Cleopas and Fred on the road back from Chicago

Posted on April 30, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the third Sunday of Easter in 2017, at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio

According to the gospel account that we read last week, while Cleopas and his companion were walking to Emmaus, the rest of the disciples were hiding behind locked doors, for fear of what might happen to the known companions and followers of Jesus now that his enemies had tasted blood.

Peter himself, arguably one of Jesus’ closest confidantes, had denied all knowledge of him when challenged outside the chief priest’s house; and now, confused by stories of angels and empty tombs, he huddled behind a locked door somewhere in Jerusalem, waiting. Waiting for the hue and cry to die down, the noise in the streets drummed up by false charges, holiday crucifixions, a rush to complete the latest round of executions before time ran out. Waiting for the coast to clear so that they could beat a retreat back to Galilee, where by some accounts, they might expect to see Jesus.

Cleopas and his friend, whom I shall call Fred, had some reason to set out anyway and journey to Emmaus. On the way, they picked up with a stranger, who butted into their private conversation, wanting to know what it was that had them so worked up.

They could have lied. They could have said they were discussing the weather, or the quality of the lamb that they had eaten for their Passover meal. They could have said anything; they were risking everything by telling the truth to a stranger.

He could have been a spy, for the chief priests or the secret police. He could have been an agent of Rome, a temple mole. They did not have to show their hand to this stranger on the road. But for some reason, they told him the truth. They told him about Jesus, about their hopes and their desires for him to be the Messiah, the one to save them. They even told him about the rumours of resurrection, even though it was demonstrably dangerous to do so, to tell a stranger that the tomb, at which Pilate and the priests had posted soldiers and guards to keep the dead man in his place; that this tomb had been emptied of its death, opened to the light on the first day of the new week.

Cleopas and Fred met Jesus on the road. They did not know him, but it turns out that it was to Jesus himself that they first preached the resurrection of Christ.

Many of you know that last weekend I spent three days in Chicago, at a conference organized by Bishops United Against Gun Violence, studying, lamenting, repenting of the unholy intersection of racism, poverty, and gun violence in our country. It was a remarkable event, and I hope that I will have more of a chance over the coming weeks to share with you some of the insights of the people presenting and preaching and teaching together at that conference.

One of the things that happens when we come together as Christians in the name of the Prince of Peace, the one appointed to proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captive, the day of God’s salvation is that we are emboldened to proclaim it ourselves. In good company, in safe spaces, it is easy to utter the iconic (really, how are these controversial?) words, Black Lives Matter. It is safe to pray for the victims of judicial executions along with the victims of extra-judicial violence. It is safe to say that gun violence will not be diminished by adding more guns to the equation. It is acknowledged and expected that a theology of the cross – of the non-violent, self-sacrificing love of God is something to follow at all costs. We are emboldened, and inspired, and our spirits are raised from the dead into something resembling new life by such meetings of minds and hearts and bodies.

But what happens when we go our separate ways, at the end of three days, and walk the road alone, or in the company of strangers? Do we remain bold? Do we continue to speak the truth? Or do we fall silent, and lock our opinions behind closed doors for fear of the chief priests, the secret police, our fellow countrymen and women? In the moment of crisis, or in the casual encounter on the road, do we deny Jesus?

At our bible study on Tuesday, we considered the conversion of the three thousand whom Peter addressed after the locked doors were blown open and the Spirit unleashed upon them on the day of Pentecost. They were literally blown away by the gospel that they heard, and they were baptized, and devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers.

But, asked one wise woman, once the commotion had subsided and the crowds dispersed, what did they tell their own rabbi when they got home? How did they explain what they had heard, and how it moved them? Did they continue to tell the truth, and to proclaim the gospel, or did they fall silent, for fear of what their family and friends might think of them?

I do not know whether Cleopas and Fred were foolish or brave. I don’t know whether they had been living in such a bubble with their fellow disciples that they forgot there could be other opinions of the death of Jesus (that seems unlikely, given the press before Pilate’s palace). Maybe they felt something sympathetic in this stranger who joined them on the road. Or perhaps they simply felt that they had nothing left to lose, if Jesus were really dead, and everything to gain if he were truly arisen.

Brave or foolish, they told the truth of the gospel nevertheless. They told of their hopes and desires for Jesus as their Messiah. They told of the mystery of the empty tomb, rumours of resurrection. They laid it all out for a stranger on the road, and he repaid them with the Bread of Life: the word of God’s promise through the prophets, and the sacrament of his own precious life poured out before them at their own table.

In fact, they risked it twice, Cleopas and Fred, preaching resurrection once to Jesus as a stranger on the road, and again to their fellow friends, who earlier had considered the women’s proclamation an idle tale; still Cleopas and Fred risked telling their truth, sharing their Jesus moment with the doubters, who now said yes, we know, we have seen him, too.

Twice they told their story, and each time Jesus was present with them, and going ahead of them.

Encountering Cleopas and Fred on the road back from Chicago this week, I feel as though their message to me is not to be afraid to continue to risk the truth.

They tell me, Jesus is the truth; accept no alternatives. He is the way: follow him, even if through the valley of the shadow of death. For he is life. He is good news to the poor, freedom to the captive, health to the lame and the lonely, sight to the blind. And, they tell me, he is risen. Amen. Alleluia.

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Suffer the children 

Posted on April 27, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Last weekend, I was in Chicago for a conference about the intersection of racism, poverty, and gun violence: an unholy trinity. You can read my review of it for the Episcopal Cafe here.

One of the features of the conference was daily contextual bible study. Led by Dr Dora Mbuwayesango, we read often-overlooked passages of the Hebrew scriptures that highlight the unequal sacrifice of mothers in times of famine and stress.

In 2 Kings 6:24-7:2, we read of the mother who was duped into sacrificing her son by a neighbour who would literally devour widows and orphans. I do not think, when she petitioned the king, that she was begging for further death, or more meat. Rather, she wanted what any mother would: for time to be returned, deeds to be undone. She wanted the king to give her back her son. But he could not.

And in his impotence and out of his rage, he seeks to unleash further violence to absolve himself of blame. But that will not bring back her son. Neither will tomorrow’s bread, although it may save some other mother’s child from starvation.

In 2 Samuel 21, we found two sons names Mephibosheth. One, beloved of the king because of his father’s friendship, lived. The other was out of luck. His mother could only shield his bones from the vultures.

Rizpah spreads herself beside him on the rock. The grief of the mothers shames their kings, but only when their sons are already dead.

And David gathered the bones, and buried them. It is not told what happened to Rizpah when her sons’ beloved bones were repossessed and returned to respectability, as though their death had been part of the very nature of life, after all.

And will these dry bones live?
The bones of children
sacrificed to satisfy
other people’s hunger;
other people’s honour;
other people’s pride.

Priests and kings rend their garments,
and the sky weeps;
but she has already laid
down the law among their clean, dry bones.

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It is not enough

Posted on April 21, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

It is not enough for him to die.
It is not enough for him to offer up
his pain, to offer us his wincing scars:
touch my hand;
my open, scored side;
trace the welts and weals of the thorns
that crowned my head.
It is not enough for him to suffer,
to shoulder all the world’s sorrows.
The grave is not sufficient ransom.
Death can never be our satisfaction.

It is not to wash his wounds
that Thomas falls at his feet.
It is not to mourn, but to worship one
who has more than his pain to offer us.
He comes in peace.
He comes with impossible, indelible life.
He comes back, just for us and Thomas;
he comes with unquenchable love.

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Learning to pray

Posted on April 18, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

“Time to pray,” the teachers said,
“hands together, close your eyes.”
They didn’t tell us why.
They might have mentioned
No fidgeting,
or sneaking peaks at one another;
No distractions.

But they never told us that
the dark space behind our eyes
could become the tomb
of the Risen Christ,
empty, yet full
of promise and startling light;
the after-image of an angel of the Lord
imprinted on the soul.

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Resurrection

Posted on April 16, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Seven of the sixteen women named in the New Testament are named Mary. Nearly half of them share that name. It is not as strange as it seems ; [see note below]. In Jesus’ day, around one in five Jewish women bore the name of Mary, so it is not that much of a coincidence that the two women named returning to Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning share the same name.

They were named after Miriam, the sister of Moses. They were named for a woman who had helped her brothers, Moses and Aaron, to lead the people of God out from under Pharaoh’s jackboot to freedom and the promised land; Miriam who sang and danced after the rout of Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea.

Calling every fifth girl child Mary was a subtle and somewhat safe way of sticking it to the Romans, and their Caesar; Pilate and his ilk.

These women were named and ordained to be leaders of the resistance.

So these are the women who return to the tomb of Jesus, and its soldier-guards, carrying the weight of their names. In the Sabbath day between the crucifixion and this morning, in the Passover feast, commemorated rather than celebrated, I suspect, in the house filled with disciples, they had rehearsed the stories of their ancient namesake, Miriam and her brothers, and the faithfulness of God towards them, when God led them through the waters of the Red Sea, under the shadow of death, and released them into a new life of freedom and a new covenant of faith.

Resurrection always begins in the darkness: under the iron rod of the Pharaoh, in the night of plagues and terror. The Pesach was remembered even in the death camps of the Holocaust, among men and women who wondered why they still prayed to a God who would allow such horrors to be visited upon God’s people, and not pass them by. Now, the disciples of Jesus marked the feast in the shadow of the cross, and the unimaginable loss of their Messiah: Yeshua, Joshua, Jesus.

We do not know what these women named Mary expected to find when they arose early in the morning after the Sabbath feast and returned to the tomb. In some of the stories, they come bearing spices to anoint his body, as though resurrection were the last thing on their mind. In the darkness of the night of the plagues, the hell of the Holocaust, the refugee camp, the field hospital; it is difficult to imagine God doing a new thing.

And yet they continued to tell the stories of God’s faithfulness, even of miracles. There must have been some hope left alive.

We come to the empty tomb in a time when the Passover is celebrated by our sisters and brothers in the shadow of bomb threats and swastikas. We come under the shadow of our own political intrigues, evil empires, nuclear nightmares, and the chronic concern of how to feed the five thousand.

But resurrection always begins in darkness.

If these disciples had not come to the tomb, with or without their burial spices; with or without hope; still, Jesus would have risen. He is risen whether we come with spices to bury him or palms to praise him. He is risen, because the crucifixion, the murder of the Son of God; our putting God to death is only one of many terrible mistakes that we humans have made; and none of them, nothing we have done or we can do upends God’s promise to stay with us, to lead us out of slavery and exile, to breathe new life into dry bones, and to set God’s people free.

None of them; not even this.

But the women did come, because they knew the story of their name, and they knew the faithfulness of God, and whether they believed it yet or not, still they hoped, they hoped that God’s grace would show them some new mercy in the morning.

As the women carried the defining hope of their names, so we bear the moniker of the risen Christ. They call us Christians – little christs – named and ordained to continue the remembrance and the promise of Jesus, embodied in his life of love and sacrifice, his death willingly endured for the sake of God’s kingdom of peace and life; his resurrection, that razed all previous expectations to the ground and established once again, once for all the promise that nothing, no one can separate us from the love that God has for God’s people.

When we are named and claimed as Christ’s own for ever, ordained to become leaders of women and men, proclaiming that God’s grace is more powerful than any force on earth. Pharaoh’s will fall, and even death is defeated by the Spirit of God, who is always ready to breathe new life into our world.

We know it because of the Resurrection. We proclaim that Christ is risen, and that we are risen with him, because God’s mercy endures forever.

Amen.

______________________

Names and numbers

I took my first sentence from class notes penned during a whirlwind intensive studying Mary Magdalene several years ago. I failed to check my work. Having been called to account for the women mentioned above, this is what I found out:

My list of seven Marys comes from a class handout from the same source:

1 Mary of Nazareth, mother of Jesus (Matt. 1:18-2:23; Mark 3:20-35 & 6:3; Luke 1-2; Acts 1:14; unnamed in John)

2 Mary Magdalene (Matt. 27:55-28:10; Mark 15:40-16:8; Luke 8:2 & 24:1-11; John 19:25 & 20:1-18)

3 Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus (Luke 10:38-42; John 11-12)

4 Mary the mother of James and Joses (Mark 15:40 & 16:1; Matt. 27:56; Luke 24:10)

5 Mary the wife of Clopas (John 19:25)

6 Mary, mother of John Mark (Acts 12:12)

7 Mary “who has worked very hard among you” in Rome (Romans 16:6)

Assuming that these are, in fact, each a unique Mary, the number in dispute is sixteen. And there seems no doubt that it is wrong. I truly apologize.

If we count women’s names in the Gospels, we find Rahab, Ruth, and Tamar (in the genealogy at the beginning of Matthew); Elizabeth and Anna (in the opening chapters of Luke); Joanna and Susanna who support Jesus; Herodias wife of Herod; Martha, sister to Mary; and Salome, who was with the other women at the cross (Mark 15:40).*

Here’s where it gets tricky. If we add these ten names to our seven Marys, we find that seven out of seventeen share the name of the Mother of our Lord. BUT, two of our Marys are drawn from beyond the Gospels; so now we have five out of fifteen. If we decide to eliminate the women invoked from ancient history, and concentrate on the characters within the Gospel story, we end up with five Marys out of twelve named women in the Gospels. And either way, the number sixteen is toast.

*It is the morning after Easter, and I am more than willing to be corrected, again, on this quick survey; but it is presented in good faith.

To restore the fullness of seven Marys, we need to look beyond the Gospels. When we do, we find more women: Sapphira, Tabitha, Dorcas, Priscilla (also called Prisca), Phoebe, Typhaena and Tryphosa, Nympha, Claudia, Hermas, Persis, Lydia, Euodia, Syntyche, Chloe, Apphia …

Again, it gets a little tricky; we aren’t altogether whether some names belong to women or men. Julia/Junia, for example, mentioned in Romans 16:7, is in some translations named Junias, a man’s name. Still, even a conservative count yields more than sixteen more named women (not counting Sarah, the wife of Abraham).

So we are left with seven Marys, and an approximate and incomplete count of women with other names; but certainly more than twenty, and maybe even thirty of them.

Again, my sincere apologies for leading anyone astray.

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Good Friday: his own people

Posted on April 14, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

At the beginning of the Gospel according to John, we read that,

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.

His own people. That phrase has quite the resonance. We are too good at deciding who are our people, and who are not. And beware those who are not; because we will have you removed, one way or another, to make way for those who are our own people.

The danger is, of course, that it is Christ we are excising from our own, from our lives, from our world, condemning him to die, as though he were not one of us.

He who became one of us. He through whom each one of us came into being. We are his own, and his own people did not accept him.

Bishop Augustine, from whom we read on Wednesday, and last night, advises that

Most of the time, when you think you are hating your enemy, you are hating your brother without knowing it.

Our brother, or our King.

“He was in the world, and the world came into being through him,”

Yet he placed himself at our mercy. For the sins of the whole world – his own people, every last one of them, of us – he would suffer and die before he would deny any of us.

He has placed himself at our mercy, so that we might know the depth, and height, and breadth of his own.

My God! What love is this
behind the nails, persisting still,
faithful against all provocation,
loving against all odds.

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Maundy Thursday: the mother of all mercy

Posted on April 13, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

What should Jesus have done about Judas? In a way, Thursday was the final chance. There is a pipeline from here to the tomb. Once Judas has left the table, Jesus knows that his fate is sealed.

Yet earlier in the evening, instead of ordering his disciples to bind Judas in the basement, he kneels at his feet, his robe set aside. And with ironic tenderness, he lifts each of Judas’ feet to wash them clean, and dry them like a mother tending to her willful, wicked child.

One of the great tragedies of Judas is that he does not live to hear Jesus’ words of forgiveness from the cross. Incredible, unimaginable grace. And Judas cannot imagine it, so he returns instead to the very people who cannot forgive him, because they are part and parcel of his crime. Perhaps that is why he goes to them; he cannot forgive himself, so he stays among those who cannot forgive him either.

The great tragedy of Judas is that even after spending all this time with Jesus; even after the broken bread and the bathed feet, he still cannot quite believe in his grace and mercy.

We have a similar problem. We follow Judas’ logic all too often: that the way of the cross, of service and sacrifice; the steadfast loving kindness of God is all very well and good; but that it is hardly good enough. So we take matters into our own hands, betraying the love of Jesus for silver, or for self-satisfaction, or the satisfaction of revenge, of being right.

But Jesus is something else. Faced with his betrayal, he tells Judas, do what you must. But I will continue to do what I must: to live a life to the very end of love without limits, service without salary, mercy without match.

Jesus knew all about Judas. But in his humanity, he was vulnerable to two key weaknesses: hope, and love. In his Incarnation, God had made the almighty vulnerable, choosing love over security and hope over certainty.

We read at yesterday’s Tenebrae service from St Augustine:

On the brow of kings that cross is now placed, the cross which enemies once mocked. Its power is shown in the result. He has conquered the world, not by steel, but by wood. … He stretched out his arms to an unbelieving and rebellious people. … And yet, looking upon them, he said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’

Judas’ error is ours, whenever we consider steel stronger than the wood of the cross. Each time we consider might greater than the mother of all mercy. Whenever we stray from kindness, withholding the water to wash the feet of a stranger, or of a close friend. Each time we stint or skimp on love, instead of pouring it out so that the whole house is filled with its perfume, we follow in the footsteps of Judas, slipping away from the table, turning our backs towards Jesus.

But we do not need to follow Judas to his grave. I have said that the tragedy of Judas is his failure to hear Jesus’ forgiveness, broadcast from the cross. But we have heard it, and every time we take our courage in our hands, to confess our betrayal and the need to be washed by the love of Jesus, he is ready to receive us. We do not need to persist in tragedy, if we can embrace the comedy, the foolish and incredible notion that God loves us so much, that the Son of God would kneel before us and wash our feet.

My God! What love is this,
reaching beneath the gnarled nails
to wash away the blood and sweat
and wrap the cooling, clean feet
in soft linen; what tenderness
takes such a body and lays it,
cool and dry, onto the bare earth?

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Holy Week

Posted on April 11, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Seven days.
Seven shades of suffering
silence.
Seven last words:
thirst, famine, fever,
finality, yet,
too, there is
forgiveness,
family,
a future
spit from split lips,
a dry tongue still
willing
to kiss
the face of God

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Palms and passion

Posted on April 9, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for Palm Sunday, 2017

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was an acclaimed theologian of the twentieth century. He became iconic after his martyrdom at the hands of Hitler’s Nazi government, shortly before the end of the second World War. According to Bonhoeffer, it was not necessary that Jesus should suffer alone, but that he should be rejected. Rejected by the authorities, secular and religious; rejected by his friends, Judas and Peter and the others; rejected by the very people who on Palm Sunday had cheered him into town in a parody of a parade, riding on a donkey.

There is a distinction here between suffering and rejection. Had he only suffered, Jesus might still have been applauded as the Messiah. All the sympathy and admiration of the world might have been focused on his passion. It could have been viewed as a tragedy with its own intrinsic value, dignity, and honour. But in the passion Jesus is a rejected Messiah. His rejection robs the passion of its halo of glory.[i]

Such rejection was inevitable, given that Jesus is ahead of his time, and beyond it; because he is the ultimate image of God made human. He is everything to which we aspire and everything which we deny within ourselves. His rejection was inevitable.

It was necessary, in order that we should know that he is not king because we made him one. He is not Truth because we believe in him. He is not Life because we let him live. He is not the Way because we follow him. He was not elected on a wave of populism and celebrated at rallies across the nation – it is easy to see where Bonhoeffer’s imagination was running over to self-anointed, popularly-appointed leaders of men.

The rejection of Jesus was necessary because we would still need to know, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, that Jesus is Lord not because of us, but despite us. That his Truth endures whether or not we believe it. That his Way is not the path of least resistance, but the lonely and lunatic way of the cross.

Even the resurrection was not a popular story, to begin with. They tried to bury it before it had even happened. Those whom we reject, they felt, should remain as quiet as the grave, out of sight, out of mind, off of our collective conscience.

It is that mindset that allows us to weep for the children of Syria, to express our outrage in an act of measured violence, all the while continuing to reject the applications of their siblings for refuge. It allows us to mourn the children of Newtown, while defeating any attempt to rein in the proliferation of the weapons that allowed their efficient slaughter. It is the mindset that writes off whole regions of the African continent threatened by famine, and whole cities of our own country where the water is poisonous to yet more small, brown children.

The prayerful gymnastics of Palm Sunday and the Passion, in which Jesus is welcomed into town as the Messiah and crucified as a madman are the prayers of a people who have decided ahead of time what is the mind of God, and whose side God is on. It is a mindset exemplified by a rigid adherence to the belief that we are right, that God is on our side. When it is challenged – when Jesus turns over the temple tables, for example, or allows himself to be taken prisoner without violence, turning the other cheek, absorbing evil to turn it to good, embodying death in order to turn it to life; such measures we reject out of hand.

It is much easier to decide in advance the direction of Jesus and his destination of glory than to follow in the way of the cross.

Jesus had to be rejected so that we would know that we did not make him in our own image, sanctified and glorified and altogether unreal, bearing no relation to those middle-eastern men weeping on our television screens. Jesus had to be rejected so that he would be remembered not as the hastily-crowned leader of the moment, before whom we spread our coats and branches of palms; not as the leader that we want, but as the saviour that we need.

You have heard it said that it was all about politics, his arrest and trial; that it was all about religion; that it was all about the afterlife, or justice in the here and now. But life is more than politics, more than religion. The life that God has given us spans eternity, and it is not divided into then and now, but in God it always is.

That is the life that Jesus led: always and in all things remembering from whom he came, in whose image he was made, to whom he would be restored. Loving God more than self, putting the interests of others before his own. It is such a perfect way that too often we reject it as unreasonable, unattainable, unworkable in the real world.

In the real world, we say, there is danger and there is terror and we cannot be too careful. But the real world is God’s world, and it was into our reality that Jesus came. He knew danger. He knew terror. He knew the outrages perpetrated by Pilate, mass murder by the roadside. He knew all too well the real pain and suffering of rejection, and still, he insisted that the way of the cross was the way of God: the way of sacrifice, of love beyond any reasonable boundaries, and mercy beyond any measure of our justice. No wonder we rejected him.

In the end, of course, the resurrection proved him right; and that is how we are able to return time and again to the streets of Jerusalem, strewing palms in his way, hoping each time that this time, we will not be called to follow him to the cross, but might be able to skip straight to the resurrection.

But he rejected our calls to save himself. He rejected our populism and the prophets who cry “Peace!” where there is no peace. He rejected our glory so that we might know the true glory of God: the compassion that passes our comprehension, the love big enough to break our hearts; the peace that still surpasses our understanding.

Amen.

___________________________

[i] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (Macmillan, translated edition 1949), 95-96

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The prayer of Lazarus

Posted on April 4, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

The prayer of Lazarus,
silent by necessity: words
swallowed by folds of flesh
falling in upon itself;
wrapped cloth swaddling his
fragile form, fragrant with decay.

The prayer of Lazarus lies
deep in the soil, the colour
of Adam’s clay; bound
to the rock of our salvation.

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