Because love is the miracle

Posted on December 11, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

For Megan and Jacob

One says
that your first miracle
was at a wedding:
celebrating love,
astonishing, intoxicating –
the kind of stuff
to leave you 
walking on air.

Love is what it takes
to make the other
miracles true:
to calm the storm,
soothe the sick,
to keep the dead alive,
to forgive and not to forget,
with heart and soul and body.

At the wedding, 
at first
you said that this
was not what you
were called to do,
then, looking on
you saw the bride
and groom, love 
shimmering between
and you remembered
what love is for 
and that you are for 
love, that
you have been for eternity;

You raised your hand
in blessing and
toasted them with wine.

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Karl Barth, St Paul, and the stickiness of sin

Posted on December 8, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

A homily for Evensong at Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland

It is said that Karl Barth once commented upon the Anglican style of liturgy:

“If the Anglo-Saxons would not make their phylacteries so broad and so long! I went to an Evening Prayer at which the Lord’s Prayer was said twice and the Gloria five or six times. I said to them afterwards, ‘If I were the good God, I would reply to you in a voice of thunder, ‘All right, that will do. I’ve heard you!’”[i]

Which is to say that I feel a little shy about bringing Barth to church with me this evening. But Barth was not one to shy away from the conflicts and ambiguities and frank paradoxes of religion and theology and our strange and wonderful relationship with God, our Creator, Christ, our Redeemer, or the Holy Spirit, who defies definition.

Take this passage from the Epistle to the Romans, in which Paul, converted and convinced of his salvation nevertheless wrestles with the stickiness of sin and its ability to contort his every effort of will into something less than righteousness, so that he cries out for deliverance.

Barth, in his commentary on this passage, is almost as sunny and gay as St Paul himself.

“Religion,” he writes, “spells disruption, discord, and the absence of peace.”[ii]

“Conflict and distress, sin and death, the devil and hell, make up the reality of religion. … Religion possesses no solution of the problem of life; rather it makes of the problem a wholly insoluble enigma.”[iii]

So that’s helpful.

Perhaps putting Barth into some biographical context might shed light on his frightening insights. He wrote his commentary on Romans relatively early in a career that would sink him deep into the mire of systematic theology and draw out of him the utter and devoted dependence upon God’s grace that looking into the vortex of our incomprehension will evoke.

He lived through two world wars. In the shadow of the first he was accused of pacifism; in the gathering clouds of the second he was criticized for militarism.[iv] Yet he was consistent in his strong belief that the justice and mercy of God do not authorize the kind of bullying might that characterizes nationalism, and he was appalled at the capitulation of too many churches to those dangerous forces. One might say that any compromising of the gospel in order to achieve greater power to proclaim it is at least misguided, self-defeating, perverse. 

There is a reason that Barth still resonates in our public theology amphitheatres.

While Barth knew clearly on which side he stood when it came to the sin of anti-Semitism, the siren song of nationalism, not to mention the seductive destructive power of the atom bomb, and while he was not shy of his duty as a political man to, as he once put it, “make it clear with whom I would like to be imprisoned and hanged,”[v] yet he knew just as clearly that salvation comes from somewhere very different.

“The kingdom of God is a foreign country, so foreign that even the saints must pray …” he wrote in his commentary on this passage from the Epistle to the Romans.[vi]

And here is the key to the hope, even joy, that both Paul and Karl embody even as they decry their own sinfulness, their own helplessness in the vice of sin that grips them.There is no political program nor self-justification that can free us from the consciousness that we fall short of the good that we feel so strongly should be available to us. But there is Jesus.

The good that I want to do I cannot, and the evil that I would avoid, I cannot. “Now,” says Paul eagerly, “if I do what I do not want, is it no longer I that do it?” That is, can I separate my actions from my will, my impact from my intention, my life from my imagination?

But these, Barth writes, “are perilous opinions.”[vii] They offer false comfort, when the only true consolation is Christ. They are perilous, too, I might add, ethically, offering a kind of acquiescence with the messiness and mercilessness of the world: “I hate that this is the way that the world works (I will good and not evil), but I am helpless to change it, so it is enough to despair of it.” Even Barth fell prey to it. As he has said, “There is no sinless Christian.”[viii]

This, too, is not the gospel of repentance that Christ calls us into. It is the hymn of the compromised conscience, the power-hungry church, the secular creed of false unity.

No, says Barth, the fact that my conscience is piqued at every turn is correct, and should not be denied. It reminds me daily that as often as I pray, “Thy will be done,” (which is too often in our liturgies for Karl, you might recall); as often as I pray it, I am reminded how far I am from doing God’s will, and how great the gulf is between Creator and this creature made dimly in Their image.

But the corollary is glorious. For, “Who … is aware of man’s real wretchedness, save he who is aware of God’s mercy?” Barth lectured his students in Bonn.[ix] We know our sin, we are convicted of it, Paul discovered his error in persecuting the followers of Jesus only when he was confronted by the living Christ himself, the revelation and reality of God’s saving mercy.

“The kingdom of heaven does exist already; from God’s side action has been already taken for our good. To pronounce the name of Jesus Christ means to acknowledge that we are cared for, that we are not lost. Jesus Christ is man’s salvation in all circumstances and in face of all that darkens his life, including the evil that proceeds from himself.”[x]

So it is that Paul can proclaim in one breath: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

In this season of Advent, when we are advised by the prophets and the preachers to prepare ourselves for the coming of the kingdom, the second coming of the Christ, while our consciences are chilled by apocalyptic fires and the dumpster fire of the world around us, when we despair of doing the good that we will and denying access to evil even in our own jealous hearts, it is the Incarnation of Jesus that reminds us that all is not lost; that nothing, in fact, is lost, since God, the originator of all things, abides in mercy and sustains us. 

Therein lies our freedom, this is our hope, our way, our truth, our life: not a reconciled conscience but a reconciling Christ, God with us, God for us, and a grateful sinner, weeping at his feet, drying his soft body with her hair.

Amen. 

[i] Mark Galli , Karl Barth: An Introductory Biography for Evangelicals (Eerdmans, 2017), accessed via Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/book/482210637, p. 164. A footnote attributes the source of the quote to Eberhard Busch’s Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 1–32

[ii] Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, translated from the sixth edition by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford University Press, 1933), 266

[iii] Barth, Romans, 258

[iv] Galli, 127, via Scribd

[v] Galli, 98, via Scribd

[vi] Barth, Romans, 263

[vii] Barth, Romans, 262

[viii] Barth, Romans, 263

[ix] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (Harper Torchbooks, 1959), 71

[x] Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 71

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It’s (not too) complicated

Posted on December 5, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent, the Sunday after yet another school shooting, during a continuing global pandemic, and other concerns … Readings may be found here (we read Baruch for our first lesson).

On this, the Second Sunday of Advent, we pray, 

Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins… (BCP, 211)

In the third season of The Good Place, the ethical complications of life are explored. It is not so easy, we find, to forsake our sins and walk in the ways of righteousness when even choosing a tomato to buy at the grocery store has implications for fair labour, the environmental impacts of pesticides and long-distance transport, and so much more, even before we get to any question of whether it tastes good! 

Even so, repenting of our sins, paying heed to the prophets, may not be as hard as we sometimes make it. Sometimes, it is simply a question of kindness, of doing the most merciful, the most loving, the most human (as Christ embodied and exemplified humanity for us) thing.

The prophets promise that God, in due course and good time, will level the mountains and raise the valleys out of their shadows and make straight the pathways before God’s people, that everyone might make their way toward Jerusalem, cast as refuge and the resting place of the children of God.

To do the work of righteousness, then – to love God, and follow in the footsteps of Christ, to love our neighbours as ourselves – means nothing less than to remove the obstacles from before the feet of those stumbling towards justice, towards equity, towards salvation, towards peace.

On a communal level, it means heeding the prophets’ warnings that chasing after wealth at the expense of the poor is plain wrong. 

It means following the example of Christ who did not care who was in or out of network, whether they were Jews, Gentiles, madmen, women, nor even what day of the week it was, when it came to offering works of healing mercy. His healing was available even to the woman who dared only creep under the crowd and touch his cloak.

It means clearing any obstacles that litter the paths of people made in the image of God, obscuring their dignity.

It means removing the plank of racism from the foundations of all of our functions and replacing it with real and radical justice rather than whitewashing over the cracks.

It means beating swords into ploughshares, guns into shovels, removing them from the hands and the lives and the deaths of our children. There is no deeper shadow cast than the deaths of children, and the enormity of the problem before us is our mountain to climb.

But Jesus once told his disciples, if you have but a mustard seed of faith you may move mountains (Matthew 17:20-21).

Better still, the prophets have told us that God is with us in the work, that God will level the ground that God has created, and bring righteousness and justice, which is mercy, to the earth.

On the personal plane, heeding the prophets and repenting of sin often means simply to do the most merciful, most loving, most humble thing available in any given situation, any God-given opportunity.

If you have ever had to fill in the ground where an old, old tree once stood, then you know that the work is not done in one day. There is filling and raking, seeding and growing and mowing of grass, and where do all of those mushrooms come from? And in a year or two the ground will have settled and sunk once more, and you will have to start over again, and again. Just as when we learn better we do better, the work of repentance is repetitive, and cumulative, and it does build toward righteousness, if it is a labour of love: Love for God, love for our neighbour, love for our enemies, as well as for one another.

I am confident, with St Paul, that you who have begun a good work will bring it to completion with the help of Jesus Christ. It is my prayer, with St Paul, that our love for God, neighbour, enemy, and one another may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help us to determine what is best, and to do it (Philippians 1:6, 9-10).

John came, eating wild honey and locusts, a simple life, preaching a baptism of repentance from sin, so that the crooked should be made straight and the rough ways made smooth, and so that all flesh might see the salvation of God (Luke 3:1-6; Isaiah 40:3-5).

It is not too complicated for us. The mountain is not too high and the valley not too cold, since God is going before us to pave the way; since Christ has gone before us to give us knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of sins.

In this way,

“In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us,
To shine on those who dwell in … the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Canticle 16, BCP).

Amen.

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Advent (the second coming)

Posted on November 26, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

There is no cloud of glory can define, 
no gates of heaven can confine; there is
no dogma, doggerel, or doctrine can describe,
no earnest imitation reinscribe him. 

Christ’s coming cannot be constrained or restrained 
by our rituals of mortality.
Our candles are dimmed, our illuminated 
manuscripts burned by the living Word… 

This is Omega and Alpha, ending 
and beginning, humbled only by love, 
by love, by love 
to enter this world and its contracting womb. 

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Christ, the King, the way, the truth, the life

Posted on November 21, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

Splendor and honor and kingly power
are yours by right, O Lord our God. (A Song to the Lamb, Canticle 18, BCP, 93)

‘Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”’ (John 18:37)

And Pilate infamously responded, “What is truth?” (John 18:38)

Because Pilate knew that truth was whatever he decided. The law was whatever he imposed. Justice, in Pilate’s estimation, was whatever he exacted. And truth? The truth could go hang from a cross for all he cared.

The visions of Daniel and of John of Patmos describe the kingship of Christ as one of glory, of dominion. But it is by his own blood sacrifice, says John, that he has freed us from our sins; it is by his love that he has made us a kingdom, priests to serve our God.

Standing before Pilate, Jesus conjures a vision of a kingdom in which the truth is not decided by the preferences of the powerful, nor is justice exacted by violence, nor does the law of the nations have the last word over it. The kingdom that Jesus brings is one in which the love of God stands resolute before the principalities that would lord it over him, and undermines them by refusing to accept the finality of their penalty of death.

As another biblical poet wrote, “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.” (Song of Songs 8:7) For love is stronger than death.

We have not yet achieved that kingdom among ourselves. We still live in a world where justice is decided by division and argument, where there is no consensus on the truth. Where a youth can take a gun he is too young legally to buy for himself and go out looking for the trouble. When he finds the trouble and becomes afraid for his safety, he successfully pleads self-defence for the deadly consequences of his decisions. Deadly for others, that is, not for him. And some see him, the survivor, as a martyr and a hero, and others see a travesty, an abortion of justice. We live where those who know the open secrets of our system see his young white skin as armour against the judgements of the world, while others still deny that such privilege exists.

We find ourselves in the place of Pilate asking, “What is the truth?”

Standing before Pilate, Jesus refuses to be drawn into his world of claim and counter-claim, power-brokerage and politicking. “I came to testify to the truth,” he asserts, even under the greatest imaginable pressure, for he knows what is to follow. He, Jesus, will not back down from the truth of God’s love, God’s justice which is mercy, which is the forgiveness of sins, which heals instead of harming, which is the reconciliation of the penitent and the hope of the sinner. He will not raise an army, of people or of angels, to save his own skin, because his reign, he tells Pilate, he tells us, does not depend upon unimaginative might or oppression, but rests in the enduring and creative power of God.

Daniel and John of Patmos each write their revelations, their visions of the kingdom come, from a position of persecution. Daniel has been captured by a foreign court and forced into exile and service to a foreign king who tried to eliminate the culture and language and religion of the Jews, who gave them new names. Daniel, whose name means “God is my judge”, was called by his captors Belteshazzar, after the Babylonian’s gods. John, in turn, has been exiled by the imperial persecution of the earliest Christians to the island of Patmos, where he awaits the judgement of God over the nations.

Daniel refused to submit to the attempted assimilation of his faith into the Babylonian ways. He held fast to the covenantal promises of God, and he looked with steadfast hope for the coming of God’s kingdom. In his vision, as in John’s he found his hope coming in the person of the Christ, the anointed and appointed embodiment of God’s mercy, justice, and reign. It was enough, even in those days of persecution, exile, and compromise with the powers that be to sustain both visionaries through long years of suffering. It did not eliminate the suffering, nor did it undo the injustices against them, but it allowed them to remain faithful, to remain true themselves to the faith that God had set within them, knowing that God is faithful and will prevail.

“Thy kingdom come,” we pray each and every time we gather, as Christians, as followers of Christ the King, whose reign comes with glory and dominion and with unending righteousness and justice, with truth. 

It is so difficult, in days like these, to imagine a universe in which truth is known and shared an accepted and agreed upon: but Jesus tells Pilate that he is bringing it, and Daniel and John, in their times of greatest trial, see it coming on the clouds.

Of course, there is the risk for any of us that we will discover that we were wrong in some of the so-called truths we espoused along the way; but God is just and merciful, and if we hold fast to the promises of mercy and forbearance, of the creative ways of love to conquer the dull blade of oppression, if we will follow the example of our King, loving our neighbours instead of taking up arms against them, seeking and serving the image of God in all people, not standing upon our privilege but standing alongside the humble, rebellious, the condemned Christ, then we will find hope to sustain us, for no empire will stand for ever against the love, against the truth of God, against the coming justice of God’s kingdom.

And so, to him who sits upon the throne,
and to Christ the Lamb,
be worship and praise, dominion and splendor,
for ever and for evermore. Amen. (A Song to the Lamb, Canticle 18, BCP, 94)

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Armistice

Posted on November 11, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

It was supposed to be

the war to end all wars,

but one hundred and three years

past the eleventh hour, we are

still more accomplished at starting

wars than finishing, and

as the day digs its way toward noon,

shaking off the silence

and the poppies,

a free cup of coffee or

a ten-percent discount on

your diy supplies

hardly seems meet penance for

a century of sundowns over

an uneasy ending to

days and dreams that do not

rest in peace

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For All Saints and All Souls

Posted on November 7, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

The Imitation of Christ is a classic Christian medieval text attributed to one Thomas a Kempis, a monk who gives sound and searching advice for developing the inner life of the soul and binding it ever more closely to God. Our Centering Prayer group has been working its way through the book, and just this past week, the main characters in today’s gospel story made a cameo appearance as a cautionary tale:

The more finely you focus your attention on [Jesus], the greater your steadiness in passing through life’s successive storms.

In many cases, however, this focus becomes blurred since the mind much too quickly becomes distracted by anything delightful that may come within its purview. … Thus it was that several Jews came to Bethany to the house of Martha and Mary not only because of Jesus, but also to see Lazarus. Your focus, therefore, must be exact and on target, directed on [Jesus] and not on anything else that might chance to enter the range of your vision.[i]

He is the resurrection and the life, and it is to celebrate and follow Jesus that we come together. Still, as far be it from me to question the wisdom of my elders, I do wonder whether Thomas a Kempis is missing something if he looks away from Lazarus too soon.

The Jews who are with Mary and Martha today have come to comfort the sisters in their loss. They are there out of love for their friends and grief for their brother. Wherever there is love, we are told, there is God.

Whether it is the same crowd that returns later to check in on the family or whether they bring more friends to see the miracle that has happened so close to hand, we can hardly blame them for their joy and relief and astonishment at the sight of Lazarus restored, unbound, ransomed from death. What would we not give to see those whom we have loved once more?

Jesus himself looked upon the grave of Lazarus and wept. Jesus himself, having called Lazarus back into life, delivered him to his family and friends, saying, “Unbind him, and let him go.” Jesus did not look away from their grief or his death, nor from his resurrection, nor from his friends’ confusion and delight; he had compassion over it all.

Today, as we celebrate All Saints and All Souls, we do not look away, either, from those who have gone before us to their reward and resurrection. The saints whose example shines and the faithful souls whom we trust we will see again on that other shore: they call forth our compassion, our grief, our hope. With Jesus, we weep. With Mary and Martha, we wrestle. With the Jews who have come to comfort them, we are astonished by the miracle of resurrection, by the hope and glory of new life. And Christ has compassion over it all.

In the past year and half, and more, we have been grieved and injured by our inability to gather as we normally would around the families and loved ones of those who have died, especially those whom we remember this morning. 

We have refrained for good and noble reasons – to prevent further suffering, death, and grief – but it has been a burden. Coming together now to name those whom we miss, to honour those whom we have loved, to celebrate their memories: this is a blessing.

We come because of Jesus, because in him only is our hope and trust in the resurrection and the life eternal that we share; and we come also to see Lazarus, to see in our memories and our mind’s eyes, in our prayers to see our friends, to be reminded of that hope, of that reunion, of that compassion, the mercy of God that will not leave us forever bereft, that wraps the grieving in love.

Mary said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.” But Jesus knew that life and death would continue after his imminent Passion, and that we would need to know that even in the face of death, even in the stench of death, even in the depths of the tomb of grief, that new life is ready to be called forth. He wanted his friends, he wanted us to know that he is with us, in life and in death, whether we see him in his body or not. Lazarus was his sign, his proof, his gift to us of hope.

So yes, we will keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, who is the resurrection and the life. And when our eyes are clouded by grief and closed by death, he will stand alongside us, and unbind us from our sorrow.

For, see, the home of God is among mortals.
He has dwelt with us as our God; we are his people,
and God is with us; and as surely as Jesus wept for his own friend,
he will one day wipe every tear from our eyes. (after Revelation 21:1-6)

Amen.

[i] The Imitation of Christ Book 3, 33.1, by Thomas A Kempis, translated by Joseph N. Tylenda, SJ (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1984), 170

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All Saints: crowning glory

Posted on November 1, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

The Daily Office readings for All Saints include a passage from the apocryphal book of Esdras which I recognized as one that had caught my imagination when I was writing about the heirloom dresses I was given by my mother when we found one another:

In the beginning, or very near to it, after God asked Adam and Eve who on earth had told them they were naked, and after seeing the flimsy job they did with their fig-leaf coverings, God sewed clothes for them. What it cost God to skin and clean the creatures whose hides formed the hiding place for shame is not described, although God had only just created them and clothed their own backs with fur. How hard it must have been to choose the raw material for Adam’s first coat; yet that is what God did, before they walked out of the Garden and away from the only Father they had ever known. One day, we are promised, when the children of God finally return from their long exile, like Adam and Eve, we will receive new garments, and the Son of God himself will finish clothing us: 

I, Ezra, saw on Mount Zion a great multitude that I could not number, and they all were praising the Lord with songs. In their midst was a young man of great stature, taller than any of the others, and on the head of each of them he placed a crown, but he was more exalted than they. And I was held spellbound. Then I asked an angel, “Who are these, my lord?” He answered and said to me, “These are they who have put off mortal clothing and have put on the immortal, and have confessed the name of God. Now they are being crowned, and receive palms.” (2 Esd. 2:42-45)[i]

The Esdras passage continues:

Then I said to the angel, ‘Who is that young man who is placing crowns on them and putting palms in their hands?’ He answered and said to me, ‘He is the Son of God, whom they confessed in the world.’ So I began to praise those who had stood valiantly for the name of the Lord. (2 Esd. 2:46-47)

It is the Son of God who crowns the saints with immortality. It is the Son of Love who tenderly sloughs away the stained cloth of sin and wraps them in lavish life; the Child of God who is Christ our Mother, in whom we are one family with all the saints and sinners who sing around the throne of God.

[i] Hughes, Rosalind C., A Family Like Mine: Biblical Stories of Love, Loss, and Longing (Upper Room Books), Kindle Edition, 68-69

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What if we were to listen …?

Posted on October 24, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, on Sunday, October 24th, 2021: Year B Proper 25. Readings include the healing of Bartimaeus and Jeremiah’s oracle of hope.

Jeremiah has spent years of his life, his health, his freedom, his being warning and lamenting and prophesying the fall of Jerusalem and the exile of all but the poorest people to Babylon, but it was never because he had lost faith in God’s mercy, trust in God’s faithfulness, confidence in God’s loving-kindness toward the people whom God had called together.

In the midst of it all, Jeremiah erupts with this oracle of hope, this affirmation of the endurance of God’s commitment to, God’s covenant with, the people who have put their trust in their Creator.

It is not the stuff of unrealistic optimism. The remnant that Jeremiah prophesies returns not in triumph – they are slow and prone to stumbling – but they are together. They return weeping, but God, their God, accompanies them with consolation. All of their troubles are not yet behind them – they return to a city razed to the ground and robbed of its Temple – but like the shepherd of the Psalms, the Lord will lead them beside calm, cool waters, even as they traverse the valley.

Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, whose name means “honour”, called upon Jesus, the Son of David, for healing and restoration. The people at first tried to quiet him; they did not understand yet God’s capacity for renewal, even resurrection. As soon as Jesus called to him, though, they became his cheerleader, changed their tune as though they had been rooting for him all along. Jesus not only healed Bartimaeus, but he opened the eyes of the crowd to the indiscrimination of God’s outpouring of grace and mercy. But it was Bartimaeus who followed him up toward Jerusalem.

Bartimaeus persisted and was heard and healed. The people of the exile remembered their God and they were led home. The people who stood on the sidelines, who did not believe that hope was at hand, were flustered by the unexpected answer of Jesus to the call for a blessing, a miracle. Somehow, even as they lined the streets he was to walk through, they failed to expect very much of him.

Do you ever wonder what happened afterwards, to Bartimaeus? Now that he was following Jesus with his eyes wide open, did the people listen to him any more kindly, or were they still telling him to be quiet, not to disturb their peace?

A few days ago, in an elevator, I found myself a little cornered by a gentleman who wanted nothing more than to share his faith that in God, all things are possible; that in Christ, forgiveness is abundant; that in the Spirit, we can find our salvation.

He was the sort of person that might make a stranger nervous with his intensity and his forthrightness. He was in a way like Bartimaeus, with his socially awkward outburst of belief in the power of Jesus Christ. “People say that he is dead,” he said, “but look, he lives in me! Look into my eyes, the windows of my soul!”

What could I say to him, Bartimaeus with his eyes wide open and his heart set on Jesus?

This time yesterday morning, believe it or not, I was standing outside the birth home of Martin Luther King, Jr, in Atlanta, Georgia. The buildings in the historical district surrounding his home and the Ebenezer Baptist Church where he and his father each once preached remain closed because of the pandemic, so I stood out on the sidewalk.

I stood out on the sidewalk like those people surrounding Bartimaeus. I stood outside like the people who told Dr King [who followed Jesus with his eyes wide open] to be quiet, to rein it in some, not to disturb my peace, with the people who would not listen to the urgency of his message until it was, to the eyes of the world, too late.

If only we could have spared the grief of wife and child, parent and sibling. If only more of us had listened instead of telling him to “be quiet”.

The stories of Bartimaeus, of Jeremiah, of blessed Martin, of Jesus, are a rebuke to those of us who would rather not be disturbed by the inbreaking of God’s justice, the kingdom of heaven.

We may well ask why, when Bartimaeus cries out from the roadside, we had not already found him medicine, sustained him in safety, instead of telling him to be quiet. Wherever injustice is administered and healing is hard to find, the gospel challenges us to do better at living and loving and listening. I live under the rebuke of Bartimaeus, of Jeremiah, of Martin.

But God will do good despite us. God will bring the remnant home, will walk beside the weeping with consolation. Jesus will bring hope and healing to the hurting, and he will confound those who say, “Be quiet! Don’t bother the Lord with your troubles. Don’t bother us either.”

But God will do good. Sometimes the call to us is simply to recognize the unexpected goodness of God and to follow it. To be patient, knowing that even in our weeping God is with us to console us. To walk in consolation beside others who are weeping. To sustain the hope of those looking for Jesus rather than to quash or to quiet it.

As much as I wonder what happened to Bartimaeus, I wonder, too, what happened to the crowd. Did anyone else have their eyes opened that day to grace? Did anyone else turn to follow Jesus up to Jerusalem, to the Cross and its confounding, the day of Resurrection?

Jeremiah spent his life, his freedom, his political capital, his health, and his strength on prophesies of warning and oracles of lament. Yet he knew that God is faithful, that God is good, that no matter the trials and temptations, the troubles and the turmoil, God cannot help but to do good to God’s people. In the midst of it all, he could not help but prophesy hope.

Because God will do good, with or without us. And blessed is the one who has their eyes open to see it.

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Repentance

Posted on October 20, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

To repent is
in some small, frayed
way to unknit
the fabric which has
woven my portrait in
such intricate and 
fascinating, colourful 
and false threads, 
pulling on the lie,
knotted and crinkled,
winding it back into
a small, dyed ball,
a little planet ready
to be moulded into
something less 
deceptively complete,
waiting with the patience
of yarn in a bowl
for the hook and the
needle, for the hands
of the Creator
to guide it into
re-presenting
(the image of)
something true

This piece first appeared at the Episcopal Cafe

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