Love builds up

Posted on January 28, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Churches of Epiphany and St Bartholomew, Euclid and Mayfield Village, during the shared sabbatical plan, Epiphany 4, 2018

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up (1 Corinthians 8:1)

Paul’s letter is not about eating meat or going vegetarian. It’s not even about idolatry. It is about relationship. It’s about consideration. It’s about love. Anything less brings the gospel into disrepute.

Many years ago and many miles away, my child’s class was studying world religions in a modest, six-year-old way. One of the students was a member of the local Sikh temple. I don’t know a lot about the Sikh religion, to be honest; I know that the men wear turbans, and from that elementary world religions class I know that their devotions involve a lot of food and feeding the community, reaching out in love to their neighbours.

The student’s family invited the class to take a field trip to the temple on a Thursday lunchtime, to taste the curries and see first hand the way that this congregation fed the community around it. Permission slips were sent home, along with guidelines for how to dress and to behave in the temple; how the children might show respect and gratitude to their hosts. Honestly, as in most religions, the youngest children, these six and seven-year-olds, could have been exempted from most of the requirements of tradition and convention, but their teachers wanted to make sure that they understood that they were entering a space that was holy and important to their hosts, so they asked the girls to cover their heads.

I was part of a group of Christian parents who met monthly to pray together for the school, its staff and students. A week or so before the field trip, we met, and one of the women expressed her concern at providing a head covering for her daughter. “Isn’t it worshipping false gods?” she wondered. She had no problem with her daughter visiting the temple – there would be no prayers or other confusing religious rituals to contaminate her child’s Christianity, but she worried about the dress code. “If we show respect for their religion,” she explained, “isn’t that the same thing as honouring false gods?”

Well, no, some of us countered. It’s more like respecting our neighbours, honouring rather than dishonouring their home. If the alternative is either to shun them or to insult them, by staying away or by showing up uncovered, what ambassador is that for the gospel of Christ, which demands first the love of God and immediately following that the love of one’s neighbour?

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Teaching a child that her religion is superior will puff her up; teaching her to love her neighbour, one of the founding commandments of her faith, will build up the whole community.

We serve a Christ who was a faithful and observant Jew for the whole of his life – not the demographic of most of us here. We serve an Incarnate God who spent his life among us as a man of the first century, in the culture and climate of the Middle East, at odds with the western traditions of the Romans. We should know how to respond in love to those whose traditions differ from our own. We should know how to build community across difference, responding with love rather than condescension; respect rather than rejection.

We serve Christ, who cast out demons and reconciled the word of God to its application, healing on the Sabbath because love is more important than letters. Anything less brings the gospel into disrepute.

At our Community Meal, which we host on the fourth Sunday of every month, we stretch our hospitality, and we exercise our love. We encounter people different from ourselves, and we are challenged whether to know better than them, or to love them better.

For a start, this Meal came about as a partnership between two parishes. Each wanted with a loving and grieving heart to do something to feed the needs of our neighbours, to do something more than to write a check, to reach out in love and to build relationship with those who live around us, who surround us but with whom we never, almost never sit down and have a conversation, or share a meal. Each parish had its heart in the right place, but neither quite had the resources to put the meal on alone.

There was a division to overcome in order for these two parishes to come together, to work together, to get this ministry started. There were the old traditions by which parishes competed for members – let’s face it – and argued over styles of music and liturgy, and whether or not it was ok to call a woman or a gay person as their priest, and whether or not decaffeinated coffee belonged at the coffee hour. Parishes divided and isolated themselves, in the old days, in the old ways, knowing better than one another, puffing themselves up instead of building up one another’s ministries. It happened with the first disciples, too; they argued among themselves as to who was the greatest, and Jesus told them that the only way forward was to stop, to kneel at the feet of the other, and to serve him.

In order to work together, to start this Community Meal, our parishes had to set aside our pride, acknowledge our need of one another, and find out how we could serve and help one another before we could serve our neighbours. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up, and in mutual love we were able to build something beyond what either parish could manage by itself.

And because we learned to love one another, we were able to build something that feels loving and nurturing, welcoming and respectful to our guests, many of whom present themselves differently than the Sunday morning crowd, and some of whom have special, secret knowledge which they love to share over the dinner table, and some of whom look and sound just like their servers.

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. The key to greatness is not knowing better than anyone who comes through our doors; not even knowing Christ better than anyone; but the key to greatness, as Jesus told his first disciples, is to love one another, seeking and serving Christ in all persons; even the ones closest to us. Anything less brings the gospel into disrepute.

But here’s the kicker. Here’s the gospel that we proclaim:

God knows it all. God knows all of our hopes and fears, our secret sins and shame, our desires, the love that dares not speak its name; God knows how small we have become, and how much God knows. And what does God do with such knowledge?

God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:16-17)

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up; and God knows you and loves you in the most mighty way possible, and through Jesus Christ that love has been proved and found to be true.

Amen.

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Sharkbait

Posted on January 21, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon on repentance and our part in it, on the Third Sunday after the Epiphany at Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio

“The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.”

Hold on, this was only the second time? That means that Jonah disobeyed God once; ran away from God once; tried to hide from God only once, and ended up nearly shipwrecked, swallowed by a sea monster, and spat up without ceremony on the beach.

“The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.” No wonder Jonah didn’t make the same mistake twice. Once! Once, he disobeyed! And look what happened.

It makes me wonder whether we – whether I sometimes presume a little too much on the patience of God. As much as I love and miss the ocean, I do not want to end up as shark bait.

Last Sunday we heard that the word of the Lord was rare in the days that Samuel spent sleeping on the floor of the temple. Nevertheless, when he was called, Samuel was ready to leap up, to wake up Eli, to listen and obey. And today, there is an urgency to the messages of scripture – from the cautionary tale of Jonah to the radical ramblings of Paul. In the gospel accounts, Jesus calls, and his disciples do not take so much as a beat to decide, and to act decisively, to follow him.

Now, I don’t think for a second that if those fishermen had taken a moment to consider their options, that Jesus would have abandoned them, or given up on them. After all, it is not as though the Lord gave up on Jonah; on the contrary, God pursued him across the ocean and into the depths in order to rescue him, in order to give Jonah that second chance to obey the word of the Lord, and to give the citizens of that den of iniquity, Nineveh, a chance to do the same.

Even so, it hardly seems polite to keep Christ waiting when he calls, after all that he has done for us. The present moment is passing away, says Paul, philosophically, since the present is always slipping through our grasp. Where is our sense of urgency for the gospel, for the word of the Lord?

The story of Jonah does not begin and end in the belly of a big fish. Before he boards the boat, Jonah has rejected God’s call for Nineveh to repent. It’s not only that Jonah doesn’t think that Nineveh can be saved, nor even that he doesn’t think that Nineveh is worth saving. Jonah doesn’t want Nineveh to be saved! Jonah hates that Nineveh repents and is saved! After he preaches to them, and they repent, and return to the Lord, Jonah gets angry with God for showing them mercy; even the same mercy that Jonah was shown, if you like, what with God saving his life after he was cast into the ocean in the middle of a storm.

The people of Nineveh are Jonah’s enemies, politically, economically, religiously, ethnically. Jonah would rather see them suffer than be saved. Jonah would rather see them continue in their sin than do the right thing, because he would rather be righteously angry with them than risk having to confront them as sisters and brothers, children of the one living God.

He reminds me of the elder brother, in the parable of the prodigal son; the brother who is jealous of the love that their father shares with his younger, more foolish sibling, as though there is not enough for them both; as though the younger is stealing their father’s attention. You would think that Jonah would have had enough of God’s attention to be going on with.

Sometimes, I worry that we have given up on Nineveh. We look around, at bad news and bad neighborhoods. We worry about rising crime and rampant gun violence. We cringe at the state of public discourse, and the coarseness of our politics. We hear rumours of wars, and warnings of warheads. Our idols topple like dominoes: him too, him too, him too. We wonder if there is any goodness left in the world worth our passion, our urgency, our attention. And let’s be honest, there are those we would rather let rot.

Jonah lived to tell the tale of his flight from God and his fight against the grace and mercy of God the better part of three thousand years ago, and have we learned anything from his foolishness in the meantime? Or would we still prefer to be right than gracious; justified than reconciled? Would we still prefer to let Nineveh rot in its own evil deeds than convert it to the righteousness of the kingdom of God? Are we still running, with Jonah, from God’s call to preach the Gospel to everyone? For everyone?

That doesn’t mean just making nice and pretending that all is well with the world. It does mean calling out what is evil in the sight of God, and recommending righteousness and repentance. That is what God sent Jonah to do in Nineveh: to make a fool of himself by calling out their foolishness and telling them, “This is wrong!” But not only “This is wrong,” but, “There is a better way. God’s anointed one has shown us a better way. Jesus has shown us a better way.”

It means risking looking foolish by sharing our faith with the lost and the blind, the captive to sin and the courtesan of evil. By risking our faith on the rocks of another’s shipwreck. It means standing for the word of the Lord; standing on the promises of God; on the promises of our baptismal covenant.

It means living with the hopeful expectation that repentance is possible, that righteousness can prevail, that even when our hearts fail us, there is room in God’s heart for redemption. It means ridding our own hearts of bitterness, so that there is room for God’s righteousness, and the mercy of the living Christ. It means standing on the side of love, and in the shadow of the hope of reconciliation.

And what if Nineveh were not to repent?

Jonah still gets to go home by another road, and I can only believe that God has a Plan B for Nineveh, too; one that doesn’t involve Jonah, or me; one that I can safely leave between God, the people of Nineveh, and their very own very big fish.

If we give up on Nineveh; if we write off our enemies, or however we define the bitterness of our hearts to political opponents or prodigal sons; if there is someone that we think we would rather let hang than let hear the word of God, then that is the person we need to pray for first, and with whom we need to share the righteousness and the revelation of God in Christ.

If we give up on Nineveh, we run the risk that instead of becoming fishers of men, we become like Jonah, in need of a fishing vessel to rescue us from the deep water we get ourselves into when we turn our backs on the grace and mercy that God has for all that God has made.

The good news is that if we miss the mark, there will be a second chance. After the storm, and the belly of the whale, and the undignified beaching, God will call again.

For my part, this time, I hope to God that I may listen.

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Discernment

Posted on January 19, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

I asked God a hundred times or so to show me the way. Trying to wrestle guidance from the silence was like wringing a dry towel in the desert and hoping for water to soothe a burning tongue.

Today, whether driven by desperation or its more dignified cousin, dogged determination, I asked again. “I know everyone’s opinion except yours and mine: give me a sign.”

After a century of silent prayers at last, God spoke.

I heard the Divine Parent say, “My child, you are a big girl now. You must learn to make your own decisions.”

And so, at once affirmed, deflated, defeated, I set up camp in the shade of that opaque, obstinate oracle.

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Holy innocents

Posted on January 16, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

Their wisdom was not wanted
by the powers that be, in case
it would unseat their certainty
of their own anointed state.

Warned in a dream, they went home
another way, pursued by rumours
of mothers kneeling in the ashes
of their frankincensed fire.

One returned to Zion, preaching
a dream he had seen lying in a manger.
They burned him with the little ones
for disturbing their peace.

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Illumined

Posted on January 14, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany at St Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, Mayfield Village, during our shared sabbatical season (more on that to follow …)

I was struck by the aptness of today’s Collect; it is almost a sermon itself on the readings for the day.

Almighty God, whose Son our Saviour Jesus Christ is the light of the world: Grant that your people, illumined by your Word and Sacraments, may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, that he may be known, worshipped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth; & Doxology.

Christ is the Light of the World; it is he, not we, who should be known, worshipped, obeyed to the ends of the earth; yet we have asked and are called to become instruments of his glory, entering his story, embodying his light, as we are able.

That image of being illumined by Word and Sacrament is instructive. In the first place, we have the picture of a traditional Gospel procession, by torchlight; the words of the Bible falling like the lumens of the candles, to brighten our understanding and lead us to see, know, grasp the Word of God whose life speaks through those words of scripture.

Then there is the Sacrament that Christ set aside for us, in which we receive and taste and internalize the grace that God has shed upon us, so that we are transformed by it and begin to shine from the inside out, so that before you know it the people of God are shining with the radiance of Christ’s glory.

This is the rhythm that we celebrate in our Eucharist service: Word and Sacrament, external and internal illumination; and it is a pattern that we get to see slowed down, stretched out across this brief sabbatical season, the pendulum swinging between Morning Prayer and Holy Communion, so that we might have a chance to reflect at length on the ways in which God illumines us from the outside in, and from the inside out; a season bathed in the light of Christ.

What a gift! But this grace is offered to us, but not for our own sakes alone, but so that Christ might be “known, worshipped, and obeyed” to the ends of the earth.

In the story of Samuel, we hear that the word of God was rare in those days: rarely sought out, rarely recognized, rarely listened to. We might think that the conditions sound familiar. When the noise of other voices becomes so loud in our newsfeed, in our daily demands, in our own heads, does the still, small voice of God become harder to hear, or to recognize?

Samuel was not familiar with the ways in which God might speak to him. He needed the wisdom and experience of Eli to help him to know when God was trying to get his attention. Illumined by the Word and the Sacramental service of God throughout his life, even Eli did not recognize, at first, the call of God through the dreams of young Samuel. But as both men, young and old, continued to listen, then between them they heard the word of the Lord, rare as it might be, and shared it between them, hard as it might be to hear.

So we learn that we need one another to know Christ. We find him here, in the Word and Sacraments; and we are well qualified, only by their illumination, to help others, to help Samuel, to recognize his voice in the world; if we will continue to seek it, and to serve one another as we are called to do. Again, in this sabbatical season, we have the opportunity to share our vision, and what we have heard from God, between our congregations and our communities, illuminating one another’s understanding.

Then, there is worship. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is so scandalous to our ears, so embarrassing that we might want to skip over it altogether. But here is what we do need to hear from him: When Paul wrote, he was addressing a society that believed that the body was a mere vessel bound for decay, while the spiritual realm, the world of the mind was all that really made them human. That said, it could be argued that what we do with our bodies, or with one another’s bodies, doesn’t matter; that the body has no moral consequences. Paul thought that this was outrageous; hence his bold and outrageous example.

The Word of God did not come to us only in visions and prophecies. The Word became flesh, and lived among us, body and soul. You cannot, Paul argues, worship Christ with your spirit divorced from your body. That is not how being human, made in the image of the living God, works. Jesus proved it to us by his own incarnation, and by his ministry. He cared about people’s bodies, feeding them, healing them, holding them. To worship God whole-heartedly means to glorify God in our bodies as well as our souls; to love our neighbours is to cherish and protect their bodies, to honour their skin as much as their spiritual enlightenment. It is a good and healthy thing that our first collaboration between our congregations was serving food, the community meal that we enjoy on the fourth Sunday of every month; glorifying God and seeking and serving Christ in body and appetite as well as in spirit and truth.

“That he may be known, worshipped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth.”

When we see a celebrity, our first reaction might be recognition; knowing: we know who they are. Perhaps that is followed by worship: “Oh, my God, it’s [insert name of favourite celebrity here]!” But obedience requires more than mere recognition and idol-worship. Obedience requires relationship. Obedience to Christ comes from the desire to be with him, to mould our lives to match his, to walk closely beside him, to follow him.

In the Gospel, Philip is called to follow Jesus. He is delighted by the call, and obeys without question. Further, he is excited enough to invite his friend along. Nathaneal is more circumspect, more suspicious. Nathaneal has not learned to seek and serve Christ wherever he is to be found. He has not learned to recognize the image of God in every child of God. He questions Jesus’ origins, his caste, class, country. Nathaneal’s doubt does not undo Jesus’ dignity, nor his authority. It is only Nathaneal’s own reputation that suffers from his outburst.

If Jesus is to be known, worshipped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth, then it follows that no part of the earth, from Nazareth to Nigeria, Galilee to Guatemala, the Holy Lands to Haiti, from Mayfield Village to Euclid, is beneath his notice, nor beyond the reach of his love.

Illumined by Christ’s Word and Sacraments, we are called; we have prayed to shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, that he might be known, worshipped and obeyed. We have all that we need to receive God’s answer to our prayer.

If the word of God is rare in these days, it will only be because we preach it too quietly. If the worship of God fails to take into account the bodies of God’s children, the sins of unequal honour, of racism and prejudice, then it is up to us to undertake a reformation. If we are to shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, then we must obey his commandment to love: to love God, and our neighbours as ourselves.

Illumined by Christ’s Word and Sacraments, we have all that is needed to continue the work begun by the shores of the sea of Galilee by a Christ clothed in flesh and crowned with glory.

Almighty God, whose Son our Saviour Jesus Christ is the light of the world: Grant that your people, illumined by your Word and Sacraments, may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, that he may be known, worshipped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

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Nazareth, Norway, Nathaneal

Posted on January 13, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” asked Nathaneal.
He was only saying what everyone was saying.
Jesus pitched up and said, “Well, now here’s an Israelite who tells it like he sees it!”
Nathaneal wasn’t sure he liked his tone. “What do you know?” he demanded.

Philip had a knack for explaining things to people who just don’t get it; possibly because Philip did not himself easily recognize boundaries of race, class, hostility, or velocity. His other claim to fame is running alongside the chariot of an highly placed Ethiopian eunuch, opening the scriptures to say, once again, “Come and see.”

Too innocent to recognize futility; too tactless to choose his audience; too excited to hold his tongue, Philip must have known that Nathaneal was a long-shot; yet he persisted.

“Can anything good come out of that _hole, Nazareth?” asked Nathaneal.
“Well, now, here is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit, who calls it as he sees it,” quipped Jesus.
“What do you know of me?” Nathaneal demanded.
“I know enough,” answered Jesus.
“Oh, Christ,” Nathaneal swore.
“You have no idea,” replied the Christ.

Philip, in the meantime, was pleased with his day’s work. He had spent time with Jesus, told his gospel story, led an old acquaintance to meet the Lord, all before supper time. For Philip, this was a good day.

Meanwhile, Andrew and Peter were watching from behind their beer.
“This one’s going to be trouble,” said one.
“Yeah,” said the other. “You know we have cousins in Nazareth, right?”
“I’m not saying trouble’s all wrong.”
They looked over at Jesus, Philip, Nathaneal, still deep in debate; then back at one another, brothers of few words.
“Cheers,” they said, raising their glasses.

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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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