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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Psalm for a commute

Posted on December 12, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

My God, my God,
the traffic is backed up
and there is no exit in sight.

I am hemmed in all around by hostility;
horns sound their derision
and air brakes vent their anger.

Evil eyes blink yellow and red:
they deceive; they devise ways to cut me off.

I look for compassion and find none,
for mercy, but it is missing.

Sunk in an ocean of metal,
humanity has been caged by its own creation.

Come quickly to release the captives
and to preach good news to the poor saps
caught in a trap of our own devising
and a net of our own knitting.

Free our hive bound imaginations
and let our spirit rise like the fumes
lifted up as incense, hot and aromatic,
polluting the air with our morning prayer.

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God’s time

Posted on December 10, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent, 2017
“But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” (2 Peter 3:8)

The first time I remember hearing Peter’s poetic line, “that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day,” it was unfortunately used to distort its message of the patience and timelessness of god. Instead of the humility of Peter’s late-life acceptance that God was not running to his, Peter’s, schedule, but was in fact free from the tyranny of time; instead of humility, the friend who quoted this verse to me used it to try to bolster a fraudulent calculation of the date of creation.

For a long, long time, it was sufficient for the people of God to know and understand that time is itself a creation, subject to the same laws of dependence, mortality, and decay as the rest of our cosmos. It was a comfort to the people of God to know that our God, as its creator, is greater than and beyond the confines of time, unbounded by seasons and untroubled by nightfall.

It was not until a few hundred years ago that a biblical scholar, Bishop James Ussher, became quite over-enthusiastic over his scriptural arithmetic and calculated the creation of the world to have begun, definitively, on October 23rd, 4004 BCE – a date accomplished by flattening every parable, play, and poetic encounter with God throughout the history of the Bible onto a calendar page, and by ignoring the very witness of the world that God had made. The friend who quoted Peter’s thousand-year days to me did so to argue that Ussher was, in fact, wrong – but only because he forgot to add 999 to each of the six days of the first of the Genesis creation stories, since each of these, and the Sabbath day that followed them, should obviously have been assigned a value of a thousand years each.

Let’s be abundantly clear: Ussher, doing his level best and carrying out phenomenal feats of biblical research in the seventeenth century, was wrong. And my friend, with her half-baked twentieth-century rationalization, learned in the lap of her devout but devastatingly naïve parents, was just as adept at missing the point.

So what is the point? Last week, I talked a little about how Advent messes with our sense of time, mixing up what was with what will be, endings with beginnings, Alphas and Omegas, the Genesis and the Revelation of the Christ. The theory of relativity and the paradoxes of time travel are nothing compared to the complexities of the Advent calendar.

For the past few weeks leading up to Advent, in fact, we have received repeated warnings that no one knows the day or the hour of God’s intervention in the world (“when the heavens will be set ablaze and the elements melted with fire”). The relationship of God with us is not bound by the mediations of time; God’s relationship with our time-bound world is much more poetic and less literal than a counting down of days between the first and the second creation to come.

It is admittedly difficult to read the fiery imagery this week without considering the people of California and their continuing winter of disaster and destruction. It is difficult to read the poet’s petitions for Jerusalem, for Zion, without remembering the political news of the day, and the concerns that follow on its heels. At this moment, a pilgrimage of Episcopalians led by Washington National Cathedral, including people from this diocese and state, is in the Holy Lands, praying in place for the peace of Jerusalem. The timing was a simple coincidence, as is often the case.

The nature of time itself has been the subject of theological as well as scientific discussion for longer than Bishop Ussher could imagine. In the Christian era, Augustine summed up the consensus when he wrote, “It is by your work that all times are made … You made all times and before all times you are; nor was there ever a time in which there was no time.”[1]

Notwithstanding the complications of Advent or of relativity, and our finite understanding of time and its dimensionality; it is a fundamental doctrine that time, as much as anything else seen or unseen, is a creature of and subject to the majesty of God.[2]

There follow two lessons from this realization: one is that when God gave humanity stewardship and care of all of creation, that included time. We are to care for time, to keep it well and spend it wisely, in cooperation with God’s creative purposes, loving God and loving our neighbours being our first and second priorities. God has sanctified time from the inside out, creating the Sabbath for our rest and reflection on the majesty of our Creator, and using it, in the person of Jesus, for the purposes of healing, and salvation, resurrection, and redemption, to show us the right and holy use of time and of history.

The other lesson is that we are only stewards of time. God is the only one who can create time, including what we sometimes call the End Times. Nothing that we can do will change God’s relationship with time, which is as loving and as intimate as with any other part of creation, as witnessed by the birth of Jesus into our history, into our time, enshrined forever in the continuum of our calendars and seasons. God is also unbound by time, and as unpredictable, patient, and faithful in that as in any other dimension of our lives.

The nonsense that follows from following Bishop Ussher comes out in the opposite direction as a tendency to count down to the end of creation; even to make wild predictions based on similarly dubious calculations; even, on occasion, to attempt to bring them to fruition by force.

But Jesus has said time and again that we do not know the day nor the hour of the new creation; and Peter writes to his faithful followers that the promise of God is not dependent upon our pace, but upon God’s patience and steadfast love. As Augustine, again, wrote, “Your today is eternity.”[3] The presence of God with us within our time transcends our plans for one day or the next; the love of God is our bridge to eternity, since it endures forever. The patience of God exceeds that of the saints. And that is good news for any and all times.

______________________________________

[1] Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, Chapter 13, translated by Rex Warner (Signet Classics, 2001),  261-2

[2] See also David Kelsey, in Creation and Humanity: The Sources of Christian Theology, edited by Ian A. McFarland (Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 53

[3] Augustine, op cit, 261

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Advent

Posted on December 6, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Dangerous moments in a darkened womb;
the unfamiliar arrhythmia of travel, the
fresh, tart taste of fear filtered through amniotic fluid,
lullaby of strange sirens steering the weary; sunk
in your swaying sea, time contracts creation
to a singularity still awaiting your advent.

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Mangled time: a love story

Posted on December 3, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Advent is not the most comforting season of the liturgical year. It itches with anticipation. It scratches at the walls like a prisoner counting out the days. It mangles time, mixing up what has been with what will be, preparing for a new birth and the end of the world. There’s a good reason that Advent gets its own special calendars.

And there can be little doubt that we live in mangled times, when the sirens of wars long thought settled are raised as the curtains open on another act in a theatre where everyone had already gone home. Mangled times, when the business of government is carried out by night and in secret, while sexual harassment has been happening in broad daylight all around us. Mangled times in which the lives of children are threatened by the sudden advent of gunfire. Mangled times, in which the words of the gospel, the words of the prayers of many nations are wielded as bludgeons and as weapons, and used to condemn instead of to comfort.

It is tempting to skip to the end. It is very tempting to cling to that one small word in the first line of today’s gospel: “after.”

After that suffering, the outrageous slanders and assaults of life, after all these things, there will be judgement, righteous and justifying and terrifying and final.

After all these things, there will be resolution, an end to the suspense of one thing after another.

After all these things, there will be revelation, and the fears that have nibbled at our heels will be illuminated and dispelled by the brightness of salvation, and our sins will be bleached out by the disinfecting light of a thousand suns and our vision will be exploded by the final face to face encounter with our God. After all these things.

But we live, as WH Auden said, “for the Time Being,” and “in the meantime.”

Even Jesus had to live, in his incarnate life, one moment at a time. He submitted willingly to the discomfort of the season labelled, “in the meantime.” In the Garden of Gethsemane, he prayed that the hour might pass from him: that unit of time, of anticipation, of dwelling in the itchy and scurrilous and uncomfortable present, with no way to hurry on to the end, and no hope for sleep. He was too present for that. His disciples did fall asleep, even after all of his warnings: the weight of waiting was too heavy for them, and it pulled their bodies to the ground and their gaze down to the void, to avoid the moment when, had they been able to pay attention, they might have found the moment of utmost clarity, the climax of the drama of the love of God played out among us, the humanity of Christ stretched to its limits by this moment of fear and anticipation, and redeemed by the perfection and endurance of his love.

One of my children, when she was very young, missed the end of almost every Disney cartoon movie, because whenever anything remotely frightening happened, she would deal with it by going straight to sleep. Baby lion king gets caught in a stampede? Just go to sleep. Dinosaurs see giant fiery meteor hurtling towards earth? Sleep.

This instruction of Jesus was aimed at such children. Stay awake! he urges; even when the light is loud and the sky is eldritch and especially when the signs of the times are worrisome; when storms disturb the vessel, and rock the boat: do not close your eyes, or turn your head away. Stay awake.

I get the need to take a break. I get the need to sleep – trust me, I am all about taking naps these days, post-mono. But sleep can be another way to manipulate time, to rush through to the end.  And if, like those garden disciples, or that small child, we fall asleep at the first sign of trouble or discomfort, we miss the love story. We miss the love story that is God’s relationship with this world, in this season, with this people; the revelation, the awakening, the glorious drama of God’s love enacted in our midst.

Last week, a group of pastors and Christians gathered to read scripture to the Senate. As our government discussed their tax plans, these religious leaders read 2,000 verses from the Bible describing God’s determination that the poor should have good news preached to them. That’s a love story.

Earlier this summer, a mob with torches marched towards an Episcopal church in Charlottesville where people of peace had gathered to pray. Surrounded by lit tiki torches, those disciples sang, “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine … Jesus gave it to me, I’m going to let it shine.” Few of them slept well that night, but that, too, was a love story.

It’s not always high drama. Many years ago, my grandmother lived on a quiet street opposite a couple called Fred and George. Every morning, as sure as they woke up, Fred and George would look out of their window to see that Dorothy had opened the curtains in her window. They loved their neighbour in the simplest, quietest, most faithful way. The morning that Dorothy’s curtains stayed closed, Fred called her son, and he came to the rescue and picked her up off the floor, and Dorothy’s life was saved, and her son’s heart was moved, awakened by gratitude, turned just a little towards this loving family whom he had found it a little difficult to understand. That, too, is a love story.

Advent is by far and away not the most comforting season of the year. We use its calendars to count it down, count it out, urging resolution, waiting for it to be over, and a new thing begun. There is too much to do, and time seems to have telescoped.

But Emmanuel is not a promise of the future, nor an episode contained by the past. It is the very status and posture of God, to be with us, to be engaged among us, ever present, always present, God with us.

This is a love story, this gospel within which we live and move and have our being.

And here we are, on day one of a new chapter, a new act, with the whole ocean of purple and blue stretched out before us, and we can huddle in the bottom of the boat, and try to sleep through the unpredictable waves and weather, or we can take the hand of the one who loves us the most of all, step out in faith, and walk on water.

Amen.

_________

This post has been updated to correct a mangled quote.

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Kamehameha and Emma

Posted on November 29, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A homily for the service of Evensong at Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, Ohio

King Kamehameha IV was no saint, by some accounts. Or at least, if he was a saint, he was still not the kind of “good guy” into whose hands you would want to put a gun. His close friend and personal secretary would have attested to that, since the king shot him not once, but twice: the first time only slightly, and by accident; the second in a drunken, jealous rage, inflicting a wound that would eventually prove fatal.

After the shooting that would lead to the death of his friend, Kamehameha was overcome with grief and remorse, and was persuaded only with difficulty not to renounce his throne, and stand trial as a civilian for his crime. He lavished loving care upon his friend and victim, but the patient died a couple of years later. Soon, that grief and guilt was compounded by the death of the king and queen’s young son, Albert, and it is commonly believed that it was a broken heart that exacerbated the king’s asthma and led to his own early death at the age of only twenty-nine.

They say that only the good die young; but the short life of Alexander Liholiho, otherwise known as King Kamehameha IV, tells another truth: that the line between saint and sinner does not divide one man from another, but runs, perhaps a little off-centre, through them all. As Jesus once told a person on his knees before him, “No one is good but God alone.”

We celebrate Kamehameha and his Queen, Emma, for good reason, and they are commemorated with the same gospel as we just heard on Sunday for good reason.

In a literal and concrete response to the gospel, they built a hospital. They knew the gospel imperative to take care of the sick, and the poor, and the needy, and they responded with practical and substantial assistance, raising money and using their influence to provide healthcare in the wake of a devastating epidemic of illness among the islands. It is said that after the death of the king, Emma devoted her life to continuing such good works, and promoting schools, churches, and programmes to care for the poor and the sick.

These two monarchs are commemorated with the same gospel as we read on Christ the King Sunday, because they modelled their reign on public service, serving as shepherds of their people, and feeding the flocks entrusted to them with justice and mercy, except, it seems, for the occasional accident.

They also called on missionaries from the Church of England to help them spread the common prayer of Christianity across their people and their islands. In his last years, the king spent much of his time translating the Book of Common Prayer into the Hawai’ian language, and making plans to build a cathedral, which was finished finally after many efforts by Emma after the queen’s death. It was dedicated to St Andrew, on whose feast day the king had died.

In his preface to his translation of the Book of Common Prayer, Kamehameha explained the urgency of his project. He saw it as a holy calling for people to be joined together in a common prayer, a united voice of praise, thanksgiving, and petition, undistracted by the need for novelty or invention. He wrote,

The prayers having been prepared of old, the Psalms ordered, the hymns sanctioned, the rites and offices authoritatively established, then, indeed, we can worship with all our mind, and all our heart, and all our strength …

But he also alluded to his own, more personal need for prayer, for the community of prayer to lift his own heart:

This is a book for every day and every hour of the day. It is for the solitary one and for the family group; it asks for blessings in this this world as well as in the world to come; that we may be guarded from all manner of harm, from all kinds of temptations, from the power of lust, from bodily suffering, and also that we may find forgiveness of our sins.

That we may find forgiveness of our sins. Kamehameha knew that too often we, even good Christians we, are the cause of injury and affliction to one another; we are the ones who provoke the need for the hospitals and care of the poor that we are called to provide. Too often we are the very ones who cause others to cry out to God in prayer, “Deliver us from evil.” The line between saint and sinner, good and evil runs a little off-centre through each of us.

The call of the gospel, even the gospel we read today, is not only to service, but also to repentance, to the recognition of real and actual injury committed in the pursuit of our own life and happiness, and to the commitment to make amends in the sight of the one who sits upon the throne of judgement. It is in the pursuit of that reconciliation that we are invited to seek and serve Christ in all others, loving our neighbours as ourselves.

Kamehameha wrote,

The Church has not left us to go by one step from darkness into the awful presence and brightness of God, but it has prepared for our use prayers to meet the necessities of every soul, whether they be used in public or in private.

In the gathering shadows of the evening of the year, as we yearn as if by force to turn the earth back towards the brightness of the lengthening days which are yet to come, whatever the necessity of our own soul for healing, for repentance, for renewal, we gather as recommended by a king, a sinner, and a saint, to find a staircase wrought by rituals and mysteries practiced through the ages by the church, a ladder of lightening shadows fleeing before the awful presence and brightness of our God.

Amen.

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The Shepherd King

Posted on November 26, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

The readings for Christ the King Sunday (RCL)

Last week, I mentioned that we have a tendency to project our own images of authority, as flawed and as fallen as we know them be, on to God; and then today we celebrate Christ the King Sunday.

Of course, the king in this parable is seated on the throne of judgement, and we read all kinds of our own prejudices, pride, and self-righteousness into that role. But show me a king who acts like a shepherd, who gets in amongst the livestock, who knows his sheep from his goats – this is not a king who depends upon our pomp and ceremony to find his authority. Show me a king who identifies most closely with those whose station in life is most humble – the “least of these” – not for political purposes nor to bolster his popular image, but out of empathy, compassion, love.

That is the king described by Jesus, by his words, by his actions, and by his very life among us.

The judgement that he describes is the same judgement as the prophet Ezekiel promises to the people of God, the sheep of God’s hand. “I will feed them with justice,” says the Lord.

And what is the justice with which they are fed?

“I will seek the lost. I will bring back the strayed. I will bind up the injured. I will strengthen the weak.” All of these things come first. The justice of God is grounded and founded and finished in compassion. And woe to those who forget that the love of God and the love of our neighbours is the root of all justice, and the end to which God’s will bends.

“I will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep,” says the Lord, or between the sheep and the goats, says the king of the parable, “Because you pushed with flank and shoulder and butted at the weak animals with your horns.”

Because you fed yourselves first, and because the bleating of the hungry lambs fell on deaf ears, so now you will go hungry, and wait your turn while they are blessed, and fed, and restored to good health and good spirits, because such is the justice of God: that those who have the most need of grace and mercy get it first, and in great abundance.

This is not an argument for buying one’s way into heaven with good works. It is a reminder to live as though the commandments were true: that to love God and to love one’s neighbour is the best way to bring heaven on earth; that those who have the most among us have the greatest obligation to find their way down from the pedestals upon which power and influence, wealth and worldly success are enthroned by our current and enduring culture.

The message for the church – for our church as we enter a new season, waiting expectantly for the Advent of Christ; a new season as we celebrate 90 years in this city and community – the message for the church is that our call is first to love. Our call is first to bring that good news of the love of God to those who need it the most – the lost, the lonely, the hungry, the neglected. That is the call of the church. The meal that we celebrate together at Christ’s table is a morsel of the feast that we are called to share with the world.

We serve a king who gets down and dirty in the sheep pen, who sets out himself to find the lost lambs, and who feeds his own flock with justice.

This is a king who doesn’t seek praises in the highest heaven but who scrambles on the earth to rescue the lamb from the lion, and to free the ram from the thicket.

We can do no better than to love him. To love Christ is not only to praise him in the highest but to serve him in the lowliest and most humble fashion we can find.

And then there is the good news for the lost and lonely lambs themselves.

Then there is the compassion from which God begins, and on which the gospel is founded and grounded, the love of God that seeks out the separated and the ashamed, the poor in spirit and the mournful, the meek and those who are troubled of heart and heavy of soul.

This is the God, this is the shepherd and the king who takes off his crown, puts aside his royal robes, closes the door to his throne room and sets out into the wilderness to find precisely those who need him the most; who hears the faintest bleating and follows it to the source; who gathers up the sick, the dying, the hungry, the faint-hearted, the foolish, the bereft, and carries them home in his own loving arms, and feeds them with love, which is the source of his justice, and mercy, which is the sweetness of his grace.

This is Christ, who set aside the trappings of heaven, the clothing of the kingdom of God, and who became as one born with nothing but the image of God which every child of God bears, so that we might know God seeking among us to restore the fallen, the frail, and the fearful to God’s good and perfect peace.

This is the king whom we serve, who renders just judgements, who separates the sheep from the goats so that they might find no further harm, but be fed with justice, each according to her need; a justice that is founded and grounded in compassion, and weighted towards mercy.

This is the king whom we serve, who shed his royal robes and was clothed with flesh to seek and serve us, his sheep, with the love and devotion of a down-in-the-dirt shepherd.

This is the king who was, and is, and will come again; and anticipating his Advent, we pray Amen: Come, Lord Jesus.

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Telling

Posted on November 21, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

We are not Survivor.
They took our bodies down,
stripped and swaddled, spiced
and laid, restless.

We are not Victim,
though they nail us
to whatever piece of wood
they find to hand.

We are Resurrection.
Bury us deep as you dare,
our tendril roots beneath
bare earth will tangle, break
the surface tension, green
the guards will faint away
for fear of our awakening.

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