All these words

Posted on March 3, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent. Exodus 20:1-17; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

Then God spoke all these words.

Have you ever read a warning label and wondered what on earth happened to make it necessary? Like the stroller that comes with instructions to remove the child before folding, or the iron that reminds you not to wear the clothes that you’re steam pressing, or those little silica packets in everything that say, “Do not eat. “

God spoke all these words because God knew that we, we humans, have been known to be foolish, and foolhardy, and even malicious in our misuse of God, creation, and one another. We need these warning labels, all of these words, because God knows what we are capable of, left to our own devices.

Murder. Theft. Adultery. Greed. Disrespect and dishonour. Actually, as a parent, I have to wonder if that one is an appeal to parents to live lives deserving of their children’s honour, worthy of respect. After all, the onus is on the adults in the room, isn’t it, to set the example?

To set the example of not taking the Lord’s name in vain, not ascribing to God our prejudices or preferences, not pretending that a tradition of our invention and imagination is a “God-given right.” Not to place anything of our own invention in the place of God.

Fun fact (which I may have mentioned before, because it is delicious): the only place in the Bible where cats are mentioned is in the apocryphal Letter of Jeremiah. In it, the cats sit on the heads of idols, because they know better than to be taken in by human artifacts of metal, wood, or stone. Whereas humanity – well, there’s a reason God needed to speak all these words.

We have a tendency to get carried away by our own brilliance, to admire our own creations as though they were on a par with the life of God. But

it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, 
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
…  Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

We – some of us – worship our own systems of justice, as though they were a glimmer against the glory of God’s mercy. We wield authority as though we were not all under the obedience of God. We design whole worlds built of metal and money, commerce and coinage, forgetting that it was the Son of Man, the Son of God, who raged into the Temple and turned it all over, the crass commercialism that threatened to drown out the prayers of the poor and make a mockery of God’s invitation to worship God alone. See how foolish our clever schemes, lines on maps to divide up the holy lands, seem as we witness the destruction of lives there today. Have our brilliant schemes not been brought to their knees?

You know how Jesus summarized all these words: Love God with all you have, and your neighbour as yourself. You know how a former communications director of our diocese summarized them: Love God, love your neighbour, change the world.

How would the world be changed if we were truly to pay heed to all these words that God has spoken? To the invitation to hold God closest to the center of our lives, to resist all temptation to treat our neighbour – every neighbour – as anything other than the expression of God’s creativity in the world, to raise our children in all humility as those willing to earn their honour; as those under obedience ourselves to the God who gave us life?

There is a difference in how Jesus confronts the profitable entrepreneurs of the Temple courts, those with sheep, oxen, coins to trade, whom he drives out with an angry outburst, and how he speaks to the poor pigeon sellers, trading among the poor who cannot afford any other sacrifice. “Take them out of here,” he says, and he sounds weary. He knows how hard it is to get by in a system that continues to elevate greed and grind down those just trying to make their way. To quote a recent television ad, he gets us.

He doesn’t make excuses for the pigeon people. He certainly doesn’t excuse the systems of exploitation that cage them like their inventory, but he does open the door to another way. And with them, at least, he is gentle. Because God’s mercy is enduring, almost unendurable. Even crucifying him would not persuade him to abandon us.

God spoke all of these words because God knows of what we are capable, and God knows how good life could be if we could, if we would keep first things first and foremost: the love of God, reflected in the love of the image of God that is our neighbour.

For the religious demand miracles and politicians make clever arguments, but we proclaim Christ crucified… For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

For the love of God is deeper even than the grave, and God’s mercy endures for ever, and we are called to do likewise.

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War

Posted on March 1, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

I want to write about

the unbearable irony of dry breasts

in a land of milk and honey,

the bitter taste of hunger among the olive groves,

but I am not qualified. Instead, I will contemplate

the crumpled faces of the women

of Jerusalem when Jesus told them, Blessed

are the bodies that never bore fruit,

and the breasts that never nursed,

while all around them pomegranates bled

in sympathy for the devastating irony

of humanity.

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Dove

Posted on February 29, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

Once upon a time,
so long ago that time itself was barely begun,
a thing with wings brooded over deep waters,
moving the surface aside to reveal
creation.

A long time later,
but so long ago that history was still in the future,
the waters had deepened again beneath the Ark
that floated the life of all flesh above the Flood:
Noah, the raven, the serpent, the lion, and the lamb.
The winged thing borrowed the feathers of a dove, 
moving the surface of the deep waters aside to uncover
the olive tree.

Not so long ago,
the waters of the river burst apart 
as the man surfaced, baptized and breathing hard, 
water dripping from his hair 
like oil from an olive press.
The winged thing parted the soft clouds of heaven, 
borrowed the body of a dove again
to cover him,

But someone caught the dove
in a snare, netting its tender claws and beak, 
folding its feathers into a basket, 
enclosing it within the heavy stones of Herod’s design
with the money changers and the priests,
The winged thing was loathe to leave it, 
having become fond, was gladdened 

when the man returned, his feet 
pounding the stones like a wine press,
his hands flinging coins and rope and wool
but tender with the cages of the doves;
he turned them loose, the bird
and the winged thing,
watched them as they soared above the firmament
until its brightness swallowed them alive.

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Take up your cross

Posted on February 20, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

I am not strong to carry your cross or mine.
I stagger beneath the weight of your command
yet knowing all the time
that you have called your burden easy.
Your hands and feet tell another story,
unwashed yet from their bodily defeat,
their wretched stench harmonious
with the odours of this hell.
Yet in their prints the soil freshens.
Your dragging cross furrows the earth
and in its harrows something grows – hope!
I see the children swinging from its boughs
as though it were a living, breathing tree.

Mark 8:35-38

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “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, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” 

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The day after

Posted on February 19, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the First Sunday in Lent, 2024

Earlier this week, along with a few other Episcopalians and a bunch of other Ohioans, I attended a Gun Violence Prevention summit at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus. The State Representative who introduced the work noted that they chose the date originally, February 15th, as being the day after the anniversary of the deadliest high school shooting in America to date, on Ash Wednesday, which was also Valentine’s Day, in 2018. The day after. The day after the shock and terror, the day after the numbness of grief, the day that we pick up our dusty feet and turn our ashen faces toward the rising sun, to do what we can to ensure that it doesn’t happen again; because, I would add, in our faith, death does not have the final word. Because the Son rises, and so do we.

On Thursday, of course, we were in another “day after”; the day after the victory parade in Kansas City that ended in a mess of death, injury, and trauma, (apparently) because a couple of kids got into a beef, and because they were carrying guns.

In the days of Noah, God saw that “the earth was filled with violence” (Genesis 6:11b), and so “God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them’” (Genesis 6:13).

Because of our violence, our tendency toward bloodshed, our refusal to bow down before the image of God in the other and our pride instead in our own image, because of the violence of these things, so the story goes, God “was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved [God] to the heart,” (Genesis 6:6), and so God determined to wash it all out and begin again.

But not altogether. Because God’s heart was grieved, and we do not grieve the loss of that which we never loved; because God’s heart is love, God chose a remnant, Noah and his family, to keep the covenant that God initiated when God breathed life into the first human made of the earth, when God placed a part of God’s Spirit, God’s heart, God’s life and invested it in our humanity.

God chose a remnant, because God knows we are made in God’s own image; we are never beyond hope, or help.

Each Lent we pick up our penitential practices and our ashy faces and head into a season of temptation; the temptation to carry on as though nothing had happened, as though we were never lost in the wilderness of sin, as though the earth were not filled with violence, as though we had never tarnished the image of God within us, as though we were still upon the mountaintop, with Jesus, Moses, and Elijah; as though we had pitched tents there, and stayed in the clouds of glory. The temptation to denial is strong.

But after the flood, God made a new covenant with Noah and his family, the remnant of humanity that God had plucked from the dumpster fire before dousing it with water. God promised that never again would God go to such extremes to try to cleanse the earth and its humanity; that instead, God would bear with us, work with us, try God’s best to save us from ourselves.

In the verses just before the ones we read today, God reasserted that as part of this covenant, a reckoning would be required for the blood of a stolen human life, since that life is made in the image of God (Genesis 9:4-7). There would not be another flood, but God made clear to Noah that we are expected to be co-conspirators with God in the remaking of the earth into something better than violence, something more beautiful than a dumpster fire, something deserving of the rainbow.

One of the details that stuck with me from Wednesday’s outrageous news was that the children’s hospital there in Kansas City was treating 11 children and one adult, because the mother of one of the children, injured herself, refused to be taken from her child to be treated elsewhere.

The heart of God is grieved by violence, hurt by our harming of ourselves and one another, but God refuses to leave us alone, first choosing Noah and his family to float upon the waters, then promising no more divine catastrophes, finally washing us clean with the Incarnation of Jesus, as a mother bathes her child.

After the flood, God placed the rainbow in the sky and Noah and his family on dry ground. After his baptism, Jesus, driven by the Spirit, went into the wilderness, to contemplate the human condition. After Herod laid hands on John and arrested him, Jesus returned to his people and said, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news,” that God keeps God’s promises.

Today is another day after, another new beginning, another chance to repent and believe in something good, to do something good; something to gladden the heart of our faithful and long-suffering God.

 Genesis 9:8-17, 1 Peter 3:18-22, Mark 1:9-15

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Tell no one

Posted on February 10, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

On the mountain top, a conspiracy:
Elijah, Moses, and Yeshua plotting
to overthrow sin and save the world.
Below the cloud line all is clear.
In the valley, people die, live, love,
and hate without once looking up.
Here on the mountain as thunder rolls in,
fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Tell no one, he says, until the deed is done.
Indeed, who would believe you?

#preparingforSundaywithpoetry for the last Sunday after the Epiphany and before Lent: Mark 9:2-9

Bonus Transfiguration poem: https://earthandaltarmag.com/posts/carrauntoohil

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Which story do we tell?

Posted on February 4, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for Annual Meeting Sunday at the Church of the Epiphany. Mark 1:29-39

What is this story about? It might depend upon who you ask.

For Simon Peter, it is a story about the first days of his time with Jesus; that time when they went to the synagogue together, and he witnessed firsthand the way in which Jesus commanded the unclean spirits and banished them, confirming for Simon his decision to leave his nets and follow this man, the Messiah. Simon invited him to his house for dinner after the service, and Jesus accepted. Things had not been altogether well at home; Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever; no one knew if she would ever leave it again. Emboldened by what he had seen in the synagogue, Simon turned to his honoured guest and set before him the situation. And Jesus healed her.

They saw many marvellous things that night, healing miracles, exorcisms, teaching with power and authority, the power of the love of God, the authority of mercy. And in the morning, eagerly they sought him, but Jesus was nowhere to be found. Eventually, they saw him in the dawning light, out in the wilderness where they had mistaken him for a lonely tree. He was praying, and Simon hesitated to disturb him, but when Jesus heard his footsteps, he turned and told him, “It is time to become a fisher of people. It is time to entangle them in a net of good news.”

And the story for Jesus? Who knows? But it is the beginning of his time of public ministry, and he begins with prophecy and with healing and with proclamations of repentance and the announcement of the kingdom of God, and with prayer. He is with the people and he takes himself apart in prayer. He is the honoured guest who performs the greatest service of the household. He is the centre, and he takes himself apart in prayer.

For Simon’s mother-in-law, it is a story of new life. A fever could be, can be deadly. It is debilitating. It wrings the humanity out of one. She couldn’t tell how long she had lain there, hovering between earth and heaven, but when Jesus came, and took her hand, heaven and earth came together as one, and she felt that new kingdom flowing through her veins, and her heart stopped only long enough to miss a beat as she leapt for joy, and in gratitude ran through the house to celebrate with cakes and oil and wine, to serve and celebrate him who had healed her.

What is our story? What are we about? Where do we find ourselves reflected in this little picture of Jesus and his disciples and their extended families?

Yesterday and Friday night, Nancy and I were at the Convocation of the Diocese of Ohio, learning about the College for Congregational Development. More about that another time, but yesterday morning’s session was working through a model for congregational discernment. What is the vocation of a parish, of a particular parish, of this parish? Vocation, the quotation goes, is where our deep joy meets the world’s deep hunger. What is our great joy? What are our neighbours hungry for? Where do those things meet?

The easy answer is Jesus, and that is the truth, and the way, and it is life. But it needs a little bit of fleshing out. We are the current incarnation of the Jesus movement. We are the descendants of Simon, Andrew, James, John, Simon’s wife and her mother. What is our story?

… [congregational activity]…

There have been times when Simon’s mother-in-law has been criticized as a bad feminist for going straight from her sick-bed to the kitchen. There are times when her healing and return to service has been interpreted as oppression. But I think that she saw it differently. I think that she found in the touch of Jesus new life, new life with abundance, that she who had given herself over to death found instead new life to celebrate, and that what sprang up in her and propelled her to service was pure and simple gratitude for our loving, liberating, life-giving God.

For those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:31)

May we find our joy in the love and service of our living Lord, Jesus Christ, the Messiah. Amen.

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Perspective

Posted on January 28, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

Writing the annual report

like teaching a child to draw

perspective, moulding

a year into blocks,

trying to keep to scale but death

is slippery and shows

between the lines;

grief will not hold its shape.

Joy alone stays

along straight and narrow rays.

Follow them back to find

pinpricks of light that,

rebellious, refuse to be hidden,

overwritten by time’s other creatures.

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Love builds up

Posted on January 28, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany in 2024

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.

Knowledge is like a little bird making itself look large by fluffing up its feathers; it warms the bird, it helps the bird, it protects the bird at times; it is all for the bird’s own good.

Love is like the bird that builds a nest, patiently searching for just the right materials to stop the draught and secure the foundation for its family, who stocks it with food when the eggs are incubating, who creates the conditions for new life to flourish. Love is the bird who comes back and starts again when it all goes wrong because of the storms or the predators or the sadness of the world. Love builds up.

Jesus, the Love of God born among us, walked up to the synagogue on the sabbath and encountered a man with an unclean spirit. The scribes knew about unclean spirits, but they hadn’t summoned the authority of God’s mercy to cast them out – I don’t know why. I can only imagine that they were too tired and worn down by working for their own survival to extend themselves further. We can all relate.

Knowledge has the words of wisdom, but love is wisdom, grace, and mercy in action. 

There’s a story in the book of Acts about a group of people who tried to use their knowledge of Christ and his saving power for their own ends and authority. They “tried to use the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits saying, ‘I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.’ … But the evil spirit said to them in reply, ‘Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?’” (Acts 19:13-15)

There is nothing wrong with knowledge, but without the humility of love, it is powerless.

Even the demons know who Jesus is; but their power cannot withstand his authority. Knowledge puffs up, but it is all bluster. But love, love is something else.

When Jesus walks into that synagogue, he comes with an authority that astonishes the people. One of the commentaries I read describes that word as meaning that Jesus has the freedom to wield the power that he possesses (The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note to Mark 1:27). He is at liberty to do what he says, to make his actions match his words, his love match his knowledge. He is free to do the will of God, which is to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim and to deliver release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim and to deliver the year of the Lord’s favour (Luke 4:18-19, after Isaiah 61:1-2).

And he, says St Paul, has set us free; Jesus has given us authority to cast out unclean spirits; and what do we do with that knowledge? Only love shows the way. 

The man with the unclean spirit was a member of the synagogue. He was right there among them on the sabbath. He was not an outsider nor an outcast. But he had a problem. He had a spirit that had hitched itself to him, hitched a ride upon his heart and soul, a spirit that itched and carped and kept him from full communion with God and with his neighbours. While the scribes were expounding on the scriptures, this spirit was whispering unsavoury nothings in his brain. While the congregation proclaimed their prayers, the spirit sneered and made his tongue stumble over the promises of God and the hope of God’s people. I think, I suspect that each of us knows that unclean spirit, or one of its relatives.

Just lately, I have heard things I haven’t heard in a generation, blaming this group of people or that for the state of the world, criticizing and carping over other people’s problems, diagnosing sin as that which dwells in them. Knowledge puffs up, but the knowledge or suspicion of other people’s shortcomings will not heal us. Love does not begin the conversation with, “You’ve got it all wrong. You are all wrong,” nor without the knowledge of how much we ourselves get wrong, and how much grace I need simply in order to survive.

I am not talking only about our state legislature that claims to know people better than they know themselves, or their own children, better than their doctors and therapists, better than their prayers, better than God knows them; although that is surely one example of puffing up. Such puffing up cannot, as Dean Owens wrote from the cathedral this week, “take away the truth that you are seen, known, and beloved by God for who you are and who you were created to be,” that there is so much more room in God’s creativity and love than in our limited and often blighted imaginations.

God knows everything, but if that were all, we would only fear him. Because God is all-loving, all-merciful, all-creating, and all-liberating, then we can rest in, and trust, and love God, too.

Knowledge may confess its sins; it is love that makes amends. Knowledge has the recipe; love feeds the world. Knowledge recognizes the tormenting spirit; love frees the captive. We know the redeeming love of Christ and the merciful way of the Cross; do we use that knowledge to puff ourselves up, to tear others down, or to build a beloved community? 

Will we use that knowledge, church, to become a hall of fame for the saints, or a place of healing and hope for sinners? Isn’t that why we come to the table, because God has known us and seen us for all of our uncleanness of spirit, and because Jesus has washed our feet anyway and invited us to his table, freeing us from our shame to be ourselves as he sees us in his love?

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. And Jesus is the Word, and the Wisdom, and the Love of God. Our foundation is in him.

Deuteronomy 18:15-20; 1 Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-28; Psalm 111
The Jewish Annotated New Testament, Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, Des (Oxford University Press, 2011)

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Cast out

Posted on January 23, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

Demons shake and scream;
for God alone my soul in silence waits.
Something deep within mutters “unclean”;
for God alone my soul in silence waits.
Power demands authority, but
humility whispers and spirits writhe.
For God alone my soul in silence waits.

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