Remembrance, repentance, and reconciliation

Posted on March 6, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for Ash Wednesday, 2019, at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio

Repentance is not an end in itself. Repentance is a right turn toward reconciliation. It is a re-turning toward the source of our life and our salvation, Almighty God, who is revealed to us in the eternal life, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Lent is a time to remember our need for penitence, for lament, for the rending of hearts and the tending of wounds. And it is a time to remember God’s mercy, which is ever-present and unfailing. In Lent, we bury alleluia [the word of ululating praise] beneath our tongues, yet even in dust and ashes it is our song, tuning in to Christ’s love, our hope, the truth of God’s undying mercy.

We recognize in the dust and ashes of this Wednesday, struggling toward spring, the end of all mortal things, the futility of our little battles, our wasted breath, dust and ashes. We recognize Lent as a season of dust and ashes, of self-examination, confession, and penitence. We tend to remember less Lent’s roots in renewal, restoration, reconciliation.

But as we are invited to come forward to receive ashes as signs of our repentance and our need for God’s rescue, we are reminded that from the early days of the Church:

This season of Lent provided a time in which converts to the faith were prepared for Holy Baptism [the Sacrament of a new life in Christ].  It was also a time when those who, because of notorious sins, had been separated from the body of the faithful were reconciled by penitence and forgiveness, and restored to the fellowship of the Church. (Book of Common Prayer, 265)

It was a time of preparation not for death, but for newness of life, for restoration and reconciliation. Even in Lent, we serve a Resurrected Christ; our hope lies not in the tomb, where mortality crumbles, but in the promise of a life with God that cannot be contradicted even by death.

“Be reconciled to God,” Paul urges (2 Corinthians 5:20). “Return to the Lord your God, who is gracious and merciful,” Joel encourages, even in the midst of trouble, and prophecies of trouble to come (Joel 2:13). “Your Father sees you in secret,” Jesus tells us (Matthew 6:4,6,18).

God knows the secrets of our hearts, our bones, our lives, our closets, our hunger, our hypocrisy. God knows the secret of our basest fear: that the dust from which we were made will one day consume us. God knows not only the sins that we have committed but the sin that surrounds us and suffocates us, and the sins committed against us. God knows the dust that we carry on our feet, the dust that we are afraid to kick up, to disturb. God knows the secrets of our broken and bruised hearts, and of the hearts we have broken and abused. God knows.

We are dust, and to dust we shall return; but who made us out of dust and breathed life into us, and who counts the very particles of creation?

When Jesus encourages us to go into a closed and quiet room to pray, Jesus knows that we have memories that we find hard to reconcile to our image of ourselves, of our lives, of how the world should be; memories of our own making and memories of our own breaking.

Lent is an invitation to risk being honest with God, with ourselves, and with one another as a means to reconciliation.

In the Book of Common Prayer’s service of the Reconciliation of a Penitent (Form 2), the priest first prays for the one approaching the arms of God’s mercy, saying,

May God in [God’s] love enlighten your heart, that you may remember in truth all your sins and [God’s] unfailing mercy. (Book of Common Prayer, 449)

For one of a certain age in the world, the words “truth” and “reconciliation” in close proximity cannot fail to bring to mind the work of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, formed by President Nelson Mandela to find a way forward after the end of the rule of apartheid in South Africa. In his book, No Future Without Forgiveness, Archbishop Tutu described the Commission’s hard and heart-rending work of telling and hearing the true stories of the most abject sinners and the most appallingly sinned against. Remembering in truth the sins of those times was essential if there was to be a chance of reconciliation, a new life for that nation.

The legacy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is not a sealed stack of stories. The work of reconciliation is not done. Telling the truth is an essential step towards repentance and reconciliation. Confession is good for the soul, but repentance is the work of a lifetime; a lifetime of working out how to live together, with ourselves, with one another, with God, in new and sustainable, honest and reconciling ways; working out how to do the daily work of mercy, love, and justice.

Archbishop Tutu wrote,

Reconciliation is liable to be a long-drawn-out-process with ups and downs, not something accomplished overnight… (No Future Without Forgiveness, 274)

Nor, maybe, in forty days. But let us begin this Lent on the work of truth-telling, about ourselves, about our sin and our sorrow, our woundedness and our wrongdoing, opening our hearts to the reconciling work of God already begun in us and among us, through the saving grace of God with us, Jesus Christ our Saviour, trusting always in the power of God to bring new life out of hopeless cases, resurrection where we least deserve or expect it.

Amen.

Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (Image Books, 1999)

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Revealed, by Angela D. Schaffner

Posted on March 5, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

I was excited when I received a copy of Revealed: What the Bible Can Teach You About Yourself from the author, Angela D. Schaffner. As someone in the midst of writing her own book relating stories of the Bible to stories from our own lives and families (more about that much later!), I was intrigued to find out what new angles Dr Schaffner might offer from her perspective as a psychologist.

Dr Schaffner’s psychological insights guide her readers through a journey into a Bible which does not lecture, chide, nor always even guide us so much as hold up a mirror to our own lives and relationships. Beginning with a gentle exploration of pain, trauma, and grief, Dr Schaffner encourages her readers to work through daily readings and weekly practices of journaling and reflection to find the mercy and tenderness of God reaching out to them, helping and healing them. After each daily “story,” the reader is asked to find out what it reflects and reveals to them about themselves. After each week of readings, Schaffner leads readers through a practice of inviting God into those reflections, and recognizing where God’s grace is already at work within us.

Generous and vulnerable with her own stories, Schaffner’s touch is light, but authoritative. When she reflects upon the story of Samson and Delilah, I think that I recognize the many stories of difficult and dangerous relationships she has met in her office. In her experience of miscarriage and disordered eating, I recognize a fellow traveler through life’s shoals and swamps, but I never feel overwhelmed nor overshadowed by her own story, at the expense of mine, or of God’s.

The book is designed to be used by individuals and by groups. A facilitator’s guide at the back helps to navigate how one might introduce it to a church small group or other supportive gathering. If you’re planning to use it alone, as a six-week plan, then you might even decide that you just have time to get it for Lent. It might even be transformative.

In her introduction, Dr Schaffner writes,

Approach the Bible as a friend who wants to give you a gift with no strings attached, a gift that shows that your friend really gets you, really knows your pain, and really loves you. Come to the Bible with healthy doses of critical thinking and respect for what its stories can teach you. Come ready to receive self-awareness. (Introduction, p. 13)

I am guessing that this may also have been the mission statement behind writing this book, and I would consider that it accomplishes its mission with beauty and with depth; depth that is stirred by the undercurrent of strong love, for God and for the reader, rippling throughout.

Revealed: What the Bible Can Teach You About Yourself, by Angela D. Schaffner, is published by Upper Room Books.

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Bright cloud

Posted on March 3, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the last Sunday after the Epiphany, at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio: the Transfiguration readings

The disciples were terrified when the cloud enveloped them on the mountaintop, but it was the voice of God that called to them, encouraging them to trust in Jesus. Down in the valley, in the shadow of the mountain, a parent was terrified for his child; he turned to Jesus for help, and even there, in the valley of shadows, Jesus had mercy on them, and the people were astounded by the greatness of God.

At the time of the Epiphany in Bethlehem, the Magi were guided by a star to the birthplace of Jesus. They recognized first by its light the significance of this holy child. By the end of the season of the Epiphany, one which is particularly close to our hearts in this place, we find the brightness of God’s revelation veiled by a cloud, even as Christ is transfigured by a vision of glory.

The cloud, that bright cloud, is manifest in more than one form. Literally, a cloud covers the mountaintop. If you have ever hiked through cloud cover on the high ground, then you know that to enter a cloud strikes a chill into your bones. Your skin grows clammy with the unspilt rain suspended in the air around you. Your vision grows vague, as mists veil the path ahead of you. Your breath is heavy with the humidity; even sounds seem muffled, as though you have already been transported to another plane, at some angle to the daylit world from which you entered the cloud. If you have never walked through a cloud, you’ll have to take my word for it: it is a lesson in mortality.

Then there is the cloud that hangs over Jesus’ conversation with Moses and Elijah, who are discussing his imminent departure; in other words, not to put too fine a point on it, his death by crucifixion, his torture and political assassination, his self-giving sacrifice which is about to take place in Jerusalem.

There is the veil that is drawn over Peter’s apprehension of the event; and then there is the cloud of anger that darkens Jesus’ brow as he is confronted, in the valley of shadows, with a father in distress, a son in trouble, the clinging power of unclean spirits, after all he has done and with all that he has left to do, after he has commissioned his disciples to do the work for him, and they have, in this instance, failed: “How much longer must I be with you and bear with you?” It is the cry of a prophet under a cloud.

Yet even this bright cloud proclaims the greatness of God; the astounding greatness of God. Throughout the Bible, a cloud is made to represent God’s very presence among us; God’s care for God’s people; God’s deliverance; God’s revelation. When Moses went up the mountain to talk with God, he entered a cloud, the glory of the Lord settling over the peak (Exodus 24:15-18), and God called to him out of the cloud. And it is out of the cloud on the mountaintop again that the disciples hear the voice of God, affirming and assuring them that, despite their fear over what might follow in Jerusalem; despite their doubts, their coldness of heart, struck with the clammy knife of the cloud, there is no denying that Jesus is the Son of God, the Epiphany, the revelation of God’s mercy made flesh. Even when Moses and Elijah speak with Jesus about his imminent departure from Jerusalem, the word that they use, obscured by our English translation; the word that they assign to Jesus’ departure is exodus. Exodus: that great remembrance of God’s deliverance, God’s faithfulness, God’s mercy towards God’s people, when the Spirit of the Lord led them with a pillar of fire by night, but with a pillar of cloud by day.

On the way down the mountain, Jesus healed a father’s only son of an unclean spirit, releasing him from the bondage of his sickness, delivering him from the pollution of his illness, and the people were astounded at the greatness of God.

So sometimes we feel as though we are moving through thick clouds, lost in a fog. Some of the mist is of our own making. Consider the smog that wraps major cities of the world in particulates and pollution, unclean air making breathing itself unhealthy. The clouds that come from an unclean spirit, serving profit instead of people, self-righteousness before reconciliation, mammon before mercy. The clouds of sin that have a chilling effect on our ability to love one another. These are clouds of our own making, that veil our vision of God’s kingdom, of the world as it could be, as it should be, if we loved God as God has loved us, with full and hungry hearts, and our neighbours as ourselves. As we approach Lent, the need to reassess our systems, our selves, our lives, our habits to discover wehre we continue to pollute our own environment with sin is evident, and we may hope to begin to clear the air, with God’s help; that’s one way of looking at the clouds that surround us.

Then there are those bright clouds in which we recognize God’s presence already among us, working in us and through us as we struggle to do the right thing, even when the way is obscure and foggy, even when we are terrified, even when we confronted with anger, grief, failure. The way of the cross is not an easy road, but it does lead to deliverance, to freedom from unclean spirits, eventually to resurrection.

There is a profound struggle for justice being played out not only in the world but in our own churches, for people claiming their full humanity, the fullness of the image of God, the call of God upon their lives. This past week the United Methodist Churh voted to continue to restrict the ministries and marriages of LGBTQ+ people. And lest we get too self-righteous, our own Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion; perhaps even parts of this community continue to get caught up in the same debates. When I think of how impoverished our history, our fabric would be without some of the ministries and marriages that we celebrate, my heart breaks. It is hard for me to imagine the harm suffered by someone who is told that the validity of their marriage, their family, is up for debate; that their worthiness to serve Christ is up for debate because of their gender identity, their loving partnerships, but this is still happening in our churches, even in Christ’s church, and he must be asking, “How long must I bear with you?”. Others suffer harm and continuing injustice because of their race, their colour, their inheritance. From the clouds of righteous anger, God thunders, “This is my child!” We would do well to listen.

Even in this cloud, God is speaking, reminding us that it is through clouds of glory that his justice will be revealed.

Then there are the clouds of grief, in which it seems as though our whole world has turned into tears. This, too, even this is a revelation of God’s mercy, for these are God’s tears that surround us, enveloping us in the cloud of God’s great compassion, bearing with us, bearing sorrow alongside us. This is not a silver lining message, but the recognition that God is with us even when we are chilled to the bone and uncertain how we will ever leave the cloud and carry on.

Perhaps the message of the Epiphany, in the end, is not to try to leave the cloud behind, but to find God within it. To pay attention to the pollution that we have introduced, the particulates of sin and pride, and seek God’s help to clean them out. To find, as we work, that the cloud grows brighter, and we see more clearly Christ transfigured within it, his glory at work even on the way to the cross. To hear, as we rest, God’s voice of encouragement. To rest in the astonishing greatness of God’s mercy, filling the whole of creation like a cloud, like the very air that we breathe.

Amen.

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A prayer for the weary preacher

Posted on March 1, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

Abundant Word,
your economy of language
makes wine out of water,
a feast of fish and bread,
breaking nets out of sleepless nights

I come with crumbs,
with unslept eyes,
high on the fumes of the day,
my shredded garment of flesh
clothing a crumpled soul,
and what will I say?

Dare I pray for a miracle,
fall on my knees, bruised with sin,
beg you to multiply mercy until
it spills from my lips
like alleluias?

Updated 3/2/2019

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An ordination sermon: submittere

Posted on February 27, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon to celebrate the ordination of Sally Goodall to the Sacred Order of Deac
Luke 22:24-27; 2 Corinthians 4:1-6

It is a privilege to be invited to preach as Sally is ordained to the Sacred Order of Deacons. Although we each grew up on a small island, in small villages next door to one another, it was only here in Ohio that we met, and only through our several calls to ordained ministry within the Episcopal Church that we came to talk in the real and true ways that Jesus opens up for us; and I am grateful.

You sent me your choices of readings and let me into some of the workings of why you were drawn to this, of all gospels, and that, of all epistles, and Jeremiah’s, of all call stories. You sent, too, a commentary from the Society of Saint John the Evangelist on servant ministry, that which is commended and commanded and demonstrated by Jesus in the gospel. Br Jim Woodrum wrote, “He entered into our condition, grew up and lived among us to show that the Way of God was not one of brute force and might, but one of gentle servitude.” “I am among you as one who serves,” Jesus confirms.

And here is the paradox of diaconal ordination: our model for service, while humble, is also glorious. It is not passive, but powerful. It comes in heavy with the threat of crucifixion, and sings with the truth of Resurrection. We aim to serve, yet all the time it is Christ who is still serving us.

To provoke this comment of Jesus about coming to serve, the disciples have been debating who is the greatest. In the Gospel according to Mark, this conversation happens out in the open, on the way down the mountain from the great Transfiguring experience in which the glory of Christ is revealed to Peter, James, and John; and the other disciples become jealous, and angry, as they jostle for position at the right hand of Jesus.

In Luke’s Gospel, as we hear it tonight, it gets worse. The disciples are sitting at the table of the Last Supper when this dispute arises. They are at the table in the upper room, where Jesus has just this minute passed around a cup of wine, telling them to drink it themselves, since he will not drink of it again until the kingdom of God is fulfilled. He has broken bread, divided it among them as though it were his body, his very life, which is about to be betrayed and handed over to those who oppose that kingdom’s fulfillment.

They begin to whisper and gossip amongst themselves, about who the traitor might be, and from there it is but a quick flip to debating which of them is, in fact, the least likely to betray Christ’s mission, who is most loyal, the best disciple. They fight over who is, in fact, the greatest, while Jesus is sitting there right in the midst of them, still holding the cup of wine!

We often think that we are living in the most divided, rude, uncivil, uncompromising times in history. Perhaps there is something reassuring about knowing that Jesus witnessed the same defensive, boastful, and clueless conversations that we now enjoy.

Whether it was on the way down from the mountain, as the implications of Jesus’ unusual messiahship, the intimations of his passion, began to sink in; or here at the table, already breaking into the bread of his body, sharing out the cup; the problem that Jesus’ disciples had was to submit themselves, their egos, their self-image to his mission, his passion, his kingdom, at the expense of their own ambition.

Submission, now as then, is whispered as a dirty word. We prefer to project strength. But in the context of the gospel, the idea of submitting to God, literally to place ourselves under God’s sending authority, under God’s mission; there is nothing more dignified, nothing more humble, nothing more empowering than that.

To place ourselves at the mercy of God (as though there were any other hope for us, and still); to do so with intention, integrity, and a degree of honesty – that might be the pinnacle of human achievement.

By the way, if you choose to read on from our gospel, you will discover that in the next paragraph, ironically, Jesus promises the disciples twelve thrones, twelve kingdoms, sublet from the kingdom of God. Never mind that Jesus has just included Judas, with his hand on the door on his way out to betray him, a throne next to the other eleven in the kingdom of God. Never mind for a moment that astonishing act of forgiveness; back up to the fact that Jesus has in one breath told his disciples to stop seeking power and glory, and in the very next breath, crowned them with it all.

Each of us is promised the challenge and the resolution that Jesus offers his disciples, those gathered around the table with him. We are challenged to submit our agendas, our fears, our defenses, our ambitions to the service of his mission, his love for the world, his undying faithfulness. When we do, we find ourselves anointed and appointed as Christ’s ambassadors for the gospel, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to discover for ourselves and for one another the healing power of love, and the deep rewards of God’s justice working among us, the crowning glories of God’s mercy and grace.

For the bishop, or the priest, or the deacon, the challenge, and the promise, become quite particular. In a few moments, Sally will submit to the Examination prescribed by the prayerbook for those seeking ordination as deacons, “a special ministry of servanthood … to serve all people, particularly the poor, the weak, the sick, … the lonely … the helpless.”

It is in serving the most vulnerable, the most easily overlooked, ignored, or exploited people that we learn the most about the love of Christ; because it is by the need to listen deeply, by setting aside our own agendas and letting ourselves be led by the pain of others that we find our way to the foot of the cross. It is in the most intractable problems of the world and its children that we find ourselves unable to proclaim our own greatness, nor believe in our own glory. It is here, at the end of hope, that we find ourselves gathered once more with Jesus at the table, with the people whom he most loves, the ones who are broken like bread, scattered like crumbs, poured out like spilt wine.

I think that’s why all of us, priests, bishops, archbishops and all, begin our ordained ministry as deacons, called to stand witness to Christ’s gradual, often painful transformation of the world’s leftovers into God’s feast of life, of fierce resurrection, fit not for kings but for saints.

And so, God tells Jeremiah, “Do not be afraid, for I am with you.” We are engaged to this ministry by God’s mercy; therefore we do not lose heart, Paul writes. William Temple translated the promise,

“We have this ministry” … There is the fact. Why God called us we do not know; but He did, and here we are. Let us not doubt the reality of our vocation. … The source of our confidence is not our characters, our ability, our eloquence, or anything which is really ours; the source of our confidence is that … God still trusts us. *

Still, Christ serves us, “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” In the call to discipleship, Jesus serves us, and we can do no other than to fall at his feet and give thanks, and then be sent, not on our way, but on his.

May this way be to you a source of deep and abiding joy, knowing that “it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry;” that God called you into this, and while God will not necessarily get you out of it, She will remain with you, serving you, and serving through you, your gifts, your prayers, your promise, sending you out under Christ’s banner – submittere –  to do the glorious work of love.<

Amen.

 
* William Temple, “Social Witness and Evangelism,” in Religious Experience and other Essays and Addresses (The Lutterworth Press, 1958)

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How to love your enemies

Posted on February 24, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany in Year C, at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid

“Love your enemies,” Jesus tells us, and we sigh like teenagers whose teacher has just announced a pop quiz, or worse still, a health and relationships lesson. We don’t want to hear this.

“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” Do good. Who does he think we are –  saints?!

And yet he believes us capable of this miracle, to love a world that runs on hate and fear, like oil in its veins. Jesus trusts us to do better, to find an alternative fuel, one that is more life-sustaining, and more soul-friendly.

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you … For [the Most High] is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

St Paul wrote in persecuted times,

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good … Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them … Repay no one evil for evil … Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord. (Romans 12:9,14,17a,19)

Some of you remember that last Fall, I told you about my friend whose husband, a rabbi, survived the horrific gun violence and terror attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Beth Kissileff wrote movingly this past week about why she hopes that this murderer will not receive the death sentence; because our hope is always in mercy, and the chance for restoration; because only God is capable of true justice; because the best revenge is a life of faithfulness, integrity, unrelenting good.

If we take vengeance off the table, if we take evil for evil, an eye for an eye away, what are we to do with our anger at the evil that is in this world?

Love, says Jesus. Love with a vengeance! Love so hard that you turn evil back on itself, going the extra mile, giving the extra cloak, turning the extra cheek, not in acquiescence to evil, but to demonstrate the better way, the loving way; love that is strong, stronger than death, and more resilient than evil.

Do good, regardless of those who hate you. Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.

And we might ask, but how, because we are not saints yet, most of us at least?

The example of Joseph and his brothers is both difficult and instructive. Joseph spent years as a slave and in prison before he ended up in the exalted position in Pharaoh’s house in which his brothers find him. And even Joseph, for all his fine words, struggled to work out how to forgive them, who to love, how to be reconciled and do good to the brothers who cause him so much harm. He wept. He had them arrested. He hid his true identity from them. Only after a lot of soul-searching and back-and-forth (literally, for the brothers) was he able, finally, to face them, to feed them, and to do good to them.

Perhaps this is a good place to point out that while Jesus is uncompromising about the commandment to love our enemies, to bless those who curse us, he offers a reprieve to the abused among us, asking only that we pray for those who have abused us. While love heals our hurt, it does not require that we keep our wounds open. Jesus does not expect us to re-enter the cycles of sin and violence which would victimize us. He does not want us to make compromise with evil, but to love ourselves as our neighbour, to drive out evil with the prayers, the answered prayers, of love. Jesus love us, and does good to us, promising resurrection.

Jesus instructs us not to acquiesce to evil, but rather commands us to fill the world with love, with what is good, such that it crowds out all evil intent.

God provide that we are never tested to the extent of my friend Beth; but instead, we can practice on small things. Instead of rising to an argument when someone at home pushes just the right buttons, we can switch the code, responding instead with cool, calm, calculated love. When someone cuts you off in traffic, then needs to change lanes at the traffic light, instead of enjoying the little thrill of petty revenge, we could let them go in ahead of us, smoothing their way, taking the anger of the road down a notch, soothing our own souls and, who knows, maybe infecting some rude road hog with a little grace.

This is not the same, by the way, as letting them go and hoping that they pick up a ticket on the next stretch of highway. God is not a traffic cop waiting to avenge our slights. In fact, the greatest risk that we run in loving our enemies, in filling the world with forgiveness and grace, in leaving our vengeance to God, that Most High God who is kind to the ungrateful and to the wicked – the risk is that our basest desires for vengeance might never be fulfilled. And isn’t that the real reason that we hold on to our own revenge – because we don’t trust God not to be more merciful, more loving, more forgiving than anyone could ever deserve?

Love your enemies, says Jesus. Let God take your anger and turn it into something beyond your imagining – just as Jesus turned the horror, the terror, the death of the cross into the astonishment of the Resurrection. Leave vengeance to God, and see how the Most High will make saints out of us all by showing kindness to the ungrateful and the wicked, after all. For the justice of God is not to repay evil with evil, but to flood the world with good, love poured out on the cross, life irrepressible, the defeat of death and evil intent, overcome by the love of Jesus.

Amen.

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A prayer for the woman preaching

Posted on February 21, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

Loving, life-giving God,
God of Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth,
God of Miriam, and Your many Marys;
God of our mothers, our wives, our sisters,
where men have preceded, succeeded,
pleaded that they do not need us;

while the world learns to walk
without us, away from us,
You remember us as
the woman who anointed Your anointed one.

Ah, God,
Mother of all gods,
remember your daughter
in the name of Your Son,
loosen her tongue,
bear her spirit above
the waters of creation:
let her utter Your Word.

Image: Le repas chez le pharisien, James Tissot [Public domain], via wikimedia commons

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The truth will make you free

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

A homily commemorating Frederick Douglass at Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, Ohio

“The truth will make you free” (John 8:30-32).

So Jesus told his disciples – but often we prefer the safe cages of half-truths, legends, or outright falsehood to the freedom, the burdensome responsibility of free agency and authority to love God before all, and our neighbour, in truth, as ourselves.

A couple of years ago, I attended a conference hosted by the Bishops United Against Gun Violence in Chicago. The title was “Unholy Trinity: Poverty, Racism, and Gun Violence.” It was, as you may imagine, three days filled with powerful, uncomfortable truths set free by bible study, communal worship, shared experience, and by the gospel. Then, the Revd Dr Kelly Brown Douglas addressed us. That prominent theologian of the Episcopal Church freed her tongue and told the assembly boldly, “You cannot be White and be a Christian.”

Can you imagine how that incendiary package of truth exploded into the silence of her audience – a silence broken only by the sharp intake of a few hundred breaths? You cannot be White and be a Christian in America today. The truth will set you free.

To preach the commemoration of Frederick Douglass is an exercise in humility for a white woman of considerable privilege. To try to bring his words and example to bear upon the way in which we hear the gospel today, without reduction or exploitation or appropriation, is an exercise in repentance. My repentance will not be perfect, so I ask your forgiveness up front. But in the words of Dr Brown Douglas, I remembered what Frederick Douglass had to say, a couple of centuries ago, about slaveholder Christianity. You remember the truth he told, in an Appendix to his first autobiographical Narrative, regarding what he called “the slaveholding religion of this land”:

… between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference – so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. …

Shall I not visit for these things? Saith the Lord. Shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?”

Douglass had told in his Narrative the unfortunate tale of the kind Sophia, his mistress when he first was sent to Baltimore city. She was the one who began to teach him to read. She treated him with dignity, and with kindness. But it was not enough for Sophia to be kind. When her husband discovered their lessons, he instructed her that it was wrong and dangerous to teach slaves literacy; it would make one unfit to be a slave: “there would be no keeping him,” he said. Douglass, a child of around eleven or twelve at the time, seized upon his words:

From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. … The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. …. What he most dreaded, that I most desired.”

He was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering – that to treat a slave with the dignity and invest in him the ability to learn and seek and find for himself all truth – that would unfit him to be a slave forever. The truth would set him free; and his master dreaded freedom.

On the other side of the page, Sophia found herself seduced, corrupted, and finally chained to the profitable lies of slaveholding. After her husband’s rebuke, she began to change. Douglass described how

Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. … Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone.

To borrow a turn of phrase from Kelly Brown Douglas, You cannot be a slaveholder and a Christian. The lies that you tell yourself, wise Sophia, in order to justify your position in the world are incompatible with the truth that sets Frederick free: the dignity of a man made in the very image of God, loved and redeemed for freedom by Jesus Christ.

It is not enough, Sophia, to be tender-hearted, kind, and merciful. Unless you actively resist your husband’s decrees; unless you will oppose yourself to the slaveholder’s life that you lead, and pull down its structure, dismantle its scaffold, you cannot call yourself a Christian. Because, as a slaveholder, you will one day curb the truth, and cut wood for the cross, and find that you have whitewashed your prayers as though they do not run with the blood of Frederick and his mother, his sister, his brothers, his ancestors, and his descendants.

The young Frederick Douglass befriended the poor little white boys who ran around his neighbourhood, and turned them into his teachers. Whatever book-learning they had, he bartered for bread from Sophia’s kitchen. And it is clear from his tender tone that he loved them for it. He loved that he was able to make an equal exchange with them, and they accepted him as one of their own brothers, and amongst themselves, they made a true friendship, a community in which they sustained one another. He freed them from hunger; they freed him to read.

Later, boys like these might have been among the mob that attacked him at the shipyard, afraid that his slave labour might undermine their own wages. They could not grow up White and remain Christian. Unless we are on guard against the corrupting influence of slavery, and its bastard offspring, systemic racism, personal prejudice, implicit, inescapable bias, White self-interest, White supremacy; then we who are descended from Sophia and street urchins are subject always to fall into its snares of sin.

The truth shall make you free. When Dr Brown Douglas addressed the Unholy Trinity, after we had recovered their breath, a few in the audience found their voice again. “We hear the truth in what you say, but you can’t say it like that,” they said, trying to tame her truth and settle it softly into the trap they had not even seen themselves setting, the false promise of peace without righteousness, the false prophecies of redemption without repentance, mercy without justice, the mirage of freedom without the breaking of chains.

The truth will make you free, said Jesus. What is truth? asked Pilate (John 18:38). I am the way, and the truth, and the life, said Jesus (John 14:6), and

the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed upon him (Luke 4:18-20)

* A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass, a public domain book via Kindle

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The truth will make you free

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

A homily commemorating Frederick Douglass at Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, Ohio

“The truth will make you free” (John 8:30-32).

So Jesus told his disciples – but often we prefer the safe cages of half-truths, legends, or outright falsehood to the freedom, the burdensome responsibility of free agency and authority to love God before all, and our neighbour, in truth, as ourselves.

A couple of years ago, I attended a conference hosted by the Bishops United Against Gun Violence in Chicago. The title was “Unholy Trinity: Poverty, Racism, and Gun Violence.” It was, as you may imagine, three days filled with powerful, uncomfortable truths set free by bible study, communal worship, shared experience, and by the gospel. Then, the Revd Dr Kelly Brown Douglas addressed us. That prominent theologian of the Episcopal Church freed her tongue and told the assembly boldly, “You cannot be White and be a Christian.”

Can you imagine how that incendiary package of truth exploded into the silence of her audience – a silence broken only by the sharp intake of a few hundred breaths? You cannot be White and be a Christian in America today. The truth will set you free.

To preach the commemoration of Frederick Douglass is an exercise in humility for a white woman of considerable privilege. To try to bring his words and example to bear upon the way in which we hear the gospel today, without reduction or exploitation or appropriation, is an exercise in repentance. My repentance will not be perfect, so I ask your forgiveness up front. But in the words of Dr Brown Douglas, I remembered what Frederick Douglass had to say, a couple of centuries ago, about slaveholder Christianity. You remember the truth he told, in an Appendix to his first autobiographical Narrative, regarding what he called “the slaveholding religion of this land”:

… between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference – so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. …

Shall I not visit for these things? Saith the Lord. Shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?”

Douglass had told in his Narrative the unfortunate tale of the kind Sophia, his mistress when he first was sent to Baltimore city. She was the one who began to teach him to read. She treated him with dignity, and with kindness. But it was not enough for Sophia to be kind. When her husband discovered their lessons, he instructed her that it was wrong and dangerous to teach slaves literacy; it would make one unfit to be a slave: “there would be no keeping him,” he said. Douglass, a child of around eleven or twelve at the time, seized upon his words:

From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. … The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. …. What he most dreaded, that I most desired.”

He was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering – that to treat a slave with the dignity and invest in him the ability to learn and seek and find for himself all truth – that would unfit him to be a slave forever. The truth would set him free; and his master dreaded freedom.

On the other side of the page, Sophia found herself seduced, corrupted, and finally chained to the profitable lies of slaveholding. After her husband’s rebuke, she began to change. Douglass described how

Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. … Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone.

To borrow a turn of phrase from Kelly Brown Douglas, You cannot be a slaveholder and a Christian. The lies that you tell yourself, wise Sophia, in order to justify your position in the world are incompatible with the truth that sets Frederick free: the dignity of a man made in the very image of God, loved and redeemed for freedom by Jesus Christ.

It is not enough, Sophia, to be tender-hearted, kind, and merciful. Unless you actively resist your husband’s decrees; unless you will oppose yourself to the slaveholder’s life that you lead, and pull down its structure, dismantle its scaffold, you cannot call yourself a Christian. Because, as a slaveholder, you will one day curb the truth, and cut wood for the cross, and find that you have whitewashed your prayers as though they do not run with the blood of Frederick and his mother, his sister, his brothers, his ancestors, and his descendants.

The young Frederick Douglass befriended the poor little white boys who ran around his neighbourhood, and turned them into his teachers. Whatever book-learning they had, he bartered for bread from Sophia’s kitchen. And it is clear from his tender tone that he loved them for it. He loved that he was able to make an equal exchange with them, and they accepted him as one of their own brothers, and amongst themselves, they made a true friendship, a community in which they sustained one another. He freed them from hunger; they freed him to read.

Later, boys like these might have been among the mob that attacked him at the shipyard, afraid that his slave labour might undermine their own wages. They could not grow up White and remain Christian. Unless we are on guard against the corrupting influence of slavery, and its bastard offspring, systemic racism, personal prejudice, implicit, inescapable bias, White self-interest, White supremacy; then we who are descended from Sophia and street urchins are subject always to fall into its snares of sin.

The truth shall make you free. When Dr Brown Douglas addressed the Unholy Trinity, after we had recovered their breath, a few in the audience found their voice again. “We hear the truth in what you say, but you can’t say it like that,” they said, trying to tame her truth and settle it softly into the trap they had not even seen themselves setting, the false promise of peace without righteousness, the false prophecies of redemption without repentance, mercy without justice, the mirage of freedom without the breaking of chains.

The truth will make you free, said Jesus. What is truth? asked Pilate (John 18:38). I am the way, and the truth, and the life, said Jesus (John 14:6), and

the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed upon him (Luke 4:18-20)

* A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass, a public domain book via Kindle

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Mere mortals

Posted on February 17, 2019 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the sixth Sunday after the Epiphany at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio, in February 2019

According to Luke, Jesus is preaching from a place of even footing. Once again, he embodies the fulfillment of the prophets: the valleys have been raised up, and the mountains brought low, and he stands upon a level plain.

There was a great multitude of people from Lebanon to the north and Jerusalem to the south, several days’ journeys away, who had come to Jesus to hear him, and to be healed by him, because power was pouring out from him. They yearned to touch him, because God’s mercy, the power of God’s love was overflowing from him. He had no political power, no armour, no army, no armory. He didn’t hold the power of the purse, nor even the power of the pen. But the people recognized that Jesus had the power of life, and in his life, they found life, and healing, help, and hope, such as no one else had ever held it out to them before or since.

Jeremiah’s words deal with political realities that have apparently endured for well over two and a half millennia, from centuries before Jesus on the plain, to this day:

Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength,
whose hearts turn away from the Lord.

There is no politician, nor priest, nor folk hero who will save us from ourselves; no philosophy, nor manifesto that will guide us through the valley of the shadow of death. There is none, but only God. There is none, but only Jesus.

Jeremiah is not a prophet with a practical plan. He doesn’t offer a three-step solution to the mess in which the kingdom of Judah has found itself, besieged on all sides. He doesn’t offer, to be more specific, an alternative to the political alliances, compromises, and petitions by which Judah is attempting, unsuccessfully, to save herself.

Instead, Jeremiah says, “Until you change your heart. Until you turn your soul. Until you remember God, this will be your lot. Unless you look for an allegiance to God, all you will find is your own sinful mess looking back at you.”

Jesus says it a different way, on the plain:

Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.
Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

The false prophets: those court prophets who assured Judah that all would be well, if they would only hold their course, and not turn aside to anything so foolish as humility, repentance, or the kingdom of God, or any of those whims that Jeremiah preached. The court prophets who have always used flattering words and false arguments to beguile the politicians and the people into thinking that their greatest goal was to maintain the status quo: the layers of power and privilege and profit and poverty that sustained the society which favoured the few false prophets preaching to the choir of the king’s court.

I hadn’t intended preaching about our landscape of gun violence this weekend. Even with the anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting on Valentine’s Day. Even so. But I can’t. I can’t be part of propping up the status quo when this country is crying out for a change of heart.

“The heart,” says Jeremiah, “is devious above all else; it is perverse.”

I read parts of a report this week issued to shareholders by the parent company of gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson. I do not own shares in that company, to be clear; I was reporting a story about investor activism for the Episcopal Café. But I found, in doing so, that this company doesn’t like the term “gun violence.” It sees it as extreme language, designed

to create a perception that the presence of a gun, in itself, somehow creates the conditions for violence.

On Thursday’s anniversary, a statement from the White House extended sympathy to the Parkland families, and all victims of gun violence. Hours later, in a Tweet, “gun violence” was reframed as “school violence.” One can only imagine the conversations that might have taken place in between: calls from those false prophets who maintain that we do not have a gun violence problem, but a personal violence problem, a criminal violence problem, a school, workplace, yoga studio, nightclub, church, synagogue, movie theater violence problem.

The heart is devious above all else, and perverse. We have a major domestic violence problem. We have a perverse and peculiar problem with people seeing violence as their vindication. We have a problematic culture which celebrates vengeance. We need a change of heart.

Introducing our proliferation of guns magnifies that problem and its power. It allows the power of violence to spill over beyond the reach of arms-length relationships, beyond person-to-person contact. It is the opposite of the power pouring out of Jesus, the power to heal and to haul people together. Until we have a change of heart, we will remain trapped in cycles of our own construction, placing our trust in mere mortals and their metal, defending the deeply problematic status quo, at the expense of those who mourn, those who weep, those who are lost.

Jeremiah declined to offer an alternative alliance for Judah to fight its way out of the corner it was in. Instead, he only offered God.

Our answer to the problem of gun violence, while it may well take political engagement and alliances, cannot come from the well of the world. That’s one reason I am not in love with the activist investor model to engage with gun manufacturers: we cannot let mere mortals, false prophets, control the environment in which we do God’s work. We cannot let the landscape dictate our footsteps, when Jesus’ call is nothing less than to raise up the valleys and erase the mountains, and level the plains.

I don’t know that anyone here is satisfied with the status quo; but what are we willing to change in order to disrupt it? Will we push back against false prophets of fear, and demand instead to declare the love of God? Will we, instead of the power of the fortress and the citadel, look for the power pouring out of Jesus, without walls, out on the plain, for all to come and reach and touch? Will we, instead of the might of armies and the inventory of armories, arm ourselves with the love of God, and love for our neighbours, knowing that these, these alone, are the marching orders of the kingdom of God?

It’s a tall order, I know. But consider the vision of God’s kingdom that Jesus offers: a world in which the poor have power; where the bereft are comforted. Where profits are harvested as food for the hungry, with ploughshares beaten out of pistols. Where the name Pulse has not been perverted to echo with death and anger, but resumes its resonance of life, and love. Where Aurora means the halo of light around the moon, giving glory to God with all the heavenly bodies, and we no longer ask, do you mean the one in Colorado, or the one in Illinois? Where the south side of Chicago is simply the sunny side of the street. Where the Tree of Life grows green in the Garden of Eden. A kingdom where the name Parkland conjures up, not the valley of the shadow of death, but a quiet place, green pastures beside still waters.

It is not a situation that will come about by accident. It will always be opposed by false prophets and fear. It is perhaps impossible for mere mortals to construct. But here’s our secret weapon: we are not mere mortals. We are created, and called, and commissioned in the image of God and by the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. By his power, the power of God’s love made manifest, made human, we can do more than we will ever imagine.

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