Community Parson: A new heaven. A new earth. A new church.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

A new heaven. A new earth. A new church.

Easter 5-c April 28, 2013

Acts 11:1-18

Psalm 148

Revelation 21:1-6

John 13:31-35

Years ago, I joined a tennis club. I did not then, and do not now, know how to play tennis, and I’m not quite sure why I joined. No one at the club was mean to me, but no one was really interested in me, either. I suppose we’ve all tried out membership in all sorts of clubs, or we’ve been in clubs when we knew that some of the people who walked through the doors just weren’t supposed to be there. What do clubs do when someone doesn’t have the right coat, or doesn’t know how to use the right fork, or, in the case of the apostles, doesn’t eat the right meat?

From the point of view of the rest of the apostles, Peter should not be eating with THOSE kinds of people. These apostles are followers of Jesus, yes, but they do not see why they should break with their Jewish past. They know well that Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” But perhaps they hear more continuity than drastic change in what Jesus says. This commandment comes from God, like Jesus comes from God – and not some new, innovative God. John – and Jesus, and Peter, and all the rest of the apostles are talking about the same God they have known from childhood – and the same God their parents, and their parents’ parents, and their parents’ parents before them knew, the God who taught them about love, and who expected them to love each other. This is the same God who gave them rules to live by – rules about food – but also rules about caring for strangers, about mercy and forgiveness, about justice and compassion. God has always been about pushing the boundaries of the community out, out out, into the whole known world. God pushed and pulled us together as a people so we could be lights of God’s goodness for the whole world. When God saw the people of Israel getting too inward, too narrow, God pushed them, gave them a new challenge, something new that forced them to re-think what it meant to be the people – not only of Israel, but of God.

One of the ways God gets to people in the Bible is through dreams and visions, and God caused Peter to have quite a vision. In that vision, God caused a complete up-ending of everything Peter thought was “the way we do things in our club”, the place where the rules said you could only eat certain kinds of meat. Make no mistake: God had handed down those rules about what to eat, and Peter knew those rules. “We” ate a certain way, and “they” ate a different way. But now Peter heard God say, “Do not make a distinction between them and us,” and Peter was shocked. He had to hear this three times before he realized that it meant he had to go into that house and eat that food with those people.

And then the miracle happened: “they” became “us.” No doubt Peter was just as odd to them as they were to him. They, too, took a risk with their hospitality, but look what happened: A whole bunch more people became Christians, got the light, learned the story, and started to believe that they were in “the club”, too. This is how Peter explained what happened to his equally shocked co-apostles: “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?"

Indeed: Who was I that I could hinder God?

Note that the word used there is not “should” but “could.” It’s not, who am I, that I should hinder God. It’s, who am I that I COULD hinder God? God’s spirit pushes and pulls us, loving us along the way, always insisting that we can do more, love more, open more, be more. We can invite oddballs like Peter into our house, invite him to sit at our table, and amazingly, there will still be enough to go around – amazingly, some amazing things can happen. The world can look like a new place. A new heaven. A new earth. A new church.

You might guess where I’m going with this. I had the strangest vision when I was praying over these texts, when I was trying to figure out what they might mean to us, here, St. David’s, DeWitt, today. I saw a medical clinic in South Sudan, and Bol Garang meeting his mother at Kennedy Airport. I saw meal after meal served at the Samaritan Center. I saw day old baked goods loaded into a van and taken to Temple Concord. I saw total strangers, grieving and sad, being welcomed here and given food and drink and comfort.

And I saw people who had not paid even their $25 Patrons membership fee drinking champagne at the opening of the Celebration of the Arts. I saw all of us – or a lot of us, any of us who want to come – whether we’ve paid our $25 or not -- wearing our name tags and welcoming people, and shaking their hands, and giving them a drink -- all those people, who came through our doors, thinking they were here just to see some art and listen to some music – people who aren’t Christians, who don’t want to be Christians, who go to other churches, people who eat all kinds of meat or no meat at all – people who came here thinking this was just some ordinary place – some ordinary church -- but what they saw, what they really saw, was a new heaven, and a new earth.

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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.