Community Parson: Thomas, Thomas, Thomas

Monday, April 16, 2012

Thomas, Thomas, Thomas

Easter 2 B April 15, 2012

Acts 4:32-35; Ps. 133

1 John 1:1-2:2; John 20:19-31

St. Thomas feels like a really familiar person to me. St. Thomas feels like someone who wants things just so. He edges into the perfectionist column on personality tests. He’s like what people used to say about Missouri: he is from the “show me” state. He’s got to touch it and smell it and pick it up with his own hands in order to believe it. Jesus was killed. Buried in a tomb. He’s over here, in this box, in this category. I’ve got my world all together. Maybe it’s not too great but I can understand it. Things used to be good, then they got bad, now they are not much better, but at least I know where things are right now. I know what is going on. I can make this work.

Thomas has got it so much “just so” that he wouldn’t know resurrection unless it hit him in the head. Until, of course, it does. It takes a little longer than the other disciples for Thomas to relinquish his hold on reality, his sense of control and perfection and order. It took a great big sign, but he did get it. What was absolutely incomprehensible had happened. Death, that ultimate control freak, was overturned. Life, in all its messy, complicated, sloppy, disorderly and miraculous, had won the day.

From the get-go of the resurrection, it seems, things get really sloppy. The abundance of new life just spills all over the place. The Acts of the Apostles is full of these ridiculous stories of extraordinary abundance.

Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

This is not easy to understand, this kind of abundance and profligacy. It really does not make sense to give up private property, to share everything we own, to eliminate need by redistributing the wealth. This has been tried, you know, and it doesn’t always go very well. Little human tendencies like greed and jealously and even perfectionism get in the way of living this wild, post-resurrection life.

In his novel, My Name is Legion*, the English writer A.N. Wilson puts this speech in the mouth of an elderly priest:

… our faith went to the Garden in the darkness of dawn three days later. Our faith did not find explanations, not did it find fake consolations. It found a new God.

This “new God,” Wilson has the priest go on to say,

… was to be found not in control, but in loss of control; not in strength but in weakness. He was no longer an explanation for what happens.

The priest, then, seems to be reflecting not only on the that ephemeral experience of the resurrected Jesus but always what happened to the Apostles, on the very real and very historical Church of the Apostles:

… we can no longer look to an imaginary God to hand out morality, to feed the poor, to heal the sick, to refashion the world along just and equitable lines. That is our responsibility now, and if it seems like a Godless world, we shall be judged – we, not God.

Thomas, and all of us, who want the world to be tidy and predictable and orderly -- even the world in its most terrible should be that way – are really in for a shock on this 8th day after the resurrection. God has come even closer to us than he was when he was a baby in a barn. The wise teacher who did no wrong, who walked and talked among us, is now seen, to quote A.N. Wilson again,

… not in the highest heavens and heaven of heavens but in a wounded human body: in bleeding hands, and pierced feet, and wounded side.

It is hard indeed for us to get back to that house with the locked doors, hard to stand there with Thomas. We know his skepticism, but find it harder to feel the mystery of what happens next.

But there is one way we can know it: in what we do together: in the hungry people we feed, in the community we create, in the love we share. Those things, however mundane, simple and everyday, are signs, just as glorious, of a new day, a new life, a new world.

* A.N. Wilson, My Name is Legion (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004) pp. 300-301

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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.