Community Parson: ... but does a human form display

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

... but does a human form display

Christmas I January 1, 2012
Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Ps. 147
Galatians 3:23-25,4:4-7; John 1:1-18

Bethlehem has come to us. God in his Son is born into our lives. John's prologue to his Gospel is true: the light shines in the darkness, and though the world cannot understand it, neither can the world put it out. Poet William Blake put it succinctly:

God appears and God is light

To those poor souls who dwell in Night;

But does a Human Form display

To those who dwell in realms of Day.

All of us come to Christmas with the same hopes and fears: we share with the prophet Isaiah the hope for the restoration of the righteousness of the Lord and the vindication of God's justice. We share with St. Paul the hope that now that Christ has come we might be freed from slavery to the law and live in freedom as the children and heirs of God. Our Christmas liturgies focus on God's entrance into history as one of us: the infant Jesus is the new Adam, and Bethlehem the site of the new creation story. Christmas, the story of Jesus' birth, is a story about us and how we come to know God.

The great secret and glory of God is the redeeming power of love given to us in the life of this person whose birth we celebrate. Jesus, son of Mary, who never traveled more than 50 miles from his birthplace, who never wrote a book, who never left any permanent memorial of his life, who was executed by civil authorities for reasons which have embarrassed humanity ever since, who was rejected by his own people: this is the babe in the manger. Following the death of this man, many strange things happened, the most familiar being that after his public execution he rose from the dead and was seen and continued to teach and be with his friends.

If this were all there was to the Christ story, we could easily drop it there, but equally mysterious was the eventual appearance of a growing number of people who called themselves followers of this man, Jesus.

Tales of strange events taking place began to travel on the grapevine: tales of robbers becoming law-abiding citizens, dishonest merchants become concerned for the welfare of others; tales of masters treating their slaves as brothers and sisters; of fanatics and bigots like Saul of Tarsus who changed their lives and began to preach an unheard-of message of love not law as the standard of conduct. The Good News spread across the Mediterranean. It filtered into the ranks of Caesar's subjects and into his own household. Wherever it went a new kind of person appeared, one who completely confused the pagans. These were people who spread joy, for whom life was exciting, who faced the future with anticipation and hope, who took care of each other and the poor and lonely around them.

When Christ enters a life, that life is changed. A new person is born. That is the Good News, and that is what we celebrate right now: not just the birth of a baby, but the Advent of Christ into the world, into the lives of men and women, boys and girls.

God comes in a form we understand. If we live in gloom or trouble, God first appears to us as light. But if we already have had a glimpse of that light, God comes to us as one of us, embodying our hopes for righteousness and justice, love and freedom, giving us something tangible to hold on to and model our lives upon until the day of the Lord comes.

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Missional church and the arts

What if we thought about church in another way, as "a small community that [moves] into a particular area (often one with a lot of deprivation and poverty) ... seeking to follow Christ but their focus is simply helping transform their community -- in arts, environment, in social needs, with youth and so on."

These are churches, as the English church missioner named Jonny Baker, "are not focused on growing big -- but more like the yeast of the kingdom that Jesus talked about infecting the wider batch of dough. ..." Such churches, Baker says, face "the challenge of weaning members off their addiction to consumer approaches to church where they get their fix of worship and teaching and meeting with friends before they could properly engage in this more local, outward-focused community approach (maybe we need a 12 step detox programme for leaving consumer church!?)"

We may benefit from thinking this way, as we explore how to connect our treasure, which is the Celebration of the Arts, into parts of the community that could use more art.

Thanks to the Patheos blog for sending this thought my way ...

"A prayer book even an atheist would love"

It does seem a teensy bit arrogant for a 21st century author to claim that he "edited" The Book of Common Prayer, but Brian Cummings seems to have added considerable value to familiar red book we find in our pews. In this 2011 volume (Oxford University Press), we can find the full texts of the 1549, 1559 and 1662 Prayer Books, along with introductions, explanations, notes and glossary. The review in the September 2012 issue of The Atlantic, gives the book a glowing recommendation -- both in its edited and "explained" form and in the original, which as the book upon which all prayer in our language is based "shaped the inner life and branded the tongue of the English-speaking peoples. Its phrases and rhythms did not merely enter the language. They largely defined the language. " Read more of the review here, and if you read it, let us know how you liked it!!

What I read - 2012

FINISHED:

At Simon's INSISTENCE I read The Hunger Games. Some parts I had to skim through, because the depictions of these young people fighting each other to the death was at times too gruesome, but it was overall well worth the read. NOW I have to get on with # 2 in the series

Dennis Lehane's A Given Day. Everything comes together in a slightly staged but effective way in 1919 Boston: anarchists, molasses, racism, repression and the Boston police strike. J. Edgar Hoover makes some unflattering cameos. I must say it is kind of Ragtime as it would be dramatized by Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg and Ben Affleck. It was in the days when you could tell what Boston block someone grew up on by the accent. The Irish don't come off all too well. Southie is a place to avoid in this prelude to The Depahted. It's good, though a little too graphically violent and written like a movie script. Let's just say Whitey Bulger came by his proclivities naturally.

Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman

quite charming and lovely; a peek into the modest domestic life and extraordinary yearnings of a summer community of Orthodox Jews in the Catskills

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Also saw the Swedish version of the first book.

The reminders of domestic terror in the most intimate sense are deeply unsettling. The author reminds of the percentage of Swedish women who are abused, beaten, left for dead, even. It is an all-too-steady drumbeat beneath human society.

Meanwhile, I found a new collection of stories, that is easier to read before bed. I heard the most astounding story on Selected Shorts: "The Mappist" by Barry Lopez. You MUST read it. Before you know it, you are in another world, that shines the most wonderful light on this place we inhabit and how we live in it.

I had a brief flirtation with a few of Joyce Carol Oates short stories. Bracing. I am always on the look-out for her perceptive comments about upstate New York.

Done with Cheever, and LOVED it. Again. If you read nothing else, read "The Death of Justina." Then again, I also like, "Goodbye, My Brother." Cheever; the chronicler of a world falling apart.

This summer ...
Middlemarch by George Eliot. This wonderful story of the intertwined lives of villagers contains the requisite English characters of pompous rectors, impoverished strivers and beautiful young women. It's like reading Trollope: you'll find someone you know in Middlemarch.
and
The Collected Stories of John Cheever. A perennial favorite. Poignant stories of families in mid-century middle America. Reading it again is a bit like Mad Men, where you are glued, almost in horror, at the train wreck you know is about to happen in these people's lives.

Responding to the Unspeakable

The shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, in the days right before Christmas, with the deaths of small children and the people trying to protect them, wrench our hearts like nothing else. However we respond to this tragedy -- with silence, with weeping, with anger, with resolve to work so that something like this will never happen again -- all of our reactions are understandable. We need ways to regain our footing and imagine how we will live in the world as it is now, in this world in which we experience yet more grief and sadness.

On Sunday, December 16, the Prayers of the People at St. David's Church were in the words of parishioners and preachers, some from the very day of the tragedy. Find the text of those prayers on our Forming Disciples blog.