Community Parson: Giving it all away

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Giving it all away

Proper 15 A August 14, 2001 St. David’s

Genesis 45:1-15; Psalm 133
Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
Matthew 15:21-28

The Canaanite woman.

The gospel fairly spits out the words with a tone of dismissal and disdain. Imagine a similar insult today, hurled at someone “other” than us, different than us, someone we do not want to take seriously.

Curiously, by the time this gospel was written, or even by the time of the events it describes, “Canaanite” was a term long out of use. It was an antique insult, used to place this woman among the enemies of Israel’s far distant past. It is a term from the Genesis days, a term those double-dealing brothers of Joseph would have known, like when they sold him to the passing “Ishmaelites.”

Even more curiously, the “Canaanite woman” does not play the role assigned to her in the vicious game of insider/outside that the disciples and Jesus have set up. The Canaanite woman knows God’s true agenda and purpose in sending Jesus to the human community. The Canaanite woman knows Israel’s religious language and uses it. “Lord, have mercy,” she says. Kyrie eleison. Even though the Jews’ ancient language was Hebrew, everyone in those days spoke Greek. If we could hear this gospel in Greek, we would hear an antiphonal, and yet dissonant chorus: the woman crying “eleison” – mercy. The disciples crying “apolyson” – get rid of her!

The Canaanite woman knows that Jesus has taken the wrong side in this dispute. A short time before this story takes place comes the story of the feeding of the five thousand, a miracle which showed God’s overwhelming and overflowing abundance. Five thousand were fed from mere loaves and fishes and there were baskets of crumbs left over. The Canaanite woman, in essence, throws these crumbs back in Jesus’ face. She throws the proof of the reality of God’s abundance back at him, and her faith and courage cause Jesus to change his mind. His heart is converted. He returns to his true self. The woman is blessed. The daughter is healed.

These gospel healings, you know, are about more than the physical or emotional healing of the person. Healing, as people understood it in those days, was about restoration. The healed person is restored to the community, to the family, to his or her full functioning; the person returns to being a contributing member of society.

So who is healed in this story? And not only healed, but transformed? The daughter, yes. No doubt the woman; her dignity as a human being, loved by God, is restored; the rest of the community sees that. But is not Jesus healed, strengthened, recommitted to his radical mission of showing people just how abundant God’s mercy is? After this story, he goes out and performs another feeding miracle, and more healings, and more amazing new signs of God’s grace. Eleison – mercy – abounds in a new and vigorous way after the Canaanite woman brings Jesus to his senses.

Our two stories today – that of Joseph reconciling with his brothers, and this story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman – bring to mind that troubling question of “the will of God.” Could it really be God’s will that the young Joseph was sold into slavery? And yet, see how it has worked out in such an astounding and surprising way! God’s purposes are hidden, and if we are blessed we may have the opportunity, like Joseph, to look back and see God’s hand at work in the world around us. Walter Brueggemann, the insightful scholar of the Hebrew Bible, puts it this way:

Joseph, man of faith, takes a second hard look at his life. He is willing to host the hidden, inscrutable, unresolved purpose of God for his life that is beyond his control….he is willing to trust a purpose for his life that is larger than his own horizon.[1]

Perhaps Joseph’s brothers, like Jesus’ disciples, needed a sledgehammer to break them open. They were so consumed by their stuff: their possessions, their position in the family, their status – and they hoarded all this stuff so jealously – that they got rid of Joseph, thinking that by getting rid of him there would then be enough of that “stuff” to go around. But the famine, like any other global economic disaster, showed that their hoarding did them no good. Joseph was God’s sledgehammer, opening their hardened hearts to God’s love and generosity. Joseph looked back and saw that hoarding and keeping and resenting did no good. Joseph saw that only by giving away all that he had that he knew the true abundance of God. Joseph was truly the good steward – of Pharoah’s lands and riches, yes, but also of God’s. When his brothers came back, Joseph knew that the only way to keep all the good things that God had given him was to give them all away.

The only way to keep all the good things that God has given us is to give them away.

Joseph’s brothers and Jesus’ disciples had to be tricked and teased and given their comeuppance – in a gentle and ultimately loving way -- to learn this lesson. Think about your own life: look back at God’s hand at work in the world around you. What have you been afraid to give up? What have you hoarded, for fear, or for jealousy? When have you given it all away – taken a risk, lost your heart, emptied your coffers – only to realize that you have everything you need and more, in abundance overflowing?

[1] From "Taking a Second, Painful Look" in The Threat of Life: Sermons on Pain, Power, and Weakness; quoted by Kathryn Mathews Huey, in Sermon Seeds, http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/august-14-2011-twentieth-sund.html

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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.