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?

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?