Community Parson: Everyone is friended

Monday, March 19, 2012

Everyone is friended

Lent 4 B March 18, 2012

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. [i]

There are people who are putting an “end to the world” spin on this “mild” winter and “early” spring. A Gallup poll released last week measured opinions on global warming – opinions of people like US, mind you; not the learned opinions of climatologists. Nevertheless, here are some of the results: over the past decade, Republicans have become slightly less convinced that global warming is occurring. Yet now almost third more Democrats as ten years ago are convinced that global warming is here, and they are nearly twice as likely as Republicans to believe this! Independents, as you might guess, although they tend to be a little closer to Democrats in their opinion on global warming, are somewhere in the middle. Wherever you are on this issue is Ok with me.

This famous “John 3:16” gospel – strewn across billboards and the foreheads of Christian athletes – seems kind of associated with the “end times” but if we look closer at it, and at the passage in the Book of Numbers to which it refers, I think we would get another reading. The Gospel of John, despite its being the favorite of people who might consider themselves conservative Christians, is not about the wrath at the end of time, not about the rapture, nor the division of the good and the bad into the sheep and the goats. In the Gospel of John, we read in this third chapter, Jesus affirms that God loves THE WORLD. The WHOLE world. God in the Gospel of John is a universalist: God sent Jesus into the world so that everyone, everywhere might be saved. The invitation is to all of us. The end times in the Gospel of John is one big love-fest, a come-as-you-are party. Everybody is “friended.”

The connection between this passage in John, where Jesus refers to Moses and the snakes, and the passage about Moses and the snakes, is – healing. Think of the caduceus, that ancient symbol for medicine, with snakes entwined around a staff. As Moses lifts up his staff, Jesus says, the Son of Man – referring to himself – will be lifted up – a sign, not of the end times or terrible days, but of eternal life.

God’s great mission, as the Gospel of John sees it, is for all of us to gain eternal life. For all of us to find healing and wholeness. For all of us to walk in the light and not in the darkness. For all of us to follow Jesus into that place of blessedness. Listen to all of these ways Jesus describes himself and his mission: I am the bread of life, the bread that came down from heaven. I am the light of the world; whoever follows me will never walk in darkness. I am the gate for the sheep; whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. I am the good shepherd. I am the resurrection and the life. I am the way, the truth and the life. I am the vine, you are the branches. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself – to this cross on which the glory of God is revealed, this cross, which is the medicine of the world, which brings about the healing of the world.

One of the temptations of the Gospel of John is to read it personally – this healing, this welcome, this walking in the light is only about ME. Yes, of course we need healing in our own bodies, in our own lives, but do we not resonate with that universal message of John? Just as the love of God is not only for us alone, but for us together, healing, too, is more than personal. It is social, corporate, world-wide, universal.

… come, you who are burdened by regrets and anxieties, you who are broken in body or in spirit, you who are torn by relationships and by doubt, you who feel deeply within yourselves the divisions and injustices of our world.[ii]

For God so loved the world that he sent his Son – not to end the world but to show us the way, to bring us light, to heal and to refresh and to feed and to lead and to guide.

[i] “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost

[ii] From the Iona Service of Healing

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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.