Community Parson: Following Jesus is no spectator sport

Monday, January 13, 2014

Following Jesus is no spectator sport

Proper 18 C Sept. 8, 2013

Jeremiah 18:1-11
Psalm 139
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33

Imagine we are among those “large crowds” that were travelling with Jesus. What would we want Jesus to be saying to us? Why would we be there?

We might be hungry, and want to be fed. (Didn't we hear somewhere that Jesus did just that?) We might be sick or disabled, and want Jesus to heal us. We might be estranged from our communities, and want to go back home. We might just want to have fun! (We also heard that Jesus went to house parties, and that, indeed, Jesus created a party wherever he went. Remember how he turned that water into wine?)

In this passage today, Jesus does none of those things: no feeding, no healing, and not much fun. He talks about hate, he talks about war, he talks about engineering.

Now a sidebar: I don’t think President Obama would like these lessons today, because together – the passage from Jeremiah and this one from Luke – they say some things about the judgment of God on human actions that might not be brought up in the White House situation room. Jesus talks about a king needing to be fully prepared before he goes to war – and if the odds for victory are not good, the king starts to negotiate the terms of peace. Jeremiah uses the image of the potter’s wheel, to talk about the utter dependence of humans on God. Just as God created us, and our nations and kingdoms, God can destroy. Jeremiah is speaking for God against the evil the people of Israel did in the sight of God, and warning them that God’s judgment will break them. Indeed, that is just how the people of Israel understood what did happen to them, when the Babylonians invaded and destroyed Jerusalem, and took the Jews captive with them. Prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah helped the people understand that their turning away from the covenant with God caused this to happen. The nation strayed, but God, and Jeremiah, loved the people and wanted them back. The Jews probably did not see this at the time, but years later they understood that that foreign invasion was led by the hand of God.

Would this exegesis go over well in the situation room? Maybe, but it is of course impossible to say how history will judge our actions in this terrible situation in Syria. What is clear from the Biblical record, however, is that God will, and does, judge us. How do we measure up to the expectations God has for the way God wants us, his beloved people, to live?

Jesus phrases those expectations in particularly serious ways. In addition to those reasons I mentioned before, about why the crowd might be following him, add the knowledge that Jesus is heading toward Jerusalem. People in the crowd might be following Jesus because they are itching for a fight: they are from Galilee, and they want to stick it to those powers and principalities in Jerusalem. They are tired of being under the thumb of the Roman Empire, tired of being exploited by their own people. Or they might be following Jesus as one might follow a funeral procession; perhaps they know the end is near, that their hopes for a new way of living may come to naught.

We sense Jesus’ impatience with these adoring crowds, who after all this time still do not get it. When Jesus says, “hate your family,” that is not about cruelty or violence; that is about detachment. It’s like throwing cold water in their faces. Discipleship is serious stuff, Jesus says. God commands all. To whom do you belong? To all of your possessions and attachments? Or to God? To this God who has known you from the beginning of your existence, this God who called you out of nothing, this God from whom you can never hide, this God who molded you lovingly and beautifully as a potter forms the clay? Does God want us to abandon our families and let them starve? No. Jesus was human like us, bringing life and health and abundance and food to those who needed them. But Jesus does ask, when he talks about the cost of discipleship, to whom do you belong? Are you really prepared to give up things that do not matter, in order to bring about the things that do?

Look again at this passage from the letter of Paul to Philemon. Paul is discussing a slave, Onesimus. Scholars are divided about what Paul is saying here. Free the slave? Send him back to me? Is Paul acknowledging the social reality of slavery in the first century Roman Empire? Is he speaking from his lifetime as a Jew, who could not own slaves, because Jews are always called to remember that once they themselves were slaves in Egypt? At every turn our lessons today draw us into painful and still-existing social, political and economic conflicts. Paul does not address those conflicts directly here, but the passage would cause discomfort and soul-searching among early Christians. Did not Paul write in his letter to the Galatians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus?”

Following Jesus is no spectator sport. Following Jesus – to Jerusalem or to anywhere – does not take us out

of this world, but further into it: into that place where there are no easy answers, whether it is about invading Syria, or if the food we put on our table is “fair trade” or picked by 21st century slaves, or if we all the stuff we have gets in the way between us and God. Wrestling with what all those things mean in our lives makes us disciples; that wrestling is part of the cost of discipleship, part of what Jesus is calling us to choose.

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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.