Ransom

Posted on October 20, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

I know that you know Aesop’s fable of the sun and the wind:

The north wind and the sun were having a “conversation” about who was stronger, better, greater.

The north wind blustered, “I’m obviously strong. I can blow the anything off anyone.”

“Is that so?” answered the sun.

“Anyone can see,” the north wind continued huffily, “that I am the greatest. I can blow anything you like into kingdom come.”

“Is that so?” replied the sun.

“I’ll prove it,” the north wind pouted out its cheeks ready to blow. “Any time you like.”

“Is that so,” smiled the sun. Then it continued, “Look! See down there that traveller, with the cloak and the staff. I tell you what, whichever of us can get his cloak off him, that one will be acknowledged as the greater.”

The north wind agreed readily. Thinking this was its game, it blustered and blew and huffed and whistled, but the traveller, disturbed and chilled, only pulled his cloak tighter. The more the north wind assailed him, the more closely the traveller wrapped himself in his cloak, as though he might blow away with it if he dared to let go.

Eventually, the traveller sat down for a rest beneath a tree. The north wind also needed a breather. So the sun took over.

First, it shone gently through the leaves, dappling the traveller into soft dreams. As the beams grew stronger, and the traveller more relaxed, he began to loose his grip on his cloak. As the sun cleared the tree’s canopy and shone fully on the traveller, he shrugged off his cloak, folded it up, and put it in his pack to use as a pillow.

***

The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. The Son came to serve, to warm and melt the hearts of the heartless, to overcome the coldness of sin with love.

I am reminded by a preacher’s podcast called The Lectionary Lab that the language of ransom can cause some theological problems for some of us. So let’s be clear: God is not a hostage-taker. Jesus is not saving us from God; Jesus is God, who loves the world and its creatures so much that God became human to set us free, to show us the way of freedom, the way of love.

God is not a hostage-taker. We, like James and John, like their aggrieved and angry companions, tie ourselves up in knots, bind ourselves to ambition and external recognition, envy and rage – these are not the attributes of God.

Left to our own devices, to our own imaginations, to ourselves – well, the devil makes play for idle hands and inflated egos. James and John, the anger of the disciples, left to spiral like a cyclonic wind, their bloviating would only cause them to wrap their errors more closely around themselves. If Jesus had agreed that they could sit at his left and right hands, the next argument would be who got right and who got left!

But the ransom of love, the profligate and abundant outpouring of love, that is the ransom that frees us, not from God, but from sin and its consequences in and for us.  

When Jesus asks James and John, can you be baptized with my baptism, isn’t he remembering that moment in the river, with his cousin John, who said, “Should I baptize you?” Isn’t he remembering that immediately afterward the Spirit drove him into the desert where he fasted until he was famished, until he could dream of stones becoming bread, until he was tempted to simply grasp the power of the world, and let it go to the devil, rather than wait a minute longer for a single sip of water?

But he resisted. He stayed true to his journey of love. In the desert and on the cross, he defeated the devil and all of its evil ways. He put to death in his body, through fasting and through death, the sin of the world.

When he asks James and John, can you drink the cup I drink? He is asking them, can you, too, absorb the pain of this world, the pain caused by its overweening ambition and selfish pride, can you absorb that pain and turn it to healing? Because that is what resurrection requires. That is the ransom.

The disciples, the twins, say, “Yes, Lord, we’ll get right on that,” but they still don’t understand. We still don’t get it most of the time ourselves. We get caught up in power plays and righteous anger and we imagine that God wants us to fight for God.

But what if instead, God wants us to love for Them, to warm the hearts of those around us with the love of God, to melt the armour off them, as Jesus, God’s Son, has melted our coating of sin until, at least from time to time, the glory of mercy shines through.

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Greatness

Posted on October 17, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

The body remembers, quakes away a frisson
as though the cool river ran still from your shoulders
beneath the treacherous sun, hollows out a growl
as though still hungry enough to break your teeth on stone,
suffer the delirium of flight, temptation to succumb
to the delegations of power and principality in return
for the bread of mercy; palms the smooth river rock
that once became a crumb gathered from a thousand
leftover from the fast that became a feast. All this
in the briefest lowering of the lashes, blinking away
astonishment that anyone would seek a baptism
of such dereliction, rinsing away glamour,
as chaotic and pluripotent as the waters over which
your Spirit brooded before creation began.

And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They replied, “We are able.”  Mark 10:37-39

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Worth it

Posted on October 13, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

It’s not about the money – or at least, it’s not only about the money. It’s about everything that the money represents. 

As I have said before when considering this text,[i] money buys prestige, reputation, name recognition. How many impoverished famous people can you name? How many billionaires? Money buys airtime, advertising. Money raises profiles, puts faces in front of the public. Money talks. Money buys privilege, which means, literally, private law. You have heard it said that there is one rule for the rich, and another for the rest. Maybe a democratic society tries to close the gap, but we know that if we were in trouble, we would do better if we had money to bail ourselves out, buy ourselves sound legal advice. Money brings privilege. Money buys influence. It buys access to the people of power; it buys their attention. A word or two at a fundraising event. Money is a lever to move the world. 

So no, it’s not just about the money. It’s about that young man having to tell his father and his mother that he no longer wants to take over the family business, that it’s not going to be as all-consuming for him as it was for them, that he wants something better, something more. It’s about telling his friends that he won’t be coming to dinner on the town Thursday night because he’s going to be volunteering down at the soup kitchen instead. It’s about suffering their jeers and their mutterings as he walks away from the hedonistic playground of the rich and the famous. It’s about risking shedding the protections of privilege and walking around in his own skin. It’s about a whole new way of life, and it’s going to hurt, not only his pocketbook. He has to ask himself, is Jesus worth it?

Jesus looked at him and loved him. That’s the line. That’s the hook. That’s the promise: Jesus looked at him and loved him. Jesus didn’t want to destroy the young man’s life. He wanted to show him something better, something deeper, something more. He wanted to show him the love of God.

A colleague asked earlier this week, what’s your one thing? What is the one thing that keeps you from going all in with Jesus? What is it I need to let go of, with all of its baggage and weight and freight, if I am going to travel with Jesus?

It may be something tangible, like money or overly-prized possessions. It may be an addiction to something that is diverting our love away from its proper source and end. It may be more elusive, like the culture of busyness and time poverty that keeps us from spending time with the one who loved us into being and who loves us through eternity. It may be the mask that we wear in order to appear to ourselves and to the world as though we were self-sufficient, as though we didn’t need saving. It may be something we need God to take for us: some grief or pain that we need healing from in order to see past it.

Whatever it is, whatever we are relying on to save us, to make us good, or good enough – if it is not the love of God, it is not good, it is not enough, for no one is good but God alone, says Jesus. 

Jesus looks at each of us, you, me, and loves us. That’s the line. That’s the hook. That’s the promise.

I went to a wedding yesterday. Two young women made promises that can’t possibly be kept without giving something up, whether it’s the upper hand in an argument or the need to know that everything will be alright. Promises that cannot be kept except through the grace of love, through the mercy of God, with the support of a loving community.

It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle – yet God shrank Godself into a human body, a human soul, a human being, in order to reach us. It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle – yet God reaches through the eye of the storm to grasp our hands and pull us through. It is harder for the camel to pass through the eye of a needle, yet Jesus looked that young man in the eye, and he loved him.

The young man is trying to be good enough for Jesus, without giving away the farm, and the disciples worry whether they have done enough, given away enough to follow Jesus, but Jesus tells them that all they have to do, all they need to know is that God is good, and that God loves them. To trust in that love instead of in the powers and privileges of a corrupt and sinful generation. 

What is it that keeps us from living in the skin that God created us in, living into the love into whose mould God poured us, living into the intimacy with which Jesus looks at us, and loves us?

Is it worth it?

[i] https://rosalindhughes.com/2012/10/14/year-b-proper-23-sermon/

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Earth and angels

Posted on October 6, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

“What are human beings that you are mindful of them, 
or mortals, that you care for them? 

You have made them for a little while lower than the angels; 
you have crowned them with glory and honor, 
subjecting all things under their feet:

“All sheep and oxen, even the wild beasts of the field,
The birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and whatsoever walks in the paths of the sea …”[i]

The author of the letter to the Hebrews quotes from Psalm 8, and Psalm 8 refers to the stories of creation in Genesis, in which God gave the human authority and dominion over all of God’s creatures; in which God delegated the loving care with which God had made every good and living thing, delegated that love and protection to the creature made most like an angel on earth, most closely in the image of the living and loving God.

My friends, I don’t know about you, but I am no angel. This language of subjection, of dominion, the language of our Eucharistic prayer, in which we remember that God made us to rule and to serve all of creation: this language makes me deeply uncomfortable. To serve, sure, I can get down with that; but to rule? Please don’t put me in charge. I don’t think that I am capable. I don’t think that I am worthy.

But here’s the thing: it’s right there in the holy Bible that God gave us, gave humanity, the responsibility, the role, the power, to govern God’s good and beautiful and bountiful creation, in the name and image of its living and loving Creator. Part of what it means to be human is that we, like it or not, for better or for worse, affect every other piece of creation with every move we make, every decision we break, every breath we take.

And we’re good with some of that, right? We have our pet blessing today, because we love to live in harmony with the birds of the air, and the wild beasts of the field, and the small creatures we have invited into our homes and our hearts. We get that love of God that named every living thing when we tickle the ears of our furry family members, and we weep for their trials as though they were human. We get what it is like to be other, and to be connected, and to love across categories of creation.

But we are less good with the pieces that take real sacrifice. Do we respect the dignity of the mountains, are we as careful not to harm the forests as the trees, do we consider our exploitation of the environment part of the loving kindness which God has delegated to us, or are we content to be powerful, and to forget the charge of protection that comes with it? Do we even think about facing up to, let alone curbing our addiction to oil before opening up new habitats to destroy with the drill?

What happens when we reap the harvest of environmental destruction that we have sown? Are we willing to accept climate refugees and call them our neighbours, and share our resources, without reserve, without resentment, because it is, for many of us, sheer dumb luck that we live in a place with fewer storms than many others? It is not because we have managed our environment better, polluted less, sacrificed any more for God’s good and beautiful and bountiful creation than anyone else. Far from it.

When we look at the devastation of the storms over North Carolina, when we consider the suffering of our neighbours, we should be moved to help, to contribute to their care, but we should also confess that we are part of a human race that has fallen short of its responsibility to care for and tend and nurture creation as God intended for us to do.

There are no easy answers to the predicament in which we find ourselves. But denial is not an option. God created humanity to be the stewards, the servants of creation, and it is part of who we are, made in God’s image, to care. We are made in the image of love, and if we set our hearts to love, as God loves us, then we will find ourselves to be only a little less than angels. 

Amen.

[i] Hebrews 2:6-8; Psalm 8:8-9

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For the hardness of your heart

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

For the times you turned your face
to reflect in the silver of idols,
the glittering teeth of that which dreams
but which is not God;
for the sake of forgiving,
I let you go, so that
upon awakening you might find me
anew,
as though you never were faithless,
as though I were never lost to you.
For the hardness of your heart
bruised me, who cannot be moved
yet time and age again
reaches for you in the night.

Mark 10:2-16; Year B Proper 22. Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you.

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What is the church for?

Posted on September 29, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

This is an approximation of the sermon I delivered this morning

What is church for? This is what James the letter-writer is talking about – what he has been talking about for some time now. 

We know that we come here to worship, to stand, kneel, sing, and sigh before God, to receive the blessed Sacrament, to be renewed by its ineffable grace. For healing and renewal, prayer and praise, redemption, community, comfort. But there is a reason that we do it all together. 

James says that if any has need of healing, they should call the church to them. If any has need to give thanksgiving, they should sing – and you know he didn’t mean in the shower. He speaks of the power of prayer, but also of the necessity of community. We are here for one another, because we follow Jesus, and he was here for us, for the sake of us; so we are here for one another. 

I want to tell you a story from a church long ago and far away. Thirty-eight years ago on the last Sunday in May, I came home from church to find the house empty. I knew immediately that something was wrong. I called the hospital, and the nurse on the ward told me that my mother had been taken down for emergency open heart surgery. My father and brother had just been in; the hospital called them to come quickly before they took her down, in case it was their last chance to see her.

When they came home, I asked why they had not come to get me, too. My father said, “The service had already started.” It never crossed my father’s mind that it would be ok – in fact, a good and faithful thing – to come and get me and my prayers out of the pew after service had started, so that I could join them on their pilgrimage to the hospital.

My mother survived that surgery, thank God, but I have never quite got over the idea that it could be so socially mortifying to walk into a church service – a service dedicated to the gracious and merciful God – once it had started that I would have missed saying goodbye. 

I think, and I hope, that my father was wrong. I believe that had he opened those heavy oak doors and stepped inside, Mr Evans, the churchwarden, would first have stepped quickly forward with a prayerbook and hymnal; then, he would have seen my father’s face, and he would have asked, “What’s wrong?” Then, without waiting for an answer, he would have continued, “I’ll get Rosalind,” because Mr Evans was a retired school principal, so he watched out for us teenagers, and he knew exactly where I was sitting. He wouldn’t have thought twice about the propriety of interrupting the psalm. I know that. But my father didn’t.

How do we let people know that we are here for them? Not, as James said a couple of weeks ago, only if they are properly turned out and prompt in their arrival, if they know their way around the service, and sing in tune. I love that in my twelve years with you, there have always been people who come late, leave early, get up and stretch mid-service, act like human beings in the middle of divine worship. Just as Jesus became human with us. And that matters, so much, that we can be human in church, drawn toward the one in whose image we all share. How else do we let people know that we are here if they are sick, if they are suffering, if they are singing, if they are sighing, that they can be human here? 

How do we let them know that just as Jesus excelled in being interrupted, we are here to welcome sinners and saints alike? How do we let the hurting and hopeful know what church is for?

We follow Jesus, and he became human so that we would know that God is with us; so that we would know that God gets what it’s like to be human; so that we could be human with each other, and in doing so, share the love of God not only amongst ourselves, but with the world.

Amen.

Text: James 5:13-20, Year B Proper 21

Featured image: Jaggery / All Saints Church, Penarth, via Wikimedia Commons,  CC BY-SA 2.0

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If salt has lost its saltiness

Posted on September 27, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

If my salt has lost its saltiness 
will the sun still rise in the morning? 
If my fire has lost its spark 
will the moon still hang pale in the afternoon sky? 
There are days, Lord, not to get salty 
with you, when I might feel 
as though the ocean has rolled me 
and the pestle has crushed me 
and I am granulated, smattered, dissolved. 
And not to get heated, but was it not you 
who promised not to break the bruised reed, 
nor smother the smouldering wick, 
so that when I am at my wick’s end, 
you understand, it is you –  
when I am not worth my salt, 
it is you I rely on to season me with light, 
with spice. If salt has lost its saltiness, 
how can you season it? With respect, 
my Lord and my God, 
I think that is my question to you.

“For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.” – Mark 9:49-50

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Succession

Posted on September 22, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

I must admit, with the news and all, I couldn’t help wondering about whether the disciples were actually arguing about the succession plan. After all, Mark says that they didn’t understand when Jesus told him about his death and coming resurrection, and that they were afraid to ask. There’s little not to understand about dying; rising to life again – that’s probably the part that gave them pause.

So if they didn’t understand that this was a new way of being, a new way of dying, a new way of living – perhaps they fell back on the old arguments about who would be the next leader, who was the best qualified to step into Jesus’ sandals, who was the greatest. No wonder they didn’t want to tell him what they’d been talking about.

Of course, with Jesus, it’s all new.

“Look,” said Jesus, scooping up a spare small child as it scurried by; “Look. This is what greatness looks like.”

He sat on the floor with the little one and its grubby little feet kicking at him. The child peered into the ears of the Son of Man, and pulled the beard of the Son of God. The child rubbed its snotty nose on Jesus’ shoulder. It wriggled and began to snivel a little.

The disciples waited for Jesus to elaborate, to draw some great lesson, some marvellous metaphor out of this admittedly very physical spiritual encounter with the child. There must be something special about it, they thought.

But Jesus continued to sit on the floor, cradling the little one, wincing whenever it caught its chubby little fingers in his hair and pulled; making soothing, sighing, songful noises whenever it became fretful; like a woman, like a nursemaid, like a mother.

The child’s own mother, a woman of no consequence, one of the servants of the household, hung around the edges of the room a little bashfully, watching as the most honoured guest of all time whispered a lullaby to her drooling child. As the little one’s eyelids drooped, Jesus murmured quietly to his disciples, who had to lean in to hear him,

“Whoever can welcome such a child as this in my name embraces me. And whoever can embrace and welcome me has opened his heart and mind and body and soul to God.”

The disciples, still a little out of sorts from their argument about greatness, could not find it in themselves to dispute or question Jesus’ teaching, since no one wanted to waken the now-sleeping infant who still rested on the knees of the Messiah, who still sat on the floor, and whose right foot had now quite definitely fallen asleep along with the baby.

And now Jesus was stuck on the floor with a sleeping baby, his hands full, his feet with no feeling left in them, and the child’s mother had gone back to work. There was nothing for it but to continue to wait on the baby, serving it with patience and with love.*

 

It’s the way not of great power, but of great love. It’s the way not of great strength, but of great service. It’s not the way of might, but of mercy.

Instead of a winner-takes-all system, Jesus’ race is about looping back around the slow kid trailing way behind the back of the pack and lifting that child onto his shoulders like a champion. Instead of fighting violence with violence, he turns his cheek slowly, looks hate in the eye, and says, “Is that really the best that you can do?” He blesses the meek, the mournful, the poor in spirit, the peacemakers. It’s a whole new world.

The disciples did not understand, and they were afraid to ask him what he meant. That was their mistake, not that they didn’t get it right away – who could imagine resurrection? – but that they let their fear, their embarrassment, their greatness get in the way of coming to Jesus as a curious child, asking, “Why?”

But Jesus is always ready to receive the curious, the coy, the confused child in need of comfort and wisdom.

I don’t know about you, but the news around us lately makes me curious and confused, and not a little in need of comfort and encouragement. I wonder where resurrection – where new life – is to be found in the midst of old arguments and enmities, age-old fights over who is the greatest, and who should succeed.

 And it’s ok to be confused, and bewildered, and to wonder what he means by resurrection, and when the new life will dawn. But let’s not make the mistake of the disciples who were afraid to turn back to Jesus to ask for help, for encouragement, for enlightenment, who fell instead into their own old patterns.

If instead we overcome our hesitation and humble ourselves to ask God for guidance, for wisdom, for forgiveness, as St James suggests, seeking gentleness instead of greatness, and peace instead of pride, then “a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.”

And if, remembering our baptismal covenant, we can extend that approach to all in whom we seek and serve Christ, remembering that every person is made in the image of God, if we can, like Jesus, let our feet fall asleep not from disuse but because we are carrying the burden of another child of God for an hour or so; if we can put aside our need to be right, to be great, to win for a hot minute, maybe more; then perhaps we will find what resurrection means, new life, the prize of mercy, the winning ways of love.

 

*https://rosalindhughes.wordpress.com/2018/09/23/the-great-and-the-good/

Year B Proper 20: Mark 9:30-37

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Succession

Posted on September 18, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

Arguing succession and success,
was the prophetic failure of death
a threat to their ambition, or
of what were they afraid:
the banality of the cross,
perverse instinct of humankind to kill,
to crush instead of to create;
or the riposte of otherworldly love
that nurtures husk and kernel, broken,
buried in the earth, into new life?

 They did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him. … They were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. (Mark 9:32, 34)

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For the love of Jesus

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Rosalind C Hughes

It’s Jesus at his most human. He longs to be known, to be close, to share himself with those whom he loves; to be loved by them.

He asks, “Who do people say that I am?” He knows that people are both awe-struck and bewildered by his extraordinary power, by his indescribable presence, that reeks of something beyond himself, the presence of God. People cast around for familiar forms in which to cast him: Elijah, the prophets.

 “But who do you say that I am?” Jesus continues. He hopes, he prays that they will say something different, something real, something that he recognizes. Something that shows that they recognize him; that he is not so removed from their human experience. “You are the Messiah,” says Peter. And he said to keep quiet about that.

 But what he said openly was that he was a full participant in the human condition of suffering and separation, of mortality and mortification. He wanted them to know not his title, not his Platonic form, not his theological significance. He wanted them to know that he was one of them, that he was with them, no matter what troubles life might bring, no matter who else might misunderstand; that he was human.

 Because if he could show them that, then they would know that God is just as close, and just as true, and just as loving, come what may.

 It makes me wonder how much effort I put into getting to know Jesus. Do I really spend the time to talk with him, to sit with him, to be vulnerable with him, to let him share in that vulnerability? Do I try to fit him into preset pigeon-holes, instead of letting him surprise me with his vision of what comes next? Do I try to speak for him, like Peter, “no, not this way, but that”? Do I disappoint him? Does he disappoint me? Do I worry too much about what Jesus would say about me, how he would describe me to another?

 And what about that? What about the ways we talk about one another. You couldn’t turn on the news or social media this week without coming across scurrilous, sensationalist lies about a certain group of human beings living in Ohio. How does it feel to be reduced to a meme, a joke, a soundbite, a lie? Each of these human beings has a name, a family, a life. Each of them is known and loved by God. But if we will not know our neighbours as individual human beings, how will we love them as ourselves, or as God loves them?

Jesus wanted to be known by more than a title, more than a meme. I think of that father and mother, beseeching the press and the politicians not to reduce their child, their pain, to a caricature in order to make a point. Because he was a child of theirs and a child of God, beloved, and loving, and because there is always more to life and death than can be captured in a soundbite by a stranger.

Jesus wanted his disciples to know him as a person. As a person willing to go to the ends of the earth, of life itself, for them. To push the boundaries of life and death, not only for the little girl he raised from her deathbed, or Lazarus from the tomb, but for all people.

He said all of this quite openly.

On Tuesday evenings, as we enter into our Centering Prayer, we read something to help guide us on our silent journey. Lately, we’ve been reading from Seeking the Beloved: A Prayer Journey with St. John of the Cross, by Wayne Simsic. John wrote in his Spiritual Canticle,

There is much to fathom in Christ, for he is like an abundant mine with many recesses of treasures, so that however deep individuals may go they never reach the end or bottom, but rather in every recess find new veins with new riches everywhere.[i]

Simsic’s commentary adds his learning from a prayer group that,

… repeating the name of Jesus [in prayer] was not simply a pious gesture or spiritual exercise but invoked his real presence. To repeat Jesus’ name opened their hearts to his energy. Each person in the group who employed the [Jesus] prayer acknowledged that it had changed their lives and their relationship with God.[ii]

I think that in this gospel reading, Jesus is asking us to see him for himself, as himself. To spend the time, to invest ourselves in knowing him. Not because he needs us to, but because if we can see him more clearly, and follow him more nearly, we will learn to love more truly, to heal more fully, to find the image of God where we most need to see it, where it most needs to be seen.

If we can learn not to reduce Jesus to a title or a type: prophet, Messiah, Son of God; but to see the whole story of him, the whole person of him, the height and breadth and depth and weight of his love for us, and for the world – then perhaps we can do the same for our neighbours. Perhaps we can even do the same for ourselves.

After all, who do you say that Jesus is?

[i] St John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle, 37.4, quoted in Seeking the Beloved: A Prayer Journey with St. John of the Cross, by Wayne Simsic (The Word among us Press, 2012), 68

[ii] Seeking the Beloved: A Prayer Journey with St. John of the Cross, by Wayne Simsic (The Word among us Press, 2012), 68

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