Community Parson: Jesus calls us

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Jesus calls us - into turmoil

Proper 7-b; June 24, 2012

1 Samuel 17:1a, 4-11, 19-23

Psalm 9:9-20

Mark 4: 35-41

During the summer, the lectionary takes us on two different train rides, on two different tracks. We travel along at the same speed on each of them, so there is the possibility that we can talk across the rails time and again. It may make for some interesting conversation, but you might just be interested in where one lesson-thread is going, and not pay that much attention to the other one.

So the lectionary gives us highlights from the life of King David for most of the summer, and today, we have this extraordinary story of David and Goliath. I am glad the lectionary gives us this opportunity to catch up with these old Bible stories – for the last time some of us read this story, we were small children ourselves. The characters in this story look very different to children – isn’t David like us, we used to think. Ruddy and handsome. A superhero at a young age. Confident and assured not only of his abilities, but that he is loved by God.

But think of Saul and Goliath, warriors in mid-life, at the height of their powers – men of power and ability, brought down – in different ways -- by this young whipper-snapper. By changing times and circumstances. By someone whose star is rising while theirs is falling. Do we, people “of a certain age” think differently of Goliath’s experience than we did when we were children? Are we now perhaps not so ready to toss aside Saul as little more than yesterday’s news? Are we not able to see more shades of gray in such tales of triumphant heroes? David may be perfect now, but later, as we shall see, he gets into a lot of trouble.

At whatever age, to be called by God to take on some task can be difficult. It seems to be God’s aim to get us to put it all on the line, to put even our lives at risk. The disciples cannot even go sailing – they cannot even ply their trade as fishermen – without Jesus leading them into treacherous waters.

“Let’s go over to the other side,” Jesus says. “The other side” in Gospel of Mark talk means the other side of human experience – the gentiles instead of the Jews, the foreign instead of the familiar, the unknown and alien. Mark’s Jesus preaches a critique of the established order. His Good News is that there is a way to live that is not dominated by Roman oppression or life-less religious observance. He breaks down that old order as he seeks to build a new one – and to understand what he has in mind perhaps we have to get over to the other side and look back on what we could leave behind forever.

But where does Jesus take us? Into the whirlwind, into chaos and danger. “Jesus, wake up! Don’t you see we are dying here. We don’t want to know about the other side if this is the price we have to pay. Let’s go back – to the familiar shore, to the way things used to be, to the way things are supposed to be.

Change is never easy – unless you are young. Think about all those graduates at this time of year – commencing on to the next phase in their lives. Legions of young Davids ready to replace those outmoded Sauls and take down the Goliaths in their paths. Change is all around us, upsetting every imaginable apple cart. Our boats seem to be riding on endlessly stormy seas, and not even Jesus seems to care. Jesus has even called us into this turmoil – taking us to “the other side,” to see who is on the other shore. People are there, people we do not yet know, waiting to hear some smidgen of good news, astounded to see the storm subside, and the seas grow calm, wondering just who could be in that boat.

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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.