Community Parson: Leaving the past behind

Monday, March 30, 2015

Leaving the past behind

Lent 4 B
March 15, 2015

Numbers 21:4-9

Psalm 107

Ephesians 2:1-10

John 3:14-21

Bread. Light. Life. Grace.

Nicodemus has heard about Jesus, and Nicodemus wants those things. But Nicodemus can’t come out. He can only approach Jesus in the dark, which is the part of this story right before the verses we read this morning.

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.’ Jesus answered him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’ Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’ Jesus answered, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. … Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can these things be?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

Bread. Light. Life. Grace.

Nicodemus wanted those things, but he could not get his head around how he could get there. The cost would have been high: he thought he would have to leave behind everything he knew, cherished, believed to be divine. He did not believe Jesus who said, in essence, it’s easy. This is the way. If you take this leap, you will find yourself flying into the arms of God, into the light, into a great big party which never ends.

But Nicodemus could not leave his past behind. He took comfort in the rules he knew, in the experience he had. He saw that Jesus saw the world as it was and turned it into something new and bright and full of grace, but he could not leave what he was used to – he could not walk away from what he knew – he could not take the risk that life in the future would be better than life in the past. He could not understand that Jesus was taking all that was good from that past – their shared past of Moses and the prophets – and taking it into a future of blessing and grace.

We are all Nicodemus. All of us have times when we cannot believe that there will be a future, when we live in the present as though it were still the past – when we think the rules and customs and behaviors of the past, if we do them enough, will get us back there – will take us away from the future we fear. We want to go back to when things were good in our lives – or at least to those times when if they weren’t so good, they were at least predictable.

With several of you, I attend the Thursday Morning Roundtable, where we hear civic leaders talk about our community and ways to make it a better place for all of our citizens to live and thrive. Speaker after speaker, week after week, says the same thing: things have changed. It’s like the ice and snow that fell off our roofs this week: smash, on our heads. All that stuff we know – loss of manufacturing jobs, corporate headquarters, failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, even Shoppingtown is a shadow of its former self! We have choices in this community, the speakers tell us. We can do things the way we have always done them, thinking that will take us back to the way it was before, or we can pay attention to what is happening, and build on that, and find a future in which we can and will thrive. There are facts, there is data, we have experience that shows us we can get out -- indeed we are getting out of despair, darkness, hopelessness and into the light. Even in Syracuse. Even at St. David’s. Unless, of course, we don’t want to.

As Christians, we are all on a continuum, from Nicodemus to Jesus. All of us have times when we sit in the darkness and don’t want to leave, when we want things the way they used to be. All of us hear the call of Jesus to come into the light – or we would not be here. We are Christians, we are people of hope, new life, rebirth. Christians know the future in Jesus, in God, is always better, always full of blessings, always beckoning us forward. Christians know there is life after death.

Imagine what it was like to be Nicodemus. Bread. Light. Life. Grace. The same stuff God has always offered, freely and abundantly, since the beginning of time. Nicodemus wants those things, but he cannot for the life of him figure out how to get out of the customs of his past life -- what he has to change in order to get there. Can you imagine what you have to change in your life, to get there, too?

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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.