Revolution

Posted on November 19, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

How many years is it since the Declaration of Independence?

How many since slavery was ended as a legal practice in these United States?

And how is it that after all this time, we read a parable that includes a king, or a slave-master, and our first thought is, “Well, that must be God”?

Two centuries since we claim to have outgrown these modes of authority and outright oppression, we still make God in their image. Two thousand years since the birth of the Christ, we still struggle to see God as God is most clearly and intimately revealed to us: which is in the person of Jesus; a nobody from Nazareth,

who, though he was in the form of God,
did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,
but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,
being born in the likeness of men. (Philippians 2:6-7)

Taking the form of a slave. So, who represents God in this parable again?

You know how in folk tales and fairy tales, it is always the third son or daughter, the most humble and least likely to succeed who is the only one to get it right?

What if the kingdom of heaven will be like this:

There once was a rich man. Never mind that he had built his fortune on dubious business practices and upon the backs of slaves – families and generations of people unfree. He was rich, and successful, and self-satisfied. So he decided he deserved to go on a nice, long vacation.

While he was gone, he chose three of his slaves to make some more money for him in his absence.

The first slave was, let’s say, connected. He did some wheeling and dealing, a few unsavoury favours, and he was richly rewarded. Never mind that some of his business was not strictly legal, let alone ethical; he made his master money, even after the percentage we can assume he kept for himself.

The second slave knew that the easiest people to make money off of are those who don’t have any; desperate people. He used his stake to open a payday loans and cash-checking business, unrestricted by government regulations, and it turned out to be a nice little earner, too.

The third slave looked at the money his master had given him.

Do you remember in the temple when Jesus had the Pharisees hand him an unclean coin, and he saw the face of Caesar in it?

The third slave looked at the money in his hands and he saw the labour of the slaves who had built his master’s fortune, and the lives of the unprotected, unrewarded masses over whose graves this money had been minted, and he felt a little bit sick.

So he went to the slave cemetery, and he dug a hole in the ground, and he buried the silver, and whispered into the earth, “This belongs to you.”

When the master came back, he and his first two slaves were well pleased with what they had done. Then came the third slave.

“I know,” said the slave, “that you are a harsh man, and a thief, reaping what you didn’t sow and harvesting where you never planted. I will not participate in such an economy of corruption and greed, which buries the poor in debt and undermines the grace of God proclaimed through the dignity of every person.”

The master was furious, not because of the money, of which he had enough, but because the slave had dared to tell him the truth about himself, and to demand his repentance.

“Oh no,” said the master, “let the rich get richer and the poor go hang. And you can get out of my sight.”

And he threw the slave out of the privilege of his presence.

And that is where Jesus met him, and called out to him, “Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you good and faithful servant. Enter now into my joy, and enjoy my inheritance.”

Now, I don’t want to push the parable too far. In particular, I am concerned that I might be unfair to the first two slaves, who never asked for their position. Perhaps they were not, after all, seduced by the corruption and greed of their master. Perhaps, knowing that he was a harsh man, they were simply afraid to disobey, or perhaps, never having known freedom, it never occurred to them that they could choose a different way.

But if they knew the God of the gospel; if they knew the gentle authority of Jesus and the loving commandments of God; then it would have been a whole other story.

And if the slave owner had known and obeyed God – well then there would have been a revolution, in which

the hungry are filled with good things,
and the rich sent empty away.
the powerful are brought down from their thrones,
and lowly lifted up;
and the proud are scattered in the imaginations of their hearts. (Luke 1:51-53, para)

A far cry from a system in which those who have plenty get more, and those who have none have what little is left taken from them.

You can apply this parable to any number of things that are going on in our world right now: from tax reform to Puerto Rico, racial inequality to healthcare, or the status of women and others who tell their stories of men who try to take what does not belong to them. We live in a broken system.

Two centuries after the Declaration of Independence, a century and a half since the Thirteenth Amendment, and after two millennia of preaching the birth, death, and resurrection of the Christ, we are still prone to fall back on familiar figures of authority, and to forget the revolutionary promises of the gospel.

Whether out of fear or seduction, we still get sucked into the ways of the world, instead of standing up for God’s economy of grace.

The third slave knew a better way. He was a leader in Christian ethics and proclamation. He was not satisfied with the corruption of the flesh, but he held out for justice.

He believed the stories of the women who poured out the pain and humiliation they had been hiding inside. He opened the coffers of the rich and wasted their money on the disinherited, on the poor, on the unprofitable dead. He sowed love in the ground, and watched it grow in the people who had nothing better to hope for. He was a one-man Magnificat. And he had the courage to call for repentance from the rich and powerful, from the man, who was not impressed.

But that is where Jesus met him, and called out to him, “Enter the joy of my inheritance.”

Enter the joy of an inheritance where all are loved and find their place; where all are fed and found worthy of mercy and of grace. Where there is no more male or female, slave or free, founding father or foreigner, but only the family of God come together around one table to give thanks, to find grace, to enter into the joy of our Master.

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Spoken and unspoken

Posted on November 17, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

I’ve been a bit quiet on the blog lately. Like many of you, I have been sitting under the pile of stories avalanching over my newsfeed, uncertain whether to say, “me too,” or simply to bear witness to the pain that too many people share.

Some of the stories we could tell are too trivial for notice. Others stay buried because their bones come with too many pounds of flesh, which refuses to decompose even over the decades. I am not surprised that a 14-year-old would turn around forty years later to discover that her story of abuse is still hanging around her neck, its hand dangling over her breast, and that she is as unprepared as she ever was to swat it away.

I’ll tell you a funny one, because it’s painless, and has an ending, with a side order of satisfaction.

Like the punchline to a tasteless joke, we don’t remember the endings to them all.

Anyway, the funny one: I had just finished working in the pub kitchen by day, and I was a waitress at the nice hotel by night. There was melon on the appetizer menu. Cue much hilarity and many boob jokes among the large party table of men whom I was serving, and whose tip was definitely penance for the sins they knew they committed against me over the course of the evening to come.

The next morning, the pub job over, I started a fresh gig at the delicatessen across the street. The manager introduced me to my new co-workers, including a nice young man who had been out celebrating his birthday the night before with a dinner party at the nearby hotel. He had the decency to turn as red as a radish.

I tell you this one, so that we can laugh, and turn our backs for another century or so on the graveyards full of other, rotten bodies.

But late one night, by the full light of the moon, we will command them to rise and account for their stench.

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This world

Posted on November 8, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

What can we do when the Communion of Saints itself comes under fire?

This morning’s reflection for the Episcopal Cafe.

Sunday morning, and the church was dressed in white, an island hour between the green of Ordinary Time. We celebrated that extraordinary time, eternity, which spans here, now, and then, world without end. We remembered those who had opened our hearts to the eternity of love, grief, and gratitude that marks human existence. At one point in my sermon, I said, “We are the Communion of Saints” to those who pass by, waiting to be surprised by a glimpse of that which lies beyond the next breath.

Then, the news. Our candles were barely cold before the heat of grief, outrageous death, rekindled our cries, our prayer.

Quickly, the conversation in some church circles turned to our security, and whether it was time to join the American arms race, to defend ourselves, our prayers, our neighbours whom we love against acts of violence that, with their increasing toll, seem less and less random.

A word of scripture whispered in my ear, and would not let me go.

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2)

It is not naiveté that invites me to open our doors, to welcome the stranger, to continue resolutely vulnerable to danger, as well as to epiphany. It is the way of the cross. It is the hospitality of the Communion of Saints. It is, if Christ is to be believed, the way of Life.

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Blessed saints

Posted on November 5, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

The readings for All Saints, Year A

I had a dream a few months after my mother died. It was the beginning of winter, as it is now. The holiday shopping season was getting underway. I haven’t started on that yet; but in my dream, I was loaded up with parcels and bags, waiting at a stop light for the pedestrian walk sign. My father was at my side. As we waited, I began to feel more and more burdened by all of the things I was carrying. My back ached; my bones hurt. As we waited, and a cosmopolitan crowd of people gathered around the light pole – “from every tribe, people, and language,” as one might say – I discovered that my aunt and my late uncle had made their way next to us. As the walk sign lit up, they began to lift the parcels and bags out of my arms as we crossed the road, until there was nothing left for me to carry, and I was able to walk easily and upright, to meet my mother, standing on the other side. The living and the dead were all jumbled together in that busy crosswalk, sharing the burdens of grief and love, lightening the load for one another.

There were no white-robed martyrs in my vision; my dreams have always tended to be a little more down-to-earth, and not entirely subtle. But the message was lighter than air.

If the vision of white-robed martyrs continually worshipping God before the throne of heaven is a bit of a disconnect from your daily life, then I would invite us to remember that our worship of God is rooted in love: in the love of God, which necessitates the love of one another.

Those who have gone before us have not turned their backs on us in order to turn towards God; rather, they now see us through the lens of God, seeing us as though through the eyes of God, with all of the compassion, forgiveness, grace that the gaze of God entails. One day, that vision will be ours, too.

But most of religion – any religion – has less to do with what happens to us when we die than what we do while we are alive. I read once, for my sins, the book 90 Minutes in Heaven. Towards the end of the book, when he is sufficiently recovered to get out and about, the author describes sitting in a restaurant with another man, a Baptist minister, who had the audacity to presume that most of the other people in it were on their way to hell.

Piper wrote:[1]

 … he paused to look around.
“Yet here we are sitting in this place, surrounded by people, many of whom are probably lost and going to hell, and we won’t say a word about how they can have eternal life. Something is wrong with us.”

I almost threw the book across the room. How the hell would this man presume to know, looking at a mess of strangers, what God intends for them? He knew nothing about them, except that each of them was an image of God, created by God for this life, on this earth, for the purpose first and foremost of God’s love.

But once I had swallowed my anger and my judgement of his judginess, here’s where I think Piper and his friend might be veering in a right direction. We live in this world as Christians, in the full and at least occasionally certain knowledge of the love of God, which is a help in our heavy times, and a joy in times of delight. We are surrounded by people, many of whom feel lost and heavy, and we often fail to share their burdens, and to offer the relief that we have found in the company of the living God, to share what we have heard and known; what might be called eternal life in the here and now.

This is the life which God has created especially for us, so that we might become fully human, creatures made in the image of our Creator, learning to reflect and resemble the divine. It is in this life that we are commanded to see one another through the lens of God’s compassion, justice, and love, to the very best of our ability.

In this life, we are the Communion of Saints to those around us, and it is our duty and our blessing to help to carry their burdens.

In this life, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” says Jesus, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Blessed are those who know that their riches come not from the world and its baubles, but from the righteousness and love of God. Blessed are those who know how to live already as though “thy kingdom” has come, doing God’s will on earth as they do in heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for even though the pain of grief and separation, the sting of loss is sharp and deep, there is comfort in finding a way through to a life that can still encompass love. There is a sad sweetness in memory, and hope in each new day.
Blessed are the meek, for in their patience, while others fight over scraps, they will inherit the goodness of creation, as those who appreciate its gifts.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will find it and be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for by their own example they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for with the eyes of their hearts enlightened, through the lens of love, compassion, and grace, they can see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who do not seek war for the sake of dominance, nor who preach peace where there is no peace. Blessed are those who do not paper over violent cracks but who open a way of safety for the oppressed, who support the cause of justice for the downtrodden, who show mercy to the penitent, and promote a lasting peace; for they will be called children of God.
When all else fails; when all the goodness of this life is exhausted, then blessed are you even when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on account of your lived-out faith in Jesus. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.

For those of us who are not persecuted nor reviled, then the blessings of this life are sufficient to know that God is good, that God created this life especially for us to live in love for our Creator and for one another, carrying one another’s burdens so that our days may be light, and easy to walk over, and without fear.

The promise of heaven is a reminder that we are not the first to have walked this way, nor do we journey alone, but with the help and comfort of the great Communion of Saints who regard us now through the eyes of God, and whom we shall one day see face to face, joined in wonder, love, and praise around the throne of heaven.

Amen.

[1] Don Piper and Cecil Murphey, 90 Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death and Life (Revell: Grand Rapids, 2007)

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Reading the road signs

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Emerging from the mist of the mountain road, a yellow caution sign:

Warning: tree on the way

One would think that the first clue to this well-rooted obstacle would be the presence and stature of the tree itself, growing out of a grassy, shrubby island, large, looming, and presumably predating the road.

If it were dark, or the monsoon rains were overwhelming one’s windscreen wipers, perhaps the addition of a couple of reflectors to pick up approaching headlights might be helpful. If the tree were not otherwise able to attract the attention of the headlong driver, though, would the appeal of language really help? Was it necessary to spell it out: “There is a tree in the way”?

Of course, there will always be those who drive anyway as though the signs do not apply to them, as though they own the road, as though the trees should shuffle off to one side to let them through. As a cishet affluently educated white woman, I’ll admit to failing to check a few blind spots. Sometimes, I need to be told.

But whether or not I read the sign; even whether or not I have begun to understand the languages in which it is written, the tree is still there, in the way, and unmoved.

 

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Timely: a psalm

Posted on October 24, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Save me, O God,
for I am a woman out of time.

I step out in the sun,
and end up running in the rain.

There is no one to dry my eye;
my calls go all to voicemail;
there is no train that I can catch
to take me home.

But You, O God, created time;
You only are the author of my days.

As a chiropractor adjusts the spine
of one bent out of joint,

bend my time back to the moment
when You are ever present,
and let it be now.

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Rendering repentance

Posted on October 22, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

The readings are for Year A Proper 24

Does your phone know your face? I find it really freaky when Facebook looks at photos I’ve taken and tells me who is in them. It’s a little worse when it gets it wrong. Recently, Apple brought out an iPhone that uses facial recognition technology to unlock the home screen, as an alternative to the thumbprint technology we’ve only just got used to. But when the phone was launched, at the public demonstration, it failed to recognize its owner and open up. It turned out that so many people had been playing with it behind the scenes, trying to get it to open up for them, that it went into lockdown and refused to play when its actual owner showed his face.

To whom do we belong? To whose face do we respond, and open up? How easily or otherwise are we misled, or overwhelmed, by distractions that do not belong in the place of that face?

The question that the Pharisees and Herodians ask Jesus is not really about the Roman taxes themselves, and the answer he gives them has very little to do with them. It’s really a question, both sides recognize, about authority, allegiance, and idolatry.

To give some context to this exchange, Jesus is telling parables in the Temple at Jerusalem. Only yesterday, just the day before, he had caused a commotion by turning over tables and spilling the small change of the men turning secular money into currency free from graven images and other signs of corruption; currency more acceptable for the purchase of sacrificial animals, and donations to the upkeep of the Temple.

Coins that celebrated Caesar, with his graven image and the inscription that named him, the emperor god of the Romans, had no place in the house of worship for the one and almighty God. That’s why there were moneychangers.

But when Jesus asked his religious inquirers to pass him a coin of the realm, inside the precincts of the Temple, they had no hesitation. They were carrying.

Jesus’ response to their trick question is to confront them with the reality that they have introduced the image and title of a false god into the house of God. They are asking the wrong question, he implies, asking what it is that is owed to Caesar, and what (remembering where you stand) belongs to God? Here’s a hint: everything. Everything belongs to God; even Caesar himself.

In essence, instead of answering their question he was inviting them to take a good look at themselves, and the compromises they had made in their lives that nibbled away at the “all” with which they meant to love God. It is his old theme, the one with which he began his mission and ministry among them: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”

We all make compromises in order to get along in this life. We all have competing demands on our time, our attention, our loyalty and our love. But we have been charged first to love God, with all of our heart, and mind, and strength, and soul; and then to love our neighbours as ourselves. These are the faces that should open us up, unlock our compassion and our humanity. Repentance involves taking stock of the distractions that keep us from true love, and the compromises that diminish our ability to respond to the face of God when it is right in front of us.

Repentance means doing the hard work of recognizing when graven images, which have no place before the throne of God, have been allowed to undermine the work of love.

I can’t help but think of the stories that have come out in the past weeks and months about widespread sexual harassment, abuse, and worse at the hands of powerful men whose faces were recognized everywhere; whose images commanded plenty of currency; who came to believe, one can only imagine, that they were owed whatever they could lay their hands on. Whomever they could lay their hands on. Their crimes are easy enough to recognize, once the story is told; but what about the silence and the whispers that helped to keep their currency flowing? I am not talking about their victims; no one except the one who has endured it knows how hard it is to talk about sexual violence, and no one should undergo the violence of being forced to tell her or his story. But there were others. There were those who were in a position to see the writing on the wall and the hands where they shouldn’t be and who failed to turn the tables, who turned their faces away for the sake of keeping the money moving, or for the sake of their own stock.

[I said a moment ago that no victim of sexual harassment or abuse has to tell her or his story; but I would add that I am available, if you have found the past few weeks triggering. I am not a licensed counsellor, but I am available to listen, and to pray, and to seek alongside you healing grace in the face of God.]

We all make compromises to get by, and we all have competing demands on our loyalty, our time, but we have committed first to love God, with all our heart, mind, strength, and soul; and to love our neighbours as ourselves. Part of our repentance has to be an examination of our complicity in situations, relationships, systems that permit the sacrifice of individuals, even entire groups of people, for the sake of the status quo; for the sake of keeping the money moving; for the sake of our own social currency.

When we see corruption entering the realm that should belong to God – remembering that everything belongs to God – then I pray that we have the courage to turn the tables, to respect and to protect the dignity of every human being, as we have promised in our baptismal covenant; to convert our culture to one that can stand without shame before the throne of God.

If we are not in a position to turn over tables, we can still follow Jesus’ example here, use his questioning technique. It can be as simple as interrupting an off-colour, sexist, racist, homophobic, or demeaning remark with a question: “Excuse me? What did you just say?” Inviting the Pharisees, the Herodians, the hypocrites to own up to the currency they are using; idolatrous coinage that does not belong before the face of God. Of course, first, we had better clean out our own pockets and purses, make sure that the currency we carry is clean.

There is an irony to be admitted in talking about the face of God, when we have just read from Exodus the story in which God refuses to show God’s face to Moses, but only the divine backside. It is a strange enough story to break the tension and restore us to the remembrance that God’s love is not only serious, but that God delights to play with us, in the most divine way; truly to love us. I don’t know how Apple technology would deal with recognizing the back end of God, but it is God’s love that is designed to open us up, to invite us into love, into grace, into mercy. It is the economy of grace that comes to us with Christ’s face, asking nothing in return but that we recognize him, follow him, turn our faces toward him, unfurling our hearts like flowers that open to the sun.

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Render

Posted on October 19, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Render
at a recent Apple launch, the phone was supposed to recognize its owner, but too many people had been playing with it backstage, and by the time of the public demonstration, it no longer knew whom to trust, nor which was its owner’s image

Render
a bruise on the skin of an apple, dented slighted by somebody’s thumb; marked out

Render
a bruise on the skin of an arm, bleeding gently from the needle. He has his father’s eyes, but the DNA goes only gene-deep

Render
to no one evil for evil

Render
to Caesar that which bears his image, but to God everything that God has touched

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Love and marriage

Posted on October 15, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Today’s readings include the golden calf incident during the Exodus, and the parable of the wedding banquet 

You may have seen, as I did, the story this week of a young girl who chose a new, white suit in which to make her First Communion. She and her family were told that she would not be welcome to participate in the public ritual if she did not put on a white dress instead. “Many are called but few are chosen,” indeed! We rightly snarl at such obvious missing of the point of Holy Communion, its promise to all people of an invitation to Christ’s table, a reconciliation of betrayer and betrayed, of God and humanity, sharing in one bread, one cup. To be cast out of the party, with weeping and gnashing of teeth for wearing the wrong cut of clothing? Incomprehensible! we say; then we turn ourselves around to read the parable of the underdressed wedding guest.

Cast that child as the one wearing the wrong sort of robe, and see whether it doesn’t change your whole perspective on the king and his party. It has become, all of a sudden, a cautionary tale about how we remake the kingdom of God in our own image, cast it in gold and bronze, and worship our own religion as an idol.

The king was throwing a wedding party for his son, but except for a passing reference to that insignificant little background detail, you would never know it. There is no evidence, in the telling of the story, that he has any investment in the joy of his son’s marriage, in the soundness of the couple’s love, in the holy mystery that tempts two people to promise forever to one another, as though any of us ever knows what tomorrow may bring.

Instead, the king has hung his self-satisfaction, and the happiness of the day, on having all of the right people at his table (judging by their response, his concept of the “right people” is already a little off); or if he can’t get the right people, then at least enough people to make a good showing; or if he can’t guarantee even that, he can at least make sure they’re dressed the part. It’s all about appearances; shiny, precious, shallow, and godless.

Behind the scenes, a marriage is taking place: the symbolic seal and promise of steadfast love; a covenant of faith; but you would never know it from the king’s story.

He has made a golden calf out of his party, his popularity, his reputation.

A golden calf.

The people who followed Moses out of Egypt had just been given some very clear instructions in a handy, 10-point plan, for living as the people of God. Love the Lord your God, says the 10-point plan, in summary; don’t reject, abuse, or dishonour God. Love your neighbour: don’t lie, cheat, steal, kill, or envy them (because there is no place in love for avarice and envy, only for mutual celebration). Love God, love your neighbour; really love them both, and we’ll all get along just fine.

The people were good with this until the very first time that Moses was late home from work. At which point, they were prepared to burn up every shred of faith and trust that they had in God, melt down their golden rings, and create for themselves something more immediate, less demanding, and more shiny in a precious metals sort of a sense.

Obviously one problem was that they had invested far too much stock in Moses as the messenger of God, forgetting that their faith, and their love, was far better invested in God, godself. God is never late home from work, because that would be a concept beyond time, space, and imagination. The whole debacle could have been avoided if they had heeded the very first point in the 10-point plan: I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me.

None of us sets out to commit idolatry. It’s more subtle than that. We start out with good intentions: “Let’s dedicate a feast to the Lord,” says Aaron; but we are afraid that God will not show up, and so we take matters into our own hands, and create for ourselves a god that cannot absent itself, that cannot hide from us, nor ask us hard questions about love.

It’s tempting to use these stories to reflect upon the latest arguments about how to honour the flag of these United States. At its best, our patriotism reflects the democratic values that hold all people equal, worthy of honour, beloved neighbours. In the language of faith, we might describe them all as children of God, indivisible and whole. If we find that such equality, honour, and love are sometimes, somehow, somewhat missing, or belated, then how are we to address ourselves to the symbols of these patriotic values, and to advance them, without falling into the idolatry of uncritical adulation? The instant gratification of a symbol is empty unless we are prepared to undergird it with the meaning we ask it to bear. As Richard Niebuhr once wrote, “[T]here is no patriotism where only the country is loved and not the country’s cause – that for the sake of which the nation exists.”[1]

It’s tempting to go there; oh, but then what about the church, and what about our own lives of faith and idolatry? We cannot get away with making comments about other faith traditions and their dress codes without addressing our own tendencies to create sacred cows, and to worship golden calves. It is often easier, shinier, and more instantly gratifying to find temporary solace in criticism, self-justification, and self-congratulation than to repent, and reorient ourselves towards the ultimate goals of loving God and loving our neighbours as ourselves.

Idolatry divorces the love of neighbour from the person presenting themselves as neighbour in the wrong clothes, at the wrong moment. It fashions a shiny god that is never late home from work instead of loving God as God is: ever-present and often overlooked.

In the table that Jesus sets, the betrayer is reconciled to the betrayed; the sinner sits next to the Son of God; the human and the divine are met together in one bread, one body, and all are invited to take a part. The covenant of faithful love; the love that God has for us, and the love that God demands from us, for God, for our neighbour; this marriage is celebrated and blessed, and all are invited to the table. The Sacrament, the symbol is undergirded by God’s faithfulness, God’s love, and we are invited to invest our love, our lives, to make good our vows to God, loving God and our neighbours, without fear or favour, as ourselves.

Some are busy, and some are late. Some are simply too angry for love. Some are not sure what they are doing at the party. Some party just for show. The tables are filled with the good and the bad, the beautiful and the beastly, the overdressed and the underpaid. A toast is raised, and the people look up, their hearts lifted for a moment by the promise of a love that lasts forever, by hope. Even the king takes a pause from policing his partygoers and raises a glass, seeing the light reflecting off it in a moment of beauty, as the singers whisper, “Rejoice!”

______________________________

[1] Richard H. Niebuhr, The Church and its Purpose (Harper, 1956), 35

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The myth of redemptive violence

Posted on October 8, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Year A Proper 22) – October 8, 2017

No one can steal the inheritance of God. No one can take away the hope that has been instilled in us by faith in Jesus. No one, and nothing – neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The tenants of the parable believe that they can steal and kill their way into owning the vineyard which they occupy. They are so removed from right relationship with God and with the world that they see others only as economic variables; they think that they can do violence with impunity; and when the landowner’s son comes to sort them out, they say, “Let us kill him and get his inheritance.”

They think that they can murder, mayhem, and steal their way into the kingdom of God.

We have tended – Christians have tended – to read this parable as a judgement against anyone we think got it wrong – Pharisees, by any other name – and a justification of ourselves. God will smite those former tenants, we declare, leading to all kinds of anti-Semitism, by the way; and we, the true and deserving people of God will inherit the vineyard.

Whenever we imagine God smiting someone else, we are on dangerous quicksand.

From the first chapters of Genesis, we find that God doesn’t operate on our economy of vengeance. When Adam and Eve (as the story goes) become disobedient, God hand-stitches them clothes to wear outside of the Garden. Even when Cain murders his brother Abel, and is sentenced to wander the earth, God places a mark on his forehead, to warn others not to harm him, to protect him from their vengeance. God does not give him up altogether.

When someone cuts off the ear of a servant sent to help arrest Jesus in another Garden, Jesus rebukes him, heals the man, and reminds everyone that had he wanted he could have called down legions of angels to decimate the forces of violence lined up against him. When he is resurrected, he does not stride into Pilate’s palace to terrify his tormentor, but sets up a barbecue on the beach for his friends.

The idea of redemptive violence, of using violence to remedy the record or reset justice is at odds with what we know of God in the Bible and in Christ Jesus. The myth of redemptive violence is one that we sell to ourselves to excuse our own inclination to revenge; to protect ourselves from the gospel that demands total love for God, and total love for our neighbour.

We cannot protect the social status of violence without becoming subject to it. We cannot promote the myth of a good guy with a gun without causing a stampede, an arms race; because we all believe we’re good guys, often with good reason. The myth of redemptive violence allows us to structure a society ready at a moment’s notice to open fire.

The first tenants of the vineyard were wicked men. They tried by murder and mayhem to steal the fruits of the vine and turn the deed to their own name. But the second tenants do not restore the landowner’s son to life, they do not undo the evil that has already happened, and they do not inherit in place of the one who was murdered. They are still and only tenants.

This parable is not the story of our salvation. It is a story about our stewardship of the grace that God has given us, in leasing to us this life, this world, and one another. What harvest will we return? What fruits will we offer back to the Landowner?

The fruits of the Spirit of God stand in stark contrast to the myth of redemptive violence. As Paul writes to the Galatians, such things as anger, enmities, and strife are not the fruit nor seed of the kingdom of God. But the fruits of the Spirit, sown by God and rendered as fruit by faithful tenants of the vineyard: those things are love, peace, patience, faithfulness, self-control, and so on. We know the lists and we see the difference. We have a choice as to what kind of tenants we want to be, cultivating our own crop of weeds, or working on the seeds God has sown, in order to render to our Landowner a good and plentiful harvest.

Love, joy, and gentleness: those fruits of the Spirit take work to cultivate. That’s why they are sown among patience, and self-control. It takes constant vigilance to weed out the temptations to slip back into anger, fractiousness, and despair.

I have heard a lot this week from people who despair of changing our trigger-ready culture of defensiveness. Sales of bump stock – the device used by last week’s Las Vegas murderer to upgrade his semi-automatic rifles to fire like full machine guns – those sales are said to have spiked since his attack, and rumours that they may come under legislative scrutiny; and so there are those who have some reason to say that the forces promoting gun proliferation and the myth of redemptive violence in this country are too strong for us.

But as a follower of Jesus Christ who overcame even death and the grave to bring us to something better than crucifixion, I have to disagree. We can be good tenants, promoting the health of the vineyard, and weeding out weaponry, and the destructive myths we use to render violence. We can move mountains, if our thoughts and prayers for the latest victims of violence are backed by faith in the one who loves us, rather than the myths sold us by our gun suppliers; if we remember who is was that sowed the Garden in the first place, and placed us in it.

Standing at the foot of the cross, we are bound to remember that its violence was redeemed not by vengeance nor by a continued economy of violence, but by the irrepressible forces of life, of God’s love, which endures all things, through which all things were made, in heaven and on earth.

For no one can steal the inheritance that we have from God. No one can kill the faith that we have in Jesus, to bring us hope. No one, and nothing in heaven or on earth can separate us from the singular and enduring love of God planted within us by Christ Jesus our Lord, and watered by the Spirit.

Amen

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