Community Parson: Serving the ones whom God loves

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Serving the ones whom God loves

Proper 24 B; October 21, 2012

Job 38:1-7, 34-41

Psalm 104:1-9, 25

Mark 10:35-45

Everybody wants to get ahead.

Every politician in this election season reminds us: times are tough, here, and certainly around the world. Do you remember, years ago, when the “Great Recession” began, how people would talk about how this economic downturn would make us all more friendly, more frugal, more compassionate? I don’t think it has quite turned out that way. The old demon greed seems more active than ever, even in a time when there is less to go around. Maybe it’s the dark side of human nature, when we fight for crumbs, steal from our neighbors, who might be even poorer than we are. We begrudge the least advantage someone else gets; “sharing” and “generosity” seem concepts long ago forgotten. This dark side can be seen in all kinds of people, whether you live in a homeless shelter or are receiving (still) big bonuses from your job on Wall Street.

This dark side was even seen in the disciples, James and John. Who can blame them? They just want to get ahead. They just want a little job security into the future. They just want to know that they’ll get theirs. Sounds like the American dream. Sounds like they work for – dare I say it? – Bain Capital. Who can blame them for trying? Especially in today’s economic climate, where no one feels there is enough to go around, and that I will get nothing if I don’t hustle.

Astounding to think, isn’t it, that thousands of years ago, in a society made of up peasant farmers and fishermen, we’d see the same jockeying for position that we see in today’s corporate raiders – or in our own lives?

You’d think James and John would know better. After all, they have Jesus right there with them: God IS one of us, walking around right there with them. Have they not been listening? You can hear some of Jesus’ exasperation in his response to them. Have you not been paying attention, he seems to say? Following me is not a path to upward mobility and privilege. In the eyes of the world, it is downward mobility – it is a life of service, of self-giving.

But whom do we serve when we follow Jesus? Service is not servility. Jesus does not expect us to be doormats for the rich, or that our “downward mobility” helps somebody else get more.

When we follow Jesus, we serve God, and the ones whom God loves: we serve the ones whom no one else serves, or cares about, or loves. We serve the world God has made, to make it greener, safer, cleaner – we serve the world by working to restore it to the beauty God intended when God created it.

This sounds beautiful, but it is hard stuff. That old demon greed, and “get-ahead,” and “me first,” and “this is mine you can’t have it” and “I want more” – well, those are powerful forces. God can seem far, far away from the pressures of life, and our fears of not having enough loom large.

Our first reading is from the Book of Job, the story of the upstanding, wealthy man who lost it all. His friends, even his wife said, you are so miserable; curse God and die; be done with all this. Job refused to curse God, and for much of the book seems to suffer in despair: why is God doing this to me?

Then comes this famous passage where God answers Job. In short, what are all of your miserable complaints against the mighty creative power of God? We can read this and be kind of confused; what kind of an answer is this to Job’s questions about why his life became so miserable?

But wait. Don’t go down that path. To think that way is to miss the point that God is here. God answers Job, comes to Job, speaks to Job. Job is part of that creation that God so lovingly describes. God is in Job’s face.

How often, in our misery, do we not recognize when God is in OUR faces? James and John, miserable and worried and greedy, could not even see God in their beloved teacher, friend and constant companion, Jesus.

Job, James, John: there is more to life than your little problems. There is more to you than what money you have, or don’t have. You are part of the fabric of the universe, created, loved and sustained by God. You are loved by God. You will have enough. And the part you play, in this great adventure God has launched with the creation of the world, is the part of service to all those whom God loves.

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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.