Community Parson: Fire and Rain

Monday, October 21, 2013

Fire and Rain

Proper 16 C; August 25, 2013

Jeremiah 1:4-10

Psalm 71

Hebrews 12:18-29

Luke 13:10-17

Our gospel lesson today is only incidentally about healing a woman’s crippling ailment. This story is really about who is entitled to be healed – who is to be included – who is privileged – and who is not.

In the religious communities of Jesus’ day, ritual purity was very important. Cleanness and uncleanness, health and sickness, who could be touched and who could not be touched – all of these considerations were the basis of religious laws. Doing any work, including the work of healing, was forbidden on the Sabbath, the day of rest.

These laws about cleanness defined who was in and who was out. If you were sick, as this woman was for 18 years, you were isolated, alone, probably shunned by your family, with begging your only option for making a living. So Jesus was not only doing some work – the work of God – by healing on the Sabbath; he was healing someone deeply unclean, someone shunned, someone the men in the synagogue would never touch – would perhaps not even look in the eye.

Jesus healed this woman, on this day, on purpose. Way back in the 4th chapter of this same Gospel of Luke, Jesus said this in his first sermon in his hometown synagogue: “Today this scripture has come true in your hearing.” You could say that the rest of the Gospel is an embodiment of that statement. In everything else he does in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is the living example of the work of God – the mission of God. If you want to know what scripture means, what God’s work of creation means, look no farther than me, Jesus said. Look no farther than this woman, this daughter of Abraham, that I have set free from her bondage to all of you.

If Jesus embodies healing and liberation, then those the gospel calls his “opponents” embody privilege, institutionalized privilege that shuts the “unclean” out. Institutionalized privilege is “business as usual.” If you do something, and someone says to you, “How dare you!” you are likely to have snubbed that person’s sense of privilege. Institutionalized privilege means you get to set the rules. You get to define what is normal, what is clean, who is worthy. You never have to earn this privilege; you just get it, by virtue of being … privileged. It is hard to question privilege that is institutionalized, because it is in the very air you breathe – that all of us breathe, those on the inside of privilege as well as those on the outs. It’s just the way things are.

That’s why the healing is only incidental to this story. What Jesus is doing here is upending a whole institution of privilege. Or you could say that healing IS central to the story but what Jesus is doing is healing all of these people of their sin of privilege – of their sin of pretending to be better than this woman – of their sin of thinking they are better than God.

In the midst of the coverage of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, I caught a re-run of a

documentary on the life of the writer James Baldwin. Baldwin was eloquent about the toll white privilege took on him as a black-skinned American. It was exhausting, crippling, to be written out of American society as though he did not exist. The documentary frequently shows footage of white people incredulously asking Baldwin why he raises these questions with such urgency and can’t he just wait until things get better? It’s like expecting that crippled woman outside the synagogue just to wait another 18 years. But when privilege – the privilege to heal, the privilege to include, the privilege to define the terms of everyone else’s life – is institutionalized, everyone is shocked, and challenged, when someone has the audacity to raise questions. It is even more shocking when someone actually acts, and exposes privilege for the fallacy that it is. Heal on the Sabbath? She is a daughter of Abraham. Why shouldn’t she be healed?

This week we are reminded again how difficult it is to raise questions about white privilege. The journalist Charles Blow wrote,

… my worry is that we have hit a ceiling of sorts. As we get closer to a society where explicit bias is virtually eradicated, we no longer have the stomach to deal with the more sinister issues of implicit biases and of structural and systematic racial inequality.

I worry that centuries of majority privilege and minority disenfranchisement are being overlooked in puddle-deep discussions about race and inequality, personal responsibility and societal inhibitors.[i]

There were people in the 1960s who found James Baldwin terrifying. He grew up in the church. He knew the power of the wrath and thunder found in writings like our passage today from the Epistle to the Hebrews. One of his most famous books takes its title from a spiritual that could have been inspired by this passage – and Baldwin used those lines to warn society of the true wrath to come at the dismantling of white privilege:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign/no more water – the fire next time.

But at heart he was a true believer in God’s work of creation, a true believe that God’s grace was about the healing and reconciling of all of humanity. At the end of the film, we hear Baldwin say,

The day will come when you will trust you more than you do now, and that you will trust me more than you do now, that we will trust each other. I do believe, I really do believe in the new Jerusalem. I really do believe that we can all become better than we are, I know we can, but the price is enormous.[ii]

James Baldwin was able to say that, with that kind of hope and realistic optimism because he knew these stories of Jesus upending privilege just to heal some unnamed woman who had been sick for 18 years. James Baldwin, and all of us, were watching Jesus that day, and James Baldwin, and surely all of us, were among the crowd who rejoiced.

[i] Charles M. Blow, “Fifty Years Later” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/opinion/blow-50-years-later.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[ii] from the documentary, James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/james-baldwin/film-james-baldwin-the-price-of-the-ticket/2632/

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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.