Community Parson: How we see the Risen Lord is revealed to us in the signs in our lives

Sunday, April 7, 2013

How we see the Risen Lord is revealed to us in the signs in our lives

Easter 2-C

April 7, 2013

Acts 5:27-32

Psalm 118:19-24

Revelation 1:4-8
John 20:19-31

Since we cannot see God, it is only human nature that we should want some sort of sign that God exists and that God loves us. We want some sort of proof, for the realities of human existence can be dismal and anything we are only promised will be good must be touched, felt, tasted, smelled -- somehow demonstrated to be real -- before we can believe in its goodness.

Looking for that sign can make us kind of wacky. Do you know the Monty Python movie, The Life of Brian – a bit of a spoof on a sometimes desperate search for a savior, set in 1st century Palestine? The crowd has somehow fixated on an ordinary person called Brian, and they begin chasing Brian through the desert near Jerusalem. He is running to get away from them, convinced he is no messiah. He loses a shoe but keeps running. “His shoe!” they all cry, “A sign!” And they immediate take of their shoes and run with one bare foot through the stony desert.

Or do you know this story, from the Middle Ages? During the Plague, the Pope was saying mass to pray for relief for the Romans, and he had a vision of an angel with a sword floating in the sky over the Castel Sant’Angelo. He knew it was a sign from God that the plague would soon end. And it did.

The Easter story is also about searching for signs – real signs that the promise of Jesus' resurrection from the dead was indeed true. In the Gospel of John alone there are four different ways the disciples come to believe in the resurrection. "[John] comes to faith after having seen the burial wrappings but without having seen Jesus himself. Magdalene sees Jesus but does not recognize him until he calls her by name. The disciples see and believe. Thomas also sees him and believes …” but only after he insists on seeing those actual wounds.

One of the central controversies of the early church was what to believe about the Risen Lord. People went to great extremes on both sides of the argument to make their points: "Jesus was just a vision," was countered with detailed and nearly gory accounts of his death and rising. Late in the first century, around the time the gospels were written, was the time when the eyewitnesses to the resurrection -- Mary, Peter, Thomas and the rest -- were dying. How do John and the other evangelists communicate this truth to the newer Christians -- the ones who were not around to see the signs of the Risen Christ and yet do believe?

After Thomas sees the signs of death in Jesus hands and believes in his resurrection, Jesus says, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." In saying this, Jesus in a sense turns away from the disciples around him (who indeed have or will soon see the Risen Lord) and turns to address us. Christians down through the ages, from the second generation of believers to us here today have not seen the Risen Lord and yet we believe. In our just-the-facts-ma’am-please world of the 21st century, it makes even less sense to say we believe in the resurrection of the dead that it did for those people who lived in the first or second centuries.

What died on the cross was the idea of a God who was also a magical mystery worker. Because we have this story of Thomas putting his finger through the hole in Jesus’ hand, we get the joke behind the story of the one-shoed false messiah. As the English writer A.N. Wilson put it, these stories of the resurrection provide us with no easy explanations or “fake consolations.” He goes on to describe why it is so hard to be a Christian:

The new God was to be found not in control, but in loss of control; not in strength but in weakness. He was no longer an explanation for what happens. He was now a person – a mysterious person who only the minute before had looked very much like the gardener sweeping the path. That has the profoundest implications for the human race and for human history for as long as it lasts. For we can no longer look to an imaginary God to hand out morality, to feed the poor, to heal the sick, to refashion the world along just and equitable lines. That is our responsibility now, and if it seems like a Godless world, we shall be judged – we, not God.

The Twelve did not recognize the friend who had been killed, brutally and savagely killed – they did not recognize him at first. But the one who doubted most of all saw, with the eyes of hindsight, that his Lord and his God was to be found not in the highest heavens and heaven of heavens but in a wounded human body: in bleeding hands, and pierced feet, and wounded side. It was in the presence of that abject vulnerability that Doubt was cast aside, and Faith could say, My Lord and my God![1]

"I shall be there," Jesus says. That is how the gospel of John ends, with Jesus' assurance that his spirit will

remain with us always, until the end of the age. How we understand that spirit -- how we have seen and continue to see the Risen Lord -- is revealed to us in signs – signs we see in our own lives, in the most surprising spots in life where the spirit breaks in – in relationships, and friendships, and moments of grace, in the food we serve to hungry people, in the children we teach, and the sick people we visit, and in the breaking of bread.

[1] A.N. Wilson, My Name is Legion, pp. 300-301

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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.