Year C Easter 7: the shadow side of miracles

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

I think that this has been the week for miracles.

Finding Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight along with a young child alive felt pretty miraculous, didn’t it?

Then on Friday’s news, maybe you heard as I did that seventeen days after a garment factory collapsed in Bangladesh, a woman worker was found alive and relatively unharmed, and she was restored to her family. Everyone described it as a miracle.

And in between times, on Thursday, Jesus ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of God, as it is described in the Gospel according to Luke,

“He led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven.” (Luke 24:50-51)

It does seem to have been quite the week for miracles. But miracles, as it turns out, are not quite as straightforward as they might seem.

Look at the lesson from the book of Acts. First of all, Paul, is fed up to the back teeth of being followed around by a pointing, teasing spirit who is in the possession of a young girl, even though it seems to be telling the truth and maybe even giving them some free advertising; still, Paul is fed up with the constant refrain of “I know who you are,” and he orders the spirit out of the girl to get a bit of peace and quiet.

That’s miracle number one, and the flipside of the miracle is that the girl’s owners – owners, because she was a slave – see the spirit leaving and taking all of their money with it, all of the earning potential of this girl, all of her powers of divination. So they have Paul and Silas arrested, dragged into the marketplace, beaten, and thrown in prison. So much for peace and quiet.

At midnight, there is a miraculous upheaval in the earth that knocks down the prison walls and shakes free the shackles of the prisoners – good news for some, but the jailer is about to kill himself for fear of what the others might do to him when they find out that he has accidentally let all of the criminals in the country loose to do what they will.

Miraculously, however, they are all still there, and Paul and Silas are able to use the jailer’s gratitude as a way into conversation with him, as a way to convert him to the knowledge of the love of God that is found in Christ Jesus.

It is miracle after miracle, and yet at the end of the story, although soothed and bandaged, Paul and Silas are still prisoners, at least until the next day, and the jailer will still have to account for any other prisoners who might have taken advantage of the earthquake to make a break for it. Not to mention that the slave girl is no doubt very worried for her own position in the household for which she is no longer a source of great income. I do have to wonder what happened to that girl. I worry for her.

I sometimes think that the reason that we don’t see more miracles than we do is that they may appear to create as many complications as they solve.

The women who escaped from a decade of imprisonment and abuse in Cleveland this past week, and the little girl born in captivity, whilst their survival and their restoration is miraculous, will have so many complications to deal with, many sorrows and trials. So much has already been lost that this miracle will not restore. Of course, it is good news, it is wonderful news that they who were lost have been found; but it is not altogether a happy ending, because their suffering will, unfortunately, last a lot longer.

And the woman who was pulled from the rubble in Bangladesh – what a miracle! After seventeen days living on scraps dropped by fleeing fellow workers who had brought their lunch to work, hoping and praying to be found, she has been raised up and lifted out; but on the same day that she was found, the death toll of those lost rose above one thousand.

Miracles are not straightforward. The universe cannot bend so far without some warping and creaking. That simply is not the way that it is made. We live in a physical world bound by certain limitations.

At his Ascension, Jesus left his disciples alone once more, waiting, watching. We would kind of like Jesus to stay here with us, to be with us in the same way that he was with them. But if he had stayed as he was, he would have continued to be limited to being in one place at a time, healing one person in place of another, making one miracle in place of another. While Jesus was incarnate, while he was in one place talking to the Samaritan woman at the well, that other woman, the one with the blood, she was hemorrhaging money to doctors, so that by the time she met Jesus she was not only desperate but destitute. Miracles are not uncomplicated, because they happen in the midst of complicated lives. The wine at the wedding in Cana may have delighted the steward and the bridegroom, but there were most likely some sore heads the next day, maybe even a midnight brawl or two. Even miracles have their shadow sides.

So what should we do? Should we give up hoping and praying for miracles? By no means! Miracles continue to give us hope where we had given it up, ten years from the date of a disappearance, seventeen days from disaster. Miracles remind us that there is more to life than we can see from day to day, that there is always reason to persevere. We should give thanks where we notice them, and especially if they happen to happen to us.

We just need not to make idols out of them not, not to hang more hope on them than they can bear, give them more weight than they can carry. A miracle is not the same as a happy ending. Endings only happen when there is nothing that comes next. Miracles happen in the middle of everyday, complicated, continuing lives.

And after the miracle is made, and the earth stops shaking, there is still work to be done: there are factories to be reformed so that the workers can make a living without risking death; there are jailers to be brought to baptism, turning from evil to the truth, because no one is altogether beyond redemption; there are slave girls to be freed, who will need a lot of help to live into that newfound freedom; there are neighbourhoods to be redeemed from fear and division; there are always wounds to be soothed, folks to be forgiven and set free.

Yes, miracles are complicated, and they happen in the middle of already complex, continuing lives. But when they do happen, when the lost are found, when those we had resigned to death are found alive, those complicated little miracles remind us always to have hope, to live with steadfast and stubborn faith that good will come, that righteousness will prevail, that life and love will win out, come what may. They restore in us that sense of wonder that left the disciples looking upward into heaven, watching transfixed as Jesus ascended into the glory which was his from the beginning of time.

After they watched him leave one last time, Luke says that the disciples returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple blessing God, not because they knew that from now on life would be easy, or that they would live happily ever after. The imprisonment and beating that Paul and Silas suffered were just drops in the ocean compared to what the early church would go through. But in Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, the disciples found new hope. Jesus had promised that he would return to them, and he had. Jesus had promised to be with them always, and his ascension allowed him to transcend the limitations of his Incarnation, so that he might be with all of us, always.

That’s a miracle worth celebrating.

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Between

Posted on May 11, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

There is a chasm between birth and being
where stuff falls, collects and,
hidden by the distance and the dark,
smoulders, sending up smoke, ciphers
breathed in the language of the unborn
and forgotten, known only to their God.

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Mother’s Day

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

I’ll make a deal with you. It is this:
that for every single rose you give to a mother walking through your Sunday morning doorway, you say a prayer for the child whose parent left him alone and hungry in the evening shadows night after night. You’ll find him over there, wearing the mask of an old man with moist eyes;
that for every saccharine hymn to mothers, you sing with their mothers a funeral dirge for the babies lost before they were born;
that for every round of applause for the mothers who made it to church with their great-grandchildren, you offer a quiet prayer for the terrified-looking teenager over there;
that for each pink carnation handed out you will lay a flower on the grave of a mother lost this year, whose children turn away from the receiving line and slip out of the back door (and if that child is you, and you cannot turn away, please accept my condolences);
that for every smiling compliment to motherhood you offer a silent prayer for the pregnant woman worried about her test results and her future as a mother of an unknown child;
that for every mother you praise, you give thanks for a father who takes up the slack, and the fathers who mother together;
that for every mother whose name you remember, you remember the mothers who do not know their own children, who gave them up or gave them away or never call them any more; and remember their children, too.
If you will do these things, I will celebrate with you, with your mothers and your children, I will smile and sing and between us, we will see to it that the others know, too, that they are beloved.

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Some things ascend (others do not)

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

The skylark, singing.
Clouds; but those that reach the mountaintop
fall as rain, giggling and gurgling.
A swan, slow to start, duckpond runway,
lifting largely, broad wings set free.
Incense laden with prayers,
pious particles.
A child on a trampoline, up, up,
down to earth with a bounce and up again.
A balloon making a break for it;
tears running down a red face.
A jump jet, improbably vertical, pregnant with fire.
Smoke and steam, volcanic ash
blankets the atmosphere, straining away,
orbiting with the satellites and the space junk
and Jesus.

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Good news

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

I am confused by the good news. It is such bright, good news, overlaid with shards of loss which cast their light, prismed through fractured pieces, across its tear-stained joy:
the loss of innocence
the loss of a mother who never lived to see the day
the loss of little lives
the loss of years, and months, and weeks, and days, and minutes, and countless moments of freedom
the loss of a neighbourhood which will never again let its children out to play in the summer street where shadows gather
the loss of unformed memories
the loss of those unfound.
And yet the colours shine with astonished life, unlooked for redemption. It is, indeed, confusingly good news.

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Year C Easter 6: Light

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Light is really special.

During the last couple of centuries, scientists began to discover some really quite counter-intuitive things about light, the way that light moves, acts, has its being. We  think of light as beams, rays, waves. But light is not only found in waves. Max Planck and Albert Einstein discovered that they couldn’t predict the behaviour of light waves as they should be able to; they had to divide light up into parcels, bits, photons. Light is not only wave, but particle too. It depends how you observe it as to which property it will exhibit; it depends how you look at it as to what you will see. Actually, I am told that this is applicable to all particle physics; but it began, as I understand it, with our learning about light.

Then, too, we have all played with prisms and seen how the different wavelengths within the spectrum of visible light translate into all the colours of the rainbow. But back in the nineteenth century, it was discovered that not all light is easily visible to the human eye. Infra-red and ultra-violet light may lie beyond the spectrum that we usually see; and yet we have heard them called light. The idea of light that we can’t see is quite something, when you think about it.

Light is really quite special.

Without light, we cannot grow, we cannot grow food, we cannot survive. Without light, we cannot survive. When a total eclipse of the sun occurs, reports say that even the birds fall silent. There is an eerie drawing in of breath as the world waits to find out if its light support system will indeed return.

In the beginning, at the start of Creation, the first creature that God spoke into being was Light. This was a couple of days (in the poetic world of Genesis) before the sun and the moon were hung in the sky to divide the daylight from the lesser light of the night sky. It’s not science, but the theological message of this evolution and delegation of light is that all light comes directly from God, and it is God who created the messengers of light that we now see, the sun, the moon, the stars, even our electric lights. Light, like us, was made in the image of God, whose face shines upon the heaven and the earth.

On the first page of our Bibles, light is created, and at the last, in the final chapters of the final book of our biblical canon, God lights us up without the need for the mediation of the moon or the sun; the Lamb is the lamp, and the face of God shines on all of the newly created heaven and earth.

Like any creature, our light can fail, and light can be abused. We hear of the problems of light pollution, the disturbances to our equilibrium that it brings. And there are old stories from the coast of Cornwall, that thin finger of land which points from the southwest of England out towards the Atlantic, whose tip is named Land’s End, about the wreckers. The wreckers were people who lay in wait for ships returning from the Americas filled with the wealth of the new world. Weary from their long ocean crossing, their spirits were lifted by the first sight of light from the mainland, the lighthouses of southwestern England.

The wreckers would take those lights and swing them on the beaches, near the shoals and the reefs, and lure the ships onto the rocks and live by their plunder; landlocked pirates, you might say. The wrong light in the wrong place was deadly.

It was one of the cruelest of crimes; not only because of the weariness of the sailors and their long months and even years away from home, but to use the very light that was meant to protect them, to bring them safely home, which raised their spirits and roused their hope – to foul that faith was diabolical.

John, the one who wrote the Revelation, lived in dark, dangerous and even diabolical times. The Roman emperor Nero had demonstrated the depths to which the worldly powers and principalities would stoop, and there did not seem to be an end to their evil. The light that Isaiah looked for to illuminate the holy city and draw the nations to God seemed to be failing. The temple was gone. These were dark days.

So John looked instead to a new creation, a new beginning, beyond anything he and the churches were now experiencing, when they would know and see and experience with fullness and certainty and safety and joy God with them, the glory of God shining upon them.

But here’s the strange thing. Back in the nineteenth century, scientists discovered that there is light that we cannot always see, which is naturally occurring in creation, which surrounds us, whether we know it or not. John’s vision is one of completion, of contrast, of a new creation. But we know that God is with us in this creation, in this life, in these times, whether or not we see the light. The consummation of John’s vision may be yet to come; but its light already shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never overcome it.

Amen.

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The water cycle

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, says The Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earths so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
For as rain and snow fall from the heavens and return not again, but water the earth,
Bringing forth life and giving growth, seed for sowing and bread for eating,
So is my word that goes forth from my mouth; it will not return to me empty;
But it will accomplish that which I have purposed, and prosper in that for which I sent it. (Book of Common Prayer, p. 87)

One morning before ordination, before church, before everyone else arrived, and we were talking about the future and the fears and the falling rolls and the failure of nerve and the fact that I was probably not going to be the person called to reverse the rot;
the conversation was full of what I could not do.
So I went into the empty chapel and knelt before the empty altar and prayed in a certain tone of depression and desperation,
“So what do you expect me to do? Go down with the ship?”
And God answered with unusual, unexpected and irregular clarity,
“It’s not your ship.”

Between the Second Song of Isaiah and the reflection upon it at Morning Prayer today, I was reminded of this little incident in the middle of a little Sunday morning, and how the word of God will accomplish God’s purposes, how God’s word will prosper, whatever our own depression, desperation and defeatist prayers.

Back then, I got up, got dressed for the liturgy, and prayed fully and fervently, “Your will be done.” And just like that, hope returned.

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Breathing room

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

I have expanded since she left,
as though she wedged me tight,
her elbow in my side,
that space whence God had made
my other self; restored
my second lung inflates;
her voice still susurrates
as I exhale.

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The Mime

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Living in a portable Perspex box,
beauty teases on the breeze,
my hand smacks hard against its borders,
my lips bruised from reaching for tenderness.

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From a great height

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

The green wooded hills
appear moss-laden, springy,
inviting embrace

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