Community Parson: All Saints: Loving God and Loving Neighbor

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

All Saints: Loving God and Loving Neighbor

All Saints Sunday Nov. 4, 2012

Isaiah 25:6-9
Ps. 146

Mark 12:28-34

Who did not sympathize with that little girl, strapped in her seat in the back of the car, while her mother listened to an endless loop of campaign speculation and punditry on National Public Radio? The little girl who burst into tears at the mere mention of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney? It is not always helpful to quote the Bible at distressed children, but perhaps she would take comfort from today’s psalm:

Put not your trust in rulers, nor in any child of earth, *

for there is no help in them.

When they breathe their last, they return to earth, *

and in that day their thoughts perish.

What would people in Staten Island, or along the Jersey Shore, make of these verses:

Happy are they who have the God of Jacob for their help!*

whose hope is in the LORD their God;

Who made heaven and earth, the seas, and all that is in them; *

who keeps his promise for ever;

Who gives justice to those who are oppressed, *

and food to those who hunger.

On the endless news loop this week we were more likely to see compelling and forceful cries for help from residents of New York City who felt utterly cut off from the rest of the nation. They had experienced the mighty force of heaven and earth, the seas, and all that is in them crashing down on their heads. If God sent justice to the oppressed, or food to the hungry, it came through the tireless efforts of rescue workers, and Red Cross volunteers, and Salvation Army food trucks. Multiply the old African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child” about a thousand times in this situation: it takes a nation, a state, a society, all of us, to restore any food, clothing or shelter to people so devastated. Even a FEMA trailer looks good to people who would otherwise choose between a cot in a school gym or their flooded, burned out or blown away home.

The LORD sets the prisoners free; the LORD opens the eyes of the blind; *

the LORD lifts up those who are bowed down;

The LORD loves the righteous; the LORD cares for the stranger; *

he sustains the orphan and widow, but frustrates the way of the wicked.

Not everyone who is giving their all to help thousands of people in need are doing it out of the conviction that when we do good, we do it in the name of God, or that when we do good we are carrying out the mission God has laid out for this world. If the orphaned and widowed are sustained, it is human hands that do it.

Not everyone understands “doing the right thing” in this God context. We can be suspicious of outsiders. The scribe, who questions Jesus in today’s Gospel, was part of a group that was very skeptical that what Jesus was doing was in the name of God. That scribe had to reach out to someone shunned by all the leaders around him, and when he saw was he was doing, and listened closely to what he was teaching about why he was doing things like healing and feeding, he reaches across the divide, and Jesus reaches back: “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

When we are in the middle of a disaster on such a massive scale, religiosity – the modern-day equivalent of “burn offerings and sacrifices” -- all those phrases about God’s providence, or about the will of God, or God watching out for so-and-so while the person next to him drowned – I find it pretty hard to recognize that hand of God in events like those. But where I do see the hand of God is in the hands of those people – no matter their motives – who are there right now, doing the right thing, people who, wherever they are coming from, are not far from the kingdom of God.

This feast of All Saints is about all those people who have the two great commandments – to love God and to love neighbor – written on their hearts. This feast of All Saints is about people who did not have to think twice: people who put their bodies between an innocent victim and an oncoming bullet; people who cared for sick and dying people even as they risked their own lives; people who lived lives of love and compassion.

This feast of All Saints is about people who, even when times are bleak, know that God’s promises are meant for them: God’s promises of great feasts of rich food and fine wines – God’s promises that in the face of death itself God is there, wiping away tears and removing all their shame and disgrace, along with all the rubble of broken homes and shattered lives.

This feast of All Saints is about people who believe that these promises are not just for “our kind of people,” our next-door neighbors only, not just for the people who vote the way we do or listen to the same radio stations, but for all people – that our God, for whom we wait, will bring this justice and abundance to all.

No comments:

Post a Comment

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.