Community Parson: The Wisdom of Solomon, or how are you going to live YOUR life?

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

The Wisdom of Solomon, or how are you going to live YOUR life?

Proper 15 B - August 19, 2012

1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14; Ps. 111; John 6:51-58

God is giving King Solomon the equivalent of the pep talk right before the Big Game. God here is Solomon’s life coach, his mentor, his personal trainer and inspirational speaker. Tell me what you need, God asks Solomon.

Solomon then speaks, we can surmise, from the heart: he does not ask for riches or personal gain – he’s not just out to win the game. He asks for wisdom, discernment, the ability to know right from wrong – gifts which God places in his heart. Then we read something about God’s character as a coach. God is not one of those “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing” kind of mentors. You can see from the advice God gives Solomon that God is in this for the long haul. HOW Solomon lives is God’s “everything”, God’s “only thing”, God’s goal: “If you will walk in my ways, keeping my statutes and my commandments … then I will lengthen your life.” God is assuring Solomon that he will succeed: that he will be wise and discerning and rule over a great kingdom – but what is really important to God is HOW Solomon lives his life, how he stays in relationship with God and with the kind of life God wants him to live.

So, was Solomon BORN with this ability to be King? Yes, his wisdom was a gift from God, but even the question Solomon asks reveals this quality before God grants it. Was it a product of his nurture? Was it his privilege as a king’s son? Was he sent away to the ancient equivalent of the playing fields of Eton?

In some research[i] I came across about education, the headmaster of an elite prep school and the principal of an inner-city charter school worked together to try to understand the influence of character on their students’ lives: other than high test scores, what factors could reasonably predict whether students would get in to college – and not only get in to college, but lead lives that were not just successful or even happy, but meaningful and fulfilling. Character, these educators determined, could be nurtured and developed – skills could be learned and practiced as math problems and grammar and critical thinking could be learned and practiced. In some of these traits, the children from the charter school had more “character” than the children in the elite school – more resilience, more learning from hardship and disappointment, more experience in picking themselves up and succeeding after a set-back.

The educators’ goal for these children was more than just getting them into college: it was the quality of these children’s lives. It was how they lived, what meaning they made – to paraphrase God’s blessing of Solomon, it was the HOW of life that mattered.

This kind of wisdom is sometimes not about being literal. In the Gospel, are the people around Jesus really so dense as not to understand a metaphor? Are they really so thick and rule-bound and goal-driven not to see that Jesus is talking about the HOW of life?

All summer, it seems, we have been hearing about bread from Jesus: the feeding of the 5000 with baskets left over, the bread of life, the living bread, the bread from heaven. So much bread, so much abundance – God will, God does satisfy our needs.

But that then raises the HOW question for our own lives: we have the living bread; now what do we do with it? How do we increase it, share it, multiply it? What does it mean in our own lives to be blessed with such abundance? If we give it all away, won’t there still be enough to go around?

In that story of the rich kids from the prep school and the poor kids from the charter school we note that all of those students had some measure of abundance. They all had some piece of what Jesus would call the living bread. The amazing thing is that their teachers began to see those children as more than their test scores or their parents’ income or the differences in where they went on their summer vacations. Their teachers cared about developing their characters – about increasing that life-giving “how” at the center of what it means to be human. Who knows if those teachers were “Christians” or not – probably not; but what they shared with their students was a piece of the living bread.

We all know places – people – in this world, places and people both near and far – who could use some of this living bread. Week after week we are reminded of this bread, of how precious it is and how much of it there is to go around. In our individual lives, and in our parish life, as we “get back into” the busy-ness of the church year, where will we share our bread, the bread that has been given to us, the bread that brings life to the world?

[i] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=magazine

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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.