Community Parson: Now we are among God

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Now we are among God

Easter 7-B May 20, 2012

Acts 1:15-26; Ps. 68:1-20

1 John 5:9-15; John 17:11b-19

This 7th Sunday of Easter is the Sunday after the Ascension: we remember this time, 40 days after the resurrection, as the first time Jesus is not around his disciples. Jesus will no longer just pop in unexpectedly. Jesus will deliver no more new sermons, heal no more sick people, teach us any more new lessons – Jesus in the flesh, that is. What the church, and what our lessons today tell us, though, is the miraculous truth: Jesus still has power in our lives, to comfort, to inspire, to bless, to protect. That’s what this passage from the Gospel of John reminds us. Jesus prays for his disciples – for us – that we might be close to God.

During the Easter season we celebrate Christ's victory over death and in the Ascension we celebrate his entering into heaven; the two are not identical.

The Ascension is the taking of our human nature into the territory where we were never allowed to go. Our created nature -- our kind of people -- were cast out of paradise, and God posted cherubim at the gates to keep us out. Now, with Christ, our status is raised higher than the angels.

These days after the Ascension are curious times for the disciples. They are not sure what will happen next. Their whole identity as a community of disciples – of followers – is up for grabs. They know what they are NOT, but do now yet know what they will BECOME. They have to figure out what the bounds of their community is, now that Jesus is no longer there to chastise them for keeping some people out, and to encourage them to bring other people in. It is a liminal time, a time on the boundary, a time when they are about the cross the threshold – the limen, in Latin – and see what happens when they start to tell the Good News about Jesus life and ministry, and it spreads like wild fire.

As the Gospel of John records these words, Jesus seems to be warning the disciples about “the world.” This place into which they are supposed to go, preaching and teaching and healing, also includes “the evil one,” or the evil powers which can threaten to destroy them and their mission. Jesus’ disciples have been given this special gift – they are “set apart” for this work and mission, but the question is, just how far apart? Does the Ascension of Jesus mean we must necessarily be “out of this world” in order to be a follower of Jesus?

We all know of religious communities who are convinced that they must do exactly that: that they must separate themselves from the world which is, if not outright evil, at least distracting, with its temptations and innovations. But Jesus’ words encourage the disciples’ “set-apartness” as something to help them, not to change them or separate them from the rest of the human race. To be set apart is to be holy, as holy water is holy – it is “not fresher, purer or cleaner than other water; it has simply been set apart and assigned a role that distinguishes it.”

So to be set apart means to be equipped for God’s mission. We had a terrific Sunday last week, with lots of people here who were new or infrequent visitors to our community. We are praying weekly for the various outreach and service ministries we are engaged in. We are working on ways we can tell that big world out there about the treasures of faith and fellowship that we have found here. We know that we are called to be doers of the Word, and we like to do that, big time.

But when Jesus encouraged his disciples to be “set apart” from the world, perhaps that included standing back sometimes from all that “doing” that the world needs from us. Jesus encourages us to set ourselves apart so we can be refreshed, so we can live a rhythm of life not as the world would have us live, but as God would have us live. So we can live a rhythm of life that builds in refreshment, that intentionally connects us to God through prayer, that provides us with time to listen to the words of Jesus. To be set apart is to know in our own lives the reality of the abundant life that Jesus promises to those who follow him.

On this Sunday after the Ascension we remember that not only is God among us, in the person of Jesus, but through the ascension of Jesus into heaven, WE are now among God. We don’t have to work anywhere near as hard as we think we have to work to understand this, to feel this, to live this. We can do all the work God would have us do not because we are particularly holy or good at it; we can do all that work because we know Jesus is there with us, encouraging us on, every step of the way.

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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.