Community Parson: Tender Mercies

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Tender Mercies

Advent 2-C Dec. 9, 2012

Malachi 3:1

Luke 1: 1:68-79

Philippians 1:3-11

Luke 3:1-6

We live in a time obsessed with the particular. TV news shows are on a lot at our house. Pundits, bloggers, reporters, editors, historians, analysts, you name it. At any time on any channel, frequency or URL, you can find a comment, an opinion, a fact about someone or something important, middling important or just plain gossipy. If it walks, talks, flies or misbehaves, we will soon know about it.

We think of this obsession with taking the pulse of the body politic as something modern, but look here: the Gospel of Luke is very concerned to place John the Baptist in his particular social and historical context. John the Baptist was not wandering around the Jordanian wilderness at any time; it was in the 15th year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberias, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee. Nor are we living in just any time: it’s the 4th year of the presidency of Barack Obama, the 2nd year of the Governorship of Andrew Cuomo, Joanie Mahoney is County Executive and Gladstone Adams is the bishop. The way Luke is telling this story of John the Baptist, place – and who rules that place – is crucially important. It was in THIS place at THIS time that the Word of God came to -- not just anybody, but to John son of Zechariah.

To the first readers of Luke’s Gospel, these little phrases would mean a lot. “The Word of God” comes to prophets in the Hebrew tradition. All the prophets identify the rulers whose reigns their prophecies will unseat. Remember Isaiah, to whom the word of God came “in the year that King Uzziah died.” Baruch, a scribe for the prophet Jeremiah, writes from the context of the terrible exile in Babylon. Malachi was written at the end of the exile, when Cyrus was King of Persia. Prophets come from particular times and places, and the word of God speaks to them and through them in those particularities.

Luke shows us a different picture of John the Baptist than we get in the Gospels of Matthew or Mark. There is no description of his attire, no eating of locusts and wild honey. He doesn’t even baptize Jesus in this Gospel – he has challenged Herod so much that he lands in prison before Jesus gets to the Jordan River.

But Luke is very careful to place John in history. In place of the psalm today, we read the passage from the first chapter of Luke that follows the announcement of the birth of John. This is the song of Zechariah, an elderly righteous man, “living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord.” As he serves in the temple, an angel comes to him:

“I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news.”

Gabriel announces the birth of John:

“ … he will be great in the sight of the Lord … He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

Zechariah was made speechless by this prophecy, and not until baby John is born does he speak, revealing some of what Gabriel had told him. This is not any child, Zechariah says; this child will be the prophet of the Most High, preparing the way of the Lord, letting the people know that God’s salvation will come, that sins will be forgiven, that by God’s tender mercies the dawn from on high will break upon us. This child, Zechariah says, will be the one to announce the Good News.

But even though this child is a New Prophet, he does not proclaim NEW news. This Good News is Old News, Zechariah says, reciting in his song all the mighty deeds of God, saving the people from their enemies and showing mercy.

That is what all this particularity is about, placing John here, in this family, under these rulers, and not just anywhere. He’s not just any righteous man: the same Word of the Lord comes to him that came to the prophets of old – the Good News he brings is the same Old Good News of the covenant made with Abraham. Those rulers might be very current in their fashions and their weaponry and their empires and their Roman names, but they are the same enemies from whom God has always rescued his people. Those representatives of the shadow of death might be unique and particular, but the words John speaks, of the dawn from on high, the light in the darkness and the tender mercy of God, are the old words, the old prophecies, the old promises of God’s love.

The wilderness itself is old and familiar, reminding the people of Israel of the very place where God first called them “My people.” Out of that old place John calls the people together again, calls them back, as the angel Gabriel promised his father he would: even the disobedient ones will come to the wisdom of the righteous. John will make them ready.

This is the Old Good News, a prophecy of restoration. John quotes the prophet Isaiah, writing about how the people of Israel will be able to return from exile to Jerusalem: the Lord will lead the way, on a path straight and smooth, only now, it’s not only to Jerusalem. It’s not only to one particular people or one particular place and time. It’s for all flesh – all of us in our particular time and our particular place – this time all of us will see just what God has in store.

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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.