Community Parson: April 2015

Friday, April 3, 2015

... in remembrance of her

Maundy Thursday
April 2, 2015

Exodus 12:1-4, 11-14

Psalm 116

1 Corinthians 11:23-26
Mark 14:1-25

This story of the extravagant woman is sandwiched between two nasty bits of anger, vengeance and betrayal. This seemingly insignificant story, often forgotten in the rush of Holy Week, as we make our mad dash from Palm Sunday to Easter, is actually a story the church has preserved carefully over the years. Indeed, along with the scrupulously remembered accounts of the Last Supper and Passion of Jesus it likely formed an important part of the liturgies – the worship services – of early Christians.

The story opens in a house. In the Gospel of Mark, lots of important things happen in people’s houses: “in the house,” or ἐν τῇ οἰκίᾳ in Greek, was where Jesus healed the sick, forgave sins, ate with sinners – many times. Jesus went “in the house” to teach his disciples, to talk about the coming kingdom, and from which the disciples were sent into the community. In the decades between Jesus’ life and the writing of this Gospel, “in the house” was where Christians gathered for worship. Churches were house churches, small, domestic, private places. When Jesus ate the Passover meal with his friends, the house was also the place from which he was betrayed.

It was probably not uncommon for a men’s-only dinner like this one – not the Passover meal, but the meal where the woman anoints Jesus – for women to come in to “entertain” the guests. But this is far from an ordinary meal. First of all, the house belongs to someone profoundly unclean, and unholy: Simon the leper – a shocking contrast to what we read before and after the story, about the very holy and very clean chief priests and scribes. So our location is already someplace very dicey, very on the edges of proper society. Jesus and the disciples are eating with a leper, in the home of a leper, on evening before the first night of Passover.

And if we take those brackets in further – “the clean” contrasting with “the unclean” – we see at the center of the story the outraged disciples. Who does this woman think she is, wasting all this valuable stuff. They are pious, they are angry, they scold. But on either side of their pique, we see the signs of the kingdom.

The woman’s alabaster jar of nard was indeed very valuable. Nard was apparently passed on from mother to daughter, a family heirloom. The oil is aromatic, beautiful, and used for healing. It is full of blessings. And so this woman takes all she has – the most valuable thing she has – her most precious asset – and pours it out on Jesus’ head. It is the kind of gesture we hear echoed in marriage vows: “with all that I am and all that I have I honor you.” When the early Christians heard this, in their house churches, years after the reality and memory of the resurrection brought them together, they would think of Jesus: God’s most precious gift, poured out completely, emptied entirely on their heads, extravagant, wasteful, overflowing and abundant. This woman’s act, to the ears of the early Christians, was a sign of what God had done for them, and a mark of true discipleship.

Then, in the story, we have the outraged disciples, and then framing them on the other side, we have Jesus’ words about what this woman’s act means. It is an act of sacred charity, of care for the poorest and emptiest person in the room. As the early church understood it years later, it was the woman and the woman alone who knew what Jesus was about to do, and it was the woman who took care of Jesus, who prepared him for the death that was to come. This woman embodied the Good News, the Gospel. The woman, with her love and charity and hope and confidence, is the prime example for the Christian life.

This 14th chapter of Mark goes back and forth between betrayal and love, greed and abundance. But it is the unnamed woman who enters the house of the leper, who leads us into the darkness of the crucifixion, who is our model for what it means to follow Jesus. It is the women, marginalized and insignificant, who stand, unnoticed, at the foot of the cross when the disciples run away. And it is the women, who sneak into the burial garden at dawn, and who are the first ones who run to tell us what they find there.

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.