Community Parson: Whose home is this?

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Whose home is this?

Lent 4-C

March 10, 2013

Joshua 5:9-12

Psalm 32

2 Corinthians 5:17-21

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Whose home is Canaan? The people of Israel, after leaving slavery in Egypt, wandering through the desert for forty years, have come into the promised land: Canaan. Joshua is now their leader, with God’s servant Moses having seen the Promised Land but died before he could cross over. This is the home God has promised them, when God called them his people and delivered them from the bad Pharaoh and separated them from the middling bad non-Israelites whose land they passed through. Now they’re here, in their new home, eating food they grow with their own hands. What could be a better metaphor for the commonwealth of heaven? For the just and merciful reign of God?

People were living in Canaan when the weary and grateful Israelites marched in, just as people were living in 20th century Canaan – Palestine – when weary and grateful survivors of the holocaust sailed in in 1947. One person’s promised land is another person’s occupied territories, setting the stage for generations of conflict, violence and war. Home is not just a simple, warm metaphor for cozying up with God.

Privilege, displacement, inheritance, resentment – Jesus sets the stage for a doozy of a story about a not-so-happy home.

There are several points of view one can take in hearing this story. One could see the story from stage left, from the point of view of the son who takes his inheritance, squanders it and then comes crawling home, knowing he deserves nothing but at least hoping for a roof over his head. It’s the “home is where they have to take you when you have nowhere else to go” point of view – except that I know plenty of people not welcome in their own homes to find any universal truth in that saying.

One could see the story from stage right – the point of view of the stay-at-home brother – the “good” one who felt he deserved the inheritance because he worked so hard and so faithfully. When we look at the story from those two points of view, the conflicts multiply exponentially. Disagreement, even violence, becomes inevitable, as each side seeks justice and mercy – but what is justice and mercy to one son is cancelled out by the other son’s equally compelling claims: this home, this promised land, this Canaan flowing with milk and honey becomes a battleground between entitlement and displacement.

This is not the story of the Prodigal Son, the name usually given to it. This is not the story of the older brother. This is the story of a man with two sons, two sons he loves equally and profligately, two sons with whom he shares everything. One son stays at home, works hard, lives well. The other son wanders off, does bad things, feels bad, needs help. He comes crawling home, afraid that he will be punished for breaking the rules he knew all too well, hoping that his father will forgive him enough to let him live at least the minimally secure life of one of his laborers. And what does the father do? This is the story of a man with two sons, two sons he loves equally and profligately, two sons with whom he shares everything. Everything.

The conflict that the two brothers lay at his feet – the disputes over inheritance and privilege and duty and goodness and responsibility and freedom – the claim of justice and the plea for mercy – are cast aside by the father. None of that matters. The one who was lost has come home. The one who was estranged is now reconciled. The one who was dead – meaning the father – is now made alive again by the sight of his lost son. All that remains is for the one who was broken – meaning the older brother, broken by his resentments – to be made whole by coming home as well to an understanding of his father’s overwhelming, abundant, profligate and generous to the point of wasteful love.

If we identify with the older brother, we will never understand this story. We will always be confused by God. We will always resent that bum who got away with it. And we will never understand what it means when that offer of abundance comes our way. The day will come when on some level we have screwed up, made a mistake, or tried to do everything right and still failed, and then someone, standing in for God as that benevolent father did in the story, will say to us, “Come on in! Great to see you! Now that you’re here, we can have a party!” We won’t know what to do when we’re offered something we don’t deserve, and we will never think we are worthy of a life of abundance and security and comfort.

It’s not that rules are wrong, or that the life the older brother lived was ungodly. Perhaps now, the younger brother will realize that squandering his life and living among pigs is not such a good thing to do, either, and that life on the farm has its benefits. The problem is that for both of them – and this is so true for all of us – the rules were the goal—either to follow or to overthrow -- and life was a zero sum game.

God holds out a different vision, a different hope for the lives of the people he created and loves. In God’s house, there will always be enough to go around. In God’s house we can experience that same kind of radical welcome and embrace that the father in today’s gospel story offered to his two sons. When we come home to God’s house, we can celebrate and rejoice, for the dead come to life, and the lost are found.

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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.