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

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

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”.

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”.

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.

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.

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?