Community Parson: God pitches God's tent

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

God pitches God's tent

Christmas Eve 2011

Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96

Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-20

“Occupy” seems to be the word of the year. Starting with the uprisings of the “Arab spring,” protests seemed to bubble up the world over – protests against dictators, against income inequality, against debt, against corporate greed and against leaders who seemed to do nothing about those things. It is hard to know what will come of this movement, or even it if is a movement. It is hard even to know what all these occupiers had in common – other than a determined and at times joyful hope that the world, as bad as it is, could be a better place.

Hannukah and Christmas have nothing to do with each other, in terms of the origins of each festival in our respective religions traditions. It’s not like Easter and Passover – Jesus was in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover when he went to face his death. Christmas, or the observance of Jesus’ birth, was not celebrated on any fixed day until the church came to inhabit the boundaries of the old Roman Empire. There was always some confusion between the return of the sun, the rise of the sun – “SUN” – god and the birth of the son – SON” – of God, and the church just kind of went with that confusion. As Christianity spread north it made sense to use the existing festivities around the solstice and the return of the sun, a powerful sign of hope in the dark and cold and want of winter. Christmas became a sign of resistance to an oppressive darkness in hopes of a brighter spring.

That is where we begin to see the theological connection between Hannukah and Christmas. Hannukah is a festival of resistance and of light. When Jewish militants finally overthrew the Hellenized occupiers of the Temple – who had defiled it with altars to pagan gods -- they cleansed the Temple and found enough oil to burn the candles for one day. God blessed the miracle of this new occupation, and these righteous Jewish occupiers, by giving them enough oil to burn the lights for eight days. As Judaism spread north throughout Europe, this Hannukah celebration of the triumph God’s righteous ones over their political and religious oppressors also became a sign of hope in a dark and cold world.

Enveloped as Christmas is by thousands of years of traditions, it is easy to forget its simple, yet revolutionary origins. God in all of God’s divine majesty chose to come to earth, to occupy, as it were, the body of one poor peasant woman long enough for her to give birth to a child. This little boy, this Jesus, is Emmanuel, God with us. God dwelling with us. God pitching God’s tent, as it were, in the Zuchotti Park of a barn in the back of an inn in Bethlehem. We forget that the reason that Mary and Joseph had to make this difficult journey in the first place was because of the political and military occupation of Palestine by the Roman Empire, and its arbitrary rules that all should be enrolled, so that all could be taxed.

Think about it: God could have chosen to be born in a much nicer place, where more people could have heard about him and taken care of him. But no: God chose to be born in a rough and vulnerable place, among people who were outsiders and rabble-rousers. Call to mind the words his young mother said, when she learned that she would bear this child: he will bring down the mighty from their thrones and exalt the humble and meek. He will fill the hungry with good things, and send the rich empty away.

God chose to be born not among those who would politely wait their turn for the privileges they knew were theirs. God chose to be born among those who were hungry, and impatient, among people who took risks because they had nothing to lose and everything to gain. God chose to be born in a makeshift tent in an occupied zone, and his birth made those people wild with hope and joy -- hope that God is moving once again with a mighty hand, and joy that the revolution has begun.

This occupy movement began small 2000 years ago – began among the poor and the humble, and among people who knew God intended better things for them and for the world. The 1% of those days cared not a fig for them. Depending on how you divide up today’s world, all of us here could be considered among the 1%. But we are here tonight because we have heard the angels sing. “Good news,” they say. “Good news for all.” We are here tonight because in our hearts we are among the 99%, hopeful indeed that the world can be the bright and shining place God created it to be.

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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.