Community Parson: Alien ownership

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Alien ownership

Epiphany 4b Feb. 1, 2015

Deut 18:15-20

Psalm 111

1 Corinthians 8:1-13

Mark 1: 21-28

Just how comfortable are you, when, during a service of Baptism, I say, “Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?” Asking this questions throws people off. It seems to come from a different time and place – almost from a different religion that polite Episcopalianism.

Satan and the powers of wickedness are just what Jesus comes up against in today’s Gospel. The easy interpretation of this passage is that the man with the unclean spirit is kind of crazy, kind of disruptive. We’ve all known people whose serious mental illness makes them helpless to help themselves. Indeed these exorcisms of Jesus are often lumped in with stories of Jesus healing sick people, or stories of their conversion in the faith, like the author of Amazing Grace: “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.” Now, those healing stories are true; people do find grace to get through life’s difficulties. Their hearts are converted and they become followers of Jesus. It’s just that this is not one of those stories.

This is a story where Jesus challenges the status quo, and when he does that, people who have a stake in keeping the status quo status quo get quite angry. Demonic even. They crack up, or at least this one man cracks up. And in that anger, that crack up, he sees what they others in the synagogue do not yet see: that Jesus is the Holy One of God, and that he has come, not just to make people feel better, or to be their friend, but to change the way the world works.

We’re in Capernaum. Here, where Simon and Andrew, James and John live. It is a fairly prosperous fishing village. Mark does not seem to care what Jesus said that shook people up so much, that called out the demons like the cavalry to protect the status quo. Perhaps Jesus said something in this Capernaum synagogue like Luke recorded that he said at his first visit to the synagogue in Nazareth. That was when Jesus quoted the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” and then said, “This day this scripture has come true in your hearing.” Think of the “business as usual” powers that that would be upset by words like that. In today’s world, what about those prisons for profit? They would be hurt by setting captives free. There are not a few institutions in society which profit by keeping people sick and poor and blind and dumb, by defining sickness and poorness and blindness and dumbness as conditions which need their help and intervention.

You can hear Jesus saying things like that – quoting scripture about the restoration of God’s justice – and ordinary people in the synagogue -- the business as usual people, the people who have something to lose if it is God’s justice they have to follow and not the usual system of justice -- getting so angry that their demons come out. Jesus is holding the world up to God’s standards of justice and wholeness. The demons, in their uncleanness, recognize that Jesus is holy – whole – clean – and they can’t stand it.

Following Jesus is an ongoing process of remembering who is in charge of our lives, who is in charge of the world. When we read in the Gospel of Mark about “demonic possession,” it is a metaphor for alien ownership. The person who is possessed by the unclean spirit is owned by someone other than God, just as Galilee and Judea were owned by the Roman Empire and not by the people who actually lived there, just as the very earth under the disciples feet and the sea in which they fished were owned by interests which put their profit ahead of people’s lives.

There are many ways to talk about the power of Satan in this world. Some people would say Satan exerts power when we choose war over peace. When we allow people to go hungry when we have plenty of food to go around. When the rich get richer and the rest of us just go along with all the legal changes that encourage money to flow to the top. Satan can take hold of our lives in quiet, sneaky ways, otherwise indistinguishable from “business as usual.”

Thinking about it in this way, we see that the stories in the Gospel of Mark are not just tales from some long ago and far away world. And the hope these stories bring is not long ago and far away, either. These stories affirm that even if we feel out of control, even we feel everybody and everything else is ruling our lives, we belong to God, and there is nothing that any of those Satans out there can do who can change that.

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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.