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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Magnificat

Posted on August 31, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

My imagination is scattered,
but my heart still hungers for something good;
my soul magnifies God the great and merciful,
but mine eyes look to the Golan hills;
from where is help to come?
We are fortunate that God does not forget us,
for if we all fell out of grace, all at once,
all hell would break loose.

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The doves of democracy

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

It sounded on my radio this morning as though the world was repeating to its leaders the lessons it learned at its mothers’ knee: Two wrongs don’t make a right. NPR reported that Angela Merkel was likely to be wary of joining military action against Syria, since she is facing an election in a Germany that has little stomach for a new war; and David Cameron has retreated from a once bitten, twice shy, post-Iraq Parliament in order to fight another day. Perhaps the population is reminding its politicians that aggression all too often brings tends to bring its shame paradoxically back to the violator rather than the victim.
The difficulty for these democratic doves, though, is letting the people of Syria know that they are not alone, that the rejection of revenge or vengeance violence, that the distaste for further death is not because their loved ones go unmourned or unmissed; quite the opposite. In fact, such inaction can only be justified by a fierce love for peace and for the people who long for it.
In the Gospel of Luke, James and John are eager to emulate Elijah in calling down fire on the people of Samaria who reject them. Jesus rebukes their zeal for revenge; it is not their task to fight Elijah’s forgotten battles; and they are not to take lightly the lives of those whom God loves, whose lives are precious in the sight of God. Theirs may be in some ways a harder road to follow, yet its yoke is easier, unburdened by the blood, grief and tears of the opposition.

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Music to weep by

Posted on August 27, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

A simple psalm, honest vibrato supplied
by the singer’s fear of the Lord;
a half-forgotten nursery rhyme
from a half-forgotten time;
a song whose intervals trip down memory lane;
a show tune belted over the kitchen sink;
notes rise on soap bubbles, floating
out of the window on a breezy day.

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Year C Proper 16: Jeremiah and Jesus

Posted on August 25, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

The Book of Jeremiah is a complicated document, and there are many scholarly debates about its history and its voices, its purpose and its people. What we read at its beginning, though, is a classic call story.

“Here,” says God, touching Jeremiah, “I am giving you my words, my Spirit, my authority.”

My goodness!

So Jeremiah begins his career as a prophet, and like most prophets, he is loved and he is hated, and he is hated the most by those nations and kingdoms (and their kings) over whom he has been appointed “to pluck and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” For his pains, Jeremiah is placed in the stocks, imprisoned, rejected and despised. In fact, at one point in the story, one of those kings over whom Jeremiah has been given authority by God takes his prophetic scroll and deliberately and defiantly destroys it, having it read to him by a voice dripping with irony, and after each section is done cutting it away and throwing it into the fire (ch 36). One commentary notes drily that “Jeremiah has the reputation of unremitting doom.”[1]

But Jeremiah never gives up the faith that he has been given. He cannot keep from the call that he has heeded. God’s words have been placed within him and they burn to be set free. He calls the people to account, to recognize that they, too, are known to God, their actions and the imaginations of their hearts are open books. He urges them to do what is right and return to God, because when they do, God will always receive them with joy, and with mercy, and with love.

Jeremiah’s is not a happy story. Jeremiah is one of those characters that gives the lie to the popular reassurances: if it is God’s will, all will go well; if you are truly inspired, no one will be able to oppose you.

It gives the lie to the popular assurances that if God is for us, no one can stand against us. That lie is too often used as an excuse, or a rationale for backing off, backing down, when a prophetic voice is needed, stronger words, the telling of hard truth to power.

Think of the modern martyrs, of Mahatma Gandhi, assassinated for attempting to bring peace between warring factions of his own country; of Martin Luther King, Jr, killed for calling out the injustices of racism in this country. Or, getting back to basics, think of Jesus, plotted against from the early days of his ministry by political and religious leaders whose authority he undermined by daring to highlight the plight of the helpless and the hypocrisy of the high and mighty.

What do you think? Sixty-five years after Gandhi was killed, the ideal of non-violence is still embattled in this country by wrangling over stand-your-ground laws and fights about just where the right to own lethal weaponry begins and ends; internationally by the apparently tortured diplomatic difficulty of controlling and calling out chemical weapons attacks and cruelty among the nations. Does that mean that Gandhi’s inspiration was wrong?

Fifty years after the March on Washington, the media is reporting on a Pew Research finding that a majority of white folks, who look like me, think that enough has been done, that the war on racial inequality has been won, while more black folks seem to believe otherwise and insist that there is more work to be done.[2] Who owns the truth?

At the very least, Jeremiah teaches us that we cannot base our judgement of what is good and true and necessary simply on polite or popular opinion. Nelson Mandela’s first arrest, coming under the “Suppression of Communism Act,” would have been considered quite legal and reasonable back in 1952; it took some while for his prophetic voice to be heard above the chatter.[3] When Gene Robinson accepted the call of God and of his diocese to serve as a bishop in the Episcopal Church, he received hate mail and death threats, and some predicted the demise of the church and of civilization; but have you heard him preach the Gospel?

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus goes into a synagogue, to take part in the prayer of his community. He is faithful in his observance, and he is obedient to his tradition. He sees a woman in need of healing, and he reaches out and touches her, and she is made strong. The leader of the synagogue berates her – notice, he berates the woman, not Jesus – for coming to worship on the Sabbath and getting healed! He is not angry because Jesus has done work on the Sabbath, because he has done something beautiful and wonderful. You can tell it from the story, because he doesn’t yell at Jesus, and besides, how would that even make sense? And anyway, Jesus shields the woman from his words and shrugs off his diatribe with disdain, and no one argues back.

No, the leader of the synagogue is lashing out at the weakest one there because he is afraid. He is afraid that he has just seen God at work, and heaven knows what trouble that will bring, God knows what God will ask of him, if God truly is at work in the world, in his little world, in his small corner of the world. The leader of the synagogue doesn’t really think the woman should continue to suffer. He is simply afraid of the burden that her freedom has just placed upon him. He has read Jeremiah and the prophets, and he knows that God is not shy of calling God’s people to account. His frightened but loud dissenting voice is hardly evidence that Jesus was wrong.

For most of us, following God’s call to love God, and to love our neighbours, will not lead to imprisonment, rejection, public humiliation, assassination, much less crucifixion, thank God. It does take continual attention to what is right, and good, and true. It does take discernment, prayer, listening to the call of God upon our hearts. It might quite often be necessary to filter out the background noise of popular dissent, or polite disapproval, or powerful politicking. It might take courage to do the next right thing, to take the next positive step towards loving God, loving our neighbours as ourselves.

Fifty years from Washington, two thousand years from the cross, more than three thousand years from the Exodus out of Egypt, we still have a long way to go, and part of that is because, for most of us, it’s all done by baby steps. Just occasionally, someone comes along who is ready to take a running jump; but for most of us, most of time, it’s baby steps: learning simply to notice the next crooked woman to walk through the door needing a touch of compassion; learning to speak the next true word with love; building our courage to take the next step towards loving our neighbour as ourselves. 

Here’s what Jeremiah’s call story and its aftermath leaves us: knowing and doing the will of God isn’t always easy. It might sometimes be scary. But God has known us, has known you, from eternity. God says, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you … Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you.” And Jesus says, “You are set free.” The Lord reached out and touched Jeremiah’s mouth, and placed words in it, and Jeremiah proclaimed the word of the Lord to the people of God. And Jesus reached out and laid hands on the woman and she was healed and lifted up her voice, praising God; free at last.

The king who burnt the scroll, the leader who lashed out in anger, they were afraid of the evidence of God’s power in their lives. They were afraid that loving God and their neighbour too much would leave too little love left over for themselves.

But as Jeremiah says later, “Thus says the Lord, ‘Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears; for your work shall be rewarded… There is hope for your future,’ says the Lord” (Jer. 31:16-17). So anger is answered with mercy, and the flow of fear is stopped up with faithfulness, and Jesus stands among the congregation, and has compassion upon the people that he finds there.

Amen.

[1] The Oxford Bible Commentary, John Barton and John Muddiman, eds (Oxford University Press, 2001), 490

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