Palm Sunday 2024

Posted on March 24, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for Palms and the Passion; John 12:12-16(9-19); the Passion according to Mark

Either side of the palms passage we heard from John this morning, quiet in the background, is Lazarus. Lazarus, we are told, is the reason that such a crowd has gathered to greet Jesus. More: the people who witnessed Lazarus’ return from the tomb have told everyone what they saw, what they smelt, what they heard, what they felt when the tomb was opened and Lazarus emerged from his grave clothes. Mystery and magic are in the air, along with rumours of a Messiah, and the people flock to see what will happen next.

What happens next is apparently the reversal of Lazarus’ miracle. At the beginning of Palm Sunday, the authorities are looking to put Lazarus to death because they cannot comprehend how a dead man can walk, and they are frightened and confused at what this means, that the boundaries between death and life have been breached. And by the end of Holy Week they have hung all of their insecurities and outrage around Jesus neck, and the Romans, with the power of life or death over anyone they choose to occupy, have obliging crucified the people’s Messiah, putting to death not only the man but the miracle, and the magic, and the mobbing of the crowd.

I wonder if all who passed by, demanding that Jesus save himself as he had saved others, were mocking him, or whether some still held out hope that even now, as he had raised Lazarus, he could bring down this cruel system of execution around the ears of the Romans and all who supported the violence that they called peace-keeping.

They still did not understand the breadth and depth of Jesus’ transgression of those boundaries between life and death, that in order to defeat death not only for Lazarus but for all, in order to reverse the injustices not only of the Romans but of all corrupt powers, in order to be fully human, and to reconcile that with his divinity, he had to harrow hell himself, within his own body and blood.

I’m not sure we’ve fully understood it yet.

There is a part of us, isn’t there, that still wants magic; for Jesus to wave his hands and turn water into wine, or wine into water; to take away not only the sting of death but the ache of grief that it leaves in its wake; to come down from the Cross so that we don’t have to walk that way. Otherwise why cry, “Hosanna!”?

Yes, I can get behind that turn in the crowd, that shouts for joy at the raising of Lazarus, and is dumbfounded by the crucifixion of Jesus. “Why don’t you save yourself?” How can you save us, they mean, if you die?

The late theologian Alan E. Lewis puts it this way: 

“The world we know is one in which unjust oppressors too regularly hold sway; in which the innocent suffer through disease, disaster, greed, and war; in which the lifelong threat of death, and the pervasiveness of evil, conspire to make belief in a God of love and power impossible.”[i] And on the Cross it looked as though that evil had defeated God. Yet, says Lewis, after St Paul, where sin abounds, God’s grace abounds all the more (Romans 5:12-21).[ii]

To put it another way, when the forces of evil, sin, and death increase so far as to destroy God on the Cross, God does not squash back but expands to encompass even this with grace, with forgiveness, with love. Because it is the nature of God to love, to forgive, to overwhelm sin with grace, it is only by engulfing even those forces that would deny God’s grace with grace that God acts.

So where does that leave us? We are standing in the crowd still, our palm branches in our hands, Hosannas still hovering on our lips, and we are as confused as the next person about how this way of the Cross makes sense. His disciples did not understand these things at first (John 12:16). Turning to Lewis again, he writes, “At the time, not even the closest of his disciples could tolerate or understand the thought of such a denouement to the ministry of Jesus. But faith’s perceptiveness came finally to see that his suffering, cross, and tomb were Christ’s glory and his triumph, the very source and form of his rule and judgement of the world.”[iii]

If we are still looking for a military ruler, or a magician, or a mighty Messiah, we had better look elsewhere. What Jesus offers us is merely the humility, servitude, self-sacrifice, self-abandonment of an all-encompassing, death-defeating love: the creative, life-giving, all-absorbing love of God that will not let us go, nor let us down, nor leave us alone.

I suspect that if there was one person in the crowd who understood, it was Lazarus. He alone had made that journey to the grave and back again, had seen his sisters’ grief and disbelief, had witnessed the wonder and anger of the crowd that saw the boundaries of life and death broken open before them. He understood their bewilderment, since he had experienced things no mortal can properly process. And he knew what Jesus was doing: that he was ready to take Lazarus’ place in the tomb, so as to sanctify even death with his love; so that Lazarus need not be afraid to die again, even if his enemies had their way, because Jesus had overwhelmed their evil designs with his grace, such that even the centurions were won over in the end, their eyes opened and their hearts broken by the knowledge that this, indeed, was the Son, the life of God, that they had nailed to the Cross.

[i] Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross & Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Wm B. Eerdmans, 2001), 97
[ii] Lewis, 96-97
[iii] Lewis, 116

Posted in holy days, sermon | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

And what of the colt?

Posted on March 22, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

It knew, as animals do,
more than the crowd,
felt beneath its hooves
the blood of the branches,
stones slickened with sap,
the vibrations of voices hungry
for release; heard the heartbeat
of the man astride its back,
how it skipped at times
with fear, at times with joy,
how it lured the beast’s own beat
into its dance. Hosanna,
brayed the donkey:
Saviour, save us!

Posted in holy days, lectionary reflection, poetry, prayer, preparing for Sunday with poetry, sermon preparation | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Lazarus campaigns against the death penalty

Posted on March 20, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

This is a #preparingforSundaywithpoetry prologue post. At last evening’s Bible study, we noticed the “Lazarus framework“ to John’s Palm Sunday story (if you’re using Mark, another poem from the pov of the colt is coming). No wonder, we said, authorities of all stripes are worried by Jesus. If you can’t even rely on people to remain dead, you have lost your ultimate power over them …

Lazarus campaigns against the death penalty

Imagine an angel in the corner
of the death chamber, wheels
and wings and eyes clothed
in a demure white coat,
seeming to pick at its nails with fire,
murmuring as though anyone might listen:
You cannot kill what God has created.
Watch: they will not stay dead
for long. Scan your night dreams
for signs of life: the smell
of empty grave clothes
amid the whiff of bleach;
the expertly executed sons of man
set free despite you.

When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he was there, they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many … were deserting and were believing in Jesus.

The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting,

“Hosanna!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—
    the King of Israel!”

Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, as it is written:

 “Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion.
Look, your king is coming,
    sitting on a donkey’s colt!”

His disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him. 

So the crowd that had been with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to testify. It was also because they heard that he had performed this sign that the crowd went to meet him. The Pharisees then said to one another, “You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!”

John 12:9-19, NRSVUE

Posted in holy days, lectionary reflection, preparing for Sunday with poetry | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Lest a seed fall

Posted on March 17, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent at Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio: John 12:20-33

What happens if you hold your breath? In order to breathe freely, in order to live, we have to let it go. If we want a seed to grow, we must entrust it to the grave of the earth, allow it to disintegrate, decompose, in order that it might be remade into a new and abundant growth.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor and theologian, wrote that when Christ calls someone, “he bids [them] come and die. … death in Jesus Christ [is] the death of the old man at his call.”[i] Or, to put it another way, the call to live with Christ is the call to die to our old selves. Bonhoeffer put his life where his preaching led. He could have remained safely out of Germany when war broke out in 1939, but he chose to return. He deplored the rise of the Nazi state as an idol, and he was killed by that state two weeks before the liberation of the concentration camp in which he was executed.

Alexei Navalny, a more recently familiar name, quoted the Beatitudes at his trial: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” He died in a Siberian work camp north of the Arctic Circle, still hungering and thirsting for righteousness on this earth.[ii]

And this passage, the one from John that we read today, is the one on which Archbishop Oscar Romero was preaching at the moment that he was assassinated in 1980. Romero lived under the threat of death by the cartels of El Salvador, and he gave his life to the cause of resisting evil, resisting any corruption of his Christian conviction that the humble service of justice and mercy outrank any earthly powers. Immediately before he was sacrificed at the altar, he said, in part,

You have just heard Christ’s Gospel, that one must not love oneself so much as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life which history demands of us …

We are warned that it profits one nothing to gain the whole world and lose oneself. Nevertheless, the expectation of a new earth must not weaken but rather stimulate our concern for perfecting this earth, where the body of the new human family grows, a body that even now is able in some way to foreshadow that new age. And so, to the extent that temporal progress can contribute to the better ordering of human society, it is of serious concern for the kingdom of God, even though temporal progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ’s kingdom.[iii]

Even though temporal progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ’s kingdom, because our vision of justice is dim and our capacity for mercy sorely constrained; even so, as these brave Christians said and lived, we should be concerned to bring about a more perfect understanding of what it is to be human, to be mortal, to be created in the image of the immortal, to be moved by the breath of God.

And despite the lessons of these martyrs, Jesus has no love for death. He will defeat death, trampling it under his discarded grave clothes on Easter morning, and harrowing hell to rescue his saints from its power. Jesus has already said that he came that we might have life, and have life abundantly (John 10:10). The question he poses here is, what kind of life?

If I cling to a life of security that depends on the threat of violence, what sort of life is that? It is one that will be nailed to the cross, since that is how order and security are kept by the powers of this world.

If I hunger and thirst to be right, to be proven right, instead of humbling myself to seek God’s righteousness, and a right understanding of God’s image in the other, and to thirst for mercy, what sort of a life is that? As the deer longs for the water-brooks, so let my soul be athirst for God, and not for my own understanding.

If I gaze in prayer and meditation upon the cross but ignore the suffering taking place at my right hand and my left, the indignities of inequity, poverty, and more, is my vision any clearer than that of the centurions surrounding the cross on calvary?

If I try to hold my breath, will I live?

I could say something here about our life as a parish; how, if we try to hold on to the past, even the present, instead of trusting God enough to fall into an unknown future, we are holding our breath, holding ourselves captive to fear; but that could be seen as self-serving, under the circumstances. Suffice to say that I believe that this community has faith enough to plant itself firmly in the grounding of Christ, who wants nothing less for us than life, and life in abundance.

You see, despite the metaphor that Jesus uses, his poetic language for the burial and transformation of the seed (and you know I love some poetic language), even so, germination is not a process of death but of regeneration. In fact, it is when a seed does not submit to its transformation that it is in danger of dying. A quick bit of Wikipedia research finds that sacks of wheat seeds entombed with the Pharaohs were no longer viable, while seeds buried by squirrels in the Arctic some 31,000 years ago still contained enough living material to recreate an ancient version of the narrow-leafed campion that went on to produce viable seeds and generations of its own.[iv] The call of the seed is to be a seed, not to preserve itself but to undergo conversion and transformation in order to produce food and beauty, life abundant for the world.

To undergo conversion and transformation in order to produce life for the world. That is the call of the seed, and the call of the Christian, and the gift of the Spirit: the breath of life, and life in abundance.

Amen.

[i] The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Macmillan, 1963), 99

[ii] https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/faith/2024/03/02/navalnys-christianity-under-reported

[iii] https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/10/12/homily-oscar-romero-was-delivering-when-he-was-killed

[iv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_viable_seed

Posted in homily, lectionary reflection, sermon | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Unless a seed

Posted on March 14, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

The risk for the seed –
consumed by birds,
razed by the sun,
drowned by hail and fire
falling like rain –
the risk of being broken
open, swallowed
by the earth,
digested and transformed
into new generations
is a kinder fate
than clinging
to the packet grinding out
of the vending machine

__________________________

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12:24-25)

Posted in lectionary reflection, poetry, preparing for Sunday with poetry, sermon | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Perpetua and her companions

Posted on March 7, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

A homily delivered at Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland

According to The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, the story is told by Perpetua herself that while she was imprisoned for her faith, her father came to her begging her to renounce, for the sake of her infant son and his gray hairs.[1]

She told him, “Father, … do you see this vase here, for example, or water-pot, or whatever?” “Yes, I do,” said he. And [she] told him: “Could it be called by any other name than what it is?” And he said: “No.” “Well, so too, I cannot be called anything other than what I am, a Christian.”

Her father left deeply angered by his grief, but if he had thought twice about it, could he have blamed anyone other than himself for naming her? Perpetua: She who persists.

Family plays a central role in Perpetua’s account of her arrest and imprisonment before her martyrdom. She is sick with worry for her baby, and when he is restored to her and she is able once more to nurse him, she is healed; “My prison had suddenly become a palace, so that I wanted to be there rather than anywhere else.” In her first prison vision, after ascending into heaven, the shepherd sitting there fed Perpetua with the milk of the sheep he was tending, milk that tasted like honey, and she knew its meaning.

But her Christian companions were her faithful family. She tells of Saturus, whom she called, “the builder of our strength,” who gave himself up to the authorities willing as a Christian to join Perpetua and Felicitas and the others in their fate. In the vision, it was Saturus who led the way to heaven through a dangerous ladder guarded by a dragon. It was he who called to Perpetua, “I am waiting for you. But take care; do not let the dragon bite you.”

The relationship of Perpetua to her companions, the free African woman to the slaves, is one that I do not feel qualified to explore here. I do notice that it is Saturus the slave who chooses freely to give himself up to the authorities for the crime of Christianity, who is the first to die in the arena, and who leads Perpetua and their companions up the ladder to heaven. The first shall be last, and the last shall be forever first.

Do you ever read a piece of the Gospel, or the commentary of the epistles, and wonder what ever happened to the “yoke is light, burden is easy” Jesus? The pieces that call us to persevere through hardships and trials, to suffer the cooling of love, to trust that the way of love, the way of mercy, the way of the Cross will endure even though this world tries its best to wear it down with its little crucifixions?

In some ways, we have only ourselves to blame, naming ourselves Christians, little Christs, followers of the Son of Man who went to the Cross for us.

It is always a question, isn’t it, when we read of these martyrs, what we would do? How we would face the crisis, the challenge to our faith, the pleas of friends and family to save ourselves, to care for our own interests – or theirs – in place of the way of the Cross. We are blessed, in this time and place, not to have to choose the narrow, knife-edged, martyr’s path to heaven. That does not relieve us from the responsibility and the choice to follow the way of deep love, of Christlike love, of uncompromising love, whatever that may cost us. And we are not alone in our trials of faith. We have one another. Within one holy, catholic, and apostolic church, we are perpetual companions.

And we have Jesus, whose love never grows cold, whose presence makes a palace of a prison, who nurses us with milk that tastes of honey. By his name we are called, regardless of status and stature and strength; and his mercy is on martyrs and muggles alike. As light perpetual in the shadows of the evening, God’s mercy endures forever.

[1] Story and quotations from The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, translated by Herbert Anthony Musurillo (Oxford University Press, 1972), accessed online at https://archive.org/details/the-acts-of-the-christian-martyrs-by-herbert-anthony-musurillo-z-lib.org/

 

Posted in homily, sermon, story | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

All these words

Posted on March 3, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent. Exodus 20:1-17; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

Then God spoke all these words.

Have you ever read a warning label and wondered what on earth happened to make it necessary? Like the stroller that comes with instructions to remove the child before folding, or the iron that reminds you not to wear the clothes that you’re steam pressing, or those little silica packets in everything that say, “Do not eat. “

God spoke all these words because God knew that we, we humans, have been known to be foolish, and foolhardy, and even malicious in our misuse of God, creation, and one another. We need these warning labels, all of these words, because God knows what we are capable of, left to our own devices.

Murder. Theft. Adultery. Greed. Disrespect and dishonour. Actually, as a parent, I have to wonder if that one is an appeal to parents to live lives deserving of their children’s honour, worthy of respect. After all, the onus is on the adults in the room, isn’t it, to set the example?

To set the example of not taking the Lord’s name in vain, not ascribing to God our prejudices or preferences, not pretending that a tradition of our invention and imagination is a “God-given right.” Not to place anything of our own invention in the place of God.

Fun fact (which I may have mentioned before, because it is delicious): the only place in the Bible where cats are mentioned is in the apocryphal Letter of Jeremiah. In it, the cats sit on the heads of idols, because they know better than to be taken in by human artifacts of metal, wood, or stone. Whereas humanity – well, there’s a reason God needed to speak all these words.

We have a tendency to get carried away by our own brilliance, to admire our own creations as though they were on a par with the life of God. But

it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, 
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
…  Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

We – some of us – worship our own systems of justice, as though they were a glimmer against the glory of God’s mercy. We wield authority as though we were not all under the obedience of God. We design whole worlds built of metal and money, commerce and coinage, forgetting that it was the Son of Man, the Son of God, who raged into the Temple and turned it all over, the crass commercialism that threatened to drown out the prayers of the poor and make a mockery of God’s invitation to worship God alone. See how foolish our clever schemes, lines on maps to divide up the holy lands, seem as we witness the destruction of lives there today. Have our brilliant schemes not been brought to their knees?

You know how Jesus summarized all these words: Love God with all you have, and your neighbour as yourself. You know how a former communications director of our diocese summarized them: Love God, love your neighbour, change the world.

How would the world be changed if we were truly to pay heed to all these words that God has spoken? To the invitation to hold God closest to the center of our lives, to resist all temptation to treat our neighbour – every neighbour – as anything other than the expression of God’s creativity in the world, to raise our children in all humility as those willing to earn their honour; as those under obedience ourselves to the God who gave us life?

There is a difference in how Jesus confronts the profitable entrepreneurs of the Temple courts, those with sheep, oxen, coins to trade, whom he drives out with an angry outburst, and how he speaks to the poor pigeon sellers, trading among the poor who cannot afford any other sacrifice. “Take them out of here,” he says, and he sounds weary. He knows how hard it is to get by in a system that continues to elevate greed and grind down those just trying to make their way. To quote a recent television ad, he gets us.

He doesn’t make excuses for the pigeon people. He certainly doesn’t excuse the systems of exploitation that cage them like their inventory, but he does open the door to another way. And with them, at least, he is gentle. Because God’s mercy is enduring, almost unendurable. Even crucifying him would not persuade him to abandon us.

God spoke all of these words because God knows of what we are capable, and God knows how good life could be if we could, if we would keep first things first and foremost: the love of God, reflected in the love of the image of God that is our neighbour.

For the religious demand miracles and politicians make clever arguments, but we proclaim Christ crucified… For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

For the love of God is deeper even than the grave, and God’s mercy endures for ever, and we are called to do likewise.

Posted in lectionary reflection, sermon | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

War

Posted on March 1, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

I want to write about

the unbearable irony of dry breasts

in a land of milk and honey,

the bitter taste of hunger among the olive groves,

but I am not qualified. Instead, I will contemplate

the crumpled faces of the women

of Jerusalem when Jesus told them, Blessed

are the bodies that never bore fruit,

and the breasts that never nursed,

while all around them pomegranates bled

in sympathy for the devastating irony

of humanity.

Posted in current events, poetry, story | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dove

Posted on February 29, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

Once upon a time,
so long ago that time itself was barely begun,
a thing with wings brooded over deep waters,
moving the surface aside to reveal
creation.

A long time later,
but so long ago that history was still in the future,
the waters had deepened again beneath the Ark
that floated the life of all flesh above the Flood:
Noah, the raven, the serpent, the lion, and the lamb.
The winged thing borrowed the feathers of a dove, 
moving the surface of the deep waters aside to uncover
the olive tree.

Not so long ago,
the waters of the river burst apart 
as the man surfaced, baptized and breathing hard, 
water dripping from his hair 
like oil from an olive press.
The winged thing parted the soft clouds of heaven, 
borrowed the body of a dove again
to cover him,

But someone caught the dove
in a snare, netting its tender claws and beak, 
folding its feathers into a basket, 
enclosing it within the heavy stones of Herod’s design
with the money changers and the priests,
The winged thing was loathe to leave it, 
having become fond, was gladdened 

when the man returned, his feet 
pounding the stones like a wine press,
his hands flinging coins and rope and wool
but tender with the cages of the doves;
he turned them loose, the bird
and the winged thing,
watched them as they soared above the firmament
until its brightness swallowed them alive.

Posted in lectionary reflection, poetry, prayer, preparing for Sunday with poetry, sermon preparation | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Take up your cross

Posted on February 20, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

I am not strong to carry your cross or mine.
I stagger beneath the weight of your command
yet knowing all the time
that you have called your burden easy.
Your hands and feet tell another story,
unwashed yet from their bodily defeat,
their wretched stench harmonious
with the odours of this hell.
Yet in their prints the soil freshens.
Your dragging cross furrows the earth
and in its harrows something grows – hope!
I see the children swinging from its boughs
as though it were a living, breathing tree.

Mark 8:35-38

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” 

Posted in lectionary reflection, preparing for Sunday with poetry, sermon | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment