Community Parson: The saving embrace of the cross

Monday, March 18, 2013

The saving embrace of the cross

Last Epiphany C; Feb. 10, 2013

Exodus 34:29-35

Psalm 99

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2

Luke 9:28-43

“This is my son, my chosen. Listen to him!”

Where have we heard that before? Well, not exactly that but something very similar:

”You are my son, my beloved. With you I am well pleased.”

Today we are reading form the 9th chapter of the Gospel of Luke, but way back there on the first Sunday of Epiphany, the first Sunday in January, on the day of Ava’s baptism and the first communion, we read from the 3rd chapter: the story of Jesus baptism. In that story, as in today’s, the voice of God thundered from the heavens. God talked about – or to – Jesus, God’s beloved Son, the one God chose to do God’s work here on earth. When he was baptized, God said, “With you I am well pleased.” Today, however, on the mountain of the Transfiguration, with only three disciples to witness it, with Moses and Elijah at Jesus’ side, God thunders, “Listen to him!”

Listen to Jesus. If we were there, on that mountain with Peter, James and John, listening to Jesus, what would Jesus be saying?

These two stories bookend our season of Epiphany, the time when we have been reading about how the light of Christ shines in the world. Way back there at the baptism, God’s pronouncement heralded the beginning of Jesus’ work of announcing the Kingdom of heaven – the rule of God – life lived in the here and now the way God intended us to live. This Kingdom of heaven, as Luke depicts it, is a kingdom of reversals, an upside down kingdom.

Remember Mary’s song when she learns that she is carrying Jesus: the mighty are cast down from their thrones, and the humble and meek are exalted.
Remember what John the Baptist said to the people anxious about what this new rule of God might mean: share your coats, don’t steal, don’t cheat.
Remember what happened at the wedding party at that out-of-the-way place of Cana, when scarcity and deprivation was turned into abundance and joy.
Remember what made the people of Nazareth so mad at the hometown boy; Jesus told them that God’s blessings came to outsiders, not only the traditional chosen ones.

When Jesus healed the sick, he healed their social status as well. Women, lepers, paralytics, beggars, the outcast of society: Jesus restored them to health, and restored them to the community as well. The first thing Jesus did when he came down from the Mount of Transfiguration was to heal the boy possessed by the demon. He restored that boy to his family: “He gave him back to his father.” When Jesus healed, he reversed the social order that expected the privileged to be at the center and the poor and sick on the outs. Jesus proclaimed a holy community, a whole community, with a radical equality. That is the light that has been shining on us all through this season of Epiphany.

“This is my Son, my Chosen. Listen to him!”

What is it that Peter, James and John are supposed to hear, up there, on that mountain? This is not the first time we encounter these three: remember them fishing on the Sea of Galilee, remember when Jesus said, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” And “they left everything and followed him.” When Jesus talks to the disciples, to those who are following him, or who say they want to follow him, Jesus talks about what it costs to follow him. There’s a cost to discipleship, a cost to this upside-down kingdom where the privileged are brought low and the desperate raised up, where the playing field is leveled and there is always enough to go around. There’s a cost. It makes people mad to challenge that much power.

Just before the trip up the mountain, Jesus had said this to the disciples: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily – daily – and follow me. For those who want to save their life with lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” That is the cost of discipleship, Jesus tells his disciples. Of course, that is not what they want to hear, up on this lovely, shining mountain top. They don’t want to hear the possibility of betrayal and death, and yet that is just what God means when he says, Listen to him.

Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the time when we remember our mortality, confess our sins and strip down our spiritual selves in preparation for the Easter Feast. But we also mark ourselves with the sign of our discipleship. We have ashes put on our foreheads in the shape of a cross. We wear, at least for a short time, anyway, an outward and visible sign of how much the world disapproved of Jesus, a sign of betrayal, a sign of violence and power, a sign of death.

Yet even as following Jesus meant bearing that cross daily, the cross also means, in the words of writer Toni Morrison, “the human figure poised to embrace.” It is a sign, then, of the love of God, in human form – a light that not even the darkness of those ashes can quench.

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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.