When Advent meets Christmas

Posted on December 24, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When the heavens open

Posted on December 22, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________

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

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Wait

Posted on December 21, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

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

“Wait with hope for the LORD.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Psalm 27:14, God’s Word translation)

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Wordless

Posted on December 20, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

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

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Gaudete

Posted on December 17, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaudete.

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In all circumstances

Posted on December 13, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

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

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

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

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

I give thanks for the tilt in circumstances.

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

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

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

________________

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

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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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