Mother of exiles

Posted on July 9, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

On Sunday morning, in a tiny park, a large crowd, heavy with bishops, gathered to pray for an end to gun violence. But we were challenged to do more than to stand still and pray.29391280_Unknown.JPG

First, we heard from Philip Schentrup, the father of Carmen, who died at the age of sixteen, at the whim of a gunman and his bullets, on Ash Wednesday, on Valentine’s Day.

As this father described his dangerous grief – “I was barely able to carry on” – his very presence among us screamed of resurrection. But of the kind which carries its marks, the hole left by the spear in the side, a heart never healed.

Well-meaning people spoke to him of God’s plan, he said. But,29391296_Unknown

“Carmen’s murder, and acts of much greater violence and cruelty are not part of God’s plan. …

Evil and violence happen in this world because we allow it, not because God allows it. God weeps for all the victims of violence. Every time we as Christians say, “That would be ideal, but that’s not realistic or practical,” we miss the opportunity God has given us to make the world He wants.

As daunting as this challenge seems, I have hope. I have hope in Jesus. I have hope in the hearts and humanity of people. …”

Carmen’s mother spoke next. Carmen’s siblings fanned her in the Texas heat and fidgeted close to one another and their mother. The love of this family, the care they showed one another was hard to witness. It brought home how much they had lost.

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A freshly-minted freshman about to embark on her high school career, Abigail Zimmerman – the Prophet Abigail, as introduced by her bishop – organized a walk-out at her school, seventeen minutes of civil silent protest at the deaths of those Parkland students and community members. She and her friend spoke at a March For Our Lives. She is organizing. She is activating. “Be the change!” she urged, and the crowd responded, “We are the change,” caught up irresistibly by her spirit.

Did I mention, she hasn’t started high school yet?

April Schentrup left us with the hope and the challenge that instead of struggling with a grief like theirs, we would fight to end gun violence.

“With God’s help, and with those here today, all things are possible.”

*

Several hundred of us left the park immediately for a fleet of buses bound for Taylor, about an hour away. We pulled up just past the fence bounding a for-profit detention center which ICE is using to incarcerate immigrants – more than five hundred women on any given day – many of whom are seeking asylum, some forty of whom, according to a local advocacy group, were separated from their children at the border and have not seen them since.
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We gathered in song in a baseball park adjacent to the prison. Our hosts advised us that the women inside could hear us rallying and praying on their behalf. Some few hundred people wanted to be sure, to be sure that the women knew that they were not alone – “No estas solos.” They walked back out to the baking midday street to stand outside the front gates, to wave, pray, chant.

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They saw women waving back, moving pieces of paper in the windows, letting them know they heard us, they saw us, they knew we were here for them. Later that day, the grassroots organization helping the women told us that they stayed at the windows until the last bus had left.

The group was invited to return to the field where our permit applied, instead of the street, where it did not.

Presiding Bishop Curry was speaking by then, pouring out the love that God has for all people, along with the better angels of America that inscribed the Statue of Liberty with its words of welcome, and the mission of us all to be God’s love for the people God has made. All of the people.

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He and President of the House of Deputies, the Revd Gay Jennings led prayers

of the people in English and Spanish, praying to do better. “We will with God’s help,” we promised helplessly.

We were blessed, we were invited to turn and bless the women we had come to encourage with our prayers and presence. We turned back once more, boarded the buses, back to business.

*

Last night, late (or late enough), I found the Sunday sacrament finally at a Eucharist hosted by Integrity USA, The Episcopal Rainbow. Welcomed to the table by former exiles, one-time “illegals,” who still risk violence to body and soul, breaking the bread of resurrection and the spilt blood of Christ, it was a fitting end to a day of hurting hope.

An earlier version of this post appeared on the Episcopal Cafe

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Your faith

Posted on July 1, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for hard times. The readings include Mark 5:21-43, in which a woman with a 12-year chronic condition sneaks up to the hem of Jesus robe to be healed, and a child is restored to her parents.

There is more than one miracle happening in this story.

First, there is this woman; this bold frightened woman.

This woman is afraid to come face to face with Jesus, not because she lacks faith in him, but because she has lost faith in herself. After so long, she has bled out all self-confidence, the assurance that she still carries the image of God within her body and soul seems to leak, ebb away. With every step she takes she feels diminished.

It is not a lack of faith in Jesus that holds her behind him, keeps her at his back, unable to face him. It is the erosion of her own ferocity, the uncertainty, any more, that she is worth healing.

She has visited doctors, yes, and she has heard doctors of the faith proclaim her disease a punishment, a test of character, a blessed burden chosen especially for her. She knows enough to sneer at them, and yet their words, like the hairs of a cactus, cling unseen to her garments and her skin, scratching at her, creating burrowing sores. She still knows better, but their superiority is wearing, and her condition wearying, and she is running out of hope.

She still believes, somehow, hope against hope, that Jesus might save her; but she dare not face him, in case she sees in his eyes the same lack of faith in herself that she cradles, like a child, against her body. In case he does not believe in her.

That is why he has to find her, to face her, to see her. How many others touched his hem, plucked at his sleeve, and went away with their hearts lightened and their stoops straightened and their coughs calmed? In the Acts of the Apostles, it is said that even the people upon whom Peter’s shadow fell as he walked by were healed. Surely the same must have been true for the people surrounding Jesus.

But this woman’s healing was not complete until she had faced him. It was not enough, Jesus knew, to stem the flow of blood. Healing is only just begun with the staunching of the wound; after that, attention is needed to sew it back together, to soften the scar, to smooth over the history of pain that the body otherwise wears on its skin.

She prostrated herself before him, in fear and trembling that she had stolen her healing from him, even now that she did not deserve his power. Jesus shook his head in disbelief.

Daughter, YOUR FAITH has made you well! Your faith in me! You! You have used your mind and your spirit and your body and your bravery to bring yourself before me (well, behind me) and by your actions you have been made whole! By your own actions! Do you not see? Your faith in me has restored my faith in you.”

Woman, your faith has made you well. Your perseverance, your resistance, your persistence. Your refusal to give up hope when all hope was lost. The feet that carried you closer to the hem of his robe even when you had said, you had thought, you could not take one more step. The hands that moved as though with a will of their own, reaching out in prayer, while you watched as though from some great height, and wondered at the boldness of your own body. Your faith has made you well.

Your faith has brought you, finally, face to face with your fear, and with your salvation. Your faith has driven out evil and restored you to health and to wholeness. Your faith. Your faith has brought you home to yourself. Will you now believe, not only in him whose power runs through your veins, but in yourself to wield that power?

It is a message, perhaps, for our own times; that when we are running out of faith in ourselves, Jesus still has the power to use our faithfulness, our closeness to him, our hope and even our desperation, our longing for God’s kingdom come, for his powerful purposes: to generate healing, when all other promises and panaceas have failed; to render life in the face of death.

“Do not fear,” Jesus tells Jairus only a little while later. “Do not fear only believe.”

Is he still thinking of that woman and her trembling faith? Is it her healing that gives him the courage to deny even death; to take the little girl by her hand and command her back to life?

I confess that there are times – days, weeks, months – when I am short on faith, of many kinds; and long, way too long, on fear. Those are the times when the faith of others carries me; the faithfulness of a community gathered in prayer. Only enough faith to come this close – that’s all that is needed in the darkest days. That is when the promise of Jesus to this woman, this brave, frightened woman sustains me; that all it takes is a shy stumbling toward him. The smallest mustard seed of faith can do great things. The very last crumb, small morsel of faith can bring us face to face with God.

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Murdering Truth

Posted on June 29, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

“What is truth?” asked Pilate, of the echo of a man standing before him. “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life,” the echo murmured, but Pilate had already turned away.

First, he battered the Truth, to alter his appearance, in order to be able to call into question his scarred and swollen features. Then, he washed his hands of Truth altogether, and handed him over to be killed.

It seems, still, as though when we have beaten the truth into our own image, and still it insists on speaking its own mind, we wash our hands of it. We make enemies of purveyors of inconvenient information. We shoot the messenger.

My hope is in the resurrection, but how many more crucifixions must we witness? Again, the pounded nails echo like gunshots reverberating through the cross, and the coffin, telling their terrible truth.

Featured image: By Gustave Doré [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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David and Goliath

Posted on June 24, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

The readings for Year B Proper 7 include the story of David and Goliath, and the story of Jesus calming a storm on the Sea of Galilee

The story of David and Goliath has entered our cultural vocabulary like few other biblical narratives. Even people who have never opened a bible know what is meant by a David and Goliath situation. Even people who roundly reject the reality of God, and of God’s Word, use the image of the small shepherd boy surprisingly defeating the giant to rally sympathy to their side. Some may not know or remember that it comes from the bible at all.

There is something exciting about seeing a story take on a life of its own. It’s like seeing a child grow up and strike out on unexpected and imaginative paths. It’s all good. At the same time, we are people of the Book. Before we run off with a story it’s a good idea for us to look back, to remember where it came from, and what it tells us, not about multinational corporations and citizen activists, governments and dissidents, big business and small local enterprises, however apt the simile might be; we are charged first to remember what the story tells us about God.

Having spent the past week in the company of several of God’s children at our Summer Music Camp, it is easy to see God’s hand at work in the enterprise, imagination, irrepressibility, and foolhardiness of the boy David. Jesus tells us several times that if we want to see God at work, we could do worse than to look to the children. “Let the little children come to me,” he said, “for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs;” and again, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” Or as the prophet Isaiah put it, “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”

In other words, the true citizen of the kingdom of God does not come onto the scene, stomping into the world beating his chest like some over-amped giant.

There is a theological argument, which I don’t want to get too bogged down in now, but I’ve been reading Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions* if you want to find out where I’m coming from; to summarize my take-away for today, there is a discussion of whether God set aside godliness in order to become a human child, or whether the act of becoming human – the vulnerability, the weakness, the helplessness, the reliance upon the love of others in order to be viable – whether that is, in fact, the essence, an essence of what it is to be God. What if in the person of Jesus – in humility, vulnerability, generosity of self, from birth to rebirth – what if in his life with us we really do see God? Isn’t that, after all, what he has been trying to tell us all along?

This does not rob Jesus of his power, let alone reduce God to powerlessness. Jesus is still the one who commands the wind and the waves with a word, even as God spoke them into submission at creation. It does say something about what kind of power is to be called godly, and what use of power is considered righteous.

It means that the story of David and Goliath is not the story of God sneaking secret strength into David’s arm, or supernatural aim into his slingshot. It means that God is with David precisely in his childishness. It means that God is present in his refusal to admit the possibility of impossibility. That God is with him in his naked vulnerability, without armour or steel, still wrapped in the softness of childhood. God is with him in his foolhardiness, and in his ability to strike at the heart of the matter without beating about the bush; his lack of tact and his direct and deadly aim. God is with him not despite but because he is a very human child.

In the person of Jesus, God’s own self grows, vulnerably, helplessly, in the womb of a woman, and is born into an occupied territory, and is smuggled out of the country as a refugee.

In the story we tell, Jesus has more in common with the infant asylum seeker without voice, without agency, without country, without her mother, than with powers and principalities who seek to deny her humanity.

Jesus is close, so close to the child taking shelter in the back of her mother’s car as the bullets fly on the corner of Lee and Harvard. He has been there. He is still there, still vulnerable, still unarmed, still dying, still promising new life.

Those moments when we feel that nothing we do makes a difference, that we are too small, too quiet, too weak, too young or too old, too human – those are the moments to remember that Jesus’ power is in his very vulnerability. When we feel as though nothing that we can do will make a difference – in our own lives, to the pain of a friend, to the pain of the world – that is the time to remember how Jesus’ childlike and generous humanity is enough to still the storm, to topple the giant, to defeat the dragon. Those are the David and Goliath moments, when we are small and the problems of life loom large.

Jesus may never be closer to us than when we feel overwhelmed and unready, afraid and unprepared, defenceless, tossed about by the storm, praying for a moment’s peace. Jesus is with us especially in those moments. They are his specialty, the reason for his Incarnation.

Small stones can topple giants. Small words can calm the waves. “And a little child shall lead them.”

Ten years and fifty weeks ago, there was a particularly nasty terrorist attack in London. That Friday morning, sitting at the pool watching my young daughter and her friend at the end of their week of swimming lessons, it seemed wrong that the sun should shine, that the birds should sing, as though nothing had changed. Then I noticed something that made me smile despite myself. It was Friday – fun day. The children were playing on the slide. Down, splash, haul out, round and back to the stairs. Their lifeguards shouted, “No running!” but the children were too full of life to walk. So they looked at one another, held hands, and started skipping instead.

Smart little souls. Irrepressible optimists. God, in God’s childishness, finds a way past our defences, takes aim at our spirits, slays us in our sin, and in the moment of impact, opens our eyes wide in surprise to the possibility of grace.

Amen

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*Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Blackwell Publishing, 2002)

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Deliver us from evil

Posted on June 17, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

This Sunday, this Father’s Day, as our diaconal postulant preached on mustard seed faith, we prayed our thanksgiving for our fathers, and those who have served as models of fatherly love towards us. We prayed for those wounded by the presence or absence of their own fathers. We prayed for those whose hopes for fatherhood have been frustrated. We prayed for fathers and children separated by death, distress, and the inhumanity of man to man. We prayed that we might be delivered from becoming instruments of that separation.

Then, more than a score of us signed a letter to send to our senators tomorrow.

Dear Senators Brown and Portman,

I am an Episcopal priest in Ohio, serving a congregation full of Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and others, of Americans and immigrants, citizens by birth and naturalization.

As a Christian I am bound by the Law to love God and to love my neighbor. As an Episcopalian I have promised to respect the dignity of every human being. As an American citizen, I am horrified that our government is using the forced removal of children to punish and intimidate parents who would seek asylum, refuge, or simply a home in these United States. Such practice is antithetical to human dignity, human rights, and God’s intention for the human family.

As a voting constituent, I urge you to do all in your power to end this cruel and unusual policy as a matter of urgency. For example, I understand that you have such an opportunity in S.3036, a Bill to limit family separation.

“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” Luke 18:16

Yours faithfully,

(The Revd) Rosalind C Hughes

Co-signed by Congregation Members

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Fraction

Posted on June 15, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

The crack of the communion host
like a whip, like bone,
like the click of handcuffs;
how far we have roamed
from the upper room:
warm bread softly torn,
love-fuelled bodies, blood
fired by passion’s wine.

You come to us unnoticed,
gathering crumbs beneath the table,
trying to piece back together
those whom we have broken

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The madness of Christ Jesus

Posted on June 9, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” (Mark 3:21; Year B Proper 5)

What I think we sometimes fail to acknowledge is that they were right: He was quite mad. How could a person be human and divine and not find themselves quite outside of the acceptable norms, the sane standards of the day?

The Word of God spoke whole universes into being, out of sheer imagination, populating them with flora and fauna never before seen, or heard of, or dreamed of, then talking to them as though they were real. Madness, we would call it.

The Wisdom of God is, as has been well-documented, foolishness to the wise philosopher. Utter foolishness.

The steadfast loving-kindness of God is steadfastly insane, where insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over (by the prophets and the Incarnation), hoping for a different response from the people, a better result.

The Love of God, manic and unrestrained, indiscriminate and unrelenting, completely lacking boundaries of self-protection, proper procedure, ever over-enthusiastic, rushing in where angels fear to tread; of course it is madness.

The life of Jesus itself, refusing to play by the rules of mortality, is an exercise in madness. His family was right. Their only mistake was in trying to rein in the force that created nature, the will of God, instead of grasping the hem of Jesus’ garment and hanging on for the ride of their dear lives.

 

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Feline mortal

Posted on June 7, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

Last night, our middle cat crawled into bed with me for the first time since I got home from my trip last week. He’d been feeling pretty rotten, and ever since the vet told us it’s most likely terminal, he’s been spending a lot of time under my desk, contemplating his mortality with the help of the theology books and bibles strewn around the floor. He’s never been much of a philosopher before now, unlike his older brother and, to a less disciplined and more anarchic extent, his younger sister. Now, largely undistracted by the need to eat or sleep, he has a achieved an impressive level of mindfulness, calm, a kind of peace.

The imminence of an ending has mellowed the middle cat. Yesterday afternoon, he let his sister skulk by behind him without so much as a tremor of his tail, or a sharp, hissing intake of breath. She was not sure how to cope with such unexpected forbearance. That’s how grace works sometimes. (“If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by doing so you will heap burning coals upon his head,”* advise Paul and the Proverbs.)

In the evening, he came to lie on the bed. Still holding himself somewhat apart, as though some part of him were ready, already, for the next mile of his journey, perhaps he remembered that love is the greater part of life, that relationship is a surer path to wisdom even than philosophy. Turning his inscrutable eyes to mine, he told him that the time had come for him to become my teacher, so close has he drawn toward eternity.

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Also published this week:

Immersive prayer: a seasonal reflection at the Episcopal Cafe

Suffer the children: what the bible has to say about immigration, ICE, and family separation, at RevGalBlogPals

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*Romans 12:20; Proverbs 25:21-22

 

 

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What I might have said otherwise

Posted on June 3, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

This morning’s sermon time was dedicated to answering some leftover questions that our Sunday School students had accumulated through the school year. At the time of the second hymn, I had not yet seen any children arrive, and so I had prepared, in pencil, on the blank space of my service booklet, a brief outline of what I might say if the best laid plans fell through.

As it turned out, half a dozen children had snuck in without my seeing them and arrived at the front of the church just in time for the gospel. I will not try to recreate the conversation that we had, but since it was also inspired by their questions, amongst other provocations, this is what I might have said if they hadn’t come to my rescue:

In the story of Samuel’s call this morning, we hear God speaking to a child, having him prophesy to his elder, and the religious professional in the household. It is not as though the child raises himself in the knowledge of God; Eli’s experience is crucial in helping Samuel to listen for the voice of the Lord in the night. But it is Samuel who hears that voice.

Our children put together some questions about God and other ineffable matters to share with us today. Whilst we are charged with raising them in the knowledge and love of God, they have plenty of inspiration of their own, plenty of curiosity and conversations with God with which to challenge us.

One of the questions that they raised was the one which every child, woman, man ends up asking for themself: if God is good (which we trust), and God is all-powerful (which we hope), how does that theology permit for the existence of evil?

One answer (and it is only one answer; there are others) is that while God created the world for good, God also created it with an existence which is, if not entirely separate, or independent from God, then at least heading so far in that direction as to allow us to understand that we have free will, and that the laws of physics and the natural sciences will tend to govern what happens around us as we exercise that freedom of will.*

It is an imperfect answer, and it is grotesquely incomplete; but as far as it goes, it allows for us to understand that while God created the world for good, we have the capacity, sometimes, to corrupt God’s purposes through error, sin, selfishness.

For example (an example I used this morning), God created us to live within a cycle that consumes food for growth, energy, nurture. One might imagine that the way in which God has provided for us to eat of the earth might be a sign of God’s loving care for us, just as a newborn infant learns that it is loved and valued because when it cries out for nourishment, its parent is right there to feed it, and soothe the fear that hunger creates (or illustrates?) within us.

But sometimes our relationship with food becomes complicated by grief, separation, insecurity, abuse, addiction; then something that was created for good can become a source of bad health, harm to body and soul.

[Of course, the simplicity of this argument leaves out afflictions such as allergies, diabetes, and so much more.]

In the gospel, Jesus uses the example of hunger to draw attention to the providence of God that underlies and underlines the law, which our own legalism sometimes seeks to undermine. God’s word to the people in the wilderness was a gift, a description of a relationship with the Creator and Redeemer designed to sustain them in their life together with God. It was not written down for use as a weapon to keep people in their place, that place being always at arms’ distance from ourselves, although close enough for judgement. That was the attitude which Jesus confronted on the sabbath, and it is familiar enough to our own culture and communities.

In the small things, it leads to hurt feelings, misunderstandings, divisions, contempt. As it grows, it eats away at the common good, seeding economic unfairness, prejudicial outcomes, cracking the cement that should bind us in community. At it extremes, and all too often, it leads to crucifixion, in all of its forms, and the killing of the innocent, the entangled, the unloved and the beloved, sometimes in the same body.

[Today was part of #WearOrange weekend, for the awareness of the scourge of gun violence, which is one of the foul fruits of this kind of corruption of the creation of God.]

When we prefer our own rules to righteousness, as defined by the generosity of spirit with which God created the world in which we live and move and have our being – well, then things get out of whack.

I listened, whilst wondering if would preach this sermon, if the children were not there, to our reader proclaim the word of Paul:

But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.

Ah, that extraordinary power that belongs to God, to created good! We are afflicted in every way, but we cannot crush the good that God wills for God’s world. We are perplexed, for sure, but do not despair, for God is with us, through the prophets, through the Resurrection, in the sacraments, speaking with and through the children to wake us up.

God speaks through the children to wake us up to the call we have as Christians: to proclaim the love of God in word and deed, in all that we say and do, working with God to create good even out of all that goes wrong and awry in this world, knowing that God has created it, has created us, for God’s good purposes, and out of God’s unmitigated love.

This, or something like it, is what I might have said had the children not come to sit on the altar step with me (and I am glad that they did. We went off on a few other tangents, too, but) I hope that it is at least in harmony with what they heard from me this morning.

I think I ended by telling them something like, “God loves you, God is with you, God wants only good for you, but come what may, there is nothing that can end or separate you from that love which God has for you. If I didn’t believe that, I would not be here, and I wouldn’t tell it to you.”

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*Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (Knopf Doubleday, 2004 ) is a classic exposition of these questions and answers which I reviewed in preparation for this conversation with the children.

This post has been updated.

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Spring fever

Posted on May 31, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

Riptide currents race through green
fields revealing their true colours,
wrecking sirens’ songs, drowning
desire with their own unfettered appetites;

they stain the earth with lively riot,
catching into their whirling dance
flotsam and jetsam, driftwood that passes
this way, these days, for human wisdom.

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