Community Parson: Be an EPIPHANY of God

Monday, March 18, 2013

Be an EPIPHANY of God

Epiphany 4-C Feb. 3, 2013

Jeremiah 1:4-10

Psalm 71

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Luke 4:21-32

Scene 1. Jesus, the hometown boy, preaches the good news to his home congregation. The poor folks of Nazareth like this Good News, because it blesses their understanding of themselves: God WILL vindicate US. God is on OUR side. They applaud when Jesus says, “Today this scripture has come true in your hearing.” They love Jesus.

That was last week’s Gospel. Today picks up right after that.

Scene 2. Jesus, the hometown boy, throws it all back in their faces. “You want me to do the things I did in Capernaum? Hah! You won’t accept me, really. You think it’s all about YOU. What do you suppose God was up to here?” He tells them one story, and then another, of biting incidents of God gracing outsiders, aliens, troublemakers, instead of the chosen people. He makes them so mad they try to throw him off a cliff. They hate Jesus.

One modern criticism leveled against religion is that all we are doing is creating a God in our own image, a God who fits our world view. Prayer to this God is to meet our needs, and we can be utterly dependent on this God, in a mindless way, because we are assured that this God, our creation, will do and say just what we need God to do and say.

That’s not such a modern criticism. You could say that that’s what Jesus is doing in this story. You might like that Good News I just quoted from Isaiah, he says, the release for the captives, the light for the blind, the acceptable year of the Lord’s favor, and yes, it’s true. But it applies not only to you. It applies to outsiders, to heathen, to the unclean, to anyone whose attitudes make you cringe and whose lifestyle makes you throw up. It’s the challenge that any serious spiritual tradition makes to the believer, or community of believers, that want to keep things cozy and their God domesticated. It’s what Jesus said all along: don’t stop with me; look through me to the one who sent me, listen to the one who sent me. Don’t let your God be too small.

The first lesson also tells of a prophet who had a hard time getting people to listen to God. This is the story of the call of Jeremiah, God as a discernment committee of ONE saying to Jeremiah, Don’t worry about your insecurities; you shall speak what I command you. You shall have my authority, “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” God didn’t say to Jeremiah, you have to be nice, you have to follow the community norms, you have to be patient, work with the people, bring them along, get a process consultant. No. You, Jeremiah. You speak for me. Tear down. Build. Plant. Be an Epiphany of God.

Predestination. Jesus and Jeremiah were predestined to be prophets. God knew when they were in the womb what they would do and what they would say. Now you recall the dark side of predestination from the heyday of the Protestant Reformation: the elect (us good guys) would be saved; the rest (you know who – whoever) would be damned. But if we listen carefully to what God says to Jeremiah, and what Jesus says, predestination is not about salvation, but about service. God is calling you forth; whom do you serve? To whom are you to speak, and from whom do you hear God speaking? The people of Nazareth did not like Jesus implying that God was speaking through widows in Sidon and not in Israel, or Syrian lepers instead of Jewish ones. Their God wouldn’t do such things. In response, they tried to throw Jesus off the hill, but he just walked through them and went on his way.

So here is our challenge: we read the call of Jeremiah, and realize, too, that we are called to be epiphanies of God, to let God’s light, God’s good news shine forth in the world. And we are reminded by Jesus that that world is wider than we first thought it would be. We are given a choice:

to let God slip away, because the idea of Good News for the whole world is too upsetting to our world view;
or to enter into God’s imagination where barriers are torn down, injustices overthrown, scarcity destroyed, and mercy and abundance planted in their place.

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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.