Epiphany wisdom, old and new

Posted on January 7, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

And so we come to the Feast of the Epiphany; in which God took a(nother) risk, reaching out beyond the usual suspects, who were followers already of the ancient story of God’s guidance, messengers of God’s love for the earth.

At the Epiphany, God reached out to strangers and foreigners, who had no clue about so many things, including the political situation, and that it was very unwise to go and visit Herod to ask him about some new king.

God inspired men (and probably women) who had never heard of Bethlehem, who did not know the word of the prophets, who had no prior relationship, perhaps, with the story of God’s salvation.

God risked reaching beyond the regular congregation of angels, ceased preaching only to the choir, and tapped someone totally new, in order to say, “Here is the Christ. God is with you.”

It is thoroughly consistent with God’s intervention in the world, calling Abraham and his family out of Ur, out of obscurity, to become the forerunners of generations of nations. God sought out David, a youngest son, sent away to the hillsides to live rough as a shepherd, far from the seat of power; the lowliest child became Israel’s greatest king. God called prophets out of the most unlikely circumstances, and while an angel visited a priest, Zechariah, about his business in the temple to announce to the birth of John the Baptist, it was to an anonymous and ordinary young woman in the backwaters of Galilee that the same angel announced the Incarnation, the concept that God could come and live among us.

No wonder, then, that at his birth, God chose foreigners and strangers to bring gifts and glory to Jesus, and to take the story of his glory home with them, by another way.

A note on the translation of the word magi might be apropos at this point, though many of you have heard it before: it is the word from which we derive magic, and magician. These were people possessed of special knowledge so esoteric that it might appear miraculous or magical to the uninitiated; but it was not supernatural, only studied and hard-won. They were not, according to the biblical text, kings; that tradition came later, applying the prophecies that kings would stream to the brightness that would rise with the dawning of the day of the Lord, the eruption of the Messiah, the coming of the Christ. And the bible gives them no number; there may have been three, or thirty-three, or three hundred; they were enough, after all, to scare Herod half to death and all the way into murder. The gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh are probably responsible for our imaginative vision of three men carrying one precious item each. Speaking of which, it is not absolutely clear from the word that the Magi must all be men. There may well have been women, wise or otherwise, among the delegation that visited Jesus from the East. The three men with crowns and beards that we depict kneeling before the Christ-child are our projected representatives of an unknown group of seekers and seers, drawn by the irresistible call of God upon their intellect and their emotions to come to Jesus.

The picture that we expect to see is not always the one that is painted by God, who has the unerring capacity and tendency to do unexpected things, through unexpected people, in unexpected places, at any and all inconvenient and auspicious times.

What does this mean for a parish named for the arrival of the Magi at the manger of the Christ-child on its ninetieth anniversary of service to this city and its surrounding communities?

For one thing, it must mean that whatever we are imagining right now pales in comparison to what God has imagined for us.

We are honoured and privileged as we gather on a significant anniversary to give thanks for the wise women and men who had the vision and who followed God’s dream of establishing this church here in Euclid. Some of them we have known and loved as family. Some were gone before even the longest-serving people here had a chance to know them. But even they are our family. They built the home in which we worship, and in their wisdom they dedicated this parish to the remembrance of the Epiphany, that moment when the unexpected and unpredictable brightness of God shone once again in strange places and converted strangers to the knowledge and the homage and the love of Christ.

They were inviting a certain uncertainty to the party when they chose this feast as our day of dedication.

So it is that even as we celebrate the wise women and men who have led us to this point, we cannot only look back. Even those first visitors to the manger did not travel home by the same road they rode in on. They were sent a different way, to explore new routes, meet new people on the way, to spread the good news of Jesus to those who were not even waiting for it.

If we are to honour the spirit of the Epiphany, we need not only open our eyes to the star that has already stopped over the place where the Saviour was born. We need to open our hearts to the stranger, the unlooked-for emissary whom God has called out of places unfamiliar to us. We who are gathered at the manger should expect unexpected guests, and their undiscovered gifts, and welcome them with open hearts and open arms.

And we should expect God to send us on new roads, through unfamiliar territory, on our way home.

If I were to try to tell you what that might look like, I know that I would be selling your vision short. You have the wisdom and experience to read for yourselves the signs that God is painting in the sky to lead you on. I have learned at least that the picture that I expect to see is not always the one that is painted by God, who has the unerring capacity and tendency to do unexpected things, through unexpected people, in unexpected places, at any and all inconvenient and auspicious times.

So wise women and wise men of the Epiphany: I charge you to read the sky, to listen to the stars, to strain to hear through the music of the spheres the small, still voice of God; to see in the stranger the reflection of God’s call to worship at the manger of the Christ; to try out a new and unusual way home; to share your wisdom, your inspiration, your love with all whom you encounter on the way, and especially with one another in this ninetieth anniversary year.

And may the brightness of God shine out from this place that all who see it may know the love of God, made manifest and glorious in our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
Amen.

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Consider hibernation

Posted on January 2, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

Consider hibernation:
a sabbatical of sorts,
refraining for a season from
the fevered fight for heat,
the crucible of creation;

letting the blood run cold,
breath slow, the rhythm
of life decrescendo to find,
swaddled in the cavernous, cool earth,
the steady state of eternity.

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God stands by God’s Word

Posted on December 31, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the First Sunday after Christmas, 2017; which is also New Year’s Eve

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.”

It is new year’s eve, and in the secular calendar, we are looking back, wrapping up loose ends, letting go of some things better left behind, missing others that we cannot take with us into the new day that awaits on the threshold of midnight. It is a day of endings.

But in the liturgical calendar, this is only the first Sunday after Christmas. The child is still new, and young, only just begun. And we read from the Gospel of John the poetic and profound account of the relationship between the beginning of this new life, Jesus the newborn king, and the beginnings of it all, out of the love, and the Word, of God.

Eighteen years ago, on new year’s eve, we stood on the brink of a new millennium, and no one was entirely sure what was going to happen next. There were horror stories of potential disaster: at the stroke of midnight, we were told, we could be cast back into the dark ages by the catastrophic failure of our technologies, built by people who were imaginative enough to create artificial intelligence, mutate genes to cure disease and fight famine, but were too short-sighted to see that the calendar would continue to rotate through time with or without them.

Looking back, we can laugh at our doomsday fears; but at the time, there was genuine uncertainty, and concern that we really might be in over our heads.

One scenario had planes falling out of the sky as their auto-assist systems simply shut down at midnight, unable to function because their computers believed the date to be before the advent of powered flight.

In a way, it was a more innocent time. We were worried that we would be brought down by the interplay of technology with naivety and human error. Now, as fifty years before, we are more concerned about killing ourselves with our own weaponry, with human hubris and the errors of evil rather than of innocence. We are concerned that our abuse of the environment might plunge us back into the dark ages, seeing harbingers of more widespread catastrophe in islands of disaster such as Puerto Rico, and patches of scorched earth in California.

Now, as for as long as we can remember, conflict pivots around that city of David, to the south of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, now as then occupied territory, governed by the outcome of war.

In that place where the gravity of secular time intersects with the black hole of eternity, unable to escape the pull of God’s grace despite all that we do to fight it, a child is born, who is always and for eternity a new beginning.

On new year’s eve eighteen years ago, Chinese airline officials were assigned to fly in planes that would be in the air, flying high across the heavens, as the clock struck midnight and the computers either moved on to the next millisecond, or didn’t. The people responsible for the safe operation of the planes were required to stake their own lives as guarantees of their work: that the planes would not fall out of the sky, and the world would not end at midnight. Rumours abounded that all Chinese engineers working on the Y2K safety plans would be up in the air that night.

As it turned out, the glitches were few, the dangers slight, and the people who had stocked up on canned goods and bottled water were well equipped to ride out the next few natural storms of the century.

But as high risk and heavy investment strategies go, the scheduling of those responsible to throw in their lot with the populace bears some comparison to the Incarnation. This Word of God, which was present at the beginning of all things and through which all things were made, did not turn away from the dangers of living in the world as it turns. Instead, he was born into it, becoming an integral part of its systems, its culture, its history. In the season of the Incarnation, God flew the earth alongside us, risking everything, in order to reassure us that God stands by his work, and stands by her Word: that what God has made is good, and that we are safe in God’s hands.

We worry, at the turning of the year, about what we have left undone, and what we will do, and what will become of us. How will we turn back the tide of fire and of fiery rhetoric? What will become of us if we do not try?

We celebrate, another year of opportunity, imagination, in which nothing will be impossible with God. That is what the angel announced to Mary, and she sang of a revolution in which the hungry are fed and the thrones of the powerful turned over. Is she singing in the streets of Iran today? Where else will we hear her Magnificat?

And through it all, although I will not say that God is flying the plane, because that would be hackneyed and open up all sorts of theological problems to do with free will – still, I will say that God is flying with us, standing by his work and standing by her Word, that from the beginning and throughout all ages, God is good, and God is with us, down to the smallest detail.

The strange, small story of a baby born to uncertain parentage in unsanitary circumstances, announced by angels instead of the society pages and worshipped by smelly animals and their shepherds; this is kind of incidental thing with which God gets involved. Incidentals such as uncertainty, humility, precariousness, and especially love. These are the materials which God chooses to mould a new future out of our mistakes and our messiness, our promise and our potential.

“He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”

Let the children of God say, Amen.

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Christmas Eve 2017

Posted on December 25, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Theirs is a story of utter powerlessness. A self-proclaimed emperor god, with a puppet regional governor, ordered an unprecedented census, for tax purposes. Joseph, a self-employed artisan, had no choice but to leave his home and business behind and travel practically the length of the country, through bandit territory and wilderness, along with his entire household through the mountains of Jerusalem to Bethlehem to be registered according to the new executive order.

Mary, his betrothed, had not even her own name to lay claim to; no dispensation for her precarious condition; she had less agency and authority than even Joseph. She was chattel, hauled along with him as her bladder ached and her belly rippled to the rhythm of her unborn son’s travelling song.

Powerless to choose the place, date, or time of her labour, Mary found herself displaced, vagrant, at the mercy of strangers and the forbearance – the fortunate, faithful, kindly forbearance – of her fiancé.

At the mercy of her own body, and the body to which she gave birth, Mary was the very epitome of powerlessness that night long ago in Bethlehem.

And yet. And yet …

That child, lying in a rented animal feeding trough, warmed by hay and close quarters; this infant, who does not yet have the power to lift his own head; this newborn child is already the most influential, the most transformative, the most profoundly powerful person ever to have lived.

Kings and emperors will quake with fear when they recognize him. They will try to control the outbreak of his power through force, employing death and oppression against him and his kind.

But this child, so vulnerable and helpless in his manger, cannot be defeated by death. He cannot be silenced by oppression. He will not be cowed by hatred, envy, or the raw abuses of powerful men.

From his position of utter powerlessness, this child organizes angels to sing, shepherds to bring the offerings of their flocks. He tugs on his mother’s heart, and she is powerless to resist him.

This child, whom prophets foretold, whom angels proclaim, who lies with a milk bubble at one corner of his mouth, constrained by the swaddling bands that cradle his newly born form; this infant embodies love in its purest, most divine form.

Love: the essence of God that will not be denied, nor overcome, nor defeated; the most powerful echo of the divine image that we can encounter.

As the child grows, this love will blossom into healing mercies, a passion for justice, the telling of truth, and the humanity of one who recognizes the image of God in prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners.

At its pinnacle, this love will devour death, and give birth to a new and bewildering life.

From his position of utter powerlessness, this infant Jesus begins the work of love simply by becoming the beloved, adored by angels, shepherds, Joseph, and Mary, who pondered all these things in her heart, remembering the words of archangel: “With God, nothing will be impossible.”

Exhausted, empowered, she lifted the Son of God to her breast, knowing that life would never be the same again; that the love of God and its quiet revolution had set in chain a life that would know no bounds, and a love that would last forever.

Two thousand years later, and several thousand miles away, we come from different backgrounds and ponder different possibilities, but as we listen for the angels singing out the birth of Christ, we are reminded that with God nothing is impossible; and as we contemplate the vulnerability of a God who would be born homeless, human, humble, we remember the power of love to change the world.

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When Advent meets Christmas

Posted on December 24, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, which is the morning of Christmas Eve, 2017

We talked earlier in Advent about the way in which this season messes with our sense of time – and here, as though to prove it, we have the announcement to Mary of her pregnancy first thing in the morning, and by tonight, the child is born: Jesus Christ, fully formed, fully human, fully divine, God’s Son and our blessed Saviour.

How long, I wonder, did Gabriel wait for an answer? In Luke’s account, it seems so straightforward, except for that moment in which Mary pondered the angel’s greeting. “Pondered” suggests a lengthier process than a short hour of church service can reflect. “Pondered” suggests something weighty, ponderous. And after all, if it were you, confronted by an angel announcing impossibilities from heaven, wouldn’t you want to take at least a moment to make sure that this was not a dream, or a prank, or a lapse into madness?

For Mary, Gabriel has opened a portal, a wormhole, an anomaly through which our history, this moment in which the blessed Incarnation is begun, is fused with eternity. The angel has all the time in the world. The plan – God’s mission of love and mercy – is as old as creation. Since making the human in God’s image, it had been inevitable that God would come close, meet us in the mirror, reconcile that image with God’ own properties of steadfast love and faithfulness.

The angel has all of the time that God has placed at its disposal and it will wait on Mary for as long as she needs to find her voice, and her courage, and her faith, and enter into the story, which will give birth to the gospel we now know, and will hear again tonight.

Now, says Paul, we have that story to tell, at once ancient and always new: one which offers strength and courage: new life, heart; a story that begins here, with an ordinary young woman making the extraordinary choice to trust God with her life, her body and soul, her present, her future, even how they will talk about her past: all of the time in her possession.

We have compressed into one day that which is timeless: God pregnant with possibility, overflowing with love, reaching into our lives to turn the everyday into the eternal, the ordinary into revelation. No wonder we are feeling the pressure of moments flying past!

But God, and Gabriel by delegation, have all the time in the world. It is precisely because of God’s patience, and Gabriel’s timelessness, and Mary’s persistent, ponderous faith that we have such a story to tell, and such a celebration to make.

Whatever we have left to do, and whatever we leave undone: they will wait on us. Whenever we glance at the clock or the calendar and wonder where the time has gone, they have opened the door to eternity. However the tyranny of time tries to catch us in its net, God, and the archangel Gabriel, and maybe Mary, too, are slicing through its bonds, making for us a nest, a cradle of calm, a portal, a wormhole to another dimension of life that whispers, “Now. Now is God’s time. Now God is with you. Now is the season of Emmanuel.”

And if we can catch ourselves out of the whirling dervish dance of last-minute preparations and activities, then perhaps we can hear them, hear the angels tuning up their glorias; hear the still, small voice of God, lighter than a baby’s first cry: “Now, I am with you.”

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When the heavens open

Posted on December 22, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A homily for a Blue Christmas service. December 21st, 2017, Church of the Epiphany, Ohio. Luke 1:39-45: Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth, who is pregnant with John the baptizer.

You may know that when a baby is born, its skull is unfinished. There are soft spots, fontanelles, where the bone has not yet fused over. It allows some flexibility for the purposes of getting born. In some faith cultures, babies are considered to be open to heaven, to have a special spiritual connection to the plane from which their souls came to be, until their bones have completely closed over this portal to the realm of the divine.

A few years ago, I visited a woman in hospital who was very old, and nearing the end of her life. She described to me the visitors who would gather around her bedside, day and night, singing the old songs, keeping her company. “They’re all dead,” she told me, “but they’re here every day.” She was ready, she said, to go with them. She was the first to make me think that at the end of our lives, when our heads begin to soften up again, perhaps, we may regain that connection to the place from which our consciousness came, and to which we may expect to return.

Twenty-five Christmases ago, I was recovering from pregnancy loss. One of the things that helped was listening on a loop to the Eric Clapton song, Tears in Heaven.

Would you know my name?
…Would you take my hand?
…Would you help me stand?
… And I know there’ll be no more tears in heaven.

To my ears, the song will always evoke those children born from darkness into eternity; the young whose minds and spirits were never hardened, or closed off from the realms of heaven.

So Mary comes to Elizabeth, who is with child in her old age. Elizabeth has just begun to graduate from fluttery, bubbly feelings breaking against her stomach to the experience of full-blown kicking and writhing from the creature living within her. It is still surprising enough each time to take her breath away, and so she cries out, “Mary, Mother of God! This child is like a jumping bean!”

John the fetus, wide open to the possibilities of heaven, knows that there is something to celebrate, someone drawing near, and he is making his excitement known in the only way open to him at the present. And so John the fetus is turning cartwheels in his mother’s womb, because with his direct line to the divine, he can hear, taste, see more clearly than he ever will with his own eyes the love of God drawn near, borne by the new life growing within Mary’s belly.

And because he sees it all, John knows that prophets never come to a good end. He sees the sword that will sever his own spinal cord, and the pain that will pierce his cousin Mary. He sees the age and fragility of his own parents, the inevitability of grief, and the vulnerability of human life. He sees it all; he sees it all, and still he leaps for joy, because he sees, too, the love that will overwhelm everything, and make all things new. He knows that love has drawn near, and he knows it for all that it is worth.

And Jesus: little, embryonic, speck of Jesus; what does he see, from such a soft and secret place? What does he know, from such a small beginning?

He knows my name. He takes my hand. He helps me to stand. Straddling the divide between heaven and earth, he promises, promises, promises that one day, there will be no more tears, and our eyes will once more clearly see the grace, the love, the everlasting mercy of God.

_______________

La Visitacion, El Greco [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Wait

Posted on December 21, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Advent Meditation for Thursday, December 21, 2017, Diocese of Ohio

“Wait with hope for the LORD.”

All is nearly ready. There is little more to be done; for some tasks it is too late, for others, already begun, the conveyor belt of Christmas, well-oiled and practiced has taken them off our hands and out of our control.

It is in the space between that we sit in the darkness and wait. There is little more to be done.

At this winter solstice, the days have grown as short as they may, and the nights stretch longer than at any other time. We cannot hurry the pendulum past its longest drop, the darkest pause of the year.

The drawn-out moment of fragile anticipation brings anxiety; but if anyone knows our feeling of helplessness, it is the Christ.

Suspended between eternity and the mortal life of one born of a woman, he waits. Daylight is laid bare, filtered through blood and tissue. In the long night, his darkness is complete. Untouched, his own skin is almost luminous, although none yet may see it.

There is nothing more to be done, except to wait for dawn to break: for light to be born into light, for gentleness to deliver the world from its deepest night.

“Wait with hope for the LORD.
Be strong, and let your heart be courageous.
Yes, wait with hope for the LORD.”

(Psalm 27:14, God’s Word translation)

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Wordless

Posted on December 20, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Wordless
came the Word of God;
not silent, as the night revolved
around him snuffling, yawning,
suckling, sighing, crying out
the love of God, wordless,
gazing into the eternity
between one body and the next.

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Gaudete

Posted on December 17, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

I don’t have a sermon to post from today. I had a micro index card stuffed in my alb pocket to make sure I didn’t forget the names of Sophronia Scott and her son, Tain Gregory. Together, they wrote a book, This Child of Faith, which I hope to pick up from an online megastore locker tomorrow. In the meantime, I watched a brief interview with them, in which Sophronia described the faith of her son as an ark built ahead of the storm, which kept them afloat in the most tempestuous times.

The tempest was the horrific firestorm that killed children and their helpers at Sandy Hook Elementary School five years ago. Tain was a third-grade student. His godbrother, Ben Wheeler, died that day.

The third Sunday of Advent is sometimes named Gaudete Sunday. The rose (pink) candle is lit. The readings reflect the meaning of the Latin imperative, gaudete: Rejoice.

Rejoice always; pray without ceasing; give thanks in all circumstances.

In all circumstances? My faithful, funny, profound parishioners shared their stories of the faith that has formed the ark that keeps them afloat in all circumstances; that allows them even to give thanks to God in the raw rub of grief, and the bittersweet pain of new birth.

Their stories are not mine to tell. I wish they were: they were powerful, humble, and transformative.

The only advice I had to offer was that if your ark is strong, and watertight, and you have the opportunity, remember to invite your neighbours aboard. Too many of us are floundering.

And if your boat is a bit leaky, remember that Jesus reached out his hand to Peter and helped him to walk upon the water itself. He does not leave us ever to face the storm alone.

So rejoice always; pray without ceasing; give thanks in all circumstances.

Gaudete.

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In all circumstances

Posted on December 13, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

“Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances.” 1 Thessalonians 5:16

Rejoice always. Certainly, it is easier to rejoice when the news matches our hopes and aspirations.

Give thanks in all circumstances. I am thankful, to God, and especially to my sisters of colour who take the lead in routing out oppression, suppression, discrimination, assault, things with which too many are too familiar.

“Bring good news to the oppressed,” says the prophet, and you brought it. “Bind up the broken-hearted.”*

I give thanks for the tilt in circumstances.

Pray without ceasing. Because the prophet can proclaim and lead and set a fire under her people, but the rest of the people need to pay heed if that tilt in circumstances is to become a revolution worthy of prophesy, and the song of the Mother,* in which the proud are scattered in the imaginations of their hearts and the lowly young girl is lifted up, believed, beloved; in which she flourishes.

Pray without ceasing, that the fire that has been lit beneath the self-righteous will burn away our lies, our complacency, our chaff. I pray for the grace to find, in the ashes of unearned influence, the seeds of humility, mercy, justice; a planting of repentance.

“Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances.” Amen.

________________

This week’s lectionary includes Isaiah 61:1-4,8-11, the Song of Mary (the Magnificat), and 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

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