Community Parson: There is enough to go around

Monday, March 19, 2012

There is enough to go around

Lent 3 B March 11, 2012

Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

“Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.”

That is how our collect, or opening prayer for this Sunday started out. That is a peculiarly un-Anglican statement, although it is a statement of completely orthodox Christian theology. It’s like St. Paul: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” It’s like St. Augustine, reflecting that on that passage from Paul: “Who then should deliver me from the body of this death, but your grace only, through Jesus Christ our Lord?” [i]

Augustine devoted much of his writing to refuting the thought of the followers of the British monk, Pelagius, who believed that we did indeed have “the power in ourselves to help ourselves.” Pelagius thought Christians were depending on the grace of God just to get themselves off the hook, to live, as he regarded it, morally irresponsible lives. In modern words, Pelagius would say:

God has given you free will. You can choose to follow the example of Adam, or you can choose to follow the example of Christ. God has given everyone the grace he needs to be good. If you are not good, you simply need to try harder.[ii]

"Pelagius" is the Latin name
for the Welsh monk, Morgan

There are many times in my life when I have found this “heresy” of Pelagius far more compelling than the orthodox theology of grace. Pelagianism makes more sense when I am stewing over someone who has really wronged me, over someone who has taken those 10 Commandments and cast them to the wind, put his or her hands up, moaning with cheap repentance, with a shallow restatement of Paul’s “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” line. Grace seems far too cheap for some people – but wait. I’d better stop here, before I persuade you of what really is a central distortion of how we understand how God works in the world. People do sin, and yes, there are consequences, but the first, last and most powerful response of God is grace, love and forgiveness.

So then, why do we need “the law” at all, if grace abounds? The very un-Anglican John Calvin described the law as mirror, fence, and guide. The mirror shows the harsh reality (what we have done, and left undone). The fence restrains bad behavior – remember all of those Puritan “blue laws”? (Don’t buy liquor on Sundays – or else!) Finally, Calvin’s image of the law as a guide for living comes closest to how the faithful Jew understands the law, which, as we sang in Psalm 19, is a delight and a joy. The heart of the law, for a Jew, is the Sabbath, the goal of life is this day of rest, the time when all commerce, all work, stop, when you refrain from doing anything else to change the world God has created.

But the world we live in is very big, where the rules society has us follow are not necessarily determined by God. Some people, and we hear them on that endless news cycle, think we should “go back” to a whole society living by God’s rules. Alas: it was never thus. Go back to those 10 Commandment times: the Jews were a tiny group, living in a big imperial sea. They always had to live as a cell inside a larger and sometimes voracious organism: the Egyptians, the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans. The law was something profoundly counter-cultural, something which indeed freed you from the tyranny of all those “-isms.” The law is holiness, yes, but it is also justice. The 10 Commandments make it possible not only for YOU to live the good life, but for your neighbor to live it as well. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says the Sabbath rest, the heart of the law is

… for self, for neighbor, and even for God … the goal and quintessence of life….a kind of 'at-homeness' that precludes hostility, competition, avarice, and insecurity…and anticipates a community of peace, well-being, and joy.[iii]

Which is how we get to Jesus throwing the money-changers out of the Temple. The law of the Lord is perfect – not a place for hostility, competition, avarice and insecurity. The law is the mirror, the fence and the guide: the money changers in the Temple jumped the fence long ago, they have smashed the mirror and have forgotten the guide. Yesterday’s New York Times[iv] ran an article about the national organization of religious congregations taking their money out of banks, like the Bank of America, which profited shamelessly from writing bad mortgages to people they knew could not pay them, banks whose scandalous behavior tipped the economy into disaster with the foreclosure crisis. Throw those money changers out of the Temple, Jesus would say. God’s world was created with enough for everyone, with enough to go around. Part of what happens during the Sabbath rest is that all of those goodies are redistributed, and what Jesus was doing with all that ruckus in the Temple was to announce that God’s true Sabbath was about to begin.

So, despite all those people who have wronged us, and made us really mad, and committed all those crimes and misdemeanors, Pelagius is wrong and Augustine is right. We are all enfolded in God’s grace after all, and before all, and above all, and around all. No, we don’t have to do it ourselves. We can throw the bums out, but there will be enough to go around for them, too. We can forgive people who have wronged us, as we have been forgiven by God, but we don’t have to reconcile with them. We don’t have to be their best friends anymore; God’s grace will take care of that, too. We can be enraged, as Jesus was enraged, but, like Jesus, we can lead Sabbath-filled lives, knowing that there is enough for everyone – even enough grace – to go around.

[i] http://www.augnet.org/default.asp?ipageid=415

[ii] http://augnet.org/default.asp?ipageid=131

[iii] Walter Brueggemann, from The Covenanted Self: Explorations in Law and Covenant, quoted in Kathryn Matthews Huey, http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/march-11-2012-third-sunday.html

[iv] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/us/churches-send-repentence-message-to-banks.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

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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.