Community Parson: God shakes it up

Sunday, August 24, 2014

God shakes it up

Proper 15 Aug. 17, 2014

Genesis 45:1-15

Psalm 133

Matthew 15:21-28

We are never quite sure who we are supposed to forgive. Or who is supposed to forgive us. Joseph’s brothers are flipping out when they realize who the generous Egyptian is, all wealthy and powerful, standing before them. Jesus himself gets caught up short by that feisty foreign woman who calls him out on his vaunted declarations of God’s abundance. Joseph forgives his brothers even before they ask for it. And does Jesus even beg the woman’s pardon? Or is it all ok now, that her daughter is healed?

The stories in the Gospel of Matthew we are reading for these several weeks have this in common. The action in each of these stories is set in motion by what happened when Jesus fed those thousands of people with a little bread and some fish. Matthew, the one who structured how these stories appear in his Gospel, shows that the ramifications of that miracle travel far and wide. The way the world itself is ordered is now changed: God’s grace is so powerful that human beings can walk on water. God’s abundance is so overflowing that even Jesus underestimates its power – it takes a foreign woman with her shocking challenge to teach Jesus that God’s generosity extends even to her and her ailing daughter.

We never know who God will use to get that point across to us. The people of Ferguson, MO, have been at each other’s throats over who is responsible for the death of a young man. Who would have thought that a career state policeman would walk among the angry mobs, shake their hands, hear their stories, and disarm the most heated conflicts? The situation got tense again over the weekend, but on Friday, this highway patrolman brought hope:

Captain Johnson, a burly and plain-spoken Missouri native, cited the Bible, preached tolerance and simultaneously represented both law and order and the fear and anger of seething residents. He turned a news conference into a town hall meeting, waded into the crowd and seemed to listen as much as he spoke … [i]

This is no quick fix, but Captain Johnson surprised everyone, police and citizens alike, the way the Canaanite woman surprised everyone around Jesus, the way Joseph surprised his scoundrel brothers. That intervention of surprise shook up what was going on, and introduced the possibility that God had other ideas about those situations. Joseph’s brothers had to come to grips with their grievous wrong-doing. Jesus had to realize that God’s grace extends to more people than he had imagined.

Don’t we all wish that life would just settle down and be normal? That there would be a reliable status quo? We yearn for that stability so much that we are willing to sacrifice justice for it. We are willing to harbor grudges, to hide our fears, to bury our angers, to silence our longings, stifle our objections, just to keep things on an even keel. Like Joseph’s brothers, we have kept all sorts of bad stuff inside for so long, that the love of God is almost unrecognizable to us when we come upon it. We have lived that way for so long: why would we ever want to change?

But God knows when that even keel that we desire so much is out of whack. That’s when God intervenes, shakes things up, destabilizes the status quo. God comes in the guise of angry demonstrators and brave police captains, in the guise of snarky mothers who want the best for their children.

Watch on when you think you have it all figured out. God may have something else in mind.

[i] New York Times

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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.