Community Parson: Stewardship Sermon # 2: Help, Thanks, Wow

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Stewardship Sermon # 2: Help, Thanks, Wow

Proper 25-C

10/27/2013

Joel 2:23-32

Psalm 65

Luke 18-9-14

You might think that this would not be the best gospel to read during stewardship season. The Pharisee, who is good, who tithes, who prays, who does the right thing always, seems to be outshone, in Jesus’ estimation, by this grubby tax collector.

Remember that if you take literally the list of religious do’s and don’ts in Jesus’ day, tax collectors are by definition sinners: the work they do – like the work done by shepherds, fabric-dyers and other necessary members of first century Israel – automatically makes them sinners, no matter how nice or good or faithful or generous they are in and of themselves. So it really is kind of shocking to the first hearers of this parable – part of Jesus’ pattern of reversing expectations every chance he gets.

And despite its being read during stewardship season, this parable is only tangentially about money. It’s really about prayer, about how we pray, and why we pray.

In her dandy little book, Anne Lamott says prayer is about three things: Help. Thanks. Wow. Today, our lessons are about WOW.

First of all, there is nothing wrong with the Pharisee. The world would get along much better with more people like him – no doubt. But it seems like the critical point Jesus is making here is that the Pharisee follows the rules maybe a little too closely. He’s got it all together -- maybe to the point of being able to go it alone, maybe even to go it alone without God.

If we look at it this way, the contrast with the tax collector becomes clearer. If the tax collector has it “up” on the Pharisee, it’s in the way he realizes he is inextricably tied up with God. He knows that it is only by the grace of God that he can get by. The tax collector is on intimate terms with all of Anne Lamott’s prayers: He’s real big on “help,” and when things work out (even when he thinks they won’t ever), he’s got “thanks” all over. In fact, his life is one big “wow.” I get the sense he is just astounded to be alive – him in his wretched, inevitable outsider-ness.

In all of those prayers – Help, Thanks, and Wow – the tax collector knows he is completely dependent on the grace of God, and THAT is what the Pharisee can learn from this person he would never have the occasion to meet. In fact, the Pharisee would learn that his prayer is tied to the tax collector’s prayer in one great loop of interdependence – the grace of interdependence. Grace is always around, before and within us – and grace is always something that God wants us to respond to. The Pharisee’s tithe and righteous prayers are not things he can make on his own: they are responses to the grace and goodness of God. And if the Pharisee is under the illusion he can do this all on his own, then he needs the tax collector, who gives thanks to God for every breath he takes, to realize that all of our lives – indeed our common life – comes always and only from the grace of God.

Our two lessons from the Hebrew scriptures are indeed about the prayer that can only be “wow,” about the glory and grace of God we can see, if we only pay attention, if we respond with that awareness of our interdependence, and interconnectedness. It’s the “wow” that we would never believe could come true if we thought we had to do it all alone, by ourselves. It’s the “wow” we are aware of when we respond to the grace of God.

And so I guess this is a stewardship lesson, and one of the things we can consider when we praying about what financial contributions we will make to this parish, and how we will contribute our time and talent to our common life. Like “help, thanks and wow”, like the Pharisee and the tax collector, we are tied together in this grace of interdependence. What would it mean, if we did more than keep the status quo going, if we did more than just keep this parish together? If we lived into that “wow” factor a little more?

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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.