Community Parson: Remember you have been in the ditch

Monday, October 21, 2013

Remember you have been in the ditch

Proper 10; July 14, 2013

Amos 7:7-17

Psalm 82

Colossians 1:1-14

Luke 10:25-37

There are two stories here. The first story is about a lawyer who wants to do the right thing. He wants to know the rules, so he can obey them. He wants to know how he can live the good life, how to be a good person. The law will tell him how to live.

So here is this lawyer, just trying to get it all straight: love God, love neighbor, okay. We’re agreed. Yes, Jesus says. Then the lawyer says, “Who IS my neighbor?” Listen to how the contemporary theologian Frederick Buechner paraphrases the answer the lawyer wants:

A neighbor (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as meaning a person of Jewish descent whose legal residence is within a radius of no more than three statute miles from one's own legal residence unless there is another person of Jewish descent (hereinafter to be referred to as the party of the second part) living closer to the party of the first part than one is oneself, in which case the party of the second part is to be construed as neighbor to the party of the first part and one is oneself relieved of all responsibility of any sort or kind whatsoever.[i]

You get the sense that Luke thinks this is the answer that the lawyer wants Jesus to give to his question. But instead, Jesus tells a story.

Read the passage again and think about it: Who is the main character of this story within a story?

A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.

The man in the ditch is the main character of the story. When the lawyer asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus says, A man was on the road, was beat up by robbers and thrown into a ditch, left for dead.

When the lawyer asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells this story about a man in pretty desperate need of a neighbor. Jesus tells the lawyer a story about himself, about a man looking for a neighbor. The man lying in a ditch is not going to find anyone remotely like him walking by, if you have to rely on people remotely like yourself to help you when you are in need. The only person who is going to help you is going to be a stranger, and that stranger might even be one of your enemies. The priest, the Levite, the Samaritan – none of them would be pre-disposed to think of a man bleeding and left for dead in a ditch would be their neighbor.

Jesus tells the story this way to shock us into realizing that we are the ones "… lying in that ditch, and we desperately need our enemy to forget what he’s been taught and what he understands his rights to be. He needs to forget the risk and the robbers, and stop and help us in our need."[ii]

We are the ones who need a neighbor.

There are a lot of ditch stories in spiritual literature. Julian of Norwich, in the 14th century, told a story about a Lord and a servant. The Lord sent the servant on an errand, but like our man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, the servant fell in a ditch, and so could not obey the master. In Julian’s day, sin, and the inevitability of sin, was a big matter. People reading her story would assume that the Lord would be angry and punish the servant for falling into the ditch. But no, Julian wrote, that is not the way God is; God loves the servant. “Sin is necessary,” she wrote – life is full of ditches we fall into, that we get pushed into, that we even jump into; “sin is necessary, but all will be well.” “God is not now one thing, now another,” she wrote, “now loving to the saved, now angry to the damned, but always the same, always love.”

The Magdalene Community, in Nashville, is a community of women who have survived lives of violence, prostitution and drug abuse. These women have developed a rule of life, kind of like a 12-step program, kind of like a religious order. In their little book, Find Your Way Home, they describe this, Step No. 17:

Remember You Have Been in the Ditch

The ditch is the place where I was beat up and beat down, with busted lips and black eyes. The ditch was where I was raped and was crying and screaming and thinking no one could hear.

My sister was rescued from a ditch. Her bus crashed while crossing over a bridge in Cameroon, Africa. She was going there to help teach and ended up being pulled from death by a kind stranger who happened to be travelling behind the bus. I will never forget how quickly she went from being there as a helper to desperately needing the help of others. If I let myself have the luxury of contemplation, the image of my sister being pulled from the ditch leaves me forever grateful.

Who are you to tell me I have done wrong? I’m asking, who are you to say that you will pray for me and that help is just around the bend? Just who are you to say that you are sorry that stuff happens and that I should stop whining? The only way I can know you is if you tell me you have been in the ditch, too.[iii]

Who is my neighbor, the lawyer asked Jesus. “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho,” Jesus answered. Your neighbor, says Jesus, is the man who, against all odds, is the one who helps you out of the ditch.

[i] Frederick Buechner, from Wishful Thinking, quoted in the Frederick Buechner Blog, http://frederickbuechner.com/content/weekly-sermon-illustration-neighbor

[ii] Kate Matthews Huey, Sermon Seeds, http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/july-14-2013.html

[iii] Find Your Way Home: Words from the Street, Wisdom from the Heart by the Women of Magdalene, with Becca Stevens (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2008), pp. 79-80

Photographs from the Thistle Farms website, where you can find out more about the work of the Magadalene community, and how these women have changed their lives.

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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.