Reconciling love

Posted on April 28, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

An unusual Easter 2 homily this morning – because we celebrated a wedding during our regular Sunday service! The Collect for Easter 2 seemed to me to speak to the happy coincidence.

We prayed at the beginning of this morning’s service the Collect that begins:

Almighty and everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery established the new covenant of reconciliation …

The new covenant of Christ is all about reconciliation. The mystery of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection are all designed to provoke reconciliation, and to provide reconciliation, between creation and its Creator; between creatures and one another; between all that is, seen and unseen.

The new covenant of Christ comes with a history, the baggage of preexisting covenants and their complicated reckonings. The new covenant does not undo any love that God has bestowed upon the world since its beginning, nor any of God’s promises or blessings. But it does something new, and for those of us in need of it, it reconciles us to God in new and loving ways.

The new covenant of Christ has room for doubt. The Risen Christ embraces Thomas and his need for reassurance, returning especially for him, breathing Peace especially upon him. The new covenant reconciles Thomas and his doubt to the reality of resurrection, the promise of new life realized right in front of him.

The new covenant of Christ has room for doubt, but not for fear. The disciples were locked away out of fear, but the Risen Christ breached that division, breezing through their locked doors, and reconciled that closed-off room to the world which he has filled with the Holy Spirit.

The new covenant of Christ reconciles our hopes and dreams to what might be: to the kingdom of God. It brings within reach the faithfulness, the hope, the love for which we long; the love that casts out fear, and the faithfulness of God that endures for ever.

The Collect continues:

Grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith …

The covenant of marriage, we are told by the church, is an image and an echo of that new covenant of reconciliation established by Christ. It models the bonds of eternity. Whether as participants or witnesses, it invites everyone to share in the good news, to examine our own vows, and the reconciliations on which our life depends. It does not come without apprehension, as of a future not yet seen; but it has power to reconcile our history as the path to our present hope. It comes with its own stumblings, as the way of the cross always does. It vows forgiveness. It makes concrete the hope, faith, and love that we invest in one another. It breathes new life into the most world-weary of souls. It is a mystery, even to those of us who live within it. At its best, as it most clearly reflects that new covenant of Christ, it reconciles us to one another, to God, even to ourselves, through the love for which God created us.

Into this covenant Ann and Ben now come to be married. May their witness to the love and faithfulness of Christ warm our hearts, our may our joy at their union be reckoned to us as a reconciling righteousness. Amen.

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Easter 2019: no idle tale

Posted on April 21, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

At the risk of frightening the horses, let me begin our resurrection story by acknowledging that Jesus was by no means the first man reported to have descended to the land of the dead, and to have returned alive. There are older myths in which a living hero tricks, barters, or steals his way into Hades, seeking lost love or the secret to defeating death.

There are others, in the bible, who had truly died, and were returned to life. The prophets had a hand in some, Jesus raised others; not Lazarus alone, although his is arguably the most dramatic story, the most prescient of Jesus’ own empty tomb. Even later, his own apostles were credited with bringing the dead to life, rescuing them from their journey to the grave.

So what makes this story different? Why do we hold the resurrection of Jesus to a higher standard of exaltation than all of the other myths and legends before or since?

First of all – first and last, perhaps – it is the person of Jesus himself who stands out: the Son of God, made perfectly human. Not a hybrid demigod, nor a mutant superhero, but the perfect image of God, a humble reflection of the Creator, and an uncorrupted example of the human design, formed perfectly to love God, to love God’s people, to love God’s creation. Offering himself fully to the human experience, Jesus lived and Jesus died. There is no humanity without mortality. That would be a cheat, a trick, and Jesus loved us too much to treat us that way.

But Jesus was not human alone. He brought with him to the cross the very essence and extremes of God’s love, God’s compassion, God’s fierce forgiveness, crying out from the cross as the world revolves around it, waiting in pain for the world’s repentance and conversion to the way of love. The people at the foot of the cross taunted Jesus with the possibility that God might cut him down, not realizing that this, on the cross, was God crying out to them to see the light of love, and take him down themselves, tend his wounds which sin had opened, be reconciled to Jesus.

Then there’s the mystery of Jesus’ journey itself, his descent to the dead; to hell, in the old language of the Apostles’ Creed. In the old myths, after some hero had explored the nether regions of our mortal experience, for glory or for romantic love, and returned, the eternal realities, the divisions between life and death, remained the same.

It was not so with Jesus. When he died, and his body was laid to rest, the love of God that he embodied could not be ended, nor silenced, nor contained. We know, we who have encountered grief, that love is not defeated by death, and the love of Jesus, perfect image of the love of God, could not be limited nor contained by the tomb. In the resurrection icons I keep in my office, Jesus does not return from the realm of the dead alone, but he has unlocked the gates of death and released from its captivity all whom God loves, all with whom God would be reconciled.

In the old stories, it was forbidden to look back. That’s often where it all went wrong. But Jesus understands that to be human is to remember, sometimes to regret; that it takes time to heal from trauma, from sin. He holds in his own body the scars of our failures of compassion. He will not discount anyone for needing to take a moment, on the way out of the grave, to grieve.

When the women returned from the empty tomb, they told the men all of this, and they thought that it was just another idle tale like so many others. How could they, even after all they had seen, fail to recognize that Jesus is like no other? We might find that surprising, given all the time that these men had spent with Jesus, and all of the advance notice he had given them of his resurrection, his irrepressible, unkillable love for them which would not leave them alone.

But, to be fair, perhaps we too often treat the resurrection like a pretty myth that changes nothing much. We fail to follow Jesus’ example of unbridled compassion. We limit our interactions with those trapped by death, or sin, sorrow; or we impose arbitrary conditions on our love: don’t look back; instead of extending our hands to all who reach out eagerly, hungrily for good news, asking them their back stories, honouring their scars, salving their wounds, tending to them as we would to Christ’s stigmata. We conspire with authority to execute innocents and criminals side by side, saying that if God loves them, let God save them, instead of recognizing God’s call to us to claw out the nails of the cross and undo our addiction to dealing with death. Like the early apostles, we still hide behind locked doors out of fear of our own neighbours, when God’s Spirit would have us break loose and babble good news to anyone who will listen.

Given all of the time that we spend with Jesus, how clearly do our own lives reflect the reality of resurrection, God’s revelation and Christ’s revolution; the irrevocable love of God?

Christ is risen. We proclaim it to be true, and not an idle tale. Then let us not be idle in putting into practice the ending of the story: the destruction of death and hell; the liberating, life-giving love of God. Christ is risen. Let’s rise with him. Alleluia.

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He descended to hell

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

In my resurrection icons Jesus does not rise alone,

but hanging on his winding cloths, his wounded feet,

holding on his holy hands,

a conspiracy of new creation spills from an empty tomb.

Image via Monastery Icons

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Why have we come here? Good Friday 2019

Posted on April 19, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

On Easter morning, when the women stumble through the pre-dawn darkness with their oils and doubts, their ointments and spiced grief, the angels will ask them, “Why do you seek him here? Jesus is not in the tomb. He has risen.”

Even more so tonight, as we stumble through our prayers of pride and confession, and doubt spiced with hope, they might ask us, “Why do you seek him still upon the cross, and dying? He is not here.” But then neither are they. We come to the cross when even the birds have fallen silent under the darkening sky, and the angels have withdrawn into heaven to weep.

But we come less for his sake than for our own, don’t we? We come to confess. We come to make amends. We come to bear witness to all the times that we didn’t come: when we turned our backs on misery, when we failed to bear witness to pain, even pain we had a hand in. We come, creeping in from the margins of the picture, hoping to pin our sin to his cross rather than to bear it on our own. We come with our what-ifs and what-abouts, our eyes cast down from the reality reckoning with us from the cross. We come with the sin we have no idea how to make clean: the irredeemable loss; the irrevocable injury. We come with our impotent hands, unable to grasp the whip from the soldiers and stop the unholy warfare we elected when we conspired with the empire instead of God’s kingdom.

We come not to glory in his death, but out of fear of our own; and not only, nor even the death of our bodies, may they never endure such pain as his; but the death of our souls, the diminishing returns of our humanity, the erosion of love and the weary wearing away of compassion. On the cross, we see the destitution of our humanity, what it has come to, that we would sacrifice Christ to keep an unquiet peace, and pile on the death of God to weight the scales of injustice. We see where it could all end up, if we would prefer the false peace of unequal empires, an indefensible and offensive defensiveness, instruments of death to a way of life that makes us vulnerable to the demands of love and of mercy.

We come to wonder at the passion, the fierce and uncompromising love that kept Jesus from capitulating to the kind of craven temptations that assault us day by day, tempting us away from the way of love, back from the brink of self-sacrifice. The death of Jesus was the ultimate victory of love over selfishness, and yet we come to the cross to mourn.

We come creeping in from the edges of the picture, our hands full of nails and our hearts fuelled by fear as much as love; we come to the cross when even the angels have fled, and the songs of the birds have been stilled by the cold cloud that has blotted out the light of the world.

Yet even in the shadow of his death, the death of hope, the death of God, we find a table set for us. There is nothing new here. Our meal is of leftovers, the remnants of last night’s Last Supper, crumbs of old grace, the lessons learned long ago: Love one another, turn away evil by doing good, love God. The hope for our humanity rests still in these stale crumbs, moistened on our tongues and turned back into food, remnants of love. Even at the foot of the cross we make our meal out of hope – bread and wine – his Body and Blood.

This is the mystery of faith: God has forsaken the scene, yet still the shepherd leads us. Christ has died, yet still he feeds us. The story has not ended well, but it is not ended yet.

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Maundy Thursday: the end of love

Posted on April 18, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

The Gospel tells us that Jesus, having loved his own who were in the world, loved them to the end. But what is the end of love?

Jesus told them, “Love one another.” This was not a new commandment, exactly; it had been around since humans knew how to pronounce the word love, and before that, we knew it in our bones, that love was the answer to many wounds, and the death of many wars. But Jesus knew that his disciples would need to hear it anew ahead of the crisis to come: the cross, and all of the afflictions that accompanied them on the way there.

Jesus, having loved his own who were in the world, loved them to the end. But where does Jesus’ love end?

And that’s just it, isn’t it? Christ’s love knows no end.

It doesn’t end with washing his disciples’ feet. It doesn’t end with their foolishness, nor with their betrayal, nor with their carelessness, nor with their cowardice. It doesn’t end on the cross. It doesn’t end in death.

Anyone who has lost a loved one knows that love is not destroyed by death. Hearts can be broken, grief run riot; love fuels the sleepless nights of the bereaved.

Love is perhaps more often killed by life than by death. The daily grind of disagreements, disrespect, dishonour erodes our commitment to the way of love. But Jesus asks, how else will people know that you are my followers, unless you love one another?

Where is the end of love? It does not end at the edges of our skin, nor the ends of our street. It shouldn’t end at the limits of our understanding, struggling to interpret the neediness of another, frustrated by their pinpointing of our impotence to help. It cannot be ended by casual affront, not if it is love, not if Jesus washed even Judas’ feet.

Love calls us to serve those for whom we have distaste, and to wait upon those who waste our time. Love calls us to forgive those who do not know what they are doing, or cannot help themselves. Love calls us to forgive others, too; sometimes from a safe and loving distance.

Love is a decision. It is our choice to make, and we cannot make the excuse that someone else destroyed it, if Jesus washed Judas’ feet, and healed the ear of the servant sent to arrest him, and restrained the angels from coming down from heaven to frighten the hell out of Herod and that weasel, Pontius Pilate, letting love be his gospel, and his end.

Jesus, having loved his own who were in the world, loved them to the end, and commanded them (not suggested, not requested, but commanded them) to love one another.

If we belong to Christ, if we would have him wash our feet, then we must allow our love to be stretched to its limits, because the love of which Jesus speaks has no limits, no end.

After he had washed their feet, and broken bread with them, he went to pray, and they fell away, falling asleep or falling into cahoots with the authorities, no matter. We are the same way. We fall out of love with God every day, and take out our disappointment on one another. Our feet are dirty and our hearts unpretty. Yet Jesus’ love for us has no end. Day after day, time after time, he pours himself out for us, his body and blood, in the water and the wine, in the bread and the tenderness of sacramental love.

As we approach the end of Lent, trembling toward the end of Holy Week and the cross. in the water, in the wine, in the bread, in the love we have for one another, we remember that Christ’s love knows no limits, has no end.

Amen.

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Tenebrae

Posted on April 17, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

Scarlet shadows seeping backward
from the cross; cruel fascination
draws us to the flame like moths,
extinguished one by one; love
like an earthquake sends us trembling
toward the tomb

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Kind conspiracy

Posted on April 15, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

Sun low, river high,

Nature’s un-kind conspiring

to blind Narcissus.

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Palms and Passion: If these were silent

Posted on April 14, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for Palm Sunday at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio, April 2019

Some of the Pharisees in the Palm Sunday crowd wanted Jesus to tell his people to pipe down. They were afraid of the judgement that might be called down upon them – from Rome, if not from God. They were worried that the authorities might sense a riot, and crack down on the Jews ahead of their Passover festival, the most sacred feast of the year. They were offended that some in the crowd seemed to have crowned Jesus as the Messiah, without first consulting the chief priests, let alone King Herod, and don’t even mention – please don’t mention – Caesar’s puppet, Pontius Pilate.

They were frightened that God might be doing some new thing, and that either they had missed it, or, perhaps more worrying still, that they might yet be required to join in.
Jesus told them, if the people piped down, the stones would sing out. The walls of Jerusalem, the foundations of the Temple would proclaim the story of God’s faithfulness to Zion, God’s saving mercy and redeeming power – the power that brought the people out of Egypt, and the mercy that returned the remnant from their Exile, and the faithfulness that promised to do it again and again, as long as the people called upon God to be with them. The stones that had built up the Temple, and had been brought low, and raised up again, and now trembled as the troops of Rome entered one side of the city,
while a procession of praise escorted Jesus in at another (Borg & Crossan, 2); these stones knew their history perhaps more completely even than the people, and if the world fell silent, they would bear witness to God’s terrible and faithful and merciful judgement and love.

And some in the crowd cautioned quiet, please don’t draw attention, please don’t.
The stones cry out God’s faithfulness and pray still for God’s salvation. The people praise Jesus for all of the works of power they have seen and the words of wisdom they have heard and they cry out for more: Hosanna, which means Save us, we pray (Levine, 31).

We know that by the end of the week, the tables had been turned. Jesus was arrested, and a crowd clamoured for his crucifixion, appeasing the emperor with his blood and their betrayal. We so often tend to see these mobs in black and white hats, but the probability exists that the same Pharisees and undecided disciples who had held back their hosannas at the gate, whispering their doubts, now shook their heads sadly, saying, See what it has come to. What did we tell you? They stood between the agitators and the agitated, casting pity over Jesus’ desperate disciples, standing slightly apart, as they
had at the gate, washing their hands of the whole distasteful, disgraceful episode.

We read of the weak, duplicitous dealings of the high priests and potentates. We remember the injustice of Pilate and the fickleness of the populace. We know about the betrayal of Judas, of Peter. But what about the way in which this small and particular group of Pharisees betrayed themselves?

These were good people. They were good, religious, pious people. They knew their scriptures, they understood the implications of Jesus’ words and actions, and the response of the crowd. There was a reason that they gathered by the gate to see him coming: they wanted to believe, they wanted to shout hosanna; in their hearts, they prayed that it might be true, that he might be the Messiah, that salvation, the kingdom of God might be at hand. They knew enough to know that it was true. Yet they held back.

They were afraid: of being wrong, and seeming foolish; of being right, and called to be brave; they knew that God’s grace changes everything, and they had concerns.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom. This little band of churchgoers was not unwise, but they were not all in.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, seeing as this parish is no whitewashed tomb, nor is its worship in vain. Still, there is a risk always of making our religion tame, forgetting the wild freedom of Jesus’ call to carry the cross; of becoming respectable, at the expense of revolution. It would be a judgement upon us if our building, the wood and stones, the cross and the carillon, were to proclaim the gospel more loudly than our lives, than we ourselves could manage. Even for the most faithful, Holy Week is a necessary reminder that there are no half measures when it comes to following Christ, who told the rich man to give it all away, and told the uncertain applicant to leave the dead to bury the dead, to leave no piece of his heart behind if he were to follow in the way of life, of our life-giving, loving, liberating God.

Secretly, perhaps, many of us have sympathy with those Pharisees, those faithful and devout people, who wanted nothing more than a quiet and pious life. We may not fall into the trap of Peter, denying Jesus outright, and God forbid that we fall into the pit that Judas dug for himself. But we betray ourselves, each time we secretly pray that not too much will be demanded of us, that not too much will change, that the way of the cross will not lead us into crisis; that our faith may fly under the radar of the world and its empires and its everyday interactions, injuries, and options, and the question never be
raised.

Dare I say that even Jesus knew that moment in the Garden of Gethsemane, wondering whether it was all too much, wondering whether he might, after all, slip quietly into insignificance, retire, perhaps, to Galilee, try to live down his bold words about the work that God was doing in his world? Of course, we know what he decided. He would not betray himself, nor his followers, nor his God, for the sake of a little peace and quiet.

Holy Week sets a high bar for the followers of Christ. It raises the cross before us and asks whether we are willing to cry louder than the forces of sin and death for our salvation, or whether we will rely on some structure, stones, wood, the cross and the carillon to do it for us, and hope that they are loud enough. It asks whether we are all in.

No wonder, then, that the word the crowd cried out was Hosanna: Save us, please. Hosanna: Save us, we pray.
Amen.

Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem (HarperOne, 2006)
Amy-Jill Levine, Entering the Passion of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to Holy Week (Abingdon Press, 2018)

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Attempting faith

Posted on April 12, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

I crossed the creek on the old tree trunk,

letting its broad back bridge the gap

between my fear and its fall.

I trod in the lake,

letting its icy wash awaken

the dream of walking on water.

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The stones would shout

Posted on April 10, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

If these walls could speak, they would sing
of the sun’s light seeping into sandstone,
warming the night
when Love comes calling;

They would cry blood, gasp
at the impact of hatred focused through a fist,
politics rifled to precision strikes,
alleged to keep the peace;

They would chant the prayers of sophisticates
and the simple psalms of children,
the chants of theologians, devotions
of pilgrims, and the braying of an ass.

If the world fell silent, yet
these stones would shout, Glory:
how the mighty crumble; Glory:
their facades are fallen; Glory:
when the Christ comes calling: Glory.

From the Liturgy of the Palms: Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” (Luke 19:40)
First published at the Episcopal Cafe

 

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