Community Parson: God appears and God is Light

Monday, December 31, 2012

God appears and God is Light

Christmas 1

Dec. 30, 2012

Isaiah 61:10-62:3

Psalm 147

Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7

John 1:1-18

Years ago, when Tim was the rector of the Syracuse Urban Cluster, we worked closely with the minister of a Pentecostal Holiness congregation. We shared services, festivities and community events. We marched through the neighborhood, praying in front of crack houses and anointing with oil any who came up to “Father Hall” or “Minister Ellis,” as our friend was called, to be saved.

Not long before he started his congregation, Minister Ellis was a jazz musician, a studio and session musician, and the grandson of folksinger Libba Cotton. What drew him and his congregation to the Episcopal Church, we wondered? After not too many sermons we understood: it was the Gospel of John, with its deep poetry, its stark contrasts between darkness and light, between those who hear Jesus’ voice and follow him and those who stray. The Gospel of John is not easy to understand, but if you live a life of ups and downs, of tragedies and near-misses, the Gospel of John is easy to feel.

Soon after we moved back here a year ago, Tim ran into Larry Ellis, a joyful reunion with many promises of getting back together. Sadly, not long after that, Larry Ellis died, unexpectedly, putting to rest a glorious voice and a magnificent soul. His music rose from the depths of his experience to the heights of glory, confident that no matter what came to pass, he belonged to Jesus, the rock of his salvation.

A theology based on the Gospel of John revels in contrasts: darkness-light; knowledge-ignorance; blindness-sight. Taken to an extreme, it defends an “us against the world” understanding of Christian community. It can feed notions like the “clash of civilizations,” leading to the demonization of “others” who just don’t get it, others who reject our world view.

It is all too easy to stay on the surface when we read the Gospel of John, and revel in its dualisms of good and evil, dark and light. But to do so can distort the Jesus about whom John is talking in this Gospel, a Jesus who brings a light to enlighten everyone – everyone – into the world.

In 1803, the English poet William Blake wrote a poem which ended,

God appears and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in Night;
But does a Human Form display
To those who dwell in realms of Day.

God comes in a form we understand. If we live in gloom or trouble, God first appears to us as light. But if we already have had a glimpse of that light, God comes to us as one of us, embodying our hopes for righteousness and justice, love and freedom, giving us something tangible to hold on to and model our lives upon.

The Gospel of John reminds us that God has been calling us into being since the beginning of time. The light still shines and there is no darkness – no depth of human evil, no ignorance or fear or violence or death – that can block it out. If you listen closely, you can hear the angels – and Larry Ellis – sing.

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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.