Community Parson: Turning our lives in the same direction as God's life

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Turning our lives in the same direction as God's life

Epiphany 3 B January 22, 2012

Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 62

1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

The juicy parts in the story of Jonah come before, and then after, what we read today. Here’s the story, in brief:

Jonah is a prophet, sent by God, to call the people of Ninevah to repent. Jonah knows that these Ninevites are world-class sinners. He has done the feasibility study on the potential of their ever doing the right thing, and he knows for sure that they do not have, as consultants say, the capacity for much repentance. They are party-hearty sinners, and set in their ways. Jonah told God all this, and said, forget it; let’s shake the dust from our feet and move on. God said, Do it, and Jonah said, No, I’m not, and went off to cruise the Mediterranean. The ship got in trouble; the crew knew that it was Jonah’s fault, and so they threw him overboard, where God conveniently arranged for a private retreat space, otherwise known as the belly of the whale, for Jonah to think again about his assignment. The whale spits Jonah out onto the beach, where, “the word of God came to Jonah a second time.” He goes to Ninevah, the people are converted to God’s agenda, and, amazingly, God changes his mind. God decides NOT to punish the Ninevites for all their world-class sins. God sees that they have turned from their evil ways, and God realizes, hey, this is what I really wanted all along. God is pleased.

Jonah, as you might recall, is not. Jonah thinks these sinners ought to be punished anyway. He goes off to sulk that his powerful prophecy about Ninevah being overthrown was nullified. He and God have another conversation, and God, as you can imagine, because this is the Bible, has the upper hand. The people of Ninevah turn toward God and thrive, and Jonah is mad, because he is deprived of the opportunity of saying, “Nyeh, nyeh, I told you so.”

So who is this story of Jonah and the people of Ninevah about, anyway? Jonah? The Ninevites? No. It is about God. God who got mad that people were not living the good lives God wanted them to live, and then God, who changed his mind. The people of Ninevah, sinners that they were, got God to change God’s mind about the future, from wrath, punishment, desperation and misery, to … grace.

St. Paul, in this little snippet from his first letter to the Corinthians, talks about what happens when wild and crazy sinners, like the people of Corinth, like the people of Ninevah, get what God is saying – what happens when their hearts are converted to God’s way of living. Things that used to matter a lot to them – all that wild, sinful life -- does not matter anymore – for the world, in that present form, is just passing away.

Conversion is like that. You might have thought that you could change nothing about your life, or you would die – and then God gets ahold of you. You begin to read the story of your life through God’s eyes, and then, without even knowing it, a lot of stuff you thought was do or die, life or death, just passes away. A lot of other things become a lot more important.

Ok, now. So reflecting on that Reader’s Digest version of the story of Jonah that I just gave you, think about this gospel story about the call of the disciples, these fishermen who left their nets to follow Jesus. What is this story about? Whose story is this?

A conventional reading, with all the “should” and “oughts” attached to it, is that this story is about the disciples, and us – about making the choice to follow Jesus, about what we are giving up, about how hard the life is, about how Jesus comes to us everyday, asking to give up everything we hold near and dear. And well, yes, later in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus does say, “Take up your cross,” and Jesus does say there is a cost to that discipleship.

But actually, when we read this story, I think it is distracting to read this story as being only about the disciples, or only about us. I love what the preacher Barbara Brown Taylor calls “the miracle on the beach,” calling this a miracle story about the power of God to create risk-taking, committed disciples out of what was just a bunch of fishermen. That this is a story not about what good, or bad, characters those fishermen were, but about the power of God, Taylor says,

… to recruit people who have made terrible choices; to invade the most hapless lives and fill them with light; to sneak up on people who are thinking about lunch, not [about] God, and smack them upside the head with glory.[i]

Reading this story as God’s story gives it a completely different point of view – one that does not reduce the fishermen to insignificant puppets, does not take away their “fisherman-ness,” but gives them a chance at something new, something creative and exciting. Reading this story as one about the power of God to convert even the most mundane and workaday heart shows us how God gives ALL of us the chance to play a role in God’s story of the creation of a transformed, abundant and blessed world.

Like the fishermen, like Jonah, like the Ninevites, like the Corinthians, we don’t have to earn our place in the kingdom of heaven.., God just invites us to come along. We’re already in. Maybe, like the people of Ninevah, we can surprise God with just how ready we are to take up that call. All we have to do now is to begin to see this story the way God sees it.

Conversion, they say, is turning our lives in the same direction as God’s life. In our workaday world, we might be doing the same things we have always done – we might still be fishermen, for example, but as Jesus says, we are going to fish for so, so much more.

[i] Barbara Brown Taylor, in Home by Another Way, quoted in Kate Matthew Huey, http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/january-22-2012-third-sunday.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.