Easter 2024

Posted on March 31, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio, Easter 2024. The prelude to the sermon was a children’s message regarding Adaiah, the Easter bat, who witnessed the stone rolled away from the tomb from the inside of the cave …

The rock has been rolled away, and Jesus is risen. But do you know the really odd thing about this Easter Gospel reading? Jesus is not in it! The promise of him is there, and the evidence of his resurrection, the messenger angel reminding the women that he has already said that he will go ahead of them to Galilee, that he will meet them there, at home. But we do not, they do not physically see Jesus, in this account. 

Perhaps if they did they would be less afraid. As it is, in this original ending to the Gospel of Mark, those women disciples are so awe-struck, so wonder-befuddled, that it frightens them. They were so overwhelmed and overcome by the thought of Jesus’ resurrection that it terrified them. Hope can be a scary animal. 

For the women, for Mary, it might have seemed safer to stay with grief, with bewilderment, with confusion. At least we know what that’s like, right? But this, this miracle, although anticipated, although predicted, although expected; this is like nothing that has gone before. This is beyond experience. This demands a whole new level of trusting Jesus, of believing in what God can do through and in Jesus. And this, a scant sabbath’s rest since they dried the tears they shed on the foot of the cross.

Hope, under such circumstances, while Pilate’s soldiers still hold sway in the city, and their own authorities are suspicious of their association with Jesus; hope, when everywhere they go it seems they see crosses, hope seems not only risky, but almost … disrespectful?

Yet here is an indisputable angel, sitting outside a tomb opened up and emptied of its dead, telling them not only to believe that they will see Jesus back at home, but to share that hope with others.

I think we can relate to their fear, their terror. So much has happened to bury our faith, our hope lately, under the rubble of war, in the river beneath the bridge, under the shattered memories of broken relationships, in the grave. It seems risky to hope, almost disrespectful to announce our hope. Not only that, but there are few enough angels out here giving out good news; if one showed up, we would have to wonder if it had been conjured up by generative AI. Truth is hard enough to find, so hope?

And yet here we are, with the women, approaching the tomb and finding that the stone has been rolled back, and the grave is empty, and that Jesus is risen, and has gone ahead of us. Because that is what we believe, isn’t it? That God has defeated death, and more than that, has given us a new life, with and in Christ Jesus.

We believe, without the benefit of angels or appearances, that he rose from the dead, that the Roman Empire, greatest superpower in history, could do their worst to kill him, but that they could not destroy him. 

We believe that in the midst of trouble, in the midst of unrest and unease, in the midst of our lives, there is no grave that can hold God hostage. We believe that Jesus is risen, and hope has been unleashed.

Because if Jesus is risen, anything is possible. If Jesus is risen, the kingdom of God is truly at hand. If Jesus is risen, injustices can be reversed, violence does not have the final word, mercy can overthrow oppression, humility, humanity is stronger than the imaginations and machinations of mighty and military empires.

And so despite the powers of the world, despite the clouds, despite everything that conspires to make us afraid, we will hope. A friend reminded me last night that the angel’s message from Jesus makes a point of naming Peter; Peter, who we last saw weeping after his denials of Jesus, and the crowing of the cockerel. We hope, because Jesus’ love and forgiveness know no bounds, and because nothing we can do, nothing have done, can stop Christ’s resurrection. We hope because if we can believe in a world where Jesus’ love reigns, where resurrection happens, then perhaps we can help bring it to hand.

We do not see Jesus in this morning’s Easter reading, but like the women at the tomb, we don’t need to see his risen body to know that it is true: that God’s life, God’s love for us – for us! – cannot be destroyed. 

The rock has been rolled away. Jesus is risen. Hope has been unleashed, and love has been set free. Do not be tooafraid to tell of it.

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Good Friday: the rock

Posted on March 29, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

The Passion Gospel is read.

Then, they rolled a stone across the entrance to the tomb.

These were his disciples, his followers, his confidantes; he had told them that this would happen, and that it wouldn’t be the end. But they had seen him helpless on the wooden gibbet; they had seen him mocked and pierced; they could not leave him defenseless against the elements or the wild beasts, be they animal or human. They rolled a stone across the entrance to the tomb.

I don’t know if it was an act of faith, expecting that if Jesus were to rise from the dead, rebuild the temple of his body in three days, that he would at least be able to cope with a rock, or whether it was an act of doubt and despair, a walling off the hope that had attended them as long as he was with them, now crucified along with him. I do think that in the moment, it was an act of love, of tenderness, of care for the body they had known. In the moment, caught between grief and wonder, wrenching hope and twisting despair, they did the only thing that they could think of to honour the love they had shared: they rolled a stone across the entrance to the tomb.

However we come to the Cross tonight, there is a reason we come here, to sit in its sorrow together instead of alone, to watch the shadows gather and hear the silence that follows the death of God, made all too human on the cross. Whether we come to hollow out our despondency, whether we are trying to scrabble together hope, whether we are bringing a heart of stone or a bleeding side, there is tenderness that awaits us here.

There is a tenderness that doesn’t insist that we see the Cross only as prelude to Resurrection. There is a love that rolls the rock across the entrance to the tomb in order to protect our grief, to honour our sorrow, to keep out the wild beasts that have no mercy. 

There is a tenderness that persists in hope on our behalf, knowing that even when God is dead and buried, God is not gone, that eternity cannot be so easily ended as by our devices. That the rock is no barrier if God should choose to move it.

The emptiness of the Cross that night seemed hollow to those who had not yet witnessed the emptiness of the tomb. Yet even in his absence, Jesus called out of those who tended to him the kind of love and mercy, the kind of persistent insistence on the goodness of God that he had embodied. They rolled a stone across the entrance of the tomb, aching to hold on to him, knowing that in order to do that, they must go home, and light the candles for their sabbath prayers; to keep the faith, however shadowed with doubt it might become, to say a blessing, and let the rock, the rock of our salvation, be its seal.

For God alone my soul in silence waits;
For Christ alone is my rock and my salvation. (based on Psalm 62:1-2)

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Maundy Thursday: love

Posted on March 28, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

It doesn’t look as though it was necessarily planned this way. You would think that if Jesus wanted to wash his disciples’ feet, he would do it on the way in, not in the middle of the meal, while they were all sat around the table. It feels awkward, that interruption to the last supper they will enjoy together. But perhaps the awkwardness is at least part of the point.

I wonder if it was as they were sharing their meal, their memories, their hopes and fears for this Passover festival, with all of its history and all of its danger, and knowing that his time with them was about up, that Jesus remembered Mary. Only last weekend, they were all at Mary’s house, with Martha and Lazarus, still fresh from the tomb. They were already making jokes about Lazarus’ body odour when Mary broke open the jar of nard and poured it out over Jesus’ feet, its scent filling the house and its inhabitants, silencing them, at least most of them; love having the final word over death.

And if he remembered Mary, wiping up the rivulets of perfumed oil with her hair, he could not but remember that other woman, at Simon the Pharisee’s house, who washed his feet with her tears; the one they called a sinner; the one that he said loved him the most. 

And in the next heartbeat he was on his feet, filling the bowl with water, stripping off his robe and rolling up his sleeves, because he knew that if he was to leave them knowing how to love, he needed to show them the depth, the humility, the profundity of his love for them.

“You see what I have done to you?” he asked them. “Now do that to one another.” He told Peter, “You don’t understand it now, but one day you will.”

Because he understood that in this moment, the love that the women had poured upon his feet was completed, by his love, by his passing it on to his disciples.

Lavishing love on those who do not understand it; it is the story of the Gospel, the story of Creation, the story of our lives, and of the love of God.

Returning to the table, Jesus took the bread, and broke it, and told them, “This is my body that is for you.” He knew that in the moment they would wonder what on earth or in heaven he might mean, but soon, after his body was broken, and his blood spilled with water upon the earth, when they came back to the table they would remember, and they would know that this, too, was love beyond measure, and he trusted that we would know what to do; how to let that understanding lift us from the table, ready to pour the love we have known upon each other, upon our neighbour, upon the world.

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What we learn from one another

Posted on March 26, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

A poem towards Maundy Thursday

Some days later, stretching out his hand 
to pluck an olive to his puckered mouth 
he remembered her hands and her hair, 
how the scent of nard filled his mind, 
overwhelming the taste of the food 
with the sweet and bitter tang of love; 
his mother and the oil she used 
to anoint her firstborn son. 
He arose, stripped down like a child 
playing around the feet of the adults 
at table, began to wash them,
wondering at how time callouses us all, 
however much tenderness is folded in. 

“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13:35)

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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

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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!

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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

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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

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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)

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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/

 

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