Friday, October 31, 2008

Political Divisiveness - At what cost?

A couple of weeks ago I was moved by an article written by The Rev. Sara Miles from St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco. She was reflecting on the culture of this election season. She wrote:

It’s no secret that there’s a lot of time, energy, and money going into stirring up passions around this election. You’ve read the attacks on Barack Obama and his supporters, on Sarah Palin and John McCain. You’ve received or sent angry, rumor-filled emails. You’ve heard or told snarky, hostile jokes about the evils of the other side–whoever “the other side” is for you. You’ve sat there fuming reading the news or watching TV, and you may even have despaired about the general level of dishonesty, vitriol and division generated by campaigns and their supporters.

I want to ask you to pause and consider how our words and actions during this campaign are going to play out in the years to come. Anger– especially anger that feels “righteous,” when we’re raging against injustice and the bad guys– is addictive. It’s hard to let go of. As someone who’s lived in wars, during bitter political struggles, and also in post-conflict societies, I can tell you that anger flung around recklessly during a conflict poisons the water of civil society for a long time. And I see how carrying around rage and resentment hurts individuals personally. And as someone who considers herself a part of what we call the Body of Christ, I can tell you that it’s impossible to hate a part of that Body without damaging the whole.

So I want to ask you, first, to take a deep breath and pray for your enemies.

So much of the political discourse appeals to our lower selves. The flames of fear and judgment are fanned in order to motivate us to vote against the evil “other.” This divisive judgementalism is sinful and harms us socially and spiritually. I believe the Kingdom of Heaven is drawing near. We will never see it, however, if we keep focusing on how evil the “other” is.

There is nothing wrong with being politically active. In fact I think we have a responsibility to take an active role in our civic life. But our civil action needs to be civil. I believe as disciples of Jesus, we need to affirm the good in our communities, and to work together, despite partisan differences, toward positive change.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Saturday Service Photos

We’ve started a new service on Saturdays at 5:10pm. It is a great, simple, casual and reverent service. Here are some pictures.


Saturday, October 25, 2008

love is all you need

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord my strength, and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14-15)

It has been a long, long green season. Early on, we heard the story of Moses found in the bulrushes by Pharaoh's daughter - and how he was nursed by his birth mother, adopted by the princess, ran with the princes, then ran away a fugitive from justice (he'd killed a man, an Egyptian who was mistreating a Hebrew slave) into the camp of Jethro, whose daughter he married and whose sheep he herded.

So there he was in the middle of the desert, herding sheep. He learned all the ways of the desert - and all the waterholes. Whatever for? What could God possibly have in mind?

Moses found himself in the midst of an outrageous training program -- and he must have wondered: "If this is the training program, God, what is the job?"

You couldn't blame him for asking. God however kept his peace, and revealed his purpose slowly. You, he said to Moses through the burning bush, are to lead your people out of slavery to freedom. You are to guide them through the desert (remember where all those watering holes are?) and lead them to the land of promise. As you travel you are to teach them the way - not just the ways of the desert but the way of God.

I will give you my word - I will give you my promise - and I will give you my Law.

Moses was alone on the mountain, Nebo or Pisgah, at the end of his life. He had climbed to a high place, and he could see all around. He could see as in a vision the Promised Land laid out before him.

It was like the view the Joad family had, in "The Grapes of Wrath", as they came over Tehachapi Pass and caught sight of the Great Central Valley of California, like a garden without walls. It was like that view for me - coming over that same pass, seeing the first green grass I'd seen for many months and two thousand miles.

For the people of Israel, it meant coming home at last to a place they had never known.

Moses had led them to this point; now God let him see the land with his own eyes.

God leads him up a mountain and shows him the view. Behind him, in the past, are the concerns for the freedom of his people, their physical safety - under threat from the overwhelming force of their declared enemies, from their hunger and thirst, from their foolish idol worship.

Moses looks out across the land. He stands there, a leader facing the future - knowing it is out there - yet dragging along the baggage of the past.

The future is so close now that he can almost taste it - and yet three problems remain: gossip, nostalgia, and, in another way, succession.

For all the time he has led them there has been murmuring - gossip - perhaps out of fear of the unknown, perhaps idle speculation, perhaps discontent with their dependency on God.

There has been a hearkening back to a past viewed in hindsight through rose-colored glasses.

And there is the challenge of bringing forth a new generation of leadership for the future.

Yes, Moses had had his hands full.

As he looks over the fair prospect of the Promised Land, he knows that his work is done-but that the work of the people goes on.

He has been their lawgiver, teacher, advocate, and guide. He has been their shepherd in the wilderness. He has seen to their needs. He has brought down to them the law - after speaking with God face to face, without a mediator. He has promised them a future with hope. And he has delivered on that promise. Now it is time for a new leader to step up.

Cheerfully obedient to the last, Moses accepts a peaceful end as a gift from the Lord, at this last place in the desert. He has reached the ideal age - 120 - and his strength is unimpaired. He goes silently to his end, alone with God on the mountain; there is no shrine to visit. His legacy is the Torah, the word of God, and the freedom of his people.

The Torah, the Law of Moses, can be summed up in two great commandments.

Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.

All 613 commandments in the Torah come to their completion in these two deceptively simple statements. If you love and show the love of God in the world, you have gone beyond the letter to the spirit of the laws.

Augustine, a bishop in North Africa when Rome was falling, had a bit of advice about the two great commandments.

He summed up all of our duty to God and each other in one phrase:

Love - and do as you please.

Love - and do as you please.

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

Love - and do as you please.

Wait a minute. Sounds like a Catch-22 doesn't it?

If you love, what will it please you to do? What is the loving thing?

And where did all this love stuff come from, by the way?

Well, it came from the top, and it came from the start.

In the beginning there was LOVE.

Love was with God and love was God - nothing came into being that did not come into being without LOVE.

For LOVE is the essence of the Torah - the Law given to Moses, the Word of God given to the prophets - and it is embodied in the words and acts and life and being of Jesus.

Jesus is love incarnate - and this love is the love of God. This love is the light of all humankind. It shines in the darkness of the world. And hate has never overcome it.

Love - and do as you please.

How do you love? Micah the prophet put it in three phrases: do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God. (Micah 6:8)

The Torah put it in two: Love God - and show that love in love for your neighbor. But where did this love stuff come from? From God: who loved us first.

Jesus is "the embodiment of the love the law requires" (Herb O'Driscoll).

Jesus is the Torah come alive, the living expression of God's will for his people.

And that Law is love.

Not from compulsion but out of love, the love that came first from God, are we to fulfill all the law and the prophets. And we do so in the name of Jesus, the epitome of love.

In the beginning there was love...

True holiness, obedience to God, is a response in love to the call to holiness, to right living, that is expressed in the two great commandments, the summary of the Law:

Love God with all your being; show that love in love for others.

Cheerful obedience to God's commandments - bearing the fruit of faith, hope and charity in the lives of believers - is a manifestation of the love of the God who loves you first and best: love God, love your neighbor.

In his obedient response to the will of God, Jesus fulfills the two great commandments - the greatest commandment, the Love of God before all else, and the second, to love thy neighbor.

In his brief encounter with the Pharisees, who asked which is the greatest commandment in the Law, Jesus shows Messiah is more that Son of David, true king of Israel: he is David's master, David's lord, the son of God. And he has come, to set his people free.

The commandments Jesus cites in answer to the lawyer's question of which is #1, are parts not of action only or bare compliance, but are part of prayer - and of a life of holiness, a life lived in the knowledge of the love of God. They are part of the fabric of being, from day one and every day of our lives. And they speak to a renewal of the heart.

What are we called to this week, as God's people, in our prayers and in our daily actions?

Sounds like a tough challenge. But the answer is really very simple:

Love - and do as you please.

May the Love of God, which surpasses all understanding,
keep your hearts and minds, your souls and your selves,
at work or at rest, gathered or scattered,
obedient, joyous, and alive
with the good news of Jesus Christ - and of the God who always loved you first and best. Amen.

"I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy."-Rabindranath Tagore

+

Thursday, October 23, 2008

"...or was it a croissant?"




ANAMNESIS: An act of remembering that brings the past into the present; that brings the present and events of the past into conjunction, aligning them in unity.

NOSTALGIA: An act of the memory serves as an escape from present realities and anticipations of the future into a past colored with yearning.

Geoffrey Cuming taught our seminary class in liturgics just two new words: anamnesis and epiclesis. This month, I thought I’d tell you about the first.

As we use it in understanding liturgy, anamnesis is the recollection of past events, chiefly in the obedient response to the Lord’s command, “Do this in remembrance of me.”

When he instituted the Eucharist, Jesus led his friends in the symbolic acts that accompany the Passover meal. He reminded them of their heritage. He led them through the events of the Exodus, from the prophecies and the plagues, to the rescue from captivity and the parting of the waters, through the wanderings in the desert and the provision of bread from above.

Most of all, he reminded them of that last supper the people had eaten the night before they were free. And then, he took the bread in his own hands, and said the blessing, as the people of Israel had blessed it for a thousand years: “Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.”

And he broke it, and gave it to his friends. And he took the cup of wine, recalling those ancient days, and with it in his hands he made an offering of prayer and thanksgiving: “Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, who creates the fruit of the vine.”

All this he did – in accordance with the Law – but he added something that showed Grace in that moment: he said, “Whenever you do this, do it in remembrance of me.” Do it, then, to bring back this moment.

Make it present in your hearts. Remember when Jesus offered himself as the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.

Remember him as the one who leads us forth from the captivity of our own self-centeredness, the lower nature with its egotistical, passion-driven desires, into the freedom of reliance on the providence of God and trust in God’s eternal abundance.

I’m not sure it’s necessary to give much space here to defining nostalgia – that mixture of glad and sad longings that accompany recalling something long ago and far away – and we all know its effects.

If we try to recover a past experience for refuge from the present, or in worried retreat from the challenges of the future, if we try to recreate a feeling or mood to indulge in, we know it is at best a temporary patch on the fabric of time. It will tear away. We do not want to go with it when it goes.

We want to move forward, bravely and boldly, holding on to the promises of God, in the light of the world that dawns in Christ, because however dark the night, as children of the day we know that joy comes in the morning.


Joy opens the heart. –Rabbi Nachman of Breslov.

+

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Scary Fincial Times

Written for Trinity's October 2008 Newsletter by Brian Baker

We are living in scary financial times. Banks have failed. Credit is getting harder to get. Our lawmakers are scrambling to shore up our nation’s financial system. While I know the crisis has complex causes, I have been considering our own culpability for the problem we are in. I feel like we, as a nation, have been on a massive consumerist binge. Housing values/prices have doubled and tripled, thus increasing the “wealth” of homeowners. While home prices tripled, salaries did not Folks bought homes they couldn’t really afford because credit was made readily available. We all wanted a piece of the crazy real estate market. Stores regularly offered deals where you could buy expensive toys without paying a penny for years. So we bought, and bought and bought.

To what end. Were we happier? Perhaps for a brief time. But the joy of shopping doesn’t last. The new item quickly becomes old, and in need of an upgrade.

Is our current economic crisis a problem that needs to be fixed so we can get back to life as it was before? Or is it an invitation to change the way we have been living?

I believe it is the latter. I believe we are being invited to live a simpler life. We can’t keep filling our lives with new stuff. The stuff never satisfied us in the first place. That’s why we wanted more. Why don’t we stop our consumerist binging and learn to become a loving, caring community with what we have. I don’t believe we need anything more to experience the Kingdom of Heaven. My most fulfilling moments come when I am serving or working with others to help make the world, or the life of an individual, better.

I am not wondering how this crisis will end. I know things will settle down. I am wondering whether or not we will allow this situation to be our teacher. Will we learn to live life differently?
I am so grateful to be a part of a congregation that is focused on experiencing God’s Kingdom right now and generously sharing God’s love with others.

Saturday, October 4, 2008

rebuild my church




Most high, omnipotent, good Lord, grant your people grace to renounce gladly the vanities of this world; that, following the way of blessed Francis, we may for love of you delight in your whole creation with perfectness of joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

When knighthood was in flower, when Richard the Lionhearted was triumphing at the Battle of Acre, and all young manhood yearned to be on Crusade, among them was a young man in central Italy, in the proud town of Assisi. His father was a wealthy merchant, a dealer in French fabrics, and his son was his best sales representative.

In fact he’d nicknamed the boy ‘the little Frenchman’ shortly after his birth. And that is how he is known to history, not as Giovanni Bernardone, but as Frankie – Francis of Assisi.

As a young man Francis longed to be a hero of romance and a singer of romances: a troubadour as well as a crusader.

He was popular with the other young men – he had the best clothes, and he fixed them up at a reasonable rate. The young nobles of the town formed his entourage. As I said, he was a good salesman – and his father’s clothes shop prospered as Francis’ friends followed his style.

So when Francis wanted to accompany the knights marching through Italy to embark on crusade, his father paid for his suit of armor. And Francis started out – but something turned him back, not long after he generously gave his armor to a poor knight who had none.

Later he was a prisoner of war in the town across the valley, for some months, as his townspeople waged war on theirs. He was in a low dungeon. It was not to be his last.

For one day, in a exuberant gesture, Francis – having visited a poor church – loaded a horse with cloth from his father’s storehouse, rode to the next town, sold both horse and cargo, and returned with the cash to offer to the priest.

The priest thought something funny was going on, and refused the gift – so Francis cast the money, no more use to him, into the corner near the altar.

His father came looking for him. He hid out in the church basement for some weeks, a virtual prisoner. Then his father had him dragged out and hauled in front of the bishop, in the town square. There in front of God and everybody his father demanded he return ‘everything you have had from me.’

Francis complied – he removed all his clothes, and placed them at his father’s feet. The bishop threw his cloak around the young man.

Francis later scrounged up a castoff garment from the under-gardener, and sketched a cross on it with a piece of chalk. He wore it proudly. He was beginning to understand there was another way to take up the cross than to be a crusading knight in armor.

He began to take up his cross and follow Christ. He took his place in the true crusade, the struggle within human souls to cast off sinfulness and embrace the life of grace.

It was soon after that Francis found himself praying at a small decrepit church – long deferred maintenance had turned it into a virtual ruin. But it still had an altar, and above the altar an icon of the crucified Christ. He stared at the icon and the open eyes of Christ looked back. He heard the call:

Rebuild my church, which as you see is falling down.

Rebuild my church.

He began with his own bare hands, there and then. He began quite literally to rebuild that little church. Day by day, stone by stone, they built it slow and surely.

And slowly and surely the church began to be recover, and to be reborn into new life – and soon companions came to share in the work. They rebuilt that little church. And soon, they had rebuilt two more.

It was just the beginning. For the days of the crusaders had left the church in a sorry state – and Francis and his companions, in their own simple way, began to follow the gospel as their rule of life.

And their lives, and the life of the church, began to be reborn, remade through the work of human hands and the power of the Holy Spirit.

Some years ago a pastor named Robert Munger wrote out a message, entitled, “My Heart, Christ’s Home”. (http://www3.calvarychapel.com/bellmawr/myheart.html)

In it he compared the chambers of the heart, the mansions of the soul, to the rooms of a house. He described how a person might invite Jesus into their heart, only to discover gradually that there is more and more work there for Christ to do, to turn their heart into a true home for the indwelling of the Spirit of God.

As we open the door to Jesus to come into each area of our life, he is able to rebuild each of us as the temple of God we are called to be.

There are many rooms in a Christian’s soul – the room of intellect, the room of emotion, the room of personal morality, the room of social responsibility, the room where we pray, the room where we give of ourselves to others, the room where the stranger is welcome. In each of them Christ has work to do, to transform our lives.

Another pastor, John Landgraff, talked about the work of personal transformation, and how we can begin, in a small way or more ambitiously, doing over one room – or the whole house. As Christ begins to go to work in us, making his home in our hearts, the whole house begins to take on new life and new purpose.

This is reflected in the promises we have made, or had made for us, at baptism:

Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?

I will, with God’s help.

Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?

I will, with God’s help.

Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?

I will, with God’s help.

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?

I will, with God’s help.

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

I will, with God’s help.

In each of these vows you can see evidence of a building project going on, in the life of the Christian.

There is another building project going on – beyond the work of God in the individual there is the work of the Spirit in the Church, rebuilding it anew in every generation.

In his generation Francis heard the call: Rebuild my church. We are each called to take part in our generation in the work of the building and rebuilding of the Church.

We are to work alongside the master builder – and like those who have gone before us, Francis of Assisi and all the others through the ages – we have work to do.

Rebuild my church.

The call goes out to every new generation of believers. We are his people and our hands do his work in the world.

Rebuild my church.

There are many rooms in the household of God, the house of prayer for all people. They are not all visible to us – but we can see some of them. There is room for education of the young, there is room for music and worship, and there is room for fellowship and celebration.

However you are called to serve, whatever place you are to take in the work of the people, you are called, as one of the people of God, to be transformed - to become one of the living stones built into the temple of his Glory.

At the altar you have a chance to renew your own intention to follow the call of Christ, in your own vocation as a person of God, called here and now as a part of the church, to accept the transforming presence of God in your life, and to invite Christ anew into your life to do the continuing work of rebuilding your heart as the dwelling-place of the Spirit of God.

O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquility the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.


+