Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Toe-tipping and Jumping into Joy (midweek)

 
Baptism of Christ, Oil Painting by Daniel Bonnell


Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
February 28, 2018
Toe-tipping and Jumping into Joy

“Thus we see now what in these days God calls us to.  We are now planted by the waters in which some Christians wade to the ankles (and be we thankful for that), some can but creep, as it were, in the way of grace, and some, it may be, can walk on with some strength; some have yet gone deeper, till they be wholly drenched in grace, and this we should all labor after.”  John Cotton, Way of Life or God’s way and Course” (1641)

 One of the great problems with boutique religion—faith that shops for the convenient and attractive, that picks and chooses the parts that appeal to us, that seeks above all for what we think we need and makes us feel good—is that it cannot challenge us, transform us, and lead us really beyond where we already are. 

Jesus asks us to get up, starting wherever we may be, and follow him (Matt 4:18).   Thomas replies, “but we do not know the way.”  Jesus replies, “I am the way”  (John 14:5-6).

Dipping our toe tips into the living water is a common response to Jesus’ call.  It is good and for many people sufficient.  But it differs little from tasting a bit from here or there, spitting out the unfamiliar or overly flavorful.  Walking waist deep in the water is also good, but if we try to run we find that the water becomes more and more of a hindrance as we struggle harder and harder.  If we are truly to follow Jesus, we need to throw ourselves whole-hearted into the flood, let the water bear us up, and then let ourselves go with the current driving the waters. 

This may appear hard or even impossible at first—who has not felt, in early swimming lessons, that that water is going to fail in holding us up, and will pull us under and kill us?  But bit by bit we learn to relax and trust as we go deeper and deeper in, learn more and more new tricks from more experienced swimmers in the water together with us.   Gradually we gain confidence and even at times proficiency in overcoming the unreasoning fear in our hearts that threatens to break out into panic and drown us.

This is not a way to escape pain or challenge.  C.S. Lewis wrote, “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand” (A Grief Observed). 

Yet, one of the words we use to describe the Holy Spirit is the Paraclete, the one we call up to be beside us, our Advocate.  And another way we translate the word Paraclete is “Comforter.”     God with us is sufficient and makes us strong enough, even in pain and doubt. 

The wonderful thing is this:  when we are drenched in grace and letting the tide of God sustain us, joy and peace do come, despite the pain and threat. 

All it takes is focusing on Jesus, on following Jesus, and then letting go of all else.  In this, we lose ourselves yet find our true selves, turn over the things and those we love the most, and find them ours in the truest sense. 

Gave and Peace. 
Fr. Tony+ 

Friday, February 23, 2018

Do Not Let Your Hearts be Troubled (funeral for Ginnie Deane)


 
“Do Not Let Your Hearts be Troubled
Homily Delivered at the Funeral for Ginnie Deane
Feb. 23, 2018 10 a.m.
Trinity Episcopal Parish, Ashland Oregon
The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
Job 19:21-27a; Psalm 91; Romans 8:14-19,34-35,37-39; John 14:1-6

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

“Do not let your hearts be troubled.  Trust God, and trust me as well.”  The death of a loved one is hard.  We miss them.  We wonder about how they are, or even whether they are.  The death of a loved troubles the heart.  And it troubles it for a long time. 

These words of Jesus are, then, a comfort:  “Don’t let your hearts be troubled.  Trust God. Trust me.”    Trust in the love behind, beneath, and driving the universe.  Trust in the God who once suffered on a cross and himself died.  Trust in the God who himself wept at his friend Lazarus’ death.  Trust. 

Trust is a matter of relationship.  And so is our hope for the dead.  As we get older, we gradually realize that more and more of those we love have passed on to death, what Shakespeare called that “undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveler returns.”  And we can either give up hope and joy forever, or give our hearts over to the power of love, of relationship, and God.  The great doctrine of the communion of the saints is all about this:  those who have gone on before are still here, but unseen.  For them life is changed, not ended.  And so we pray for them and ask them to pray for us.  Our relationships go on, though they are changed.  And it is all in the warm embrace of an all nurturing God who loves us and wills joy and salvation for all. 

Hazel Irma Howard, known to family and friends as “Ginnie,”  was born and raised in East Anglia, 60 miles northeast of London.  She kept her light East Anglian working class accent to her death.  Moving to London, she was a Girl Guides leader during the Blitz.  One day she returned to her troup’s Activity Center only to find it destroyed by one of Hitler’s bombs.  Moving to the U.S. after the war, she soon fell in love and married  Dudley Deane, her employer.     

Her life was marked by relationship and service.
She was open to a range of spiritual and physical training practices, from India, China, and Japan, and was one of the first U.S. Rieki masters.  She was known for her healing touch.  A popular poem used in Reiki circles tells of the gifts Ginnie enjoyed: 

Release my thoughts into the air,
I ask for guidance from above
That my hands might flow with healing love.

A touch that’s meant to reach the soul
To ease the pain that took its toll,
The mind and spirit to renew
As energy flows from me to you.

I only knew Ginnie the last six years of her life. Looking now on Ginnie’s family and friends, drawn together for this sad event, it is clear that relationship is still what her life is all about.   And that is what makes the event also one of joy, and hope. 

In the Father’s house, there are many dwelling places, Jesus says.  The word means stopping over places, temporary abodes on our journey in the eternities following Jesus.  There are many, not a few or one.  That’s because there are many of us, and a great variety of relationships between us and Jesus, Jesus is the way we follow in this great mystery.   Our relationship with him is what draws us on, whether we know him by that name or not.    

Ginnie led a full, joyful life, and was taken into the mystery of death quickly, without pain.  In that, there is hope and joy.  Let not your hearts be troubled.    Amen.

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Embracing Mortality (MIdweek Message)




Embracing Mortality
Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
February 21, 2018

This coming Sunday’s reading from Mark’s Gospel (8:31-38) tells the story of Jesus’ reaction to St. Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah.  Jesus tells Peter that he has understood "Messiah" wrong.  Jesus will not triumph militarily over Israel’s enemies and make it a great thing to be a Jew.  Rather, Jesus says “The Son of man is going to undergo great suffering, be rejected by the religious and social leaders, and be killed.”  Then he adds that even in death there is hope, alluding to Hosea (6:2), “after two days God will revive us, and on the third, raise us up.”  Peter can’t accept this and tells him he is wrong.  Jesus replies, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things. … If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

Clearly, the way this is phrased in the Gospel comes from a post-Easter perspective.  But these sayings have a clear, though different, meaning on the lips of the historical Jesus.  “Son of Man” (bar enash) in the Western Aramaic that Jesus spoke simply meant a “human being,” and was a way of referring to oneself in a humble, self-deprecatory way.  Occasionally when one of the Synoptic Gospels has “Son of Man,” another has “I” or “me.”  Jesus is saying, “this average person you see before you is going to get himself killed after great suffering” if he continues proclaiming the Reign of God.  He adds, “But there’s still hope.  And if you want to follow me, you too must embrace this surety of death as well.” 

Only later, after Good Friday and Easter, did the Church see this quirky way Jesus had of referring to himself, “Son of Man,” as a claim to be the Messiah:  they linked Jesus’ use of it to a passage in the Book of Daniel that refers to a coming future saving figure as looking “something like a human being,” literally, “a son of man.”     It took Easter to make them see the phrase with new eyes, just as it made them see Jesus’ references to God as “Abba” or Papa not a teaching of the intimacy of each and every person with God, but rather a claim to Jesus’ unique divine sonship. 

If indeed these sayings go back to the historical Jesus, then, they must mean something like, “Human beings, if they live how they’re supposed to, are bound to suffer.  And you must embrace this fact or you’re not really understanding my teaching, not really following me.” 

Embracing the bad that goes along with the good God gives us, then, would be the point of this teaching by Jesus.  

The idea is very close to what we find in the Book of Job.  When Job’s wife tells him to curse God and die because God has been so unfair to him, Job replies, “You are talking like a foolish woman. If we are willing to accept good things from God and bless him, shouldn’t we be willing to accept hard times from him as well?”  The narrator adds, “ In all this, Job did not sin in what he said” (Job 2:0). 

We must accept the good and bad that God gives us.  This isn’t to say we need to reject feelings of hurt and pain when we suffer.  Feelings will come, and that’s O.K.  That’s one of the great lessons from the Book of Psalms, that has about every emotion under the sun.  

But trusting in a gracious and good God, a loving Abba or Papa, means trusting.  That means we need to have equanimity and patience.  It means acceptance.

Acceptance is not gritting your teeth, holding your nose, and putting up with the intolerable.  Acceptance is embracing what is, good and bad, and letting that embrace be part of our love for God and God’s love for us.  Acceptance is not judging, but watching and being present. 

There is a traditional Chinese story that tells of accepting the way things are, the Tao:  A farmer had only one horse.  One day the horse ran away. The neighbors came to commiserate over what they saw as his terrible loss. The farmer said, "What makes you think it is so terrible?"  Later, the horse came home--this time bringing with her two beautiful wild horses. The neighbors became excited at the farmer's good fortune. Such lovely strong horses! The farmer said, "What makes you think this is good fortune?"  The farmer's son was thrown from one of the wild horses and broke his leg. All the neighbors were very distressed. Such bad luck! The farmer said, "What makes you think it is bad?"  A war came, and every able-bodied man was conscripted and sent into battle. Only the farmer's son, because he had a broken leg, remained. The neighbors congratulated the farmer. "What makes you think this is good?" said the farmer.

When Jesus says he will suffer terrible things and we must be willing to suffer terribly too, I think he is calling us to acceptance.  And this is because our Father in heaven is ultimately good and kind, despite what may appear before our eyes.  Trusting God, having faith, means acceptance. 

Sunday, February 18, 2018

With the Wild Beasts and Angels (Lent 1B)

Noah and the Rainbow, Stained Glass in Saint Augustine Day Chapel 
of St. Jude's Roman Catholic Church, New Lenox, IL

With the Wild Beasts and Angels
First Sunday of Lent (Year B)
18 February 2018; 8 am Spoken Mass; 10 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP. Ph.D.  
Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-13

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


One of the details we usually miss about the story of the Great Flood, whose conclusion we read today as our Hebrew Scriptures lesson, is the reason that God decides in that story originally to destroy the earth and all flesh:  it is the violence that has become so common and the cries of those suffering from it.  God can't stand the noise and decides to unmake the world by letting the great Deep loose from below and above, causing the Flood.  This is not so much, I think, a story of God's intentional harm of his creation, but rather his desire to protect it and preserve it.  That is clearly the point of God's covenant with all creation that we read about today--the rainbow is a sign that God will never again destroy the earth.  I think this should give us pause when we reflect on what happened in Florida on Wednesday this week.  One of the most heart rending pictures to come out of it was a mother hugging a child escaped from the carnage and weeping.  On her forehead was a cross drawn with the ashes of mortality.  God hates violence and injustice.  He is not its source.  But God continues to love us his creatures. 

The Harrowing of Hell, Stained Glass in the Church of St. Mary, Fairford, England

The reading from Peter links the Flood with baptism, and with the idea that God redeemed his promise to care for all creation by sending the slain Jesus, while his body was in the tomb, to preach the Gospel to the souls of those killed by the waters of the Great Flood.  Baptism is a sign of hope: not a washing of dirt from the body, 1 Peter  says, but rather an appeal for a clear conscience.   And in the Gospel reading, Jesus in his own baptism hears the Voice of God declaring his love and acceptance--a verbal affirmation of the hope of God's bow set in the clouds.  

The baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist is one of the few events told in the Gospels that almost all biblical scholars and historians agree actually happened.  The story shows up in too many varied forms in too many differing early traditions to ignore.  And the various retellings and versions of the story show an acute embarrassment among some early Christians at the story of their sinless Lord and God seeking “baptism of repentance” from another religious teacher.  Such embarrassment makes it unlikely that early Christians made the story up.  

The Baptism of Christ, stained glass by Gerhard Remish, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. 

Mark’s story of Jesus’ baptism and temptation is short and sweet: Jesus comes to John and is baptized.  Coming up from the water, Jesus sees the heavens split apart and the spirit of God descends on him “like a dove.”  Then Jesus hears God’s voice, quoting the Psalms and prophets, “You are my son, this day I have fathered you. I love you, you make me happy.” Immediately, the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness where he remains for forty days, tempted by Satan, living with the wild beasts, though “angels ministered to him.” 

What would receiving baptism from John have meant for Jesus and why would he have immediately thereafter gone to the desert to be alone with God?

John preaches in the wilderness of Judea, near the north of the Dead Sea. He is within a few kilometers of the community that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, and there are clear links between him and that community.

The Judaisms of the period all agreed that impurity both ritual and moral could be driven away by following the prescriptions of the Torah—usually to wash in pure water and wait until sundown. As a result, mikvehs, or ritual baths are common objects in the Jewish archaeological sites from that period.

The Dead Sea Scrolls sect, with its dispute with the Temple leadership, believed that simply being born Jewish wasn’t enough to be part of God’s people.  You had to accept the right beliefs and practice the right rituals. They required a ritual washing in order to enter their exclusive community. Their rulebook says that this washing had to reflect a change of heart to be truly valid.

Both John the Baptist and the Qumran covenanters fled to the desert to escape what they saw as the corruption and false religion of the Jerusalem elites.   The desert is where God met with his people. God meets Moses and purifies his people there as they wander for 40 years after they leave Egypt (Exodus 2:11—4:31).  God meets Elijah there (I Kings 19:1-18).  

John appears preaching what Mark and Luke call a “baptism of repentance unto the forgiveness of sins,” that is, “a washing showing your change of heart that results in your sins being set aside.” 

Why would a thirty-year old building contractor (that’s what the Greek word tekton means, not “carpenter”) from Nazareth be interested in this?  The Judean wilderness was a long way from Galilee for someone on foot.   Why would Jesus want to go to the Baptist, especially if he were not unduly burdened by a sense of guilt or sinfulness?  As a Jew, he would have been unable to avoid incurring ritual uncleanliness in the course of day-to-day life. But the regular washings prescribed by the Law would satisfy that. Why undergo John’s washing to signify a change of heart?

He was attracted to the Baptist’s message:  the Temple and political leadership are hopelessly corrupt and detached from God.  His baptism is something like what the Qumran covenanters practiced, but popularized and meant for all, not a hermetic ritual into an exclusive sect.  Masses of common people flock to Jordan for John’s baptism. 

Matthew and Luke give a fuller telling of the Baptist’s preaching: “Go and produce tangible evidence in your acts that you have indeed had a change of hearts.  If you are a soldier, don’t commit unnecessary violence and take advantage of people; if you are a tax revenue agent, only collect what is required and don’t skim the proceeds to line your own pocket.” 

The Baptist is preaching basic justice.  He is calling people to take God’s love of fairness personally, to make God’s will their own.  This personal involvement with God, this demand for social justice as evidence of our change of hearts--these are all elements that would remain part and parcel of Jesus’ own proclamation that the Kingship of God had arrived in our midst.

What would John the Baptist say today if we asked him to give examples in our society of tangible evidence of a change in our hearts. Would he ask us to stop walking past beggars without assisting? Would he insist that we stop paying less than living wages to those we employ?  Stop abusing spouses and children?  Looking down on those who differ from us?  Stop frequenting enterprises or buying goods and services based on the exploitation of, or the trafficking in, persons?  Stop facilitating the murder of innocents by supporting the political cause of gun manufacturers and the people they have seduced into thinking that guns somehow represent freedom and security for us?  Stop taking bribes from such merchants of death in the form of political contributions? 

Jesus seeks baptism at John’s hand because he takes to heart John’s message of justice, personal responsibility, and relationship with God.   He is himself having a change of heart.  He is moving from one part of his life to another: from his private life with his family and friends, his assisting in the carpentry/house building business, to his public ministry.   

Jesus sees in John’s baptism a call to refocus, to reorient, to redirect his life. For him, the “fruit worthy of a change of heart” would be the living out of the task to which God was calling him. 

Despite the pressures on him in Nazareth to do the conventional, to follow the norm, to settle down, possibly start a family of his own and make something of himself, Jesus makes the long journey to see this Wildman of God in the Judean desert.   His neighbors in Nazareth think he has abandoned his Mother and siblings.  Yet Jesus in baptism hears the voice of God.  The result is clear in Jesus’ public preaching when, alone of the religious voices of the day, he calls God, “Father” and says He is above all a loving Father.    

This is why he must leave for the desert, where must be tested, “live with the wild beasts” and sort out things to find out what his identity revealed in baptism means. 

When Jesus later returns to Nazareth later, his Mother and siblings try to get him to come home and start acting normally again, because they think he has gone insane (Mark 3).  He is no longer the Jesus whom they had known and loved.  He now is clearly a man willing to give up everything for God’s reign to be made more clearly visible, willing to die if necessary. The time in the desert has left its mark.

Wherever we hear and accept the Good News of God’s love, we find that the good news makes us crazy.  Jesus puts us at odds with the economic and political systems of our world.  This gospel forces us to act, interrupting the world as it is in ways that make even pious people indignant. 

Friends, we are not what God intended when he created us.  We need all the more to have a change of heart and manifest it in our actions.  We too need to seek in quietness our true baptismal identity, and God willing, have angels minister to us also as we struggle with the wild beasts.  May we, like Jesus, remain undeterred from the mission on which God sends us, no matter how crazy this appears to those we love.

In the name of Christ, Amen.

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Who Knows? (Ash Wednesday)




Who Knows?
Ash Wednesday (Years ABC)
14 February 2018; 12 Noon and 7 p.m. Said Mass with Imposition of Ashes  
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon  
The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.


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

I read in the blog of a friend, a priest in Nahelem, that she was not “doing Lent” this year.  She is gravely ill with a degenerative respiratory illness, and may not make it to Easter.  As I recall, she said, “I may be having a real life—make that real death—experience of ashes to ashes and dust to dust in the next few weeks.  I don’t need any extra reminders, since it is about all I can think of.  And I’m not sure that 40 days of effort are going to make any headway on my besetting sins—they are what they are and if I haven’t changed yet, I doubt whether one last heroic effort of a month or so will change anything.  And my time is so limited that I feel that a better spiritual practice for me is to enjoy the good things God gave that I know I love and value.” 

I felt very sad to hear how poorly she’s doing, but was in awe of how well she understood Lent and what it’s about. 

We often get Lent and Ash Wednesday completely wrong.  I’m not talking about the naughty choir boy’s snickering at the line in the liturgy, “Remember you are BUT dust.”   Our misunderstanding is far deeper and pervasive, and comes from not understanding the context of all the scriptural talk about sin, punishment, the wrath of God, and penitence.  We think it’s all about heroic efforts to convince God to not be so angry at us.   At a more pedestrian level, we think that it’s about showing to ourselves and others how pious, how spiritual, we are.  We keep those ash marks prominent on our foreheads and go boldly back into the world to let others see.  Or some of us wrongly think that we can take the ashes out into the world and give other people a chance to show off their spirituality without the inconvenience of actually getting their behinds into a church:  ashes to go, indeed.  But it’s all there in today’s Gospel:  Jesus says if you do a good thing for show, the show is all there is: “they have received their reward.”

For Jesus, it’s all about doing good things in secret, without trying to have anyone know.  “God, who sees in secret, will bless you.” 

Reading about my friend’s vacation from Lent, I was struck by something that happened to me yesterday.  I was available most of the day to hear confessions and give absolution in the Church.  For whatever reason, not a single parishioner showed up.  That’s OK:  we are Episcopalians and “All may, none must, but some should.”  But yesterday, I was one of the last group, one of the one’s who should confess.  After finishing in the Church, I talked with my Spiritual Director and made my confession.  It was greatly centering and soothing.  As we talked, and we went between my sins and the things in my life that drive them and trigger them, I found myself confessing like many other people I have heard over the years:  I told not only the hurts and harms I had done other people, but wondered about the hurts and harms done to me.  For, as much as we want to keep these two separate in terms of accepting responsibility and making amends, from the point of view of our heart, of how we feel, they often are one and the same.   This is not simply because of the collective, the corporate nature of sin, and the fact that all sin of all people is interconnected.  It’s more personal, deeper.  My own failings are often reactions, hurt reactions, to the failings of others.  And as most counselors and Twelve-Step sponsors know all too well, much of the harm we do is the result of addiction, compulsion, and things beyond the control of our wills.  An alcoholic will drink.  A junkie will shoot up.  A hurt person will lash out.  A person with low self-esteem may overcompensate and act with the self-absorption of a blissfully clueless narcissist.  Even though we are responsible for our actions, often our actions are beyond our control.  Again, the hurt we cause and the hurt we feel are in a real sense one and the same when viewed through the heart’s lens.   When we confess our own sins, it is important to focus on what we are responsible for, and not what other people are.  But that said, we often find that in plumbing our own hearts for the sources of sin we find the hurts we have suffered from others.  And in discussing such a thing in confession, we are actually talking about our need to make amendment of life and make restitution to those we have harmed, but also and, I think just as importantly, our need to forgive the others who have hurt us.

Our English word “confess” is odd, just like the Latin it translates, Confiteor.  It means not only fessing up and accepting responsibility for and rightly naming our misdoings, but it can also mean extolling and proclaiming our faith, like the Augsburg Confession or the Westminster Confession of Faith, or St. Augustine’s faith proclaiming spiritual auto-biography, the Confessions. 

We often misunderstand all these scriptures about penance and sin.  We think it is about judicial angels, no harps and angelic choirs, but with wigs and gavels and the occasional sword or trumpet to announce punishment thrown in.  But no:  these scriptures express how when we are hurt, or scared, or sick, we want the world to be orderly and make sense:  this must be a punishment.   It must be from an angry God.  We need to change to make nice with the big guy up there who is putting us through the wringer.  Sickness feels very close to guilt, doesn’t it?  This emotional truth is what is behind the Great Litany’s conflation of all these things.  “Spare us Good Lord!” “Good Lord, deliver us.”  Not just from sin, and temptation, and rottenness, but from sickness, plague, flood, and fire, war, and “dying suddenly and unprepared.” 

But the heart of the matter is always this: God is love, not rage.  The passage from Joel expresses it well in passing: God is punishing us, right?  But if we repent and turn from our evil ways, “Who knows?  Maybe God will relent and turn.  And he may just leave us, from among the offerings we have put on the altar to placate the Deity’s anger, something for us to eat.”  Who knows?  Maybe God is kind and loving, just like Jesus taught.  Maybe those images of God’s wrath are more about our own feelings of conviction than they are about the heart of our loving Abba.  Maybe he already loves us and accepts us, and wants us to pull up our socks and get on with life.  Who knows?  As Jesus taught us, we can hope. 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 


Sunday, February 11, 2018

Refulgent Beauty (Last Sunday before Lent B)


Elijah and the Fiery Chariot, stained glass at the Church of the Sacred Heart, Jersey City NJ
 
Refulgent Beauty
Last Sunday after Epiphany (Year B)
11 February 2018; 8 am Spoken Mass; 10 am Sung Mass
Transfiguration Sunday
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon  
2 Kings 2:1-12; Psalm 50:1-6; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-9 

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

Light and fear: it’s in all the scripture passages today. 

The Gospel sees Jesus shining bright before his closest friends.  The light shining from the face of Jesus overwhelms Peter.  “Let’s build three small shelters commemorating this!” he says.   We shouldn’t hold the odd reaction against him, says the narrator—he was, after all scared out of his wits.

Paul in the Epistle says that people are blinded from seeing the light of the Gospel, the brightness of Christ, because of their lack of trust.  That what the word translated as “unbelievers” means: they lack trust in God.   Again, fear blinds us to the light. 

The Psalm says “Out of Zion, in its beauty, God discloses himself in brilliant light.” Surrounded by a raging storm and a fire devouring everything before it, God’s appearance pulls his people into a courtroom where only God’s Hasidim, can stand.  The word means those devoted to him, the kind ones. Their fear has been overcome by shared trust and commitment:  when the scripture’s shorthand says these gentle ones “have made a covenant with me and sealed it with sacrifice,” this means they have had a relationship of mutual goodness, promises, and care between them and God, one involving serious self-giving.  Here, love and trust casts out the fear that would have blinded them to the light. 

In the Hebrew scriptures, the great prophet Elijah gets ready for his last trip.  The younger man he has mentored all these years, Elisha, asks to go along for the ride, afraid the old man is going to disappear.  When anyone reminds Elisha that this is after all Elijah’s last trip, Elisha does not want to hear.  He is afraid to face up to his mentor’s passing.  Elisha’s afraid he won’t measure up and be able to fill the old man’s shoes.   When Elijah gets to Jordan, that symbol of endings, new beginnings, death, and new life, Elisha insists on going on with him, and true to form, Elijah performs one last great marvel.  He takes his coat and smacks the water with it.  It divides it into two, and the two men walk across on dry ground.   “Now I really am leaving,” says Elijah, “What is it you want?”  Afraid of his own inadequacies, Elisha wants twice as much of whatever it was that made Elijah the prophet he has been.  “Wow! That’s a steep order!  If you face up to reality and actually see what’s coming, you might just get what you ask!”  When the fiery whirlwind comes to take his mentor, Elisha, having to taken to heart his mentor’s encouragement, sees the whole thing and receives Elijah’s cloak: he has indeed grown to fill the shoes left by his legendary mentor. 

There is a subtle message in Mark’s telling of the transfiguration story.  Three times in that Gospel, facades are ripped away and the refulgent beauty of God revealed: in each scene, Elijah appears in some form, and a voice declares that Jesus is the Son of God.  In Mark’s story of the baptism, John the Baptists, elsewhere called “Elijah” by Jesus, baptizes him, and the heavens are ripped open, revealing the descent of the Spirit and the voice of God: “This is my son, the beloved.”  In his story of the Transfiguration, the everyday looks of Jesus depart as he metamorphosizes and is revealed in blindingly brilliant light, and God’s voice again says, “This is my Son, the beloved.”  Then, at the crucifixion, the crowds mistake Jesus’ call to God, “Eloi,” as a call to Elijah.  The Temple curtain is ripped in two, and the centurion supervising the judicial murder of Jesus, seeing him expire, says, perhaps ironically, “This was God’s Son.”    The truth of who Jesus is is revealed in each scene, but it is not just about the stage props of the blinding light, the refulgent beauty in the first two.  In the crucifixion, God reveals himself not in visible glory, but by suffering horror.   Seeing beyond and behind the ugliness of Jesus’ death, we recognize that the centurion’s words can only be verified for us by God speaking in our own heart.   There is refulgent beauty behind it all, but we at times cannot see it because of our fear.  The original ending of the Gospel of Mark is the flight of the women from the tomb where an angel has told them Jesus is not there.  The women say nothing, however, “because they were afraid.” 

Today is the last Sunday after Epiphany before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.  It is called transfiguration Sunday, after the Gospel reading.  But all of these texts talk about transformation and transfiguration:  change that we all must undergo if we are to come to recognized the light, love it, and not be blinded by it. 

Sisters and brothers, know that God loves you and accepts you.  If you have fear, it stems from not accepting this essential fact.   Fear blinds us, makes us crazy, and distorts us.  We become twisted and the world becomes broken. But as Leonard Cohen says in his song “Anthem,”     

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Loving Jesus is about facing the truth.  It is about losing our fear.  It is about being open to sudden astounding moments of clarity.  It is about seeing the love and refulgent beauty of God even when we are faced with darkness and horror. 

As we prepare for Lent, I invite us to look at the areas where we are blind.  The most direct way is to find what deeply upsets our balance and joy, and then ask what it is in us that makes us so vulnerable here.   This is a practice commonly used in counseling and direction.  Jesuits call it an examination of conscience.  Twelve Steppers call it a moral inventory.  It is best done with a friend, a spiritual director, or ideally a "discreet priest." 

Ask yourself, “what is it about me that causes me to be so upset or undone by this action of others or situation?’  I think that if you ask yourself that question and observe carefully and honestly, you will find that fear it at the heart of most of our problems.   

A simple example might be:  I get upset when my “fairness” button is pushed, when someone, especially someone I’m responsible for, suffers from unjust treatment. What is it about me that upsets me so in this?  I think it is because I am afraid that I do not do enough to uphold fairness.  I am afraid of people thinking ill of me.  I am afraid of thinking of myself as one of the oppressors.  I am afraid for my social- and self-esteem.

Again: what is it about me that lets this situation set me off? Why does it upset me?  What fear is at the heart of it? 

Letting the light in through the cracks, being open to sudden epiphanies, recognizing the refulgent beauty of God even in hardship, letting ourselves be changed from glory into glory as we bathe in the light coming from Jesus’ face, all this starts with recognizing our blindness, identifying our fear.  Once we have identified them, it will be time to let Jesus gently overcome them. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.  




Friday, February 9, 2018

Life not Judgment (funeral for Ojuida Bradford)

 
Life not Judgment
Funeral for Ojuida Robinson Bradford
9 February 2018 11:00 a.m.
Trinity Parish Church, Ashland Oregon
The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
Isaiah 25:6-9; Psalm 91; Romans 8:14-19, 34-35, 37-39; John 5:24-27

Give us grace, Loving One, to look forward with hope to our life in Jesus Christ, the Risen One.  Amen

Just before Christmas, I went up to visit Ojuida at her new apartment in Skylark.  She was her usual gracious self, decked out in Southern Lady style and primly sitting in the sun beams pouring into her room onto her easy chair.   “I am 97 years old and ready to die” she said, but then added her plans to perhaps change into a slightly larger suite.  Then, in fashion typical of Ojuida, she asked me how I was doing, and about my wife Elena and her illness.   “You take care of her,” she counseled, “our chance to be with the one we love is taken away far too soon.”  In her instructions for her funeral, Ojuida left a message for family and friends from a couple of years ago, a message now from beyond the grave:  “I have always had faith in God and thought of Jesus as my holy Friend [and then later in life as] my Holy prayer partner… My faith was childlike until my college years caused me to question and cease being as faithful in church worship.  My father was a strict Methodist.  I think that’s why after college I was drawn to the Episcopal Church with its beautiful liturgy and its broader view of all people.  I tried to practice that more and more as I had children, met more people, and moved many times. I love my family and many friends, but most of all, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  I’m much older and I can feel it; there are physical changes.  I don’t know how I will accept death when it comes.  It seems unreal for me right now.” 

In today’s Gospel, we hear Jesus say, “anyone who hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life and does not come under judgment, but has passed from death to life.  … the hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.”  This optimistic word seems to be contradicted by what follows: “[T]he Father … has given [the Son] authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man.”  We must remember, though that the Biblical idea of judgment is not primarily a scene in a court of Law, but rather the setting right of all that is wrong.  The Book of Judges is not about people in wigs with gavels: it is about military heroes who rescue the oppressed.  

So what the Gospel is saying is that faith, what we call trust, in Jesus saves us from being on the bad receiving end of such a setting of things right:  we are rescued, not punished. Trusting Jesus brings us life, and makes us pass through death.  Jesus sets things right because he is not only the Son God, but also the Son of Man, one of us.    I hope in my heart of hearts that this will be for all people.  Jesus wants us all to have joy and peace. 

Just before his death, Jesus says, “Don’t let your hearts be troubled.  Trust God. Trust me.”    Trust in the love behind, beneath, and driving the universe.  Trust in the God who once suffered on a cross and himself died.  Trust in the God who himself wept at his friend Lazarus’ death.  Trust.  

Trust is a matter of relationship.  And so is our hope for the dead.  As we get older, we gradually realize that more and more of those we love have passed on to death, what Shakespeare called that “undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveler returns.”  And we can either give up hope and joy forever, or give our hearts over to the power of love, of relationship, and God.  The great doctrine of the communion of the saints is all about this:  those who have gone on before are still here, but unseen, like Ojuida and Larry.  For them life is changed, not ended.  And so we pray for them and ask them to pray for us.  Our relationships go on, though they are changed.  And it is all in the warm embrace of an all nurturing God who loves us and wills joy and salvation for all. 

I thank God for having known Ojuida, and for the confidence I have that for here, and for us all, in the end, all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.

In the name of Christ,  Amen