Maundy Thursday: footprints

Posted on April 17, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Almost all of you have heard this poem at one time or another, or seen it printed on pretty pages in the inspirational section of the bookstore or Christian gift shop. I refer, of course, to the both famous and infamous, “Footprints in the Sand.”

I would hate to offend anyone who draws comfort from the image of being carried like a child across the rocky parts of life’s beach. But because I have at times a slightly inappropriate sense of humour, I find myself drawn to some of the various parodies that have necessarily sprung up around such a ubiquitous text. My favourite is a cartoon that was going around the internet a couple of years ago, in which God tells the beloved child, “This, where there is one set of footprints; this is where I carried you. And that long groove over there? That’s when I dragged you along for a bit.”

There is, in this scene between Jesus and his disciples, there is in the backdrop to the tender moments a battle going on. The devil is at work behind the scenes, plotting to disrupt Judas’ relationship with Jesus, to sow betrayal and heartbreak even in the middle of the most intimate and loving moments that Jesus shares with his friends. Entering into an intimate relationship with Jesus, with anyone; entering into an intimate relationship with God, is not simply a sunset stroll along the beach.

It bothers Peter immensely. It bothers him that Jesus would both lead him and serve him – how can that be? Can’t Jesus do one or the other and leave it at that? Peter tries to hold him at bay, first by refusing his ministrations, and then by focusing on the water instead of the man pouring it – wash my head and my hands, too! Jesus laughs at him a little bit for that one. No, Peter. It is not about the water. It is about me, taking your feet in my hands, with your eyes in mine. It is about crossing that line of comfort that keeps me at a safe distance, praiseworthy but a little out of touch. It is about knowing that I would do anything for you; that I will lay down my life for you.

It makes Peter quite uncomfortable. How about you?

The act of foot washing makes many of us uncomfortable precisely because it is so unusual for us to hand over our feet to one another. It is more usually the prerogative of a mother bathing her child, or a daughter bathing her elderly father, a nurse caring for one who depends upon him, or maybe the undertaker. We do not often wash the feet of strangers.

When Jesus told his disciples, told us, that what he had done for us we must do for one another, he was not talking just about the water. He was not talking just about a yearly uncomfortable moment. He was inviting us to get real with one another; to become real to one another; to be a family of believers, bound by love for him, caring for one another with the love he gave us.

It is not without danger, nor without trouble that we enter into these relationships. The devil is at work behind the scenes, plotting to disrupt relationships, to sow betrayal and heartbreak even in the midst of our most profound moments with Jesus. And Jesus will not summon the hosts of heaven to drive him away. He chooses a longer road, and a harder one, but he chooses it for us, so that we will not lose him in a cloud of fiery archangels, but can walk with him every step of the way, as far as the cross on the hill.

When they placed him in his mother’s arms, a newborn child, she counted his fingers and his toes, kissed each one. When they laid him in her arms again, she counted the holes in his hands, in his feet, and kissed each one.

By the time the tomb was opened, no doubt there was a mess of footprints around and about, and one set strangely marked and marred.

“It was there that I carried you,” said the Lord.

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A sermon for the Palms and the Passion

Posted on April 13, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

At the beginning, the tempter had urged him to make bread, to bow down, to throw himself from the temple and be saved by the angels. In the end, the people would taunt him and tempt him to leave his cross of shame and show them all what he could really do. On the night that he endured as much stress as any one can handle, the knowledge that he was about to die, to leave his friends, his followers bereft, his legacy in tatters, smeared as a criminal, his mother in tears. In the garden, he wrestled with his own issues, wondering whether he could go through with it, whether he might take them up on it, either quietly, leaving them sleeping in the grass, or loudly, with legions of angels to cloud the air.

Instead, he stayed.

Despite the sting of the betrayer’s kiss, he stood still. Despite Peter’s denials, he would not deny himself. Despite their choice of another saviour, another Jesus, one who lived by the sword instead of by love, he loved them; he let them call him their king. Despite the taunting and the torment and the scourging, he would not leave his post.

Welcomed through one gate as with Hosannas, he was ushered out through another with hatred, yet he never turned his back on them.

God has never turned away from us.

Even in our deepest provocation, when we grieve the soul of God so deeply that the divine one can barely bear the cup of sorrows that we hold up, the gall and the bitterness; still God does not turn away. We see in the person of Jesus, in the Passion of Jesus, the endless endurance of a God who loves us, without reservation; who forgives us, without exception; who redeems us from the mouth of the grave, without counting the cost.

We see a God who stays with us.

What can we offer in return to one who gives us everything: in whom we live and move and have our being? What does he ask of us but this:

Sit here a while, and pray with me. Keep awake a while; stay with me.

It is so hard to stay still in a world that is constantly running around. It is harder still to sit with someone in their pain, their sorrow – our instinct is to turn away, to find something to do, to busy ourselves instead of listening, pull away rather than to draw closer. We fall asleep with the news on, begging us to pay attention to the need that surrounds us, the need for reconciliation, for justice, for peace. We fall asleep while the world pleads for our prayers.

This Holy Week, I would invite you to try to sit awhile with Jesus, to stay with him and pray, in this Sabbath of the Christian year, this seven-day set aside for the redemption of the world. Stay with Jesus, walk with him as he journeys the Way of the Cross. He has, after all, never left us lonely when we needed him; and the more deeply we can enter into his life, death and resurrection, the more keenly we will feel his presence in our own.

If you can bear to hear it, Dom Denys Prideaux OSB put it this way:

‘The Cross is the only key to prayer. You will never pray well unless you take the hammer and the nails, and the spear and the thorns, and the hyssop dipped in vinegar, and go to Golgotha stripped and bare, and in physical agony as well as agony of mind and soul, re-enact the Crucifixion in your own members, making up what is behind of the sufferings of Christ. You can only plead through Lips that were once parched and cracked and stained with blood – your prayer can only be heard if it is joined to that stream of intercession that pours forth unceasingly in Heaven from One who once was “slain.” Impassible though He be now, He is not unfeeling, and His very memories of Good Friday wing your prayers.’[1]

It is hard to find time, in a world run wild, to sit and to pray. And yet it is so little that Jesus asks of us, really, when all is said and done, and he asks of us nothing that he has not already done for us. All he asks is for us to stay with him a while.

The church will be open each day of the coming week, and each evening, one way or another. Services are offered Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, culminating in the Eve of the Resurrection, a foretaste of the Feast to follow, on Saturday night.

Sit here a while, and pray with me. Keep awake a little while longer; stay with me. Because if we sleep through Holy Week, the empty tomb makes no sense, the Easter bells ring hollow. But if we stay, we discover piece by piece, as Edward Bouverie Pusey wrote, to whom I’ll give the final word:

‘He wept, that we might weep no more; but God should be “very gracious to us at the voice of our cry.” … By that Cry did He, with His Own Blessed Spirit, commend our spirits also to the Father. For us, “though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered;” that “being made perfect,” He might become “the Author of Eternal Salvation to all them that obey Him.” His Shame is our glory; His Blood our ransom; His Sweat our refreshment; the Streams from His Side our Sacraments; His Wounded Side our hiding-place from our own sins, and Satan’s wrath; His Death our life.’[2]

 

[1] Dom Denys Prideaux OSB, ‘Prayer and Contemplation’ in Laudate (Quarterly Review), Nashdom Abbey, December 1944, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, complied by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson and Rowan Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; paperback 2003), 547

[2] Edward Bouverie Pusey, Sermons during the season from Advent to Whitsuntide, Oxford, 1848, pp. 120-3, quoted in Rowell et al., 398

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How to read a palm

Posted on April 11, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Examine the heart; is it sappy, or made of stone?

Trace the veins that indicate the wisdom of Solomon,

or the mercurial folly of man.

Follow the lines of travel: do they cross?

If the life line looks long enough, break off the branch,

toss it in the street, to be trampled by donkeys and pilgrims.

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Lenten meditation

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Today’s meditation, offered as part of a multi-authored series available through the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio @ http://www.dohio.org:

It is a day like no other, this Thursday in the fifth week of Lent. It isn’t one of the “big” days, like Ash Wednesday or Palm Sunday, or Fish-Fry Friday. Yet it is a day like no other.

On this day, in the garden, a plant shivered and began to bud in anticipation of the need for comfort and beauty ahead.

The man who owned the colt fed his animals and brushed the donkey’s tail. “Not long now,” he whispered, and the animal tossed its head and stamped impatiently.

The merchants and money changers began to stock up ahead of their busiest week of the year, grinning and cackling as they thought of the profit, and wondering why their wives looked at them strangely.

Somewhere, a baby was born. A child spoke her first word – “Abba.” An old man breathed his last, with a prayer that sounded like a sigh of relief. A woman had a fine dinner with friends and went to bed with a headache, to awaken never the same again.

For some, this will be remembered as a red-letter day. Others will misplace it in the jumbled narrative of a busy life. For some, it will be buried deep, and carried like a stone that splits the current of their river of beating blood.

It is a day like no other. When God created Time, that fitful and fine creature, and saw all of its minutes and hairbreadth moments stretching out (and it was good), God appointed this day to you. How will you live it?

The Rev. Rosalind Hughes. Priest-in-charge, Church of the Epiphany, Euclid

The odd thing is that I had forgotten (having sent it in six weeks ago) that I had slipped my mother’s stroke in there, in acknowledgement of its anniversary this week. It would be, for her, the beginning of an ending, the opening sentence of her next and last, eternal chapter. It is one of the quieter anniversaries that my father and I keep. She would have approved this message. Strange and rather lovely that eight years after her death, she is still teaching and inspiring me.

Wishing you all a blessed day.

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Year A Lent 5: Lazarus and other resurrections

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Of course, they all would ask him about it, after the event. What was it like, being dead? Lazarus would tell them, “I don’t know what I can say to you about that. I can tell you what it was like to come back.
“You know, when you wake up but your dreams carry on, so that you can’t move your arms or your legs? I couldn’t move my eyelashes, let alone open my eyes. My mouth was sealed, my nostrils stuffed up with stale, sour bandages. I could hear him calling, and I had to get out there, I had to reach him. They make it sound, in the stories, as though I lifted to my feet as though pulled by an invisible string – nothing could be further from the truth. I was wrapped tightly like a swaddled newborn, and the best I could do was to roll and to squirm and to twist my way across the floor like a baby who has not yet learned how to crawl.
“When I reached the mouth of the cave, I could feel the sun’s warmth, hear the hissing breath of scores of men, and my sisters. I heard him again, telling them to unbind me, to set me free, and I have never been so grateful for the touch of a human hand.”
They would ask him, then, “What will you do now? What did you miss the first time around?”
Lazarus would get a faraway look in his eye. “I would awaken the sleepwalker, unbind his eyes. I would loosen the shackles of those bound by sin, or by fear. I would seek out and untie the ones who walk as though they are dead, because I have walked in their grave clothes.”

In a sermon preached in London in 1884, the Baptist minister Charles H. Spurgeon said,

In many things our Lord Jesus stands alone as a worker. No other can unite His voice with the fiat which says, “Lazarus, come forth!” Yet, in certain points of gracious operation, the Master associates His servants with Him, so that when Lazarus has come forth He says to them, “loose him, and let him go.” In the raising of the dead, He is alone, and therein majestic and Divine—in the loosing of the bound He is associated with them and still remains majestic—but His more prominent feature is condescension. How exceedingly kind it is of our Lord Jesus to permit His disciples to do some little thing in connection with His great deeds, so that they may be, “workers together with Him.”

Sometimes, something happens that stops us in our tracks. It may be the end of a relationship, a betrayal. Someone does a thing that makes us wonder if we ever really knew them. Or I do something that shakes my own self-image, makes me wonder about myself. Somebody dies, and you feel as though they might just as well lay you out right alongside them.

We wonder, can these dry bones live?

And yet, God demands our life, our resurrection. Lazarus had no more choice to resist the pull of Jesus’ command to live than the dry bones on the valley floor. Life goes on, and we go right on with it.

The question becomes, then, not one of whether to live or to die, but whether to live wrapped in a shroud or clothed in life.

Spurgeon went on:

A notable miracle was unquestionably worked, but it required a finishing touch. The man was wholly raised, but not wholly freed! Look, here is a living man in the garments of death! That napkin and other grave clothes were altogether congruous with death, but they were much out of place when Lazarus began to live again! It is a wretched sight to see a living man wearing his shroud. … Such was their condition that unless you observed carefully, you would think them still dead. And yet within them the lamp of heavenly Life was burning. Some said, “He is dead, look at his garments.” But the more spiritual cried, “He is not dead, but these bands must be loosed.”

It is Jesus who commands, who brings life, who is the Way and the Truth and Life – and yet he invites us to help one another, to loosen the bands of death, to change our clothes for the raiment of light and life. None of us does it alone. Even Jesus, who had no equal, relied on his friends to say, “Let us go also and die with him,” to roll away the stone from the tomb that held Lazarus in, to unbind the living.

There is much work to do. Whether it is lifting the dull darkness of lazy prejudice; it is our task, our call to remove the bandages that blind us to the beauty that God sees in each of us, in all of us, no exceptions. Whether it is teaching those who have lived in fear to stop holding their breath and believe what God has said, that “I will be their God, and they shall be my people;” to be the kind of friend, the kind of companion who will walk through the valley of dry bones, the valley of the shadow of death, when we are needed to give confidence and comfort to another. Whether it is loosening our own death grip on weapons of destruction and violence, opening ourselves instead to love and peaceful ways – we have seen yet again this week in Fort Hood a brutal reminder of the dead ends that war and weaponry can lead us down, and we know that there are many more threads that we never see, that wind in silence to the grave. Whether it is unstopping the mouths that need to cry out their truth, their love, their pain, their joy – it is our work to unbind them and set them free, those to whom God has given life, and life eternal.

When Jesus set his face towards Bethany, Thomas the Twin said, “We can’t let him go alone.” When Jesus called Lazarus out of the tomb, he made sure that he was surrounded by his family and his friends; he told them to go and lay hands on Lazarus, to unbind him, to unwind the winding cloth, so that he would know the tenderness of their touch, and know himself wrapped in love. Such is our work, to love one another, even our enemies, and our neighbours as ourselves, and not to hold back our help from the living dead, the walking wounded, the fettered and afraid, from one another.

The body count at the beginning of today’s readings is incredible – it is not just Lazarus, but there are dry bones and filled tombs everywhere – which only makes the miracle more stupendous. “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you,” says Paul.

And so the glory of God is revealed, and we follow in the footsteps of Lazarus, helping each other off with our grave clothes and working out, every day, how to shun the shadow of the tomb and live in the light of life.

And Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Amen.

Ref.: Charles H. Spurgeon: http://www.gospelweb.net/SpurgeonMTP30/spursermon1776.htm

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Dry Bones

Posted on April 5, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

I cried so long my very bones were dry;
I couldn’t raise my head, lay loose-limbed, sunken.
I heard a voice cry, “Prophesy!” My body jumped,
of its own volition, to attention,
knocking the stale breath out of me with a sigh…

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An Interview with Lazarus

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Of course, they all would ask him about it, after the event. What was it like, being dead? Lazarus would look at them with strange eyes. He would tell them, “I don’t know what I can say to you about that. I can tell you what it was like to come back.

“You know, when you wake up but your dreams carry on, so that you can’t move your arms or your legs? I couldn’t move my eyelashes, let alone open my eyes. My mouth was sealed, my nostrils stuffed up with stale, sour bandages. I could hear him calling, and I had to get out there, I had to reach him. They make it sound, in the stories, as though I lifted to my feet as though pulled by an invisible string, and shuffled, zombie-like, out of the cave – or perhaps even I flew!

“Nothing could be farther from the truth. I was wrapped as tightly as a swaddled newborn, and the best I could do was to roll and to squirm and to twist my way across the floor like a baby who has not yet learned how to crawl.

“I knew, though, when I reached the mouth of the cave, because I could feel the sun’s warmth, and hear the hissing breath of scores of men, and my sisters. I heard him again, telling them to unbind me, to set me free, and I have never been so grateful for the touch of a human hand.”

They would ask him, then, “What is it that you have the greatest need or desire to do before death claims you for good? What did you miss the first time around?”

Lazarus got a farway look in his eye. “I would awaken the sleepwalker, and unbind the eyes of the one who doesn’t see. I would loosen the shackles of those bound by sin, or by fear. I would seek out and untie the ones who walk as though they are dead, because I have walked in their graveclothes.”

His voice choked up, every time, and they would be afraid to ask him anything else.

 – As I have discovered, the Rev. Charles H. Spurgeon preached a rather marvellous sermon, in London, in 1884, about Jesus’ condescension to allow his disciples’ participation in such miracles as this one, and the unbinding of others.

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Blind

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

He sent me away. I don’t know why,
having shared with me his spit and mud,
he wouldn’t lead me to the pool, cup the water
in my hand; he didn’t see the wonder through.
If he had, the first thing I had seen
would be his face. Instead,
having never laid eyes upon him,
I had to search him out blind.

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Year A Lent 3: Come and see

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Come and see. That’s what she says. Come and see this man who told me everything I had ever done – could he, he can’t be, the Messiah, can he? Come and see.

The woman at the well has got a bad press in the past, possibly quite undeserved. People have said that the fact that she was at the well at noon meant that she was an outcast, under the scorn and beneath the contempt of her townspeople. They have said that the five husbands and the man with whom she now lives had a lot to do with that scorn and contempt. Yet the text contains no hint of judgment. Jesus does not accuse her of any moral sin when he uses his insight to surprise her with his knowledge of her situation, so why should we? Their meeting at noon stands in high contrast to the meeting between Jesus and Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews, at midnight. This Samaritan woman is more ready to see the light that he was. In fact, while Nicodemus took a lifetime to decide about Jesus, this woman, in a few short minutes, in a brief encounter beside a well, moves from “Who are you, and what do you do want?”, through, “I see that you are a prophet,” to “He couldn’t be the Messiah, could he?” to the conversion of a whole city: “At first we believed because of what you told us, but now we have seen and heard for ourselves, and we know that he is the Saviour of the world,” and all because she was willing to say, “Come and see.”

What if she was an outcast, a reprobate? They heard her anyway: Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony. What if she was not an outcast, but one respected and well-connected? Then they listened to her, and because they listened to her they heard Jesus: “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world.” We do not need to know where she stood to follow her example.

I have to wonder why, out of the two meetings, at night and at noon, in secret and at Sychar, it is Nicodemus’ name that we remember, and not that of the woman, who gets to be the Samaritan woman, or the woman at the well, or the one with five husbands and more. It is as though we want to sideline her, as though we are afraid of her challenge: “Come and see. He can’t be the Messiah, can he?”

Nicodemus was prudent, cautious, careful and judicious, all qualities that we appreciate. The woman was a little more extravagant, exuberant, garrulous, loud; qualities that we might enjoy in others but are wary of displaying for ourselves (or is it just me?). Are we, even the ones who show up to church on a Sunday morning, who tithe and provide the coffee, who pray and provide rides to one another, who volunteer and do good works – are we still a little afraid to follow the example of one who casts caution to the wind and calls all who will listen to “Come and see? See what you think. Do you think he is the Messiah? Do you think that God really might love us that much?” Are we still hiding in the shadows of the dark with Nicodemus, afraid to come out into the light of day as disciples of Christ?

What are we afraid of?

Perhaps we are afraid that those we meet will not understand. We tend to look for God, for the gospel, in times of stress, but we are afraid to offer it as a salve to those who are wounded, in case we are misunderstood. The woman said, “Give me this living water, so that I will not have to come here any more to draw water,” but that is not the offer that Jesus is making. He does not promise that life will suddenly become easy, that the well will bring water to the city by itself so that the women don’t need to carry it. He doesn’t promise that the heat of the day will diminish, or that winter will end. He will not rewrite her troubling and ambiguous history. He doesn’t offer to end the realities of human life, but to sustain those living through them, to slake their thirst for hope, to soothe their feverish fears, to give them life and courage, all that they need to get through this day, and the next.

Give us today our daily bread, we ask, each day, not that we will never need to eat again, not that we will never hunger, but that we will be sustained, that we will not starve for the lack of God’s mercy and providence.

Are we afraid that it will not sound like enough? Are we afraid that the offer of hope will resound hollowly to the one who is facing death, that the offer of courage will falter before the one facing foreclosure, that the offer of life will be a slap in the face to the disappointed parent, to the grieving widow, to those in despair? Who do we think we are to make such judgments, to keep our help to ourselves, to ration the hope that we offer to others, to dispense, judiciously, only the courage that we deem appropriate to their situation, when we have found the waters of eternal life, when we have seen the Messiah, and have heard him tell us everything about ourselves?
What brings us back to this well? Isn’t it worth sharing?

We don’t have to be the ones with all of the answers, we are not the answer. We are right not to pretend that we have found the panacea that will cure all ills; we know that we cannot take away someone else’s pain. But we can offer the help that we have found. We can say, “We have met someone who spoke to us, when we were at the well. When our tears welled up and when our lives dried up; when our courage failed and when our hearts were parched and stony. When we plumbed the depths to find that the well was so deep, and so dark, and the water beyond our reach, we met someone who understood it all, and who offered to stay with us, beside the well.”

“Come and see.”

Even better: “Come with me, and see.”

And many from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all about myself.” So when they came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this truly is the Saviour of us all.” Amen.

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The well woman

Posted on March 22, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

“Give me that water,” she said;

“no more drudgery of trudging to the well.”

He fixed her with a look so keen

she felt the bucket of her belly tip over;

all told she was empty, and bottomless.

The water jar fell.

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