Community Parson: Three Miles an Hour

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Three Miles an Hour

Proper 17 B Sept. 2, 2012

Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Ps. 45:1-2, 7-10

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Labor Day is the American holiday, as the unions like to say, brought to us by workers. Working conditions at the beginning of the 20th century were abysmal, especially in the rapidly industrializing cities, Laws and customs changed when people, working across class and social boundaries, decided it was in everyone’s best interest to improve things for the people who worked the hardest: No child labor. 40-hour work week. Occupational health and safety standards. And an occasional paid day off: hence, Labor Day. The last day of summer. The last day of the State Fair. Brats and burgers on the grill. Fresh corn and tomatoes. One farewell swim at the beach.

Yet even if the workers threw off their chains over the past 100 years or so, the industrial revolution is not what it used to be. We’ve certainly seen in this community how it has come to a screeching halt, and no amount of fair work rules can make up for a workplace that is no longer there. Technology is rapidly creating a new kind of workplace and a new kind of labor, but we know that it has not quite jelled in our social consciousness. We’re going somewhere in a hurry, but we may not be quite sure where, and if we stopped a minute to think about it, we might acknowledge some worry that not everyone is coming along.

Listen to this, the Manifesto of the Slow Food Movement, written in 1989, in Paris (of course):

Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine, and then took it as its life model.[i]

Slow Food, which began as a protest to the introduction of a McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps in Rome, now claims over 100,000 followers, in 53 countries. They are dedicated to food grown and served locally – food that starts out fresh and ends up as a delicious meal on your table. By hearkening back to the beginning of the industrial era, I think they are saying that workers don’t live by their union dues alone – that there has to be something about the quality of life – about the very bread we eat and the wine we drink – that is worthy of who we are as humans created in the image of God.

I think Jesus would be part of the Slow Food movement. In our reading today, Jesus accuses the Pharisees of being too rule-bound, of worrying too much about who shouldn’t eat with them. In service to these well-intentioned rules, they have neglected some of the deeper traditions of God, traditions like hospitality to strangers, and feeding the hungry, and providing for those who are in need. They certainly have forgotten the sensual beauty of the Song of Solomon, where every meal is a delight, especially when shared with someone you love. The words of the Psalmist fall on their deaf ears, unaware of the songs and treasures and fragrances that are part of the language humans use to praise God.

The Slow Food movement has encouraged other movements, including a Slow Church movement. Like the rest of society, church life can get too busy – we can focus our attention on the wrong things, and lose sight of the delight we have in each other, in being called together in Christ’s name. We can think too much of our selves, and our needs, rather than on those out there who need us, and how much we have to share. Theologians have for some time encouraged us to slow down and pay attention to what is going on around us; they remind us that the pace of the modern world, and all its rules and restrictions, distance us from life itself. “Love has its speed,” Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama tells us:

It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice it or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore the speed the love of God walks.[ii]

Each local chapter of the Slow Food movement is called a convivium. It’s a Latin word, describing the place where people come together for a feast, where they live and dine together, where they eat, drink and are merry.

A convivium is what Jesus had in mind when he ate and drank with his disciples, for wherever the love of God is, you will find a party. Remember the story from the Gospel of Luke, about the dinner in Emmaus. Two disciples invited their companion, who had walked along the road with them, to join them for a meal. As the meal progressed, and the conversation became lively and animated, it was then they realized they were having a party, a great, rollicking, delightful party, and only then, in the middle of all that conviviality, did they realize it. Only then did they realize that their companion had brought the party with him, only then did they realize it was Jesus, revealed to them in the breaking of the bread.

[i] Quoted by John Pattison in “Why We Need a Slow Church Movement” http://neuemagazine.com/digital-archives/issue-08-augustseptember-2011?page=34

[ii] Kosuke Koyama, The Three-Mile-an-Hour God (Orbis Books, 1980), quoted by Simon Marsh in <http://simonmarsh.org/2011/07/22/three-mile-an-hour-god-2/>

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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.