Guns kill people

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Guns are not choosy. Guns just kill people. It’s their modus operandi. It’s what they do.

We are hearing more, bit by bit, about the latest victims of the latest shooting rampage. Each detail chips a little more flint from our hearts. The sister who sneaks up and holds your hand. The mother of the bride. The older man with the inimitable friendly greeting. The woman who could not respond to increasingly frantic texts, because no, she was not all right. No, she was not safe. The son who spoke to his mother just the day before, as though nothing were amiss, because back then, nothing was. God heal their souls from their violent passage and bring them to peace; God help his mother, her brother, her daughter, his friends; God console all those who are in grief.

Including the soul and the family of the thirteenth person to die, the one plagued by paranoia, who had called for help with voices and radiation machines and sleep-stealing vibrations, who had difficulty, apparently, telling nightmares from reality. The one to whom we sold a gun.

A lawyer for the gun dealer assures us that the transaction was legal. The requisite background checks were run. I guess there was no mandated waiting period. This man was allowed, was invited by us to buy a shotgun and ammunition. A man who could not tell reality from nightmare was handed the responsibility for controlling a deadly device, a machine manufactured to kill.

We failed that man on Saturday [corrected from Sunday following NPR’s similar correction], and because we did, we failed a dozen more people on Monday, and their families, and their friends, and our own children to whom we now have to explain yet again why the news is so sad, so scary, so damn wrong.

At the risk of repeating myself, and with all respect to the dead and those who mourn them: Guns kill people. It is their raison d’etre. That being the case, we must control them. We must clip their wings and limit their clips and we must do it before more blood is shed, because if we do not, that blood is on our hands.

We, the people, run this country, so our laws say. Guns kill people. We, the people, need to fight back.

this post has been updated to credit news sources

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Year C Proper 19: God’s unrelenting love

Posted on September 15, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Does anyone think that the scribes and the Pharisees might be just a little bit jealous? For the past few weeks of story, Jesus has been at their house, eating at their tables, messing with their seating arrangements and telling them who they should and shouldn’t invite for dinner: and now he’s ditched them for this other crowd, and they are either not invited or wouldn’t darken the doorway if they were; and they’re feeling a little bit petulant. It makes you wonder, at least a little bit, just who it is Jesus thinks might be lost.

We lost my elder brother once. It was in a department store in Bristol, England, where we used to live. Our parents, in those seemingly innocent days, would park us in the toy department while they looked at boring stuff like kitchen appliances or clothes or goodness knows what. Anyway, that day they came back and found me playing with the teddy bears (I had a certain weakness for stuffed animals), and asked me where my brother was, and I looked around and shrugged – I hadn’t seen him in a while.

We searched the toy department. Then we went to customer service and got them to put out an announcement over the tannoy. We waited. Store security poked about in fitting rooms and unlikely corners, and came up empty. He was not in the store.

We went to the police station. I remember our parents giving them his description: it was strange, hearing him reduced to height and hair colour and the clothes on his back. There were no cell phones back in the olden days, so they told us to go home and wait there for their call.

We walked back through the department store, retracing our steps, searching and seeking about, until we reached the multi-storey parking garage where we’d left our old, maroon Ford Cortina, and there he was, sitting on the ground, leaning against the wheel arch. It turned out, he didn’t even know that he was lost. He was simply sitting, waiting to be found.

I believe that we ate chip-shop fish and chips out of the newspapers that night, a humble celebration saved for the most special of occasions, and a sure sign that our mother was both exhausted and elated.

In the readings that we heard this morning, we rehearse the cycle of a father, of a mother, of a lover who has lost the one most precious to their heart. Jeremiah proclaims God’s anger, God’s regret, God’s undoing of Creation: Genesis has gone into reverse – lo! Let there be no light! Lo! Let there be no land! Lo! Let there be no life! My children are stupid and foolish and leave me behind, and I will have none of them. (Oxford Bible Commentary, John Barton and John Muddiman, eds, OUP, 2001, 493)

But God has been here before, and God promised Noah never again to say never again; never again to make a full end, so that even in the face of betrayal and anger and grief and pain, God will not say, never again will I love you. Indeed, in the first letter to Timothy, the author (who may or may not have been Paul himself, but who considered himself at least under Paul’s mantle) describes himself in the terms of a foolish child, ignorant and in need of patience; but God sought out Paul when he was Saul, persecuting the people of the risen Christ, and saved him from himself. A Pharisee who thought himself firmly on the road of righteousness, nevertheless Saul was lost until he was found on the road to Damascus and blinded so that he might see. “Amazing Grace” might have been his theme song, if it had been written yet.

And then in the Gospel, the denouement: the lost child, the wanderer, the fool who in his heart said there was no God, has been found, and is brought home to great rejoicing, relief and tears, and dancing on the edge of heaven.

Have you seen those aging images that they use to portray how children who went missing ten or twenty years ago might look now? There are those who never give up searching, who cannot let go of hope. We had a lesson in that this year, after a decade of three girls gone who have been restored to their families; and despite the hardship, despite the horror, there was great rejoicing that they had been found. How could there not be?

And if we, who are sinners and Pharisees and scribes, know how to rejoice when someone is found, and brought home, how much more our Father, our Mother who is in heaven?

The scribes and the sinners and the Pharisees with their dinners can argue till the cows come home over who is last and who is first and who is lost and who is found – Jesus tells them, no matter what, no matter when, God delights in all of God’s children, even you, even me; God delights to receive us in a loving embrace, no matter how, no matter why; God never gives up searching, never gives up calling, gives up sweeping the floor to find us, no matter how, no matter who. God never loses hope.

It is a matter of great delight; it is a saying worthy to be received, that God never gives up hope of finding our faces turned toward heaven, and the joy that is freely offered from on high.

And we can grumble with the Pharisees – what, God loves them, too? – whoever “them” is for you – or we can say, Jesus Christ; my God; I never knew how lost I was until I was found by you. Amen.

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Lost in the department store

Posted on September 13, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Frantic, fleeting moments in the old department store,
for each passing second a hundred possibilities; few of them good.
Disembodied voices broadcast fear across the floors:
“Have you seen this child? Wearing a blue coat with a hood.”
Elevators, escalators, all head down and out the door,
into the town where strangers stand in shadows at high noon.
Reduced to the clothes on his back, his height and hair colour,
adrift in the wilderness of the city, someone’s beloved son.
Imagine the moment they see him, as if he’s been born all over again,
counting his fingers and toes, hugging him tight,
shouting aloud to the heavens above:
here is the one who was lost; now rejoice. He’s alright.

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Psalm 14 (53)

Posted on September 11, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Psalm 53 is included in today’s Daily Office readings. It is almost exactly the same as Psalm 14, which is included in this Sunday’s Revised Common Lectionary, except for the penultimate verse(s). The text of Psalm 14 is included below, from the Book of Common Prayer translation.

Bread

They eat up my people like bread,
kneading and wheedling them,
seeking to get a rise out of them,
baking them and slicing them.
They eat up my people like bread,
stealing them in desperate times,
stuffing them into their children’s mouths
to quiet their hungry cries.
They eat up my people like bread,
morsels divided, dissolving on the tongue,
washed down with wine;
there is none who does good; not one.
They eat up my people like bread;
they crumble them between their hands,
throw them to the birds,
dust them off with a brisk slap.
They eat up my people like bread,
ask for more, day by day,
and I, the fool, feed them;
I find I cannot turn away.

Psalm 14 Dixit insipiens
1 The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.” All are corrupt and commit abominable  acts; there is none who does any good.
2 The Lord looks down from heaven upon us all, to see if there is any who is wise, if there is one who seeks after God.
3 Every one has proved faithless; all alike have turned bad; there is none who does good; no, not one.
4 Have they no knowledge, all those evildoers who eat up my people like bread and do not call upon the Lord?
5 See how they tremble with fear, because God is in the company of the righteous.
6 Their aim is to confound the plans of the afflicted, but the Lord is their refuge.
7 Oh, that Israel’s deliverance would come out of Zion! when the Lord restores the fortunes of his people, Jacob will rejoice and Israel be glad.

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Year C Proper 18: One lousy sales pitch

Posted on September 8, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

The other day, during a screening of the final movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy – the one where all of the final battles happen and the last-ditch attempts to overcome evil in the face of incredible odds are fought, and the sacrifice of a humble hobbit and the sacrificial love of that humble hobbit’s humbler best friend save the day – at the start of yet another massed battle scene, where the good troops are lined up to face their inevitable defeat and demise at the hands of the horrible orcs and their armies of monsters, the king gave a rousing speech to urge the people onto the field of carnage, and a child was heard to comment, “You know, these kings don’t give very good pep talks. They’re basically saying, ‘You’re all going to die, so get out there and get it over with.’ It’s not very encouraging,” he said.

I think that he might feel much the same way about this particular invitation to discipleship: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. …None of you can become my disciples [moreover] if you do not give up all your possessions.” It’s not a great sales pitch.

There are large crowds following Jesus, large and curious crowds, impressed by his healing powers, entranced by his teaching “as one with authority and not like the scribes.” They have seen his courage, they have witnessed his wit and wisdom, and they wonder what he will do next.

The trouble is, what Jesus will do next is go to Jerusalem and complete on the cross God’s intervention in this fallen world and the beginning of its re-creation as one on the path to salvation. And this will be hard and painful work. For Jesus personally, it will mean his death. For many of his disciples, it will mean persecution and death. For those struggling through the centuries to come, still waiting for the completion of the kingdom, it will mean difficult decisions about what it means to love God, what it means to love one another, how best to love our neighbours in Syria, to promote peace in a world still wracked by war. It may mean hard words between spouses, between generations, between friends, as we continue to strain out God’s purpose for us, to discern the difficult work of building the kingdom of God.

No one starts a building project, says Jesus, without first costing it out. Otherwise, they may get halfway through and have to abandon it, and everyone will laugh at them, and they will go bankrupt. Can you afford, he is asking the crowd, to be my disciple? Do you have what it will take? Do you even understand what you are getting yourself into?

No one starts a war, Jesus says, without first calculating the chances of winning. Otherwise, they may get drawn into open-ended, unending conflict, with no clear way out, sending life chasing after death as though they hate the lives of their own children, and that is no way, says Jesus, to wage war. Sometimes it is better to hate your own strength than to use it. Better to sit down and work out the cost of peace. Do you know what you are getting yourselves into?

It isn’t that Jesus hates his family. One of the last words that he croaks out from the cross is to make sure his mother is taken care of; at least one of his brothers continues as a devoted disciple and church leader in Jerusalem. Jesus doesn’t hate children; he is vociferous in their defence. He doesn’t even hate his life; he prays that there might be a way to keep it, to pass the cup of suffering up; he enjoys meals with his friends, he drinks and laughs and loves people; he saves lives, he doesn’t hate life.

But he will not cling to it. When his mother and brothers come looking for him, worrying that he has gone mad, with all of this talk of healing miracles and the love of God, he will not be turned aside from his work even for love of them. When Pilate demands that he defend his life from the charges laid against it, he will not turn on his own people, he will not turn away from death even to save his own life. He has calculated the cost of building the kingdom of God, and he is good for the account. He has considered the options of waging war on sin, and he has made peace with the terms that victory will extract from him. He is good for that account.

We are, to be honest, a little spoiled in twenty-first century America, we Christian disciples. For most of us, there was little resistance to our becoming Christians. There was little we had to give up. Few of us were thrown out of our family homes for apostasy, or disinherited by reason of insanity. We are not, for the most part, the ones calculating the costs of war over the price of peace. Instead, we are like the large crowd following along, watching and wondering what Jesus will do next, curious and often a little detached.

But make no mistake, warns Jesus. Once you commit yourself to following me, you will not remain detached for much longer. Once you know, once you have experienced and known the love of God, the mercy of God, the God who loved us so much as to become one of us, to live with us and walk with us and die for us and live for us again; once you have gone there, there is no turning back. There is no unknowing. So be sure, before you start, that you know what you are getting yourself into. Be sure, before you start, that you have costed out what might be demanded of you: what prejudices will you have to give up, what shackles must you break, what evils you will be called upon to face and fight, which wars you may have to trade out for peace, what relationships will be transformed when you learn to love God and your neighbour, every neighbour, enemy or friend, as yourself. Do you know what you are getting yourself into?

Of course, we don’t. Did you hear or read the story of the school bookkeeper in Atlanta, Georgia, who saved the lives of who knows how many children and innocents, as well as the life of the one who would have taken theirs, a couple of weeks ago? She bore the burden of loving this dangerous and deranged neighbour like one who had heard and heeded Jesus’ words:

“I just started praying for him,” Antoinette Tuff tells Atlanta’s Channel 2 Action News. “I just started talking to him … and let him know what was going on with me and that it would be OK. And then [I] let him know that he could just give himself up. … I told him to put [the guns] on the table, empty his pockets. He had me actually get on the intercom and tell everybody he was sorry, too. But I told them, ‘He was sorry, but do not come out of their rooms.’ … I give it all to God, I’m not the hero. I was terrified.”[1]

Hers is an extreme example, at least for our times, our place, but Antoinette Tuff reminds us that we don’t know the shape or weight of the cross that we will bear. We can’t see the future, we can’t know when we will be called upon to face down evil with love or to entertain angels. We do know that Jesus is worth it, worth it all, because he has given his all for us, he has given God’s all for us.

Jesus gave the large and curious crowd fair warning that following him closely would involve more than they could imagine. He already knew how much would be demanded of him, all of his love and all of his life, and he knew that, with God’s help, he was good for that account.

There’s a verse at the end of the hymn, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” by Isaac Watts, which sums it up nicely:

“Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine
Demands my soul, my life, my all.”

Amen.

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Tomorrow’s gospel

Posted on September 7, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

“No one starts a war, Jesus says, without first calculating the chances of winning. Otherwise, they may get drawn into open-ended, unending conflict, with no clear way out, sending life chasing after death as though they hate the lives of their own children, and that is no way, says Jesus, to start a war. Sometimes it is better to hate your own strength than to use it. Better to sit down and work out the price of peace than to wage such a costly war. Do you know what you are getting yourselves into?”

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Snooze

Posted on September 6, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

The early morning dreams were the worst,
when the bridge between sleep and the waking world
was already open to traffic, its boundaries blurred;
she’d wake uncertain if he’d really come back,
dazzled and dazed by what she would do if he had.

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Loose ends

Posted on September 5, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

When someone dies, there are plenty of loose ends. Some are hanging by a thread, easily pulled away, dealt with and discarded. Some we fear that if we pull the whole thing will unravel, so we leave them well alone. Others are so tangled together that it is hard even to see the ends, to know where to start when someone’s life ends.

Maybe that is why there has been, as a friend noted last night, little commentary during the day since the apparent suicide of Ariel Castro. It is not because we didn’t notice, or think about it; when he came into the kitchen to kiss me goodbye yesterday morning, it was the one piece of news that my husband shared, without comment. I had already seen the news, and was standing over my iPad wondering what it meant, what it meant for those three young women, for the daughter born in that house, for their families. I thought of his other family. How would they tell one another? How would they tell the girl? It was impossible to imagine how any of them are feeling, because what they went through, what he put them through, is unimaginable. We don’t even want to try too hard.

I didn’t worry a whole lot about Ariel Castro himself. Of course, the prison system will need to make sure and certain that it did the right things by him; those loose ends can’t be left laying around to trip up anyone else. But the loose ends that he carries with him are in God’s hands, and I have perfect trust that God knows just what to do with them; that God is doing God’s own right thing by him, and I don’t need to second-guess God.

Perhaps then, the loose ends that tangle and trip us up are our own. We allowed Ariel Castro to represent to us, to carry for us all that robbed us of our own innocence, our own childhoods, our own freedom; but he refused to hold them; he has let them go. There has been an abruption, and we are left with loose ends.

So I will commend his soul to God. I will continue to pray for his victims. I will continue to pray for all prisoners, of all kinds. I pray for our own loose ends, that we may not come unravelled. Pray for me; I will pray for you.

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Rumours of war

Posted on September 2, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

I dreamed of the young ones on graduation day.
They were leaving for war, assembled
rank and file on the high school field,
the front line singled out and sent away.
We tried to reach them for a parting embrace;
too many bodies lay between us.
The sun, stealing down behind the football posts,
fell upon her fresh, flushed face.

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Year C Proper 17: An ambition for humility

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

So what happens if the audience at the dinner party follows Jesus’ advice? What if the next time they are invited out, they are falling over themselves and each other to sit at the foot of the table? What if the most ambitiously humble of them all manages to scramble into the lowest cushion and sprawl there, with a fixed and slightly frightening smile, waiting to be recognized and invited up to the favoured place at the host’s right hand? The others, denied the lowest prize, sheepishly take their places to his left and his right, and fidget expectantly. And no one says a word.

The host takes his place at the head of the table, the dinner begins, and the ambitiously humble Pharisees at the far end realize that they have been truly humbled, that they will spend the whole evening in the lowest place, except for the wait staff who attend them; but who counts the servants? Do they shrug it off, chalk it up to experience; do they grumble and curse Jesus and his bright reverse pop-psychology ideas – the last shall be first indeed, pah!; or do they laugh at themselves, suddenly seeing themselves through his eyes, always fighting for position whether it be at the top end or the bottom end of the table, when really what matters is being there, being together, being fed among friends?

But then, if the host follows Jesus’ advice, they won’t even have been invited to the next dinner party. Forget them, Jesus says, in front of them all, mind you – they’ll just invite you back and you’ll have to do this all over again at each of their houses. Instead, invite the people you walk past every day in the marketplace, the ones who have no table to invite you back to. At the very least, they won’t be jostling for position at the expense of your honoured guest, and when dinner’s over, because they can’t return the favour, you never even have to see them again!

I would hope that the fact that, in the gospel accounts, Jesus is always getting invited to dinner means that his host and his fellow dinner guests got the joke. Even the narrator throws in the hint: he was telling them a parable. Jesus the preacher amazed his audiences in the synagogues; Jesus the dinner guest knew how to use humour to defuse an awkward social situation and deflect his own impatience at those who considered only their own place at the table.

It is a theme which Jesus continues to develop with parables and stories about wedding banquets and waysides and rich men’s tables and poor men’s hunger, and throughout it runs the melody of the Magnificat:

[The Lord] hath showed strength with his arm;
he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Because, of course, it is God who exalts the humble and the meek, and puts down the mighty. It is only in the imagination of our own hearts that we have the power to evaluate one another’s worth, or validity, or place at God’s table. The host should be under no illusions about his own ability to bestow honour upon another.

I wonder what we are to make of this parable today. The falling over themselves Pharisees part is perhaps easy; we can all laugh at our clumsy efforts to out-honour while simultaneously out-humbling one another, or at least I can. Have you ever got stuck in that door-opening infinite loop – “After you; no, after you; no, I insist, after you; no, no, please, after you…” until someone has to give in and go first even though they know that the first will be last, darn it! Jesus’ joke is on us; how hard it is truly to love another as much as ourselves!

The host who has to offer the most to those who can do the least for him, though; what is the parable there for a parish? Is it meeting the needs of those who will never translate into pledging units? Is it offering prayer for those who might never pray for us? Is it going out after those who will not sit and stay and raise our ASA (our Average Sunday Attendance)? Is it supporting social programs and welfare initiatives on behalf of “the least of these”? This past week, a faith group was threatened with arrest for giving food to homeless people in a public place; in a letter to the city’s mayor, Bishop Michael Curry of North Carolina said, “A pivotal principle of Christian morality is summed up in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth when he said, “As you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me,” (Matthew 25:40).” We are blessed when we keep a place at the table for those we do not know, do not understand, do not get, because by doing so, some have entertained angels unawares.

C.S. Lewis, in a sermon entitled “The Weight of Glory,” says, “There are no ordinary people… Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.” We are blessed with scores of opportunities each day to seek and serve Christ in our neighbours, those extraordinary and holy people.

“When you give a banquet, invite the poor, those who cannot repay you, and you will be blessed precisely because they cannot repay you,” suggests Jesus. Love strangers and do good to them; in doing so, some have entertained angels unawares.

The humbly ambitious, ambitiously humble Pharisees falling over themselves and one another to get to the foot of the table, like the people stuck in the door-holding dilemma, are still missing the point, which is to look around and see who does not have a seat at all, who still needs to be invited in, who has been ignored and neglected, left hungry and out in the cold for too long.

If you look at the verses that we leave out of this morning’s gospel reading, between arriving at the dinner and finding his seat, in the sight of all of the guests, Jesus heals a man who is suffering from dropsy. This is exactly the kind of person that Jesus turns around and tells his host should be invited to join them at the table – and he is standing right there, having just been healed, on the Sabbath no less, by the merciful touch of Jesus’ love.

The response of most of the guests is to turn around quickly to make sure they haven’t lost their place of honour in all of the excitement. Jesus uses humour to remind them gently but in no uncertain terms of the unseemliness of such actions, and the commandment of God to love every neighbour as ourselves, even, especially, the “least of these”.

And the man who was healed gets the joke, and he goes away humming the Magnificat under his breath:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.
For God has looked with favour on this lowliest servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me;
and holy is his name.

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