Songs of praise to the Trinity

Posted on June 11, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for Trinity Sunday, 2017, at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid. The metrical version of the Nicene Creed which we sang is appended below, and will be published this week in a separate post. We sang it to the hymn tune, Merton.

Some of you may have noticed last week that instead of our usual recitation of the Nicene Creed, we sang that long and ancient screed that comes in the centre of our service. With our bishop’s permission, I made a metrical and rhyming version of the prayerbook text, and Chase selected a familiar tune from our hymnal to which to set it. One of the reasons that we decided to do that was to reintroduce the idea that this Creed is a part of our praise and worship of God. It is not a stand-alone statement, or a contract to sign before Communion, and still less do we intend it as a litmus test of our beliefs and faith. It is, at its best and in its highest vocation, a song of praise to our God. Trinity Sunday seems like a pretty good time to explain why that might be.

I know that some of us have trouble with the Creed. We find that it makes us say things of which we are uncertain, or even with which we sometimes disagree. If that is your experience, I invite you to consider the disciples who received Christ’s great commission at the end of Matthew’s gospel account. They worshipped him, we are told, but some doubted. Some doubted, even as they worshipped in the presence in the Risen Christ! Jesus didn’t separate these goats from the sheep, though, but gave to them all the great commission: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matthew 28:19-20)

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

No summary of God, long, short, or sideways, nor even, it seems dropped directly from the lips of the living Lord Jesus will ever be adequate to erase all of our doubts, nor to engender our full understanding. Yet we have been given a glimpse, by this Trinitarian formula, into something important about who it is that we worship; and it is because we find it important to try to name who it is we worship that we have been using the Creed in our worship since the church’s infancy.

We say that God made us, and all that we inhabit; that it is only in God that we live and move and have our being. We say that Christ is both wholly human and wholly God – that God in absolute truth and sincerity came to dwell with us, out of God’s pure love for us. We say that the Holy Spirit is not some ghostly emanation from the heavens, but that the full force of God continues to move among us, so that in God we continue to live and move and have our being. The Trinity is our assurance of Emmanuel, God with us. We worship, we doubt, we worship anyway; and the God whom we worship receives us all, which is a pure blessing.

In fact, the other scriptural definition of Trinity that we hear this morning comes in the form of a blessing: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. (2 Corinthians 13:13)

This, writes Edwin Hatch, also tells us something about the nature of the God that we worship. Edwin Hatch was a nineteenth-century preacher and teacher who wrote the famous hymn, “Breathe on me, breath of God,” and who preached on Trinity Sunday, 1888, at Westminster Abbey, on “The Threefold Benediction.” He began,[i]

It is remarkable that one of the two most explicit recognitions of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity in the New Testament should be in the form of a benediction. The fact is itself a sermon. It is full of instructive lessons. It tells us, above all, that the revelation of the Trinity is a revelation not of an object of speculation, but of a living truth. It recalls us from metaphysics to life. It reminds us that in our world of effort and failure we need the varied help of God. It reveals to us that God, who in His trinity of Persons is very near to us, is near to us with a trinity of blessings.

I will not read to you his entire explication of the argument, but it is all bent towards that assurance of God with us. He says,

[God] comes close to us with the awful revelation of His infinity. And then, in close communion with us, He whispers to us with tenderness, as of a mother to her son, “I, God, am yours; I, your God, am your Father and love you; I, your God, am your Saviour and have redeemed you; I, your God, am your Helper and can sustain you.”

And so our ancient creeds and our struggles to articulate what it means to say that God is God lead always, if they are faithful, back to worship: wonder, love, and praise that God, our God, should be so gracious as to bless us with God’s very being.

And when we share that blessing, well then we share in that nature of God which is to bless, which is not turned inward not satisfied with itself, but which reaches out to nurture, to love, and to bless. What kind of God we say that we worship matters to what kind of Christians we will claim to be, and how we will see the work of the church called out into the world.

And when we come together as the church; when we sing or say the Creed, with our worship and our doubts, our dilemmas and our divine inspiration, we do so not to try to define an indefinable God, nor to prove our proud orthodoxy, but to render grateful praise to the one in whom we live and move and have our being: our God. And while our worship here on earth will always be but a faint echo, it is amplified by the voices of the church triumphant, already gathered around the throne of heaven, who have seen the mysteries of God face to face; that God who is always One, and who multiplies through God’s very self blessings upon us. This One is a God who hears us, receives us, embraces us in all of our folly and faith and our doubt, forever faithful to God’s own nature, which is forever turned towards us in love.

Amen.

____________________

[i] Both quotes are from “The Threefold Benediction,” Westminster Abbey, Trinity Sunday, 1888, by Edwin Hatch. Memorials of Edwin Hatch, Edited by his brother, London, 1890, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Angican Quest for Holiness, complied by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001), 488-493

____________________

The Nicene Creed (8787)

We believe in God Almighty,
Father of Creation, who
made all things in earth and heaven
that are seen, and unseen, too.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus,
only Son of God, unmade;
of his Father’s love begotten,
through him all that is was made,

God from God, true God from true God,
Light from Light, who’s always been,
before time from time eternal;
with his Father one true Being.

Now for us and our salvation
he came down to earth from heaven;
by the Holy Ghost and Virgin
Mary he became a man.

Suffered under Pontius Pilate,
crucified for us, entombed.
Three days later he is risen –
Scriptures told of his return.

He ascended into heaven,
sits at God’s right hand on high.
He will come again to judge us,
king whose kingdom never dies.

We believe the Holy Spirit
gave us life; will always be
with the Son and Father worshipped,
Three in One and One in Three.

Spirit speaking by the prophets;
we believe the Church is one
holy, catholic, apostolic.
By one baptism guilt’s undone.

We believe in resurrection,
hope of a new life to come.
We believe in God, Christ Jesus,
and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Posted in holy days, sermon | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Holding fast to an ordinary peace

Posted on June 6, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Whenever we visit the in-laws in the British midlands, my husband’s extended family gathers in a local Indian restaurant for a curry. On one such evening a couple of years ago, the service was, uncharacteristically, rubbish. We were beginning to get annoyed that our family reunion was not being catered to with – what? the respect? reverence? professionalism? that it deserved.

The sun sets late in England in the summer. A little after nine, the kitchen staff emerged blinking from their backroom furnace bearing a tray of small snacks. The wait staff met them with tall glasses of water, and they quickly, almost furtively (except that they could not altogether suppress their ravenous joy), broke their fast together.

After that, the service picked up. The whole atmosphere improved, along with our own attitudes. After all, it has to be really hard running a restaurant in the West during Ramadan.

On our way out, the manager stood at the door, as usual, to shake each hand and smile us away. A daughter said, “Our mum fasts, too.” I demurred; “Not hardcore, like you. I drink water at least, sometimes even tea. And I only fast one day at a time.” Still, he smiled more broadly, and we wished one another a blessed fast; all was forgiven.

The ordinariness of living together across cultural and religious traditions can lead to the occasional rubbing up of rough edges; slow service and forgetfulness of another’s fast. Such slight injuries might just be covered with a handshake and a smile.

I have been trying to fathom the ends of so-called ISIS, or Daesh, in the West. The terrorism of my youth came with clear objectives and ransom demands. This terrorism, though, seems something else. It is indiscriminate in wielding death. It is not being visited upon us on behalf of the ambitions of Muslims – the Midlands restauranteur or the Mayor of London or anyone in between. It is, I believe, intended precisely to divide them from their non-Muslim neighours, customers, constituents, as much as us from them. It is designed to turn rough edges into severing blades, and misunderstandings into willful incomprehension. It is bent on civil war, and it is not interested in supporting a winner, only the downfall of us all.

The Bangladeshi-born owner of a British restaurant caught up in the recent terror incident at Borough Market in London shared a similar concern with the Guardian newspaper.

‘“I hope this won’t break the resolve of people to stay united. There will be people who, whether they articulate it or not, will feel resentful towards people whose religion has been used to justify these terrible attacks. It’s understandable,” he told the Guardian.’

He understands that he might be resented, hated even for a terror that targets him, too. The humility, empathy, and will to mercy that well up beneath his words is a sermon many Christians could use to hear.

“The government should rely less upon religious leaders and really try to bring integrated Muslims on board, people who live their lives in a contented manner who say there is scope to prosper in the west. We should actively engage Muslim professionals instead of professional Muslims,” he went on to say.

Some politicians have called for greater segregation, isolation, even banning the free movement of people like this Iqbal Wahhab, or the manager of the local curry house, the Mayor of London, or the paediatric neurologist with whom I shared a podium at this January’s Martin Luther King, Jr commemoration. But it is the very ordinariness of our togetherness, the everyday interactions as ordinary people, with a shared hunger, thirst, handshake and a smile that will save us from our division and destruction.

We cannot fight terror with tyranny, ideology with ideology; but in all humility and with God’s grace, the imago Dei within, we can follow our own humanity into an ordinary kind of peace.

Posted in current events, story | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Holy Comforter

Posted on June 4, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Preaching and prayers for Pentecost, 2017, at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio. “Praise & picnic” moved indoors because of unpredictable weather conditions …

The Holy Spirit is as unpredictable as the weather! One minute she is described as the sound of a rushing wind; the next sounds more like the sun, as flames as of fire rest on each of the disciples’ heads. I think it goes to show what lengths God will go to in order to reach us, to reach out to us, to reach God’s arms around us.

I like the image of the Holy Spirit as the sun. It gives light for us to find our way. It warms our hearts and lifts our spirits. It is an essential condition of our life – without it, life as we know it would not exist. Even in the darkness, in the night, the sun does not go away. It is, as much as any created thing can be, steadfast. It is we, with our little planet, who turn our backs for a time; and when in the morning we complete our rotation and return to the sight of the sun, its apparent rising brings us new hope, a new day.

No metaphor for God is sufficient; and it is unwise to try to divide God into separate parts. Divine vivisection is not a recommended practice. Nor is it the done thing to multiply by three.

Nevertheless, today we celebrate the Holy Spirit: the ruah, the breath of God.

Jesus had told his disciples, when you look at me, you see my Father. We know Jesus as our only mediator and advocate, but he promised that the Holy Spirit would be our Advocate and guide.

When the Holy Spirit blew through the room on Pentecost, it was with the fullness of the power of God. This was not an emissary, an angel of the Lord. This was the wind that whipped up the waters of creation. This was the breath that Jesus breathed over his apostles, speaking, “Peace.” This was the fullness of God, reminding and reassuring those apostles and the others that God is not gone away.

So what do we mean when we celebrate Pentecost today, and pray, “Come, Holy Spirit”?

I think that we are asking, once more, for God to let us know, in no uncertain terms, that God is not gone away, has not forgotten us, or closed the doors of heaven on our troubles, our dilemmas, our terror, or our love.

We are asking for that comforter, advocate, and guide whom we were promised, upon whom we can rely, even in the darkness.

The Holy Spirit does not always come in dramatic fashion, with a rushing wind and tongues of fire. Sometimes, she comes in that still, small voice in the darkness, so quiet that we wonder if we are imagining her presence. Do not be fooled by her quietness; she only has the full power of God reigned in.

Do not be alarmed by her unpredictability. She knows what she is doing. She speaks your language. She knows your name.

She is not confined to dramatic events or unexplained experiences. She who brooded over the waters of creation and breathed it into life is as close to your life as your beating heart, and as concerned for your heart as your own hidden hopes and fears.

It was when the apostles were gathered together in one place, as we are now, that the Holy Spirit came with the fullness of God, goosing the apostles into life, and setting them loose on their unsuspecting neighbours. It is when we come together that we have the power to do greater things in the name of our God, in the name of Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Our voices become stronger; our reach longer. When we inspire – literally in-Spirit one another; when we encourage – literally give courage to one another; then we know that power in all of its fullness and its glory.

But do not forget, in those quieter, still moments, and in the silence that follows the storm, and in the darkness, that the Spirit is still with you, as close as your breath, always there to remind us that God is not gone away, that you are not forgotten, but that the Spirit of God broods eternally over you, her beloved child.

Amen.

___________________________________

Prayers of the People for Pentecost (with musical response)

Spirit of All Holiness, fill your holy Church with the breath of life, with the words of prophecy, with the humility to seek your kingdom come.             Response

Spirit of God Almighty, guide this nation. Impart your Wisdom to those in authority, so that all may become agents of your kingdom.                  Response

Spirit who brooded over the waters of creation, protect and preserve your work, we pray, and bend our wills to yours, to create and not to destroy.             Response

Spirit of Life, in you we live and move and have our being. Be among us, as we live and move and have our being in this community, and let us love our neighbors as ourselves.             Response

Spirit of Peace, give rest to the victims of gun violence, and turn the hearts of those who choose to study war. Spirit of Truth, shine your light on the lies that breed terror, and relieve the grief that oppresses us.              Response

Spirit of Salvation, bring your compassion and mercy to bear upon all those who suffer in mind, body, or spirit, and give rest to those who are in trouble. Bless and keep all who contribute to the comfort of others.      Response

Spirit of Reconciliation, we confess that we have too often failed to follow you into the way of love. Forgive us, and renew a right spirit within us, we pray.         Response

Spirit of Resurrection, bring to perfect peace those who have died, that in your new creation they may worship you in spirit and in truth. Response

Closing Collect 

Heavenly Spirit, help us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that God’s very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words (Romans 8:26, para).

Final Response

Posted in current events, prayer, sermon | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Good

Posted on June 1, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Brooding over the nascent creation;
the divine nesting instinct restrained,
barely distressing the surface,
featherlight, lest
its exquisite potential be crushed
by the weight of glory.

Posted in current events, lectionary reflection, poetry | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Sunday morning

Posted on May 28, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

It’s Sunday morning. I had thought maybe of retracing my steps to my childhood church, twenty miles away; but the moment passed. I will stay in the village.

In fact, I am locked in my father’s house; he may or may not have set the alarm before he went to bed last night, so I dare not open any doors.

Instead tonight, before dinner, I will make my way downhill to the village church for Evening Prayer. My mother’s grave marker will be the last thing to greet me before the open door.

It is never easy, returning. In part, this time, that is because my legs have been destroyed by the mountain. It was strange; we both remembered clearly the frightening and unforgiving ridge. We had both forgotten completely the amount of full-on, full-body rock climbing it took to get that far, and more on the other side.

I think that I managed it more easily this time than decades ago. I was less afraid, for certain. I have learned, somewhere along the way, to trust my body, having got me this far. I have learned that what will hurt and destroy and throw me down is less easily predicted or mapped out than 35mph winds on a narrow ridge. I have learned, not to tempt fate nor to accept it, but to work with it.

I am in no more pain, coming down, than last time; but that is not saying too much.

The prospect of descending the steep hill to church, let alone coming back up, is daunting; but there is no easy way out. It is Sunday morning, and I am locked in my father’s house, waiting.

Posted in prayer, story | Leave a comment

Statuesque

Posted on May 21, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, 2017

“Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’” (Acts 17:22b-23)

Paul arrives in the ancient city of Athens, and I imagine from what he says that there are statues everywhere – to all kinds of gods and goddesses, demi-gods, illustrating aspects of Athenian life and values, ambitions and aspirations: Athena and Aphrodite, goddesses of love, beauty, and wisdom; Apollo, who made music and medicine; and Nemesis, the god of revenge – but there is one shrine in particular that catches Paul’s attention – a shrine to the unknown god.

Which led me to ask the question: To whom would you dedicate a statue, and why?

It’s not supposed to be a trick question, but it may reveal something more than the surface would suggest; might pierce the shroud of our shared values and bring our biases into the light. After a confederate statue was sold by the city of Charlottesville, VA, last weekend white supremacists took up torches, illuminating exactly why such statues have become the source of controversy, conflict, and shame. In New Orleans, such statues have been removed by night and under the cover of anonymity, since the contractors chosen to complete the task received death threats.

Choose carefully what to memorialize, is the lesson learned; the question of to whom we would raise a statue, and which we take down, calls out our values: what we seek out, admire, aspire to.

You can tell a lot about the shared values of a city or a system by what they choose to memorialize. One of my favourite statues in Cardiff, the city where I did much of my growing up, is of Aneurin Bevan, the author of the British National Health Service which transformed the face and financial implications of healthcare in that country.

He is often to be found with a traffic cone on his head, because it doesn’t do to take one’s heroes too seriously. They all have clay feet, concreted into the ground.

Someone Tweeted last week the observation that there are no public statues to the leaders of the once-powerful Nazis in Germany; only Holocaust memorials.

One of the most iconic images of this nation is the statue of Abraham Lincoln seated in stone. Not too far away stands the recently completed image of Martin Luther King, Jr. We share with France twin statues of Lady Liberty; symbols of a relationship built upon the shared values of the two relatively young republics.

In Denmark’s capital, a statue to the Little Mermaid overlooks the harbour of Copenhagen; a monument to power of story, imagination, and love.

What we choose to set in stone for all to see gives away more than we might realize about our beliefs, our values, our aspirations.

And so Paul arrives in Athens, and finds it full of statues and shrines, and even one dedicated to a god as yet unknown.

He is half-teasing; more than half when he says to the Athenians, you are so religious that you worship even what you don’t know!

One of my test subjects, on being asked, to whom would you dedicate a statue and why, replied without hesitation, “Myself, because I am awesome.”

Which is awesome, but which would not have given Paul that same opening of humility and haunting half-knowledge, seeking what we know to be real but not quite yet seen, that was represented by the shrine to the unknown god.

This shrine has potential precisely because it acknowledges that truth, that there is something beyond what we know that we know to have power, and value. It is precisely when we leave off from making our gods, our idols in our own image that we can begin to seek the God who made us in God’s own image,

“So that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him – though indeed he is not far from each one of us. “ (Acts 17:27)

When we have the humility to seek the answers from our God, instead of telling God what we already know and what God should do about it – then we begin to find that God is waiting for us, to show us the way.

When we awaken the hunger to do God’s will; when we stop asking God to do our will, to back our side against all others, to funnel grace in our direction, when it is designed to fill the whole world – when we awaken that hunger and thirst for God’s kingdom, we find ourselves refreshed.

When we seek and serve Christ in all persons, as our baptismal promise guides us, then we find living statuary, made in the image of God, to be all around us in the city, awaiting our notice; not far from each of us.

“I will not leave you orphaned,” Jesus promises, “I am coming to you.” And he does, in the bread and the wine, in the water and the word, in the church and in the world. And no statue will do him justice, and no shrine will hold him hostage; but we remember him, each time we come together at his table, to share in his body and blood, and he meets us, and reminds us of what matters: love and sacrifice, not set in stone, but set free from the tomb hewn out of the rock to live to the glory of God alone.

Posted in current events, lectionary reflection, sermon | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Crossing time

Posted on May 19, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

This time next week, I hope to have reached the mountaintop.

Between here and there is a steep and rocky ridge. Last time I crossed Crib Goch, it was on my hands and knees. My ambition, some quarter of a century later, is to stride across (at least some of) it like a woman, erect and unafraid; but if I crawl again, clinging to the earth and rock the whole way as for my very life, I will not be ashamed.

I realized rather late in the day why this trip has become a source of such anxiety, a needle of nervousness when I prick my plans upon it. The last time I was in that land was for a funeral. My father made the journey to join us not, I think, so much for the sake of the widow as because, in the dying days, an opportunity to share the same air should not be wasted.

The death of my father-in-law has changed the landscape to which we will return, and the journey has become, in its details and diversions, its stops and starts, layovers, inspections, security insecurities – it has become a metaphor for the passage of time, unseen and uncertain, and steeped in our mutual mortality.

My ambition is to stride across it like a woman, erect and unafraid. But if I fall to my knees, clinging to the earth and rock as for my life, I will not be ashamed.

Be to me a rock of refuge (Psalm 71:3)

 

Posted in other words, prayer | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Creation

Posted on May 16, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

He was silent for the longest time
(it felt like an eternity),
brooding over the dark waters
as though through glass, strangely
untouched by the storm, unmoved
by the violence of the deep as it wrestled
life to the surface, only to sink
again into depths unplumbed.

Fascinated; hypnotized
by his own genius, he skimmed
something like a stone across its face,
turned away, stopped, spoke: “Light,” 
he muttered, and at his back 
the sunset lit the sea on fire.

Posted in poetry | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Truth, lies, and email scams

Posted on May 14, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the fifth Sunday of Easter, 2017

Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” (14:6)

Later, at his trial before Pilate, he said, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” (John 18:37)

But Pilate treated truth with contempt, like a thing to be ordered by his whim. “What is truth?” he said. (John 18:38)

Sometimes, it’s pretty easy to find out the truth of what’s going on. For example, I received an email this week via the church’s account, marked “Extremely Urgent,” from a man I will call WM. Mr M wrote, in part,

The Bank has sent me frequent memos urging me to get in contact with the beneficiary of the sum of THREE MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND POUND in the account of my late client at their bank … Till his death I was his personal lawyer, this was why the bank informed me to get in Contact with the beneficiary of his bequest funds in their custody. I have made series contacts to get the beneficiary without success and I just confirmed that the beneficiary has also passed on … and his family relocates from their former address no one know their where about and I could not locate them after several try.
For this reason I like to present you to the bank as the beneficiary of the bequest THREE MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND POUND to enable us to claim the funds from the bank otherwise the funds will remain in the bank unclaimed, meaning the funds will belong to the bank if not claimed. I have all the details to claim the funds from the bank peacefully and lawfully.
Get back to me for us to work together and claim the funds from the bank for ourselves.

I did write straight back to Mr M, advising him that this was a church, and that I would pray for him. He responded, IN ALL CAPS,

I am quite aware is church email i.e. (Church of the Epiphany). I contacted you so that part of the funds can be as donation for the church. That is, by the time we claim the funds, I will have 40% for myself, 40% for you and 20% for Church of the Epiphany as donation.
Reply if you are interested so that we can commence to claim the funds immediately without delay.

So I explained to Mr M that I thought it unbecoming of a priest to claim falsely to be the beneficiary of a man whom I had never met, even for the sake of a substantial donation to the parish coffers. I reminded him that Jesus told his disciples that it would be easier for a camel to thread the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. I could have added something about choosing God over mammon, or the time that Jesus himself declined to involve himself in an inheritance argument between two brothers, or that he advised on storing up treasures in heaven, where neither rust nor moth can destroy, nor thieves steal it away, and that where one’s treasure lies, there one’s heart will dwell also. But I wanted to keep it short and sweet.

Mr M, to my surprise, was not yet deterred, but offered his further opinion that I was quite wrong, explaining,

You will not be dishonest to involve in matter of this nature because if we don’t claim the funds from the bank, the fund will ever remain in the bank unclaimed and automatically the funds will be long to the bank. I am a very good Christian so I believe it is far better and more religious for us to claim the funds and use for ourselves and in the course of propagating our religion.  This how I look at the whole matter. The lord will reward you if we claim the funds and make donation to the church rather than allow the funds to remain in the bank forever.

“The lord will reward you” for bending the truth.

My final word in the matter was that I was unconvinced that pretending to be someone I was not would still be dishonest, even if it deprived the bank of undeserved money. I also let Mr M in on the secret that his emails read somewhat like a scam to trick an unsuspecting person into revealing their own bank details down the road. I continued to assure him of my prayers, and I have been praying for him, whatever his true name might be, ever since.

The truth is, of course, as fun as it was, that I had no right to be holier than thou with him. We all fall short of scrupulous truthfulness from time to time. It’s easy to spot the lie in a scam email, but it is harder to keep an eye on that subtle tendency of sin to skew our discernment, especially when it is coupled with expediency, or greed, or need, or “the lord will reward you.”

But whenever we turn away from the truth, we lose sight of Jesus.

In an exhaustive examination of the ethics of truth-telling and deception, Sissela Bok says that

Deception is taken for granted when it is felt to be excused by those who tell the lies and who tend also to make the rules. [i]

In other words, those with the power to shape the world around them decide for themselves what manipulations of the truth are acceptable in order to do so. By means of false words, they remake the world to suit their purpose. Remember Pilate?

People with that kind of power – and the scammers who prey on people by email are only a caricature, a cartoon villain of the type – people with the power to deceive live in a different world than those who, as Bok notes, are “rendered powerless” by the falsehood.[ii]

But the world was created by the Word of God, which is the ultimate truth; the Word of God, which is the Christ; Jesus, who is the way, and the truth, and the life.

And Jesus, in the gospels and in everything that follows, has a tendency to side with the powerless.

He is the way, and the truth, and the life. Thomas asks him, “How will we know the way?” And Philip says, “Just show us God already and we’ll be satisfied, we’ll be good.”

Jesus tells them, “You know the way. I am the way, and the truth, and the life. And if you are paying any kind of attention to me, you have seen God.”

When we turn from the truth, we lose sight of Jesus. When we turn away from him, we lose sight of God.

The words we use to try to remake the world in our own interest and our own image cannot replace that creative Word of God, which writes truth on the heart and directs all of life towards its loving mercy.

As the twentieth-century poet WH Auden wrote,

He is the Way. Follow him …
He is the Truth. Seek him …
He is the Life. Love him …”[iii]

Amen.

________________________

[i] Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, 2nd edition (Vintage Press, 1999), Introduction xxviii

[ii] ibid, Introduction xxix

[iii] From WH Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, part IV, in WH Auden, Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (Vintage International, 1991), p. 400; and in The Hymnal 1982 of the Episcopal Church, #463 & 464

Posted in sermon | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Spring cleaning

Posted on May 9, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

I threw away
the old, stale curry leaves,
the old, stale bread.
I threw away
the old, stale news-
papers half unread.
I threw away
old, empty bottles,
their promises unslaked.
I threw away
some old, empty dreams
that were keeping me awake.
I threw away
the skeletons, but they
refused to go,
piling up their
old, stale bones
to barricade the door.

Posted in poetry | Leave a comment