Stop the bleeding

Posted on October 26, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

Dear God,
we cry, dear Lord,
how much blood can humanity shed
before we become something other
than the body that you formed
and the spirit that you breathed
and the image that you called
very good?

My Christ,
can we lay down our weapons
and crawl beneath your Cross,
weep and water the ground there,
turn it to mud with our repentance?

Dear One,
we need to be created anew,
to be reformed by your brooding
over us; we need you to patch up
our clay, renew your right Spirit
within us to stop the bleeding.

My Lord, have mercy

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Regret

Posted on October 25, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

What happens when we stop 
asking questions? What if instead 
we had kept on, like a child 
of God asking why? why? but why? 
If we had trusted enough 
to stay in our cautious curiosity, 
allowed our anger, even outrage 
to feed a sceptical hope. 
He was our mirror; turning away 
we forgot how he looked 
a little like a boy we once loved. 
I could wish that instead of walking 
away that like Jacob, I had wrestled 
until there was no more night, 
no more stars falling silently to light; 
only the breaking open of day 
and the delicate wound of God.

No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions. (Matthew 22:46)

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The flight to Egypt (through Gaza)

Posted on October 21, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

I can only imagine that you went that way, 
searching the skies by night for a sign 
of Herod’s madness overtaking, 
or a message from the Magi 
flashed through the heavens; 
at twilight I scan for the satellites 
that bring news and war to stream down 
like rain on an unready desert; 
I think of you bearing away the salvation 
of the world in such fragile bodies. 

Featured image: The Flight into Egypt – a night piece, by Rembrandt, via Wikimedia Commons

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Render

Posted on October 19, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

Give to God what is God’s,
he said, and some, taking him
at his Word, went out
to prepare the holy sacrifice.

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God head

Posted on October 18, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

Note: this week’s #preparingforSundaywithpoetry takes non-random words from the Gospel and pairs them to unearth (or undermine) the meaning of the exchange. These words appear in the NRSV translation.

sincere malice 
lawful partiality 
plotted accordance 
aware emperor 
deference test 
entrap hypocrites
know show 
truth tax 
God head 

Matthew 22:15-22 The Pharisees went and plotted to entrap Jesus in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “The emperor’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away. 

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The erosion of innocence

Posted on October 17, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

Since it was more than one mile from the border (although under two kilometres), I felt that I was justified in assuring my parents that the kibbutz I visited for a long month decades ago was “miles away” from the rocket launches on the six o’clock BBC news.

Every night, we listened to the rockets fall. The one night that all was quiet, no one could sleep. Still, the most danger I fell into that summer was from the heat, high waters, and the inappropriate appetites of some men. One evening I sat on the hillside with my arm around a friendly Doberman who had planted himself between my body and that of a boy who had tried to separate me from the herd. I felt safe.

The day that we did stumble into no-man’s land by mistake, we thought we had landed on another planet. Flat earth stretched into the distance as we shuffled sheepishly back under the domed canopy of the trees, giving thanks for the absence of patrols at the crucial moment of error.

Mostly, I worked in the rubber boot factory, wiping the glue off the seams at the end of the assembly line, dipping my rag into an open vat of acetone and coming out singing, with a chemical headache swinging its way in for the afternoon. But I had a little high-school German, so occasionally I was relieved instead to join the little old ladies in the Community Room, setting up for something or another. They spoke a mix of German and Yiddish. I tried hard to understand their instructions and to avoid staring at the blue numbers tattooed on their arms, and they laughed at me.

The kibbutz is under an evacuation order now. The dog and the old ladies are long gone; I wonder who the boy grew up to be. I wonder how pain can be revisited again and again, suffered and inflicted in a never-ending cycle. I wonder what it will take to disrupt the process, where war has become a lullaby, its absence an anomaly.

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Dressed for a wedding or a war

Posted on October 15, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for 15 October 2023, on Year A Proper 23 readings Matthew 22:1-14, Philippians 4:1-9, Exodus 32:1-14, at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio

Paul writes, Beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.

“The God of peace will be with you.” But this is not a peaceful parable. 

Remember that it is being told in the holy city during Holy Week. Tensions abound, becoming unbearable. As Jesus was arriving to Hosannas through one gate, Pilate was processing with Aves through another.[i] The chief priests and elders, the Pharisees and the faithful are caught between them, fearful not only of God but of the empire. The so-called Pax Romana, an uneasy and ill-named peace maintained only by brutal conquest, was not an easy rule under which to live.[ii] And they so wanted to live, and to sacrifice the Passover in the Temple, and to tell their children the old stories of God’s deliverance, and for their children to believe them.

And how is that even possible, when the fear of the golden calf, or the bull-calf sacrificed to Mars the Roman god of war, is as strong a motivator as the love and fear of God? 

So Jesus tells them this parable, about a wedding feast, the consummation of God’s love for God’s people.

In the story, there is a king. He invites the kind of guests a king would expect at his table: rich merchants and so on; but they will not come. Worse, they do violence to the messengers sent to bring them, just as Herod beheaded John the Baptizer, as Zedekiah handed Jeremiah over to be half-drowned in the mud pit, as Jezebel and Ahab tormented Elijah and pursued his life.[iii] Some do not want to hear the summons of God, even to the feast. Some would rather dress for war than for a wedding.

Too often we have heard this parable as the rejection of one class, race, or religion of people and the elevation of a substitute, as though God were subject to the same division as we practise among the bearers of God’s image. Too often we have decided that we are to judge who is invited first or second, or who is improperly dressed, instead of looking at our own invitation and making sure that we are ready.

But in the story, the people are not shut out of the feast because of who they are, but because they refuse to come, because they refuse to lay down the distractions of business, money-making, empire-building, or simple self-interest that keep them from seeing the grace that God has laid out before them. And look, the others that are gathered in from the highways and byways, they are good and evil alike. They are not the virtuous, the moral elite. They are just people, willing to come to the wedding and sit down together around the table.

There is no avoiding the acknowledgement, with fear and trembling, of the terror attacks that ravaged Israel last weekend. Let it be said clearly that there can be no justification for such cruelty, such atrocity. The terrible stories, the awful details continue to emerge. We hesitate in the face of raw pain, yet it must also be clearly said that there can be no justification either for cruel vengeance. We have heard from our own churches and hospital there how desperate conditions have become in Gaza. To withdraw the human rights to life and living water and any hope for peace from an entire people cannot be what Christ commands. 

Too often we dress for war instead of the wedding feast, ready to wield the sword against the unworthy, to cast out one people and elevate another. We relegate Christ to the role of the man of sorrows, cast out by our arrogance into the darkness, where he wails and weeps over Jerusalem.

There is, it has to be said, a moment in the parable which would seem to prop up our desire for punishment, whether or not it results in peace. The reaction of the king to the rejection of his invitation and the abuse of his servants is fierce. He destroys those murderers, and burns their cities. How many innocent servants and citizens, how many children perished in that revolt? It is unfathomable.

Yet when the moment comes for the elders and the authorities to come and arrest Jesus, as the prophets were abused and killed before him, he does not wreak vengeance. He tells them clearly, I could bring down legions of angels to destroy you (Matthew 26:53-54); but that is not how this story goes. That is not how the Gospel goes.

Because the parable, the Gospel, is not about revenge. It is not about rejection. It is about the complicated, difficult time we have gathering around a table, good and evil alike. It is about the tendency we have to pull away from God’s invitation to celebrate the Christ, even on his way to the Cross, because we would rather look away. It is about the ways in which we resist the call to end the violence, against the prophets, against the innocents, against God’s invitation to mercy, against each other, preferring to keep up the cycle, dressing for war instead of for a wedding. 

And it is about God’s tendency to keep reaching out into the highways and byways, calling good and evil alike, anyone who will listen, regardless of history, ethnicity, anything except the willingness to accept the invitation to come to the table, to put down the sword and put on the wedding garment, to be fed with the bread of life, the water that washes away all tears, the medicine of mercy.

Because the Gospel is the incarnation of God’s love, not of our failure to love.

St Paul knows that better than many. And so he writes, Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

May it be so. Amen.

[i] See The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem, by Marcus J. Borg & John Dominic Crossan (HarperOne, 2006), 2-3
[ii] See Post-Traumatic Jesus: A Healing Gospel for the Wounded, by David W. Peters (Westminster John Knox, 2023), esp. chapters 2, 9
[iii] Matthew 14:1-12, Jeremiah 38, 1 Kings 19:1-3

A lament for peace

God of mercy,
your peace still passes our understanding, and far off seems the time when we will study war no more. Rachel weeps anew and unconsoled, for her children dead and missing; a grief which is both universal and particular. 
God of compassion,
protect the innocent, receive the dying, be among the grieving, strengthen the hands of those who labour for life and peace.
God of peace,
save your children from vengeance. Turn our hearts toward wisdom. Guide the powerful, stay the hand of the desperate, and shepherd your people toward your peace, though yet it passes our understanding.
Amen.

A prayer for the helpers

O God, our salvation and our hope,
be with those who venture into danger to help and save the innocent, the injured, and the lost. Be with those who continue to work for the relief of pain and grief under impossible circumstances. Sustain those who bear the weight of their own trauma even as they tend to the wounds of others. Protect the hearts of those who will see terrible things. Give them hope that in serving the vulnerable, they are your hands and feet and heart in your world. Save them, save us from this time of trial, and deliver us from evil.
Amen.

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Burned

Posted on October 10, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

This week’s #preparingforSundaywithpoetry is informed not only by the Gospel and its parable of rejection, revenge, celebration, and their cycle, but inevitably by the images it calls up of contemporary violence, war, and burning cities; God save the innocents.

After the burning,
in ashes stirred by the tow
of a cautious breeze,
dawn steps with reverence
over the city so heavy in its fall;
over its delicate fragments
a mourning dove hovers, weary
yet unwilling to alight
upon her sorely singed feet.

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The cornerstone of mercy

Posted on October 8, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for October 8th, Year A Proper 22, Matthew 21:33-46, Exodus 20

The chief priests and the Pharisees realized that Jesus was telling parables about them.

Notice that it’s parables – plural – that they cite. Last week and this, we hear Jesus talking of vineyards. Throughout the stories of scripture, God’s vineyard is the chosen people, the beloved ones with whom God has covenanted throughout all generations. Last week’s image was domestic, pastoral; a father and his sons and the family vineyard. This one is broader. It involves larger economics, even international scope, greater distance between the landowner and the workers, and a lot more violence. 

How quick we are to repay violence with violence! We elders and betters, chief priests and Pharisees, we stand together with our biblical counterparts and pass righteous judgement on those wicked tenants. They will get what’s coming to them, we mutter, with satisfaction.

The problem is that what God has coming is mercy. See what God did to Paul, that arch-Pharisee, persecutor of the church, blameless Benjaminite! God struck him down and raised him up to be among the chief of the apostles. No, the cornerstone of the kingdom of heaven is mercy, and it crushes our dreams of vengeance and wrecks our fantasies of karma.

The vineyard endures. The landowner will not simply give it up and give it away, because it is beloved of God. The landowner will not allow the bloodthirsty violence of the tenants to sour the land, because it is beloved of God. My God, we could use some assurance of that now, as violence and terror erupt once more in the holy lands, and innocent blood again cries out. 

Yet as hopeless as it seems in the moment of crisis, in the parable, in the parable at least, the landowner reclaims the vineyard, and restores its cycle of fruiting and harvest, because God loves to surprise us with new life.

The constant between these two parables is the vineyard, the symbol of God’s loving care and tending to God’s people. In both stories, others are invited into that loving care with, let’s call them, mixed results. 

The commandments are clear: no lying, no stealing, absolutely no murdering, no coveting of what is rightfully another’s – and it all belongs to God. Honour your father and your mother, our God who asks us to labour in the vineyard.

But the commandments are about more than prohibition. They are our invitation to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, mind, strength, and life, and our neighbours, those images of God, as are we.

They are an invitation to participate in tending the vineyard.

Do you remember how, in the stories of the beginning, God set the humans in a garden, and bid them tend it, care for it, and all of the creatures within it? We were made for love, for tending, and for tenderness.

As in the parables, we are called to labour domestically, within our homes and families and circles of close companionship. We will honour today those who care for God’s creatures by ensuring that they have a home, somewhere to rest, somewhere to trust that when God created them, God saw that they were good, because this, too, is the work of the vineyard.

We are called to labour, not because the vineyard belongs to us, not greedily to grasp its fruits, but because we have been called to tend and grow the vines.

How will we do that? We do it by resisting violence in our communities, by refusing to allow the vineyard to be soured by bloodshed, by working for peace. I was so pleased Friday evening that the High School football team got to have their senior night with a home game. Those who would give up on the vineyard, let its walls fall and its vines run to brambles, perhaps they have not heard that the landowner has not let go of his claim on this land.

We do it by praying fervently for the peace of Jerusalem, as the psalm calls us to do, and by holding our leaders accountable for protecting the innocent and preserving the lives of civilians and children, in the midst of war. 

Since before the law was inscribed on stone tablets, God has planted and tended and protected and saved God’s people. It is unthinkable that God would let them go to seed now.

Martin Luther, the great reformationist, wrote in his Small Catechism that the commandments given to Moses and the people are both small and domestic and of eternal consequence in their call and their impact. Commenting on the commandment against murder, Luther concludes that this applies equally to harm, hurt, anything that might “destroy, shorten, or embitter” our neighbour’s life.[i]

Can you imagine taking such care of those set before us as tender vines as to avoid so much as to cause them grief or worry, which Luther says will undermine their health? In fact, he writes, we keep this commandment not merely by refraining from murder, but by being merciful, compassionate, kind, patient, and forgiving. Tending the vineyard means not only refraining from killing the vines, but actively nurturing them so that they can fulfill their potential, become all that God planted them to be, and produce good fruit.

In the story Jesus tells today to the elders and the chief priests and the Pharisees, preaching from the middle of Holy Week from the shade of the palms and the shadow of the Cross, there is too much trouble, too much violence, too much strife. We feel it. We know it.

But there is more to follow. There will be another season for the vineyard. There will be another seating of the cornerstone. There will be another chance. Because this is a parable, not a prophecy; a caution, not a prediction. As Moses tells his people, do not be afraid. 

Because the fruit that grows from the vines of the kingdom of heaven are mercy, forgiveness, the very love of God. And God will not give up God’s beloved vineyard for anything less.

[i] Luther’s Small Catechism, annotated by Edward W. A. Koehler ((Concordia Theological Press, 1946-1981), 75-80,

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The witness

Posted on October 4, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

And in the dirt between the rows
a single grape transfixed my pity,
split, seed spilt on unforgiving earth,
ragged skin torn from purple flesh;
like a dog, I wanted to kneel down
and lick the wine from its tender wounds.

‘Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.’ (Matthew 21:33-39)

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