The level place

Posted on February 13, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany. The Gospel lesson is from the Sermon on the Plain.

All is not what it seems. 

Jeremiah asks, “Who can understand the heart of a person, of a people?” It has a tendency to deceive itself; all is not what it seems. But God will not be deceived, nor is God influenced by the outward appearances of success, strength, social acceptability. 

Jesus’ words to his disciples in the level place take aim at the false assumptions of us all about what represents God’s favour, God’s love for God’s people.

In the gospel according to Matthew, Jesus preaches from the mountainside; in Luke, he come down to stand in a level place. He is in the levelling place, and he levels with the crowd, and with us.

“Do you think that you are secure in your status, your riches, your good reputation, your sound body and skilled mind?” he asks. “Think again. For the poor, the wretched, the hungry, the despised: those are the ones overdue for God’s blessing. These are they upon whom healing has been proclaimed.”

The people in the crowd, you may notice, were not the powerful or the self-possessed. They came with their unclean spirits and their palsied hands, with their hurts and their heartbreaks, with their hidden and public diseases, united in their unacceptable brokenness. These were the people reaching for Jesus and touching him, upon whom his power poured out, upon whom his pity rested. Those who were in need of him were healed, and those who thought that they had no need of him – they were the ones who would weep when they realized what they had tried to turn their backs upon; from whom its was they had tried to turn away.

*

“Those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength … They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes,” warns Jeremiah. Those who are self-possessed, self-assured, whose roots go only as deep as their own bootstraps – they are rooted in a desert. They do not see the erosion around them, the encroaching sand. There is no one near, they have not kept company with those who gather at the watering hole, who share the springs that bubble up at God’s command.

But we are dependent not upon ourselves but upon God, and if Jesus has taught us anything by his incarnation, by becoming one of us, it is that we need one another, too. Each of us. All of us. 

It is only when all are fed that there will be none left to go hungry; only when each has a voice that no one has to shout; only when there is nothing left to be lost that there will be nothing left to weep over. 

The problem of the shrub that tries to stand on its own dignity and its own shallow root system is not only that it will one day, inevitably, shrivel, but that in the meantime it will spend all of its energy sustaining only itself. It will miss out on the joy of collaborating within God’s creation, the ecosystem of grace. 

*

You know that we have a problem going in around us and within us right now. The book bannings and even book burnings, the frightening new bomb threats to HBCUs, violent acts of antisemitism and re-legalization of discrimination by gender, rumours of war and of insurrection; all of these are greater or lesser symptoms of the disease that has taken hold of us, the virus of self-satisfaction and self-reliance, which are the respectable faces of selfishness. 

But there is no blessing in privilege. Inequality is not a blessing even upon those who benefit materially from it. Freedom from love is no freedom at all. There is no blessing in superiority, let alone supremacy; these things are deceptions of the heart and perversions of God’s mercy. But God’s justice will not be mocked.

Our aspiration, if we follow Jesus, is not for ourselves, but for each other; for strangers, even for enemies, as well as for family and friends. As long as selfishness continues, Jesus and Jeremiah each warn, then the crooked and deceitful heart is just begging to be broken. 

*

The problems writ large may seem far from the everyday experience of many of us. But the symptoms of the virus start in the cells. Each one of us is susceptible to selfishness. There is not one among us who has not looked upon another with contempt, who has not justified herself by comparison, nor considered her own needs good reason to go before another. It seems to be human nature – except that Jesus took our human nature upon himself, became our human nature, without selfishness, without pride, without exceptionalism.

The root of hatred is the fear that allowing that someone else is as beloved, esteemed, filled by the Spirit of God as I am takes something away from me; that somehow if everyone is as beloved as I am, as blessed as I am, as good as I am, that diminishes my blessing, my belovedness. What nonsense! As though God’s grace were rationed! Yet time and again we fall prey to something less than love.

*

What then, are we to do, when the human heart is crooked and will keep deceiving us with its petty pride and its little victories?

Here’s where we are in luck. The people came in a great crowd, from the cities and the coastlands and the interior, from the wilderness. “They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.”

They came to Jesus, and he healed them of their unclean spirits and their diseases of heart and soul, and of body. They came because they knew that they could not manage it on their own, and they came because they knew that he loved them, each of them, all of them, enough to share his anointing with them. He was their bright hope, and he is ours: not hope for riches or status or even acceptability; see what he says about the reputation of those who do what is right.

But he is our hope for wholeness, for a heart that knows what it is to be truly human, healed by grace of its unclean spirit; a heart to love and to know its belovedness. 

We stand on ground that is spinning at astronomical speed, hurtling through the immensity of space, at an enormous distance from the sun. No wonder we feel unstable! But Jesus is our level ground. He is here with us still, in the level place, steady and steadfast in a world full of trouble, rising above it all.

Posted in lectionary reflection, sermon | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Flotsam

Posted on February 11, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

There is a thread that ties the sparrow
to the hair on the pillow in the morning;
There is a straight line from “My thoughts
are not your thoughts,” through,
“There are more things …, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
There is some cold comfort in the promise
that tomorrow will bring new worries;
at least no one sugar-coats the tragedy
of salvation; 

somewhere in the midst of all
even sea monsters sport 
and play for the entertainment of God
and the bemused, slightly horrified wonder
of we who drift, moored to the flotsam 
left by the winged one who brooded over water at our beginning.

References: Matthew 10:29-30; Isaiah 55:8; Hamlet Act 1, Scene v (William Shakespeare); Matthew 6:34; Psalm 104:26; Genesis 1:1-2

I am participating in a 20-day Evangelism Challenge designed by the Revd Dr Patricia Lyons for and with the Diocese of Ohio (although I don’t promise to post every day!). Today’s prompt asks: “What is your favorite scripture when you need inspiration? Why do you love it?” I’m really not sure how to answer that comprehensively, but some candidates are included in the poem above.
Sign up for more prompts at https://www.dohio.org/offices/congregations-christian-formation/2022-winter-convocation

Posted in poetry, prayer | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

A memory in black and white

Posted on February 10, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A memory so ancient, it could be in black and white.

I met the vicar on the street, in his white collar.

He said, “J’accuse!”

He did not. 

He said, “It has been too long since you received Communion.”

I was so far from grace, I heard conviction instead of invitation.

“I was busy,” with adolescent dignity, “playing your black and white Sunday School piano.”

I think he wore a black hat.

He said, “You need Communion.” 

And he passed on.

In the blackest sky I ever knew shone the most and brightest stars.

I saw some fall like the round, white wafer into my hand.

I am participating in a 20-day Evangelism Challenge designed by the Revd Dr Patricia Lyons for and with the Diocese of Ohio (although I don’t promise to post every day!). Today’s prompt asks: “Think about your life. When have you felt close to God? When have you felt far from God? What brought you home?”
Some of us have a lot of life to sift through! The longer version of the memory above is written up below.
Sign up for more prompts at https://www.dohio.org/offices/congregations-christian-formation/2022-winter-convocation

I do not have good memories of my teenage years. Make of that what you will; I do not remember those times well.

For example, in my twenties I met a woman at a hotel who swore that she knew me. We traded overlapping, intersecting stories and locations, and she pinned me down to a weeklong, residential music retreat held at a teacher training college. She was in the county youth choir; I was in the orchestra. I had often wondered how I knew so well what the entrance to that college looked like, since I did not remember going there. To this day, I have no memory beyond its front doors.

Were those the days when I was far from God? I was clearly far from myself.

I do remember a conversation I had in passing with the vicar. When I was a child, and started taking myself to church, I didn’t know that there was such a thing as Sunday School, held in the parish hall where I went to Brownies. I stayed in the service with the adults and their overcoats. I am glad no one sent me away. (This was in the olden days.)

But at a certain point in my teens, I was recruited to play the piano for the Sunday School songs, ended up spending my 11 o’clock hour in the parish hall instead of the wooden nave, in my side pew with the view of the Lady Chapel. 

When the vicar stopped me on the street, somewhere between his house and the churchyard, and said, “You haven’t been to Communion for a while,” I was indignant. “I’m busy playing the piano for your Sunday School,” I thought, and perhaps said. “Then you need to come to the 8 o’clock,” he returned, unperturbed. “You need the Eucharist.”

It was sometime close to that conversation that I saw the stars for the first time. Of course I had seen ordinary, suburban stars before, but here in the Welsh hills, on some youth group weekend that I also barely remember, I saw the stars as they were designed to be seen. I do not know even today whether there was a meteor shower, or whether with such a conflagration of stars visible one is bound to see the odd one fall.

Somehow, that memory has bound itself to the word on the street, and the knowledge more than the remembrance of returning to the altar rail, of the Sacrament in my hand, in my mouth. It turned out that Dilwyn was right: give me all the stars in the night sky; I still will need Jesus.

Posted in poetry, prayer | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

It was the sea

Posted on February 9, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

It was the sea,
salt and water,
the press of the tide
and the undertow;
the frightening mystery
of jellyfish; the shells,
whitewashed tombs
yet evidence of enduring
beauty

I remember once
we went out
in a rubber dinghy,
daring the waves to drown us,
and they did.
Beneath the boat,
I held my breath,
let the currents
fight one another
for me.

The church looked like
an upturned boat;
I could count the rowers’
benches stretching
toward the Host upheld
just out of reach

When the tide went out,
mudflats emerged,
full of seagulls,
silt sucking at ankles and thighs;
as often as I entered the ocean
to wash my feet
I found myself once again
stuck in the mud.

If I could have stayed
with the sea, salt
drying on my hair …

I am participating in a 20-day Evangelism Challenge designed by the Revd Dr Patricia Lyons for and with the Diocese of Ohio (although I don’t promise to post every day!). Today’s prompt for drawing closer to God: Who introduced you to (a relationship) with the person of Jesus Christ, and how? 
Sign up for more prompts at https://www.dohio.org/offices/congregations-christian-formation/2022-winter-convocation

Posted in poetry, prayer, story | Tagged | Leave a comment

Is it joy?

Posted on February 8, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

Is it joy
or curiosity that binds them;
astonishment in discovering
that God
has made another, unalike,
incomprehensible if somewhat
familiar?

Is it joy,
the flick of the ear,
the tic of the tail,
a frisson of fur filled
with static
electricity,
the stuff of life?

Who would not enjoy
the vast and tiny details
of God’s imagination;
the curious creations
of Love?

Photo credit: Gareth Hughes

I am participating in a 20-day Evangelism Challenge designed by the Revd Dr Patricia Lyons for and with the Diocese of Ohio (although I don’t promise to post every day!). Today’s prompt for drawing closer to God: What in the past 24 hours has given you joy?
Sign up for more prompts at https://www.dohio.org/offices/congregations-christian-formation/2022-winter-convocation

Posted in poetry, prayer | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

A Song of Anna

Posted on February 2, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

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

A version of this Song appears, with commentary, at the Episcopal Cafe.

Or, try singing this version to “O Jesulein süß”:

a_song_of_annaDownload

Featured image: Presentation of Christ in the Temple, from the Melisende Psalter, C12th British Library, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (detail)

Posted in holy days, poetry, prayer | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

God has warm legs?

Posted on January 30, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A homily for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, which was our Annual Meeting at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid

The other morning I happened to pick up my phone before I got out of bed. This is very unusual; I try to follow the advice of the professionals and leave my phone behind when I am trying to sleep. But no matter; the phone was there, I picked it up, and it caught a ray of sunlight coming through the blinds and flashed it across the far corner of the room.

The cats love random flashes of light. They sit and jabber at them when they land on the ceiling, and chase them around the room like laser pointers. Now, every morning since the phone incident, the gray cat has woken me by poking around in the corner, calling softly for the flash of light she once saw there. She doesn’t understand that the conditions that produced the effect were a one-off combination that I might not be able to reproduce even if I tried: the exact angle and brightness of the sun, the exact angle at which I held my phone, the circumstances that had led me to have it in my hand in the first place.

Eventually she gives up and comes to lean against my legs until I have to leave the warmth of our little nest.

Watching her yesterday morning, I thought of the ways in which we all look to recreate events and conditions from the past that might not be available or relevant or even desirable any more. When the magi left the manger, they returned home by another road, and had they decided to return to Bethlehem, to visit the child and his mother once more, or had they sent their friends to follow up, they would not have passed through Herod’s palace again, looking for directions. They would not have found the holy family in the same place, either; they had fled to Egypt. 

Even Jesus, returning to his familiar family synagogue at Nazareth discovered that it was not the same as when he was a child. He quoted proverbs to the people – not biblical proverbs, but adages and idioms they had once taught him: Physician, heal thyself; and the one we all know, hanging in the background, cross-stitched into the air: You can’t go home again.

Conditions change, the world turns, people grow, some get sick, some get better, some flee to Egypt, some return. We cannot expect, nor should we try, to recreate the past; but there is sunlight in the future, too, and flashes of inspiration. And there is warmth still in the relationships that endure. The cat, when she has given up on the flash of light, curls up in the patient knowledge that sooner or later, someone with warm legs will feed her; that she is beloved.

Jesus went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom; and he continued to do so throughout his ministry. His relationship with God, with the prayers of his people, with the scriptures and their shared meaning for the gathered people: these were the warm places that he returned to again and again, knowing that they would feed him even as he paid out healing and hope wherever he went.

It is love that holds us together, after all: the love of God that reassures us that we will be fed, forgiven; the love that we have for one another, that has its moments of regret when we see whom we are missing; the love that Jesus has planted in our hearts, Christ’s love for the world, his longing to set it free.

Some things are constant; others are ephemeral, tricks of light in a mirror. We put our faith, if we are wise, in that which will endure. I am not saying that nothing will ever be the same again, although it’s true that we cannot visit the same moment twice. But we are not dependent upon flashes of light appearing in the same place twice for our faith, our hope, nor our love. We know the warmth of God’s love that sustains us, the warmth of the love of this community that surrounds us. However the conditions change and shift and wherever the light comes from this year, God has proven God’s constancy toward us. The Word of the Lord is with us, for us to plant and to build us up, our warm refuge, and our strength.

Amen.

Posted in homily, lectionary reflection, sermon | Leave a comment

Decade

Posted on January 24, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

Ten years a priest.
I should have something to say,
but I have let words trickle away, 
at funerals or weddings,
during mundane Monday 
phone calls, meetings;

I notice the peripheral
things, such as my hair,
cut off after my husband’s cancer,
when I couldn’t handle
one more thing,
which grew back 
in pandemic’s early days
when I couldn’t be near
one more person,

Is now the same length 
again as it was ten years
ago, although
each strand that hangs
in the photos between 
my face and my family 
has fallen away, 
like words that fell
from my lips 
or silently decayed.

They have been replaced,
with new growth – a miracle,
as are words of grief,
blessing, prayer that continue
to babble, to bubble up,
to sink into the silt,
to water my eyes;

as is the Word that continues
to wrap my heart with stubborn moss.

Posted in poetry, prayer | Tagged | 1 Comment

On the sabbath, he went to the synagogue

Posted on January 23, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon on the third Sunday after the Epiphany, January 23 2022. The gospel reading includes Jesus’ teaching in his childhood synagogue in Nazareth.

On the sabbath, Jesus went to the synagogue, as was his custom.

It is a comforting picture: Jesus, who had grown up in Nazareth, attending the synagogue week by week. It would be full of familiar details, familiar faces. The scroll which they handed to him – he had watched his mentors, perhaps his own father, read it as a child. Now, it was his turn to proclaim the prophet’s message of hope and of justice, healing and the knowledge of God’s love, God’s favour.

It was the sabbath, so she went to the synagogue. I wonder how many people’s stories began that way last weekend, before the worship of the Jewish people was interrupted yet again by violence. It should be as safe as we feel coming to church. It should be as easy and as natural as the scripture makes it sound: it was Saturday, so he went to synagogue.

If the description of Jesus going home to his childhood congregation makes you nostalgic for gathering in our sanctuary, that is valid. We will be back together soon enough, though, and throughout this pandemic period, while it has been challenging, we have not faced any threat that is not common to the entire global population.

Unfortunately, for our cousins and siblings going to synagogue, there are other considerations. It is a sad fact that antisemitism continues to infect the public imagination. It was no accident that last week’s hostage-taker chose a synagogue to stage his act of attempted terrorism. He, who grew up two hundred miles and not ten years away from me, had absorbed messages about Jews that coloured his choice.

Yair Rosenberg, writing for the Atlantic, calls antisemitism, “a conspiracy theory about how the world operates.” It is dangerous to everyone, to all of us, he argues, because the nature of conspiracy theories is to distort our view of reality, of how the world really works, in favour of “fevered fantasies.”

We have seen how dangerous conspiracy theories can be over the past two years when celebrities and authorities and people’s uncles have touted miracle cures for Covid over proven medicine, and eschewed public health practices in favour of magical thinking, or misplaced individualism. We have seen how dangerous conspiracy theories can be to our democracy.

Conspiracy theories affect us all; but the enduring nature of antisemitism is particularly dangerous to our Jewish neighbours. It is simply not right that anyone should have to think twice about going to synagogue on the sabbath, as was Jesus’ custom.

We have a particular responsibility to counter antisemitism wherever we encounter it, not only because of Jesus’ heritage, and not only even because the Christian churches have a long and sorry history of theological and practical antisemitism for which to atone. We, who follow the Way, the Truth, the Life, have a responsibility to speak up for that truth, to counter the lies that bind our cousins to the risk of violence: to counter antisemitism and it vile conspiracies in our communities, and even in our own reading of scripture.

When Jesus stood up to read from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue, and when he boldly claimed the Spirit of God for himself, and declared that the scriptures had been fulfilled, that the year of the Lord’s favour was, like the kingdom of God, at hand – this was not a claim without risk.

The Roman empire had claimed kingship for itself, and installed its Caesars as its gods. They knew, the Romans, that the Jews were faithful only to the Almighty; that they would not worship idols of metal, stone, nor even of flesh. Within a generation of Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Romans would raze the Temple and devastate the priests and the people. Yet here was Jesus, claiming that the kingdom of God, the year of the Lord’s favour, was at hand.

In retrospect, we, as Christians, understand that he meant that he was God’s favour, God’s love born among us; that he had come to heal the sick, bind up the broken-hearted, release the captives from their misery, even as God had always been faithful to God’s people, leading them out of bondage in Egypt, restoring them from their exile, binding up their broken hearts again and again.

Perhaps it was because of the breadth and length and power of the Roman empire that God chose this moment to reveal the plan for salvation to the rest of the nations: because in this moment all the nations needed it; because in this moment all were crying out for something real, something true, instead of the false gods of the Caesars. It was also a prime moment for the word to take flesh and to be carried far and wide, across trade routes and along roads made straight, ironically enough, by their Roman builders.

Perhaps it was because it was in this moment that the nations needed to hear of something greater than the might of armies, stronger than the grip of emperors, a deeper peace than the uneasy truce of a people kept under control by threats and promises.

That word that was needed, that Word that was spoken, came from a young man from Nazareth, who had gone to synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom, and told his people, his family, his community of faith, his beloved ones, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

It has been the promise all along, and God has always fulfilled God’s promises. For our part, we understand that Jesus is the pinnacle of the promise, the evidence of Emmanuel, God with us; the atoning sacrifice and the light to the nations, to bring them, to bring us into the covenant that God had long established with God’s people.

And Jesus, this Jesus, our Jesus, was a Jew, going to synagogue on the sabbath, as was his custom.

We are reasonably confident that next Sunday, we will come back together in the sanctuary for our Eucharist and our Annual Meeting. For those who need to stay home to stay safe and healthy, we will continue to livestream and open the Zoom room. No one should feel obliged to risk their health or the health of others to be here. But those risks are not ones that we alone face.

As we prepare to come together on Sunday, as is our custom, let us pray for our siblings and cousins whose sabbath is complicated by antisemitism, and let us decide that, as far as it depends upon us, this will be the day, the year, when the scripture is fulfilled: good news and healing, release from all oppression, the knowledge of the Lord’s favour.

Image: (Part of) The Great Isaiah Scroll MS A (1QIsa, the Dead Sea scrolls), via wikimediacommons (public domain)

Posted in current events, lectionary reflection, sermon | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Working on a miracle

Posted on January 16, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the second Sunday after the Epiphany in 2022. The Gospel reading is the story of the wedding at Cana, at which Jesus turned water into wine. Other texts referenced include the Psalm for the day, Psalm 36.

How priceless is your love, O God! Your people take refuge under the shadow of your wings.
They feast upon the abundance of your house; you give them drink from the river of your delights. (Psalm 36:7-8)

And who will draw the water? And who will taste it, to find that it has been transformed, by the grace of God, by the presence of Christ, into something new, and unexpected, and long-awaited?

When I was a child in the 1970s, there was a drought – I remember the year I learned the word and its meaning – which resulted in planned water shut-offs three or four times a week. I remember filling the bath in the morning with a few inches of water to throw down the toilet or to wash hands; my mother filling the kettle so that there would be water for tea after work; pans of water sitting idle on the stove, ready to be pressed into service. I have to wonder, now, whether we really saved any water that way.

But either way, it meant that when a man came to my front door Thursday and said that they were about to shut off our water for the remainder of the day, I was ready, and I remembered. I remembered my mother, and as I – not too reluctantly – put off washing the kitchen floor till later, I remembered her mother, my grandmother, who once worked as a domestic servant. And as I pulled together the wherewithal to get our household hygienically and well-hydrated through a single afternoon, I thought about the servants in the story of the wedding, the ones sent to haul the water to make the miracle happen.

There are only a couple of stories in the gospel in which Jesus is said to have changed his mind about what he would or would not do. This is the one of them.

At first, when his mother came to him to report the lack of wine, Jesus responded … wearily? Why do I have to do everything? What has this to do with me anyway? How is it my problem? And don’t I get even an hour off to enjoy the wedding? (I’m paraphrasing.)

But Mary, his mother, in a way that only she could, read the man and ignored his words. She did not argue with him, merely turned to the servants and said, “Do as he tells you.” She put him in his place – amongst the servers. Was it from this incident that he derived his famous aphorism, “For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve”?

“Now standing there were six stone water jars, …. each holding twenty or thirty gallons.”

Some say that the next wars will be fought not over oil but over water; but it doesn’t have to be that way. When one runs short, it is all of our business. There is no, “What is that to me?” There is, for instance, no distance between Flint, Michigan and here, no difference between its children and the children of any city cornered into substandard housing and fed lead instead of water. 

You all know that the work is not done. Jesus, for the rest of his ministry, preached repeatedly parables about fair labour, a living wage, the value and dignity of each person and an end to their exploitation. The work is not yet done. There is time yet for us to participate in the miracle, to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24)

The shortages that we encounter tend to be those that we have created, through overuse, exploitation, gluttony. Where we have hoarded access to clean water, creative medicines, even access to the vote; where we have created shortages, it is not for us to say, “What is that to me?”

The work is not yet done, and those who will not see, who turn a blind eye to the continuing  and corrupting effects of greed, of privilege, of racism, and antisemitism; who complain about running out of wine while others are still hauling water; we don’t even know what it is that we are missing.

I can only imagine my grandmother’s face if she were serving at a wedding, tending to all sorts of details and dust-ups and delicacies so that the guests never even knew how much work it took, and someone told her, “Stop what you are doing and go fetch – I don’t know – like 150ish gallons of water for me, would you?”

This was not a small ask. But then, when the water was drawn and poured and her face was sweating into it, he told her with a twinkle, “Now draw out a measure and take it to your leader.” Now, having let her in on the work, he was letting her in on the joke, on the cosmic laughter that was his wedding gift not only to the couple but to all who were in on the secret, the servants and the servers, and his mother.

When Jesus first demurred, it was his mother, knowing that he would not resist, could not resist protecting the joy and the celebration of the loving couple; it was his mother who recruited him helpers, and reminded him that he did not have to perform the miracle alone. When he recognized that he was not alone in the work, he was also ready to share the joyful revelation of the result, the surprise on the chief steward’s face, with his new friends.

It is such a gift that Christ has shared with us, to share not only in the labour of love but also in its sweet rewards: the waters of purification turned into wine as repentance is turned into new life, which is resurrection; contrition into a celebration of the mercy of God, which is justice.

The work is not yet done. God knows, the work is not yet done. Which also means that there is time yet for us to participate in the miracle, if we are willing.

“How priceless is your love, O God! Your people take refuge under the shadow of your wings.
They feast upon the abundance of your house; you give them drink from the river of your delights.” (Psalm 36:7-8)

Posted in lectionary reflection, sermon | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment