Advent IV C _ Dec 20, 2009 St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA The Rev. Brian McHugh +
Have I shared with you the moment I consider my “conversion event”? I can date it to the place and hour - 6:00pm on the Feast of all Saints at St. Thomas’ Anglican Church, Huron Street, Toronto, November 1st, 1965. I was a university student then. Nine years later, I was to become an Associate Priest there. The church shimmered in candlelight. The procession of acolytes, choir vested in black cassocks and crisp floor-length white Anglican surplices, and clergy in gold Eucharistic vestments was moving down the center aisle as we sang the glorious hymn, “For all the saints who from the labors rest”. The air was dense and redolent with clouds of incense – at St. Thomas we always had two thurifers on major feasts. Walter McNutt (known to us as "Bunny") was at the organ console, a little tipsy on Scotch as usual, which was in a teacup on the console. It only made his playing more powerful. Just as the gold processional cross, held high by the crucifer, passed by me, swirled in glinting candlelight and incense, the organ thundering, we sang the wonderful words, “And yet there breaks a yet more glorious day / the saints triumphant rise in bright array / The King of Glory passes on His way / Alleluia, Alleluia!”
I identify that moment as my “Mary and Elizabeth” moment. That was the moment that the inner truth that lies in the encounter between Mary and her cousin Elizabeth became a spiritual truth for me. It was a moment not of the intellect but of the heart, aided by the music and light and color and smells and drama of the Liturgy. Just as John leapt in the womb of Elizabeth when Jesus entered in the womb of Mary, it was as if Jesus passing on the cross, radiating His unswerving love, caused the John the Baptist that was waiting in me to leap in recognition of the great Mystery that is God.
That same moment of recognition, with the same power, happens in the Eucharist when we come to receive the Body and Blood of Christ. Perhaps not always, but certainly when we have prepared ourselves to meet Him, when we come with the expectation so heightened by the Advent season. This moment, when we recognize God in the simple bread and wine, not with the mind but with the heart, is meant to be a pattern for our Christian life. God is present in all of Life, in persons, in Nature, in events, in experiences and feelings, in quietness, in all things. This expectation of meeting God is the character of Advent, the character of being a Christian. It is what we train ourselves for by our religious practice.
The language of faith is not essentially a language of the mind, though we do bring our minds to the thoughtful examination of Faith. The language of faith is a language of the heart, because it is essentially about love and will. Christ dying on the cross may seem irrational to us, until His gaze meets ours and we are moved by the great love of God that led Him there.
The language of Faith is the language of Mystery and of Wonder. Seen only on the level of literalism, the story of Mary and Elizabeth can easily be questioned and belittled. But heard in the tongue of Wonder, it beautifully illustrates the Gospel truth that God can be encountered at any moment of our daily lives. Elizabeth and John are you and I searching for God, waiting for God to touch us. Mary and Jesus is an icon of God touching us in our pain, our bewilderment, our sorrow, our quiet joy, our hopes and our dreams. In four days, we will celebrate the birth of God among us in human form. Our minds may reel, but our hearts say “Ah!”, as mine did when that shining cross passed by me so many years ago. The older I get, the more I experience the World as Mary with the infant Jesus in her womb, bringing God into connection with our waiting hearts.
Advent is now at an end. You and I have been shaped yet again by our yearly liturgical cycle in the principles of Christian Life - in the character of the reign of God, in the healing work that God has done in freeing us from the power of sin and death in order to liberate us for the life of love. Now we start the journey again, week by week drawn by the Liturgy into the Mystery of Divine Love and the frail beauty of human possibility.
If I kind of squinch up my inner eye, I can catch a glimpse of the meaning of the extraordinary phrase in the reading from the Letter to the Hebrews today: .. we are made fit for God by the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus. If we are listening, the inner truth of the image of the crucified Christ erupts within. It is not that Jesus’ death relieves us of the necessity of offering ourselves as a sacrifice of love to God. Exactly the opposite. The inner imperative is clear: our inner Christ must be born in us again and delivered to the World by us. This is what Mary’s “Yes” and the Incarnation invite us to.
To the intellect it is a puzzle. But to the intuition, it makes perfect sense. Perfect love is fearless and casts out fear. It is why discerning the character and nature of Love is the primary work of a follower of the Gospel. Bound to Christ, there is only one choice: to live, to trust, to hope. Faith, Hope, and Love, these three things last. They alone will carry us through each earthly day in power and, at that journey’s end, to the shore of the next unknown adventure.
The 13th C theologian and mystic known as Meister Eckhart makes clear for each of us the message of Elizabeth and Mary, and I think I have quoted it before:
“We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.”
Come Christmas, Advent has prepared us for Christ to be born in us once again, and for us to say, with Mary, “Yes”.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Homily for Proper XXV B_RCL _ Pentecost XXI_Oct 25, 2009
St. Benedict’s, Los Osos (The Rev) Brian McHugh +
[Jer 31:7-9; Psalm 126; Heb 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52]
Today, in the reading from the version of the Gospel called Mark, we are reacquainted with an old friend, a nameless blind beggar, known only as the son of Timaeus, who has the courage to defy his so-called friends and insist on asking Jesus to “let him see again”.
In one of those lovely “coincidences”, the great Greek philosopher Plato wrote an essay called “The Timaeus”, a figure who has a conversation with Socrates. Timaeus is the Latinized form of the Greek “Timaios” – and it means “Honour”. Keep this in mind as we think of our blind beggar friend. Timaeus says to Socrates that he thinks sight to be the source of the greatest benefit to us because it has allowed us to see the Universe, and ponder its nature. He then goes on to say that God “gave us sight to the end that we might behold the courses of the intelligences in the heaven, and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence, which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the perturbed, and that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and regulate our own vagaries.
I understand the story of Bar-timaeus – as I understand all such stories in the Gospel – to be about Becoming. About how, in knowing God in the person of Jesus and His interactions and relationships with others, we can learn to “Honour” our humanity, to become fully ourselves. What then does the Blind Beggar – who presumably had not met Jesus but calls Him “My Teacher” – teach us about our path into the fullness of Life? Here are a few things to ponder, after which Caro will respond to and enlarge upon.
All of us have things about us, being human, that hamper us, hold back our growth, symbolized by Bar-timaeus’ blindness. But we are all like Bar-timaeus. As a friend of mine says , Bat-timaeus may have been blind and a beggar, but he was part of his community; he had “spirit and initiative”. We all want to see our way, to know and understand and participate in Life. We all want to see a vision and a meaning for our Life. The important point is: Jesus relates to Bar-timaeus as a whole person, not just to his “handicap”. After healing him, He invites him into “the way” - the fellowship of the Good News. The God we know relates to us in the same way.
Bar-timaeus’ “friends” try to shush him up. Their culture says that a lowly blind beggar isn’t worthy to approach a prophet or ask for healing. Much of our culture does the same to people. We do it especially to the poor, the powerless, the outcasts of various sorts, among which are often included women, Gayfolk, and men who don’t fit the societal norm of “fighters”. I think we are called in Christ to claim for ourselves and for all others our full humanity as God’s People. As my friend says, “our fellowship with one another is as whole people, not as walking maladies”. No one should be “shushed”, prevented from entering fully into life in God.
What happens in the Gospel of Mark after Bar-timaeus? It moves into what we call the “passion” of Christ. Bar-timaeus throws off his cloak; this we can see as a symbol of letting go of paths, of ways of living and thinking and believing which only mislead and fail us. In essence, with Bar-timaeus we are invited to come to the Great Teacher, to enter the Mystery of Christ’s Death and Resurrection, to wrap ourselves in the new cloak of resurrection Life, and to “see again”: the inner sight of the Way of God’s amazing Love, God’s Compassion, God’s Justice, God’s Gentleness.
Touched by God, we like Bar-timaeus can “spring up”, despite our handicaps, and claim full Life.
St. Benedict’s, Los Osos (The Rev) Brian McHugh +
[Jer 31:7-9; Psalm 126; Heb 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52]
Today, in the reading from the version of the Gospel called Mark, we are reacquainted with an old friend, a nameless blind beggar, known only as the son of Timaeus, who has the courage to defy his so-called friends and insist on asking Jesus to “let him see again”.
In one of those lovely “coincidences”, the great Greek philosopher Plato wrote an essay called “The Timaeus”, a figure who has a conversation with Socrates. Timaeus is the Latinized form of the Greek “Timaios” – and it means “Honour”. Keep this in mind as we think of our blind beggar friend. Timaeus says to Socrates that he thinks sight to be the source of the greatest benefit to us because it has allowed us to see the Universe, and ponder its nature. He then goes on to say that God “gave us sight to the end that we might behold the courses of the intelligences in the heaven, and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence, which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the perturbed, and that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and regulate our own vagaries.
I understand the story of Bar-timaeus – as I understand all such stories in the Gospel – to be about Becoming. About how, in knowing God in the person of Jesus and His interactions and relationships with others, we can learn to “Honour” our humanity, to become fully ourselves. What then does the Blind Beggar – who presumably had not met Jesus but calls Him “My Teacher” – teach us about our path into the fullness of Life? Here are a few things to ponder, after which Caro will respond to and enlarge upon.
All of us have things about us, being human, that hamper us, hold back our growth, symbolized by Bar-timaeus’ blindness. But we are all like Bar-timaeus. As a friend of mine says , Bat-timaeus may have been blind and a beggar, but he was part of his community; he had “spirit and initiative”. We all want to see our way, to know and understand and participate in Life. We all want to see a vision and a meaning for our Life. The important point is: Jesus relates to Bar-timaeus as a whole person, not just to his “handicap”. After healing him, He invites him into “the way” - the fellowship of the Good News. The God we know relates to us in the same way.
Bar-timaeus’ “friends” try to shush him up. Their culture says that a lowly blind beggar isn’t worthy to approach a prophet or ask for healing. Much of our culture does the same to people. We do it especially to the poor, the powerless, the outcasts of various sorts, among which are often included women, Gayfolk, and men who don’t fit the societal norm of “fighters”. I think we are called in Christ to claim for ourselves and for all others our full humanity as God’s People. As my friend says, “our fellowship with one another is as whole people, not as walking maladies”. No one should be “shushed”, prevented from entering fully into life in God.
What happens in the Gospel of Mark after Bar-timaeus? It moves into what we call the “passion” of Christ. Bar-timaeus throws off his cloak; this we can see as a symbol of letting go of paths, of ways of living and thinking and believing which only mislead and fail us. In essence, with Bar-timaeus we are invited to come to the Great Teacher, to enter the Mystery of Christ’s Death and Resurrection, to wrap ourselves in the new cloak of resurrection Life, and to “see again”: the inner sight of the Way of God’s amazing Love, God’s Compassion, God’s Justice, God’s Gentleness.
Touched by God, we like Bar-timaeus can “spring up”, despite our handicaps, and claim full Life.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Sermon for: Pent XVI B_RCL _ Sept 20, 2009
St. Benedict’s, Los Osos (The Rev) Brian McHugh +
[Wisdom of Solomon 1:16-2:1, 12-22 ; Psalm 54 ; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37]
One night last week while Dennis and I were in Wisconsin for his fortieth high school reunion and to visit with his family, I awoke just before 1:00AM. I don’t know about you, but it is always clear to me within a minute or two whether I am going to go back to sleep or not. That night, I clearly was not. So, I turned on the light and reached for my “book” ….. well, not exactly a “book”. I reached for my Kindle. (Everyone know what a Kindle is? – show it.) Now, this is entirely the fault of our esteemed Rector Emeritus Mary Elizabeth. She brought her Kindle to a clergy meeting a few weeks ago, thus opening a channel of seduction, my following of which I put the total blame for on her.
I turned my Kindle on, deciding to continue reading “The Cave Dwellings and Castles of Europe”, by the Victorian author and Anglican priest, Sabine Baring-Gould. I have long been entranced by what can only be called charmingly dilettante literature, Rose McCauley and Anthony Trollope being other favourites. If you haven’t read Ms. McCauley’s “The Pleasure of Ruins”, I highly recommend it. Anyway: when the home page appeared, behold, a modern miracle had occurred. I forgot that a couple of weeks ago I had pre-ordered a copy of Dan Brown’s new book “The Lost Symbol”, due out on September 15th – and lo and behold it was now past midnight and the morning of the 15th. The Kindle – in a brilliant bit of marketing - allows you to be automatically online anywhere in the U.S. You can search Amazon for over 350,000 “books”, buy what you want, and the cost (usually quite reasonable – all best-sellers, regardless of the print cost, are $9.95) is charged to your credit card. As soon as I had turned on my Kindle, “The Lost Symbol” appeared as if my magic. I opened the electronic book – and finally turned out the light 6 hours later at 7am.
The book is typically and wonderfully Dan Brown, and if you intend to read it I won’t spoil it for you. But for me, beyond all the wonderful arcane stuff, which I love, the book is essentially about a very modern, and yet very ancient, theme. Simply put, it is this: When will we human beings decide to live up to our potential as a race? The Christian theological version of that question is: When will we manifest our Christ-like being and destiny? As Dan Brown makes clear, he believes that every faith, religion, philosophy, path, etc., has at its heart the same question and goal, seen from its own perspective and experience. In Buddhism, it is how one reaches Enlightenment and becomes part of the sangha, the holy community. In the Jewish context, it is when will the Messianic age come. For the classical Greek philosophers, it is how Utopia can be achieved. For the Taoists, it is how one “goes with the Tao”, becomes one with the flow of Creation. For Islam, it is how the Umma, the people of the Qu’ran, become one in the wisdom and spirit of the Prophet.
In “The Lost Symbol”, Dan Brown is asking the age old question: As we gather knowledge – knowledge on all levels, including scientific and spiritual – will individuals and cultures use it to advance the destiny of the human race in a common search for a community of love, compassion and justice, or in support of a human race ruled by power, dominance, inequality, and the hate and division these engender. Some individuals and cultures hold to a belief and hope for the former, and many for the latter. The World is in a particularly dangerous time as to what path we shall choose. I see the tensions in the Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Communion these days as a microcosm of this tension. I see the tense political and religious climate in America these days as a manifestation of this struggle. Metaphorically speaking, each of us has a Peter Solomon or a Ma’lach, Brown’s protagonist and antagonist, battling within us. What path will we choose? What kind of human person do we strive to be, and what kind of human community are we committed to work for? (Note that many these days are looking to December 2012, when the Mayan calendar apparently predicts either the World's end, or a complete transformation.)
Our readings today all present the same situation and pose the same choice. In the Wisdom reading, the “righteous man” represents the way of God, and the “ungodly” those who follow the “way of death”, who oppose the way of kindness and justice, those who “did not know the secret purposes of God, nor hoped for the wages of holiness, nor discerned the prize for blameless souls”.
The Psalm is the cry of the “righteous man”, beset by enemies, who seeks God’s protection and strength – and who hopes and trusts in God’s faithfulness.
The Letter of James holds up the stark dichotomy as seen in one early Christian community – a picture on the one hand of “envy and selfish ambition” where there is also “disorder and wickedness of every kind” and, on the other hand “wisdom from above” which is “pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy”, and where there is a “harvest of righteousness … sown in peace for those who make peace.” The writer reminds his hearers, “"God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us".
The reading from Mark’s Gospel presents Jesus as the reflection of God’s being and purpose, confronted by those who seek to betray and kill Him. He is trying to teach his disciples the Way of that Godly Kingdom. He boldly challenges their way of thinking of “greatness” as being counter to God’s will. He makes it clear that they have to learn new ways of understanding Life and of making choices for that Way. He does it by gathering children around Him, by telling HIs followers that they must be like the children if they want to know Him and His heavenly father. Now, I’ve known many children; they have ranged from little monsters to little angels and everything in between! The important point I think Jesus was trying to make was that children have to, are going to grow up. To mature fully, they have to be open to learning the true nature of Life. They have to choose the path that supports and nourishes that Journey. As it was starkly put in Wisdom, we – for we are those children – can choose the way of Life or of Death. The walking of the Path is the daily challenge for each of us. The Church is called to be such a culture or community.
The Bible presents a very complex God – not surprising, since that picture is filtered through human experience, which is influenced by all manner of things good and bad, by things that support Life or Death. But in my experience as a priest, most authentic Gospel people know the essence of the God proclaimed in the Christ: Unconditional Love, Compassion, Justice, Mercy. Most spiritually healthy people reject the negative characteristics projected onto the Mystery we call “God”. The incisive Karen Armstrong wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently:
… Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.
As individuals and as “church”, we seek to be shaped and held in relationship with this Mystery, keeping our “spiritual exercises” richly nourishing (which includes embracing change), cultivating a compassionate lifestyle by non-judgmental loving, and cultivating a childlike openness to new capacities of mind and heart. The first two are important; I would say that the latter – new capacities of heart and mind – are critical as we negotiate the times in which Humanity lives at present. Barriers must fall in order to allow an age of new Light to mend the brokenness we all now live in.
The best way to do this is to come to God like the children who came to Jesus. In a poem by Rumi, a young man seeking advice asks to speak to someone wise. The villagers point to a man playing stick-horse with children. “He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity like the night sky, but he conceals it in the madness of child’s play.” Asked why he hides his intelligence, the wise man answers, “The knowing I have … wants to enjoy itself. I am a plantation of sugarcane, and at the same time I’m eating the sweetness.” Later in the poem, Rumi gives us wise advice, for today as we worship and for the path to our destiny:
Our destiny and our path is to live on “sweet sugarcane God-Love”, to be a “plantation of sugarcane” where others may chew. Gandhi said: … a child, even before it begins to write the alphabet and gathers worldly knowledge, should know what the soul is, what truth is, what love is and what forces are hidden in the soul. It should be the essence of true education that every child learns this and in the struggle of life be able more readily to overcome hatred by love, falsehood by truth and violence by taking suffering on itself.”
Our discipleship is, whatever our age, to know the things a child must know. Only as such can we, as the Collect says, “hold fast to those [things] that shall endure”. And help the World to its destiny as a Human family od God-Love.
St. Benedict’s, Los Osos (The Rev) Brian McHugh +
[Wisdom of Solomon 1:16-2:1, 12-22 ; Psalm 54 ; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37]
One night last week while Dennis and I were in Wisconsin for his fortieth high school reunion and to visit with his family, I awoke just before 1:00AM. I don’t know about you, but it is always clear to me within a minute or two whether I am going to go back to sleep or not. That night, I clearly was not. So, I turned on the light and reached for my “book” ….. well, not exactly a “book”. I reached for my Kindle. (Everyone know what a Kindle is? – show it.) Now, this is entirely the fault of our esteemed Rector Emeritus Mary Elizabeth. She brought her Kindle to a clergy meeting a few weeks ago, thus opening a channel of seduction, my following of which I put the total blame for on her.
I turned my Kindle on, deciding to continue reading “The Cave Dwellings and Castles of Europe”, by the Victorian author and Anglican priest, Sabine Baring-Gould. I have long been entranced by what can only be called charmingly dilettante literature, Rose McCauley and Anthony Trollope being other favourites. If you haven’t read Ms. McCauley’s “The Pleasure of Ruins”, I highly recommend it. Anyway: when the home page appeared, behold, a modern miracle had occurred. I forgot that a couple of weeks ago I had pre-ordered a copy of Dan Brown’s new book “The Lost Symbol”, due out on September 15th – and lo and behold it was now past midnight and the morning of the 15th. The Kindle – in a brilliant bit of marketing - allows you to be automatically online anywhere in the U.S. You can search Amazon for over 350,000 “books”, buy what you want, and the cost (usually quite reasonable – all best-sellers, regardless of the print cost, are $9.95) is charged to your credit card. As soon as I had turned on my Kindle, “The Lost Symbol” appeared as if my magic. I opened the electronic book – and finally turned out the light 6 hours later at 7am.
The book is typically and wonderfully Dan Brown, and if you intend to read it I won’t spoil it for you. But for me, beyond all the wonderful arcane stuff, which I love, the book is essentially about a very modern, and yet very ancient, theme. Simply put, it is this: When will we human beings decide to live up to our potential as a race? The Christian theological version of that question is: When will we manifest our Christ-like being and destiny? As Dan Brown makes clear, he believes that every faith, religion, philosophy, path, etc., has at its heart the same question and goal, seen from its own perspective and experience. In Buddhism, it is how one reaches Enlightenment and becomes part of the sangha, the holy community. In the Jewish context, it is when will the Messianic age come. For the classical Greek philosophers, it is how Utopia can be achieved. For the Taoists, it is how one “goes with the Tao”, becomes one with the flow of Creation. For Islam, it is how the Umma, the people of the Qu’ran, become one in the wisdom and spirit of the Prophet.
In “The Lost Symbol”, Dan Brown is asking the age old question: As we gather knowledge – knowledge on all levels, including scientific and spiritual – will individuals and cultures use it to advance the destiny of the human race in a common search for a community of love, compassion and justice, or in support of a human race ruled by power, dominance, inequality, and the hate and division these engender. Some individuals and cultures hold to a belief and hope for the former, and many for the latter. The World is in a particularly dangerous time as to what path we shall choose. I see the tensions in the Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Communion these days as a microcosm of this tension. I see the tense political and religious climate in America these days as a manifestation of this struggle. Metaphorically speaking, each of us has a Peter Solomon or a Ma’lach, Brown’s protagonist and antagonist, battling within us. What path will we choose? What kind of human person do we strive to be, and what kind of human community are we committed to work for? (Note that many these days are looking to December 2012, when the Mayan calendar apparently predicts either the World's end, or a complete transformation.)
Our readings today all present the same situation and pose the same choice. In the Wisdom reading, the “righteous man” represents the way of God, and the “ungodly” those who follow the “way of death”, who oppose the way of kindness and justice, those who “did not know the secret purposes of God, nor hoped for the wages of holiness, nor discerned the prize for blameless souls”.
The Psalm is the cry of the “righteous man”, beset by enemies, who seeks God’s protection and strength – and who hopes and trusts in God’s faithfulness.
The Letter of James holds up the stark dichotomy as seen in one early Christian community – a picture on the one hand of “envy and selfish ambition” where there is also “disorder and wickedness of every kind” and, on the other hand “wisdom from above” which is “pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy”, and where there is a “harvest of righteousness … sown in peace for those who make peace.” The writer reminds his hearers, “"God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us".
The reading from Mark’s Gospel presents Jesus as the reflection of God’s being and purpose, confronted by those who seek to betray and kill Him. He is trying to teach his disciples the Way of that Godly Kingdom. He boldly challenges their way of thinking of “greatness” as being counter to God’s will. He makes it clear that they have to learn new ways of understanding Life and of making choices for that Way. He does it by gathering children around Him, by telling HIs followers that they must be like the children if they want to know Him and His heavenly father. Now, I’ve known many children; they have ranged from little monsters to little angels and everything in between! The important point I think Jesus was trying to make was that children have to, are going to grow up. To mature fully, they have to be open to learning the true nature of Life. They have to choose the path that supports and nourishes that Journey. As it was starkly put in Wisdom, we – for we are those children – can choose the way of Life or of Death. The walking of the Path is the daily challenge for each of us. The Church is called to be such a culture or community.
The Bible presents a very complex God – not surprising, since that picture is filtered through human experience, which is influenced by all manner of things good and bad, by things that support Life or Death. But in my experience as a priest, most authentic Gospel people know the essence of the God proclaimed in the Christ: Unconditional Love, Compassion, Justice, Mercy. Most spiritually healthy people reject the negative characteristics projected onto the Mystery we call “God”. The incisive Karen Armstrong wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently:
… Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.
As individuals and as “church”, we seek to be shaped and held in relationship with this Mystery, keeping our “spiritual exercises” richly nourishing (which includes embracing change), cultivating a compassionate lifestyle by non-judgmental loving, and cultivating a childlike openness to new capacities of mind and heart. The first two are important; I would say that the latter – new capacities of heart and mind – are critical as we negotiate the times in which Humanity lives at present. Barriers must fall in order to allow an age of new Light to mend the brokenness we all now live in.
The best way to do this is to come to God like the children who came to Jesus. In a poem by Rumi, a young man seeking advice asks to speak to someone wise. The villagers point to a man playing stick-horse with children. “He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity like the night sky, but he conceals it in the madness of child’s play.” Asked why he hides his intelligence, the wise man answers, “The knowing I have … wants to enjoy itself. I am a plantation of sugarcane, and at the same time I’m eating the sweetness.” Later in the poem, Rumi gives us wise advice, for today as we worship and for the path to our destiny:
“Chew quietly your sweet sugarcane God-Love, and stay playfully childish.
Your face will turn rosy with illumination like the redbud flowers.”
Our destiny and our path is to live on “sweet sugarcane God-Love”, to be a “plantation of sugarcane” where others may chew. Gandhi said: … a child, even before it begins to write the alphabet and gathers worldly knowledge, should know what the soul is, what truth is, what love is and what forces are hidden in the soul. It should be the essence of true education that every child learns this and in the struggle of life be able more readily to overcome hatred by love, falsehood by truth and violence by taking suffering on itself.”
Our discipleship is, whatever our age, to know the things a child must know. Only as such can we, as the Collect says, “hold fast to those [things] that shall endure”. And help the World to its destiny as a Human family od God-Love.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Sermon for: Pent VI B_RCL _ Prop 10B_July 12, 2009
Epiphany, Agoura (The Rev) Brian H.O.A. McHugh +
Amos 7:7-15; Psalm 85:8-13; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29
The poet Adrienne Rich wrote this poem, called “Prospective Immigrants Please Note”: (underlining mine)
Either you will go through this door
Or you will not go through.
If you go through
There is always the risk
Of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
And you must look back
And let them happen.
If you do not go through
It is possible to live worthily,
To maintain your attitudes,
To hold your position,
To die bravely.
But much will blind you,
Much will evade you,
At what cost who knows?
The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.
So. What is the door we are invited to go through in the readings for the Liturgy today?
We have the 8th C. businessman and farmer who was called to be a prophet to the Northern Kingdom of Israel – at a very bad moment! God has reached the end of His tether and made up His mind. The plumb line has been poised – and nothing in Israel is aligned with God’s purposes and desires. God says, “I've spared them for the last time. This is it! Isaac's sex-and-religion shrines will be smashed, Israel's unholy shrines will be knocked to pieces. I'm raising my sword against the royal family of Jeroboam." God tells Amos to say, “Jeroboam will be killed. Israel is headed for exile”. Was this Amos someone significant? No. Amos says to Amaziah the High Priest of the Bethel shrine, “I never set up to be a preacher, never had plans to be a preacher. I raised cattle and I pruned trees. Then God took me off the farm and said, 'Go preach to my people Israel.” Amos’s inconsequence should strike a little trembling in our own hearts. What powers are you and I, followers of the Gospel of Peace and Justice and Compassion, being asked by God to confront in our agonized World and in our own country today? What door are we being asked to walk through?
Today, we have John the Baptist. He had been imprisoned by Herod as a political risk. Herod was apparently fascinated by John and hesitated to kill him. But as often happens in human affairs, in some form of intoxication with gaining or maintaining or misusing power, this intoxication can lead to deceit and violence. Herodias, Herod’s sister-in-law and now wife, angered by John’s exposure of her own designs on power, tricks Herod into beheading John and giving her his head on a platter. It isn’t hard to look around our World today and see the deals that are being made to gain or maintain power. Many plattered heads have been demanded in order to maintain hegemony in our World. To many in places of authority, there is no alternative but to cut off the head of a rival, in some form or other, literally or economically or politically or militarily, in order to save face with other allies, secure resources, or maintain a standard of living.
We can see parallel examples in our own church today. At our General Convention, some are asking for the head of the LGBT members of the church on a platter in order to placate other hostile members of the Anglican Communion. And many in the LGBT community are asking for the head of the Anglican Communion on a platter in order to serve God’s call to Justice and Truth. As a Gay man and priest who has engaged with this issue for over 40 years, I know what I want my church to do. But I have a hope that heads on platters will not be necessary. This will depend not just on the Episcopal Church, but on the other members of the Anglican Communion as well. Whether we all can work our way through the labyrinthine history of this clash with grace and honour and respect and continuing voluntary community, I don’t know. Having lived in Yankee-land for a lot of my life, I am hoping for “Live and let Live” as we enter a new era. These eras happen about every 500 years. The last was the Reformation. We are, I believe in the midst of the next, one example of which is being called by people like Phyllis Tickle, “The Emergent Church”. You might be interested in her book, “The Great Emergence”.
We have Paul – if indeed Paul wrote the Letter to the Ephesians, which is debated. But it is agreed by many scholars that, even if the Letter was written by a disciple of Paul, and even if there is clear development from Paul’s thinking as seen in other of his writings, Ephesians does represent one of the boldest statements of the Christian message - that the mystery of God’s purpose is known in Jesus Christ, the essence of which, to my mind is this: that the power of God, which (as one of our collects says) is shown chiefly in showing mercy and pity , claims precedence over all that claim authority. Ephesians also explores, in discussing the mystery of bringing together Jews and Gentiles, the reconciliation of previously hostile groups. We don’t have many examples in our present situation of the reconciliation of hostile groups, but we can remember the Berlin Wall, and Ireland, and South Africa, and hope and work for our own time by their light.
Paul preached what he believed to be God’s message, and he ended up in jail, after suffering many hardships, as we heard last week. Amos was expelled from Bethel and threatened and denounced. John was imprisoned and killed. The lesson seems clear for those who have the courage to speak truth to power.
Our problem is, what is God’s purpose and will? Both World leaders and Religious leaders have their own convictions, as do citizens of our land, and of our church and other churches and religions. Everyone can proof-text their own documents and sources to support their point of view. But, as I said last week in my sermon, the path to reconciliation and understanding lies only in Love. “Learning Love” is the primary, daily work of the Christian, centered on the love of the Christ, seen in His actions, in His foundational commandment that we “love one another as I have loved you”, and in His support of the great principle of His Jewish tradition, to love God will all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbour as ourself”.
I see preaching not as telling people what to believe, but to encourage the walking of the path of Learning Love, as a tool in sharing thoughts and ideas and feelings. I hope we might have time, for the three weeks I will be here at Epiphany, so engage together in Learning Love. This is the door that Adrienne Rich invites us to walk through. And, as a colleague of mine says , the fact that we are marked with the seal of the Holy Spirit means embracing Love over safety or comfort ….. No matter what you face in your mission … the heart of the call is always Love.”
I leave us with two quotes. The first from the Spiritual Canticle” of St. John of the Cross:
“The more a soul loves, the more perfect it is in its love ….. All its actions are love, all its energies and strength are occupied in love. It gives up all it has, like the wise merchant, for this treasure of love which it finds hidden in God ….. The Beloved cares for nothing else but love. The soul, therefore, anxious to please him perfectly, occupies itself unceasingly in pure love of God ….. the soul most easily draws the sweetness of love from all that happens to it. It makes all things subservient to the end of loving God, whether they are sweet or bitter. In all its occupations its joy is the love of God.”
And from the 8th C archbishop of Mainz, Rabanus Maurus, who shows us the way into Love:
“John was sent ahead like a voice before a word, a lamp before the sun ….. Let us, too therefore, prepare a way for the Lord who is to come into our hearts. Let us remove the barriers of sin by confession and repentance; let us straighten the paths of our life which for too long have been undirected and devious; let us pave the way of true faith with good works. Let us rid ourselves of all arrogance and lift high our fainting hearts. Then … we shall see the salvation of God as he is.”
Finally, may we remember and be delighted by Paul’s word’s to the Ephesians:
“Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, he had his eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living, part of the overall purpose he is working out in everything and everyone.”
Friends in Chrst: The door awaits us. Shall we go through?
Epiphany, Agoura (The Rev) Brian H.O.A. McHugh +
Amos 7:7-15; Psalm 85:8-13; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29
The poet Adrienne Rich wrote this poem, called “Prospective Immigrants Please Note”: (underlining mine)
Either you will go through this door
Or you will not go through.
If you go through
There is always the risk
Of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
And you must look back
And let them happen.
If you do not go through
It is possible to live worthily,
To maintain your attitudes,
To hold your position,
To die bravely.
But much will blind you,
Much will evade you,
At what cost who knows?
The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.
So. What is the door we are invited to go through in the readings for the Liturgy today?
We have the 8th C. businessman and farmer who was called to be a prophet to the Northern Kingdom of Israel – at a very bad moment! God has reached the end of His tether and made up His mind. The plumb line has been poised – and nothing in Israel is aligned with God’s purposes and desires. God says, “I've spared them for the last time. This is it! Isaac's sex-and-religion shrines will be smashed, Israel's unholy shrines will be knocked to pieces. I'm raising my sword against the royal family of Jeroboam." God tells Amos to say, “Jeroboam will be killed. Israel is headed for exile”. Was this Amos someone significant? No. Amos says to Amaziah the High Priest of the Bethel shrine, “I never set up to be a preacher, never had plans to be a preacher. I raised cattle and I pruned trees. Then God took me off the farm and said, 'Go preach to my people Israel.” Amos’s inconsequence should strike a little trembling in our own hearts. What powers are you and I, followers of the Gospel of Peace and Justice and Compassion, being asked by God to confront in our agonized World and in our own country today? What door are we being asked to walk through?
Today, we have John the Baptist. He had been imprisoned by Herod as a political risk. Herod was apparently fascinated by John and hesitated to kill him. But as often happens in human affairs, in some form of intoxication with gaining or maintaining or misusing power, this intoxication can lead to deceit and violence. Herodias, Herod’s sister-in-law and now wife, angered by John’s exposure of her own designs on power, tricks Herod into beheading John and giving her his head on a platter. It isn’t hard to look around our World today and see the deals that are being made to gain or maintain power. Many plattered heads have been demanded in order to maintain hegemony in our World. To many in places of authority, there is no alternative but to cut off the head of a rival, in some form or other, literally or economically or politically or militarily, in order to save face with other allies, secure resources, or maintain a standard of living.
We can see parallel examples in our own church today. At our General Convention, some are asking for the head of the LGBT members of the church on a platter in order to placate other hostile members of the Anglican Communion. And many in the LGBT community are asking for the head of the Anglican Communion on a platter in order to serve God’s call to Justice and Truth. As a Gay man and priest who has engaged with this issue for over 40 years, I know what I want my church to do. But I have a hope that heads on platters will not be necessary. This will depend not just on the Episcopal Church, but on the other members of the Anglican Communion as well. Whether we all can work our way through the labyrinthine history of this clash with grace and honour and respect and continuing voluntary community, I don’t know. Having lived in Yankee-land for a lot of my life, I am hoping for “Live and let Live” as we enter a new era. These eras happen about every 500 years. The last was the Reformation. We are, I believe in the midst of the next, one example of which is being called by people like Phyllis Tickle, “The Emergent Church”. You might be interested in her book, “The Great Emergence”.
We have Paul – if indeed Paul wrote the Letter to the Ephesians, which is debated. But it is agreed by many scholars that, even if the Letter was written by a disciple of Paul, and even if there is clear development from Paul’s thinking as seen in other of his writings, Ephesians does represent one of the boldest statements of the Christian message - that the mystery of God’s purpose is known in Jesus Christ, the essence of which, to my mind is this: that the power of God, which (as one of our collects says) is shown chiefly in showing mercy and pity , claims precedence over all that claim authority. Ephesians also explores, in discussing the mystery of bringing together Jews and Gentiles, the reconciliation of previously hostile groups. We don’t have many examples in our present situation of the reconciliation of hostile groups, but we can remember the Berlin Wall, and Ireland, and South Africa, and hope and work for our own time by their light.
Paul preached what he believed to be God’s message, and he ended up in jail, after suffering many hardships, as we heard last week. Amos was expelled from Bethel and threatened and denounced. John was imprisoned and killed. The lesson seems clear for those who have the courage to speak truth to power.
Our problem is, what is God’s purpose and will? Both World leaders and Religious leaders have their own convictions, as do citizens of our land, and of our church and other churches and religions. Everyone can proof-text their own documents and sources to support their point of view. But, as I said last week in my sermon, the path to reconciliation and understanding lies only in Love. “Learning Love” is the primary, daily work of the Christian, centered on the love of the Christ, seen in His actions, in His foundational commandment that we “love one another as I have loved you”, and in His support of the great principle of His Jewish tradition, to love God will all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbour as ourself”.
I see preaching not as telling people what to believe, but to encourage the walking of the path of Learning Love, as a tool in sharing thoughts and ideas and feelings. I hope we might have time, for the three weeks I will be here at Epiphany, so engage together in Learning Love. This is the door that Adrienne Rich invites us to walk through. And, as a colleague of mine says , the fact that we are marked with the seal of the Holy Spirit means embracing Love over safety or comfort ….. No matter what you face in your mission … the heart of the call is always Love.”
I leave us with two quotes. The first from the Spiritual Canticle” of St. John of the Cross:
“The more a soul loves, the more perfect it is in its love ….. All its actions are love, all its energies and strength are occupied in love. It gives up all it has, like the wise merchant, for this treasure of love which it finds hidden in God ….. The Beloved cares for nothing else but love. The soul, therefore, anxious to please him perfectly, occupies itself unceasingly in pure love of God ….. the soul most easily draws the sweetness of love from all that happens to it. It makes all things subservient to the end of loving God, whether they are sweet or bitter. In all its occupations its joy is the love of God.”
And from the 8th C archbishop of Mainz, Rabanus Maurus, who shows us the way into Love:
“John was sent ahead like a voice before a word, a lamp before the sun ….. Let us, too therefore, prepare a way for the Lord who is to come into our hearts. Let us remove the barriers of sin by confession and repentance; let us straighten the paths of our life which for too long have been undirected and devious; let us pave the way of true faith with good works. Let us rid ourselves of all arrogance and lift high our fainting hearts. Then … we shall see the salvation of God as he is.”
Finally, may we remember and be delighted by Paul’s word’s to the Ephesians:
“Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, he had his eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living, part of the overall purpose he is working out in everything and everyone.”
Friends in Chrst: The door awaits us. Shall we go through?
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Sermon for: Pent V B_RCL _ July 5, 2009
St. Benedict’s, Los Osos (The Rev) Brian McHugh +
[Ezekiel 2:1-5; Psalm 123; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13]
I love the way Annie Dillard writes. I think I have read every book she has written, including Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm– though I will tell you that I have always been someone who can never remember the titles of books or what was in them! The same is true of movies, of where I have traveled and when, of the events of my Life, places I have been, etc. Things I read, see, experience, become part of the woven fabric of my Life, and in their own mysterious way they shape and form me, my thinking, my ideas, my identity. If there is anything I think I am going to want later, I have to make a note of it, and file it somewhere I can find it. Hence the rather large file on my computer called “Resources” – which, lest I lose my identity, I have backed up on three different places!
Being prompted by the readings for today, I did recall and did find these startling lines, which I suspect many of you have heard, from Annie Dillard’s book of 1988, Teaching a Stone to Talk”. She says:
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, making up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offence, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
“The waking God may draw us out to where we can never return”. For me, this “never returning” is a given of the life of the Gospel. It is what is so terrifying about Baptism – and why I think that the sacrament of Baptism, in our era, should only be administered to adults - adults who have stared the Way of the Cross in the face. Taking the Baptismal vows, which we have degraded into a cute naming ceremony, is meant to stand us on the edge of the precipice called “Never Return”. Baptism reminds me of the poetic words of Peter McWilliams, who died at age 51 when the federal government took away the medical marijuana that would have prolonged his life, and who helped fund the Wisconsin Journey for Justice:
Come to the edge, he said.
They said, We are afraid.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came.
He pushed them…
And they flew.
Like birds, we can’t fly until we have been prepared for fledging. But we are meant to fly! This is what worship and sacrament and prayer and Christian fellowship is for. Worship and sacrament nurture the Inner Christ. It should start very early, as our present Prayer Book encourages. Never will I forget a little boy in one of my congregations who had been receiving the Eucharist since age two, when he came to the rail, looked up at me, and said loudy, “Me too!”. When he was about four, I said the invitation to Communion. He lept up from his pew, raced ahead of everyone down the aisle and up the steps to the altar, came round to me, and held out his open palms. I laughed and said to him, “You seem excited!” “Yes”, he said, “because Jesus is coming to be with me!” It is when we discover that Inner Christ living within us that we will heed the call of the Spirit and, like those fearless birds, leap. As Harriet Beecher Stowe said: “All serious daring starts from within.”
“Never Returning”, nor looking back, is what discipleship - being a student of the Gospel and of Jesus - is about. It is what “dying to self” is about. It is what “dying with Jesus that we may be raised with Him” is about. Being “encouraged out” to a place from which we can never return – nor would want to return– is exactly what we have prayed for today in our gathering Collect. We have asked God to help us keep all of God’s commandments by doing only one thing: loving God with our whole heart and each other with pure affection. If we leap from that precipice, there is nothing else to do but soar.
Learning Love. This is what is at the heart of Life, and, I am convinced, at the heart of God, of Jesus, of His Gospel, and of the Scriptures He so challengingly interpreted to His neighbours in the synagogue. Jesus could not have made it plainer than by giving the New Commandment to “love one another as I have loved you”. In my over 40 years of ministry, it is that question that has been writ large in front of me: What does it mean, to love? We Christians believe that we can find the heart of the answer in Jesus, whom we have invited to reign in our Inner Country. I still believe that Learning Love, day by day, over and over again, is the core enterprise of Life, certainly of being a Christian.
It is not my intention this morning to chide us all for our failures in Love. I assume that all of us are doing the best we can. Life is a real challenge! We are - at times more, at times less - deeply aware of the daily failures and successes. We know we need the understanding and compassion of God, of friends, of our fellow journeyers in the Faith. We know our need of that Mystery we call “Grace”, and of Forgiveness. At age 63, forty-four years on from my Confirmation at age nineteen, I am embarrassed at my failures to love my friends, and at my selfishnesses. I am dismayed at the anger that can rise in my heart for those I identify as “enemies”, at those with whom I disagree, especially in the areas of sexuality, Biblical interpretation, and militarism. I am grateful that my grappling with the Gospel, and my priestly vocation, and some loving fellow journeyers, have kept me from “acting out” - most of the time, anyway! - in unloving ways.
The season of Pentecost (now rather boringly called “Ordinary Time”) is a long season of asking the question, “What does it mean, To Love?”, in the context of the Mysteries we have contemplated since the Feast of the Incarnation through the Gift of the Spirit. It is my desire today to encourage us in this enterprise of Love. Think of those disciples that Jesus, in the passage from Mark today, sends out to confront evil and to heal, rookies though they are. He tells them, "Don't think you need a lot of extra equipment for this. You are the equipment ….. Keep it simple.” Off they go. And we are told, “They preached with joyful urgency that life can be radically different; right and left they sent the demons packing; they brought wellness to the sick, anointing their bodies, healing their spirits ….. They [had] nothing but themselves and the message of God’s Love.”
Simply to love is all we are asked to do, and we are assured that it will make all the difference in the World. Paul, talking about his limitations – handicaps, weaknesses, abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks –urges us just to “let Christ take over” – by which he means, do our best to love God, our selves, and each other as God loves us.
I still believe that we are made to love – made in the image of the God of Love. All of us here will have had a sense of or seen the power and the possibilities of Love. Of those possibilities Soren Kierkegaard once wrote: “It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it….. If God does not wish it then let him prevent it, but one must not hinder oneself. Trusting to God I have dared, but I was not successful; in that is to be found peace, calm and confidence in God. [If] I have not dared: that is a woeful thought …...”
In our own small circles of families and friends, in our own country celebrating the great ideals of equality and Justice set forth in the Declaration of Independence, in our deeply troubled, anxious, fearful World, God has asked us to live the power of Divine Love. Today’s theme is the courage to set forth on the unknown path. Christ says that Love will “send the demons packing”. What is our answer to Annie Dillard’s suspicion? Do we indeed believe a word of what we say about the power of Love?
Come to the edge, he said.
They said, We are afraid.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came.
He pushed them…
And they flew.
We have been gently pushed to the precipice of a radical Love that will define our lives. Shall we fly?
St. Benedict’s, Los Osos (The Rev) Brian McHugh +
[Ezekiel 2:1-5; Psalm 123; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13]
I love the way Annie Dillard writes. I think I have read every book she has written, including Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm– though I will tell you that I have always been someone who can never remember the titles of books or what was in them! The same is true of movies, of where I have traveled and when, of the events of my Life, places I have been, etc. Things I read, see, experience, become part of the woven fabric of my Life, and in their own mysterious way they shape and form me, my thinking, my ideas, my identity. If there is anything I think I am going to want later, I have to make a note of it, and file it somewhere I can find it. Hence the rather large file on my computer called “Resources” – which, lest I lose my identity, I have backed up on three different places!
Being prompted by the readings for today, I did recall and did find these startling lines, which I suspect many of you have heard, from Annie Dillard’s book of 1988, Teaching a Stone to Talk”. She says:
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, making up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offence, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
“The waking God may draw us out to where we can never return”. For me, this “never returning” is a given of the life of the Gospel. It is what is so terrifying about Baptism – and why I think that the sacrament of Baptism, in our era, should only be administered to adults - adults who have stared the Way of the Cross in the face. Taking the Baptismal vows, which we have degraded into a cute naming ceremony, is meant to stand us on the edge of the precipice called “Never Return”. Baptism reminds me of the poetic words of Peter McWilliams, who died at age 51 when the federal government took away the medical marijuana that would have prolonged his life, and who helped fund the Wisconsin Journey for Justice:
Come to the edge, he said.
They said, We are afraid.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came.
He pushed them…
And they flew.
Like birds, we can’t fly until we have been prepared for fledging. But we are meant to fly! This is what worship and sacrament and prayer and Christian fellowship is for. Worship and sacrament nurture the Inner Christ. It should start very early, as our present Prayer Book encourages. Never will I forget a little boy in one of my congregations who had been receiving the Eucharist since age two, when he came to the rail, looked up at me, and said loudy, “Me too!”. When he was about four, I said the invitation to Communion. He lept up from his pew, raced ahead of everyone down the aisle and up the steps to the altar, came round to me, and held out his open palms. I laughed and said to him, “You seem excited!” “Yes”, he said, “because Jesus is coming to be with me!” It is when we discover that Inner Christ living within us that we will heed the call of the Spirit and, like those fearless birds, leap. As Harriet Beecher Stowe said: “All serious daring starts from within.”
“Never Returning”, nor looking back, is what discipleship - being a student of the Gospel and of Jesus - is about. It is what “dying to self” is about. It is what “dying with Jesus that we may be raised with Him” is about. Being “encouraged out” to a place from which we can never return – nor would want to return– is exactly what we have prayed for today in our gathering Collect. We have asked God to help us keep all of God’s commandments by doing only one thing: loving God with our whole heart and each other with pure affection. If we leap from that precipice, there is nothing else to do but soar.
Learning Love. This is what is at the heart of Life, and, I am convinced, at the heart of God, of Jesus, of His Gospel, and of the Scriptures He so challengingly interpreted to His neighbours in the synagogue. Jesus could not have made it plainer than by giving the New Commandment to “love one another as I have loved you”. In my over 40 years of ministry, it is that question that has been writ large in front of me: What does it mean, to love? We Christians believe that we can find the heart of the answer in Jesus, whom we have invited to reign in our Inner Country. I still believe that Learning Love, day by day, over and over again, is the core enterprise of Life, certainly of being a Christian.
It is not my intention this morning to chide us all for our failures in Love. I assume that all of us are doing the best we can. Life is a real challenge! We are - at times more, at times less - deeply aware of the daily failures and successes. We know we need the understanding and compassion of God, of friends, of our fellow journeyers in the Faith. We know our need of that Mystery we call “Grace”, and of Forgiveness. At age 63, forty-four years on from my Confirmation at age nineteen, I am embarrassed at my failures to love my friends, and at my selfishnesses. I am dismayed at the anger that can rise in my heart for those I identify as “enemies”, at those with whom I disagree, especially in the areas of sexuality, Biblical interpretation, and militarism. I am grateful that my grappling with the Gospel, and my priestly vocation, and some loving fellow journeyers, have kept me from “acting out” - most of the time, anyway! - in unloving ways.
The season of Pentecost (now rather boringly called “Ordinary Time”) is a long season of asking the question, “What does it mean, To Love?”, in the context of the Mysteries we have contemplated since the Feast of the Incarnation through the Gift of the Spirit. It is my desire today to encourage us in this enterprise of Love. Think of those disciples that Jesus, in the passage from Mark today, sends out to confront evil and to heal, rookies though they are. He tells them, "Don't think you need a lot of extra equipment for this. You are the equipment ….. Keep it simple.” Off they go. And we are told, “They preached with joyful urgency that life can be radically different; right and left they sent the demons packing; they brought wellness to the sick, anointing their bodies, healing their spirits ….. They [had] nothing but themselves and the message of God’s Love.”
Simply to love is all we are asked to do, and we are assured that it will make all the difference in the World. Paul, talking about his limitations – handicaps, weaknesses, abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks –urges us just to “let Christ take over” – by which he means, do our best to love God, our selves, and each other as God loves us.
I still believe that we are made to love – made in the image of the God of Love. All of us here will have had a sense of or seen the power and the possibilities of Love. Of those possibilities Soren Kierkegaard once wrote: “It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it….. If God does not wish it then let him prevent it, but one must not hinder oneself. Trusting to God I have dared, but I was not successful; in that is to be found peace, calm and confidence in God. [If] I have not dared: that is a woeful thought …...”
In our own small circles of families and friends, in our own country celebrating the great ideals of equality and Justice set forth in the Declaration of Independence, in our deeply troubled, anxious, fearful World, God has asked us to live the power of Divine Love. Today’s theme is the courage to set forth on the unknown path. Christ says that Love will “send the demons packing”. What is our answer to Annie Dillard’s suspicion? Do we indeed believe a word of what we say about the power of Love?
Come to the edge, he said.
They said, We are afraid.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came.
He pushed them…
And they flew.
We have been gently pushed to the precipice of a radical Love that will define our lives. Shall we fly?
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Sermon for: Easter VII B_RCL _ May 24, 2009_Ascension Sunday
St. Benedict’s, Los Osos (The Rev) Brian McHugh +
Totally unbeknownst to her – at least I think it was; one never knows! – my maternal grandmother Margaret Harker Angell made it possible for me to receive one of the most important gifts of my childhood. Her husband, my grandfather Joe, died in 1939 at age forty-five of heart failure apparently brought on by the effects of being gassed in WWI. My grandmother was an unusual woman. She did two things with some insurance money. She bought a big black Packard – though she did not ever drive. And she bought a little tiny cottage on a beautiful lake in the Laurentian Mountains about 80 miles north of Montreal in a village called Montfort – then a very long way on often torturous roads. There, for the next almost thirty years, she had herself taken in the Spring of every year, and brought back to her flat in Verdun before the snow flew or her wood and coal stove couldn’t keep out the cold. At four weeks old, in 1946, I was taken to Montfort. I spent every summer there until I was sixteen. It is the only physical place I have missed or longed for.
The gift? Well, since I was not a “jock” and temperamentally “out of synch” with most of the other boys, I spent a lot of time alone, quite happily. I wandered the forests for endless hours, and swam or boated on several little lakes, most often with no sounds other than Nature. Lying naked on large rocks heated by the sun, I came to know intuitively that I was integrally woven into the World around me; that It and I were One. And if there was an Energy behind it all, that I was One with It. Later, I would come to know the word “God” to name this Energy – though from that time until now I have waged a long struggle to know the true nature of “God”, and I am not finished yet. But never since those childhood says have I doubted my experience of Oneness with all Being, and with It’s Source, whatever that may be.
The Christian Story can be seen, in one sense, as my story writ large, or my story as the Christian Story writ small . And I think that, either positively or negatively, it is probably true of us all. I liked the portrayal of God the Father as a Black woman in the book “The Shack”; it reminded me of my grandmother and the part she played for me in the search for who I am. In some way, consciously or unconsciously, all human beings are seeking to experience Unity or Oneness with Creation and with the creative Mystery at It’s heart. The Biblical story can be seen as the tragedy of the breaking of that Oneness, and of the estrangement, struggle and suffering that plagues that brokenness. The Gospel Story of Jesus can be seen as a story of the journey towards the healing of the Brokenness. In great simplicity, telling of the birth of God in human form, of His rekindling in His followers their sense of the divine at their very core, of the “Man/God” whose power triumphs over death, it reweaves the shredded threads of human existence back into the great tapestry of Being so that we can see the whole and true picture. The message is clear: in union with “God”, Life is eternal and we are forever woven into that Eternity. By the end of the Story, we are all metaphorically lying on the sun-warmed rocks, conscious of our Unity with all Life and with “God”.
The Church celebrated the next to last step in the basic Story last Thursday: Jesus’ ascension into Heaven. A tough moment for His followers. Having “lost” Jesus to the Cross, and having regained Him and experienced His Life and Love with them again, He tells them He must leave. Why? Because the Unity for which He so earnestly prays in John’s Gospel can only be accomplished in one way: “God” must be woven into and live in each human heart and spirit, for this is the true place where the Divine Spirit and humans are One.
Suzanne Guthrie says, in writing of Ascensiontide, “The Church gives us ten days to practice dwelling in the ambiguous time of the Resurrected Christ vanished, and the Holy Spirit not yet come. In the mystical life, Ascensiontide is the Dark Night of the Soul, the anguished sense of abandonment after a solid period of union. The soul can not cling even to this union. The last threads of attachment must be broken in the darkness of unknowing before the completion of the Christian transformation – being “sent” into the world as bearers of Love. But the mystics testify to a stunning paradox. The abandonment IS the union. It is in the Dark Night of the Soul that Lover meets Beloved and transforming union takes place”. (1) We remember the words of the Psalmist: “Darkness is not dark to You; the Night is as bright as the Day”.
The sixteenth century mystic John of the Cross, in his poem “The Dark Night” beautifully describes the journey that we metaphorically must take in this Ascensiontide:
On that glad night,
In secret, for no one saw me,
Nor did I look at anything,
With no other light or guide
Than the one that burned in my heart;
This guided me
More surely than the light of noon
To where He waited for me
-Him I knew so well-
In a place where no one else appeared.
O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
The Lover with His beloved,
……
Upon my flowering breast
Which I kept wholly for Him alone,
There He lay sleeping,
And I caressing Him
There in a breeze from the fanning cedars.
………
I abandoned and forgot myself,
Laying my face on my Beloved;
All things ceased; I went out from myself,
Leaving my cares
Forgotten among the lilies. (2)
In the liturgical ten days between Ascension and Pentecost, we follow the seemingly dark path that leads from the sense of being “abandoned” by God to the awareness of our unity with the Divine which cannot be broken - only forgotten. Having been cast out of Eden and an intimate relationship with God, we discover that the place where we walk with God in the cool of the evening is as near to us as our breath. The prayer of the Christ has been affirmed: we are one with God as He is with the Father. And this must translate into the profound sense of our unity with each other. Next Sunday, on the Feast of Pentecost, we will be breathed upon by the wind of the Holy Spirit, in confirmation of the common Life we share with people of every language and nation. Then, sustained by Word and Sacrament and holy Fellowship, so that we might not forget who we are, and leaving our “cares / Forgotten among the lilies”, we take up the mission the Christ gives us – to be bearers of Divine Compassion to each other and to the World.
Alleluia! Not as orphans are we left in sorrow now / Alleluia! He is near us, faith believes, nor questions how: / though the cloud from sight received him, when the forty days were o’er / shall our hearts forget his promise, “I am with you evermore”. (3)
1. Suzanne Guthrie, on her website “At the Edge of the Enclosure”, for Easter VII
2. John of the Cross, The Dark Night, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh OCD & Otilio Rodriguez OCD
3. William Chatterton Dix (1837-1898) Second verse of Alleluia! Sing to Jesus (#460-461, 1982 Hymnal)
Monday, May 4, 2009
Sermon for: Easter IV B_RCL _ May 3, 2009_”Good Shepherd”
St. Benedict’s, Los Osos (The Rev) Brian McHugh +
Recently, we here at St. Benedict’s have had the fun opportunity to hobnob with a flock of goats. That’s probably the closest most of us get to sheep. But in general, we don’t have much if any experience of the culture of shepherds. “Good Shepherd Sunday” usually produces a lot of reflection about sheep. I would like us to focus on the shepherd today. Here is one reflection on the shepherd role:
The symbolism of the shepherd … contains the sense of a wisdom which is both intuitive and the fruit of experience. The shepherd symbolizes watchfulness. His duties entail the constant exercise of vigilance. He is awake and watching. Hence he is compared with the Sun, which sees all things, and with the king. Furthermore, since … the shepherd symbolizes the nomad, he is rootless and stands for the soul which is not a native of this Earth but always a stranger and pilgrim. In so far as his flock is concerned, the shepherd acts as a guardian and to this is linked knowledge, since he knows what pasture suits the animals in his charge. He observes the Heavens, the Sun, the Moon and the stars and can predict the weather. He distinguishes sounds and hears the noise of approaching wolves, as well as the bleating of lost sheep. Through the different duties which he performs, he is regarded as a wise man whose activities are the result of contemplation and inner vision. In other words, the Shepherd is a guide to be trusted.
Why essentially do we gather as “church”? Why are we striving to follow Jesus and His Gospel? I’m a life-long seeker after knowledge, and so I’m always asking and re-asking these questions, and will continue I’m sure until the day I die to this Life. I’m well aware that there are no simplistic answers to these questions. Today, the question is, Who is this “Good Shepherd”, and to what sheepfold are we being shepherded? What Voice are we being asked to hear and trust?
Bruno Barnhart, in his book “The Good Wine: Reading John from the Centre”, writes these words:
Jesus, the new Adam, is at once shepherd and Word, “Name” of God, who is sent to men and women, to call them by name – by their true names in the creative Word, which are godly names, generative of divine being. Those who hear the Word of God are gathered into it and become “gods.” Those who receive the Son of God are gathered in to him and become children of God (John 1:12).
Did you hear those words? “Generative of divine beings”. Now that is a startling phrase! The Shepherd is the Divine Word that has been sent to us. The Divine Shepherd dwells within every person. The Divine Shepherd is the One Who knows who we really are, are meant to be. The sheepfold we are being led to is God, where we become “gods”, or “children of God”. Or, as Barnhart puts it: “The Father and I are one” (10:30). The sheepfold into which Jesus leads those who hear his voice, who hear him speak their new names – whether they have been Jews or Gentiles – is ultimately this One, this I Am, which is his own being. The ultimate goal of the Christian - and as a symbol, of all persons - is, by following what is called in mystical theology the “Unitive Way”, to become One with the Divine. To become not “God” as in taking God’s place, but of God in our humanity. We Christians hold a very high doctrine of human nature - and it is Scripturally based!
Christianity is of course not the only religion or path that seeks unity with God. Most do. It has been said that the primary concern of most religions is Incarnation - the recognition of the divine in Creation. I recently finished a book called “Hidden Journey”, by Andrew Harvey, who was the youngest man, at age 25, to be elected a Fellow of an Oxford college. His description of the search for union with God by fully offering himself as a disciple to a Hindu woman who was recognized as an avatar of the goddess known as the Great Mother, was intriguing. While the Eastern context is “strange” to Westerners, I recognized in it many principles of the mystical life that are taught in Christian and Jewish mysticism. Primary is the recognition that we are of the Divine; that we are not, as our Ego tells us, separate from God, or each other. In reflecting on Jesus’ hearers rushing forward to stone Jesus to death, Barnhart comments that “what they rush forward to destroy is the divine-human life which is their own destiny”. Yes, we are often our own worst enemies when it comes to fulfilling our destiny as human-divine beings – and this is why finding and following a Good Shepherd whose “voice” we can trust is critical.
What does that Voice sound like, and what makes Jesus an authentic “Good” Shepherd? A former Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, once translated the meaning of “Good” as “The Beautiful One”. He had this to say about the word “Good”, as applied to Jesus and, by association, with us:
….. the word for “good” here is one that represents, not the moral rectitude of goodness, nor its austerity, but its attractiveness. We must not forget that our vocation is so to practice virtue that [people] are won to it; it is possible to be morally upright repulsively! [What a superb phrase – and true!] In the Lord Jesus we see “the beauty of holiness” (Psalm xcvi,9). He was “good” in such manner as to draw all men to Himself (xii,32). And this beauty of goodness is supremely seen in the act by which He would so draw them, wherein He lays down his life for the sheep.
Yes: the words and deeds of unconditional Compassion and Love - these are the “voice” that will or should resonate with the divine nature that is at our core as human beings, and with the urgency of our Journey through this Earthly Life.
We have a tendency to make the picture of Jesus carrying the little lamb all cute and cuddly and benign. Perhaps we should rethink our iconography about this. “Wandering sheep” – that is, we - are often at great danger, and the shepherd has to be tough, wise, experienced, vigilant, sensitive to the waywardness of our “soul”. In other words, if we really want to achieve Oneness with God, really want to become fully human and fully our Selves, we must not listen to the voice of false shepherds about whom the prophet Ezekial warned the people of Israel - and there are plenty around with seductive voices willing to take on the job!
One of the primary reasons we gather as “church” is to learn the character and nature of a true Good Shepherd. And, as well, to learn how to be a Good Sheep. Ultimately, the Sheep and the Shepherd are One – that is the Mystery we are seeking to inhabit. It is our destiny to become, by our union with God, “attractive”, living our moral virtue so that others are drawn by our acts of kindness and justice, not repulsed by moral aloofness or arrogance. We see a lot of the latter these days. I am heartened by the result of recent polls which show that Americans in greater numbers are rejecting the voices of false shepherds.
Every human person is born with the Good Shepherd indwelling in us. The Christ we know as Christians is trustworthy. Our work is to distill out the authentic Shepherd from the false shepherds that others have insinuated into what we now call the Scriptures.
One hymn that will be sung at my funeral (#645, Hymnal 1980 – The King of Love my Shepherd Is) - in hopes that I have been faithful - makes clear what the central character of the faithful Good Shepherd is; it is a paraphrase of the 23rd Psalm appointed for today’s Liturgy. Listen to the Psalm again, in The Message version:
God, my shepherd! I don't need a thing. You have bedded me down in lush meadows,
you find me quiet pools to drink from.
True to your word, you let me catch my breath and send me in the right direction.
Even when the way goes through Death Valley, I'm not afraid when you walk at my side.
Your trusty shepherd's crook makes me feel secure.
You serve me a six-course dinner right in front of my enemies. You revive my drooping head;
my cup brims with blessing.
Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life. I'm back home in the house of God
for the rest of my life.
You and I have been “attracted” by the true Goodness of the Christ in us. May our Life Together at St. Benedict’s deepen that Divine Presence in us. May our own lives, reflecting Jesus’ giving up His life in love for the sheep, “attract” others to authentic humanity, and to Oneness with the God of Love.
St. Benedict’s, Los Osos (The Rev) Brian McHugh +
Recently, we here at St. Benedict’s have had the fun opportunity to hobnob with a flock of goats. That’s probably the closest most of us get to sheep. But in general, we don’t have much if any experience of the culture of shepherds. “Good Shepherd Sunday” usually produces a lot of reflection about sheep. I would like us to focus on the shepherd today. Here is one reflection on the shepherd role:
The symbolism of the shepherd … contains the sense of a wisdom which is both intuitive and the fruit of experience. The shepherd symbolizes watchfulness. His duties entail the constant exercise of vigilance. He is awake and watching. Hence he is compared with the Sun, which sees all things, and with the king. Furthermore, since … the shepherd symbolizes the nomad, he is rootless and stands for the soul which is not a native of this Earth but always a stranger and pilgrim. In so far as his flock is concerned, the shepherd acts as a guardian and to this is linked knowledge, since he knows what pasture suits the animals in his charge. He observes the Heavens, the Sun, the Moon and the stars and can predict the weather. He distinguishes sounds and hears the noise of approaching wolves, as well as the bleating of lost sheep. Through the different duties which he performs, he is regarded as a wise man whose activities are the result of contemplation and inner vision. In other words, the Shepherd is a guide to be trusted.
Why essentially do we gather as “church”? Why are we striving to follow Jesus and His Gospel? I’m a life-long seeker after knowledge, and so I’m always asking and re-asking these questions, and will continue I’m sure until the day I die to this Life. I’m well aware that there are no simplistic answers to these questions. Today, the question is, Who is this “Good Shepherd”, and to what sheepfold are we being shepherded? What Voice are we being asked to hear and trust?
Bruno Barnhart, in his book “The Good Wine: Reading John from the Centre”, writes these words:
Jesus, the new Adam, is at once shepherd and Word, “Name” of God, who is sent to men and women, to call them by name – by their true names in the creative Word, which are godly names, generative of divine being. Those who hear the Word of God are gathered into it and become “gods.” Those who receive the Son of God are gathered in to him and become children of God (John 1:12).
Did you hear those words? “Generative of divine beings”. Now that is a startling phrase! The Shepherd is the Divine Word that has been sent to us. The Divine Shepherd dwells within every person. The Divine Shepherd is the One Who knows who we really are, are meant to be. The sheepfold we are being led to is God, where we become “gods”, or “children of God”. Or, as Barnhart puts it: “The Father and I are one” (10:30). The sheepfold into which Jesus leads those who hear his voice, who hear him speak their new names – whether they have been Jews or Gentiles – is ultimately this One, this I Am, which is his own being. The ultimate goal of the Christian - and as a symbol, of all persons - is, by following what is called in mystical theology the “Unitive Way”, to become One with the Divine. To become not “God” as in taking God’s place, but of God in our humanity. We Christians hold a very high doctrine of human nature - and it is Scripturally based!
Christianity is of course not the only religion or path that seeks unity with God. Most do. It has been said that the primary concern of most religions is Incarnation - the recognition of the divine in Creation. I recently finished a book called “Hidden Journey”, by Andrew Harvey, who was the youngest man, at age 25, to be elected a Fellow of an Oxford college. His description of the search for union with God by fully offering himself as a disciple to a Hindu woman who was recognized as an avatar of the goddess known as the Great Mother, was intriguing. While the Eastern context is “strange” to Westerners, I recognized in it many principles of the mystical life that are taught in Christian and Jewish mysticism. Primary is the recognition that we are of the Divine; that we are not, as our Ego tells us, separate from God, or each other. In reflecting on Jesus’ hearers rushing forward to stone Jesus to death, Barnhart comments that “what they rush forward to destroy is the divine-human life which is their own destiny”. Yes, we are often our own worst enemies when it comes to fulfilling our destiny as human-divine beings – and this is why finding and following a Good Shepherd whose “voice” we can trust is critical.
What does that Voice sound like, and what makes Jesus an authentic “Good” Shepherd? A former Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, once translated the meaning of “Good” as “The Beautiful One”. He had this to say about the word “Good”, as applied to Jesus and, by association, with us:
….. the word for “good” here is one that represents, not the moral rectitude of goodness, nor its austerity, but its attractiveness. We must not forget that our vocation is so to practice virtue that [people] are won to it; it is possible to be morally upright repulsively! [What a superb phrase – and true!] In the Lord Jesus we see “the beauty of holiness” (Psalm xcvi,9). He was “good” in such manner as to draw all men to Himself (xii,32). And this beauty of goodness is supremely seen in the act by which He would so draw them, wherein He lays down his life for the sheep.
Yes: the words and deeds of unconditional Compassion and Love - these are the “voice” that will or should resonate with the divine nature that is at our core as human beings, and with the urgency of our Journey through this Earthly Life.
We have a tendency to make the picture of Jesus carrying the little lamb all cute and cuddly and benign. Perhaps we should rethink our iconography about this. “Wandering sheep” – that is, we - are often at great danger, and the shepherd has to be tough, wise, experienced, vigilant, sensitive to the waywardness of our “soul”. In other words, if we really want to achieve Oneness with God, really want to become fully human and fully our Selves, we must not listen to the voice of false shepherds about whom the prophet Ezekial warned the people of Israel - and there are plenty around with seductive voices willing to take on the job!
One of the primary reasons we gather as “church” is to learn the character and nature of a true Good Shepherd. And, as well, to learn how to be a Good Sheep. Ultimately, the Sheep and the Shepherd are One – that is the Mystery we are seeking to inhabit. It is our destiny to become, by our union with God, “attractive”, living our moral virtue so that others are drawn by our acts of kindness and justice, not repulsed by moral aloofness or arrogance. We see a lot of the latter these days. I am heartened by the result of recent polls which show that Americans in greater numbers are rejecting the voices of false shepherds.
Every human person is born with the Good Shepherd indwelling in us. The Christ we know as Christians is trustworthy. Our work is to distill out the authentic Shepherd from the false shepherds that others have insinuated into what we now call the Scriptures.
One hymn that will be sung at my funeral (#645, Hymnal 1980 – The King of Love my Shepherd Is) - in hopes that I have been faithful - makes clear what the central character of the faithful Good Shepherd is; it is a paraphrase of the 23rd Psalm appointed for today’s Liturgy. Listen to the Psalm again, in The Message version:
God, my shepherd! I don't need a thing. You have bedded me down in lush meadows,
you find me quiet pools to drink from.
True to your word, you let me catch my breath and send me in the right direction.
Even when the way goes through Death Valley, I'm not afraid when you walk at my side.
Your trusty shepherd's crook makes me feel secure.
You serve me a six-course dinner right in front of my enemies. You revive my drooping head;
my cup brims with blessing.
Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life. I'm back home in the house of God
for the rest of my life.
You and I have been “attracted” by the true Goodness of the Christ in us. May our Life Together at St. Benedict’s deepen that Divine Presence in us. May our own lives, reflecting Jesus’ giving up His life in love for the sheep, “attract” others to authentic humanity, and to Oneness with the God of Love.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Sermon for: Good Friday B_RCL _ April 10, 2009
St. Benedict’s, Los Osos (The Rev) Brian McHugh +
The only reward for emulating the Jesus of Mark's gospel is to have done it. (1)
A priest colleague and friend of mine wrote these words recently in his Blog. There is an obscene explanation that has lurked for millennia amongst the various “explanations” of why Jesus died on the Cross. It says that “God” deliberately sent the Divine Logos/Word, in the guise of his “son”, to suffer horribly and to die on the cross, so that human beings, unable to extract themselves from the consequences of sin, would be “saved” by the substitution of Jesus as the only “worthy” required sacrifice. “Obscene”, perhaps blasphemous, are the only words I can think of adequately to describe this lie. It completely ignores the moral integrity of Jesus’ Life, freedom, and work as a person, let alone as “God’s Son”. It implies that whatever Jesus did or said had nothing to do with what was already a predetermined outcome. And it implies that “salvation”, meaning “wholeness” and health as a human being is a “done deal” and has nothing to do with our response. This is false.
To “venerate the Cross” under such circumstances would, I think, indeed mean that we were venerating an “instrument of torture” - and an immoral “God”. Further, it makes no sense when held up against the words of the apostle Paul, who said: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”; and, “We must work out our own salvation in fear and trembling.”
We must ask the question, especially on Good Friday, “What did Jesus do that He ended up on the Cross?” And secondly, “What does it mean, for Jesus, and for us?” On this Good Friday, let’s take a look at His Life for a few moments.
Jesus was an implacable critic of the “organized religion” of His time – the religion based on the Pentateuch which His people had followed for over 1500 years. And he was an implacable critic of those whom He saw perverting the essential message of that religion for their own power and prestige. He regularly denounced them and their interpretations, and taught His disciples to follow His “Good News”. He spoke out, following in the footsteps of the great prophets and of great kings like Josiah, against “harmful religious tradition and intolerance”. In His zeal for His “Father’s House”, he drove the debasers out of the Temple. One of the Gospels is clear that this was the act that set in motion a plan to kill Him.
When Jesus spoke of “taking up our cross and following Him”, He meant us to join with Him, in our own time and place, in this determination to rid our religion of traits that are contrary to God’s desire. I could list those things that I would put on that list, but I will let you build your own. And then we must ask what we will do to join Him in carrying that cross, out of Love for God and for God’s people. We must start with our own Episcopal religious tradition; what in it is contrary to the will of the God of Love? And we must be respectfully critical of the great and powerful religions of the World which accuse others of being “Worldly” but which themselves oppress others in their search for Worldly power under the guise of “spiritual concern”.
Jesus could not avoid confronting “the principalities and powers of imperious politics, hierarchical economics and malign social policy”, either Jewish or Roman. The behaviour of both the Roman and Jewish people in power was contrary in so many ways to His understanding of the politics of God’s Kingdom. We get His point clearly and gently but firmly in His encounter with Nicodemus, in His insistence that we must be “born again” in and by that same Spirit through which He was adopted a Son of God His baptism.
Christians cannot be other than fearless confronters of “the principalities and powers of imperious politics”, whether coming from political leaders or the economically powerful of our World. I don’t have to rehearse for you all those things which are contrary to the health and welfare of the peoples of the World perpetrated by our rich and powerful, given the situation we are in these days. Whether it is the use of torture, or the militarism, or the failure of many administrations to provide healthcare for all Americans, or the continuing tendency of the present administration to curry favour with bankers and arms dealers to the detriment of regular hard-working folk, or the dictators of the world feathering their own nests while their people starve or die in armed conflict, Jesus asks us to “take up our cross” and follow Him in the way of loving confrontation of these policies.
Jesus was a constant foe of anything which “robs individual human beings of their innate dignity”, whether it be those oppressed and denied their humanity by the powerful, or the oppressing powerful themselves who are demeaned and twisted in soul by their lust. In Jesus’ time, this included women, servants, the downtrodden poor, Samaritans, Pharisees. Today He would stand with Gayfolk, women still, and all the men whose humanity is eviscerated by a false and oppressive definition of “masculinity”, and certainly the poor and destitute whose numbers continue to grow in our World while the numbers of the obscenely rich continues to grow as well.
Going willingly to death in order to witness unflinchingly to the unconditional compassion of His Heavenly Father and ending up being crucified is what makes the cross not an instrument of shame and suffering but, as Paul said, an instrument not of Death but of Life – and a worthy symbol for the Christian Church. It is the sign that out of Love alone God brings Life.
I quoted my friend Harry Cook at the beginning:
The only reward for emulating the Jesus of Mark's gospel is to have done it.
We venerate the instrument by which the Christ gave all in Love. Most of us will not be killed for the Kingdom of God. But, every Good Friday, the Cross calls out to each of us to follow Jesus in the way that leads not to death, but to eternal wholeness and health - perhaps with fear and trembling, but also with sure and certain hope that we are on the sacred path of what we call “salvation”.
St. Benedict’s, Los Osos (The Rev) Brian McHugh +
The only reward for emulating the Jesus of Mark's gospel is to have done it. (1)
A priest colleague and friend of mine wrote these words recently in his Blog. There is an obscene explanation that has lurked for millennia amongst the various “explanations” of why Jesus died on the Cross. It says that “God” deliberately sent the Divine Logos/Word, in the guise of his “son”, to suffer horribly and to die on the cross, so that human beings, unable to extract themselves from the consequences of sin, would be “saved” by the substitution of Jesus as the only “worthy” required sacrifice. “Obscene”, perhaps blasphemous, are the only words I can think of adequately to describe this lie. It completely ignores the moral integrity of Jesus’ Life, freedom, and work as a person, let alone as “God’s Son”. It implies that whatever Jesus did or said had nothing to do with what was already a predetermined outcome. And it implies that “salvation”, meaning “wholeness” and health as a human being is a “done deal” and has nothing to do with our response. This is false.
To “venerate the Cross” under such circumstances would, I think, indeed mean that we were venerating an “instrument of torture” - and an immoral “God”. Further, it makes no sense when held up against the words of the apostle Paul, who said: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”; and, “We must work out our own salvation in fear and trembling.”
We must ask the question, especially on Good Friday, “What did Jesus do that He ended up on the Cross?” And secondly, “What does it mean, for Jesus, and for us?” On this Good Friday, let’s take a look at His Life for a few moments.
Jesus was an implacable critic of the “organized religion” of His time – the religion based on the Pentateuch which His people had followed for over 1500 years. And he was an implacable critic of those whom He saw perverting the essential message of that religion for their own power and prestige. He regularly denounced them and their interpretations, and taught His disciples to follow His “Good News”. He spoke out, following in the footsteps of the great prophets and of great kings like Josiah, against “harmful religious tradition and intolerance”. In His zeal for His “Father’s House”, he drove the debasers out of the Temple. One of the Gospels is clear that this was the act that set in motion a plan to kill Him.
When Jesus spoke of “taking up our cross and following Him”, He meant us to join with Him, in our own time and place, in this determination to rid our religion of traits that are contrary to God’s desire. I could list those things that I would put on that list, but I will let you build your own. And then we must ask what we will do to join Him in carrying that cross, out of Love for God and for God’s people. We must start with our own Episcopal religious tradition; what in it is contrary to the will of the God of Love? And we must be respectfully critical of the great and powerful religions of the World which accuse others of being “Worldly” but which themselves oppress others in their search for Worldly power under the guise of “spiritual concern”.
Jesus could not avoid confronting “the principalities and powers of imperious politics, hierarchical economics and malign social policy”, either Jewish or Roman. The behaviour of both the Roman and Jewish people in power was contrary in so many ways to His understanding of the politics of God’s Kingdom. We get His point clearly and gently but firmly in His encounter with Nicodemus, in His insistence that we must be “born again” in and by that same Spirit through which He was adopted a Son of God His baptism.
Christians cannot be other than fearless confronters of “the principalities and powers of imperious politics”, whether coming from political leaders or the economically powerful of our World. I don’t have to rehearse for you all those things which are contrary to the health and welfare of the peoples of the World perpetrated by our rich and powerful, given the situation we are in these days. Whether it is the use of torture, or the militarism, or the failure of many administrations to provide healthcare for all Americans, or the continuing tendency of the present administration to curry favour with bankers and arms dealers to the detriment of regular hard-working folk, or the dictators of the world feathering their own nests while their people starve or die in armed conflict, Jesus asks us to “take up our cross” and follow Him in the way of loving confrontation of these policies.
Jesus was a constant foe of anything which “robs individual human beings of their innate dignity”, whether it be those oppressed and denied their humanity by the powerful, or the oppressing powerful themselves who are demeaned and twisted in soul by their lust. In Jesus’ time, this included women, servants, the downtrodden poor, Samaritans, Pharisees. Today He would stand with Gayfolk, women still, and all the men whose humanity is eviscerated by a false and oppressive definition of “masculinity”, and certainly the poor and destitute whose numbers continue to grow in our World while the numbers of the obscenely rich continues to grow as well.
Going willingly to death in order to witness unflinchingly to the unconditional compassion of His Heavenly Father and ending up being crucified is what makes the cross not an instrument of shame and suffering but, as Paul said, an instrument not of Death but of Life – and a worthy symbol for the Christian Church. It is the sign that out of Love alone God brings Life.
I quoted my friend Harry Cook at the beginning:
The only reward for emulating the Jesus of Mark's gospel is to have done it.
We venerate the instrument by which the Christ gave all in Love. Most of us will not be killed for the Kingdom of God. But, every Good Friday, the Cross calls out to each of us to follow Jesus in the way that leads not to death, but to eternal wholeness and health - perhaps with fear and trembling, but also with sure and certain hope that we are on the sacred path of what we call “salvation”.
(1)
The Rev. Harry Cook, Holy Week = Homiletic Bonanza, March 30, 2009. I am specifically using some of his thoughts in this sermon.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Sermon for: Lent I B_RCL _ March 1, 2009
St. Benedict’s, Los Osos
(The Rev) Brian McHugh +
It is Lent again. A colleague of mine recently wrote , "During Lent this year the Hebrew scriptures take us week by week through covenants in our holy history. This Sunday the church offers us consideration of the rainbow-sign of the covenant with Noah. It is worth taking time with patristic and medieval typologies of the Ark itself: the Church is the Ark. Lent is the Ark. Wisdom is the Ark. Even our heart is the Ark – a place of safety and yet a place of transformation. Enclosed and tossed upon turbulent seas of sin and chaos and culture, these 40 days of Lent give us a time of growing, transformation, renewing our lives from the core of our hearts. Thus, we emerge from Lent and Holy Week to face again the uncreated Light of the Resurrection, the shadow of which we observed at the Transfiguration. But we have to prepare rigorously to meet this new Light. And so we make our way into the desert, or seal ourselves up into the ark to practice a 40 day "Night of Purification" in this Season of the Soul."
Like everything else that we do as part of our religion, Lent has only one central purpose: To bring us close to God. The Epistle today from the First Letter of Peter, in The Message version, puts it in the context of the meaning of Christ’s life: He went through it all—was put to death and then made alive—to bring us to God. We must take care that none of the “things” we do, or don’t do, give up or take up, should in any way distract us from coming close to God.
The Sufi poet Rumi, in his always sharp clear way, voices the urgency of the call of the Lenten season to stay focused and come close to the Mystery of God and of Life:
Why cling to one life till it is soiled and ragged?
The sun dies and dies , squandering a hundred lived every instant.
God has decreed life for you; and God will give another and another and another.
Why do we have the story of Jesus baptism today? Because Baptism is the entranceway or gangplank into the Ark that is the Church. Like Noah’s Ark, the Church is meant to be a way of Holy Living that keeps us afloat and safe from the waters of chaos; not necessarily protected from the “assaults” of “many temptations” and from the “weaknesses of each of us” mentioned in the Collect, but fortified against them by our relationship to God in Jesus Christ.
I mentioned earlier that Lent will be a time of being taken week by week through covenants in our holy history. What was the Biblical storyteller’s purpose in telling the mythological event of the Great Flood? There are stories of a great destructive flood in the mythologies of many cultures and peoples. But the Biblical story has a purpose unlike the others. For Jews and Christians, the story is a reflection on the meaning of the Rainbow, which they interpret as a sign of God’s power and Goodness, preserving them in the face of potentially destructive floods and other disasters. Any Jew or Christian who knows the essential nature of God as Love, Mercy and Justice would be disturbed by a picture of God as purposely destructive of almost all the Earth’s people. But the real meaning of the story is made beautifully clear by the explanation of the rabbis that is found in the Zohar:
How did the Blessed Holy One respond when Noah came out of the ark and saw the whole world destroyed and began to cry over the holocaust? Noah said, "Master of the world, You are called Compassionate! You should have shown compassion for Your creatures!" The Blessed Holy One answered him, "Foolish shepherd! Now you say this, but not when I spoke to you tenderly, saying 'Make yourself an ark of gopher wood ... I am about to bring the Flood ... to destroy all flesh' ... I lingered with you, spoke to you at length so that you would ask for mercy for the world! But as soon as you heard that you would be safe in the ark, the evil of the world did not touch your heart. You built the ark and saved yourself. Now that the world has been destroyed do you open your mouth to utter questions and pleas?"
This ancient Flood story isn’t about a destroying God; it’s about a God Who has made an eternal covenant with his Creation. It is about the giving and the preservation of Life. This is how we understand the nature of that Mystery which we sense to be at the heart of Life. It is also a story which makes clear that each of us is responsible for the welfare of the human community. Noah rejected that responsibility and death ensued. But both Abraham and Moses argued and bargained with God, and saved the men and women of their generation.
Lent is a time of growing, transformation, renewing our lives from the core of our hearts. There is a story from the sayings of the Desert Fathers of an old Abbot talking about the conversion of the heart with a young monk”:
Once there was a woman of ill repute in a city. She had many lovers. The governor approached her and said: "If you promise me you will behave properly, I will take you for my wife." She promised, he married her and took her to his own home. The lovers who still wanted her, said; "That official has taken her, If we risk going into the palace, he'll catch us and punish us. But we'll get out of that. Let's go round the back and whistle to her. She'll hear it and come down, and then we'll be all right.” But the woman, when she heard them whistling, blocked her ears, bolted the doors and hid herself in the innermost part of the house.
The old man explained the story. The woman of ill repute is our soul. Her lovers are our passions. The governor is Christ. The innermost part of the house is our heavenly dwelling place. The whistlers are the devils. But the soul can always find refuge with its Lord.
St. Francis de Sales neatly summed up the meaning of this story: Let the enemy rage at the gate, let him knock, let him push, let him cry, let him howl, let him do worse; we know for certain that he cannot enter save by the door of our consent. In other words, Evil can only overtake us if we permit it. We need to stay strong and focused on God. This is the point of Jesus’ testing by Satan for 40 days in the Wilderness.
Lent is a version of Christ’s Forty Days. And it is symbolic. For us, the Wilderness is a part of daily living, coming close to God, drinking in Devine Grace and Power and Love, of understanding and living into Jesus’ words after John’s arrest: “Time’s up! God’s kingdom is here. Change your life and believe the Message.”
Our prayer and our path for the Lenten season, centered firmly in our knowledge of the God of the Rainbow, the God of Jesus, the God of the Covenant, is beautifully expressed in the Psalm appointed for today:
My head is high, God, held high;
I'm looking to you, God;
No hangdog skulking for me.
I've thrown in my lot with you; …..
Show me how you work, God;
School me in your ways.
Take me by the hand;
Lead me down the path of truth.
You are my Savior, aren't you?
Mark the milestones of your mercy and love, God;
Mark me with your sign of love.
Plan only the best for me, God!
We board the arks of Church, Lent, Wisdom, our longing hearts, open to transformation, heading always to the Light of the Resurrection.
It is Lent again. A colleague of mine recently wrote , "During Lent this year the Hebrew scriptures take us week by week through covenants in our holy history. This Sunday the church offers us consideration of the rainbow-sign of the covenant with Noah. It is worth taking time with patristic and medieval typologies of the Ark itself: the Church is the Ark. Lent is the Ark. Wisdom is the Ark. Even our heart is the Ark – a place of safety and yet a place of transformation. Enclosed and tossed upon turbulent seas of sin and chaos and culture, these 40 days of Lent give us a time of growing, transformation, renewing our lives from the core of our hearts. Thus, we emerge from Lent and Holy Week to face again the uncreated Light of the Resurrection, the shadow of which we observed at the Transfiguration. But we have to prepare rigorously to meet this new Light. And so we make our way into the desert, or seal ourselves up into the ark to practice a 40 day "Night of Purification" in this Season of the Soul."
Like everything else that we do as part of our religion, Lent has only one central purpose: To bring us close to God. The Epistle today from the First Letter of Peter, in The Message version, puts it in the context of the meaning of Christ’s life: He went through it all—was put to death and then made alive—to bring us to God. We must take care that none of the “things” we do, or don’t do, give up or take up, should in any way distract us from coming close to God.
The Sufi poet Rumi, in his always sharp clear way, voices the urgency of the call of the Lenten season to stay focused and come close to the Mystery of God and of Life:
Why cling to one life till it is soiled and ragged?
The sun dies and dies , squandering a hundred lived every instant.
God has decreed life for you; and God will give another and another and another.
Why do we have the story of Jesus baptism today? Because Baptism is the entranceway or gangplank into the Ark that is the Church. Like Noah’s Ark, the Church is meant to be a way of Holy Living that keeps us afloat and safe from the waters of chaos; not necessarily protected from the “assaults” of “many temptations” and from the “weaknesses of each of us” mentioned in the Collect, but fortified against them by our relationship to God in Jesus Christ.
I mentioned earlier that Lent will be a time of being taken week by week through covenants in our holy history. What was the Biblical storyteller’s purpose in telling the mythological event of the Great Flood? There are stories of a great destructive flood in the mythologies of many cultures and peoples. But the Biblical story has a purpose unlike the others. For Jews and Christians, the story is a reflection on the meaning of the Rainbow, which they interpret as a sign of God’s power and Goodness, preserving them in the face of potentially destructive floods and other disasters. Any Jew or Christian who knows the essential nature of God as Love, Mercy and Justice would be disturbed by a picture of God as purposely destructive of almost all the Earth’s people. But the real meaning of the story is made beautifully clear by the explanation of the rabbis that is found in the Zohar:
How did the Blessed Holy One respond when Noah came out of the ark and saw the whole world destroyed and began to cry over the holocaust? Noah said, "Master of the world, You are called Compassionate! You should have shown compassion for Your creatures!" The Blessed Holy One answered him, "Foolish shepherd! Now you say this, but not when I spoke to you tenderly, saying 'Make yourself an ark of gopher wood ... I am about to bring the Flood ... to destroy all flesh' ... I lingered with you, spoke to you at length so that you would ask for mercy for the world! But as soon as you heard that you would be safe in the ark, the evil of the world did not touch your heart. You built the ark and saved yourself. Now that the world has been destroyed do you open your mouth to utter questions and pleas?"
This ancient Flood story isn’t about a destroying God; it’s about a God Who has made an eternal covenant with his Creation. It is about the giving and the preservation of Life. This is how we understand the nature of that Mystery which we sense to be at the heart of Life. It is also a story which makes clear that each of us is responsible for the welfare of the human community. Noah rejected that responsibility and death ensued. But both Abraham and Moses argued and bargained with God, and saved the men and women of their generation.
Lent is a time of growing, transformation, renewing our lives from the core of our hearts. There is a story from the sayings of the Desert Fathers of an old Abbot talking about the conversion of the heart with a young monk”:
Once there was a woman of ill repute in a city. She had many lovers. The governor approached her and said: "If you promise me you will behave properly, I will take you for my wife." She promised, he married her and took her to his own home. The lovers who still wanted her, said; "That official has taken her, If we risk going into the palace, he'll catch us and punish us. But we'll get out of that. Let's go round the back and whistle to her. She'll hear it and come down, and then we'll be all right.” But the woman, when she heard them whistling, blocked her ears, bolted the doors and hid herself in the innermost part of the house.
The old man explained the story. The woman of ill repute is our soul. Her lovers are our passions. The governor is Christ. The innermost part of the house is our heavenly dwelling place. The whistlers are the devils. But the soul can always find refuge with its Lord.
St. Francis de Sales neatly summed up the meaning of this story: Let the enemy rage at the gate, let him knock, let him push, let him cry, let him howl, let him do worse; we know for certain that he cannot enter save by the door of our consent. In other words, Evil can only overtake us if we permit it. We need to stay strong and focused on God. This is the point of Jesus’ testing by Satan for 40 days in the Wilderness.
Lent is a version of Christ’s Forty Days. And it is symbolic. For us, the Wilderness is a part of daily living, coming close to God, drinking in Devine Grace and Power and Love, of understanding and living into Jesus’ words after John’s arrest: “Time’s up! God’s kingdom is here. Change your life and believe the Message.”
Our prayer and our path for the Lenten season, centered firmly in our knowledge of the God of the Rainbow, the God of Jesus, the God of the Covenant, is beautifully expressed in the Psalm appointed for today:
My head is high, God, held high;
I'm looking to you, God;
No hangdog skulking for me.
I've thrown in my lot with you; …..
Show me how you work, God;
School me in your ways.
Take me by the hand;
Lead me down the path of truth.
You are my Savior, aren't you?
Mark the milestones of your mercy and love, God;
Mark me with your sign of love.
Plan only the best for me, God!
We board the arks of Church, Lent, Wisdom, our longing hearts, open to transformation, heading always to the Light of the Resurrection.
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