enough away not to know any better, despite their proverbial wisdom, than to consult Herod. They had journeyed for who knows how long – days, weeks, months? Years? Perhaps their whole enlightened lives, since they first looked up and recgnized, realized the stars speaking to them in their bright semaphore; perhaps they had always been on this pilgrimage, their destination, their destiny to meet God, born king of the Jews, a baby human, nestled at his mother’s breast.

That must have been confusing; disorienting, you might say.

The remarkable thing is that nevertheless they trusted the instincts and the star’s bright semaphore, the sign that had drawn them to this place, this child; apparently unencumbered by disappointment, anxiety or regret, they laid at the feet of a nondescript infant in a nondescript town outside of the great city, out of earshot of the temple and out of sight of the palace; they laid there on the ground the treasures of their accumulation of days and years and miles: the myrrh, frankincense, the gold they had brought across the wilderness, braving bandits and who knows what treachery to offer their gifts to God.

And after all that effort and expectation, and after all that time, and all of those miles, and all that money, they asked for no surety that their prayers would be answered to their satisfaction. They asked no place at the right hand of the child who must need wise advisors; every king who was any king had them. They asked no favour, no future; they left without even finding out whether their gifts would go with the child, or be bartered or used as bribes on their escape to Egypt, or abandoned and left to benefit those other families of Bethlehem who were about to suffer devastation. Did the gold go to buy off one or more of Herod’s soldiers? The wise men didn’t stay to find out.

They offered their all at the cradle of God, of Jesus. They offered their journey, their blisters, their tribulations. They offered their time, the days, and the nights spent under starlit skies. The delays on the dark nights when clouds covered the moon and hid the stars from sight. They offered their treasure.

An act of true worship: offering all to God, without ever stopping to check whether God would use it to their liking; they sought nothing in return for the labour and love of their lives, except to know that God has, indeed, come into the world, and to see the face of God look back at them, brighter than any star.

Wise, wise men, indeed.

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Impetuous

Posted on January 5, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

For two pins, I’d rip
out every stitch, if it
weren’t a waste of time.

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Year B Christmas 2: the flight into Egypt and beyond

Posted on January 3, 2015 by Rosalind C Hughes

This is not a story about how special, important, and indispensable Jesus was; that his family out of all the others in Bethlehem was warned to get out of town, so that he alone out of all the little boys in Bethlehem could grow up to be the Messiah, the Christ. So that he alone out of all the little boys in Bethlehem could grow up. Because if one thing is clear from reading the Bible, the Gospels, from our prayer and our own lives with God, it is that every one of those children was dear to God; every one of those mothers and fathers, God would have spared their pain if God could; that if those children were not important, not special, not indispensable, then there would have been no purpose to the Incarnation, the birth of Jesus at all.

“For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son…”

The beginning of Matthew’s gospel is clear about setting up a scriptural context and mandate for Jesus. Everything that happens does so “that the scripture may be fulfilled.” Jesus has to flee as a refugee to Egypt so that the Exodus can be revisited, the theme of deliverance brought into play: deliverance from slavery, captivity, oppression; deliverance from the desert, the wilderness; deliverance from exile and delivery into the new world, the Promised Land of freedom and plenty, the land where God dwells. And all of this, if you read the old stories, is delivered only by God.

The only piece of scripture which Matthew does not say must be fulfilled is the one about Rachel crying for her children after Herod has killed them all. That did not have to happen, suggests Matthew. Even he balks at such a level of determinism, such fatalism. No; that atrocity was all on Herod.

In the old story, it was the Pharaoh, a foreign and godless king, who brought down chaos by his stubborn refusal to release the people of God. In the end, he called down even death, even the death of his own son, the children of his own people. In the new story, Herod is one of us, one of the people of Jerusalem, of Bethlehem, one of the chosen people of God; and he does it to his own people, his own flesh and blood. We have turned upon ourselves, and it is from ourselves and our own sin that God is born to save us.

We do not have to look far to find the cousins of Joseph, Mary and Jesus fleeing for their lives, placing their safety in uncertain guides, living on the edges of life and death in exile, in borderlands, in no-man’s land, at the mercy of the merciless.

In the past week, not one but two cargo vessels have been intercepted off the shores of Italy after their crews abandoned their human cargo, refugees from Syria and from northern Africa, leaving the un-crewed ships on collision courses with the Italian coast, carrying hundreds of people, including children, and at least one woman who gave birth to her child, apparently even as the rescue was underway. Modern-day soldiers of Herod, mercenaries who cared nothing for their cargo but only for their money, abandoned them in stormy seas to await their fate.

And just in case we are tempted to blame Pharaoh – foreign kings, godless religion, not our problem – have we forgotten so quickly the children on our own borders, bussed into dormitories full of fear and bewilderment, children whose parents had such despair in their own land and such faith in our goodwill to all people that they sent us their flesh and blood? And we held up signs and shouted at the innocents, “No one wants you here.”

Have we forgotten so quickly the children killed by our own grown-up guns, the lives maimed by our own sin? Herod is one of us, and it is from our own sin that God was born to save us.

But here’s the thing: it is from our own sin that God was born to save us. Jesus came in order to deliver us from slavery and oppression, from sin and evil, from death in all of its guises. God became incarnate, took flesh and dwelt among us because God so loved the world that God could not stay away. Because God so loved those children, of Bethlehem, of the borderlands, of Cudell Park, that God became one of them, one with them, so that they would know, each of them, that God was with them: Emmanuel.

Jesus was not saved from danger, from Herod’s jealous rage, because he was more important than the other children in Bethlehem. Jesus was born into the same danger that they were because God so loved them world that God would stop at nothing to deliver it from that danger.

Jesus became a refugee, a borderland survivor, a displaced person with no home, no country, no security, with only the clothes on his back and whatever his parents could carry because God so loved the world that God could not imagine telling a child that no one wanted him; God wanted us all to know that even those whom the world rejects as outcasts, or abandons at sea, bear the image of the Christ child in their stories, in their lives.

“For God so loved the world” is not a romantic story of clean straw, shining stable lights and gentle cattle lowing. It is the story of our lives, of God entering the very heart of our divisions, our distress, our sin and our sorrow, in order to deliver us out of them, by the grace of God’s love for each and every child of Bethlehem; each and every child of God.

And to those who believe, who count themselves as followers of Christ, it is an invitation, to do the work of love: to love the world as God loves us; to love the world because God loves us; to carry on the work of delivering hope out of despair, comfort out of sorrow, justice out of violence, peace out of mercy, light in the darkness,

remembering the Light that has come into the darkness, which the darkness has not comprehended nor overcome.

[ Because this is the season of new resolutions, I’m going to propose a little homework assignment between this week and next. Next Sunday we celebrate the Baptism of Our Lord, which is an opportunity to review and renew our own baptismal promises. It is precisely those promises which mark our commitment and give us the chance to avoid the horrible sin of Herod, and to live instead with the love that God has for the world.

We promise:

to reaffirm our renunciation of evil and renew our commitment to Christ;

to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers;

to persevere in resisting evil; whenever we fall into sin, repenting and returning to the Lord;

to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ;

to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbour as ourself;

to strive for justice and peace among all people; respecting the dignity of every human being.

Each of these; all of these we are charged to remember and employ, with God’s help. We revisit them at intervals throughout the year, when we celebrate our baptism and share it with new Christians. Sometimes, one will speak more loudly than another to one of us or to another.

So, remembering that invitation, to do the work of love: to love the world as God loves us; to love the world because God loves us; to carry on the work of delivering hope out of despair, comfort out of sorrow, justice out of violence, peace out of mercy, light in the darkness; I wonder if there is one of these that offers itself as a mantra for your new year, one that will be your focus for faith and faithfulness, not forgetting the others, but one to keep as your touchstone, to keep you connected in all that you say and do and are in this year to your baptismal covenant, the source and reminder of new life with God. (You can remind yourself of them in pages 292-294 of the Book of Common Prayer.)

I wonder if you will bring that promise with you next week. I wonder how it will be worked out in the year to come; but that, dear reader, is a sermon for another day. ]

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New wine and old skin

Posted on December 31, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

It is a truth universally acknowledged that
we prefer beginnings to endings,
opening lines to famous last words;
and so we usher in the year with
bells and whistles; fireworks
obliterate the unforgotten, bury the
little piles of guilt, glinting with
the tears unshed by cold hearts
broken in anew each passing day;
we say, “happy”, as we turn our backs
and pretend it never happened,
nor will again; our faces shine
with the empty light of what has
yet to be.
And would you have us
turn again to the harrowed husks
of last year’s selves, and hand them
into the next new thing; or whisper
words of sweet release as we slough
them, dessicated, into the abyss?

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Christmas 2014

Posted on December 26, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

On Christmas Eve, we talked about miracles and the veil between heaven and earth rent by angel song and the birth of God, the love of God borne into the world by a baby.
The next morning, wondering what to say next, I remembered the story of our first child’s first Christmas, or the first one that she knew. She was old enough to be aware of the event, but not old enough for anticipation, so that everything was a surprise, an unexpected delight. She had a very good Christmas.
But the real surprise was the next morning, when she got up and came downstairs and discovered all of her opened gifts still under the tree (there wasn’t much of that small room that wasn’t under the tree); still there, still hers, still an unexpected delight. She was overjoyed all over again.
The next morning, for Mary, Jesus was still there. It was only the beginning of his story. It was only the middle of our story with God.
Perhaps that was something of what John meant, when he talked about light coming into the world, and the darkness had not overcome it; it blazed on, even so.
So that with every act of love and forgiveness and grace that we receive, and with every act of justice and mercy and love that we offer, we may remember that the story of God’s love has no ending.
After even the longest night, when we awaken the next morning, we find that the darkness has not overcome it.

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Christmas Eve: love you to Bethlehem and back

Posted on December 24, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

There is a tradition that the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day is a time for miracles. Beatrix Potter, who wrote the Peter Rabbit books, said that,

it is in the old story that all the beasts can talk, in the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the morning (though there are very few folk that can hear them, or know what it is that they say.)

Beatrix Potter, The Tailor of Gloucester (Frederick Warne, 1987 edn)

And there has been a lot of attention paid this year, on its one hundredth anniversary, to the so-called Christmas truce between the Allied and German forces in the trenches of World War I, when beleaguered soldiers sang Christmas carols across the battlefield, and even exchanged gifts of the goodies sent from home.

It wasn’t long before the peace broke back out into all-out war, but for that brief time of respite, it must have seemed as though the heavens were smiling on them, there in the mud and the mire; must have sounded as though the angels were singing with them, Peace on earth, goodwill to all people.

Certainly, we could use a miracle or two this year, this season. We could use some respite. We could use some peace.

But the real miracle of Christmas is not about respite, or a break from the grueling realities of life. Just the opposite. It is about the very fact that life goes on, with its struggle and strife, and the miracle is that as shabby and shameful as we can be, with our wars and our worries; as silly and unnecessary as we can get with our greed and our distractions; as human and prone to error as we show ourselves time after time, that God is in it with us.

The miracle of Christmas is not that life as usual ends, or is even suspended, but that God loves us in the very midst of it, in the middle of unmade beds and unmade Christmas pies; in the middle of family squabbles and tantrums; in the middle of our divisions and yes, our sin; God loves us.

Far from laying back and letting it all go, God is actively labouring to be born among us.

That is why the angels sing. That is why the shepherds run. That is why the wise men come and the very stars gather to celebrate, illuminate the small, stumble-down, tumble-down stable of Christmas card pictures and children’s nativity plays, or whichever humble home with a manger of hay Jesus found to be born into; because his birth, in reality, was not so much unlike yours or mine.

As the Christmas carol says,

Day by day like us he grew. He was little, weak and helpless. Tears and smiles like us he knew. And he feeleth for all our sadness, And he shareth in our gladness.

(“Once in Royal David’s City,” words: Cecil Frances Humphreys Alexander, Hymns for Little Children, 1848)

That is the miracle: that God is with us, born to be one of us, so that we may know that God knows us inside and out, that God loves us inside and out, to Bethlehem and back.

Tomorrow, the cats will sound like tortured violins again, and the sides will draw up their lines again, and peace on earth will feel like a dream deferred.

But God is dreaming with us, snoring in the manger with sweet baby’s breath. And there is no going back from that. God, Emmanuel, Jesus Christ is here to stay

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