Community Parson: Believe in miracles

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Believe in miracles

Proper 4 C June 2, 2013

1 Kings 18:20-21,30-39

Psalm 96

Galatians 1:1-12

Luke 7:1-10

In April, we had three groups of people talk to us during coffee hour – people doing, for lack of a better term, “global mission.” These were three groups of people working in, to say the least, difficult circumstances.

The Sisters of St. Margaret respond to the daily needs of Haitian people still trying to recover from the earthquake.
The Brackett Refugee Education Fund finds and supports the educational efforts of refugees fleeing strife-torn Burma.
Dr. David Reed works with a medical clinic in South Sudan where, with medical interventions both simple and complex, this team of Africans and Americans performs miracles daily.

In order to get their work done, all three of the groups have to collaborate with the enemy. The Sisters were invited to Haiti by the elites around the Duvaliers, whose rapacious policies stripped the country bare and left people lives of violence and poverty. Accomplishing anything in that land of civil and geographical chaos is a miracle in itself. The Bracketts found, in their work with people living on the Burmese border, that that is a very dangerous place in deed; even the progressive Burmese, trying to democratize a dictatorship, would just as soon kill as look at the Muslim minority group that lives there. David Reed talked about one of the ways they keep their clinic safe: they invited enemy warlords – both sides – to receive medical treatment – eye surgery, I think. The clinic became common ground for these modern-day equivalents of the Roman centurion, a safe place where miracles could happen for anybody, on any side, in any condition.

So our gospel story today is full of things that do not make sense to us. Miracle healings. Working with and even praising the enemy. Reprehensible social relationships, like slavery. Acknowledgement of a military social structure that seems anathema to Jesus, the Prince of Peace.

This territory of contradiction is the place we are entering for the next several months, as we work our way through the Gospel of Luke. We will read many stories of miraculous healing. We will encounter many non-Jews, Roman and otherwise, who seem to understand what Jesus is talking about better than those people who would be his traditional followers. Social boundaries are crossed right and left, and all sorts of “disreputable” people – demon-possessed, leprous, women, even, are healed, included, empowered, employed, as servants of the Good News, the vanguard of the Basilea: the kingdom of God, the reign of God, even, as one scholar puts it, the Empire of God.

Jesus in the Gospel of Luke doesn’t care that he upsets people, that he shocks people by breaking the standard operating procedure. Our lesson today, of the healing of the Centurion’s slave, echoes back to a story Jesus told in his very first sermon – we read it in chapter 4 – in his home synagogue of Nazareth. He talked about a story from 1 Kings, where the prophet Elisha healed Naaman, the enemy commander, who then turns and praises God. This story got the Nazareth crowd so angry they tried to throw Jesus off a cliff. And here he is again, not only telling the story of “healing the enemy” but doing it, but in front of a friendlier crowd. The Good News breaks all bounds, Jesus says. The power of God is recognized in the most surprising places. Human power structures, even those as powerful and vast as a Roman legion, are only human; the power of God to rule the world with justice and mercy and abundance and hope upends even all that.

What is a miracle? David Reed described the relatively simple eye surgeries that are routinely performed at the medical clinic in South Sudan. To those with those crippling conditions, who can never work or be productive members of their community or family, who must always be taken from place to place and cared for by other people who themselves cannot work or go to school because they have to care for these blinded people, people who cannot see the faces of those they love – for those people to have their sight restored is a miracle. It doesn’t matter if it comes with an “abracadabra” incantation, or mud and spittle rubbed in the eyes like Jesus did, or with a surgical scalpel in a sterile field: it is still a miracle. With an eye given sight, a whole community is healed.

Two thousand years ago people believed in miracles. We believe in miracles today. We believe in the people who restored us to full life, just as Jesus restored the lives of countless people he came in contact with. The Good News is not the technical aspects of what happened. The Good News is that none of us have to live like THAT any more, in fear and trembling, in darkness and despair. Those are the daily miracles that David Reed’s clinic, and the Brackett Foundation scholarships, and the patient work of the Sisters of St. Margaret accomplish. Like them, we are God’s hands, working those miracles.

At the offertory, we will add to our collection our gifts to the United Thank Offering, gifts of thanksgiving for the daily miracles in our lives. Give generously, give often. Like the Centurion, be part of the vanguard of the Empire of God.

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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.