The Friday Fast: spring snow

Posted on March 11, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

Like snow that falls

after the daffodils have shown their colours,

Friday afternoon slips in

at the end of a long, slow week to whisper,

“One more fast yet

before the Sabbath.”

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“God shall give the angels charge over thee”

Posted on March 6, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the First Sunday in Lent, March 2022

Gravity is a morally neutral force. The devil was not asking Jesus to do anything brave or courageous or righteous when he tempted him to throw himself down from the tower, but on the contrary, to throw off his humanity for the sake of his own vainglory. If Jesus had done it, he would only have proven that he was not one of us after all; or else he would have fallen. But Jesus is with us, and for us.

The Archangel Michael, prince of all angels, is usually depicted in iconography soundly defeating the dragon, “that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil, and Satan”, in the book of Revelation (Revelation 12:7). Then was heard a voice from heaven proclaiming, “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah, for the accuser of our comrades has been thrown down … Rejoice then, you heavens and those who dwell in them! But woe,” the voice continues, “woe to the earth and the sea, for the devil has come down to you with great wrath because he knows that his time is short!” (Revelation 12:10-12)

The Book of Common Prayer, since its earliest editions, petitions St Michael and All Angels that those who worship in heaven might also help and defend us here on earth. The Archangel is implicated in the Roman Catholic rites of exorcism.

Michael is also the patron saint of Ukraine. An Eastern Orthodox Akathist, or hymn to the Archangel, concludes with a prayer that asks, in part,

“O holy and great Archangel of God Michael, first among the angels that stand before the inscrutable and transcen­dent Trinity, overseer and guardian of the human race, who with thine armies didst crush the head of the most-proud Morning Star in Heaven and dost ever put to shame his evil and cunning on earth, to thee do we flee with faith and to thee we pray with love; be thou an invincible shield and a firm bulwark of the Holy Church and our homeland, pro­tecting them with thy lightning-bearing sword from all ene­mies, both visible and invisible. Be thou a guardian angel …”

When the devil decided to tempt Jesus in the desert, his use of scripture was cynical. The pinnacle of his efforts was straight out of the psalms: “If you trust God so much,” the devil said; “If you really think that God is with you, that God keeps promises, that God loves you, then throw yourself off the temple and let God send guardian angels to catch you.” 

Much later, in the Garden, when Jesus asked his accusers, “Why have you come to me with clubs and swords. Don’t you know that I could call down a legion of angels to defend me from you if I wanted to?” (Matthew 26:52-56), I wonder if he was responding again to Satan whispering around the stressed edges of his mind, returned at an opportune time to test him. And still, in the moment of crisis, Jesus was far beyond that serpent’s reach.

I do not think it any accident that, after showing him all of the kingdoms of the earth in the second temptation, it was no Roman tower or pinnacle to which the devil took him to tempt him next. The idea that Jesus would willingly cast himself down from the temple, away from the presence of God, and expect angels to follow was both misguided and misleading. It would be nonsensical for the Word of God, to depart from the will of God, which was not that Jesus should avoid or cheat death and its snares, but soundly defeat it.

He did this not by employing his angels to shield him from the world, but by participating so fully in it that he took all of its injustice and its violence and its blasphemy upon his shoulders and carried them through the streets of Jerusalem, though he might stumble beneath their weight, to the site of crucifixion.

Even knowing that resurrection was at hand, he did not avoid our sorrow or suffering, but he shared fully and bodily in it.

So where does that leave us and our prayers of petition, or for protection? What is the difference between trusting God and testing God?[i]

If we expect God’s angels and archangels to fly us away, to help us flee from our responsibilities to repentance and restitution and reconciliation and relationship; if we turn away from the Cross and expect Jesus to follow us, then we are not trusting God, but testing God’s patience.

None of this undoes the good news that Jesus also told us, that if one lamb should go astray, our good shepherd will go after it, but at what cost, what risk to the life of the flock as a whole?

In the fuller version of the psalm that the devil quotes, there is a plague stalking the country. Tens of thousands are dying, maybe hundreds of thousands, let the reader hear. The psalmist prays that he is protected, like one who stands on the field of battle while all around him are falling, as though the angels have formed a shield around him, impermeable and impenetrable.

We are entering the third year of a plague that has killed nearly a million people in this country alone, and brought low many more. We are grateful for this present lull in the battle. Covid has no conscience; it is a morally neutral force. But defeating it has required and will continue to require a moral response of us, one based in love, self-sacrifice, wisdom, and care for the other, rather than bravado, selfishness, greed, or vainglory.

It makes me wonder, what if we are supposed to be the angels to one another, to catch those who are falling through the cracks; to catch them and cradle them? 

The letter to the Hebrews quotes another psalm, “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, or mortals that you care for them? You have made them for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned them with glory and honor, subjecting all things under their feet” (Hebrews 2:6-8). For God did not provide this world to the angels, but to us (Hebrews 2:5).

What if we are called upon to lift one another over the obstacles that would crush our toes and cause someone to stumble? What if we are responsible for helping to carry the cross of Christ, to lift the burden of suffering from the Son of Man, to strive to remove the violence of war and the scourge of terror from among his children, to bear their burdens; to bring relief to those in need, without complaining of the cost? What if we are called to the way of truly sacrificial love, as the means to resurrection?

What if when we do these things, taking up spiritual arms against the onslaught of sin, the temptations of selfishness, fasting and praying and strengthening our spirits and training up our hearts to look to God in faith, and in trust; what if it is when we do these things that St Michael and her angels surround us and support us and sustain us, as the angels attended to Jesus in the wilderness after he resisted the wiles of the devil, according to Matthew (Matthew 4:11)?

Leave not without thy help and protection, O Archangel of God, also us who glorify thy holy name today; for behold, even though we be great sinners, nevertheless we desire not to perish in our iniquities, but rather to turn to the Lord and be quickened by Him unto good works. … Strengthen through the Grace of the Lord our weak will and feeble state, that, made firm in the law of the Lord, we may hence­forth cease to be tossed to and fro by earthly thoughts …, foolishly forgetting the eternal and heavenly for the sake of the corruptible and earthly. Above all these things, do thou ask for us from on high a true spirit of repentance, unfeigned sor­row before God and contrition for our sins, that we may spend the number of days that remain to us of this transito­ry life not in gratifying our senses and in slavery to our passions, but in wiping out the evil things we have done by tears of faith and heartfelt contrition, by struggles of purity and holy deeds of mercy. And when the hour of our end … draweth nigh, O Archangel of God, leave us not defenseless against the spirits of evil in the upper air, who are accustomed to hinder the ascent of man’s soul on high, that guarded by thee we may attain without hindrance those most glorious dwelling-places of Paradise, where there is neither sorrow, nor sighing, but life everlasting, and be vouchsafed to behold the most radiant countenance of our all-beneficent Lord and Master, fall down with tears at His feet, in joy and compunction shouting aloud: Glory to Thee, our most dear Redeemer, Who, because of Thy great love for us unworthy ones, hast been pleased to send Thine angels in the service of our salvation! Amen.[ii]

[i] See The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, Volume IV, 1048

[ii] Akathist to Archangel Michael, https://www.akathists.com/archangel-michael/akathist/

Image: Archangel Michael (Aleppo) Q104195342, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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The Friday Fast: God remembers that we are dust

Posted on March 4, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

An occasional series for Lent 2022

God remembers that we are dust

On street corners, cats scavenge for scraps
deep within the angles of the shadows;
dust and debris fallen from the high-carried
baskets of bread and meat; the fruit
they could take or leave; the herbs,
relics of another time and place
where the sun shone and the city
opened its gates to devour its light,
intoxicate them.

A little lower than angels, we
carry the baskets high, but we
are not the acme of this trickle-down economy;
shedding our dust and ashes,
knees and ankles buckled by 
our own cobblestones, the ways
of our own making; we grow
like weeds among the dirt, shallow-rooted,
subject to drought,

Yet God remembers us.
God remembers that we are but dust
and the ashes of last year’s plans;
God remembers how once we blossomed
with hope and love; even so
God sweeps together the dust and ashes,
anoints them with a little oil from the marketplace,
daubs the walls while the world sleeps:
Remember, and return.

This poem is also found at the Episcopal Cafe

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Ash Wednesday: ice to ashes

Posted on March 2, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

Last Saturday, I spent far too much time and energy chipping away at the layer of ice that was left behind after I shovelled the snow. I did it because the sun was out and I knew that if I could just break up the ice enough, the sun would do the rest, but that if I left that half-inch layer intact, the chances were that it would not look much different by the time the sun went down.

The power of the sun is an immense natural wonder. I tried looking up the numbers, but they are mind-boggling. Suffice to say that on a cold winter’s day, the sun is sufficient to melt the ice off my southeast-facing driveway – but even then, it could sometimes use some help.

In the old religions some worshipped the sun. We know better, that our Creator and Sustainer is more powerful, more personal, more remarkable and mysterious than the greatest created forces that we can encounter. Still, as I chipped away at that ice, with one eye toward Lent, I wondered whether my work on the driveway could be work as a metaphor for the season.

There is no doubt that God has more power to reach me than I have to reach God. And yet there is something to be said for clearing my heart of ice, for attempting to break up the layers of hardness and chill that have a tendency to accumulate, given the casual coldness of the world and the cynical response of my soul. There is something satisfying in partnering with the power of the Spirit to provoke repentant reflection, and the renewal of a spirit of resurrection. 

This does not have to do with making myself holier. There isn’t much I can do about that: God is the one who sanctifies. It certainly isn’t about making myself look or feel or seem holier; Jesus has plenty to say about the outwardly pious, as do the prophets (Matthew 6:1-6,16-20). It does have to do with paying attention to where I am setting up barriers that prevent me from seeing God, experiencing God’s love, reflecting God’s grace.

Someone, somewhere, has said that sin is whatever separates us from the knowledge and love of God. That could probably use some further examination (and Lent is a time for self-examination and reflection, leading to repentance), but in essence it rings true. Like the ice that goes before a fall, sin builds on itself and creates further harm. Selfishness engenders pride, and pride begets greed, and greed spawns envy, and envy was the first sin of Cain (Genesis 4:1-8). 

The more embroiled in sin we become the harder it seems to be to turn ourselves back toward God, to face the music. The sun on the ice can appear blinding instead of warming.

The prophet Joel evokes the threat of war and the terror of a people who feel helpless in the face of disaster, natural and unnaturally made (Joel 2:1-2). We see the dust and ashes and the weeping far too clearly in these days. Our sin is ever before us.

Yet the words of the ashes, taken from the words of the psalm (Psalm 103:14), are not a threat but a promise: God remembers that we are but dust. God knows our frailty and our fright, and our fragile faith.

It seems almost that God is not concerned for our shame, which is another form of self-pity. Jesus tells us to wash our faces and not to wallow but to simply to get on with the business of repentance: the chipping away of the ice that surrounds our hearts; to turn away from oppression, from the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil (Isaiah 9-10); to do good instead of harm; to do justice, and love mercy, to put it another way (Micah 6:8).

The work of Lent can be daunting. Self-denial is not an easy habit to establish, and our fasting may be fraught. What is healthful and helpful for us to give up, and what will further harm our relationships with God, our bodies, our spirits? Self-examination can be difficult, and repentance tinged with regret. But reading and meditating on God’s holy Word will remind us that God, unlike the sirens of this world, is slow to anger and full of compassion and kindness (Psalm 103:8). God remembers that we are but dust, and we can enter into that remembrance with God, warmed from ice to ashes, we will remember that God waits for us as a grandmother waits for a beloved child to come home, waiting to wash our faces and settle us down.

Then, the work of Lent is worth it, to melt open that doorway to the Spirit, the comfort of the Advocate, the joy of the Son, and the love of the Father, our mothering God.

Amen.

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Shrive vs shrivel

Posted on February 28, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

Shrive vs shrivel

Shrivel is related to wrinkling and to shrinkage, 
especially the kind that happens from drying out. Think
the unintended creases of a shirt sleeve, 
or a face not-so freshly from the pillow.

We could ask for our sins to be shrivelled, 
to curl up at the edges like offended nostrils, 
sawdust on the outskirts of the fire.

Shriving comes from the same pen 
that inscribes a penance, 
hatches out a psalm, 
writes a prescription for our sins before absolving them.

Each, I suppose, cures in its own way: 
one dries me out like leather, but the other 
spells my name in the same ink 
with which it writes the book of truth
whose words are living 
and will not be blotted out.

Wordplay in place of prayer will lead to dereliction, 
but One stencils wisdom on the tablet of the heart, 
great physician of the inward breath:

Write me the script for a new heart, O God; 
scratch out a new and shriven, 
unshrivelled spirit within me. 

*

It occurred to me idly to wonder whether the shriving of Shrove Tuesday was etymologically connected to shrivelling. According to The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (OUP, 1993), apparently (and fortunately) not.

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From the cloud

Posted on February 27, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the last Sunday after the Epiphany, 2022

The Transfiguration is one of those gospel events which puts our scepticism to the test. It challenges us to believe that Jesus is the Son of God, the Beloved, the Messiah, as he appeared to be on the mountaintop and as a voice from heaven attested. It confronts us with the truth of his divinity in the midst of his humanity. It shows us the consistency of God’s intervention in the world, God’s merciful attention to us, God’s children, through Moses and the prophets, through Jesus. It tells us that God has, indeed, drawn near to us: Emmanuel.

It is the bookend of the season after the Epiphany, which began as the Magi made their way home by another route to avoid the machinations of Herod. The revelation of a Messiah is not always welcomed.

At the beginning of this chapter of Luke, word has spread to Herod’s eventual successor of Jesus’ power and preaching, and the king was disturbed, and wondered who this might be, confronting the status quo with healing and mercy and turning the established order around and around. Some said that this was Elijah returned, some another ancient prophet. Some said it was John the Baptist, whom this Herod had beheaded, come back to haunt him. 

Jesus asked his disciples what they thought, and Peter told him plainly, “The Messiah of God.” 

Then Jesus began to tell them what being the Messiah really meant, and that they would need to be ready to take up their own crosses, too. “But truly I tell you,” he said, “there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”

Cyril of Alexandria connects all of this to the moment of Transfiguration, when the three disciples see Jesus clothed in glory, flanked by Moses and Elijah, to remove any confusion that Jesus was his own man, and consistent with God’s story of salvation, God’s steadfast loving kindness to those whom God has made. This, Cyril said, this brightness, this epiphany was the vision of the kingdom of God that Jesus promised his disciples; but it was not the end of the story. Even on the mountaintop, with Elijah and Moses, he was discussing his imminent death in Jerusalem. The whole episode, as blindingly bright as it is, takes place in the shadow of the Cross.

Moses and Elijah gather with Jesus not to congratulate him but with words of solidarity and comfort. They know, these prophets, what is in store, and they have come to lend their support, the strong staff of the law and the prophets, God’s consistent intervention in the world that God loves, to sustain Jesus in the crisis that is to come. He has been speaking with them of the Cross when the voice from heaven commands, “This is my Son: hear him.”

We want the revelation of the Christ, the epiphany of the Messiah, to be the brightness of the cloth, but it includes the cloud of the continuing conflict between Herod and the Magi, the worldly and the wise, the kingdom of heaven and the pursuits of a lesser form of majesty. And it is the promise that in all of these things, wherever we find them still active in the world, Christ is at work transforming them through the power of the Cross and the Resurrection that it engendered.

We are at the intersection of competing crises and compelling emergencies. The cruel and unusual invasion of a sovereign nation by one drunk on the vision of empire, is terrifying. I’ll be honest: it frightens me. And, it is one of many wars or conflicts currently being waged in the world. That spectre of war, the names we hoped never to hear again, are set against the backdrop of a global pandemic, the continuing violence of racism and its offshoots, the violation of our contract with creation, a world on fire. Why is Jesus still talking about crosses when the world is already twisted like a pretzel?

Well, it turns out that the reason is that God loves us. God loves us so much that even though we rejected Moses and the prophets, even though we are still more likely to fear Herod than to follow John the Baptist, even though we fail at loving our own neighbours, let alone our enemies; even though we still suffer war to happen, blinking at the slaughter of the innocents: nevertheless, God has not given up on loving us. God knows why; perhaps that is simply part of who God is.

And when Jesus said that there were some standing before him who would not taste death before they saw the kingdom of God, it may be that what he meant is that seeing God’s love in the world transforms everything; that God is able to turn even the shadow of the Cross into the pathway to Resurrection, even as the seed that falls is transformed in time into a sunflower.

It may be that in taking Peter, James, and John up the mountain with him, Jesus was giving them that foretaste of glory that they would need to sustain them through the days and weeks to come: that they would need to draw upon to find hope even when all hope seemed lost, to find faith when they heard the incredible stories of the women who found the empty tomb, to find the strength not to fall apart, even though martyrdom finally claimed them.

Jesus gave them what they needed to endure: the message of God’s consistent loving kindness throughout the generations. The cloud which guided the children of Israel through the wilderness. The glimpse of glory from within its shadow.

The fact that the world still turns to Herod as often as to hope, to Pilate as often as to peace; the fact that innocents still suffer and that we still falter and stumble, not knowing even what to say – these are not signs that the kingdom of heaven is far from us, but reminders of how close it could be, if only we knew where to look. The child born in the bomb shelter should be visited by Magi and receive their strange gifts.

If instead of lights from Herod’s palace and guided missile systems the world would follow the star, looking for God among the humble places, the children in need of protection and stable shelter. If instead of looking to sit at the right or the left hand of power, we sought instead to carry the cross of those who were stumbling beneath its weight, as Simon of Cyrene did for Jesus. If, instead of being merely dazzled by Jesus, we listened to him, as the voice from heaven suggested, then we might begin to see those glimpses of the kingdom of God among us.

The vision, though, is not the end of the story. It was in the cloud that God drew close to Moses, and in the silence at the eye of the storm that God spoke to Elijah. On that mountaintop, it was not out of the brightness that the voice of God spoke, but out of the cloud that surrounded them.

We have the brightness of the Resurrection. And even in the cloud, Emmanuel: God is with us.

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(Holy Saturday)

Posted on February 26, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

How to carry the world’s pain –

the cries of the children,

the palsy of their great-grandparents

confused with the tremors of memory;

the subtle, internal turmoil that turns

digestion upside down –

violence is not a visitor but

an ever-present guest.

It trains the hearts that pound the nails,

hardens the hands against the kickbacks –

iron echoes.

 

Iron echoes.

In the lead-lined core of history

there is one who is still absorbing

the repercussions.

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Yesterday is closer than it seems

Posted on February 24, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

Yesterday I walked past a fallout shelter sign

in the “historic district” of a run-down part of town,

its triune logo sunny against the greying day,

repainted, no doubt, as an artefact of interest;

but yesterday is closer than it seems and safety,

like the Trinity to which we pray today for peace,

impenetrable in its mystery.

Praying for the relief of those afflicted by aggression and war in Ukraine. Praying for peace.

Image via canva.com

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Love your enemies

Posted on February 20, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the seventh Sunday after the Epiphany, February 20th 2022. In the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus directs us to love our enemies.

Do you believe that you have been forgiven?
Do you believe that God has forgiven you your faults and your failings and your shortcomings and your sins; that God in the person of Jesus Christ has redeemed you and restored you and brought you to new life, a foretaste of the resurrection to come?

And do you believe that God has forgiven your enemies?

If I say, “I have no enemies” (to paraphrase a psalm), then I am deceiving myself, and the truth is not in me, for I am at times my own worst enemy, and I know that the world is divided amongst itself, and that oppression still stalks the poor in spirit and the meek who have yet to inherit the earth, that sin is the enemy of God’s good grace. We cannot avoid Jesus’ strong words by replacing them with milder alternatives or euphemisms. Christ does not lie. He knew what it was to have enemies, and he knows us.

Jesus recognized the existence of enemies. He did not try to sanitize the extremism of an occupying empire, nor the cruelty of crucifixion, by “agreeing to disagree”. He did not agree that he deserved such a vile death! He refused to engage the injustice system of Pilate and that trumped-up trial by Herod’s flunkies – this is important, because loving our enemies does not demand that we ingratiate ourselves with them, or with the ways of enmity – but neither would he tolerate violence against them, healing the ear of the slave injured while arresting him in the garden. Even from the cross, he forgave them. He loved his enemies, even to the bitter end.

So Wilfred Owen, poet of the Great War, imagined in “Strange Meeting” that the enemy he had killed on the battlefield welcomed him to the underworld with “hands as if to bless.”[i]

After two brutal world wars, the powers that be came together to negotiate the Geneva Conventions; to attempt to re-humanize our relationships with one another, with an enemy. They provide for things like the imperative after a battle, as soon as is humanly possible to search, rescue, treat, and aid all injured and sick, regardless of side, and to protect them from further harm. Enemies are not our enemies forever, and the demands of humanity outweigh any other declarations of allegiance, even in war. “Prisoners of war are entitled in all circumstances to respect for their persons and their honour,” the articles declare,[ii] in a strange and somewhat perverse foreshadowing of our own baptismal covenant.

The burden of love outweighs all other duties, and not only toward those who love us. Even our secular treaties and rules of engagement declare it to be true. And still, Jesus goes further.

In the examples that Jesus gives to his followers on the plain, he is not talking about abstract love or lip-service to prayers for hypothetical persecutors. The occupying forces could and did conscript the people to bear their burdens, without regard to their interests or civil rights. If the people resisted, the occupying authorities could and did use force to persuade them to comply. As Rowan Williams writes in his haunting reflection and response to the events of 9/11, the soldier’s slap “is the kind of gesture that assumes no response at all; it’s designed to be the end of the story, because it simply affirms who is in charge.”[iii] The order of the soldier to carry his kit works much the same way. 

But for Christians, for Christ, someone else is in charge. Someone else has the final say. For Jesus, for his close followers, there is the choice not to accept the premise of the order, of the injury; there is the invitation to tell a different story.

Melissa Florer-Bixler, in the beautifully titled, How to Have an Enemy, writes that “In the teaching to ‘turn the other cheek’ Jesus does not call us to passive reception of violence but instead to dismantle the power of the old order in creative, life-giving ways.”[iv]

We do have to be very careful with this passage, not to promote the acceptance of abuse or oppression, in any form, by anyone. This is not a prescription for submission to personal abuse and harm. Instead, turning the other cheek is possible, perhaps even permissible, only where it acts as the rejection of abuse, the refusal to accept a status quo of violence and force, of “might makes right”. In this way it becomes the emblem of a new reality, one in which Jesus has already led the way.

How do we love our enemies in this reality? We respect the dignity of every human being enough to do them the honour of believing what they are capable of, protecting the vulnerable from excessive and abusive power, confronting them with justice and with peace, without losing our own humanity, and without denying theirs. We strive for a world in which enmity is no longer necessary, because the poor are protected and the meek are respected and the marginalized have been centred and celebrated, and we refuse to take up the old tools of oppression and enmity to bring that world into being. To quote Florer-Bixler once more, “Resisting the desire for retribution is the announcement of a new world. It refuses the tools of death. In the end it will save our enemies too.”[v] And, it will preserve our hearts from sin, and our souls from entropy.

And if we say, that cannot be, that’s not how the world works – perhaps that is because we are afraid to live as though Christ really meant what he said, really went to the cross, even if we hope that resurrection will follow. “Be not conformed to this world,” wrote Paul, that former enemy of the church turned avid convert; “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2)

The kingdom of God is a whole new world order. Actually, it’s the original world order, the starting point and end of creation, which we’ve managed to mess up pretty brutally along the way. Jesus reminds us of the dream of God, in which justice and mercy flow like wine and water, and righteousness and peace have kissed one another, and he tells us that the dream is close at hand, if only we will wake up to it.

Be transformed by the renewing of your minds, that you may discern what is good. That transformation is not an optional part of the process. Martin Luther King, Jr., preached, “Nonconformity is creative when it is controlled and directed by a transformed life and is constructive when it embraces a new mental outlook. By opening our lives to God in Christ we become new creatures. This experience … is essential if we are to be transformed nonconformists and freed from … cold hardheartedness and self-righteousness.”[vi]

That is where the other part of Jesus’ command comes in: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” Pray for those who persecute you. Give to God your anger, your frustration, your enmity. Remember that you are forgiven, even for being your own worst enemy. Remember that God has judged, that God has justice, that mercy means that the oppressed will be restored, and the oppressors put in their place. Forgiveness, for God, is a first principle rather than an afterthought. Even so, trust God to deal with your enemies justly, acceptably, perfectly; however you may pray for them, God’s will be done.[vii]

Do you believe that you are forgiven?

Do you believe that God has forgiven you your faults and your failings and your shortcomings and your sins, and mine; that God in the person of Jesus Christ has redeemed us and restored us and brought us to new life, a foretaste of the resurrection to come?

If not, pray anyway. If so, let’s pray to live that way.

Amen.

[i] Wilfred Owen, “Strange Meeting”, collected in The Rattlebag, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, eds (Faber and Faber, 1982), 407

[ii]   Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Geneva, 12 August 1949. Respect for the persons and honour of prisoners. Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Additional Protocols, and their Commentaries. https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Treaty.xsp?action=openDocument&documentId=77CB9983BE01D004C12563CD002D6B3E, accessed February 2022.

[iii] Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust: After September 11 (Wm B. Eerdmans, 2002), 24-25

[iv] Melissa Florer-Bixler, How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger & the Work of Peace (Herald Press, 2021), 101. This sermon is indebted to Pr Florer-Bixler beyond the quotations cited.

[v] Ibid, 103

[vi] Martin Luther King, Jr. “Transformed Nonconformist,” collected in Strength to Love (Fortress Press, 2010), 17

[vii] See “Praying for Enemies,” in Melissa Florer-Bixler, op cit., 45-62

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What is good news?

Posted on February 15, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

“Take 20 minutes and list the ways God
is already using you to be good news …”

God showed me a robin in the snow,
so I hung a feeder from my window:
so far no one has used it but
the cats live in hope.

What is good?
What is news?
There is none good but God alone,
and nothing new under the sun.

Bad news from a stranger elicited
kindness from a slew of friends;
did choosing their compliments
make them smile? Good news out of self-pity.

Has it been 20 minutes
yet?

And then, I celebrated Eucharist,
giving thanks, breaking bread, singing
holy, holy, holy
Lord, is God using me?

Or, with the tenderness of love,
are They lifting me with one hand while
the other waits to catch me
as I fall?

I am participating in a 20-day Evangelism Challenge designed by the Revd Dr Patricia Lyons for and with the Diocese of Ohio. Clearly, it’s a good thing that I set the expectation up front that I might not post every day.
Today’s prompt asks participants to “Take 20 minutes and list the ways God is already using you to be good news to those around you. Are there patterns? Does anything surprise you?”

Sign up for more prompts at https://www.dohio.org/offices/congregations-christian-formation/2022-winter-convocation

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