Thomas the trusting

Posted on July 3, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

Thomas dared to wrestle with God,

as Job before him, resisting and insisting

on a trial, the evidence to be enumerated

in wounds; bold Thomas,

brazen Thomas. I do not dare

to call Christ to account, to demand

such demonstration of the divine,

to command such a performance

as would bring me to my knees, declaring,

My Lord, and my God;

and will he yet tread the base

boards of my heart?

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Images from the life of Christ – The Incredulity of St Thomas – Psalter of Eleanor of Aquitaine (ca. 1185) via wikimedia commons

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Welcome

Posted on July 2, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, 2 July 2023. The readings include Genesis 22:1-14 and Matthew 10:40-42

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The word of the day is welcome. Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” (Matthew 10:40)

A few years ago, our Vestry considered what it means to post a sign outside the church proclaiming, “All Are Welcome”. It may be time to consider again that word, “Welcome”, as a church and as a nation. Because it is not enough to open a door and say, “Welcome” to someone who cannot get past the outer gate. What does it mean to say, “Welcome”, then, “Time’s up. Now find somewhere else to be”? It is not enough to say, “Welcome” to the parched and weary stranger, without offering them also food and drink, and a place to rest. It is a bait and switch to welcome someone in out of the cold but deny them a place by the fire. Welcome doesn’t say, “yes, I’ll help you, but then you’ll owe me, literally, for life.” It is not enough to invite someone in but then demand that they hide who they really are. It is not enough to say, “Welcome, come on in,” then leave the stranger alone while we talk to other people whom we already know and maybe even like.

I was reminded during a conversation this past week of the wonderful show, “Come From Away”. It tells the story of a small town in Newfoundland that, in the wake of the attacks on the United States in September 2001, became the destination of necessity for dozens of international flights that had made it across the Atlantic but could not land in an America that had, for sound reasons, closed down its airspace.

The people of Gander, Newfoundland, found themselves inundated with unanticipated refugees – temporarily, but in staggering numbers. These travellers, caught up in the ripple effects of extremist violence, numbered a full two-thirds of the standing population of the town. It would take a concerted and united effort to help them, house them, feed them, for who knew then how long before they would be able to complete their journeys. They were frightened, grief-stricken, anxious, stranded, and the town was overwhelmed.

Yet they found it in themselves to provide welcome. They understood that their discomfort at this avalanche of need was part of the human condition, that has to shift and find new positions and accommodations when another child of God, another facet of the image of God, finds its place among them.

This miracle of sacrifice and selflessness is repeated across our country and our globe in ways both large and small and mostly without having musicals written about them; but we hear, too, the voices of unwelcome, of irritation, voices built of barbed wire and venom, along with the voices that worry, less loathingly but with the same result, that if we offer another a cup of cold water, there may not be as much left for us; who forget who it was that set aside water out of the waters of creation for us and our fellow creatures to enjoy.

Welcome – real welcome, the kind of welcome that the prodigal father has for his son, that God has for us – that welcome when we can manage it is a form of worship, since it humbles the self before the image of God standing in front of us, and calls out of us our best approximation of the image of Christ. Whoever welcomes you welcomes me.

We are still, remember, at the tail end of the sending speech that Jesus started giving to his disciples two Sundays ago, when he began to send them forth to cast out demons, heal the sick, raise the dead, proclaim good news. He warned that there would be wolves along the way. But he also promises these pockets of welcome.

Welcome is costly. God is a gracious and abundant giver – but God also asks of us our love, our devotion, our service to one another and the creation which God made us to tend. Sometimes, sure, it seems as though God is asking a lot. Ask Abraham. Ask him.

If Abraham had gone through with it, he would have lost everything to God, everything to his covenant, everything for his faith. He would not only have given up Isaac, but his sense of himself. He would never sleep again. He could never go home. He would never be the same again. (Genesis 22:1-10).

But God – that was not what God was asking of him. God gave it all back. God proved trustworthy. God asked Abraham to lay everything – everything – on the altar of God’s covenant, and God gave it all back (Genesis 22:11-14).

“Truly I tell you,” said Jesus, “none of these will lose their reward.” (Matthew 10:42)

God commands, demands that we love with all our heart, soul, strength, mind, and being the one who has loved us into being, and that we demonstrate that love amongst our neighbours, and our enemies, strangers and people who are simply strange, sinners, foreigners, friends: everyone else who is made in that image of God. Whoever welcomes them welcomes God.

And God, God gives it all back, pressed down, shaken together, overflowing into our embrace from those prodigiously welcoming arms (Luke 6:38).

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Abraham also laughed

Posted on June 30, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

A poem-sermon for Friday in the first week of the 2023 Chautauqua season at the Chapel of the Good Shepherd. The readings include Genesis 17:1,9-10,15-22

Abraham also laughed,
in the face of God, no less,
and lived – more than lived –
thrived and grew and strew
descendants across the centuries
like seasons, like days, like hours.

Abraham laughed,
and God laughed with him,
shaking earth and quaking the continents.
God laughed until the tears came
and fell like rain,
and Abraham lifted his face to the sky
like purple sage.

God and Abraham laughed until
they no longer knew if they were
laughing or crying,
or why.
They laughed like old friends who knew
that this moment will not pass by again;

and Abraham, finding himself alone
once more, head and shoulders shaking
with the occasional aftershock of glory,
called himself an old fool
as he lifted his feet toward home,
where his son played havoc with his heart.

Featured image: the patriarch Abraham, via wikimedia commons

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A new creation

Posted on June 28, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for Wednesday in the first week of the 2023 Chautauqua season at the Chapel of the Good Shepherd. Readings include Genesis 15:1-12,17-18 and Matthew 7:15-20

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So here we have it: Judge not – but – by their fruits shall ye know them. It would be wrong, wouldn’t it, to ask Jesus to make up his mind?

Jesus asks, “Can a thornbush bring forth grapes, or thistles a fig?” Can a wolf in sheep’s clothing eat nothing but grass?

I’m sure some of you know the Edwin Friedman fable of The Friendly Forest. In that story, a tiger comes to live in a forest, which is very worrying to the lamb who was already living there. The other animals of the forest tried to reassure the lamb that they had instructed the tiger that a condition of living there was to let others there live. Still, there was something about the tiger’s growling, stalking nature that bothered the lamb. Even when the tiger was not actively stalking, the lamb was always worried that it would. Eventually, the lamb announced that it could not stay in the forest any longer – the poor lamb’s nerves wouldn’t take the strain of always being on alert for low growls. The other animals proposed a conversation between the lamb and the tiger to sort things out; all except one, who “was overheard to remark, ‘I never heard of anything so ridiculous. If you want a lamb and a tiger to live in the same forest, you don’t try to make them communicate. You cage the bloody tiger.’”[i]

In amongst yesterday’s brilliant sermon, I believe I heard Bishop LaTrelle Easterling quote bell hooks in saying that love and abuse cannot coexist. And Jennifer Senior told us that research shows that spending time with a wolf in sheep’s clothing – a false friend – is measurably more physically stressful than hanging with an outright enemy whose stripes we know.

Beware, then, of the false prophets, Jesus warns; the false friends, the fake fruit trees.

It makes one wonder, what was it like for Jesus, living with Judas all that time?

The sheep cannot teach the wolf to eat grass, to enjoy the snap of a fresh clover stalk and be satisfied. The dove cannot eat plastic olives. Yet Jesus shared even his last meal with the one they called Iscariot.

Perhaps this saying is easier to apply if instead of concerning the true nature of others, it leads us to self-examination. We are not Jesus. We hope that we are not Judas. We try to produce good and satisfying and sound, at least not poisonous, fruit. We worry, some of us, that we come from thistle stock, rather than dandelion, bramble rather than the vine.

You know the saying, that the leopard cannot change his spots. A thistle cannot become a fig tree. But there is one, there is one who can make all things new.

In the description of that strange and mystical covenant scene between God and Abram, there is an intriguing detail – forgive me, I cannot remember where I first read this, and my Hebrew is next to non-existent, but I looked at the interlinear translations online, and it checks out – the deep sleep that comes over Abram, the terrifying, deep abyss of sleep, of non-consciousness, of close to non-existence that comes over him is the same deep sleep that God cast upon Adam, the first human, when God divided that one into two pieces, male and female (Genesis 2:21-23).

After God created the Adam, in that story, God made all of the animals in turn – lambs, tigers, wolves, doves – but none was right to be Adam’s partner (Genesis 2:18-20). So, in that first operation, after putting them into that deep sleep which is as close as we come without succumbing to the abyss, God remade and recast the human; Wil Gafney, in her Womanist Midrash, says that “God puts the creature to sleep and divides it in half.”[ii] The human, who was one, is divided and becomes something new; in fact, two things new! Now more than one human being shares the image of God; we were truly made for one another.

In the covenant that God cut with Abram, in darkness and smoke and fire, just as the first human was made anew into two, just so Abram awoke from the sleep that took him back beneath the primordial waters, a new person, re-created, born again into the life that God intended for him.

We cannot change another’s spots, but as Bishop LaTrelle put it yesterday, we can love them. While refusing to enter into their ravening ways, nor to be torn apart by them, we can still remember that we share the image of God; and in so doing, we can let God do God’s thing with them.

And it is true that we cannot change even our own sin-tempted nature, however we dress it up in lambswool and feathers, but in Christ we are a new creation: “everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17) For with God, nothing will be impossible (Luke 1:37).

[i] Friedman, Edwin H. Friedman’s Fables (p. 30). Guilford Publications. Kindle Edition.

[ii] Gafney, Wilda C. Womanist Midrash. Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.

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Let go to let love grow

Posted on June 27, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for Tuesday in the first week of the 2023 Chautauqua season. The first reading is Lot’s separation from Abram in Genesis 13.

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After all those years in the bosom of his grandfather and uncle, I cannot imagine how Lot felt about Abram’s invitation to leave. Was he offended, rejected, relieved? Did he worry about leaving Abram and Sarai alone in their advancing years, with no other family to care for them? Nevertheless, he took Abram’s offer, to choose the direction that looked most fertile for him, and he left.

Yesterday morning, introducing and moderating the first lecture, President Michael Hill once more said something that caught my ear. He quoted the proverb, “Blood is thicker than water.” But, he went on to say, it is a matter of debate as to whether the blood in question means biology, or whether it refers to the kind of blood that seals a covenant. Surely both are at work here.

When Abram’s father left Ur, he took Abram and Sarai, and their nephew, Lot, since Lot’s father had died. Nahor, suffering from middle child syndrome, was not mentioned, but he also ended up in Haran (Genesis 11:27-32). After Terah died, Abram and Sarai continued their sojourn into the land that God had promised to show him, and, after the model of his grandfather, they took Lot with them. After some adventures, they arrived once more in Bethel.

But here was where their paths diverged. Abram said, “Let there be no strife between us; for we are kindred” (Genesis 13:8). “Separate yourself from me,” he told his nephew. “Go your own way.”

And Abram and Sarai were left alone, except for all of the livestock, all of the people, and the promises of God, the covenant that God would make with him.

It is rare for relationships to remain static and intact. Karol Jackowski talked about that yesterday afternoon, as the very sky altered and opened up over the Hall of Philosophy. People grow, change, discover new and exciting things about themselves, which may or may not be new and exciting to their friends and family. People acquire needs and desires, or fulfill them, and adjustments are needed, if a relationship is not to wither. Sometimes greater space is needed; sometimes deeper closeness.

Abram assessed the state of his relationship with Lot, and he realized that if they were to remain kindred, and remain kind, something had to change.

He also recognized that if he needed space to remain in relationship with his nephew, then he needed to give his nephew space, too. He invited Lot to choose his own direction. He let him go his own way, the way that seemed best to him. Perhaps he was doing what he wished his father had done for him; we have no way of knowing that.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus advises, “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the sum of the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 7:12) Before the law and prophets, Abram looked upon his nephew, and wanting not to fall into strife with him, did what he thought was best for both of them.

A cynical person might wonder about inviting Lot to choose the richer, more fertile ground. A cynical person who has read ahead might notice that the rich, fertile plain upon which Lot is about to settle will not remain rich and fertile for long. If you travel there today, you will find the salt flats that surround the Dead Sea, stretched out like the skin of the earth to dry. Is this what it means to cast pearls before swine (Matthew 7:6), letting Lot’s greedy eyes tempt him to the greedier town of Sodom, whose sin, according to the prophets, was haughty pride and excess, cruelty to the poor, and contempt for the compassionate provisions of the law of God (Ezekiel 16:49-50)?

But no. This was Abram’s gift to Lot, to let him freely choose what looked good to him. And when Sodom went to war, and Lot was taken captive, Abram went out to redeem him (Genesis 14:1-16). And when it all went down, Abraham still spoke up for his nephew and his neighbours (Genesis 18:16-33), bargaining with God not to give up on the city. His distance did not diminish his care for Lot. This was a decision, not a division, and despite putting some distance between them, Abram loved him.

No, this story, although it is hard, is not one of the breakdown of love, not even of blood, but a parable of the growing pains that accompany true love, and the necessity for kindness even in the midst of them. It is a story about letting go in order to let love grow. Yesterday afternoon, in her description of holy sisterhoods born not of biology but of friendship, Karol Jackowski described sealing a promise with a dying friend by pricking their thumbs and rubbing them together, to bind them together but also to allow them to let one another go where she needed to go.

It is not the story of every family (or perhaps, after all, it is), but it is the story of our biblical family, in which even the dogs eat the crumbs from under the table with impunity.

It is a story through which the blood of the covenant courses, that which has bound us to the family of God through our spiritual ancestors, with all of their ups and downs and sideways. It is the story that continues, through the blood of the new covenant, the generosity of Jesus who has done for us more than we could ever have asked or imagined, who has bound together heaven and earth, however great the distance between us may be.

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Judge not?

Posted on June 26, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for Monday, June 26th, at the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, Chautauqua Institution. Year A Proper 7 Monday Gospel: Matthew 7:1-5

There is but one judge whose acumen is trustworthy and true. Fortunately, God is infamous for steadfast forbearance, slow to anger, and abiding in great mercy.

I find it interesting that the morning after the opening challenge from [Chautauqua Institution’s] President Hill to exercise curiosity before or even instead of judgement, we have this lesson from Jesus. One might even call it a curious coincidence!

There is no doubt that we carry logs in our eyes, prejudices and prejudgments that subject us to “confirmation bias”. I know that I am guilty of it. I know that it is easier for me to pick holes in the argument of another than to recognize the chasm of compassion missing from my own. And it is true, I think, that apart from the patience of saints, I will be judged as impatiently as I categorize, affirm, or dismiss others.

Still, we are told elsewhere that we shall know the trees by their fruit; we are told to be as wise as serpents, though as gentle as doves; we do need day by day to make judgements about situations, actions, even to prejudge what might come next, as part of making our lives in the world. 

There is another problem, which is that this verse, “Judge not,” has become a way to end rather than to begin a conversation. I guess that’s where the curiosity would come in.

Stephen Holmgren, in his book, Ethics after Easter, teases the verse out this way:

It is usually quoted in situations where a person or group is admonished not to criticize the behavior of others. However, it is likely that the kinds of judgments that Jesus forbids are assessments of the final state of another’s soul. … This is quite a different matter from using reason and reflection to assess the structure and moral character of acts that we witness on an everyday basis.[i]

In other words, we do have an obligation to exercise (good) judgement; but we cannot mistake our judgement for God’s justice.

Beth Kissileff, whose husband survived the murderous attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, has written several times about the difficulty of rendering justice, even when we are quite certain of our judgement. Most recently, she wrote for Haaretz,

The only thing that makes sense to me in relation to the trial is an insight from the Talmud which has been on my mind. The “profundity of justice” (In Hebrew, omek ha’din) is among the seven things concealed from humans.
Why? Humans are not equipped to cope with some kinds of information. Most of us would not want to know the day of our death or what is in the hearts of others“[ii]

“The profundity of justice is hidden from humans.” In amongst the awfulness of what Beth is writing about, that insight rang like a clear bell. Most of us would not want to know what is in the hearts of others; only God knows, only God sees the whole human clearly. Our judgment, even at its best, is incomplete; we judge actions, while God has charge over the whole person.  

Most of the time, thank God, our judgements are not based on such an intense crisis. But that in itself gives us the opportunity to interrogate them, examine them for short-sightedness. Because left unquestioned, unrestrained, they can affect not only to those we judge, but our sense of justice itself, our vision of God’s kingdom come, which contains compassion beyond our understanding, which is restorative, and redeeming, which renders the justice of reconciliation, which so often evades us. There is, after all, more joy – and probably relief – in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine (if you could find them) who need no repentance (Luke 15:7).

Sometimes, I think that the idea of exercising curiosity rather than judgement over someone we disagree with is, while a really good idea, a stretch in practice. To be more honest, I find it a stretch, especially over an extended period that feels like eternity. But I wonder if we could manage, if I could manage, curiosity over what God thinks of this person, whom I know that God loves, despite the grief they may occasion, whom I know is made in God’s image. What does God still see in them, that God has counted every hair of their head?

There is but one judge whose acumen is trustworthy and true. Fortunately, God is infamous for steadfast forbearance, slow to anger, and abiding in great mercy, even for a sinner like me.

[i] Stephen Holmgren, Ethics After Easter (Cowley Publications, 2000), 143-4

[ii] https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-06-19/ty-article-opinion/.premium/the-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooter-has-been-convicted-but-theres-no-real-justice/

Featured image: Michelangelo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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… But do not be afraid

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the first week of the Chautauqua Institution season, 2023, Year A Proper 7

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There’s nothing like starting in the middle. With no context, no backstory to soften the blow, we arrive for a week at Chautauqua focused on friendship, only to have Jesus announce that he has come to ginger up our divisions. But do not be afraid.

Just as this is one week out of many, a Sunday in the middle of most of our lives, these verses, this word, is one out of a whole speech that Jesus is in the middle of giving to his disciples in the middle of his ministry. This speech began with him sending them out in great power: to cast out demons, heal the sick, raise the dead. It continues with warnings: sheep among wolves, fallen sparrows, dissent, and even persecution. But do not worry, he says, and do not be afraid.

It’s the personal divisions that catch at us, though, isn’t it? The threat of family arguments, the breakdown of peace talks at home. The Psalmist laments,

For if it had been an adversary who taunted me, then I could have borne it;
But it was you, one after my own heart,
my companion, my own familiar friend;
you have broken your covenant. (Psalm 55:13a,14,21b, pronouns altered)

Still, do not be afraid. God is faithful to God’s covenants. And this is only part of the story.

You remember elsewhere in the gospels, when Jesus’ mother and his brothers came to take him home by force if necessary, for they said, he has gone mad. He is a laughing stock. That boy is going to get himself in trouble. And Jesus, feeling a little salty perhaps, looked around at the crowd of friends and strangers gathered around him and said, “Well, maybe you’re my family now.” (Mark 3:21;31-35) And yet at the end, which was not the end, he saw his mother and his friend and he made them family: “Woman, here is your son; Here is your mother.” (John 19:26-27) And at the beginning of the following book (because that was not the end), Jesus’ mother and his brothers were gathered together with his disciples in prayer (Acts 1:14).

Yes, Jesus came to put a cat among the pigeons, and see what a flurry of fur and feathers and wool would ensue. But he also came to heal, to cast out demons, to raise the dead, and those whose hope was no longer alive. If we don’t read these verses in the context of the whole story of God’s grace to us sinners in the Incarnation, we miss that.

At our parish bible study last week, we read this passage and someone asked about the sparrows. One person described them as “junk birds”, but there is more to their story, too. The house sparrow, it turns out, is not indigenous to the Americas. Millennia ago, they evolved in Asia and Europe to live among humans: they are house sparrows because they have adapted to build their homes among us. I read somewhere on the Audubon website that you will not find a sparrow’s nest in a completely natural setting, only among the structures that humans have built or altered. The house sparrows nestle up against us.[i]

That sounds lovely, but when they were imported to America, in order to deal with a caterpillar infestation, they did tend to proliferate, and they became the source of great consternation and even conflict, as bird people argued over whether they had become a pest, an invasive species, an enemy.[ii] But if they have, it is we who made them so.

Yet not one sparrow falls that God does not notice, and catch. There are no junk birds in God’s economy, and however far we fall out over them, and however we devalue not only them but one another over them, and over bigger issues than a sparrow, let those with ears to hear understand, God does not stop noticing.

Whatever our divisions, however they devalue us and others, God does not stop counting the hairs on the heads of enemies and strangers, wolves and friends alike. So do not be afraid, even in the midst of conflict and rumours of more, but be humbled by the love of God that passes human understanding and calculation.

None of this is to make light of the very real divisions and decisions we are left with among family and friends, former family and former friends. Jesus, the incarnation of the unimaginable grace of God, does put a cat among the pigeons, does sometimes demand that we risk offending one side of the bird debate by standing up for the sparrow, whom we have cast as a junk bird, but who isn’t junk to God. The risk of fallout is real.

But do not be afraid. For we are not called to remain rankled, but to let our peace return to us, and shake the dust from our feet, and walk on in the way of the cross. We will find dissent and division (we may even feel persecuted), but we are called to cast out demons and heal those in need of it.

Remember where this word from Jesus started: Proclaim good news. Cleanse the leprous, raise the dead. As you enter the house, greet it with peace. If the house will receive it, peace be upon it. If not, let your peace return to you (Matthew 10:7-8;12-14).

Do not be afraid, but let your peace return to you. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in the knowledge of the love of God, which is Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7, altered).

Amen

[i] https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/house-sparrow

[ii] https://www.audubon.org/news/meet-little-brown-bird-holds-mirror-humanity

Also read on background: D. Mark Davis, https://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/

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When the cat preached the sermon

Posted on June 18, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for 18 June 2023, Year A Proper 6: Sheep among wolves

It was a good morning for birds at my window feeder. I have it set up across from my desk, close enough that I could reach out and touch it, except that the glass is in the way, and I have a small square of reflective film taped up to make that section of window into a two-way mirror. As long as I keep fairly still and quiet, the birds don’t see me. It means that my cup of tea is growing cold while they eat – the pair of finches that dropped by yesterday were really making the most of the breakfast buffet. After them there was a pair of tufted titmice (titmouses?). I know nothing about birds, but I know that I love it when they come close, as though I were trustworthy. Is this what it is, to be cunning as a serpent, with my two-way glass to fool them close, and as tender as a dove, with my cooling cup of tea and my rapt admiration? Of course, if they could see me, they would recognize a predator. And when the cats come flying across my desk, everyone’s breakfast is all over.

When Jesus sends out his disciples, he tells them, he tells us, that he is sending them like sheep among wolves. It is not an insult, mind you, to be a sheep, not in Jesus’ mouth. Sheep are communal animals: they are God’s flock, God’s people, God’s community. Throughout the scriptures, the ancient and the merely old, God’s sheep are beloved, sought after. They are valuable, they are valued. They belong together, and they belong to God.

Wolves are fairly self-explanatory. They are beautiful, but dangerous. They are almost seductive in their wildness, their mystique, their strength; but they are dangerous. They belong in the ecosystem, because nothing, no one that God has made does not belong somewhere; and if you see one up close, you know it to be a predator.

Jesus did not call his disciples to be wolves. Predation is not one of the gifts of the Spirit. Jesus was not a lone wolf, but the Lamb of God, born into the flock of God’s own people.

This sending of Jesus’ disciples is full of apparent contradictions. Be like serpents, and like doves. Stay, and flee. Beware, but do not worry. Offer peace, and shake the dust off your feet. Raise the dead.

Life is full of contradictions, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution to every situation. Except the gospel.

Be wise; be gentle. Be not afraid; cast out demons. Carry peace with you; leave peace behind you; let your peace return to you. Be sheep, for you are the flock of God; stay together, and remember the green pastures in which the Good Shepherd leads you, the deep and still waters of creation among which your Shepherd feeds you.

This morning, we had a reminder of what it is to be the flock, the sheep-fold of God. A little lamb escaped from his barn up the street. His mother came running to the church, crying for him, where she found our open doors and people to help seek him out. On the other side of the church, a man found a little one walking outside by himself and was concerned; he pulled into the church parking lot and picked up the boy, recognizing this as a safe place to seek help for a lost lamb. Because they saw us as a safe place for all sheep, we were able to play a small role in reuniting the little lamb with his mother, a little healing to our neighborhood.

In the next month or so I will not be around so much. Next Sunday, I’ll be at Chautauqua as the Episcopal chaplain for the week, taking some time for continuing education and refreshment in that meadow. Though we are many, we are one body, for we all share in the same bread, and as I break it there, I will be thinking of you.

The following Sunday morning, I’ll be back here briefly before I leave for a month’s sabbatical for the remainder of July. You are going to hear new voices: newly licensed Worship Leaders, and visiting priests; and always when you hear it you will know the voice of Jesus, the voice of the Good Shepherd who calls each of us by name. Stay together, flock, people of God, gifts of God for the world.

While I was typing this sermon into my laptop, one of the kittens did, indeed, come to join in the bird-watching. As you may imagine, that put the cat among the pigeons for real. The birds still chanced it once in a while. They have come to know that they are safe here.

The cat also did a bit of typing while she was rolling around on the desk. She wanted to add a word on behalf of the wolf. She said:

“Once, in my ancestral imagination, I was a lioness, fierce and feared. I still sometimes examine my claws in awe at what havoc they might wreak. I look at my sister’s teeth and recognize the fangs of an ancient nature. Yet here we lie, content to be coddled and cuddled by a softer species. Even if I caught the cardinal, I wouldn’t know quite what to do with him. I am not sorry, but while I am still shaped like a predator, I have become quite domesticated, tamed by love. You see, a leopard cannot change his spots, and a wolf will always have a complicated relationship with the sheep, but love changes everything. Love feeds the birds and saves me from my worst impulses towards them. Love sets a table before me in the midst of many distractions and attractions, and bids me eat.”

She made a number of typos while inputting this message, but I think I got the gist of it. I like to think that she was channeling the words of the prophet:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, 
the calf and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together,
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox…

They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
[when] the earth [is] full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.              (Isaiah 11:6-7,9)

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Sheep

Posted on June 13, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

Can a sheep teach a wolf to eat grass?
To enjoy the tender snap of clover stalk,
the flake of its flower upon the red and eager tongue?
What does the wolf know or love of green pastures,
still less peace; yet
waterfalls spill like wine at an abundant feast
and pool beside the meadow you have spread
like a cloth before my hungry feet
in the presence of those who snap at my heels,
who have eyes only for the shadow of death.

_______________________

“See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves…” (Matthew 10:16a) Year A Proper 6: Matthew 9:35-10:23

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Radical

Posted on June 11, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Second Sunday after Pentecost and the day after our latest Guns to Gardens event

It’s a story of radical transformation. First, the tax collector turned convert, the taker turned giver of banquets in honour of Jesus, the Messiah, the money-grubber turned gracious host to sinners and self-righteous folk alike – for how else did the Pharisees observe his company, and how else get into conversation with Jesus, unless they, too, were among Matthew’s guests. Talk about dining across the divide!

Then, then no sooner had Jesus spoken about coming to heal the sick, to bring mercy to the needful, than a woman, taking him at his word, but secretly, stole up to him to touch the fringe of his prayer shawl. And he saw her, and he knew her need, and he healed her with a word of affirmation: “Your faith has made you well.” He healed her body and her bowed down, but still secretly hopeful, spirit.

It’s a story of radical transformation, and none more so than the final twist, the turning from death to life. The child, already surrounded by paid mourners and undertakers, lifted from her deathbed by the Author of Life, who wrote her a new chapter, unexpected and unlike anything that had been seen before.

The radical transformation from death into life. It is our hope, and a challenge to our world-weary faith. How rarely do we expect a miracle, how rarely do we anticipate real change?

Yesterday morning, when the sun rose, this was a shotgun barrel, designed for hunting, for ending life. By lunchtime, it had become a garden tool, forged in fire and hammered out (not by me this time, but by my talented husband), designed to dig into the earth that God has made, out of which God formed the plants and the trees, out of which God crafted humanity, and breathed into it the spark of life, according to the stories of Genesis. Radical transformation: a tool designed to kill had been converted into a tool to grow new life.

There was an array of humanity on display in our parking lot yesterday, from different backgrounds, philosophies, different deeply held beliefs on how to bring to awakening the beloved community imagined by those who dreamed of peace on earth. But all were willing to try something, some radical transformation. The Pharisees, as much as the tax collectors, wanted Jesus to be the real thing; they had more to lose by challenging the status quo and being wrong than those who were already in the wrong, so it made them somewhat spiky; still, they were there.

And what if Matthew had decided that it wasn’t worth risking a solid, if squalid, career to follow Jesus? And what if the woman had given up hope, and failed to reach out to Jesus? And what if the leader of the synagogue had not had the courage or the foolhardiness to go beyond anything that was reasonable or expected or had any hope of success for the sake of his child? What if he had not come to Jesus and asked, as unrealistic as it was, for that radical twist of creation that would bring his daughter back from the dead?

But they did. All of them, each of them trusted God more than their own imaginations. And they were right so to do. Because Jesus treated each of them, groundbreaking physician that he was, that he is, to the radical grace of an infinitely compassionate and merciful God.

That is not to say that their lives became trouble-free. The girl would grow up to know grief as well as joy, pain as well as pleasure. But she would at least grow up. And she would grow up knowing that Jesus had brought her into a new and marvellous life. 

A Facebook memory popped up this morning: three years ago on June 11th, a number of us here today were marching up E222nd Street, demanding a radical transformation of this nation and its powers and principalities following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, while others looked on. We are still waiting on a radical transformation.

And, I heard recently from someone who said, “Oh, and now they’re telling us to do this Guns to Gardens thing, as though that’s going to solve the problem …” At which point, having been uncharacteristically quiet for a while, I said, “Oh, I think that’s us; I think that’s me. I’m doing Guns to Gardens with my parish and our community. Not because I think that it will end all of our problems with gun violence. But if it removes one gun from a home with a child who is at risk from its presence, or an elder who is heading for an accident; or if it hands a lifeline to someone feeling the weight of despair and the matching heaviness of the handgun – if it saves one life, one family temporarily from grief, isn’t it worth it?”

The story is told within the group that does these things across the country of a woman who kept guns under her bed for years because she didn’t know what else to do. She brought them to an event and watched them go under the saw. “I’ll finally sleep tonight,” she told her hosts. 

And what of the grace that brings together police and pacifists, gun rights advocates and abolitionists, the fearful, the bold, and the faithful, all in one place and one mission? We can’t often do that, but God does, and God has.

Next time the opportunity for something radical presents itself – perhaps it’s a new relationship, or a chance for conversation with someone you never in a million years would imagine exchanging words with, or the chance to get truly creative, or the chance to challenge an addiction, or the chance to turn an avenue of death into a route back to life – next time you hear that voice of doubt asking, “But is it really worth it; worth the effort, the upheaval, the risk of disappointment, or of failure?” remember Matthew, and the Pharisees, and the woman, and the child.

There will always be enough grief in the world, enough obligations, enough left undone. But the leader of the synagogue came to Jesus to ask for one more chance at life with his daughter. The woman with the haemorrhage came with one more dose of hope. Matthew heard his chance to do something radical, something new with his life, and he got up without a word, without a murmur. Because we may not know where he will lead us, but following Jesus is never the wrong choice. Because we may not know how much we need him, but he has come to save us. Because turning to Jesus is never the wrong choice, and it may lead us to a radical transformation, even if it takes some time, and always to unexpected grace.

Amen.

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