Community Parson: The kingdom of heaven has come near to you

Monday, October 21, 2013

The kingdom of heaven has come near to you

Proper 9C; July 7, 2013

2 Kings 5:1-14

Psalm 66

Galatians 6:1-16

Luke 10:1-12, 16-20

There is a scene from a movie that sticks vividly in my mind. It’s from Merlin, a made-for-tv version of the King Arthur legend, told from the point of view of the wizard, Merlin. After a lifetime of having his life, and the lives of good people, damaged by Queen Mab – a deliciously evil Celtic goddess – Merlin realizes that if everyone turns their backs on Mab, if they just go on with their lives as though she did not exist, then she would lose her power over them. She would not exist if no one followed her devious schemes into violence, deception and death.

One way to look at evil is that it is a figment of our imaginations. Satan, or Mab, in her made-for-tv incarnation anyway, are creatures of human myth, personifications of a seemingly insatiable demand for murder and revenge. They seem to offer humans privilege but it is all a scheme to enhance their power.

While the 70 are out on their mission to preach the Good News, Jesus receives a vision of Satan cast down “from heaven like a flash of lightning.” Could it be that this very mission, this sending out of simple earnest folk, two by two, signals the end of the stranglehold of Satan over us? Could it mean that our imagination is now freed from this personification of evil that keeps demanding violence and blood sacrifice? From this creature of our own making that gave voice to an insatiable desire for vengeance? “The kingdom of God has come near to you,” Jesus told the apostles to say to everyone, even those who ran them out of town. “The kingdom of God has come near to you, whether you listen to me our not.”

The apostles turned their backs on the seductive power of Satan, and Satan, always more alive in the human imagination than in God’s, began to fade into oblivion. But even the defeat of Satan is not really the point of Jesus’ mission: it is to ready all who are willing to listen for their citizenship in this new kingdom, this new way of being, that is already here.

If Jesus came here today and commissioned the 70 of us to go out into Onondaga County two by two, it would not be that unlike the mission of the 70 in the gospel. Like them, we would be sent out to places we knew, and to places where we were strangers. Scholars say Jesus sent the 70 into Samaria, to Jews who had broken with mainstream Judaism and to whom Jesus offered an invitation to restoration to the community. We would also be sent into hostile territory, to a society that does not want to hear much of Jesus’ message. It’s best to travel lightly into such danger, and to be ready to move on when rejected. We might be visiting neighborhoods where drive-by shootings happen, or panhandlers accost you. We might be in very comfortable places, where people politely turn away from us, certain that their lives are together and they don’t need to hear the words we have to bring.

When the apostles said, “The kingdom of heaven has come near,” many people turned away way. A society ruled not by violence and threat, not by the “haves” lording it over the “have-nots,” but by justice and mercy, generosity and abundance, seemed inconceivable; a nice fairy tale, but, no thanks, that’s not the way our world works.

Many did listen, however. The gospel reports that the 70 came back to Jesus reporting success, and Jesus told them his vision: “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.” It worked. People listened. They moved into the new reality. They were healed of infirmities, relationships were reconciled, they turned their back on the power violence and the fear of violence held over them.

The Kingdom of heaven has come near to us. We know it comes near when we notice when people choose conversation over confrontation, reconciliation over retribution, generosity over greed, solidarity over selfishness.

When I was in campus ministry, some of my students were counselors at the diocesan summer camp. One week the campers were nearly all from tough neighborhoods in Chicago. The counselors had to break up a lot of fights; gang signs were flashing right and left. A few kids were sent home. But at moments when the counselors needed to calm the kids down, when the culture of violence and revenge was getting just too seductive and powerful, the camp musician started playing a song on his guitar. The children would stop what they were doing, gather in a circle and hold hands. “They just loved that song,” he told me. “It would always calm them right down.”

It’s a simple song. I don’t know the words, but the meaning is clear, to those who are willing to hear it: “The kingdom of heaven has come near to you.” And when that circle gathered, and those young, frightened people held hands and sang and swayed, Jesus had a vision: “I watched Satan fall from heaven in a flash of lightning.” It’s possible, even today, even now, for even us to go out on Jesus’ mission and to come back, rejoicing.

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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.