Community Parson: June 2015

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Prisoners of Hope: an open-door policy

Easter 3 B April 19, 2015

Acts 3:12-19
Psalm 4
1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36b-48

Have you ever seen that bumper sticker: “Had a rough week? We’re open on Sundays.” The disciples, in these early days after the resurrection of Jesus, have had a bad week; a lot of crazy and frightening things have been happening. Like the disciples, we are all capable of being scattered, undone, confused. Come to think of it, who has not had a rough week this week, what with one thing or another: cleaning, cooking, taking care of your family, driving in bad traffic, having so much to do that you do not know which end is up. Had a rough week? We’re open on Sundays.

We do not have to dig down deep in our lives to find places that resonate with what the disciples must have been going through. In what must have seemed like a mission very quickly going out of control, Jesus is arrested and killed, and the disciples lost their beloved friend. He was a wonderful teacher -- he was kind, exciting, charismatic -- it was a thrill to be in his presence. He held people -- physically and spiritually. He knew the right thing to say every time, and he made each one of them feel important. He gave them hope for the future and they knew they were involved in something important enough for them to turn away from what was important in their lives just to be with this person, Jesus. A couple of his disciples were convinced that he would become the King of Israel, unite what had long been separated, and throw out the Roman oppressors.

Then it was over. He was dead. He had talked a lot about suffering; he quoted scripture about it. He said every prophet suffered, and that his time would be fulfilled, but it was just words to them -- until it happened. Then none of it made any sense at all: he wasn't King. He wasn't teaching anymore. He wasn't healing the sick. He could have done so much more if this horrible, confusing thing had not happened. They could have followed him all their lives. They could have grown old together, but now he was dead. Because when death happens, isn’t that all we have ever known?

It took some time – years, even – for the disciples around Jesus to begin to see what had happened, to begin to feel the power, the hope, the possibility, what it meant that God had brought someone back from the dead. That’s why every Easter season we read passages from the Acts of the Apostles: those stories tell us how the disciples incorporated this astounding Good News into their lives some years later. The Gospel accounts tell us what happened in those first few days and weeks. We see the
progression from confusion to clarity, from a scattered disbelief to a confident assurance.

We come to church to hear these stories. When we hear these stories, we see where our story – our confusion, our confidence – fits in with God’s story. We see that we are part of that great stream of the people of God, witnesses to the Good News, prisoners of hope, even during those rough weeks when we are scattered and confused and too tired even to sleep. We’re open on Sundays because that was the day Jesus opened the tomb, and this whole Good News began.

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.