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)

Posted in story | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in poetry | Tagged , | Leave a comment

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

 

Posted in holy days, lectionary reflection, poetry, prayer, sermon preparation | Tagged | Leave a comment

Anointing

Posted on April 6, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

They say that scent is

the closest sense to memory;

I wouldn’t know, but Jesus,

enveloped in the memory of myrrh –

his mother Mary eked it out,

birth by birth –

his mortality laid out end to end,

Jesus remembered swaddling love.

One can only imagine Judas

had other memories

that smelled less sweet;

I wouldn’t know.

Posted in lectionary reflection, poetry | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Refreshment Sunday: Going over Jordan

Posted on March 31, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, otherwise known as Laetare, Rejoicing, or Refreshment Sunday. Readings in Year C include the Israelites’ first Passover in the Promised Land, and the parable of the Prodigal Son.

Did you know that the earth is moving? The continents, as you know, were formed many millennia ago as the land masses stretched and split apart and drifted, sinking the sea beds and raising mountain ranges. They are not yet done, as they continue to move by about an inch each year. One day, our maps will be out of date. Continents will have turned, drifting and shifting. The solid ground itself is on the move.

As much as solid ground shifts, water courses are perhaps even more dynamic, as they seek out the tender spots of the earth, and wear down the defences of rock, changing the landscape around them. Even by season, they swell and shrink. Visiting the site of Jesus’ baptism beside the Jordan River, the water might be slow and muddy, or swift enough to keep pilgrims out and their feet dry. On either side of the river, people gather to pray and to be baptized, often forgetting that this very place was where the waters were rolled back for the prophets and the people of God. The pilgrims trust instead that the waters will flow on, and pass over them, washing away their sin, and renewing a right covenant between them and their Saviour; our Saviour: the descendant of Joshua, whose name means salvation.

In the backstory to today’s little snippet of the Book of Joshua, after forty years wandering in the wilderness, and after the death of Moses, the prophet of their Passover and Exodus from Egypt, the people of the Exodus finally cross over into the Promised Land. But they do not come from the west, as if straight from Egypt, but they have swung through the desert to approach the land from the east, crossing the Jordan River just in the area where John would later baptize Jesus, and coming to rest on the plains below Jericho.

This is probably no accident. In the early stories, when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, they were sent away to the east, as evidenced by the detail that it was at the eastern edge of the Garden that God set up a guard of cherubim with flaming swords to guard the tree of life; and when Cain committed the first murder, he was sent further east, away from the presence of the Lord.

Now, the people of God are returning from the same direction, albeit having come by a roundabout route.

We miss so much sometimes when we read these little snippets of story. Joshua and the people enter the Jordan River from the East, and as they do so, the waters stand up as they did at the Red Sea, so that the people cross over on dry land. Later, Elijah will cross the Jordan at this same point, and be taken up by chariots of fire as his feet reach the eastern shore. Both he and Elisha, returning the same way, cross the river on dry ground, having touched it with their mantles to make the waters stand up on either side of them in salute. For Joshua and the Israelites, the priests carrying the ark of the covenant stood between the walls of water, and the whole nation crossed over on dry land. God is not above repeating God’s miracles.

After the people had crossed over, and as they were encamped on the plains of Jericho on the West Bank of the Jordan, the people were circumcised, to remember the covenant that they had made with God. They had to be circumcised, the scripture notes, because in forty years of wandering the people who were circumcised when they left Egypt had died, and the practice had not been kept up in the wilderness. Now, they rested while they healed, and as they rested and celebrated their return to the covenant and to the land of milk and honey, then it was that God addressed Joshua, saying, “Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.”

And the people celebrated the Passover as they had for forty-one years now, but with new food in a new land. The story is not without serious problems. Who grew the food that the Israelites ate at that first Passover in the Promised Land? It was not only the river that was displaced by their arrival. Today, to undertake an archeological exploration of the story is to enter a literal minefield.

So the stories repeat, their cycle circles, the river runs on. Even now, our calendar returns us every year close by this place, just outside of Jerusalem, poised for the royal entrance of Jesus on a donkey, and the tragic ending of the cross, and the surprising twist of resurrection. We are a little more than halfway there, through a season of wilderness wanderings, Lent full of fasting and repentance, study and self-examination. We are just to the east of the action, poised to plunge in.

This Sunday, a little over halfway through Lent, is known as Laetare, or more commonly Refreshment Sunday. It comes from the instruction of the psalm to be happy, to shout with joy; it echoes the rejoicing of the father in the parable. If we had them, I would wear rose vestments today; a lightening of the Lenten purples, representing a pause in the austerity of Lent. Laetare invites us to relax the fast and remember, in the midst of our self-examination, study, and repentance, God’s provision and abundant grace. It recognizes that, even though our covenant does not require circumcision, the renewal of our covenant with God can be painful in its own way, uncovering wounds and woundings by our confession and efforts at reconciliation. It acknowledges the weariness of the journey through the wilderness, the cold shadow of the cross before the resurrection rises. On Refreshment Sunday, we are invited to remember and rejoice in the kindness of God, who provides manna where nothing will grow, who supplies the Passover lamb, and prepares a feast of fatted calf on the right occasion; who protects us from becoming overwhelmed by the waters of our baptismal covenant and its promises.

The stories of Joshua and the people are far from over. In fact, their battles are just beginning. The story of the family of the prodigal son is about to enter a whole new phase that we will not witness. Each of the characters will find himself challenged to find his place in the new family dynamic, and to rediscover how love might work day by day, and not only through drama and grand gestures. Lent is not over, and the disciplines of reconciliation and redemption will continue to demand our attention as we journey towards Jerusalem. And yet here is a moment to rest in the promises of God already realized:

“I have rolled away your disgrace. I have set you on solid ground.”

The name of Gilgal might once have been based on another part of the story, in which Joshua commanded the twelve tribes each to pull a stone from the dry riverbed and set it up as a memorial to the miracle with which God had welcomed them to the Jordan valley. The name Gilgal might once have referred to that ancient stone circle. But names, like histories, are dynamic, and for Joshua and the people, resting after the renewal of their commitment to God, and after crossing the river on dry ground, Gilgal took on new meaning, bringing to mind the promise that God had made to them, the faithfulness of God to the Exodus.

For us as Christians, when God says, “I have rolled away your disgrace,” it cannot help but bring to mind the rolling away of the stone from the tomb that is to come in a few short weeks, the hope beyond Good Friday:

“I have rolled away the disgrace of sin and death. I have brought you out of the deep waters of baptism, and set you on solid ground. I have set a table before you, even in the midst of trouble.”

And so in the midst of Lent, and a world that moves ever so slowly and all too swiftly, may we rejoice and rest for a moment in the never-changing mercy of our God.

Amen.

Posted in sermon, sermon preparation | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A prayer for the anxious preacher

Posted on March 30, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

Faint stigmata of fingernails in palm-flesh,

the careful unclenching of the jaw

do not show, but You know,

Anointed with anxiety in the Garden.

If I lay end to end the moments I have spent,

keys in hand, chanting, “okay,

okay,” they may convey me like clouds

to the pulpit to belt out Your praise;

but You, O Key of David, know a rougher road

in minor mode; a finer gate, and so,

what shall I pray?

That this moment, too, shall pass;

that with your help I’ll fail us both

to betray.

Posted in poetry, prayer | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Book Review: Made to Move, by Wendy LeBolt

Posted on March 28, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

Have you ever heard of a Kinesthetic Christian? Neither had I, until Wendy LeBolt sent me a copy of her book to review. Made to Move: Knowing and Loving God Through Our Bodies is LeBolt’s guide to loving God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength – without making half of them metaphorical. An expert in cardiovascular physiology and exercise science, she really wants the reader to put her heart’s amazing pumping abilities, and the strength of his limbs as well as their will, to work at loving God.

The result is a 7-week program that seeks to reconnect body, soul, strength, and spirit with the life of loving God – with prayer. It isn’t an exercise program, although it is clearly the author’s hope that some extra physical activity and ease will come from it. Despite the title, it uses more than the movement of the body, prescribing exercises in listening, breathing, fasting, and forgiving, as well as the heart-healthy and strengthening activities one might expect from the title. In fact, the range of activities and engagements is quite remarkable.

IMG_4110

Videos online, a leader’s guide, a guide to playing through the program with children, all enhance the use of the book, which offers varying levels of engagement, for example offering different levels of activity and plenty of modifications, so that most users will find a way to participate most, if not all of the time. As someone who has use of four of the five traditional senses, I appreciate the care LeBolt has taken to include different bodies’ abilities at various points in the program.

Throughout the book, LeBolt keeps the reader connected to scripture and prayer, grounding each of the themes and its exercises in biblical readings, and ending each section with a prayer. This endeavor, she indicates, is not about tending the temples of our bodies for their own sake. It is part and parcel of the work of loving God with all that we’ve got.

Perhaps the best explanation of what LeBolt means by kinesthetic Christianity comes in a section devoted to Thomas, often called the doubter, who refuses to believe that his fellow disciples have seen the risen Christ until he sees – and touches – Jesus for himself. LeBolt rechristens Thomas “the patriarch of kinesthetic Christians!” She explains,

When the risen Christ is revealed to us, the full power of the Resurrection is released in us. Our Lord doesn’t just lay claim to our spiritual nature, but to our physical nature as well: heart, soul, mind, and strength! It’s no wonder Jesus says to love God with each of these. (See Matthew 22:37) We need our entire selves to love God fully. Kinesthetic Christians need more than hearsay; we need to get physical. We need to go, do, and see for ourselves.

I was drawn, though, to the simple conclusion she draws from the story of Peter stepping out on to the waters of the Sea of Galilee, impetuous and floundering:

Love is more than an emotion; it sets us in motion.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going for a prayer walk.

Made to Move: Knowing and Loving God Through Our Bodies, by Wendy LeBolt, is available from Upper Room Books in print and electronic formats, and your usual book retailers.

Posted in book review | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

People want answers

Posted on March 24, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent, 2019. Readings include God calling Moses from the burning bush, revealing the divine name I AM. Paul uses the subsequent wanderings in the wilderness as a cautionary tale for the Corinthians, and tells them, in a frequently misused verse, that they will not be tested beyond their strength. Jesus puts to rest the notion that disaster only befalls the deserving, and tells a poignant parable.

I once met a man in the hospital. I don’t remember exactly what had put him there, but it was something sudden, irrevocable, and life-altering. He told me that it was God’s answer to prayer. He was, in his own estimation, a hopeless drunk, and he had prayed to God to stop him from his drinking, and the next thing he knew, to hear him tell it, he woke up in the hospital, helpless and weak as a kitten, having been detoxed by the doctors while he slept so that they could better treat his immediate and acute presenting problem.

I had my doubts. But it was not my place, as the visiting chaplain intern, to tell him that I doubted that God had deliberately reached down from heaven to touch the neurons in his brain, or the sponges of his lungs, or whatever it was that had landed him in the emergency room. It was not my place to tell him that I doubted that God had, as precisely as a surgeon, tweaked them just so as to bring on this medical catastrophe, so bad and no worse, calibrated to bring him to his senses but not yet to meet his maker; it was not my place to say that I thought it more likely a simple cause and effect of his chronic abuse of is own body.

It was not my place to ask him, What about the other disasters that filled the rooms around him, from whose teary and weary bedsides I had come to his? It was not my place to ask him, Then what about my mother’s stroke? Did God cause that, and to what end? To ask such questions was clearly not my place.

My part in this drama, my line was to ask him how it was that he found God in that moment of crisis, when so many would feel themselves abandoned. I was genuinely curious to know where he saw God at work in his life, and what help he might need, after the emergency, to sustain the relationship he longed to have with the God he knew had saved him, and with his sobriety. Because whether or not God had put this man in the hospital, the Spirit of God had certainly raced to his room quicker than the on-call chaplain, and was already hard at work pumping absolution through his IV and dosing him up with repentance, and sustaining him with mashed up mouthfuls of the hope of resurrection.

This man, had he heard the parable of the fruitless fig tree in that moment, might have recognized the voice of the gardener as God who said, “ Let me dig him around a little, and cover him in manure for a bit (only God used a different word for manure), and see if he comes out right.” One more year. One more chance. One more time.

There are times when I wonder how often the landowner and the gardener had this conversation; whether it was the same every year, by season; whether every spring anew the gardener pleaded the tree’s case, protecting it and promising on its behalf to do better; whether the tree grew its whole life on borrowed time.

In the readings we hear today, Jesus and Paul tell different stories of disaster, seeking God’s meaning in them. Paul tells a cautionary tale of the people in the wilderness, going astray and awry and being struck down, destroyed by serpents, and by the destroyer. Even Paul does not accuse God of killing the wilderness people, instead coming to the conclusion that it was their own evil and idolatry that destroyed them, and their own apostasy that led to their downfall. God, Paul asserts even in the midst of dire warnings, remains faithful. Jesus is clearer: the disasters, natural and unnatural, that befell the people of Galilee and of Siloam, murdered by the empire and destroyed by accident, were no judgement upon them. The physical consequences of Pilate’s actions and the laws of physics did not differentiate between the upright and the scoundrel, the deserving and the undeserving sinner. God did not pick winners and losers, still less appoint Pontius Pilate as an instrument of God’s righteous judgement.

And if we had visited the hospital wards in the days after that construction disaster in Siloam, my guess is that we would have heard some who wondered why God had abandoned them, and others who wondered what God was telling them; some who asked what they had done to deserve such punishment, and other generous souls who would have gladly traded places with one who had died, and some who cried out with simple gratitude that they had escaped with their lives, with one more chance.

It would not be our place in that moment of pain to correct them, nor to question their theology. It would certainly not be our place to say, “God does not give you more than you can handle” to those whose hands are overflowing with grief, or twisted with pain, or wrung out with sorrow; and anyway, the word that Paul uses here is “tested,” not punished, injured, or overwhelmed. Paul says that we will not be tested, or tempted or tried, more than Christ was tested in the wilderness, when Jesus told the devil not to put the Lord our God to the test.

So what is our role, as the church, as Christians, in community with one another and as an example to the world, when we are faced with the questions that naturally arise after a disaster, be it personal or communal, asking where is God when trouble happens, and what it means when God is or is not seen to intervene? What is our line?

In his Preface to Evil and the Justice of God, even N.T. Wright admits that “our primary task is not so much to give answers to impossible philosophical questions as to bring signs of God’s new world to birth” (Wright, 11). Samuel Wells comes closer, perhaps, to giving an answer we can use. It is difficult to reduce his collection of essays, Be Not Afraid: facing fear with faith, to a single quotation, but at the end of an essay titled “What’s wrong with God?” he offers this:

If we want to be bearers of God’s Holy spirit, and we want to make Jesus present to people like that fragile woman with cancer and that young man who’d just lost his father, we need to let ourselves be shaped by the astonishing, liberating, and exhilarating news of these three simple words. Here. Now. Us. (Wells, 162)

If you want to know what Wells means, and the stories that he refers to, you’ll have to read him for yourselves (see below). But thinking of the stories that Paul and Jesus tell, and my various encounters in the hospital rooms and the world, here is what those three simple words tell me:

Here. God is near. No matter how unlikely it seems in the moment, in the wilderness – and Jesus had those moments too, in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross – God, it turns out, is faithful, and has not wandered far from us. The old hymn sings, Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. Wherever there is love and kindness, God is there. When we enter into the world of someone else’s pain, as we are able, it is our task to notice, sometimes, but not always, to name where God is already present and at God’s work of healing, reconciliation, loving kindness.

Now. God is present. Whatever the past holds over us in terms of shame, regret, or grief; whatever challenges, worries, or goals the future holds, God is present. When I met with that man in the hospital, it’s fortunate that his astonishing take on his situation struck me momentarily mute, because it gave me time to notice that God was already at work in the present moment, which was perhaps the most hopeful of all moments in that man’s life. God’s presence in that moment was enough to shelter him from his past and his future, and give him space to find some healing and hope, even in the midst of a medical emergency.

Us. This is the scary part. What if the help, the hope that God sends in the present moment, in the here and now, is us? What if we are the messengers of the gospel whom God has chosen to bring good news to the oppressed, the bereft, the imprisoned, and those in pain and suffering? What if we are to bring with us the loving kindness of God in Christ?

Maybe like Moses we might protest, “Who am I, that I should go?” Perhaps like him we will argue that we do not know how to speak God’s good news, how to stand before the forces that stand against God’s children, God’s will for the world. But we know God’s answer: “I will be with you. I AM with you.”

And who are we to say that’s not enough?

N.T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (InterVarsity Press, 2006)

Samuel Wells, Be Not Afraid: facing fear with faith (BrazosPress, 2011)

Photo: the empires lie in ruins. In Jerash, Jordan

Posted in sermon | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Citizens of heaven

Posted on March 17, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Second Sunday of Lent, 2019. Earlier this weekend, a white terrorist attacked two mosques in Christchurch, NZ, killing at least 50 people at prayer and injuring scores more. Jesus wept.

Our citizenship is in heaven, writes Paul (Philippians 4:20). You may well imagine that as someone who has lived as a native, an alien, an expatriate, an immigrant, and a so-called naturalized citizen in a few different nations on three very different continents that Paul’s words hold particular meaning for me, and you would be right. Some of you feel the same resonance in your gut, in your heart. Paul’s own journey and life was profoundly and inescapably affected by the tension between his religion, his conversion, and his citizenship of Rome.

Our citizenship is in heaven, and Jesus is our Lord. It is a promise that has sustained more wretched wanderers than I have been, protected as I am by privilege. Our citizenship is in heaven, whisper the refugee and the asylum seeker, the trafficked and the traveller, the dispossessed and the disoriented, drawn to the image of a God who shelters all of her children under her multi-feathered wings, a Christ who draws all people to himself.

Our citizenship is in heaven, declare the confident and the confused, the helpless and the hopeful, in every language invented under the Word of God.

The kingdom of heaven is at hand, says Jesus.

A couple of years ago I participated in a Martin Luther King, Jr Day commemoration and celebration at arguably one of the more astonishingly diverse institutions in Cleveland. I was to read from the Bible. The man next to me was to read from the Qur’an. We fell into conversation waiting for the program to begin. He was also an immigrant and had lived in the US for a similar length of time as me. We talked about his work as a pediatric specialist, how he met some of his patients within an hour of their birth, how he accompanied some of them throughout the duration of their young lives, how close he became to their families, their parents, how his work was a ministry of love.

We moved on to talking about our own families. Like me and my spouse, he and his wife had raised their own children in greater Cleveland. Like us, they had discovered that once that happens, despite the strong bonds and heartbreak of elderly parents and relatives back in the old country, we have no choice but to follow our children’s futures, and to throw in our lot with them. We raised our children in America; that’s how we became American.

We are very different people, this man and me, yet arriving at the same destination. And in our hands, between us, we held the words of our holy scriptures, the certificates of our citizenship in heaven. There are very real, significant, and undeniable differences between our religions, but there is one God who calls us each by name, with whose image we are indelibly stamped.

There are real and significant differences between our religious rites and doctrines, but there is one God, who revealed Godself to Adam, to Abraham, and to the prophets. At a vigil on Friday evening, speaking for the Christian community, a representative of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Cleveland mourned the murders in the mosques, houses, he said, where “the true and living God is worshipped.” There is one God who is worshipped by those who died and those who weep and pray in Emmanuel church in Charleston, and in the synagogues of Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, and in the mosques of Christchurch, New Zealand. They are all our fellow citizens, since God’s realm is without borders. More than that, they are our family.

After Paul wrote to the church at Philippi that too many there were living as enemies of the cross of Christ, his words were most unfortunately used and abused through centuries of Christianity to slander those of other religions. For the longest time, the season of Lent, and especially Holy Week was particularly dangerous for those of Jewish descent and religion. Anti-semitism has deep roots in western Christian culture. We have much of which to repent.

Many, Paul wrote, live as enemies of the cross of Christ. He writes with tears, he tells his audience, he weeps for those whose end is destruction, who set their minds on earthly things and forget their citizenship, their covenant with the crucified and risen Christ, the king of heaven. What a shame, he mourns for them. And how his words have been twisted to bring pain and persecution upon those of another faith. And yet it seems likely that it is the very church at Philippi, and that it is us as their descendants that Paul weeps for, our shame at which he shakes his head. For we have much of which to repent.

Most of Paul’s audience in Philippi were citizens of Rome,* which assessed itself as the greatest empire on the earth, with some reason. But your status in the empires of this world will not save you, Paul warns. It is from heaven that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who was not a Roman citizen, nor a member of the Greek elite, but a wandering Jewish rabbi from the outback,

who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, [when he was] born in human likeness. (Philippians 2:6-7)

That claim of the Incarnation of Christ, the form of God who loved us so much as to be born into our midst, so close that he could gather us into God’s arms like a hen who shelters her chicks beneath her wings, that naming of Jesus as Emmanuel, God with us, that is, it seems to me, the defining difference between Christianity and other forms of faith. Understanding that the birth and life and shameful death of Jesus undermined all expectations of power, pomp, status, citizenship, and ceremony should surely protect us from any sense of superiority or supremacy over those around us who also bear the image of God, whom God created out of love and whom God loves as much as God loves us.

Those living as enemies of the cross of Christ are not those to whom God has spoken by another prophet, but rather those who deny that God may speak to whomever God chooses. Those living as enemies of the cross of Christ, as Paul puts it, are those of any religion or of none who denigrate or even seek to destroy that image of God in the neighbours and the strangers whom the Christ of the cross commands us to love as ourselves; those whose end is destruction. They live as enemies of the cross who seek to divide God’s family of faith as the soldiers drew lots to divide Christ’s clothing. Those living as enemies of the cross of Christ are those (please excuse me) who would burn it even as they claim to follow it.

The lies of sectarianism, colonialism, and their cousins, white supremacy and Christian nationalism, touted by the internet trolls and others whose end is destruction, are routed by the Incarnation of Jesus as the Word of God, the Christ, taking the form of a slave when he was born in human likeness, the child of a dispossessed state; whose citizenship was in heaven; whose religion was the most perfect practice of the love of God.

Our citizenship is in heaven, declare the confident and the confused, the helpless and the hopeful, in every language invented under the Word of God; and the kingdom of heaven is at hand, says Jesus, where love is unwavering and indiscriminate; where death is defeated by the stubborn and resilient love of God, and the hope of heaven.

Let us pray:

O God, you made us in your own image and redeemed us through Jesus your Son: Look with compassion on the whole human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us; unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; that, in your good time, all nations and races may serve you in harmony around your heavenly throne; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

(Prayer 3: For the Human Family, Book of Common Prayer, 815)

* New Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Edition, Carol A. Newsom, Marc Z. Brettler, Michael D. Coogan, Pheme Perkins, eds (Oxford University Press, 2001), text notes

Further reading:

Michael Lodahl, Claiming Abraham: Reading the Bible and the Qur’an Side by Side (Brazos Press, 2010)

Barbara Brown Taylor, “My Holy Envy” in The Christian Century, Vol. 136 No. 6, March 13, 2019

Nicholas E. Wagner, “Paul and Cynicism in Philippians 3:2,” https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/research_sites/cjl/pdf/Nicholas.Wagner.CCJL2011.pdf, August 31, 2011, accessed March 14-17, 2019

Posted in current events, sermon, story | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Hungry for God

Posted on March 10, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the first Sunday in Lent, 2019, at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio

They tempted him at the end, too, taunting him to come down from the cross, to save himself. But he was not in the world to save himself, but to give life to those who need it – hope to the sorrowful, comfort to the suffering, release to the captives of sin, misery, and death, good news to those in most need of it.

After these early temptations, the gospel says, the devil left him until an opportune time, until his next weakest moment, but even on the cross, Jesus’ love was stronger than the devil’s snares.

There is nothing wrong with turning stones into bread. Jesus himself was not averse to using miraculous means to feed multitudes, multiplying loaves and fishes to feed thousands on the hillside. Did he remember the devil’s temptations at that moment, as he gave thanks to God and broke the bread that would satisfy five thousand followers? There is nothing wrong with turning stones into bread. Jesus even turned water into wine, to delight a wedded couple and their guests.

There is nothing wrong with taking care of our own bodily needs, and in fact it is demonstrated throughout the gospels that God, and Jesus, want our health, our wholeness, our satisfaction. Jesus is worried about the congregation on the hillside and their hunger. The discipline of fasting, our hunger is not an end in itself, nor is it designed to be a permanent state. That would be to deny the abundance of God. Fasting, rather, is a means of ridding ourselves of distractions, and even of using the distractions of our bodily prompts of hunger, appetite, desire, to remind us of our appetite for God, our need for mercy, our desire for grace. The first temptation, then, is not to satisfaction. The first temptation, rather, is to take our attention back from God, elevating any other appetite above the hunger to know deeply the love of God.

Thus Jesus answers the devil.

There is nothing wrong with taking care of our own bodily comfort, still less with taking care that all are fed.

Then who would decide how they were distributed, who was deserving? Who would pay for the delivery, the packaging, the tracking, the clean-up? Who would profit from this miracle? The devil is in the details.

This is the second temptation. The devil tries to deceive Jesus, first by telling him that the whole world has been given to him to manage, to divide and conquer, that the world has already gone to the devil and there is no hope but only to worship me, the devil tells Jesus; only then can you become an influencer, make a difference, change the world. Only submit to me and my rules, and think how much good you could do, how much bread you could spread. But one cannot worship God and the devil.

Making bread out of stones is one thing, but if we think we can partner with hatred and manufacture love, that’s a whole other level of delusion. If we think we can make compromise with injustice and come out with dignity, we are deceiving ourselves worse than the devil could do. If we think that we can use foul means to make a fair profit, we are missing the point of the miracle. Perhaps that is why we cannot be trusted to make bread out of stones, bread rolls out of grains of sand. We may not take short cuts to doing the right thing. We have to love God first, with all of our hearts and minds and souls and strength, and the love of God will help us to love our neighbours as ourselves.

Then there is the temptation to helplessness. It is right and good to trust in the promises of God. We used the self-same words as the devil when we prayed this morning’s psalm:

For he shall give his angels charge over you, * to keep you in all your ways.
They shall bear you in their hands, * lest you dash your foot against a stone.

Throughout the Bible and throughout our history we have learned that God is true and faithful. Part of the way in which God is true and faithful is to design for us and support us in a world that makes sense. It is appropriate to use and to trust the gifts of gravity, and our understanding of how the world works, to do great things, to accomplish marvellous feats of exploration, engineering, inspiration, so far as they enlighten and encourage our vision of what it is to be fully human, made in the image of the almighty God. It is not appropriate to defy the gifts of God, to challenge God to let us fall and fall without ever landing, and throw our lives away as though they were without consequence.

It is a good and appropriate and joyful thing for us to use our God-given abilities to emulate Jesus in the feeding of multitudes, in the healing of the sick, release to the captives, in providing good news to those in most need of it. This is the work that God has given us to do, as stewards of God’s creation, as inheritors of God’s covenant of mercy and of grace, as those made in God’s image, and following in the footsteps of Jesus. Sometimes, it will mean self-sacrifice, fasting, discipline and discomfort, as we reorient our appetites from selfish desires to something more satisfying: sacrificial giving; a shared meal; a sacrament of God’s abundance. Sometimes, it will mean having the humility to turn down deals with the devil: quick schemes and short cuts that threaten to distract and divert our souls away from the goal of loving God, and loving our neighbour, however long it takes. It will mean having the courage not to compromise with promises of false peace that deny justice, whitewashed walls that cover up but do not undo the graffiti of hate, which will one day bleed through. Often, it will mean getting over our own helplessness and hopelessness, to trust in the promises of God to walk the long way with us, to pick us up when we do fall down, to hold us when we stub our feet against a stone and cry out in pain and anger.

This was the last temptation, the one that the devil returned with at an opportune time, when Jesus was dying on the cross, stripped and struck and suffering. The devil and those whom he had successfully deceived taunted Jesus, saying, “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” (Matthew 27:40b) Give it up, this plan of being human, God Incarnate, this compassion for, this solidarity with the people made only in your image. Why suffer for them?

But the promises of God are more enduring and more trustworthy than the temptations of the devil, and Jesus came not to glorify himself, but to draw the world closer to the profound understanding that God is faithful, that God hates nothing that God has made, that, come what may, God will forgive all who turn back to grace. Jesus went into the wilderness, led by the Holy Spirit, so that whenever we find ourselves lost, hungry, at an end of hope, tempted to give up on life, on the God who gave us life, Jesus is there to meet us, swaying with hunger between us and the devil, famished, and full of love.

Posted in lectionary reflection, sermon | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment