SImeon and Anna (noon healing mass)

 

Simeon and Anna--Hoping for Consolation

30 December 2021

Thursday in the Octave of Christmas

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

12:00 noon Healing Mass

The Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP. Ph.D.

1 John 2:12-17; Luke 2:36-40; Psa 96:7-10

 

1 John 2:12-17

¹²I write to you littlest ones:
    your failings have all been sent away on account of who Jesus is. 

¹³I write to you oldsters:
    you know the One who is from the beginning.
I write to you youngsters:
    you are victorious over the evil one.
¹⁴I write to you little ones:
    you know our heavenly Parent.
I write to you fathers and mothers:
    you know the One who is from the beginning.
I write to you young adults:
    you are strong and God’s word abides in you,
        and you are victorious over the evil one.

¹⁵Do not love the world’s ways or the world’s goods.  The love of the world squeezes out the love for the Father; ¹⁶for almost everything that is the world’s—excessive desire for sex, possessions, and wealth—draws you not to the Father but rather separates you. ¹⁷The world and all its ceaseless wanting is fading away—but whoever does what God wants will abide into the new age.  (TAB)

 

Psa 96:7-10  Cantate Domino BCP 726

7	Ascribe to the Lord, you families of the peoples; *
	ascribe to the Lord honor and power.
8	Ascribe to the Lord the honor due his Name; *
	bring offerings and come into his courts.
9	Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness; *
	let the whole earth tremble before him.
10	Tell it out among the nations: “The Lord is King! *
	he has made the world so firm that it cannot be moved;
	he will judge the peoples with equity.”

 

Luke 2:36-40

²⁵Now there was a person in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon. This person was quick to give alms and devout, awaiting the consolation of Isra’el, and a Holy Spirit was upon him. ²⁶It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he should not die before he had seen the Messiah of the Noble One. ²⁷He came in the Spirit into the temple; and as the parents brought in the little child Jesus to perform for him what was customary in law, ²⁸he took him in his arms and blessed God with these words: 

²⁹“Now, Master, you may set your servant free
    to go in peace, as you have promised,
³⁰for these eyes of mine have seen your salvation,
³¹     prepared by you for all the world to see,
³²a light to enlighten the nations,
    and the glory for your people Isra’el.”

³³The child’s father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him; ³⁴then Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “See:  this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Isra’el, and to be a symbol rejected by many—³⁵indeed, you yourself a sword shall pierce—thus revealing the thoughts of their hearts.”

 

³⁶There was also a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Phanu’el, of the tribe of Asher. She was elderly, having lived with her husband after her marriage for seven years, ³⁷and then as a widow for another eighty-four. She never left the temple, but worshiped night and day with fasting and prayer. ³⁸And coming forward at that very time, she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem.  ³⁹When they had fulfilled all the prescriptions of the law of the Noble One, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. ⁴⁰As the child grew up, he became strong; he was filled with wisdom and God’s favor was upon him. (TAB)

 

 

 

 

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

 

The readings today are all about one idea—ascribe to God the Glory due God’s name, rather than ascribe to yourself the glory which you think you are due.  Simeon and Anna “await the consolation of Israel” in prayer and worship, and suddenly find the one they had hoped for right there in front of them.  Anna has been a widow for most of her long life, and she stays almost non-stop in the Temple each day to worship.  Their faith and trust transcend the Temple, precisely because of their dutiful and intentional participation in its rituals and attention to the meanings and hopes expressed in these words and actions.  1 John tells us to give up our “ceaseless wanting” and do what God wants instead. 

 

Remember that when God made the world, God pronounced it “very good.”  But left to our own devices, we twist that good into something distorted and broken that isolates us from God.  It is only when we let go of our excessive desire to have our own way, our own pleasure, our own wealth that we find the broken mended, the twisted straightened, and the sick healed.   What the King James version translates as “all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,” is actually an illusion that is passing away.  When you look at it carefully, you realize, in the words of Alan Watts, that you don’t really have to let go of anything, because there is nothing there actually to hold onto.     

 

Trusting God, trying however imperfectly to live according to God’s expectations, that is what gives us the heart to hope for consolation, and eyes to see it when it comes. 

 

Thanks be to God.    

Big-Hearted Hummingbirds (Mid-week)

 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Big-Hearted Hummingbird

December 29, 2021

 

With the snow and cold weather, the small hummingbird feeder on my front deck has been seeing a lot of visitors each day.  During the summers, we see mainly the bright emerald Anna’s hummingbird and the scarlet Rufous.  The Rufous is more aggressive, defending its feeding grounds by pecking at and dive-bombing even competitors that greatly outsize it, while the Anna’s seem more inclined to flee or stand only in self-defense.  This time of year, the Rufouses have all migrated to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific coast of south-central Mexico for wintering.  The Anna’s tough it out here, descending from the higher elevations into the valleys like our own and using feeders abandoned for the winter by their more aggressive cousins.  So all of our visitors this week have been green and less inclined to wage hummingbird war.  Their visits brought to mind a story I have heard that speaks deeply to me.   

 

In the Pali canon of Buddhist scripture, there is a series of stories about the future Buddha in various incarnations as animals and nature-spirits called the Jataka tales.  One of them is about a brave little parrot who tries to fight a forest fire by taking beakfuls of water from the stream to the fire front.  The other animals ask why it is so foolish as to risk its life in a clearly hopeless task, to which the parrot replies, “Hey, I’m doing the best I can here!”  The parrot, with its great heart of a future Buddha, draws together the clouds, which then produce a downpour that puts out the fire.    

 

This story appears in several world folk traditions, including Mexico, where the hero of the story is a roufus hummingbird.  Because of its feisty character, it is associated with the Aztec war god, whose name Huitzilopchtli comes from the Nahuatl word huitzilin “hummingbird.”  In this form of the story, Huitzilopchtli miraculously calls in the storm clouds to save the day.  Many native American folk traditions, including the Pacific Northwest Shoshone and Haida peoples, tell stories of the hummingbird based on its perserverance and seeming great courage.   In other forms of the story, it is the brave little hummingbird’s tears that bring on the rain. 

 

The holidays this year have been hard on all of us, I think.  Some of us are mourning family and close friends who have died; all of us are suffering from the uncertainty and fear of the omicron covid surge.  And we continue to suffer from the effects of the wildfires last year.   So those indomitable little hummingbirds on my deck have been a great sign for me of our need to face the world with all its threats and fears with a brave spirit (hopefully like the peaceful Anna’s and not the feisty Rufous, though either will suit us well).   

 

Many of Jesus’ parables teach the importance of faith and soldiering on in the face of great odds: the persistent widow and the corrupt judge, the visitor at midnight, the seed growing secretly.  As we get ready to face 2022 with all its challenges, let’s be brave, do our part—however small and hopeless as it may seem—and expect a miracle. 

 

Because miracles do come for those who trust, for those with big hearts.    

 

Grace and peace. 

--Fr. Tony+

The Pattern (Christmas 1ABC)

                      In the Beginning was the Tao, stained glass in Morrison Chapel Macau

 

The Pattern  
John 1:1-18
Homily delivered First Sunday of Christmas (All Years RCL TEC)
26th December 2021: 8:00am Said and 10:00am Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)

The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
Readings: (Isa 61:10-62:3; Ps 147, Gal 3:23-25; 4:4-7; John 1:1-18)

 

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

“O Come, Let us adore Him,” we sing, without a thought about what we are saying. Worship a baby? Barely born and in diapers? (That’s what “swathing bands” were for.) Worship a little creature with a brain that is just beginning to organize sensory input and is still years away from rational thought? How can this be?

But other lines of carols seem to have given the matter some more thought: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail the incarnate Deity,” “Of the Father’s Love begotten, ere the worlds began to be,” and “God from God, Light from Light, Lo he abhors not the Virgin’s womb. Very God, begotten, not created. O Come let us adore him.”

 

Today’s Gospel does not tell the story of Jesus’ earthly origins.   John tells us of something quite a bit deeper and much, much more hidden.  He begins also by quoting a hymn, this one to Christ as the Logos, the eternal word of God.  It begins, “In the beginning was the Word.”

This translation misses the richness of the Greek en arche en ho logos. Another way of translating might be, “At the start, at the root of all, the logos existed.”  The usual way it is translated in Chinese captures the idea much better than any I have seen in English: 太 初 有 道 “At the great beginning of all things, there was the Tao.”

The Greek word logos is where we get our words logo, logic, and analogue and dialogue. It means much more than just “word.”   Its basic meaning is whatever it is that creates or conveys meaning or sense, whether in our minds or on our lips.   Something is logical, or has logos, because it coheres and is patterned.  Geo-logy is the patterns we see in the physical world, Gaia.  Theology is a patterned and coherent way of talking about God, Theos.   Logos is a deep pattern, a coherence, that lies behind and beneath disparate and apparently random facts. 

 

Thus, a good way to translate the first verse is, “At the root and heart of all things lies a Pattern, a Meaning.”

I propose the following paraphrase of John 1:1-18, pointing to the meaning that John’s Gospel gives such words as “word,” “light,” and “darkness”: 

 

At the start and in the heart of all things,

there was a meaningful pattern.
The pattern was God’s; God was the pattern.
At the moment of creation, it was already this pattern with God.

Everything came into existence from it.
Nothing exists that didn’t come from it.
The pattern brought forth life and

    the light of meaning for humankind.
This light shines in darkness, and darkness cannot put it out. … The genuine light, the source and meaning of everyone's life,

was coming into the universe,

and though the universe came into being by the light,

the universe did not recognize it for what it was.  

It came into its own realm,

but his own kin did not take him in.

But he empowers all who do take him,

those who trust in all that he is,

to become children of God:  

children not born from masculine will,

    reproductive instinct, and the blood of birth,

but rather, begotten from God alone.  

The pattern and meaning of everything

Took on human flesh

and lived with us a short time.

We experienced how wonderful he is:

as wonderful as a father’s only child,

full of joyful promise, where things are as they should be.  (The Ashland Bible)

 

 

The hymn says that the Word/Meaning/Pattern of God took on flesh. The choice of the word “flesh” is deliberate. In Semitic culture, basar “flesh” was the physical, earthy part of a person that you could see, touch, and smell. It was a key part of you, and not wholly separable from your mind or spirit. The symbol for a man to be part of God’s covenant with Abraham was that he be circumcised in his flesh. For Greeks, sarx “flesh” was the changeable, impermanent part of a human being. For some Greek philosophers, it was the part that resisted reason and had a mind of its own, the part that I think we would identify by talking about addictive, obsessive, or compulsive behaviors. It was in this sense that Saint Paul had occasionally used the word—sarx for him sometimes is shorthand for that part of a human being that resists God’s intentions for us.

When the prologue of John says the logos became sarx, it means that Reason, Pattern, Meaning itself, took on all it means to be a human being: all the limitations, all the doubts and fears, the ignorance, all the handicaps.

 

The hymn adds “he dwelt among us.” The word used for “dwelt” is eskenasen: he “set up his tent” among us. The image is of a temporary habitation, like the Tent of the Meeting or the Tabernacle of the ancient Israelites, where God Himself was made manifest to Moses.

The hymn adds, “and we saw his glory, as of a father’s only Son, full of Grace and Truth.”

Grace—joyful and tender love, without condition.  Truth—genuineness, authenticity, things being as they ought to be. It is here that the conflict between divine and human, the perfect and imperfect, the boundless and the bounded is resolved: Grace and Truth. For despite all our limitations, we human beings can on occasion transcend ourselves and open ourselves to Grace and Truth. On even fewer occasions, we can even become the channels or instruments by which Grace and Truth can be given to others.

“We saw the glory of God made flesh, we saw the beauty of the pattern behind the worlds placed within this apparently meaningless world—and we recognized that glory as Grace, we recognized that glory as Truth.”

It is in Jesus’ gracious love and authenticity that the Gospel of John says we can recognize the pattern of the universe, see Jesus is the Logos from all eternity.   But he adds “the only child of the father.” Jesus is monogenes—one-of-a-kind.   Despite all he shares with us, he is different in this one way.  Despite the limitations his humanity imposed, Jesus as Eternal Pattern of Meaning is Transcendence Itself.

The hymn to the Logos ends by saying, “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.”

The Ultimate Meaning of the universe found a place in human flesh, in the person of this helpless baby, who was only beginning to enjoy the good things life offers. But he was also just beginning to suffer everything that life can throw at any of us. Despite it all, he remained ever steadfast.

 

This only Son of God offers us Grace and Truth.  He gives us the chance to be born as Children of God, to share in the pattern and meaning.  Grace and truth:  Joy, love and thankfulness on our part. 

 

As helpless, pathetic fellow human beings, let us accept what he offers, and in Love offer the same Grace and Truth to those around us.

In the name of God, Amen.

 

On Us A Light has Shone (Christmas C)

 

On us A Light has Shone
Homily delivered for Christmas Day (Year C)
24th December 2021

6:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. Sung Eucharists
Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

The Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Isaiah 9:2-7 ; Titus 2:11-14 ; Luke 2:1-20 ; Psalm 96

 

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

 

“The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;

those who lived in a land overshadowed by death --
on them light has shone…

For a child has been born for us,
a son given us;

Ruling rests upon his shoulders;
and he bears the names

Marvelous Mentor, Dauntless Deity,
Father Forever, Peaceful Prince.

His rule shall grow and grow,
and peace without end will prevail.

David’s throne and reign
Will he establish and sustain,

Setting things right and overturning injustice
from this time onward forever.

Yahweh the Heavenly Commander, by heartfelt ardor, will accomplish this.” (The Ashland Bible)

 

Earlier this week, in the Daily Prayer Office, we sang the O Antiphons upon which the hymn, “O Come, O Come, Immanuel” is based.  On the Solstice, the shortest day and longest night, we sang “O Rising in the East” which says, “O brightness of light eternal and sun of justice: Come and enlighten us who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.” 

 

I have never noticed the theme of “the shadow of death” in these Christmas texts before, but given our repeated bereavement in the Parish these last weeks, this year I recognized it again and again, as incongruous as it seems in the season’s expressions of joy. 

 

As John says, “the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.”  We appreciate light precisely because we dwell at times in deep darkness.  And letting that light brighten our minds and lift our hearts is wonderful indeed. 

 

The doctrine of the incarnation, of God taking on flesh and becoming a human being, is by its very nature as incongruous and wonderful as light in the darkness, hope in the face of death. 

 

The basic problem is simple—“God” is what we are not. We are contingent; God is sufficient. We are changeable; God is unchanging. We are masses of conflicting urges and desire, most of them selfish and all of them formed by a self that is in no way complete or whole. God is pure being, intention, and love itself. We are incomplete and sick; God is wholeness and health itself. We have failings galore; God is holy perfection itself. We can be pretty benighted, ugly, and false; God is beauty, light and truth. How can these two polar extremes be reconciled, let alone combined?

 

The early, united Church discussed the issue at length.  It gradually recognized that the Love and Power that brought the universe into existence and still sustains it, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth embraced and took on in every way but sin the weakness, limitation, handicaps, and contingency of being human. The early Councils declared that Jesus Christ was fully God and fully Man, 100% Divinity and 100% Human Being. He was not a 50-50 mix, half God and half human being.

To those who say that Jesus was merely a man whom God had raised up, the Creed they wrote replies, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father,” that is, there never was a time when he was not thus begotten.  “…Of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.”   “O Come All ye faithful” quotes the Creed when it sings, “God from God, Light from Light Eternal, Lo! He abhors not the Virgin’s womb:  Very God, begotten, not created, O Come let us Adore Him.”

At the other extreme are those who believe that Christ was fully God and only seemed to be human. The letters of John in the New Testament condemn people who “do not acknowledge that it is in the flesh that Jesus Christ came” (2 John 1:7) and later Gnostics even split the human Jesus from the divine Christ, and pictured the unsuffering, unmoving Christ looking down upon Jesus on the Cross, laughing that people would mistakenly think that he, the Christ, had suffered.

 

To all of these, the Creed states, “He became incarnate (that is, took on flesh) from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.” 

“Truly God and truly Human”: we often miss the point, wrongly thinking that somehow God came among us without truly being one of us, only play-acting to be human.   The one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church confessed in the Creeds teaches that this belief is deficient, despite its broad popularity among believers. 

 

God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth shared all our limitations, weaknesses, ignorance, fears, and silly quirks. He was subject to natural evil like the rest of us. The most obvious example is his unjust death by torture at the hands of the Roman Empire. But despite this, he never resisted God.   When we talk of him as light, it is often hard to remember that he was light “in the darkness.” 

Theologians try to describe the incarnation from God’s viewpoint by saying that God took on flesh and accepted its limits, willing his divinity to be hidden.  An early hymn in Philippians (2: 6-8) describes this as Christ “emptying himself.”

But we need another image to describe it from a human viewpoint.  One is Celtic spirituality’s idea of “thin places,” geographic spots where the veil between the ordinary world and the spirit world seem particularly thin, like the island of Iona, or our Trinity Labyrinth.  These are places where the Distant, Shining City does not seem so far away. There are also some people in whom the image of God does not seem so distorted, whose life shows the presence of God shining through. The man Jesus is the ultimate example of a person as a “thin place,” in fact, the thinnest of places.

 

The incarnation marks a profound continuity and solidarity between God and us and our lives in all their messy, chaotic glory.  In Jesus, all we are has been brought intimately close to God.  In Jesus, all we are can be made holy as he is. 

 

William Stringfellow writes,  “Jesus Christ means that God cares extremely, decisively, inclusively, immediately, for the ordinary, transient, proud, wonderful, besetting, frivolous, hectic, lusty things of human life. The reconciliation of God and the world in Jesus Christ means that in Christ there is a radical and integral relationship of all human beings and of all things. In Christ all things are held together (Col. 1:17b)”.

 

In the light of Jesus, we see that our human limitation and weakness do not have to equal rebellion or resistance against God.  In Jesus, we see that God made us, wanting to look upon his creation and call it “very good,” but is not yet finished creating us.  Jesus calls, “Let God finish.” In Jesus, we see that though we all will die, this does not mean oblivion and endless separation.  It means even greater life, even deeper relationship.  

Just as Jesus accepted our mortality and all that this means, we too must accept who we are— hopes and fears, gifts and strengths, disabilities and ugly deficiencies and all.  We must accept who others are as well. We must be gentle both on them and ourselves.  Seeking to let God finish God’s  creative work in us, trying to amend our lives, both personally and communally, requires an open-ended listening, a total trust that in God’s good intentions, in Lady Julian of Norwich’s words, “all is well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

 

A pretty good sign that we are not following Jesus in this is alienation: alienation from our selves; alienation from our bodies; alienation from our conscience, even alienation from our own mortality. Alienation between people is a sign of this on a social level.  Alienation appears when we do not accept who we and others are and surrender this to God. We try to tough it out, and bulldoze ourselves into the better us that we have in mind, rather than following Jesus by emptying ourselves, to let go and let God do what God does.

A pretty good sign that we are getting closer to God in this is that regardless of the limitations and hardships we face, we still have a sense of one-ness. Teillard de Chardin wrote, “The surest sign of God’s presence is joy.”

 

Christmastide is a time of joy.  “O Come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant.”  That’s because God is here.

 

Ambrose of Milan, who taught and converted Augustine of Hippo in the mid fourth century, wrote the great hymn praising the enfleshment of Christ in these words:

 

O equal to Thy Father, Thou!
Gird on thy fleshly mantle now;
the weakness of our mortal state
with deathless might invigorate.

As God became truly human in Jesus, let us truly accept our own humanity, with all its limitations and failings, all its fears and pains, including the dark, including death.   And as Jesus accepted the Father's will in all things, let us open ourselves to listen to God and follow where Jesus leads. 

 

Follow that bright light.    

In the Name of God, Amen.

 

Letting the Story Bear You Away (midweek message)

 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Letting the Story Bear You Away

December 16, 2021

 

As we go into Christmastide, when we will be reading and hearing all kinds of stories that demand a willing suspension of disbelief but that have been the subject of historical and literary criticism that makes us wonder, I am reminded of a conversation I had with my wife Elena back on November 17, the feast of St. Hild of Whitby in Yorkshire. 

 

Elena, as you know, was a children’s librarian, deeply passionate about bringing the new generation into the great conversation of our culture through exposure to books and stories.  Her “book talks” and “story times” were legendary, and drew children from all over the DC metropolitan area.  She understood the importance of story-telling, and was acutely sensitive to the various ways we short-circuit the ability of stories to speak to us.  When a child would raise a hand and ask an extraneous question that took away from the story, say, “and why didn’t Goldilocks run away as soon as she saw it was a bear’s house,” she would reply, “That’s not part of this story.  Let’s ask that another time but not right now, so we can hear what the story says.”  

 

                        Elena giving story time to her great niece and nephew in the 1990s. 

 

What you may not know is that she was an equally passionate amateur follower of geology.  Over the years, many times she told me, “In my next life, I want to be a geologist!” 

 

When I prepared a homily on the blessed founder of Whitby Abbey, I noted that Hild’s story was filled with fanciful and imaginative legendary details, as are many of the tales of the saints.  In particular was the story that when Hild decided to found the Abbey, its locale was infested with snakes, seen at the time as servants of the Devil and marking the ground as unholy.  So, according to the stories, Hild “cast a spell” and turned all the snakes into stone.  She then had her monks gather the petrified snakes up, and throw them off of the cliff into the sea.  She thus purified the monastery grounds and left a remembrance in stone of her miracle:  hundreds of thousands of “snakestones” in the surf and the cliffs.

 

Sir Walter Scott memorialized the legend in his poem Marmion:

“When Whitby's nuns exalting told,
Of thousand snakes, each one
Was changed into a coil of stone,
When Holy Hilda pray’d:
Themselves, without their holy ground,
Their stony folds had often found.”

 

These “snakestones” actually are fossils of Jurassic era sea creatures called ammonites, an ancient form of a chambered nautilus, from about 200 million years ago.  This particular species is called Hildoceras bifrons in honor of Hilda and the legend. 

 

I told Elena the story, and pointed out how the geology contradicted the legend.  Her response, slow and quiet through her impaired speech of late Parkinson’s, was clear all the same: “That story is beautiful.  Don’t ruin it by dragging in geology at the wrong time.  That would be like a child in story time asking about the name of the mother of one of the characters.  I love geology.  But I also love stories.  We need to let them each be themselves.” 

 

And so it is with all legendary story-telling, including the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke, the infancy stories which we read during Christmastide.  When Nadia Bolz-Weber was here a few years ago, she noted that the story of the virginal conception of Jesus was too beautiful to be bogged down by extraneous questions of historicity or biology.   

 

Great fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien, after the Hobbit, but before Lord of the Rings, wrote about this in an essay “On Fairy-Stories.”  He says that what counts in a legend-type story is not how well it coheres with the outside world, but rather how well it coheres with itself.  “It is at any rate essential to a genuine fairy-story, as distinct from the employment of this form for lesser or debased purposes, that it should be presented as ‘true’. ... But since the fairy-story deals with ‘marvels’, it cannot tolerate any frame or machinery suggesting that the whole framework in which they occur is a figment or illusion.”  Fantasy or imagination were for Tolkien, as for Aristotle, a tool of perception.  It brings the reader into a separate world that operates consistently under its own rules in order to open the mind and heart to better perceive and experience our own day-to-day world.  “It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.”   The different perspective that such stories give us allows us to escape the constraints of our own life, and find hope. Christianity itself was for him the way that God healed and made good on our tendency to use story-telling destructively, “a way fitting to … [our] strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories.”  For him, the birth of Christ is the “happy ending” of human history, and the resurrection is the “happy ending” of the story of the incarnation.  While “extraneous questions” are valid in approaching other issues (like the physical natural history of Whitby, or the dating of Roman censuses), we should not let them intrude in the magic of the stories that give us hope. 

 

The point of the stories is the happy ending, the hope and trust we feel in God.  Let us not allow extraneous questions get in the way of that. 

 

Grace and peace. 

Fr. Tony+

Gaudete! Du Courage!

 

“Gaudete! Du Courage!”

12 December 2021

Advent 3C

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
by the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Ashland, Oregon

8:00 a.m. Spoken Eucharist, 10:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist

Zephaniah 3:14-20; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18; Canticle 9

 

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

 

It’s been a hard couple of weeks.  Ann Gagnon’s beloved Phil died last week; my own beloved Elena died on Monday after a Parkinson’s related stroke.  We have several parishioners facing the end games of long-term degenerative illness.  In the larger world, we see continuing fear and stress due to the pandemic and how the virus seems wily in adapting to beat our countermeasures.  And we saw those horrible tornadoes in the Midwest.  And the bitter political division in our country seems to only get worse.  And now increasing tensions and possible conflict over Ukraine, or the Taiwan Strait.  Many of us are facing fear, bereavement and grief. 

 

But today, the third Sunday in Advent, is called Gaudete Sunday.  We light the pink candle on the Advent Wreath, and we wear rose vestments. This is the Sunday in Advent when fearful expectation of the coming of Christ is supposed to turn into joy anticipating the setting right of all things that are wrong.   Gaudete means “Rejoice.”

 

Be happy.  Rejoice.  Smile.  Despite all that is in the air, sing a happy song. 

 

How can we rejoice when things look so bad?

 

First of all, let me make this clear:  grief and mourning are natural expressions of our love, and we must never try to chase them away.   Susan Church sent me a poem by Denise Levertov expressing how important it is to accept, welcome, and name our pain, “Talking to Grief”:

   

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you

like a homeless dog

who comes to the back door

for a crust, for a meatless bone.

I should trust you.

 

I should coax you

into the house and give you

your own corner,

a worn mat to lie on,

your own water dish.

 

You think I don't know you've been living

under my porch.

You long for your real place to be readied

before winter comes. You need

your name,

your collar and tag. You need

the right to warn off intruders,

to consider

my house your own

and me your person

and yourself

my own dog.

 

We must also never let grief and pain overwhelm us so that we lose hope: the Chinese have a proverb for this, as they seem to have one for everything:  节哀顺变  [節哀順變] jié'āishùnbiàn, “bind up your grief so you can ease inevitable change.”

 

C.S. Lewis, in his magnificent but painful “A Grief Observed,” writes that no one ever explained to him how much grief as an emotion feels like fear.  Part of our “binding up grief” in fact is an act of courage in the face of the unimaginable. 

 

When the French want to tell you to be strong, find joy in the face of trouble, and deal with what life dishes out, they say “du courage!”  It’s like saying “buck up!” or “hang in there.” 

 

 

 

The Honorable James Lilley and Deng Xiaoping. 

 

One of the pivotal moments in my life, and one of the greatest bits of counsel I ever received, took place in Beijing China on June 6, 1989.  I had arrived to work at the U.S. Embassy there just days before.  In the closing days of May, things in Beijing had gotten more and more chaotic as the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tian’anmen Square dragged on.  The evening of Saturday June 3, the army moved in to recapture the Square, re-exert control over the city, and terrorize the people back into compliance with the Communist Party’s leadership.   Many of you saw the picture of the single protester standing his ground before a column of tanks.  That scene was unusual.  Generally people who stood in the way were simply run over by the armored personnel carriers, crushed and chewed up by the treads.   For days the army used random shooting toward crowds as a way of cowing people to get off the streets.  More than a thousand were dead, and rumors of dissenting Army units firing on each other raised the specter of Civil War.  In all this, the U.S. Embassy granted refuge to the leading dissidents in the country.  They came in through my office.   The next day, the army opened fire at U.S. diplomatic apartments—some with children in them—in an hour-long shooting spree in which, fortunately, none were killed.   The Ambassador James R. Lilley called us all together to announce that our dependents were being evacuated from the country and that we would mount a full-scale evacuation effort to take stranded Americans in remote parts of the city to the airport.  As we were meeting, automatic weapons fire opened up just outside the Embassy compound where we were meeting.  People crouched beneath the window levels until silence returned. 

 

Then Ambassador Lilley called us back into order.  What he said then is deeply etched in my memory.  Calmly, with emotion, he said, “We are not often called upon to show courage.  Courage is grace under fire, keeping your head and your heart focused on what you need to do, and why, and then doing it regardless of all the things you cannot control going on around you.  As you go out to help evacuate Americans, you must keep your cool and stay focused. As we send off our spouses and children, not knowing when we might see them again, we must give them confidence and hope by our own calm and love.  Stay on task, remember our values and the oath we took when we entered into Federal service.  Though all might not be well, you will have the calm of knowing you have done everything in your power.  It’s a matter of faith, both having faith, and keeping faith.  It’s called courage, and that is what we must step up to now, so we can make the best of this bad, bad situation.”  The words had particular impact on me as we drove the next two days in convoys across the barricades all over the city, facing the muzzles of AK-47s held by PLA teenage recruits from the provinces shaky with amphetamines to keep them awake. 

 

I have always thanked God that Jim Lilley knew exactly what to say to us and then modeled courage for us.  He taught where courage comes from.  As African American Spirituals say, “Keep your eyes on the prize! Keep your hand on the plough!  Hold on, hold on!”  This lesson has stayed with me from then until now.  

 

What Jim Lilley knew was this:  if we keep our minds on the goal and stay on task regardless of how bad things are, if we are true to the better angels in our hearts, grace under fire just happens.   We are no longer overwhelmed by the things over which we have no control.  And we find we can even find humor, satisfaction, and yes, even joy in pursuing our course, come hell or high water. 

 

It’s there in today’s Canticle: “Surely it is God who saves me, trusting him, I shall not fear.”  Paul says as much in today’s Epistle: “Rejoice always,” he says, but then adds, “in the Lord.”   “In the Lord”: Jesus is the prize that we need to keep our eyes on.  His teachings are the plough we must keep our hands on.  He is the source, object, and driver of our joy and courage, not the circumstances we find ourselves in.   Paul, like us, experienced bad stuff that he didn’t have any control over.  He says, “do not worry about anything that may happen,” but rather pray and ask God for our deepest desires in all aspects of our lives with a thankful heart.

 

If we have thankful, yearning hearts full of petitions to God, Paul says, the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will fill our hearts and minds with the knowledge and love of God.  Joy, serenity, and courage are there to be found.  

 

The usual Jewish expression of condolence upon the death of a loved one is “may their memory be a blessing.”   Treasuring the good memories is a way of keeping joy alive in our hearts, despite grief and suffering.  Noting and remembering such glimpses of goodness when they happen are ways to help us keep our eyes on the prize. 

 

Siblings in Christ: Du courage!   Let us go forth from this Eucharist today, this Great Thanksgiving, renewed and recommitted to joy, to love, to caring for each other, to supporting and healing the ill and reconciling hurt, and to forgiveness.  Let us mourn with those who mourn, but always be ready to find joy and hope when it happens.  For Joy and hope are there.  We are in God’s hands. 

 

Thanks be to God. Amen.