One of those weeks

Posted on April 20, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

This is the newsletter greeting I almost used for our May edition at Church of the Epiphany. Almost; I thought better of it after I realized how much of my own exhaustion I had allowed to peek through between the gaps in the paragraphs.

In the end, I went with something about the Ascension, something a little more tidy and wholeheartedly hopeful and spry. But this is what I almost used:

April 18, 2013.

It has been one of those weeks when, sitting at my desk a little over halfway through April, I know that by the beginning of May everything might have changed, anything could have happened.

 In the past two weeks we have suffered hard and unexpected losses in our parish, we have seen suffering we never thought to see in Boston, and we have been reminded yet again of all that our first responders put on the line in the course of their duty in West, Texas.

 I do not know what will be at the forefront of our minds by the time you read this in May. So much is happening so quickly.

 What I do know is this: God is with us.

 In May, we will celebrate Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit like tongues of fire upon Jesus’ disciples. They broke out of the building they were in and converted crowds standing around to the gospel, the good news that Jesus is Lord, and God is with us.

 Pentecost was not a one-off event. Every time the wind blows, the breath of God is moving through our lives, and the Holy Spirit is breathing with us, through us. Every time one person reaches out to help another in need, in distress, God’s love flows between them. Every time we come together in prayer, or pray alone, God is listening, and God is answering with the language of the Spirit, with tongues of fire, with words of passion and love.

 I do not know what May will bring us, but I know that God will be in the midst of it.

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Walking beside still waters in the shadow of death

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

This Sunday, we will pray Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters. He revives my soul.

He revives my soul.

We will also read from the Gospel according to John. It won’t sound quite like this; this is the translation called The Message, by Eugene Peterson:

My sheep recognize my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them real and eternal life. They are protected from the Destroyer for good.

I give them real and eternal life.

They are protected from the Destroyer for good.

Real life is eternal. It is lived in the here and now, and its echoes reach the alpha and the omega, the lengths and breadths of all that is; it is eternal, and it is known to the Eternal One.

Real life suffers death. It is not protected from dying, but it is protected from destruction. It is protected in death, so that it is not destroyed but lives eternally. It is a dilemma, a paradox. Paradoxes are not always helpful in the midst of fear and grief.

Love may be a little more helpful. The love which poured itself out in donations of blood in Boston, which ran towards the wounded, without a care for the danger still waiting to explode upon it. The love which fuels a firefighter protecting a nursing home from a fertilizer fire, which drives into the hot zone with a truck full of wheelchairs and a willing pair of hands. The love which will not let a parent let go of the passion to continue to beat on the hearts and minds of recalcitrant lawmakers to legislate some sanity into our gun ownership laws.

That Love which is stronger than death.

I shall fear no evil.

They are protected from the Destroyer for good.

He revives my soul.

 

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Boston marathon

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Innocent desire:
the race to outrun the bounds
of one’s own body.

With love and prayers from Cleveland.

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Year C Easter 3: Paying attention

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

God would like our attention, please. It seems to me that the very different stories in today’s lectionary selections have the common theme of God getting someone’s, or some-two’s, or everyone under heaven and earth’s attention.

Hey! Listen up! Pay attention! This is your God speaking! What does God have to do to get our attention?

Revelation: Around the throne thousands upon thousands are drawing our attention with loud voices to Lamb who was slain, who is worthy of power and wealth and wisdom and glory and blessing, who is exalted to the right hand of God, worthy of everyone’s attention from heaven to Hades, from the earth to the oceans, from the beginning to the end.

The Gospel according to John: a gentler image. Jesus appears on the shore, arranges for a miraculous catch of fish, and cooks a barbecue breakfast on the beach for his disciples. Now that’s a way to get my attention!

In the book of Acts, Ananias has a vision, and Saul – Saul on the road to Damascus. How does God get Saul’s attention?

What does God have to do to get our attention?

I met a man in the hospital. He had prayed to God to change his life. He knew that the way he was leading it, he was leading it right into disaster, but he didn’t seem to be able to change direction. Like St Paul, who used to be Saul, the good that he would do he could not, and the evil he wished he would not do lay just too easily to hand. So he prayed that God, that Jesus, would change his life for him.

I met him in the hospital. I thought that this was a sorry turn of events, but he was laughing. “Be careful what you pray for,” he told me. He said, “I told God, I know I asked for a change, but did you have to be quite so direct about it?” Then he said, “But yeah, he kind of did. Otherwise I wouldn’t have paid any attention.”

I struggled to hear that. I still do. I’m still not as sure as he was that God wanted to put him in the hospital, but he was convinced that this was the answer to his prayer, that this was what God had to do in order to change his life. I remembered him, reading about Saul on the road to Damascus. Be careful, he said. What does God have to do to get your attention?

I still don’t know quite what to make of Saul’s story. Is this what they call tough love?

But let’s not forget about the other actor in this story, the man named Ananias. He is visited in a dream, or a vision. He was ready and eager to hear his Lord’s voice, “Here I am, Lord,” he responded right away when God called him by name. But he did not like the message that he received, he did not like the sound of the errand he was sent on, to lay hands upon his enemy in order to pray for him and heal him. And yet when he went, he became an instrument of amazing power in the Holy Spirit, causing something like scales to fall from Saul’s eyes, causing something like a sclerosis of the soul to be removed from Saul’s heart and mind, as he finally saw Jesus and his disciples clearly.

An encounter with the living God can be disturbing. It may well be frightening; we should, in meeting God, expect to be changed, to be converted, to be transformed, and that is rarely easy.

The good news is that God loves us and is always working in, with and through us for what is good. As God spoke through the prophet Jeremiah,

“I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfard and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” (Jeremiah 29:11)

Ananias fought against the idea of seeking out and healing his enemy, the enemy of the church, but when he did, he essentially launched the missions of St Paul that changed the course of the church for good.

The really extraordinary thing about Saul’s story is less his dramatic blindness on the road to Damascus: that sort of thing happens with almost alarming regularity in the Bible; think of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptizer struck speechless by the angel who foresaw his baby’s birth, who lost the power of speech for months; no, the really extraordinary thing about Saul’s story is that in three short days he went from killing Christians to living in their homes and learning from them, from beating on them to sharing in their baptism and their bread, from imprisoning them to preaching their own gospel. Come to that, in three short days the Christians went from fearing Saul to healing him, from hiding from him to teaching him, from hating him to feeding him with solid food and with the Word of God.

And all of this happened, you might say, not so much because Saul was struck blind, but because he was healed, by one who overcame his own fear and trembling to pay attention to the vision that God sent him, to seek out and pray for his enemy. That’s transformation.

In the stories of Saul and Ananias, it was only by paying attention to God that they were able to find any good in one another.

The good news is that God is still speaking to us, speaking through us, staging encounters with us in unexpected places, setting up meetings with unexpected people. It doesn’t have to be on the road to Damascus, and it doesn’t have to involve a traumatic trip to the hospital. A woman told me recently of how the birth of her first child transformed her view of everything, that she was now able to forgive hurts she had never forgotten, able to hope for a future that she had never foreseen, because of the love that enveloped her in that moment. That was her moment of vision. That’s transformation, too. That’s an encounter with God.

We need to pay attention to the places and the spaces in our lives where God is reaching out to us, and we should be prepared to be altered by the encounter. Listen like Ananias to your dreams. Love your neighbours as ones who bear the transforming presence of a child of God into your own life. Pay attention to the image of God within them. Take note of words that leap out at you as though the book were written only for you to read. Prepare to be changed, to be challenged, to be converted. Part of a poem by Mary Oliver reads this way:

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.[1]

On the beach, Jesus had a fire going, and he cooked the fish. Then with it he took bread, and he broke it, and gave it to his disciples. When the story is done, the evangelist finishes his book this way,

“This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things; and we know his testimony to be true. But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” (John 21:24-25)

The disciples paid attention to Jesus on the shore; they were astonished by him; they told about it. More encounters with the living Christ than could be contained in the libraries of the world have yet to be told. We know about Saul’s. We know about Ananias’. We know about some of our own. Will we tell about them?

Here is one everyday encounter that, when I pay attention, regularly astonishes me. Every Sunday, at the altar, Jesus offers his body in the form of bread, his blood in the form of wine. He offers it to each of us; to all of us. Just as he returned and told Thomas, “Here I am. Touch me. Place your hands on my hands,” so he returns time and again, and time and again he invites us, “Here I am, hold me; receive me.” Even today, after a week that has left many of us reeling for many reasons, Jesus returns in all gentleness and invites us to receive the bread of life, broken for us; to receive Jesus himself, Risen and with us always.

For what greater sign of God’s tender attention to us could we ask?

[1] From ‘Sometimes’, by Mary Oliver, in Red Bird, Poems by Mary Oliver (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), 37

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For Thomas

Posted on April 6, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Thought for the second Sunday of Easter:
when you are doubtful, uncertain;
when you stumble through grief and tears cloud your vision as they fall;
be kind to yourself.
Remember, Jesus came back
especially
for Thomas.

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The spiritual gift of doubt

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Blessed are those who can live with certainty, who can bear the burden of sureness. Because in certainty there is no need for hope; sureness has no need for trust.

Some of us are not so strong. We cannot live without hope. We depend on those whom we trust.

Doubt is the flint whose friction creates the spark which lights the fire of hope.

Doubt is the darkness against which hope blazes, to light it up and drive it out, and yet without it, hope remains unborn.

Doubt leans on the shoulder of the one that walks beside us. Doubt demands reassurance, demands a rock, a refuge.

Doubt cries out in the night for salvation, and it is not disappointed.

Blessed are those who can live with certainty, who can bear the burden of sureness, the curse of knowledge.

For the rest of us, there is comfort in doubt, a calmness that comes through the fear that hopes that the Comforter is near.

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Easter 2013: Aslan is on the move

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

It is the question of Easter morning. Why are these women coming to the tomb carrying their supplies of bodily embalming, their perfumes and their potions to preserve the dead, their unguents and spices, carefully prepared after the Sabbath had ended, during the night when all was dark and quiet as the tomb, ready to rise early in the morning to use the first light to do for the dead what they had been unable to do on Friday in the evening, since it was already late, and the sky was dark, and they were afraid and exhausted from watching from afar?

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

The truth is, that these women are not looking for the living but for the dead. They are seeking the corpse of Jesus to cover with their spices and their tears. They watched the men take his body from the cross, and seal it into the tomb. They know that they are in the right place.

The problem is, that they are looking for the wrong thing. They are looking for a dead body, not a living, breathing, risen Christ.

Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but he has risen.

The women expected to find Jesus where they had left him, but he was not there. He would not stay dead, and he would not stay put. They should have known; remember that time when they left him on the hillside and went fishing, and he came to them walking on the water? He never would stay where they left him.

Because we do not have a God who is content to sit still on a celestial throne surrounded by seraphs, but we have a God who is irrepressibly active in the world, who refuses to stay out of our business, who will not be left on a shelf to be taken down and dusted once or twice a year. As C.S. Lewis defined the problem in his Narnia novels, Aslan is not a tame lion.[1] God will not be confined by our expectations.

In the midst of a cruel empire – effective and efficient, yes; ordered and orderly, maybe, but cruel nevertheless – God was at God’s most active among the oppressed and the despised, the sinful and the suffering. He sat at table with friends and enemies alike; he regaled them with stories, he entertained them with wine, he blessed their children and played with them; he loved them. In the lives of the people, when they were sick, or possessed by demons of rage and despair, when they were hungry, even when they were dying, those are the times when Jesus reached out of the shadows and touched them with his divine love, his very human compassion. And so now, in their darkest hour, their deepest grief, when they are afraid that, literally, all is lost, why would the women expect him to remain in the realms of the dead when he is needed by the living?

He has been there, too. He has touched them, too, the ones already in their graves. From his tomb he unlocked the doors of theirs. But he did not stay in the land of the dead. Why would you look for the living among the dead?

When the women returned to tell their tale, the others didn’t believe them. They thought it an idle tale, as though this were any time for telling stories. But it was true. It was more true than any fable they could have fabricated. Jesus was risen. Jesus is alive.

The women, the disciples, even Peter didn’t see Jesus on this occasion. He would come to them soon, and there are other stories which tell of other encounters. But even in this telling, where Jesus is not, the signs of new life, new power, new glory are all around. The rock rolled back, breaking death’s hold on him. The shrouds shrugged off. The angels left to point the way, “He is risen.” The breaking of a new dawn.

No one saw the moment of Resurrection; the Resurrection on which the faith of the apostles was grounded and grew was the Resurrection which continued in their lives, as they saw Jesus risen and among them, as they saw his work continuing, God’s mercy abounding, God’s power still at work around them.

We do not come to Easter morning looking for a dead God to bury with our songs and praises. We do not come to sit and wait by the empty tomb for Jesus to return to his resting place.

We come to seek out, to find and encounter the living Christ, raised for us, the first fruits of the dead, so that death has no more dominion over us, nor is any life lost to God. We seek, and we shall find; we knock, and the door, even the doors of the tomb are opened unto us; we ask, and we listen for the voice of God among us for an answer.

And we might as well go ahead and expect to find God in the places we least expect to encounter the divine, at the most unexpected hours: our God is not confined by our expectations, by our restrictions, by our actions or inaction; God will work with and through us, yes, but God does not await our permission to play God.

And when we are left waiting outside an empty tomb, when we wonder where God has gone, why our plans have been turned upside down, inside out, shredded; while we are wondering what to do next, we might remember the women with their spices and their story: he is risen. He is alive. He is up to something.

Where there is danger and disease, sorrow and oppression, God has never been more active. In the midst of life, of our mortality, the immortal one still moves among us. In a word, in the stroke of a brush, in the touch of a stranger steadying an elbow on an escalator, in the joy of a child’s laughter, in the emerging of spring and the rising of a musical phrase, in the sacraments of the church and the coming together of the community founded on the rock rolled away from the empty tomb, we see glimpses of God. Where there is love, where there is life, where there is joy; even where there is spice-scented grief, the angels whisper, he is risen.

He is alive.

Thanks be to God.

 

[1] “For Mr Beaver had warned them, ‘He’ll be coming and going,’ he had said. ‘One day you’ll see him and another you won’t. He doesn’t like being tied down – and of course he has other countries to attend to. It’s quite all right. He’ll often drop in. Only you mustn’t press him. He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.’” C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London: Puffin Books, 1950) 165-6

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Great Vigil of Easter: 2013 update

Posted on March 30, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

(For the fire and water demo that accompanies this sermon, see last year’s offering: https://rosalindhughes.com/2012/04/07/easter-vigil-sermon-new-fire-and-living-water/)

New fire and living water. Extremes of existence, held together by the cross and the resurrection, like life and death.

Fire. It falls from the heavens and scorches the earth. It burns out of control, terrifying; yet without it, we would have no life, no earth, nothing. The sun, a burning ball of fire, gives us light, warmth, the conditions we need for life on this, its third orbiting planet. Fire even delights us, whether through the comfort of a homely fireplace or the excitement of a firework display; it adds to our enjoyment of life.

Water. Soothing, refreshing, life-giving. We play in it, luxuriate in it. Our bodies are more than half made of it. Yet when it is contaminated, it kills; when it is scarce, we fight over it and worry for it; and when it breaks loose, like the archetypal flood, the waters before creation, the terrifying deep, it burns like fire and drowns all that it touches.

Fire and water. Life and death. Extremes which shouldn’t be able to play together. Yet, in the very beginning, the Spirit which fell like fire on the disciples brooded on the surface of the deep waters to bring not destruction but creation. In the person of Jesus, humanity and divinity, the mortal and immortal, life and death, flesh and spirit were made into one being.

By his death on the cross and his resurrection, by the mystery of the tomb emptied overnight of death, Jesus showed how fire and water, life and death, mortality and immortality, the creation and its Creator can come together, held together in the cross and the resurrection, the cross which we mark with oil on the heads of the newly baptized; the resurrection which overcomes death.

The waters of baptism, and the fiery anointing of the Spirit, come together in the shadow of the cross of Christ, the sign and sacrament of God’s grace, God’s love for us, God with us.

We began Lent, forty days and six Sundays ago, by marking our faces with ashes, those signs of our own mortality, of the dying of the light, the remains of the fire.

When we are united with Jesus in death, we are united with him in resurrection. When we bear the sign of the cross anointed with oil on our foreheads, we hold the cross and the resurrection together in our own bodies, our own lives. We are sinners, forgiven. We draw mortal breaths, filled with eternal life. We are transformed, and our lives are no longer our own, but they are God-given and thanksgiven and we live no longer for ourselves alone but for God and for one another.

We began Lent by marking our faces with ashes, the dying of the light, the remains of the fire.

Now, as we baptize and renew our own baptismal vows, we wash our faces clean, so that they might reflect the new fire, the Paschal candle, the signs of the eternal life that we live with God, the divine spark within each one of us, fire and water by the grace of the cross and resurrection burning together.

In the name of Jesus Christ, our Risen Lord and Saviour: Amen.

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Holy Saturday and the Harrowing of Hell

Posted on March 30, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

This is what I wrote for my Good Friday reflection in the collection put together by the Rev. Gayle Catinella on behalf of several members of clergy in the Diocese of Ohio:

 O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction. (Hosea 13:14)
My brother said, “No one knows what it’s like to be dead.”
I was puzzled; “Grandpa knows.”
My brother was unconvinced. “No one knows what it’s like to be dead, because no one can ever tell them.”
I persisted, “Grandpa’s dead, so he knows what it’s like.” Reaching for some heavier emotional clout, “George the fifth knows.”
George was the fifth in a series of short-lived hamsters. My brother had sat up with him into the night. Now, he hit me.
“I’m telling,” I cried, as usual.
“If you do,” he threatened, “I’ll tell them what you said about Grandpa.”
It was my first introduction to the idea that death was scandalous, that to die was a betrayal, a shame.
I began to notice how people whispered around death, not using its name but a variety of euphemisms, how they looked off in the distance and let their words trail after their gaze. Death was not fit for polite company. It was indelicate and indiscreet and occasionally downright rude.
And here, in church on Good Friday, was Jesus, doing it right in front of everybody, shameless and scandalous, indiscreet and indifferent to the spectacle he made, forgiving people left and right and crying out to God, with his mother looking on, as though dying were nothing to be ashamed of.
“Jesus knows,” I told my brother. “That’s different,” he said, but I didn’t think it was.

*********************************************************

Psalm 88 asks the question,

Do you work wonders for the dead? Will those who have died stand up and give you thanks? Will your loving-kindness be declared in the grave, your faithfulness in the land of destruction? Will you wonders be known in the dark, or your righteousness in the country where all is forgotten?

Holy Saturday answers, yes.
Yes, God speaks to the dead.
Yes, God reaches into the grave.
Yes, no one is lost to God.
Yes, no one is beyond God’s reach.
Yes, you who are dead and gone, you know the love of God.

Jesus knows what it is like to be you, and Jesus loves you.

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Seven Psalms: A meditation for Good Friday

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Psalm 55:13-14 If it had been an adversary who taunted me, then I could have borne it; or had it been an enemy who vaunted himself against me, then I could have hidden from him. But it was you, a man after my own heart, my companion, my own familiar friend.

Betrayal. The betrayal of a friend, of a close companion, a trusted colleague. The raw wound of trust ripped open and torn away. Judas, and then Peter. One,knowing only too well what he was about, betrayed him with a kiss; the other with his head turned away, his eyes cast down, denying that he ever knew him. Jesus bore the burden of them, bore the burden for them.

Psalm 35:14 I prayed with my whole heart, as one would for a friend or a brother; I behaved like one who mourns for his mother, bowed down and grieving.

Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother. The pain of parting, the ruin of relationships, the fracturing of family. Mary, his mother, and the disciple whom he loved, a new kind of family formed out of loss, the clinging together of shipwreck survivors cast adrift, and the captain lashed to the mast, sinking with his vessel, mourning the loss of those placed in his care, giving up his life vest to his mother, his last breath to his friend.

Psalm 58:1-2 Do you indeed decree righteousness, you rulers? do you judge the people’s with equity? No; you devise evil in your hearts, and your hands deal out violence in the land.

They put a crown of thorns on his head and a purple robe around his shoulders. They wrote, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews”, and when the people said, “He is not our king,” Pilate replied, “I have written what I have written,” because what is truth anyway? What is it to Pilate that Jesus is the true king, the truth, the life of all people? Pilate is, for the moment, the one with the power of the sword in his hand, and he counts it as real and authentic authority, because he doesn’t know and has to ask, “What is truth?” Jesus knows the helplessness of those without power, without mercy, and the redeeming help of God.

Psalm 22:17 They stare and gloat over me; they divide my garments among them; they cast lots for my clothing.

Since Adam and Eve and their fabric woven of leaves our nakedness has been our shame. They tried to visit upon Jesus the guilt of an innocent body violated, the shame of one used and abused, to leave him nowhere to hide his dignity.

Psalm 143:6-7 I spread out my hands to you; my soul gasps to you like a thirsty land. O Lord, make haste to answer me; my spirit fails me; do not hide your face from me or I shall be like those who go down to the Pit.

Thirst. Bodily drought, the gasping for air of an asthmatic child in the night, the hunger of the refugee, the desert of despair when hope is spent and the well of it is dry. Hands spread wide in supplication, in resignation, imagining fingertips touching skin, another, a friend, a lover, a mother, a comforter, an angel.

Psalm 13:1 How long, O Lord? will you forget me for ever? how long will you hide your face from me?

A child lost in supermarket aisles as tall as skyscrapers, impenetrable as lead. The moment of awakening before the empty space in the bed has cooled reality and pricked grief again. The slow diminuendo of memories accumulated over the years and now swept aside, broken and fragmented, crumbs out of order. The empty womb, the ones never born, the ones given up, the ones who left and slammed the door behind them. Abandonment. The loneliness of a cross high above the hillside but not yet reaching heaven.

Psalm 11:1-2 In the Lord have I taken refuge; how then can you say to me, “Fly away like a bird to the hilltop; For see how the wicked bend the bow and fit their arrows to the string to shoot from ambush at the true of heart.”

High enough above the hillside to see beyond horizons of time, space: Auschwitz, the crusades, Newtown, the writing on a bathroom wall, treachery and treason, the slaughter of the innocents. Is there anything left? Anything missed or fallen from the cross of Christ? Is there any pain or sin or shame that Jesus would not bear for us; purge for us in the fire of his own agony; take to his grave for us? I do not think so. I think that his work was complete, his sacrifice divine, God’s mercy all-embracing.

Psalm 31:5 Into your hands I commend my spirit, for you have redeemed me, O Lord, O God of truth.

You have redeemed me.

Amen.

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