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.

Posted in lectionary reflection, poetry, prayer, sermon preparation | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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

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

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.”

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

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.

Posted in current events, gun violence, prayer | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in current events, poetry, prayer | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in lectionary reflection, sermon, story | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

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.

 

 

 

Posted in current events, lectionary reflection, sermon preparation | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Year C Proper 5: the widows of Zarephath and Nain

Posted on June 5, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

A boy died in Zarephath, and his mother and Elijah cried out to God in anger at the injustice, in bitterness at the waste of life, saved by a miracle and spent so soon. Another mother’s son died in Nain, and Jesus was moved to radical, rebellious intervening action by his compassion for her grief and heavy loss.

Once, when I was interning as a hospital chaplain, a young man came into the Emergency Room and died, and his church wanted to perform a resurrection of him. In anger and hope and frustration they sang and prayed; for the sake of the other patients and staff, they were invited to move to the chapel. They borrowed holy oils and water. They tried so hard to raise that mother’s son, their faith that they could persuade God to give back his life endured longer than most could bear.

The call to #WearOrange to commemorate the lives lost to gun violence, and to pray for a solution to that plague on our community – it is born out of our distress at injustice and wasted life; out of compassion for those suffering injury and grief; out of that burning desire for radical intervening action to reverse death and restore our common life. It is not a political movement, and definitely not a partisan one. We all want to live free from injustice, and fear, and the premature entrance of death on the scene.

After Sandy Hook, and the murder of small children in their school, we came together in this place to pray. We cried out in anger and bitterness at the injustice of it all, at the lives, little miracles, spent too soon. We were moved with compassion, and we thought that we would do anything to prevent a tragedy like that from ever happening again.

This is uncomfortable ground, I know. But if we follow Jesus, we need to go there.

On the third anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre, NBC published research about the deaths of children by gun violence since December 14, 2012.  They found that a child under the age of 12 had been killed by a gun almost every other day since then. Seventy-five % of those children were killed with guns belonging to family members or acquaintances. In other words, we are intimately acquainted with the means of their deaths.

Elijah rages at the injustice and the waste of life, and Jesus is moved to radical, rebellious action by his compassion for their heavy and immeasurable loss.

What will we do?

It’s not only about the children, of course. But it was after the murder of a five-month-old baby, Aavielle, shot as she sat in her car seat in Cleveland last year that some of you asked me directly, “What can we do?”

What can we do?

I’ve been exploring that question in the meantime. Last week, I sat down with some folks from Greater Cleveland Congregations who are working with local municipalities on an initiative around smart gun technology – the kind of safety features which make it less easy for unauthorized users to access and abuse guns. In two weeks’ time, I’ll be in Columbus with colleagues to hear about a proposal for extended background checks before guns are purchased, designed to make gun ownership safer for all concerned. And we are all concerned, aren’t we? And there’s always education, a traditional vocation of the church: providing parents and caregivers information on safe gun storage if you find you must keep one in your home.

I invite you to notice that each of these initiatives is designed not to take away anyone’s guns, but rather to reduce the misuse, abuse, the wasteful and wanton violence wrought by gun violence in our communities. I will note, though, that the NBC research found that legislation to restrict the ownership of guns by partners cited in domestic violence cases likely saves the lives of children who are otherwise caught in the crossfire when their mothers are attacked by their abusers.

I don’t want to smother the gospel with statistics, like the estimated 32,000+ deaths [<-note: this from a conservative, gun-friendly source] from gun violence, either by suicide, homicide, or accidental discharge that happen each year in this country, most of which never make the evening news; or the seven young people under the age of 20 who die daily from gun violence.

I don’t want to smother the gospel with statistics, as tempting as it is to go on.

But the gospel tells us that Jesus is moved to radical and rebellious action by his compassion for the bereaved, for those left to pick up the pieces of lives shattered by death. There is little more counter-cultural than interrupting a funeral, reaching in and reversing death.

How will we follow that?

If you think that we are helpless in the face of the overwhelming toll that death doles out, let me tell you something that you did, one Sunday, a few years ago, without even knowing it.

[Trigger warning: this story is not easy to hear, especially if you have been touched by suicide or thoughts of self-harm.]

We had a visitor. Most of you didn’t notice the quiet person who slipped in just as the service began. After the service, this person made an appointment to come back and talk with me during the week. They told me that they had intended to come and tell me all of the reasons they didn’t like church. But instead, they told me another story.

On that Sunday morning, this person had woken up with the conviction that this would be the day that they would not survive; that they did not want to survive. They got in the shower and considered their options. To their surprise, the thought came to them, as though from without, that they should try going to church first. So they came, and they sat among you. They watched you sing, and pray, and share the Body of Christ. You offered them the Peace of Christ, the peace that passes our understanding, and they thought that they understood why the voice in the shower had sent them here. They left feeling … better. Not good, but better. And they came back.

“If I had had a gun at home that morning,” the person told me, “I would not have come to church.”

I am glad that they found you that morning, instead of a firearm. I wish I knew where they were today.

We come together here, week by week, and on the first Sunday of every month we pray for healing, and we hope for miracles. We know Elijah’s anger, and his bitterness at the inexplicable sufferings of life. We know the helplessness of one another’s grief. But we, too, know the healing touch of Jesus, at least a little, at least enough to bring us back, week by week, for more; waiting on and expecting his radical and rebellious action in our lives, his resurrection of our bodies and our spirits.

We may not have the power to raise the dead, but that does not mean that we give in to grief. We have so much to offer: we have our prayers and encouragement; repentance for the healing of guilt and blame. We have our hope in the resurrection, and the peace which passes understanding. And when we choose, we have radical, rebellious, intervening action, following Jesus as he stops the procession of funerals passing by, and reaches out to return a son to his mother, washing out death by the power of the life which he pours into the world.

The priest whose off-the-cuff comment started our orange stole movement also preached on grief and gun violence today: find the Revd C. Eric Funston’s sermon here.

The title of this post has been updated.

Posted in gun violence, sermon, story | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Martyrs

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

The commemoration for tonight’s healing prayers, held in orange, is for Blandina and Her Companions, the Martyrs of Lyons.  The Collect:

Grant, O Lord, that we who keep the feast of the holy martyrs Blandina and her companions may be rooted and grounded in love of you, and may endure the sufferings of this life for the glory that shall be revealed in us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The gospel text is from Mark:

Jesus called the crowed with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

I have stored up seventeen thousand
six hundred and forty-eight days.
I hoard them in my body like water.

I hear the call to profligacy.
I wonder how it might feel
to spend them down, pouring

love like oil on the ground,
anointing Golgotha with wanton,
wasteful sorrow; prodigal.

Posted in current events, gun violence, lectionary reflection, poetry, prayer | Leave a comment

Year C Proper 4: un/worthy

Posted on May 29, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

There is a wideness in God’s mercy that covers the ends of the earth and beyond.

The conveners of this lectionary clearly put these stories together to demonstrate to the listening church the breadth of God’s embrace, the wideness of God’s mercy. As we heard at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit speaks all of the languages of all of the peoples.

So Solomon declares that his temple will be a magnet for the prayers of all nations. Paul preaches the one true gospel to the Gentiles of Galatia. Jesus commends the faith of the centurion, a foreign presence to the peasants of Galilee.

The in-crowd worship in splendour and in majesty, whether in Solomon’s temple or in a synagogue built on donated foreign funds. The foreigners, likewise, turn towards the altar and their prayers are graciously received.

As one who has lived, by some measure, more than half her life as a foreigner of one sort or another, the grace of God’s preference for all people is reassuring. Still, the stories themselves are not without difficulty.

Solomon’s temple was built as a testament to the presence of God with the people of God. It was built on prodigious scale, with such extravagance as to put the tower of Babel to shame in its aspirations to reach towards the glory of God. It was built that way not only to offer glory to God, but to boast to the neighbouring nations of the chosenness of the people who built it, and their special relationship with God. It was built to attract friends of God, and it was built to warn potential enemies that this was the side on which God would fight.

At the dedication of the temple, Solomon hailed it as a beacon to the nations, who would come to know God and the favour of God; God would hear the prayers even of foreigners drawn to its doors. But what of the foreigners already there?

The bible says over and again that Solomon built the temple, that Solomon finished the house of God, that Solomon lined the house with gold, and that he carved the cherubim on its walls.

 

 

Of course, Solomon did nothing of the sort. He even arranged for it that the stone used for the temple would be carved outside of the city, so that the court of the king would not be disturbed by the sound of hammer and chisel within the city walls.

The bulk of the labour for the temple came from a census that Solomon took of foreigners living in the land. “Seventy thousand of them he assigned to carry burdens, eighty thousand to quarry in the hill country, and three thousand six hundred as overseers to make the people work” (I Chronicles 2:18). So Solomon built his temple on the backs of 153,600 conscripted foreign slaves?

Fast forward a thousand years or so. The temple has been razed to the ground at the time of the Babylonian conquest; and after the return of the political elite to Jerusalem, a new temple has risen from the ashes. But foreigners, the Romans now administer the wealth and status of the city.

To the north, in Galilee, a Gentile centurion working for the Jewish king, Herod Antipas, has a slave whom he values highly. The slave becomes ill, and the centurion, who has established good relations with the community he oversees by means of generous donations to the church building fund, calls in a favour with the local religious elders. “Find me that miracle worker.”

At our Bible Study on Tuesday night, which I commend to you, we were a little merciless with the centurion. By the end, one of our members said wistfully, “I used to like the centurion.” But our hero in this little healing story is of a foreign faith, he is a slave-holder, and a wheedling, fawning politician.

He is right to tell Jesus, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof.” And yet in the next breath, he proceeds to describe just how powerful he is, just the same, telling his subordinates to jump and expecting the answer, “How high?”

He has bribed the populace into quietude, and what happens to those of his slaves whom he considers of lesser value when they fall sick?

 

 

Fortunately, the centurion is not really the hero of the story. Neither is Solomon the hero of his. The Jewish elders tell Jesus that the centurion is worthy, deserving. The foreigners flock to Solomon’s spectacle.  But it is the unseen, unnamed slave with whom Jesus is concerned at this moment, and it is he who is healed. Not even he is the hero of the story, of course: but only Jesus.

When I was growing up, we used a prayer twisted from the words of the prideful centurion as our prayer of humble access to the altar:

“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you; but only say the word, and I shall be healed.”

There were those of us for whom it was a heartfelt plea, and others who, like the centurion, really could not conceive of their own unworthiness, given their status in society and so on, but who prayed it anyway, just in case.

And all approached the altar of God, and none, in the time that I was watching, was struck down by lightning.

The faith that the centurion held in the power of Jesus to heal his slave did not undo the corruption of his position of unequal power, nor did it diminish his pride in his own status and ability to influence peasant preachers such as Jesus of Nazareth. Neither did those things hold Jesus back from helping him.

The helplessness of the slave, unnamed and unseen, confined in the house of a Gentile and unable to receive Jesus at his bedside; these things did not hold Jesus back from healing him.

The confusion of the elders, who thought that they were in a position to tell Jesus who was worthy and who unworthy of his attention; this did not bind Jesus.

“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you; but only say the word, and I shall be healed.”

Jesus told the people, the first time he preached in his own home synagogue – not the one that the centurion had helped to build – Jesus said,

 

 

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” (Luke 4:18)

He is not bound by the confusion of pride and humiliation that brings us to the altar of God. He is not dazzled by our branding nor is he deflected by our shame, nor even defeated by our hidden sickness, our unnamed helplessness.

We come to the altar of God, the in-crowd and the outsider, the natural-born citizen and the naturalized, and the one hoping to remain unseen, flying beneath the radar. We come as cradle Episcopalians and converts, as centurions bearing authority, and as those bearing only our own names. We come, weaving slightly under the influence of a heady cocktail of keeping up appearances and dropping our guard, of self-justification and secret shame. We pray,

“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you; but only say the word, and I shall be healed,” whatever we mean by that;

and Jesus receives us here. He affirms our faith, however faltering. He astonishes us with his healing. He loves us and values us highly, not based on how we are judged or valued by the world, but simply out of the vast expanse of God’s mercy, the breadth and depth of God’s love, no exceptions.

Amen.

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