On this date the Episcopal church remembers Anne Hutchinson as a holy person. This is not an unfamiliar name to me. I have often travelled that winding highway north off the Whitestone Bridge in New York named for her, The Hutchinson River Parkway. The plaque affixed to a stone bridge along the way announced whom the road was named for, the same Anne Hutchinson the church remembers today.
The exact message, sermons and teachings of Anne Hutchinson are lost to me. The message of her life is what I write about all the time. The message is one that Jesus is so familiar with, it is a reason he died for us. Anne, like Jesus, was a considerable rebel. She sought a voice and personal worship with God in a time it was neither recognized or tolerated. In fact it was essentially against the law having settled with her husband in a theocratic government in Massachusetts. She prayed with women and preached and then added men too and that mix and voice would not be tolerated.
How long must we go on as humans when our understanding is upended? Is our voice really louder or more reasonable when we denounce or demean others? Jesus upended everything. The Jews were expecting a warrior Messiah and they get Jesus who consorted with all sorts of the marginalized which were considered sinners and impure.
The mix of politics and religions has never had a good outcome. The founding fathers of the United States knew this. They were, by and large, men of faith but they were knowledgeable about so many varied religions and knew that a wall between church and state was imminently necessary if this experimental government was to succeed.
This concept is lost on many fundamentalists today in the USA and they feel convinced that we are "a Christian nation". Well, it just is not so. The plaque that proclaims the remembrance of Anne Hutchinson as well as the Episcopal Church remembrance as a Holy Person calls us to reaffirm the notion of upending our beliefs and accepted norms. It may very well be to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior but it may also be to accept another faith , to practice that faith to the full in the glory and love of our Creator.
We are called to recognize the validity and surety that all people are created equal and that in this United States we are all called to respect and love each other as sure as we are all immigrants and created in the image and likeness of God. Today we honor the love and life of a voice in the desert, Anne Hutchinson, her voice can still be heard today. It is the life and love of an inclusive, loving and rebellious preacher, Jesus Christ.
Mark 8:1-10
In those days when there was again a great crowd without anything to eat, he called his disciples and said to them, ‘I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat. If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way—and some of them have come from a great distance.’ His disciples replied, ‘How can one feed these people with bread here in the desert?’ He asked them, ‘How many loaves do you have?’ They said, ‘Seven.’ Then he ordered the crowd to sit down on the ground; and he took the seven loaves, and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to his disciples to distribute; and they distributed them to the crowd. They had also a few small fish; and after blessing them, he ordered that these too should be distributed. They ate and were filled; and they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full. Now there were about four thousand people. And he sent them away. And immediately he got into the boat with his disciples and went to the district of Dalmanutha.
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