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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Year C Epiphany 3: The year of the Lord’s favour

Posted on January 27, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

There has never been a time that God was absent from us.

There have been times when it seemed a close thing. The Flood, for example, the bondage in Egypt, the Exile, the cry of dereliction from the cross.

But we have seen, we know, we are here because we trust that God was never gone, that God would never leave us.

We read in Luke’s gospel that Jesus read from the scroll of Isaiah, from that wonderful oracle about the year of the Lord’s favour, with its images of freedom and vitality, health and restoration, gladness and joy, and then he sat down and began to say to the gathered worshippers,

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

We assume that he was talking about himself and his mission. But he was also talking about the fact that every day this scripture is being fulfilled; every day this scripture has been fulfilled since the beginning of time. Every year is the year of God’s favour, because God, since the creation began, has proclaimed it good, and loved it.

Jesus in the synagogue was following in the traditions of his ancestors, reading from the scriptures and then giving interpretation, explanation, for the understanding of the people. We see it back in Nehemiah, in our first lesson, where the scribes “read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.”

In Nehemiah’s time, the people had lived without the law for years during the exile of the Jewish people in Babylon and Persia, and part of the restoration of the people to Jerusalem and the temple was their restoration to the covenant of Moses, to the law of the Lord. When they laid the foundations for the new temple, the people sang responsively, singing psalms back and forth as we do even today,

“praising and giving thanks to the Lord, ‘For he is good, for his steadfast love endures for ever toward Israel.’ And all the people shouted with a great shout, when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid.” (Ezra 3:11)

As a gradual return and resettlement program began, the found scriptures guided the reestablishment of the old religion in the old country, and the people were reminded of their covenant with God, the covenant which Moses had received and brokered on behalf of the people after their return from the Egypt, after the Exodus through the Red Sea so many centuries and generations ago.

The people wept to hear the law, because they had abandoned it for so long; but their leaders told them, “This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep,” because the law was the sign that God had made an everlasting covenant with them, and had never left them, would never abandon them. Their leaders told them, today this scripture is being fulfilled in your hearing.

But the people wept in their joy, because the human condition is always mixed, because restoration of one thing means letting go of another, because recognizing a better path means realizing that the one we have been struggling along was not so good, was not, perhaps, worth all the toil that we invested in it. Hope brings, paradoxically, a little bit of hopelessness in its wake.

We hear the words of Isaiah, the year of the Lord’s favour, sight to the blind, good news to the poor, freedom to the oppressed, release to those held captive by whatever binds them; we hear Jesus proclaiming that this is the year, this is the day, that this prophecy is fulfilled, here and now, and we look around, and we wonder, why, then, are we not free from poverty and disease, hunger and oppression, violence and bondage to sin?

Like the people gathered before Nehemiah, hearing the word of the Lord as if for the first time, we mourn for what we know could be, even as we hear God’s promises to us.

But here’s the thing. When God restored the fortunes of Israel, when God led the people on another Exodus back into the promised land, to rebuild the city and the temple, to restore their way of life and their relationship with the covenant that God had given them, God did not hand them a finished temple, a city with its walls intact. God did not raise up for them houses and fields of grain. God gave them God’s word, God gave them a promise to be among them, to work among them, to lead them and to correct their compass and never to leave them.

But they had to work. They had to build. They had to grow. They had to care for the sick and the needy, to help those who could not help themselves back to the old country; they had to pore over the old scriptures and discern what God was asking of them, what God was promising them. They had to meet together and to share ideas and to work them out and to plan and to promise one another that they would work together. They had to make decisions and choices and they had to dig out foundations and put one stone on top of another, piece by piece, until the work was done.

When Jesus sat down, and told the people gathered, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” he did not stay sitting down in the synagogue and let it be. He did not mean that the work was over, that his work was done. No; he went out after this and he began to preach good news to the poor, and he began to proclaim release to the captives. He restored sight to those who were blind, and he set free many who were oppressed by disease or demons or by guilt. His fulfillment of the prophecy was to do the work that the prophecy proclaimed; and if we call ourselves followers of Jesus, we might think about doing the same.

There are many ways that we might think of doing that.

Did you see yesterday the people lined up behind the banner of the National Cathedral, Episcopalians among so many others marching together to require that we take action to curb our gun violence, to rein in our addiction to weaponry? They were pleading liberty for the oppressed.

Or maybe some of you were there, or at least you will have seen on the news or in the Plain Dealer that on Thursday evening people of God from around the city of Cleveland and from the cities around Cleveland gathered to talk about access to healthcare, about the extension of Medicaid to those who are most vulnerable and who have no means of paying for medical assistance. Our bishop was there. They said that 600,000 extra people would be helped to better health and security if our state chooses to expand our Medicaid program as provided for in the Affordable Care Act. My friend and colleague Dean Tracey Lind told the assembled congregation on Thursday night that the number 600,000 occurs just once in the Bible, in the book of Exodus, so I looked it up: it is the number of the Israelite men, not counting women and children, who were led out of Egypt on the night of the first Passover; the people whom God led to safety through the Red Sea (Exodus 12:37). Talk about proclaiming release to the captives. Talk about preaching good news to the poor.

The year of the Lord’s favour is the year that we proclaim, this year and last year and next year. It is any time in which we remember the promises of God and share them, do the work that shares them with our neighbours, with the people whom God loves. Because God has never been absent from the world; there has not been a year which God has created in which God has not loved the world. And that is the prophecy into which we are called to live. And this is the work that we are called to do: to preach good news to the poor, and release to the captives, sight to the blind and liberty to those who are oppressed.

“Today,” said Jesus, “this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Because any day that God is with us is the day of the Lord’s favour; and God is with us, every day.

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Little ones

Posted on January 26, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

Last week, while some were celebrating “Gun Appreciation Day,” a six-year-old girl in Cleveland found her father’s gun, and she shot herself to death.

(http://www.19actionnews.com/story/20631205/6-year-old-dead-after-severe-head-trauma)

Later in the week, a four-year-old boy in Akron died in similar circumstances.

(http://www.19actionnews.com/story/20678028/4-year-olds-death-ruled-a-homicide)

In both cases, their fathers are being held by the authorities, and investigations will continue, but this much is abundantly clear:

when the proliferation of deadly weapons in our neighbourhoods, in our homes and around our streets has got so out of hand that they find their way into the hands of children, there is something terribly wrong. We should be ashamed of ourselves for ever letting this get so out of hand and into theirs.

Jesus said, “Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to anyone by whom they come! It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble.” (Luke 17:1-2)

We would do well to take heed, and to work to remove these weapons of personal and painful destruction out of the centres of our lives and our families, where life belongs, not death.

 

 

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Ordination anniversary

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

It’s been a busy day. Perhaps tomorrow will be more reflective, more suitable to the occasion; but one story stands out from the day as particularly apt to this first anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood.
This morning, at a community meeting, I introduced myself to the young woman sitting next to me with my name and the organization I was representing. We exchanged pleasantries, then she asked, “What is your role at the church?” I replied, “I am their priest.”
Her eyebrows rose. “That’s cool!” I had to smile. “Yes, it is really cool.”
What sort of church, she wanted to know, so I told her, and she had heard a few things about the Episcopal Church, and she wondered … Can they… Could I…. Did they…
I waited, still smiling, because I was confident that the answer would be yes.
It turned out the question was could I be a priest and be married? Yes, I told her, for twenty-one years and with three children.
“Wow. That’s awesome.”
Well, yes. Yes it is.
Thank you Florence. Thank you Nancy. Thank you Katie, and Mark, too.
And thanks be to God.

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Seven below

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Rosalind C Hughes

One from the archives for a chilly day

This morning, on the school run,
even the sun did not want to rise,
lounging fatly in the treetops,
red and round, heavily globular,
a frozen popsicle on a bare tree stick.
The air itself petrified hard,
was spiky and painful to touch,
unyielding; we hugged ourselves
and shouldered the cold aside.
It was cold this morning.

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