Ascending

Posted on May 21, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

An arpeggio rising beyond our ear, they
who strum and straddle the lines
between heaven and the earth, the angels incorporeal, they
think us foolish to strain after touch, sight, sounds,
the echo in our marrow of a descending chord
that sits in the solar plexus skewering us to the pew.
You will find him, they say, as you saw him leave,
wounded and glorious, witnessed by others and told to you
as though in a dream, fixed and risen barely beyond translation

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A new creation

Posted on May 17, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, still under stay-at-home orders.

Since Peter’s letter invites us to remember the story of Noah, let’s imagine ourselves into the Ark, and out of the Ark, emerging to see the first rainbow. Can you imagine what it would be like to see that accident of light for the very first time, blazed across the sky? Can you imagine, having come through a storm that devastated everything familiar, that ended life as you knew it, and deposited you on a mountainside to build a new life out of the debris of the old creation; can you imagine then seeing in the sky something so beautiful, so terrifying, so bright, so inexplicable (if you were Noah)? Would you run towards it, seeking God where it seemed to touch the earth, or would you fall on your face in fear, uncertain what this new sign, this new promise, this new covenant might mean?

Some of you know that the clergy of this diocese met earlier this week with our Presiding Bishop by Zoom. One of the crossbeams of his message to us was that, as much as we hear the phrase, and use it, we are not seeking a new normal on the other side of this pandemic, whatever that might look like and however long it might take. Instead, we, as Christians, Bishop Curry said, are always looking for, always embodying God’s new creation.

Noah wasn’t looking anew for the old world, on the Ark or after the Flood. That ship had sailed.

Paul wasn’t seeking a new normal for his life after the road to Damascus; he preached the new creation of a life in Christ, with Christ, the new life of resurrection.

Jesus was not looking for a new normal when he returned from waking the dead after his resurrection. Nothing was normal. His own disciples both saw him and didn’t recognize him, believed although some doubted, were afraid and full of joy, promised to love him, and feed his lambs, and still sheltered in place, behind locked doors.

I have said a couple of times that one of the best, most serendipitous things I did before our quarantine, not seeing this situation coming, was to adopt our two kittens from the Euclid Pet Pals. They have been a godsend to our lockdown days. Of course, they think they run the Ark.

Last week I had to bring the kittens back to Euclid for their little operations to make sure they couldn’t grow more kittens. Pet owners are advised to keep their patients quiet and calm for a period of convalescence after surgery; try that with a pair of prime young cats. One of the sisters healed beautifully, but I had to bring the other back this week for fresh stitches and a bit of remedial care because she simply will not follow her treatment plan. Even after this latest set of warning signs, she insists on picking at her stitches and has now been rewarded with a cone of shame, for her own protection. Because she wouldn’t follow the rules for recovery the first time around, her healing will take more than twice as long than it should have. And it’s true, and unfair, that her sister broke all the same rules she did and is perfectly healthy; one person’s luck is not a scientific study in what we can get away with.

We all want to reassemble our common life in Christ, to celebrate the Sacraments and to worship together, to see the faces of those whom we love and for whom we pray daily, to work out our salvation together with fear and trembling.

But what if we prepare for that reconstruction not by working out how to work around or set aside the sacrifices that public health and our common good requires of us at this time, but by imagining a whole new creation; not by trying to retrofit the future onto the patterns of normality to which we had become accustomed, but by entering freely into the creative imagination of God?

As Paul has preached,

“The God who made the world and everything in it, the One who rules over heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is God served by human hands, as though God needed anything, since it is God who gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.”

It is true, I am convinced, that God meets us in our buildings, our upturned Arks; in our rites and rituals, in our calendars and feast days, since we are bound by space and time; that God graces us through the Sacraments. This is true; and/but we do not contain God that way, and if God’s grace is uncontained by our construction of normality, then it follows that we, made in God’s image and inspired by God’s Spirit and led by Christ’s example, may also find ourselves called to be not entirely normal. We are a new creation.

New creation is hard work. While Bishop Curry was preaching it, I could almost see it, almost taste it, because he is that good and persuasive a preacher; but even God rested after six days. Creation, finding a new way forward, is exhausting. It’s so tempting to fall back anew into an old normal instead.

But “God waited patiently in the days of Noah,” the first letter of Peter tells us. God is patient as we work out with fear and trembling the path of the Cross set before us, knowing its dangers, knowing, too, that it leads toward life.

When Noah began to build the Ark, its dimensions were beyond his capacity to grasp. As he saw it come together, he must have thought, “This is not normal.”

As the storm hit, and its intensity hit home, and as it showed no signs of letting up, the world must have thought, “This is not normal.”

As the Ark drifted on the surface of creation for months, by biblical account, not for forty days, but forty days followed by one hundred and fifty days followed by a season of gradual abatement of the waters first from the uninhabitable mountain tops and only slowly to a level where a man and his family and somewhere between two and fourteen of every kind of animal in the world might have room to disembark – as life on the Ark stretched from month to month, its inhabitants must have found some sort of routine, some rhythm, some method of accounting for the days and their demands, but God knows, it cannot have felt anything like normal. And what followed, after the tide ebbed, after they all emerged, after Noah built an altar and made his sacrifice to God; what followed was a new creation, the sign of the rainbow in the sky.

There were survivors of the old days, the old ways. Olive trees still grew, doves and ravens still flew, Noah still knew how to make an altar and offer sacrifice. And when God responded, with a whole new creation blazed across his vision, across the sky, did Noah fall on his face, or hide his eyes, or did he look with wonder toward that infinite and creative space between the arc and the earth, filling it with his imaginations of what other new and wonderful things God might have in store for him, and his family, and somewhere between two and fourteen of every living creature on the earth?

Amen

Featured image: Noah’s Dankgebet, by Domenico Morelli, Public Domain (detail) via wikimedia commons

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Living stones

Posted on May 10, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

If I were preaching this morning, I might want to say something about living stones.

(I was not preaching this morning; our Senior Warden offered a strong word of grace and encouragement. Nevertheless:)

When Jesus entered Jerusalem and the people sang and chanted and waved branches and coats and created a holy cacophony, some asked Jesus to ask the crowd to tone it down.

“If these were silent,” he said, “the stones would shout out.” (Luke 19:40)

Have you ever wandered through an old graveyard, reading the tombstones, wondering about the stories that they tell? Most give little away. Many speak names, dates, perhaps a close relationship or two. My mother’s stone has the fragment of a poem I wrote for her funeral, but when she was dying she chose a different epitaph. One day, when I visited, she was repeating the same phrase over and over, in her absent murmur: “well loved. Well loved.” She was well loved.

Stones have little space for ambiguity or nuance. They are hard-nosed, they get straight to the point. They do not give up extra flourishes easily. “Well loved” is the kind of distillation of a life they can support. Names, dates, and one salient detail to sum up the measure of a man, or a mother.

When Peter’s letter wrote that we should become living stones, chosen and precious, it might have had in mind (it might not) the kind of exercise that asks, “What will be on your tombstone?” An examination of our cornerstone values, our foundational tenets, and whether or not not they are reflected in the facades of our lives; whether they would be recognized and rendered by those who will choose the word or phrase by which we will be recognized and remembered, that our stones will speak for us.

“Well loved,” my mother said. I suppose that I would like to be remembered for having loved well, but the truth is that always I have relied on the love and mercy, the forbearance and forgiveness of others, which is why the Gospel holds such appeal for me: if all else fails, the churchyard will bear witness that God had mercy on my mortality; that by God’s grace, the first and last word the stones shout is of love.

Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. …
…Once you were not a people,
but now you are God’s people;
once you had not received mercy,
but now you have received mercy. (1 Peter 2: 4-5,10)

 

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Mother

Posted on May 8, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

Rizpah marked mother’s day

as any other, sitting on her sackcloth

in grim imitation of a picnic blanket,

strewn about with the bones of her sons,

watching hope deteriorate, refusing

to let it be picked clean in the face

of overwhelming evidence

Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org 

Rizpah keeps watch in the tranquil night over the decaying bodies of her sons. Mezzotint by R. Dunkarton and J.M.W. Turner, 1812, after the latter.

Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Known and unknowns

Posted on April 26, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter during the pandemic suspension of public worship.

So here we are again, on the road to Emmaus with Fred and Cleo. We know that Jesus is risen from the grave. We have heard the stories. We have witnessed fear, joy, awe, and the tears of great consolation in the midst of great grief. And yet, somewhere on the road, between there and here, going about our daily business and its many steps, we forgot how to recognize him. We began to doubt that he was with us. We forgot what he looks like.

A lot of the time, perhaps, we are content to let the rituals of bread and wine stand in for understanding; we allow the Sacraments to serve as our certainty. He is known to us in the breaking of the Bread.

But I wonder, as they hurried back to Jerusalem, their hearts full of the joy of Jesus, whether Fred and Cleo nevertheless harboured some regrets, at not recognizing him sooner, not following the promptings of their hearts.

Before he was made known to me in the breaking of the Bread, Christ made himself known to me through the stories of the Bible, through prayer, through the kindness of certain teachers. He saved me from an emptiness that I was just beginning to recognize. He raised me to a new life, one which would last me a lifetime, so far. It was as though I was born again.

If I had waited to look for him, to find him, to recognize him; if I had waited until I was allowed to share in the breaking of the Bread, for me, it may have been too late.

When I was a child, I took myself off to church looking for the God that I had heard about in Bible stories and in prayer: the one whose name was hallowed, whose name was intimate, who would deliver us, me, from all evil. I found a church with dark wood pews and a boat-like ceiling; with an unlikely yellow carpet and a stained glass window of the Lamb carrying a flag emblazoned with a cross. It looked like something out of a picture book.

I heard prayers in a language that I barely understood, but whose poetry sang to me. I don’t remember many of the sermons, except one when the vicar referenced a new blockbuster movie, which he thought was called The Empire Hits Back, and one when a woman preached. I don’t remember her words, but her presence was astonishing to my adolescent spirit, a witness to the resurrection.

I found the Psalms of Morning Prayer to be almost interminably long. But twice a month, we celebrated Eucharist, and I learned to get in line with the adults heading up the steps toward the altar, between the choir stalls, to kneel at the altar rail, where the priest would place a blessing on my head. I would file out with the others, through the Lady Chapel. There was one man who would leave right from the rail, straight out of the back door of the church. The rest of us remained for the Post Communion prayer; I would fret over the words, knowing that I had not consumed the Body and Blood of Christ as it was placed in the hands of the adults around me, but grateful, nevertheless, to have drawn near, to have known his presence so close to me.

Even before I was admitted to the Communion of bread and wine, Christ made himself known to me in the breaking of the Bread.

But first, he came to me in story, in word and prayer. As we heard in the Letter of Peter, “You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God. … That word is the good news that was announced to you.” (1 Peter 1:23,25)

Like Fred and Cleo, my heart burned within me as, through the salvation story, Christ made known to me God’s love for a child such as myself. Had my heart not burned, and had I not followed my heart, I would never have come to that supper of the Lamb, the breaking of the Bread.

We are living in uncertain times. We hear mixed messages about opening up and continuing to keep ourselves to ourselves – at least physically. While we received some clarity from the Bishop’s Pastoral Letter issued Friday, which confirmed that we will continue to fast from public worship for a while yet, we may feel as though we are in famine from our Holy Communion. But if Christ is known to us in the breaking of the Bread, that Bread is his Body. We have seen him broken on the Cross. But even he himself told the devil, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matthew 4:4); and he is the very Word of God. He is known to us in the mystery and majesty of his Resurrection, and in the uncertainty of unfamiliar terrain, and in the prayers and concerns that we share, and in the doubts that we discuss between us, in our grief and in our hope.

We are on the road to Emmaus still, uncertain and excited; and Christ is still with us, meeting us at the crossroads, walking with us, telling us the salvation story and waiting with us, waiting for us to understand, for as long as it takes for our hearts to awaken, our eyes to open, our joy to be complete.

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Easter 2: What Thomas saw

Posted on April 19, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter in 2020, preached from home

It wasn’t what Thomas didn’t see that gave him pause, but what he had seen, out there, while the others were safely sequestered. He wondered, if Jesus was raised, why he was not on the streets, laying on hands and healing as in days past; teaching truth and challenging vested and vaunted interests as he had until so recently, so suddenly.

While the other ten disciples sheltered in place, fearing contagion from their fellow men, Thomas was considered an essential worker. He worked nights in the ER, making life and death decisions, wrangling resources, frequently pushing to the back of his mind his own life and death. Or he worked there as a security guard, explaining why a mother could not hold her bleeding son, pretending to be a brick wall between them while his insides crumbled. He drove the dark roads, seeing the fear in the face of the woman as he changed her tyre; fear not of the strength of his body, but of the sickness he might carry within. He worked at the bank, mostly from home, slipping out at odd hours to finish bits and pieces of paperwork, ignoring taps on the window from the man with whom he used to exchange the sports stats daily, the currency of his mental and social health. He was a delivery guy: a brown-skinned young man now wearing a mask by order of his employer and common sense, and more afraid than ever of being misconstrued, misidentified, shot by some suburban homeowner. Thomas was a pharmacist, but he had run out of hydroxychloroquine when his favourite RA patient called for her regular refill. He stocked the shelves at the supermarket, trying not to see the anxious plea in the eyes of the people standing in front of an emptiness that he couldn’t fill. He remembered how Jesus would turn water into wine, bread and fish into a feast fit for thousands.

When Thomas heard that Jesus had visited with his disciples behind locked doors, he was incredulous. More than that, he was angry. Didn’t Christ know how much he was needed out there, in the city? Didn’t he know how much he, Thomas, needed him?

Of course, Jesus came back for Thomas. He always did, he always would. He had promised it, faithfully.

When Thomas saw him, he fell to his knees in the astonishment of recognition. “My Lord and my God,” he cried out, once more almost incredulous.

Because Thomas saw Jesus’s wounded hands and recognized the firefighter he had treated last week in the ER, who had hurt himself helping a family escape a house fire, who had put himself between them and the blaze. He saw the rough-rubbed hands of the harvester, the twisted and arthritic hands of the truck driver, working to feed the multitudes.

Thomas saw Jesus’s face, and for a moment he thought that his eyes were those of the bus driver, masked and gloved, who came faithfully to pick him up day by day.

He saw Jesus’s scarred feet, and he recognized the aching arches of the nurse whose Fitbit showed by the end of the day that she had walked the distance to Emmaus and back (and back again). He felt the ache in his own big toe, which he had stubbed yesterday on the cheerfully painted rocks left out by the neighbour children which spelled out, ironically, “Stay Safe.”

Thomas saw Jesus’s pierced and bleeding heart, and he recognized another neighbour who had slipped by the disciples’ place during the week, knowing their trouble, knowing their fear, who asked in a whisper through the locked door if there was anything she could do to help, who left matzo ball soup on the doorstep, who slid a card with a little cash under the door, that they knew was more than she could afford to give away. He saw the teacher who stayed up past midnight making sure she had a plan for each of her quarantined children. He saw Jesus’s pierced and bleeding heart and he recognized the grief of the widower, and his joy when his son, for the first time in months, facetimed him out of the blue.

Thomas realized, as he had known all along, that of course Christ could not be confined behind locked doors, hidden away with his disciples, any more than he could stay sealed in the tomb. Of course he had been active in the world, as he had since the beginning. Of course, his love would reach within, and without, whatever bounds Thomas’s imagination set for it.

And Thomas remembered that Jesus had, after all, given him, given them authority to heal the sick, to cast out demons, to return life to the dying, to feed the hungry, to love the people of God beyond all reason. Thomas and all of the disciples had received that authority, and the responsibility; a shared burden with God’s own Christ. It’s the burden and joy of all Christians: little Christs, anointed by God to share in the works of mercy and creation. It is our mission.

“My Lord and my God,” Thomas murmured, once more in awe of the complicated, comprehensive, simple love of this man, this Son of God, once more incredulous at his power to turn the world upside down and right way up, all at once; to make the world turn.

Amen.

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Rolling stone

Posted on April 14, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

I like to imagine that
instead of rolling the stone
he turned it into bread
for the birds to swarm
and peck, hungry for spring
time and their nests,
carrying it crumb by crumb
to feed their young,
open-mouthed and shrill,
laughing at the devil

Mark 16:1-3 When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.

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Easter 2020: empty

Posted on April 12, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

On page 880 of the Book of Common Prayer there begins a series of instructions for finding Easter and other moveable feasts. If you have the Golden number and the Sunday letter, it promises, you can find Easter in any century or year …

Easter is a moveable feast. It is linked to a lunar and sacred calendar more ancient than the one that we use. Even other Christian churches use yet other calendars. For some of our siblings, today is Palm Sunday; Easter is yet to come.

I have seen churches saying that when we come back together, when e back in our buildings, when we are able to sing our alleluias together, that will be Easter. Easter is, after all, a moveable feast. And Easter is seven weeks long – fifty days. Is it unreasonable at least to hope that, by the time we are together again, it will still be Easter?

In the meantime, our aumbry, the tabernacle remains void of the reserved Sacrament. Our pews remain empty of our voices. The building remains empty of alleluias.

But I was reminded this week that on that first Easter, it was the tomb that was empty. And that reminded me that before God created the heavens and the earth, all was empty and void. And see what God created out of that emptiness. And remember the new life that Jesus brought out of the empty tomb.

And so I invite us not to shy away from the emptiness of this Easter, hard as it is, but to remember and to wonder what new thing God will create out of this new emptiness.

Amen.

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Saturday 2020: there is a time

Posted on April 11, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

We read, there is a time to live
and a time to die; we thought
we get to choose, but even
Saturday dawns bright yellow
with birdsong; it stretches into
Easter churches, silencing
their pews, emptying the
air of alleluias

 

Trump said Easter is a “very special day for me.” “Wouldn’t it be great to have all of the churches full? You know the churches aren’t allowed, essentially, to have much of a congregation there,” Trump said. “You’ll have packed churches all over our country. I think it would be a beautiful time.” He added, “I’m not sure that’s going to be the day, but I would love to aim it right at Easter.” – Business Insider, March 24, 2020

For this is the reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead … (1 Peter 4:6)

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Friday 2020

Posted on April 10, 2020 by Rosalind C Hughes

A brief homily for a Good Friday service from an empty church

After his arrest in the garden, we are told, Jesus’ disciples scattered and fled; but at least two of them ended up in the courtyard of the High Priest’s house, listening in on the trial. And several of them gathered near the Cross, to bear witness to his suffering, to his death. Was it one of them that offered him sour wine, mixed with myrrh, to ease his burden at the end? And there was Joseph, and the women, who claimed him and tended to his poor, dear body after all was said and done.

We have heard stories of patients dying alone in nursing homes and hospitals and we are horrified. The loneliness of death frightens us already, and these stories compound our fear. But there are still those in attendance. There are those offering medicine on hyssop branches. The respiratory therapists whose work is that of the Holy Spirit, breathing life back into the world. Those who come from Arimathea to take care of the dead. And the women, and men, with their water and wipes, their sprays and their cleaning fluids, mopping up and down the wards, who visit the rooms of the living and the dead.

And we have the telephone and other technologies that keep us in touch – thank God for the creativity with which we were endowed.

But we are rightly afraid, I am afraid that I will be unequal to my promises, the promise of Peter, though all become deserters, to stay with you, to stay near you, come what may.

I am unequal to my promises, but Jesus is not. If nothing else, he proved that on the Cross.

Even those who do die truly alone, who have died or will die crying out; as soon as the words have left their lips, or are formed in their imagination, they are echoed by Christ on the Cross: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me, and are so far from my cry and my distress? Even in that moment, especially in that moment, we are not alone, Christ is with us, crying out our own prayers, and answering them.

When he promised the thief that he would see him in paradise, Jesus did not only promise him heaven. Today, he said, you will be with me.

No one dies alone. Jesus took care of that on the Cross. “For if we have life, we are alive in the Lord, and if we die, we die in the Lord,” as the burial service affirms on our behalf.

After three hours, it looked as though all was ended. That Jesus was finished. The disciples, bereft and bewildered, withdrew, alone and together, to await – what? They did not know, they could not imagine, when they would see him again, how they would get along without him.

But before they scattered from the garden, before they broke bread, before he was betrayed he told them, “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.”

If the Cross proclaims that no one dies alone, then the life of Christ promises that no one lives alone. Even when the hillside has fallen silent, and the tomb has been sealed with a stone, and the people have retreated each to their own home, the work of Resurrection, subtle and silent, has begun. God’s mercy endures forever.

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