Jesus, Mary, and Judas

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

Poor, jealous Judas, love-lorn puppy,

eyes stinging from the stench

and from the memory: “See

how he loved him!” they said

when Jesus wept,

and now this woman spilling fragrant

death all over. Her sister

rattles the plates on purpose.

Mary, rapt face hidden by her hair,

rolls at his feet.

Poor puppy, Judas, always attention-seeking,

pants, “Teacher! She’s doing it wrong.”

Martha hollow laughs. Lazarus ghosts.

Poor, jealous Judas, his passion betrayed,

swears his own lips will kiss him the last.

Only then will they understand;

maybe then they will weep to remember

how Judas loved him.

_____

Poor, jealous Judas, love-lorn puppy,

eyes stinging from the stench

and from the memory: “See

how he loved him!” they said

when Jesus wept,

and now this woman spilling fragrant

death all over. Her sister

rattles the plates on purpose.

Mary, rapt face hidden by her hair,

rolls at his feet.

Poor puppy, Judas, always attention-seeking,

pants, “Teacher! She’s doing it wrong.”

Martha hollow laughs. Lazarus ghosts.

Poor, jealous Judas, his passion betrayed,

swears his own lips will kiss him the last.

Only then will they understand;

maybe then they will weep to remember

how Jesus loved him.

 

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Year C Lent 4: life and death

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

It is such a familiar story, and one which we love: God running to us, skirts hitched up, “my child! My child!” It is all the good news that we need. We were dead but are alive again, by the grace of god, the love of Christ.

But the first ones to hear Jesus tell the tale did not have any such tradition of layers of interpretation. Just for a few minutes, I want to see if we can set aside the Sunday school children’s bible picture of the father God running in the road, and hear the story of an ordinary family, as though for the first time.

A man had two sons, the one who left, and the one who stayed away.

Thirty years ago, or so, I was still at home finishing school. My brother was living in a land to the west, working drudge shifts in a fancy hotel. An acquaintance reported seeing him lately in town. Nonsense, said my father; he is working out west in a fancy hotel. But then my parents got to thinking that it had been a while since they had heard from him, and when they tried to call the fancy hotel, he was no longer living there, or working there. Some trouble over drugs, the manager said. For a week or two, we wondered where he might be, whether the neighbour had truly seen him, and not some ghost that looked like him.

We found him, in the end, because in his desperation and degradation and drug famine, he broke into the pharmacy at our  doctor’s surgery.

There was no feasting at his return; but there was some kind of relief, resolution. My brother, who might have been dead for all that we know, was alive, and kicking; and although there was no fatted calf, there was a bail-out.

Or am I conflating his infinite cycles of exile, disgrace, and restoration; his many returns from the dead?

I read this parable, and it is impossible not to recognize the addict in the younger brother. Even as he is coming home he is working out how to get around his father, calculating the angle that will get him off the hook, because he is hooked. And even then, reading him, his blessed return, it is impossible not to weep for the ones who never made it home.

Last year, according to figures from the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office, deaths from heroin overdose totalled 183, or one at least every two days. Add in Fentanyl, oxycodone, other opiates, and the death toll rises to 279, in Cuyahoga County alone, in 2015. In one graph, Euclid is second only to Lakewood as a suburban site of overdose death. In another graph, Parma throws out the curve and Euclid is third; but we are head and shoulders above the next-placed city, and this is not a competition we want to be winning. We are our brothers’ keepers, are we not?

There are some things we are beginning to get right, in spite of our Pharisaic impulses to self-righteousness and morality plays. “Just say no” is so much easier to say from outside of the spiral of addictive disease. But there are some things we are beginning to get right: zero tolerance is beginning to give way to an understanding of acquired tolerance, and the dangers of overdose after withdrawal and treatment, when that tolerance has dropped, and the same dose that used to do it for us now is deadly. Zero tolerance is not, anyway, a good Christian response to chaos and crisis. Healing sounds more like the Jesus we know.

It is easy to be bitter, to remember that when black bodies were dying of the same addictive, predatory disease, the answer was to declare war, waged less against drugs than against drug addicts, as it happened. It is worth noting that cocaine still accounted for 109 deaths in  Cuyahoga County in 2015. It is worthy to point out that more than 75% of people dying from heroin are white; and in the face of that crisis, we are willing to extend our tolerance, even beginning to venture out to meet them on the road, to catch them with our naloxone kits, to save them. Those who were dead are alive again.

But one who was dead is alive again, and may we all learn to live again. I don’t know that I have the right to say so, but I am trying to be honest with you.

I have wondered, this week, how we are called to respond to the family crisis unfolding around us. I have not always been able to do much for my own elder brother. None of us saves the other; but God, who is the father and mother of us all, loves each of us beyond understanding, beyond all reason.

That, I think, is what we have to offer. That is the good news that should send us flying out, skirts hitched up, to forestall the one who is lost on his way to death. One way or another, there is always a place for you in God’s house, we should tell her, your own home. One way or another, we tell her mother, his father, one way or another there is welcome, there is food, there is life. And we will do our best to leave our own baggage in the fields, and come into the light with the lightness of love hitched up to join the feast.

Amen.

_____

Further reading:

Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (HarperCollins, 2014)

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010)

Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Orbis, 2015)

 

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The prodigal God

Posted on March 3, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

Waiting 

for the God to come

home; if I saw her

on the road would I run,

hitching up my skirts,

fire up the pyre,

melt the golden calf,

sacrifice my unbelief,

my cold soul

on the altar of her passion?

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A cynical preacher on the prodigal parable

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

Every story has a point of view. I knew that family. I would have told their story a little differently than Jesus did. I would have told you a little more.

The kid was a chancer, a gambler, an addict. Not his fault; he took after his old man: emotional, extravagant, uninhibited. When he hit rock bottom – seriously, pigs? And in a conveniently foreign, far-off land; a likely story – anyway, when he finally ran aground he thought, as addicts do, strategically, lining up his next hit in his head. His father had always been a soft touch. He’d lay it on thick, he’d have the old man weeping, promising the sun and the moon for his redemption by the end of the night.

It went even better than expected.

The elder brother: sober, serious, steady; he took after their mother. He had never forgiven father or brother for driving her, as he saw it, to an early grave with their profligate ways. He heard the sounds of carousing and he knew; he knew. He went to have it out with his father; he didn’t trust himself to go near his brother. Their father was already drunk, promising the moon while his threadbare sleeve caught the cup of wine and floored it, thick red liquid spilling across the mud floor.

In the morning, by the time the elder brother could trust himself to approach the main house, his younger sibling had flown the coop. Recharged, redeemed, refinanced, he had left with the dregs of the dawn. The father, well hungover, wept and belched. The elder brother, caught between his mother’s long-suffering love and compassion and his own anger at her leaving, watched him wearily, balanced between pity and contempt, shifting his weight from one to the other like a boxer.

So tell me, Jesus: how are you going to pull this one out of the pigswill (to put it politely)? What miracle will you work to rescue, to redeem out of this thick muck the bright shining river that runs from the throne in the kingdom of God?

(… to be continued)

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Year C Lent 3: self-examination and repentance

Posted on February 28, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

Lest ye repent, says Jesus, you will all perish as they did. It was the first soundbite of Jesus’ campaign trail, his initial mission statement: Repent, for the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Our exhortation to a holy Lent includes an invitation to self-examination and repentance (BCP 265). Self-examination and repentance. They are two sides, really of the same coin. They are two steps on the journey, one foot in front of the other; the journey closer to God, in the footsteps of Jesus.

James Ussher, an early scholar of Trinity College, Dublin defines the parts of repentance as

Two. A true grief wrought in the heart of the believer, for offending so gracious a God by his former transgressions. And a conversion unto God again, with full purpose of heart ever after to cleave unto him, and to refrain from that which shall be displeasing in his sight. (Jame Ussher in Love’s Redeeming Work: the Anglican Quest for Holiness, Rowell, Stevenson & Williams, eds (Oxford University Press, 20014) 156)

Self-examination, penitence, that true grief wrought in the heart of the believer for that which has been done or undone, which grieves the heart of God; then repentance, a conversion, a turning, a new beginning as many times as it is necessary, to turn us towards God, to cleave us more closely to Christ.

If I say that repentance is not the same thing, then, as saying sorry; that it is not the howl of the penitent or the hand-wringing of regret; that is not to let us off the hook for the shortcomings we are afraid to find in our self-examination. But it demands even more. It demands that we turn aside from that which we cringe to confess, and that we do justice instead; not once as a penance for our sins, but always afterwards, as part of our life with Christ.

Repent, then, says Jesus. Pay attention. Look where you are going.

There’s a presumably true story making the rounds of a couple driving in their car, following the directions of their GPS system on an unfamiliar route. The GPS did not know, being non-sentient, that the bridge ahead was out. The couple followed its directions past road closed signs and bridge out warnings and diversions, right off the road into the gully below. They were an ordinary pair. They were not worse sinners, nor more stupid or gullible than any of us: we all rely on auto-pilot, the unexamined life, far too much for our own good. They did not examine their surroundings, their misplaced trust, they failed to turn aside when it was necessary. Everything was offered for their guidance and protection; but they perished.

Lest ye repent, says Jesus, you all will perish as they did. Which is not to say that all self-examination and repentance has to be negative. In the case of the couple in the car, the choice of right or wrong way was not a moral decision but one of wisdom and discernment; paying attention.

Those of us working through Growing a Rule of Life are finding that examination and discernment, praying to find a way to grow God’s kingdom within our own souls and our own spiritual home, may bear good fruit.

Next week, our Vestry will meet for a period of self-examination on behalf of this parish; and discernment about which direction we need to turn in next; and we certainly hope that it will not be all hand-wringing and woe. When we are most deeply honest with ourselves, we know that we are made in God’s image, and called as a church to further God’s kingdom.

I look around and I think of the old saw that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America. I look at our beautiful, blended family and I wonder what we are doing right. Is it just that we meet at 10 instead of 11? Or is there something we can find in our self-examination that may be useful to the culture that surrounds us; a culture wringing its hands over all-white Oscars?

We spoke just briefly last week about the epidemic of heroin abuse and overdose deaths all around and within our families. Only through hard self-examination is our culture beginning to ask what is the difference between the reaction and response to this epidemic and the crack crisis of the 80s and 90s. We know what it is: the answer is black and white. The question is how to repent, and reset, and return to God’s call to love.

This community, this country need not look too deeply into its self-examination to find areas worthy of repentance. The people came to Jesus and said, what about these people killed in religious violence, by persecution, by Pilate? And Jesus replied, yes, and what of those killed by workplace violence, negligence, neglect? What of those dying on the streets of Kalamazoo, or killed by a co-worker in Kansas? Unless you repent, says Jesus; unless you decide to do something differently, then you will perish the same way. For two millennia and more we have continued to wring our hands and say our prayers; but repentance not only says its prayers, but when it gets up off its knees it moves deliberately and surely away from temptation; it delivers us from evil.

If turning the world towards the kingdom of God seems like a tall order, that is what Jesus came for; to turn us, to draw us close to God, even if the way runs through the cross.

Our own self-examination, our facing of the places within ourselves that we fear to uncover, that we cringe to confess, comes at a cost. Repentance contains the acknowledgement that we have made wrong turnings, that our desires have been disordered; turned toward revenge, envy, violent emotion. And yet, it is in that confession that we find our conversion, that we find God waiting with the burning desire not to punish but to turn us around and embrace us; to walk us into the kingdom of heaven.

Moses was going about his father-in-law’s business, minding his own. He was keeping a low profile; he was on the run for a murder he had committed back in Egypt. He saw a strange sight. “I must turn aside,” he said. I must turn aside. He found himself suddenly on holy ground, in the face of God, and he was given God’s name, and the command to turn around, and set God’s people free.

We repent not because we are afraid of punishment. We turn aside, we turn towards a God who is waiting for us, burning with desire to make the name of God known to us, to show us his face in the person of Jesus; who is dying to call us by name.

That is why we make our discipline of self-examination in Lent. To discover that spark, and if it has gone cold, or become smothered by sin, to turn, to turn aside, to turn back towards a God whose fire does not consume but which inflames us with passion for God, for the people of God, for freedom, and the promised land.

Amen

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A word about music

Posted on February 27, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

For TrebleFest 2016, Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, Ohio; in these or other words:

Singing is a profound example of how we are made in the image of God. Whether we come to it through the science of the body, the breath drawn in and transfigured into music, just as the breath of God brought the first human to life (according to Genesis); or whether we find it through the mathematics of the intervals of sound that work together to produce beauty; or the soul of the artist, painting with sighs; there is room for everyone to come together with God in that work of creating God’s image on earth.

Whether you are the outgoing type who just has to share all your feelings and words with the people around you; or whether you are more on the shy side, hiding yourself inside the notes, letting the music speak for you, give you a voice, there is room for every image of God in the choir, in the song.

And just as we never reach the end of the image of God, so we never reach the end of the ways that music can speak to us and for us. It is a gift.

And those who sing it show us the image of God, and bless us with the image and echoes of immortality.

Amen.

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The penitent

Posted on February 26, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

on her knees scrubbing

blood from the pavement beneath

the broken icon

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Still

Posted on February 23, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

At the eclipse, the birds fall
silent, the earth shrugs its mantle
of shadows close; death comes
easily, a simple matter of forgiving all
that life still owes

Resurrection rises with the spring
equinox sun pressing home its higher vantage.
The very rock unfurls; the tomb is warmed;
salt dissolves; the taste of something
almost forgotten

The night before, the world turned still
toward its winter moon, the garden chill
with sleep, shifting friends face down
dreams of betrayal, torches burn a false dawn.
The hardest is to stay, still

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Small world 

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

… Those moments when the world telescopes down, folds up like a map that will not go back the same way, creases turning inside out and sideways. Like that one time in an dim alcove of Notre Dame: “Of all the cathedrals in all the cities of all the world…”

Those moments when the lines of latitude grow short and the longitude cinches its britches.

Once, when I was a child, an elderly couple asked me for directions and I said, “I’m going that way, I’ll show you,” and they followed me through my own front door, old friends of my mother.

It is either that the world is small, and we have not come far, after all, from Adam and Eve, from Eden; or else I myself travel in slender spirals, always circling back unknowing to the hilly fields where life was simple, and my brother found the grass snake, smooth and harmless, yellow-green, coiled in his hand.

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Year C Lent 1: reading and meditating on God’s holy Word

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

So it is Lent; but because we are not Puritans but Episcopalians, we can still have a little fun. Today, I have brought a new game to get us in the mood to consider this morning’s gospel. It is called, “Bible or Bard,” and it’s very easy: for each of the following quotations you have simply to decide whether they are written in the Bible (King James Version) or in the works of William Shakespeare, aka the Bard.

(Answers are at the bottom of this post!)

  1. To be, or not to be – that is the question.
  2. In the beginning was the Word.
  3. Why should the private pleasure of some one become the public plague of many more?
  4. Every man shall kiss his lips that giveth a right answer.
  5. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.
  6. They were children of fools, yea, children of base men; they were viler than the earth.
  7. What is your substance, whereof are you made…?
  8. If I be wicked, why then labour I in vain? If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands never so clean…
  9. Though it be honest, it is never good to bring bad news.
  10. Neither a borrower nor a lender be.
  11. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.
  12. The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

 

In the exhortation to a holy Lent, which we read and heard on Ash Wednesday, we are invited to

self-examination and repentance; [by] prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and [by] reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.

Given the biblical battle enacted between Jesus and the devil in this morning’s gospel, I thought we’d take a look at that instruction, to read and meditate on God’s holy Word. How do we read the Bible? How do we use what we read, in our lives of prayer, in our lives as a whole? The second letter of Timothy tells us that all scripture is inspired, and is profitable, but Shakespeare is not wrong when he says that “Even the devil can cite scripture for his own purposes.” We see that pretty clearly in this morning’s story. And many people think it comes from the Bible, precisely because it so clearly recalls this scene with Jesus and the tempter, throwing Bible verses back and forth in a battle of steadfast faith against feckless self-interest. So how do we discern what we hear from others, when they use the Bible to bolster a political argument, or shore up their own authority, or suggest an action with consequences for those beyond themselves?

Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that we cast anyone, let alone everyone; and certainly not only those with whom we disagree in the role of the devil when they quote scripture. I think that the danger is a lot more subtle than that. The temptation to abuse scripture is what comes between us, not from within any one of us. It is in that tug of war that characterizes the exchange between Jesus and the tempter that the devil comes and lends weight to anything that will divide us, that will keep us from loving God and our neighbour as ourselves.

We all proof-text. We all pick the words that fit our purposes, and that’s reasonable; even Jesus did it right back at the devil. “Make bread out of stones,” said the devil. “It is written,” replied Jesus. “Have the angels hold you up,” said the devil. “It is said,” replied Jesus. “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

But we can test our own understanding of scripture, and whether we are being tempted to twist it into a divisive device. We can use the authority of scripture itself, we can use our tradition, we can use our own reasoning, our own common sense, to know what we are reading, what we are hearing, and whether it comes from God.

Since the time of the English Reformation, the people who would become Anglicans (and Episcopalians) were “exhort[ed] … to read [the Bible] as the very lively word of God.”* It is inspired; the Holy Spirit moves within it. That, in fact, is the only reason that we can read a sermon from centuries before Christ, and a letter written to Roman Christians of our own first century, and find any relevance whatsoever for ourselves. We are not the same people as those to whom these words were addressed; and yet we read it in the sure and certain knowledge that God is speaking clearly, intimately, to each one of us in our daily prayer. The Bible is a lively, a living word, when we read it as part of our relationship with a lively and living God.

John A. T. Robinson said of scripture that “The Christian message is offered as a faith and a way of life which you can trust … [But] ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ for the writers of the New Testament is not a timeless prescription for good living, but a person born at a moment of history.”**

The Word of God, says Bishop Robinson, is Jesus Christ. Not a set of rules or instructions, but a person with whom we can have a real and lively relationship: Jesus is the lively, the living Word of God.

So we can test our understanding of the Bible by its own authority in our tradition, and in light of our understanding of Jesus as the lively and living Word of God.

One day, Jesus was interviewed by a lawyer in Jerusalem who asked him, “Which is the greatest commandment?” And Jesus told him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments,” said Jesus, “hang all the Law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:35-40)

In other words, Jesus, the incarnate, the lively and living Word of God, declared that the commandments to love God with all of our being, and our neighbours as ourselves, are the foundation of all of that God-inspired scripture; are the source from which all talk of God may come.

As our own Presiding Bishop might say, “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”

That is the test for ourselves, when we are tempted to use scripture as a tool for argument, or worse, a weapon. It is the test of how we hear others’ use of scripture, when they make declarations to further their own ends. Only if that use of scripture is made in the service of loving God, and loving our neighbours as ourselves, is it legitimate. Anything else might as well have been made up by William Shakespeare, rather than inspired by the Holy Spirit. “The devil cites scripture” indeed.

“If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”

And so, dear people of God,

I invite you, … in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.

Amen

_______________

*”The second Injunction of 1538, Walter Howard Frere and William McClure Kennedy, Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, 3 vols (AC, London, 1910), Vol ii, 35-66, 118,” in Stephen Sykes, John Booty, Jonathan Knight, eds, The Study of Anglicanism (SPCK/Fortress Press, 1968/1988), 11 & note 7

**John A. T. Robinson, Can We Trust the New Testament? (William B. Eerdmans, 1977), 7

__________________

Bible or Bard Answers:

  1. The Bard. Hamlet, Act III, scene i, line 56
  2. The Bible. John 1:1
  3. The Bard. The Rape of Lucretia, lines 1478-9
  4. The Bible. Proverbs 24:26
  5. The Bible. Song of Solomon (Song of Songs) 2:5
  6. The Bible. Job 30:8
  7. The Bard. Sonnet 53, line 1
  8. The Bible. Job 9:29-30
  9. The Bard. Antony and Cleopatra, Act II, scene v, line 85
  10. The Bard. Hamlet, Act I, scene iv, line 75
  11. The Bible. II Timothy 3:16
  12. The Bard. The Merchant of Venice, Act I, scene iii, line 93
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