Trinity Sunday 2013

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

(A sermon I won’t be there to preach, ironically because I am “suffering” from shingles. But my love and prayers are with the parish of Epiphany this morning, and I’m so glad to be in a relationship with them.)

I know that it’s Trinity Sunday. Maybe you are itching for a theological treatise on the traditional, reformed and emergent doctrinal debates about the nature of our Triune God. Well, to be honest, that’s not a sermon I’m dying to preach. As we discussed in a conversation earlier this week, my clergy colleagues and I, this is not the Feast Day of a doctrine of the church; it is a celebration of God, of the wonder and mystery that is the Holy Trinity; it is a day set aside among all of the days in which we praise the name of our Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, the God in whom we live and move and have our being.

So that being said, what difference does it make that we have a relationship with a God that is all about relationship, that consists in relationship, that subsists in mutuality and love?

According to St Paul, it means that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. It means that we are filled with peace, with grace, with love.

Lovely stuff: then he goes and spoils it by talking yet again about suffering, and about how it produces endurance and character, like a gruff school master out of a black and white movie who insists that anything you don’t like and don’t want to do is, in fact, character-building and therefore desirable.

The problem with the gruff and grumpy approach to Paul’s invitation to boast in suffering is that it becomes a badge of pride in itself, something to be sought after. We should suffer, we begin to think, so as to find opportunities to boast in it. We saw something of this in the early martyrs of the church: Ignatius of Antioch, for example, was delighted, overjoyed, ecstatic at the prospect of being eaten by lions!

He wrote to friends in Rome in the year 110, worried that they would try to save him from his martyrdom:

What a thrill I shall have from the wild beasts that are ready for me! I hope they will make short work of me. I shall coax them on to eat me up at once and not to hold off, as sometimes happens, through fear. And if they are reluctant, I shall force them to it. Forgive me – I know what is good for me. Now is the moment I am beginning to be a disciple. May nothing seen or unseen begrudge me making my way to Jesus Christ. Come fire, cross, battling with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body, cruel tortures of the devil – only let me get to Jesus Christ![1]

Now, Ignatius may be a justly revered Christian saint, but honestly, this all seems a little twisted to me, and after the suffering we have seen even just this week, just this month, just this year, in Oklahoma, in Boston, in Newtown, on Seymour Avenue in Cleveland, the idea that we are supposed to celebrate suffering is quite obscene.

And I think that when we do that, we are in fact pushing Paul’s words further than they can really go on their own. What Paul writes, if we read it faithfully, is not, “Boast about your suffering,” nor even “Boast of your suffering,” but “We boast even in our suffering.”

The people whom we memorialize this weekend did not go out in order to suffer, but to overcome. Theirs was a courage born of necessity, not the excess of all kinds of extremists.

It’s a very different message.

Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 16:24-25)

Jesus used the same word – take up – to the man lowered through the roof by his friends in order to be healed: “Take up your bed and walk.” Take up your cross; take up your bed. It is the same action, one not of hardship only but of healing, one which finds its way through suffering to the reward to come, one which bears as its fruit not despair, but hope.

Jesus did not tell any of them to seek out suffering, although he warned them that it would find them. He did not seek himself to suffer, but he did not turn aside when the true course, the path to freedom led him through those dark valleys. His instruction was not one of cruelty but of mercy, of healing. He told his disciples, he told us that when we stub our toes on the hard wood of the cross, when we stumble, even when it feels as though we have fallen through the floor, we are to pick up and carry on, and Jesus will be right there beside us.

To be human is to be vulnerable to suffering; to be in relationship, to feel love for another, for God and the children of God, for special relationships, partners, children, friends, is to open ourselves up not to the possibility but to the inevitability of suffering.

To be human is also to be vulnerable to the most profound joy, and love, and hope; only in relationship can we be open not only to the possibility but the inevitability of reciprocal love and mutual enjoyment.

To be made in the image of a God whose essence is love, who exists eternally in relationship, who cannot be confined but must always be sharing, intimate and discrete, three in one, one in three – to be made in this image is to be made for relationship, for love and mercy, for hope and kindness.

So Paul can say, even out of the suffering of his own life, that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ; God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. Thus we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God; not by an effort of our own will but by the grace and gift of God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, one God, love shared but undivided, bound together in relationship and reaching out in love to us; and we need not be afraid that any kind of suffering, or shame, or doubt can come between us and the love of God poured out in the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ and the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

[1] “From Early Christian Fathers, edited and translated by Cyril C. Richardson (Volume I: The Library of Christian Classics), pages 104-105. First published in MCMLIII vy the SCM Press Ltd., London, and The Westminster Press, Philadelphia. Used by permission of the publishers.” William C. Placher, Readings in the History of Christian Theology, Volume 1: From its Beginnings to the Eve of the Reformation (Westminster Press, 1988), pages 17-18

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Trinity

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Trinity (in preparation for Sunday)

When the children were little,
and they wouldn’t listen,
they wouldn’t play nicely,
or tidy their toys, or eat their greens,
or let go of the poor cat’s tender tail,
I would say, “I’ll count to three,”

And every time it did the trick:
the cat was saved,
the sprouts were ingested,
the sprawling teddy bears laid to rest,
friendships mended and mothers mollified,
and all I had to say was “One …”

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To forgive is divine

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

the first in a short series on forgiveness. I’m really interested to hear your own stories, insights and opinions

“To forgive is divine,” so they say.

In some ways, it’s simple. Why forgive? we might ask, and we can enumerate the spiritual and psychological benefits, but if we are Christians it usually, eventually comes down to, because we are forgiven, and anyway Jesus said so.

To forgive is divine, and we strive to follow in the footsteps of the revealed incarnate God.

But happens when it is God that you need to forgive?

After my grandmother died, my mother was very angry at God, not for her death so much as for the suffering that preceded it. Why, she demanded, did your god put my mother through all that, if she was only going to die of it anyway? I was fourteen, and I hardly knew what to say; truth be told, more than thirty years later it’s still a struggle.

My mother eventually forgave God. I don’t know how she got there.

I have had my own moments of shouting at God, particularly over parenting issues: “They’re your children, too, you know!”

But like any other relationship, if it’s going to carry on, if it’s going to bear fruit, the grudges have to be given up. Whether or not we understand the behaviour of the other, whether or not we know what in heaven or on earth they were thinking, whether or not we agree with their actions (if in fact we can ever really know what they were up to, in the case of the ineffable godhead), we cannot reach out to take their hand if our own arms are full to falling off of heavy resentments and half-remembered arguments.

Because of the difficulties, because he would not remove all of the difficulties but in some ways seemed to add to them, many of his disciples turned away from Jesus (John 6:66-68). He asked the others, “Do wish also to go away?” And Simon Peter answered, exasperated, exhausted, resigned, “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Forgiveness is a very practical matter, when it comes right down to it, a function, perhaps, of the creator god who liked to use anthropomorphic hands to mould out of clay the trees and the people and the sea anemones; less a manufactured feeling of softness than a shrug of the shoulders and a sigh as the resentments stream like grains of sand through unclenched fingers.

If we practice on God, we might even find that we are able to forgive one another, all in good time.

We forgive in order to live together, to live for one another, we and God; and that becomes, if we live it and let it, our deep, deeply serious, and profound joy.

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Tornadoes and sympathy

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

When I attended prenatal classes nearly twenty years ago, they warned us that watching the news would never be the same again after giving birth; that we would weep more, suffer more, seeing each vulnerable child in the light of our own babies, every family tragedy as a warning of what can happen; that our hearts would break for every mourning mother as though for our own.

Tonight, CNN.com added a line to their coverage of the tornadoes in Oklahoma between updates. They mentioned a man, the father of a third grader, waiting quietly on a stool for news of his child.

I doubt that anyone needs to have given birth to weep with him, to wait and watch with him, to hope against hope and pray with him for his baby.

Whether we are mothers or daughters, sons or brothers, fathers or grandparents, godparents, friends, our hearts go out to Oklahoma tonight, as we wait, and watch, and weep with those whose lives, whose loved ones are on the line, and we offer up our prayers to the night sky, hoping that they will be heard above the noise and chaos of the wind and weather, that peace might prevail in the morning; and we add our tears to those who already mourn.

 

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Pentecost 2013

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

It was Pentecost. The disciples were gathered all together in one place. And the Holy Spirit came among them like a rush of wind, like the breath of god, the sound of a mighty exhalation, god whispering in what might seem to the vastness of the universe like a still small voice; a whisper which deafened the disciples like the roar of a hurricane, with the timbre of a tornado, rushing and beating and throbbing and insisting,
I am here.

They all knew the stories of Moses. They were Jews; they had been raised on the Exodus and the covenants and the burning bush, so when tongues as of fire divided and settled on each person’s head, then their neighbours saw and recognized the sign of the Angel of The Lord, the presence of god come to earth, the fire that burns but does not consume.
Their shoes would already have been removed, since they were indoors; truly, surrounded by burning women and men, every one knew themselves to be by the sign of the others to be in the presence of the divine.

Did each know that his own head burned, too? Yes; he must have seen the flames reflected in his astonished sister’s eyes.

Silence. First the noise, then the shear shock robbed them of words, of their sense almost. Then, as the wind died down and the flames began to diminish, the impulsive one said,

“Dude! Your head was on fire!”
And the dude said, “Ja, ganz recht es war!”
And another said, “C’est incroyable!”

Whose idea was it to go outside and try out their new voices on the crowd? One who remembered, perhaps, Jesus’ injunction to them: you will do even greater things than these, after I have gone to the Father.

These were people who knew their history, who knew the wonderful deeds that god could do when a bush was set on fire in the path of a reluctant refugee like Moses. They had recently witnessed much greater deeds than these, travelling with Jesus before and after his execution, his resurrection. They knew, by now, to take his predictions and his promises seriously. They knew their history, and they gathered together in one place to rehearse that history, to praise God and pray together, so that when the call came, the urging of the Holy Spirit upon them, they were ready to do great things. They went out declaring, so the crowd reports, the wonderful deeds of god, confident that they would be understood, even if they themselves weren’t entirely sure what they were saying.
Jesus said, you will do greater things than these.
They were ready to rock Jerusalem’s multicultural world.

Do we believe that? Do we really claim the baptism of the Holy Spirit poured out upon us? Do we read our salvation history and expect that we, like they, will be touched by a burning flame, passionate and lively, powerful yet gentle, and sent out to proclaim, to demonstrate, the greatness of god in the world? Do we look for the tell-tale signs of God’s presence with us, among us, the tongues of fire, the blaze of the Spirit of God within everyone we meet? Do we remove our shoes to acknowledge the ground upon which they stand, upon which we meet, as holy ground, touched by the presence of God?

Jesus has promised that the Holy Spirit is with us, is in us. The Holy Spirit is God’s continuation of the Emmanuel story, the story that tells how god lives among us and loves us intimately, pouring upon us the life of the divine, eternal life.

All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God, says Paul. For we do not receive a spirit of slavery, but of adoption. We are not mean minions, cowed and bowed before God, but we are heirs with Christ, children adopted into the family of God. Adoption means that whatever has been, wherever, whoever we have been, whatever names we bring with us, we are from henceforth now and forever family, with all of the rights and responsibilities, privileges and advantages of blood-born children. We are God’s family, and we can do anything, be anything that we are called to be, in the family business.

I met a woman once who had given up praying because she felt unworthy any more to approach god. I asked her what would it take for her to know that god still loved her, that god missed her and wanted to invite her back into the relationship that she once enjoyed through her prayer; that God forgave her,. She said she would need a sign.
This was well before I was ordained. I wasn’t at all sure that I had the authority to say what I was about to say, but since she had asked for a sign, I suggested that maybe god sending someone to listen to her, and then to tell her unequivocally that god had forgiven her and loved her and wanted her to come back into the divine embrace – could that be a sign? She agreed that could work, and together we prayed.
I was afraid, honestly, to claim that I might be a sign from god to anyone, but I am convinced that the Holy Spirit was indeed burning in that room, between her and me, and that the power of that flame was what burned away enough guilt, shame and fear from both of us to achieve and pretty great outcome.

In the Holy Spirit, with the Holy Spirit, you have become the signs of God’s presence in the world, the dwelling place of God. In the Holy Spirit, we know ourselves to be children of God, with all of the rights and responsibilities and privileges of family. It is a bold claim, but we are not given a spirit of fear but of fire, to do great things. In the Holy Spirit we have the boldness, the confidence to do great things, and those great things can start with a simple word, spoken to someone in their own language. And they can happen anywhere: at work, at play, on the bus, on the beach, even at church.

Teilhard de Chardin says,

“There are, of course, certain noble and cherished moments of the day – those when we pray or receive the sacraments. Were it not for these moments of more efficient or explicit commerce with God, the tide of divine omnipresence, and our perception of it, would weaken until all that was best in our human endeavour, without being entirely lost to the world, would be for us emptied of God. But once we have jealously safeguarded our relation to God [thus] encountered …, there is no need to fear that the most trivial or the most absorbing of occupations should force us to depart from him. … Nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see …Try to realize that heaven itself smiles upon you, and through your works, draws you to itself; then, as you leave church for the noisy streets, you will remain with only one feeling, that of continuing to immerse yourself in God.”[1]

We come together, continuing in the apostles’ teaching and in the prayers, so as to equip one another, to draw water from the well of god’s praise, to rekindle the flame of passion for God’s mercy and love, then we are sent out to proclaim god’s greatness in many different ways and languages; the language of work, of play, or forgiveness and love, of generosity, of music and the arts, each of them the language of the family of God.

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came … divided tongues, as of fire, … and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.” And as they looked at one another, and recognized the presence of God in each and every one around them, each saw reflected in their neighbour’s eyes that same fiery passion of God anointing their own heads.

Amen.

[1] Teilhard de Chardin, The  Divine Milieu (London: William Collins Sons & Co, Ltd and New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1960),  pp. 65-66

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Scary monsters at play

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

This may be irreligious, but…

Have you ever had that person in your life (perhaps you are that person) who thought that it was funny to jump out from behind the sofa and yell “Boo!” at the climactic moment of a suspenseful horror movie? The ones that think that it is hilarious to scare the living daylights out of you, because they know it’s all ok, they know they would do anything to save you from a real monster, so it’s all just a bit of fun, right?

You may be getting an inkling of how I feel about having my dignity undermined by an undeservedly provoked screaming session.

Bearing that in mind, here is a verse from this Sunday’s psalm:

Yonder is the great and wide sea with its living creatures too many to number, creatures both small and great.
There move the ships, and there is that Leviathan, which you have made for the sport of it. (BCP)
The CEV, “as well as the Leviathan, the monster you created to splash in the sea.”
The New American Bible for Catholics, “here leviathan, your creature, plays.”
The NIV has it formed for frolicking.

I could go on, but I think that the point is made: God made sea monsters – big hulking, scary monsters, Nessie, lurking in the Loch, the dragons that “here be” on the old maps – for fun. As a little splashy, scary joke.

Well colour me Queen Victoria.

I guess it’s good to know that God has a sense of humour, and it may be even more reassuring to those on the giving, rather than the receiving end of the behind the sofa late night horror movie ambushes.

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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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