Community Parson: When you live in a crazy time, it can drive you crazy

Saturday, September 21, 2013

When you live in a crazy time, it can drive you crazy

Proper 7-C;June 23, 2013

Laura Austin plays Lady Macbeth, and
and Tyler Spicer (behind her) plays one
of the witches, in the RedHouse free summer
outdoor production of Macbeth.

1 Kings 19:1-15a

Ps. 42 & 43

Galatians 3:23-29

Luke 8:26-39

DRAMA came right to our front door, yesterday. An audience of churchy and non-churchy people saw a production of Macbeth. Why, I wondered, are we seeing Macbeth on a midsummer afternoon, when any number of other Shakespeare plays spring to mind, for an afternoon’s entertainment. This story of evil, ambition and greed, of political intrigue and bloodthirsty vengeance – but this is a Saturday in June; what does any of THAT have to do with us?

Macbeth and his wife hatch their wicked plot to kill the king – and they succeed, although they leave a few more bodies in their wake then they had planned. But by the time Macbeth is made king, they are beginning to fall apart. The world has gone awry, and even though it was their evil deeds that caused it to happen, Macbeth and his lady are going mad. Macbeth sees the bloody ghosts of the men he has killed. Lady Macbeth cannot rest but dream of blood. The doctor her husband sends to heal her answers, She is

Not so sick, my lord,
as she is troubled with thick coming fancies,
that keep her from her rest.

Macbeth replies with the anguish of a husband, but with words tainted by the guilt that their actions have caused such madness:

Cure her of that.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
raze out the written troubles of the brain
and with some sweet oblivious antidote
cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
which weighs upon the heart?

Macbeth is not pleased when the doctor responds, “Therein the patient must minister to himself.”

The doctor, and Shakespeare, and Macbeth, even, know that when you live in a crazy time, it can drive you crazy. When the society around you is crumbling, you can feel yourself coming apart. When there are conflicting voices and threats and challenges and fears, outside of you, you can feel them inside yourself, possessing yourself, almost taking your real self away from you. The world might be mad, but that madness is manifested one person at a time.

We have lessons today about naming the demons and confronting your fears. We have God taking a direct hand in the righting of some individuals. Elijah, caught up on a deadly conflict with King Ahab and his powerful wife, Jezebel, runs into the wilderness, prepared to die – willfully to die. But God intervenes, makes him eat and drink, sends him to a mountain cave. After all the noise of earthquake, wind and fire, it is in the sheer silence, the solitude, the absolute aloneness that Elijah hears the voice of God. God restores him to his right mind, to his mission, to his life. Now go back to Damascus, God says; right those wrongs.

In the story of the person filled with so many demons their name is “legion,” we hear great noise as well. The poor soul screams and hollers and breaks his bonds. When Jesus commands the demons to come out of him, they jump into a herd of squealing pigs and hurl themselves off a cliff. And here, too, as in the story of Elijah, all the drama is followed by silence and stillness: the man sitting clothed and in his right mind. He wants to follow Jesus, but Jesus sends him back to his home, to tell this story of God’s power.

That’s the thing about all these stories of healing in the bible. Yes, an individual is healed, but it is always an individual in a social context, in a setting, a person with a mission. The healing is to right a wrong, to get someone back on track, and then to get that person back into the community. There is not the sense that the person is at fault alone for his predicament. It’s the demons, it’s the persecution by the king – something from the outside is causing the trouble here. And when the person is healed, back he or she goes to work. The healing itself is proof that God is in charge of the world, not those demons who throw individuals out of whack, not power-hungry kings. There are no HIPAA laws in the bible, no medical privacy acts. When God heals you, it is your job to get back out there, and tell the Good News.

There are a lot of stories of healing in the Gospel of Luke, so many that Luke gets nick-named “the

physician.” These healings are signs, Luke tells us in this version of the story of Jesus, that the kingdom of God is breaking in all over. The reign of God is happening. God is in charge here, God is healing the world. God’s spirit and God’s goodness cannot be contained. They are specific incidents: Jesus healing that man in that place, and that man is living in a Jewish country occupied by a massive Roman military force – by the Roman military legions. The Gospels are pinpoint specific to that time and place.

And yet if we would but hear it, we can hear how these stories of healing apply to us, and to our time as well. God is breaking through in our lives, and in our time and place – God moves in to any situation where things have gotten out of whack, and if God has ever restored us to our rightful minds, then we should get out there and spread that Good News that the world is dying – literally dying – to hear.

Let’s remember this where we are, here in this church, in this garden, in this town and community, that the treasure we have is the treasure of the Good News. Like the man healed, wouldn’t we love to get into that boat with Jesus and sail away, but Jesus speaks these words to us, too: "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you." So let us then proclaim throughout our city how much Jesus has done for us.

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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.