Community Parson: All we have is a child, and everything in the world looks like a promise

Thursday, December 27, 2012

All we have is a child, and everything in the world looks like a promise

Christmas 2012

Christmas is a confused jumble of stories, sources, traditions, customs. We pull together what is “Christmas” to us from a variety of places. At the 4 pm service we read the accounts of the birth of Jesus from both the Matthew AND the Luke gospels. Those two evangelists tell different stories about Joseph, Mary and the Babe in the manger; Mark and John tell us nothing at all about how Jesus got here, but they both allude to Jesus’ mother and brothers and sisters.

We also include in “Christmas” dozens of customs from all over – a mélange of Charles Dickens and medieval carols and Coca Cola ads. The piano accompaniment to “the Charlie Brown Christmas” means the holiday to us as much as Handel’s “Messiah.” “The Miracle on 34th Street” captures the essence of the season as much as any number of elegant musical settings by Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughn Williams. This season is a sentimental time, and a hopeful time, as we approach the turning of the year and all of the promise that the birth of a new child brings.

But back to the Bible: even with all these different strands of stories about the birth of Jesus, the Gospels all include some mention of dark things. Even the blessed Wise Men, when they come to honor the Baby Jesus, inadvertently play a role in terrible destructive things. Herod, powerful and yet weak, so fearful of this child, this king-to-be, uses the Magi’s hopeful seeking for his own wicked ends. He uses his military might to kill all the baby boys just in search of the one who escapes his grasp. The Holy Family flies to safety, just in time.

Christmas has always included this poignant mix. Charles Dickens wrote his “Christmas Carol” against the backdrop of the deprivations and hardships of industrial England, contrasting the bounty and warmth and cheer with loneliness and hunger.

Christmas is, in a way, a kind of crystal ball: what we see in it, what we experience, is influenced by what we bring to the encounter. There is an old saying, that if all you have is a hammer, then everything in the world looks like a nail. The terrible events of the past couple of weeks have reminded us that if all you have is a gun, then everything in the world is a target.

But tonight, all we have is a child, and to us, everything in the world looks like a promise: a promise of hope, of love, of grace, of forgiveness, of starting over, of seeing the world in the way this child sees it. And since this child is God, that means seeing this world in the way God sees it.

One of the things that our Christian tradition enables us to do during this season, is to hold together all of these things: the promise and the pain, the abundance and the loss. We can miss someone so much during these days that it hurts, and yet at the same time be overjoyed with gladness at the things around us.

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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.