Community Parson: Splash!

Sunday, August 10, 2014

Splash!

Proper 14 A August 10, 2014

Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28

Psalm 105, 1-6, 16-22, 45b

Matthew 14:22-33

There is an old cartoon in The New Yorker which shows two men watching another person walk across the top of the water. One observer says to the other, "It's been a long time since that has been done well!"

In fact, walking on water is one of those things that seem to belong to Jesus alone, and ever since Jesus, people, try as they might, have had difficulty following Jesus' effortless performance. Like Peter, we attempt the impossible -- we go out too far and find ourselves sinking, because we do not know or we forget that deliverance comes only from God, not from our own cleverness or strength or luck.

Relying on self alone, we sink, and struggle to get back to where we wanted to be all along: safe in the boat. Shivering and wet maybe, but in the boat, with its well defined boundaries and its protection, however feeble, from the stormy seas.

This can happen to us at any stage of our lives, when challenges beckon and we think we can meet them on our own, unaware that we are woefully unprepared – that we have not, after all, assembled the right tool kit for this task. Any of those change points of our lives can feel like venturing out onto stormy seas: leaving high school for college, leaving college for some kind of career, and now, as is the case for nearly everyone, finding that career upended and we are back in the water again, floundering. It can be the time the children leave home, or when retirement is reached, or a spouse or a parent dies, or grandchildren are born. We think we are ready to walk smoothly across those waves, but we are not. We are not.

I don’t think there is any formula for “relying on Jesus” at those times. God’s saving help to us must take different, completely unexpected forms each time we need it. If we think the same old words, the same old faith, the same old patterns that got us from high school into the work world, or when we were newlyweds, or through problems at work, will apply to our stormy seas now, we are mistaken. We’ll sink like a stone. In the words of the old hymn, “New occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient truth uncouth.” As new challenges appear in our lives, and we find our selves out on that stormy sea, we have to find some way to stop and listen to what God is saying to us now – not just march on and think we have it all together, not just do those same old things and expect different results, and certainly not just think that the old way forward is to get back into the boat. God is with us in those terrible places, calling forth new things, new strengths, new faiths, new abilities, that we never thought we had – that we had never even imagined before. “You of little faith,” Jesus says to Peter. The “little faith” that Peter relied on was the old way of thinking and being and doing. Jesus called Peter – and calls us – to the new, the uncharted, the unimagined and unexpected – and is there with us all the way.

You know this is true in your own life. It is just as true in church life. This parish, the Episcopal Church, all churches, will go nowhere if we think all we have to do is to stay in our safe – albeit wet and leaking – little boat. Jesus calls us, in the words of a contemporary English theologian, to “journey out,” to find mission and ministry not in this safe place but out on the margins of the community. Our initial impulse might be just to try to fix our status quo – to “do church” a little better, or even just to do the things we have always done with more energy and vigor. But that is like rowing backward against the current. It is undeniable in these times that something powerful in the culture and wider world around us is pushing us quickly into uncharted waters – and just to keep this maritime metaphor going, it is very likely that the boat of the institutional church will break apart on the shoals.

Nevertheless, journeying out is exactly what Jesus is calling us to do. It is an anxious time. It feels crazy, but we hear it again and again through these ancient scriptures: God calls us to transformation – to take on God’s new life as individuals, and as individuals to be part of an ever new, ever transforming world.

Ann Morisy is the English theologian and church worker who wrote her book Journeying Out about 10 years ago – an eon ago in this rapidly changing world. But she has some pithy quotes that still ring true: the church is not a “waiting room for the hereafter.” “The church, if it is to honor the gospel, has to journey out, embrace strangers, work for social peace and justice and partake of God’s gracious gift of salvation.”[i]

That is so hard for “we of little faith” to hear, even for those of us who have heard these stories all of our lives. But knowing who is calling us to journey out, what are we waiting for?

[i] Ann Morisy, Journeying Out: A New Approach to Christian Mission (Morehouse, 2004), p. 5

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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.