Brian's Sermons

2011-12-17T20:15:00.000-08:00

Advent IV B_RCL Dec 18, 2011

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA
The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

2 Sam 11: 1-11,16 Canticle 15 Rom 16: 25-27 Luke 1: 26-38

"A Mansion Prepared for Himself "

“Who am I?”
“Who do I wish to be?”
And the third Question must follow as Day follows Night: “What is my heart like?”
I think that these are the questions that all human beings, and certainly all Christians, would do well to meditate on at the beginning of every day. They are the questions that lie at the core of all seeking, all religion, all art.

I have come – that is, I have chosen - to believe that at the heart of the Mystery of Being Human there is a common Story, a Great Myth - by which of course I mean a Story that speaks the deepest Truth about Life. This common Story has taken different forms throughout history. The Great Myth is often held in one simple, all-encompassing, holy Word: “God”. In order to become a complete and whole living being, one must become One with God, with the very essence of Life. This is the core teaching, the core wisdom, of all religious thought. And at the core of all religious practice is the desire to enter into this unity with God.

We disciples of Jesus have our version of the Great Myth. It is a beautiful, charming, powerful ….. and sometimes inevitably a disturbing Story, because it deals with living and dying, hate and love, suffering and joy, enslavement and freedom. Every year, it unfolds as we do our primary spiritual work, our leitourgia, liturgy – “the work of the people”. Every Advent the call goes out: Come to the banks of the Jordan, confront your separation from God, begin to “make straight in the desert a highway for our God”. And the work begins. It is a yearly cycle ….. but it also a daily cycle. Every day is a journey through Advent to Resurrection to new life in the Spirit.

Advent Sunday brought us face to face with the questions, Who am I?” “Who do I wish to be?” On this third Sunday of Advent, here we are, each and all of us, in the figure of Mary. And the answer comes: “You are the Theotokas, the God-bearer. Will you say Yes to God’s request to come and dwell in your heart?” As the Collect for today asks, will the One Who Comes find a “mansion prepared for Himself”?

The 11th C mystic Bernard of Clairvaux captures the urgency of our answering, not only for ourselves but for the whole human community, in words addressed to Mary:

“This is what the whole earth waits for, prostrate at your feet. It is right in doing so, for on your word depends comfort for the wretched, ransom for the captive, freedom for the condemned, indeed salvation for all the children of Adam, the whole of your race. Answer quickly, O Virgin. Reply in haste to the angel, or rather through the angel to the Lord. Answer with a word, receive the word of God. Speak your own word, conceive the divine word. Breathe a passing word, embrace the eternal word.”

In Mary, each of us is charmingly seen in our youth, in our freshness, in the openness of youth to a new adventure despite the challenges hinted at in the fact that she will be stepping outside the accepted ethics of her community as a pregnant unmarried woman. On this journey to union with God, we are all likely to have to face into cultural demands that run counter to our longing for union with the God of Unconditional Love, Justice, Compassion, and Kindness. Bernard recognizes the power of the World, and therefore the urgency to say with Mary, “Let it be to me according to your Will” ….. for in some way, on our Yes depends “salvation for all the children of Adam”.

The importance of living out our Great Myth is spoken to by Rob McCall, the editor of the Awanadjo Almanac ; he says:

“Ancient myths and legends so surround the Christmas season that it is hard to know what’s true and what isn’t. The oldest biblical accounts include no nativity tales, no angels, no wise men, no stable and no date of Jesus’s birth. December 25th was likely borrowed from the pagan Saturnalia and solstice celebrations. Our roly-poly Santa Claus is a 19th century make-over of the 4th century St. Nicholas who brought gifts to poor children. Flying reindeer didn’t pull Santa’s sleigh until Clement Moore’s famous poem “’The Night Before Christmas,” first published in 1823. Christmas was a regular business and school day in Boston until about 1860. Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer didn’t show up until the 1930s. Myths can be bad when they over-ride common sense and when we worship the myths themselves rather than the truth behind them. But myths can be exceedingly good when they awaken our hearts to joy, wonder, reverence and compassion for Creation, as all good myths will do. Children need good myths for their hearts and souls to flourish. And so do adults. We need to believe, not in myths of endless war and terror, but in myths of peace on earth. As we believe, so we do.”

With Mary, we say a daily “Yes” and enter into the journey towards union with the Mystery of God, into the journey to human wholeness, and into the creating on Peace on Earth.

I hope that in the future Dennis and I will have opportunity to worship again with you. Happily, Dennis has gotten a good job as General Manager of Food and Dining Services at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, New Mexico, 14 miles from our property! What a blessing! This is his last Sunday. I leave after the Christmas Liturgy. I certainly have had a lot of frustration with “church” over the decades. But “church” is vitally important when it is centered in being a community in which we all together work to “prepare a mansion fit for” God to dwell. Dennis and I have found St. Benedict’s a nurturing place for this ongoing journey and it has been our pleasure to share it with you and to have found so many new friends.

As we approach the celebration of the Incarnation, in which through the beautiful, so-human Story of the manifestation of God in human form in the child Jesus we are reminded that the womb of Mary and the inn and the manger are our own hearts, may we delight in the assuring words of another mystic, Juan de la Cruz, in the 16th C:

Oh, then, soul, most beautiful among all creatures, so anxious to know the dwelling place of your Beloved so you may go in search of him and be united with him: now we are telling you that you yourself are his dwelling and his secret inner room and hiding place. There is reason for you to be elated and joyful in seeing that all your good and hope is so close as to be within you, or better, that you cannot be without him.

2011-11-06T20:26:00.000-08:00

Proper of All Saints_RCL Nov 6, 2011 St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA

The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

Rev 7: 9-17 Ps 34 1 John 3: 1-3 Matthew 5: 5-12 (Beatitudes)

Getting Your Mind and Heart Put Right

It’s All Saints Day! This is the day that we disgustingly uninhibited, somewhat boundary-less Episcopalians remember everyone who has gone before, because, to quote the fabulous Louis Crew, Founder of Integrity, “God loves absolutely everyone!”.

Let’s take a minute or two to remember our favourite “saints”. I’ll start with a couple. First, my Nana, Margaret Harker Angell. I went to visit her every Saturday when I was a boy. She lived in the then wilds of Montreal East, and it was an adventure, taking 1.5 hours on three buses, all by myself from age 9 till 15. The visit started with her putting five dollars in my hand and sending me to the store at the top of the street to buy five pounds of chocolates. I got to eat a few, and she would consume the rest during the week - “to soothe her throat” she said. Then we would play cards ….. for money! She staked me five dollars. She always let me win, and I would go home with ten or twenty dollars – an enormous sum in those days for a kid. (I never told my parents.) She’d cook me lunch; whatever else we had, it always included home-made chips (known in this country as French Fries) with vinegar. And we would laugh a lot, and look forward to the summer, when I would go to her cottage in the mountains to spend an idyllic three months. She died at age 82 in 1968, when I was 21 and a postulant in the Order of the Holy Cross ….. alas from smoke inhalation in a fire, caused – you guessed it – from cooking chips. I was on our postulant retreat at the time. My novice master came to tell me the news, and asked if I wanted to go to Montreal for her funeral. I knew it would be at some horrible funeral home, with who knows who leading the service. “No”, I said, “I want to remember her as she was”. Nana was full of life; always generous, not just to me; never went to church; loved being with her friends, at card parties and lunches at the cottage, to which I was always invited. Oh yes, she could be demanding! But to me she was primarily a kind, loving, fun-loving, failable human being ….. qualities I look for in a saint.

Three others, among many: Pope John XXIII, a simple man, and a true reflection of Jesus. Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, Anglican bishop of Shanghai, who, after a stroke, with the use only of one finger, typed out a Mandarin translation of the Gospels – a work of love and faithfulness. And my friend Bishop Ann Tottenham, retired Suffragan bishop of Toronto, one of the funniest people I know, and devoted to nurturing the young as a school headmistress, and her clergy as a bishop. She could bring healing humour to any trouble, and a fine humility about herself.

What about you? Go: you have 2 minutes. [ Give 2-3 minutes ]

On this All Saints Day, I want to lead us in a meditation about the nurturing of the soul in the image of God. That, I think, is what the feast of All Saints is essentially about. It is about our fellowship with those who have sought, many with great struggle and all with varying levels of success, to be filled with the wondrous mystery of God. Which includes all of us, in this eccentric and so very human community of Christians at St. Benedict’s. And which brings me to another “saint” of mine: Dr. Eugene Peterson, the creator of the version of Scripture known as The Message. For many generations, the Gospel reading for the Feast of All Saints has been The Sermon on the Mount (or as Luke has it, The Sermon on the Plain), called The Beatitudes. Being good Episcopalians, we have left off the following Curses, in the theologically astute knowledge that Jesus could not possibly have uttered them! [ I thank Caro for having that optional Gospel today instead of the one appointed.]

We are all familiar with The Beatitudes we just heard in the “traditional” translations. Libraries have been written about them. But Dr. Peterson, who is a Biblical scholar and an expert in ancient Biblical languages, sees through to the essence of living the Way of the Beatitudes, the Way of the Saints. You can hear it; listen:

“You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule. “You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. “You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought. “You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat.

Becoming homoousios – “of one being with the [Holy One]”; that is the path of sainthood. Desire “More of God”. Hunger for God’s embrace. Understand the essential giftedness of Life. Sustain yourself with Holy Food. Sainthood has little to do with dumbed-down morality and with “following the rules”. Have you ever wondered why such a big deal is made of ordaining priests in our church? Sure, priests are being given a ministry to do; but essentially we reflect the baptismal promise to every one of us: we are being made – ontologically changed - by the Holy Spirit into a saint, a member of the Priesthood of All Believers.

This has nothing whatever to do with denying our humanity and our mortality. It is simply our own attempt to manifest what our mind, heart and spirit has revealed to us, deep within our being, of Who We Are. We are each a Christ, a part of God.

Am I trying to make you “feel good” about yourself. You bet I am! We are all “saints of God”, all on the path to whatever beauty we can manage in this earthly life. And so, I believe, is every human being - and that is why we decline to dishonour or denigrate any person, why we welcome every person here whatever their stage of “The Journey”. We are neither perfect or imperfect: we are, as Dr. Peterson says, “content with just who we are”, inching, with each others’ help, to Wholeness.

We are here today, as every Sunday, for the best and most deeply satisfying meal that we will ever eat: God! Partaking of the sacramental Body and Blood of Christ is the Sacred Longing at the heart of our lives – the longing to be One with God.

Eat this bread, drink this cup / come to me and never be hungry. / trust in me and you will not thirst.

O blessed Communion, fellowship divine! / We feebly struggle, they in glory shine / Yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine / Alleluia! Our participation in the community of the saints is a daily walk. And, less we feel overwhelmed by the path we must walk, The Talmud shows us the simple, faithful way:

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

2011-09-25T18:57:00.000-07:00

Proper 21A_RCL

September 25, 2011

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA
The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

Ex 17: 1-7; Ps 78: 1-4,12-16; Phil 2: 1-13; Matthew 21: 23-32

In 1972, my mother came to my Life Profession in the Order of the Holy Cross. She was going through “the Change”, cried a lot, and carried the Eucharistic elements down the aisle wearing very dark glasses. In 1973, she came to my ordination to the priesthood, and again carried down the Eucharistic elements, no sunglasses, smiling, cool as a cucumber. At the reception afterwards, I recalled the first event, and complimented her on how well she had done. “Well”, she said, “I should have ….. after two Valium!”

I’ve had a hell of a month since my surgery. The worst has been the lingering shock to my system - like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. My whole system wound tighter than a clock spring. My body was saying loud and clear - this being the 4th time my gut has been ripped open - “Enough is enough, OK?!” I am grateful for your love and prayers – and for the Ativan that is unwinding me a bit! I’m still a little shaky ….. but I’m here.

Many clergy often tell jokes in their sermons. I’ve always thought it generally a very bad idea. The joke is often all anyone remembers. But, I’m going to begin with a funny and – at least to me - relevant story, in the sure and certain hope that you St. Benedictites will rise above the temptation.

A drunk man who smelled like beer sat down on a subway next to a priest. The man's tie was stained, his face was plastered with red lipstick, and a half-empty bottle of gin was sticking out of his torn coat pocket. He opened his newspaper and began reading. After a few minutes the man turned to the priest and asked, 'Say Father, what causes arthritis?' The priest replied, 'My Son, it's caused by loose living, being with cheap, wicked women, too much alcohol, contempt for your fellow man, sleeping around with prostitutes, and lack of a bath.'
The drunk muttered in response, 'Well, I'll be damned,' then returned to his paper. The priest, thinking about what he had said, nudged the man and apologized. 'I'm very sorry. I didn't mean to come on so strong. How long have you had arthritis? 'The drunk answered, 'I don't have it, Father. I was just reading here that the Pope does.'

And there we have it: a modern day version of the “chief priests and the elders, tax collectors and prostitutes” in the Gospel reading today. Except that the priest in the joke exhibits something that the “chief priests and elders” don’t have, but which the tax collectors and the prostitutes do: they are dying to the old life and rising to the new. Almost everything in the Gospel of Jesus has to do with entering the Kingdom of God: "Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the Kingdom of God ahead of you." And of course, in you and in me at various times is found them all: the power and status-clinging chief priest or elder, the greedy tax collector or the self-demeaning prostitute, the judgmental priest and the addicted drunken man. They each dwell in some dimension in our inner psyche.

After nearly forty years in the priesthood, it’s pretty clear to me what lies at the heart of entering Kingdom Life - that Kingdom which Jesus tells us has come near to us now in Him. It shines forth from the cross, far outshining the horror and the suffering. It is the outpouring of Love - Life pouring Itself out to give Life to the World, so powerfully voiced in the great hymn from Philippians. Love flowing down from the person of Jesus to engulf us all. We can only be filled with awe and perhaps holy fear when we hear Him calling us to take up His cross - to give ourselves as completely to Love as Jesus did so that the Kingdom of God may manifest itself in the Earth.

The Kingdom of God and the Way of the Cross and the Way of Discipleship and the Way of Baptism are the same thing: a life in which we accept and welcome death to everything that is not Love (or, as Paul puts it, we are buried with Christ) and become a new person in the risen Christ. To put it even more simply: what is not of Love is death, and what is of Love is resurrection. Right here, right now.

I came to two moments of deep knowing while meditating on this Gospel this week. The first was about the nature of one of Christianity’s core symbols: Jesus dying on the cross. What I saw Him doing, through the pain, was marshalling Love in the midst of the suffering. Bonding his mother Mary and John to each other. Freeing the repentant thief. Struggling through a sense of abandonment to a renewed trust in His loving Heavenly Father. As I pictured this scene, I became aware that Jesus’ deepest pain came from His acute awareness of the failure of Love. I felt the fear and hate of the rich and powerful. I was grateful for Joseph of Arimathea’s loving care, adding a touch of love at the end, and Mary of Magdala and the women. I literally felt overshadowed by the deep sorrow and disappointment that Life/God must feel when we reject It’s gift and choose Death.

My second moment was a dream I had after a restless night of not being able to turn over or sleep comfortably. Sometime after 3am, I fell asleep. I dreamt that I was tied to a cross in the middle of the United Nations Plaza. In front of me was a semicircle of huge TV screens, which kept changing. Right in front of me was one that didn’t change. It was a picture of the Republican candidate debate, where all the people were clapping in support that a person without health insurance should be left to die. On others I saw governments mowing down their citizens - Libya, Syria, Egypt, Bahrain, Somalia, Yemen, Jews on the borders of Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Burma - behind many of whom loomed American soldiers. I saw people dying everywhere of hunger and neglect, Darfur, Pakistan, Sudan, Kenya, China, 46 million American children holding up begging bowls. Then a voice came from my right. I turned. Jesus was on a cross beside me. He said, “Follow me, and you will live”.

No one can enter the Kingdom of God except through death. . … Our false self must die, so that we can find our true self, the self which God meant us to be and which he created in his image and likeness.

Our government, like many others, seems to have lost its moral compass. This week, a possibly innocent Troy Davis died as if before a modern Pontius Pilate concerned only with securing revenge for 150 years of humiliation. In my dream, the faces of human leaders melted into mindless metal, devoid of compassion, pity, brotherhood, injecting needles replacing arms and hands.

What a time to live! The World, the whole human community, is dying for lack of Love. The signs tell me that it will get a lot worse before it gets better. We Americans are more vulnerable than ever before, as structures we thought firm are collapsing around us. But the plan has not changed for those of us gathered here to share in the Body and Blood of Christ: “Love one another.” Shine from the hill that others may find Life. We will be there waiting with Love when we pass through the next great transition.

2011-08-21T22:51:00.000-07:00

Proper 16A_RCL

August 21, 2011

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA
The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

Isaiah 51: 1-6 Ps 124 Romans 12: 1-8 Matthew 16: 13-20

The 19th C Russian Orthodox bishop and saint Theophan the Recluse once wrote this when asked about prayer:

You must descend from  your head into your heart.  At present your thoughts of God  are in your head. And God Himself is,  as it were, outside you, and  so your prayer and other spiritual  exercises  remain exterior. Whilst you are still  in your head,  thoughts will not easily be subdued but  will always be whirling about … like clouds of mosquitoes in summer.

Now, to my ever-quirky mind, Theophan’s words relate directly to the Gospel passage this morning. Jesus is having a discussion with His disciples - and it is a “head” discussion, the wandering rabbi engaging and challenging His pupils on the meaning of Scripture. The phrase “Son of Man” is a semitic idiom originating in Mesopotamia, used in Hebrew, denoting “humanity” or “self”. Used in Greek, it can mean “offspring of Man”. The phrase was presumably evolving by Jesus’ time, and the disciples offer both traditional [some say Elijah or Jermiah] and “modern” interpretations [some say John the Baptist]. Jesus then changes the drift by asking, “Who do you say that I am?”, and Peter – in one of those sudden shifts of consciousness that all therapists and clergy love - blurts out, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God”. It is a seemingly wacko, disconnected response ….. but one that Jesus was, I think, hoping for and obviously, by His response, delighted in.

The whole thing has suddenly shifted from the head to the heart. The cloud of mosquitos has dispersed. Peter, speaking for us all, voices what we have come to call the “a-ha!” moment – which always surprises us, and which we usually can’t explain. They are what people online call OMG moments – Oh My God! Abraham had one with the Three Strangers; Jacob one at Bethel when he awoke from his dream and exclaimed “God is in this place and I did not know it!”; and Peter, when he said, “Now I know that God shows no partiality!”

Jesus’ response to Peter was: "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven."

Many Christians, especially the Roman Catholic Church, have taken this literally and interpreted Jesus’ words to their ends. I leave you to decide the legitimacy of that. What I am engaged by is the inner and mystical meaning. This is how I see it: Peter’s “heart” has caught a vivid blinding glimpse of the vast and infinite Love that is God in the person and action and words of Jesus. I choose to believe that this awareness lies hidden in every human heart, waiting to be touched and ignited by the fire of the Holy Spirit. The awareness of the vast and infinite Love that is God is the rock on which the community of God, of Love – the “church” – is built. And, as the parable of the house built on sand or rock reminds us, it is the only base on which the Church – and by extension, the human community – can be sustained in any authenticity as a manifestation of what God desires of us.

It is not possible fully to enter the Kingdom, to receive the keys to the Kingdom, unless we are blinded, struck dumb, by the light of the Divine Love. Jesus told us that His Kingdom was “not of this World”. He told us that the Kingdom was “within us” - among us, so very near and yet often so very far from our consciousness. The Kingdom does not manifest Itself with any clarity in the World unless it lives in our hearts. In Heaven, all is in accord with God’s Love. To the extent that the overwhelming wonder of Divine Love lives in us depends what is bound or loosed in the World: fear or freedom, hate or enfolding, division or unity, despair or joy, war or peace.

At the end of the passage today, Jesus tells His disciples not to tell anyone that He is the Messiah. Why? My interpretation is because He does not want anyone to settle for the superficial easy solution of how we are “saved” – a military or political or economic one. Jesus is the transformer of the soul - and that is the path to which He calls all humanity.

Every now and then, I’ve had to revise a sermon. One Christmas Eve, I was all prepared and ready ….. until that morning I read the cartoon “Hagar the Horrible”, and had to revise the whole thing. This week, it is the fault of my esteemed colleague Amma Donna. We were having an online discussion about my Reflection on St. Theophan’s words, and about “spiritual practice”. She emailed: “by "practice" I didn't mean the habitual things we do to try to stay in the same ballpark as God, whether liturgy or reading or meditation, etc. I meant, what do I have to do to move out of my bumbling, self-protective "head" into my more generous "heart"? And what do I do to train my heart towards more generosity? If I'm Peter and I momentarily "get it" (and I think he did), how do I get back there the next time I'm functioning as plain old Peter again?

Lucky for me, she just asked what we need to do, not how to do it! So I offer only one, and you all can think about your own answers this week: We need to enlarge our Love. We need to enlarge our consciousness of the vastness and infiniteness of the Divine Love. I can be pretty circumscribed in my love! I have a whole long list of people I don’t want to love or whom I think don’t deserve my love. But something has been happening in me, especially since I retired from parish ministry (whatever that might mean!). My sense of God has been expanding. I’ve been getting out of my head and “descending into the heart” – and there God is beyond all the stuff that human heads put on God. Beyond institutional church and beyond theologies and creeds. I wake up in the morning these days and I’m aware that I’m awash in a great cosmic, all-embracing sea of Divine Love. All the other stuff of Life pales in comparison.

I can suggest one place we can start in descending from the head into the heart. We have each other. This is in part what the church, and our own St. Benedict’s community, is about. We are all different, and we have different ideas; we agree or disagree, sometimes quite strongly. But we can practice interacting with each other as fellow fishes in the Sea of Divine Love.

I do not denigrate or undervalue the work of the intellect or philosophy or science; in fact I deeply value them. But may we remember the 17th C words of Brother Lawrence:

[God] alone can make Himself known as he really is. But we go on
searching in philosophy and science, preferring, it seems, a poor copy
to the original that God himself paints in the depths of our souls.

The deepest love I have for my Dennis, or for you, or for myself, is not for anything external. It is not for any “poor copy", but for the Original in the depth of the soul. It is the same with God. In the heart – which in ancient thought is the place of deepest Knowing – is the vastness and infiniteness of the Love which is God and you and me.

To seek and live this Love is our Life in Jesus the “Messiah, son of the Living God”.

2011-08-08T09:28:00.000-07:00

Proper 14A_RCL

August 7, 2011

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA
The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

1 Kings 19:9-18 Ps 85 Rom 10: 5-15 Matthew 14: 22-33

water - a poem of the water-walker in us all

water
water is life, yes
we float in the watery womb
we emerge a water-creature given shape in a shell of leaky tissue
dehydration is an enemy to be constantly watched
improperly drained, we bloat with edema that can kill us
yes, water is life and death both
we walk a fine line between them
too little is bad, too much is bad
like peter we must walk a fine line upon the water
it’s swim or sink, this living business
maybe sink and swim
when we drown here, only a bloated corpse rises
but not so when we live in the spirit

a boat helps
a vision, a path, experience, wisdom, strategies, insight,
help, o god yes, help
a vessel with sail or oars or engine
because to live we cannot just float
but travel across the great seas of being
the sea of mind, the sea of intellect
the sea of feelings, the sea of love
the sea of wounds, the sea of healing
the sea of struggle and the sea of peace
there are always waves and winds that batter
we can be blown helter-skelter …
or we can install some radar

“jesus came walking toward them on the sea”
who is this jesus?
he is the master of fear
“do not be afraid; it is I”
he clangs like an unseen buoy
sharp and clear in the dense fog
when we are far from land and the winds are against us
“follow me follow me
love one another
seek first the kingdom
do not be anxious
leave the dead to bury the dead
sell all you have and give to the poor
have compassion like the good samaritan
eat my flesh, drink my blood
do my words
have faith, come, walk on the water”

faith is not magic
faith is trust in what our heart speaks to us of life
that we can have what life offers us
faith is courage to step boldly into the wind and tempest
faith is knowing
[sing] we have an anchor that keeps the soul
steadfast and sure while the billows roll
fastened to the rock which cannot move
grounded firm and deep in the saviour’s love

as light must shine and fire must burn
so love must act
so we must step out
life can be dormant or vibrant
we can live in the paleness beneath the waves
or in the sun above
this is the call and promise of baptism
dying to a pale life, rising to a bright life
it is only love that catches us by the hand
only love that lifts us into life
this jesus who walks in the light
who commands us to come and walk with him on the water
for there is no other way to find life
even herod wanted to meet such a man

do we doubt love?
do we cry in fear “it is a ghost”
when love comes striding through the gale
offering its strong hand?

faith trusts love
and seeks to walk love’s way
love is stronger than death
it lasts
of the three is the greatest

life is full of storm and tempest
let us choose love
the winds will cease

let us live love
it shall be said of us
“how beautiful are the feet of those
who bring good news”

bhoam+
080711

2011-07-17T06:16:00.000-07:00

Proper 11A_RCL - July 17, 2011

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA
The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

Genesis 28: 10-19a Ps 139: 1-11,22-23 Rom 8: 12-25 Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

I don’t know about you. But what I require from the Scripture we hear week by week is a window into Reality. I see Jesus’ parables about the Kingdom as just such windows. They express what He believed to be Reality, and He invites us to engage with them and use them to clarify our vision about the essence of Life in general and our own Life in particular. Human beings always have agendas of course, open or hidden! We see it in the Gospel today. I agree with many scholars who believe that the “interpretation” of the parable is an add-on by an apocalyptic faction within the community that produced the Gospel we call “Matthew”. I’m sure they sincerely believed that they were interpreting Jesus “correctly”. I’m equally sure they had their own hidden local agenda. It’s up to you and me to discern if there is anything helpful in their interpretation for us today. (Not for me!) Seeing the Scriptures for what they are and how they were formed is in itself a challenge to see Reality!

The writer and retreat leader Judy Cannato, in her very engaging book “Radical Amazement: Contemplative Lessons from Black Holes, Supernovas, and Other Wonders of the Universe”, says, “Contemplation is a long loving look at what is real”. Personally, I don’t generally believe in Absolutes, including Reality. My intention this morning is to invite you to join me in contemplating the Reality Jesus offers in this kingdom parable, and to consider what Realities we chose to live by.

Here’s what I think the parable says about the nature of Life, about Reality: Human Beings are capable of Good and Evil – Love and Un-love. It distorts Reality if we deny both those characteristics - if we delude ourselves that we were created “Good” and some outside force makes us “do bad”. The wheat and the tares grow together. The enemy is within - and must be recognized and faced. The God of Love and the Prince of Lies are the two faces of the coin of Life. What is critical is, if we deny this Reality, we diminish the ability to manage our lives; we live in a fantasy which robs us of the power to see clearly and accurately and make appropriate choices. We shift the blame, as Adam and Eve did, and when we do that, we lose Eden. Remember that in contemplating parables, the details of the story are not the point; the point is found in contemplating the dynamics the story raises and in grasping the implications. There is always a snake in the Garden; the issue is, do we listen to the snake.

We have to manage Life. That’s the implication of the Householder telling the slaves not to gather the weeds, but to let them grow together “until the harvest”. We can’t eliminate weeds entirely; they are always intertwined with the grain. I have learned to my chagrin that dousing a plot with Round-Up ruins the ground for any flowers! And I have learned, as did the Buddha, that trying to eliminate tendencies to un-Love doesn’t work. Millenia of self-flaggelating monks prove this. But we can manage them, as any gardener knows, so they don’t overwhelm. In Life, we have to manage our tendencies towards what is unlovely, unkind, ungenerous, and nurture what enhances our own humanity and our fellow human beings. “Cutting back weeds” is what we constitutes our spiritual path. We are responsible for deciding the principles by which we will strive to live, and how to nurture what encourages and strengthens us for the Journey. Trust in a God of Compassion; recognition of our intrinsic value; Confession, Repentance, and Absolution; and acknowledgment of our unity with all our fellow human beings come to mind. Life has many times of harvest; if we manage our plot well, the ripe grain, i.e., the fruits of Love, can be harvested and the tares burnt, or robbed of their destructive power. But the Reality is: we shall always live with Good and Evil as part of who we are. And no outside factor can be blamed.

In the parable, the tares were sewn “when everyone was asleep”. This brings to mind that little injunction in the Office of Compline: “Be sober, be watchful; your adversary the Devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour”; “resist him, firm in your faith”. I have come to see that spiritual life is mostly about “being awake”. It is so easy to lose awareness of the Realities of our lives. Staying awake to the Truth about ourselves – both the positive and the negative - is both a challenge - and very freeing.

I understand the Good Seed as the potentiality we all have, in the inner field that is our lives, for Love, and for all that Love implies about the high character of being Human, of being “made in the image” of the God we Christians worship, and which we see manifested in Jesus. Grasping the character of that Love, and acting it out, is the essence of our Life’s Work.

Judy Cannato continues: “How often we are fooled by what mimics the real. Indeed, we live in a culture that flaunts the phony and thrives on glittering fabrication. We are so bombarded by the superficial and the trivial that we can lose our bearings and give ourselves over to a way of living that drains us of our humanity. Seduced by the superficial, we lose the very freedom we think all our acquisitions will provide. When we are engaged in the experience and practice of radical amazement, we begin to distinguish between the genuine and the junk.”

Here at St. Benedict’s, let us help each other, anchored in the Holy Eucharist, in the Christ, in the heart of the Gospel Message, and in the character of Christian community, to embrace Reality. As Dr. King said, “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.”

2011-07-10T22:33:00.000-07:00

Homily for the Gay Pride Liturgy
SLO Mission Square
July 10, 2011
The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

“Taking Back the Good News”
[ Theme for the Liturgy ]

“God” is an awesome concept. Some very early religionists insisted on calling God “Nothing”, to make the point that once you’ve said everything there was to say about God, you’ve said Nothing.

I have come to think that there are basically two types of religious folk: one for whom the idea of God grows more and more vast as they journey into the Great Mystery, and the other whose idea of God diminishes and narrows. In my experience, the former become embracing, welcoming, compassionate, and inclusive; they recognize that they are one with God and with every other person. The latter become more and more pinched, judging, and exclusive; their “God” more and more tribal, and more and more small.

Religiously, I started as a Scottish Presbyterian in Canada, age five. By age 8, I knew I was whatever the word for Gay was then - sissy, I think; this complicated things. I became an Anglican at age 19. At age 21, I became a monk in the Episcopal Church. If I ever wondered if God existed, the fact that I ended up in a deeply rich and open religious setting of mostly Gay men convinced me that, in whatever mysterious manner, She did! It saved me from a lot of pain and grief. At 27, I was ordained a priest, and, even though it was still Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the Episcopal Church, it was definitely affirming to hear the Bishop ask, “Is it your will that Brian be ordained a priest” and hear 250 people shout loudly, “It is!” I retired in 2008 after 40 years in ministry at age 62, and 4 days ago I turned 65. And relentlessly, throughout my Life, God has gotten vaster, more Mysterious, more inclusive, more loving, more compassionate, more glorious.

What’s been at the heart of this Journey? Being Queer! And I will tell you why. “Being Queer” is a metaphor to the larger Truth that the idea of “God” is formed by the struggle of human beings for identity and affirmation, particularly in the face of oppression and discrimination. There is not one of us here this afternoon who has not experienced these things in some way. You can see this in the Scriptures of every religion. Every culture develops deities who affirm, strengthen, encourage and empower its people. The Jewish people come to mind, as do the African-American people in our country. The great 16th C Mogul Emperor of India, Akbar, in his wisdom understood that “all religions are “historically developed” and “products of their time and the land of their origin”. Where we often go awry is when tribal gods remain tribal gods; when we fail to recognize Akbar’s insight that “all the nobler religions ….. radiate from the one eternal truth”.

The great Nothing, the great Mystery of God, does indeed work in mysterious ways to become Known. She has “spoken” through the oppression and struggle of many many peoples and individuals. Now it is the time for Queerfolk confidently to take our place in this divine revelation. But for a few exceptions, Queerfolk who do manage to escape the oppression of tribal religions with their narrow views of God and the diversity of the human creation know that God is Goodness, Compassion, Justice, Kindness, Inclusion - and that all human beings who strive for the deepest authentic humanity strive to image and to be One with these things. And: we know that we Queerfolk are radically, intrinsically OK!

I have a few words for those in America and in our World, of the likes of Michelle Bachman and her ilk, who seek to impose their tribal gods and their fear and exclusion on Queerfolk or any others. The first is from the Christian monk Thomas Merton; he said, “A faith that supports itself by condemning others is itself condemned by the Gospel." The second is a word of caution from that great wise crone philosopher many of us know and love, known as Maxine; she said, “Life is like a jar of jalapeno peppers ..... what you "eat" today might burn your ass tomorrow”.

Those of us who follow a religious path know and value the Wisdom of our traditions. I would also offer a bit of spiritual and practical advice for all of us, Queer and not, as we seek to live out our radical OKness, from the Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius: he wrote, “"The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are." Jesus’ version was, “Be wise as serpents and gentle as doves”.

The God Who is Love and Truth has spoken throughout human history through those who have been oppressed. Now is the time for Queerfolk and all who are one with us to take back the Good News from those who have stolen and perverted it in the name of their petty tribal gods. We are all One, and we are all beloved, the more so that we strive to act in Compassion, do not fear those different from us, seek to honour and respect the dignity of every human being, and seek to serve others in kindness and generosity and justice.

Today we take back the Good News. Let us live it well ….. and with our usual Gay Abandon!

2011-04-30T22:48:00.000-07:00

Sermon for Easter II A_RCL

May 1, 2011

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA
The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

Acts 2: 14a, 22-32; Ps 16; I Peter 1: 3-9; John 20: 19-31

The French theologian, scholastic philosopher, and logician Peter Abelard (1079-1142) is quoted to have said: “By doubting we come to inquiry, by inquiry we come to truth”. His words are, I think, important to consider on what has come to be “Doubting Thomas” Sunday. Those who designed our present three year Lectionary seem to think that the story is important for our spiritual understanding and maturity; it is the Gospel for all three years!

Abelard’s words from a thousand years ago can, I think, assure us that Doubt is part and parcel of the Journey of Faith. Perhaps we need to be assured of this now and then ~ but I think not every year! I think that Jesus was saying to Thomas, “Thomas, you have been with me, and you have experienced the life of God in me; trust in your experience, and in my promise that God is always with you.”

I would say this: focusing on Doubt in this story is a red herring. When Jesus taught in parables, He included a lot of red herrings ….. things that could distract people from the essence of His teaching. Why? I think of His words, “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” (Matt 7: 6, NIV). Now, some of you may go away and say that Brian said that Jesus thought we human beings were dogs and pigs, beneath His attention. No, Brian didn’t say that. Jesus was saying that we must learn not to be distracted by red herrings, but to have “ears that can hear” and to listen for the inner truth. This is what I think is the import of the Gospel today: Jesus is saying to all of us, through Thomas, “You have seen in me that God’s Unconditional Love is real and at the heart of Life. Trust that. Do not be distracted by squabbling over irrelevant “side” issues” ~ if you will pardon the pun. This is the same message of the story of Martha and Mary: “Live Life from the heart of Love; don’t be distracted by unimportant issues; Choose the better part”.

So: what is “the better part” in this story of Thomas? What is the “sacred”, the “pearl”? It has to do with the Beloved Community, with the Community that gathers around the Mystery of God’s extravagant Love, and around us as those who are committed through our baptism to live out Jesus’ plea, which we heard at the Maundy Thursday Liturgy, to “love one another as I have loved you”.

I think it is important that Thomas was not with the community of the disciples when Jesus came to them in the Upper Room. It points to the critical importance of being a functioning part of the Beloved Community and, by extension, of the Human Race, namely of God’s People. It IS all about Love, and we can’t love in the abstract. We have to love someone: God, self, neighbour, enemy, stranger, mother, father, brother, sister, terrorist, friend.

I believe that “church” is, above all things, meant to be a place where we practice becoming loving members of the Beloved Community. Becoming a member of a congregation may begin in the search for simple companionship, but I think it must soon appear to be a place in which we can trust people to love us, and in which we are all learning day by day to live out of trust in God’s unconditional love, learning the character and nature of Love, and learning how to make that real for each other. And I think we need to be intentional about it to the fullest of our ability. It is not enough to be nice, pleasant, or friendly ….. though that’s a good place to start. But as Jesus once said, “even the tax-collectors do that!”. Every Episcopal church profile that I have ever looked at said some version of “We are a nice, pleasant, and friendly church”. But that is only the beginning of “being church”.

Which brings me to my final point. Today’s Collect goes to the heart of the Thomas story: “Almighty and everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery established the new covenant of reconciliation: Grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith”. God has proclaimed a covenant of faithful love to Her people from time immemorial. This Covenant in Jesus reminds us that covenant life is not magical. God does not wave a magic wand and – poof – we are all radically loving people. God offers, and we must then say Yes. Jesus has told us that all brokenness can be healed, if we are honest about our sin against Love, desire to change, and look to the Living Spirit as Guide.

I think that we who are members of the Beloved Community here at St. Benedict’s are, to be modest and humble, on a scale of 1 to 10, about 6. And that’s pretty good! I know personally how hard it is to be the Beloved Community of Reconciliation; I have some pretty strong political and theological views and a prickly personality to boot! But trusting in Jesus and the Gospel, I say let’s shoot for a 7.

I need you to help me “increase in love” ….. and I can be a good subject on which to practice!

One should always end on a positive note; so I end with two things:

Douglas Adams, the author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe”, says in his latest book “The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time”, “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be." The message: Let’s expand our perspective.

And, an act of praise and Thanksgiving, from the Spanish Jew Solomon Ibn Gabirol (c.1021-c.1058) , which I have translated into modern English:

Who can know the secret of Your accomplishments,
when You made for the body the means for Your work?
You gave us eyes to see Your signs,
Ears, to hear Your wonders,
Mind, to grasp some part of Your mystery,
Mouth, to tell Your praise,
Tongue, to relate Your mighty deeds to every comer,
As I do today, I Your servant, the son of Your handmaid;
I tell, according to the shortness of my tongue,
one tiny part of Your greatness.

2011-04-02T20:33:00.000-07:00

Lent 4 A_RCL

April 3, 2011

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA
The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

1 Samuel 16: 1-13; Ps 23; Ephesians 5: 8-14; John 9: 1-41

[Sing} Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me;
I once was lost, but now I’m found,
I was blind, but now I see!
[We were blind, but now we see.]

These days for me are an exciting time of rethinking and clarifying many things. This hymn verse is troublesome, and always has been for me, despite the powerful emotional appeal. I’m OK with “Grace”; I know that Life is intrinsically full of astonishing Gifts. I’m not OK with “wretch”; I don’t accept as Biblical the doctrine of Original Sin; that doctrine erupted out of Augustine’s troubled mind. A church that claimed to be the only way to “salvation” knew a good thing when they saw it! I acknowledge and live by the doctrine of Original Blessing ~ that we are created Good in the Image of God. The implications of living by one and the other are profound. As to so-called “miraculous healings”, I accept what the 3rd C Christian writer Pachomius has to say:

After the manifest healings of the body, there are also spiritual healings. For if a man intellectually blind, in that he does not see the light of God because of idolatry, afterwards is guided by faith in the Lord and gains his sight, in coming to know the only true god, is not this a great healing …? One of the brethren asked me, "Tell us one of the visions you see.". And I said to him, "A sinner like me does not ask God that he may see visions: for that is against His will, and is error....Hear all the same about a great vision: If you see a man pure and humble, it is a great vision. For what is greater than such a vision, to see the Invisible God in a visible man, His temple?" I don’t accept as literal so-called healings which reverse natural law; but I certainly have experienced in myself and others the intellectual and emotional restoration to wholeness that can be effected by the light of Jesus’ Wisdom, by trust in God, and by practicing Jesus’ Wisdom.

The business of Original Sin vs Original Blessing is relevant to the Lectionary for today. We come here Sunday by Sunday for many reasons. But one of the principal reasons is to be reminded Who We Are. What is our essential Identity, as individuals and as a community – and not just any community, but as God’s Beloved Community? This issue of Identity is raised in the story we have from the Gospel called John this morning, of the man born blind who is given sight by Jesus. “The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, "Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?" Some were saying, "It is he." Others were saying, "No, but it is someone like him." But it is established firmly that this guy is the same one who was in darkness and then brought into the light of a new understanding of Life and Divine Compassion. The “man born blind” is you and me. Our “eyes” require opening. We each need the healing salve of the Word of God’s Love applied to our often-wounded Life. In our Life within the Beloved Community, we are, like the Blind Man, washed with God’s Love in Word and Sacrament and Community, washed in baptismal water to which the Spirit is “sent” – our own Siloam - and then we are sent to live the Life of the Beloved Community.

The most chilling, even evil, phrase in the whole convoluted reading is, to me, this: "This man is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath." It is of course likely that much of the Gospel texts which vilify the Pharisees was inserted into the text by early Christians. Be that as it may, the behaviour of the Pharisees implies that the keeping of religious rules is more important that practicing the Compassion of God, and that one is “saved” by what one believes rather than by showing Compassion. Or, as Robin Meyer puts it, in his book Saving Jesus from the Church, by believing in Jesus rather than by following Jesus. Since the time of Nicea in the early 4th C., this “blindness” has inflicted much of the Christian Church. Countless people have been killed or ostracized or shunned because they did not believe in the Trinity, or in Biblical or Papal infallibility, or in countless other rules of so-called “orthodoxy” set up by the Church to control its membership and protect its power. The same is true of other religions as well; we are awash in ‘salvation by belief’ in the World today, requiring people to accept often complete absurdities, or the rule of moral tyrants, or otherwise suffer often horrific consequences. In America, not believing in the Virgin Birth can bring down a presidential candidate! And shamefully, in the Episcopal Church, espousing Buddhist prayer practices and acknowledging the Wisdom of the Buddhist path kept one man who was elected by his diocese to be their bishop from being ordained.

Apparently people choose to forget the wider implications of Jesus saying, “Man was not made for the Sabbath; the Sabbath was made for man.” In other words, Nothing must get in the way of radical Compassion ….. especially “church”. Yet Jesus was murdered, in part, for challenging the power of the religious elites ("church") of His time.

I am not saying that the Church shouldn’t have doctrines and guidelines. I am saying that those doctrines and guidelines must not prevent us from being Followers, disciples of Jesus and His Gospel. I became and remain an Episcopalian for many reasons. One of them is that, however messily, the Episcopal Church strives to “walk the walk” of following Jesus over believing in Jesus as defined by church doctrine. Knowledge is not redemptive. We are not “saved” by believing the “right thing”; we are confirmed as an Heir of the God of Love by imitating Jesus’ radical inclusiveness and compassion for all persons. Dennis and I worship here at St. Benedict’s because it strives to Follow – a symbol of which is our welcoming of all to full sharing at God’s table ..... our little rebellion against “church regulations” for the sake of living God’s policy of No Outcasts.

Robin Meyers says, “..one of the great divides in the church could be healed if we got one thing straight: the truth of which Jesus speaks is wisdom incarnate, not intellectual assent to cogent arguments made on behalf of God. Indeed, a quick glance around this broken world makes it painfully obvious that we don’t need more arguments on behalf of God; we need more people who live as if they are in covenant with Unconditional Love, which is our best definition of God.”

The holy bread and wine we share, for which we pray in the Collect today, is a sign of that Covenant of Trust and Love we have made with God and with each other. The Eucharist is the food of Followers like us; and “following”, as Meyers says better than I can, is “not about knowing new things or subscribing to certain theological statements or positions, but about the never-ending process of dying to an old self and being reborn into a new one. The evidence for this rebirth was not a clever argument or allegiance to a certain rabbinical school. It was made obvious by a new way of being in the world. Good Friday and Easter are therefore not isolated events. They are the twin polarities of wisdom – as we constantly die to the bondage of blindness and are reborn to the light.”

Like the man blind from birth, we have been flooded with light by God’s love incarnate in us. Now we “see”. The Invitation is to live our Truth confidently and without Fear.

2011-02-27T06:25:00.000-08:00

Epiphany VIII A_RCL

Feb 27, 2010

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA
The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

[ Isaiah 49: 8-16A; Ps 131; 1 Corinthians 4: 1-5; Matthew 6: 24-34 ]

Here is an excerpt from a poem entitled “The Summer Day” by the American poet Mary Oliver:

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
……….
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Don’t those six words just ring with poetic strength! “What is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” That is exactly the question that Jesus is addressing in the passage from Matthew this morning. I would guess, from now having known most of you for 3 years or so, that we all confront this question. I’ve heard many of you voice it in different ways, regardless of age or experience, and I do so myself quite often. Have I found out what Life is essentially about? And if I’ve gotten an inkling, then how am I living it or how do I plan to live it in all it’s potential fullness?

Jesus puts the choice(s) involved fairly starkly: “You cannot serve God and Wealth.” Jesus is not saying that we can’t make money, wear nice clothes, drink good wine, eat good food. He is asking what the foundation of our Life is, and will it support us in a Life that radiates with the joy and peace and aliveness of the radical Love that is God and, by inheritance, us. As we yet again pull the Divine Life-force into our beings in Word and Body and Blood, He is quietly asking, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?”

“God” and “Wealth” are both rich symbols. It’s a challenge to live the human life in our “dust of the earth” bodies which have been somehow magically animated by what the Bible calls the Breath of God. The Genesis Creation Myth addresses the challenge, in the story of the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It proposes that once the Human Race had it all, but we made God angry, and now we have to work hard by the sweat of our brow to eke out a living. Steinbeck powerfully portrayed it in the story of the 1930’s Dustbowl, set appropriately in a land East of Eden. It’s just as hard for most people here in the wealthiest nation on Earth, given the idea of the “American Dream”, to make ends meet ….. and it’s gotten a lot harder in the last fifty years.

By the way, I don’t buy the part about once having had it all. The storytellers knew that we have always had to work hard to keep body and soul together. They were looking to answer the question “Why”? The image of an Eden of plenty, with no suffering or pain, just highlights the reality most of us live with. At least they had the grace to put the responsibility where it belongs: on ourselves - which is at least a step forward from Adam and Eve blaming each other or the serpent.

“Where are you focused? Where are you anchored? Where do your energies go? How do you answer the question Who Am I? What defines you? - these are the questions that Jesus is always gently but firmly asking. Because they are critical to our peace and freedom and happiness. Early Christian and other Gnostics had some strange advice around these questions. “The Gnostic secret of being able to face death is simple. Don’t wait; die now! Plato describes the ‘true philosopher’ as someone who ‘makes dying his way of life’. Paul writes, ‘I die daily’. Valentinus teaches, ‘We choose to die so that we can annihilate death completely’. The Islamic Gnostic Abd al-Kader explains: ‘There are two types of death. One which is inevitable and common to all, and one which is voluntary and experienced by the few. It is the second death which Muhammad prescribed saying ‘Die before you die’. Those who die this voluntary death are resurrected.”

In his book “The Laughing Jesus”. Peter Gandy goes on to reflect, “When we identify exclusively with our physical body, we are consciously or unconsciously in a constant state of anxiety, because decay and death is what inevitably lies ahead for this walking-talking skin-bag. But when we wake up we realize we need not fear the death of the body any more than we need fear dying in a dream. The more lucid we become the less we fear death, which makes living a lot more enjoyable!”

And this is what Jesus confronts us with in the Gospel this morning, with His questions about worry over food, drink, clothes and a myriad other things He might have mentioned: power, prestige, ignorance, self-delusion, etc. None of these things guarantee Life. The only thing that guarantees Life and Immortality is, to use a specifically theological image, Surrender to the God of radical Love, and Self-giving. Jesus role-plays it for us, constantly surrendering His life to God and, when it became clear that physical death was inevitable, unconditionally accepting it. And, as Muhammad said, “Those who die this voluntary death are resurrected”. We see it in the Christ ….. and we are asked to imagine it for ourselves.

This is why Jesus says, “Do not worry, saying, `What will we eat?' or `What will we drink?' or `What will we wear?' For it is the Gentiles [meaning those not awake to a destiny for their humanity] who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” And they are! But we may have to adjust our expectations! Expensive Edna Valley wines, designer clothes, and Filet Mignon may have to give way to Kohls and to farmers’ market fresh veggies and to Two Buck Chuck, or the more fancy stuff just now and then. But it won’t matter by then! We will have left our lonely isolation and become part of a human community of radical Love which rejoices our heart.

The Psalm for today says: “I still my soul and make it quiet, like a child upon its mother's breast; my soul is quieted within me.”

Take heart my fellow travelers! Let us quiet our souls. We are walking a holy path, and it has the power to make us new beings. Let us not be afraid to abandon ourselves with faith and trust. We shall be clothed like the lilies of the field in array more splendid than Solomon in all his glory: the shining raiment of a person raised from Death to Life. As Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

Most loving Father, whose will it is for us to give thanks for all things, to fear nothing but the loss of you, and to cast all our care on you who care for us: Preserve us from faithless fears and worldly anxieties, that no clouds of this mortal life may hide from us the light of that love which is immortal, and which you have manifested to us in your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

[1] Peter Gandy, “The Laughing Jesus”, location 2641 in the Kindle edition

[1] ibid

[3] Matthew 6: 33

2011-02-20T13:30:00.000-08:00

Sermon for Epiphany VII A_RCL

February 20, 2010

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA

The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

Leviticus 19: 1-2,9-18; Ps 119: 33-40; 1 Corinthians 3: 10-11,16-23; Matthew 5: 38-48

At the risk of sounding defensive: as with all of my sermons, I am not telling anyone what to do or think or believe. My intent is to encourage thinking and discussion and meditation on the important issues of our Path in Life. That said …..

Jesus was not a Literalist. There was almost nothing that he said or taught that He expected anyone to take literally. He taught principally by way of Parables ….. and Parables are not rulebooks. They are carefully crafted stories which, if we are open to be taught, push us over mental or emotional or rational cliffs, to a place where we are forced beyond established patterns of thought or perception, with the hope that we will break into new dimensions of understanding, in head, heart, and “spirit”. Jesus never explained any of His parables; that’s the work of later editors.

So, let me begin by proposing this about the Gospel reading for today: Jesus is not telling us to do what He says literally. He is not telling us to allow ourselves to be abused; to get smacked on the cheek and invite another; to get sued and give the one suing you twice what is required; to do twice the work you’re paid for; to give to the beggar or lend while your family starves; to permit enemies to hurt or destroy you. To do this, to behave this way, would be to reject the ways of Justice and Love which undergird both the ethical path we hear this morning in Leviticus, and the full understanding of Jesus’ commandment to love profoundly as He loved.

Now, lest you think that I am watering down the Gospel Path in what many consider to be a typical Episcopalian way, let me assure you that I am not. Because here is the reality: Jesus is asking us to do far more than meet the literalist responses! Far more. He is asking us to open up our lives to a radical way of living, of understanding Life, ourselves, others, and the Mystery we call God. He is asking us to be transfigured, as He was in the mountaintop vision, into a New Being.

Now: a little caveat here. There have always been special people who did try to reach this level of transformation by following the literalist path. It can be said that Jesus was one of them, when He did things like refuse to allow His disciples to fight for Him, or to justify Himself to Pontius Pilate. After Him, most were monks or nuns or specially guided people. We all know about St. Francis stripping himself naked and living in poverty. And the Buddha leaving his royal palace and his riches (and even his wife and child – not something that in general would be applauded) for the life of a wandering sadhu. But I think these are special witnesses; and it is not their specific renunciations we are called to imitate, but the seeking of the inner light which motivated their Path.

Here’s a little story about the Buddha, to heighten the sense of how the Great Teachers lead us:

If a villainous bandit were to carve you limb from limb with a two-handled saw, even then the man that should give way to anger would not be obeying my teaching. Even then, be it your task to preserve your hearts unmoved, never to allow an ill word to pass your lips, but always to abide in compassion and good-will, with no hate in your hearts, enfolding in radiant thoughts of love the bandit (who tortures you), and proceeding thence to enfold the whole world in your radiant thoughts of love, - thoughts great and beyond measure, in which there is no hatred or trace of harm. Whew!

Jesus tends to be a little more stark. Yet Jesus does not expect us, when He urges us to “take up our cross”, to get literally crucified. He expects us to see how Life is embraced in it’s fullness by relinquishing one life to find a greater. It is in this context, by the way, that we are to understand the story of Abraham and the near-sacrifice of his son Isaac. No God of Love would ask us literally to kill a child – or for that matter pluck out an eye or cut off a foot. This is a story pointing us towards “extravagant” self-giving. Abraham is offering his whole being to God through his blood-son Isaac, who is a representation of himself. We are asked to do the same.

SO: what IS Jesus leading us? To radical Compassion; to a tender understanding of human nature; to a maturity of Being; to a move beyond our isolated Self to a Unity with God and Creation and each other, enemy or friend; this is where Jesus is leading us. (Joseph Campbell said that to love our enemy was the hardest saying in the Bible.) Jesus offers powerful words that push us beyond the walls we have erected – walls which lock us in diminished, dry, shriveled modes of Being Human. If once we should be infused by an inner experience of our Oneness with The Christ, with Divinity, with All Being, our minds would, to use a 60’s phrase, be “blown away”! We would be overwhelmed by such a sense of Liberation that we might think we have been “made a new person”. And indeed we would have.

Who would worry about “length of days” anymore? We would know only calm, intense daily living. Who would be afraid? We would never fear to do what is just and compassionate and loving simply because we preferred to live a long Life rather than a powerful Life. Who would not be generous in all ways, knowing that Life is enriched for us all by making sure that all are sustained by material and spiritual giving? Who would hold back with Love, when Love heals all suffering, for both Giver and Receiver? Is this not the great Teaching of the Resurrection? It has little to do with physical resurrection; it has to do with “dying” to the “little Self” and “rising” to the “Larger Self”. This is the meaning of Baptism. Every time we relinquish our separate Ego, we “die; and every time we awaken to our Unity with all things, we “rise to Life again”.

Lets not lose a grip on Reality and think that we shall suddenly “become as Christ”, become God. We are not meant to be “God”. But we are meant to be god-like in our Humanity, shaped and defined by Love and Compassion, Justice and Forgiveness, by Affection and utter Heart-ache with all our fellow human beings. Never are we meant to despise ourselves for our inability to live up to the call to Perfection. We are not meant to be Perfect in this Life; only Faithful. And there is always a path to renewal: self-knowledge and surrender.

“Do not resist the evildoer, says Jesus. Turn the other cheek, give your cloak, go the extra mile, give. Love your enemies and pray for them. Why? [because] All these instances of abuse provide occasions of awakening, perhaps - for the evildoer as well as the victim.” (1)

In other words: Every day the Path to Full Humanity, the experience of our Oneness with All Existence (or, to put it in Jungian terms, our participation in the Universal Unconscious; or in Christian terms, of loving each other as God loves us) will be offered to us. There are lots of ways we are “struck on the cheek” in Life. To “offer the other cheek” literally would be easy! The harder “offering the other cheek” is to ponder how we will respond in a way that will deepen and enrich our humanity. The same is true with “giving your cloak”, or “going the extra mile”, or “loving your enemies”. If we live in boxes built of our own fear or infantile natures, we will live limited lives. If, however, we risk to “take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost part of the sea”, God meets us there and offers us a Life we couldn’t have imagined.

Here is a wonderful relevant passage from the Buddhist Evening Gatha:

Let me respectfully remind you:
Life and Death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by, Opportunity is lost.
Each of us should strive to
Awaken, Awaken, Awaken.
Take heed.
Do not squander your Life.

We remember Jesus’ words: “Those who would win their Life must lose it.” This is the Mystery Jesus calls us to “know” and live. To Awaken, to be transformed, even a little, is much harder than enduring insult or unfairness.

2011-01-23T05:41:00.000-08:00

Duccio c. 1308 – The Calling of Peter & Andrew

Epiphany III A_RCL

Jan 23, 2011

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA

The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

Isaiah 9: 1-4

Ps 27: 1,5-13

1 Corinthians 1: 10-18

Matthew 4: 12-23

“Called” ….. yes. All persons are called to Wholeness and to Fullness of Humanity. I believe that this Call is intrinsic to our very nature, and that all the great spiritual paths of the World give voice to this Call. The Episcopal Church made its thinking clear on a poster during the time when Ed Browning was our Presiding Bishop; it said “The glory of God is a human being fully alive”. It derives from the teachings of Irenaeus of Lyons in the late 2nd century. [ link: http://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/library_article/149/Man_Fully_Alive_is_the_Glory_of_God___St._Irenaeus.html ]

There is, of course, the other side of the coin. Yes, the Call is voiced, out of the very depth of the Mystery of Being ….. but who hears, how do they hear, and who answers? There seems to be a general consensus that “few” answer. Cynthia Bourgeault, Episcopal priest and author of “The Wisdom Jesus”, using a computer software image, reflects that every human being is born with a “hard-wired operating system” which allows us to establish a distinct identity, but that we are all called to chose a “system upgrade”, which essentially moves us from isolation and separateness to a sense of Oneness with God and each other and the World. Jesus prays intensely for this in the version of the Gospel called John – Father, may they be One as You and I are One.

One of the mysteries is that few seem to choose this “upgrade”, this Path, and it is important to ask, “Why?”. We all know the phrase, Many are called, but few are chosen. In the context of that statement, I think the phrase means, All are called, but many reject it. Is it because, in part, we don’t have many good teachers or exemplars? And that by nature we human beings are lazy about doing the work that keeps on the Path to Wholeness and Fullness of Humanity? I’ve just finished reading a book called "The Value of Nothing”, by an economist named Raj Patel. He says basically that we have allowed an extreme view of unregulated free market profit economics to define what is of value, including ourselves, and that we must change this if the human race is not to descend into both physical and spiritual poverty.

So yes: we Christians are Called by the Gospel….. but essentially to what? Here is a painting from the 14th century Renaissance painter Duccio, depicting the Calling of Peter and Andrew to be apostles and disciples of Jesus. [ I will leave this here on the lectern if you would like to see it more closely, and I will include it with the sermon when it is posted to my sermon blog.] Duccio was greatly influenced by the Byzantine icon style, and that style is strong in this painting. Peter and Andrew are in their boat fishing; this is some time after both had met Jesus. Andrew is waving, and Peter looks stern and skeptical. The sky is golden behind them, indicating that this is a moment set in Eternity. Their net is full of fish ….. live food to feed the biological body. Jesus is standing on the rocky shore, reminding us of the parable of the man who built his house on the solid rock. He is holding out his hand to Peter and Andrew. The Gospel reading tells us that he is saying, “Come, follow Me, and I will make you fish for people.” It is the same invitation He will offer to them at the Last Supper: “This bread is my Body broken for you; this cup is my blood of the New Covenant; anyone who eats this bread and drinks this cup will live forever”. It is the same invitation He offers to the Syrophoenecian woman: Anyone who drinks this living water will never be thirsty. What Jesus is saying to Peter and Andrew is that if they accept His call to transformation, accept His invitation to renounce their “little self” and become their “larger self”, One with God and with all fellow human beings, they will become a Fellowship of Life in which wholeness and fullness will be found.

This of course is the Call of the Church, the Call to us here at St. Benedict’s: to be that Mystical Body of the Christ, where separation and exclusivity and isolation are renounced. As Fishers of People, we cast out the net of Compassion and Unity and draw men and women into the Kingdom. The Church is not a place where we “admire Jesus, but acquire His consciousness”. The Church is called to be a place which lives by the Heart – through harmony, where “separation as a category disappears”, and we are free to live in “fearlessness, coherence and compassion, in other words, as true human beings”

Here also is found the meaning of the Cross. The Way of the Cross is our journey – where the “horizontal axis of our life in time” meets with “the vertical access of timeless reality: the realm of meaning, value, and conscience” . Where they cross is the Heart of Jesus.

The Call is an invitation with far more consequences that “doing good”, far harder than “dying for the Faith”. It is about coming alive and living for the Faith, about being transformed into a “new person in Christ”. C.S. Lewis depicts it beautifully in "The Chronicles of Narnia” when Eustace, by his greed and lack of caring for his cousins becomes a dragon; being transformed back into a true human being by Aslan is painful, but worth it; Eustace is clothed in the personhood of the Christ, clothed in his divine Humanity.

Every day that you and I live, we are sitting in front of the Laptop of Life. And every now and then, the Message appears on the screen: “An upgrade to this software is available.” There are usually three choices: Yes; Remind me Later; No”. Any one of the three choices comes with a cost and, counterintuitively, in terms of our health and growth as a person, “Yes” is the least costly choice in the long run that is Life. “Remind me Later” or “No” only infantilize us and the cost is heavy.

Every time we come to this altar, hear the Word spoken and interpreted, and hear the invitation to feed on the Body and Blood of the Christ, we are like Peter and Andrew being Called to be transformed, to become an instrument of transformation, a place where the old, out of date software is upgraded for the Journey towards Wholeness.

Each time an “upgrade” is offered, as it is today here at St. Benedict’s – in the fellowship, the breaking of the bread, and in the Prayers, those vows of our Baptism – the invitation is yet again offered to leave the “small Self” and enter into the “larger Self” ….. to “put on the mind of Christ”.

Christ holds out His hand to us. Like Peter, let’s be lifted onto a new plane of Being. Let us be Fishers of Women and Men.

2010-12-26T13:30:00.000-08:00

Christmas I A_RCL Dec 26, 2010

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA

The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

Isaiah 61:10-62:3

Ps 147

Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7

John 1:1-18

How we love Luke’s beautiful story ….. the Great Myth or Truth-story we all hear on Christmas Eve and day! The familiar Christmas story that features angels and shepherds, a brilliant star and a silent night, Mary and Joseph in a stable, and the newborn child asleep on the hay – this is a story that captures the imagination - source for countless carols and pageants, greeting cards and paintings, and nativity scenes. It appeals to our imagination, as does Matthew’s version, with Wise Men and flights to Egypt. Mark is a little boring - nothing to read at Christmas!. I have learned that great truths must be presented to us in such a way that they engage our Imagination. Human beings thrive on the Imagination; we are shaped by Wonder and Mystery.

When we hear the Gospel version called John, we may think that the appeal is again to our Imagination; the language itself is mysterious, strange: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. What does “Word” mean? What is a time before Time? The reason John is different is because it’s appeal is not primarily to our Imagination, but to our Intellect, to our Minds. So, while we don’t want to lose track of the Mystery we are participating in as we gather around the altar today – namely, the presence of the Holy in the whole of Creation and specifically the presence of the Holy in each of us – the Prologue of John asks us to stretch our minds – and Episcopalians are good at exercising our minds along with our hearts and spirits and Imagination!

So let’s think a bit about the word Logos. We translate it in English simply as “Word”. But it has a much deeper meaning in its context in the Greek Mediterranean world of Jesus’ time. Let me do a quick, brief and by no means fulsome history.

The Greeks used Logos to mean, besides “word”, “speech”, “account”, or “reason” – and Reason is critical in Anglican thinking. Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC), used the term to mean the principle of order and knowledge. The Sophists used the term to mean “discourse”. Aristotle applied the term to "reasoned discourse" in the field of rhetoric. The Stoic philosophers identified the term with the divine animating principle pervading the Universe.
After Judaism came under Helenistic influence, the great Alexandrian Philo (ca. 20 BC–AD 40) adopted the term into Jewish philosophy. Which brings us to today: the Gospel of John identifies the Logos, through which all things are made, as divine, and further identifies Jesus as the Incarnation – the coming in flesh - of the Logos.

Plotinus (204/5–270 AD, the first neo-Platonist, interpreted Logos as the Principle of mediation. This is important for us; John’s Gospel presents Jesus as the Incarnate Logos who makes it possible for you and me to know God (“mediates” God to us), Who is essentially otherwise Unknowable.

The concept of Logos is applied in Sufism (Islam); it is used to relate the "Uncreated" (God), to the "Created" (man). In Sufism, for the Deist, no contact between man and God can be possible without the Logos. The Logos is everywhere and always the same, but its personification is "unique" within each region. Jesus and Muhammad are seen, in Sufi theology, as personifications of the Logos, and this is what enables them to speak in such absolute, authoritative terms.

To return to John’s Prologue: a priest colleague of mine, in reflecting on John’s Prologue, says this (1)

“First, [Logos] refers to the structure that underlies the universe, what holds everything together, what makes things work. It is this Word that scientists of our time endeavor to hear and understand, whether they be physicists or biologists or astronomers. The glue that somehow unites all aspects of our wonderfully complex cosmos – this is part of what John means in today’s gospel in making reference to the Word.

The second meaning has to do, not with what is, but with what ought to be, the divine law and intention. Atoms and galaxies are obedient; they follow laws appropriate to what they are. Human beings are manifestly not obedient, yet still we understand there is a law. All people recognize this, however imperfectly, and ethicists and legislators work to express this law. So the way we are meant to live, in all its power and profundity – this is part of what John suggests in making reference to the Word.

Yet another sense of this term has to do with meaning and purpose, with a question that haunts every human heart: What’s it all about? We endeavor to connect with purpose and meaning through myriad forms of philosophy and religion, literature and art. We rage against the suggestion that the grandeur and sorrow of earthly existence is without significance. A persistent sense of purpose in the universe – this is part of what John means in making reference to the Word.”

So: this is just to “wet your whistle”, to set Logos” within a context, to get you thinking as you ponder John’s Prologue this week! But the principle reason we are here this morning is this phrase from John’s Prologue: What has come into being in him was Life, and the Life was the Light of all people.

Life is the Great Mystery. Who knows whence Life came? Or “when”? Or “from What”? Today we celebrate and wonder at the emergence of Life out of the Hiddenness. We gather in Thanksgiving that we are, that our World is, that the Logos has flooded us in Sacred Light, with a power that Darkness cannot defeat. With heart, mind, imagination, spirit, we pose that eternal Question: “What’s it all about?” And every Sunday morning, as the Bread of Heaven, the Body of Christ, is eaten, and the Cup of Salvation, the Blood of Christ, is drunk, our minds and Imaginations begin afresh the Journey into Life.

John’s Prologue says:

We all live off [God’s] generous bounty,  
gift after gift after gift.  

We remember Ralph Waldo Emerson’s (1803-82) words:

Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence,
the universal beauty, the eternal One.

So: Let us Eat. Drink ….. and Know.

2010-11-27T17:58:00.000-08:00

Advent I A_RCL Nov 28, 2010 St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh

Isaiah 2: 1-5 Ps 122 Romans 13: 11-14 Matthew 24: 36-44

There is an old rabbinical saying which says: “Three things come unexpectedly: Messiah, the discovery of a treasure, and a scorpion”. That, I think, sets the stage perfectly for the season of Advent, and for what our Advent “inner work” is as we begin our liturgical year. The message of Advent is, to me, clear: if we don’t do the inner work of Advent, the rest of the liturgical year is very likely to be a waste of time and to bear little fruit. Though, to be fair, there is also the other side of the coin: Like it or not, having prepared for it or not, Life can and will surprise us. But often, as the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins teaches, if our hearts and minds aren’t at least trained to be opened to the Expected as well as the Unexpected - something we often call Divine Grace - we can be roughly shut out from the metaphorical Wedding Banquet.

The issues of Advent are, to me, clear: Who are you and I as a person?; Who do you and I want to be as a person?; Who do you and I feel invited or called to be as a person - in our case as Christians, by God in Jesus? What vision of the human community do we hold?

Now, I am what has been called an Eighth Day Christian. That is a “mystical” way of justifying many of my odd views ….. and you are all used to my “odd” views! ! Essentially what it means is that, post-Resurrection, everything of Time and Space and Being has “collapsed” into the Now. How’s that for mystical weirdness?? It’s like there’s a Sacred Black Hole into which all Reality has been sucked ….. and our lives are what pop out at the mysterious other end!

I happen to believe that the Eighth Day is the “norm” for Christians. It is he context in which we strive to live each moment. This is reflected liturgically in the Acclamation we all “shout” in the middle of Eucharistic Prayer I: “Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again. Most people think this is linear: the Past, the Present, the Future, following one another. I think it is the only way we know how to say in words that the Life-giving power of the birth, life, death, resurrection, and eternal presence of the Holy One are all simultaneously present and part of our own lives and of the Life of all living things. In it’s own limping way, the Collect for Advent Sunday tries to say the same thing, calling us “now in the time of this mortal life” to live fully Christ’s Incarnation and His Second Coming. It is all our Now.

The Biblical story presents the Incarnation and the Second Coming of Christ as if they are single events in Time. I do not understand them in this way. Advent asks us to be centered in the great Mystery that you and I and all that exists do so through the inpouring and indwelling of the Divine Life. We immerse ourselves in this Divine Life again and again in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, eating Christ’s Body and drinking Christ’s Blood, merging flesh and spirit. And Advent asks us to be centered at the same time in the expected or unexpected moment by moment “coming” of the Giver of Life into us. I think of the lovely hopeful words of the Psalm: “I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where will my help come?” And in the Psalm appointed for today (psalm 122), there is the beautiful image of Jerusalem, shining on the hill, “to which the tribes go up”. Jerusalem – that place where God “dwells” in His Temple, is “at unity in itself”, a symbol of the unity of God and Humankind, in which we are called to live and daily “to go up”.

Now, I have said many times that, being Episcopalians, we have a wide context for belief! You can go from the rigid so-called “literal” on one end to the verging-on-the-heretical-if-not-wild-eyed mystical-or-metaphorical on the other. I believe that the meaning of the wonderful myths of the Nativity of Jesus (the First Coming) and of the end-time coming of the Christ in judgment (the Second Coming) are not found in chronos, linear time, but in chairos, the “in-between” time where Mystery is revealed. They are both part of the One Reality. What is that One Reality? That God dwells at the core of our Being, and that we are being shaped moment by moment by Divine Love and Mercy and Justice and Forgiveness.

Advent gives us only four weeks to regroup ourselves - to resettle ourselves and to cultivate an openness to the “daily visitation” of the Divine, after forty-eight weeks of dealing with the ups and downs of our crazy lives, and liturgically pondering what we call the Holy Mysteries: Incarnation; Epiphany; Passion and Death; Resurrection; Ascension; the Descent of the Holy Spirit. I think we need more of Advent! If I had my way, I’d reorganize the liturgical year, with at least two mini-Advents through the long Pentecost Season, pulling us back to the center from which we so easily stray. Of course, the Holy Eucharist provides this anchor each Sunday.

So: our work as followers of the Gospel path is to be awake and nurturing of and expectant of the Holy Presence. My colleague Suzanne Guthrie eloquently voices what often is our state:

My soul wallows in its long habit of sleep: of disregard, of thoughtlessness, heartlessness, a psychic hibernation against feeling and against knowing for fear of pain. My soul reclines, suspended in a torpor of uncaring. I'm not ready to greet either the horrors or wonders of the dawning of the Great Day. My body stands dumbly looking at the sky, but my soul lies dormant like a rodent deeply buried in its underground nest in darkest winter, far from my heart.[1]

St. Paul puts it this way in his letter to the Romans today: “make sure that you don't get so absorbed and exhausted in taking care of all your day-by-day obligations that you lose track of the time and doze off, oblivious to God.[2] The Collect proposes the simple answer: “give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light”.

In other words, the answer is the path of Repentance. But Repentance is not just the rejection of Sin, of the unloving. Repentance is the art of learning to call out our rodent souls from their buried nest in darkest winter and stand before the bright Jerusalem, before the moment by moment power of all that God in Christ – and Life! - eternally is: Incarnation, Epiphany, Dying and Rising, Ascending into God, living in the Spirit of Truth.

St. Andrew of Crete (650) speaks to the urgency – as does the apocalyptic language of Advent: The end draws near, my soul, the end draws near; Yet you do not care or make ready. The time grows short, rise up: the Judge is at the door. The days of our life pass swiftly, as a dream, as a flower. Why do we trouble ourselves over what is all in vain?

Advent calls us to Awaken – to awaken to our Reality as a “child of God”. To awaken to the reality of our Sin, but also to our capacity to love. We don’t have to become instantly “perfect in Love”; just each day to face into truth and into the face of God. The mystery of Grace will lead us on.

In his Advent Poem, the 18^th C English priest John Keble writes:

But what are Heaven's alarms to hearts that cower / In willful slumber, deepening every hour,

That draw their curtains closer round, The nearer swells the trumpet's sound?

Lord, ere our trembling lamps sink down and die,

Touch us with chastening hand, and make us feel Thee nigh.

“Three things come unexpectedly: Messiah, the discovery of a treasure, and a scorpion”.

Our hearts do not cower. In Advent, we boldly face the “scorpions” and cast out all delusions. We seek the treasure that is “the Lord, the Christ” in our “earthen vessels”. We welcome the Messiah Who eternally, moment by moment, forever comes among us.

[1] Suzanne Guthrie: “Edge of the Enclosure”, for Advent Sunday

[2] Rom 13: 11, The Message

2010-10-17T08:05:00.000-07:00

Pent XXI, Prop 24_C_RCL Oct 17, 2010

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA

The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh +

Jer 31: 27-34; Ps 119: 97-104; II Tim 3:14-4:5; Luke 18: 1-8

The answer to prayer – at least “from” the God I have over many decades come to know and understand, and yes, I’ll even say love, though that’s a topic for several other sermons! - is instantaneous. [Look around.] Do I see some of you look dubious? But I now see, and I am saying, that every prayer I have ever offered, every insight I have sought, has been instantly answered.

I can equally say that this has been the consequence of “faith”. The Evangelist Luke asks today at the conclusion of the Gospel reading, “When the Son of Man comes, will He find such persistent faith on earth?” ”Faith” is the issue we are being asked to address first, because what we understand by “faith” is critical. Friedrich Nietzsche allegedly said: “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything”. What I hear in his comment is contempt for a certain understanding of faith, an understanding which believes, for example, that if sufficiently loved, adored and praised, God will prevent suffering. In my experience, delusional thinking. What God will do is, at the least, suffer with us.

My comment on Nietzsche’s words was, “Faith” is not about trading slave-like submission for a Deity’s condescending favour. Faith, from the Latin “fides – trust”, means diligently adhering, often with difficulty, to a path which gives birth to the Mystery of God Within. The meaning of everything: Life, Death, Wholeness, Love, Joy is at stake. Discerning the authentic Path is the life-work of every person. And I might add that there are many paths that need to be discerned throughout our lives. “Having faith” is always a process of liberation; it is never a process of escaping being human.

I believe, based on experience, that both “faith” and “prayer” are two way-streets: between us and God. To what end? To the end of knowing, of sensing, that God lives at the core of our being, and we live at the core of God’s Being, at least at some level of experience and knowing. Or, as Paul the Apostle puts it, coming to know the “Christ in us” which makes us fully human.

This is the point of the instantaneous answer to Prayer of which I spoke: it is the moment at which we experience, even haltingly, our Unity with God. Prayer, for me, is never “God actively gives, I passively receive” - though the answer to Prayer can sometimes feel like that, especially when we are in the midst of struggle and pain. I believe that the answer to Prayer is always a transformative moment, in which, consciously or unconsciously, our humanity has become more whole – which is to say more God-like.

Jesus makes it clear in the Gospel reading that what is essential in being both a prayerful and a faithful person is Persistence, or Perseverance. And here is the bottom line as I see it: God is unchanging, as I understand God. What changes is our perception of God. It is expressed in that classic hymn – which always makes me laugh because of its rather overdone humility – “We blossom and flourish like leaves on the tree / and wither and perish but nought changeth Thee”. The God I know always seeks to give us what we need for abundant, whole Life, and this includes our understanding of what it means to be mortal, subject to decay and death. It is indeed, in some sense, in the Puritan preacher John Edwards’ rather silly sermon title, a “dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God”.

The work of faith requires perseverance and dogged persistence. NOT so that we can wear God down, until God gives up, or changes Her mind, and gives us what we demand – though it would be easy to misinterpret the parable about the widow and the impious judge in this way. Those who were spiritually unprepared to understand Jesus’ parable would not have gotten the message. But those who are open– and this openness to the message is critical for any transformation – understand that we must persist until everything we have put in the way of hearing the Message is removed. Only then will that moment occur when instantaneously Prayer is answered. The answer to Prayer is instantaneous at the moment when our Self and our Desire begins to merge with God’s Self and Desire.

Two personal examples: One: When I was a Novice in the Order of the Holy Cross, age 21, I had a headache during all waking hours for 7 months. No aspirin or anything else took it away – though a couple of glasses of wine would distract me, or a long walk along the railway tracks along the Hudson River. I assumed it had something to do with my vocation. I prayed a lot, everything from asking that the headache go away (shades of St. Paul!) to understanding why I had it. I persisted for 7 months – discomfort will do that for you! Finally one day, I said to God/the Universe/the Mystery – they all merge for me - “OK, I have no idea why I’m here; You deal with it.” That second, the headache was gone. Yes, it was about that old devil Control, and it’s counterpart Trust. But the “answer” I got was NOT “You aren’t in control, I am, so submit”. I don’t believe in a God who demands “submission”, and I won’t say that horrible line in Eucharistic Prayer B that says, “put all things in subjection under Your Christ”. Rather, the message was, “We’re in this together; trust me and yourself; relax.” I learned a critical lesson about Life – and God.

Second: In 1995, after 9 years of a little congregation in Providence that went from 12 to over a hundred and had a vital ministry to the AIDS community, I took a job I thought would be wonderful: Director of The Oasis, the ministry to the Gay community in the diocese of Newark. Seven months into it, I started having anxiety attacks for the first (and only) time in my life. I prayed about that mightily. One morning I awoke after a bad night, and an inner voice said clearly, “Brian, this job is just not for you. Forget about what others will think; just resign. It’s OK. Not every decision we make is the right one. This setting is not where your gifts are best used. Trust yourself.” Instantaneously, I felt better, and I’ve never had another anxiety attack – though if I do I will know what the message is! I learned that I don’t have to succeed at everything, and to appreciate what gifts I do have, and I’m still learning not to beat myself up.

The answer to Prayer is always, I believe, that we are offered the opportunity to grow and change – and that often is a wrenching process – but it gets easier too! As we take the opportunities, our comprehension of the great Mystery of Life, of God, of Meaning, changes and grows. We set out on the road of isolation at our birth into this Earthly life, and we move towards a sense of unity in our self and with each other and with all Creation and with the infinitely beautiful Power that enlivens it all.

The Message today is: Keep at it! As Winston Churchill once said, “Never, never, never give up”. The great saints are those who first set their hearts on “union with God” - those who like Jacob wrestled with the angel God, until the break of day, and would NOT let go until the angel blessed him. Some of the blessings we receive may seem like a curse – until we recognize we have been freed of things we thought we had to have but which only stood in our way to Freedom.

So in praise of Persistence I leave us with these verses of a very long hymn called Wrestling Jacob, by the great hymnologist Charles Wesley [1742]: [Tune: St. Petersburg, attributed to Dimitri S. Bortniansky 1825]

Come, O thou Traveler unknown /  Whom still I hold, but cannot see!  / My company before is gone,  / And I am left alone with Thee; / With Thee all night I mean to stay, / And wrestle till the break of day.

Wilt Thou not yet to me reveal  / Thy new, unutterable Name?  / Tell me, I still beseech Thee, tell;  / To know it now resolved I am;  / Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,  / Till I Thy Name, Thy nature know.

[Sing last verse]

Contented now upon my thigh  / I halt, till life’s short journey end;  / All helplessness, all weakness I /  On Thee alone for strength depend;  / Nor have I power from Thee to move:  / Thy nature, and Thy name is Love.

2010-07-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

Pent IX, Prop 12_C_RCL

July 25, 2010

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA

The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh +

Genesis 18:20-32; Ps 138; Col 2: 6-19; Luke 11: 1-13

I’ve been doing a lot of reading these past months. The history of ideas. Mysticism, including ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern. Pagan, both Greek and Roman, particularly Plato and Celsus. Christian Gnosticism, particularly Valentinus and Basilides. Early Christian writers, particularly Origen – brilliant man who, of course, strayed too far from the 6th C Roman hierarchy and got condemned as a “heretic” and excommunicated. “Literalist” Christianity, which may be a new term for you, used by Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy in “The Jesus Mysteries” ….. but I won’t get off on that tangent today! I’ve come away with, among a lot of things, a strong sense of how many people think it’s really hard to be and to become a fully human person. One of my favourite cards has a picture of the former Tammy Faye Baker, on the front saying, “Lord, I’m sorry about the money”; inside she says, “Being pretty ain’t cheap.” To paraphrase her, Being a fully human person ain’t easy - and is hard work!

One measure, it struck me, of how hard it is to reach maturity as a human being is the number of persons, philosophies, and religions throughout the millennia that believe in reincarnation ….. including many of the early Christian so-called “Church Fathers” – and a surprisingly large percentage of American Christians, according to a recent poll. Several of those “church fathers”, by the way, of the first two centuries, were Gnostics. Gnostics were exterminated by the Roman Church by the 6th C., but a few have revived; there’s even a Gnostic bishop in – of course! – California/San Francisco.

What I am segueing to is Prayer – and to the fact that Prayer is “hard”, or perhaps better, requires hard work and stamina and persistence. I was going to say, hard until one gets to the point of “becoming Prayer” – which is what I think St. Paul was pointing to when he said, Pray always”. But on second thought, I won’t say that. I suspect that Prayer requires persistence and stamina forever – given my own experience. Why? Essentially because Prayer is about becoming One with the Soul of the Universe. For some of us, getting to that place and holding there may come more easily than for others. Some people are just more inclined to be what mystics call “Awake” or “Awakened” than others. It’s one of the reasons that relatively few people were fully initiated into the ancient Mystery Religions of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Syria, Persia, and other places; you had to be both highly committed and intellectually agile.

Prayer is essentially a context for living one’s Life. The context is Mystery, and the core “posture” of Prayer is Openness. This is reflected by the ancient “orans” position taken by the priest (or any others for that matter) at the Eucharist, the “Holy Mysteries” – arms open to receive or embrace, recalling Jesus on the Cross, and the Egyptian godman Osiris, who was “hung on a tree”. Our mouths are saying formulas, words, with which we do our best to express what we think we understand about the Mystery of Christ’s self-giving, death and resurrection. But the bottom line is, we “see through a glass darkly”. At the heart of Prayer is Openness and Listening with the Inner Ear. When I was young, I was taught an acronym for Prayer: ACTIP. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Intercession, Petition. But adoration – standing open to the Mystery and wonder of the infinite and Unknowable God – was and is always first. “Adoration” is the setting, into and out of which, all the other activities of Prayer flow. We catch it in the Psalm for today:

I kneel in worship facing your holy temple and say it again: "Thank you!"
Thank you for your love, thank you for your faithfulness;
Most holy is your name, most holy is your Word.

A friend of mine, in an email last week, went on a rant about how boring the Prayers of the People were at his church’s worship. Just rote – a pile of names and issues and causes raced through in order to get through the service in an hour. I opined to him that the Prayers of the People – and the Eucharist itself – are a Sunday morning metaphor, reminding us that the rest of the week is to be spent open to and acting upon what the Mysteries we celebrate together call us to in daily life: ACTIP.

So, when He is asked by his followers to teach them how to pray, Jesus simply reminds them of the context for a Life that is Prayer (This is in the words of The Message):

Father, Reveal who you are.
Set the world right.
Keep us alive with three square meals.
Keep us forgiven with you, and forgiving others.
Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil."

Jesus doesn’t say Pray for others, or Ask God to do something. He says: rest in, become One with, the Holy One; know that God’s will and yours are the same; tend to your whole being, material and spirit; stay One with God and others; keep centered in the Inner Christ in times of trail and evil. Then we act out of your own compassionate, loving, divine Being.

The story of Abraham we hear today reveals what I think is the most exciting dimension of Prayer. We all know the reputation of Sodom and Gomorrah! Wicked, wicked, wicked; rebellious against God; the rich and powerful victimizing the poor and helpless. So God decides to go and see what's going on, and God does not seem pleased. But Abraham - who seems to have assumed that God is going to destroy everyone, stands right up to him, blocks God’s way from leaving, confronts Him. “You’re the judge of the whole World”, he says; “You can’t act unjustly!” Abraham starts at 50 righteous people and works down: 40? 30? 20? 10? He is persistent, acting out of the context of his life of prayer. Finally God agrees; God won’t destroy the city if there are just 10 righteous people.

Most people think that this is a story about God. About God changing Her mind. It isn’t. It’s a story about us. It’s about our Journey into the depth of Mystery of God and the Mystery of our true Selves - which ultimately, so the mystics tell us, are the same thing. It’s about us changing our minds, our perceptions, our understanding. It’s Abraham who sees, step by step, deeper into the Mystery of God’s Justice and Compassion, deeper into the Mystery of what it means to be Human. To put it in Christian terms, what it means “to be as Christ”, to discover , as Paul says, “Christ in us, the hope of glory”. I have no doubt that Abraham would have worked God down to 1, maybe even none!. Perhaps that he only got to 10 is a sign to us that the Journey into God and Self never ends. There is always a deeper layer. Step by step, Abraham was challenging himself, opening himself to a fuller and deeper understanding and experience of God. Asking the Question: “How extravagant, how generous is God’s love and compassion for us?” This story asks us to contemplate the Mystery of both God’s and our infinite capacity for Compassion. It asks us to forge ahead on the Journey of becoming fully Human.

In the Hebrew Bible stories, God “changes”. But the hidden meaning – when we can hear it - is that we change. I have said this before and say it again: No prayer changes God or God’s “mind”. God is perfect Love, and God desires and offers us all we need to grow in truth and love - "will not God give you the Holy Spirit ...?". It is always we who must learn and change, adapt or make choices that reflect the Christ in us. When we make intercession for or petition for others, it is always the first step in taking loving action as we are able.

We have only begun to speak of the Mystery of Prayer. The conversation will continue. Let us remember these empowering words of Joseph Campbell, which I think call us to prayer: “The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness”. In other words, rhe intent of Prayer is to become One with God and Others and our Self. There is, in the end, no Other. No separation between you and me, others, and God.

Homily at the marriage of Liz Beaman & Philip Dizard

2010-05-05T15:27:00.000-07:00

Address at the Wedding of Liz Beaman & Philip Dizard
The Heinz Chapel, Pittsburgh
Saturday, April 24, 2010 @ 6:30pm

Liz, Philip, and all here today: first let me tell you why I am thoroughly delighted to have been asked to officiate at your wedding ceremony – aside from the fact that I am always inspired when two people are willing to give themselves to each other, and aside from the fact that Darby and Chris were cherished parishioners of mine when I was a parish priest and remain cherished eccentric and always delightfully bizarre friends. Birds of a father tend to flock together. I look forward to adding Liz’s family and friends to the stew.

I revel in diversity. I deeply hold that disrespect for diversity and the attendant unwillingness to learn new truths from the reality of diversity is one of the primary causes of discord and of social fragmentation. There is a wonderfully human stew-pot of diversity here today. I just wish that America could learn to rejoice in it and honour it. We would be a much more nurturing, affirming human community. And, I think, a more, generous, kind nation. My hope – no, more, my challenge - is that this weekend and Philip and Liz’s marriage will be an opportunity to find pleasure in each other’s diversity, and deepen the wonder of being human.

We all know that the so-called “institution of marriage” is fraught with issues in our culture these days. The courage and desire to offer themselves to each other in order to explore and learn the Mystery of Love is a symbol for us all of the possibilities for each of us as a person and as a sharer in family and community. Relationships so often fail. But every time two people have the courage to marry, it raises our hope. This is the gift that Philip and Liz offer us all today.

Liz, Philip: I have read the vows you will make and their preamble many times. They resonate with the deepest principles that I have shaped my life around as a Christian priest, and I believe with other of the great time-tested principles of the World’s religions and philosophies. I am always open to Wisdom, from whatever source, though I will confess that I measure the truth of Wisdom by the great invitations of people like Jesus and the Buddha to Compassion.

You will make vows today, by your own will and choice. I believe this to be the working of the Mystery we often call “God”. Vows are important; their keeping reflects on our integrity. You will work every day of your Life together to sustain the hopes and goals your vows embrace. I hope that I and all here today will continue to support you both on this Journey together. And I would remind you that it is the Journey that is paramount, not the End; the End takes care of itself.

Today I offer you Four Toltec principles – which Don Miguel Ruiz calls “Agreements” - by which to accomplish your vows.

One: “Always be Impeccable with your word.” Your word is the power you have to create. It can also be used to destroy. Your word expresses what you dream, what you feel, what you really are. If you are impeccable in your word, you create beauty, love, heaven on earth. Strive always to use your word impeccably.

Two: “Never take anything personally.” 99.9% of what happens around you and what is said to you is not about you. It is about what lies behind others’ words and deeds. To take everything personally is deeply selfish; everything is not about you. And we are not responsible for everything. Taking everything personally poisons you. Live your own truths. Help each other to see honestly.

Three: “Never make assumptions.” Almost all assumptions are wrong. They cause us to judge people, usually wrongly. They cause us to mistreat each other. If in doubt – and that is most of the time – Ask, talk, be honest or seek honesty. Truth is always the best way to deeper love.

Four: “Always do your best.” Circumstances in Life change. Your best will be different at different times, depending on how you feel and many other factors. But if you both are committed to doing your best, you have a better chance of keeping the other three Agreements. They will all lead to a choice for Love.

And remember: we all fail. So when you do, acknowledge it and start again.

Love is not essentially feelings. Love is essentially an act of the will – the conscious decision to care and be compassionate to the one who will share Life. Spiritually, emotionally, psychologically healthy people give generously – and are never diminished by it.

Liz, Philip, may your journey together bring Wonder, Astonishment, Surprise, Peace. and Joy. I believe there is a Great Mystery of Being at the heart of Life. It is also our deepest Self. Together may you catch a glimpse, and help each other to be fully yourselves.

2010-05-02T08:53:00.000-07:00

Easter V, Year C_RCL May 2, 2010

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA

The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh +

Here is a wonderful story from the Bhagavata Purana, a Hindu text from about 200 CE:

A dispute once arose among the sages which of the three gods was greatest. They applied to the greatest of all sages to determine the point. He undertook to put all three gods to a severe test.   He went first to Brahma, and omitted all obeisance. The god's anger blazed forth, but he was at length pacified.   Next he went to the abode of Siva, and omitted to return the god's salutation. The irascible god was enraged, his eyes flashed fire, and he raised his Trident weapon to destroy the sage. But the god's wife, Pirvatt, interceded for him.   Lastly, Bhrigu went to the heaven of Vishnu, whom he found asleep. To try his forbearance, he gave the god a good kick on his breast, which awoke him. Instead of showing anger, Vishnu asked Bhrigu's pardon for not having greeted him on the first arrival. Then he declared he was highly honored by the sage's blow. It has imprinted an indelible mark of good fortune on his breast. He trusted the sage's foot was not hurt, and began to rub it gently.   "This," said Bhrigu, "is the mightiest god; he overpowers his enemies by the most potent of all weapons - gentleness and generosity."

This is why, in the great Christian Myth, Jesus stood silent before Pontius Pilate. Jesus is the One who “overpowers his enemies by the most potent of all weapons – gentleness and generosity”. Jesus chastised Peter for using his sword in Gethsemane, and healed the ear of the man Peter struck. It is why Jesus tried to make it clear over and over that His kingdom was not of the character of this World”. It is why Jesus rejected the Devil’s offer of all the power of the World’s kingdoms. It is why Jesus rejected the role of a military messiah. It is why Jesus is portrayed healing bodies, minds, and spirits. It is why He is portrayed as a raiser even from the dead – Lazarus and the son of the widow of Nain. It is why Jesus accepted the possibility of death in His determination to be faithful to the God of Love He served and loved. Ultimately it is why Jesus is raised from the dead: The Gospel is scandalously determined to make the point that Love triumphs over, is greater than, all things.

I am utterly opposed to making anyone, including St. Paul, the source or arbiter of all truth. But I do think that Paul got it right about the centrality of Love at the heart of the Gospel, at the heart of God, and at the heart of the Jesus he met “in the spirit” on the Damascus road:

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.

Jesus said to love our enemies – a commandment that Joseph Campbell thought was the hardest sentence in the Gospel. Jesus demanded of Peter, the deeply faulted man who would lead His followers, only one thing in that role, asking not once but three times, “Peter, do you love Me?” Love had to be the center of Peter’s discipleship – not his goodness or perfection or law-keeping. [The wonderful Verna Dozier once said that this three-fold question of Jesus surely showed His godlikeness; Jesus completely freed Peter from his three-time denial of Jesus. What could be more loving, gentle and generous!]

There was another very important way that Jesus demonstrated the love of His heavenly Father. He challenged the contempt and meanness and indifference of the religious leaders by almost ostentatiously loving His society’s unlovable – just as Gandhi was later to love the Indian dalits, the Outcasts. He loved lepers, and Samaritans, and prostitutes, and tax-collectors, and thieves, and a Roman centurion, and widows and orphans. Constantly He was expanding the boundaries of His own love; people saw it. Many saw themselves criticized by it, their lack of love exposed, their guilt and their anger exposed. Were Jesus alive on the Earth today, He would be in crack dens, and eating with undocumented immigrants, and sitting with refugees in squalid camps, and attending Gay marriages, and in countless places where the rejected and the despised are gathered. He would also be in the White House and in the Kremlin and Robert Mugabe’s palace, and the United Nations , and the World’s Pentagons, gently challenging them in their positions as he did the Pharisees and Herod, and speaking about the ways of the Kingdom. And, when threatened human powers killed Him again – and we would, for the World is little changed - we would again hear Him speak those ominous words, “Father, forgive them”.

I imagine Jesus’ voice somewhat tinged with understanding and perhaps some loving frustration as He gathers with his disciples for the last Passover meal in the Upper Room. Loving them all, including Judas, He says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." He had tried teaching them for a long time. But it is clear that they “didn’t get it”. Let us sit at your right hand and left they said. Shall we call down lighting to kill them? they said. How dare those peasants be healed on the Sabbath? they said. I think Jesus took stock, saw their human waywardness as He sees ours, and knew that He had to focus them on the heart of His message. I give you a new commandment: Love one another as I have loved you. Jesus would have understood that like all human beings His disciples and we would make a mess of things - making idols of Bible and Church, succumbing to the desire for earthly power and glory, relishing honour and praise.

My guess is that He took a risk. He focused us on the centrality of Love. He hoped that we would “get it” – that we would learn ways to stay focused on Love. Love was the one thing that others would see and recognize the God of Love present among them. Even though being a loving person brings such a sense of Peace and of Happiness, it is amazing how easily we are tempted away from it! You’d think we’d see that His Way blesses us and others more. What contrary, self-destructive people we are!

But maybe the words of Mencius, a Chinese Confucian philosopher and sage of the 4th century BCE, are true. Despite the evidence, I choose to believe he is right. He said:

All [persons] have a mind which cannot bear to see the sufferings of others. If [they] suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, they will experience a feeling of alarm and distress. Let them have their complete development, and they will suffice to love and protect all within the four seas.

I think only one spiritual practice is necessary: it is to mediate daily on the question What is Love? Jesus showed how He loved, showed by His life and teachings what Love, Compassion, truly, authentically is. At the core of our Life as Christians is this Question. We can expand our spiritual practice as we wish, but always our quest is to seek and know the meaning of Love, and our calling is to generate Love around us and within.

The Muslim mystic Ibn Arabi wrote this verse, entitled Whatever Way Love’s Camel Takes; here is his wisdom for us:

My heart has become capable of every form:
It is a pasture for gazelles,
And a monastery for Christian monks,
And a temple for idols,
And the pilgrim's Ka'ba,
And the tablets of the Torah,
And the Book of the Koran.
I follow the religion of Love:
Whatever way love's camel takes,
That is my religion, my faith.

The camel makes it through the desert against great odds. Love will get us successfully through Life’s often treacherous places. Law-keeping will not transform the human heart into the flame of Compassion. My religion is Ibn Arabi’s: Whatever way Love’s camel takes.

2010-04-02T13:43:00.000-07:00

Good Friday C_RCL April 2, 2010

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA

The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh +

We sing the praise of him who died,
of him who died upon the cross…..

Inscribed upon the cross we see
in shining letters, God is love …..

The balm of life, the cure of woe,
the measure and the pledge of love,
the sinner's refuge here below,
the angel's theme in heaven above.

Words from the Holy Week hymn We sing the praise of him who died.

We do not gather here tonight to celebrate suffering.

To acknowledge it, in Jesus’ life and ours, Yes. To be one with Jesus in the agony of crucifixion, Yes. To be deeply aware of how we and indeed all human beings inflict suffering and sorrow upon each other, Yes. But to “celebrate” suffering, No.

Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ is the modern-day culmination of a theology gone awry, probably since the Middle Ages. The prominence of blood, of Jesus’ body twisted in agony, darkness and weeping so evident in the art of the last several hundred years, culminating in the sacrilege of the unrelieved masochistic horror of Gibson’s film which portrays nothing but horror and pain and nothing of the Gospel message, has perverted the focus and the meaning of what we still dare to call “Good” Friday. They are designed to connect us personally and emotionally with Jesus. They are misdirected. What we need is connection to Obedience and Love.

Good Friday is centered in these two things: in Obedience, and in Love. Christ Crucified is the sign that the two are one. Jesus was not hung upon the Cross essentially by evil or hate or politics, but by His choice to be obedient to the essential nature of His God: that of Unconditional Love and Compassion. The choice for Love has engendered evil and hate and political revenge onto many before and since Jesus. It will continue to do so in a World of human beings who are free to choose self-giving generous Love, or selfish self-interest. And, Jesus’ choice will continue to shape the core of those of us who follow His path.

Phillips Brooks, bishop of Massachusetts in the late 18th century and famous for having written the text for the Christmas hymn O Little Town of Bethlehem has written:

The essence of that by which Jesus overcame the world was not suffering, but obedience.
Yes, men may puzzle themselves and their hearers over the question where the power of
the life of Jesus and the death of Jesus lay; but the soul of the Christian always knows that
it lay in the obedience of Christ. He was determined at every sacrifice to do His Father's will.
Let us remember that; and the power of Christ's sacrifice may enter into us, and some little
share of the redemption of the world may come through us, as the great work came through Him.

The story of Jesus last days are full of hurt and suffering, yes. But it is also full of love. The love of His disciples – perhaps even the misguided Judas who desperately wanted Him to claim His messiahship. The compassion of the woman who wiped his face (a non-Biblical legend) as He staggered under the weight of the crossbeam. The love of his mother and of John and the other women as they stood at the foot of the cross. The love of Mary Magdalene, buying burial ointments and following to see where He would be buried. And of course, Jesus’ love: for His mother watching Him die; for His disciples, especially John; for God’s people, “sheep without a shepherd”; for Jerusalem, rejecting God’s love; for His tormentors, forgiving them for their ignorance; for the thieves crucified with Him; and of course for the God of Infinite Compassion Who was the very heart of His being.

Jesus’ resurrection is the Christian proclamation of a great Mystery of Life: that Love is greater than even Death. It is that Mystery which we, in our baptism into Christ, seek to live out every day of our life. Jesus summed up all Christian action in His “new commandment”:

“Love one another as I have loved you”. “

He emphasized servant-Love by washing His disciples’ feet and telling them:

“As I have done for you, so you are to do for one another.”

The essence of that by which Jesus overcame the world was not suffering, but obedience. …
May we remember that; and the power of Christ's sacrifice may enter into us, and some little
share of the redemption of the world may come through us, as the great work came through Him.

It will – as long as we are faithful in Love. It is the Way of the Cross.

2010-03-21T20:03:00.000-07:00

Lent V C_RCL March 21, 2010

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA

The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh +

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, …… Natura naturans.

There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that
is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows
out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me
tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility. This is at once
my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator's Thought
and Art within me ….. (1)

Words of Bruno Barnhart, in his commentary on the Gospel called John. Despite the fact that we are so often unaware of their truth, I believe his perception is accurate.

Next Sunday we begin what the Church calls Holy Week. It is a week filled with emptinesses, with sparseness, with isolation, with betrayals, with pain, with death and burial – though we must not forget the gift glowing at the heart of this week: the gift of Himself that Jesus makes to His disciples at that last earthly Passover celebrated together. Holy Week, by deliberate liturgical planning, is full of what the Collect today calls “the unruly wills and affections of sinners”, full of the “swift and varied changes of the world”.

We latter-day Christians know what comes at the end of Holy Week: a rising from the dead. Resurrection. Strangely and ironically named “Easter”, after the ancient Anglo-Saxon goddess of Spring, Fertility, and New Life, Estre. But I delight in this! It reminds us of what Bruno Barnhart tells us and of which we are often skeptical – that there is in all visible things an invisible fecundity. It reminds us that Life – and our Life – is the ultimate force, and will rise from the ashes of seeming destruction and death. I was reminded of it on Thursday as I drove the Chumash Highway north out of Santa Barbara past last year’s devastation of fire. Tree stumps still stood blackened and empty as they had over scorched earth after the Tea Fire – but now they stood above vibrant green and brilliant wildflowers. How many times in our lives have we known such dying, mentally, physically, emotionally – only to feel new life rising up in wordless gentleness and flowing out to me from the unseen roots of all created being. I have known it many times. As I’m sure you have.

Holy Week is a cursillo, an intense “short course” in the essentials of Being Alive. Jesus’ Holy Week journey is our own; facing opposition; facing doubt; choosing Love; trusting God; staring the various aspects of Death in the face. It is harrowing. We need anchoring. So, the Gospel anchors us on one end with Easter. Perhaps those who devised the Revised Common Lectionary felt we needed an anchor at the other end. And at least in this Year, they have provided it. This Sunday before Palm Sunday – if you will pardon an overwrought poetic image - reeks with what I will call the heady perfume of Generosity, symbolized by Mary’s costly ointment poured over Jesus’ feet. She anoints the One in Whom “true joys are to be found” as we make the journey with Jesus through His Passion – recognizing our own journey of dying and rising in His.

Through the prophet Isaiah, God addresses His people, calling them out of the past, their times of defeat and exile and suffering, into the present, into God’s Present:

 Forget about what's happened; don't keep going over old history. 
Be alert, be present. I'm about to do something brand-new.  It's
bursting out! Don't you see it?  There it is! I'm making a road
through the desert,  rivers in the badlands ….. I provided water
in the desert,  rivers through the sun-baked earth,  drinking water
for the people I chose.

Ever-generous God. Never giving up on us. Shaking us free from the places where yet again we have gotten stuck. Promising and giving new yet time-tested roads through our deserts, ancient life-giving water. As an example: through the challenges of this past year of economic stress, God had been showing us the path of Simplicity and mutual concern and sharing. I hope that the Church will be a faithful witness.

The Psalm confirms God’s generous faithful ways. What could Israel possibly hope for, dragged off into slavery into foreign lands? But God brought them home again. Nations were amazed, Israel herself was amazed, to be freed and brought home. And when it happened again, they remembered God’s generosity, God’s Way, and had the courage to call out for God to help them again:

And now, God, do it again—
bring rains to our drought-stricken lives
So those who planted their crops in despair
will shout hurrahs at the harvest,
So those who went off with heavy hearts
will come home laughing, with armloads of blessing.

Paul knew the Divine Generosity in his life. A persecutor and murderer of followers of the Gospel Way, his words passionately show how God freed him and filled him with a new Life:

Yes, all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life. …..
I've dumped [all my old ways] in the trash so that I could embrace Christ and
be embraced by him ….. I gave up all that inferior stuff so I could know
Christ personally, experience his resurrection power, be a partner in his suffering,
and go all the way with him to death itself ….. [God] has so wondrously reached
out for me …

Have we followed dead-end ways? You bet we all have. But in a God generous with His Spirit and Love, we have found paths leading to new Life.

The precious ointment that Mary generously lavishes on Jesus is a sign to us that the ultimate generosity of God is seen in Jesus. The costly nard is a sign of the abundant Life that passes to us, is lavished on us, from God - as life passed from Jesus to Lazarus. It is a sign that even if, in our own lives, we lie in our self-made tombs three days as Lazarus did and decay has set in, we can be called forth – and not to our old life but to a deeper and richer and truer one.

As we approach our yearly cursillo in facing Death and choosing Love and trusting the ultimate power of Life, we are securely anchored: on the one end by God’s vast generosity and on the other by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. We are well prepared to enter unafraid into the Mystery of Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection.

Oscar Wilde has said:

Where there is no extravagance there is no love, and
where there is no love there is no understanding.

He is correct. Jesus – extravagant, loving, understanding - is the living proof, along with all who take up His cross and follow.

(1) Bruno Barnhart The Good Wine: Reading John from the Center pp.215-16

2010-02-28T08:25:00.000-08:00

Lent II C_RCL Feb 28, 2010

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA

The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh +

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets

and stones those who are sent to it!
How often I've longed to gather your children,  
gather your children like a hen,  her brood safe
under her wings—   but you refused and turned away!

Some of the most deeply felt words from Jesus in the Gospels. There are so many echoes, in Scripture and in later writers. One echo is certainly the longing cry of the exiles in Babylon, from the 137th Psalm: (1)

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,  let my right hand forget its skill. 
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth  if I do not remember you, 
if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.  

Here is a poem by Yehudah Halevi, from the late part of the 12th century:

Would that I had wings
that I could wend my way to Thee,
O Jerusalem, from afar!
I will make my own broken heart
find its way amidst your broken ruins.
I will fall upon my face to the ground,
for I take much delight in your stones
and show favor to your very dust,
to the air of your land!

And finally, bringing us to our own times, words from 20th century Rabbi Abraham Heschel : (2)

Who will fan and force the fire of truth to spread across the world,
insisting that we are all one, that mankind is not an animal species
but a fellowship of care, a covenant of brotherhood?  

There is cursing in the world, scheming, and very little praying.
Let Jerusalem inspire praying: an end to rage, an end to violence.  

Let Jerusalem be a seat of mercy for all men. Wherever a sigh
is uttered, it will evoke active compassion in Jerusalem.  

Let there be no waste of history. This must be instilled in those
who might be walking in the streets of Jerusalem like God's
butlers in the sacred palace. Here no one is more than a guest.  

Jerusalem must not be lost to pride or to vanity.  

All of Jerusalem is a gate, but the key is lost in the darkness of God's silence.
Let us light all the lights, let us call all the names, to find the key.

On this Second Sunday of the Lenten Journey, we open ourselves to a core theme in the Jewish and Christian faiths: that of Covenant. “Covenant” lies at the heart of our relationship with God. “Jerusalem” becomes, from at least the 5th century BCE, the universal symbol of the goal and destination of Faith. “Jerusalem” is both that place where God and God’s people dwell together, or where, as in the Gospel today, that relationship fails. In her usual eloquence, my friend and colleague Suzanne Guthrie says, bringing us full circle:

In Christian symbolism Jerusalem is everyplace and the ultimate place. Jerusalem
is the conflicted city within our hearts and the hoped for heavenly city of promise.
Jerusalem is Earth herself. We lament over the world and our continual warfare
and our ongoing destruction of land and seas and air. We (3) are the holy place that
kills prophets, healers, sages and innocents in the complex chaos of our passions. (4)

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the word for “covenant” is always berith. The derivation of the word is uncertain. Some think it comes from the Assyrian word beritu, which means “to bind”. This makes sense. But most believe it comes from the Hebrew verb barach, meaning “to cut”. That links us immediately to our reading from Genesis 15, where God establishes His covenant with Abraham, affirming His promise that Abraham, though now childless, will be the “father of many nations”. In the ritual sacrifice that affirms the covenant and binds Abraham to God, the animals are cut down the middle. This ritual will be seen many times in the Hebrew Bible. In Jeremiah 34, God says, “The men who have violated my covenant and have not fulfilled the terms of the covenant they made before me, I will treat like the calf they cut in two and then walked between its pieces.” (5)

Berith can mean a legal contract, a mutual voluntary agreement. But when used of God and us, it is clear that God and we are not equal parties. Berith in this case says more about God’s disposition towards us. Simply, our failing faithfully to keep the relationship does not break the relationship, as a broken contract would. God’s relationship with us is unbreakable. This is clear in God’s promise to Abraham, clear in the covenants with Moses, Joshua, with the whole of Israel – and with us in the person of Jesus.

The knowing, in the mind and heart, that God will never break our relationship, and the knowing that when we abandon God there is always a way back on the path of self-knowledge and repentance – so powerfully depicted in the parable of the Prodigal Son – is the core principle that this Second Sunday in Lent calls us to embrace. It is the rock foundation on which to build our Life. Our life with God is never contractual, never subject to cancellation due to “pre-existing conditions”. It is always Covenantal. “God” is ever-faithful in Love, Justice, Forgiveness.

“Jerusalem” is the living symbol of our life-giving relationship with God. It is extolled in the Song of Solomon, and in the vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem in Revelation. It is hoped for in that overly sentimental but stirring Blake poem set as the hymn “Jerusalem” by Parry – a deep cry for God’s Peaceable Kingdom to come among us: “and is Jerusalem build-ed here / among the dark Satanic mills.”

Our work is to let God build “Jerusalem” in our hearts. To bind ourselves together with God in the covenant of Love. To live our lives out of that radiant core. To build “Jerusalem” stone by stone around us, extending the Covenant Community to all peoples and nations.

Our rallying cry, in this week of our Lenten journey, can be the words of the 18th century Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav: (6)

Wherever I go, I go to Jerusalem.”

+++++

Footnotes:

(1) Ps 137: 5-6

(2) Abraham Heschel: "Israel: An Echo of Eternity"

(3) emphasis mine

(4) The Rev. Suzanne Guthrie, on her website "At the Edge of the Enclosure"

(5) Jeremiah 34: 18

(6) Nachman of Bratslav, 1772-1810

Sermon for Epiphany II_RCL: The Marriage at Cana

2010-01-17T13:03:00.000-08:00

Epiphany II C _ Jan 17, 2010

St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA

The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh +

These are words from the 14th century Islamic Persian poet Hafiz of Shariz:

From the large jug, drink the wine of Unity,
So that from your heart, you can wash away
the futility of Life’s grief.
But like this large jug, still keep the heart expansive.
Why would you want to keep the heart captive,
like an unopened bottle of wine?

Uncorking the heart. Being an enthusiastic winebibber myself – perhaps too much so, as one can see from my girth, and the fact that my cross which used to hang parallel to my body now falls at a 30 degree angle! - I find this a perfect image for why we gather here week after week as “church”, around a feasting table of bread and wine holding the abundance of Divine Life. We come to get uncorked! We and God know how easy it is for the “heart” to be captive and imprisoned. We know how it’s capacity for Life – for love and compassion and kindness and generosity - can get “bottled up”. Jesus also knows, as we see in the Gospel reading for this Second Sunday in Epiphanytide – the liturgical season which spotlights Jesus’ manifestation in the World’s consciousness.

We come together in worship in order to set our captive hearts free, to “keep the heart expansive”. One of the antiphons for the Feast of St. Agnes says, "I have drawn milk and honey from his lips, and his blood hath given fair color to my cheeks." Romano Guardini has written:

“...Wine possess a sparkle, a perfume, a vigour, that expands and clears the imagination.
Under the form of wine Christ gives us his divine blood …… For our sakes Christ
became bread and wine, food and drink. We make bold to eat him and to drink him.
This bread gives us solid and substantial strength. This wine bestows courage, joy
out of all earthly measure, sweetness, beauty, limitless enlargement and
perception. It brings life in intoxicating excess, both to possess and to impart.”

Jesus knew the words of the prophet Isaiah, words we often use as we celebrate the life of one who has died:

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples

a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food
filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.

Christians who have feasted at the Supper of the Lamb for any length of time – on Word and Sacrament and Community - know with a deep inner knowing that all people have been invited to the “marriage supper of the lamb” – not only beyond this earthly life but within it as well. We also know that God has invited us to be heralds of this invitation, by our words, our deeds, by our lives both individual and as the living Body of Christ in the World.

The authors of the Gospel called John produce right near the beginning a story of a marriage in Cana. It is deliberate; they want to create the context in which the Gospel message and the meaning of Jesus’ Life is set. The wedding is obviously a local community affair since Jesus is invited along other residents, many of whom are his disciples. It focuses our attention, as it would have that of His contemporaries, to God’s abundant nurturing of the People. In our minds and theirs arise images: manna and quail in the wilderness; a land flowing with milk and honey; Isaiah’s feast of rich food; the countless psalms like today’s that speak in various ways of eating our fill at the banquet God spreads and filling our tankards with Eden spring water.

The story of the marriage reminds us of the intimacy of the relationship of God and God’s People. The huge amount of wine – 180 gallons! – reminds us that God’s gifts are boundless. The fact that the wine wasn’t cheap rotgut but the finest reminds us that when we feed on the things of God, it is the best, always. God doesn’t hold back at any time in our Life or no matter how much we’ve had or need. We’re talking here not only of things to keep us physically alive – though Haiti reminds us that it is the responsibility of the human community to see that all have the basic material requirements met. We are talking of identity, of love, of inner peace, of resilience, of self-respect. Martin Luther King Jr. – whose feast day we keep this week - would, I think, have accomplished far less than he did were he not firmly grounded in God and Her gifts.

It is an important part of the story that the wine gave out. People hearing the story would have raised an audible gasp. This would be a serious thing to happen at such a gathering. They and we would certainly find ourselves thinking: “Am I prepared in mind, heart and spirit to meet the demands of Life? Is my community prepared to meet the demands of our common Life?” I’m not at all sure that I understand what the business is about Jesus saying to his mother, “"Is that any of our business, Mother—yours or mine? This isn't my time. Don't push me." You might have some thoughts about that. But Mary, as the mother-figure, represents those very necessary people in our lives who care about us, those who support us and rally support at difficult times, sometimes without our knowing it. We all need help in our Journey. The story reminds us of our need for a relationship with God and all that “God” means, and with fellow human beings.

This story clearly sets the solid foundation on which the Gospel of John tells the story of Jesus: When your Life is intimately woven into the Divine Life, not even Death can defeat you. Death did not defeat Martin Luther King Jr. A new Life was given to the whole American people by his prophetic ministry and death and, like Jesus, he continues to live powerfully among us now.

Bruno Barnhart has written:

"When the wine gave out..." These words bear a weight of feeling. One imagines
the pain attending such an embarrassment at the great event in the lives of these
two poor people. The words resonate on other levels, too. They express
something of the profound and manifold sorrow of the human condition. The
wine is always giving out. And as the day wears on, we are more and more aware
that we cannot replenish it from our own resources.”

Every time we uncork the heart, Love rushes in to enliven it. Good worship and liturgy always aids this process. The lovely Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Community, so wisely speaks to what that means for us as followers of Jesus:

“True love is delicate and kind, full of gentle perception and understanding, full of
beauty and grace, full of joy unutterable. There should be some flavor of this in
all our love for others. We are all one. We are one flesh in the Mystical Body as man
and woman are said to be one flesh in marriage. With such a love one would see all
things new; we would begin to see people as they really are, as God sees them."

Coming here, to the “marriage supper of the Lamb”, we affirm that what may be standing in the way of love flowing out of our hearts is pried, popped out, uncorked. We “draw milk and honey from [Christ’s] lips”, and His mystical Blood “hath given colour to [our] cheeks”. Then we can do what Hafiz of Shiraz, in his forthright words, says:

“Get up and make an effort. Don't lie around like a bum. He who throws
himself at the Beloved's feet is like a workhorse and will be rewarded ..”

Or, as the Collect says: we may “shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory”.

2009-12-21T09:36:00.000-08:00

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”.

2009-10-25T17:56:00.001-07:00

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.

2009-09-20T20:11:00.000-07:00

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:

“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.

2009-07-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-07-05T17:16:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-05-24T19:56:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-05-04T13:21:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-04-09T13:26:00.000-07:00

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”.

(1)

The Rev. Harry Cook, Holy Week = Homiletic Bonanza, March 30, 2009. I am specifically using some of his thoughts in this sermon.

2009-03-03T15:56:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-12-21T20:26:00.000-08:00

Sermon for: Advent IV B _ Dec 21, 2008
St. Benedict’s, Los Osos, CA
[The Rev] Brian McHugh

This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.”

These are the words of the 13th C. mystic known as Meister Eckhart (1260-1328). He expands and illuminates for us, in this season of Hope and Longing, the message and the Mystery of the Annunciation that is our Gospel reading this morning, on this last Sunday of Advent, by the simple use of the word “us”.

Advent has been full of longing and hope: for God’s rule, for the Kingdom of Peace and Justice, for the Messiah of God, for renewal of our lives through repentance and God’s mercy and love. And for the strengthening of that great Mystery we call Hope. I have an icon of Harvey Milk (show icon), the Gay San Francisco Supervisor who was murdered in 1978. The words that accompany it are Harvey’s: “The important thing is not that we can live on hope alone, but that life is not worth living without it.” What did he mean? I think Harvey’s meaning is pointed to by Meister Eckhart seven centuries earlier.

Hope is not a desire for the impossible, but for the possible. So, we humans need to see results nowe and then, need to see possibilities coming to fruition. Harvey Milk is acknowledged as the first openly Gay man elected to public office. For those who understood his election as a fulfillment of a hope for justice and for understanding, both Straight and Gay, Hope came alive and real.

The story we call the Annunciation is a brilliant jewel about the Hope for God’s loving, just, merciful, kind presence in human life. I read once that every woman in ancient Israel longed to be the mother of the one who would represent God, to be the mother of the Messiah. The archangel Gabriel tells Mary that she will bear God’s Son. Her name means bitter, and bitterness will remain in Mary's life; but the bitterness will be tempered with a deeper joy that she said Yes to God, Yes to bringing God into the World. Our celebration of the Incarnation four days hence will be the fulfillment of that Hope.

But Meister Eckhart reminds us, teaches us, the deeper meaning of the Hope for God - and the deeper, universal meaning of Jesus’ birth to Mary through the action of God’s Holy Spirit - by that little word “us”. "This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.” Listen to what he says before this sentence: “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?

St. Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux (1090-1153) in the 12th C, beautifully captures the importance of Mary saying Yes to God. He is addressing Her directly: This is what the whole earth waits for, prostrate at your feet. It is right in doing so, for on your word depends comfort for the wretched, ransom for the captive, freedom for the condemned, indeed salvation for all the children of Adam, the whole of your race. Answer quickly, O Virgin. Reply in haste to the angel, or rather through the angel to the Lord. Answer with a word, receive the word of God. Speak your own word, conceive the divine word. Breathe a passing word, embrace the eternal word.

The Annunciation, and Mary’s “Yes”, and the resulting dwelling of God in human flesh, is the pattern for the full glory of our lives, and a pattern for our calling and ministries for God in the World. The “Yes” is critical, because the God we know does not force Himself on any of us against our will. God seeks a home in us, with us. In the reading from Samuel, God reminds King David that He does not want to live in a “cedar house”. Rather, God will live among His people, bring them safety and abundance and a home, through a descendant of David, whose throne will last forever.

This last Sunday of Advent reminds us that we are all “mothers of God”, destined to bring Christ into the world; reminds us that this is what all our religious life is training us to be. Scripture reminds us that we who have said “Yes” to God through our baptismal vows are all sisters and brothers of Christ.

The founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day, beautifully expresses the Mystery of the Annunciation to Mary and of the “motherhood” of Mary as it describes our lives: Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts. But now it is with the voice of our contemporaries that he speak; with the eyes of store clerks, factory workers, and children that he gazes; with the hands of office workers, slum dwellers, and suburban housewives that he gives. It is with the feet of ….. tramps that he walks, and with the heart of anyone in need that he longs for shelter. And giving shelter or food to anyone who asks for it, or needs it, is giving it to Christ. . This is how God is present in the World – through the “us” of whom Meister Eckhart spoke.

Dorothy wisely reminds us not to be too hard on ourselves as we try to give birth to God in the World: “It would be foolish to pretend that it is always easy to remember this. If everyone were holy and handsome, with “alter Christus” shining in neon lighting from them, it would be easy to see Christ in everyone. If Mary had appeared in Bethlehem clothed, as St. John says, with the sun, a crown of twelve stars on her heard, and the moon under her feet, then people would have fought to make room for her. But that was not God’s way for her, nor is it Christ’s way for himself, now when he is disguised under every type of humanity that treads the earth.”[1]

Here at the end of Advent, and looking forward to the Eternal Word that will leap down from God’s royal throne, we hope for our love to grow for God and all Creation. It is always about Love, as my colleague Suzanne Guthrie says in her book "Grace’s Window”: Love waits behind the silence of prayer for my yes to a deepening capacity to love. Every love informs a greater love. Every lesser love is a forerunner of the great Love, sensed but never seen, to whom Mary once said yes.[2]

In Advent, we have been drawing courage to say “Yes” to God’s desire to live in us and be present in the World through us. We never give up Hope that this is possible! As Harvey Milk said, “Life is not worth living without it”. And God’s Spirit never rests, both to strengthen Hope, and to show us results in our lives and in our World.

These are hard times for Hope. Everything seems collapsing around us. But Hope is the Art of the Possible. And – with the appropriate theological investigation – I do believe at some basic level that “With God all things are possible”. I need to learn again not to look for the “bad” but to look for the “good”. There is much of it, even if we have to look down the long road or at the broad picture. “Taking the long view” is a hard lesson for me, but I’m trying.

The Anglican poet John Donne (1572-1631) wrote these words about the Annunciation and Mary’s Yes:

Salvation to all that will is nigh ;
That All, which always is all everywhere …..
Lo ! faithful Virgin, yields Himself to lie
In prison, in thy womb ; and though He there
Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He'll wear,
Taken from thence, flesh, which death's force may try.
Ere by the spheres time was created thou
Wast in His mind, who is thy Son, and Brother ;
Whom thou conceivest, conceived ; yea, thou art now
Thy Maker's maker, and thy Father's mother,
Thou hast light in dark, and shutt'st in little room
Immensity, cloister'd in thy dear womb.

Like Mary, we are all “in Christ’s mind”, all our Maker’s “maker” and our Father’s “mother”. God is “cloister’d” in our hearts. So let us, in the words of the Christmas carol, sing out together with Hope: “O holy Child of Bethlehem / Descend to us, we pray / Cast out our sin and enter in / Be born to us today / We hear the Christmas angels / The great glad tidings tell / O come to us, abide with us / Our Lord Emmanuel .

[1] From Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, edited by Robert Ellsberg (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1992).
[2] (The Rev.) Suzanne Guthrie, Grace’s Window, pg. 17

2008-11-23T18:49:00.000-08:00

Sermon for: Nov 23, 2008 (St. Peter’s, Santa Maria CA) Brian H.O.A. McHugh, priest
Season: Proper 29A_RCL_Last Pentecost_Reign of Christ

Are we fools, we Christians, or what?? Here we stand, poised in hope, at the end of our liturgical year, on the last Sunday of the long season of Pentecost, claiming God is in charge of everything. In the blinding light of the Mystery of the Resurrection, for 28 weeks, we have pondered what the Spirit of God has attempted to show us, in the Eternal Present in which we live, about Life, about the Creation, about humanity, about the core Reality of Love. The question is always the same: How can, may, shall we be faithful manifestations of the Shepherd God in the World?

Today is sometimes called The Feast of Christ the King, or Of the Reign of Christ. Many of us keep it in the Episcopal Church, though it is not “official” in the Calendar. Our Collect, referring to the Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lords is a “somewhat free”[1] translation of the Latin collect from the Roman Missal. The Roman Church has kept the feast since 1925, and it is included in the Lutheran Calendar.

Let’s look at the Collect for a minute. It speaks of God’s will to “restore all things” in God’s” well-beloved Son”, especially “the peoples of the Earth, divided and enslaved by sin”. I buy that. I believe the Gospel and the Hebrew Scriptures indeed speak to a deep desire for all of humanity to be one in God’s unconditional and abiding Love. The real question for me, after 40 years pondering and preaching about the Gospel, is, How? And, What does “brought together under His most gracious rule” mean?? Many Christians over the last 2000 years have interpreted it as meaning that God wants everyone to be a Christian, to be part of the Christian Church, broadly defined. With respect, I disagree.

Now, it may be that my concept of God’s Time is impoverished. But, looking back over 2000 years, I think I have adequate basis for thinking metaphorically rather than literally. Jesus is, to my mind, essentially, in the lovely phrase from the hymn, the King of Love, and our Shepherd. The human community does not show, in all recorded history, a tendency towards unity under one temporal, religious, or spiritual “ruler”. We human beings have free will, will not be coerced or subjugated (as history surely shows), and unity only comes through Choice. Unity cannot be imposed for long. It is like Love. Love can only be given or received freely, and is the only way that true Unity can be achieved. As that other lovely hymn says, Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est - Where is found compassion and love, there is God. In other words, God’s purpose can only be achieved when Love reigns as “King” ….. or “Queen”.

In preaching two Sundays ago about the nature of “The Kingdom of God” I said I based my core understanding on three sayings of Jesus: First, Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand; Second, My Kingdom is not of this world; and, Third, The Kingdom of God is within you.
At hand means that that the Kingdom is a kind of parallel universe – and it can break through in what are called these days “thin” spots - holy places, or people, or events. The Church is meant to be such a “thin” place. By my observation, we are failing widely. We have made the institutional church and the Bible “golden calves”, often worshipping them than the Living God.
Not of this World means that the Church can’t be a kind of spiritualized replacement of the United Nations with some religious leader at the top, Pope, Imam, llama, avatar, or whomever. The Kingdom is not of bricks and mortar, and in Gethsemane Jesus would not allow Peter to act as if it were. The Kingdom of God is a vision of the heart, mind, and spirit. It transcends all boundaries of power, control, and inequality. Love is the only “sword” that can be wielded in it’s construction or defense.
Within you means that the seeds of Kingdom-building rest within each human being. The seed is divine Love, the presence of the Holy One. There is only one way in which that seed can grow, as Jesus taught in a parable. The seed must be buried and die in order to produce abundant fruit. We must rise to the consciousness that we are matter infused by spirit. We are a manifestation of God – and are called to live accordingly.

“Becoming Christ” is fundamentally what our religious practice is all about. Baptism unites our material nature, signified by the water, with the life-giving Spirit, signified by the Dove, and sets us on the path to full humanity. The Body and Blood of the Christ – our spiritual food and drink - nourishes the Christ Within. All our personal and communal piety – and, critically, the physical structures and organization of the church in the World – have only one central aim: to awaken us to the presence of God incarnate within us. When the Christ is alive within us, the Kingdom manifests itself in the Earth.

The writer to the church in Ephesus understood this. He says of the Church, The church is Christ's body, in which he speaks and acts, by which he fills everything with his presence. But, he warns, the Church is dead unless the Church’s members be “intelligent and discerning in knowing him personally, your eyes focused and clear, so that you can see exactly what it is he is calling you to do, grasp the immensity of this glorious way of life he has for Christians, oh, the utter extravagance of his work in us who trust him—endless energy, boundless strength!”.

The Reign of Christ is not established by Worldly might. Nor, I have come to realize, by some final allegiance by all to some one or another institutional Church or Faith, especially those which resort to coercion or fear. Nor by the fundamentalist’s vain delusion that God will override our free will to choose, and intervene to impose Her will. The Reign of Christ only becomes a reality in the World when Divine Love pours out of us. This is God’s message to all human beings, and certainly to those of us called to witness to this truth by “taking up the Cross”. Here is the meaning of the parable of the separation of the Sheep and the Goats: Either you see God in human beings or you don’t. God reigns only as human beings love God and each other and the whole Creation as God loves us. If we remember nothing else from the Gospel, Jesus drove the message home in His Great Commandment: Love one another as I have loved you. As 1 John reminds us, Anyone who says he love God but hates his “neighbour” is a lair.

Are we Christians fools? Today, we end our liturgical year expressing our hope that the Kingdom of Divine Love, headed by a Shepherd King, is possible. Next Sunday, we will begin our new liturgical year in the same way. We will immerse ourselves in the truth and hope that the Kingdom is at hand, that it transcends this physical World, that it is within us and every human being. At the Christ-mass, we will rejoice that the Christ is born in us and every person. Then we will set out once again to give Life to the hope of the unity and freedom of all the peoples of the Earth, “divided and enslaved by sin”. Each will do what we can, in Love.

Fools? Yes we are. Can we know and liberate the God-in-Us; give ourselves to Love; care for Mother Earth; see every human being as our sister, our brother; have compassion for the poor; defend the oppressed and the victims of false witness, including our Gay and Lesbian brothers and sisters; choose Love over defending institutions of power, both secular and religious?

As a man just elected to be President of the United States calmly says: Yes we can.

[1] Marion Hatchett, Commentary on the American Prayer Book

2008-11-09T21:19:00.000-08:00

Sermon for: Nov 9, 2008 (Good Shepherd, Salinas CA)
Brian H.O.A. McHugh, priest
Season: Proper 27A_RCL_Pentecost XXVI

Basileia tou Theou, in the Greek. The Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of Heaven. The Reign of God. The phrase, in its various English forms, appears in the Gospels and the Christian Testament over 100 times. It is a strong theme in Judaism, as the hope that God will restore the nation of Israel to the land. In Islam, it refers to the absolute reign of Allah over all things or Creation; or, to a possible earthly entity, sometimes referred to as the caliphate or imamate, where Allah’s laws are embraced and adhered to, bringing peace and unity to the devout [Islamic scholars have used Matt 13: 13ff to support their position]; or to a spiritual entity revealed after the Day of Judgment, inhabited by those who have gone to Heaven. We find all these various aspects of the nature of the Kingdom in the history of Christianity. Why? I believe, because somewhere inside, we all want Peace, Justice, Compassion, and Joy as the context for Life. Essentially, human beings are creatures of Hope, which Barack Obama tapped into.

It has been argued that the theme of the Kingdom is the core, central heart of Jesus’ message in the synoptic Gospels. The theologian Tom Harpur, a Canadian Anglican priest, has put it succinctly: “Jesus did not come to save us from our sins; He came to usher us into the Kingdom of God” (paraphrased). Certainly most of the Gospel parables speak to the nature of the Kingdom of God. We have one today – the Wise and Foolish Virgins.

We could argue all day about the nature of the Kingdom – and scholars have. Every one of them uses Scripture to support their view. Personally, I have centered my thinking on three of the sayings ascribed to Jesus: First, Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand; Second, My Kingdom is not of this world; and, Third, The Kingdom of God is within you. This morning, I want to share some thoughts about the Kingdom, and for us to look at what the parable we have today says about that Kingdom and about how we become a citizen of it.

In the history of Christianity, various attempts have been made, both in the East and the West, to merge the temporal and spiritual realms. In the East, it was Byzantium, where from Constantine on, the church and the empire were seen as one, and the Church’s Liturgy reflected the splendor of the Oriental court. In the West, it was the rise of the Roman Catholic Church as a temporal power, using spiritual power and the fear it held to control politics and wealth. The Medieval period implied that church and state were one. This collapsed in the 16th C with the Reformation, though vestiges still remain, for example in Vatican State, English establishment, and the Islamic Ulema. In my opinion, reading over history, the attempt to associate the Kingdom of God with an Earthly Kingdom has both never worked, and has missed Christ’s message. It hasn’t worked because we have failed to understand the meaning of the Incarnate Christ, and therefore failed to see what must lie at the heart of the manifestation of the Kingdom.

I use “truth-story” for “myth” so that we understand that “myth” indeed expresses truth and not falsehood or fantasy. Over the decades, I have come to understand that the truth-stories/myths of all faiths and religions attempt to answer two central and related questions: What is the nature of Existence?, and Who are we as human beings? In the Christian tradition, though I disagree with some interpretations, the Genesis Creation stories answer the first question: All Existence is a manifestation of the Divine.

The second question is powerfully answered by the Cross on which, in the Christian myth, the Christ died. The cross in some form has existed in many religions, including Egyptian and Buddhist. It has always been a symbol of Life. This is why Protestantism rejected the crucifix, which had come to represent suffering more than Life in popular understanding. The Cross represents, by it’s horizontal arm, matter/flesh; by it’s vertical arm, spirit. This is who we are as human beings: matter enlivened by Divine spirit. The story of the birth of God to Mary by the “coming upon her” of the Spirit tells us this. Other religions and their myths have made the same point. As one example, note the story of the birth of the Egyptian god Horus, son of Osiris, to Isis. The meaning is the same: What animates us, what makes us a unified living human “soul” is the indwelling of the Divine. In essence, this is what we mean by "Christ died that we might live”.

Here I think lies the meaning of the Kingdom, and it’s manifestation. The Kingdom of God cannot manifest itself until each one of us realizes that God lives at our core, in our heart. We are a part of the Divine energy that created and creates the Universe. Tom Harpur puts it this way: …the story of Jesus is the story of each of us in allegorical form. As spirit-gifted animals, we are crucified on the cross of matter; we are bearers of the Christ within, and will one day be resurrected to a glorious destiny with God.[1]

The Kingdom is God is within you, Jesus said. To me, this means that it can’t appear until the light of Christ flares up in us and flows out from us. It is not going to be imposed at the end of some eschatological Age, or after some last, destructive Judgment. The Kingdom of God is at hand, Jesus said, for there He stood among them, mirroring the Divine within them. Which means that we must stand in the World as Christ. My Kingdom is not of this World, Jesus said ….. implying that the Kingdom cannot come through worldly power or Peter’s sword or might, but only by the light of the Divine shining out of each of us, giving light to the World. The Gospel is clear that the greatest sign of the Kingdom breaking through is Love.

And so, what does the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins tell us? Here’s my take. I understand the home to which the Bridegroom arrives to be each of our hearts. He is coming to marry His divinity with our flesh, to make us a whole human being. But in reality, the Divine Bridegroom is always there, or we would not be alive. So the issue is, are we prepared to Welcome Him? All of us have lamps: our bodies, our hearts, our minds, our senses, our intellects. But do these lamps have adequate fuel? Worship is a fuel: How do we worship? The Eucharist is the heart of our worship for a reason. It sacramentally fuels us with the Body and Blood of the Christ, teaching us to feed on God. Reading is a fuel: What do we read, or watch, or study? Do they shed light to help us recognize the Bridegroom? Relationships are a fuel: Do our relationships glow with the love, justice, kindness of God? Self-love is a fuel: Do we love ourselves as God loves us, or mistreat ourselves? How we love God and ourselves determines how we love others. Charity is a fuel: How do we give of ourselves to sustain others?

The parable tells us that the Bridegroom comes at moments we don’t anticipate. Our work this week is to ponder the ways we keep our lamps burning. God is always here, bidden or unbidden. It is a darkened heart that obscures God’s Presence. Our work is to keep as many lamps as possible well fueled and burning brightly, creating a welcome for Holy Wisdom, like a plane honing in on a runway at night. As our reading says, and it is Good News: Wisdom .. hastens to make herself known to those who desire her .. she goes about seeking those worthy of her, and she graciously appears to them in their paths, and meets them in every thought. When Holy Wisdom leads us to the Christ Within, the Kingdom makes its appearance. Only then can the World be transformed.

[1] The Pagan Christ, Tom Harpur, pg. 147

2008-11-05T12:25:00.000-08:00

Sermon for: All Saints Day [Nov 2, 2008]
Season: St. Benedict’s, Los Osos, CA

From the Letter to the Church at Ephesus:

"Now, in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He is our Peace..In His flesh He has made (all) into one...reconciling (all) to God, in one Body, through the cross. So then, you are no longer strangers or aliens, but you are citizens with the saints, and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundations of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the cornerstone. In Him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in Whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God."

Every year we give ourselves a party, a party that includes us, all who have gone before, and all who will follow us. Our celebration of the Feast of All Saints is a rejoicing that you and I are fellow citizens with all those who have walked the Gospel path before us - from Stephen the Deacon to the last who passed on among us. We claim our place in the Communion of Saints - not with a bunch of perfect goody, goodies, but with the whole bunch of fallible human beings who opened their hearts to the transforming power of God’s grace.

Being disciples of Jesus is not easy! Nor, despite the somewhat sanitized picture we tend to have of the great saints and their great deeds, was it easy for them. They, like us, were human, and we all share propensities both for good and for evil. Polycarp and Benedict and Thomas Gallaudet and Sojourner Truth and Martin Luther King were flawed human beings, capable of great courage and love as well as human weakness. We are no different. In our humanness, we can speak carelessly, act thoughtlessly; we can judge each other harshly or in ignorance; we can disappoint each other. It is all too easy for us to forget why God has brought us together. Yet each one of us, by virtue of our baptism, has been drawn here to come into an intimate relationship with our God. As promised, Christ’s yoke is easy, and His burden light.

We Present-Day "Saints" – the Mormons don’t have a patent on the name - seek to live according to a vision, because we know that "without vision, the people perish". What is that vision? It is this:

· that we are deeply, deeply beloved.
· that the God Who makes us whole and free has made our flesh Her home.
· that in listening to Jesus, His teachings, His values, and by letting go of false priorities, we will find joy and fierce energy and freedom for the living of our lives, by loving Self and others as God loves us.
· that in service to others we will find our true Selves, and true greatness. Jesus said, "those who seek their lives will lose them, but those who give their lives for My sake and the Gospel will find them".
· that by Truth-seeking and repentance, we will by Grace live our humanity in a Christ-like way.

The Beatitudes are always the Gospel reading for this Feast. They hold the heart of what, in the end, makes any of us a member of the Communion of Saints. On this All Saints Day, let’s take a few moments to meditate on them (the text is from The Message, by Dr. Eugene Peterson)

· "You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and God’s rule.
· "You're blessed when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.
· "You're blessed when you're content with just who you are—no more, no less. That's the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can't be bought.
· "You're blessed when you've worked up a good appetite for God. He's food and drink in the best meal you'll ever eat.
· "You're blessed when you care. At the moment of being 'care-full,' you find yourselves cared for.
· "You're blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.
· "You're blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That's when you discover who you really are, and your place in God's family.
· "You're blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God's kingdom. Not only that—count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable.

Do you know the song Earthen Vessels? [ Behold a treasure / not made of gold / in earthern vessels, wealth untold / One treasure only / the Lord, the Christ / in earthen vessels ] The Beatitudes are a basic map for finding the treasure “not made of gold” which we hold within ourselves as earthen vessels. They are the path to wholeness and authentic humanity. We are earthen vessels filled with the compassion, justice, mercy, and peace which defines the Holy One, and defines us as Christ-filled beings. Rightly, the First Letter of John says: “What marvelous love the Father has extended to us! … we're called children of God! That's who we really are” ….. What our baptism calls us to become more deeply every day.

The Beatitudes are the path to sainthood that so many have sought to walk. As Ecclesiasticus (44) reminds us, some were great and famous; of some there is no memory. Today we honour them, give thanks for them, especially those living and dead who have inspired us. We count ourselves among them as we stream towards the throne of God, made worthy to stand before God, scrubbed clean by the blood of the Lamb.

Our psalm [34] for today best expresses both our goal and our hope:

I bless God every chance I get; my lungs expand with his praise. 2 I live and breathe God … 4 God met me more than halfway, he freed me from my anxious fears. 5 Look at him; give him your warmest smile. Never hide your feelings from him.8 Open your mouth and taste, open your eyes and see— how good God is. Blessed are you who run to him. 9 Worship God if you want the best; worship opens doors to all [God’s] goodness. [The Message]

As the hymn says (293): For the saints of God are just folk like me / And I mean to be one too.

2008-09-07T14:08:00.000-07:00

Sermon for: Sept 7, 2008 (St. Benedict’s, Los Osos CA) Brian H.O.A. McHugh, priest
Season: Proper 18A_RCL_Pent XVII

[Note: All Scripture quotes are from The Message.]

As I pondered the readings for this Sunday, I found most of the readings uninspiring. This happens every now and then. Usually it means that I’m in a discouraged or cynical mood. The constant drone of politics will always do it. Usually in such circumsatnces I produce a “comfort sermon”. Most of us like to come together as “church” to be comforted. To be reassured that “all will be well” both in this life and in the unknown Beyond; that God loves us unconditionally. That's OK. Of course, we often make the assumption that if God loves us unconditionally, God approves of us and what we do. This, of course, is not necessarily the case. But, I don’t want to get off on a rant, especially since rants are pretty grim. Aside from their message, maybe that’s why the prophets were so “without honor in their own country”. So, I would like to engage us in a conversation. What does it mean that God is Love – if you agree God is? What does it mean that the Gospel is a Gospel about Peace and Reconciliation – if you agree it is? I will try to take a balanced look at both the Bad News and at the Good News today.

“Israel” is a symbol for Humankind. God chooses all Humankind as Her people. God loves all Humankind equally and unconditionally. This, I think, is clear in both the Hebrew and Christian Bible – despite the fact that various sides are always trying to co-opt God for their own ends. All peoples tend now and then to confuse God’s will with their own cultural values, especially in times of distress or threat, or of scrambling for power.

Today, we hear God sending His “son of man”, the prophet Ezekiel to “speak to Israel” – remember, that’s us. The message is pretty “grim” and unequivocal: 'Wicked man, wicked woman, you're on the fast track to death!” Now, I think this is constant state of human affairs. We live on this fine edge between spiritual death and life most of the time - and I think we all know it. The lament that God has heard from Israel is the lament of Humanity when we are able to be honest: "Our rebellions and sins are weighing us down. We're wasting away. How can we go on living?” And God in frustration replies, “As sure as I am the living God, I take no pleasure from the death of the wicked. I want the wicked to change their ways and live. Turn your life around! Reverse your evil ways! Why die, Israel?'”

“Why die” indeed!? There is an old joke about a man arriving at the Heavenly Gates prepared to show his excellent credentials to St. Peter. Peter just asks to see his chequebook; that will say what he truly valued. What Peter would see in the World’s chequebook today is a vast amount spent on weapons of destruction - this is the prevailing symbol of Death hanging over us all today (except for Costa Rica, which courageously has no military). As I look around the World today, it feels to me as if we are all on the Path to Death, both spiritual and physical. Fanatical extremist terrorists of all religions and cultures; hate-and-fear-driven skinheads of all stripes; ethnic gangs who (as the mayor of Santa Maria said Wednesday) would as easily shoot you as say Hi; governments who permit millions of their people to die or suffer or be raped or starve in order to stay in power; rapacious corporate capitalists, communists, oligarchs, all of whom in their own ways ruthlessly limit freedoms in order to allow the few to become fabulously rich or powerful while the majority – including now the “middle classes” in our society – struggle along managing as best we can, while the growing number of the poor slip further and further into desperation.

Oh, I know that many of us are “doing ok” in the parts of the World with enough economic power to provide the essentials, especially in America – but we are a very small percentage of God’s people. Maybe I’m only seeing the dark picture. If so, I can’t help it. I’ve been raised on the Gospel since I was four. I’ve heard about God’s equal and unconditional love for each and every sparrow that falls. I’ve heard that the heart of the Hebrew Scripture is Love God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and your neighbour as yourself. I’ve heard that the summation of all of Jesus’ teaching is, Love one another as I have loved you. I have heard and sung about justice for the poor and the oppressed. I have heard about the Good Samaritan, that my neighbour is anyone in need. I have heard about being my sister’s keeper. I have heard about it not being possible to worship both God and Money/Power - what does the Psalm say today: Give me a bent for your words of wisdom, and not for piling up loot. Divert my eyes from toys and trinkets. I’ve heard about the core ministry of Peace and Reconciliation that has been given to all who have taken up the Way of the Cross.

I can’t help asking myself why, if there are over two billion Christians in the World whose Faith is centered in Love, Justice and Reconciliation, (not to mention one billion moderate Muslims, peace-loving Buddhists, etc), why is the World such a mess? And since I live here, where many of our elected leaders profess to be Christians, either Democrats or Republicans, why do I not see our foreign and domestic policy defined or at least powered by the core Christian values of Love, Justice and Reconciliation, or our Christian politicians walking the Way of the Cross – the Way of self-giving even unto death that all of God’s people may have every blessing for Life that God offers? Or, for that matter, Life, Liberty and Happiness, with equality and Justice for all?

Have I heard wrongly? Is it just simply true that Power Corrupts? If you see it differently, I’d really like you to help me with this. Is the way that I understand the Gospel completely skewed? This is the conversation I’d like to have with you, my fellow travelers.

Of course there is Good News. God, we read in Ezekiel, does not want us to die. We know in Jesus that God gives His life to give us Life. God makes a home in every human heart, and is willing to suffer rejection in order to be there when we need Her. Psalm 119 says, God has taught us lessons for living, given us insight, commanded us on the path to Love and Justice, revealed eternal Wisdom, shown us “straight paths”, made many promises that He has kept, counseled us, preserved our Life. We are here because, I hope, we have experienced this. There is only one crucial catch - it is all dead unless, as the Psalmist says, we make our whole life one long, obedient response.

Paul says to the church in Rome in today’s reading, “The law code—don't sleep with another person's spouse, don't take someone's life, don't take what isn't yours, don't always be wanting what you don't have, and any other "don't" you can think of—finally adds up to this: Love other people as well as you do yourself. 10 You can't go wrong when you love others. When you add up everything in the law code, the sum total is love.

He ends by saying: Dress yourselves in Christ. The question is, just what does this mean for how we live our lives, as individuals, as a church; and what is our witness to our local community and to our nation?

2008-07-20T15:56:00.000-07:00

Sermon for: July 20, 2008 Brian McHugh, priest
Season: Proper 11A_RCL, Track 1 St. Paul’s, Cambria CA

It is one of the great privileges of my life as a priest to stand at the altar as an “icon” of the priesthood we all share in Jesus, and to preside at our Eucharistic meal. Thank you for inviting me to be with you this morning. My partner Dennis and I are glad to share worship with you.

St. Paul says to those he loves in the church in Rome this morning: For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and – listen closely here - will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. [Rom 8:19-21].

Ah, yes! This is why you and I are here this morning. There are many reasons why we come together as “church”. But there is one core reason that we stick with it Sunday by Sunday and year by year, often through many frustrations and disappointments. God knows there have been many times in my life when I just wanted to chuck it all through 35 years of priesthood and over 40 in ministry. We stick with each other, and with the Scripture, and with Sacrament because we were called from deep within us, some perhaps recently, some perhaps many years ago. We were called, some gently, some shockingly, by the Christ who dwells at the center. A vision, a hope, was awakened within us. It is a vision of the possibilities for ourselves and for the whole Creation. In Paul’s words, it is the vision of the glory of the children of God.

There are perhaps some hardened souls whom the vision never touches or who don’t allow it to touch them. Such people have created and continue to create havoc and suffering in the World. They often suck many others in because of fear or deception. But most of us, in some way, have caught a glimpse of , well, let’s call it God, and we hunger for it to flower.

Jesus told many parables about the path that leads to the Glory. We gather around one of them in our worship today. But before we look at it, let me “rattle your cage” a little bit. Let’s first talk about the Bible. How people understand the Bible is the fundamental divisive issue among Christians today. Not just how they interpret it, but how they think it came about. Being a “good Episcopalian”, you can make your choices and you certainly don’t have to accept what I say! But I’ll tell you where I have gotten in over 40 years of thinking and meditating and studying and listening to greater intellects than mine.

Some believe that God dictated it word for word to various scribes. Others, that God somehow mysteriously manages by the skin of His teeth to get Her message across through the written experiences of the peoples of the Bible. Most are somewhere in between. (By the way, I use Him and Her for God interchangeably, just to remind us of a longstanding Anglican principle enunciated in what are known as the Articles of Religion (see BCP). The First Article says, God is a spirit, without body, parts, or passions - thereby reminding us that God does not have a gender, and that it is misleading and dangerous to box God in with one or the other.) I’m far to the “skin of His teeth” side. There is an icon often seen in the Eastern Orthodox Church, an icon of Christ the Teacher, holding a closed Gospel Book. This icon is to remind us of something I have believed and taught for a long time: that Christians interpret the Scriptures through Christ, and not the other way around. Once you understand this, as I think the Church did in the early centuries and until the ascendency of the Western Church, you understand why it is important to have an intimate relationship with Jesus, to know the core of His Being. It is His teachings and, most importantly, His Love, grounded in and manifesting the unconditional Love of His Father, that define how we understand and interpret Scripture.

Let’s look at the parable of the Wheat and the Weeds (or tares if you prefer). I do not believe that Jesus interpreted His parables to his followers. As I said, the Gospels are a combination of what Jesus might actually have said, and additions by the early church in the decades following His Death and Resurrection, expressing their understanding of what Jesus said and meant. They would in no way have thought that they were falsifying or misinterpreting Him. The “interpretation” we have today is, I believe, one of those additions. And to me, it doesn’t sound like Jesus. Neither God nor Jesus goes about destroying people and sending them to the “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. I think it comes from the early community defining its specialness as against the surrounding Jewish and pagan cultures and religions. Many scholars agree. And of course, you can do your own thinking.

Jesus, as usual, is clear in his parable today. It is about hope and faith in a loving God Who, having created us, knows what we human beings are like. We can choose Good and we can choose Evil. This is the human condition. And all of us, like St. Paul, have cried out in desperation at how often we fail in choosing the Good, often bewilderingly so. But God wants us, as Romans says, to shine like the sun in the kingdom of the Father. God has a covenant of Love with all of us, symbolized in the covenant with Jacob. The promise is that, despite all, God will stay by us, shower us with mercy and forgiveness and strength and hope, lead us like a faithful shepherd Who is even willing to give His life for the sheep - as He does in every Eucharist.

Our destiny is to have all causes of sin burned out of us, till we shine like the sun in the Kingdom. Even a little success brings light to our own lives and to the World. Our part of the bargain is to be as faithful as we can in repentance and humility, acknowledging our failures and accepting God’s grace and Love. We “come to church” to be held on, and to help each other along, that path.

In the words of the lovely Psalm 139: If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. This is the God we love and trust and serve.

2008-07-14T06:42:00.000-07:00

Brian H. O. A. McHugh, priest

Sermon for: July 13, 2007
Season: St. Benedict’s, Los Osos, CA, on their Feast of Title

What do we know about Benedict? Personally, relatively little. He was the son of a Roman noble, born about 480, in Nursia, in what is now Italy. It seems that at about age 19, he became disgusted with the way of life of Rome, which he thought dissolute. He may also have been jilted in love. These things are deduced from the only “biography”, more a character sketch in the hagiographic style, done by Pope St. Gregory the Great. Benedict left the city, taking his nurse and a servant, to live quietly, apparently in some kind of association with a group of “virtuous men”. He apparently knew the Gospels, and was drawn to the life they manifested.

Benedict received the distinctive monastic habit from a monk in the areas named Romanus, with whom he had discussed the reasons that brought him to Subiaco, where Romanus had his monastery. At Romanus’s advice, Benedict became a hermit for 3 years, and he lived in a cave above the river, pondering the Gospel and how one should live to be a part of the Kingdom of God. Some monks begged him to be their abbot, but that experiment failed, and Benedict returned to his solitary life. But many people, attracted by his sanctity and by the various miracles that he is recorded to have performed, came to join him. He had 12 monasteries built, where 12 seekers lived with an abbot. Benedict lived in a separate monastery with a few close followers. Somewhere in this time, he wrote a Rule for his monks, based on an earlier rule called “The Rule of the Master”. Benedicts “Rule”, described by Gregory as “firm but reasonable”, became the basis for Western monasticism in following centuries and up until the present day.

Benedict intended the Rule to be a way of life that honoured Christ’s teachings. The rule allows all that is necessary to each individual: sufficient and varied clothing, abundant food (excluding meat from quadrupeds), wine and ample sleep. Possessions could be held in common; they might be large, but they were to be administered for the furtherance of the work of the community and for the benefit of others. While the individual monk was porr, the monastery was to be in a position to give alms, not to be compelled to seek them. It was to relieve the poor, clothe the naked, visit the sick, bury the dead, help the afflicted, and – what became a central Benedictine character - to offer hospitality to all strangers. The poor came to Benedict to get help to pay their debts, and for food.

Work was critical in the common life, and even more important than liturgical prayer. This is enshrined in the famous phrase, “Laborare est Orare”, to Work is to Pray, and it reflects Gospel teaching that religious faith must manifest itself in good works to be authentic. Work was not to be considered the task of slaves, but seen as a necessary path to for holiness for all men and women. But Prayer was the common bond; the average day provides for a little over four hours to be spent in liturgical prayer, a little over five hours in spiritual reading and private prayer, about six hours of work, one hour for eating, and about eight hours of sleep. The entire Psalter is to be recited in the Divine Office once every week.

All possessions were held in common. And all were equal, whether once slave or noble. Benedictine communities are families. The local community is more important than the larger order, a character that is reflected in our Anglican tradition, where parish communities are the heart and the diocesan level serves the local communities. Unlike many religious orders which take the vows of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, Benedictines take the vows of Obedience (so that God comes first), Stability (so that the prime place where holiness is sought is in one’s parish family), and Amendment/Conversion of Life, the goal being to become as Christ. These vows reflect the Baptismal vows.

Benedict is the icon of our community of faith here, what we call our “patron saint”. We live under his bright shadow. Most people are not called to be monastics. But Benedict is a worthy icon for us as followers of Jesus. We are here because we have the same desire as Benedict and his monks did. I was a monk for 15 years. I only knew many years after why I was led to try the monastic life. The monk is an archetype – a symbol of the radical call to become as Christ. Which is the same as the radical call to become fully human and fully the unique individual we have been created to be. But even more amazingly, to become Divine – for that is what the Gospel says we are, an incarnated expression of holy love.

We are not called to be monks or nuns. But Benedict’s radical search for the Gospel life is our search. That is why we come together around the altar and the Eucharist and Scripture. Archbishop Cranmer, in the early 16th C, apparently designed English parish life on the Benedictine model. We pray together, we seek to understand the Gospel life. We commit to obedience to God, to a stable parish family life, and to learning in that family how to let God shape us in the image of Christ. And we work together to reach out to those in need, especially offering hospitality to those on the journey to God, as our mission statement says.

Today we gather to join Benedict on the path to holiness. To thank and honour him as a faithful model and guide for parish life over the last 1500 years. And to recommit ourselves to each other as diverse people brought together by God to help and support each other on our journey of transfiguration into people of Divine Light.

2008-06-29T12:54:00.000-07:00

The Rev. Brian H. O. A. McHugh
Episcopal Diocese of El Camino Real

Sermon for: June 29, 2008
Season: Gay Pride Service, United Church of Christ, San Luis Obispo, CA

Title: May They All Be One

Let me tell you up front what the central point of my reflection at this Gay Pride service is. Doing this will hold me accountable to myself and to you for my words. I’m following the first of the Four Agreements enunciated by Don Miguel Ruiz, by which I try to live: Be impeccable with your word. My point - and I believe it to be the Good News of the Gospel - is this:

Each and every human person is a manifestation of the holy energy at the core of all life. Every human being is a sacrament of that Holy Mystery - if I may use an old Anglican phrase, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. Every person, irrespective of the particular configuration or manifestation of their sexuality or any other characteristic, is a unique, beautiful, sacred Being. God does not disown or reject any person, for God cannot disown or reject Herself.

Now you may ask, Where the hell in the Bible did he get that?! Believe me, I got it from the Bible alright. But not because it is written out in just those words. I got it from the Bible, and from the Gospel, and from the eternal Christ who shines at the heart. I got it filtered through my own personal experience over fifty years and that of thousands of others, of hearing and pondering the Word. I got it through the reasoning of my and many minds, through the longing of my heart, and through the working of the Spirit of Truth which the Christ promised and bestowed.

When I was ordained a priest, I took and oath that I believed the “Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation”. And I do. But not in some simplistic, literalist way. I firmly believe that the Mystery we call “God” dwells within and not without. That God is revealed from the inside out. That God is always vulnerable to the workings of the human mind and heart. All Scriptures are written by human beings who are seeking out the meaning of their lives. The myriad pictures we have of God reflect the experience of human beings in every time and culture. Many, if not most, are projections of individuals and cultures, their times and experiences. Many claim to know God, to know that God is “on their side” - a projection that Bob Dylan so aptly parodied. Most of those pictures are misleading, in my view, in terms of the actual nature of “God”. The wonder of sacred writings, for me, is that the still, small voice of God manages to be heard in the minds and hearts of those who are willing to be surprised by the vast and infinite Compassion of God. Over 40 years in ministry, I have learned the wisdom of the old rabbi who said of the Bible’s message, God is Love; all else is commentary.

God has insinuated Herself in sneaky ways into many hearts. Certainly into the hearts of many Gayfolk, many of whom were brought up in cultures and religions which filled them with shame and terror, and caused them to doubt their worth and beauty. It is a wonder to me that so many Gayfolk continue to be part of religious communities, almost all of which have excluded and condemned and brutalized them for millennia. Happily, some of those faith communities have changed their ways, and many of the rest of us are slowly struggling to get there. That “still small voice” has quietly, persistently whispered, and been heard in generous and loving and open and sometimes needy hearts. Hearts that have seen that the orientation of Gayfolk is not a sinful or unnatural choice. Just another facet of human nature. The only choice involved is to reject lies and self-doubt and to be one’s authentic self. The God I know wills this freedom for Gayfolk and for all persons.

It is a cliché, but ….. God does indeed work in mysterious ways! She has in mine. And I think that my experience is a kind of metaphor for the way the Divine Spirit works. I knew what my sexual orientation was when I was a little boy. Luckily I was born in Canada in the late 40’s, among somewhat dour Scots Presbyterians who were both upright and whiskey drinkers. The topic of sex, at any level, was avoided. I did not have to deal with the particular ingrained Puritanism which lies at the root of the American psyche until I came here in the late sixties. There was a counterbalance to Puritanism then in the Flower Revolution, and I am proud, at 62, to be a Hippie throwback. I came here to be a monk, which I was for 15 years. And so - and I can’t help crediting God in this - I ended up in a community of almost all Gay men! What a coup for the guidance of the Unconscious! I could be myself as a Gay man. Equally important, I was then free, in a religious setting of daily prayer and Scripture and learning, to enter into a relationship with the God Who created me and unconditionally loved me just as I was. What a blessing, considering the hell that so many Gayfolk still go through in accepting their gift.

I spent 26 years in parish ministry, often filled with rage at the homophobia of society and of Religion – and we all know what rage can do to us. I was profoundly frustrated at the either inability or unwillingness of people to see the reality before their eyes and hearts in the Gayfolk they knew - the normal glorious fragile humanity we all share, in the heart of the Mystery of God I had come to know. But I chose or was blessed with parishes in which I was basically accepted and appreciated for my gifts. When I finally “retired” in utter frustration at our House of Bishops seeming to kow-tow to homophobic bigots in the Anglican Communion and at the affront (as I see it) to my seminary classmate Bishop Gene Robinson, I considered renouncing my orders. But my partner and other friends counseled wisely. The gift I was given was that the rage was taken away. I resolved to “make no peace with oppression”, to live calmly but passionately as the sacred being I knew myself and each of us to be. And I ended up in a California that now – and I hope forever - allows same-sex couples to marry with the same equality under the law promised by the founding documents of this land.

The title of my sermon today is from the great prayer of Jesus in the Gospel called “John”. May they all be One, as You, Father, and I are one. Jesus wants us all to know the unity that He knew with the Source of His Being. What he prayed for was not superficial in any way. It is not about looking alike; not about a renunciation of uniqueness; not about male or female, “Jew or Greek” (metaphorically speaking), Gay or so-called “Straight” – though I am happy to say that most of my heterosexual friends are anything but what I would call “straight”; “wonderfully bent” would be more like it! It is about knowing at the gut level that each of us is part of the Mystery we call God. It is about knowing that together we are one unquenchable blaze of Compassion, Love and Justice. It is about knowing that our calling as people of Faith is to actualize and make real, by our practice, the truth of our making in the image of the God of Compassion, and our unity as human persons free to be whole.

“Pride” is a paradox. It is both a sin and a blessing. A sin (that is, a rejection of our nature as Love) when we fail to live into our divine nature. A blessing, when we gather together as we do this afternoon, “of many tribes and people and tongues”, of theological perspectives, and of shades of sexual orientation, to claim our sacred selves, and to claim the essential unity we each and all have.

It is my duty and privilege to say today to all Gayfolk: Be proud. Be joyfully and passionately yourselves, with unwavering confidence and power and love. And to say the same to all who have gathered here in support of their sisters and brothers in the family of God. May we all be One, for such I know to be the desire and longing of God. As the lovely Psalm 139 says: You created my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

Sermon for the Ecumenical Service on Gay Pride Week

2008-06-29T12:52:00.001-07:00

2008-06-08T13:31:00.000-07:00

Sermon: June 8, 2007 Proper 5 A (RCL)

[Hosea 5:15-6:6][Ps 50: 7-15][Rom 4:13-25][Mt 9:9-13,18-26]

Avoiding Rock Bottom

In the reading from the prophet Hosea this morning, we hear a somewhat petulant God whining. God is ticked off that Ephraim and Judah, who have behaved badly themselves and are now being oppressed and suffering, have turned to the great king of Assyria instead of Him for help. God is heard saying:

I’ll go back where I came from until they come to their senses.
When they finally hit rock bottom, maybe they’ll come looking for me.[1]

The people seem to understand the process of their Life and of their relationship with their God. They say:

Come on, let’s go back to God. He hurt us, but He’ll heal us.
He hit us hard, but He’ll put us right again.
In a couple of days we’ll feel better.
By the third day, He’ll have made us brand new.[2]

Don’t be distracted by the portrayal of God as hurtful and causing pain. I’ve pondered the Scriptures for decades. Of course, being Episcopalians, you are free to interpret as you like! Personally, I know, and I think any of us who truly know God knows, that God does not hurt or cause pain or death. As is said elsewhere, “God does not desire the death of a sinner, but that they should repent and live.” Speaking of God as the origin of both good an evil is an ancient way of saying that God is present in and to all things. It is we human beings who cause suffering and pain and death to ourselves and others, physically and emotionally. It is in embracing the Divine source of Life that we find the power and grace to Live.

Living is what it is all about. Living is why we are here this morning. If you have been doing this for a long time, I suspect it is because you know what Ephraim and Judah knew. If this is new to you, you have brought your hunger for life to the right place. There is a deep and powerful energy that flows through the great Mystery we call Life. A deep and powerful movement – into and away from pain and death and into Life. Our Baptism into Christ is a mind-blowing, blazing image of the power we have laid claim to in our saying Yes to the Gospel. There is indeed a way by which we can be drowned in suffering, where we die at one or many levels, and rise to healing and new life.

The Mystery of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus throbs at the heart of our Faith. The same Mystery lies at the heart of our own human lives. But as we hear from Hosea, this is an old, ancient, eternal Truth. Ephraim and Judah understood and experienced it. It is heard in every faith and religion, and in all the great literature of every language and people. Have you read Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea Trilogy? Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings? Beowulf? The same Message rings out:

Come on, let’s go back to God. He hurt us, but He’ll heal us.
He hit us hard, but He’ll put us right again. In a couple of days we’ll feel better.
By the third day, He’ll have made us brand new.

The eternal pattern familiar to Christians in the Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection goes on. We suffer, we “die”, we are buried, we are raised to Life. This is why the Cross shines as the core symbol of the Christian faith. Beyond anything else, it speaks of the God of Love Who is never absent from us, holds us in our pain, walks through the valley of the shadow of death with us, and lifts us up to new Life. The great Holy Week hymn says it all:

Inscribed upon the cross we see in shining letters, God is love:
it cheers with hope the gloomy day, and sweetens every bitter cup.
It makes the coward spirit brave, it takes its terror from the grave, and gilds the bed of death with light.
The balm of life, the cure of woe, the measure and the pledge of love.[3]

But we, like Ephraim and Judah, must do our part. Come on, let’s go back to God. He hurt us, but He’ll heal us. Twenty-six years ago, I left a monastic vocation after 15 years; but, new life opened up in front of my sadness. Six years ago I had heart surgery; I was prepared to awake or not; I did, and knew I was healed. Three years ago I met Dennis; a whole new Life opened up. Two years ago my colon burst; I almost died; I had a colostomy that was later reversed. I was raised to life. In April I “retired”, the culmination of decades of fury at how I and other Gayfolk are treated by society and the church; but out of it came a gift: my anger was taken away, and I am ready to lay hold on Life again. I have aggressive prostate cancer; I face it with calm and trust. Think about it - every one of you here today has experienced this Great Love healing us and giving us Life as we turn into the embrace.

We are not here being “the church”, waiting for an arbitrary God to decide if we have followed the rules/contract suitably enough that She will throw us a tidbit which we have “earned”. We are here, avoiding rock bottom, being “the church”, together eating and drinking God’s Life, holding ourselves in the context of the Death, Burial, and Resurrection of Jesus, in the sure and certain knowledge of at least some of the people of Hosea’s time - After two days God will revive us; on the third day [God] will raise us up, that we may live before Him.[4] We are instruments of that trust and embrace each to the other. Crucified, dead, we rise on the third day. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”

We’re here to practice our religion, which by Word and Sacrament and Fellowship hold us in the cycle of hurt, healing and revival. We bear each others’ burdens and so fulfill the law of Love. With the ancient Hebrews we say, Come on, let’s go back to God. To the God who lives in us. In Her we find the power to rise and live.

[bm+/060808]
[1] The Message, Hosea 5: 15
[2] ibid, 6: 1ff
[3] Hymnal 1982, #471
[4] The Message, Eugene Peterson

2008-03-23T05:44:00.000-07:00

Sermon for: Easter Day_March 23, 2008_A_RCL
Brian McHugh, priest & vicar
[Ezk 37: 1-14][Ps 130][Romans 8: 6-11][John 11: 1-45]

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love:
the more they give, the more they possess.

Words of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

It seems illogical. It seems counterintuitive. Human logic would say that the more you give, the less you possess.

But I know, in my spirit, however faulty my or our love may be, that Rilke’s words are true. Those who love, and give, discover the truth. Jesus is recorded as saying that, in following Him, we would know the truth and the truth would set us free. I am convinced that is not some theological doctrinal “truth” that makes us “right” that He wanted us to know. What Jesus means us to discover is a way of Life: Rilke has spoken it: “This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more [you] give, the more [you] possess.”

This paradox - that for those who really love, the more they give the more they possess - I know and passionately believe is at the heart of the Mystery of God, of the Christ, of the Gospel, and of our humanity. We ponder the hints of our holy writings. We listen to longings and hopes that rise up in our hearts and minds. From these, we have imagined a God who pours out unconditional love endlessly. In my view, no other God is worth knowing. No other God can lead us to a mature and authentic humanity.

As “church”, we spend year after year in our worship. We walk with Jesus. We recognize a true child of the God of Love. We listen to His Good News, His teaching about Life. In the week before this day of His rising from the dead, we see His unswerving love of His God; His compassion for God’s oppressed people; His firm clear loving servanthood in washing feet; His mystical gift of Himself in bread and wine; His refusal to compromise God’s integrity in willingly accepting suffering and death.

However and at whatever level we grasp it, Christ’s death and resurrection is a sign to us about the great Mystery of being alive. It is about the mundane miracle of Love. This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess. We will not grasp this truth by reading the tortuous sentences of the Letter to the Hebrews. We will not grasp it by comprehending intellectually Paul’s or Aquinas’s doctrine of salvation. We will only grasp it by embracing Christ’s commandment to “love one another as I have loved you”. This is what it means to “take up his cross and follow me”. It is why the cross is the core symbol of the Christian faith. It is why our primary “work” is exploring what Love is.

Paul the apostle tells us what happens if we love: He wrote in his second letter to the faithful in Corinth:

People are watching us as we stay at our post … working … in gentleness, holiness, and honest love ….. terrifically alive, though rumored to be dead; beaten within an inch of our lives, but refusing to die; 10 immersed in tears, yet always filled with deep joy; living on handouts, yet enriching many; having nothing, (yet) possessing all. [1]

Jesus had set the standard for authentic discipleship and authentic humanity, as recorded in John’s Gospel: “See how they love one another”. And Jesus has requested, putting aside as secondary the whole Law of Moses, only one thing: “Love one another as I have loved you.”

Hanging on the cross, Jesus looked as if His love brought Him nothing, took away everything, including His life. But on the morning of the third day, the angel says to the women, “Why are you seeking the living among the dead?”

Here is the pattern for our life, yours and mine. Paul understood it when he said, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” The Christ lives in each of us, and to live we must become One with that Christ. It might seem that pouring ourselves out in love will bring us nothing. But Jesus and His Gospel and His Cross and Resurrection says, with Rilke, “This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.

The invitation this Easter morning, my friends in Christ, is the same as always: Really love; the more we give, the more we possess of what gives meaning to our lives. It is Love that broke open the tomb in which the dead Christ was buried. It is Love that breaks open the tombs we so often are buried in and gives us Life. It is love that liberates the Christ Who lives within the heart of each of us.

The Rich Young Ruler asked Jesus what he must do to have Eternal Life. The answer he was not ready to hear was, “Really love” – and though you give up all the worldly goods you have, you will possess everything. “

On this Easter morning, may we take one step further on the path of Love. It is our calling as the Body of Christ and as the Beloved of God. The more we give, the more we will possess. And the World will be transformed.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen. Let us be raised with Him!

[1] 2 Cor 6: 4-10 [MSG]

2008-03-09T06:38:00.000-07:00

Sermon for: March 9, 2008_Lent V_A_RCL
Brian McHugh, priest & vicar
[Ezk 37: 1-14][Ps 130][Romans 8: 6-11][John 11: 1-45]

Dry Bones! It’s a great story isn’t it. Sunday School kids my age remember it, aided by the popular song - “The ankle bone’s connected to the shin bone / the shin bone’s connected to the thigh bone / the thigh bones’ connected to the hip bone ….. Hear the Word of the Lord”. “Can these bones live?”, God asks Ezekiel. It’s almost as if God is looking for a little reassurance. God spends centuries nourishing, guiding, protecting His people Israel for Life, and what is the state of affairs as God chats with Ezekiel? Israel is like a huge field of completely dry, bleached, clattering, dead bones.

I can hear God’s thoughts: “Is anything ever going to bring these people to Life! Will they ever become the people I created them to be?” But, God never seems to get discouraged. God answers his own question: “I'll dig up your graves and bring you out alive—O my people! I'll breathe my life into you and you'll live. Then I'll lead you straight back to your land and you'll realize that I am God. I've said it and I'll do it.'" God’s problem, of course, is that however generous God is, however forgiving, however faithful in love, we human beings have to cooperate – and there’s the problem.

As far as Life goes, the critical phrase is, “I'll breathe my life into you and you'll live.” This is where Life flows from, says the Bible. We are given Life, made human, by the breath or spirit of God breathed into us. “Life” doesn’t just mean biologically alive. It means far more. The Biblical Creation story says that, after making humanity from the dirt, God breathed Spirit into Adam, and humans became living beings. This morning, the question we are prompted to ask is: What does it mean for me to be truly, fully alive? Maybe it doesn’t grab you, but, as a Christian, it grabs me - a lot.

Even more dramatically we are confronted with the same question by the reading from the Gospel today. What a sight that 4-day-dead Lazarus, wrapped in grave-clothes, must have been to Mary and Martha, their friends, and the disciples, as he emerged from the tomb and later sat with them at dinner! I believe that many were drawn to Jesus because they felt a whole new possibility for their life coming from Him. For the same reason Jesus threatened the religious authorities. They knew deep within them that they were supposed to be leading the people to the Life God wanted them to have. But they had rejected their calling, more interested in prestige and power. Jesus gave new Life to people, by His words, His actions, His teachings. He touched their souls. That’s where these marvelous stories of raising even the physically dead come from. They are a dramatic symbol of how God can yank people from the brink of death experiences to a fuller sense of how we can live, what Life is all about.

“Can these bones live?” That is the question that God asks Ezekiel. It is a very pertinent question as we head for the liturgical celebration of Christ’s Resurrection from the dead in two weeks. This is the core Christian Feast. It affirms and celebrates Life’s power over death in all its aspects. On Easter morning, what will God see in you and in me? Will God see a people - us - risen to new life, flesh breathed into Life by divine Spirit, unafraid, confident, living fully and enthusiastically, full of enjoyment of the Creation, generous in Love, merciful, compassionate, just, full of humility, ? Or will God see yet again a field scattered with bleached dry clattering bones, and asking with a deep sigh, “Can these bones possibly live?!”

Of course we here are not in general unkind or thoughtless or uncaring people. We do what we can to help those who need help, especially amongst our family and friends. But look around at the World, especially at our own country. We are the largest consumers of drugs and alcohol in the world. One out of every hundred of us is in jail – 30 million people! A huge percentage of us are afflicted with clinical depression, including the young, and are on meds to help us manage. Our suicide rate is high, especially amongst the young and the elderly. We are not a happy people – nor is much of the World.

Every year at Easter, God’s words spoken to the prophet Ezekiel are heard again: "I'll dig up your graves and bring you out alive—O my people! I'll breathe my life into you and you'll live. I've said it and I'll do it". And God did it, in raising Jesus from the dead. God hopes that we will hear the message deep within our souls, hear what Her messengers and Her Son taught, and see the path that leads to fullness of Life. We as the Body of Christ are meant to know it for ourselves. But even more so that we can be a light to the World. God want us to know in Christ what Life fully is, and to do as the hymn says – “Lay hold on Life, and it shall be / thy joy and crown eternally”.

Maybe I’m the only one who feels something's missing. But I think we are all called, like Lazarus, like the people of Israel, to become as Christ. Live the Gospel. Help transform the World around us. Two weeks before Easter, and as we prepare to follow Jesus through the journey of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, we are reminded that, like Jesus, we too are meant to rise daily from the dead places we often inhabit and claim the Life God prepared for us. As always, God is ready to help us.

+++

I sent around on Saturday by email a question: As a follower of Jesus, what (in a few words) is something you strive for, or do, or believe, that makes you a fully-alive human being?

Would anyone like to share (in a few words) your answer?

2008-03-05T14:42:00.000-08:00

Sermon for: March 2, 2008_Lent IV_A_RCL Brian McHugh, priest & vicar
[1 Sam 16: 1-13][Ps 23][Eph 5: 8-14 ][John 9: 1-41]

Well, I am going to be a little “dark” this morning.

I think I have always had a love-hate relationship with the Church. But then again, I think I’ve had a kind of love-hate relationship with mostly everything, including myself. I was raised under Scottish Presbyterianism, which had a strong message of striving for perfection. There was little room, at least theoretically, for human weakness or foibles. It rubbed off while I was singing in the choir and trying to ignore the “dour” approach to life I heard from the pulpit. It is my nature to enjoy Life. A religion of strict limitations has never appealed to me – and I have avoided them. But, a certain guilt at not being perfect still lurks. Part of me longs to live the ideals of the Christian Gospel and the Kingdom of God and personal holiness and charity, and wants to help others to too. Alas, I’ve had to accept minimal success, on my part, and from the church at large. Well, that’s a big ongoing topic.

These days I’m particularly disenchanted with religions and religious leaders, who say they want justice and compassion and peace but seem to foment the opposite. I’ve read several eloquent books recently by atheists. They haven’t so much advocated atheism for atheism’s sake, but reject religion’s shocking failures to live up to it’s principles.

Presumably it has always been so. I admire God’s great optimism, and His ability to find our weaknesses charming. God simply seems to understand the human condition, and is eternally, lovingly patient, hoping we will embrace the way of compassion and find peace, and ready to give us all the help we need.

In the reading today from Samuel, God, having given Saul to the people of Israel as their first king, has rejected him. He brusquely tells his prophet Samuel to “get over it” and stop moping. Saul has disappointed God, and not been a faithful, caring shepherd for His people. He sends Samuel to anoint a new king, a good-looking shepherd-boy. David finally fights his way to the throne, but turns out badly, an adulterer and a murderer. But Davis at least repents and, as always, God is forgiving. It’s the same old story: God has high hopes for human beings, but they mostly disappoint him and reject Her ways.

Perhaps most regular folk behave properly. I’d like to think this is true. On the whole, regular religious folk just get on with caring and helping and being decent human beings. The major problem seems to be the leaders who rise to the top by whatever means. Those are the people Jesus confronted regularly in his ministry, for their legalism, their hard-heartedness, their hypocrisy. In today’s reading it is the Pharisees He’s after, those in Judaism thought to be the most religious and pious. He has healed a blind man on what happened to be the Sabbath. Are the Pharisees thrilled and delighted and amazed by what could only be God’s work through this man, or happy for the man healed? No. They are only legalistically concerned that Jesus was doing something forbidden on the Sabbath – though of course this was just an excuse to cover up their fear and anger at Jesus, whom they saw as undermining their authority. Hypocrites and “whited sepulchers” Jesus called them – looking good on the outside and full of rottenness inside. They called the blind man’s whole identity and integrity into question, and his parents were so intimidated that they knew better than to defend their son. The Pharisees were so intent on discrediting Jesus that they simply refused to acknowledge the amazing healing, and focused only on His “rule-breaking”. Sad. But this is very often what having power and needing to preserve it will do. No wonder God wanted a shepherd-king for His people. And Jesus tried with all His might to teach His followers that true greatness comes through servanthood. Few have learned it, in my opinion.

So it has been in the history of the Church throughout the centuries. Popes, archbishops, bishops and clergy committing all kinds of utterly Un-Christlike things. Orthodox patriarchs siding with ethnic cleansers. Bishops hiding pedophiles. Modern dictators claiming God’s protection for their appalling oppression and cruelty. The Vatican suppressing priests who are fighting to liberate the poor. Televangelists and swamis bilking people of vast sums of money to finance their fleet of Rolls-Royces and aircraft. Various Anglican prelates attempting to destroy a Communion in order to confirm their own narrow Biblical and cultural prejudices. On and on it goes. No wonder more and more choose atheism as an expression of horror at the suffering that false religious leaders have caused. Jesus never ceased to confront them in his zeal for God’s Kingdom.

Well, I’ve painted a rather dark but I think fairly accurate picture. But there is Good News. God rejects such leaders, and eventually, by whatever means, they are replaced. In the Church. In the Islamic Umma. In the political world. The major frustration is the time it often takes.

There is a lesson here for us all. Especially those like us who get to choose our leaders. We need to make sure that we “anoint” the right leaders and support them. For our church. For our country. Leaders that are not wolves in sheep’s clothing. We have got to get our priorities straight. For us, the Gospel commands our first allegiance. Would Jesus want us to make sure that we got adequate medical coverage under plans that disadvantage or exclude the poor? Would Jesus want us to be able to drive expensive gas-guzzling cars at the expense of His Creation? Would Jesus want us to spend 1/3rd to ½ of our GDP on Weapons of Mass Destruction? Would Jesus want us to include only conditionally in His church anyone He died in love for?

We are soon to elect new leaders for our country. Will how you vote be determined by God’s hope for servant leaders who will shepherd the flock in the ways of justice, compassion and peace? St. Peter’s/St. Michael’s is about to call new priestly leadership. Will you call someone who will lead and nurture you on the Gospel path of loving service? Will you help and support your Bishop’s Committee not to be just a managerial business board (some of which they must do), but leaders who stay centered in helping St. P/M reach out to each other and to others with God’s amazing, unconditional love?

Today, we “collected” ourselves around a gathering prayer that asked God for the “true bread that gives life to the world”. As we eat the bread and drink the cup today, may we come alive with God’s amazing joy, and become a servant people who bring life to the World.