In Jesus’ Name

Posted on May 15, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

John 14:13-14 “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”

What if I were to say:
No matter what I say,
no matter if I beg or plead
or curse or kick or swear,
you are not to give me
what I most desire?
What if I were to say
all this
then ask for it
in Jesus’ Name?

Too easy. What if
I were to risk my life,
my soul, my sanity
on an errand of love,
a noble cause which
must not fail:
what if I were to ask
not for my life
but for another
in Jesus’ Name?

What if I were to threaten
to curse God and die?
What if I could not fathom
the depth of your “no”,
the mercy of refusal,
the grace of your averted eyes?
Whatever you ask
in my name, is what you said.
Whatever the Hell
did you mean by it?

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Mother’s Day

Posted on May 11, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

From the side of the multipurpose
metro parkway trail,
a single angelus transports me:
You sing some nursery nonsense as
we pack away the picnic stuff;
it’s time to go home.
Within the forest’s shade,
there is nothing to be seen but
bluebells, by their thousands,
ringing out the joys of heaven.

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When is a door not a door?

Posted on May 11, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Jesus is posing his listeners a riddle when he talks of himself in the language of the sheep pen. We only get part of the passage today; we don’t hear Jesus, today, call himself the Good Shepherd. That comes immediately after we stop reading. Today, Jesus calls himself the Gate. It is not an image that has received nearly as much attention as the Shepherd, or the Light of the World, or the True Vine. It has similarities, I suppose, with “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” but that is nicely abstract and at least lends itself to poetry and music. A Gate is not exactly abstract, not exactly romantic, not exactly what we expect Jesus to call himself when he is talking about sheep and shepherds.

It doesn’t entirely help that Jesus also says that the Shepherd, whom he also is, will enter through the Gate, which he has just said he is; it is a puzzle.

We might find an easier way into the puzzle through the thieves and the bandits that Jesus warns against. These sayings come right after the man who was born blind is healed, and the Pharisees argue with him about Jesus and about his healing, and they expel him from the synagogue. The Pharisees, as religious leaders, are supposed to be shepherds to the people of Israel; they are supposed to look out for them and guide and protect them, but instead they closed the Gate against the man who was formerly blind, against the possibility of God working through Jesus and bringing light to the world; and so they failed their flock, and became like thieves or bandits. They tried at once both to break and to lock up the Gate – you can taste their desperate confusion. They put themselves before Jesus, before God. They put their own power before the works of God made manifest in the healing of a blind man. They put their ability to eject the man from the synagogue before the ability of Jesus to draw all people to himself. They put their talent for misery before the man’s gift of joy.

Whenever I thought about that phrase this week, I couldn’t help thinking, though, not of the Pharisees but of some other religious fanatics, those thieves and heartless bandits that stole hundreds of girls from their schools and their homes in Nigeria. Those thieves and bandits who have stolen the children of hundreds of mothers and fathers; who have stolen the innocent lives of those young women; who have stolen the joy of a nation. I am glad that it is not Mothers’ Day in Nigeria today. I cannot imagine the salt that such a celebration would rub into the wounds of those hundreds of mothers, grandmothers, godmothers on a day such as this, when those with a talent for misery have stolen a generation’s worth of joy.

A year ago this week, three Cleveland women were redeemed from another thief, another bandit, one who had stolen from them a decade each of their lives. We do not have to look far, unfortunately, to find the thieves and bandits who put their own misery before others’ joy, and who would close the Gate of life against their neighbours.

I read an interview with Michelle Knight yesterday, via the Guardian news website. What happened to her should not exist in this world, but listen to the triumph of hope over despair that she articulates. Her interviewer asked her,

Has she ever thought what would have become of her if she hadn’t been kidnapped? “I’d probably be living on a street or dead by now. It probably would have been drugs or drink.” So the hell she lived through might have saved her? She smiles. “Yes. Because it gave me street smarts. It made me see the other side of the road that no one else gets to see. Even though it was painful and horrible, I survived it.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/10/michelle-knight-ariel-castro-how-i-survived

She smiles.

Jesus said, “The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.”

They know his voice. We know when we hear the voice of Jesus; we recognize it because we are his sheep. The thieves and bandits try to lead us astray – the ones who speak weaselly words to draw us into captivity, to misery, to addiction, to petty sinfulness and meannesses. The ones who tell us that they have the power, the ability, the talents to undermine the work of God, to undo the saving work of Jesus, to outdo the glory of God.

No one, no thief, no bandit, no disease or disappointment can undo or outdo the glory of God.

We know the voice of the Shepherd.

He speaks in the voice of those who preach peace. You know, I am sure, that Mother’s Day in the United States began not as a day to celebrate maternity but as a day for women to gather in their outrage against war, against the violence that stole their husbands and fathers from them, their sons, their nephews, their joy. It was a day to speak out against death-dealing, and to stand up for peace.

The shepherd speaks in the voice of those who preach peace. He speaks in the words of those who prescribe healing. He speaks in the words of those who love to see us laugh more than cry, who raise us up when we fall, who release joy from the many prisons of misery that the thieves and the bandits build up around us.

I can’t help feeling that the true test of the authenticity of the Shepherd’s voice is, simply put, joy. Thieves and bandits fool us through fakery. They offer false joy, or they falsely promise us that there is no more joy, that all hope has been destroyed. They are wrong.

The Shepherd calls us, his voice reaching even down into the valley of the shadow of death; he calls us out of the shadows into the light, into real and enduring joy.

I notice that we are back on the Shepherd rather than the Gate, but it is not my fault that Jesus mixes his metaphors. “Very truly,” he says, “I am the Gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar.

It doesn’t make perfect sense. It is a word game disguised as a riddle.

Jesus spoke to them in figures of speech because the thing that he describes is bigger than our language can bear. The joy that he offers, that we hear in his voice, is broader than the biggest words we have to describe space. It is more infinite in its variations than a Bach fugue. It is more detailed and beautiful in its brush strokes than a Renoir painting reworked by Picasso by way of Monet. It defies description.

That is how we will know it. The thieves and the bandits lay out their logical schemes for their own salvation, but the love of God moves in mysterious ways. Pay attention, then, to the voices that we hear, and the voice that we use when we speak. If its words are beyond our imagining, if it hopes beyond reason, loves beyond measure, promises joy in the most impossible of places – then it is almost certainly the voice of the Shepherd, or perhaps the Gate creaking gently on its hinges, calling us poor woolly sheep home.

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Hacked into the neural network,
the viral voice of the Accuser, fiat
crashing in:
Deny.
Gliding behind
the altar:
Make room, sinner.
The silver pieces gleam complacently.

The desert dwellers hunger and my lips are dry.
I watch my own hands try to conjure
bread from stones, strike wine from the rock.
Silver glimmers duplicitously.
The microphone amplifies my soundless cry;
my heart is gripped between my teeth.

Fingertip touches tarnish, silver
blushing at its complicity.
Wild beasts lap up wine like blood
and amble away, satisfied and pacified.
In a draught, the candle
flickers.
For a heartbeat, all I hear is blood
behind my ears:
Just keep praying.

Posted on May 9, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes | Leave a comment

Wrinkle

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Stitching time back together,
the threads held slack;
more room for tangling and dropped
stitches, repetitions overworked
and undone; old patterns emerge
slanted, fraying, well beloved.

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Year A Easter 2: Thus and so

Posted on April 27, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

“But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.”

So says Peter to the masses of the Jewish people gathered in Jerusalem in the aftermath of the Passover, and of the crucifixion that accompanied that particular Passover.

Peter quotes the Psalm of David to back up his claims for the resurrection of Jesus from his people’s own scriptural traditions: Listen, he says, this is not a new idea! God was promising this to us all along.

In the Psalm, David is giving thanks to the God who saves him, in the here and now, from his very real and present enemies. In an Israel battling to make its presence secure in a troubled and tribally divided region, David rests in the promises of God made to Abraham, to Samuel, made to David through his anointing as king, never to desert him, never to abandon him, even to the grave.

“You will show me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy, and in your right hand are pleasures for evermore.”

It is the Easter promise, the promise of resurrection, renewal, of rescue from the grave, from death, from all that would oppose God in our lives.

Peter uses the Psalm to say, Look, David did die, and his body was laid to rest in the usual manner; so when he wrote this psalm he was prophesying about Jesus, whose body would not stay at rest, whom God raised up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.

Peter is right, of course, but he is also right, when he says, in the letter that we call First Peter, that God has given us also “a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.”

Actually, the letter might have been written even after Peter’s death, by one who knew him well enough acceptably to write in his name [1]; these things were considered quite acceptable then [2]. If so, then it is even more poignant that he continues to claim the promise for himself and those whom he addresses of imperishability, unfading inheritance, even from beyond the grave.

David, Jesus, Peter, we are all heirs to the promise articulated in the Psalm, whether our bodies live or die, whether they are subject to decay in this life or in the grave, still the promise is that God will not abandon us to destruction, will not abandon us in life or in death. We have been freed from death, from all that opposes the life of God, our life with God, through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

Peter is right to preach to his people from their own scriptural traditions, that the promise of God has always been one of steadfast faithfulness, enduring loving kindness; God has never been inclined to abandon the people of God to the forces of sin and death.

William Barclay, twentieth-century commentator, puts it this way:

Acts safeguards us from two serious errors in our thinking about the death of Jesus (a) The Cross is not a kind of emergency measure flung out by God when everything else had failed. It is part of God’s very life. (b) We must never think that anything Jesus did changed the attitude of God to men. It was by God that Jesus was sent. We may put it this way – the Cross was a window in time allowing us to see the suffering love which is eternally in the heart of God.[3]

Throughout the book of Acts, the apostles rehearse their faith story, from the beginnings of God’s call on the people of God, to demonstrate how it makes perfect sense for God to come to us in this way, in the person of Jesus, even to suffer and die for us, because it is absolutely consistent with the character of a God who has always loved us. What else would God do?

And so the letter writer is able to address his correspondents gently, acknowledging that their sufferings continue in the present time, persecutions and pains, and reassuring them that by no means does this mean that God has abandoned them, nor could ever abandon them, to the forces that oppose life, goodness, God. Instead, the Cross opens that window in time that allows us to see that God continues to bear with us, to suffer with us, to beckon us with love to rest in the heart of the Divine.

Thus it is that Jesus comes back to Thomas. He has missed the first miraculous moment when, thinking they had sealed everyone out, Jesus came among the disciples and broke their hearts open all over again. Thomas remains closed, locked, until Jesus comes back especially for him.

Thomas had insisted that he must touch the wounds, renew the pain, see Jesus flinch in order to believe that he was truly keeping his promises, bearing with them, suffering with them, even now, when they were in disarray and bewildered and afraid. Thomas had wanted to make God squirm, to see God suffer.

But when Jesus returned, he offered it all, all of the pain, all of his wounds, to Thomas. “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side,” says Jesus. Then Thomas understood, and he knew that his suffering, his doubt, his fear did not undo the promises of God to bear with him always, to come back for him, to him always; not to abandon him.

“My Lord and my God!” Thomas cried out to the scarred figure before him, bearing the wounds of the world, now for all eternity.

And so it is that Jesus returns to us, faithfully and without fail, in broken bread, the broken Body which bears our pains and our suffering: he offers his own to all of us who are spiritually descended from Thomas, who continue to lock our hearts up against him, who want to poke at God, to lash out and punish God for our own pains.

He comes to us in Blood poured out like wine, the cup of sorrows, of joy and complicated lives, which make sense only in the complete confusion of the Resurrection, the window through which we see the love of a God for whom none of us is too much trouble, none of us is too heavy a burden, whose wounds, whose doubt and anger he bears as his own, because it is impossible for his faithfulness to be interrupted even by death.

So the people who heard Peter asked, “Then what should we do?” And Peter said, “repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, and you will receive the Holy Spirit. For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, to anyone whom the Lord our God calls.”

The promise is for you, for us, even for those who lock themselves away, who are afar off. God abandons none of us; it is a part of the heart of God never to abandon us. Jesus came back for Thomas; he comes back for us, Risen and reaching out, reaching for our hands and our hearts, placing his sacred brokenness in our own wounded hands, handing himself over to our broken hearts to make them whole.

Amen. My Lord and my God.

_______________________

[1] Eric Eve, “I Peter: Introduction,” in The Oxford Bible Commentary, John Barton and John Muddiman (eds), (Oxford University Press, 2001), 1263-4

[2] J.D.G. Dunn, “Ephesians: Introduction,” ibid, 1166

[3] William Barclay, The Daily Study Bible: The Acts of the Apostles (St Andrew’s Press, 1976), 26-7

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Hard of hearing

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Tender words shouted
at my father; love rendered
hard in his hearing.

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PTSD Jesus

Posted on April 22, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

When he was raised, he bore the marks,
which must mean he remembered.
Then does each adulterous kiss make him wince at its betrayal;
each flash of the needle, of the knife make him flinch?
Does he recoil at the sound of gunfire?
Only God could reasonably endure
so many insults as this world hurls.

He bears the marks to remember,
to reassure that resurrection has not removed him
from us. He picks up the shards of our broken lives,
piece by piece transforming them into something new,
crazed and beautiful:
the glass in which he sees reflected his own
sweet injuries made whole.

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Easter 2014: Do not be afraid

Posted on April 20, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

DO not be afraid.

Not the way you expect Easter to begin: do not be afraid.

After all, the hard part is over, the trial, the cross, the tomb, the harrowing of hell. What is there left to fear?

Yet twice in ten short verses the phrase appears: Do not be afraid.

Each evangelist tells the story a little differently; this year it’s Matthew’s turn.

In the Matthew account, after Jesus was placed in the tomb, a guard was set against the possibility of interference by his disciples. Worried that they might stage a resurrection, those who had manufactured the death sentence against him took steps to ensure that he remained dead and buried. So the women of Matthew, Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, those faithful souls who attend the tomb in every account of it, they arrive empty-handed. They do not bring spices to anoint him. They do not wonder who will roll away the stone, because they know that’s not going to happen, with two guards keeping watch. They go to see the tomb because they simply want, need to be close to him, close to Jesus. They miss him. It’s as simple as that.

We have heard what happens next: the earthquake, the angels, the guards playing dead, quite sensibly under the circumstances. The women are told, “Do not be afraid.”

The guards are allowed to stay afraid, possibly because they have fainted and can’t hear the angels’ instructions not to be. In the part of the gospel we don’t read this morning, they return to their bosses, terrified that they have fallen down, literally, on the job. They concoct a story to say that exactly what they had feared was what had happened: Jesus’ body had been stolen, a resurrection faked.

Is that what we are afraid of, that we have been duped? That it wasn’t real, isn’t real, that our faith is based on a lie, a trick? None of the accounts in the Bible attempts to describe the moment of Resurrection. Some later gospel accounts do, some of the ones that are not in our Bible, but they are full of special effects and CGI; you can see the strings, and catch a whiff of smoke in the mirrors. Better, as Matthew does, to respect the mystery.

The women knew that the Resurrection was real not because of the earthquake and the angel, but because Jesus came to them. They sought him out, but it was he who found them. They knew him. He knew them, and he told them, “Do not be afraid.”

Why would they be afraid? They had longed for him, they had missed him so badly that they had gone to the tomb simply to be close to him, as close as they could manage when he was on the wrong side of the gravestone.

Were they afraid that Jesus would be angry? The women had done their best, but they had given up hope. They were looking for the living among the dead, expecting him to be there in his graveclothes. Or was his message for the men: Peter, who had denied him? The ones who ran away? Judas, who betrayed him with a kiss? Were they afraid that their sins would demand an accounting now that the Master had returned? They fell down at his feet.

But Jesus said, “Do not be afraid,” and he called his disciples brethren, family, still beloved. “Tell them to go home, to Galilee. Tell them I will be with them when they get home.”

Jesus reassures the women that he has come back not for judgment but for relationship, not for an accounting but for an embrace.

 

 

The message of the empty tomb is that there is nothing to be afraid of. Jesus has taken on everything that torments us, and he has defeated it, and he has returned to meet us. We seek him out, and he finds us, in our homes, in our own lives, as our brother, as our friend, as our God to remind us, always, “Do not be afraid. I am with you.”

Whatever it is that we fear, Jesus has defeated it. Not only death, but the pain of dying; it was not for nothing that he suffered; it was for us. Not only death, but the grave, the far side of dying; he descended to the dead, and rose again. Not only death, but life. Jesus knew all about betrayal, about hunger and homelessness. He knew about oppression, war and rumours of war, wondering what the world is coming to. He was experienced in false imprisonment, bereavement, grief and family strife. Whatever it is that we fear, Jesus has lived through it, died for it, defeated it.

And now on Easter morning he greets us, “Do not be afraid. Tell my brothers and sisters they will see me in Galilee, I will go home with them.”

Put off your mourning clothes and celebrate, in the midst of the empire, in the daily battles of life, even in the pain that dogs you and the weariness that defeats you – Jesus has defeated even those things, and invites us to celebrate with him. I can only imagine the party they put on as soon as they got home to Galilee, the welcome home banners they drew up, the fatted calf they roasted, those footsore and faithful, dazed and doubtful disciples.

With them we put off the mourning clothes of Lent and bedeck the church and feast on fattening chocolate eggs, we bewildered and bedazzled disciples. But Jesus did more than make a guest celebrity appearance at a party.

“I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you,” says the Lord through the prophets.

Love that is everlasting; love that survives death. Faithfulness that reaches beyond the grave. How much more clearly can God say it than to live it in the person of Jesus, risen and returned to his friends, to his family, to bless their homes.

Jesus died and descended to destroy death. Jesus rose and lives with us to defeat our fear and strengthen not only our Easter but our everyday faith that in God through Christ we are forgiven, restored to our true selves, beloved.

Do not be afraid. It might not be the Easter message we were expecting; but it is Jesus’ first word to his beloved Marys on this Easter morning, and it is his word to us.

The Incarnation – the life of God in Jesus – the Cross and the Tomb, all say that God is absolutely and intimately involved with us. The Resurrection replies, And God is still God, and will always act beyond our imagination, doing impossibly unexpected new things in fearful and wonderful new ways.

“Go, tell my brothers and sisters I am coming to meet them.”

Tell them, do not be afraid: Jesus is alive!

Alleluia. Amen.

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Good Friday 2014

Posted on April 18, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

With condolences to all victims of violence and their families.

Last Sunday, a short while after the Passion Gospel was ended in churches across the nation, across the world, a man took a shotgun to the parking lot of a couple of Jewish community establishments and killed three randomly targeted people.

What does that have to do with reading the Passion Gospel? The man was reliably insane, repeatedly reported as an extremist and a hatemonger. We don’t know but that the timing might have been a coincidence. So what does it have to do with us, gathered here on Good Friday?

Try this: it didn’t take long, it took less than a generation for Jesus’ message of love, of forgiveness even from the cross, of prayer for an enemy, peace in times of persecution; it didn’t take long for those words to get buried under a mountain of righteous and ironic indignation on behalf of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace.

It is a frighteningly short step from righteous indignation to revenge.

In the garden, it is Peter who strikes out at a slave, a scapegoat for his anger and fear. But Jesus will have none of it. Jesus would die before he would have anything to do with such denigrating, violent oppression of another human being.

I don’t believe that any of us here is a crazy extremist, but we have all used other people, or groups of people, even people in our own families sometimes as scapegoats for our own anger and fear. We use the language of code to test out who is one of us and who is one of them. At our worst, we twist their differences from us into excuses for righteous indignation against them. We use the cross as a weapon with which to stake others through the heart, or we stand by in silence as others do the dirty work for us. Yet, in the words of James H. Cone, author of The Cross and the Lynching Tree, “The cross places God in the midst of crucified people, in the midst of people who are hung, shot, burned and tortured.”*

Every time we use the cross, or stand idly by as the cross is abused as a weapon of oppression, prejudice or hatred, against anyone, we crucify God anew.

Sometimes we try justify our hatred of one thing, one group, one aspect of our humanity by our love of something higher; but real love does not beget hatred. The Archbishop of Canterbury recently illustrated on a radio phone-in show how using the cross as a tool for the appeasement of oppressors can land us in the moral marshlands, wet, sticky and muddy. “What is truth?” asked Pilate. It cannot be constructed out of lies. It cannot be based on insulting others, or undermining their stories, or denying their dignity.

The Archbishop was right about one this: how we talk about one another matters. How we are heard and seen to treat one another matters immensely. “By this shall they know that you are my disciples,” said Jesus, “that you love one another.”

The services for two of the victims of last Sunday’s violence took place today, Good Friday, I am told, at a church called the Church of the Resurrection. I am a big fan of irony, but I think that we may be sinking in it by now.

On Good Friday we celebrate the cross, yes, we are so thankful that Jesus was willing to suffer for us. But we are called to do more than to stand at the foot of the cross and wait for him to die so that we might live.

As Lent closes, we are called, again, to give up more than we ever have succeeded in leaving behind us before, and not only for forty days. We are called to give up those voices inside us that cry violence, that cynically scapegoat, that secretly insult our neighbor,that would crucify Christ anew. We are called to give up our pride, our paltry righteous indignation, our revenge, recognizing that these were not what Jesus chose to employ, but grace, and love. We are urged to give up using the cross as a weapon of oppression or as a tool for appeasement, allowing that Jesus intended that symbol of hopeless inhumanity to be a beacon of hope to all people.

We are called to take up the cross of love, to bear with gentleness the burdens of others, to forgive as often as we fall, to help one another, to hold one another up, as though we were Jesus’ mother and the disciple that he loved, leaning on one another at the foot of the cross.

Jesus had told them. “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.”

Drawn to the foot of the cross, in sorrow, in trembling, let us draw close to one another in our grief and gratitude, and stay awhile with Jesus.

 

James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis Books, 2011), 27

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