The Noise of Wings (Midweek)

 

The Noise of Wings

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

November 29, 2017

I have been thinking a lot about angels recently.  The idea that there are such things as personalities without bodies is strange indeed to the modern mind.  “Angels dancing on a needle’s point” is proverbially the ultimate needless point—a late medieval refinement about the unseen and unknown that Occam’s razor—the simplest explanation is the best—shaved away long ago at the start of the Renaissance.   

But the idea persists.  We sing each week about “angels and archangels and all the host of heaven who forever sing” to the glory of God.   Occasionally, the priest in blessing asks God to send “the holy angels to defend” those being sent out into the world after worship. 

At the heart of it, belief in angels is an expression of hope and yearning that in this messy, complex world, where unseen forces threaten and frighten us daily, there are benevolent and loving unseen forces too.   

In the old Gospel tune “Angel Band,” we sing,

“O come Angel Band, come and around me stand
O bear me away on your snow-white wings to my immortal home.

I know I'm near the holy ranks of friends and kindred dear
I've brushed the dew on Jordan's banks, the crossing must be near.
I've almost gained my Heavenly home, my spirit loudly sings
The Holy ones, behold they come, I hear the noise of wings.” 

The noise of wings.  We once in a while catch glimpses, hear whisperings, and catch the sweet fragrances of goodness and love at work in the world around us.   Such momentary and occasional perceptions are of something real.  The idea of unseen beings carrying out the work and will of the Love beneath and behind all of life is an image that helps us perceive graphically the truth that God is love, and that all will be well.    Our Trinitarian faith sees God as nothing less than personal; it is no great stretch for me to see these unseen instrumentalities of God as personal also. 

Grace and peace. 

Fr. Tony+ 

No Longer Ravaged (Christ the King A)

“No Longer Ravaged”

24 November 2017

Solemnity of Christ the King

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Psalm 95:1-7a; Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

There are many ideals taught in seminaries about homiletics: the word of God, properly preached, comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.  A minister must never prostitute the pulpit for partisan political purposes, but must always make the word of God live and breathe for people, and this means making sure they know what God is calling us to in our common life, in policy, and in our societal processes.   Sometimes this can sound like partisan politics, especially to the comfortable one afflicted by the word. 

I had two experiences when I worked for the State Department that underscored for me the difference between partisan politics, however tarted up with pious and heartfelt appeals to higher values, and living one’s faith even in the public realm.

I worked in press relations for much of my career, and became a go-to press center manager for overseas Presidential trips for Bill Clinton’s White House.  It was heady stuff:  always looking for the right still photo and video framing of the President’s words and actions, always seeking to cultivate the media reps to try to get as sympathetic coverage as we might hope for, and planning and arranging the scenarios to put the President’s work and contributions in their best light.  While other embassy colleagues were trying to arrange working meetings with high level leaders from the host country, the circles I traveled in saw everything through the lens of how things might look to the camera.  Where my Embassy political and commercial colleagues always referred to foreign dignitaries and common people by name, title, and role, my media management colleagues called them “props” just as we called print media reps “pens,” radio ones “voices,” and video ones “faces.”

I remember the moment I decided I could no longer in good conscience work press for President Clinton.  When the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam were bombed, the air force brought back the bodies of the U.S. personnel killed.  Colleagues at State who knew them were invited to attend the welcoming ceremony at Andrews.  When we arrived, we were driven to a small hangar off to the side rather one of the capacious ones in the center of the base.  The small hangar was overcrowded, hot, and chaotic.  I understood: the media team had not wanted the images of the President talking to a half-filled building, and so they had insisted on crowding the bereaved, including family members, into a confined space that while uncomfortable for us “props” provided a proper “cut-away” view accentuating the President’s importance.  There he was, front and center on the dais, 4 meters away from us, with the 13 flag-draped coffins in between.  It was the morning after key sordid details about Monica Lewinski had appeared front page in the Washington Post.  He was peddling as fast as he could to get out of the ditch he had thrown himself into.  The First Lady was late in arriving, so initially Secretary Albright sat to his side.  As we waited for the press to finish hooking things up and for things to start, the President began to chat with the Secretary.  She must have said some mild witticism, because there, in full view of the bereaved families on the other side of the coffins, Mr. Clinton began laughing.  But then, as part of the white screen balance, the live light on TV camera One came on and he knew his image was live.  His smile turned down into a frown, and he reached deftly into his suit pocket and fetched a handkerchief, with which he wiped imaginary tears from his eyes.  I was only a few feet away and saw it clearly, and was sickened.  I never traveled for him again, despite pressure on my bosses from the White House Travel Office. 

I don’t think I’m telling any secrets here to say that I am a liberal democrat and a socialist.  I agreed with Bill Clinton’s policies generally, and thought he was a good President.  But Clinton’s taking advantage of that intern, his lack of any integrity beyond what showed to his audience or could be argued by his attorney, all this raised profound questions for me.  To see this in front of the families of colleagues and friends killed in their service to the nation hurt me deeply.   

Fast forward a few years: when George W. Bush became President, I assumed he was as ignorant and misinformed as his mispronounced words and naïve appeals to evangelical Christianity made him appear.  I was doing more senior analysis work on East Asia at the time, and was privy to many things that never make it into the media.  I was told that his hail-fellow-well-met image as a West Texas frat boy was an image he had cultivated after losing two elections run as an Ivy-league scion of the Kennebunkport Bushes.  On one occasion when I prepared a briefing for the President on a complex and highly sensitive subject, I was surprised to have him ask the single most astute question only a careful and informed reader could have formed from the dense and heavily footnoted 15 page paper.    A few months later, an American missionary who had been held hostage by terrorists in the Philippines was freed in a bloody operation that left two of his fellow captives dead.  He was returned to the U.S. and was waiting at LAX to change planes to rejoin his family.  The President was headed to East Asia on a long trip.  Air Force One happened to stop at LAX at the same time.  President Bush asked if he could meet privately with the traumatized missionary, who agreed.  They met for a couple of hours.  The President consoled the man, listened to his stories, and then prayed with him.  All in private.  The story was never leaked to the press because the President had given clear orders that he did not want the story reported.  He did it because he thought it was the right thing, and it would not have been the right thing if he had tried to make political hay out of it by publicizing what needed to be private.    Here was a President with whom I disagreed on nearly all major policy issues, but who earned my respect and love by trying to do what he saw was the right thing. 

I tell these stories not to drop names.  I was a very minor, low-level player in both.  But they formed me, and lie behind my take on the issue of politics and religion today, and how I understand what is appropriate or inappropriate to preach.  Partisan politics is by nature a struggle of our side vs. their side.  The great temptation is always to see no redeeming virtues in your opponents and no sins or abusive behavior in your own people.  Partisan advantage is sown and grown in part by exclusion of others and by lying, whether by silence of inconvenient truths or by wholesale fabrication.  And call me cynical, but all kings, all politicians, all leaders and adherents of party—political or otherwise—suffer from these failings in one degree or another.   But we are still called to transcend these our failings. 

Today is the Feast of Christ the King.  It celebrates the idea that human governments and sovereigns—all human governments and sovereigns—are flawed and tend toward corruption.  Celebrating Christ as the true sovereign is not a call for theocracy or rule by clerics.  It is a call to follow Jesus even as we live amidst the hurly-burly of partisan politics.  

The Hebrew scripture lesson today speaks of God coming to serve as a shepherd for the peoples, and not just one who will find the lost and bring back the wandering, but also a hero who will set things right (that’s what the word mishpat or judgment means).  “Therefore, thus says the Lord God… I myself will set things right between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will set things right between sheep and sheep” (Ezekiel 34:22).   No longer ravaged—that is the day we hope for.  The Gospel is Jesus’ version of the scene of setting things right: on the final day, when judgment comes, he will divide the sheep and the goat kids previously intermingled in this messy, chaotic flock.  Jesus’ sole criterion of dividing them is how you treated the least of these, my brothers and sisters.  The only thing that matters is how we treated the most vulnerable, the most in need.   The fat sheep who have butted and pushed the skinny sheep are actually those who refused to practice basic human kindness and empathy.

I am a priest, set apart to preach Jesus’s call to us, and this call can be a comfort or an affliction, depending on us.  It is a call that has personal dimensions to be sure.  Of necessity it has political and social implications as well.  But this call is for all, regardless of party and ideology.  If we serve the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the imprisoned, the sick, those unable to stand up for themselves and make their own way, the foreigner in our midst, and the abandoned, we serve Jesus himself, no matter what our tribe or beliefs.  If we turn a cold, stony heart to them, we turn our backs on Jesus himself, regardless of our high-minded justifications, effective and cynical spin-doctoring, or alternate fact tweets.   If we do it to the least of these our sisters and brothers, we do it to him. 

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.  

Rules of Thanks (Midweek Message)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Rules of Thanks
Eve of U.S. Thanksgiving Day

November 22, 2017

I think that gratitude is the emotion that best connects us with God.  Trust is a close second.  Both of these are in fact expressions of love.  And God is, in fact, Love Itself. Love, trust, and gratitude give us eyes to see God. At the very least they allow us to perceive the works of the hand of God.  

There are, I think, some basic rules of the road to feeling gratitude and expressing thanksgiving, to keep these profound feelings from leading us astray.   There are some too for feeling or expressing gratitude’s opposites, like resentment, disappointment, anger and regret.  Here are a few:

1)    When good happens, when beauty occurs, when grace arrives, feel gratitude.  Let yourself feel it fully.  Direct it to the giver, and know that when all is said and done, all good comes from God. 

2)    When good happens, do not feel that you deserved it, earned it, or were entitled to it.  Especially do not feel this if in fact you contributed in some part, large or small, to the arrival of the good.   Even if you made the good, recognize that whatever skills, attributes, and abilities you used in doing this were also gifts.  Admit that all good gifts come from God, because of God’s goodness, not the goodness of the gift’s recipient. 

3)    When good happens to other people, be sure to tell them how much they contributed to it or made the good possible.  Be lavish in praise.  But be careful not to suggest that somehow your good estimation of that person is based merely on their performance. 

4)    When bad stuff happens to you, do not blame God, or feel that it is punishment.  If you are responsible in whole or in part, accept the responsibility, but do not mistake the natural results of your actions as malevolent or willed harm from an angry deity. 

5)    When bad stuff happens to other people, do not attribute it to some punishment by an avenging or even just God.  Do not try to explain it away, or even say you understand.  Just say how badly it makes you feel. 

6)    Use gratitude and thanksgiving as a means of driving away negative feelings. Alienation, anger, hatred, jealousy, envy, fear, disgust—all of these feelings have a difficult time remaining in our hearts when our hearts are full of gratitude and thanks.   Make use of a gratitude list and be sure that your prayers have at least as many as many thanksgivings as petitions. 

7)    Know that joys and thanks shared with others are multiplied, just as sorrows and burdens shared are lightened. 

Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton once said this to a group of monastic novices:

“Life is this simple: We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows [God’s] self everywhere, in everything - in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that He is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without [God].  It's impossible. It's simply impossible. The only thing is that we don't see it.”

Being open hearted, open handed, and open-minded all depend on a sense of gratitude and thanks.   When all is said and done, so does any true faith in God.   

I am so thankful for so many things.  I am grateful for my family, especially my life’s companion Elena, and my children.  I am thankful for having been given the privilege of serving my country overseas for most of my adult life, and for the blessing of a late-in-life call to the priesthood in Christ’s One, Holy, and Apostolic Church.  I am thankful, so very, very thankful, to be serving this gifted and faith-filled group of friends at this time, here, in the Rogue Valley.    I am thankful for the wonderful music here, and for our commitment to service and justice.  I am thankful for the opportunities for education and personal development my family and I have had, and for the abundance and liberties we enjoy here in the United States.  I am thankful for health and for the natural beauty around me here.  I am thankful for so many, many things. 

I hope that you take time during the holiday to sit back a few minutes in quiet and reflect on what you are thankful for, what makes you bless God and love the world.    

Grace and Peace.  

Samuel Seabury (midweek message)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

November 15, 2017

Samuel Seabury

On the Episcopal Church’s Calendar, yesterday was the feast day commemorating the first American Bishop, Samuel Seabury.

Before the American Revolution, the Church of England was the state-sponsored Church in several of the colonies.   There was no American Bishop.  American members of the Church of England had to go to Britain to be confirmed or ordained.  There had been several efforts to consecrate an American bishop, but these had always triggered fierce opposition:  bishops were members of the House of Lords, and seen as tools of the Crown and the rule by the nobility, and possible agents of crypto-catholicism.  The Church of England in the northern colonies, a minority in a sea of Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and Quakers,  tended to have “High Church” beliefs and practices, and valued bishops, their succession from the Apostles as overseers of God’s work, and a more sacramental view of life and worship.  The southern colonies, including Virginia, tended to have the CoE as the established Church, but its orientation was more Protestant, “Low Church,” and focused on the authority of Presbyters (Priests) and lay Vestries rather than Bishops. 

Though about 2/3 of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had nominally been Anglican laymen, their independence-mindedness was not shared by most of the Anglican clergy serving in America.   All Church of England clergy took an oath of loyalty to the King, and only those with sufficient “Low Church” loyalties and theological flexibility actually supported the Revolution.   In addition, the patriot Committees of Safety used mob violence to punish those seen as pro-crown or merely insufficient supporters of Independence: Anglican clergy were regular targets of such violence, often being tarred and feathered, beaten, and having their homes destroyed.  During the revolution, the various colonies disestablished the Church.  The Continental Congress passed laws making it treasonable to lead public prayers asking for God’s blessing on the King of England or its Parliament.

Born in Connecticut in 1729, Seabury had been ordained in 1753 a Church of England clergyman like his father before him.  Seabury took his oath to the King seriously, and saw the Bishops, who were peers of the realm and sat in the House of Lords, as the thing that linked the Church with the historical teaching of the Apostles.  He wrote a series of tracts, “Letters of a Westchester Farmer,” under a pseudonym opposing Independence and criticizing Alexander Hamilton’s tracts supporting the Revolution.  Seabury continued in public prayers for the King and Parliament.   Imprisoned briefly in Connecticut in 1775 by Continental forces, Seabury took refuge in New York (a Tory stronghold that remained under British control) for most of the war - even serving as chaplain to a Loyalist regiment.

After 5 years of war, the British surrender to Colonial forces at Yorktown in October 1781 meant that the thirteen colonies would not return to British control.  As British forces elsewhere in the colonies withdrew, Anglican clergy and loyalists fled en masse to Canada, the Caribbean, or back to England.    Seabury decided to stay, recognizing that he was an American and not an Englishman, and desiring to help rebuild the Church, devastated by the loss of clergy and mainstay Tory contributors. 

In 1783, Seabury was elected by ten of his New England peers to serve as bishop.  He sailed to England, and eventually was consecrated as Bishop by bishops of the non-established Episcopal Church of Scotland.  English Bishops would not consecrate him because as an American he could not take an oath of loyalty to the King.  The Scottish bishops asked that the American Church call itself the Episcopal Church and that its prayer book include the epiclesis, or invocation of the Holy Spirit, in its Eucharistic prayers.  Seabury accepted, and, newly consecrated, returned to America.  He was instrumental in setting up the Protestant Episcopal Church of the (newly formed, in 1789) United States of America.

In 1785, a young Episcopal lay minister approached retired General George Washington for a recommendation to Bishop Seabury, so he would ordain him.   He believed that General Washington, a well-known and highly regarded Anglican, could give him a recommendation that the Bishop could not refuse. Washington's account of the meeting is as follows:

A Mr. Jno. Lowe, on his way to Bishop Seabury for Ordination, called & dined here. Could not give him more than a general certificate, founded on information, respecting his character; having no acquaintance with him, nor any desire to open a Correspondence with the new ordained Bishop.

Washington never got over his reluctance to directly engage Seabury.  As President, when one of Seabury's allies, the Reverend John C. Ogden, sent several appeals to Washington for help in a dispute between Seabury's Episcopalians and the New England Congregationalists, Washington declined to respond.

George Washington and Samuel Seabury were both Episcopalians, and fervent ones at that.  They each represented a particular experience within the Church:  Seabury High Church Apostolic succession and Washington Low Church lay governance.  Each let their faith bring them to opposite conclusions on the great political issues of the day:  Seabury as a Loyalist and Washington as a Continental patriot. 

The greatness of the two is found in how they each reacted to the defeat of one party by the other.  Seabury did not pack up and abandon his country or his Church when the Loyalists lost the war.  He stayed in for the long haul, rebuilding the Church from the foundations up.  He refused to rehash his former opinions once they had clearly become historical footnotes.    For Washington’s part, while avoiding direct contact with a man who had bitterly opposed him in the greatest struggle of his life, he did not work actively to undermine him or expel him, either from the country or the Church.  Washington remained a faithful Episcopalian, even under the bishopric of the one-time Tory, Samuel Seabury.    Both continued to try to pursue his duty to God and country as each saw it, and not bring too much recrimination or reproach from the past to dealings with former adversaries. 

Grace and Peace. 

The Delayed Host (Proper 27A)

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“The Delayed Host”

 November 12, 2017

Proper 27 A

Homily preached at Trinity Parish Church

Ashland, Oregon

The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

8:00 a.m. spoken Mass

Wisdom of Solomon 6:17-20 Psalm 70 1 Thess 4:13-18 Matt 25:1-13

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 “At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom.  Five of them were foolish and five were wise.”  

This parable is strange, even for Matthew.  Look at its shape and tell me what is wrong with this picture.    There is a clear social hierarchy, a pecking order.  A male holds the ultimate power and is called “Lord” in Greek.   In this pecking order, there are two groups of women, identified as parthenoi, or “virgins.”  They are not married, attached to a husband in the subordinating chattel marriage of that age.   But they are still low in the pecking order.   All are without power.  Five ask to be let into the party, and are refused.  Another five are admitted, but unable or unwilling to help the other five get in.  Those excluded are called “foolish,” morai, the word from which we get our word “moron,”  which captures the harshness of the word in Greek.   The other women are called “wise,” phronimoi, which means something more like “prudent,” evidenced by their planning ahead.   “Wise” here does not mean kind, generous, or empathetic—they refuse to help the fools by sharing their oil with them, and then remain silent as they are excluded from the party, though the delay, the running out of oil, and the falling asleep are all really the fault of the delayed host, who refuses the fools entry with the brutal words, “I have no idea who you are!” 

Strange.  The bridegroom or his master of ceremonies might be unacquainted with the friends and family of the other side of a new marriage, but getting to know them is the point of the wedding feast, isn’t it?  Why doesn’t he just ask the bride or her clan to identify them rather than simply assuming they are wedding crashers? 

The whole story depends on the exclusion of the five foolish:  the closing of the door to those who have gone off to buy oil provides the occasion for the punch line or moral of the story, “Stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”   This is not the only one of Matthew’s parables that depend on exclusion.  Remember the guy from a few weeks back who showed up in the wrong clothes for a wedding party and was thrown out, even though he had been dragged in off the street as a back-up party stuffer because the invitees had blown the event off?  Remember what happened to those original invitees?  Massacred, together with their villages.  Of course, they had killed the messengers sending the to-remind invitations.  

Exclusion is a way for Matthew to express his need for boundaries, for basic standards to be shared with gentiles coming into the Church after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.  That’s why he often adds this element to parables that on the lips of Jesus were focused on joy and inclusion.  

Clearly, for Matthew, this parable is telling us to get ready for Jesus to come again.  We must stay awake and watch, follow the rules and spiritual practices that metaphorically trim our lamps and fill them with oil so that we may not be asleep or off somewhere doing remedial work when Jesus comes again.

But what would this tale of excluded women and thoughtless powerful men have meant on the lips of Jesus? 

Jesus proclaimed the coming of the reign of God, already here in some ways.  Look around—see that God is already at work, is already in charge, right here, right now.   A fool refuses to see, and is distracted by the wait for seeing the kingdom come in full power, and in efforts to prepare and make it happen.  A wise person accepts the fact that the reign is not yet fully here, acts accordingly, and keeps fixed on the signs of God already at work. 

As in other parables, Jesus here is not saying God or Jesus himself is brutal and exclusionary.  The contrast between this sad tale of late arrivals and rude turn-downs at the door and the welcome and joy of God’s table is perhaps what Jesus wanted us to see in telling this story.   Jesus told parables; Matthew tended to make them into allegories.  A parable has one point—and the point here is that once the door closes, it is closed.  You can be late and miss the party simply because you delayed in letting yourself see it.   

It is like that other parable of Jesus—the narrow gate and the tight path.  Jesus’ point is not that only the very few and blessed will get the blessing while all the rest will remain in outer darkness.  The point is that you have to give up what encumbers you to get in, and it isn’t always an easy or soft path.  But it’s the easiest and softest path around—and it’s for all.  

Think of the images in this story, and how they show up elsewhere in Jesus’ teaching and life. 

A lamp:  “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. [Mt 5:15-16]

Foolish and wise:  You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has lost its taste [lit. "become foolish"], how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. [Mt 5:13]

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise person who built their house on rock. … And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish person who built their house on sand. [Mt 7:24-27]

“But if you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.”

Getting tired and falling asleep during a wait: In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus came back from agonized prayer to find his closest disciples all sleeping: “So, could you not stay awake with me one hour?”

Fear that the lamp’s wick will go out:  Jesus praised John the Baptist by saying, “A smoldering wick he will not snuff out.”

The “wise” virgins’ refusal to share with those who ask: “Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.” 

The desire to keep the lamps burning:  “In the city of God, they will not need the light of a lamp, for the Lord God will give them light.”

The “wise” virgins entering into the banquet first:  “But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.”

The shut door:  “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door to kingdom of heaven peoples’ faces.

The host’s refusal to let the unwise virgins in even when they beg him: “If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry out and not be answered.”

On Jesus’ lips, this story is about how we react to Jesus’ announcing of the Kingdom of God.  It is about decision, not preparation.  That closed door at the end of the story on Jesus’ lips says “Don’t wait until it’s too late.” 

I personally think that those wise virgins ought to have shared their oil and their light.  The host ought to have let the moron girls in, and probably apologized for being so late.   But that is another story.  The story here tells us: wake up and look at God at work in the world around us.  Don’t put off such clarity of vision until it is too late. 

The foolish ones need to stay put even with lamps sputtering out, rather than leave in search of oil.  Dry times will come in our spiritual lives, be sure of that.  But be equally sure that leaving and wandering in the night on the off chance of finding a store that is open that might, just might, sell you new batteries, is not a good strategy for dealing with dryness and depleted spiritual life.  Hanging in there is the smarter choice. 

I pray that all of us can come to know in our hearts that God knows us and loves us.  Know that you are beloved.  God has always loved you and has already done everything needful for you to know this deeply.  But we do have to shake off the fear of sputtering lamps and darkness, and or being abandoned by what appears to be a perpetually late host.   Blessed are those who suffer, Jesus says, for God is already with them.  “Rejoice, and be overwhelmingly happy,” he says, “because this is the way it is with prophets and holy ones.”  

In the name of Christ, Amen.

More Gun Violence (Mid-week Message)

 

Screen capture from CBS News

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

More Gun Violence

November 8, 2017

Awful news last Sunday from Texas: 26 worshippers, including infants and elderly people, killed in Church by an angry white male wielding high-capacity firearms.  On Monday at Morning Prayer, we tolled our bell once more for victims of gun violence.   And we said once more this prayer: 

All nurturing God, you cannot bear the violence of your creatures and have promised with a rainbow to keep your creation safe.  Turn far from us the violent, and keep us from vengeance, anger, and fear.  Heal us and help us to love. Remove from us the root of bitterness and bigotry.  Help us to find ways to reduce and eliminate the scourge of violence in our society, especially the harm wrought through firearms.  This we pray for your tender mercy’s sake, Amen. 

The pattern is all too familiar:  an angry male with a history of domestic abuse and rage control issues obtains high capacity and rapid fire weapons and uses them to kill scores of innocents in short order.  The right reacts by saying it is a problem of mental health or general societal immorality, or of not enforcing the laws already on the books, and says we should not politicize the deaths by calling for tighter gun control.  “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.”    The left replies with “prayers without action are an obscenity.”  They point to the contributions of the NRA to members of Congress who oppose more rigorous limits on access to guns and ask that we work for their electoral defeat.  Frequently mentioned is our own Congressman, Greg Walden (an Episcopalian from Hood River), who appears on most lists of the top recipients of NRA money in Congress: about $40,000 over the last 15 years. 

It seems that the violence that plagues us here in the U.S. is uncontrollable.   We glorify violence in our arts, have movies that tell stories of the good guys blowing the bad guys away, use armed force as a major component of our foreign policy, proclaim it in our political memes, and think that capital punishment is the ultimate solution to horrible crime.  Guns are an important part of this culture of violence. 

 

Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America says that our culture embraces the idea that there is no problem so severe that it wouldn’t improve if we could just shoot someone.  Walter Wink called this the false “myth of redemptive violence.”   To this, Jesus says, “those who live by the sword will die by it,” and “if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him your left.”

Closely tied to this fascination with violence is fear.  Most people who buy guns and who argue for no restrictions on gun ownership appeal to “self-defense” as their motivation.  They buy guns and want others to buy guns because of fear.  After mass killings at churches, fear-mongers urge worshipers to bring their own weapons to Church (!)  They urge us to better “secure” our churches by locking all the doors and keeping outsiders outside, where they belong. These are not options for those of us who follow Jesus.  Fear makes us hunger at a banquet, be stingy with abundance, and externalize all our problems.  To this, Jesus says, “be not afraid, I am with you.”  

Blaming our problems on someone else, we scapegoat.  The right says it’s the left who are violent, and who are more interested in limiting freedom than in enforcing laws already on the books.   The left says the right has blood on its hands.   Our common life is further eroded, and we talk less and less across the divide about ways to rid our society of this scourge.  We make someone else—anyone other than us—bear the blame. Make the stranger pay for it.   But we all share at least in part responsibility for the perpetuation of the myth of redemptive violence, not addressing domestic abuse and mental illness, the fear-mongering, bias, and obscene numbers in our midst of weapons designed for no other purpose than to kill other human beings. 

The gun lobby draws its strength from the money of gun manufacturers and sellers and the greed of politicians eager for it.   To all these, Jesus says “You need to lose your life in order to save it,” “not as I will, but as you will,” and “You cannot serve both God and money.”  

Lord have mercy.  Christ have mercy.  Lord have mercy. 

Fr. Tony+

Beloved (All Saints' Day A)

“Beloved”

 November 5, 2017 Solemnity of All Saints

(Year A; transferred from Nov. 1; with All Souls' Prayers for the Dead)

Homily preached at Trinity Parish Church

Ashland, Oregon

The Rev’d Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Revelation 7:9-17; Psalm 34:1-10, 22; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

Mother Mary Piper in her All Soul’s Day homily at the Thursday Healing Eucharist this week challenged us to tell each other stories of our beloved departed.   It made me think of my father, Alonzo Hutchinson, and my mother, Grace Warr.  They were both devout Mormons, but also free thinkers who valued pursuing a reasonable and moderate rule of life.  They had met in elementary school, and fell in love as teenagers.  With several months left in high school, they secretly eloped and then continued living in their respective parents’ homes until after graduation.  It was still a source of pain for my grandmother decades later, although a source of secret pride for my parents.    

One moment in particular tells of how my father transmitted his values to me.  One day, when I got home from classes at high school, my father was waiting for me and asked if we could talk privately.  He explained that earlier in the day, he had come home from work to pick up an item he needed.  Then, unexpectedly, the newspaper delivery person rang the bell and asked for payment for the month that was ending.  “I was short a few dollars and wanted to pay him in full right then, so I went through jackets in the front closet to see if anyone had left change that would make up the difference.  I am sorry I went through your things.  But this is what I found.”  To my surprise and horror, he held out a small pouch containing a pipe redolent with a rich aroma that was not tobacco. My friends and I had been experimenting for a few months.  I thought I had left it in my locker at school.  “What is this?” he asked gently.  Totally flummoxed, I stammered out a tale of how the day before there had been a police sweep at school, and one of the known “problem kids” in my class had approached and asked me to hold this pouch for him, since tobacco products were forbidden on campus and the cops would surely not even search me, given my goody-two shoes reputation.  “I took it as a favor for him and was going to give it back at the end of the day.  But he had left campus and I forgot about it.  Why, do you think I shouldn’t have done that to help a friend?”  My father was silent a couple of moments, and then said quietly, “Son, I think this may be drug paraphernalia.  Your classmate was just trying to not get arrested.  But if the police had found this on you, you are the one who would have been arrested.   Here it is.  Give it back to him as soon as you can and don’t put yourself at risk like this again.”    I was so relieved.  I was and am not a very good liar, and here my father, world-wise in so many ways more than me, swallowed my story, hook, line, and sinker.  But it bothered me that I had lied to my dad.  Later in the year, as I read Mohandas K. Gandhi’s autobiography, I came upon his story where he tells his father similar lies to cover for his own disrespect of Hindu dietary laws to curry favor of British classmates at school.  Gandhi said this hurt his conscience so badly that he vowed he would never again do anything he would have to lie to his father about.  I felt all the guiltier: I had not felt even a wisp of guilt when I had lied to extravagantly to my dad.  In the next weeks, I tried to pray and meditate to help figure out if there was something broken in me.  Soon I had a deep religious experience that helped me get order and direction back into my life. 

Years later, talking to my dad, I asked him if he even remembered the incident and said I couldn’t believe how he could have been so gullible and believing in me.  He smiled and said gently, “Actually, I knew you were lying.”  “Why didn’t you confront me then?”  “I realized that if you were willing to lie to me to cover up things, you were not ready at all to have what was going to be a difficult conversation.  So I allowed you the dignity of thinking I believed you, knowing that given who you were, a time would come when we could be honest about it.”   

My father knew to wait until people were ready to talk about the things that matter most.  He had the confidence that no matter how uncontrollable things might look now, in the end, all would be well. 

I believe that we must have confidence and hope that all will be well for our beloved departed, and not just for those who died in the embrace of the Church.   This hope is the basis for our praying for the dead.  It is also why we celebrate both All Souls’ Day right after All Saints’.

C.S. Lewis, in his great work Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, writes this: 

“Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would survive if those for the dead were forbidden. At our age, the majority of those we love best are dead. What sort of intercourse with God could I have if what I love best were unmentionable to him?

“I believe in Purgatory.  Mind you, the Reformers had good reasons for throwing doubt on the ‘Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory’ … [but T]he right view [is] … in [John Henry] Newman’s “Dream [of Gerontius].” There …  the saved soul, at the very foot of the throne, begs to be taken away and cleansed. It cannot bear for a moment longer ‘With its darkness to affront that light’…

“Our souls demand Purgatory, don't they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, ‘It is true, my [child], that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy’?  Should we not reply, ‘With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I'd rather be cleaned first.’  ‘It may hurt, you know’ – ‘Even so, sir.’

“I assume that the process of purification will normally involve suffering.  Partly from tradition; partly because most real good that has been done me in this life has involved it. But I don't think the suffering is the purpose of the purgation...  The treatment given will be the one required, whether it hurts little or much.

“My favourite image on this matter comes from the dentist's chair. I hope that when the tooth of life is drawn and I am 'coming round',' a voice will say, ‘Rinse your mouth out with this.’ This will be Purgatory. The rinsing may take longer than I can now imagine. The taste of this may be more fiery and astringent than my present sensibility could endure. But . . . it will [not] be disgusting and unhallowed.”

Since it is impossible to know what is inside the human heart, in practice many of us remember and pray for all the dead, confident that God wants to save all his creatures.  God is love, and love draws us all on.  I am hopeful that, in the end, God’s love will overcome all our human crankiness and resistance.   Perhaps, just perhaps, all the departed will one day be faithful departed since the faithfulness at issue is God’s, not ours.  And washed and scrubbed, dried with large soft towels and dressed in comfortable fresh clothes, we will be welcomed to the royal banquet, not as permitted strangers, welcomed from outside, but as family members who belong there and without whom there could be no party, beloved all. 

Blessed and beloved: All Saints and All Souls.  But also all of us here:  Blessed and Beloved.

Each week we say “Therefore we praise you, joining our voices with angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven.”  Mary reminded us on Thursday that this  includes the beloved departed.  We may not see them, but we hear them in our praises: a communion of saints indeed.

Together with Mary, I invite us all to think about a loved one who has died, whether one of the great saints of the Church, or a dear friend or family member.  Tell others their stories.  Pray for them, and ask them to pray for us.  Think of what they prayed for when they were here.  Wonder what they might be praying for now, in that great company of the Blessed.  If they weren’t churchy, and it is hard to imagine them praying, ask what their hopes and fears were, and what their hearts yearned for, especially when they were at their best.  For yearning is prayer.  And then find a way to start working for that.  I know my dad wants me to listen better to others, and recognize when people are ready to talk.

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.