Community Parson: This is the way the world works when God is in charge

Saturday, February 7, 2015

This is the way the world works when God is in charge

Proper 23 A Oct. 12, 2014

Exodus 32:1-14

Psalm 106

Philippians 4:1-9

Matthew 22:1-14

We have just read two pretty shocking stories today, one from Exodus and one from the Gospel of Matthew. Are they about God’s wrath? Or God’s judgment? Or is that the same thing?

Many people do believe that God is a punishing God, that God’s judgment means we can never measure up, that we have disobeyed, that God is angry, and that that is the end of us.

The Exodus story is familiar – or is it? We know that Moses is himself pretty angry with this golden calf-fest. He sees this seemingly irreparable division between God and God’s people – between God’s expectations for their living the way God would have them live and the people’s gold-crazed worship of something else – and Moses steps right into that breach. He does the unimaginable. Moses asks God to change his mind, to turn away from that justifiable anger and remember how much God loves these people, however wayward and selfish and whiny and stiff-necked they are. Moses reminds God of the promise GOD made to these very same people – and God changes his mind. There could be no worse sinners than those people who squandered their future, the promise God had given them. They took all their money, their assets, their gold, all that they had, and dumped it into something as foolish as a golden calf. There are no worse sinners than these – but the hand that holds them is the hand of a God who loves them and who keeps his promises. God remembers that love, and God changes God’s mind. The story of the golden calf is a story not of God’s wrath but of God’s grace.

When Jesus tells his very troubling story of the wedding banquet, the illustrations he uses – the kingdom of heaven, the king, the slaves, the guests the wedding, the wedding garment – these are not religious images. Today we think they are religious, because we have read them for 2000. But in Jesus’ day they were illustrations from the secular world. People knew powerful and capricious kings, the kind of ruler who had absolute control over their lives. They would recognize the arrogant ones who refused to show up, the thugs who would follow violent, death-dealing orders without question, the slaves and poor people who would cower in fear, not understanding what was going on and not knowing what would happen next. And so is this a story of God’s wrath? Or of God’s judgment? And is there any difference?

This is a story full of symbols. The kingdom of heaven represents the way the world operates when God is in charge. The wedding banquet represents the abundance of God’s grace. Who gets invited in? Everybody: the good and the bad. Even after the first guests refuse to attend, God does not seek out only the good ones – God still invites everyone in. In the kingdom of heaven there is always enough to go around. Even though all is provided – not only food but wedding clothes as well – and even at that late hour, someone is not ready. Someone does not accept the full invitation. Someone still refuses God’s grace. Someone still doesn’t get it about how God wants us to live.

The people to whom Jesus preached lived in difficult times. They lived lives of insecurity and fear, under the threat of violence and in a land where powerful people called the shots. If you have ever gotten in trouble with the law, if you have ever been accused of something you did not do, you have an inkling of what power those people and the system behind them have over you. The people to whom Jesus is speaking lived with that kind of insecurity and system-induced shame all of their lives.

When Jesus spoke to those people around him about the kingdom of heaven, he didn’t mean something far off, pie in the sky by and by. He used language that described their current reality – a reality of fear and powerlessness and insecurity – and told them that the world did not have to be like that. He told them that God was on their side. That the king would throw the scalawags out, the ones not prepared to accept God’s invitation to live as God would have them live.

Yes, this is a story of God’s judgment, but it is a story of hope. There are things that God will just not put up with, Jesus says. The world as it is – of greed, and homelessness, and violence, and fear – is not the way it has to be.

When I was preparing this sermon, and first read over the lessons, I thought I could not preach on the Philippians lesson. It was just too simplistic, too happy, for our polarized and unsettled times; it put too happy an ending on the other two troubling stories from scripture. But now I think just the opposite. The Philippians passage is what the wedding banquet is all about. The Philippians passage describes the life God invites us to share, for the abundance of the wedding banquet is all around us. Rejoice, God says. Be gentle. The Lord is near. Don’t worry. Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, whatever is excellent, whatever is praiseworthy: think on THESE things. In times like this, those words may pass all understanding, but this truly is the peace 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.