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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Friday

Posted on October 6, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

In God’s gospel truth, the day comes
when nothing is to be done,
except to shiver below the lowering sky,
crouch within the trembling earth,
wind down the body into
the new-hewn tomb

*

*

*

The birds are the first to recover their voice.
Riding the up-draft, they have seen beyond
the turning of the world;
they have overflown the flood,
from their crop dropping scant hints of melody,
feeding us on broken hymns

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Guns kill people (updated)

Posted on October 4, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A version of this was first posted four years ago. My prayers go out, too, for those we sorrowed with then, whose hearts are rent open, whose pulse rises, whose fear returns with each new atrocity that we visit upon one another.

Guns are not choosy. Guns just kill people. It’s what they do.

We are hearing more, bit by bit, about the latest victims of the latest American massacre. Each detail chips a little more flint from our hearts. The woman who found heaven in a softball diamond. The police officer and football coach. The “superhero who loved country music.” The man who died in the lap of his best friend. The father who was shot shielding another, and whose son tried so hard to save him. God heal their souls from their violent passage and bring them to peace; God help his mother, her brother, their daughter, his friends; God console all those who are in grief.

A hotel room stocked as an armoury of enviable firepower, and it was legal, meaning we allowed it, according to news reports:

Of those weapons, 12 had devices known as bump stocks attached that allowed semi-automatic rifles to mimic fully automatic gunfire. The ATF agent, Jill Snyder, said officials had determined the devices were legal. The weapons – rifles, shotguns, pistols – were purchased in Nevada, Utah, California and Texas, she said.

We failed to control those guns, and because we did, a previously law-abiding, unsuspected citizen of these United States used them to kill dozens of people, dancing on a Sunday night, and to injure hundreds – hundreds – more.

At the risk of repeating myself, and with all respect to the dead and the injured and those who mourn them: Guns kill people. It is their raison d’etre. That being the case, we must control them. We must clip their wings and limit their clips and we must do it before more blood is shed, because if we do not, that blood is on our hands.

We, the people, run this country, so we say. Guns kill people. We, the people, need to fight back.

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Book Review: For Sabbath’s Sake

Posted on October 3, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

“Should this be your first go of sabbath, don’t write that you want to observe a strict twenty-four hours in a mountain cave while doing a headstand atop hot coals.”

Good advice abounds in this new book by J. Dana Trent, as does good humour. I had the pleasure of meeting the author at a writers’ conference this summer, and was further rewarded with the pleasure of reading an advance e-copy of her book, For Sabbath’s Sake: Embracing your need for rest, worship, and community.

This Sabbath thing is different from a prescription for self-care whose end is to extend our productivity or general usefulness. It is not a Puritanical penance for the other six days of living large. It is a remembrance that God made time, and hollowed out within it a resting place for us to share with our Creator. Who would knowingly turn down such an invitation?

There is no hint of reprobation here for those of us who struggle to keep the Fourth Commandment; only an invitation to wonder how it might be to revel in the gift of God’s time. That’s not to say that I felt no guilt reading this book. As an Episcopal priest, the experience of a new Episcopalian seeking and failing to find guidance or example within her church of how to practice Sabbath caused me to think about the messages I am giving my congregation (by sitting at my computer, for example, after service and before the next public activity, writing this book review).

Towards the end of the book, a sub-title declares, “Ego is the Enemy.” Since meeting Dana this summer, and being provoked by her to consider my own approach to Sabbath, I have been reminded regularly that God, in the story of Genesis, after six days of Creation, decided that a day of rest would be a fine idea. “Who am I,” I find that I keep asking myself, “to decide that I need less rest than God?” Ego is the enemy of letting myself into that time hollowed out by God as a resting place to share with my Creator.

But just as God is slow to anger and abounding in mercy, so this book offers the grace of companionship through the hurdles and hobbling that come between us and our Sabbath rest.

These is even, for those keen on a check-list, a helpful Appendix of suggestions, including scripture references, and guidance towards Trent’s trinity of Sabbath practices: rest, worship, and community.

My take-away, though, is a certain wistfulness, a longing for that hollow space where God is waiting for me. This book has reminded me what I am missing, and like a helpful spiritual friend, nudged me in the direction of finding my own way back to Sabbath, back to the beginning, back to God.

An abbreviated version of my review was posted on this book’s page at amazon.com

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Every knee

Posted on October 1, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Not long after the First World War, William Fraser McDowell, a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, gave the Mendenhall Lectures at DePauw University, addressing a class of young men living in a world, as he says, which had been blown apart, and which was only now beginning the work of picking up the pieces and trying to set them back together. McDowell’s only and all-consuming prescription for this generation of rattled and scarred human beings was the instruction of St Paul: “Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 2:5)

This mind: the mind of one who knows his own value, the Son of Man, the Son of God; and yet who knows, too, that he is the brother of slaves, the descendant of wanderers, co-citizen with the least and the lowest ranks in the Roman empire. He “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.”

Even Moses found his way out of oppression first by stealing the heart of an Egyptian princess, and was raised in a royal palace; but not Jesus. Although he, too, was saved from the infant massacre of a mad king, escaping to Egypt, his flight was as a refugee, with a family of refugees displaced and dispossessed by violence and war. Jesus, from the first, was associated with the humble and the homeless, crossing borders without fanfare, hiding in the plain sight of his humanity, his posture one of humility.

He knew his own value, made in the very image of God, born of the will and Spirit of God; and instead of using that knowledge to lord it over humanity, he made it his mission instead to show as clearly and as unambiguously as possible the love of God: healing the sick, raising the dead, bringing the good news of salvation to the poor and freedom to the prisoners of sin and persecution, from among their very own communities and families and lives.

The hymn of praise that Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians continues (Philippians 2:9-11),

Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

In the Gospel reading for today (Matthew 21:23-32), Jesus talks about the difference between paying lip service, tongues confessing that Jesus Christ is Lord, and acting as though it were true. It is easy to create pomp and ceremony, rituals and hype to pump up the name that is above all names. It is more important: crucial and critical to find this mind that is in Christ Jesus, and follow him, in all of his glorious humility. There is nothing wrong with kneeling before him in silence.

It is no good, he implies, to rely like the second brother on our own privilege, saying, “Of course, we are always doing our Father’s will,” and then turning aside as soon as the last Amen fades away to go our own way.

It is better, he murmurs, to own up to our doubts and our uncertainties, as long as when push comes to shove, we know how to do the right thing: to heal the sick, raise the dead, bring good news to the poor, the parched, the storm-tossed; to proclaim God’s love among those in dire need of a word of good grace.

McDowell has one more piece of advice for his students about having and applying this mind of Christ:

“The life decisions of Jesus ran straight into personal relations, his relations with persons. And these relations were immediate, direct, and wholly his own. He was not an armchair friend of humanity in the abstract … He had personal concern for and personal contact with all sorts of persons.”

The one son may love the idea of doing his father’s work; but unless he is prepared to get personal about it, he is not carrying it out. We may love the idea of relieving suffering, but if we are cruel, or unkind, or unfeeling in the way that we treat the grocery store clerk or the clueless pedestrian, or dismissive of the human feelings of our most inconvenient neighbour, then we have contributed to the deficit of peace and happiness, instead of reducing it. It is no good relying on grand gestures and proclamations of faith, unless we are prepared to get down on our knees in the dirt and do the work that our great faith demands of us, up close and personal.

As McDowell says, have the mind in you that was in Christ Jesus: “Having loved his own, not a very lovely or lovable lot, he loved them clear through to the end. He did it. It can therefore be done.”

Such fertile soil is the humus, the humility out of which humanity was made in God’s image.

The Christ whom we follow, before whose name every knee shall bow and every tongue confess him king; that Christ Jesus did not grasp equality with God, but equality with us, taking on the form even of a slave. His equilibrium rested on the bedrock, the foundation of our humility and our humanity, the humus out of which we were created in the image of God, so that we would know, if he can live for God’s will, then if we put a mind to it.

In other words, when we bend our knee at the name of Jesus, and our tongues confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God his Father; well, then, let the same mind be in us that was in that Jesus, who bends his knee with the first and last of us, and confesses God’s love for sinners and the sorrowful as well as for the saints, without regard to rank. If we bend our knee to Jesus, then let us also kneel before one another, and place our pride on the ground before the feet of one another.

As St Paul says elsewhere, “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Galatians 6:14) Our only acceptable pride is in the holy humility of Christ,

who, on the night before he died, stripped off his robe, and tied a towel around his waist, kneeling before his disciples to wash their feet, in an intimate gesture of completely selfless love; then he told them; then he told us, “Do for one another what I have done to you.”

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”

Amen.

_____________________________________________________

All non-scriptural quotations are from This Mind: The Mendenhall lectures, 8th series, delivered at De Pauw University, by William Fraser McDowell (Methodist Book Concern, 1922)

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Guarding the dead

Posted on September 29, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

An earlier version of this post was published at the Episcopal Cafe on September 27, 2017

I had been traveling in a country not previously visited; we drove past houses, both small and a little larger, surrounded by fortressed fences, and I wondered about the fearful stories behind those defenses. Then, there was the cemetery, bounded by angles razor wire of the kind and style I am used to seeing around correctional facilities and military installations.

The proverbial banality of evil is such as to acclimatize us to a certain level of violence – that which we might consider “normal,” “occasional,” “random,” until something – some incident, scene, or someone catches our attention, provokes us to examination, self-examination, repentance, and prayer.

I wondered, in passing, why would you need to set up barbed wire fences to guard the dead?

In 2 Samuel 21, Rizpah set herself to watch over the bodies of her sons and their brothers, whom David had considered of sufficient value to pay off the wounded debts and demands of his enemies. For an entire season, she lay on the hillside, scaring the crows from their bones, until the king finally took notice and restored the dead to a place of honour and acknowledgement.

Those who kneel to watch over the dead – Armoni, Mephibosheth, Michael, Trayvon, Tamir, Freddy, Philando, Anthony and the others – they make us alive to the fact that the violence we are tempted to accept as normal, occasional, random, is nothing of the kind. It is sinful, oppressive, deadening.

Pilate set a guard against Jesus’ tomb because, he said, he was afraid that Jesus’ followers might steal his body; but perhaps he was a little afraid that the rumours of resurrection might be true, and that real justice might undo his rule of violence.

For such is the reign of God: a country in which violence does not wield power, oppression has no weight, even death has lost its sting, and war has been drowned, dissolved by the flooding rivers running down from the throne of God, washing away barbed wire fences, rolling rocks, opening at last our deadened hearts to the possibility of another life.

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Unfair

Posted on September 24, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

You do not reward us
according to our loveableness,
thank God, you are less fair,
unlike our exacting, you err
always on the side of mercy,
balancing justice by melting down
wood and iron, recasting the scales
to create love’s crown.

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A prayer for the end of the world

Posted on September 20, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Will the world end on end on Saturday?

For some, it already has. Those caught in storms of unimaginable strength & devastation. Those whose very bedrock is shaken like a jar full of beach pebbles, shattering glass, spilling blood & pain. Those gripped by the vicelike jaws of war & terror.

Will the world end on Saturday?

For some it will. For those who wake from the sleeplessness of grief to find the world transformed overnight into an alien landscape, unfamiliar & unkind.

Who will build us an ark?

Promises of rainbows are not enough, our God, to sustain us, when the waters have risen up to the neck.

I will give praise to our God, who is gracious, slow to anger, whose mercy endures forever.

Have mercy on us, our God. Speak peace to the storm; calm the mountains; settle the ocean floor. Soothe the sudden earth & let restless hearts of stone cease from creating chaos by their commotion. Make all things new.

But for those whose world is ending, in your mercy, drown with them; do not rush forward to your new creation. Do not leave us alone, at the end of the world.

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