Community Parson: Wild Beasts & Angels: the Wilderness as the Peaceable Community

Monday, February 27, 2012

Wild Beasts & Angels: the Wilderness as the Peaceable Community

Lent 1 B February 26, 2012

Genesis 9:8-17; Ps. 25

1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15

If we all wanted snow this winter, it came yesterday, with a vengeance: cold, driving, thick, wet. When we read the gospel account of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, we usually imagine a warmer place, but certainly one as inhospitable as being outside yesterday. Just ask Bill, our cat, when he tried to venture out of doors, thinking it was as warm as the day before. No wilderness for that not-so-wild beast.

We’ve read about this wilderness before; in the other gospel accounts, in Matthew and Luke, we get a lot more detail about what Satan thinks will tempt Jesus to leave this mission behind and take up the easy life. We read nothing here about stones becoming bread, nothing about daring God to rescue him if he were to jump from the Temple roof, nothing about how all the powers and principalities of the world would be his to command if only Jesus would worship Satan. In this gospel the temptations are left up to our own imagination. It’s all there together, perhaps for the whole 40 days: the wilderness, the temptations, the wild beasts, the angels. When we read this story, we can write our own temptations into it: what struggles do we have which threaten to take us away from what God wants to do with our lives, which undermine our assurance that we are God’s beloved child?

We think of the Spirit in our lives as a good thing. In the old Prayer Book language we would say, “The Lord be with you,” and reply, “And with thy Spirit,” as though that were something comforting.

But the Spirit in this Gospel passage is anything but comforting. The Spirit appears first in the violent tearing of the heavens. And then the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness – literally, the word in Greek, is “to throw.” The Spirit, no gentle, soft thing, throws Jesus, pitches him like a fastball into the wilderness, into the arms of Satan, into the company of the wild beasts, into the care of the angels. And here again, the story is so spare, so parsimonious on details, that we can imagine our own life against this scrim of a gospel: with what power is the Spirit working in our lives? Is the affirmation we hear from God, about our beloved identity, accompanied by the soundtrack of our lives being torn apart?

In these gospels, there is something about the wilderness experience that prepares Jesus for his mission – to proclaim good news, to bring about healing and wholeness. There is something about being there – with Satan, and wild beasts, and angels – that made him ready to recognize that the time was right. When John was arrested, it seems, the whole operation is set in motion. The kingdom of God is no longer in the distance; it is near, here, present tense, good news, time to believe that things are getting better. What went on in the wilderness that made Jesus ready to face the bad news of John’s arrest with the Good News that God’s reign has begun?

Curious, isn’t it, that this Gospel story is paired with the end of the story of the flood – with God’s promise to Noah that the world would never be destroyed, that God would live in harmony with the world he created. Every living creature can live in safety under that covenant – that never again would God’s anger be so great as to destroy it.

Such a human longing, this is, this vision of the peaceable kingdom. The prophet Isaiah spoke of it, that God would never let anything be hurt or destroyed on the holy mountain. Utopian dreamers like Edward Hicks would base their fantastical paintings on this promise of a created world in which all live in harmony.

Could that peaceable kingdom be what Jesus experienced in the wilderness? A place where the reality of wild beasts and angels and the beloved Son of God living in such harmony drove out the devil himself?

What are we doing in our places of wilderness? We can find them as places of trial and difficulty, the dark night of the soul, the battles we must fight to earn our “hero’s badge.” Or we can see the wilderness as a place of preparation, a place apart from the rest of our lives, where we can see God’s purpose clearly, where God’s harmony is revealed, where we live with wild beasts and where angels take care of us -- a place where we can hide out for a while from the Spirit, until that day when something big happens, when the plan is set in motion, and we know, with clarity and strength, just what God would have us do.

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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.