Dwelling in glory

Posted on February 19, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany in Year A, February 19 2023

There is a temptation on the Last Sunday after the Epiphany to look forward to Lent. The foreshadowing is there in the forty days and nights that Moses spent on the mountain, and in the Collect, the warning that we will need strengthening for the days to come, the days of the Cross.

But Peter says something, on the mountaintop, that is often brushed away but, whether he knew it or not, contains some wisdom. “It is good for us to be here; let us dwell in the moment a while longer.”

Forty days and forty nights Moses remained on the mountain, and that after he had been summoned into the cloud on the seventh day. But the people had no patience, and by the time Moses returned to them, although they could see his congress with the Lord, in lightning and in fire on the top of the mountain, they had made themselves a golden calf, an idol because they could not bear to wait upon God, to stay in the moment that God had created in that cloud covering the mountaintop.

I don’t know how long it felt to Moses, whether the time passed slowly, or whether he opened his eyes as though from a brief dream; either way, the come-down was brutal. No doubt, he wished he could have stayed a little longer in the cloud.

So instead of looking towards Lent, let’s dwell in the season of the Epiphany, God’s self-revelation, just a moment longer.

Just before Moses enters the cloud, the elders of Israel, the people of the Exodus, encounter God. In an astonishing theophany, God allows Godself to be seen by the likes of Aaron and at least seventy-two other elders. They eat and drink in the divine presence, proving perhaps that they have not given up their mortality, their humanity, in order to gaze upon God.

It is this generosity of God’s unveiling that makes Aaron’s participation and even precipitation of the golden calf debacle all the more cynical.

Just before Peter, James, and John find themselves enveloped in the cloud of glory with Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, Peter has had an epiphany of his own, realizing out loud that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. And still, such faith does not free him yet from quailing at the spectre of the Cross.

In fact, it takes repeated exposure to the truth and glory of God’s incarnation – law, prophets, transfiguration, resurrection, the transformative power of Pentecost – before Peter is fully ready to live into his calling as the Rock, the bedrock of the church.

It takes time for the glory of God to sink in, to make our bones tingle with it, to make our hearts glad of it, and our spirits ready to respond in kind.

It is good to dwell in it a little longer.

At the foot of the mountain, people are making golden calves, idols out of metal and their own hands. They are worshipping gold and making sacrifice to that which cannot give life.

At the foot of the mountain there is disease and terror, and the helplessness of the disciples who have no clue how to make it right, until Jesus should return, descend, and cast out the demons for them.

At the foot of the mountain lies the road to Jerusalem, to the Cross, to the tomb, to the emptiness of the next day.

It is good to dwell a little longer in the foreshadowing, the fore-brightening, of the resurrection.

You may have seen or heard on the news or the social medias something about a “revival” taking place at a small Christian college in Kentucky. For two weeks, they (whoever they are) have kept the chapel service going around the clock, dwelling in moments of prayer and spiritual song, conversation and hopeful conversion. Responses to the event have ranged from excitement to bewilderment, even suspicion. How long, some wonder, can these students and others remain on the mountaintop, while in the foothills earthquakes happen, disease, death, and rampant unrighteousness with idols and metal that cannot offer life?

It is good to dwell in the glory of God, but even the President of this evangelical college, Timothy Tennent, warns, “Despite the endless coverage in social media and the regular media which is calling this a revival, I think it is wise to see this, at the current phase, as an awakening.  Only if we see lasting transformation which shakes the comfortable foundations of the church and truly brings us all to a new and deeper place can we look back, in hindsight and say “yes, this has been a revival.”  An awakening is where God begins to stir and awaken people up from their spiritual slumber. … But, we must keep our hearts and eyes fixed on Jesus and ask for him to complete the work he has begun so that, over time, there is a lasting transformation in the lives of those who are being touched by God.”

It is good to dwell in the glory of God, but only if by doing so we are awakened to the presence of God in all the world, in our daily lives in the foothills of glory, in the cloud of everyday unknowing, in the dilemmas and desperation of all that assails us, and those around us. If we have seen Christ transfigured into the image of resurrection, can we see our neighbours transfigured into images of the living Christ, whom we seek to serve on every available occasion? “For the glory of God is a living human; and the life of a person consists in beholding God. For if the manifestation of God … affords life to all living in the earth, much more does that revelation of the Father which comes through the Word, give life to those who see God.”[i] If we have seen the glory of God, can we see a better way of life than the idolatry of the world toward gold and metal that cannot offer a single breath?

When Moses became aware of the transgressions of his people, how they had turned from the true God to the worship of gold and metal that cannot give life, he could not leave them to their folly or their fate. He came down from the mountain with the tablets of stone in his hands, and he confronted them with the anger of righteousness against such abominations. And he interceded for the people before God, because he had, in those forty days, imbibed something of the compassion of God.

When the disciples heard the voice of God coming from the cloud on the mountaintop, they were terrified. Their legs crumpled, their faces fell. But the voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him,” and Jesus said, “Do not be afraid,” and led them trembling down the hill toward everything that was to come next, beginning with the healing of a child.

O God, who on the holy mount revealed to chosen witnesses your well-beloved Son, wonderfully transfigured, in raiment white and glistening: Mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may by faith behold the King in his beauty; and by this beholding may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness, from glory to glory. Amen.

[i] Irenaus, Adverses Haereses 4.34.5-7

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Fall silent

Posted on February 18, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

A short (but true) story for the Sunday Last before Lent: “We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven” (2 Peter 1)

_______

Every day, at around about eleven in the morning, the world stood still. Teachers fell quiet mid-lesson, principals mid-lecture, parents part-way through a nursery rhyme. No one heard a baby cry or the teller call out, “Next!” It was an accidental, almost religious observation – a moment not of silence, since the sky filled the earth with sound such as none could counter, but of the withholding of breath, a suspended sentence.

After the iconic birds were grounded, the opposite transpired: the skies fell silent, only the scrawl of vapour left to tell their tale, while the world prattled on, oblivious still to the voice of heaven.

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A psalm of lament

Posted on February 14, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

How long, Compassionate One, how long
will you allow our angry spirits to arm themselves
against their own children, our own children, your own children?

Every night we soak our news cycle with tears;
in the morning, the sun rises only to illuminate fresh wounds.

Not a day goes by that isn’t the anniversary
of someone’s grief, some atrocity.

We wring our hands, 
we mangle-press our souls with mourning;
our tears add salt to the wounded.

To whom will we turn, and who will save us
from the heart’s desire for blood?

Idols of metal will not breathe life,
and icons with feet of clay do not walk their words.

What then; are we left to our own devices?
But they are deadly.

No: we turn to you, Compassionate One,
with your endless forbearance and infinite mercy,
and pray that your patience will one day break;

because it seems some days that ours,
our capacity for carnage,
is everlasting.

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Fire and water

Posted on February 12, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, 12 February 2023, at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio

I heard something phenomenal this week. It was on a call with the folks who’ve taught me this business of turning guns into garden tools, helping our little congregation run buybacks for our broader community. 

One district, far from here, has had trouble with youngsters, teens and preteens, bringing guns to school. We know the problem. We’ve seen it here, too. Children who are afraid of their peers on the walk to and from home, those with scores to settle, those too young and too foolish to differentiate between bravado and brazenness, those whose hearts harbour violence too big for their bodies, too advanced for their age, who have inherited dangerous ideas from those around them. Those whose adults have failed them.

Anyway, in this other district, the discovery of a firearm in a student’s possession means immediate and irreversible expulsion from the school system. Leaving troubled teens to work it out for themselves is not everybody’s idea of wisdom, so someone got a grant to put together a diversion program that teaches these very children who have transgressed to beat guns into garden tools. The ones found with the firearm in their locker are now forging a new future, for the weapons and for themselves. The ones who may have been sorely tempted to choose death have been given a chance to grow a new life.

Of course, it’s not going to work for everyone. But for those whose lives are changed by the program, it’s not just about the lessons, or the forge, or the little bit of money they earn from working the metal. It’s also, of course, about the relationships that they are forging with mentors devoted to life, to peace, to them. Like I said, it sounds phenomenal.

Because the phenomenon of forgiveness, of second chances, of investment in those who have little enough to offer, on the surface, is not widespread enough, not commonplace enough in our culture and society. It’s certainly something I could work on, too.

Ben Sira writes, “He has placed before you fire and water; stretch out your hand for whichever you choose.” (Sirach 15:16)  Do we choose to baptize, or to burn, those who come before us in dire need of a good word? And again, “Before each person are life and death, and whichever one chooses will be given.” (Sirach 15:17)

We can choose how to deal with one another, in which currency we barter: life or death.

Even when it seems as though all agency has been taken away, when the very earth turns on its inhabitants, and death chooses all too many, thousands upon thousands; still, we see the response of those who choose to spend their lives rescuing, helping, uplifting others, where they can, as they are able, and we recognize in their service something of God, who is compassion, and mercy, and the Creator of love.

The thing about pursuing an ethic of life, an ethic of love, is that it’s going to take a lot of work, a lot of humility, a lot of patience, and a lot of forgiveness. Jesus sets out the barriers of perfection, the impossibility of consistent and undeviant adherence to the code: never get angry, never desire, never despair. Even Jesus got angry. The psalmist calls people fools left, right, and centre.  Who among us has never made a promise we couldn’t hope to keep?

The image Jesus sets out of the person approaching the altar, who remembers suddenly the person they offended, or defrauded, or damaged, and runs out of the church to track them down and fall at their feet with an apology; it’s very dramatic. Maybe sometimes it is within our power to make things right with those we know hold us to be in the wrong. More likely, each of us approaches in the knowledge of our sin, in the sorrow of the things done and left undone that cannot be made right, because it’s too late or too little or we don’t even know who we hurt. 

So we come with our feeble promises: I will do better, I will love more, I will live more faithfully, more humbly, more mercifully, I swear … Oh, swearing was off the table, too.

God knows how many chances we will need, how many dead-ends we will choose, how often we will have to return, to leave our souls at the altar and hope to have them returned in a better state than we left them, before we are ready to go into the world to make right what we have gotten wrong, to forgive others before ourselves, to humble ourselves before the image of God among us. 

“For great is the wisdom of the Lord;
he is mighty in power and sees everything;…
and he knows every human action.” (Sirach 15:18-19)

“He has placed before you fire and water;
stretch out your hand for whichever you choose.
Before each person are life and death,
and whichever one chooses will be given.” (Sirach 15:16-17)

We come again and again because we choose life, the one who gives us life, the one who saves our life. The one who forgives us, and gives us every chance and opportunity to forgive ourselves and others. The one who shows us the way into life. The one who sets before us fire and water: Spirit and baptism; the pillar of fire and the divided waters of the Red Sea; the light of the world and the waters of creation. It’s a trick question, you see: in the end, there is no direction in which we can turn where God is not waiting for us, patient and long-suffering, waiting for us to choose to see Her.

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Salt, light, love

Posted on February 5, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon delivered at the Solemn Sung Eucharist service of Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, Ohio. The propers are for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany

_______________

You are the salt of the earth; … You are the light of the world.

What do salt and light have in common? Each of them works to enhance everything around them.

Salt is used to bring out the flavour of food, to nourish the earth, to melt the ice beneath our feet or our car tires; it has many uses, and each of them draws focus from the salt itself to the environment which it is improving and healing. Salt dissolved in water is an antiseptic and a balm. In one of the stories from the law and the prophets, Elisha casts salt into the stream near Jericho and the water is cleansed and the land that it irrigates begins to produce good food after a long period of famine (2 Kings 2:19-22).

Light, likewise, illuminates not itself but the space around it, and the faces, those images of God dimly revealed and deeply shadowed. Looking into the light itself may be contraindicated: never look directly at the sun; even reflected off cold snow, it can be blinding. But without it, we are lost. A candle set upon a lampstand sheds light upon the room in which it stands: the people, the well-seasoned food, the furniture, so that you don’t stub your toe on the lampstand, or the bushel in the corner.

Salt and light: this service, this outreach, this is their essence. They are vital, and they exist not to their own ends, but are part of God’s marvellous and intricately interwoven plan for the sustaining of God’s creation.

Another thing that salt and light have in common is that they can become dangerous. Salt, if it becomes too concentrated, causes all kinds of chaos, from kidney stones to the lifeless waters of the Dead Sea.

And in the example that Jesus gives, hiding a light under a bushel is not only counterproductive, but it’s really quite risky. If you put a candle or an oil lamp under a rush basket you are asking to burn down the entire house. If you set it under a ceramic bowl, it will consume all of the oxygen surrounding it before it burns out; it may even crack the bowl with its heat as huffs up all of the available air.

The light cannot exist only unto itself, or things will begin to go awry.

You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world. Jesus is telling his disciples something about our essence, the ideas that God had about us when we were created. That we were not meant to be and live only for ourselves, but made in the image of God, to point one another back toward the source of our life and all that is beloved.

Jesus goes on to say that he has come to fulfill the law and the prophets. And how does he sum them up, when he is asked later by a lawyer? “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind … You shall love your neighbour as yourself. One these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:34-40)

To quote our Presiding Bishop, if it’s not about love, it’s not about God.

Love, salt, and light: none of them is designed to serve itself. Each of them is essential to the order that God has created. Salt does not lose its saltiness when it is used to flavour our food. Light is not exhausted by its shining. Love does not run out.

But if salt has lost its saltiness, Jesus warns, then it is worth nothing. If we forget that even our righteousness is not ours to keep or to hoard, but it is to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8), as we heard last Sunday – if we for a moment think that our righteousness is ours to keep, then we have lost our way.

No: like salt, like light, like love, it is ours to spend. As salt, we can make a difference for someone slipping on thin ice; as light, give hope and a hand to someone who is lost and afraid of the dark. It is our righteousness, if we understand ourselves to be disciples of Jesus, salt of the earth and light for the world it is our call to right the wrongs of injustice, to free the oppressed and the tormented, to heal the bruised, to bring the dead to life (Matthew 10:7-8). To bring the dead to life: to say their names.

We may say, but I am only a little pinch of salt, a modest candle.

But here’s another astonishing thing about what Jesus tells his disciples, and the crowd, pretty indiscriminately on the mountainside. He says, “You are the light of the world.” Who is the Light of the world? He is the Light of the world! He says it himself elsewhere (John 8:12): “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

Salt of the earth, essence of creation, light of the world, love of God: he is telling us that he is with us, that we are not alone, that we were not created to be alone, apart from him, apart from God. He has shed his light upon us, dim and deeply shadowed images of God that we may be, so that we can see and taste God’s glory, God’s mercy, God’s justice, God’s grace among us.

You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world. It is our call and it is our essence, to give thanks to God who created us; to follow Christ, who grounds us; to love God, to love our neighbours; thereby to change the world even one grain at a time, trusting that, in the words of the apostle, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, [that is] what God has prepared for those who love him”. (1 Corinthians 2:9)

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From the forge

Posted on February 4, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

I made
a heart; hammered
away at steel
hot from the forge
until I got into its groove,
turned the base until
it barely looked
like the barrel of a gun
any more.
I sliced it with the saw
until it wouldn’t hold
any more.
I thought about
that Bible verse,
turning hearts of stone,
but this one,
these are still metal,
and magnetic;
they make that hard
ringing sound when they fall.
They remember
the hardness of heart
that created them.
I hope that they remember,
too, the fire
that moulded them
into something new.

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A Song of Anna

Posted on February 2, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

This post first appeared at the Episcopal Cafe

In the story of Jesus’ Presentation at the Temple, and the purification of his blessed mother, Luke tells of two words that Simeon utters. The first is a hymn of praise to God that Simeon should have seen the coming of his Christ. The second addresses the holy family, blessing them, but adding some words of caution for his mother, that this epiphany would not be without trouble, and that its sword would pierce her own heart.

Then we are introduced to Anna. She has spent several decades, the majority of her life, in the Temple as a widow devoted to worship, fasting, and prayer. When she sees the family and their child, she too breaks into praises, and she, too, has something to say about what this means, the coming of the Messiah, the birth of the Christ, and his appearance in the Temple. She tells all who will listen – but her words, unlike Simeon’s, are not recorded.

Simeon’s song, the Nunc Dimittis, crops up regularly in our liturgies, especially during Evening Prayer. I wonder what it would sound like, what it would feel like, if we had Anna’s song, too, to sing as our prayers rise like incense at the end of the day.

Not fruit of my womb,
but fruit of the Tree
of Life, this one
who will give his flesh
for the world, and I,
who have fasted so long,
now feast my eyes,
my heart, my soul,
upon the child of God,
the promise of Israel;
Not fruit of my womb,
yet I give thanks
that I may bear this
joy into the world.

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A hymn in response to gun violence.

Feel free to sing, share, etc (you can also sing it with your favourite LM hymn tune). Message me if you’d prefer it as a pdf. I’d love to hear from you if you do sing it – or even hear a recording. And if you have been affected by gun violence, my prayers are with you.

Posted on January 25, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes | Leave a comment

(A conversion) not (of St Paul)

Posted on January 25, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

No lightning bolt
nor sudden fall
but the gentle tap-tap
of mercy raining
like hoofbeats
like heartbeats
over the umbrella
of consciousness –
Who are you?

You sang,
my pied piper;
I was powerless
not to follow;
you led my soul
astray, and it has never
(it has rarely)
looked back to see
the salt flats
of life without
You.

This poem first appeared at the Episcopal Cafe in the Episcopal Journal

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Fishing

Posted on January 22, 2023 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany, Year A Epiphany 3: Matthew 4:12-23. In our prayers we remembered those killed, injured, and terrorized by another mass shooting overnight, this time during celebrations of the lunar new year in Monterey Park, CA.

______________________

Once upon a time a hundred years ago when I was about nine or ten, I embarked upon a fishing trip off the west coast of Scotland. The sea that summer day was white and gray, the spray was cold and constant, and I think that may have been when I found out that I suffer terribly, horribly from sea-sickness.

For all that, I can’t bring myself quite to wish it hadn’t happened, or that I hadn’t gone, because a couple of hours in, at our furthest point from shore, we saw suddenly a pair of pilot whales breaching. It really was the most amazing thing. It was almost like looking into another world, and if I’d stayed safely back on dry land, I would have missed them. Worse still, I might never even have known what I was missing.

All of which is to say that if Jesus comes by and invites me on a fishing trip, I’m going to be torn. I know that there is going to be deep and abiding misery: look at the garden, look at the cross; look at John’s imprisonment and the people who wanted to throw Jesus off a cliff; look at his own words, “Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Look at the storm, and the disciples’ terror: “Master, do you not care that we are perishing?” There will be sea-sickness.

And yet there will be, too, those glimpses into another world. Moses and Elijah on the mountaintop. Jesus preaching in the synagogue, “Here, today, the words of the prophet are fulfilled.” The healing miracles, the victory over demons and death, and that other scene on the beach, after the cross, after the disciples have come home here once more to Capernaum, to the Sea of Galilee, and to their nets, when they come ashore in the morning light and find Jesus and the fire and the food, and he calls to them to catch one last harvest before sending them back once more to Jerusalem.

How much of this do Andrew and Simon anticipate when Jesus comes to them in the morning as they fish from the shore? This is after John the baptizer has been arrested and imprisoned; Jesus has withdrawn north to Galilee, and so, it seems, have these two, whom we last met down by the Jordan river, when they were disciples of John who turned to follow the stranger whom John called the Lamb of God, whom Andrew already recognized as the Messiah.

After John was arrested, they returned to Galilee and to their nets. They must have lost track of Jesus when he went into the wilderness alone after his baptism, during those long days of fasting and temptation. And here he is, back as if from the dead, and once again, they follow him.

They know that following will not protect them from the world, any more than putting out to sea shelters them from the storms that follow the water. There are still fevers that put fear into a community; Simon Peter’s mother-in-law nearly died of one, before Jesus lifted her up and set her back on her feet – remember that story? Not everyone in town got so lucky.

There are still harsh words from those who don’t understand the lives they lead, the choices they make to leave the traditions of their fathers, to leave father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, to walk away first to follow John, and now this other, this Jesus, this dangerous preacher. “Shake the dust off your feet,” advises Jesus, but it’s not so easy. Mud sticks, and dust gets in your eyes.

There will be worse to come, from the Romans, in due course. Following will not save them from seeing their loved ones die, nor from burying them.

Jesus is not taking them out of the world, but into it. He calls them away from the nets and the open water, and promises to make them fish for people. He is calling them back into community, but a community centred no longer on survival, but on salvation. And they follow.

Julian of Norwich, medieval mystic, in one of the visions granted her at death’s very door, saw herself walking as it were upon the seabed, and she understood from that “showing” that if one were to walk with God, in the plain and certain sight of God, that person would not only be safe in body and spirit from the weight of the ocean and its depths, but they would know greater peace and comfort than anyone still on dry land, safely and ordinarily ignorant of the ever-tending mercies of God.[i]

There have been times, to be sure, in the past few years filled with fevers and violence and more when we have felt at sea, or underwater, or worse. But then there are those moments where we see into another world, the world as it might be, the world as God wants it to be, with all of God’s heart, with all of God’s might, with all of God’s life. The moments when we recognize that here is the Messiah, that God is with us, that God is calling to us, in the midst of the everyday, after the arrest, in the midst of the fever, in the wake of bad news or good; that Christ has come to find us, to feed us, to save us.

That when we are farthest from the shore, glory will still breach the surface.

[i] “One time mine understanding was led down into the sea-ground, and there I saw hills and dales green, seeming as it were moss-be-grown, with wrack and gravel. Then I understood thus: that if a man or woman were under the broad water, if he might have sight of God so as God is with a man continually, he should be safe in body and soul, and take no harm: and overpassing, he should have more solace and comfort than all this world can tell. For He willeth we should believe that we see Him continually though that to us it seemeth but little [of sight]; and in this belief He maketh us evermore to gain grace. For He will be seen and He will be sought: He will be abided and he will be trusted.” The Second Revelation, Chapter X, “God willeth to be seen and to be sought: to be abided and to be trusted.”

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, edited by Grace Warrack (digireads.com, 2013), via Kindle

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