Unashamed

Posted on October 9, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for 9 October 2022, Year C Proper 23

Every Sunday we say together the Nicene Creed. Morning and night, in the daily office, we recite the Apostles’ Creed. We proclaim, unashamed and aloud, the faith that we have inherited: that, however we think it was managed, God is the author and originator of all that we know and all that remains a mystery to us. That Jesus Christ, the Son of God, became one flesh with us, because God so loved the world. That there is forgiveness for sins and hope in this life and beyond. That God remains with us, in Spirit and in truth. 

Some several years ago, when I was beginning the final stages of my journey toward ordination, I had a conversation with a colleague who was on the same track. I remember them saying that one of the benefits they had accrued from the process of conversation, discernment, and successive interviews with various church bodies was that they found it much easier to say the name of Jesus aloud than they had before.

I remember this because at the time it was arresting. Here was someone whom I knew through the church, through our shared faith, and whom I knew well only because we were both on the same path towards priesthood; and here she was confessing that up until quite recently, it had been a bit awkward talking with people about Jesus. It’s alright in church, couched in the Creeds, but still, in the world, the name of Jesus is one that can evoke caution. It has too often been used as a cudgel rather than a comfort; hence, I think, the embarrassment of those of us who long to shout from the rooftops, “Jesus loves you!”, in case we are misunderstood.

But if this is what we believe: God loves you, no exceptions, and Jesus is the living proof of that, well, then, isn’t that something to sing about?

The middle lines of the piece that we read from Paul’s letter to Timothy today are thought by many scholars to be from a hymn, which must make it one of the oldest in the Christian canon. The poetry of the paired propositions: 

If we have died with him,                   we will also live with him;

if we endure,                                       we will also reign with him;

if we deny him,                                   he will also deny us;

if we are faithless,                              he remains faithful

point to that musicality, that repetition, the refrain that tends to form us in faith.

The commentaries that I had to hand to consult this week debated whether the first line, dying and living with Jesus Christ, point to baptism or to physical death and its counterpoint, resurrection. The final line, telling of the incorruptible faithfulness of God in Christ Jesus is our blessed assurance. God is with us, God does love us, without regard to how lovable or otherwise we are.

The commentaries were less inclined to scrutinize that third line: “If we deny him, he will also deny us.” I can understand why. It is a hard word in the midst of such a glorious and warm song.

It seems important, though: both Mark and Matthew record Jesus saying something similar to his followers during his earthly ministry. Mark helpfully renders the saying, “Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father in the holy angels.” (Mark 8:38)

That makes sense to me. I am not ashamed of the love of Jesus; but I can sometimes feel a little abashed, almost embarrassed, by some of his commands: to give away everything, to love even enemies, to eat with tax collectors and sinners, the greedy and the grasping. But worse, I confess sometimes to having my own purity code against which Jesus Christ himself might, at moments, be judged. That, as cringy as it is, might be my moment of denial.

And here’s the thing that I think might be most dangerous and insidious about it: when we are embarrassed by the largesse of God’s mercy towards those of whom we do not approve, we are tempted to deny Jesus’ love for them, Christ’s love to them. Personally, I find it easy and obvious to proclaim God’s love for the straight, gay, trans, questioning, single, married, black, white, Asian, uncertain, stranger; but I can’t kid myself that there are not lines that I draw, ironically enough, mostly between those who agree with me and those whom I think are just plain wrong. And when I find my limits, when I close the door on understanding and the possibility of reconciliation, when I deny Jesus to them, that’s when I pass judgement upon myself. 

And let’s be clear: I am not ashamed of the gospel that I have received. I won’t wrangle over the words “black lives matter”, nor the good news that trans children are God’s beloved children. I am not ashamed or embarrassed to proclaim the love of Jesus, except when it comes to the people whom I find it hardest to love. But I know that “If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13:1-2)

If I deny the love that Christ has even for my enemies, I become like the people at the dinner table where Jesus sat, who prided themselves on being in his presence, while he only had eyes for the weeping woman at his feet. I become like the nine who were healed, who received mercy, who went on their way happy, no doubt, and whole, but who missed out on the profound and deep joy of the Samaritan who saw more clearly than any of them the depth and breadth of God’s grace, and fell on his face before Jesus in gratitude for the limitless love that he embodied.

Still, I am comforted by the last line of the hymn; perhaps that’s why its composers put it there, to remind us that even though we fall down in faith, Jesus remains faithful to us.

After the cock crowed the morning after Jesus’ violent arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter broke down weeping, knowing that he had just done precisely what he had vowed he never would: denied Jesus before the onlookers around the fire, afraid of what they might say to him, do to him, tell others about him. Peter wept; but after the resurrection, when Jesus found him, he greeted him with peace, with the peace that passes understanding. Even Peter fell, but Christ was faithful, because that is his nature, and his being.

And that’s a love worth shouting from the rooftops.

Amen.

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Of faith, tides, and tables

Posted on October 2, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for 2 October 2022 at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio. Readings for Year C Proper 22 Track 2

King Cnut the Great ruled in England, as well as Denmark and Norway, toward the very beginning of the second millennium of the Christian era (c. 1016-35).[i] He was, by accounts, a religious man, one who travelled to Rome to make penitence. He was a man of faith, and he knew, even so, his limitations. 

The legend is told that Cnut demonstrated this by setting himself before the rising tide and bidding the waves to cease at his royal command. The waves did not, in fact, turn aside, instead splashing his legs and his robe as they rolled in before he leapt up and cried out, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name but He whom heaven, earth and sea obey by eternal laws”. Henry of Huntingdon, who wrote down this account of Cnut’s legend, added that Cnut would no more wear his crown of gold, but instead placed it permanently upon an image of the crucified Christ.[ii]

The apostles ask for more faith, but Jesus doesn’t seem to think that it is more faith that they need, any more than it is necessary to uproot trees and throw them into the sea.

“If you had faith as a mustard seed,” he says. Elsewhere, that little piece of seasoning has been heralded as a sign of the kingdom of God; small enough to be overlooked by many, but capable of growing into something that provides shelter to many more. 

The apostles have left everything to follow Jesus, and they are with him still on the road to Jerusalem, despite storms and strife, hunger and miraculous food; they have faith, they believe in Jesus, or else they would not be there with him, knowing that they were heading into trouble. Faith, whether as a mustard seed or a tree of life growing through their spines and their souls, was not at issue.

What prompted this little piece of conversation was Jesus’ telling them a little more about the life to which he was calling them. It was not simply about faith, believing that he was the Messiah, being assured that God was with them. That was – almost – the easy part. The hint of a suspicion that Jesus was of God was enough to keep them near him, is enough to keep us coming back to him, and to his table.

But Jesus kept reminding them of the implications of walking in God’s grace, in the footsteps of love. It meant taking care of others, neighbours and strangers, enemies alike; and it meant forgiving more times than we would like to those whom we find it impossible otherwise to love.

What the apostles needed was not to believe harder, or more, but to accept that the life of faith, the way of Christ, which is the way of the cross, would require them to give over their own will to that of their God: thy kingdom come, thy will be done.

The prophet Habbakuk writes, “the righteous live by their faith”; that is, they do not simply set it as a rare jewel on a cushioned seat in their hearts and minds, congratulating themselves on their right and deep belief; but they are governed and guided by it. They have given themselves over to the consequences of it: the knowledge that we are walking in the way of One whose property is always to have mercy, and who asks nothing less of us.

Faith: Cyril of Alexandria wrote, “If you have faith as of a mustard seed, hot, that is, and fervent …”;[iii] faith, hot and fervent, spicy as a mustard seed, is not an end or ambition in itself but the flavour of life, and the means to its sharing. 

Paul writes to Timothy (in so many words), “Do not be ashamed of the faith whose testimony I have given”; faith is a gift, but not one to be locked away in a secret safe, nor set on the shelf for later, nor even hung as a piece of art, an installation, or an exhibit. Like a musical instrument, like a precious crystal flute, as it were, faith is designed to be taken out and played, not merely looked upon, but heard, heeded, acted upon, perhaps even danced with.

Paul preaches elsewhere, “If I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2b). Faith is everything, and it is nothing if it does not lead to a faithful, which is a loving, way of life.

“You want to uproot trees and plant them in the ocean?” Jesus asks the apostles. You want to turn aside the tide? You want to commit spectacles and put on miracles? Make the Guardians of Traffic disappear from the Hope Memorial Bridge and show up in First Energy Stadium? Is that how you want to use your mustard seed of faith?

But the work of faith, the life of faith is more prosaic, and more humble. It is to tend the sheep, to care for those on the outside, and at the end of the day to feed the hungry, and to serve God so that God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done, rather than our own.

It is not, we might consider, the commanding of the waves and the weather, the turning away of the hurricane, but the steadfast and steady work of addressing and arresting the changes to our climate that bring ever-stronger storms, and in the meantime, the bringing of relief and succour to those most affected.

Faith fills in the ditches and brings down the mountains, makes the paths straight and helps the weary not to stumble, but not for the sake of the miracle itself, but because the faithful life participates in the prophetic mercy of God.

And then Jesus offers this little parable of severe humility, the reminder that there is nothing we can do to earn God’s gratitude and love, but that all we have, all we are depends upon and is owed unto God’s grace, and that the work of mercy is never done.

And having said that, Jesus stops, and removes his outer robe, and ties a towel around his waist, and tells his disciples, “Now, sit a while, and let me wash your feet, and serve you.”

Because here is the miracle: not how many trees we can toss into the ocean nor even whether we can still the storm, but that God cares enough to bring us back, time and again, to the table, to feed us with mercy and love.

Amen

[i] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Canute-I

[ii] “Canute and the Waves”, by Lord Raglan, in Man, Vol. 60 (Jan., 1960), pp. 7-8, Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, accessed via JSTOR, October 1, 2022

[iii] Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Luke (Beloved Publishing, 2014), 340

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Angel

Posted on September 28, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

Hide stretched taut, 
a little frayed at the edges – 
homage to the fantasy of feathers – 
humming as the updraft plays 
its song of praise to the author 
of breath; 
                        you have become  
an instrument of glory, 
the terrible call and echoing, 
empty response, symphony 
on skins full of water and light 
prepared to weep over the world

The Collect for Saint Michael and All Angels
(September 29th)

Everlasting God, you have ordained and constituted in a wonderful order the ministries of angels and mortals: Mercifully grant that, as your holy angels always serve and worship you in heaven, so by your appointment they may help and defend us here on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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The chasm

Posted on September 25, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for Year C Proper 21, September 25, 2022

I remember the first time I stumbled across a ha-ha – almost literally! 

A ha-ha is a deep and broad ditch with a wall at the bottom, creating a boundary in a park or garden – think grand country estate – that is invisible from a distance. Your eye skips over to the gap in the green grass so that it doesn’t interrupt the view from the great house, and only becomes obvious when you walk right up to the edge, but it is quite effective in keeping out deer and other riffraff. The name – “ha-ha” – comes from the surprise that it elicits from the one who stumbles into it.

In Jesus’ story, Abraham is given to say, “between you and us a great chasm has been fixed”. 

This, unusually for Jesus, is not a parable but a straight up moral fable: a rich man ignores the poor man at his gate at his own eternal peril. The rich man had either never read Moses and the prophets, or he thought that the warnings we heard from Amos this morning simply didn’t apply to him. There are always those who believe themselves to be exempt from the usual consequences of their decisions and character. This rich man continues in his self-deception even after death. He attempts to recruit Lazarus as a servant, believing himself even now to be sufficiently superior to make demands even of Abraham.

The chasm that has opened up between the rich man and Lazarus was long in the making, and yet he didn’t see it coming. As patient as a glacier, Lazarus sat at the gate awaiting mercy, while the rich man accrued deposits and encrusted himself with accoutrements, until they were as distantly separated from one another’s experience as the estuary is from the mountaintop. It is, in a true sense, a tragedy.

As with any good fable, there is a multitude of applications that we could make of this morality play to our own lives and times. 

At a global level, we could talk about the hunger of rich nations for more and more power and influence, consumption and growth, while others far and all too near pay the price with the symptoms of climate change: flooding and fire, the sores left on our planet by an impoverished diet stripped of green leafy forests and inadequate shelter from the ozone layer. Do we notice the suffering of Pakistan and Puerto Rico, or continue to pride ourselves on our own fragile and temporary comfort?

At a national level, we might talk about the chasm between those who consider themselves well insulated from disease, disaster, disability, gun violence, injustice, inequity, and those who carry the open wounds of grief, trauma, and the reprehensible poverty of Lazarus in the country of the rich man.

We could look at ourselves, church, and wonder whether we are doing enough to create relationships with those neighbours who are right on our doorstep.

All of this before we even get to the individual considerations of whether we, like the rich man, are isolating ourselves by our selfishness from those whom God has given us as neighbours, or whether we with Lazarus need the comfort of the angels and the promise of Abraham’s eventual embrace.

But the piece of the story that sticks to me like a burr is that chasm, how long it has been in the making, how deep and broad it has become, so that even Abraham no longer sees any way to bridge it. Like a ha-ha, the rich man doesn’t even see it until he is right up against it.

We read this story with a sense of dramatic irony. Jesus’ original audience, upon hearing the line, “neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead,'” did not know what Jesus was about to do, to accomplish on the cross, in the harrowing of hell, and by his resurrection. They had no idea how astounded the world would be by the telling of his new beginning, how the gospel would girdle the earth and cross unimaginable chasms of culture and time to bring us here, against the odds, to celebrate the one who was raised from the dead, who brought new life to the living and hope to depths of despair.

There is no chasm that Christ cannot cross.

In this I am of a mind with Paul, convinced that nothing, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). There is no chasm that Christ cannot and has not crossed for us.

However, we can divide ourselves from one another pretty effectively, and in doing so create hell on earth for some. Will we build a ha-ha, gazing past the chasm, letting nothing spoil our view, or will we practise seeing Christ in all people, as our baptismal covenant puts it?

We see the choice starkly, on the news, in the decisions that are made on our behalf whether to isolate and separate and put away those who come to this country for help, or whether to embrace the stranger and relieve the refugee. Will we dig a chasm or build a bridge?

We make the choice each time a stranger presents themselves, perhaps with their hand out, or with their handmade cardboard signs; whether or not we have anything material to help them with, we make the choice whether to see them, whether to see them as siblings, as beloved children of God worthy and in need of a blessing, or whether to pretend not to notice them at all.

We make the choice each time we notice the old and new gashes and scars that racism, sexism, plain selfishness, all kinds of hurts and harms have opened up between us; each time we choose to repent, to return, to ask forgiveness.

Our Collect for today praises God for declaring power in showing mercy and pity, the treasures of heaven. The richness of grace, of mercy, is that which denies the economy of separation and defines the boundaries of God’s love, which is limitless. It shows us the way to fill in the ditches and bring down the fences and level the stumbling places between us, by following in the footsteps of Christ, who has harrowed hell to be with us and to call us into new life with him. There is no chasm that love cannot cross.

Amen.

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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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