Joseph, the dreamers

Posted on January 2, 2022 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas Day (online) at Church of the Epiphany, Euclid

“This took place,” we are told, to fulfill the words spoken through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”

We talked about this passage at last week’s Bible Study. The thing that took place in order to fulfill the prophecy was not, let’s be clear, Herod’s attempt at genocide, at regicide, at theocide. That idea was not from God, but came out of the twisted and tarnished head that would not trade its crown even for the promised Christ, the Messiah. No, the thing that took place was the holy family’s exile to Egypt, and their return, if not to Bethlehem, then to some new settlement, some precarious safety.

Here’s a curious thing: According to Luke, Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth before Jesus was born, although Joseph’s ancestral home was in Bethlehem. According to Matthew, they settled in Nazareth only because it did not seem safe to Joseph to return to Judea, to the region of Bethlehem, given the politics of the day and the cruelty of the politicians. Perhaps the story is told in different ways because for some of their neighbours they would always be foreigners, born out of Bethlehem, while for others they were simply neighbours. The ways in which we sort and categorize people, humans made in the image of God all, continue to poke at the peace on earth promised by the angels.

It is as though, having become one of us, incarnate in solidarity with our frail humanity, Christ chose to associate himself with the most vulnerable of all: the refugees, the homeless, those whom their neighbours see as perpetual foreigners, or simply as neighbours. 

Our Gospel reading today glosses over what happens when love fails, when humanity fails. We get to look away. But our hearts know what is at risk. If we will not see those who come to us seeking asylum, seeking shelter, seeking kindness as kin to the holy family, kin to the Christ, then are we not as guilty as Herod and Archelaus of refusing to welcome God’s anointed among us?

Joseph knew what was at risk, and he did what was necessary to protect his family from harm, not by entering into the violent fantasies of Herod, but by following the quiet and insistent whispers of God as they invaded his dreams. 

We don’t talk a lot about Joseph. We don’t know a whole lot about him. He is referred to, obliquely and in passing, as a carpenter (Matthew 13:55), which could (according to Geza Vermes)[i] be metaphor for a scholar or a learned man, well-versed in the scriptures and sayings of God. That would account for Jesus’ own precocious ability to argue with the scribes in the Temple as a twelve-year-old (Luke 2:41-50). We do know from Matthew that Joseph, like his namesake, he was a dreamer, and that he knew God and interpreted God’s will for him in part through prophetic dreams.

Interestingly, the older Joseph, the one with the dreams and the coat and the brothers, the ancient Joseph was the reason that the people of God ended up in Egypt in the first place, the reason why God’s child, Israel, was called out of Egypt, why the prophecy was there for Jesus and his family to fulfill.

You remember that Joseph’s brothers, jealous of his dreams and of his father’s favour, threw him in a pit and then sold him to slavers. After some adventures, Joseph established himself in the court of the Pharaoh, and when a famine fell across the region, and his brothers came to find bread, it was Joseph who eventually embraced them in Egypt, although he never forgot his other home (Genesis 37-50).

Some time later, after the generations of Joseph and his brothers had descended into a great number of people, a new Pharaoh arose who did not remember Joseph, and he it was who enslaved and even murdered the people of Israel, the children of God (Exodus 1). So it was that God called them out of Egypt, appointing Moses to be their guide, and leading them through the sea and the desert and the mountains and the wilderness to bring them, not without conflict, not without hardship on every side, but to bring them home.

The new Joseph, today’s Joseph, our Joseph, would have known the stories of his ancestral namesake. He knew to pay attention to his dreams, that God was never far from him, and especially when his resistance was down and his heart and mind open to hear the word of God, the dreams of God. Perhaps that is why he so readily followed the path that his dream set out for him: first marrying Mary instead of putting her away as he had intended, then setting out for Egypt as a refugee in a hurry, leaving everything behind him, becoming a foreigner for the sake of the skin of his child. Then returning, but still dislocated, still watchful for the safety of his son, ready to settle somewhere new if only the child would live.

With the eyes of his heart enlightened, Joseph knew how to pay attention to the whispers of God, how to be guided by love, how to risk giving everything up, giving everything to the project of God’s incarnation as the Christ.

He knew because he paid attention to the stories of the Bible, the salvation scriptures that told again and again of God’s fierce love for God’s family, the human God had made in God’s image. He knew because he fell asleep praying and awoke with the word of God upon his lips. He knew because he had opened the eyes of his heart to see what God had in store for him.

Sometimes I wish that my dreams were as clear as Joseph’s; perhaps if I paid attention like Joseph they would be. If you need a new year’s resolution or revolution or commitment, reading the stories of our faith ancestors in scripture and praying night and day are always on trend.

If we are to see one another, those around us, friends and foreigners, strangers and neighbours alike; if we are to see with the eyes of our hearts enlightened by the prophets and by the profundity of Christ’s incarnation, the birth and life and the incredible story of Jesus; if we are to allow that story, the story of our namesake, to inform and enlighten the eyes of our hearts, the way in which we see the world around us, and those who walk within it, then we will know the riches of the glorious inheritance of the saints, which is the love of God, and the immeasurable greatness of God’s power among us, which is the power of love.

Then, with the eyes of our hearts, we will see God’s dream for us. God help us to follow it, wherever it may lead us.

Amen.

[i] Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels (SCM Press, 2001), 28-29, via Scribd

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A prayer on the threshold of the year

Posted on December 31, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

Dear God, most gracious, whose creature is time, we are ready for a new year:

This one has been full of pestilence and plague, dissent and derision, violence, victims, virulence that ebbs only to regather and return with, “and one more thing…”

We have lost heroes. War has ended not in peace but the descent into chaos. Rumours of war abound and weapons of war surround us on our very streets, in our very homes.

Justice like a dripping tap stuttered and startled, left its stains, but would not wash clean. 

For a moment, it looked as though the throne of our secular religion had fallen. Is this when we turn to you?

This morning, the sun shines and I am reminded that in this year children were born, love blossomed, there was marriage and giving in marriage, as in the days before the flood.

John Linnell, Noah, The Eve of the Flood. Cleveland Museum of Art, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Dear God, are we ready for a new year? Already it is at hand, already it has arrived on distant shores and makes its way towards us like a steam ship, like a migration. Time, your creature, our sibling and companion, orbits us.

How will we greet it: as a child of your mercy or an angel of your justice or an incarnation of your endurance?

The year of our God is at hand, and will we remember to repent? Will our resolutions be a collage of the great commandments: covenant, compassion, creative cooperation with the confounding mercy of our God?

Will we still the dripping tap or ease its turning to a torrent?

How will a small thing such as one of us turn the tide on chaos? We share a decima of our DNA with viruses. Our smallness is no reason to be shy.

Outside my window, sun pierces cloud and I remember how small instances, slivers of time, stay with us, as though eternity were not broad but the deepest cut.

Dear God, make me ready for a new year. But not yet. Not yet.

First, there is today, before tomorrow comes with joy and sorrow, worries of its own.

First, there is this day, that God has made.

First, as though rehearsing for a new year, the sweeping in of time like a bride; for now, this is the day that God has made: let us be glad in it.

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Holy Innocents: transferred

Posted on December 28, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

There must have been others who retraced
their ancestors’ footprints over Sinai,
although no Moses basket launched upon the Nile;
instead, the Innocents wakened from a nightmare
by the whisper of a blade, the fading
memory of mothers’ final, ululating lullaby…

Innocence today plays with gunfire;
still unconsoled, our hands, like Herod’s,
holding court to gold, fear, and profits, grasping
at alibis, washed clean by rights…

And Christmas cards celebrate family
and firearms, oblivious or willful to the irony,
forgetful of the Innocents.
Where is the dream to lead us by another road?
Where wisdom to kneel, not beneath the falling sword
but humbly before the helpless, the innocently sleeping Prince of Peace?

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Holy Innocents: a pieta

Posted on December 28, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

On the third, fourth, and most likely the fifth day of Christmas, too, I, like many of you no doubt, am spending some time catching upon a few things. One project seemed particularly and poignantly apt to the season: during Advent, some friends active in gun violence reduction and prevention asked for an orange stole to present to the speaker at their annual Vigil. (Find the story behind the orange stoles here.)

Advent anticipation aside, the days were overfilled and in the event, they passed on one they had already to hand, giving me time to fabricate a replacement, along with a few spares against future need. We’ve all done this – passed them on to share our prayers, commitment, the promise to pay attention to the plight of too many for whom the angels’ song of peace on earth is drowned out by gunfire, or by the echo of a single shot.

The stoles are cobbled together from whatever orange fabric I can lay my hands on in any given season; the constant that binds them together as a family – except for the orange colour – is the children’s handprint pattern that finishes each one off at the ends. It was that fabric, hauled back out onto the dining room table between celebrations, that caught me on the eve of the feast of the Holy Innocents, victims of Herod’s rage, pride, and violence.

In a flash of transference across time and space, I saw hands that would no more be held to cross the street, cupped to hold a splash of water, a cotton-seeded dandelion, a cheeky snowball. I saw hands that would not wash clean, reaching for the manger and the cradle over and over again, trying to reverse time. I saw hands at prayer and at work to end the ricochets that we continue to let loose among our children and their families; God help us and save us.

Because of Sunday, the commemoration of the Holy Innocents has been transferred to tomorrow. But their memory permeates this day, its work and its prayers, raised up by their brother, cradled in the arms of his mother: Jesus.

The observance of the Feast continues tomorrow.

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All in the family way

Posted on December 26, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the First Sunday after Christmas Day, 2021. Our services remain online at this time.

What does it mean to you to have been adopted as the child of God? As a child, and as an adopted child myself, I heard Paul’s words quite literally: that God had chosen, contracted, covenanted to make me a part of God’s family, a child with God’s name; a child welcome in God’s home. (Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7)

But John talks about this relationship, too. What does it mean to you to have been reborn, not of flesh but of the will of God – not as children adopted only but as children recreated and remade in God’s image? (John 1:1-18)

And then there is the vision of Isaiah. What does it mean to you for God to clothe you as a bridegroom, to adorn you as a bride, to prepare you for such intimacy and joy that we cannot imagine beginning to imagine with the almighty God? (Isaiah 61:10-62:3)

It seems as though the depth and strength and sheer closeness of God’s love for us defies any single image of relationship that we can dredge up and dress in poetic language. God is our father and our mother and our lover. 

And then, and then, God became flesh, and dwelt among us. If we cannot imagine ourselves as God’s bridegroom, as God’s bride, as God’s born and bloody infant, how much more impossible to understand that God chose to become a child of human conception and birth, to live as one of us, so that through his humanity and his glory we have received grace upon grace?

Whatever we make of Christmas, of the Feast of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ; when we dare to look directly at what God has done, it is staggering. It is more outlandish than angels and guiding stars and virgin births. It is something only God could have imagined to do. It is not something we would have dared to claim, but it is what God, through Jesus Christ, has invited us into.

To be adopted, reborn, married into, to take the family name of Christ, to become a Christian, as we talked about a few short days ago, means something. Christian, little Christ, child and sibling and friend of Jesus; to share in his name is a responsibility, and a gift, and a charge.

It is a charge to live as those who are free to live with grace and truth, not pride, not greed for power or profit, but grace to love those whom God has placed before us, and truth to recognize the image of God within them.

Not one thing came into being without the Word of God; not one child, not one person. To live into the family name of Christian means to live with them all.

The refugee and the reprobate, the sinner and the sullen, the arrogant and the ignorant: God grant us patience; the needful and the lonely, all are ours to love as Christ has loved us, not as a disciplinarian, but as lover, a parent, a companion in the way.

To be born among us, to become as one of us: how better could Christ exemplify the lengths to which love is called to go for God and for our neighbours, even for our enemies? Peace on earth, goodwill to all whom God has made …

And yes, there are sometimes family feuds and rifts and family members who need some boundaries and not everything can be solved with a kind word. There are times when we do not recognize what on earth is going on with one particular image of God or another. God knows, having dealt with enough of us who fail to live up to the family name on the regular.

Yet as a mother’s heart is burdened by the love of her child and a bridegroom’s heart aches for reconciliation with his bride (or a bride for her bride), and a father longs to reach into his infant’s mind and plant in it the knowledge that you, child, are beloved; that you, child, are my own; so God does not turn away from us, even at the cross, nor even at the manger.

And yes, sometimes it seems too much even to contemplate, busy as we are with the cooking and the cleaning and the cat litter boxes, the simple act of making ends meet, the not-always-simple act of putting one foot before the other; and yet to be born as one of us, to become flesh and live among us, sharing our burdens and our joy: how better could God exemplify to us the lengths that love will go to?

There is more to be said, but a new year is coming and God willing, we have time. In the meantime, in this mean time, we can do little more than wonder at the ludicrous love of God, who is beyond and above all that is created, coming to be with us after all.

Who would have thought it; who could believe it? And yet this is our testimony: that “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and …from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.”

“Grant [therefore] that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ,” born anew among us and growing within us. Amen.

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Word, wordless

Posted on December 25, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

A brief message for Christmas Day

If, like me, you have memories from long before you learned how to talk, then you know that even before it speaks an infant tells itself stories and lays them down, woven into the foundations of who it is to become.

The Gospel of John tells the Christmas story in a new way, not with angels or shepherds, nor even Mary and Joseph. There is no manger; there is only the Word of God, come into a world that doesn’t understand it, yet speaking unceasingly of light, of life, of God.

Here, in the Christ-child, the Word has become wordless: an infant without language, whose knowledge of the world is brand new and ever-expanding. Yet this is the Word of God, beyond our comprehension, who called all things into being, with the unfathomable eyes of an infant whom we are only just beginning to hear, to heed, to understand.

Still, there is much to confuse and bewilder us. There are prayers that we have no words for, aches that we have no name for, love that leaves us speechless. We are, especially in a season such as this one, like infants, reaching toward God from the heart of our being; and like a faithful mother, God reaches back, holds us close, even sings to us, whether or not we understand the words.

The Word of God has become a wordless infant, and in that very Incarnation is the message that speaks volumes, that tells the story of God’s love for the world, God’s love for the people God has created, God’s love for you.

Not even the words of the angels: Do not be afraid, come close. But do not be afraid. The Word of God has been spoken into the world, the light of Christ has been born into the world, the love of God has been let loose, the glory as of a father’s only son, as of a mother’s only child, full of grace and truth.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us: Emmanuel. God is with us.

 

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Emmanuel

Posted on December 24, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

Emmanuel

Away from the crush of the crowd 
and the hubbub of the inn, 
aside in the stable
Christ is born;
in the silence that prepares 
for his first breath,
God speaks: 
“I am with you.”

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The longest night

Posted on December 22, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

Morning after the longest night,
like the first day of creation
when evening fell before the dawn;
as the dream goes before awakening,
the linened tomb before resurrection,
the twilight womb before the birth
of the Christ, all part
and particular to his Incarnation,
this nurturing dark that precedes
the light of the first new day.

This poem first appeared at the Episcopal Cafe

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Mary’s song, our song

Posted on December 19, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, 2021

I think that I’ve mentioned it from this pulpit before, but Mary was not the only Mary in her town. At the time that Jesus was born, around one in four or five Jewish girls were named one form of Mary or another.[i] Their naming may go back to Miriam, the clever and resourceful sister of Moses, who helped arranged his adoption into Pharaoh’s household and his exodus, along with all of the enslaved Hebrew people, their liberation from an empire of oppression. More recently, the descendant of the Maccabees, the Hasmonean queen Mariamme herself bore the name that once sang of God’s deliverance at the Red Sea. Whether the inspiration were ancient or modern, naming Mary could be seen an act of bravado, of rebellion, of faith in the promises of God that delivered God’s people from Pharaoh, and could be relied upon, so the hope went, to deliver God’s people now from the Romans and their puppet-potentates.

The name Mary cried havoc and announced the day of the Lord’s deliverance from the bonds of oppression. Mary’s word to the angel, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord,” was the acceptance of a mantle, the mantle of Miriam, the sister and peer of Moses. Mary’s, “Let it be with me” was saying, in effect, “Bring it on.”

Mary knew the dangers of raising an eyebrow in a buttoned-down society, one under the chastening rod of the empire. She knew the dangers of childbirth in a pre-medical society. She knew the danger of singing a Magnificat that glorified the God of promise and prophesied the scattering of the proud and the unseating of the powerful. 

The Incarnation of Christ, the entering of God into human flesh, is an act that defies our expectations and shatters our exact rules about where God belongs and how God is allowed to interact with human nature. Mary knew it in her body: that God was not living down to our ideas of how these things were supposed to happen. In all sorts of ways, barriers and boundaries, barricades were being breached that had sought to keep the sacred and the fleshy apart, separate, sacrosanct.

And she was Mary, named for Mariamme, named for Miriam, who sang of God’s victory over Pharaoh at the Red Sea, who followed the pillars of cloud and fire, and while she may well have been afraid, she was not going to let that stop her living up to her reputation.

Just as God defied the imaginations of the Egyptians at the borders of the Red Sea, so now God was about to make a new way out of no way, and Mary wanted every part of it.

We are still a way from realizing the grand conclusions of the Magnificat. The powerful are not yet cast down, the fall of the Roman empire notwithstanding; we still suffer natural disaster and unnatural, violent division. 

A civil rights case here, a murder conviction there; justice trickles past us, but where is the torrent that Amos prophesied, that Mary sang?

Last weekend, deadly tornadoes blew through Kentucky, Illinois, Tennessee. We have witnessed the devastation and the aftermath of a natural disaster that was exacerbated, allegedly, by unnatural greed and inhuman interactions, by bosses who refused to let workers leave the shop floor to take shelter; by the perennial survival gap between the wealthy and the struggling. This is not the levelling that Mary imagined.

And there is this pandemic that seemingly will not let us go. Where is the healing of the nations?

Perhaps it is not enough to sing of it. Perhaps, like Mary, we need to embody the incarnation of God’s mercy, the growing of God’s justice, the birth of God’s new way in order to find our way out of no way.

In Mary’s town, one in every four or five girls born was named Mary. In our country, nearly two out of every three people calls themselves Christian. Just as Mary’s name meant something, called her into something, prophesied something, so the name of Christian should mean something for us who bear it in the world, should tell out something about God’s promise to us and through us.

Mary was named after a queen and a rebel slave and we are named after a radical religious type who preached counter-intuitive peace and love for enemies and friends alike and who died as a criminal, condemned by religious and state authorities, and who would not let even death deter him from bringing God’s mercy to the world and living God’s love in the world.

What Mary believed and proclaimed and laboured to reveal began deep in her own body, in the quiet mystery of her hidden organs, and it grew. How can we, from the small beginnings of our own embodiment of Christ, our faith in the goodness and mercy of God, labour and deliver good news to the poor, healing to the sick, justice to the oppressed, freedom to the prisoners, life to the dying? It is not beyond us; it is within us to do what God has called us into.

It seems as though the kingdom of God, the second revelation of Christ, is a long time coming, and there is much that we are afraid of, and much that we despair of, and too much that we have already left undone; yet, Mary’s song reminds us, God is already at work in the world. God has cast down the mighty, repeatedly; God has scattered the proud, perennially. God feeds the hungry with mercy, and pays attention to the prayers of the lowly. God is with us.

God is with us when we defy the injustices and entitlements of the world and respond instead with counter-intuitive kindness, counter-cultural mercy, radical devotion to the principles of peace, hope beyond measure, faith in God’s ability to break down barriers, to cross boundaries, to do whatever it takes to be with us, Emmanuel.

We are named, we Christians, for that first note of Mary’s song, the one who inspired in her courage and the imagination to live into her name, the name that launched a freedom movement onto the Nile in a Moses basket; the name that can do great things out of small beginnings, with strategic and rebellious mercy, with the insistence that God is with us, yesterday, today, tomorrow, and then some; and Christ’s new revelation is coming.

Amen: Come, Lord Jesus.

[i] Tal Ilan, “Notes on the Distribution of Jewish Women’s Names in Palestine in the Second Temple and Mishnaic Periods”, in Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol. XL, 1989

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Suffer the little children

Posted on December 17, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

Rumours of rumours; and the rub is that in this country, in this time, we cannot dismiss them as rubbish until the day is done and the sun has set over the farthest gate. It should not be this way.

My heart goes out; my heart remembers one day when two of the three were still in high school and there were rumours. One decided to stay at home, and I wept for the anxiety that we have bred and our children bear. One decided to go to school and I wept, watching love walk away from me, the closing doors illuminated by blue and red lights, a mockery of the Christmas lights dancing up and down the neighbourhood. It should not be this way.

When my child was very young, I was tucking her into bed one night, and she was distressed. I asked why, and the reply was that at any moment, an asteroid might smash into the earth and destroy it, ending all life and all knowledge of life in an instant. Rational arguments about probabilities, space stations, forecasts, warnings, and probabilities again did nothing to soothe the young soul. “But you can’t tell me it can’t happen,” she insisted. …
Children already know that the world is dangerous. They do not need their fears magnified; their imaginations will take care of that without encouragement. They see dragons in their sleep.

Whom Shall I Fear? Urgent Questions for Christians in an Age of Violence (Upper Room Books), 89, 91

In Isaiah’s vision of peace, “a little child shall lead them” (Isaiah 11:6); but we are not casting the vision before our children of peace but of lockdown drills and guns secreted in backpacks. The guns belong in lockdown, not the children.

In Children Under Fire: An American Crisis, John Woodrow Cox finds that, “If children did not have access to guns, well more than half the school shootings over the past twenty years would never have happened” (p. 291). The guns belong in lockdown, not our children.

About halfway through our march in Cleveland, I found myself on East Ninth Street directly behind a woman with a young child in a backpack carrier like the one I had used when my children were younger. Too small to walk so far, the little one’s legs and feet hung from the carrier, bouncing and dancing with her mother’s stride. A sign attached to the out fabric of the child’s traveling nest said, “My preschool class does lockdown drills.”
I wanted to fall to my knees on the spot and repent of my dismal stewardship of her world, but the crowd swept me on.

Whom Shall I Fear, 95

It is past time to repent. It is no time to be simply swept along. The guns belong in lockdown, not our children.

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