Community Parson: November 2014

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

What is holding you back?

Proper 21 A Sept. 28, 2014

St. David’s Church & St. Paul’s Cathedral

Exodus 17:1-7

Ps. 78:1-4, 12-16

Philippians 2:1-13

Matthew 21:23-32

Our lessons today – from Exodus and from Matthew – give church leadership a bad name. We are whiners, complainers. We change our minds at the drop of a hat. All we want to do is give the right answer and for the life of us, we don’t know what it is. On and on it goes, the conventional readings of these miserable lessons.

Yet, if we turned the gospel lesson on its head, a bit, we might get a different reading about both lessons. So let’s think about authority: what is authority? It is given to us: from above, often, if we are under orders to do something – if our power derives from someone above us who has expectations for what we are to do. In other cases, in democracy, for instance, authority comes from below, from the consent of the governed. In a democratic system, we have to live up to the expectations of the people who have elected us to lead them.

There is another kind of authority, as well. It is the authority of the past. This can be a kind of tyranny, especially if someone in the past has harmed us, or if we are filled with remorse over our own past wrongdoing. That remorse, those regrets, that person who wronged us – all of those things can have tremendous authority over us. Those memories can govern our present behavior, can direct our future, can make us afraid to take another step for fear of harming again, or being harmed in the same way. We can fear what we think we have to lose – that “authority of desire” or fear of losing what we have, can paralyze us. The tyrannical authority of our own past prevents us from living a full life now, and from living fully into the future.

There is something of that tyranny of the past that Jesus brings up in this encounter with the people around him. These people are worried about what they might lose. They are worried about doing the wrong thing. They cannot imagine a future other than one circumscribed by all of their past. They are paralyzed by Jesus’ “trick” questions. They think something might be happening around them, with this John the Baptist and this Jesus, but they cannot get out of the authority of their past long enough to see what it is.

You could make the same observation about the Israelites following Moses out of Egypt. This new life of freedom is hard, in the wilderness, so hard that it is nearly impossible for them to recognize the gifts of freedom and grace, of manna from heaven and water from the rock, that through Moses, God gives them. The authority of their past – their lives as slaves in Egypt – prevents them from this new life of grace, this new identity as the people of God.

I’m sure you recognize yourselves, or people you know, in these stories. I do. It is understandable to get caught up in the authority of our own pasts; after all, our experience is all we know. It is hard to imagine a better future – but that is exactly what God is doing here. God – unlike ourselves – does not count our past misdeeds, our grudges, complaints, mistakes or hurts against us. “God … refuses to define us by what we do (or what has been done to us), but instead regards us always and only as God’s beloved children.”[i]

How do we learn this radical obedience to a joyful and welcoming God? Who are our gospel role

models for such behavior? Probably not the “people like us” from those pages – probably not the well-behaved establishment types, probably not the chief priests and elders. We learn radical obedience to a joyful and welcoming God from our gospel role models who lived at the bottom of the social heap. From the tax collectors and prostitutes. From all those people Jesus healed. From people Jesus moved from exclusion to the inside, from the street to the table. People who gathered hungry on a mountaintop and left fed and full in body and spirit. People who realized that could be free from a past that bound them to a restricted and unhappy life, and instead move into a new and fuller future where they recognized with their own eyes, touched with their own hands, and tasted with their own senses all the delicious, delightful, sparkling and wonderful gifts God had given them. That’s the future I want. That’s the future we can all have.

[i] http://www.davidlose.net/2014/09/pentecost-16a-open-future/

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.