Community Parson: Healing & Restoration: Party like the Messiah has already come

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Healing & Restoration: Party like the Messiah has already come

Epiphany 5 B February 5, 2012

Isaiah 40:21-31; Psalm 147:1-12, 21

1 Corinthians 9:16-23; Mark 1:29-39

Have you not known?

Have you not heard?

Has it not been told you from the beginning?

Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?

It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
and spreads them like a tent to live in;
who brings princes to naught,
and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.

When Jesus enters Simon’s house and goes to see Simon’s ailing mother-in-law, he is not going as a doctor making a house call. He does not ask about her symptoms, or take her vital signs, or make a diagnosis.

Jesus enters Simon’s house as the bringer of Good News: the reign of God is at hand, here, among us, right now.

Jesus enters Simon’s house having been baptized by John, having heard the fabric of the universe being ripped open when God anointed him for this mission.

Jesus enters Simon’s house having preached that this Good News is at hand so compellingly that a group of fishermen dropped their nets, left behind their livelihoods in the everyday world in order to follow Jesus the herald of the abundant world.

Jesus enters Simon’s house having been recognized in the synagogue by a spirit so powerful that it had trapped a man in madness, a spirit so happy in the world of the status quo that it was furious to be exposed and dislodged.

Jesus enters Simon’s house on the Sabbath, and he knows right away that the divine order of abundance, and refreshment, and hospitality has gone very, very awry. Simon’s mother-in-law is ill, and without her, the Sabbath community will not be complete.

Jesus enters Simon’s house as the bringer of restoration. Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth – that this is the way that God has always intended you to live?

Years ago a rabbi friend told me that during the Sabbath, that one day out of seven, that one-seventh in the life of a faithful Jew, you live as though the Messiah had already come. You live in a world without work, without worry, without toil. You rejoice in the beloved community of family and friends. There is always enough of everything to go around. This world of the Messiah is the world the prophet Isaiah describes, the promise that gives voice to all of our longings for a world that lives with all the blessings with which God created it.

So when Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law, he is not doing that just so she will feel better and get up and serve them dinner. He is not working that miracle as a magician or a technician or just to show off.

When Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law it is a sign that the Sabbath has come, that the abundance of creation is now restored, that the reign of God is not only “at hand” but that it is here, right now. All those princes of oppression, those rulers of the world, truly are nothing in the face of this hospitality at the very root of humanity. Those who were excluded – like Simon’s ailing mother-in-law, and like all the other people Jesus will heal as the narrative of the Gospel of Mark continues – are now restored to this blessed community.

What Good News this is for all of the rest of us on the margins of this dog-eat-dog world, where we will never be pretty enough, or thin enough, or rich enough, or successful enough, or popular enough.

What Good News this is for people who get beaten up by the police because they looked at some officer the wrong way, for people who have to stand in line on the sidewalk just to get a hot meal, for people whose only respite in life is a five-dollar bag of heroin.

What Good News this is for people who whine, and carry on, and think they will never be able to reach down deep enough in their pockets to find the resources they need to live the abundant life God has promised them.

What Good News this is that Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law, because now she can rise and rejoin her family, and the party can go on.

Have you not heard?

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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.