The Call of Matthew

Posted on September 21, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

If you were to write a gospel,

what would you include?

What might you leave out?

 

Would you slide in a cameo

of the time that Jesus,

passing through your toll booth,

caught your eye, mouthed,

“Follow me”?

 

Would you elide the moment

of mad fear, somersaults

of stomach and soul,

taste of metal as you bit

your tongue stumbling

to shuck off your tabard,

un-tag your name,

agonize for less than a second

too long whether to lock up,

where to leave the keys,

afraid that he will turn

his face away?

 

Will you tell

of the love that he levied

as he set you free?

___________________________

Featured image: Saint Matthew, by Joachim Wtewael (public domain via wikimediacommons). First published at https://episcopaljournal.org/the-call-of-matthew/

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Power and piety

Posted on September 4, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for September 4 2022; Year C Proper 18

Now large crowds were traveling with Jesus; and he turned and said to them, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.

Luke 14:25-26

Elsewhere – specifically, in fact, while preaching the sermon on the mount – Jesus tells his disciples and anyone who will listen, “I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.” (Matthew 5:22)

So how do we hold that sermon in tension with this rather harsh set of demands that Jesus offers the crowd who are thinking of following him to Jerusalem?

The context for that difficult set of words about hating your family and even your life is on one side the crowd and on the other, the parable.

Great crowds were following Jesus, looking for healing, or food, or living water, something of hope in a harsh landscape – and rightly so. He is the image of God’s grace and mercy among us. He is hope for the helpless and life for the powerless.

But he worries that the crowd does not understand that he has not come to take them out of this world, but to be with them through it – he is God with us, Emmanuel. He knows that although resurrection is coming, it comes through the cross.

The commentary in The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes that the people following Jesus down this road are the type with the disposable income to build a tower with their name emblazoned upon it, according to the parable he offers them.[i] Power and piety are a dangerous combination.

So he asks them, “Are you sure?” Because he wants them to know what they are getting into, the cost of loving neighbour as self, enemy as neighbour, denying pride and vengeance for the sake of love, denying self for the sake of God, giving and forgiving, and never counting the cost.

“Are you ready for the cross?” he is asking them.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his masterpiece, The Cost of Discipleship, offers that “The life of discipleship is not the hero-worship we would pay to a good master, but obedience to the Son of God.”[ii] Jesus is not offering a get-even-richer-quick scheme, nor even a decent return on investment. He is offering a radical re-ordering of the lives of his followers, and they, and we, may not be prepared for what that might entail.

I met a man in a hospital once, long ago and far away, who had suffered a major medical event which would involve a long and arduous recovery and, once that was underway, a complete transformation of his lifestyle. He told me that God had done this to him, struck him low and smitten him, and I thought that would make him angry; but no, he told me, he was grateful.

He had prayed to Jesus to help him get free from a way of life that was killing him and destroying his family, and this total and devastating disaster, he believed, was in fact Christ’s way of healing him, of getting him the help he needed, and setting him on a new path.

Bonhoeffer says, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die … because only the man who is dead to his own will can follow Christ.”[iii]

In our own rite of Baptism, in that blessed Sacrament, we speak of dying to an old way of life, of drowning it in the waters of a new creation, a new life in Christ. We say we mean it metaphorically, of course, but metaphor is not without meaning.

Elsewhere, the disciples cried out, “Look, we have left everything and follow you!” And Jesus told them, “Yes, and anyone who is prepared to give it all up for me will get it back now and in the age to come; and you may expect hardship, too.” (Mark 10:28-30, paraphrased)

In order to love as Christ loves, to love even family, friends, life itself as God so loved the world, we have to recognize the breach within it, which is the cross, which is sin, which is every selfish impulse that would lead us away from Jesus toward something that, someone that, in the moment, we prefer.[iv]

Jesus challenges those who would follow him to hate, to abhor, to detach from, to cleave their relationships with that which they hold most closely, be that money or family or reputation, and cleave unto him, not because it is wrong to have a happy family life. Far from it. He does not want anyone to hate those who should be beloved. Love God, and your neighbour. He does not want us to hate the life which is our gift from a generous and gracious God, I don’t think. Love God, and your neighbour as yourself.

But when we come to a crossroads, and the gospel calls us to walk one way, and the world tells us that way leads to ruin, or rejection, Jesus wants us to have the courage to follow him, even in the way of the cross.

The people followed Jesus looking for healing, or food, or living water, something of hope in a harsh landscape – and rightly so. He is the image of God’s grace and mercy among us. He is hope for the helpless and life for the powerless. He became our hope by becoming as helpless and as powerless as we are, and by resisting the temptation to find any better way than this: the love of God made perfect and living among us, now and for ever. Amen.

 

 

[i] The Jewish Annotated New Testament, Amy-Jill Levine, Marc Zvi Brettler, editors (Oxford University Press, 2011), commentary to Luke 14:28

[ii] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, revd edn (Macmillan, 1963), 84

[iii] Bonhoeffer, 99

[iv] See Bonhoeffer, 110

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Did Jesus dream?

Posted on August 31, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

Did Jesus dream? 
Were his dreams oracular, spectular, unconsciously omniscient, encompassing future and past, nebulae and black holes? 
Were there days when night hung from his shoulders, unlight, leaden remnants of memory or premonition? 
Did Jesus delight in the absurdity of dreamscape? 
Was he ever afraid to close his eyes? 
Did he crawl into bed with his father and mother, wrapped like a warm loaf, dreaming a knock at the door, importuning, 
“Friend! I want only a piece of your bread …” 
I ask as one in search of rest, tired of caterwauling chaos. 
Jesus, did you dream that it would come to this?

You are Emmanuel.
From the milk dream of the infant barely aware of world beyond the womb to the tremor of the cross, the absent vision of the grave, you have harrowed humanity, our conscious and unconscious need,
and hallowed it.

__________________

This poem was first published at the Episcopal Cafe, part of the Episcopal Journal

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Things I made this week*

Posted on August 26, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

Bread
A dress
Communion
A poem
Goat milk vanilla bean ice cream
A discovery: the cats adore goats’ milk
Love
A sermon
A cross out of dismantled gunmetal
A deal with the lake, God, and the sky
that if they will endure
a little longer so will I

*some details may vary week to week, while others remain constant

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Miracles break the rules

Posted on August 21, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

When the woman crept into the synagogue, barely able to breathe because of the compression her torso, and the sheer effort of making it there – was it her wheezing and rasping that drew Jesus’ attention, and unintended obligato running its ragged rhythm beneath the chanting of the psalm? – when Jesus reached out his hand and spoke God’s mercy over her, it was not work, but a gift; not labour, but grace. It was a miracle, and miracles, by definition (as Amy-Jill Levine and others have noted) do not fit into the categories prescribed by creation and the laws of our physics.[i]

This was what made it so disturbing, perhaps: we pray for a miracle, but if one fell upon us, we would be both astonished and, let’s face it, a little afraid, to be singled out, that God would overturn the natural order for us. And yet, is that not what God has already done, in the person of Jesus?

The woman, this woman, in this moment, was so relieved to be able to stand, to stretch, to breathe, to sing. This was Sabbath to her – relief from the work of carrying her body like a burden, from labouring for every step and every breath; from shame, and sheer inconvenience. This, to her, was rest, this miracle, and she began to praise God, as is appropriate to Sabbath in the synagogue.

What had kept her all these years – eighteen years, as long as it takes a human in our society to grow from birth to adulthood – what had bound her and burdened her? Jesus implicates Satan, but what does that mean?

Frederick Buechner rightly observes that Jesus, like Job before him, “specifically rejected the theory that sickness was God’s way of getting even with sinners (John 9:1-3).” Nevertheless, he recognized some kind of a connection between sin and sickness, telling those with ears to hear that just as the healthy do not need a doctor, but the sick, neither will he turn away sinners who need him (Mark 2:17).[ii]

Tom Wright speculates that, “maybe someone had persistently abused her, verbally or physically, when she was smaller, until her twisted up emotions communicated themselves to her body, and she found she couldn’t get straight.”[iii]

In other words, if her burdened body and crumpled spirit was the result of sin, it need not even have been her own sin that bound her, but the sin of those who surrounded her with the burden of their own pride and bitterness.

And there’s the rub. If Satan, if sin are at large among us, the damage is diffuse. It extends far beyond the one bent-over woman: it is the fallen state of our world, in which the poor are easy to oppress and healing, far from being given as a joyful gift, becomes the source of further crippling debt to many. We would like to set the captive free, raise the dead, preach good news to the poor, we say, but our hands are tied. 

Our hands are tied because we bind one another with our rules and expectations, because we continue to resist radical, revolutionary grace. 

I can’t help thinking of the children’s hospital and its staff who had to call in extra security this week because of threats they have received because some angry people have heard that they offer care to trans and questioning children. Hear this: they have been threatened because they care for the health and welfare of children. 

There has been wild disinformation about what kind of care is offered to children and teens, and you can imagine the chilling effect it has had on all kinds of families, parents, and children seeking life-saving care for all kinds of ailments at this facility, the constriction of throats and spirits as already-anxious people wonder whether they will be greeted with healing or violence at the door. Eighteen years: birth to adulthood.

I mention this particularly because, as part of the discourse, it has come to the attention of some news and other media that our Episcopal Church, at its General Convention last month, passed a resolution to affirm the care offered to trans children and adults. So, in case it comes up, you might want to know that it is true that we voted to commend the provision of care to support the bodies and spirits of those whom God knows best, and who know themselves better than we do. In the Explanation section of that resolution, we are told that,

As a Church we celebrate the diversity and glory of God as reflected in every human being. We have also embraced access to necessary healthcare without restriction on gender. The time has come for us to unite these views to advocate for acess to healthcare for our trans and nonbinary Siblings in Christ. 
We are also a Church guided by science and, in this case, the science is clear. Access to gender affirming care substantially reduces suicidality amongst trans and nonbinary youth (Tordoff et al 2022) and adults (Seelman et al 2017). The compassionate Christian stance is to embrace our trans and nonbinary siblings, advocating for their access to all health care needs.[iv]

It’s ok, too, if this feels to some a little confusing, bewildering. It does break many of the social rules and norms with which many of us were raised. But that is the anatomy of a miracle: God breaking our rules and remaking God’s creation in the way that God chooses and intends it to be. Into this context Jesus comes and works a miracle, and some rejoice, and others tell him to stay in his lane, and wait for a better time. But for the one in pain, in sorrow, burdened with grief and constricted in her breathing, there is no better time than now to receive the miracle of God’s healing grace and mercy, liberating love.

And if God were to break into our service with a miracle, with a fresh understanding of what is possible or permissible as worship on a Sunday morning, would we rejoice or tell Them to kindly sit down?

Fortunately, Jesus is not bound by our expectations and God’s mercy is not constrained by our imaginations. Jesus breaks, not the holy laws of the Sabbath but our imagined laws of cause and effect, sin and sickness, the very cords which bind us in order to set the woman free, in a miracle.

And this is Sabbath for her, and for us: that God is indiscriminate in mercy, unstinting in grace. That God refuses to stay in God’s lane, but comes to live among us, to heal us, to love us, to free us: no exceptions.

[i] Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew (HarperOne, 2006), 203

[ii] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, 41

[iii] Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone (SPCK, 2001), 166

[iv] https://www.episcopalarchives.org/sites/default/files/gc_resolutions/2022-D066.pdf

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An “unsafe peace”

Posted on August 14, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for August 14, 2022: Year C Proper 15. In the news, Salman Rushdie was attacked on stage at the Chautauqua Institute; the FBI have executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago; a person attempted to breach an FBI facility in Ohio and was later killed by police during a stand-off; concerns about continuing violence remain

Let’s start with the obvious: the level of division, the kind of disillusionment, the deadly distrust and disdain with which we are tearing ourselves and one another apart lately is not Christlike, and we cannot blame it on Jesus, the Prince of Peace, because he once said something like, “I came not to bring peace but division” (Luke 12:51).

Lately, I’ve been playing with fire. I’ve been working on the pieces of dismantled and destroyed guns left over from our buyback earlier in the summer. Burning and beating and splitting and smelting, I’m trying, ironically, to embody the spirit of peace that is evoked by the prophets: beating firearms into flowers, guns into garden tools, weapons into leaves for the healing of the nations. I am trying to embody the spirit of Jesus when he tells his disciples, “Put your sword back in its sheath! Those who live by the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52).

Then along comes Jesus, at whose birth the angels sang, “Peace on earth, and goodwill” (Luke 2:14, paraphrased). He says something like this, and we cannot make it our excuse to give up the hard labour of peace, of repentance, of reconciliation.

Ambrose of Milan, writing in the fourth century, insisted that we must read this passage through the lens of religious piety. He said, the division is within each of us. He went so far as to relate the family members enumerated, two against three, to the five senses, to insist that “if we separate the senses of sight and hearing according to what we hear or read, and exclude unnecessary pleasures of the body that derive from taste, touch, and smell, we divide two against three.”[i]

But are the pleasures of taste, touch, smell unnecessary? I doubt it. Worse, blessed Ambrose seems to assume that all that we read or hear is godly, scriptural, enlightening. I have seen Twitter. I doubt it.

Ambrose is on more solid ground, I think, when he relates the fire that Jesus says he will bring to earth to the fire that enflamed the hearts of Cleopas and his companion on the road to Emmaus, the fire that opened the mouth of Jeremiah, the prophet, the fire that purifies and impassions, the living Word of God, which is described elsewhere as a sword (Hebrews 4:12).

Cyril of Alexandria, a century later, agrees. He, too, struggles with that word of un-peace that Jesus proclaims. He knows that it must, somehow, be brought into agreement, into unity with the rest of what we know of the Gospel of Christ: that God loves the world enough to live in it, to die with it, to redeem it.

“Peace is an honourable and truly excellent thing when given by God,” Cyril writes, “But not every peace necessarily is free from blame: there is sometimes, so to speak, an unsafe peace, and which separates from the love of God those who, without discretion or examination, set too high a value upon it.”[ii]

An unsafe peace … which separates.

Jeremiah decries the false prophets who cry, “Peace, peace, where there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14), and who proclaim their own dreams instead of the vision of God (Jeremiah 23:25-28). “Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?” (Jeremiah 23:29). Here is the division.

Is it worth remembering at this point that this whole discourse, that we began reading three weeks ago, started with a man coming to demand that the Messiah arbitrate between him and his brother regarding their inheritance? And that Jesus refused to go there, but instead set off on a whole new tangent regarding the proper disposition of the heart, the true value of treasure, and the generous providence of God?

While the brothers are arguing over nickels and diamonds, the poor go hungry for lack of bread, the oppressed are incarcerated for the theft of a loaf of bread, the needful look for healing, and the hopeless for a reprieve from violence.

There is no peace in settling the will of the privileged brothers while their siblings struggle for simple human dignity beside them, or if there is, it is, as Cyril has written, an unsafe peace; that self-satisfaction that separates from the love of God those who pin their hopes upon it.

It is strange that peace should be so divisive: that putting love before enmity, generosity before gain, gentleness before vengeance, patience before pride, kindness before triumph, justice before profit should be a less popular way forward than winning at all cost. But that division has been our shadow side since Cain slew Abel out of envy and Jacob cheated Esau out of his inheritance by using his own hunger against him.

Do you remember what happened to them? God set a mark on Cain so that no one might kill him in vengeance, not because God approved of what he did, but because God still loved him, still owned him, despite his grievous sin. God stayed with Jacob through thick and thin, wrestling with him, holding onto him until daybreak, because as tricky as he was, God would not let him slip away.

Jesus plays with fire throughout his public ministry, causing division, answering arguments with piercing questions, refusing to play politics for the sake of an unsafe peace, staying true to the Spirit that conceived him in the womb, the humanity into whose image he was born, holding fast to the God whose life he brought home.

Jesus is on fire with justice, aflame with mercy, and his Passion splits the very rocks of the earth (Matthew 27:51), just as God said God’s Word would do.

And all of this, so that we might know, instead of an unsafe peace that keeps the hungry weak and the hopeless meek, the peace of God that passes understanding, that gives the poor in spirit joy and lifts up the broken-hearted in song; that transcends the divisions that we have created and continue to sustain to find the reconciliation that God has intended, and set in motion, and completed in Jesus.

That Word of God, the living, double-edged sword does divide the thoughts of the heart from the lies that we tell ourselves about where our hearts are invested, what will make us whole, what will make us free. This does not excuse us from the labour of love, the work of peace, the settling of divisions, and the forgiveness of debts; on the contrary, it requires that we set our hearts on the treasure that does not tarnish with time or revelation: the mercy of God, the Word of God that is Jesus.

The peace of God, which passes understanding, extends far beyond our surface concerns and digs beneath our petty arguments to the very heart of being, the humanity that unites us in God’s image, the baptism which we share with Christ; the union of life, death, and resurrection which no one can set asunder. 

[i] Saint Ambrose of Milan, Exposition of the Holy Gospel According to Saint Luke, translated by Theodosia Tomkinson (Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2003)

[ii] Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Luke (Beloved Publishing, 2014), 276

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Lost in prayer

Posted on August 10, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

Sometimes 
when I pray the words 
scurry by like ants 
I watch their silent progress 
unregistered on the kitchen scale 
undulating in their trail 
unnoticed until they become 
a swarm 
indistinguishable one from the next 

Sometimes
there is one you see
that carries five thousand times
its weight
enough to feed them all
for a day

________________

This poem first appeared at the Episcopal Cafe, part of the Episcopal Journal

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… There your heart will be also

Posted on August 7, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for August 7, 2022. The readings are for Year C Proper 14.

The other day I was looking for something in my house. I can’t remember what it was, nor even whether or not I found it. What I do remember was that, while scouring the back of my bedside drawer, my eye happened on a glint of silver. It was the old name tag from my Granny Lyle’s dog, Littlun, taken from her windowsill after her funeral, before we cleaned out and left her little council house for the final time. How I still have it, three continents and some forty years later, God alone knows. But then love does have its ways of hanging on, doesn’t it, and resurfacing at the most unexpected times to surprise us with memory, grief, and joy?

We talked a little last week about legacies, and here is Jesus at it again: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” What we invest with meaning, what we treasure, what we seek out, accumulate, spend, hoard, love: that tells a story about our orientation, our perspective, our life.

And look, Jesus is not being a scold about this. Sure, he starts with the parable of the rich man with the overstuffed barns and the understuffed heart, but he goes on to tell his disciples about God’s loving provision for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. “Of how much more value are you than the birds?” he asks them (Luke 12:24). So do not worry: God loves you.

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your God’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” (Luke 12:32)

Jesus is not sentimental about it either, mind you. He is eminently practical, saying, sell your possessions in order to give alms to the poor. This is not a theory but a call; one which at least one rich young ruler failed (Luke 18:18-25), and most of us, too.

I read the chapter on Treasure in Gail Ramshaw’s Treasures Old and New. She observes,

“Most readers of this volume live in capitalist societies. The economic theory behind capitalism is that an individual’s accumulation of personal treasure is a social good because it eventually enriches the entire community. Christians who wish to live faithful lives within capitalism continue to reflect how to juggle this idea of treasure with that in the New Testament. What does it mean to treasure God?”[i]

Well, and I have a few follow-up questions. If individual accumulation is good only because it “eventually” enriches the entire community, how can we hurry that process along? Jesus has a suggestion (see, again, his encounter with the rich young ruler). If the accumulation of treasure is good because it enriches the entire community, why is the gap between the very rich and the very poor still increasing, in this country and across the globe? Where have we put our heart? If Christians who wish to live faithful lives have to juggle the claims of capitalism and those of the gospel, which will we drop first?

I’m not loving the implications of these questions. I live too comfortably to be comfortable with them.

But “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your God’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” Not the power, or the wealth, or the glory, but the kingdom of God, in which the oppressed and the imprisoned are set free, the afflicted are healed, and the poor have good news delivered to them by God’s own Word.

How will we set our hearts there? How can I set my heart there?

The other question that came to me as I was thinking about this passage was, “What did Jesus treasure?” Or, to paraphrase a once-popular wristband, “What would Jesus accumulate?”

He treasured God. He valued the time he set aside for prayer, climbing mountains or going to the lakeshore to find space to be heart to heart with the one he called his Father. 

He accumulated stories, told to the astonishment, confusion, and curiosity of his disciples and his detractors alike. He spoke of the always unexpected, often counter-cultural, utterly unnerving mercy and love of God.

He collected people as he went, again, disciples and detractors – honestly he had no standards, he would talk to anyone – and then there were those who came to him for healing, for favours, for a word of encouragement or the touch of forgiveness. He dispensed blessings without a copay, healing without fear, life without observing the limits of death.

Where was his heart? When he saw the people, he had compassion for them – his heart went out to them – because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. (Matthew 9:36)

Gail Ramshaw, in her article about Treasure, notes that this aphorism, about the treasure and the heart, appears also in the Gospel for Ash Wednesday, when we read it out of Matthew. It is bound up with our call to fast, pray, and to give alms. She writes,

“We are called to find our treasure, as we give alms, in the poor; as we pray, in the needy; as we fast, with the hungry.”[ii]

You might say, we are called to find our treasure in the image of God, in our neighbour, in those whom Christ came to serve, and whom we are called to serve in his name, with our whole heart.

By the time my grandmother died, I was a little old for a child’s treasure box. Still, I hung onto that dog tag. Granny Lyle left next to nothing when she died: a windowsill full of bird seed; the bird and the dog went to live with a neighbour. She had loved that dog like nobody’s business, and he only had eyes for her, and teeth for everyone else. I didn’t keep his broken nametag because I loved him, but because it reminded me of how much, how stubbornly, how idiosyncratically she could love something, someone, through her last breath.

I am not sure whether she would have called herself a Christian. I would never have dared to ask. But the kind of love that invests itself where others hold back, that spends itself without counting the cost, that endures well after death has had its final say: that is something like the kind of love Jesus has for us wretched people, who make often unwise investments and who juggle our hearts and hope for the best, who stumble unexpectedly and often over the surprise of God’s merciful grace. We have the map; we have seen its cross. There lies abundant, unburied treasure.

Amen

[i] Gail Ramshaw, Treasures Old and New: Images in the Lectionary (Fortress Press, 2002), 392

[ii] Ibid

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Where your treasure is

Posted on August 4, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

In a child’s treasure box you’ll find
a leaf, flower, or petal
once lovely,
chosen for its fragrance or
the promise of colour
broadening the senses
like a never-tasted flavour;

A rock, stone, or pebble
of indeterminate origin,
chosen for its shape,
heft, and texture, the left-overs
of creation’s crashing asteroids
imagined to contain
the footprint of a dinosaur or fern,
or worn smooth by water
into the irregular form of a heart;

A piece of beach glass,
imagined to be a jewel;

The shell of a long-dead
animal of land or river,
polished clean by grit and seagulls,
because mortality has its own beauty;

The words of a story,
bible verse, or limerick
faithfully copied 
and mostly rightly spelled;

A marble, bead, or bouncy ball
snuck away from the common collection
not to be played with except surreptitiously,
an early experiment in sequestration
deemed a certain, if lonely, success;

Some fur, the collar, or faded photo
of the much-loved pet now
buried beneath the flagstones
of the new back patio;

A single wrapped sweet,
for emergencies.

In the child’s treasure box
you will find
the decadent, sticky scent of optimism,
dust of a thousand lives unlived,
a heart of flesh, calcifying,
hope adrift on an ocean of memories
whose swell and valleys may
at any moment inundate.

This upcoming Sunday’s Gospel reading includes Jesus’ aphorism: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Luke 12:34 and parallels). Last week, looking for something I have already forgotten, I found at the back of my bedside drawer the name tag of my grandmother’s dog, which I have apparently and largely unknowingly kept for some forty years; hence this poem.

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Bonsai, barns, and building a legacy

Posted on July 31, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for Year C Proper 13: July 31 2022. In the news: devastating floods in eastern Kentucky

A few weeks ago, on my way to General Convention in Baltimore, I stopped off in Washington, DC, and visited the National Arboretum. That was where we found the bonsai museum.

I had not realized that such a wide variety of trees could be made into bonsai. Perhaps my favourite was the olive grove, a miniature version of the scene that greets visitors to the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem. Some of the bonsai were relatively young; others were hundreds of years old. I got to thinking about the generations of trainers and nurturers who had tended those trees – how many hands must they have passed through? Then I wondered, when a bonsai is inherited, when its originator dies, is the inheritor expected to be faithful to the vision of the first owner, or does each generation add its own twist, as it were, to the trunk and the branches?

The readings that we hear today, particularly from the Teacher of Ecclesiastes and from the good teacher, Jesus, focus on legacies. 

Ecclesiastes rails against what he sees as his wasted work – he does not trust that his legacy will be respected or worthily received. “Sometimes,” he says, “one who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by another who did not toil for it.” He declaims this as a great evil. (Ecclesiastes 2:18-23)

And yet, I think of the bonsai, hundreds of years old. I am told that bonsai take a lot of work, and daily attention. The trees signal subtly their needs, and their carers rush to interpret their signs and respond to them. True, it must be true that some, perhaps many, have been lost along the way, bequeathed to inheritors who had neither the skill nor the inclination to nurture them. And yet here are those that have been tenderly serviced and kept from generation to generation – and who can say that their first parent’s skill or wisdom or knowledge was wasted? Perhaps it inspired a new generation to learn something new about caring for the bonsai, about listening to the leaves, about selfless engagement with creation.

To consider our work wasted if another is to inherit it or reap the benefit of it is a terribly selfish and limiting point of view. This is exactly the parable that Jesus told, of the rich man who thought of nothing but enjoying the profits of his own work, and forgot to look beyond his own storage barns. (Luke 12:13-21) The joke is on him, though: God asks, “these things you have prepared, whose will they be?” The rich man will leave a legacy whether he likes it or not, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if those storage barns were opened up to the poor and the needful to take whatever they could use, and they celebrated him as a great benefactor, who had no thoughts of generosity in his own lifetime? Wouldn’t it be just like God to subvert his selfishness and redeem his legacy despite his limited outlook?

And wouldn’t the man have enjoyed seeing that redemption in his lifetime, if he had remembered to look beyond his own barns, if he had for a moment thought of the servants who built them and filled them and perhaps even went home hungry? “Didn’t toil for it?” they mutter, behind Ecclesiastes’ back. None of us survives or thrives without the labour of others; our legacy is not entirely our own.

And we have seen, all too clearly and nearly, how quickly a life can be swept away, and worldly possessions with it. Even that which endures is transformed: love into grief, faith into lament, hope into who knows what?

The precipitating scene for this parable of Jesus is the argument between two brothers over their inheritance. Jesus refuses to get involved, but he does warn against letting material possessions take precedence over relationship, with God and with one another. He warns against limiting our view of what we inherit, and what we leave as an inheritance; against being over-rich in worldly goods, but poor toward God and our neighbour.

The Book of Common Prayer has an obscure rubric tucked away at the end of the service of Thanksgiving for a Child – obscure because it is buried within that particular liturgy, even though it is not only addressed to parents or families. It provides that “The Minister of the Congregation is directed to instruct the people, from time to time, about the duty of Christian parents to make prudent provision for the well-being of their families, and of all persons to make wills, while they are in good health, arranging for the disposal of their temporal goods, not neglecting, if they are able, to leave bequests for religious and charitable uses.” (BCP, 445)

In other words, while Jesus will not tell you how to solve disputes over the distribution of inherited goods, the church advises that it is better to think ahead, in order to head off such arguments before they begin; to be as clear as possible about how you would like your goods distributed after you have no further need of them, to do so with a heart for charity, with a sense of responsibility toward family, and with the understanding that all things come from one Creator, and that nothing is ours forever, since we ourselves will one day return to the dust from whence we were formed.

The thing about thinking about our legacies generously, rather than complaining like Ecclesiastes or hoarding like the rich man in the parable; the thing about imagining those who will take on the bonsai, and continue to care for it and shape it and tend it, is that it lets us look at our lives now, the shape of them, the trajectory of them, and assess whether the legacy that we are nurturing is the one by which we would want to be remembered, the one we would want to outlive us, outgrow us.

This past week I spent some time with young people enjoying a summer peace camp. We gathered in a hot parking lot with a hot forge and they helped hammer gun parts into a garden tool and leaves for the healing of the nations, leaves for a tree of life made out of ammunition magazines. They are already thinking about the legacy they will bring to their community, not after they are gone but now, while they are young and vibrant and hot with the possibilities of forging a life for themselves and for their brothers and sisters and siblings.

They made a tree of life, not out of bonsai but out of gun parts, and I fixed it in a frame, but it will not be bound by glue and glass. It grows in them, with them, I hope.

The legacy that Jesus left us is life, and life with abundance. It is our inheritance, it is our joy and our salvation. It is ours here, and now, and it is not our own; but we are invited to nurture it, shape it, tend it, share it, so that all who pass by may see what hope there is in Christ, what resilience, what love.

Amen 

Bonsai image: detail from photo by Sarah Dorweiler on Unsplash

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