Community Parson: End time?

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

End time?

Proper 28-B

November 18, 2012

1 Samuel 1:4-20

Ps. 16

Mark 13:1-8

Now that the election is over, the politicians find it safe to talk about global warming. Even with Hurricane Sandy rearranging the coastline and wiping out whole towns and neighborhoods in two of the most populous states in the union, Governor Cuomo didn’t quite want to take sides, but he did admit we’d better be better prepared for more “extreme weather” than we have seen in the past.

Talk of what to do when the End Time comes is nothing new. It was, for example, one of Jesus’ big themes. When he left the Temple, after denouncing the “fat cats” who took advantage of the “widow’s mite,” the first thing he said was, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down. … Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes … there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.”

Humans like talking about The End Times, big, dramatic and scary. And not to diminish either what Jesus said, or the very real effects of global climate change, we have been talking about The End Times for a very long time. And all that talking can wake us up – which is what I think Jesus intended when he told his disciples about the signs to come – or it can paralyze us into despair, powerlessness and inaction.

Obviously, talking about The End Times hasn’t gotten us anywhere. We can focus our considerable energy on the “pangs” about to come, or, like Hannah – Hannah, who is barren, Hannah who is heartbroken – we can focus on the “birth.” On the future. On the child Hannah will bear. On what we can do to participate in the signs of hope that are breaking all around us. We can pay attention, take action, band together, connect the dots.

Yesterday at Diocesan Convention, we heard some amazing stories that are signs of hope in desperate times and places. There was a re-cap of the twenty-some years of our companion relationship with El Salvador, how we walk with the people of that very poor nation as they recover from earthquakes, wars, hurricanes, with resilience and grace. We watched a tribute to Bishop Martin Barahona, who will soon retire – looking at his leadership not only as a kind pastor, but as someone who took risks for social justice and structural change and for the hard work of peace-making. We heard the report of the Episcopal Church Women, who at last summer’s General Convention announced that they had given away millions of dollars in grants to address human need and build permanent good in 37 dioceses and eight countries.

And here at St. David’s: this has been an autumn of abundance – raising nearly $4,000 to help Bol Garang bring his mother to the U.S., partying at St. David’s Court, serving at the Samaritan Center, helping residents get to services at Van Duyn, raising money through the CROP Walk for Meals on Wheels, getting CoDFISH off the ground. And it’s not over yet: we’re still collecting canned goods and funds for holiday food for the Springfield Gardens Food Pantry and will have our own in-gathering of the United Thank Offering Blue Boxes on December 2.

Next Sunday is the last Sunday of the church year, and as we read these words of Jesus about the End Times, we wonder, what is this all about? The way the Gospel of Mark writes the story, Jesus is concerned with the present: with the kairos moment, the fulfillment of time. Mark’s story is about the one who brings about the beginning of the reign of God. Mark's community is the community of the New Age, a community who understands that their domination by corrupt, terror-filled and self-centered political powers will soon be over, and that God will vindicate the righteous. Their sufferings mark the culmination of history, and the birth-pangs of the rule of God.

What Mark leads us to look to is hope -- hope not only that the future will be better than the present, but that even the present troubles we experience now are part of the providence of God. Mark encourages us to stand firm throughout; God will triumph! In fact, we are not merely spectators to God's drama, but participants, partners with God in God’s mission of health and wholeness. We who follow Jesus see these signs of the times, these signposts of the triumph of hope over the paralysis of despair.

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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.