Samaritans and street vendors

Posted on July 7, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

Here’s what happens: the priest looks back and sees the Levite pass by. Their eyes meet. They are of the same tribe, and their unspoken concurrence in the decision not to stop reinforces itself in that consecrated moment of collusion, comprehension.

They find it hard to credit what happens next. A Samaritan, in traditional garb,* is bending over the man, kneeling at his side, rummaging over his body. Excited, they call the police, who arrive at speed and in force, on the understanding that they are witnessing a murder – what else would you expect from a Samaritan?

We know what might happen next. But for a moment, let’s decide to be hopeful. Nobody dies.

The Samaritan is wrestled to the ground, searched, shaken, sent on his way with an obscure warning, never returns to the Jericho Road.

It’s a debacle, and someone has to pay for it. The man attacked by bandits, still bleeding, is arrested for selling his wares on the sidewalk without a permit;  also for false reporting and inciting panic. He is hauled away to the hospital in handcuffs. Later, he is released quietly through the back door. He has no choice but to return to the Jericho Road to ply his trade, to pay off the hospital bills, including transport.

The priest and the Levite continue to pass by on the other side, refusing to meet his eye, for fear that their guilt will show; guilt which over time, unassuaged, hardens into anger at the emotional turmoil he has put them through.

 

  • A word about words: I have heard the word “garb” more times in the past week than in my whole life before it. I regularly appear in robes in public, and even so have never heard my clothing described as garb.
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The business traveller

Posted on July 5, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

After the incident; forever after
as he travelled from city to stone city,
he would look across the crowd, scanning
the horizon and its fall, not for danger –
he never saw the robbers coming,
never would – blissfully ignorant,
he nodded civilly to priest and prelates.

He searched each face for tenderness,
for the long cool water that streamed away
his blood, the proximity of love, so close
beneath the veil of diffidence, political
reserve. His heart, never quite the same again,
would skip a beat each time the beloved
enemy passed by.

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Year C Proper 9: Make Jerusalem Great Again

Posted on July 3, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

On this July fourth weekend, it is perhaps appropriate that we hear a word from some of our political campaigners.*

Towards the end of Isaiah, the “Make Jerusalem Great Again” party is gaining in popularity. The prophet paints a vivid picture of the land of milk and honey, food flowing from God’s glorious bosom, with just a little sweetness from the righteous judgement that will justify us.

“Can a country be born in a day,” asks the prophet, “or a nation be brought forth in a moment? Yet no sooner is Zion in labour than she gives birth to her children.”

I tell you, it’s going to be great.

I heard Walter Brueggemann speak at the Old Stone Church a few weeks ago. I don’t want to put words into his mouth, but I believe that what that Old Testament scholar was teaching us was that the oracles written from a place of Exile about a homeland flowing with milk and honey are written from a place of deep nostalgia and deft denial.

Jerusalem fell because it could not sustain a dream that lifted a few by treading on the necks of too many; the cream at the top of the milk was too rich and too heavy, and it broke down.

Jerusalem fell because it believed in its own greatness over the greatness of God. The prophets warned of it time and time again.

In the epistle of Paul to the Galatians, his new little church is suffering under the campaign of the Make Christianity Great Again. There are people coming to the new converts and trying to persuade them that in order to become Christians, little Christs, disciples of Jesus, they first need to be circumcised. After all, Jesus was a circumcised Jew. So were his first disciples. “To be one of us,” they tell the Galatians, “you first need to be like us.”

Within a single generation, the nostalgia has already started for a movement that raised up an inner circle to a position of prominence. Within a single generation, the nostalgia for a false memory of generic greatness has set in.

Forgotten already is the core of Jesus’ teaching that those who would be great must become servants to all, that greatness is of God, and not something to be grasped. That the Gospel is not a great campaign slogan, but good news for all people.

When Jesus sends out the seventy-odd messengers ahead of him to pave the way of the gospel into the hearts and minds of the people to whom he is coming, they have a fine adventure. They are high on the power of the peace that they bring, amped up by their ability to heal the sick and to cast out demons. And Jesus says, “Yes, I saw Satan fall from heaven, and I knew that you were up to something. But do not imagine that this was to prove your power.”

Do not imagine that your mission was about your ability to make Judea great again. Do not rejoice in your own greatness, but in the greatness of God, who has restored you to a right relationship with heaven and earth, who has written your names in the book of life.

You can cast out demons till the cows come home, but still, there will be people in poverty, overlooked and overwhelmed, and there will be those who lord it over them, reveling in their own greatness, and there will be lightning from heaven to fall and scorch the land and flood the valleys again. Until the kingdom of heaven is come, until the reign of God is complete upon the earth.

All of us, when we talk about making things great again – any of us, left, right, or middle – have a tendency to remember a false past. Whether it is an America in which everyone is White and middle class and lives in a sitcom suburb, or a pre-European Britain, where everyone speaks English and the Empire with its colonies and colonials is far, far away. Since the Brexit vote a week ago, racist attacks in Britain have risen by 57%. Nostalgia for a false past is never a sound or safe basis on which to build our future.

Whether it is a church where every pew is filled with tidily dressed children who are seen but never heard; when we remember how great things were, we only remember how great they were for us. Or for people like us. People willing to become like us, or pass for people like us. We make an idol of our memories, and a religion of nostalgia. We build a campaign out of curses for all that separates us from a past that never really was.

Do not rejoice, says Jesus, in your own greatness, but in the greatness of God, who has restored you to a right relationship with heaven and earth, who has written your names in the book of life.

“See,” said Jesus, “I am sending you out like lambs among wolves.” Cleveland sports aside, greatness is overrated. The Gospel is so much better than that: good news for all people.

*Disclaimer: Jesus never registered as a Democrat, or a Republican, Libertarian or Green. He never even registered to vote; but you should.

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Year C Proper 9: God-mother

Posted on June 28, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

Extract from this weeks readings (Isaiah 66:10-14; Track 2):

Thus says the Lord:
“Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her,
all you who love her;
rejoice with her in joy,
all you who mourn over her –
that you may nurse and be satisfied
from her consoling breast;
that you may drink deeply with delight
from her glorious bosom.

For thus says the Lord: …
As a mother comforts her child,
so will I comfort you;
you will be comforted in Jerusalem.”

**
Children of the promise, your God
lifts you up as a nursing mother
comforts her child;
her nipples cracked and bleeding, she
pours out her blood like milk,
washes your face in her tears.

She will not lay you down
until you are satisfied; she
will not give you up until
you are filled
with the goodness she
created for you.

Children of the promise, your God
sings you lullabies of sweet surrender;
binds you with tenderness to her breast.

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On being right

Posted on June 26, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

So the shock take-home of today’s lessons might be that the Gospel is not always about being right.

James and John, two of Jesus’ inner circle of inner circles, right at Jesus’ side all the way to Jerusalem – they could not be more in the right. The Samaritan village which turned them away could not be more wrong. For one thing, it was full of Samaritans. We hear the name now and think of the parable of the Good Samaritan – but there was a reason that story was surprising enough for Jesus’ listeners to remember it verbatim. Samaritans were not friends of the Jewish people. They were foreign, and their religion was twisted, and they were just plain wrong. And then they had the audacity to turn Jesus away?

James and John could not be more in the right. Pumped up with righteous indignation, they asked Jesus if they should call down fire to consume the village, but Jesus rebuked them. He rebuked them, even though the Samaritans were clearly on the wrong side of history, even though they disrespected Jesus. Still, the answer was not to consume them with fire.

It’s not always about being right.

We have seen all too graphically how the conviction of rightness can call down fire to consume not only our enemies but all manner of innocent lives, collateral damage. From the horrors of war and the ultimate disasters of the atom bomb and drive-by drones, to the all-too personal murder of a politician, even the mowing down of party-goers. Last night in Texas, a family argument called down fire on two sisters and then their mother, who had shot them to death. Was the cost of being right ever higher? Calling down fire to consume our enemies is a poor way to promote the common good, let alone the gospel.

It’s not just about calling down fire from heaven. Paul uses the same word – consume – to describe how we bite and tear at one another in everyday arguments and microaggressions, little slights and dents in one another’s humanity that eat away at us, consume us.

I deleted a comment on social media this week that suggested that the way to pass gun safety legislation – the things that the Senate filibustered for and those Representatives sat in for – that the hope for such legislation lay in a few well-placed political funerals. It is a common enough way for speaking, these days; but such speech and attitudes consume our love for one another and spit it out, chewed up and slimed up and unrecognizable as anything related to the Gospel. I might add that after the murder of Jo Cox, the Member of Parliament murdered in Britain in the lead-up to the Brexit vote, it is hardly a thing to be heard lightly.

Beware, says Paul. If we allow our love for one another to be eaten away by our differences, eroding the image of God within us, we will find ourselves consumed.

Consumed by anger, passion, self-righteousness, envy; never have I heard anyone describe being consumed by gentleness, or self-control, peace or patience, those things on Paul’s list of the fruits of the Spirit.

But if the Gospel is not always about being right, that doesn’t mean that we are off the hook for doing right, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we are to give up standing up for what is right.

We have heard time and again the wisdom that all that is needed for evil to flourish is for good men and women to do nothing. We dare not blink at evil, nor turn a blind eye to hatred. We cannot stay silent when our brothers and sisters are abused for their race, or their religion, or for their tendency to love.

But not because we are so right, but for the sake of the Gospel, that God loves each one made in the image of God.

Even the Psalmist knew that silence in the face of the provocation of ill deeds would be heard as complicity. In Psalm 50 God is speaking:

“When you see a thief, you make him your friend, and you cast in your lot with adulterers.
You have loosed your lips for evil, and harnessed your tongue to a lie.
You are always speaking evil of your brother, and slandering your own mother’s son.
These things you have done, and I kept silent, and you thought that I am like you.”

In the silence of God’s speech, we have written our own lines for God, assuming that holiness will condemn whatever we condemn, and approve whatever we approve, and collude in our calling down fire from heaven to consume our enemies.

But then Jesus rebukes us.

Our righteousness, such as it is, does not depend on our being right. We can be right till the cows come home, and unless we are loving it will do us no good.

We can be right, but it is not our place to have the final word: that will always belong to God, just as the first word belonged to the one who called words into being.

We can be right; but if we define the one who is wrong as anything less than the image of God, then we may as well be stuck in a Samaritan village with our eyes closed the Christhood of Jesus and our ears stopped up to the Gospel.

Doing right, which Jesus defined as loving God with everything that we have and loving our neighbours as ourselves; that kind of doing right is much harder work than being right. It requires our constant attention, through prayer and practice, listening for Jesus in the silence, rather than assuming that he is like us, because we have walked with him a while.

So James and John got it wrong, this time. It happened. It happens to us; and Jesus rebuked them, and Jesus rebukes us, but the thing about Jesus is, even though he is right, he does not feel the need to call down fire from heaven to consume us.

Instead he continues to walk with James and John, even with Judas, towards Jerusalem. He takes on all that can be called down, he allows himself to be consumed by our self-righteous anger and envy and passion; with gentleness, peace, and self-control he takes it with him to the grave.

And even then, he is not consumed, but he devours death, spits it out, unrecognizable. For the way of the Gospel is not fire from heaven, but the quiet touch of the morning, speaking our names in love.

Featured image: Lightning. Public domain, via wikicommons

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Year C Proper 7: a brief litany of idolatry

Posted on June 18, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

The prophet drips irony using the voice of the idolatrous and indolent who say, “do not come near me, for I am too holy for you.”

It is in itself idolatrous: the idolatry of the one who worships their own sense of self.
It is the idolatry of fundamentalism: my way or the highway to hell.

It is the idolatry of fear: do not touch me.

It is the idolatry of purity: do not contaminate my quarantine.

It is the idolatry of violence and violation: if you touch me, my holiness will burn you.

It is the idolatry of judgement: I am much holier than you.

It is the idolatry of isolation: I will not love you.

Such idolatry leads us away from love. Such holiness is the opposite of godliness. The Christ of God is the one who deigned to become unholy, unsanitary, hanging with the unhinged, indiscriminate in his attention, promiscuous with his mercy, down and dirty with his love, laying himself into our hands: “This is my body.”

“Touch me, for you are not too holy for me.”

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Elegy

Posted on June 16, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

The world is still, on the edge of tears, even as it continues, as it must, to turn night to day and business to money and traffic to weariness. The leaves tremble at an unseen adjustment of air pressure; an atmosphere of tears, held back for now, are felt as a prickling of the hairs on the back of your hand.

Outside the cathedral, a rainbow flag drips colour across the sidewalk, while the buses shiver and hiss at the traffic lights: Stop. Go. Wait …

Inside, the air is quiet, but it is not at peace. Grief, anger, the memory of all that it took to build stone upon stone, the dust and ashes of lives spent in hope unrealized; hope trembles still on the humidity rising, shed and unshed tears evaporating, clouding, condensing upon the stone cold throne of God,

while on the street the exhausted heat breathes a weary defiance of death, the throb and pulse and ache of life.

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Learning to dance

Posted on June 12, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

Learning to dance

the two-step, quick

quick slow; sus-

pended between beats, 

the kiss falling from your lips –

let’s say that it was caught

by One who had already

fallen for you,

who held it like a talisman,

spinning out hope 

until dawn fell,

laying the night to rest.

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Year C Proper 6: stories

Posted on June 12, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

This Sunday, I will most likely preach not from the pulpit but from the steps, sitting on the floor, in the middle of our Sunday School’s end-of-year celebration. With that change of perspective comes the realization that I can’t say everything I think about this week’s scripture stories, and the news.

But there are ways of telling stories which find their way between the cracks, between generations, and genders, and things like that; we will see how I am able to navigate that path.

This story is not necessarily true. For example, we are not given the name of the woman in Simon’s house in the storytelling of Luke; but I think everyone deserves a name, so I’m going to call her Sarah.

We don’t know, either, how she ended up in Simon’s dining room, as though she belonged there, when he apparently thought so poorly of her.

So I’m thinking that maybe the story goes that Simon and Sarah grew up around one another. They were children together. In another time, they would have gone to the same school, where Sarah was shy, and wore clothes that were too small for her. Her homework was written on ratty pages torn from a notebook, and in pencil instead of pen. She never brought cupcakes to share with the class on her birthday. Sometimes, her long hair was greasy. Sometimes, people made fun of her for these things, and she cried. Then they called her a crybaby. They began to tell stories about her, and her hair, and her crying, and how she was always hungry, and what she would do for a sandwich.

Simon was always well turned out, and always brought cupcakes for the whole class on his birthday and any other special occasion he could think up. No one had ever seen Simon cry.

Simon and his friends, strangely enough, liked having Sarah around. When they were feeling magnanimous, they enjoyed feeling generous in including the less fortunate. When they were feeling mean, they liked to have someone they could be mean to without worrying. When they were feeling miserable, it helped them to consider how much more successful and popular and important they were than poor Sarah. In other words, they told stories about Sarah so that the stories they told about themselves sounded better.

So when Sarah came to Simon’s house that evening, it wasn’t unusual for her to be around at one of his large dinner parties. And everyone wanted to be there to get a look at this famous Jesus character.

Simon smirked, and his friends whispered and laughed behind their hands, making themselves feel big and important entertaining Jesus while Sarah sat at his feet. She knew what they were saying about her, and again, she cried.

But Jesus did not think that Sarah’s place was to be the butt of Simon’s jokes, or his friends’ stories. He was not impressed by their snickering. So Jesus gave Sarah her own story to tell.

He gave Sarah a story in which her tears were not pathetic but precious, and the scent of her grandmother’s perfumed lotion not old-fashioned but unusual, and her long hair beautiful, just because it was hers. He gave her a story in which her life was just as interesting and as important as Simon’s and his friends’; he told her a story in which Jesus loved her.

And that story – the one in which Jesus loved her – that was a true story.

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Year C Proper 6: David, Bathsheba, and Jesus go to Stanford

Posted on June 7, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

A friend asks, “If last Sunday’s stories of bereaved mothers compelled us to lift up the grief caused by gun violence in the wake of #WearOrange day, do this Sunday’s stories demand that we address rape culture, privilege, and power in the wake of the Stanford case?”

Well, yes, wise friend, I think that they do. As it is, my church is celebrating its Sunday School this week, with readings and songs by the children, and as much as I feel that we need to teach our baptismal covenant promise of respect for the dignity of all early and often, we both know that effective education is age-appropriate. So I will not be preaching that sermon this Sunday.

Which leaves me free in the meantime to think aloud some meandering thoughts…

Let’s start with the obvious: I have a lot of privilege. I also share with #yesALLwomen the experience of sexual harassment and worse at one level or another. I am bewildered that the commission of a crime of sexual violence could be seen as something that victimized its perpetrator and his high hopes of a gilded life. Those are just a few of my filters for reading this week’s lessons.

When the people of Israel first began clamouring for a king, the prophet told them it was a bad idea. But they persisted, and got their way. It could be argued, I suppose, that David, became the victim of that system with its inbuilt inequality and the dangers of the deluded ego that went therewith. If that’s your bent.

I am not sure what justice would even look like at the end of the biblical story of David’s regal rape of Bathsheba. Certainly, there is no justice for Uriah, nor for the baby, both of whom lose their lives to David’s act of lust.David is allegedly punished by the death of his son; whom David only acknowledged because Uriah could not be fooled into thinking it was his own. David would just as soon have washed his hands of Bathsheba, baby and all, as soon as he had done what he wanted with her.

As to Bathsheba, she is still deprived of her voice and her vote on where to live and with whom to share her body.  And what of Bathsheba’s loss? We hear nothing of the mother’s grief this week, only of the father’s hand-wrung guilt. We hear nothing of her confusion and fear and outrage at her treatment at the whim of the king; only of his machinations to cover up his crime, and the sweet, ironic loyalty of her husband. Bathsheba, like the baby, barely counts in the economy of this system. Her pain does not weigh on the tally of good and evil in this story. She is consumed by the greedy king.

God! This story makes me angry.

There is no justice at the end of this story. Suffering is not the same as justice; and how, anyway, is the suffering imposed upon David to be compared to that of Uriah, or of the short-lived, suffering infant, or of Bathsheba, who will live with the progenitor of that pain for the rest of her life?

As it stands, David will continue as king. His crown, barely tarnished, still shines through generations, even unto Jesus.

It may be that he should weep at her feet, and kiss them, the Son of David begging forgiveness, belatedly, of the daughter of Bathsheba.

But instead, systems being what they are, and he being free anyway of inherited sin, unlike most of us, he forgives her the shame that she carries in an alabaster jar, and we expect her to be grateful.

… It may be a good thing that I am not preaching on these stories this Sunday.

 

 

 

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