Epiphany: the Lord shall arise upon you

Posted on January 6, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Feast of the Epiphany, shared by Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, and the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio

This sermon was written and recorded before Christmas. This afternoon, White nationalists bent on overturning the result of the 2020 election stormed the Capitol building. At the time of posting, all is not well in our nation, and anxieties are high.

This is still true: That the Magi saw the light from the borders of tumult and strife, the rough and raw edges of empire. After they had found its source, … cradled in a manger and squalling with humanity; afterwards, they returned home by another way, having discovered in a dream the cruelty of human kings and the personal danger of confronting corruption with the light of God. But it is out of the darkness of God’s womb that light shines, and out of emptiness that God’s love filled the world. And no amount of destruction can counter the creative love of our God.

My friends, take care of one another, for great care will be needed to patch up the wounds of this country. Pray for peace. Pray for healing. Pray for the soul of our nation. Pray for one another. God, hear our prayer. Christ, have mercy upon us.

It began in darkness.

Before the creation of the world, everything that yet was nothing was empty and devoid of light There was as yet no heaven, no earth; but there was God. In the dark womb of God’s imagination, creation began.

First, God called out the light.

A few billion years later, give or take, a stargazer by night, his life swept up in awe of God’s resplendent creativity, noticed something bright, something unusually bright.

Arise, shine; for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
For darkness shall cover the earth,
and thick darkness the peoples;
but the Lord will arise upon you,
and his glory will appear over you.

Isaiah 60:1-2

The prophet wrote his oracle of light in the midst of exile and oppression. The Magi saw the light from the borders of tumult and strife, the rough and raw edges of empire. After they had found its source, not, as they once might have expected, in the heavens but cradled in a manger and squalling with humanity; afterwards, they returned home by another way, having discovered in a dream the cruelty of human kings and the personal danger of confronting corruption with the light of God.

Out of darkness the light shines. The Magi saw the light from the borders of tumult and strife, the rough and raw edges of empire. After they had found its source, not, as they once might have expected, in the heavens but cradled in a manger and squalling with humanity; afterwards, they returned home by another way, having discovered in a dream the cruelty of human kings and the personal danger of confronting corruption with the light of God.

In recent years, scientists across the globe have named a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene—to describe the tipping point at which human activity, human creativity, human consumption and callous casting off have come to define our world, its climate, its health and safety. Humanity, we are now told, has filled the world with as much matter as life itself. That is, all the stuff that we have made now weighs as much as every living thing on earth put together. We have become so distracted by our own bling that we are in danger of burying ourselves beneath it.

darkness shall cover the earth,
and thick darkness the peoples;
but the Lord will arise upon you,
and his glory will appear over you.

A United Nations report argues that “we are the first people to live in an age defined by human choice, in which the dominant risk to our survival is ourselves.” Inequities across the world threaten some, while over-indulgence threatens others, and the changes to our climate, the mantle cloaking the shoulders of our environment, torn and stained and singed, are becoming ever more visible.

It is the challenge of a new era, a new epoch, but it has been a long time in the making.

When the Magi chose another route to their home, they did so because they recognized that “we … live in an age defined by human choice, in which the dominant risk to our survival is ourselves.” They saw the cruelty of kings and the greed of power, the dangers of opposing corruption and consumption, and they withdrew.

Perhaps the difference is that we are now past the point of withdrawing from the danger. Warned by the prophets, by the Word of God, by our dreams, and by the modern Magi, our scientists, we have recognized that the danger is within us.

“We … live in an age defined by human choice, in which the dominant risk to our survival is ourselves.” We make our choices of how to live, whether to increase the burden of our climate or relieve what we can; whether to protect the air from pollution and the airways of our neighbour from pandemic, or not; whether to humble ourselves before the image of God confronting us across the street, or to turn our faces away. Whether to seek illumination as wise inquirers, or, like Herod, self-satisfied yet precarious, only to pretend.

If we find ourselves in darkness for a season, we have no need to be afraid of it, for Christ is with us, for darkness is the womb of God. If we find ourselves uncertain of the way forward, the heavens clouded and the north star shrouded, we have seen a light that is not distant from us, not hidden in the heavens or shrouded by clouds of grief or of glory, but borne among us, wherever the love of God is remembered, and the child of God attended with mercy and justice and humility. We have a light that we can carry before us, to lighten the ways of the world for those whom God has given us to love.

If, in fact, we “live in an age defined by human choice” still, we live also in an age defined by the patient and persevering love of God, the timelessness and tirelessness of mercy, the endurance of the One who holds both light and darkness in one hand, and makes of them kings and wise men, fools and knaves, sinners and saints, and the Christ child, born to save us all.

Arise, shine; for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
For darkness shall cover the earth,
and thick darkness the peoples;
but the Lord will arise upon you,
and his glory will appear over you. …
Then you shall see and be radiant;
your heart shall thrill and rejoice …
The sun shall no longer be your light by day,
nor for brightness shall the moon give light to you by night;
but the Lord will be your everlasting light,
and your God will be your glory.
Your sun shall no more go down
or your moon withdraw itself;
for the Lord will be your everlasting light,
and your days of mourning shall be ended.

Isaiah 60:1-2,5,19-20

Amen

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The Magi by Night

Posted on January 5, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

They travelled by night
they followed his star meaning
they had to wait for darkness to fall as a mantle
about their shoulders to know the way

to navigate mountainsides littered with bodies
of mountain goats sleeping mountain lions creeping
owls startled at this untimely interruption
of their prey-ful meditation;

they followed his star meaning maybe
that they stumbled on stepping stones
robes heavy with salt and clay
casting relics with their feet as they

followed his star waiting by day
for God’s preëternal presence
to show them the light

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Not there yet

Posted on January 3, 2021 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas and the first Sunday of 2021 at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid

The fact is that God was born into a world where danger still existed, where mayhem and murder were still the purview of kings, where exile and refuge and return were part of too many lives; where the promises of God to be with God’s people did not circumvent history, but redeemed it.

Joseph’s dreams drove him across the wilderness, dangerous then and haunted now. They persuaded him to leave the country he knew behind, because it was about to become unrecognizable, mangled by Herod’s rage. When God called him home, Joseph considered where to go. He was still afraid of the family that Herod left behind. The disposition of one tyrant did not undo his terrors. Joseph went north, out of the way. He did not return the same way.

Still, Joseph trusted that God would be with him, and his growing family, wherever and however they found their way home.

When Jeremiah reassured the people that they would return to Jerusalem, it was to a city whose Temple had been razed by invaders, whose altars were unrecognizable, whose homes were destroyed and who would have to start over as a people under occupation, to rebuild their devotions and their dwelling places. They would return with weeping, said the prophet, but with the consolations of God around their shoulders. Even though they would not return to what they had left behind, God would guide them into a new future, a new Temple, a new covenant.

We are in no such dire straits as we face a new year, filled with uncertainty and somewhat bewildered at what we have lost in the preceding months: the people we have missed, the final goodbyes unsaid, the Eucharists uncelebrated. The ground beneath our feet has shifted, and we know that we still face a long road home; but we are not as uprooted as Joseph and his holy family, nor exiled like Jeremiah and his nation. We have seen how the innocent still suffer from the violence of the proud and the angry; we still have much we need to work out about that.

In recent months, we turned 2020 into a scapegoat, piled on our woes: a global pandemic, economic uncertainty, health worries, the inability of our election magically to make everyone finally agree; even murder hornets. But the year has turned, and has a new name, and we are still some way from the solid ground of familiarity, of home.

We are not without hope, any more than Joseph was, led by a dream through the desert, or Jeremiah, drawn from the well of depression and oppression to preach the peace of God to come, that passes understanding.

It’s going to take patience, to find our new beginnings this year. It’s going to take perseverance, to complete our journey through the wilderness. There may be detours that are indicated to keep us safe along the way, different ways of doing things or being in the world together. But we have, in God and with God, everything that we need for our journey.

We have, in the knowledge of the love of God, the awareness of the image of God in every person ensouled by the Spirit, to keep us from bitterness and hatred, and to protect us in the paths of righteousness, and of repentance, and of forgiveness.

We have in the example of Jesus, and of his devoted parents, the call to sacrifice that will keep us from encroaching on the safety of our neighbours with the selfishness of our desires; that will keep us patient, and apart, until it is safe to come together; that will remind us of the value of the lives of others.

We have, in the Wisdom of God that guided the Magi, the ingenuity of scientists and the compassion of caregivers who distribute the curiosity and love of humanity distilled into vaccines and packed into care plans.

However, and whenever, we find our way home, God is not only there waiting for us. God is with us in the journey. God is with us in the wilderness. God is with us in the grief and the weeping. God is with us in the consolation and the moments of levity. God is with us in the confusion and in the insight. Even the Christmas season draws itself out beyond our patience for it, all to remind us of the promises of Emmanuel: God is with us. Jesus, a saviour, is born.

As the apostle Paul might have written just for such a time as this,

I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, and for this reason I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which God has called you, what are the riches of God’s glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of God’s power for us who believe.

Ephesians 1:15-19

Amen

The featured image is from The Flight into Egypt: A night piece, by Rembrandt van Rijn, which was donated to donated to Wikimedia Commons and the public domain as part of a project by the National Gallery of Art

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Halfway

Posted on December 30, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

This devotion for the sixth day of Christmas was first posted at the Episcopal Cafe: Speaking to the Soul

Halfway through packing for their pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the Temple and its sacrifice, the covenant and its blood, Joseph is distracted by the keening of the child. He had never noticed before how like grief a baby’s cry could be – wailing for the womb, mourning the waters from which it was drawn out and adopted into the world. Half-turning, he would scoop up the infant and cradle him, soothe him from the pain to come; but his mother already has him in her arms, holding him to one breast, whispering secrets.

Halfway through the night, a shepherd shifts uneasily in sleep, dreaming of a terrifying light, a polyphony of voices, but it is only the sheep bleating. They, too, still watch the sky for the return of angels.

Halfway through their journey, the astronomers, looking for their own light, rail at the cloud cover and complain to their camels. They set up camp in the desert, closer than they think to the site of God’s deliverance.

Halfway through dinner, Herod belches and clutches his chest. Heartburn. For all the heat of its name, his blood runs cold each time he is reminded of his mortality. He is out of sorts, and he is afraid.

Halfway through a prayer, Anna pauses. She can hear Simeon greeting another young couple with his practised patter, putting them at ease with his restless eyes and excitement, as though every infant coming through these portals might be, at last, the Messiah. As she hears them murmuring by, gossiping under their breath about Simeon’s zealous optimism, for the first time in decades, Anna realizes that she is hungry.

Halfway through the prayer of confession, I stumble across the words, “We have not loved you with our whole heart.”

On the sixth day, halfway through Christmas, with the wholesomeness of God’s love lying in a manger and the heartlessness of Herod running riot in the streets; with God’s Incarnate One being prepared for his first wound, and his mother slowly healing, but her catching her heart in her mouth each time he sighs; on the sixth day, Joseph half-turns back, forgetting to pack up the bread he had picked up before the baby cried, his heart halfway to heaven and his spirit halfway to madness with the wonder of it all.

Featured image: detail from St Joseph with the Infant Jesus, Elisabetta Sirani (Bologna 1638-1665), c. 1662, photographed by Palmesco, used under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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The first breath

Posted on December 25, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

scented with humanity –

the particulates of life –

held for what seemed like

eternity, let loose at last

(his mother, astonished at

the audacity of her body, gasped)

with the force of a singular

creation, splitting the skies,

setting stars with its

raucous music

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Mary and Joseph’s no good, terrible, wonderful year

Posted on December 24, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

A homily for Christmas Eve, 2020

At the turning of the year, as the days began to push back against the pushiness of night; as the light grew longer and the shadows shorter, the people were going about their business without a second thought, as the saying goes, as in the days before the Flood. There was no warning that everything was about to change, the world turn upside down, a new creation sweep across the earth as surely as in the days of Noah.

Back in those days, in which ignorance was bliss, an ordinary young couple was planning a wedding. But their plans were abruptly upended, not only by the government decree that mandated their registration and restricted their freedom of location, sending them scurrying for accommodation. That was only the backdrop to the real dilemma: that an angel of the Lord had appeared to each of them in turn to explain that instead of marrying and settling down as they had anticipated, instead, they had been chosen to bear and raise the Son of God, and all of their other dreams would have to take a back seat, for now, to the imperative of God’s love.

In an instant, everything was changed. By late spring, their plans were in tatters and their nerves raw from explaining to relatives the new situation. Mary, visiting her cousin in the country after Elizabeth emerged from her long quarantine, found herself staying for months, unable to leave. Just when she and Joseph could have used the time together.

Through late summer and into the autumn, quickly and quietly married to avoid the gossiping crowds, the new family found themselves almost adjusting, as though, for moments at a time, this were all quite normal and to be expected. After all, it had happened to Elizabeth, too.

But as the night pressed back again, eating into their days, the sleepless dreams returned. The political situation was becoming oppressive, and it became necessary to travel south, to Bethlehem, and search for shelter.

The centres of hospitality were full. They had to make a makeshift bedroom and delivery suite out of a cave, where the animals were stalled. It was nothing like Mary had imagined her marriage, her first childbirth, would be, this strange isolation with the ox and the ass. It was a singular situation, in a stressed-out time and place, and it was there and then that the Christ was born, God incarnate, Emmanuel: Jesus, whose name means our salvation.

It was a year like no other, but Jesus didn’t wait for a better time to come among us. He didn’t choose a safer place to be born – the palace of the king, or the living quarters of the chief priests, or some other realm altogether.

Instead he entered into the messiness of the stable, the precariousness of a politically explosive empire, the inexperience and uncertainty of young lives, the isolation of those without a footprint on the earth. He was born into a makeshift hospital when all of the others were full, and he made do with the midwives his mother and father could muster, drafted out of shepherds and angels and strangers.

He did not wait for a better time.

The world turns and we find ourselves once more at the manger. Last time the nights were this short, and the days just beginning to push back against their borders, we had no idea what the year would bring. It has upended our expectations, more than once. It has brought us grief, and loneliness, and creativity, and comfort. It has certainly not been without conflict, doubt, or fear. Yet still it brings us here, to the manger, once more.

Jesus didn’t wait for a better time to be born among us, because God knows we need him now. Jesus would not leave us hanging when we are out of room in the hospitals and out of patience with our politics and out of sorts with each other because we just need a hug.

God chose exactly the most inconvenient, unpromising, unstable time to be born among us, because that’s when we need Jesus the most.

Mary pondered this in her heart, as she contemplated the child lying in a manger, and all that was before them. There would be trials to come; life would never be the same as it was. And yet here, in the messiness and unexpected warmth of it all: here was Love laid out before her; the love of God, made manifest, born to save us all.

Amen.

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Solstice

Posted on December 21, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

This poem first appeared at Bearings Online, a publication of the Collegeville Institute, at last year’s winter solstice

Solstice

At the abyss of the year
the sun is silent;
but in the bleak midwinter
something shifts
A fearful hope, homunculus,
wakes the woman: light
beyond the turning of the world
begins to show

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Complicity with God

Posted on December 20, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio

The fourth Sunday of Advent is one of my favourites of the church year. The apocalyptic visions and prophetic warnings have given way to the promise that Christmas is, indeed, coming; that Christ will be born in Bethlehem, the manger filled; that the angels will sing and for a moment, we will forget the present, the future, the apocalypse, everything except that baby, born in more than the image of God: Emmanuel. God with us.

On this Sunday we still have the anticipation, the anxious and fervent hope. There is labour to come, we know that. But in this moment, we allow ourselves the hope of complicity with God: Let it be as you have promised.

And with Mary we break out into the song of all that might be: the redemption of the lowly, the revolution of the meek; an end to corruption and conceit; the satisfaction of hunger and the setting right of the world.

We sang a different form of the Magnificat this morning, prompted at first, admittedly, by purely pragmatic concerns over copyright of the hymns we usually use; but when I came to research the tune we adopted, Jerusalem, I discovered some things about its composer that seemed almost prophetic in their appropriateness for this morning’s worship.

You may know that Charles Hubert Hastings Parry composed this music to accompany a poem by William Blake, based on an old legend that Joseph of Arimathea once took the young Jesus on a European tour (the whole thing being under the Roman Empire, who would not permit a Brexit, and therefore full of open borders). Uncle Joseph was supposed to have landed with the teenaged Messiah on the western tip of England. But Blake’s poem may also have been a critique of the rise of the industrial era, which he feared was crushing the poor, not to mention destroying green and pleasant land, and of the complicity of the established church in that secular oppression and support of rich and powerful interests over the needs and cares of the lowly.

When Parry first composed his tune, he was commissioned by those encouraging support of the war effort and the troops of the First World War. But Parry found himself sickening of war and withdrawing his support from the pro-war movement. It is appropriate, then, that his tune in our Hymnal is set to the peaceable words of Isaiah, in which the lion lies down with the lamb.

But Parry did lend his composition to a different fight. When he was approached by the Women’s Suffrage movement, he gladly gave them permission to use the song as their anthem. Like Mary, he recognized that God did not regard the estate of women in as low terms as some of the men around them; he was happy to affirm their claims to full and equal stature, to level out the elevated and raise up the lowly. He even, upon his death, bequeathed to them the copyright of the anthem.

Parry did not live to see the completion of women’s suffrage in his home country. He died a victim of the global pandemic, the Spanish flu, six weeks before the first, limited allowances for women’s votes, and a month before the Armistice that ended the First World War.

Parry, an ally of peace, encourager of revolutionary equality, a victim of pandemic, and a life lived in anticipation whose echoes resound still in song is, I think, the perfect accompaniment to this morning’s Magnificat.

We are still finding our way between the fight for what is right and the deep and urgent desire for peace. We are still reckoning with the fallout and pollution of our own creative success. We are still uncomfortably aware of our inequity. We are still connected globally as much by our suffering as by our progress; but we are learning, and we are not without hope. We are still labouring toward the kingdom of God and the upheaval of mountains and valleys that will bring equality to our lives and justice to our streets, an end to oppression and complicity with greed instead of with God. The contractions are strong.

This is the Sunday of anticipation of the Incarnation of God. It is the Sunday on which we sing of what might be, and consider how we will labour toward what should be, and trust that God will bring to bear what will be.

It is the Sunday on which we pledge our complicity with the conspiracy about to be born in Bethlehem: Let it be to us, O God, according to your Word.

Amen

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Christmas is coming

Posted on December 15, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

“I’m coming!” I would lie to my mother, laying in bed, or loitering over a page like a fly in treacle.

“So’s Christmas!” she would yell back, her point being that I was as slow and full of secrets as an Advent calendar, doling out its little pieces of time and chocolate with precision and restraint. If you skipped a window, finding it too late, it would be as though time turned backward, counting down instead of ratcheting up the days until the tension was perilous.

“Christmas is coming” meant that somebody was running out of patience, out of breath like a woman in labour; like a baby in the birth canal, out of options to retreat; as though, if one didn’t pay attention to the tone of a mother’s exasperation, pregnant and impending, one day it would be too late.

All the more reason, perhaps, to lie a moment longer, pausing over a paragraph, cocking an ear to listen for the exact moment when Christmas will come, all heaven break loose with the implosion of glory, the sudden and dangerous contraction of love.

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Among you

Posted on December 13, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio

Advent is a season of anticipation; of awaiting the long-expected unexpected. We sing of the second coming of Christ, with clouds and great glory. We read warnings to stay awake, to be alert to the coming of the kingdom. On the earthly and mundane scale, we wait for Christmas, to celebrate the Incarnation, the cataclasm of time and eternity born in the body of a baby; while here and now we wait for Christmas, our souls and our spirits wonder when we will see God for ourselves.

John the Baptizer had a word for the priests and the Levites about that. John the Evangelist takes pains to make sure that we know that John the Baptizer was not claiming any kind of status for himself; he pointed instead to the one who was coming after him. But there is a line that we sometimes miss while we are looking for what comes next:

“Among you stands one whom you do not know.”

That is, the one who is to come is already here.

Richard Benson, the founder of the Cowley Fathers, wrote that the saints are bound together in the

“joy of perfect sympathy since all are pouring forth their whole being to the One who is the center of their conceptions and the common principle of their life. They turn not aside from God to speak to one another; their whole being is rapt in the thought of God, and they live in the knowledge of the mutual love which binds them all because that love binds each to God. …
“Eternity is the manifestation of the marvelous unification of life.”[i]

When we recognize Christ among us, in the friend or the stranger, in the one most in need of our service and our devotion; when we seek and serve Christ in one another, then we have no need to turn away from Christ in order to serve that one, or to love them, but we love Christ in them.

When we share in the anointing that Jesus himself proclaimed from the synagogue at Capernaum, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, when we “bring good news to the oppressed, …bind up the brokenhearted, … proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners;” and do not, by any means, kill them, but show them instead the way of life; when we offer “the oil of gladness” to those who mourn, then we find among us the one who is to come, who is already here.

When we visit the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort the lonely, the ones who are already here, Christ has told us, we do it also to the one who is to come.

When we love Christ in one another, then we see the one to come in the one who is already here; then we glimpse eternity in the “marvelous unification,” the solidarity of a shared life.

“Among you stands one whom you do not know,” said John, and if you knew, if you were to turn and recognize the Christ among you, the anointed one, then the Holy Spirit would be unleashed upon you in that cataclasm of time and eternity and you would have no need to turn from God to speak to one another because you would see the love of God, the spark of Divine breath, the image of God through it all.

And still, it took Jesus to be born, to be baptized, to be anointed, to be tempted, to be loved, to be crucified, to be risen, to make us know that love of God that enfolds us and unites us. It took that act of Incarnation to rupture the veil between time and eternity, and to repair the rift.

And he is coming; and “we shall see him, and our eyes behold him who is our friend, and not a stranger.” (Job 19:27)

For he is our end, and our beginning, and through his birth, that cataclasm of time and eternity, we find our way home.

[i] Richard Mieux Benson’s The Religious Vocation, is quoted in Love Came Down: Anglican Readings for Advent and Christmas, compiled by Christopher L. Webber (Morehouse Publishing, 2002), 45

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