Community Parson: The hand of God rebuilds the world that vengeance and violence destroy

Monday, April 22, 2013

The hand of God rebuilds the world that vengeance and violence destroy

Easter 4 C April 21, 2013

Acts 9:36-43

Psalm 23

Revelation 7:9-17

John 10:22-30

The Gospel for this week takes us, curiously, out of Easter and back into the confrontations between Jesus and the people who did not like him, the people who got him put to death. “It was winter,” the Gospel tells us. The Feast of the Dedication is what we now call Hanukkah. This is the feast commemorating the rededication of the Temple by the Maccabees, an army of Jews fighting a war of independence against Syrian invaders. The Syrian king had desecrated the temple, and as the Maccabees cleansed the temple and rebuilt the altar, they found enough oil in the lamps to last eight days: a great miracle of light – God’s light – shining in the darkness of violence and bloodshed and desecration – a sign of the hope that defeats despair.

After the events of this week – of this spring – of this year – of this decade – it is tempting for us to say we have “lost our innocence.” But you would have to go back to the Garden of Eden, to the time before Adam and Eve lied about taking a bite out of that apple, to discover humans living in innocence. Of course, there are innocent and blameless individuals, and there are even whole societies of humans who live in peace, but really and truly: history is marked by horrific, blood-thirsty and wrenching violence.

The festival of the Dedication celebrates righteous violence, if there is such a thing. The Maccabees used military might to defeat a cruel invader. The drumbeat of vengeance was loud in those days, and we hear it today. There are people in our world for whom honor is more important than life, for whom shame must be punished by death. There are no innocents in such a calculation. Swords are drawn, armies march in, bombs explode: there are no bystanders, innocent or otherwise, in such a culture of war and vengeance, honor and shame. All take part, as protagonists or antagonists.

The events of the past week have caused me to read this brief Gospel passage in a way I never read it before. I now see so much more clearly that Jesus stands right in the middle of that culture of violence. Jesus places himself always in the center of that death-spiral of blood-vengeance, of honor and shame. Even in the midst of that festival that commemorates a righteous act of violence, Jesus says, Stop it all. Your culture holds life less important than honor? Stop it. To follow me is to gain eternal life. Your culture frightens people by threatening to take everything away from them? Stop it. No one will snatch my followers away from me. The hand of God does not wield a sword or pull a trigger; the hand of God brings comfort, and bread, and healing, and wholeness. The hand of God rebuilds the world that the culture of vengeance and violence – even righteous violence – destroys.

There is a reason why today’s reading from Revelation is so familiar to us: it is read at funerals. When someone we love dies, or is critically ill or injured, we are taken to a very raw and exposed place. It is the kind of place where we can see God so much more clearly than when life is ordinary and we think we have it all together. Revelation was written by and for people on the receiving end of that terrible culture of violence, and in some places of this complex book we read images of war and apocalypse.

But here, in these verses, we read what God means to people whose lives have been shattered. God is shelter from all danger, comfort from all pain, refreshment from all want. How can God be on some glorious, remote throne, when it is the very hand of God that wipes every tear from their eyes?

There are few people in the world today who have first-hand experience of a shepherd. Sentimental Victorian church art has made it even more difficult for us modern Christians to understand; stained glass windows crowd our imaginations with clichéd images of fuzzy sheep and Jesus in a pristine, white robe.

But look here: Peter, in the story from the Acts of the Apostles, looks more like the shepherds we would

recognize today. Who comes to us today, in the midst of our ordeals? Who pulls us away from scorching heat? Who rehydrates our parched lips, ties tourniquets around our shattered limbs, pulls us out from the rubble caused by earthquake, tornado or bomb? Who carries us to a tent, or slides us into an ambulance? Who reassures us with strong hands and calm voice, that now we can rest, that now we will be taken care of? Who rushes into the middle of that vortex of violence and chaos and dust and blood, and brings order and hope and a way out?

We know—we have always known – that we see the hand of God at work in the world around us – that the hand of God is none other than the hands of those who reach out to help, who go where they may not even have known they were needed. The hand of God is attached to the arms of people who have listened to the voice of Jesus all of their lives, and not known what it meant until some moving story, some situation of grief, some moment of overwhelming need compels them to act.

The shepherd is in our midst, saying “Stop that! But embrace this. And here, let me wipe the tears from your eyes.”

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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.