Community Parson: Satan, beasts and angels

Friday, March 6, 2015

Satan, beasts and angels

Lent 1B Feb. 22, 2015

Genesis 9:8-17

Psalm 25

1 Peter 3:18-22

Mark 1:9-13

Life is bewildering enough without having to be thrown into the wilderness.

“Thrown.” That is actually the meaning of the word in Greek. “Immediately the Spirit threw him out -- ekballei -- into the desert, the wilderness -- erhmon -- the desolate place, the place of hermits. Jesus is thrown from his place of chosenness, where God has named him as Son, beloved, favored one, into a dangerous place, full of wild beasts. Looking up the Greek word for beast in a dictionary, one finds several references to beasts as the animals to which people were thrown for punishment and death. Capital punishment was a genuine, gruesome spectator sport.

On the other hand, perhaps these 40 days were not all bad for Jesus; the text also tells us angels served him. The word is dihkonoun, the root of the word deacon. The angels were the first Christian deacons. This wilderness is also the place where Jesus first found the strength to resist: he resisted the temptations of Satan, a process which apparently steeled him for the rest of his ministry, when he would resist the powers and principalities who were Satan’s human agents in first century Palestine.

Water – the water of baptism in particular – is understood as a vehicle of salvation. Good Noah and his family were, as St. Peter says, “saved through water.” The water of baptism is not a mere cleansing of the body, but “an appeal to God for a good conscience.” Yet water also can be powerful and dangerous, a bringer of death and destruction. God may have allowed Noah and his family to live, but the rest of the human race was destroyed. God saved those eight humans – as well as all the progenitors of the wild beasts which later prowled around the desolate Jesus in the dry wilderness. In the waters of baptism, Jesus experienced near-death by drowning, and came out of the waters raised to new life and new status. He is then thrown into the desert for another encounter with near-death and comes out as a steeled and experienced resistance fighter. The first thing he hears when he comes out of the desert is that John the Baptist has been killed. Jesus, now schooled and hardened in the desert responds, “The kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the Good News.”

Good News?? Is this the way God works?? Is the rainbow, the sign of God’s covenant never again to destroy the people of God, GOOD NEWS?? Has this Good News not come at a terrible price for the human race? A destructive flood, and as the earth dries out, a newly created desert and wilderness? God does work in bewildering ways.

Perhaps this is why these dramatic, short and scary stories appeal to us: our own lives – and certainly the world we live in -- are at times bewildering and frightening. People are forever being left desolate, or drowned. Just when we think we’re sinking never to rise again, a hand pulls us out from the deep, only to throw us into a worse place than we were before.

And then: good news: Satan’s temptations do not win Jesus over. The wild beasts do not eat him, he does not shrivel or starve in the desert heat, and angels take care of him. Even God thinks twice before getting so angry again, so angry as to destroy the human race. Out of what is terrible comes a new way of life: the kingdom of God is at hand.

Lent can be about a personal struggle in the wilderness. Challenges at work, with our families – what

one day is ordinary busy-ness turns the next day into a mountain of stress. During Lent we can think about our private sins and shortcomings. But I also think these stories today play out on a larger stage, a global stage. Sabers rattle, rockets blast destruction, troops are deployed: As talk of war swirls around us, these stories call us to global repentance, to a change of heart from destruction to peace, from floods which drown to waters which cause the deserts to bloom. The wild beasts which prowl menacingly are also the ones we can imagine nurturing and keeping alive 40 days in the ark of our salvation. Who are our wild beasts? With what temptations does Satan come to us, as individuals and as a nation? And who are the angels who will serve us and nurture us into the new way of life which is the reign 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.