Jerusalem, Jerusalem

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
The chicks scatter, competing instead of complementing one another, straining to grow despite one another, as their the mother hen clucks her sorrow and spreads her wings, shaking out her feathers and down, offering her warm body for their comfort and solace,
and still the foxes prowl and scavenge and destroy the peace that would be theirs.

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Year C Lent 1: Temptations and the time of day

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

The trouble with the devil is that he seems sometimes to make a lot of sense.

“You’re hungry – conjure up some bread,” he suggests. Quite reasonable. And it is not, after all, as though Jesus is not able to make bread – he stretches the loaves and fishes beyond their breaking point more than once in the gospels.

“You are the Son of God. You should rule the world.” How many times have we asked ourselves how much better life in the world would be if only, if only everyone knew and lived out the commandments to love God and love your neighbour – simple words yet so hard to put into practice, especially in a world divided into powers and principalities. Why wouldn’t Jesus want to do a deal, make some trades, take some political advice from the campaign manager of kings and make his mark?

And then, the last. The devil can even quote scripture to make his point. God said that the angels would take care of everything, so that you would never so much as stub your toe. Why not just close your eyes, fall back, and let them fix everything for you?

Despite our temptation to update everything into modern terms – email as the ultimate distraction of the devil – I think that in fact he probably had the classics covered already.

First, he tackles our bodies. Now let’s be absolutely clear: there is nothing, nothing, nothing wrong with relieving hunger or thirst or suffering of any sort. There is no virtue in prolonging pain for its own ends, and Jesus spent his life and ministry offering that instant relief of healing and feeding and forgiveness that his followers craved. But the temptation that the devil offered was not about generosity or charity nor even self care. Jesus had gone into the wilderness in the power of the Spirit, on a deliberate fast, in an honest attempt to claim the spiritual strength that his baptism had lent him to embark on the journey ahead. He had withdrawn to fast and to pray, and the temptation was to turn aside from that destination, and take care of his physical appetite at the expense of his spiritual longing.

It isn’t about being hungry or being fed. It’s about twisting relationships, so that the first thing that we think of when we think of prayer is coffee hour and the cupcakes we might find there. It’s about ruining our intimate relationships by letting our own desires overrule our concern and tenderness for our beloved. It’s about using and abusing drugs of addiction in an always doomed attempt to avoid the reality that surrounds us, the need to persevere day by day in the work of living with God and with our neighbours, with the hunger and thirst for righteousness which is just out of reach, and remaining hopeful.

In his little treatise about temptation, The Screwtape Letters, C.S.Lewis has his senior tempter advise the younger demon that, “However you approach it, the great thing is to bring him [that is, the temptee] into the state in which the denial of any one indulgence – it matters not which… – “puts him out,” for then his charity, justice, and obedience are all at your mercy.”[1]

It is about what we put first: our relationships, or our appetites. Jesus put his relationships first.

So the devil went on to talk about power. We all like the idea of the quick fix. Those get-rich-quick schemes which we all know are scams are still so tempting because we love the idea of getting to the top easily, quickly, painlessly. We know, too, all the good that we could do, if we had just a little more power, influence, money, ammunition. We would use it for good, wouldn’t we?

Elsewhere in the gospels, when a young man asks Jesus, “Good teacher, what must I do?” Jesus rebukes him, saying, “Why do you call me good? God alone is good.”

None of us has sufficient wisdom, grace, goodness to be trusted with power dishonestly come by. Even our best intentions can be misguided, especially if we start out by making deals with the devil.

It is worth noticing that the devil has fallen victim to his own temptation before this episode even begins. He boasts that all of the authority and glory of the kingdoms of the world are his to offer, “for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please.” This devil, like too many of us, looks around and declares the world, or kingdoms of it, God-forsaken, and assumes that he, then, can take charge. But let us be very clear. There is nowhere on this earth that God has forsaken. There is no one in God’s good creation who is beyond the reach of the realm of God. God hates nothing that God has made, and God has made all of us.

The devil has fallen victim to his own temptation to take the place of God. When we consider ourselves to be exceptional, we have taken the first step towards accepting the devil’s offer, to use whatever means fall at our disposal to do whatever we consider necessary and good to bring about the order that we would like to see imposed upon the world. At its worst, we see that power played out in acts of violence and acts of war. We see it played out in homes and families, in parishes and in all sorts of systems, as we vie for power and influence trusting in our own righteousness.

Jesus said, “God alone is good. You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”

When we fall into the trap of worshipping ourselves, or our own intellects, our own insightfulness, even our own denomination or country or city as being worthy and deserving of the greatest power, we diminish our ability to worship God in humility and truth, and to receive the wisdom of God.

But there is a counter to that, in the third and final temptation. The devil says, “Fine. If God alone is good, and God alone has power, there is nothing left for you to do but to cast yourself on God’s mercy and let the angels bear you up.”

The temptation that he offers here is the temptation to helplessness. Don’t be fooled just because he quotes scripture. This is not humility, to offer up your common sense and your good conscience and your free will for the sake of sacrifice. It is not humility to say, “There’s nothing I can do, so I might as well sit back and do nothing, and see what the angels do about it.” It is not humility to deny the sincere human agency that God has given us, to live together in relationship, to work things out, to share our insights and influence, to work for the common good, to deny the power of violence and oppression, to feed the hungry and quench the thirst of those longing for liberty.

If we turn our backs on those things, we are not trusting God, we are looking for a God to blame when things go wrong.

That is the temptation that the devil offered, “Hurl yourself from the temple, so that you may curse God as you die.”

There’s a lot of irony wrapped up in these three little timeless temptations. Feed the body without feeding our appetites. Don’t grasp power, and don’t give up the power that we have. Be strongest when fasting and famished; worship the Lord your God, and live up to God’s expectations of you.

There is irony and there is complexity and it is confusing and that’s just how the devil works, playing one thought off against another, using the words of scripture against themselves, flattering and wheedling and then belittling in the next breath. It is exhausting just to think about.

But Jesus didn’t take a whole lot of time and effort dealing with it all. He didn’t enter into a debate with the devil. He didn’t argue or dispute or take a whole lot of notice, by the sound of things. He simply shrugged the devil away.

“One doesn’t live by bread alone.” “Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.” “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” Short, sweet, and to the point.

We know that we are subject to the temptations of inappropriate or inconvenient bodily appetites, vanity and false humility; they are the classics. Jesus reassures us that we don’t need to spend a whole lot of time worrying about them; not that we should pretend that they don’t exist,  nor that we should give in to them (he didn’t), but that we should not let them be the focus of our attention, we should not let them have that power over us.

Jesus spent forty days in the Spirit fasting and praying and concentrating on what was important: his relationship with God, preparing for his ministry. The episode with the devil, as we just read it, may have taken all of five minutes.

The forty days of Lent are for fasting and praying, studying scripture, building our relationships with God, and with our neighbours; practising disciplines that will enable our ministry as disciples of Christ, not for occupying our minds with the strategies of the devil, with temptations or distractions. They are not worth our time of day. To quote Lewis’s demons again, “Even of his sins the Enemy [by which the devil means God] does not want him to think too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased.”[2]

Better, like Jesus, to carry on regardless, loving God and loving our neighbours to the best of our ability, and praying for the grace to do it better.

Paul offers this reassurance: “No one who believes in him will be put to shame,” and “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

The devil left Jesus on the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, having finished all of his tests. Jesus wound up on the top of the temple, refusing to put God to the test by throwing himself on the mercy of the angels to rescue him from a cruel death in the holy city, and the devil left him until a more opportune time.  But we know that when the devil returned, Jesus had no more time for him during Holy Week than in the wilderness; so that no one who believes in Jesus will be put to shame, and everyone who calls on his name shall be saved.

Amen.

[1] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, rev. edn. (New York: Macmillan, 1982), p. 79

[2] P. 66

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Year C Lent 1: temptation and perfection

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Notes for the sermon that won’t be preached tomorrow:

Was there never any danger that Jesus would succumb to the temptings and promptings and proddings of the devil?

We tend to trap ourselves in our language of perfection and innocence, of sinlessness and spotlessness, and turn Jesus into an invulnerable icon, an armoured superhuman with bullet-proof hide and a soul to match.

But if Jesus was in no danger from these temptations, if his fast left him as strong and as energetic as ever, if he responded so one hundred and eighty degrees differently than any one of us would or could, then what is the point to the story? Why tempt the untemptable? Why rejoice at the victory of the one for whom these is no match, no challenger worth the title? Where is the hope? What is the point?

Perhaps our language is missing something. Perhaps our idea of perfection is lacking. In Platonic thought, everything that exists on earth is a shadow, a copy of its perfect form, which exists in idea only, perfectly preserved and untouched by mortality or creation. It is a philosophy which has infected our idea of perfection and spread to our Christology, our descriptions of who Jesus was and is as the Son of God. We consider that in his perfection, he could have been no other, could have behaved and responded no other way; but then what would have been the point to his Incarnation, to his becoming human? Donald Mackinnon, citing another scholar named Cook-Wilson, pointed out that “once Plato had established the reality of the forms, his problem was to find any raison d’etre for the particulars which copied them, or partook of their being .. Christianity faces men with the paradox that certain events which could have been otherwise are of ultimate, transcendent import; and this without losing their character as contingent events.”[1]

[1] “Our Contemporary Christ,” in Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays, Donald MacKinnon, edited by George W. Roberts and Donovan E. Smucker (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011; orginal copyright 1968 Lutterworth Press), 87

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Valentine’s Day

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

A poem from a couple of years ago, when the only time in the day that I saw my husband was as our cars passed on opposite sides of the highway’s central divide. This year, he’s out of state. Oh for the days when we were close enough for our cars to pass like ships in the night!

Speed dating

I glimpsed you, hurtling through mile one eighty-five
on Valentine’s Day;
you were heading home to our half-fed children,
while I, running late as usual, raced toward the reddening sky,
glancing in my driving mirror.

Incidentally, the children did get fully fed, in the end.

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Ash Wednesday

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

There is, on occasion, a disconnect between our words and our actions. We smile through gritted teeth as we make polite conversation with someone we do not like. We have profound and prolonged conversations about liberty and justice as we calculate the smallest tip we can get away with giving to the server whose minimum wage is below minimum wage because her tips are expected to cover the difference between a week’s rent and being out on the street. We bemoan the state of the environment as we toss out our polystyrene coffee cups. We say, “This will hurt me more than it hurts you,” then walk away, unscathed.

Sometimes, there is a disconnect between the words that we hear at church and the way that we behave. In the gospel, Jesus admonishes us, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; when you give alms, do not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing; When you pray, go into your room and shut the door, and pray in secret; when you fast, do not look dismal or disfigure your face, but put on oil and wash your face, so that your fasting may not be seen by others.”

And here we are, gathering to follow Jesus, to follow his commands and his example, to worship God in his Name; and here we are, gathered to pray in public, taking up an offering and displaying it before all eyes, covering our foreheads in ashes as a sign of our Lenten fast.

There is, on occasion, a disconnect between our words and our actions. The prophets called us out on it, time after time, proclaiming a fast of the heart and soul rather than a hard and fast rule, reminding us that our rituals are not rehearsed for their own purposes, nor for the purpose of showing the world how holy we are, but to remind ourselves of our need for God’s salvation, to rend our hearts, to bring us to our knees before God.

It is no good, say the prophets, says Jesus, fasting and praying and calling on God’s name in front of anyone who will listen, if you fail to love the listener, who is always beloved of God, love them as you love the sound of your own voice. Otherwise, all that praying and praise, fasting and sacrifice, is what Jesus calls hypocrisy.

And yet, it is not always and everywhere a bad thing that there is a disconnect between our words and our actions. Sometimes our better deeds are trying to drown out our words, trying to tell us something that we really need to hear, about forgiveness, and grace, and God.

We dance even though our heart is breaking, each step another crack in the fabric of our being, but we dance ourselves into hope and healing. We sing praises to God through gritted teeth when we are angry or hurting or sad. We are kind, when our minds use cruel words to persuade us not to be, because we would rather think of ourselves as good than otherwise.

The goal, of course, is always integration, the full involvement of our hearts, minds, bodies and souls in the same pursuit, the love of God and of our neighbour; but whether the gap between our words and our actions, our prayers and our practice, our intentions and our temptations; whether that gap is growing or diminishing may rest in the difference between hypocrisy and hope.

Hypocrisy, leads us further from the integration of our words and our actions, of our hearts and God’s heart; when we use our words to veil our intentions or excuse the inexcusable, we know what we are doing, and our Father, who sees our secrets, who sees what our hearts secretly hide, will call us out.

If our ashes are worn as a mask to cover our pride in our own righteous piety, our reluctance to repent, our unwillingness to work to change our hearts and minds to conform with the loving will of God, to feed the hungry, to house the homeless, to fight injustice and to refrain from fighting one another – if we wear our ashes instead of doing those things, to excuse ourselves from that call, well, then, we have fulfilled the prophets and proven the gospel, we have made Jesus’ point for him, fasting as the hypocrites do.

But what if what we are doing is about hope?

What if we acknowledge that we are sinners, hopeless hypocrites without Christ, and we mourn with ashes our sinfulness, but we mourn as those who have hope, because we are not without Christ’ love; what if we pray together out loud and in public because we wish to become the people who live their prayers; if we give alms hoping to grow in generosity, we sing psalms hoping to grow in praise; if we wear our ashes in the hope that they will remind us, by their very disobedience, of our sin, and consequently of our need for God’s grace, God’s loving kindness toward us and all that God has made, then maybe that is what we will find;

if we bear our ashes with hope, rather than with hypocrisy, because we know that line from the Psalm, that the sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise (Psalm 51:18).

And so, with broken and contrite hearts we pray, Create in us a new heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within us (Psalm 51:11)

Amen.

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Burning

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

I’m sitting up tending a pot of palms as they slowly disintegrate into ash. Under the surface red and orange molten lava moves, shifting and sifting through the burnt and unburnt bits and branches, preparing their repentance for their part in the play, the opening scene in which they waved and hailed the King, the Prince of Peace.
Moving backwards through the calendar from Palm Sunday through Lent to Ash Wednesday and back through the night, this night, to the present, and back, back to a hopeful day in sunnier climes and dangerous times, they burn with a passion.

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Year C, Last Sunday after the Epiphany: Transformative prayer

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

The season of Sundays following the Epiphany is bookended by that voice from heaven that declares that Jesus is the beloved Son of God. On the Sunday following the Epiphany, at the Baptism of Our Lord, the heavens are opened and the Spirit of God descends like a dove, and a voice falls from the sky as a blessing upon Jesus. On this last Sunday before Lent, we always hear the story of the Transfiguration, that mountaintop moment when the voice again rumbles from the clouds and declares that Jesus is the chosen one of God, God’s own Son; and that he is to be listened to.

In the accounts given by Luke, which we read this year, there is besides the voice from the skies another striking parallel between the two stories. Both in the account of Jesus’ baptism and here at the top of the mountain, Jesus is deep in prayer at the moment of blessing. Neither Mark nor Matthew mentions this detail, but from Luke we heard that all the people had been baptized, and Jesus also had been baptized, and was praying when the heaven was opened and the dove came down; and now, taking Peter and John and James, he has gone to the mountain especially to pray, and it is as he is praying, this time just as before, that the strangest things occur.

It can’t be a coincidence that Luke mentions prayer, when no one before him did. It can’t be a coincidence that he mentions it twice, in two transformative stories of Jesus. For Luke, prayer is transformative; Jesus’ prayer is part and parcel of what makes him, what defines him, what reveals him as the Son of God.

But prayer is a gift of God which is shared even with us. The medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich, said that “the Goodness of God is the highest prayer, and it cometh down to the lowest part of our need. It quickeneth our soul and bringeth it on life.”[1] Any one of us can pray; I hope that each one of us does pray, because as Jesus demonstrated, prayer is transformative. It brings us into the presence of God, in the company of our spiritual ancestors and companions. It grants us access to heaven on earth. It makes us shine.

Granted, prayer is not always easy. One of the desert fathers, asked by his monks what was the most difficult labour of life in the monastery, answered, “Forgive me, but to my mind there is no labour so great as praying to God: for when a man wishes to pray to his God, the hostile demons make haste to interrupt his prayer, knowing that their sole hindrance is in this, a prayer poured out to God.”[2] We know how often our good intentions to spend time in prayer are distracted by the cares of the world and the call of warm and welcome interruptions. Prayer is offered to us as a gift, but we have to make an effort to unwrap it. One of the reasons that it is so important for us to continue to meet together regularly, religiously, is to encourage one another in prayer, in a life shared with God, lived in love for God and our neighbour.

And here is encouragement: prayer is transformative, even when we do not know it. Moses spoke with God on the mountaintop, and his face shone with the glory that he had seen; he reflected the glory of God through his eyes and his mouth, and the people were afraid to look at him, but Moses didn’t know, until they told him, that it was even happening. He did not know, until they told him, how much his encounter with the divine had changed him. He had been in conversation with God, but he did not know how deeply it had converted him. Like Peter on the mountainside, we rarely know just what we are saying or hearing or receiving when we pray; but God uses our prayer to transform us as God knows our need. At the very least, a habit of intentionally recognizing that we live in conversation with God can help us to recognize the places in our lives where God is already waiting to meet us, hiding as it were in plain sight. Prayer transforms those places in our lives. One desert father asked another, “Father, according to my strength I keep a modest rule of prayer and fasting and meditation and quiet, and according to my strength I purge my imagination: what more must I do?” The old man, rising, held up his hands against the sky, and his fingers became like ten torches of fire, and he said, “If thou wilt, thou shalt be made wholly a flame.”[3]

That is not to say that prayer will always work miracles. When Jesus came down from the mountain, he was confronted by a scene of grief and despair. A man had asked for help and healing from the disciples, and although they had already worked many wonders when Jesus had sent them out on the road, giving them power and authority over all demons, and to cure diseases, to preach the kingdom of God and to heal (Luke 9:1-2), still, this time, they were powerless.

Some years ago, I received word from a friend that her very young son was in the hospital. He had spiked a fever, and his white blood cell count was through the roof, and his kidneys were in imminent danger of failing, and the doctors were not sure what was wrong, and they were racing to find out, because they could only treat him once they were sure; his small body would not survive trial and error.

On about the third day, the fever broke, and the doctors came back with a diagnosis, one which promised a full and swift recovery. This happened on the boy’s second birthday, and his mother described it as being like the day of his birth all over again; it was as though, she said, she and the boy’s father had been given their son once more as though for the first time, just as Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, healed the boy, and gave him back to his father.

We all know that it does not always work out that way. The disciples had been unable to help the child and his father; but God was with that family, in the person of Jesus, and God is with us. There is always hope in the transformative power of prayer, which is why we pray for one another; and there are people praying for each of you, every day, whether or not you know it. While prayer may not change God, because God has always loved us as only God can, and God always will; still, prayer may change us.

While he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white… a cloud came and overshadowed them…Then from the cloud came a voice that said, This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him.

In the stillness of Lent, may we be transformed by penitence and prayer. In the silence that replaces our Alleluias, may we hear the voice from heaven that speaks to our hearts and changes our minds, transfigures our souls; and may we listen with the confidence of those who are being transformed from one degree of glory to another by the grace and glory of Christ our Lord.

Amen.

[1] Revelations of Divine Love recorded by Julian, Anchoress at Norwich anno domini 1373, “A Version from the MS in the British Museum edited by Grace Warrack” (London, Methuen & Company 1901), Harvard College Library preservation facsimile by Acme Bookbinding, Charlestown, MA 2005, via books.google.com; p. 13

[2] The Desert Fathers, Translated and Introduced by Helen Waddell, Vintage Spiritual Classics (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), p. 116-7

[3] Desert Fathers, p. 117

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Spiritual warfare: a sonnet with apologies to Hamlet

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

The “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”
have nothing on the armour-piercing fury
of a bullet tipped with wormwood gall;
no arbitrary missile this, but launched from
beyond the earth; underworld to surface borne
on wings of fire, brimstone burning, sulphur smelling,
singeing souls and scorching bodies, brandishing
the branding irons of images that sear themselves
into the skull, the mark of the beast tattooed
across the desolate, desecrated landscape.

Try as you might to hide, or to “take arms
against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them,”
it will dash you to the ground, drown you in clear air;
this kind can be defeated only by prayer.

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Year C Epiphany 4: God loves you, no exceptions

Posted on February 3, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

The title is from a billboard and bumper stickers put out by the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio. It’s one of my favourites, the other being, “If you’re looking for a sign from God, here it is.”

Once upon a time, a boy was born, and he grew up in a regular-sized town, and the people who knew people knew him – the teachers and the coaches and the librarians, the grocers and the beat cops, his neighbours and the local pastor – they saw him grow up, they knew who he was, where he came from.

And as he grew older, he developed these incredible talents. He had a gift – no, he had gifts galore. His reputation spread around the region as someone who had the gleam of greatness. All spoke well of him, and they expected great things. And when he was at home, the people who’d watched him grow up said, “Hey, look, it’s our boy! Turned out ok, right?” And the people who hadn’t noticed him growing up, they had heard the rumours of greatness, too, and they sat up and paid attention and said, “Hey, look, he’s our boy! He’s one of us! We know his people, he knows our place. As he grows into greatness, he will take us with him; we will rise with him and become great because of him.”

And the boy, the young man by now, looked around him, and he said, “You know me. You’ve seen me grow up. You know that I will always come from here, from you. But there are other people out there, there are other places that fall under God’s plan for greatness. This isn’t the only place that can use my special talents, and you aren’t the only people I can love.”

“So I’ve made a decision: I’m taking my gifts to Miami.”

So ok, the comparison doesn’t stand up to too much scrutiny. There are some very subtle differences in the two stories. But still, at the beginning of today’s gospel, Jesus is golden; by the end, they are trying to throw him off a cliff. If we can remember the emotions that led to jersey-burning and other forms of effigy abuse that followed LeBron’s “Decision,” maybe we can gain a little more insight into what it was that made the Nazareth crowd so mad, and whether we are in danger from the same malady.

After all, as John Barton says,

“It is very hard to identify just what it was in Jesus’ teaching that was offensive enough to his contemporaries to get him executed, … but it almost certainly had something to do with this theme… If Jesus ‘came to his own home, and his own people received him not’ (John 1:11), it was above all because he refused to acknowledge that there were any creatures of God who were more his own people than others.”
(John Barton, Love Unknown(2nd edn, Oxford, SLG Press, 1999), pp. 9-10)

And if we’re brutally honest with ourselves, we all suffer a little bit with that Nazareth delusion. We would all like to think that we, or our family, or our way of thinking, or our lifestyle, or our nation, is the favourite child, the one that God secretly loves the best.

And here’s the thing: we’re right. In Jeremiah, God singles out a young man for special favour, but he is chosen not for his own sake but for the sake of his people and even of his people’s enemies. What is more, as we say the psalm, we each claim that exact special favour for ourselves. The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” (Jeremiah 1:5) and in the Psalm we say, “Upon you I have leaned from my birth; it was you who took me from my mother’s womb; my praise is continually of you.” (Psalm 71:6)

But like Jeremiah, we are not chosen only for our own sake. We are chosen for one another, given as sisters and brothers to one another, for the sake of showing God’s love to one another, and to the world, love which is not bounded by tribal or trivial alliances, which is not sheltered from outsiders by turning inward, which is not choosy about its recipients; love which knows no exceptions.

The people of Nazareth thought that they had proof that Galilee was at last in for some special recognition, some royal redemption, a little bit of love. They were right, up to a point; God loved them enough to give them Jesus and share him with them as their son. But they were wrong in thinking that was all God had in mind, that they were all God had in mind when Jesus came to them.

Jesus reminded his people that they were chosen by God not only for their own sake, but for the sake of the world. Prophets were raised up in ancient Israel not only for their own sake, nor even only for the sake of the nation, but to show God’s love beyond their borders, to show that God’s love has no borders.

The church, we might add, was raised up in the wake of Jesus, to continue Jesus’ proclamation that God’s love has no borders, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the world at large.

The church has been blessed by God with the Sacraments that Jesus gave us by his Baptism and by his giving of himself, his Body and Blood, for the sake of the whole world. But he has told us to share them, making disciples of all nations, and he has warned us not to think that because we have been blessed, those blessings are ours to hoard like a miser. No, they are to be shared with the tax collectors and the sinners, with the outcasts and the unloved, with the others, especially those who are other than we are.

Here are two descriptions of how the church is living into that mission. The first is from a sociological study of life in modern America, called The Big Sort:

“American churches today are more culturally and politically segregated than our neighborhoods. This happened partially because we prefer to worship in like-minded congregations. But churches also are more homogeneous because ministers took what was learned nearly a century ago by Christian missionaries trying to overcome the caste system and language barriers in India … The strategy was as simple as like attracts like. The new and crowded megachurches were built on the most fundamental of human needs: finding safety within the tribe.”
(Bill Bishop, with Robert G. Cushing, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008, p. 159)

There is a lot of literature about church growth and how to achieve it that builds on this tribal tendency, that uses this assumption as a founding principle for an evangelistic movement, and it is definitely effective.

But here’s the other description, from novelist Michael Arditti, who was explaining why he chose to set a novel in, of all the villages available, a parish church:

“One of my aims in writing Easter was to paint a comprehensive social portrait of a kind that has largely disappeared from the contemporary novel. Nowhere but the church could I find an institution where all the different classes and racial and sexual groups stood (and sat and knelt) side by side.”
(Michael Arditti, Easter (London: Arcadia Books Ltd, 2000), from the Preface, p. viii)

I have to ask, not which portrait of the church today is more accurate, nor even which is more effective for church growth, but which one looks more like the kind of village that Jesus built up around him. Remember his dinners at the tax collectors’ homes, where scribes and Pharisees sat across the table from a Galilean carpenter and a few fishermen, and women of dodgy repute hung around the edges?

We have been blessed. We here in Euclid have been blessed to find one another, to find God together, to find a like-mindedness which is not dependent on education or age, on race or sexuality, on nationality nor even political affiliation, but on the understanding together that Jesus is Lord, that God has loved us from before we were born, that God calls us into being together.

Those blessings are not ours to hoard, and they are not ours to ration out to those we consider deserving, or helpful to us, or even to those we consider most needful. God’s love knows no exceptions: it is radically indiscriminate, irresponsibly inclusive.

Now we see only in part, but there is a fullness to God’s love which transcends our partiality, which Jesus demonstrated and called us out on, and the people were envious and resentful, but love is not. Love is patient, and kind. The people were angry, but love is not irritable, nor does it rejoice in wrongdoing, but it rejoices in the truth. Jesus’ radical, indiscriminate love nearly got him killed that day in Nazareth, but he continued to break boundaries and to reach beyond borders, because love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Eventually, of course, this radical, indiscriminate, exceptional love did get him killed. But even that didn’t stop him, because love, God’s love, Christ’s love, never ends.

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Year C Epiphany 4: Early reflections on Luke 4:21-30

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Once upon a time, a boy was born, and he grew up in a regular-sized town, and the people who knew people knew him – the teachers and the coaches and the librarians, the grocers and the beat cops, his neighbours and the local pastor – they saw him grow up, they knew who he was, where he came from.

And as he grew older, he developed these incredible talents. He had a gift – no, he had gifts galore. His reputation spread around the region as someone who had the gleam of greatness. All spoke well of him, and they expected great things. And when he was at home, the people who’d watched him grow up said, “Hey, look, it’s our boy! Turned out ok, right?” And the people who hadn’t noticed him growing up, they had heard the rumours of greatness, too, and they sat up and paid attention and said, “Hey, look, he’s our boy! He’s one of us! We know his people, he knows our place. As he grows into greatness, he will take us with him; we will rise with him and become great because of him.”

And the boy, the young man by now, looked around him, and he said, “You know me. You’ve seen me grow up. You know that I will always come from here, from you. But there are other people out there, there are other places that fall under God’s plan for greatness. This isn’t the only place that can use my special talents, and you aren’t the only people I can love.”

“So I’ve made a decision: I’m going to Miami.”

So ok, the comparison doesn’t stand up to too much scrutiny. There are some very subtle differences in the two stories. But still … it might help explain why they felt like throwing him off a cliff.

 

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