Isaiah 6: 1-8

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

the seraphs, shimmering as if aflame
flew on strong winds bellowing the coals to life;
even the heavenly hosts used borrowed tools to take
cleansing fire to touch my lips, set loose my tongue.
Burning from the outside in, swallowing fire
to fill my belly and stoke my heart and pepper my speech;
seasoned, destroyed and made new in one smoky breath,
the exhalation like incense rising with the sweet smell of prayer.

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The birthday of the Book of Common Prayer

Posted on May 28, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

This is an edited version of a sermon celebrating the anniversary of the first English Book of Common Prayer. The anniversary falls on June 9th, but it “is properly celebrated on a weekday following Pentecost,” (Lesser Feasts and Fasts) and my calendar marks it for tomorrow. The links between Pentecost, language, and prayer, common or otherwise, are poignant. This sermon is less so, but I offer it as a humble reflection.

The Gospel lesson is from John 4:21-24:

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

When I entered the church as an English child in Wales in the seventies, at the height of Welsh nationalism, language was such an important part of self-expression in that country and in that time; it was a test of identity. But I did not speak Welsh, and, ironically, it was rarely spoken around me in the southern coastal town where I lived. I attended worship in English in our parish church, speaking many of the prayers which had followed our church through the centuries all the way from 1549. At my Confirmation I was presented with a Book of Common Prayer whose pages mirrored one another in English and in Welsh, so that in theory you could switch seamlessly from one to the other (and the Archbishop of Wales will sometimes do just that), weaving a net of shared language and shared worship to draw the divided English and Welsh and anyone caught between them into the fellowship of the Lord’s Table together.

The Gospel reading for this day speaks of worship in spirit and truth. The creations of temple and the city and the mountain are superseded by God’s own spirit and truth. Salvation comes from the Jews, embodied in Jesus; and it is for all people. God reaches out to us, to the whole of God’s creation, in spirit and truth, and we can respond only by the grace of God’s own self.

We read only a part of this story today. In its fuller form, it is the story of the woman at the well, who had had five husbands; a Samaritan. When Jesus met the woman, he spoke to her in language she could understand: “give me a drink of water”. It was completely appropriate for the time and place and context: they were at a well; he asked for water. But this simple request led to a great revelation, that this man, Jesus, was in fact the Messiah. It led to evangelism, as the woman ran back home to share her story with her people, in her language, about the man she had met who told her everything about herself, who understood her, who spoke to her in words she could understand.

In today’s service we are using language which has fallen largely into disuse in our churches, language which is a closer and more direct descendent than we usually hear of the words which Thomas Cranmer gave us in 1549. He would, no doubt, be appalled. After all, one of Cranmer’s priorities in introducing a Book of Common Prayer was giving the people a liturgy that they could understand, written in their own language, which they could read together, if they could read, which they could certainly speak together, and which would furnish them with a resource not only for public worship but for private devotions. And here I am, speaking in language which we never use these days, in order to celebrate his work. Isn’t it ironic?

The first Book of Common Prayer replaced regional rites which could be quite different from one county to the next with this one standard, not because it was necessarily the best, or the most true, or the most spiritual. It regularized worship not because there is one true and right way or place to worship God. It did it to bring the Church of England and its people together in worship and in fellowship and in the prayers, celebrating their unity in the baptism which they shared in Christ Jesus. It did so to draw Christian people closer to one another, so that by loving neighbor, they may come closer to loving God.

That’s why I thought it might be a good idea for us to revisit the words of our spiritual and ecclesial ancestors today, to celebrate their achievements and insights, and to acknowledge that we are bound together – although not by the words in a Book of Common Prayer. The words of this book are beautiful, and timeless, and spiritual, and they ring true even today; but their purpose is not to worship God on the mountain, or in Jerusalem, but to point us to the Word of God himself, who draws all peoples to himself, whose sign to his apostles was baptism, whose comfort to them was fellowship and the prayers, and the holy meal; who continues to speak words of challenge and love and invitation and forgiveness to us all, each in our own language. …

Amen.

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Pentecost

Posted on May 26, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

Apostles on fire,
unconsumed; baring their souls
before holy ground.

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And another (Pentecostal) thing …

Posted on May 25, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

With all the fuss about people hearing Galileans butchering their own languages with their heavy accents, where are the people curious about the fire sitting on top of these folks’ heads? (“Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.” It isn’t clear when the fire went away.)

Babies. Babies would have noticed the fire. Perhaps it was for them. When they begin to babble, I am told, babies all do it in the same pre-language. They make the same sounds. There’s a reason it’s called Babbling. As they become more discerning, provided they can hear sufficiently well, they will begin to distinguish the sounds of a distinct language, the one which surrounds them, and their sounds will become more focused toward learning to speak that language. But babies learn to speak by looking as well as by listening. They pay a whole lot of attention to people’s faces. That’s why a baby will stick her tongue out at you when you talk to her: she is hoping that if she wiggles her tongue like she sees you doing, she will find herself magically able to pronounce the words, “Can I have a cookie?”

Babies would notice something like fire on top of people’s heads before they noticed that the person on fire was speaking ancient Gallic with a strong Galilean accent. So perhaps the Holy Spirit included the visual for them. Or for those for whom spoken language was a mystery even later in life.

Joel’s list of those upon whom the Spirit of God would be poured out is not exhaustive but expansive; before it begins to list categories, it embraces them under “one flesh.” Including the very young and the very hard of hearing. All shall prophesy.

How do the babies in our congregations prophesy to us? How do they mirror to us God’s relationship to “all flesh”? Do they point at flames of fire? Do they babble? Do they mimic us (if so, we had better be careful how we teach them)?

How do the people who are too innocent to know that drunkenness does not keep to a disciplined schedule prophesy?

What are those who cannot or do not hear us telling us that we cannot or will not hear?

How do we make space, give voice, recognize the fire of those who prophesy in our congregations from whom we rarely hear, whose accents are thick, whose languages are foreign, who speak with tongues of flame or who babble, so to speak?

“I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; … I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.”

Are we listening?

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Postponing Pentecost reflections

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

“How can they be drunk?” asks Peter, in all innocence. “It’s only nine o’clock in the morning!” And every time, I have to smile, or smirk, or weep at his innocence, or naïveté.

As in the rest of the gospel stories, Peter blurts out whatever he thinks, oblivious to his own unsophistication. Jesus would have had some pithy retort to set him straight – I can’t come up with one just now, only prosaic wisdom like “Wine knows no time;” – but anyway, Jesus wasn’t there.

I’m going to try between now and the end of Sunday to reflect a little more deeply, a tad more prayerfully, perhaps more inspirationally on the Pentecost event and our own Pentecosts; in the meantime, apparently, I am stubbing my toe on Peter the Rock.

One novelization of Jesus’ life which I read posited that Peter’s nickname “the Rock” was the result not of his loyalty or solidity but was given because he was as dumb as a rock. (I can’t remember offhand whether this was Christopher Moore’s Lamb – funny, maybe a little edgy for the tender-hearted – or Testament, by Nino Ricci.)

But Peter evangelized. He had the Holy Spirit to give him voice and he had the prophets to lend him words and he had the life of Jesus in all of its glory to offer.

Who needs a world-weary, sophisticated cherry on top?

My “sophisticated cynicism” can sometimes block me from hearing really good news. Between now and Sunday, my challenge to myself (one of them) is to listen to Peter. The one filled with the Spirit and sent out by Jesus himself, who knew all too well his occasional obtuseness. My challenge is to rest a while in the world of someone who can’t imagine anyone getting drunk at nine o’clock in the morning, to be infected by his innocent inspiration and overflowing, effervescent joy. I can think of worse worlds to visit.

Wish me bon voyage!

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Science and religion

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

There are books and periodicals and articles and blogs and essays galore written to tell us that science and religion do not mix. More than that, that they are antithetical to one another. If you have faith, you must give up science. To be a scientist, you must turn your back on your religion.

And then there are the people, like Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, who turn their backs on the headlines and, thankful for the gifts that God has given them, use them to see beyond the next horizon, to see the world more clearly, to show us marvellous things about the universe in which we live.

People like Copernicus and Kepler change everything. Kepler codified a growing body of reason about the way that the world works and laid the foundation for generations to come. Copernicus changed the world by telling us that the sun was its centre. He changed our world; he didn’t change God’s world. It turned out later, afer all, that our sun was only one centre, one sun among countless others.

With each discovery, our awe for our Creator should surely increase, not diminish.

“Science” means knowledge. Knowledge is tricky – the garden of Eden story, with the tree and the serpent, warned us that it can fool us into thinking that we are our own gods, that we have no need of God. But our capacity for knowledge is a tremendous gift. Treated with humility, with gratitude, respect and love, it accomplishes wonderful things: medicine, machinery, new ways of creating art – itself once thought to be the opposite of science.

Copernicus, Kepler and their like have shown us astonishing things about the universe in which we live. More astonishing still is the knowledge that among so many stars, in so many galaxies, in such an unfathomably large (and possibly expanding) created universe, God knows and recognizes each one of us, even counts each of the hairs on our heads, even loves us.

And that changes everything.

 

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God’s right-hand wo/men

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

Or, Eternity: the Sunday Update! Parts of this morning’s sermon for St Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Elyria, are already covered in the previous post (TGIF and Eternity), so I won’t repeat those parts here, but here’s where eternity ended up (so to speak):

Eternal life is not what happens to us after we die. Or at least, it’s not only what happens after we die. Eternity is not what comes next; eternity has no future, no next thing. Eternity isn’t where we lived before we were born. It has no before, no beginning. Eternity is not the length of this sermon; it has no length, no duration, no end. …

… Eternal life will I believe be with us beyond death, but eternity doesn’t wait for death to get started. Eternal life is life that beats within us now, that is as close as the divine spark that galvanizes us, that lives, dies and rises with us. It is the life within us that gazes upon the timeless face of God. It is the life that God shares with us.

Jesus showed us eternity by living beyond his mortal life – the usual birth, living, death – through resurrection and ascension; but Jesus’ eternal life didn’t begin at his resurrection, or at his ascension. Jesus was there in the beginning, with God; he was God. But Jesus’ Ascension, which we celebrated this past week, and which we sing about in today’s hymns – Jesus’ Ascension showed us a picture of what it is like for us to have eternal life with him. Jesus ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God.

Of course, going up, sitting, God’s right hand – they’re images that stir up our imaginations. We don’t expect to find heaven hiding above a cloud, or Jesus bodily sitting there, and who could imagine God’s hands except Michelangelo?

But the picture that Jesus’ Ascension painted told us that we, God’s children to whom he came, we live with him at the right hand of God. That is what it means to have eternal life, according to the Ascension story. It is to live at the right hand of God. That is why Jesus prays for his disciples who live in the world but not in the world – who live in Galilee, or Elyria, and at the right hand of God.

John the letter-writer says, “I write these things to you, … so that you may know that you have eternal life.” Because he knows that we who live with Jesus at the right hand of God sometimes forget where we live. We forget that we live with God, because sometimes it doesn’t feel like it; when we’re lonely, or in pain, or even in joy. So John reminds us: “You have eternal life.”

What a riot! What could you do, living at the right hand of God? What couldn’t you do? God’s right-hand men and women, with God at your side, what forgiveness could you offer, what reconciliation could be wrought, even if you yourself are the one you need to forgive? What courage could you borrow to stand up for your neighbour, the ones we are called to love, to speak out against injustice and unrighteousness? We could be bold, with God at our side. What testimony could we give, what joy could we share? What storms of grief could we weather, knowing that God is right there beside us?

It doesn’t necessarily make life easy, living at the right hand of God. God doesn’t live our lives for us: we still have to do that ourselves; make our own decisions, our own mistakes, fall in love for ourselves, grieve for our loved ones, speak words of truth to power. God doesn’t live our lives for us. But God lives with us, sharing the eternal life which belongs to God alone. God lets us lean on God, the strong rock and redeemer, who is eternally by our side, at whose right hand, with Christ, and through Christ, we live. God, the eternal one, whose life, by God’s own grace, we share.

What will you do, reaching out from God’s right hand? How will you share the eternal life with which you have been gifted? What glory can we expect to shine forth from you?

After all, I’m telling you these things so that you may know that you have, here and now, that life which belongs to God alone; that through the love of God and the incarnation of Jesus Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit, you are God’s right hand women and men; and your eternal life has already begun. Amen.

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TGIF and Eternity

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

Spoiler alert: this blog post may contain themes to be explored in Sunday’s sermon 😉

It’s Friday. Cue the “tgif” facebook posts, the end-of-work, end-of-week blowout plans. We like endings. We like our time packaged into boxes with sides and floors and flaps that we can close down and tape up so as to store them away into our memories. We like endings in the books that we read and the movies that we watch – and heaven help the author or director that screws up the ending. They make us angry. We demand satisfaction; closure.

We mortal creatures, finite in our physical and temporal reach, like to know where the beginnings and the endings are, so that we can plan the time in between. We like to know that the world is arranged the same way as we are: bounded, limited, its flights of fancy encompassable by our imaginations.

Yet religious types persist in talking about eternity, about eternal life. Is there a conflict here between culture and theology, between real life and religion?

Not if we take seriously the theology of eternity as it comes to us from scripture, from the Greek philosophers who influenced its development as a scriptural concept. Not if we take seriously our relationship with God.

If we talk about eternal life as some everlasting, never-ending existence like the one we know now, it is an intolerable proposition. We need endings, as already mentioned. We crave closure. The Greek myth of Tithonus tells of a mortal man condemned to immortality by the careless goddess of the dawn, Eos, who forgot to gift him with commensurate preservation of his youth and powers. Tithonus found out the pain of endless life, aging past the point of endurance, but unable to stop, to end, to die.

But eternal life as promised by the gospel of Christ is no such thing. It is not something that comes to us by the stretching out and drawing length of time. It is not something even that comes to us on the other side of death – waiting for eternity makes no sense, when you think about it, given that eternity has no beginning. How can we wait for something that never starts? (Movies and books that fail to begin are as bad as ones that fail to end, in my opinion.)

William Barclay’s study of the word “eternal” traces it back to Plato, who described it as a word belonging to the realm of the divine, unable to describe anything created: “The essential point [in Plato’s picture] is that eternity is always the same and always indivisible; in it there is no being created and no becoming; there is no such thing as being older and younger in eternity; there is no past, present or future.”*

Eternal life, then, is not ours to come into at some point in the future – after death, for example. It does not describe our life before our conception – it has no before, no after. It does not belong to us at all, but only to God.

Yet the gospel of Christ, especially as given us by the Johannine school, tells us over and over that eternal life is God’s gift to us through Jesus Christ. (John uses two words for life: one to describe mortal life, and the other to describe that life which Plato says cannot be applied to the created realm but belongs to the Divine.) “Whoever has the Son has life,” writes 1John 5:12, using the word for eternal life, that life of God which is not mortal, which is unbounded, which does not belong in the created realm.

In Jesus, God has shown us eternal life, the divine life, the life with which God gifts us, the ones made in God’s own image. It is not an alternative to life that ends in death. We need our endings. It is not a second life that we wait for, after death. It is life that beats within us, that is as close as the divine spark that galvanizes us, that lives, dies and rises with us. It is the life within us that gazes upon the timeless face of God.

*William Barclay, New Testament Words (SCM Press Ltd, 1964)

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Prayer cycle

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

It is fairly well accepted that a change of scenery, a new activity, can shake up our thinking; derail our trains of thought; get the wheels out of the grooves, the ruts they’ve been stuck in. My daughter tells me of research that suggests that this is why I keep forgetting what I went upstairs/downstairs/outside/inside for: going through a doorway triggers a change of setting, a change of gears for our brains, so whatever our intention was before we went through it gets shifted out of the picture. More positively, the change can shake the stale crumbs out of our routines, even out of our prayers. I like walking with prayer. It seems to allow greater freedom to my wandering mind, my seeking, searching soul, to notice, make connections, listen; and in the stumblings – metaphorical and physical – there are opportunities for the Holy Spirit to grab me and save me and set me straight (or let me fall).

If mind-emptying contemplation is more your thing, then there is still good reason to get moving. Paradoxically, exercise can do a good job of replacing sitting still and silently. Repetitive motion, routine movements, can occupy the parts of our thinking that would otherwise be concerned with distracting mundanities or intractable problems.

So when I began training for the bishop’s bike ride, it seemed like a great idea to take my daily prayer out with me on the road.

Well, it sort of works. Honestly, the daily office podcast that I usually listen to gets pretty drowned out by the rush of wind past my earbuds (and I’m not even going that fast!) and the traffic on the road next to me.

On the other hand, having looked again at the six “principal kinds of prayer” listed in the Catechism of the Book of Common Prayer (pp. 856-7), then maybe with all the repeated cries to God

–  of petition for divine assistance and protection (motorist friends, make room for bikes when passing, please),

of penitence (if your child’s school bus was late yesterday, that might have been my fault  – sorry…),

of thanksgiving (for patient bus drivers, for example),

of intercession (especially for the safety of all the children who are travelling those same roads during Bike to School Month),

of praise and of adoration (especially when passing the lake) –

maybe this cycling thing is a means to an extended prayer life after all!

This Friday is national Bike to Work day (http://www.punchbowl.com/holidays/national-bike-to-work-day). I don’t work Fridays, so I’m going to try it on Thursday instead. Prayers for safety, good sense (mine especially), and good weather are welcome. Also, prayers that I will have sufficient left to cycle back home at the end of the day 🙂

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Mothers’ Day

Posted on May 13, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

The Worst Mothers’ Day Ever was the one when I was nine or ten and I had completely forgotten that it was Mother’s Day. I tried to bluff my way through by rifling through my desk, and producing a craft made at school. Unfortunately, it was a calendar, with a collage owl face on the top, made back in January. My mother pointed out that no one gives calendars out halfway through the year; I was busted.

My Best Mother’s Day Ever has many competitive entries. There was the multi-generational lunch with my mother, my grandmother, my daughters and son. There was the day of my youngest daughter’s baptism, when mothers of all kinds (godmothers, grandmothers, first mothers, second mothers, mothers-in-law, you name it) were in attendance, some dancing around meeting one another for the first time. There was the year of the pussy willow planting. There have been Mother’s Days that have been overtaken by soccer tournaments, that have been pushed back, postponed or cancelled by Real Life. There have been barbecues and breakfasts in bed.

Today, I got up before the rest of the house was awake. I put on the shoes we had chosen together to mark the occasion. There were sleeping teenagers (not all of them mine) all over the place, recovering from Prom. By the time I got home from church, after praying to our Mother God for them – their lives, their loves, their friends, their future, their present day – they had broken the sofa by sitting on it in a pile all at once. “Hello, homewreckers,” I greeted them wryly, and they laughed a little sheepishly and said sorry for the sofa.

I drove my husband to the airport, dropped off my son’s tux at the rental place, picked up take-out food for dinner. The youngest, herself in high school, made me the traditional Coloured-in Heart Paper Card. We watched some tv, and now everyone’s turned in for an Early Night.

The best Mothers’ Days are the ones when I get to be the mother of my children. The best Mother’s Day, so far, is always today.

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