Shekinah

Prophet in a Trenchcoat

2011-12-11T15:12:00.000-08:00

The Spirit Has Anointed Me…
• Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
• Psalm 126 or Luke 1:46b-55
• 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
• John 1:6-8, 19-28
Holy Trinity Episcopal Church
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor, 12/11/11

As an Episcopal Priest in Berkeley, I not infrequently find myself at dinner tables or in group conversations with all kinds of people. And at the revelation that I am a priest, a kind of shocked and horrified silence often settles upon the crowd. And I hear all sorts of unsolicited opinions. Some that have been stated before they know I am a priest.
“All religion is absurd!” I hear.
“Why does there need to be a “magical being who controls everything?”
or “We don’t need God to be good people”
“More harm than good has been done in the name of religion”
“And finally, “You have no hold on reality”

Once I gather my tenuous hold on reality, I say,

“What a bleak world it must be, to believe only in science, to believe only what is visible, what is scientifically provable. What would we do without people of imagination, people of faith, people of the Spirit, what would we do without our prophets? What new invention could come into being without the inventor having imagination, taking a leap of faith, trusting in something that has not yet been proved, and that possibly never can be? What artwork would be created if everything had to have a logical and practical use and explanation and be proven to fit into the scientifically defined realm of reality?
And what force would help us to resist our human tendencies toward greed and self interest and spur us on to a compassionate and just world?”

None of these arguments particularly convince.

I am used to being around atheists here in Berkeley, and I am used to seeing intelligent people on the news or on talk shows who seem to share those views. So I was quite astonished to hear this from the brilliant comedian and writer of the priceless “The Daily Show,” John Steward. He said the following when referring to the great economic inequities in our country. “It’s not Christian!” Then recovering himself, he said, “Or Jewish or Muslim!” He himself is a Jew, married to a Catholic. Then soon after, on a different news show, I heard the wonderful and always controversial Keith Olberman say, when describing Michael Blomberg’s destruction of the Occupy Wall Street camp, exactly the same thing- “Its not Christian!” he bellowed.

But nothing surprised me more that the amazing words of the prophet Chris Hedges.

Chris Hedges is a modern day prophet, whom the Spirit of the Lord has surely anointed. He is a hugely talented, Pulitzer-prize-winning author, journalist and war correspondent, who is also, I found to my amazement, a faithful Christian. I had no idea of his religious background until he made an extraordinary speech, and I looked him up. Then I read that he had gone to seminary at Harvard Divinity School, and that his father was a Presbyterian minister. He has been absolutely fearless, as a prophet must be, covering wars all over the world, and seeing the inevitable horrors. He is quoted in the beginning of the award-winning film about the Iraq War, “The Hurt Locker:
"The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug."
And yet with all this experience, all this knowledge that would turn most people cynical, he has held on to his faith- in God and in humankind.

Chris Hedges wrote a book, as it turns out, called “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” which came out of a series of interviews he did with three prominent authors, who have been called “The New Atheists.”
Chris Hedges compares the new Atheists with the Christian Fundamentalists, in that the Atheists have made science an absolute religion, whose every word must be taken for absolute truth. They see nothing in shades of gray- everything is absolute- everything is black and white. There is no room for diversity of thought, diversity of belief.

Then I saw another astonishing piece written by Chris Hedges that truly had the passion and fiery certainty of an Old Testament Social Justice prophet, and the blazing heraldry of John the Baptizer proclaiming the coming of something great. This was a defense of the occupy movement, which was also a defense of Christianity, pointing out the great social justice movements in history have been inspired or led by religious leaders. He urges the church of today to embrace the Occupy movement- not let it die. The name of the piece is “Were You There when they Crucified my Movement?”
He started out by saying that outside the doors of churches, many of which have trouble filling a quarter of the pews on Sundays, struggles a movement, driven largely by young men and women, which has as its unofficial credo the Beatitudes:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied….
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons and daughters of God.
Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
He goes on to point out that it was the church, and its expression in Liberation Theology in Latin America, which gave moral support and direction for the opposition to dictatorship in the bloody 1970’s in those desperately oppressed countries.
It was the church in East Germany that organized the peaceful opposition marches in Leipzig that would bring down the Communist regime in that country.
It was the church in Czechoslovakia, and its 90-year-old cardinal, that blessed and defended the Velvet Revolution.
And of course it was the church, and especially the African-American church, that made possible the civil rights movements. Not only Martin Luther King Jr, but other the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Rev. John Duffy and so many faithful lay people.
In Advent, when we celebrate hope, when we remember in the church how Mary and Joseph left Nazareth for Bethlehem, we remember who it was who came into the world. We remember who was incarnated on that holy night. Who it was who gave us the Gospel’s radical message of justice and compassion. Who gave us the message of love.

I saw a film of Chris Hedges as he was walking down a New York street, talking to someone about the Occupy movement. He said something like, “I’ve got kids now (he has four as it turns out) and this is not about us anymore, it is about the next generation, my children’s generation. This is about them. My passion for the justice of what you young people are doing, and I would even use the word love, is that you are fighting for the future of my three year old daughter [and here this hardened war correspondent began to cry] and he said, God bless you for it- God bless you.” An unnamed long-haired young man appeared from outside the frame of the film, and, Jesus-like, embraced the tearful prophet, bringing him good news, indeed.

Amen.

Occupy Christ

2011-11-30T22:19:00.000-08:00

Reflections on Is. 64:1-9; Ps. 80: 1-7, 17-19; 1 Cor. 1:3-9; Mk. 13:24-37
Good Shepherd Episcopal Church
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor, 11/27/11

The first Sunday of Advent is a good time to come to church. If you stay awake and pay attention, you will hear that all the dark scriptural readings we have just heard are trying to prepare us for something. Clearly, it is something other than Santa Claus.

The readings are dark powerful and alarming. These are not quiet readings, These are not peaceful readings. The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give it’s light, the stars will fall, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

The vision of the coming of the Son of Man, in clouds and great glory, comes directly from a dream. It is the dream of Daniel the prophet, which begins by describing four surrealistically horrifying beasts who emerge from the sea:- a lion with eagle’s wings, a bear with three tusks, a winged leopard and most horrific of all, a gigantic beast with ten horns and steel teeth. The Son of Man arrives on his clouds of glory, interrupting the fourth beast as it tries to destroy the enthroned Ancient One, robed in white. With the coming of the Son of Man, the beast is vanquished. Darkness and chaos are overcome.

The readers of Mark would have been quite familiar with this image and this story from the Book of Daniel, where the Son of Man is placed on his heavenly throne, and given dominion over everything. But in our Gospel reading, the coming of the Son of Man marks the second earthly coming of Jesus, When he comes he faithfully gathers his elect, from all the corners of the earth.

This is an end-time story we hear at the very dawn of Advent. But we are cautioned to stay awake- to keep watch. Because, as the prophets have foretold, something really extraordinary is beginning. From darkness and chaos, something revolutionary will emerge. The whole order of the world will change, the world will be flooded with light, and the forces of darkness will be repelled. After all the suffering, tidings of joy, are heralded.

The truth is, if we are awake at all, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see, we will behold striking expression of the Advent times here in our streets and all over the world- a moving of the spirit and a caution to stay awake that is hard to miss.

My parents we proto-beatniks and they loved nothing so much as to share a bottle of wine and then waft out into the woods, reciting poetry to each other and then (according to my mother, my hand to God) actually embrace the trees. So, from the very beginning, because of my genetics and through no fault of my own, I never had a fighting chance of being a Republican. So I do admit to a weakness for radical movements, a weakness, in fact for revolution. And that is one of the big reasons that I became a Christian. Jesus is just SO RADICAL! He started, from a very unpromising little band of brothers and sisters, who began Occupy Galilee, a most profound and lasting revolution that is still as challenging and radical as the day it was born. And he did it non-violently. Jesus and his disciples kept a common purse, kept no extraneous possessions- and so they were radical in their self-imposed poverty. Jesus told them, “Call no man your master, call no man father, he said “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.” He said let me do the work of a slave, let me wash your feet. So I even I believe he might have preferred a leaderless movement if he could have had one. I believe he would still like that.

Tuesday November 17 I was safe at home in my fold. It was my day off and I was really enjoying doing nothing. But my husband bounded through the door and said, “Robert Reiche, (the wonderful writer, professor and political philosopher), is going to speak at the UC Campus at Sproul Hall at 8:00- let’s go hear him!” It was warm in my house, and I was betting it would be cold at Sproul Plaza, no matter how inspiring the talk. But I decided to stretch my comfort zone and leave the nest. When we approached Sproul Plaza, it was clear that we were not the only ones who decided to come. It looked to be about 5,000 people milling about or sitting in little organized circles. It turned out that these organized circles were the General Assembly of Occupy Cal going full force.
The Wednesday before, the protestors at Occupy Cal had set up tents, as had so many occupy sites, and as in so many other cases, the police were called to pull them down. But what was so astonishing was that the very first action by the police was to viciously (I saw the tape) drive their night sticks into the rib cages of the students who had formed a circle, linking arms to protect their campsite. Well, on Tuesday night, the General Assembly was taking a vote on whether or not to erect the tents again. I was floored at their courage. I was floored anyway, because I had not seen anything like this many young people protesting for peace and justice in just about exactly forty years. I lived in Washington DC during the Vietnam War, so I saw a lot of mass protests of young people then. But not since then. Eighty percent of the students voted to put the tents up again. The motion passed.
At bottom the Occupy movement is about compassion and justice, and not only economic justice. But according to the author of Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein, it is about much more than that. He says it is about nothing less than creating a new world, a world of equality and peace and healing that our hearts tell us is possible. Tidings of great joy indeed. I went on a site called globalrevolution.tv, a switchboard for live streaming coverage of the Occupy movement, and up came a picture of a broadly smiling young woman with bright pink hair, holding a sign. It said “Compassion is Revolutionary”. I couldn’t agree more. Then came the live-streaming part: I saw police bristling with nightsticks in riot gear roughly shoving protestors who were trying to march. I thought about the beast with the steel teeth. One woman was poignantly speaking to the policeman pushing her back- “Please don’t fight us-we need you- join us- don’t fight us- we are you!” Then a chant sounded as the police began the arrests “This is a peaceful protest! This is a peaceful protest!” As people were being pushed to the ground the chant changed “The whole world is watching!” The whole world is watching. And compassion is revolutionary. And expensive.

In this Advent season, amid the unavoidable chaos and darkness, we pray for the peace to slow down and open our hearts. For the grace to be ready to embrace the coming Messiah- Emmanuel- God-with-us. For surrender to get our hearts and minds around this amazing and precious notion of God coming to us as a helpless infant. What could be more radical than that? What could be more radical than the incarnation? What could possibly be more radical, more revolutionary than God flooding into a mortal being that he might grow in grace and wisdom and flood into all of us? Last week we heard the gospel reading that showed us that the compassion of Jesus was so complete that he not only identified with the us, he insisted that he actually WAS us; “When I was hungry, you gave me food, when I was thirsty, you gave me drink, when I was a stranger you took me in …”

Even with all its imperfections, the remarkable modern movement we have been witnessing seems to contain something of that spirit- something of divine generosity, something of the Reign of God. All the nations seem to be gathered before us, as the needs of the poor and marginalized are being lifted up to the public attention world-wide- proclaimed in the marketplace, in our modern temples, and on the street.

There has been a lot of anxiety that the movement seems to have no leader. But what I see is the incarnation of the radical Jesus in thousands of leaders in this movement, over-turning the tables of the money changers in the temple, and pointing out the hypocrisy of the mighty. People also complain that there are no specific demands. I would say that they have one great demand, very like the one spoken by the prophet Amos, and taught by Jesus:

"Let Justice roll down like the waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

Stay awake- something remarkable is going to be born.

In the Breaking...

2011-05-09T18:12:00.000-07:00

Reflections on Luke 24:13-23 5:1-12

Holy Trinity La Santisima Trinidad and Good Shepherd Berkeley, 5/8/11, Easter II
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor

What a week we have lived through. And what a neck-snappingly swift global change of focus we have had, from the pomp and frills of the royal wedding to the brutal death of Osama Bin Laden. Our own Bishop Marc recently said that we are in an apocalyptic moment. He said that an apocalyptic moment in history is like a baptismal moment for an individual. But what are we being baptized into?

In an individual baptism, you are baptized into the death of Christ, that you might be raised with him, that you might recognize and live into the living Christ. An appropriate notion for our Easter season. And one of the signs of the living Christ, Bishop Marc goes on to say, is how we treat our enemies. Well, the way we have treated our arch enemy just this past week, has created, in my mind, the baptism of fire that we now find ourselves in.

Sometimes it is hard to tell who our enemies are. Sometimes we may wonder if we have any real enemies at all. Often we may feel that we have met the enemy, and he is us. But no such problem exists with the formerly living human being we know as Osama Bin Laden. He is obviously our enemy, and someone who was undeniably instrumental in the deaths of 3,000 of our tribe.

Jesus’ notion of “love your enemy” rather than “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” the Old Testament suggestion for enemy combatants, is one of the most original ideas Jesus ever had. Most everything else Jesus said (well, outside of the extraordinarily long-winded monologues in the Gospel of John) are re-iterations of his beloved justice-loving prophets of the Old Testament, who taught him what it was to be a truly righteous Jew.

Do we believe Jesus meant what he said when he told us to love our enemies? When he indicated that even “the least of these my brethren” were worthy to be seen as Christ himself? Was he sincere when he cried out “No more of this!” at his arrest when his disciple severed the ear of the slave?

As civilized, let alone spiritual beings, there must be a way to at least begin to obey these teachings, which are so profound. Assassinating and then proudly proclaiming the death of our enemy, literally dancing in the streets in celebration of man shot to death in the presence of his 12 year-old daughter, does not seem to me to be a close following of the letter of Jesus’ intent.

I understand and share the very basic human tendency to want to celebrate. Times are hard- especially for those of us who have lost our jobs, our homes, our security. We long to run out into the streets, throw our hats up in the air and shout for joy. And I understand the need for a feeling of justice and closure for the horrific events of almost ten years ago. But speaking only for myself, the killing of Bin Laden does not bring justice or closure. It just adds one more death to the tragic toll of 3,000.

I have read many comments and many quotes people have come up with to try to deal with the horrendous and divisive nature of this recent assassination, and the response the world over. Brian McLaren, a progressive Evangelical pastor and writer said,

"Joyfully celebrating the killing of a killer who joyfully celebrated killing, carries an irony that I hope will not be lost on us. Are we learning anything, or are we simply spinning harder in the cycle of violence?”

I also saw a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 book, The Strength to Love, he writes:

"Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars… violence multiplies violence … in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says “Love your enemies,” he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies– or else?"

Our gospel story today follows a death that similarly upset the fabric of the society of the day. Some rejoiced mightily, some mourned mightily. There are many eerie similarities in the news of our week and our Gospel story. In both there was an execution of a man who profoundly threatened the powers and principalities of the day.

Great emotions were stirred. Certainly grief and mourning in some sectors- in the heart of the 12 year old daughter in one, and in the heart of Mother Mary, in the other. Great rejoicing took place in our modern story, in front of the White House and at Ground Zero. Doubtless there was rejoicing in some quarters after the crucifixion. And great fear followed both incidents. In our modern day, some might even be tempted to stay inside for fear of the Muslims.

Our gospel contains, once again, a story of mistaken identity. As in Shakespeare, it is a revealing and useful plot devise, because it illustrates how wrong we can be in our assumptions, and it is always useful to be showed how wrong we can be. In our Easter Gospel story, Mary fails to recognize the risen Christ, and mistakes him for the gardener. Our travelers to Emmaus, probably fleeing Jerusalem in terror, fearing for their lives, are not able to recognize Jesus in the several hours they apparently spent together. Until the breaking of the bread.

What are we not recognizing? There is a poignant coincidence in the similarity of the names of our president and of the dead arch enemy. Several times I have caught myself accidentally referring to the death of Obama, and then wanting to knock on wood, cross myself and turn around three times after spitting on the earth, that it may never be so! The Osama/Obama rhyme reveals to us how very differently we recognize these two human beings. We do not even see the humanity, let alone the Christ in one of these children of God.

What else are we not recognizing? I would say that if we allow ourselves to celebrate, if we are complicit in anyway with the murderous act of last week, we are not seeing the Christ in ourselves.

As theologian, writer, and rebel, Father Matthew Fox writes:

"Only the human species dares to deny it’s divinity. But now it is time to 'deny the denial.'” And then he asks :

"Can our churches themselves believe enough in the resurrection and in Pentecost to be resurrected and to become awakeners of the Spirit?”

My response to this question would be, “Yes, we can.”

We need a recognition of the divinity Matthew Fox speaks of, and the inevitable breaking of our cycle of violence that will result. We need it as desperately as we need the breaking of the bread. And it is in this breaking that we will be able to recognize Christ, in ourselves, in our enemies, and in our lives, as we truly live into this baptism of ours, which will, one day, break upon us like a long-awaited dawn.

Amen.

The Art of Resurrection

2011-04-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

Easter Sunday, 4/24/11
Reflections on John 20:1-18
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad/ Good Shepherd, Berkeley

Alleluia! Christ has risen!

Three images of the resurrection have come to me lately to illuminate this holy week.

The image on the banner you might have noticed outside the church today describes the heart of our Gospel reading. If you didn’t, it is also helpfully provided in your bulletin! It is from a 12th century fresco in the Scroveni chapel in Padua Italy, and the artist is Giotto di Bondone.

It depicts the moment after Mary Magdalene has heard the voice of Jesus calling out her name- the moment of recognition. She cries out “Rabbouni!” which means “dear teacher”, and falls to her knees, reaching out to touch him. We know from the gospel that Jesus’ reply to her is "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to my father.”

The angels who stood guard at the tomb are now magically outside of it, appropriately wearing wings and halos, and each brandishing a slender scepter. They are perched high atop what appears to be a huge stone ossuary, and one angel is front and center, with Jesus at the far right and the other angel at the far left. The soldiers guarding the tomb, like the unroused souls in hell, are fast asleep and lie in a heap behind the figure of Mary Magdalene.

Mary, who had already been pulled out of a very dark tomb once by Jesus when he freed her of seven demons, reaches out to touch Jesus as she kneels before him.

A different but equally beautiful depiction of resurrection is on a small plague in our sacristy here. It is 14th century Russian Orthodox icon called “Icon of Victory- The Resurrection.” In this amazing image, The risen Christ, far from resisting their touch, is pulling Adam and Eve from their tombs, grasping them by their wrists and hauling them up into life. They are surrounded by the Old Testament righteous and those souls who Jesus has already liberated from Hell. Below them are the chaotic remains of hell, with Satan bound and gagged and all of hell disintegrated into small sharp fragments. As the old Easter hymn goes,

Christ is risen from the dead,
Trampling down death by death,
And upon those in the tombs bestowing life!

Every year at Easter in Guatemala, another work of art is created by the people.
I read a children’s book that described this annual miracle. The surface of the streets are covered in what appears to be flowers, in fantastic ornamental patterns that resemble the exquisite hupiles that the indigenous women all wear. But fact they are not flowers, but patterns made of colored saw dust, laboriously assembled on the surface of the streets, awaiting the great Easter procession.

The children’s book was about a little girl who had taken part in the creation of this ornate carpeting, or alfombra. When the procession carrying the image of Jesus came to the section of the street the little girl had helped to create, she suddenly ran out and blocked the way with her body- she could not bear to see the beautiful work destroyed.

Her father took her by the hand and led her away. “My daughter,” he said. “It is our custom. The alfombras are like offerings to life. They are not fixed in time. The flowers bloom and then die, but they give us seeds for the birth of other flowers. Life follows death and death follows life.”

In this procession, Jesus was trampling down, not the gates of hell, but an equisite offering- a masterpiece of new blossoms, bearing the seeds of resurrection.

The long days of Lent, long before blossoming, long before seeds, and the progression of Holy week, leading up to the desolation of Good Friday have been fullfilled. These days mirror our own lives, our own descents into the tomb. The tomb of loss- loss of a home, a job, a wife, a husband, a child. Losing our health, our wholeness, our spirit, our faith. Looking into that tomb, as Mary did, hopefully, even in her grief, and not even finding the expected body- finding only an empty tomb. Finding only two small piles of desolate rags. And so Mary weeps as do we. Mary despairs as do we.

And then Jesus apprears, but in her greif, as perhaps in ours at first, she does not recognize the risen Christ. Then, in that joyful moment of recognition, she reaches out her hands.

Why does Jesus tell Mary not to hold onto him, when he seems like the only thing worth holding on to? One comentary I read simply said that Mary must learn a new relationship with Jesus- a spiritual rather than a physical one. I think Mary has the same instinct we all do when a loved one has passed away- we want to hold onto them- to have a lock of their hair, to hold onto a possession of theirs, to bury our face in their garment.

But Jesus was in a liminal state, one that could not be grasped. The tomb and the angels had created some kind of Chrisalis for the resurrection. And now in our Gospel reading, Jesus finds himself, in the words of ancient Celtic spirituality, in a “thin place” between life and death, a place where the veil between this world and the next is very thin. Mary has to see, as do we all, that there is a more eternal presence than the physical one. And although we might not be able to hold that presence, it is able to hold us, and eternally.

We don’t always know what resurrection might look like for us- or what it might take to get us there. We don’t know how that blinding light breaking on us from outside of the tomb might feel. To our shock, our sawdust flowers may be swept away to be replaced by the real thing. The familliar comfort of our coffin may be denied us.

But Jesus comes to us, and reaches for our hands, and whether or not we reach for him, he takes our wrists, and pulls us, blinking and gasping, into the bright, unaccustomed brilliance of abundant life.
Amen

Open Your Eyes...

2011-04-07T21:27:00.000-07:00

Reflections on John 9:1-41
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad, Richmond, 4/3/11

This is a long and astonishing parable on blindness and belief. As always in the Gospel of John, the true believers are the ones who, unfailingly believe in Jesus as the Messiah. The unbelievers are the people of Jesus’ religion and heritage: the Jews.

We hear of the strictness of the Pharisaic code- a man must not work on the Sabbath - even to mix saliva with mud to enact a miracle. A man born blind is simply proof of the sins of his parents or himself- the only question is- which one sinned? But nothing is more chilling than the terror displayed by the parents of the man born blind. When pressed by “the Jews” they would sooner turn in their own son “Let him speak for himself” than suffer the worst thing imaginable for any Jew- to be expelled from the synagogue.

A text now called the Birkat Ha-minim, or Benediction Against Heretics was discovered in the Cairo Genizah in 1896. Apparently, any first century Jew was forced to recite this before they could enter the temple, making it impossible for the Christian Jews to enter their former house of worship.

…And let the arrogant Government (the Romans)
be speedily uprooted in our days.
Let the Nazarenes (the Christians)
And the Minim (the heretics) be destroyed in a moment
And let them be blotted out of the Bood of Life and
Not be inscribed together with the righteous.
Blessed art thou, O Lord, who humblest the proud.

Blindness in the presence of miracles is an oft-repeated theme in the Old and New Testaments. I spoke of Hagar last week, who was certain that she was lost in the wilderness, and so desperate that she left her young son under a bush so that she would not see him die, then she wandered away.

But God opened her eyes- he took away her desperate blindness, and she saw that she was right in front of a well of water. No longer desperate, but filled.
Mary Magdalene, upon seeing the risen Lord, was blind enough to take him for the gardener! And on the road to Emmaus, two of Jesus’ disciples, those closest to him, came upon Jesus on the road, and took him for just some guy who, apparently had a remarkably good handle on the scriptures!

How do we remain blind to the miraculous? After a long cold winter, I took down heavy curtains in my bedroom to launder them. When I woke up, for the first time in a very long time, I was looking directly outside at the dawn. There were exquisite bands of gold and pink stretching across the sky, and I thought-
“Wow! Does this happen every day?” How do we insulate ourselves, how do we protect our selves, how do we all remain blind to the miraculous?

For more than a year, I have been mourning my best friend Alison, who died after a long illness. She used to travel to California from Georgia every summer for 13 years with her young son, Alexander. My eyes were gloriously opened, this Spring, when her beautiful son, now 21 years old and the spitting image of her (except that he is 6’6”) gave us a call. He said he wanted to continue the tradition- he wanted to spend his Spring break with us, and then come back to camp with us in Big Sur in the summer- just as he and Alison always used to do. The miraculous occurred- Alison was resurrected for me in her beautiful boy, and now I too, have a son, and Alexander has the closet thing possible to a mother. He spent a wonderful week with us in March, and his smile, his humor, his sandy blond hair- so much of him was my dear friend come to visit. My daughters were reunited with their new older brother, and it was, for the first time in my life, like having three kids!

Before his visit, I had known, I had seen what was true, which was that there was no resurrection, and I had lost my best friend of 43 years, and there could be no comfort for me. But fortunately, my eyes were opened to the miraculous, in the person of my tall, blond, sweet new son.

Jesus, tells us that he came into the world so that those who are blind may see, and those who see may become blind.

I think all of us err on the side of out-thinking God. We KNOW what will or will not happen. We can just SEE it. We don’t take into account that miracles can and do happen. We are too apt to see what we see, believe what we believe. The disciples of course, were champions at this. There they were, actually in Jesus’ presence, and still, so often, they were blind.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Christian/Buddhist poet and theologian has a lovely passage about this in a meditation about the Eucharist:

The disciples had been following Jesus, and had seen Him, had the chance to look at Him, to look into his eyes, to see him smile, to see Him in reality. But it seems they were not capable of being in contact with that marvelous reality. Then he broke bread and poured wine and said, “This is my flesh and blood, take it, eat it, drink it, and you will have eternal life.” We eat a lot, we drink a lot [we SEE a lot] but what do we eat? We eat phantoms, we drink ghosts. We don’t eat real bread, real wine, real life. But Jesus said, “This is my flesh, this is my blood. It’s a very drastic way of awakening us from our forgetfulness, from our ignorance.

A drastic way of awakening us from our blindness.
Amen.

Jesus Met the Woman at the Well

2011-04-07T21:23:00.000-07:00

Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad, Richmond; Good Shepherd 3/27/11

Reflections on John 4:5-42

The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor

In the Old Testament as well as the new, there is just something about women and wells. For the men, the thing seems to be the parting of waters. But for the women, it’s the wells.

All through the Old Testament, women received blessing, grace, and often husbands, at wells of water. Hagar, the slave of Abraham and Sarah had been cast out into the desert with her young son, and wandered along lost for some time. Her skin of water was empty, and she left her son under a bush and walked away so that she would not have to see him die. She wept loudly in her agony. God answered her by opening her eyes and allowing her to see that she was standing in front of a well of water. God assured her with a further blessing- that God would make a great nation of her son.

When it came time for Abraham to find a wife for his other son, Isaac, he sent a servant to search far and wide. He found Rebecca at a well. She proved that she was the chosen one by her kindness, giving water to the camels, and then agreeing to travel back home to marry Isaac.

Isaac’s son, Jacob, whose well is the one featured in today’s story, first met his favorite (but not his first) wife Rachel at a well. He watered her flock, kissed her and wept aloud. This was apparently enough to win her.

Finally, Ziporah and her sisters came to a well to water their flock. Moses drew water for them and defended them from the other shepherds. Zipporah later became the wife of Moses. And it was Moses who was the first, and the most famous of a series of water-parting male prophets. He raised his staff and parted the Red Sea so that the nation of Israel could be delivered to faith and freedom.

Then Joshua, his protégé, led his warriors through the River Jordan. As they marched behind the Arc of the Covenant, the waters rose up in a heap so that the soldiers could cross on dry land.

Also at the River Jordan, Elijah rode to glory in a flaming chariot, while his protégé, Elisha, watched in astonishment. Then Elisha struck the River Jordon with Elijah’s cloak, and sure enough, the waters parted.

I have heard it said that In the New Testament, Jesus transcends all these parting of the water stories, also at the River Jordan. He parts the waters ABOVE the firmament. At his baptism, the heavens part and the Holy Spirit comes down to pay a call on the New Creation, who was, himself, a well of living water.

The is was a place of pairings. And just as Jesus’ baptism brought the partings of the waters to a new level, Jesus’ meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well brings a new dimension to the pairing stories. This time at Jacob’s ancient well, it was not just a man and a woman who were paired. It was the pairing- the symbolic reconciliation- of two tribes who despised each other with a passion.
A pair of tribes possessed of seemingly irreconcilable differences. Their hatred is well illustrated by a quote from the Book of Sirach, which presents the Samaritans as sub-human:

Two nations my soul detests, and the third is not even a people: Those who live in Seir, and the Philistines, and those foolish ones who live in Shechem [of Samaria]

As a Jewish Rabbi, Jesus could not have chosen a less likely subject with whom to share water than the Samaritan woman. With his offering of living water, Jesus turns the age-old story of tribalism, of hating one’s enemy, one its head. You had only to look at the sky to see what time it was. The time was high noon, and that bright sun shone on a transcendental laying down of arms.

The Samaritan woman is almost an opposite entity to the person of Nicodemus, whom we heard about last week. Nicodemus was not only a Jew, but a respected religious leader, and, of course, a man. The Samaritan woman has so little status that she is not even given a name in our story. She is female, from a despised tribe, has a highly questionable marital history, and is now living unmarried with yet another man. I have read that the normal time of day for women to gather at the well and draw water was early morning- but this woman comes at noon when no one else is there, possibly to avoid their distain. But Jesus does not distain her- does not judge her for any of these things. And more amazingly, he proceeds to have the longest theological discussion with her of any in the New Testament. His conversation with her far surpasses his exchange with Nicodemus, which Jesus cuts short in apparent impatience. But with the Samaritan woman, Jesus blasts through their cultural differences to usher her into the Kingdom of God, which, as he says is not only coming soon, but is now here.

The story’s opening shocker is Jesus asking a foreign woman to lend him her unclean utensil to give him a drink of water. After she sputters her protest, he offers her, as he says, “living water.” She apparently takes this to mean running or flowing water, which would have been precious enough in the parched land of Samaria. Jewish renderings of the apocalypse are filled with lush gardens thick with rivers and streams. The Book of Zechariah describes the Day of the Lord like this: “On that day, living waters will flow out of Jerusalem.”

But Jesus will convince the Samaritan woman that he has replaced the Jerusalem Temple, and the Samaritan Temple. The living water now flows from him.

Even after Jesus offers her living water, the woman perceives Jesus only as a prophet. Since the only prophet recognized by the Samaritans was Moses, the giver of the Law, she asks Jesus a legal question- on the location of the Temple, which Samaritans believe to be on Mount Gerazin, not in Jerusalem.

This question puts the dispute between the Samaritans and the Temple Jews in center place, but Jesus does not take the bait. His response opens the door to salvation for both the Samaritans and the Jews- in fact, for everyone. He says that the location of the temple does not matter anymore. In the Kingdom of God, place is irrelevant. The hour is coming, and is now here, when people will worship the Father, not in any temple, but in Spirit and in Truth. When the woman says that she believes that the Messiah is coming, Jesus simply says,
“I am he.” This seems to be enough for her to believe. She walks away, transformed, and leaves her jar- after all, she certainly does not need it for the Water of Life. And Jesus transforms the Old Testament stories in terms of gender as well. It is he who waits passively at the well, and the Samaritan woman who becomes a leader of her people. Like all those water-parting prophets, she is clearing a path to bring her people to faith and freedom.

What was it like for this woman to have been accepted, taken seriously, to have been so respected by Jesus- to have been offered the water of life? What was it like for her? What is it like for those of us who can’t believe that Jesus would offer US the water of life? It is astonishing. It is confounding. How comforting it is for those of us who have, during our lives been wedded to at least five things that were supposed to make us happy and did not. Or for those of us who may have long worshipped at the wrong temple, and I don’t mean the one on Mount Gerazim.

But Jesus does come to us. And just as he scandalously requests a drink of water from the Samaritan woman, he asks something of us as well. Something that we, at least at first, may have no idea how to give him. We may believe, as the Samaritan woman did, that the obstacles are great, that societal conventions forbid us to answer his request. But Jesus breaks down all those barriers. He parts the waters and sweeps away mountains and leads us to the well. And when Jesus gives us this living water, then we have a pairing from which we need never part. We are like the Prodigal Son in the arms of his father, like the lost sheep in the arms of the shepherd, like the child who unquestionably owns the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen

The Evolution of Angels

2011-01-05T09:32:00.001-08:00

Reflections on Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

Good Shepherd Church 1/2/11
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor

The readings we have been enjoying in the Christmas season describe a very familiar message from the angels – one that we all know and treasure. A baby arrives, like many babies do, in a cold, unsheltered environment, sheltered only by the love of its astonished parents. This is a very prosaic beginning- a baby human born among his human parents, and several common animals. Even the arrival of the shepherds is not overly surprising, but then, the shepherds begin to tell the tale of what the angels said to them: “To you is born this day in the City of David, a Savior, who is the Messiah. We read that “all who heard it were amazed” and Mary, astonished, treasures this news in her heart.

But in our Gospel reading today, we hear of a new set of angelic messages- beginning with a very ominous one. Joseph is warned by the angels that he must flee with his family, or Herod will surely destroy the child. Joseph unquestioningly follows the advise of the angel and brings his child to Egypt. Twice more Joseph is visited by the angel in a dream, and twice more he obeys, and brings his wife and child to safety in Nazareth.

When did angels first appear in human consciousness? When did the idea of the Holy begin? When did the first notion of God emerge? These questions are beautifully explored in a great book I am now reading. Karen Armstrong’s “The Case for God”, is not only a remarkable and intelligent attempt to answer these questions, it also seems to be an answer to the numerous books we now see that are basically “The Case for Atheism.”

In the beginning of Ms. Armstrong’s book, we find ourselves in France, in the underground caverns of Lascaux. The guide has just switched off his flashlight and, as one visitor recalled,” The senses are suddenly wiped out- the millennia drop away. You were never in a darker darkness in your life.” Then as now, in order to arrive at the caves with the famous prehistoric animals painted on the ceiling, one has to go back to the utter, formless, directionless blackness of... the beginning. Then as now, the pilgrims must “stumble for eighty feet down a long sloping tunnel, sixty-five feet below ground level, penetrating ever more deeply into the bowels of the earth.” They then have the privilege of seeing what seems to be an incredibly ancient precedent to ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The earliest French site at Grosse Chavet, dates from about 30,000 BCE. It is now apparently accepted that these labyrinthine caves were sacred places for the performance of a religious ritual- they were man-made wombs for the Holy. They were temples. Why did humans, in these distant times, express themselves, make their mark, go to such extraordinary lengths and expend so much energy, so much apparently unproductive labor, to create these amazing images of oxen and bison horses and mammoths- these startlingly beautiful images? What angels were they obeying?

On my vacation last month my husband and I had a rare opportunity to spend five days in the museums and Galleries of the amazing (and free!) Smithsonian Institution, as I had as a child. We were particularly captivated by a wonderful display of early Homo Sapiens and their tools, art work, early rituals and religion. Probably the very first implication of a ritual action, a consciousness of the afterworld, is the fact that among a number of skeletons deposited in a deep cave, was a smooth carved and burnished stone that had been placed there with the bodies. There seemed to be a need to honor them, or to equip them for the afterlife. The evidence is mounting that even these early humans had some consciousness of the sacred.

Far from shrinking from the scientific evidence of creation, as some modern as well as ancient Christianians have done, our own Bishop Marc brought with him, when he first joined us from Alabama, a wonderful presentation called the Cosmic Walk. This is a ritual created to celebrate and illustrate the miracle of the natural history of the universe, using sacred language. A rope is placed on the ground in a great spiral, and candles are lit at important milestones. We are given the opportunity to see what this glorious creation, so often celebrated in our religion, is really all about. I have always noted that this account has much in common with the Genesis story. It begins with “The Great Flaring Forth” more commonly known as “The Big Bang” 14 Billion years ago, and then describes the development of the stars, the supernovas, the universe, the earth, the emergence of plant and animal life, finally detailing human evolution. Here it is in a MUCH edited and abridged form:

5 Million Years Ago – Human Ancestors Walk on Two Legs
In Africa, our ancestors leave the forest, stand up, and walk!

140,000 years ago – Anatomically Modern Human Emerges
The ancestors of modern humans walk the savannah of east-central
Africa. All modern humans are the progeny of one small group of these.

12,000 years ago- A Homo Sapiens artist paints an image on the walls of Lascaux: A large bison that has been pierced by a spear, thrust through its hindquarters. Lying in front of the animal is a man, with arms outstretched, wearing what seems to be a bird mask. His staff, also lying on the ground, is also topped by a bird’s head. The image is repeated many times in different places, and the man depicted is likely a shaman.

Armstrong contends that the very first efforts at art and the very first efforts at worship were one and the same. There was a irresistible pull to soothe or explain the profound discomfort felt even then, by the killing of creatures so much like themselves. The shaman- a early priest, was doing his or her best to span the mystery of life and death- slaughter and survival. As Armstrong writes, “From the very beginning, it seems, religious life was rooted in an acknowledgement of the fact that life depends on the destruction of other creatures”- on sacrifice.

Angel-like, the shaman were thought to have a kind of mystical power of flight- thus the bird-mask. And the paints were composed of animal elements- blood and fat- so there was an attempt to miraculously resurrect those sacrificed beings.

We have seen how all the wonder of creation came about- how the stars were formed, how humans came to be. But the consciousness of the holy, the yearning and pull toward morality, the existence of love for other creatures, seems to have been there from the very beginning. And as soon as human consciousness was born, we felt it. And just as Joseph listened to the angels, humankind responded to this unnamed Holy Spirit. It does not have a scientific explanation, we cannot measure God, but we feel it. All through all the vast darkness of space, through the trials and errors of evolution, the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

This life-giving, loving glory was in the beginning with God, this light, this magnificence, this glorious cosmic creation. It is a vast mystery-we cannot fully comprehend it, anymore than those early artists of Lascaux could. But we have a human incarnation of this holiness, this enfleshment of God’s loving word, this new creation, this reality that outshines every darkness. This is the love of Christ, foretold by the angels, and given by God.

Amen

Lit up

2010-12-31T15:59:00.000-08:00

•Christmas Eve 12/24/10 The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor
• Isaiah 65:17-25 Psalm 98 •
• 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 •
• Luke 21:5-19

The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who lived in a land of deep darkness — on them light has shined… For a child has been born to us, a son given to us.

Every Christmas Eve, in every year, I feel the dawning of a wonderful sort of season of innocence, a kind of enchantment not usually celebrated in our society. Fifty years ago CS Lewis said that he felt the deepest need of humanity was for a “re-enchantment” of the species. He certainly did his best to create that, with his wonderful tales of the miraculous.

On my vacation I stayed with friends who have a remarkable 7 year old child. She was making her list up for Santa, in whom she firmly believes, as she also believes in God. But even she has figured out a scientifically sound reason for believing in Santa: “I have a hypothesis about this” she said. Every year she places the cookies and milk in front of the fire place Christmas Eve and every year they are gone in the morning. She reasoned that since her mother never stays awake past 9:00 and her father is lactose intolerant, it just had to be Santa. She has a sunny and grateful attitude that helped support my own seasonal optimism. As I say in the back of the car with her she said, “Its really lucky that I have you back here to talk to. My parents are always sitting together in front and I have nobody here. But then, I am lucky in so many ways.” Back home she wanted to show me every stuffed animal she has, wanted to do summersaults for me, show me how to knit, introduce me to her dog, all her toys, and she said a beautiful grace at supper. She reminded me that Jesus said we have to become like little children before we can enter the kingdom of heaven. She reminded me of what C.S. Lewis insisted was desperately needed fifty years ago, and it seems to me to still be needed today: what he called the “re-enchantment” of our species.

Traveling from Maryland to Washington DC we went from the innocence of that child to the innocence of an old friend of mine who had completely and uncompromisingly kept his pacifist hippie ideals. He had started the Washington Free Press, the Washington Free Clinic, the Washington Free School. He was always working for peace and justice. Since I had seen him, he and his girlfriend of 35 years had adopted 20 foster children. Theirs was not an entirely peaceful kingdom, but they certainly did their best, and their was not a drop of cynicism in the proceedings.

When I think of the innocence of children at Christmas time, I remember the eight Christmases during which I rehearsed children for the annual Christmas pageant at All Souls Church. Every year, a child from 6 to 8 years old would play the part of the angel Gabriel. And every year, the angel would look earnestly into the eyes of the child playing Mary, and say
"And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son”

And I would look into their earnest and innocent eyes and realize that they had absolutely no idea exactly what that meant. They had only a child’s instinct for the miraculous, and no special knowledge of the incarnation.

I do not have the blind, accepting, miraculous faith of a child, and so the meaning of the incarnation has developed slowly over the years for me. I stumble on. When I first came back to the church, I approached Jesus (although he was loudly calling out my name) with great caution and suspicion. I was eased back into the fold only because my priest recommended that I read a book by Marcus Borg and felt assured that I could accept Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus, and I had to go no further. I was truly "Meeting Jesus again for the first Time" which is the title of the book.

Borg talked about what the human Jesus — the "Pre-Easter Jesus" must have been like. What extraordinary eyes he must have had, how brilliant his language skills were, how passionately wedded to justice and compassion he was. The book barely deals with what he calls the "Post-Easter Jesus," a term I now find woefully lacking to describe the Risen Christ. But at first this was helpful to me. When faced with the incarnation, with the divinity of Jesus, I just didn’t want to go there. But slowly, I began to perceive a curious image seemingly just out of my peripheral vision whenever I thought of the incarnation. I seemed to see brilliant rays of light emanating from something which refused to come into focus front and center, but nonetheless streamed blazingly just beyond the edges of my field of vision. There was a brilliance I couldn’t understand, and could not even fully see, that I began to know was present, nonetheless.

It finally came to me that I was seeing those wings of light on either side of my peripheral vision because whether or not I knew it, something was embracing me. I began to have some sense of the great and overpowering Newness of the incarnation, as expressed so heart-breakingly in the precious newness of the infant Jesus. And I began to understand that the miracle of God’s presence in Jesus Christ has little meaning (at least for me) if we did not relate it to Christ’s presence in us- in ALL of us. As I searched for a way to understand the incarnation I also searched for a prayer I could say at waking that would bring this great newness into my life every morning.

Upon opening my eyes one anxiety-ridden, guilt-stuffed dawn, I suddenly realized I could simply repeat the words of Paul: "If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation. Everything old has passed away — behold, all things are become new." (2 Corinthians)

I finally saw my first flicker of the image of brilliance that had been eluding me, that explosive and irrevocable NEWNESS, blazing right in front of me when I read the words of Father Pierre Tielhard de Chardin:

It is done. Once again the fire has penetrated the earth. Not with the sudden crash of thunderbolt, riving the mountaintops. Does the Master break down doors to enter his own home? Without earthquake or thunderclap the flame has lit up the whole world from within. All things individually and collectively are penetrated and flooded by it, from the inmost core of the tiniest atom to the mighty sweep of the most universal laws of being. (Song to the Earth)

The incarnation- this birth of hope, of light, of innocence and newness in us all- causes us and all things to be lit up from within. It fills us up, embraces us and causes us to be fully alive.

And because the wonder of it is too great to define or comprehend, the best we can do is, like Mary, to behold it, to hold it, and to treasure it in our hearts.
Amen.

Amen.

One Stone Upon Another...

2010-11-14T20:40:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 65:17-25 and Isaiah 12
Thessalonians 3:6-13
Luke 21:5-19

Good Shepherd Berkeley and Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad, Richmond: 11/14/10

Yosef Ben Matityahu, was a highly Romanized historian who dumped his Jewish name for the more politically advantageous “Titus Flavius Josephus.” He describes the blinding brilliance of the Jerusalem temple in 75 AD, five years after the temple was destroyed, but obviously long before it faded in his memory:

"The exterior of the building lacked nothing to astound either mind or eye. For, being covered on all sides with massive plates of gold, the sun was no sooner up than it radiated so fiery a flash that persons straining to look at it were compelled to avert their eyes, as from the solar rays."

Jesus responds to the ooing and ahing of the disciples by pointing out that this temple will be utterly destroyed, not one stone left upon another. And this temple was indeed destroyed in a hideous orgy of violence, by the Romans in 70 AD.
Josephus was present in Jerusalem when the city was captured and the temple was incinerated. You can hear the grief of the Roman-sympathizing Josephus in spite of himself:

"The countryside, like the City, was a pitiful sight; for where once there had been a lovely vista of woods and parks there was nothing but desert and stumps of trees. No one - not even a foreigner - who had seen the Old Judea and the glorious … City, and now set eyes on her present desolation, could have helped sighing and groaning at so terrible a change; for every trace of beauty had been blotted out by war, and nobody who had known it in the past and came upon it suddenly would have recognized the place…"

The temple was meant to imitate the holy with it’s vast solar brilliance. But as we know from other stories in the bible, when humans try to build structures to rival the glory of God, it never ends well.

In great contrast to the magnificent grandeur of this temple, throughout Luke’s gospel we are told of the lowly origins of Jesus, and the devotion with which he cares for the lowly. Jesus had the lowly birth of a homeless child, born, not in a glorious temple, but in a barn, and he will die the lowly death of a criminal. His mentor was the homeless wild man John the Baptist, who wears a mantel of camel skin and survives on what he can scrape together in the wilderness- wild locusts and wild honey.

In his first public declaration, Jesus quotes the words of the social justice loving Isaiah when he says that God has sent him for the poor, the imprisoned, the disabled, the oppressed. He heals those who were most unclean and despised: lepers, the paralyzed, epileptics, a bleeding woman, a girl who was already dead, and the blind, all observed by his apparently blind disciples.

Again and again he speaks with, heals and teaches that despised subset of the population, women, unheard of for a first century Jewish man. He warns that you must not take the seat of honor when invited to a banquet. Jesus particularly speaks against the hording of gold, telling his disciples to store up their treasure in heaven instead.

And the disciples have been with him all this time. So what do they say when they regard the splendor of the vast gleaming temple?

They say something like- “OY! Will you look at that gorgeous hunk of gold-plated real estate!”

But Jesus, ever patient, tries to tell them that, like all wealth, it will tumble, like all things material raised up, it will fall.

Jesus warns that not one stone of the temple will be left on top of another. He knows that this kind of wealth invites violence, that in fact that kind of wealth IS violence, and that violence is soon to come, war and insurrections . The violence and the devastation described by Josephus is the inevitable outcome of those things Jesus railed against over and over again: Power over the poor, hierarchy, greed, hatred.

We are a slow-learning species, and we, as a nation, are, as addictively as ever, worshiping gold and indulging in war, two wars in fact, one at least partially caused by greed, the other by revenge, the opposite of forgiveness. Jesus warns us against false prophets that will come in his name saying “I am he!: And “The time is near!” Jesus warns us not to go after them. We pray that our children do not harken to the call of the false prophets urging them on college and even high school campuses to “Be all that they can be” and help to obliterate modern temples.

Every day we hear about 3,400 other messages from false prophets, according to a film I saw called: Advertising and the End of the World. Every tee shirt you see advertising a name brand, every bill board, every TV or internet commercial, every product placement, every cereal box, every piece of junk mail and every sales man you are accosted by is helping to drive you into the hell of hording, the enchantment of gold, and, as the movie implies, the end of the world through the earth-destroying reality of manufacturing. Each false prophet will urge: “The time is near!”
“This sale ends in two days!”
“Get in on the ground floor of this investment!”
“Enjoy yourself before the economy tanks completely, or before you die, which ever comes first! You deserve it!”

I must confess that the radiant temple at which I worship lately, is my beloved Mac Book Pro, a false prophet I will follow almost anywhere, at almost anytime. My husband asked me what I wanted for my last birthday, and I said I would like a Kindle, an easy way to have a whole library of books at my disposal while I traveled. He immediately said no, He would get me an ipad because that could do the work of a kindle and so much more! Very weakly and for a very short time I protested, and so I now have my Ipad and I no longer worship monotheistically at my Mac book pro. In fact, now that I have a smart phone, there is a kind of unholy trinity of false prophets in my life. This phone is not only inexpressively smarter than I am, but is able to beep and buzz when it wants me to do something, which I pretty much immediately do, except at 3:00 in the morning, which has happened lately. I find that I surf the web with my Ipad (you can do it anywhere!) much more than I read on it, and it is so easy to get lost down the rabbit hole of the world wide web, wherein time slips away, and your life along with it.

But it seems I am not the only one with cyber addictive tendencies to these radiant little temples. I recently heard that the fastest selling application for the Mac is called “Freedom,” and it is simply an application that will make it impossible for an individual to log on to the net for a pre-set number of hours of the day or night. I think I better get that ap, because when I wrote this, staring at my little glowing temple, it was 10:09PM and I hadn’t yet said hello to my daughter, who got home at 4:30. I sometimes think that if this cyber-temple of mine is not destroyed, it will destroy me, that one stone of me will be left upon another.

We risk our very souls when we don’t consciously walk away from all false prophets, electronic and otherwise, when we don’t question the powers and principalities that Jesus warned us about.

But Jesus, of course, preaches a different kind of prophesy, radiates a different kind of brilliance. Jesus is seen, shining like the sun, unsheltered by any temple, surrounded by those who loved him and whom he loved, in the story of the transfiguration, not long after our story of today.

God is not shining in this story, but is hidden behind a cloud, beseeching the ever-clueless disciples to listen to the “Beloved son.” And Jesus, glowing brighter than any gold, seems to have already replaced the blinding temple, by radiating love. He is flanked by his beloved OT prophets, Moses, who taught him about the love of the sacred, and Elijah who taught him about the still small voice of God. At Jesus’ feet are the disciples who he loved so much, in spite of everything they did. Peter, so typically, pops up in the midst of all this brilliance and wants to construct a few little temples of his own- but the voice from the cloud silences him. The vast structure, the brilliant temple, the awe-inspiring edifice that Jesus the new creation gives to us is the miracle of unconditional love. And any rich person can tell you that no amount of gold, no quantity of gigabytes can buy that.

But, as Jesus says, if we can endure this culture, that makes a God out of gold, that makes a sacrament out of war, if we can open the door of our own small temple to the possibility of love without counting the cost, we may just see the new Jerusalem in our lives, a new heaven and a new earth, right here and now. And we may even be able to re-gain our true souls.

Amen.

Beyond Betrayal

2010-11-14T20:19:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 1:10-18, Psalm 32:1-7, 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12, Luke 19:1-10
Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, CA Sunday, 10/31/10
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor

Beyond Betrayal

In today’s Gospel is the last encounter Jesus has with an outcast before his entry into Jerusalem, and his crucifixion.

Jesus has been seen to help many other kinds of dispised and unclean outcasts in this Gospel- a man possessed by a demon, a hemoraging woman, a man who had dropsy, a who is bend double with her disease, ten lepers and finally, the blind man.

The old prophets continually preached though the scriptures that a righteous Jew should help the poor and powerless, even those who were aliens. In our Old Testament reading we hear “learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” But these dictates did not include the ritually unclean, such as the ones I just listed. And Zaccheaus, as a traitor working for the Romans, certainly was among the dispised unclean.

To accept someone like Zacchaeus, to have table fellowship with him was really extraordinary, in fact, inflammatory in Jesus time and place. Zaccheaus status among the Jews would have been a few rungs lower than lepers and the hemoraging woman.

The Tax collectors of the Jesus’ time, had nothing in common with the IRS agents of today. We might feel some level of unease with an IRS agent, but we know they are just doing their job. But the tax collectors described in the New Testament were uniquely dispised as true traitors, true betrayers of their people.

The Greek term teloni, in this case describes an entrepreneur who would pay a contract in advance, and then extort as much money over and above the required Roman tax as he could, for his own personal gain.

Under the rule of Herod Antipas, in the time of Jesus, there were personal, or poll taxes, land taxes, and a host of indirect taxes, such as the tax on transporting goods. Then there were the religious taxes, as well. And on top of that there was whatever the individual teloni could extort. The people were so desperately stretched and impovershed by all this taxation and extortion, that their desperation led to violent uprisings agains the Romans authorities.

So in finding a contemporary equivalent of Zacchaeus, one would not compare him to an IRS agent, but rather to one of a multitude of Bernie Madoffs, who would think nothing of backrupting elderly people and families and driving them out of their homes, just to further increase their already obscene wealth.

But Jesus, ignoring purity codes and ancient predjudices as usual, was willing to love beyond betrayal. And he was oblivious to what people would think of this acceptance of a betrayer of the Jews. Think of the political fallout if President Obama was seen having an elegant dinner over at Bernie’s Madoff’s opulent abode, pre-incarceration of course. But although the crowd around Jesus grumbled bitterly that he was associating with a sinner, Jesus didn’t care.

Jesus also may have sensed the betrayers to come, whom he also greeted with love. He not only accepted Judas’ kiss, but during the last supper, according to the Gospel of John, he gave Judas communion, handing him a piece of bread dipped in wine- forgiving him before he even committed the betrayal. Jesus may have been demonstrating to the beloved disciple by his side, not only who would betray him, but how one ought to respond to a betrayer- offer him the sacrament of forgiveness.

In his wonderful book, Works of Love, Sooren Kiekegaard speaks of the moment after Peter denyed knowing Jesus for the third time. Immediately after the third betrayal, the cock crows, and Jesus turns and looks at Peter, (Lk 22:60-61a). Then Peter leaves him, weeping bitterly. Kierkegaard, extrapolates for sometime on his conviction that the look that send Peter away weeping was simply a look of the purest love and forgiveness.

Then as a further act of compassion, Jesus later allowed Peter to ritually undo his betrayal, when Jesus asked him three time, “Do you love me, Simon Peter?”

Jesus loves through all the betrayals- the betrayal of Judas, the betrayal of Peter, and finally, as he desperately perceives it, the betrayal of God. He repeats the anguished words of the psalmist, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And so Jesus knows how to love beyond the betrayals of the tax collecting Zaccheaus.

And Zaccheaus, in our story of today, miraculusly becomes as a child again, thus beginning his ownership of the Kingdom of Heaven. Given that he was short of stature, he already had a head start, and so he discarded his dignity to run ahead and climb a tree, something any child would have delighted in doing.

And miraculously, Zaccheaus, when he sees Jesus not only looking at him with love, but inviting himself to the tax collector’s house, is able to accept the love, and to be transformed by it. He immediately offers to give away half of everything he owns, and pledges to pay back four-fold, those people he had defrauded. Therefore Jesus announces that salvation has come to the house of Zaccheaus, and that he, this dispised betrayer, is a son of Abraham, a just and faithful Jew. His betrayals are forgotten, and Jesus enacts the forgiveness we heard in our reading from Isaiah “though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.
This is the happiest ending in a story involving a rich man in the Gospel of Luke. Early in the gospel, it is made clear to whom the Kingdom of God belongs, and it is not to the rich. And in the “woe to you” section, of the beatitudes Jesus tells us “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” A little later, he calls the rich farmer a fool, and demands his soul of him. The sumptuously feasting rich man dressed in purple and fine linen, goes to Hades while the poor man Lazarus rests in the bosom of Abraham. Finally, not long before our gospel of today, Jesus meets a rich young man, who asks him what it takes to earn eternal life. Although Jesus looks at him with love, he tells him that to earn eternal life, he must give away all of his possesions. The rich young man, unlike Zaccheaus, turns and walks away sad.
Jesus then delivers his famous one-liner about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Jesus looked at Zaccheaus, at Peter, at Judas, as he looks at all of us. He sees not a betrayer, but a lost sheep, a broken heart, a lost soul. All of us are broken, all of us are lost at some time in our lives. And perhaps we have the guilt of a traitor. We may have betrayed a child, a loved one, a friend, a master, as Peter did, we may have felt that we betrayed God, and we may have betrayed ourselves. But in our own lives, it is exactly in the guilt of betrayal, exactly in the brokenness of our hearts, the brokenness of our lives, that we meet Jesus. Not in our perfection, not in our riches, not in our perfectly appropriate life styles and professions. Luckily, Jesus came to save the lost, as he says at the end of our Gospel reading. He comes to save us when we need him the very most, wounded by judgements of who we are, judged as a sinner, a betrayer, an abomination before God. Judeged, perhaps most brutally, by ourselves.

This last outcast Jesus heals is a most unlikely convert, a rich man who transforms into someone who could, indeed enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Now, in our story, as we are almost entering Jerusalem, the previous reality is turned upside down. We are approaching the time when Jesus, with his death, shatters the old world order. With the great force of Jesus’ resurrection, a new world, blessed by the Reign of God is opened for us. And here the broken-hearted, the lost, the hopeless, rich and poor alike can and will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, can and will invite Jesus to stay with them, can and will be not lost, but found.

Written on Our Hearts

2010-10-16T21:19:00.000-07:00

A reflection on Jeremiah 31:27-34 and Psalm 119:97-104 • Luke 18:1-8
Good Shepherd, Berkeley/Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad, Richmond

When I was about 10 years old I had a best friend named Gregory. We lived in the same small apartment building in the outskirts of Silver Spring, Maryland. I lived on the top floor, apt 303 and he lived on the bottom floor, apt 101. I liked Gregory so much because he was not like other boys. He loved to gossip with me and he was very interested in things like clothes and movie stars and junk food and books- all the things I most loved in life.

We would hike together through a little patch of woods to the five and dime and buy comic books, and finish off our afternoon if we could scrape 35 cents together, with an ice cream soda.

One of the many things we had in common was that we both had brilliant, withdrawn older brothers in their teens- creatures who seemed to be above our realm of existence all together. His brother was not just handsome- it has to be said that he was pretty- in fact, he was beautiful. I did not know him well, but sometimes he condescended to spend a little time with us. My girl friends all thought he was dreamy.

One day something indescribably horrible happened. Gregory’s older brother was found hanging from a rope in their apartment. He hung himself the day after he had been walking partway home from school with us as we chatted to each other, and he was as remote as ever.

My father told me that he did it because people said that he was a homosexual.
Even at 10 years old, I knew what that meant, and somehow I knew that that would have been a reason for doing this awful thing. The death of this young boy send shock waves through our small apartment building and all through our community. But no one talked about it. No one said a word.

The next time I saw Gregory, we, of course did not mention what happened. Gregory had had a bit of a stutter, and it became much worse. He had been a little chubby, but now I could see that he was resorting to comfort food in a big way, and not with me anymore. I am sad to say that our relationship seemed to stifle and die in that new silence. What happened to him was too enormous for me to carry with him, and he had to carry it by himself. He moved away with his family not long afterwards, and we never heard from them again.

I was reminded of Gregory and his poor brother as heard about case after case of similar suicides of young gay men- boys really, that took place during September of this year.

All of these boys died because they were, or were thought to be, gay, and had been ceaselessly bullied and harassed, until they took their own lives in despair.

Thirteen year old Asher Brown, of Houston Texas, shot himself after a year and a half of torment, with bullies taunting him about his religious beliefs, his height and of course, his apparent sexual orientation. His mother said that she had continually begged the school to do something, with no results.

Thirteen year old Seth Walsh from Tehachapi, California. hung himself after several years of harassment due to his apparent orientation. A picture shows a sweet, mischievous looking brown-eyed boy, with a lot of life and light in his eyes.

Billy Lucas was a fifteen year old, from Greensboro, Indiana. His parents found his body in his family’s barn. He had been harassed at school for months because of his sexual orientation, and he apparently couldn’t stand it anymore.

Eighteen year old Tyler Clementi, of Rutgers University, a brilliant young violinist jumped off the George Washington bridge after being outed live on the internet by his remarkably vicious roommate.

And 19 year old Raymond Chase, a gay sophomore at Johnson & Wales University in Providence Rhode Island, also hung himself, just like my friend Gregory’s brother. His mother said that he had seemed very happy, but obviously there was a different story.

As religious people, we must feel the full force of these tragedies, because the acts of bullying, and the horrific results, have been supported, have perhaps even been created, by “religious” people and institutions.

I believe we have to do whatever we can to counteract these horrible messages. As Christians, as people following the word of someone of limitless compassion, limitless inclusivity and limitless love, we have to make sure our embrace is wide enough to make a difference to all marginalized people, including and especially the incredibly vulnerable and suffering population of LBGT children and youth.

Bishop Gene Robinson put a video out after several of the tragedies of the past month, addressed to those despairing children who are still suffering. He said in the video, “Maybe you are in a very dark place now because people are telling you, religious people are telling you that you are an abomination against God. Maybe you have been told that you are intrinsically disordered, or that your life is a sin, or that God does not accept you as you are.

He went on to say that he, as a Bishop, as a religious leader, wanted to tell them just the opposite. That God wants them to be just who they are- just who God made them to be. That God loves them, as he loves all of us- more than we could possibly imagine. He said that God loves us all beyond our wildest imagination.

There are many ways in which religious establishments have created an atmosphere that could produce the violence that these boys have suffered. Misquoting the bible, misquoting Jesus, supporting hierarchical, patriarchal structures, naming homosexuality as a sin. But there is one sin that Bishop Robinson did not mention. One that we must not fall into. That is the sin of silence. Silence as complete as the silence my childhood community fell into after the death of that neighbor boy. Silence as complete as the silence I fell into with my shell-shocked friend.

I believe silence is almost as grave a sin as the complicity and promotion of the horrific messages of hate that the clueless bullies have been using like lethal weapons.

We can’t live in a silence like that. We must, like the widow in our Gospel story who over and over again goes to the judge to demand justice, make our voices heard, over and over again. We must, as Jesus tells us, pray continually and not lose heart.

Our Old Testament reading also speaks of hope for us in this time of mourning.

It speaks of an image of humankind that is so complete, so whole, so realized that it is almost heart-breaking. It speaks of a time when we will all have God’s word in our hearts. When we will no longer have to struggle to learn the law. We will no longer have to struggle to avoid sin.

“This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the LORD," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” This is a beautiful prophesy. That the compassion, the justice and the love taught by the prophets and lived out to the fullest in the life of Jesus might live inside of us forever- might be written in our hearts. And that we will be forgiven our sins. Even the sin of silence.

I hope we never stop fighting for the justice we seek. I hope and pray that we will redouble our efforts to send out a message of inclusivity and love to all people, especially those vulnerable children and youth who are in such real danger. Let us make this church a welcome house of refuge.
Asher, Tyler, Billy, Seth, Raymond, let this be our memorial to you. And let the way you changed our lives be your resurrection.
Amen

St. Francis in the Buff

2010-10-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

St. Francis in the Buff
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor, 10/2/10
Good Shepherd, Berkeley

My very first course at Seminary at the Franciscan school, was The Early documents of St. Franacis of Assisi. The professor told us with some exictement, that we would be reading some texts that had been suppressed for 800 years, because they reveaked the less than saintly side of St. Francis.

This encouraged me very much, because I had always felt greatly inferior to the vast generosity and spiriuality of St. Francis. I struggled with an addiction to things and to nice jackets and coats in particular, from which I am recovering one jacket at a time. I knew that Francis only wore brown burlap robes, with a coarse rope for a belt. But in this course I learned that Francis in his youth was actually quite a dandy.

One of his followers, Thomas of Celano, wrote an early life of Francis in 1229:

“Francis miserably wasted and squandered his time, almost up to his 25th year. Maliciously advancing beyond all his peers in vanities, he proved himself a more excessive inciter of evil and a zealous imitator of foolishness… in his flamboyanrt display of vain accomplishments, wit, curiosity, practical jokes and foolish talk, songs and flowing garments.”

He “was still boiling in the sins of youthful heat” when an illness fell upon him, which lasted a long but unspecified length of time.

When he finally began to recover, Francis found to his surprise that the worldly things that had so enraptured him before brought him no pleasure whatsoever. So he decided that if his life as a dandy no longer gave him pleasure, that he would go to war and be a great and famous warrier. But in the night he had a horrible dream, that his whole room was filled with the instruments of war, swords and shields, saddles and spears. He refused to go to war, and withdrew to the countryside, where he had a long dark night of the soul, hiding out in caves and desperately praying for God’s guidance. After a long struggle, he had a powerful and transformative experience of God, and he went to sell everything he owned, and not incidentally, some things actualy owned by his father, a wealthy merchant of fine fabrics.

He gave it all away to a poor priest he met on his travels, who was living in the ruined church of San Damiano. Francis begged the priest to let him stay there, and the priest reluctantly agreed.

Francis’ father began searching for his son, and finally found him living a life of happy poverty with the old priest. His father prompty dragged Francis before the bishop, claiming that Francis had stolen a large quantity of precious fabric from him, which was actually true. He screamed at the bishop to remove all rights of inheritance from Francis, and to force him to return to his father all he had. Francis did just that with great glee. He pulled off every stich of clothing he had, not yet the brown robe, but the expremely begragged garb of a nobleman, until he was standing stark naked in front of the bishop and his astounded father. The bishop, perceiving him to be a holyman, at once took off his own ornate robes and put them on Francis. Thereafter he was his friend and protector.

One day in church Francis heard these familiar dictates from the Gospel of Matthew: that the disciples should not “possess silver of gold or money, or carry on their journey a wallet or a sack, not bread nor a staff, nor have shoes nor two tunics but that they should only preach the Kingdom of God.

Francis, according to Thomas of Celano, burst out in ecstacy “This is what I want, this is what I seek, this is what I desire with all my heart.”

Then Francis had his famous brown robes made, gave away his staff, and exchanged his leather belt for a rope. He then began gathering his brothers, and building his humble order of servants.

But although Francis truly and loving embraced Lady Poverty, as he called her, he never really lost his taste for fine things. It seems that our Francis had a taste for cooked chicken, and every once in a while he would manage to sneak some into his cell and, with great delight, eat it. But then his guilt would torture him so that he would beg one of his brothers to help him atone for his sin.

“He commanded the brother to tie a cord around his neck and drag him through the whole city, a though he were a theif, loudly crying out, “Look! See this glutton who grew fat on the flesh of chickens without your knowledge!”

Francis lived a beautiful life of giving, reaching out and ministering to lepers, anyone in need, and famously, even the birds of the air, those animals that creep upon the earth, and even the lowly earthworm.

And after a lifetime of poverty, of denying himself, of radical giving, Francis on his deathbed wanted three things: he wanted almond cookies, he wanted a satin pillow for his head, and he wanted the company of Lady Jacobi, a female devotee about whom very little has survived the sensorship of the papal decrees. But she, the cookies and the satin pillow were all there when Francis finally passed into paradise.

I take comfort in hearing these less than saintly things about Francis. Maybe he was no more a real saint that any of us, but he certainly did his best. He was only human, but he paid attention to his calling as a Christian, he read the fine print of the gosples.

There is one biblical text that I never connected with St. Fancis until I heard my daughter’s interpretation: The rich young man comes and asks Jesus what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus says to keep the commandments and the young man says that he has always kept them, since his youth. Jesus looks at him with love, (the guy is probably 19) and says, “One thing more- sell what you own and give the money to the poor. Then come and follow me.” The text goes on to say that the young man went away grieving, for he had many possessions

My daughter, had a good midrash for this story. She thought it was obvious that the young man went away sad, gave his possessions away, became joyful and came back to follow Jesus! Like Francis, he went through a transformation.

I believe that Jesus gives us all a forge for our transformation, which is our faith, which is our existence as the bodly of Christ. It is our own personal miracle- praying as Francis did, to hear God’s call and then acting on the answer to the question: What is God calling me to do?

Amen.

Dying in the Promise Land

2010-09-18T21:37:00.000-07:00

Reflections on Jeremiah 8:18-9:1, Luke 16:1-13
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad/ Good Shepherd, Berkeley

Some people think that every word of God is contained in the holy scriptures, and that all that is necessary for salvation is there. But some people think that the Gospel is on-going, that God is still speaking. and that is what I think.

In this past week I have heard the Gospel is an unlikely place, it seems to me, in the sweltering inferno of Arizona.

For three days we sweated it out at the very first official meeting of the Coalition of Episcopal Latinos. I heard God’s familiar call to justice and compassion from many passionate, committed and brilliant individuals. I heard many beautiful dreams and visions, as well as some on-going nightmares.

Early in the conference we were shown a list of the people who had died in the desert each year for the past ten years while trying to cross the Mexican border. In 2001 there were 77 deaths. In 2004 there were 219 deaths. In 2007 there were 250 deaths. And so far this year there have been 186 deaths, that is counting only up to August 18. Then we were given innocent-looking pieces of paper that were in fact, small stealth bombs set to explode our complacency.

On these pieces of paper were the names and vital statistics of those who had died, and ten of us were asked to say a spontaneous prayer each of these people.

There was Maria Julietta Lorenzo-Garcia. age 23. home town, Tulancingo, Hidalgo, Mexico. She was found on July 9, 2010, in the desert county of Pima. The cause of death was hypothermia. This young woman died alone of the cold, out in the unsheltered wilderness. God only knows what conditions she fled to take such a risk. There was Fidel Vargas Parra, age 17, hometown unknown. Cause of death: Hypothermia. He died alone of the cold near Pisinemo Village, and was found on July 11, 2010 also in the county of Pima.

Then there were the many who were found who were never identified, but we prayed for each of them as well. There was someone, an unidentified male, age unknown, hometown unknown, cause of death unknown, who was found on July, 11, 2010 , on a lonely stretch of North Mesquite Oasis Road in the desert county of Pima. There was another body found, and not only the name and all other circumstances were unknown, but even the sex was undetermined, which made me wonder how long the body had been out there, or what had been done to this person. The body was found on a wild, remote part of the desert, there was no road or town anywhere near where this person was found, only the longitude and latitude were listed, and the fact that he or she was found on July 12, 2010 in Pima County. All of these people had actually made it across the border, but the area was so brutal, so unsheltered and freezing at night, that they died even as their dream was realized.

The prayers for these seekers were beautiful heartfelt and tearful. One intercessor said that although we did not know the name or the face of the person he was praying for, that God knew his face and god knew his name, and for God he was not unidentified.

The words of Jeremiah come to me when I hear these stories:

My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.

For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.

Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health
of my poor people not been restored?

O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!

But even with the consciousness of all these recent tragedies, there was so much hope and strength and beauty present as well in that amazing gathering.

We were in Arizona, and so of course the brutal law that has been passed there, SB 1070 up was on everyone's hearts and minds. This law was put into effect on April 23 of this year. It allows police officers to stop and interrogate residents of the state of Arizona for no reason other than the fact that they appear to be Latino, and might possibly be illegal. The language of the law is so open to interpretation that abuses are very common. Among many other things, the bill also forbids churches from providing sanctuary, and makes illegal the soliciting of work, or the hiring of day laborers.

A woman came to the conference to speak to us, and she brought her whole family, her mother, her husband, her father, her brother, her baby and 4 year old daughter. she told the story of how they all held vigil for 103 days, even the baby. This was to bear witness to those many individuals and families who would be harmed by this brutal bill, and to pray together that the law would be reversed.

On April 15 SB 1070 was passed by te Arizona house, and on the same day a series of raids took place in Phoenix, Tucson, Rio Rico and Nogales, and in the Mexican city of Nogales, Sonora. The raids targeted people traveling on shuttle services, but whole neighborhoods were affected, with traffic brought to a virtual standstill while agents occupied the cities in their biggest operation in the seven-year history of Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE). Scores of people were arrested and fifty vehicles were confiscated. The effects of the law were immediate and devastating to the community. School children were afraid to leave the house to go to school, And their parents were afraid to go to work. Adults going to school were afraid to go to their classes. And of course families were devastated by the loss of their fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters. Seeing all this, the woman who came to speak was moved to volunteer with Promise Arizona, and organization created to fight SB 1070. These are her words:

When that bill was made law my whole world collapsed. Because I knew we were going to be persecuted I was afraid when I saw a cop and I would change my route and run away. Many people lived with that fear by the time I heard of the vigil which was at the state capital.

I decided to join Promisa Arizona as a volunteer. I knew no one in the organization, but I approached the group to hear what they were doing and I heard about the vigil. I said are you going to stay here and sleep? They said yes, so I brought from home my own blankets and one day when the press was going to come we told the people we would vigil for 90 days. During that time there was joy, crying, fighting and many said to us, how can you endure so long? But for me the endurance came from seeing the people when they came, and I said to them, have faith, pray with us do not go away. We saw the sad faces of the children saying I do not want to go away- 15 and 16yr old kids, they have been here all their all their lives they lived here and they had to go back. That gave us strength to keep on. Day after day people brought us food- every day a different group would come. And this baby was there all the time- 6 months when we started- there were many babies there but this baby we called the baby of the vigil.

The other thing gave us strength was other people came from other states to support us and I thought if they leave everything to support us how can we not support our selves? The promise we made continues. we said we would be there for 90 days we were there for 103 days and we are still holding vigil, we continue to work. We learned that it doesn't matter if we are immigrants or not we have rights. For those who are already established here is very easy to forget those who are left behind, but this vigil helped change minds. People came and said vulgar things to us sometimes. We were depressed and said how can we go on? But others would support us and give us the strength to go on. What is important is not for us but for the next generation so that they will suffer from the color of their skin. I didn’t know if I would survive for 103 days, but I did survive, because God provided. And what I learned was that God gives you what you need.

We are, many of us, Americans, and I hope, proud to be American. We grew up listening to the legend on the base of the statue of liberty, give me your tired your poor. I pray that this legend does not become a myth. And for our congregation, we have a special place in this on-going struggle. Jesus has answered the question he was asked, “Who is my neighbor?” We have many neighbors we see each time we come to this church, who have made this neighborhood a much safer place, with their eyes on the street, with their constant presence. These are our Guatemalan day laborer brothers who have endured twice the hardships of a brutal border crossing- from Guatemala into Mexico, and then from Mexico into this country. And here in the promised land they were attacked by a driver who threw a home-made bomb at them right in front of our church earlier this year. They were attacked because they were standing and waiting for work, while wearing brown skin. They are our neighbors indeed. Talk to them. Come on Fridays and feast with them at our day laborer lunches. And listen to their stories.

Perhaps it is true that we cannot serve God and wealth at the same time. We cannot worship our lifestyle, our comfort and our security, and let injustice continue. The borders rights activists in Arizona were quoted as saying that “Tuscon today is the moral equivalent of Birmingham Alabama in 1961.” The civil rights abuses that are happening down in Arizona as we speak are very much very like those of the Jim Crow south of the sixties. Families are being torn apart, and lives are being destroyed.

God spoke to me this week in Arizona. God spoke to me through the name of Maria Julietta Lorenzo-Garcia, in the God spoke to me in the name of Fidel Vargas Parra, in the name of Omar Velazquez Luna, and in all the no-names of names of the unidentified who died in the wilderness, who died in the promised land. God spoke to me through the incredible courage of Petra Falcon of Promisa America and all the families who held vigil, often on their knees, for 103 days. They are still holding vigil.

God is speaking, and if you hear the question, “Who shall I send? And who will go for us?” you can find the answer to that question in the bible.

Amen.

A Place at the Table

2010-08-29T17:18:00.000-07:00

Reflections on
Heb 13:1-8, 15-16, and Lk 14:1, 7-14
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad/ Good Shepherd, Berkeley
August 29, 2010

Our readings today speak of the forsaking of God, of the necessity to continue in mutual love, and the urging by Jesus that we not take the place of honor at the table. Yesterday was a date that resonates for me with all these things.

Yesterday was August 28. This date is the anniversary of three seminal events; one tragic, the second filled with hope, and the third an apparent fulfillment of that hope.

The first of these three anniversaries is the incident that kicked off the modern civil rights movement: the murder of Emmet Louis Till, a fourteen-year-old boy who was tortured and murdered on August 28, 1955 in Money, Mississippi, when he allegedly whistled at a white woman. I saw a picture of Emmet Till’s face. He was a beautiful boy, his up-turned face filled with hope, with confidence, with humor. But that is not the face the world saw. His distraught mother made the decision to have an open casket at the funeral, so that, as she said, everyone “could see what they did to my baby.” The horror of that day was not only shared with the many mourners who came to pay their respects, but also, through photographs of the open coffin, the horror was shared with the whole world. Adding to the universal fury was that his two murderers were acquitted on the very day of the funeral, after the all-white jury deliberated for 67 minutes. One juror was quoted as saying that it wouldn’t have taken so long if they had not taken a break for soda pop. The murder of Emmet Till resonated through history, and set the struggle for human rights on fire. After so many horrors had been dismissed or hidden, this was the catalyst for the events that led to the next indelible anniversary of August 28: The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King made his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Whereas fifty thousand people had stood in line in the sweltering Chicago streets to pay tribute to Emmet Till, at the March on Washington. exactly 8 years later, two hundred and fifty thousand people marched for the rights that Emmet would never have the chance to enjoy.

When the March on Washington took place, I was about the age of Emmet Till when he died. And since I lived in Silver Spring Maryland, very close to Washington DC, I wanted to go. I wanted to march. My family belonged to St. Michael and All Angels Church in Adelphi Maryland, and we considered ourselves to be pretty radical. We had mimes performing during the liturgy, we had the blues guitarist John Fahey providing music, we had a committee for civil rights, and when I was 12, I started going on demonstrations with my mother. Fahey later wrote and recorded a song, March! For Martin Luther King! although, unlike my mother, he didn’t have the courage to actually march. Before the March on Washington, protesting in large numbers for civil rights was synonymous with getting your head bashed in, getting dogs sicked on you, or if you were lucky, just getting water hoses trained in your direction, and very likely going to jail. It was a real risk to go on the March on Washington.

Medgar Evers had been the Field Secretary for the NAACP, and had been among those who had searched for Emmet Till. He was also among those devastated when the body was found. Medgar Evers was assassinated outside his home in Mississippi on June 12, 1963. After his funeral, where 5,000 people came to pay homage to him, a smaller number of mourners hit the street singing and moving toward the main street of the city. The police stopped them with billy clubs and dogs. The mourners responded by throwing bricks, bottles and rocks. This was the atmosphere at the time of the march on Washington.
So my mother forbade me to go. But I remember the day very well, because I was at home, filled with mixed feelings of guilty relief, because I was afraid the march might turn violent, fear for my mother, and regret that I didn’t go. So my mom got to go to the march, and hear Martin Luther King, Jr. give his famous speech, and all I got was this lousy bulletin from the march. But from the bulletin, I know that the program began with Marian Anderson singing the National Anthem on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The last time she sang there was on Easter Sunday 1939, after being barred from singing in Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, because she was black. So with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt, she had her open air concert, with the great statue of Abraham Lincoln looking on in approval, while 75,000 people attended and millions listened on their radios.
I know from the bulletin that Mrs. Medgar Evers, two and a half months after the murder of her husband, led a tribute to “Negro Women Fighters for Freedom” that included Rosa Parks. And number 16 on the list of speakers, simply listed under “remarks” was The Rev. Martin Luther King, Junior. Inside the bulletin was a special plea by the organizers that showed that they feared violence as well:
“We, the undersigned, who see the Washington March as wrapping up the dreams, hopes, ambitions tears and prayers of millions who have lived for this day, call upon the members, followers and well-wishers of our several organizations to make the march a disciplined and purposeful demonstration. We call upon them, black and white, to resist provocations to disorder and violence… We call for self-discipline, so that no one in our own ranks, however enthusiastic, shall be the spark for disorder.
Under another section entitled “What We Demand” were such outrageous requests as: Comprehensive and effective civil rights legislation to guarantee to all Americans: Decent housing Adequate and integrated education The right to vote Meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.
We may feel that the reign of Jim Crow is long over. But quite aside from the victims of the on-going economic crisis, those who have lost their homes, their jobs and their dignity, there is a whole class of people whose rights, those hard-won rights demanded at the March on Washington, are being systematically stripped away.
I recently read that as many as 1 in every 9 young black American men is now incarcerated. The vast majority of these are for nonviolent crimes, mostly drug-related. The percentage of black men in prison is even more incredible when you read the stats that young white men are just as likely to be involved in this kind of non-violent crime. And once one is incarcerated, every right that we take for granted as Americans, is lost. I heard this trend described recently as the new reign of Jim Crow- even the right to vote can be rescinded. Employment is made incredibly difficult, even public housing is out of bounds.
Paul entreats us, in his letter to the Hebrews, to “remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them.” It is also those who have served their time and find themselves permanently on the bottom of a brutal caste system who need us to remember them.
Paul also urges us to “remember those who are being tortured, as though we ourselves were being tortured.” We can honor Emmet Louis Till, by remembering that he was tortured and killed solely because he was a young black man.
We have continually taken the place of honor at the table. We have enjoyed incredible freedoms, privileges, rights. The right to vote, the right to live in a decent place, the right to a good education, and for some of us, the right to marry. Paul also urges us to “let marriage be held in honor by all” and how better to honor it than to make sure this human right is shared with everyone.
Paul urges also us to “continue in mutual love,” and if he is following the teachings of Jesus, that means love for everyone, even the stranger, even the outcast, even the lowly.
Martin Luther King wrote, poignantly from the Birmingham jail:
I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride for freedom is not the… Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…
King wanted us all to remember that none of us are free until everyone is free.
But there is, in all this seemingly endless, seemingly hopeless struggle, a ray of hope, an almost painfully promising ray of hope. The third anniversary.

On August 28, 2008, Barack Obama accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party for the office of President of the United States. Ninety thousand ecstatic people watched his acceptance speech in a Denver auditorium, and through the media, the whole world was watching. A place of honor had been granted to a person from the struggling class, from an enslaved people. Now those troubled young black men whose previous career options had been life in prison or gang membership, had another option: They might become the president of the United States. It seemed to be so tangibly the answer to Dr. King’s dream, to the great promise he held.

We need to continue to dream. Because dreams, like prayers, can move mountains. Can profoundly change hearts. Perhaps Paul was dreaming when he asked so much of us, but it is a beautiful dream: Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have. And do not neglect to show hospitality to those not of your tribe, for by doing that some have entertained angels without even knowing it.

Fire

2010-08-16T11:06:00.001-07:00

Reflections on Luke 12:49-56
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad/ Good Shepherd, Berkeley
August 15, 2010

Well, what happened to “Do not worry about your life?” What happened to the lilies of the field? What happened to “Do not be afraid, little flock?” Jesus, in this stunning passage, seems to be saying “Be afraid, be very afraid!”

In trying to tease out the meaning of this passage, we find many references to sayings in the Old and New Testaments, some that confirm the old prophesies, some that turn them on their heads. In his promise of fire upon the earth, Jesus seems to be confirming the proclamation of John in the beginning of the gospel, that Jesus will “baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” And calling down fire on the heads of opponents is a time-honored tradition, done several times in the Old Testament, by Elijah in Kings I and II against the prophets of the pagan god, Baal and a few other unfortunates. It was such a familiar act that James and John helpfully offered to “command fire to come down from heaven and consume” the Samaritans who refused to receive Jesus in their village, earlier in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 9:54). Jesus refers to his own coming baptism, but it is nothing like his gentle experience with the water and the dove. Rather it is his own baptism of fire, his crucifixion and death that he is dreading, that is causing him, in this understated modern translation, such “stress.” And poignantly, the bright predictions of the peace that Jesus will bring are flatly contradicted. In the song of Zechariah, the Prophet of the most High is sent to “guide our feet into the way of peace.” And of course, once he is born, the angels sing, “peace on earth, goodwill toward men.”

The source for the awful division of family unity and love seems to be in the Book of Micah, which reads:
Put no trust in a friend, have no confidence in a loved one;
Guard the doors of your mouth
from her who lies in your embrace.
For the son treats the father with contempt,
The daughter rises up against her mother
The daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
Your enemies are members of your own household. (Mic. 7:5-6)

Since Jesus chose to quote this horrendous passage, it kind of makes you wonder what his own family life might have been like.

But there is a more reassuring passage from the book of Malachi, although it begins as harshly as any fire and brimstone in the Old Testament:

See the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evil-doers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. (Mal. 4:1)

But then a few verses later we have:

Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah. …he will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents…(Mal 4:5-6)

Well, anyone who has had difficult and even fiery relations with a parent (perhaps as even Jesus did) or with a child, knows that sometimes the fire is necessary before the reconciliation is possible. I have experienced that in my own life with both of my parents, but a friend of mine just told me a story of fire and reconciliation that goes beyond anything I have ever experienced.

The story began with an urgent call from my friend. She was begging me to pray for her son, who was in the emergency room after a massive stroke. He was 40 years old. She had had a difficult relationship with him for a long time. When they communicated he was hostile and secretive, arrogant, and he surely treated his mother with contempt. This had been the case for many, many years, and eventually she gave up hoping for a reconciliation. Then he had this sudden massive stroke, and suddenly she was by his bedside every day, begging everyone she knew to pray for the life of her son.

In the emergency room he was comatose and bristling with tubes. After some days, the doctors told her to summon all the family who needed to travel. They said that her son would surely die. My friend called someone she knew of, a non-traditional healer, since Western medicine seemed to have given up on her son. The healer told her to place her hand on the heart of her unconscious son and say the following. ”Someone broke your heart. Your heart is broken, but now you can begin to heal.” She did this for days, literally reaching out through the fire for healing and reconciliation. As she continued to pray, she was aware that she was violating one of her own rules of prayer- that she pray only for God’s will and the power to carry it out. But she could not bear to pray for anything but the survival of her son. For days in the hospital he seemed to be slowly fading and she kept up her fervent prayers along with the mantra the healer had taught her. Then, she was visited by a woman who had lost a baby. The woman described seeing her beloved infant covered with tubes, in apparent pain, and unable to come home, to be held, or to have any kind of a normal life. The woman told my friend that she finally let go, she let God have her child. After two weeks in the hospital, after one more visit to see her comatose entubated son, my friend went home and prayed. She finally said I am ready, God. If this is your will, I accept it. I pray that my son be in your arms, and whatever your will is, that is what I pray for.

The next time she visited her son, to her amazement, he began to come around. And not only did her son slowly come back to health, but he confessed to her and to the doctors that he had been an addict of methamphetamine for 23 years. This is what caused the stroke. As he confessed these things, he asked his mother what she had been saying to him while he was unconscious. She told him what the healer had told her to say. Then her son said to her, “That’s right. Someone did break my heart.” Twenty-five years before, unbeknownst to his mother, he and his girlfriend had lost their infant, and then his girlfriend left him. In his great broken-hearted grief, he destroyed his health and was lost to addiction. But now he wanted to start over with his life, and he wanted to go into recovery. My friend said that his personality had completely changed. He spoke to her with respect, with love and gratitude, his heart had turned toward his mother. The fire he had gone through, the fire that my friend had gone through, seemed to have burned away a lot of dross, and seemed to have made their reconciliation possible.

She was amazed that she had not seen the signs, that she had not suspected any kind of addiction. He had held down a job, she had never seen him high, or so she thought. She had considered herself to be a very wise and perceptive woman, but although she knew how to predict when the rain was going to come, or the scorching heat, she had not anticipated the Kingdom of Heaven reaching out for her son.

Later in our Gospel of Luke, the fire did arrive. But it was the fire of Pentecost, not a destroying fire, but an inspiring, blessing, illuminating fire. A fire of the spirit that first created familial unity between the disciples, and then spread to a familial unity between the vastly diverse members of the Body of Christ. The Greeks, the Jews, the Africans, the slaves, the free, the males and the females, the rich and the poor.

We are feeling a fire between many members of the family of God in the world today. The fire that separates human rights from those who, by their identity as children of God, deserve them. The fire of warfare on innocent people, the fire of inequity of wealth the world round. If we fight this fire, surely there will be those in the family of humanity who will turn against us. But as we watch with anxious eyes the signs of the earth, let’s remember that the time for justice, the time for reconciliation, between family members and within the family of humanity, is now, is in the present time.

Self-addiction

2010-08-11T12:47:00.001-07:00

Self-Addiction
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor
Hosea 11:1-11 and Psalm 107:1-9, 43 , Colossians 3:1-11 Luke 12:13-21
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad/ Good Shepherd, Berkeley
August 8, 2010

Well, in last week’s gospel reading, Jesus warned us about greed, and this week he isn’t letting up any. Jesus has also previously urged us to stay awake- just as he begged the disciples to in the garden of Gethsemane. Here he tells us to have our lamps lit- to be ready for action. Speaking only for myself, if I don’t make a conscious effort I do fall asleep. And if I don’t keep my lamp lit, I fall into self-centered thinking. I fall into self-addiction. I had already been thinking along these lines, given last week’s gospel, when I happened to begin reading a book a friend gave me a long time ago. I whole-heartedly recommend to you. It is called “Blue Like Jazz,” and it is an unusual book, in that it is a fervently and even evangelically Christian book, written by a generation exer named Donald Miller. He tells many wonderful stories of his Christian journey, but he often goes back to the theme of self-addiction- just the thing that Jesus always tries to free us from.

Miller recalls the hero of the wonderful film About a Boy, who thinks that life is a movie about him. He is the main character and everybody else in his life are just supporting players. Things always get out of hand when one of the supporting players seems to think they are the star.

When author spoke of his troubles to his pastor, after thinking about it, the pastor answered him very baldly: Unless you can wake up every morning and be willing to die to self, maybe you should question whether or not you are really following Jesus…

CS Lewis makes a confession of his self-addiction in this refreshingly honest poem, called As the Ruin Falls. Achingly, he realizes that his self-involvement is only beginning to fade as he is losing his wife to cancer:

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love --a scholar's parrot may talk Greek--
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack,
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.

We might hope that it will not have to come to this. That we would not have to have the ultimate heart-break in order to see the illusion of our superiority- the illusion of our separateness. The relative triviality of our needs when compared to someone else’s’.

My favorite part of Donald Miller’s book was the amazing and unlikely time he spent at Reed College. Apparently Reed has a reputation of being somewhat anti-religious, and perhaps anti-Christian. But there was a small brave band of Christians on campus, and our hero was one of them. Reportedly, there was a big party at Reed every year, kind of a pagan love fest, called Renn Fayre. It was known for its drinking and drugging and wild behavior. So Don asked his fellow Christians what kind of a statement did they want to make at Renn Fyre. At first they couldn’t think of anything, just that it would be a good time to come out of the closet, a good time to introduce themselves to the school as Christians. Finally, Don jokingly suggested, let’s set up a confession booth right out there on the square. Everyone laughed except for one of their number, a particularly convicted young Christian named Tony, who sat up like he had been electrified. YES! He said. That is exactly what we will do! They rest of the group protested wildly, “No Tony, no!” They will lynch us! They will burn the booth down!” Tony looked at them all with a smile. “No! we will build it, but there will be a catch.”

Everyone was quiet, trying to hear what the catch was. “The catch is, we will confess to them. We will confess that, as followers of Jesus, we have not been very loving. We have been bitter, and for that we are sorry. We have been judgmental. We have not been true to the teachings of Jesus. We will apologize for the Crusades, for televangelists, for neglecting the poor and lonely and we will ask them to forgive us.”

They all recognized the genius of this and they actually went through with this. They built their booth, a few stoned curiosity seekers came inside and got the surprise of their lives. After the first student was confessed to he said, “I think what you guys are doing is really cool. I am going to go and tell my friends.” After that the relationships between the Christian group and the rest of the campus changed dramatically. A group started volunteering at a homeless shelter, and soon they had to rent a second van because so many people wanted to come. There was a volunteer poverty day where people lived on 3 dollars a day to show solidarity with the poor. And at one point they had four bible study groups going, made up entirely of non-Christians.

Paul tells us in our lesson from Hebrews today, that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. To have faith, then, is to somehow be assured, regardless of what IS seen, regardless of external factors, that the things we hope for will be fulfilled. But I would also say that faith is not what you believe, but what you do. Jesus gives us very strong advise in all the gospels. We may feel that we believe it, but do we do it?

In another part of his wonderful book, Don Miller talks about a church that was planted in Seattle, and their efforts to grow it. For a long time it was just 20 people. The author described it as an AA meeting gone bad. Then one week the pastor showed up looking kind of beaten up. He had been at a conference where it was stated that the church had lost touch with people who didn’t know about Jesus. Had lost touch with people who were different than the typical church goer. Rick suggested that they repent, that is, repent in the original sense, which does not mean to say you are sorry, it simply means to change. The best translation from the original Greek of metanoia would be to transform. He suggested that they should transform into missional Christans who are actually doing what Jesus suggested- loving people who are different from themselves.

Two chapters before our gospel of today in Luke, a lawyer asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks him, what is written in the law? The lawyer who may not have been up on his scriptures answers, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Actually, the first commandment says nothing about loving God, but simply says, “You shall have no other gods before me.” Then way over in Leviticus, between the dictates of whose nakedness you must not uncover, is written, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” But in Leviticus, the commandment bears a different meaning from what Jesus apparently thought it meant. The whole passage in Leviticus makes it clear that it is your kin and those of your tribe whom we are to love as ourselves. The whole sentence goes, “You shall not make vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But when Jesus is questioned, “Who is my neighbor?” he uses as an example the biggest enemy of his tribe, a Samaritan.

So Don’s pastor suggested that they start listening to Jesus, and praying every week that God would teach them to live missional lives, to notice people who needed to be loved, even, and especially those different from themselves. The goal was not to love them so they would come to church, the goal was just to love them. And they seemed to subscribe to the idea that love is not what you think or say, love is what you do.

Our author tells us that lots of people started coming to their church after that.

The good news is what is said at the very beginning of our gospel:
"Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

It is God’s will, God’s good pleasure that we should enjoy all of the fruits of the kingdom, that we should experience heaven on earth. But apparently, heaven is not a very homogeneous place. It includes all kinds of people, people who love each other, and it does not seem to include an addiction to possessions. Heaven is a place where we are able and willing to continually keep our lamps lit, to keep our eyes and our hearts open for the Kingdom of God.
Amen.

The Unequal Inheritance: August 1, 2010

2010-08-11T12:44:00.000-07:00

Hosea 11:1-11 and Psalm 107:1-9, 43 , Colossians 3:1-11 Luke 12:13-21
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad/ Good Shepherd, Berkeley

As most of you know, I have been in Guatemala for the past month, and it has been a breath-taking and eye-opening and uncomfortable experience. On the one hand, I saw a high level of Bay Area style luxury, apparent in the swank hotel near the house I stayed in, where I paid to experience an actual shower, some of the restaurants that cater to tourists, and some of the shops and markets. These places looked and felt somewhat familiar to me.

But then there is the sharply different Guatemala. The Guatemala of the indigenous people and the many workers and laborers, sellers of trinkets, hawkers of beautiful indigenous fabric and bags on the street, drivers of the tourist-seeking horse-drawn carriages, street beggars, and the servants in so many houses including the one I stayed in. The Mayan servant in our house, Ruty, named after the biblical Ruth, works hard for 9 hours a day, six days a week and makes $250 dollars a month. And our landlady frequently pointed out how well she paid her. In fact, I found out that Ruty was a trained nurse, but that her job cleaning our house and making meals paid better than hospital work, and had much more humane working hours. One morning, one of our number at breakfast didn`t want the single egg we were offered, and suggested that it be given to a fellow student of Spanish with a big appetite. Ruty paused, confused, although her Spanish was very good. We later realized that she just could not conceive of anyone having the opportunity, or even the ability to consume more than one egg at a sitting.

Mayan woman in their exquisite native clothing were everywhere, including the great and beautiful Iglesia de San Francisco, the largest and most beautiful of the four huge and ancient Catholic churches in Antigua. At one service I saw 12 indigenous babies baptized. To the right of the great altar there was a section that read Sólo para las oraciónes- For prayer only. After the service I went through the railing to pray and I beheld a vast and beautiful mural, featuring multitudes of indigenousness women with their gloriously colorful wipiles and skirts, laborers and farmers and children and babies surrounding an image of Jesus emerging from the water after his baptism. To my amazement, the mural, which depicted so many beautiful brown Mayan faces, rendered a Jesus who resembled no one so much as Peter O’Toole. A blond blue-eyed Jesus in a sea of black haired, brown-eyed indigenous people. This was bad enough, but then when I told my Spanish teacher about it, she told me that in her little pueblo of Pastores, just outside of Antigua, there is a statue of a Mayan God, Maximon, with distinctly European features. I later read that the God Maximon was originally embraced by the Catholic church, but then they decided he was too threatening, so they began to depict him as Judas Iscariot. What have we left them, I thought. Co-opting Jesus was bad enough, but stealing the identity of their own Gods as well?

I was constantly torn between dismay at these absurd inequities, at seeing the tremendous need of so many in the streets, and struggling with my own middle class discomforts- the lack of all the things I take for granted- drinkable water, electricity that stays on, showers with warm, clean water, dry clothes and shoes, beds with no uninvited living creatures, and disturbingly of all, inconsistent cell phone and internet access!

Our gospel warns us about greed, but desafortunadamente, by the time I decided to check out the readings, I had been treating my discomforts with retail therapy, and my natural greed was in full flower. I was assailed on all sides by expert saleswomen in the streets offering some of the most beautiful fabric items I had ever seen at, of course, ridiculously low prices. By the time I saw the readings about greed I was praying every morning for God to grant me the strength not to purchase every piece of beautiful fabric in Guatemala. But like the man who planned to build two new barns to house his many possessions, I found I had to purchase two more bags to bring home all my bounty.

After my brain was bursting trying to memorize the myriad verb forms in the past tense, my Spanish teacher suggested I get a Latin American Bible and that we just read through that.

I went right away for the most familiar and beloved passages, and I opened the beginning of the Gospel of John. But to my great surprise, the passage was not as I expected En el principio era la Palabra or “In the beginning was the word.” It read instead, En el pricipio era el verbo. “In the beginning was the verb.” After that bible reading, God started giving me all kinds of unsubtle hints about how I might also be a verbo.

I went to a lecture about an organization that is deeply involved in building schools and insuring better education for the children of Guatemala: Common Hope/ Familias de Esperanza. The opportunity for sponsoring a child’s education for a pittance appealed to me, but I also wondered about a more direct involvement. The man who spoke said that Guatemala had the highest gap between rich and poor of any nation on earth. He said that only one quarter of the students even pass first grade. This was due to conditions in the home which, to say the least, are not conducive to successful learning. Food and shelter and clothing, the bare necessities of life, were often not available to them. The men are very often out of work, all too often alcoholic, and the women are often left to figure out a way to survive.

We saw the sad extreme solution to that problem when we drove past the red light district on way out of town, and saw the women leaning out of windows, with their children playing in the dirt outside.

Then a woman I met at the Spanish school recommended a book, Three Cups of Tea. This is a really incredible story about a Midwestern mountain climbing drifter, Greg Mortenson, who became an unstoppable force for promoting education to impoverished children in Pakistan, and then Afghanistan, by actually building schools in these difficult mountainous areas. He was especially interested in educating girls, and this was in Muslim country just before during and after 911. The story was astonishing and inspiring.

Finally, we heard about an after-school program for needy kids called Angel Guardian, started by a woman who had been an orphan herself. The kids had nowhere to go after school, and normally they would just be out on the streets. But at Guardian Angel, they got help with their home work, opportunities to make art, healthy snacks and loving care. During one visit, I played for about an hour with a four year old Mayan girl who seemed to have big anger issues. We played with blocks, tranquilly for a while, and then, apparently trusting me a little more, she started letting the blocks fall down the cement step we were playing on, then eventually she started violently smashing the blocks together, then letting them fall to the ground like dead people. After doing this for about an hour, she calmed down and quietly ate her snack while sitting on my lap. I was later told that her father, to whom she had been very close, had been murdered in the marketplace, traumatizing her and rendering the family destitute. Many of the mothers of the kids who go to Guardian Angel are employed there, or in a neighboring farm that benefits the program. My little friend’s mother had found a job at Guardian Angel, and the girl had apparently come a long way since she had come to the center.

When I planned to go to Antigua, no one told me that July was the rainy season, and that I would experience torrential rainfall every afternoon, if not all day every day. That my shoes would never dry out, because I would have to wade through deep water in the narrow streets which quickly became rivers. The last day I visited Guardian Angel, I noticed that all the kids seemed to have colds. Outside, a particularly impressive thunderstorm was in progress, and at 5:00 all the kids pulled small scraps of plastic over their heads and proceeded into the downpour on their long walk home. I too waded home in the downpour, trying not to think of exactly what was in the water we were deeply wading through. But as I walked that soggy way home, I suddenly thought of a way to be a verbo. I had noticed at the grand mercado in Antigua, that children’s raincoats were very colorful and cheap. I told my friend about my plan to buy 20 raincoats, and she donated enough money to buy five more. The next day, my last day in Guatemala, I asked my Spanish teacher if she would come and help me bargain. Whenever she spotted a stall with raincoats I made myself scarce. Three stalls and twenty-five beautiful colorful impermeables later she proudly gave me change back for the amount that I thought it would cost. I spent a ridiculously small amount of money to keep twenty-five kids happily dry through the rest of the rainy season. It felt good to be a verbo for a change.

As our gospel of today tells us, you can`t take it with you. It is implied that rather than building barns for our possessions, it is possible to build the Kingdom of Heaven right here on earth. In fact I think one of the surest ways we can experience heaven is when we pass it on to someone living in of hell.

Of course these organizations would love your support, but you don’t have to go to Guatemala or Afghanistan to be a verbo for children’s education. The children of Wilson Elementary School in Richmond need help and support, and Liberty Hill Baptist Church one block from Good Shepherd in Berkeley does free tutoring for high school kids every Saturday morning at 10:00. They could use our help too.

When the man who gave the lecture on unequal wealth in Guatemala finished with his statistics and his numbers, he said the following to the very white and affluent group who had gathered to hear him:

"The gap between rich and poor in Guatemala is just an example of the gap between rich and poor world-wide. Given that we are on the grossly rich end of that unequal divide, I have two questions for you: 1. How do you feel about that? and 2. What are you going to do about it?"

Amen

June 27, 2010: Home: Reflections on Luke 9:51-62.

2010-08-11T09:04:00.000-07:00

2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14Ps 77:1-2, 11-20, Gal 5:1, 13-25
Luke 9:51-62
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad NOT GS
6/27/10

After all the healings, the feasts, the anointing, the praying, Jesus finally sets his face for Jerusalem, for his awful and inevitable death. He sent messengers ahead of him to provide for lodging, because as we hear, the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.

But if this was the intention, the village of the Samaritans would provide no such thing. They would not receive him precisely because his face was set toward Jerusalem. The Samaritans worshipped only on Mount Gerizim, and did not acknowledge the Temple in Jerusalem as the home of God, and the Jerusalem Temple Jews and the Samaritans despised each other with a passion. The hatred of the Jews for the Samaritans is well illustrated by a passage from the Book of Sirach, which represents the Samaritans as sub-humans;

Two nations my soul detests and the third is not even a people: Those who live in Seir, the Philistines and those foolish ones who live in Shechem [of Samaria].
(Sir 50:25-26)

There were solid reasons for hatred from both sides. The Samaritans, although they were the descendents of the Jews of the Northern Kingdom, had included pagan elements in their worship, which was anathema to the Jews of the Jerusalem Temple. The Samaritans rejected all the books of the Jewish prophets and all references to Temple worship in Jerusalem. The Samaritans worshipped on Mount Gerizim, until their temple was destroyed by a Jewish high priest a hundred years before Christ. Apparently a hundred years was a small amount of time to those villagers in Samaria who refused to receive Jesus.

The continuing sentiments of the Jews toward the Samaritans are well-illustrated by The helpful offer of James and John:
"Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?"

Jesus had twice in other gospels, demonstrated his outrageous and shocking acceptance of the Samaritans, both in his tale of the Good Samaritan a little later in our Gospel of Luke, and the beautiful story of the Samaritan woman at the well in the Gospel of John. In both cases he is reaching out to or praising Samaritans individuals. A less likely source of praise or fellowship could scarcely be imagined by his disciples. To their continuing shock, he refused to punish or judge the Samaritans, and he rebukes his disciples for even proposing such a thing. They were probably so exasperated that they just passed on to another village without further comment. A devout disciple on the road proclaims that he will follow Jesus where ever he goes, and Jesus answers,
"Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head."

This past week I did something I had wanted to do for years. I joined the San Francisco Night Ministry on one of their amazing tours through the freezing and non-tourist oriented tours of the night. I went with a youth group that came to visit from Washington State. They were all children of migrant workers, all Latino, but with indigenous languages, not Spanish as their first language. They had heard about out Latino ministries on the web and came and stayed at the house next to Good Shepherd Church. So with some excitement and some anxiety, I rode with them in their van into San Francisco at 8:00 Tuesday night. This left some time for orientation with the night ministry chaplains, because they do not get going until 9 or 10:00.

I was teamed with a tall blond chaplain named Tom and a 19 year old from the youth group named Juan Carlos. With the chilly fog blowing all around us, we walked down the street from the church headquarters into the Tenderloin. Almost immediately an emaciated man with a paper cup in his hand engaged the chaplain in conversation. He never asked for money, as he knew that the night ministers never hand it out. They hand out something much more important than money. They hand out a kind of home to the homeless. A place of acceptance, non-judgment and most importantly, a listening ear. Apparently, the gentleman we were conversing with was not only used to the Chaplain making his rounds, but also used to others accompanying him, as he started telling us about his life immediately. He was standing at the garage exit of a hotel with his paper cup, waiting for the guests to exit and hopefully, contribute. He gestured to a overhang near the entrance and said that was where he lived. Juan Carlos, immediately intrigued, asked “Where do you go to the bathroom?” This remained unanswered. The man told us that he had AIDS, that he had been addicted to crack for many years, that he was an abused child, had seen his sister raped and was sexually abused by his parents. That was in the first 5 minutes. He had that dramatically pinched face and absence of teeth of one who not only suffered from malnutrition, but from drug addiction as well. He said he was given medication for his depression, but that it only made him crazier. He had a remarkably kind and gentle aspect for someone in his condition, and I began to realize how absurd it was for us to be afraid of people like this. After a while the chaplain offered him a new pair of clean socks, which were received with gratitude. As another car came through the drive way we said our good-byes.

After a while, we began to move out of the Tenderloin and into Union Square, where many go to beg. We approached a laughing group of tourists standing in front of an African American gentleman who was performing as a mime. Standing perfectly still and then suddenly coming to life moving quickly, as each group approached. The tourist laughed riotously and dropped a few coins into his cup. The night was freezing and the mime was wearing a t-shirt. After they left he resumed his stock-still vigil.

On the corner next to Macy’s was the most defeated-looking woman I have ever seen. She was kneeling on the cold pavement with a small dog around her shoulders, and a cup in front of her, her face cast down to the street. We approached her and after a moment, during which she did not look up, I asked her what kind of dog she had. “Jack Russell Terrier,” she said immediately with surprising dignity in her voice. We stayed and chatted for a few minutes and then the chaplain handed her a few granola bars. They apparently knew each other well.

At the church headquarters when we returned, we discussed who we had seen that night. A man who said he was a pirate, a man who wanted to chase them away, like the demons inside the possessed man in the Gospel we heard of last week. And someone who said he was Jesus. They laughed at that and said, “Oh yes, we have met Jesus many times.” I thought to myself, yes, you have met Jesus EVERY time. We had all met the Jesus who says "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." If we believe what Jesus says in Matthew 25, everything we did or said to these brethren and sistern that night we did and said to Jesus. He is them.

This Gospel passage we heard today is all about home. The dispute of the Jews and the Samaritans was the question of where the home of God lay. The follower on the road was willing to follow Jesus, but may not have understood the homelessness that following Jesus would entail. One follower wants to go home to bury his father before following Jesus, and another wants to say farewell to those at home. Jesus tries to explain that only the Kingdom of God will be their home from now on.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist Christian I have quoted to you before, practices what he calls engaged Buddhism. He is always reaching out to the suffering, working for peace, putting himself in danger or discomfort to do these things. But he has a calm and serenity that is enviable, because he has found his true home. He speaks of a home that to me is comparable to the Kingdom of God. Jesus has said that the Kingdom of God is at hand, is in the present moment, that it is within us. And in today’s scripture he is saying that to go back to the past, to what is dead, is to relinquish this precious kingdom. Thich Nhat Hanh says the following mantra as he mediates:
I have arrived. I am home. I have arrived in the Pure Land, a real home where I can touch the paradise of childhood, and all the wonders of life. I am no longer concerned with being and nonbeing, coming and going, being born or dying. In my true home I have no fear, no anxiety. I have peace and liberation. My true home is the here and now.

We might even say, my true home is the Kingdom of God.
Amen.

Longing for Running Water: Father's Day 6/20/10

2010-08-11T08:55:00.000-07:00

Reflections on Luke 8:26-39
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad/Good Shepherd
6/20/10

What great readings for Father’s Day! A single frightened prophet is plagued by survivor’s guilt, a dear longs for running water, and a man full of demons is finally healed. I don’t know about you, but I have to say that these stories really remind me of my dear old dad.

My father always seemed to be longing for something beyond his reach- something that might soothe him as surely as cool water soothes a forest animal. He has longed for it his whole life so far, and for much of that time, what he longed was a mystery to me. But at some point I realized that what my father was longing for was his own mother, who died very suddenly when he was only thirteen. I know that like our psalmist of today, for many years my father felt that tears were his only food day and night, and the question certainly came up for him, "Where is my God?" My father developed into a life-long atheist, probably because he just couldn’t answer that question, given what he felt God had done to him.

So it seemed that the only thing nearly big enough to even begin to fill the void that my father lived with, was the whole of glorious creation. He made the worship of our great mother earth his whole life and became a geologist.

My father had very early wilderness experiences which shaped him his whole life. His father was a crusty old silver miner named A.C. Gardner, and so my father grew up in a tiny encampment right on the silver mine- the Betty O’Neil mine near Battle Mountain Nevada. My brother and I once made a pilgrimage there just to see if it was real. It was.

When my father was two years old, he was given a huge, shaggy and protective companion named Bobbie dog. With Bobby dog to protect him my father was apparently free to roam the Nevada desert. He was after all, the youngest of 4 and his mother was very busy. One time, when my father was only five or so, a rattle snake appeared out in that desert and quick as lightening, Bobbie Dog leaped between my father and the snake, who bit the dog on the nose. My father ran home, terrified, assuming that Bobbie dog would follow, as he always did. But to his great sadness, Bobby dog did not follow him home, and for two weeks they waited in vain. Finally one night at suppertime they heard a faint scratching on the front door, and there stood Bobby dog, skinny, weak and covered with mud. They later realized that he had gone down to the river and stuck his nose in the mud, instinctively knowing how to save his own life. He was immediately named the hero of the town and my father basked in the reflected glory.

My father joined the Navy as a young man, and was delighted to experience marine wilderness. His longing for running water took him to many strange places. He told me that once when he was on leave from his duties he found himself in North Carolina at the beach right after a hurricane when the waves were still tremendously high. Longing for running, in fact, crashing water, he and two of his buddies swam out to body surf in these towering waves and one of his friends had brought a canteen and handed it to my father. It was not full of running water, but rather, it was full of running vodka, but the discovery did not dissuade my father. They got more enthusiastic as the afternoon and evening wore on and my father apparently felt more and more at one with the elements as he continued to assault the great waves as the night grew very dark. For some reason he did not drown, but eventually looked around and realized that his buddies had gone home, and the canteen was empty and he was freezing cold. As he splashed ashore a Coast Guard officer spotted him, and watched him stagger out of the water in swimming trunks, obviously disoriented. The officer assumed that my father was a ship-wrecked sailor. My father decided to enhance this impression by speaking only in rapid Portuguese and making wild arm movements describing the sinking of his ship. The officer took him to a police station, and while my father dried off he over-heard the officer submitting a report that detailed his courageous rescue of this drowning Portuguese civilian. My father, dry and almost sober at this point yelled out, “Oh give me a break!” These were the first English words he had uttered and a chilly silence followed. When my father was court marshaled he said that the judge, upon hearing the story had to pretend to cough and finally to cover his face with a handkerchief to hide his laughter. He didn’t give my father any formal punishment, but once he had gained control of himself he uttered a phrase that would live long in my family history. He told my father, “Not every one has a sense of humor like yours, Gardner.”

Vodka continued to be my fathers way of staving off his demons, with predictable results.
Of course there were wonderful times interspersed with the very bad. One Christmas not long ago I called my father to reminisce about our Christmases and how I had loved to go and buy the Christmas tree with him and drag it home through the snow. “I’m really glad to hear you say that,” my father said. “Because your brother just called me up to tell me that I ruined every Christmas we ever had with my drinking.”

After a short but very successful and promising career as a soil scientist, as the head of the National Soil Survey, which is now the National Geological Survey, the demons that my father had held at bay for so long, possessed him with a vengeance. My father contracted a demonic disease at 38 years of age that hadn’t even been invented yet. Arithema Multiformi, was a crisis of the immune system that was scarcely seen again for another 30 years, when it became common among AIDS patients. It involved among other things, horrible sores on his arms and legs and a swelling of his throat that stopped his breathing and almost killed him. The disease was so rare and fascinating to the doctors that my father was hospitalized at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda Maryland, and teams of medical students would stop by my father’s bed to stare at his bizarre and spectacular allergic symptoms. The doctors told us that he would surely die. He lost an incredible amount of weight, and finally he could hardly lift his head off the pillow. We would go and visit him and reminisce about the places we used to go as a family, about the camping trips and the mountain hikes and the beautiful beaches. Slowly and to the doctor’s amazement and embarrassment, my father began to rally. He was such a devout atheist that he never would have prayed for himself, but his family prayed for him. We prayed fervently at our little church of St. Michael and all Angels in Adelphi Maryland. Apparently Michael or one of the other angels troubled the waters in just the right way and my father got well.

My father never gave a thought to thanking God, and since he just kept getting sick again, it sort of makes you wonder. He continued to battle ill heath, probably caused by the internal scars of first illness, all his life. But he always seems to rally and rebound from the very brink of death. There have been quite a few death bed visitations that have turned into bright chatty gab sessions. The last time I visited my father, he regaled me with stories of his days in the navy, his courtship of my mother, and his bizarre sense of humor.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about my last visit to my father, was what seemed to be his awkwardly emerging faith. He had a giant bible by his bed and I, of course, asked him about it. Glossing over the fact of his life-long atheism he said, “Oh- it’s the King James Version- don’t even talk to me about the other translations.” Then he asked me to read the part in Revelation that talked about the end times. Feeling like I was in a strange dream, I found chapter 20 of the book of Revelation and read it to him. He listened carefully, remarking on the beauty of the passages. He also showed me a copy of “The Purpose Driven Life” which one of his nurses had given him. Not taking any chances, she signed his name on the dotted line where you commit yourself to Christ. He thought this charming. Before I went I asked him if I could say a healing prayer for him and he consented immediately. I put my hands on his thin silver hair and offered a healing prayer. I prayed for his health, for his comfort and for peace in his heart. He was visibly touched and, as he said, very grateful.

When my father was healed, saved, from the demonic disease, like the man in the story, he was able to go home again, but, of course, not praising God. My father was somehow saved, after a youth of bitter mourning, horrific illness and alcoholism in his adult life, and life-long bouts of euphoria and depression. He was saved by God in creation and he didn’t even know it. He was saved by all the glorious running waters he took us to, the glory of God in everything from the exquisite paramecia in the soil he loved so well to the grandeur of the planets and the stars and the glory of the earth itself. He was saved by God in creation, and God apparently never even minded that the favor was not acknowledged. At least not so far.
Amen.

The Outrageous Anointing: 6/13/10

2010-08-11T08:50:00.000-07:00

Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad
Reflections on
Luke 7:36-8:3
6/13/10

The story of the anointing woman is a well-known and well-cherished one and probably was at the time that the Gospel of Luke was written. It is dear to my heart because it illuminates two of the elements of Jesus’ life and teachings that fascinate me most: Jesus’ relationship with the women of the New Testament, and the teaching that Jesus tried so hard to convey to his uncomprehending disciples - the teaching of unconditional, extravagant love.

This story occurs, in differing versions, in all four gospels, which is very unusual for any of the New Testament stories. In every version it is an outrageous act, for differing reasons. But in only one of the four stories, in our story of today from the Gospel of Luke, is the anointing woman is a sinner. And so in this version it is the fact of Jesus receiving and touching a “woman of the city- a sinner,” that shocks the on-lookers. As his host testily says, “If this man were a prophet he would know who and what this woman is.” There was a strict taboo against any first century woman letting a man other than her husband even see her hair, it was usually tightly bound with cloth-so you can imaging how shocking this scene would have been.

In the anointing woman story in John and in Matthew and Mark, it is the extravagant waste of the very precious oil that shocks the bystanders. It was then and is now an utterly counter-cultural act. Love without counting the cost. But the extravagance in our story today is the gesture, heedless of propriety, heedless of taboos, heedless of any thought of limitation or fear. It is a outrageously courageous act.

I suppose that in every one of us there is something of the Pharisee and something of the anointing woman. It is a little surprising that Jesus was invited to the home of the Pharisee. The Pharisees were a very strict and exclusive sect, their name coming from the Hebrew “Parush” or “set apart.” Jesus alienated himself constantly from the Pharisees by his contempt for the law- and the purity codes- healing on the Sabbath, refusing to fast, taking women as disciples, allowing the touch of a bleeding woman, speaking with, healing and raising up women of the despised races of the Canaanites and the Samaritans, and, of course associating with sinners, as he does in our gospel of today. You have to wonder if Simon the Pharisee did not have a few misgivings in inviting him over. Then when this outrageous act occurs, at his tidy dinner table, he must have thought “Oh my God, I was afraid something like this might happen!” Jesus obviously hears his thoughts when the Pharisee sneers at the woman, as she covers Jesus feet with her tears and her kisses.

“Simon, I have something to say to you.” This is one of the most direct statements we ever hear from Jesus. He will not let pass the opportunity to show the Pharisee what a true disciple should be like. He will not pass up the opportunity to show Simon the human miracle taking place before them.

There are many examples of Jesus performing miracles of unimaginable abundance in all the gospels: The feeding of the multitudes, the massive catch of fish that Simon and his fellow fishermen harvest, the gallons and gallons of expensive wedding wine, and Jesus’ instruction to forgive your brother not seven times but seventy times seven times. ”

But in the story of the anointing woman, we have someone other than Jesus actually performing a courageous, taboo-breaking act of tremendous generosity. We are shown that one doesn’t have to be Jesus of Nazareth, one doesn’t have to have miraculous powers to emulate the kind of unconditional and almost limitless love that Jesus models.

In Matthew and Mark, Jesus defends the anointing woman from the scolding disciples saying, “Truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.” Ironically, in these two Gospels, she is never named. And, for the most part, it is Luke’s sinful woman of the city that has traditionally remained as a composite portrait of her. She has often been inaccurately identified as Mary Magdalene, although nowhere in the Gospels is it written that Mary of Magdalene was any kind of sinner. But this sermon today and so many throughout the centuries have fulfilled the prophecy that she will be remembered. And Jesus’ words hold more importance than can be ascribed to a simple act of extravagance. It is the anointing of the Anointed One. It is the good news- the news that we can allow the Grace to rain from us for a change; we can give something without calculating the cost.

In the book of Isaiah, God says,

Do not remember the former things,
Or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing
Now it springs forth do you not perceive it?

Like the Old Testament God of Isaiah, the anointing woman, and Jesus of Nazareth, were trying a new thing. As it sprang forth, like that flood of fragrant oil, like that extravagant gesture of love that Jesus presented to the uncomprehending Pharisee, a new idea came into being, a new life and a new hope, not based on market forces, not based on self-preservation, but based on unlimited love. Based on the unfettered compulsion to give back something for something incredibly precious that has been given. What we all have been given is unimaginably precious. We have been given the glory of creation, we have been given the miracle of Jesus, and we have been given boundless grace.

The Christian Buddhist, Thick Nhat Hahn best describes for me this abundance that we are all gifted with: He reminds us that:

The winds of grace are always blowing- we have only to put up our sails.

Jesus calls us to mirror the anointing woman and give back in some small measure, the love that has been so extravagantly poured out for us.
The never-ending raining down of Grace in our lives- Grace we did not earn, Grace we can’t even conceive of, and grace that does not ever exist in terms of lack or cost, but only in glorious abundance.

Amen

Trinity Sunday: 6/6/10

2010-08-11T08:48:00.000-07:00

Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad/Good Shepherd
Reflections on 1 Kings 17:17-24, Ps. 30, Gal. 1:11-24, Luke 7:11-17
6/6/10

Today is Trinity Sunday and often, on Trinity Sunday, we hear the ancient hymn, I bind unto myself today the strong name of the Trinity, the three in one, the one in three. Whenever Trinity Sunday comes around, I have to stop and ask- Just what are we binding ourselves unto? Well, the truth is, we don’t really know. The truth is, none of us really knows exactly what God is, let alone what the Trinity is. All of us, in this sense are agnostic. So in a sense to try to explain God, even through the time honored and holy persons of the Trinity is a little dangerous. God is the unexplainable mystery- Job’s whirlwind. As God tells us through the words of Isaiah, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways. “ So how can we understand her, triune or not? But we can ponder. We can ponder anew.

Gregory of Nyssa, his brother Basil and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus were desert monks in the 4th century who greatly helped in the understanding (or impossibility of really understanding) the Trinity. They warned their initiates against striving for a clear understanding of the Triune God. Instead of struggling to understand what they deemed was a holy mystery, initiates were encouraged to keep their minds swinging back and forth between the one and the three. Gregory of Nazianzus writes:
No sooner do I conceive of the One, than I am illumed by the splendor of the three. No sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back to the one. When I think of any of the three I think of him as the Whole and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of that One so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest. When I see the three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divine or measure the undivided light.

Before I went to seminary I was very comfortable with the idea of God, but very uncomfortable with the idea of Jesus. After 6 years of seminary, I found that I was very comfortable with the idea of Jesus, but uncomfortable with the idea of God. I didn’t think of it much then, but I guess I had always been most comfortable with the idea of the Holy Spirit- or maybe the Great Spirit.

I used to think of God through the lens of Lakota Sioux spirituality: MITAKUYE OYASIN, which is Sioux for “All my Relations.” In other words, God is truly all-encompassing. All creatures are our relations and are all part of God with us. There really was nowhere that God did not touch, and the why and wherefores of what God did and did not do were a huge mystery, not to be too deeply plumbed.

Then I read about process theology and I read Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book ”Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.” Rabbi Kushner came to a new conclusion about God when his young child died of cancer. He could not reconcile the God he loved with anyone who would allow such a thing to happen. He described his new philosophy like this:

A 707 crashed into a bridge in Washington DC- that was physics. But when Maury Schmutnick, who had never had a heroic thought in his life, jumped into the river to save a drowning stewardess, that’s God. A Christian perspective might have called it the Holy Spirit. This explanation of what seemed to be God’s unexplainable foibles initially appealed to me.

But as time went on, I realized that Rabbi Kuschner’s idea of God was too easy an answer. I felt it was wrong to put God in a box, that God in fact was the very definition of “out of the box.” And maybe that is the true value of the Trinity- it keeps God out of the box. As I pondered this, a phrase I heard somewhere kept coming back to me: “Do you praise God only when the hurricanes do not blow?”

Or do you embrace and say yes to creation in all its wildness? Is that not at least one definition of faith? Around this time one of my influences was a kind of an out-of-the-box priest who was at the time serving (for free) as vicar of a small church in Oakland. Right after the great tragedy of the Tsunami title waves in Indonesia in 2004, I asked him:

“How do you reconcile the reality of that scale of devastation with the idea of a loving God?” He said, “God gives the plates of the earth’s crust the freedom to be plates of the earth’s crust. They then do what plates of the earth’s crust do- they shift.” He challenged me to imagine a world in which creation did not have this freedom. An utterly ordered world with no death, never any chaos, no wildness- no wilderness.

In the book of Job God speaks out of the whirlwind. He speaks of the glories of creation; the unfathomable complexity and power of that God-made creation, and man’s arrogance in thinking he can comprehend or control it.

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements, surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”

God speaks of the great power of the Leviathan, the sea monster whose creation is noted in Genesis.

Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook? Put a rope in its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook?
Will it make a covenant to be your servant forever?

These wonders are a mystery I don’t want to mess with; the great and truly unfathomable whirlwind that is the glory of God. But I do believe that when we are sheltered and nourished and even when we are challenged by God’s exquisite creation, this is the purest form of God’s love for us.

Predictably, Fr. Matthew Fox, author of “Creation Spirituality,” doesn’t want to mess with the mystery of God in Creation either. He just wants to glory in it. He sees the ecstasy of the Trinity, in perhaps a different but just as powerful way as those initiates of the Cappadocian Fathers. He glories in Creation and in the mystery of the Holy Spirit, while pointing out the Jesus-centric tendencies of conventional Christianity. He was once confronted by an impatient listener at a lecture he gave in Australia. “I hear you speak of the Cosmic Christ,” the man said. “Well, are you a Christian or not? Do accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior or not?”

Fox replied, “I am a Trinitarian Christian. Those who think that Christianity is exclusively about Jesus are in fact heretics. They deny the Trinitarian Divinity.”
He later accuses many Christians of what he calls Jesusolotry. He goes on:
“To zero in on redemption of sin only, is anthropocentric and leaves out the mystical experience we have of God in creation and of the Spirit in our world.” Then he adds that it leaves out what he calls the Cosmic Christ, the Cosmic Wisdom that was present before the creation of the world (which we heard about in proverbs 8) who was incarnated in Jesus (Jn 1:14) and whom Jesus promises to send as spirit.” As it says in our Gospel reading of today.

Perhaps it is more important to see what the Trinity leads to than what it actually means. Matthew Fox’s idea of the Cosmic Christ comes from the brilliant and radical Catholic theologian Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose writings were banned by the Catholic Church. He seems to think that what it all leads to is his idea of the Cosmic Christ, and he places humankind itself as one with Christ in the Trinity. According to Teilhard de Chardin, Christ is the force behind a collective "Christ consciousness" of humankind, which will culminate in the emergence of a "Cosmic Christ" - the true parousia, or presence. Teilhard de Chardin essentially taught that the whole world itself was being transubstantiated into Christ. Is that cool or what!

Since the word “Trinity” never appears in the bible, on this Trinity Sunday, the lections are selected, as best they can be to reflect the idea of the Trinity.
Our wonderful reading of Proverbs today, that Matthew Fox alluded to, could indeed be said to reflect his concept of the Cosmic Christ, imparting wisdom, and understanding, and existing, just as “the Word” did in the prolog of John, before the beginnings of the earth. She seems to be at all places at once, in the present time as well as the past. She is, all at once:

…on the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads, at the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals.

And at every stage of creation, Wisdom was working alongside God the creator. Expressing her ecstasy at co-creating with God she says:
Then I was the craftsman at God’s side.
I was filled with delight day after day,
rejoicing always in the presence of God,
Rejoicing in the whole world and delighting in all humankind.

We need the wilderness, we need wildness of creation, but the majesty and the glory and the fearful mystery of God is too much for us. I guess that’s why we need the Trinity- we need the humanity of Jesus and the soft transcendence of the Spirit.

But if we truly have a have a triune God, whether or not we can grasp the three in one, then we must have something astounding. We have all the vastness and wildness and unpredictability of God the Creator. But we also, in the same being, have the human compassion, forgiveness and redeeming love of Jesus. And we have the mystery of the Holy Spirit, channeling that love and power through us, if we will allow it, like a great ecstatic river. Amen.

The Spirit of Truth: Pentecost, 5/23/10

2010-08-11T08:44:00.000-07:00

Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad
Reflections on Acts 2:1-21 Psalm 104:24-34, 35b, Romans 8:14-17
John 14:8-17, (25-27)
5/23/10

We have heard the story of Pentecost, and we have heard the wonderful cacophony of at least several if not many languages telling this beautiful story at the same time. We have heard the symbols of wind and fire used to paint the picture of the shell-shocked disciples, still reeling from the loss of their master, suddenly filled with the Holy Spirit. One of the miracles of the Pentecost story is that suddenly, without any effort, they could all speak and all understand many different languages.

As is noted, there were Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesapotameans, people from Judea, Cappadocians (turkey to us) Egyptians, Libya, Romans, Arabs and more. The healing and opposition of the tragedy of the tower of Babel, where they could not understand each other took place on this Holy day. The Power of the Spirit gave them so much enthusiasm and such loud and joyous ability to communicate, that it was assumed that they were drunk. Peter, apparently keeping a straight face, defends his brethren. We are not drunk, he insists, but filled with a different kind of Spirit. He quotes the old scripture from the book of Joel:

I will pour out my spirit on all flesh
Your sons and your daughter s will prophesy.
Your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.

After Jesus was crucified, there is no doubt that the disciples were very afraid. We read that there were only 120 left of the multitudes that used to throng to hear Jesus preach. And on that first day of Pentecost, it had been 50 days since the disciples had lost their beloved master. In the beginning of Acts, the author reminds us that Jesus told the disciples that while John may have baptized with water, they would soon be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Perhaps it was this promised baptism of the Holy Spirit that they kept them going. On that day of Pentecost, at that baptism of the Holy Spirit, something new was created. The Body of Christ was created.

As in all creation stories the natural elements play a huge part- the rushing wind conjuring up the beginning in Genesis when a mighty wind swept over the face of the water. And a flame appears on each of the disciples, reminding us of the first light at the beginning of time. Creation is not a comfortable thing. A great wind and fire, especially a fire that alights on a human being does not conjure up comfort. In fact the advent of a new creation is far from a comfortable thing- just ask any birthing mother. But it seems a necessary art of any creation, including the creation we witness in Pentecost.

The Holy Spirit often inspires groups of people, sometimes when only two or more are gathered together in the name of Christ.

1901 the Holy Spirit swept into Point Richmond, and the first two Episcopal services were planned and celebrated by a small group of determined Episcopalians.

J.A. Emery the arch deacon of the diocese of California was first one to conduct an Episcopal service, and the Rev. D.A Kelly was the first vicar of what became Holy Trinity Mission. In Dec 8, 1901 at Trinity Mission, Bishop Nichols petitioned God to continue to fill seven confirmands with the holy Spirit more and more in their lives as he laid his hands on their firey heads and confirmed them..

The church must have burst it’s seams, because in 1922 property at 10th and Barrett in Richmond was purchased to accommodate the growing numbers of Episcopalians there. This became St. Edmonds Mission.

On May 24, 1922 the first service was held, and the bishop petitioned God to daily increase the Holy Spirit more and more in the lives of seven confirmands.

I was extremely interested to note that from 1901-1922- a series of 7 priests served both missions at the same time. This could be considered antique area ministry, and a precedent for what I am doing now.

In 1935 a Sunday school was opened at the corner of San Pablo and Barrett. There was not enough room at either Trinity Mission in Pt. Richmond or at St. Edmond’s for the 100 children who were housed at the new Sunday school.

Trinity mission at Pt. Richmond closed in 1930, and land was eventually purchased at 37th and Roosevelt. St. Edmonds was soon closed as well, and by May 1948 services started at our present location.

And then about about 20 years ago the Holy Spirit visited three sisters, one of whom, Gloria Del Castillo, is now an Episcopal priest. The Del Castillo sisters, Episcopalians from Peru, visited the diocese of California saying they wanted to start a Latino ministry. A Latino priest, Ricardo Francisco was assigned the task, and with the assistance of Dorothy Curry, who was the priest at Holy Trinity at that time, a Latino presence came to Holy Trinity. And we are now so blessed to have Padre Javier and a great cloud of witnesses in our church, living and worshipping as part of our congregation.

Like any creation story, there have been discomforts, there have been rushing winds, hot fires and initial difficulty in interpreting different tongues. But all along, there has been the Holy Spirit. All along there has been the pioneering splendor and pain of a Pentecost experience. We are blessed and challenged in this church to have the opportunity to learn to understand each other’s cultures, to be all together in one place, to listen to the winds of heaven. To be baptized with the Holy Spirit, as Jesus promised us we would surely be.

Mother's Day: 5/9/10

2010-08-11T08:36:00.000-07:00

Mother's Day Sermon,
Holy Trinity Richmond/La Santisima Trinidad

Well, I always like to preach on Mother’s day, because I have never met a mother who did not remind me, at least a little bit, of Jesus. Because we are the ones who wash your feet! We are the ones who heal the owies, and we are the ones most likely to be called upon to feed the five thousand.

If you are a mother, you know what I am talking about. And if you are a mother, there's nothing I can tell you about being a mother that you don't already know. But if you are not a mother, then maybe you will do what I am going to do today. Maybe you will reminisce about your own mother. Maybe you will recall her in all her short-comings and all her glory.

When I think about how the Holy Spirit worked through my mother to bring me into the Episcopal Church, I picture it like this. In the beginning, the Spirit of God moved over the face of the deep and chlorinated waters of the Indian Springs swimming pool in rural Maryland. She then glided over the shallow end and kept moving until she rested on the sun-tanned face of Babs Warren, who immediately removed her sunglasses and sat bolt upright. She turned to the sunbathing figure of my mother lying next to her and proclaimed, "Joan! I've been meaning to tell you about this neat little church I've started going to! St. Michael and All Angels Church over in Adelphi!"

The next Sunday my mother took me there. She didn't say I had to go. She never said I had to go. She would just put on some great-looking little suit and say, "I'm going to church. Wanta go?" I did want to go. I always wanted to go. I had never set foot in a church until I was 8 years old so it was strange, fascinating and exotic to me. Since I was a girl I could not, of course, be an acolyte like my brother, but I did everything I could do. I joined the choir, I went to Sunday school, I played Jesus in the Easter pageant. I performed in the variety shows. I went to the pot lucks. After a while my mother got confirmed and I asked her if I could do that. She told me that I had to be baptized first, and I was all for that. And so I was baptized on Easter Even in April of 1962, wide-eyed and blasted with the Holy Spirit. A week later I was confirmed by Bishop William Creighton.

I remember standing a the communion rail, watching the Bishop move towards me. I didn’t notice that everyone else was kneeling, and my best friend, Laura Libby, kneeling to my right, desperately pulled on my dress to get me to kneel, which, mortified, I immediately did. The Bishop loomed over me, placed his enormous hands on my head and said,

Defend, O Lord, this child with thy heavenly grace: that she may continue thine for ever; and daily increase in they Holy Spirit more and more, until she come into thy everlasting kingdom. Amen.

Because my mother saved it for me, I still have the bulletin from that day.

My mother had purchased a beautiful white lacy dress for me for the confirmation. This purchase caused a screaming fight between my mother and father, so the dress must have been really expensive. My father boycotted the confirmation event, probably because of the dress. But I had the satisfaction of watching my priest, Don Seaton, storm into our apartment without knocking on the afternoon of my confirmation. He shouted at my father, who had been reclining on an easy chair, "Where the hell were you this morning, Dave Gardner?" I was thrilled.

My mother had extraordinarily high boundaries when it came to church work. She never joined the choir. I never saw her enter the church kitchen. She was never on the altar guild. Never even taught Sunday school. And for years she never joined a committee. I later realized that as the daughter of a preacher she felt she had done her time as far as church work was concerned all through her childhood and youth. But she was in those pews every Sunday, and finally, there came a time when she did join a committee.

My mother not only introduced me to the Episcopal church, she also introduced me to social justice. In the sixties the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (or ESCRU) was very active in the civil rights movement, and St. Michael and All Angels became involved too. This was the committee that my mother finally joined. Groups from the church would go out and participate in civil rights demonstrations which my Mother, however, felt were too dangerous for me to go to. But I remember joining my mother and a group from St. Michael's to picket a housing development in rural Maryland called the "Belle Aire Estates." They cluelessly advertised the fact that they would admit no black families to their housing developments. At twelve years old I walked proudly behind my mother in the picket line, carrying a placard and miming her obliviousness to the rude comments that were hurled in our direction.

In August 1963 the March on Washington was being organized and I begged to go. But in many quarters it was feared that the march would be a bloodbath, as so many marches had been in the South, and so my mother forbade me to go. Not many people in our church had the courage to go to that march, but my mother was one of them. She got to hear the "I Have a Dream" speech by Martin Luther King Jr., and all I got was her lousy bulletin from the march. It was clear from the remarks on the bulletin that the organizers expected the march might be violent as well. It read in part, "We call upon all marchers, black and white to resist all provocations to disorder and violence." The march, of course was a peaceful and history-making event.

My mother was also before her time in her support of what we now call gay rights, although she wouldn't have called it that. When I was five years old, she worked as an Arthur Murray's Dance Studio instructor. I loved watching my mother dance in rhinestones and her gauzy formal gowns. I noticed right away that most of her co-workers were good-looking young men who dressed extremely well. And they all seemed to pair off socially. When I asked her about this she told me that the reason they liked each other so much and were not married was because they were gay. And that's also why they are so much fun, she added.

The advent of the sixties seemed to suit my mother really well. In one of St. Michael's infamous floor shows, she organized a group of women to do a modern dance as beatniks. Dressed in black tights, long black turtlenecks and berets, they did a slow and Jules Feiffer-like modern Dance while they intoned the nursery rhyme, "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot, nine days old" My mother looked great in tights, and she was aware of this.

My mother, through St. Michael's church, also introduced me to pastoral care. We would frequently drive out with the church group to orphanages or half-way houses for youth to play with the children there. I clearly remember my mother sitting on the sidewalk with a few of the girls from the half way house, playing jacks and laughing.

After I left home my parents separated and my mother moved out of our little apartment in the suburbs, and into a breathtakingly dangerous neighborhood in South East Washington DC. She immediately made friends with her neighbors and allowed the children of the neighborhood to have the run of her small apartment, often feeding them or giving them small gifts. She was not tempted to move out of the neighborhood even when her apartment was, predictably enough, burglarized. Finally, one of her neighbors was murdered and our family insisted that she move into a safer area. So she moved to am apartment directly across the street from Christ's Church in a slightly safer part of town, as if to say that this was all the protection she needed.

Like many great women in history, my mother's courage and virtues did not always extend to her duties as a mother. But she had no patience for my complaints. She seems to lack the guilt gene that I inherited so strikingly. In answer to my protests about her neglect or her dishonesty, she would exclaim with great incredulity, "Oh, give me a break!" When pushed she might finally say, "Mea Culpa! Mea Culpa! All right?"

By the time I was 24, which was the year she died, I had decided that her manifold sins and wickedness were beyond my powers of forgiveness. We were barely on speaking terms. I was in art school at the time, painting large silver cubes or something. When she ventured that she couldn't see that there would be any money in that, I took it as proof of her great, sabotaging lack of faith in me. Then, a week before she died, she heard me being interviewed on the radio for a show I was in. The next time I saw her, which was the last time I ever saw her, she embraced me and told me how proud she was of me – that she was glad I was doing what I really wanted to do, and was sure I would succeed. This exchange was so utterly uncharacteristic of her, that I don't think I uttered a word in response. Luckily I did return her embrace.

My mother brought me back to the Episcopal church again, twenty-some years later, when my long suppressed mourning for her reached a fever pitch, and going to church was the only thing I could think of doing. Over the years, especially when I was on the rocky path to holy orders, I have thought about her a lot. Sometimes, when I look out and notice that the front right pew is empty, I suddenly realize that is not really empty at all. I can feel her presence very palpably at those times, sitting right there in that front pew, in one of those great little suits.

As I wait with all of you for the Holy Spirit promised by Jesus in our passage today, I strive to experience forgiveness, to feel the breath of God on my life. And to realize, that like Jesus, my mother left only so she could come back again, in a way that leaves my heart untroubled, in a way that gives me in deep peace.

Peace she left me, peace she gave me. My heart is not troubled, and I am, now, finally, not afraid.

Amen.

Earth Sunday 4/25/10

2010-08-11T08:28:00.000-07:00

T
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor
Acts 9:36-43 • Psalm 23 • John 10:22-30
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad 4/25/10

My father was and is a geologist and a physical scientist, and when every Earth Day rolls around I inevitably think of him. He was from my earliest memory, a devout atheist, and an ecstatic, evangelical lover of God’s creation. All through my childhood I was gifted with many camping trips in the various places we lived. We moved from place to place, not infrequently, as he carried out his work as head of the United States Geological Soil Survey. He even made dirt seem wonderful. He took us to The Appalachian Mountains, the Shenandoah River, Mount Washington, Sugar Loaf mountain, Rehoboth Beach, Bethany Beach, Assoteague and Chiniteague islands, the beautiful Tridelphia Resevoir on the Patuxant River, the glaciers of Upstate New York, and the Eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

I absolutely received my first experience of God through this instructed love of nature. On a camping trip when I was five years old, my father gave me the job of walking down a wooded path to put the milk and the eggs into the ice-cold stream. I was thrilled to see, when I came back to fetch them, that a raccoon had found them and had a glorious breakfast. I then got lost trying to find my way back, so I climbed a friendly-looking tree and waited for my father to come and find me, which he soon did.

I never darkened the door of an Episcopal Church until I was eight years old. At that time, my mother, a preacher’s kid who married an atheist, finally found she had to come back to church. But I knew who God was and I had an inexpressible gratitude for what she had created.

My father, from the beginning, was a good shepherd to us kids, teaching us to be good shepherds to the beautiful fauna and flora of the earth. After he stopped working for the government, he was a professor of geology and physical science for 25 years, and he taught this same love of nature and responsibility for shepherding to all his students. When I would go back to Maryland to visit, we could not go to a public place without ecstatic former students of his calling out “Dr. Gardner! Dr. Gardner!” They certainly knew his name.

From a very young age I was told all about how the earth fit together. I was told about plate tectonics, about air pressure, wind patterns and why the sky was blue. I was taught how rocks were formed, igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic including my father’s personal favorite igneous rock, granite. I heard him talk so much about granite as a young child, that the first time I ever heard someone complain that they were being taken for granite ( probably my mother) I imagined that it meant they were mistaken for a large gray rock.

I was pretty sure my father was the Messiah, at least it certainly seemed like it to me. He knew everything- he knew about how the earth was created, how stars were made- how creatures evolved. I thought he was brilliant. I remember clearly that he took me aside one November when I was 3 years old and told me that I was to tell no one, but that he was going to vote for Eisenhower. How silly, I thought. Anyone would be able to tell that my father would be the best imaginable president. Why bother with other candidates?

When I was 10 my father became desperately ill, and his energy for shepherding shrank to nothing. He lost his job at the Soil Survey, got full disability, and had to rebuild his life from zero, once he began to recover. But, thank God, it seemed that nothing could snatch him from my hand, and he did regain his health.

Our beautiful psalm for today, the 23rd psalm, speaks of a father, of a shepherd whom we know will never be snatched from our hands. It speaks of a God who gifts us with the glory of creation, symbolized by the green pastures and the serenity of the still waters. It speaks of a God who will fill our every need, feed us with the finest food, keep us from fear. It speaks of a God who will restore our souls.

As I was writing this my father called me on the phone from Maryland. He wanted to talk about the volcano in Iceland that is still erupting, and correct several misconceptions about it. He also told me that he had been on that volcano (it is called E-16, he said) in Iceland when all it was doing was melting the glaciers a little. Volcanic ash is a misnomer he said emphatically. You only get cinders and ash from combustion, and there is combustion in a volcano only in Hollywood movies. He began to explain to me that what people call volcanic ash is actually tiny fragments of rock- in this case basalt- that has exploded apart when the hot lava hits water and steam erupts from the volcano. He then went on to tell me the exact physics of a volcanic eruption, about the viscous mantle of lava under the earth’s crust, and what happens when it begins to leak through, which, given plate tectonics, it inevitably does.

I was reminded again that I had a father who gifted me with creation, and that, amazingly he is still in my life, unrolling its mysteries. Although he would never put it this way, I believe that when are sheltered and nourished and even when we are challenged by God’s exquisite creation, this is the purest form of God’s love for us.

As Henri Nouwen implies in our second reading, if we can see all of nature as a sacrament, just as we see the bread and the wine, we have a chance of saving the glory of nature from our own destructive hands. He goes on:

“God is with us, not as an isolated event once a week, but as the concentration of a mystery about which nature speaks day and night.”

The mystery continues in the roaring of hurricanes, the endless tides, the blue mountain mists, the glory of our vast forests, and the extraordinary and fierce explosions of a volcano. It is the whirlwind described in the Book of Job, it is unknowable and unspeakably precious.

God in creation knows our names- knows all our needs and fulfills them all. We and this beautiful, fragile creation are one.

Feed My Sheep: Third Sunday of Easter 4/17/10

2010-08-11T08:11:00.000-07:00

Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad/Good Shepherd
Reflections on Acts 9:1-6(7-20),Rev. 5:11-14, John 21:1-19
4/17/10

In Our gospel reading, we hear that today’s story is the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples. But it is actually the fourth time by my count, unless you don’t count the appearance to Mary Magdalene. But Jesus did appear to Mary at the tomb, and this of course was the first resurrection appearance, although she did not recognize him at first. The second time, Jesus appeared to the disciples when the they were anxiously gathered together, locking their doors for fear of Jesus’ persecutors. He showed them his wounded hands and feet, breathed the Holy Spirit on them and left. Thomas was not among the disciples then. The third time is our story of last week, when Thomas makes his huge leap from doubt to belief.

By the time of our story of today, even with these miraculous appearances, it seems that the disciples have gone back to doing what fisherman do. They fish- and not for people. The desolation of life without their beloved teacher was deepened by their utterly barren night of fishing.

Then, at dawn, the disciples, exhausted, discouraged, notice someone on the shore, apparently begging for food. Perhaps he was an old man, for he called them children. He apparently wanted to be fed. Just as Mary mistook Jesus for the gardener, the disciples mistook Jesus for just some guy on the beach. But they take his advise unquestioningly, and throw out the net, this time on the right side of the boat.

They then have their miraculous catch of fish, and it is the beloved disciple who recognizes Jesus. Peter, buffoonish as ever, pulls on his clothes and plunges into the water. Why was he naked on the boat in the first place, and why did he put his clothes ON to jump into the water? This was just what Peter was like- always getting it backwards.

The disciples move in this story from utter emptiness and desolation to abundant fullness- they are fed the bread (and the fish) of life.

The story of Saul of Tarsus is an extreme example of someone moving from doubt to faith. In his case he moved from murder to evangelism. Saul, who was an energetic captor and persecutor of Christians, was literally on his way to Damascus to deliver letters to the synagogues requesting that they turn in the Jews who have begun the follow the Way, so that he might bring them bound to Jerusalem where they would be put to death.

But a brilliant, literally blinding light stops him in his tracks, and he hears a voice. Like Mary, like the disciples in today’s story, he does not recognize Jesus. But Jesus tells him what to do, and he blindly follows. He remains blind, experiencing physically what he had lived out spiritually, until Ananias lays hands on him, and invokes the name of Jesus. Saul, of course, became Paul, who spent his life helping everyone he encountered to recognize Jesus.

In our Gospel story, after Jesus has given communion to the disciples, he takes Peter aside. Knowing well Peter’s short-comings, Jesus asks him not once but three times, do you love me? Perhaps it was a way of undoing Peter’s betrayal, when three times, he professed that he did not know Jesus at all. Peter affirms, with growing upset, three times that yes, he does love Jesus.

And each time Peter affirms this love, the message that is given is “Feed my sheep.” We are given to understand that to love Jesus and to feed his sheep are one and the same thing. Jesus’ great commandment is repeated three times, lest we miss it- feed my sheep.

It is a comfort and a blessing to be reminded that it was Peter- Peter the betrayer, Peter the clumsy doubter, Peter the naked buffoon, to whom Jesus gives this command. It is Peter who is called the rock upon which Jesus will build his church. And Jesus finds a way for Peter to transcend his betrayal, gives him an opportunity to affirm his love, and even to feed his sheep. And even more amazingly, it is Saul, captor and murderer of the early struggling Christians, to whom Jesus appears. It is Saul who is gifted with the mission to carry the work to all corners of his world.

What a comfort to those of us who, although we may not be murderers, and although we may have slightly more grace than Peter, still may feel unworthy or unable to love as Jesus has commanded us. There is hope, it seems, even for the most unimaginable unlikely among us.

John’s gospel begins and ends with miracles of vast abundance in Galilee. And in each case the miracle is the occasion for an epiphany. The gospel begins with the miracle at Cana, where the vast abundance of wine is the first sign of the divinity of Jesus. And we end with the miraculous catch of fish, where Jesus reveals that he is the one who will feed us with incredible abundance.

But right in the middle of the gospel is the human miracle of vast generosity- the tremendous abundance of nard that Mary of Bethany pours on the feet of Jesus.

It seems that the only miracle that we humans can attempt, is to transcend our ever-present fears, and love abundantly, feed each other abundantly.. To transcend our fear of running out of wine, of giving too much away, of catching absolutely no fish, and to listen to Jesus’ commandment. However many times we may have betrayed his teachings, however we may have murdered some of his children in our hearts, there is the possibility that even we can in fact love and feed each other abundantly. That we can fulfill this great commandment “Feed my sheep, feed my sheep, feed my sheep.”

Wounds: Second Sunday of Easter, 4/11/10

2010-08-11T08:04:00.000-07:00

Holy Trinity/Santisima Trinidad
Reflections on John 20:19-31

I have been re-reading a beautiful book by Karen Armstrong, called Beyond Belief. It is a powerful and insightful book about the Gospel of Thomas, the Gnostic gospel that was discovered with the rest of the Nag Hamadi find in 1948, and also a wonderful meditation on faith.

The most arresting image for me from the gospel story that we heard to day, is that of Thomas placing his hand in the wound of Jesus, at Jesus’ request. What more powerful image of the incarnation and the resurrection could we possibly have? Well, Elaine Pagels begins her book with an image just as heart-wrending and just as carnal. After jogging in Central Park, she enters a church in New York City, Church of the Heavenly Rest right on Fifth Avenue. She has gone there to pray, because her 1 ½ year old child, recently operated on for a heart condition, has developed a probably fatal lung disease, and the doctors want to operate again. She envisions another invasive procedure on her exhausted son, and she refuses them the opportunity to reach into his wound again. She doubts their ability to heal and she brings her son home.

She then goes into a meditation on belief. People have said to her, despite her lack of belief in her doctors, “Your faith must be such a great help to you.” She wonders what that means, noting that the prayers in the services she hears sometimes sound like dim echoes from the surface barely reaching someone at the bottom of the ocean.

She briefly tells us the history of belief in the Christian Church before the Nicene Creed was formed. How for example, in the early church, money was shared between the members and a common fund always existed for the orphans who had been abandoned in the trash heaps, or the widows with no support at all. They believed that this was their duty. The church father Tertullean wrote in about 200AD:

There is no buying or selling of any kind in what belongs to God. On a certain day, each one, if he likes, puts in a small gift, but only if he wants to do so, and only if he is able, for everything is voluntary, nothing is compulsory.

This kind of generosity attracted many converts, because it was the kind of generosity that was normally only shown to family members. It showed a remarkable kind of faith, and a rare one for those times. But an even more remarkable faith was described by Galen, the most famous doctor of his age, who had survived the enormous plague of 1629-1631 by fleeing it. The Christians stayed and cared for the sick, while their pagan counterparts fled. Galen was amazed at their courage and commented, when he came back to the scene,

For the people called Christians… contempt of death is obvious every day…

And during a second great plague in 260, , the Alexandrian Bishop Dionysus wrote,
Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves, and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ.

This remarkable courage in the face of death brought countless non-Christian people into faith, as they considered these acts to be almost miraculous.

The skeptical followers of pagan gods were transformed by witnessing the love and care the Christians gave to their stricken brothers and sisters. They were not afraid to touch their wounds. The Christians did not doubt that they would receive their reward, even if they died. The pagans converts began to believe that what the Christians were representing was a kind of truth in the face of disaster that they could live by. Even in times of devastation, the illness or even death of a young child, the horror of a plague, this kind of faith, this kind of belief, can hold us up. Elaine Pagel’s son died 4 years after that first visit to Church of the Heavenly rest, and the funeral was in that same church. She was comforted, held up, and eventually she experienced some sort of resurrection from her desolation. Friends and family gathered, as she said to “bridge an abyss that seemed impassable.”

Compared to a plague, or the loss of a child, our problems may seem slight, but lest you doubt me, I am going to tell the truth. Although, Halleluiah, it is Easter time, you and I are still continuing on something of a wilderness trek. In your case, you are still recovering from the loss of a beloved vicar, being asked to get used to the idea of sharing your very new vicar with another congregation, having to get used to a new service time that had been the same for 50 years or so, and continuing a brave and sometimes challenging experiment in multicultural worship. We are seeing signs of resurrection all around, but there are ways in which these changes might feel like an empty tomb.

For my part, I have been questioning God about the inconvenient timing of my particular trek, with no understanding until just lately. On Dec. 1, I was called to be your priest in charge here at Holy Trinity Richmond, which has been a rich and truly wonderful experience. On Dec. 30, as I have shared with you, the woman who has been my best friend since I was thirteen died after a long illness. Two weeks later I was called to Good Shepherd Church. After questioning the timing of these events, what came to me was this: Perhaps I had to begin this ministry with a broken heart. Perhaps in order to pastor two congregations in the midst of painful doubt and change, my heart had to be broken open so that I could walk this wilderness walk with you, so that we could experience resurrection together. Maybe these wilderness experiences are the marks of our resurrection. Maybe they are the wounds in our hands and in our sides.

In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, there are numerous assurances that the resurrection is often right in front of us even as we are waiting for it. When the disciples ask Jesus,
“When will the resurrection of the dead come, and when will the new world come?” Jesus says to them,
“What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it.” And when they asked,
“When will the Kingdom come?” Jesus said,
“It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying, ‘Here it is.’ Or ‘There it is.’ Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.”

We have had ample opportunity for doubt, there has been ample wounding. But we may, like Thomas, find that our doubt transforms into resurrection. We may find that the Kingdom is already here. We may find that blessings and miracles can spring from the tomb. We may find our doubting words turning into Alleluias.

Thomas, in the Gospel of John, is also called Didimus, which is Greek for “the twin.” Jesus calls Thomas his twin. If that is true, and we are Thomas’s twin in our doubting, then we know we will have resurrection with our twin, in spite of all our wounds, and all our doubts.

Amen.

Alleluia and Halleluiah!

2010-08-09T12:16:00.000-07:00

March 28, 2010, Easter Sunday
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad/Good Shepherd

Well, Alleluia and Halleluiah!

The Hosannas we cried out on Palm Sunday have turned, thank God, to Alleluias. Now, Hosanna does not mean “Praise God” like Alleluia does. It is a Hebrew word that means emphatically, “Help! NOW!” People were waving those palm branches and calling out to Jesus, “Help us!- Save us!” And on Palm Sunday we shouted along with them- begging for help for the oppressed within us and in the world, help for our fears and for all the fearful, for those who mourn within us and without us.

Mary Magdalene must have been looking for help when she found the tomb where Jesus was laid. She wanted help in her great sorrow, help in her mourning as we who mourn always do. She had once received some kind of profound help from Jesus, according the gospel of Luke, when Jesus exorcised seven demons from her body. According to ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬the gospel of Luke she was a woman of means who supported Jesus’ ministry from her own wealth. And in all four gospels, she is identified as the first apostle to proclaim the risen Christ.

So very early on the first day of the week, she crept to the tomb, probably because she wanted to see her teacher again, even in death. This took considerable courage, as all who knew Jesus had now fled, and as we know, Peter, who was probably typical of the group, denied even knowing him three times. She was devastated that her beloved teacher had died the death of a common criminal- was executed like a thief. Perhaps she wanted to honor him in some way.

So in the dark, just before dawn, she came to the tomb, but found to her amazement that the great stone that was rolled up to seal the grave, to protect the body from thieves and animals, had been rolled away. It seems from the reading that she did not even go into the tomb to check- she just seems to assume that Jesus is gone. Her distress must have risen even higher- not even to be able to see her Lord’s body- not even to be able to cry by his tomb. So she runs to Peter and the beloved disciple. Now there seems to commence an exciting competitive footrace to the tomb, with the beloved disciple arriving first. Unlike Mary, he DOES look inside the tomb, and he sees that Jesus is gone. Somehow, just by seeing the linen wrappings, the beloved disciple believed- we are not sure what he believed- maybe he just believed that Jesus was in fact gone. Peter shows up, and, as clueless as ever, does not seem to understand. So, they decide to just go home. Mary is somehow there, although she is not mentioned in the footrace. She begins to weep, and finally has the courage to look into the tomb, still weeping. She sees two angels.

They ask her why she weeps. Still crying she explains that Jesus has been taken away. She must have been weeping very hard, because when Jesus is standing there before her, even speaking to her, she does not recognize him. It seems likely that the risen Christ did not look very much like the earthly Jesus. But how exalted could he have looked? She thought he was the gardner.

Anyway, Jesus has to jolt her awake by crying out MARY! She must have recognized his voice more than she recognized his face. “Rabbouni!” She cries- which is an Aramaic endearment meaning “My teacher” Then Jesus makes the mysterious request that she not touch him. This may have been a way of saying that she should not try to keep him in his earthly body- she should not interrupt the coming resurrection, his triumphant and contagious victory over death. This may be a comment for all of us when we mourn- we too have to let the resurrection happen.

Then Jesus tells her to go to her brothers in the movement and tell them that he is ascending to his father and their father, to his God and their God. He seems to be saying that what is true for him is also true for them- they are also children of God, and as he told them before, he goes to prepare a place for them.

Then Mary Magdalene runs joyfully to the other disciples- her fears and mourning at an end, and announces, "I have seen the Lord.”

One of my favorite images of Christ is an icon showing him pulling Adam and Eve out of their tombs- literally pulling them from death into life. He grasps them by their wrists- not by their hands- implying that he is doing all the pulling- it is the grace of his resurrection and not our own efforts that save us. When Jesus lifted himself out of that tomb he lifted Mary Magdalene and all humanity out of the tomb as well.

A beautiful Orthodox hymn for Easter goes:
“It is the day of Resurrection; let us be radiant for the festival, and let us embrace one another. Let us say, O brethren, even to those that hate us: Let us forgive all things on the Resurrection; and thus let us cry: Christ is risen from the dead- by death He has trampled down death, and on those in the tombs He has bestowed life.”
Christ in his death has killed death. Christ has made captivity a captive. So that all that is dead within us is brought blazingly alive. That within us that is captive now knows perfect freedom. That within us that has been dark is now flooded with light.
As beautifully said by John Chrisostom,
Hell grasped a corpse and met God
Hell seized earth and encountered heaven
Hell took what it saw, and was overcome by what it could not see.
For those of us skilled in creating our own private hell- there is hope- there is life after hell!

Jesus lived and died fully as the word of God incarnate. When he died, that word, so powerful, so transformational in it’s truth, it’s love and it’s justice, came blazingly alive in the hearts of Mary Magdalene and the small band of Jesus’ followers.

Jesus lived and died a life suffused with love, and he showed us how to do the same thing. How to pull ourselves out of our own graves and into a life suffused with love.

As Jelaladden Rumi would have it:

Inside each of us, there's continual autumn. Our leaves
fall and are blown out over the water.

A crow sits on the blackened limbs and talks
about what's gone.

Then love returns: spring, moisture, intelligence, the
scent of hyacinth and rose and cypress

There's a necessary dying, and then Jesus breathes.

Very little grows on jagged rock.
Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will spring up
where you are.

Alleluia- Christ is Risen!

The Passion of Joan

2010-08-09T12:13:00.000-07:00

Good Friday 4/2/10
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad

It is strange, considering the horrendous nature of the passage we have just heard tonight, that the overwhelming message of John’s Gospel is that Jesus’ death is the hour of his exhaltation, of his glorification. He goes to his death of his own free will, and not as a victim. John’s calm beginning portrait of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane is in sharp contrast to the Jesus in the Gospel of Luke who literally weeps blood in his agony. And in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, he pleas for God to take the cup of crucifixion from his lips. But in John’s version, as Peter, always the hot-headed one, tries to save him, Jesus asks, “Am I not to drink the cup the father has given me?”

And yet clearly it is a story of suffering. As in Matthew, Mark and Luke, we get the agonizing description of Jesus’ torture: the flogging, the crown of thorns, the soldiers repeatedly striking him on the face, the carrying of the heavy cross, the brutal crucifixion. And finally, apparently drinking with willingness the cup his father had given him, Jesus receives the sour wine, and gives up his spirit.

There is however, one great moment of beauty. Just before Jesus gives himself up to the care of his father, he gives his mother into the care of the beloved disciple. “Woman, behold your son” he says to his mother. “Behold your mother,” he says to the beloved disciple.

Since it was my mother who taught me about Good Friday, I always think of her on this day. I remember, when she told me the story, blinking out at the bright Maryland Springtime, wondering how the sky could ever turn black at mid-day. But there did come a time for me when the sky turned black in the middle of the day, and that was the day my mother died. There were lots of stations of her cross, but I was absent for most of them.

The first station would have been the accident, when she was struck by an out of control vehicle after her busy day of work as an executive secretary in Washington D.C. The first station was rendered almost immediately into scripture:

A reading from the Washington Post, Friday, Oct 25, 1974:

A Washington woman was injured yesterday when she was struck by a metro-bus as she was crossing Pennsylvania Avenue at 15th Street North West, Metropolitan police said. The woman was identified as Joan R. Gardner of 520 “N” St. NW, an employee of the Association of Registered Bank Holding Companies. She was taken to Washington Hospital Center where her condition was listed as critical.

Here ends the reading.

Everybody else got out of the way, but she apparently didn’t turn her head to see an on-coming bus. I always wondered: was she so lost in thought that she couldn’t turn her head and look up, even to save her life? Or did she make a sudden dash for eternity for reasons eternally known only to herself?

Station two would have been the arrival of the ambulance, and the rescue workers. They had difficulty identifying her until someone found her purse which had been thrown some distance away.

Station three was the waiting room where I sat with my dry-eyed siblings and my mother’s best friend who wept non-stop. I hugged her, feeling guilty about my own dry-eyed state. I was however, comforted by my brother when the doctor told me my mother would have no cognitive functions left.

Station four was the hallway where my father and I walked, meaning to see my mother in the ICU. Just outside of the room, at station five, a well-meaning nurse, playing the part of Simon of Cyrene, wrong-headedly offered to carry the cross for me. She had just seen my mother and she said, “Her blood pressure is dropping and her condition is not compatible with life.” I let her carry that cross and I fled, ever-after wishing I had stayed and been with my mother at the last station as she died. Instead I have only my brother’s description of my mother’s beautiful face. She was all swathed with white bandages from her head to her toe, he said. So all he could see was white with the exception of her very blue eyes which were open but unseeing. I have had a recurring dream ever since that she died peacefully in my arms, instead of all alone surrounded by doctors and machines.

I did make it to one more station of the cross for my mother, the station of ashes. No one else in my family wanted my mother’s ashes or knew what to do with them, so I brought them with me in my suitcase to California. I decided to scatter them in the San Francisco Bay, since I knew how much she loved it. I opened the container of ashes in the bright sunlight and I looked in. I saw a glaring bright whiteness- brighter than anything on earth could have bleached them. As devastated as I was I couldn’t help but see how beautiful they were. They looked like the ornaments of any sun-bleached shore- tiny fragments of seashells and delicate shards of the bones of fish and birds nestled in white sand. My mother had been transfigured, had been glorified, had somehow entered into the arms of all creation.

Even with that glimpse of glorification, of resurrection, I spend the next several decades in the tomb. I dwelt with death and with regret at my missed opportunity to be with my mother when she died for a very long time.

I once heard a wonderful sermon from Bishop William Swing and he talked, among other things about death. He said everyone seems to have something like a little bag of death inside of them, pulled closed with fragile threads of string. He spoke of the death of someone he loved and how the sound of earth thrown on the lid of the coffin loosened those strings for him and let death slowly leak out. The sight of my mother’s ashes, and the memory of them, beautiful as they were, seemed to loosen those strings for me as well.

Then, only very recently, I learned there was one station more for me to witness. I was asked to preside at the 7:00 AM Ash Wednesday service which is something I had never done before. A kindly altar guild member warned me about opening the container of ashes too quickly. Be careful, she said. The nice silver container sticks and if you just pull it open, the ashes will fly out all over the altar and all over your face and the mood will be altered in a way you might not want.

So at 6:30 AM, half awake but conscientiously trying to prepare, I decided to practice opening the container. Just before I did I remembered that container of my mother’s ashes. I wondered in the dim light of the chapel if I would re-experience my mother’s death- if the fragile strings of that little internal bag of death would loosen again. I slowly and carefully opened the container of ashes and was thunderstruck. What was in the container were not the ashes of death but the bread of life. I had switched the two silver containers and was now looking down at the communion wafers I was about to serve to the faithful.

I have had other experiences of resurrection in my life, but never so instant, so head-jerkingly sudden, so mocking of my tragic expectations. Rooted to the spot, I continued to stare into the silver container. I suddenly realized that this instant transformation had taken 32 years. Seeing that bread of life made real for me the answer my best friend had given me when I asked her why my mother had to die. “Este,” she said with great certainty and even joy, “Your mother is not dead.”

As I often have, I felt the presence of my mother there with me in the chapel on that Ash Wednesday morning and I realized that although I had not been there at the foot of the cross, I was somehow there at the resurrection.

Feet

2010-08-09T12:02:00.000-07:00

4/1/10- Maundy Thursday
Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14 * Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19 * 1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad/Good Shepherd
March 14, 2010

Every one of our readings refer to the Passover feast mandated by the writings in Exodus, or the Last Supper, which in all but John’s Gospel, is described as a Passover feast. The passage begins “Before the Passover festival” and places the last supper on the day before the feast, probably so that Jesus would be seen as the sacrificial lamb, sacrificed on the day of the Passover. The other three gospels place the last supper during this feast. The very first place we see the words of institution, “This is my body, this is my blood” are not in any of the gospels, but in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian’s. Paul wrote only 50 years after the life of Christ, and John’s gospel, by contrast is the newest of the gospels. “I received from the Lord what I also handed over to you” says Paul. And then, the words of institution, “The Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed took bread…”

It is fascinating that the words of institution do not appear in John at all, but the foot washing does, and this is the only Gospel to tell that story. Really the emphasis is on love, and the only sacrifice demonstrated at this point, is the sacrifice of Jesus dignity, in washing feet of his disciples. The washing of feet was strictly the work of a slave, never to be attempted by an ordinary citizen, let alone a teacher. I think it is hard to appreciate what kind of taboo Jesus was breaking. We get a glimpse of what it must have been like for the disciples by awkward, even a little embarrassing to have one’s feet washed by even a peer, but it is no where near the outrageous act today as it would have been then.

Several years ago I was a chaplain at San Francisco General Hospital. SF General is a county hospital and they have to take everybody. So a great number of the patients there were the homeless, the alcoholic, the drug addicted, the desperate. This was quite an experience for an uninitiated middle class white girl from Sliver Spring Maryland. Although I did not grow up in an affluent household, I never saw things like I saw at SF General. Their slogan was “SF General. As real as it gets.”

For a time I was assigned to the ward for the ambulatory disabled. In other words, people who had something wrong with their feet. One homeless man had been afraid to ever take off his shoes for fear that they would be stolen. So infections and eventually necrosis of his feet had ensued. Another man had decided to have a few beers before he climbed up on his roof to repair a hole. Both feet were shattered by the fall. And I will never forget the sight of steel shackles on the slender ankles of a young African American woman who had been taken from her prison cell to be treated at the hospital. But the most profound foot-related story did not happen to me. It happened to my mentor Reverend Bob.

Reverend Bob had seen it all. But still he was unsettled enough by one experience that he felt compelled to tell this story to those of us he was supervising.
He was acting as chaplain to a Pacific Islander patriarch of a large family. The man had been hovering near death for weeks, and his family came to my teacher with a very unusual request. In their Pacific Islander tradition, unless the Shaman attending a man’s death kissed both the feet of that man, the man’s soul could not be released to go and live with the ancestors. They figured that my teacher, Rev. Bob, a Baptist preacher, was about as close as they were going to get to a traditional shaman, so they asked him to kiss the feet of this dying old man.

In the work of a chaplain, one has to establish certain boundaries, and Rev. Bob decided that this was a boundary he did not want to cross. So he said to the family that he would not kiss the feet of this old man, but that there was a similar gesture in his tradition that he would do. He would wash the old man’s feet. The family was disappointed, but they decided to work with what they had.

And so, ceremoniously, with the whole family watching, Rev. Bob brought a basin of water, girded himself with a towel and began to wash the old man’s feet. And then he said, something came over him, and he, seemingly propelled by a power beyond himself, bent over and kissed both of the old man’s feet, to the amazement and delight of his weeping family.

Almost immediately the old man breathed his last breath, and the family
came and embraced Rev. Bob in one great cloud of love. He said he never got over it. Rev. Bob got glorified without even having to die. He proved himself a true disciple of Christ. He proved that love goes beyond fear, prejudice and tradition. And anyone would know that he was a Christian by his love.

Amen.

Forgiven

2010-08-09T11:50:00.001-07:00

3/14/10
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad/Good Shepherd

I knew the beautiful story of the Prodigal son as a small child even before my mother brought me to the Episcopal church at eight years old, because it appears in the children’s classic, “Heidi.” As I was reading this book, which I did again and again, I was in a problematic relationship with my older brother, who made my life hell by not only beating me black and blue, but also, frequently surprising me with his friends in tow when I was dressing or undressing.

He turned out, later in life, to be something of a creative genius. But as a child he used that genius to think up activities which, if the Americans did them to the Iraqis today would probably be termed as torture.

To be fair, ours was a chaotic and confusing family environment and my brother was taking out his fears and anger on me, which did not make it feel any better. I began a life-long habit of hatred toward my brother, holding him in eternal unforgiveness.

I don’t have that much trouble believing that God loves and forgives me unconditionally, as is the point of the our story today. But the point is also, I think, that we should see the forgiving father as a model for our own behavior. Jesus tells us elsewhere, in answer to Peter’s question that we should forgive our brother 77 times. I was not willing to forgive my brother once. For me, this is was not an easy chore. Even Jesus, I told myself, did not apparently really forgive those who crucified him. But he asked God to forgive them, which is a pretty good start.

As my brother and I grew up, and passed through teenhood, we both had our prodigal phase of enthusiastically squandering our property. This was the sixties and it was not only easy, but almost required to do so. But as we entered young adulthood, to my alarm, my brother, for all his past sins began to turn into a very successful and happy man. Apparently God’s forgiveness was kicking in just fine, with or without my own. My brother worked his way up from being a gopher in a small film company to producing and directing his own films. I made a point of not watching any of them, even when he was nominated for an academy award for one of his documentaries. I got rid of my television so I wouldn’t see any of them accidentally. It got harder to avoid news of these films though, as they began to be advertised on posters in the city.

Finally, at the urging of a therapist I wrote my brother a letter. I detailed all his abuses and told him how they had damaged my life. He called me immediately. He apologized profusely and said he loved me. He told me about some horrors he had been subjected to that I did not know about. He asked me to forgive him. I don’t know what I thought the end result of my letter was supposed to be, but as far as I was concerned, it certainly was not forgiveness of my brother.

A few years later I visited my father, but although he lives 5 minutes away, I did not visit my brother. I told my father not to mention my visit to my brother, but that was like telling Pavarotti not to sing. When my brother found out I had come to see my father but not him, he was very hurt. He called me right away and tried to find out why I had not come to visit, but I wouldn’t talk about it.

Finally, as I progressed through Holy Orders, my spiritual director pointed out that my holding my brother in unforgiveness was definitely hurting me more than it was him. What should I do? I asked him. The awful prescription was to begin to forgive my brother. I literally did not even know how to start. “Pray for him,” my spiritual director said. This was hard. The best I could do initially
Was to say, “OK God I am praying for my expletive deleted brother.” But as the weeks went on it became easier, and something funny happened. I began to remember all the good things my brother had done for me. And that at times he had to be my mother and my father in that dysfunctional family. I remembered a time when I performed in my Junior High school variety show. Neither my mother nor my father came, but my 16 year old brother did. And he later confronted my mother, telling her she should have gone. “Give me a break!” was her very maternal reply. I remembered that he had come out to San Francisco in 1969 to come and get me, urging me to go back to college, and urging my parents to pay for it. I began to consider forgiving him.

“OK,” I said to my spiritual director, “What is the next step?”
“Show your brother loving hospitality.” He said. Even harder. But I called my brother up, and as I spoke to him I realized it was the first time since we were children that I addressed him without resentment or hostility. I confessed that I had never watched his films, but that I would love to do so. How could I get copies? He told me to just wait and watch the mail, and in a few days I got a big custom-made load of his films. (I confessed I still haven’t watched all of them) He called to see if I got them, and how I liked them. I began to realize that it was easier to forgive my brother for all his abuses than it was to forgive him for being so successful. This started to feel like my problem.

When I visited my brother he showed me remarkable loving hospitality. We began to relate as equals, not longer as big brother and little sister. A number of his films have been about religion, and he took an interest in my vocation. The last time I heard from him was on Friday when he e-mailed me a clip from a recent documentary he made about a Catholic nun, wanting to know what I thought. The film was so beautiful that my first instinct was envy. Then I remembered that I was no longer his little sister, and that he had sent this to me to get my approval.

Forgiving my brother, no longer holding him in unforgiveness, has been one of the biggest changes of my life. It has been such a great change that I could almost say that I was dead and am alive again, was lost and am found. And I am reminded of the beautiful words of Paul that we heard today. About what happens when we even begin to follow Jesus’ teachings- about forgiving your brother and things like that.

“If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away; see- all things have become new! All this is through God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. Amen.

What is Promised

2010-08-09T11:25:00.000-07:00

2/28/10
Good Shepherd Church, 2/28/10, Lent II
Gen. 15:1-12, 17-18, Phil. 3:17-4:1, Luke 13:31-35

Last week we read of Jesus wandering in the wilderness, tempted by the devil. Today we hear of the promised land. God brings Abraham outside at night and shows him a sky full of stars. To the childless Abraham, God promises countless descendents. And God a makes a solemn and rather bloody covenant to give a vast stretch of land to Abraham and his many children.

The covenant that God makes with Abraham is mysterious, violent and terrifying. What is enacted is the ancient ceremony that sealed a covenant in those days. The participants in this covenant oath actually walked between the severed halves of various animals, implying that if they broke the covenant, they themselves would experience a similar fate. God walks the path symbolically as the element of fire, making it an unbreakable covenant.
Given what has occurred in history since that time, one might have wished God had voiced this bloody covenant it in a different, perhaps more breakable way. Or that he had said “But, Abraham, if ever in the future there arises a dispute between you and your brothers, please- don’t take me so literally!”

There is another population I recently saw represented, who also longs for the promised land. Last Tuesday I went to an interfaith Immigration reform vigil at Grace Cathedral. Many faiths were represented, and each faith leader gave their blessing and reflection before we heard stories from immigrant families. A Muslim Imam quoted a poem that you might recognize::

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor…

I had processed in with the other clergy in my white alb and stole, next to a rabbi in his seventies in a rumpled sports coat and yamaka. I liked him tremendously, especially as he managed to kiss his anxious-looking wife as we passed her in procession- as if to say, “Yes I am marching with the Goyim, but I love you and it’s OK!” As we sat and listened to the poem being read, I noticed that he was speaking every line along with the reader. I wondered what this poem- what the experience of entering and surviving in this promised land had meant for him.
We then heard some of the victims of our present immigration laws tell their stories. There was a man who had to face the choice of visiting his dying mother in his country of origin, or staying with his pregnant wife, knowing that if he visited his mother he might never be able to be reunited with his wife and child. His mother died without the comfort of his presence.
There was a very bright young man who had to watch his classmates go on to college, while he threw away many invitations from colleges because he did not have a social security number. There was a Haitian man who experienced ship wreck and then swam the rest of the way to Florida. At the end of this heroic trip he had to hide out for 20 years. We have betrayed the words of the poem beneath the Statue of Liberty. And America cannot, alas, be called the mother of exiles.
Speaking of the mother of exiles, Jesus. at the time of our Gospel story, has just been immersed in teaching and healing, battling with disapproving Pharisees when he heals on the Sabbath. He has just ministered to a woman who had been bent over for 18 years. When he lays hands on her, immediately she becomes whole. Jesus raises her up, in the great tradition of God raising up the lowly. He restores her dignity, restores her as a daughter of Abraham. He then tries to explain the expansive wonder of the Kingdom of God to the disapproving leader of the synagogue. He describes the glorious hospitality of the great tree grown from the tiny mustard seed. He describes the tiny amount of yeast that causes all the bread to rise.
The fearful and fox-like treachery of Herod is the antithesis of all of Jesus teachings. Jesus instructs the Pharisees to tell Herod that he is indeed fulfilling the mission he proclaimed at the beginning of his ministry: to bring good news to the poor, release the captives, bring sight to the blind and let the oppressed go free. But carrying all this life-giving power, he finds himself approaching the murderous city of Jerusalem.

Jesus, threatened with death, explains that he will travel three days, not to escape death, but to seek it. In the contest between a mother hen and a fox, surely the fox will always win. But Jesus, of course, has the loving quality of that mother hen, gathering her children- ALL her children into the safety of her out-stretched wings. This is a quality that defies death.

The promise land that Jesus seeks to give us in the non-violence of his new covenant, is a promised land of the heart, where all is expansive, all is forgiven, where God will, as Jesus longs to, gather all her children as a mother hen gathers her young under her wings. This is a state without boundaries, with no bordering rivers, no sea to shining sea. It is a promised land that is not only given us, but also required of us.

Although Jesus’ covenant is not a violent one, it is a very serious one- a life and death covenant, because you cannot have real life, abundant life without it. So Jesus’ covenant harkens back to the ancient ones, by referring to his own flesh, his own blood. And as Jesus tells us again and again, this promised land of forgiveness, of unconditional love is available to precisely the people who feel they could never deserve it- the lost sheep , the barren, the exiles.

Ah Wilderness!

2010-08-09T11:20:00.000-07:00

2/21/10
Reflections on
Good Shepherd Church, 2/21/10, Lent I
Deut. 26:1-11, Romans 10:8b-13, Luke 4:1-13

The first thing that strikes me about our Gospel passage this is what can only be called Jesus’ relationship with the devil. His responses are surprisingly calm and civil. He does not run away, he does not refuse to engage, he does not try to kill or destroy the devil. He even goes along with the devil to several locations- “up” presumably to the holy mountain as it says in the Gospel of Matthew, and to the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem. And he listens to the devil, hears him out, and then starkly tells the devil the truth as he sees it, quoting scripture in every case. Even in this early wilderness experience, Jesus shows an uncanny calm and an uncanny courage. Jesus, unlike most Episcopal Priests, according to a recent survey, was not conflict adverse.

But in the teachings about Jesus, the courageous and the assertive nature of this truth-telling is nearly always down-played. The story of Jesus’ over-turning the tables in the temple is often cast as something out of character for Jesus. But it is absolutely in character.

Jesus is the one who, at twelve years of age, went missing for three days. When his mother and father finally found him, and burst into the temple, Jesus said to his distraught and probably furious mother, “Why were you searching for me? Didn’t you know I must be in my father’s house?” For the next 20 years of Jesus’ life, we read nothing about him in any of the gospels. One theory I have heard is that that was because Jesus was grounded for all that time. Jesus later called his best friend Peter the devil, he basically called the Syrophoenician woman a dog, and he very clearly said, “I have come not to bring peace to the world, but a sword (Mt 10:34). Jesus was a powerful and fearless truth-telling person.

And so, inspired by Jesus, I am going to tell you the truth. You and I are each embarking on a bit of a wilderness trek, not of our making. In your case, you are experiencing the loss of a beloved interim vicar, being asked to get used to the idea of sharing a vicar with another congregation, having to get used to a new priest-in -charge that you don’t know AT ALL yet, and changing a service time that has been the same for oh, 130 years or so.

For my part, I have been on a wilderness trek as well. And I have been questioning God about the inconvenient timing of my particular trek, with no understanding until just lately. On Nov. 15 I was called to Holy Trinity Richmond, which has been a rich and wonderful experience. On Dec. 30, the woman who has been my best friend since I was thirteen years old died after a long illness. Two weeks later I was called to Good Shepherd Church, and even in a grieving state, I have been so happy to meet and begin to know some of you, and so glad to be at this beautiful parish. It finally occurred to me that perhaps I had to begin this ministry with a broken heart in order to pastor two congregations in the midst of difficult change, in order to walk this wilderness walk with you.

Of course many of us may have had our hearts broken time and again, by things more powerful than a changes in service time and liturgical leadership. We may resonate not only with wandering in the wilderness of temptation as in our New Testament story of today, but with many Old Testament stories as well. We may have been barely created before we visited violence, whether physical or psychological on our brethren or sistren- or they may have visited it upon us. We may have experienced slavery, either to a person or to a substance. We may have been exiled from a beloved relationship, or job or home. We may even have lost a child, an experience as close to crucifixion as any of us are likely to get.

And out of this damage, we may well have mistaken things for our bread that were not our bread. We may have grasped at kingdoms and glory, when we were just so very famished for something real. We may have metaphorically flung ourselves from high places.

In the opening of our liturgy today, we are urged to work our way through the wilderness of our past and our present in the observance of a holy Lent. We are advised to do this with self-examination and repentance, prayer, self-denial and reading and meditating on God’s holy Word. These practices it seems to me, ultimately help allow God the room for God’s work- the healing of broken hearts, ours and those of others in our lives.

The liturgy goes on to say that Lent is a time for those who have felt separated from the body of the faithful, separated from God, for whatever reason, to be reconciled and forgiven. I saw a sign on a banner at St. Augustine’s church last Saturday. It said, “If God is not with you, guess who moved?” So we are encouraged in Lent, if we have moved away, to find a way back home.

Lent is not only a season when we seek forgiveness, but also a season when we seek to forgive. In the short and sweet book, “Have a Little Faith,” I read of a Rabbi who told a young writer about a Jewish teaching that on the last day of your life, you must have forgiven everyone who ever did you wrong. The young man thought for a moment and then said, “How will I know what is the last day of my life?” the rabbi said, “Exactly.” But if there is someone you cannot bring yourself to forgive, try doing what Jesus did from the cross; ask God to forgive them instead.

We are urged to read and meditate on God’s holy word during the season of Lent. But the scriptural phrase that may be most helpful in our time of self-examination in the wilderness and in our struggles with change was said by Jesus and by angels many times. “Do not be afraid.”

To take time each and day for prayer and meditation in these incredibly busy times may seem like a very tall order. But maybe just for Lent we are urged to try. A Buddhist saying I have heard goes, “Thirty minutes of meditation a day is required, unless you are very busy. Then a full hour is necessary.” Particularly in times of transition, we are told to, as scripture would have it, “Go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father (or mother) who is in secret; and your Father (or mother) who sees in secret will reward you.” (Mt 6:6)

The good news, the hope and the glory, is that if we are not afraid to use them, we are given the strength, the heart, and the choice to walk through our shared wilderness and emerge together into the light of the Spirit, which always leads us.

A Moutaintop Experience

2010-08-09T11:18:00.001-07:00

Reflections on
Ex 34:29-35,2 Cor 3:12-4:2, Luke 9:28-36 (37-43)
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad 2/7/10

The story of the transformation of Jesus up on the mountaintop is a beautiful and glorious vision. No seems to one know the historical roots of the story- was it a recorded vision or dream that someone had during Jesus’ lifetime, or was it (as many have said) a misplaced post-resurrection story? Or simply a way for the early church to establish, beyond any doubt, Jesus as the beloved son of God? As is often the case in biblical narratives, it might be less important to know the dreamer than to know the dream. And this dream-like story seems to encapsulate the whole of Jesus ministry, from his baptism to his resurrection. It is as if, on this high mountaintop, Jesus can finally see clearly- can finally see the whole of his life and the whole of his destiny. The story not only establishes Jesus as the undisputed answer to the Law and the Prophets of the Old Testament (symbolized by the great prophet, Elijah and the great law-giver Moses) but it also again highlights in a dramatic contrast to Jesus’ glory, the cluelessness of the disciples, particularly Peter, who can’t seem to stand the magnificence before him.

In fact, for all its astounding radiance, it seems like the transfiguration doesn’t even make much of an impression on the disciples- they can barely keep awake, Peter babbles about a building project, and none of them ever mention it in any of their preaching again. Even their terror does not seem to make a lasting impression- when the cloud began to engulf them we hear that they are terrified. But after the whole ordeal is over, they remain silent. They do not ask their teacher about what has occurred, and they tell no one.

The Old Testament roots of this story are deep and wide, particularly in the stories of Moses. Jesus is seen shining like the sun up on the mountaintop, just like Moses after he spoke to God. Moses and Elijah speak to Jesus of his departure- and the Greek word Ex-hodus- Exodus, literally “the road out” is used- apparently a reference to the exodus of Moses. And even Peter’s strange construction plans (what was he thinking?) come from Leviticus (Leviticus 23:42-43) -the dictate of the Lord to “take the product of hadar trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook and You shall live in booths seven days” … in recognition of the end of the wandering in the wilderness.

The disciples, as usual, are still in the wilderness, not only missing out on the significance of the astonishing image before them, but later, unable to cure the poor epileptic boy who Jesus, exasperated at their incompetence, later makes whole.

There are several elements of the story that recall the Book of Daniel, where “One like a Son of man came on clouds of glory to the Ancient of Days, who wore clothing that was as white as snow.” He is given “dominion, and glory, and kingship, that all peoples, nations and languages shall serve him.” So it seems that these references to Daniel are another affirmation of Jesus as having dominion over everything- even the Law and the Prophets.

Jesus moves from his mountaintop experience, shining like the sun, to the inevitable use of that radiance, to do a great act of love- the healing of the epileptic. The convulsed boy, silent, helpless, a victim of a demon, is the polar opposite of Jesus in his glory. Standing upright high on a mountain, Jesus is affirmed by God and the prophets, literally glowing with health and holiness. Jesus is able to transfer some of that glory to the child and do the miraculous- to cure the father’s only son. It is as if Jesus shining health is contagious. And the crowd seem to see the glory of a different kind of transfiguration- the boy is made whole- they do see “the greatness of God” and are astounded by it. Nevertheless, Jesus’ shows surprising anger, apparently at the crowd, echoing what he has said in earlier passages about this “faithless and perverse generation.” Perhaps he is predicting the betrayal and death that is to come. And once again, there is an echo of Moses, who lamented in very similar words over the faithlessness of Israel in Deuteronomy.

Jesus, who is, as always, infused with love, can cure anyone’s demons, can love even the exasperating disciples, can glow like the sun. So God the mother points out with similar exasperation, this is my son LISTEN TO HIM!

We find in the Old Testament, in Leviticus, “love your neighbor as yourself.”
And of course in Deuteronomy we find “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might. You will even find, in the Old Testament, something close to “love your enemies.” But the Old Testament phrase, found in proverbs, does not go so far as to urge us to literally love our enemies. Proverbs 25 says that if your enemy is hungry, give him bread, if he is thirsty, give him drink.

Jesus has found the thing, exhumed it from his own ancient scriptures, that transcends the Law and the Prophets, and that is love. Moses leads his people out of slavery and into the promise land. Jesus leads his people out of sin- out of hatred and vice into compassion, forgiveness and love. Jesus offers perfect freedom, and love is the child of that freedom.

The obliviousness of the disciples to Jesus shimmering transfiguration makes me wonder how often WE miss the blindingly beautiful miracles that happen right before our eyes- how often we almost sleep through bright epiphanies that surround US.

WE MAY BE STRUGGLING WITH the OLD TESTAMENT in our own lives today. And all the elements of the Old Testament may have made up our past lives. Warring against our kin or foreign tribes, slavery to one or another thing, endless wandering in the wilderness.

But on this Valentine’s day we may suddenly begin to realize that we have found the promise land. Even as we struggle to emerge from the Old Testaments of our lives, we might find ourselves changed, transfigured by feelings of love. And if we start to get those feelings, let’s try not to ignore the glory, as Peter did. Let’s not try to put it in boxes or start a building project. Let us be still, say nothing, feel our hearts open, and maybe even feel that glow. Because when we do that, no matter where we are, or what time it is, we are up there on that mountaintop.

Bombing the Good Shepherd

2010-08-09T11:15:00.000-07:00

Bombing the Good Shepherd
Reflections on
Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13), Psalm 138, 1 Cor. 1215:1-11, Luke 5:1-11
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad 2/7/10

This past Friday and Saturday I was sent on a retreat for ministers in multicultural settings. Fr. Javier, myself and twenty other bay area ministers went to a set of beautiful cabins in the Santa Cruz mountains to rest and reflect.

The first thing I did when I arrived was to walk around the beautiful grounds and just inhale the woodsy air. After a while I discovered a lovely and rather large lake, ringed with think rushes and with a stand of pines on one side. I realized that I had about an hour before dinner, and so I just sat and watched the lake as the sun set. After a while the wind picked up, it started to get cold, and ripples began to appear on the water. The trees were reflected black in the water
And their outline was visible in the slowly dimming sky. I realized that the whole lake would be the black of those trees after the sun set.

At dinner I heard that this was a great place for catching all kinds of fish, and although I had not brought a line and a pole, I went back to look at the lake, after dark, while an almost deafening soundtrack of frogs filled the air. As I shone my flashlight before me and crashed through some undergrowth, three deer sprang past me. I approached the pitch-black lake and a sudden terror arose in the pit of my stomach. The reality of the fearfulness and the wildness of a lake in the black of night crept up on me with unexpected strength.

The disciples in our story of today were out in that kind of blackness all night- struggling to bring home the thing that kept their families alive- the thing that kept their communities alive. Jesus must have come to them at dawn, after a whole desperate night of struggle to bring life out of that pitch-black lake.

At the time of our story in the Gospel of Luke, Peter hasn’t been called yet. But he knows Jesus enough to do what he says even when it makes absolutely no sense- even when his experience as a fisherman tells him just the opposite. And so once again, against all odds, they cast their nets. And doing the impossible, the unlikely, even the ridiculous yielded astonishing results- results so astonishing that Peter was propelled into a spasm of unworthiness. But Jesus, as he has so often before, tells him, “Do not be afraid.”

This story led me to wonder, for what do we cast our nets? What unlikely, seemingly impossible thing? What are we called to do for the very life of our community? Since I have come to Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad, and now Good Shepherd, Berkeley, it seems that we are all called to cast out our nets in an effort at community that knows no bounds of culture and country of origin. I feel as unsure of myself in this calling as Peter OR Isaiah- an unlikely choice, I think- I can’t speak Spanish, I am easily afraid, and timid when I encounter strange fish.

And yet I was called as surely as we are all called in this church. And I have seen impressive catches sometimes in our efforts. The first thing I did at this church was to participate in a grand service of reception, confirmation and baptism, where the yield was incredible. There were 168 people there, and the net did not break. There were 15 receptions (some of them spontaneous) five confirmations (one of them spontaneous) and one baptism. The bishop was gay, the Latino, and Anglo parishioners were enthusiastic in their pews and the Holy Spirit was everywhere. We had similarly lovely experiences at the wonderful posada Christmas service at Julia Mcray-Goldsmith’s home, and the beautiful Epiphany service at Deacon Kate’s, where the children brought the three kings to the altar, and 8 yr old Lionel found the baby in the Epiphany cake. Two Sundays ago I netted 13 of the best-behaved children, ages 3-9 that I have ever told a Godly Play story to in 12 years. And I have been very impressed by the respect and clear communication at our bi-lingual bishops committee meetings.

Sometimes we have struggled- sometimes the net has not been so full. But all in all, we have had a wonderful yield, however discombobulated we fisher people have sometimes felt.

But this past week at our new sister church, Good Shepherd, we experienced something akin to our nets being hauled in not only empty, but sliced to ribbons.

On Monday morning, as four day laborers sat on the steps of Good Shepherd church, seeking work and waiting for another car to come by, a 40ish while male drove by and threw a bottle at them. The bottle turned out to be a home-made bomb. Literally by the grace of God (La gracia de Dios), when the bomb exploded it propelled itself away from the workers- all the way across the street. I heard about this as I was checking my e-mail at the airport, coming home from Georgia. I was shocked by the news- that a group of peaceful people, sitting on the steps of a church could be attacked like this.

I met with Father Rigo, the head of the Multicultural Institute, which partners with Good Shepherd in their ministry to the largely Guatemalan day laborers.
He was surprisingly unruffled by what had happened. It turned out that there had often been cars full of men yelling racial slurs at the laborers, or threatening them. To the workers, to anyone from a war-torn country, this did not seem like much- imagine what they went through just to get to this country.

We decided to have a quiet service, right in front of the church where the bomb was thrown, to bless and show support to the day laborers and to bless and reclaim the ground. I had no idea what it would be like, or who would show up, or how they would receive a new, female, Anglo priest. It looked like rain, and I was afraid of more than rain.

But we cast out our nets anyway. Under sunny skies, about a hundred Guatemalans, three Franciscans one Buddhist and a Jewish woman from the multicultural institute joined us on this past Friday morning. Fr. Javier joined us as well and Fr. Rigo and myself conducted a short service of blessing and support for the workers, who then filed into the parish hall for their weekly lunch. We all gathered under that blue sky to follow the words that Jesus spoke so many times- be not afraid.

Miracles happen when people have the faith to keep casting out their nets. Miracles happen when we refuse to be afraid of dark water, threatening skies, even entrenched hatred. Miracles occur in the hearts of people who, even when exhausted, even when they have exhausted every possibility, go forth without fear and cast their nets again.

Amen.

Grant Desme and the Spirit of the Lord

2010-08-09T11:12:00.001-07:00

Reflections on
Neh. 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10, Psalm 19, 1 Cor. 12:12-31A,
Luke 4:14-21
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad
1/24/2010

Jesus’ great mission statement to the befuddled crowd at Nazareth sets the tone for his ministry for the rest of his life.

18"The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
19to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."[a
The scripture quoted in the synagogue is barely changed from Isaiah 6:1. But, significantly, given the loving and non-violent message of Jesus, Isaiah’s last phrase, “and the day of vengeance of our God.” Is omitted.

Very soon after this startling proclamation- AND the even more startling affirmation that the centuries of waiting for God’s fulfillment has ended- Jesus digs even deeper into this revolutionary message of inclusively and radical justice. He points out that his tribe does not have exclusive rights to God’s blessings. Jesus refers to two scriptural stories they would have been familiar with, in which God gave help to foreigners, those not of their own tribe. The pagan widow who fed Elijah had a son who was raised from the dead, and Naaman’s leprosy was cleansed, even as many Jewish Lepers and others suffering from the famine did not receive help. This apparently so enraged the people in our Gospel of that they attempt to drive Jesus off a cliff.

Jesus has come for the poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed. And he proclaims the jubilee year, when all slaves are freed, and all land that had to be sold goes back to the original owners.

At the beginning of the week, we celebrated a slain prophet, who surely tired to fulfill the mission statement of Jesus, unto his own death, and surely brought good news to the poor and the oppressed.

Martin Luther King Jr. had his own way of bringing good news to the poor, of bringing release to the oppressed. He had a vision of the Kingdom of God right here on Earth, and he called it the Beloved Community. His mentor in seminary, the philosopher-theologian Josiah Royce, coined the phrase, but, Dr. King, developed it into something that has changed the world.
The Beloved Community was not a lofty utopian goal to be confused with the pastoral image of the Peaceable Kingdom, in which wolves lie down with lambs. After all, as Woody Allen has said, the wolf may lie down with the lamb, but the lamb is not going to get a very good night’s sleep. Rather, the Beloved Community would be a real world goal that could be accomplished in real time, if enough people would embrace and believe in Dr. King’s creed of love, mutual tolerance and non-violence. As part of this vision, the most affluent would work along side of the impoverished. This is indeed good news for the poor.
As Dr. King said in a speech at a victory rally following the Supreme Court Decision desegregating the Montgomery’s busses, “the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.”

Martin Luther King was deeply influenced by the non-violent teachings of Jesus, urged us all to lay down our arms. And beyond that, he urged us to lay down our privilege of tribe and culture, to literally and figuratively share the wealth. But Like Jesus’ tribal brothers and sister in Nazareth, we might not want to lay down our tribal privilege, and share the wealth of God’s apparent blessings. Those of us who are white may not want to share the wealth. Those of us who are straight might not want to share the wealth. Those of us who are male might not want to share the wealth. And let’s face it, by global standards, we are all in this room wealthy, with food to eat, a place to sleep, even a church community.

The theologian Sally Mcfague asks us to consider a “liberation theology” for North American Christians. This theology might focus, not on personal salvation in this world or the next, but rather on lifestyle limitation, on developing a philosophy of “enoughness” and realizing that the cruciform way of Christ means making sacrifices so that others may live.”

This is what the Beloved community is made of, this is what the Kingdom of God is made of. As Jesus suggests, we are not to expect God’s exclusive favor. And in fact, we are not to expect that Jesus carry out his mission statement all by himself.

There is not a specific calling of the fishermen story in the Gospel of Luke, as there is in Matthew and Mark. As I looked for the story in Luke, I suddenly thought- I have found the fishers and they are us! We are called to do this work with Jesus, especially now, since as the 16th century mystic Theresa of Avila has said,

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world…
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

I am happy to say that in this week of bad news for the poor, I found one story that was one of the most revolutionary countercultural good news stories I have ever heard.

Grand Desme, young, white, with every privilege and apparently spectacular athletic gifts, has laid down his privilege and picked up the scroll to preach the good news. With a likely potential of making millions, he instead is leaving his position as outfielder for the Oakland A’s and entering seminary. He is quoted as saying that the decision brought him a great amount of peace. The peace that comes from exchanging a guaranteed lifetime of wealth for a life of work for the poor, could be described as a peace that passes all understanding.

Grant Desme gives me hope. Jesus’ call to bring good news to the poor, justice to the oppressed, and to free all captives is alive and well. This is a calling that may in various ways, risk a dive off a cliff, risk discomfort, risk sharing the discomfort of the world. But it is a calling that will bring us good news, open our eyes, free us from bondage, and bring us peace.

Amen.

The Thin Places

2010-08-09T11:01:00.001-07:00

Reflection on Luke, 3:15-17, 21-22
Jan 10, 2010

I have been privileged to walk with you through the seasons of Advent and Christmas, and now we are in the bright season of Epiphany. The word epiphany has the same Greek root (phanein, to show, to bring to light) as the word phantom. You also find it in the word “fantasy” and even “cellophane”

Epiphany means a manifestation- a showing forth- the big aha moment. The baptism of Jesus is such a moment. The voice from the clouds, the dove lighting upon Jesus as the Holy Spirit, bring to light the divinity of Jesus even as he submits to something so human as being dipped in the River Jordon by his cousin John.

The other story celebrated at the beginning of Epiphany is also revelatory: The story of the magi bringing gifts to the Christ child, revealing him to be something much, much more than your average baby.

The biblical stories of Epiphany are like the thin places from the Celtic tradition- times and places where the veil between this ordinary world and the miraculous world to come is so sheer that it becomes transparent- invisible, like the Holy Spirit.

In our Gospel of today, the voice of God speaks through the heavens, and just as in the beginning, when God says of creation, “It is good,” God acknowledges Jesus, the new creation, as God’s beloved son. We have heard this loving voice of God before, saying exactly the same thing, also from the heavens, at another epiphany- the transfiguration, where Jesus glowed like the sun on the mountaintop and was book-ended by the great prophets Elijah and Moses.

In time-honored Old Testament fashion, God thoughtfully does not appear to us in today’s gospel, for as God points out to Moses in the Book of Exodus, “no one may see me and live.” So God is manifested as a voice from heaven. This voice was heard, coming out of the opening heavens long before Jesus’ time,, by the prophet Ezekiel, also by a river- the River Chebar, in Babylon.
Ezekiel was minding his own business at the river’s edge with the other Israelite exiles back n the 6th century BC, when the heavens opened, and he had his own epiphany. He had a vision of God that included strange and alien-looking animals and a wheel-within a wheel contraption. God’s voice from the heavens told him that he was to be a prophet, and speak for God to the people of Israel. In place of the Holy Spirit dove, the Lord God gave Ezekiel a tasty honey-flavored scroll to eat, that he might relay the message thereon to the Israelites.

The Holy Spirit is the all-present, supporting, inspiring, free-flying aspect of the Trinity, invisibly carrying out the work of God. The image of a dove is apt because of the ethereal swiftly flying nature of this invisible force. The Holy Spirit, in dove form or not, seems to have the nature of searching- The creation story tells us of Ruach Elohim, the Spirit of God, or you could say, Holy Spirit sweeping across the face of the waters, almost as if she were looking for something. And Noah send out the dove on just such a mission- to find the saving dry land that would mean survival for the human race. And then, in our story, it seems that the dove finally finds what she is looking for, swooping down and blessing Jesus, as God watches proudly from the clouds.

First century rabbis taught that the Ruach Elohim, or the Spirit of God left the realm of the earth when the last prophets of Israel died. However, they taught that God could occasionally send down a voice from heaven. And when he did, this voice was called the bat qol, or the daughter voice. It was, however, according to rabbinic teaching, not to be considered a continuation of the revelation in the Torah, or the prophets. One can only assume that if it did qualify, it would have been called the bar qol, or the son’s voice.

As for the Son, it is poignant to note that the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove,
descended upon Jesus while he was praying. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus always prays at significant moments, you might even say, at the significant epiphanies in his life. Just before Jesus’ first attempt to tell the disciples that he will be crucified, he prays. Right before the transfiguration, he prays. At the Garden of Gethsemane he prays. And on the cross, he prays.

And after his baptism, he prays. It is not entirely clear in Luke why Jesus gets baptized, and of course we do not know what he is saying in his post-baptismal prayer. John was preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. But from what we read, it doesn’t seem that sin would have been a problem for Jesus. Why was he baptized? Perhaps Jesus himself wanted some kind of rite of passage- an initiation, some kind of ritual cleansing. He was, after all, just about to meet Satan in the wilderness.

Most of these epiphany moments for Jesus involve or foretell his death. Even a baptism speaks to the death of the old and the birth of the new. At every moment that Jesus is forced to look at his own mortality- at the coming suffering and death that he must face, he turns to God in prayer, trying to understand, trying to see through the thin places. Death as well as life are together and visible at the thin places- you are spanning the world of life and death in a way that is very suddenly revealed.

As soon as Jesus is baptized, the same Holy Spirit that blessed him leads him out to the wilderness. After this blessing, after his loving father has made known his love, the next step is desolation, wilderness.

Last week I shared with you that I had lost my very oldest and dearest friend, and I have greatly appreciated your thoughtfulness and prayers. And today, in the beginning of this bright season of Epiphany, we bury the ashes of Sharon Gay Smith, so beloved of so many of you in this congregation.

Epiphany stories are not only the thin places where the veil between this world and the next becomes transparent. They are also the stories where the membrane between desolation and blessing, shrinks to almost nothing.

Like all the Epiphanies in the bible, when God peeks through the clouds, death brings its own epiphany, and I suppose each death might bring it’s own. But what I have seen through the clouds of late is the urgent importance of being with our loved ones, to love them to treasure them in our hearts while they are still on our side of the veil. And that for the rest of our lives we will have an on-going epiphany of our lost loved ones- a thin place between life and death, because they will always be with us.

Even in the wilderness that is grieving and mourning, we are supported and sustained and saved by the love of the Holy Spirit made manifest by our loved ones, on both sides of the veil.

In community we commit to one another that we will journey with each other in sickness and in health, in joyousness and sadness, and even in death. This covenant is the bright blaze of light in this season that will outshine all the darkness. This is the blessing of the Holy Spirit, and the voice of God.

And perhaps these wilderness experiences of loss are the fire by which we are baptized. Certainly during these epiphanies, the chaff of our life is burned away. What is revealed is what is really important.

The refining fire reveals in blazing clarity what we have always been told, what we thought we believed, what we have suspected all along. The transfiguring blessing that we run from and seek our whole lives is always right before us. The epiphany, the revelation, the blessing of the Holy Spirit that is our love for each other. This is the bright and even joyous good news that is revealed to us in our darkest day.

Amen

Alison Christian Land

2010-08-09T10:58:00.000-07:00

What Was Spoken Through the Prophets
Reflection on Mt. 2:13-15, 19-23
Jan 3, 2010

In our beautiful Gospel passage, so full of dreams and ancient Old Testament prophesies, the author of Matthew makes his case again and again that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, the inheritor of the cloak of Moses. He uses Joseph as a way of showing this.

The author of Matthew combed through the Old Testament to find ways to root the story of Jesus in these trusted texts.

We first hear of camels, gold and frankincense being brought by foreigners in tribute in the Book of Isaiah (60:6)

The young camels of Midian and Ephah;
All those from Sheba will come.
They shall bring gold and frankincense
And shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.

The presence of a star for the magi to follow to find the new king is inspired by this quote from Numbers 24:17:

I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near
A star shall rise out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel.

Joseph’s second dream is the one in our passage today. The angel tells Joseph to flee to Egypt with his child. Just as the mother of Moses hid her child from the murderous pharaoh, who pledged to kill all the Hebrew babies, Joseph flees with his son to save him from Herod’s very similar slaughter of the innocents. Once again, we are told that this was to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, in this case Hosea (11:1). In this lovely Old Testament passage, Israel is pictured as God’s wayward child.

Out of Egypt I called my son.

Hosea could be referring to Moses, or to the Child Israel called out of slavery by the Lord God. The idea is that Jesus will lead a new and greater Exodus, as he is a new and greater Moses.

In the third dream of Joseph, the angel appears in Egypt and tells Joseph to go back to Israel, as his enemies are now dead. This is an almost identical phrase from Exodus (4:18) When Moses wished to return to his home, although he was wanted for murder. God said,

Go back to Egypt, for all those seeking your life are dead.

But in a fourth dream Joseph was warned to go to the district of Galilee. So he went to Nazareth, that the word of the Lord spoken through the prophets might again be fulfilled.

He will be called a Nazorean

This sacred story, like all sacred stories, reaches for a truth more profound, deeper than history. Seeks assurance and corroboration from the ancient sacred texts so familiar to it’s readers.

This past week, I have been experiencing a sacred story of my own, trying to make sense of it by matching it up with Old Testament stories of my own life, and casting around for sacred scripture that might help it make sense. The remarkable, beautiful force of nature that was Alison Christian Land, my best friend since I was 13 years old died this past Wednesday at 8:00AM.

We met way back in Old Testament times, at Eastern Jr. High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. It was in our geography class that Alison first noticed me and decided that I was worthy to be her friend. She later told me that she had admired me from afar, thinking that I was very pretty. This was kind of funny, because she always pointed out to everyone how very much we resembled each other. I was an extremely introverted, shy geek of a girl, without a friend in the world, so I will always be grateful for her unexpected friendship.

We soon found that we had everything in common. We had the same weird taste in music and we both liked to draw, and to over-eat junk food. My brothers had indoctrinated me into the rarefied world of old time Appalachian country music- the sort of music that very few people like then or now.

So I brought an album by Dock Boggs, the seminal banjo player and singer from West Virginia, to our English class and Alison gratefully took it home and digested every note. We both had ancestry from Ashville North Carolina, so this music was in our blood. But what I didn’t know until she told me many years later, is that the Appalachian grandmother who she said taught her the wonderful and esoteric old time tunes she brought to me was an invention of her imagination- or should I say it was her own sacred story. The mythical grandmother was a calculation to insure her superiority over me in terms of Old Time music authenticity. She would covertly go to the Library of Congress, ( the Old Testament of Old Time music) searching for songs she thought I never would have heard and she would transcribe them and then teach them to me, as something her grandmother taught her.

Alison played dulcimer, an unimpeachably authentic Appalachian instrument, I played guitar, and we could harmonize. So we got an act together and played in coffee houses for brownies and applause. I never, ever had the nerve to suggest any songs for us to play- they all had to be from the sacred source of her imaginary grandmother.

We had the same taste in fine art too, and we would walk the ten miles or so from Silver Spring Maryland to the National Gallery in Washington DC. Then we would go to Georgetown to gawk at the stores and eat candy or cookies together in the sweet shops.

While other girls were listening to the Beatles, we were glorying to Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the “Minstrel of the Appalachians,” or the Carter Family or Doc Watson. But finally, as the sixties were at their late peak we became part of the throng of hippies that rebelled in one great multitude. We even started to listen to rock music.

Alison always went five steps farther than I was willing to go. She went to Woodstock and although I had planned to go, she called and told me it was just a big sea of mud. After a time her life style got too scary for me, and I was estranged from her for about 10 years. Finally, she cleaned her life up completely, got married, had her beautiful boy, got back in touch with me, and started coming out to California every summer. From the beginning she brought her son, Alexander, who is just one year older than my older daughter. My kids got so used to them coming out every summer and the attendant fun things we did that they began to refer to their visits as “Camp Alison and Alexander.”

When Alison first started coming out to California it was a delightful re-living of our adolescent friendship. It seemed that essentially, nothing had really changed since we were hanging out at her locker before we had to tear ourselves away from each other to go to class. When those wonderful summers first began, we would walk for hours, all over San Francisco, from Union Square up through Chinatown and through North Beach and up to Coit Tower. We would troll the record and book stores, the fabric shops and bead shops, and she, with her exquisite taste, would always find those gems that she felt I really had to possess.

We would take the kids camping to Big Sur or go to see the Tule Elk at Point Reyes. One summer, as we were walking up to Coit Tower, she remarked, with surprise in her voice, that she was getting winded. By the next year, I noticed that she always got short of breath before I did. This amazed me, as I had always had trouble keeping up with her- she was taller than I was and would walk in long, graceful, swift strides.

Then she told a mutual friend that she really didn’t want to go camping anymore- she preferred a cabin when we went to Big Sur. I happily switched over to cabin camping, but couldn’t help but notice that she had trouble climbing the hill to get to the cabin site.

On her next trip out she told me that she had been diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Lung Disorder- something like emphysema but worse, usually suffered by people much older than herself. What could be done, I wanted to know. It seemed that nothing could be done. I paid for her to go to my favorite acupuncture guru, and she did seem to make some progress. But she couldn’t find anyone like him where she lived in Decatur Georgia, and didn’t seem to want to be proactive about her disease, nor did her husband.

Her trips out to California started to be different- we didn’t try to go much of anywhere, we would watch DVD’s or go to movies or sit and make beaded necklaces, or cook. She was adamantly against any invasive treatment, and seemed so sensitive about talking about her illness that I eventually backed off. The last time she came out to visit was 3 years ago. She was beginning to have panic attacks when she would run short of breath, and I encouraged her to start using oxygen to help her breathe. Back home in Decatur she started doing just that, and when I visited her last February, she was on oxygen 100% of the time. She had a walker- she used a wheel chair whenever she could. It was a shock- my beautiful, glamorous, wild friend, still only in her fifties, in a wheel chair.

She continued on her downward slide, and the past 2 years it was I who traveled out to her home in Georgia, as she could no longer travel.

I don’t think any team of psychologists or matchmakers could have invented a more perfect best friend for me than Alison. She was funny, so smart, so down to earth, so talented, she had such great taste in art and music. She was so enthusiastic about life, so irreverent in the best sense of the word. She never complained about her disability, her sense of humor was untouched and she was, even in her debilitated state, a joy to be around as always.

This past week I have had dreams, not of angels, but of my angelic Alison coming back to life again. There is a way in which Alison was never of this world- was always larger than life- mythical, magical. Perhaps her passing had to happen, that she might truly be the untamed spirit she always aspired to be.

Thinking about the whole sweep of my relationship with her now, it all does seem to have an inevitability about it- a dream-like quality, as if her death had to be, to fulfill some kind of prophesy, perhaps her own.

There are plenty of sacred scriptures that I have looked to, but the one that rings true, the one that I cling to is from that Old Testament treasure, the Song of Songs. I know that Alison will be with me all my days, because, as the scripture tells us, “Love is stronger than death.”

Amen.

In the Beginning was the Word

2010-08-09T10:51:00.000-07:00

John 1:1-18 In the Beginning Was the Word…
12/28/09

Our Gospel passage for today is a hymn so beautiful that it is almost intimidating in its perfection. Last week I spoke of the incredible newness of the incarnation- the newness of the baby Jesus and the newness of the new creation we are promised to become in Christ. The prologue to the Gospel of John seems to bring this glorious newness to a whole new dimension. We are stunned by he heart-stopping profundity and the total newness of the phrase: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The words thrill us with the mystery and the glory of the uncreated Christ.

In the whole of the Gospel of John, and especially in the prologue, Jesus is shown to embody the natural elements of the world, life and light. When is life more intense than in the beginning- at a birth? And when is light more spectacular than when it blazes out of the darkness? These elements are at there most astonishing, in their very beginning.

Our passage has as its source not only the very beginning of the Book of Genesis, but also the ancient Jewish concept of “Wisdom” a feminine form of Yahweh. In the book of Proverbs the uncreated status of the Wisdom, or Sophia in Greek, is described:

Ages ago I was set up,
At the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
When there were no springs
Abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills
I was brought forth…
When he established the heavens, I was there.

The author of Proverbs wants us to make no mistake about the pre-existing, nature of the Wisdom Sophia, as the author of the Gospel of John wanted us to fully understand the divine nature of Jesus. With the opening of the Gospel of John we go beyond the Christmas story, because we are told that Christ did not first appear in the manger, but long, long before, in the very beginning. He was not created with the other beings of God’s creation. He was God’s co-creator and not one thing came into being without him.

Something about beginnings stir our souls with longing, and rend our hearts with hope. In our own beginnings as helpless infants, coming out of the chaos of birth, we struggle to experience the spirit- our first breath. And then the new beginnings that we witness in our own children might stir even more heartbreak, longing, joy, pride and fear all at once. Perhaps it is a primal yearning to go back to the beginning- the pristine newness of creation. As if we could re-enter paradise and do it right this time. The beginning of any journey, and any calling is fraught with these emotions.

My own beginnings as an aspirant to Holy Orders were filled with the kind of chaos, hope and fear of any birth. In the beginning when I heard the Word, when I received my first calling orders, I had two young children, no Christian friends, and although I had grown up in the Episcopal church, I had been back at church for only one month following a fifteen year hiatus. My husband was (and is) Jewish, and was at that time still trying to get used to the fact of my going to church each Sunday.

But immediately after hearing the Word I was so struck by the rightness of the calling that I immediately picked up the phone and talked to the patient receptionist at CDSP, where I much later attended seminary. I actually said, “Uh- I have a friend who wants to become an Episcopal priest- what steps would she have to take?” I found out that you had to attend the same church for at least 3 years, attend seminary for three years, do field work for no pay for one year at another church, work at a hospital for your Clinical Pastoral Education (again for free), pass physical, psychological and academic tests, go before the Commission on Ministry three times go before the Standing Committee three times, be voted on by your vestry go before the Bishop and bring back the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West. After hearing that I hung up and told myself to get a grip, to go lie down until the feeling went away.

The calling still tormented me, for several more years, but I suppressed it as best I could, and attempted to go on with my life as if the Word had not spoken. Two years later I was vacationing with my family outside of Yosemite National Park and on a 2 mile treck to get supplies I suddenly heard organ music in the middle of the woods. I braced myself for a spiritual vision, then I noticed that I was just approaching an RV camp and the music came out of what looked to be some kind of small recreational lodge. I realized that there must be church going on (it was Sunday morning) and I decided to attend services. I walked in and sat down among a congregation of 6-8 people mostly elderly. After we had sung several songs, a short, attractive woman in her fifties came up to the podium and said, “My name is Patricia and I came up here from LA. I heard that there was no speaker this morning, and so I offered to speak. I do that sometimes at home.”

She proceeded to give an absolutely beautiful sermon on forgiveness that just left me devastated. Afterwards she offered to hear anyone who wanted to talk with her, or to lay hands on anyone who wanted a healing. I wiped my eyes, came forward and said to her, “Patricia, I have this strong calling to the ministry but it just doesn’t seem possible in my life right now and I don’t know what to do.”

The Word spoke up again. Patricia of LA put both hands on my head and I heard her say, “ The only thing keeping you from doing what you were created to do is a feeling of unworthiness, and I ask God to remove that now.” Of course I fell apart immediately. This was one of most powerful experiences I had ever had in my life, and
I heard the Word with certainty this time, As I stumbled back to camp, I began making plans to somehow start seminary.

I began with just one class, the early documents of St. Francis at the Franciscan School. I had no idea how I would do at seminary, and to my surprise, from the very beginning, I adored it. I continued with my part-time regimen at seminary, my half time job as Director of Religious Education at my church, and after a while I started to preach. But even after my road to Damascus experience with Patricia of LA in the RV lodge there were obstacles and doubts. To my amazement, with the great support of family, friends and community they all dissolved one by one.

I was ordained a year ago this past Dec 4th and my two daughters and my husband were the official vestors, placing my stole and chasuble over my head as I bawled in the front of Grace Cathedral. That, of course, was only the beginning...

There is a sacredness, a divinity in all our beginnings, our false starts, our great risks for unlikely results, Marriages, children, a brand new calling, life’s great landmarks. And whenever we fear, when we tremble to make a big change, to risk a great transition, it may comfort us to know that Christ is there and was from the very beginning.

Amen.

Two Chicks Sitting Around Planning the History of Salvation

2010-08-09T10:49:00.000-07:00

Homily for Advent IV
Luke 1:39-45 (46-55)
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad
12/22/09

The story of Mary's visit to Elizabeth is dear to my heart. I played Elizabeth a few years back on a Wakefield Mystery play at my old church and the woman who played Mary was one of my best friends. It wasn't hard to feel the the glory of salvation history rolling along incarnate in these two woman, speaking in canticles and bearing the fruits of the coming Kingdom.

When Gabriel visits Mary six moths before, he says that she will conceive the son of God by the Holy Spirit. And in case she still doesn’t believe him, he points out that her aged cousin Elizabeth, who was known to be barren, was six months pregnant, for nothing will be impossible with God.

And Mary, when she visits her cousin Elizabeth, exquisitely echoes the song of Hannah, the mother of Samuel. Hannah’s joyful song of the raising up of the lowly and the blessing of barren women described her own triumph in the birth of her son. All these Old Testament references underline what Luke presents as the miraculous fulfillment of the ancient prophesy. In the words of Isaiah:

The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who lived in a land of deep darkness — on them light has shined… For a child has been born to us, a son given to us.

The meaning of the incarnation has developed slowly over the years for me. I do not have the blind, accepting, miraculous faith of a child, and so I stumble on. When I first came back to the church, I approached Jesus (although he was loudly calling out my name) with great caution and suspicion. I was eased back into the fold only because I read a book by Marcus Borg and felt assured that I could accept Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus, and I had to go no further. I was truly "Meeting Jesus again for the first Time" which is the title of the book. Borg talked about what the human Jesus — the "Pre-Easter Jesus" must have been like. What extraordinary eyes he must have had, how brilliant his language skills were, how passionately wedded to justice and compassion he was. The book barely deals with what he calls the "Post-Easter Jesus," a term I now find woefully lacking to describe the risen Christ. But at first this was helpful to me. When faced with the incarnation, with the divinity of Jesus, I just didn’t want to go there. But slowly, I began to perceive a curious image seemingly just out of my peripheral vision whenever I thought of the incarnation. I seemed to see brilliant rays of light emanating from something which refused to come into focus front and center, but nonetheless streamed blazingly just beyond the edges of my field of vision. There was a brilliance I couldn’t understand, and could not even fully see, that I began to know was present, nonetheless.

The whole of it still eluded me, but I began to have some sense of the great and overpowering Newness of the incarnation, as expressed so heart-breakingly in the precious newness of the infant Jesus. And I began to understand that the miracle of God’s presence in Jesus Christ has little meaning if we did not relate it to Christ’s presence in us. As I searched for a way to understand the incarnation I also searched for a prayer I could say at waking that would bring this great newness into my life every morning. Upon opening my eyes one anxiety-ridden, guilt-stuffed dawn, I suddenly realized I could simply repeat the words of Paul: "If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation. Everything old has passed away — behold, all things are become new." (2 Corinthians)

I finally saw my first flicker of the image of brilliance that had been eluding me, that explosive and irrevocable NEWNESS, blazing right in front of me when I read the words of Father Pierre Tielhard de Chardin:

It is done. Once again the fire has penetrated the earth. Not with the sudden crash of thunderbolt, riving the mountaintops. Does the Master break down doors to enter his own home? Without earthquake or thunderclap the flame has lit up the whole world from within. All things individually and collectively are penetrated and flooded by it, from the inmost core of the tiniest atom to the mighty sweep of the most universal laws of being. (Song to the Earth)

The incarnation- this birth of hope, of light, of newness in us all- causes us and all things — to be lit up from within. It is as cosmic as the words of this poem and as small and intimate as a morning prayer of newness in Christ. Jesus went from being a human body to being the blazing and illuminated Body of Christ- incarnated first in a few frightened survivors after his death and now incarnated in all things. Jesus told us after all, “I will draw all things to myself.”

We need only embody the words of Mary "Let it be to me according to your word," and accept that newness, that utterly forgiving and loving newness, leaving behind the agonies and anxieties of our old life of last night or all the past years. Then we can behold, front and center that great light, the great incarnate truth of limitless love and compassion that will light up our every darkness.

Amen.

Multi-Coated

2010-08-09T10:46:00.000-07:00

Advent II. Reflections on
Zeph. 3:14-20, Phil. 4:4-7, Luke 3: 7-18 18:33-37
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad
12/13/2009

John the Baptist is one of the most fascinating and fearsome creatures of the New Testament. In the gospels of Matthew and Mark, he was said to be dressed in clothes made from camel's hair, he wore a leather belt around his waist, he ate locusts and wild honey and lived in the wilderness. In the Old Testament it was Elijah the great wild prophet who was described as wearing a hairy coat, with a leather belt. In the Book of Malachi, the Lord God is quoted as promising his people that he will send the prophet Elijah before the Day of Judgment comes. So the appearance of a hairy coated, leather-belted prophet would really get people’s attention, and may have been the reason they were flocking to be baptized!

The sermon we hear John preach this morning seems to be the quintessential “Fire and Brimstone sermon.” John first castigates the hordes coming for baptism as a “brood of vipers” implying that they have been warned to slither to baptism to escape judgment, then he warns that “the ax is ready.” He then exhorts the crowd to live a strictly ethical life- whether they are regular citizens, despised tax collectors or soldiers. He disappoints those among the crowd who think that HE might be the Messiah, and lastly he again threatens them the coming of Jesus who will burn them with unquenchable fire. This apparently is the good news he is proclaiming to the people!

Well, or not we see it as good news, it was historically noted that John’s preaching and baptism ministry was extremely popular. Shortly before our passage of today, we read,” from Jerusalem and all Judea and from the Jordan River valley, crowds of people went to John.” Josephus, the first century Jewish historian writes a detailed paragraph about John, which includes the fact that Herod became alarmed by the crowds that congregated around John, “aroused to the hightest degree by his sermons.” Herod felt that this might lead to sedition, so John was put to death. This all the more poignant because, as it is written in the Gospel of Mark, Herod used to like to hear John preach…

But, John was preaching sermons that were not altogether unlike those of Jesus, with some important differences. The sermons of both John and Jesus reflected the prophetic sermons of the many Old Testament prophets. - the prophet Amos, for instance, who castigated people for paying too much attention to their liturgy (especially music), rather than concentrating on social justice-we might all take note. Here is the word of the Lord according to Amos:
I hate, I despise your festivals. Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!
Or the word of the Lord according to Malachi:
See, the day is coming…when all the arrogant and evil doers will be stubble.- the day that comes will burn them up- leaving neither root nor branch…
When Jesus asked his disciples, “who do people think I am?” The top choices were “John the Baptist come back from the dead and the prophet Elijah. This makes me wonder what Jesus was really like- perhaps a lot wilder than we imagine. But one thing is for sure. Jesus may have preached wild prophetic sermons, but unlike John, he preached about love and forgiveness.
I found myself in need of that love and forgiveness once when I ran afoul of one of John the Baptist’s milder dictates in a very public way.
I was at my old parish with my daughter, who was then four years old, She was listening to a children’s homily on the words of John the Baptist. She suddenly stood up and said, “My mom has a whole BUNCH of coats!” Although I knew I was not alone in the congregation in my multicoated state, I nevertheless felt the call to repentance went that very day to the Goodwill and gave away all of my coats. All, I confess, but the essential six, with which I confess, I could not part with. There was my polar Tec jacket for those cruel Berkeley nights, my short parka in case of rain, my long black raincoat in case it rained and someone died, my down jacket with the hood in case of blizzards, the yellow coat that looked like the one my late mother used to wear, and the red hoody for Christmas caroling.

When Jesus saw that that rich young had gone away sad rather than give away all his possessions, he first said the famous one-liner about the rich man, the eye of a needle and the Kingdom of Heaven, but then he said, with God nothing is impossible.

John was preaching a coming Day of Judgment, But Jesus preached something different. Jesus preached the coming of the Kingdom of God, a phrase never heard in the Old Testament. The Kingdom of God was only described in parables, and Jesus variously said that it was here now, among us or within us, or would soon come.

The Kingdom of God is so precious that when one finally finds it, like the pearl without price, they will sell everything they have to own it. The Kingdom of God was what the little children could understand but their puzzled parents could not. There is a great feeling of equality- of justice in the Kingdom of God parables- the woman puts yeast into three batches of flour and all the dough rises up. The tiny mustard seed grows to be a great tree, such that all the birds may find a home there.

Jesus did teach radical social justice but he also taught radical love and radical forgiveness- you were to forgive your brother 7 times seventy times. I had trouble forgiving my brother once.

But with God, all things are possible. With God, even unforgiving, ungiving stones can be raised up as children of Abraham. We might even be so brave that we will, as our second reading suggests, “let our gentleness be known to everyone.” And even if we start out as cold as stones, God can enliven us, inspire us and even warm us infinitely more than even 6 coats. Amen.

Sky Signs

2010-08-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

Homily for Advent I, Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad
Luke 21:25-36
November 30, 2009

There will be signs in the sun, the moon and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding…

This is a warm and fuzzy reading for the beginning of our Advent season! We may be far more used to cheerful images leading up to the Christmas season. But what is referred to here is a section of the Book of Daniel. In the first year of King Belshazzar of Babylon, when Daniel “had a dream and visions of his head… “ and not of sugarplums.

These were wild and varied visions which Daniel had, including great winds stirring up the oceans, great beasts who rose up from the sea, and finally the coming of the son of man. Daniel’s wild beasts look variously like a creature with a lion’s head and eagle wings, like a winged leopard and like a bear with three tusks in its mouth. In this wild hallucinatory dream, which also inspired parts of the Book of Revelation, these strange beasts transform, devour, and come and go, apparently symbolizing the various powers that overtook Jerusalem.

Finally, the “Ancient of Days” presumably Yahweh, the one Hebrew God, appears and sits on a throne of judgment. After the various beasts are punished, Daniel proclaims:

I saw one like a Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. To him was given dominion, glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.

All over the Old Testament, in Isaiah, Haggai, The Wisdom of Solomon and in the Psalms, horrendous storms and wrenchings of the earth, darkness and the falling of stars are foretold- these are the signs leading up to the Day of the Lord- the end of time as we know it.

But also in our passage today, is the hopeful parable of the fig tree is invoked- the green leaves in summer signifying the promise of sweet fruit. The reference is to the sweet coming of the Reign of God after the recognizable signs. We are implored to be ready. Not to be distracted by unconsciousness and the worries of this transitory life. To stay conscious- to stay awake.

In this Advent season, we might be expect to be hear lessons foretelling the gentle miracle of a newborn baby on Christmas Eve, we may not be used to contemplating the end of the world.

But in Advent, what we contemplate is enormous- the world as we know it is coming to an end. God is entering time through Jesus, and things will never be the same. The early Christians too were talking about the end of the world as they knew it- the end of the Kingdom of the Romans and the beginning of the Kingdom of God. It’s what Jesus talks about again and again- the grand and cosmic event of everything being turned upside down- the first being last and the last being first.

As I read the passage about the signs of the sun, the moon and the stars, I thought of a different set of cosmic signs I had witnessed lately. I recently I went to visit my daughter at college in New York, and among other things we visited the planetarium at the Natural History museum in New York City. We had often taken our daughter to the Chabot observatory in Oakland, and watched the wonderful planetarium show there. She was thrilled one time when we went home and found the Andromeda Galaxy from our roof top using only binoculars. Apparently from that cosmic inspiration, she decided to change her name from Lilly to Andromeda, and now insisted that we call her Andromeda, or at least Andy. This was a cosmic shift for me! “You’ve gone from being a flower to a galaxy,” I said. “Pretty good.” We perused the outside of the planetarium room that starts with the big bang and goes through the history of the known universe, constantly shifting, changing, birthing stars. We saw incredible images of the star nebulae, the unimaginably beautiful birth places of those stars.

When we got back to Berkeley there was a series of very clear nights, and, by luck, the street lamp on our street was burning out, and emitted only a rosy glow like the red light of a dying sun. So we saw the stars with startling clarity. The constellations spelled out their ancient stories, I even think could see the milky way. I know I was seeing only the light emitted from these stars, millions of years ago. Some of them might already have passed out of existence. But in the glow of that dying streetlight, even knowing that these stars may have already died, I saw them as great beacons of hope, great and joyful expressions of the glory of creation. The vast and thrilling and changing universe I was staring at , even with its roiling star births and exploding suns, seemed to speak of an unchanging God, in the great quiet of that silent night. I had a powerful feeling of something unchanging, something constant.

The universe will always shift and change, it is the nature of creation. The sun and moon, the familiar stars we know, the very earth under our feet should be expected to shift. But there is something unchanging, whose birth we are preparing to celebrate. A light soon to come out of the darkness.

And we are called to be that light in the darkness- we are called to be the love of God, the light of Christ, the sign of new life in the fig tree. We are part of the inevitable coming of God, part of the coming Kingdom. This is the way we welcome in the incarnation of the holy in the improbable form of a tiny, fragile and unimaginably vulnerable child. A child whose holy presence causes our accustomed dark earth to blaze into the light of present eternal life.

Amen

A Different Kind of King…

2010-08-09T10:31:00.001-07:00

Reflections on
2 Sam 23:1-7, Rev.1:4b-8,John 18:33-37
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad
11/22/2009

For almost a thousand years before the birth of Christ, a messiah was predicted in the Hebrew scriptures- a great warrior King to reign in the style of King David. This warrior king would restore the sovereignty of Israel, and conquer the various crushing forces that plagued Israel through the centuries, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, leading up to the occupying force of the Roman army in Jesus’ time. There was good reason for the yearning for a savior king. Josephus writes of 500 Jews a day being crucified by the Romans after the rebellion of 66 AD, and six thousand were crucified after the rebellion of Spartacus. So the desire for a savior king was at a fever pitch in Jesus’ time. Several of these messianic predictions, sometimes very beautiful ones are often read in Advent: This passage in Isaiah is one:

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse (King David’s father)
And a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The Spirit of the Lord shall rest on him
The spirit of wisdom and understanding
The spirit of council and might
The spirit of Knowledge and fear of the Lord.

And a portion of a reading from Numbers is also often read..

I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near. A star will come out of Jacob (another anxestor of Jesus’); a scepter will rise out of Israel.

(The rest of the passage is usually omitted:)
He will crush the foreheads of Moab, the skulls of all the sons of Sheth.

It was indeed a war-like messiah that was longed for.

And the David whose voice we hear in today’s Old Testament reading is surely a war-like king. Shortly before our passage of today, David, in his fervent praise of the Lord says,

He trains my hands for war, so that my arm can bend a bow of bronze… I pursued my enemies and destroyed them… I beat them fine like the dust of the earth…

Nowhere do we see a reflection of the gentle Jesus, who directed us not just to avoid crushing our enemies to dust, but actually to love them.

The word Messiah is derived from Machiach, the Hebrew word for “The Anointed One.” The Greek word for the same thing was Khristos, Anglicanized, of course as Christ. This longed-for redeeming king, was anointed by another king, or by a judge, or a person of great importance. But, as the Advent Godly Play lesson for children points out, “The people were waiting for a king. But the kind of king who came was not the kind of king they expected.

We as Christians, are named after the anointed one whose anointing goes to the very heart of what he was about, and what we are about as Christians. Jesus was anointed, not by a person of power, but by a woman that most of us would probably hesitate to invite to dinner. A “woman of the city” who poured an incredibly precious treasure of perfume on Jesus’ head to anoint him for his work on earth. Jesus’ life and teachings reflect that kind of radical giving.

So what kind of king do we have here? What, if not war-like glory, did he teach us? Jesus’ great subject was certainly not war, nor was it the hording of wealth as a king might do. His great subject was giving, even sacrifice, in all its forms. But radical giving is, to most people, a frightening thought. A more comfortable thought is to aspire to the kingly, to aspire to power.

I spoke last week of the disciples, gawking at the gleaming stone and gold-edged temple, and how we still fall prey to that tendency to worship power, even war-like power, and the real estate it yields. Our faith may be the only thing in our lives that helps us to spring ourselves from the awful reality of this culture of ours that makes a King of status and image.

In our Gospel of today, Pilot tries to get Jesus to admit that he is King of the Jews. Jesus points out that if he were a worldly king, his followers would form an army and rescue him. But Jesus tries to tell him that he is not of this world- this violent culture. He is here to bring the truth. Pilate, way out of his depth here, asks one of the most contemporary and existential questions in the whole of the bible, “What is truth?” he asks Jesus. Jesus does not answer, as he knows his answer would fall on deaf ears.

The irony of accepting Jesus as Lord, as king, is that Jesus was profoundly anti-hierarchical. He didn’t even want anyone to be called “father,” except our father in Heaven. After I was first ordained, the altar guild was showing me what I didn’t have to do anymore- “You don’t have to do that now- you’re Father Este,” they said. It never sat well with me. And yet a word we hear over and over again in the old testament prophesies and in the New is King, lord of all. We are to bow down to our King, every knee shall bow, in spite of the fact that Jesus himself knelt down to wash the feet of the disciples, to give them an example of the true work of a master.

I believe that if we follow the example of our messiah, of our Christ, we can evolve from people whose priorities are those of James and John, who desire kingly power into people who are moving toward understanding the lesson of the kneeling Jesus, the lesson of the anointing woman. This is a miracle we can effect in our own lives. Slowly shifting our priorities away from pre-occupation with kingly and queenly power and over to the humble and daily bringing of the Kingdom of God. Amen.

Home Inspection in Antiquity

2010-08-09T10:27:00.000-07:00

1 Samuel 1:4-20, Heb 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25, Mark 13:1-8
Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad
11/15/2009

My husband Matt is a house inspector in Berkeley. My first thought was that the beginning of this passage reminds me of nothing so much as his descriptions of the leaning stone chimneys and brick foundations of some grand house in the Berkeley Hills. The temple was, after all, only a building. But that was not how it was seen in the eyes of the disciples and their fellow first century Jews. It was the Beth El- the one house of God. And so this house of God was of necessity an unimaginably grand and gigantic structure. The temple of Herod was so vast and in fact so impressive that the disciples could not help but turn around and gawk up at it as they left its huge courts.

According to the Talmud, the second temple, or the temple of Solomon had thirteen gates, and an Ezrat Nashim (a large Women's Court) to the east and vast main area to the west. The roof and capitals were covered with gold, and the whole structure was gleaming white. The massive stones that survive in the Western wall are proof of the awe-inspiring scope of this temple. This great temple replaced the original first temple, the Temple of Solomon that was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC.

Imagine, then the horror of the disciples when Jesus calmly predicted that the glorious temple of God would be destroyed for a second time. Jesus is predicting the Siege of Jerusalem in the year 70 AD. The Roman army, led by the future Emperor Titus, conquered the city of Jerusalem, and the city and the Temple were utterly destroyed- barely a stone was left upon another.

This devastating change, these great birth pangs, gave birth to rabbinical Judaism. It was no longer possible to worship and make sacrifice in the great temple. There had to be a way to believe that God dwelled, not in only one place, but in the Word- in scripture, which could be taught by these newly elevated men (of course it was only men) of God.

But all this was in the future as the dazzled disciples gawked at the huge edifice of gleaming stone and gold. They could not image God living anywhere else. And even though Jesus had just taught the disciples about the relative worthlessness of wealth, unfavorably comparing the rich people in the temple with the impoverished widow, the disciples were awed by this grand and enormous complex. “Look, teacher, what large stones and what great buildings!” They say.

Soon after this James and John, always clueless, will ask Jesus to place them at his right and left hands when he comes into his glory. He advises them that they will not want to drink the cup that he must drink, but they don’t get it. The disciples still squabble over their status with Jesus, their place in the hierarchy that they imagine exists with him.

We continue our narrated gospel tour with Jesus and the disciples retreating to the Mount of Olives after their comments about the temple, to a place which overlooks Jerusalem so that they can still admire it. The disciples who Jesus first called, Peter, James, John and Andrew, begin to ask Jesus for the signs that will precede the falling of the temple.

First Jesus warns them of false prophets- those who will come in his name, leading them astray. With the vast multiplicity of interpretation of Christianity in our own day, we modern readers might well listen to that warning.

Then Jesus lists the signs: wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, and famines. But there is a positive note- this apocalypse leads to a birth- he describes all these disasters as merely the beginnings of the birth pangs.

We are blessed this morning with another story that speaks of birth pangs- the beautiful story of Hannah, whose first birth pangs were the grief and mourning she experienced before her prayers were answered. A barren woman was an object of great shame in those days. So the story of Hannah is one more that celebrates the lifting up, the victory of the lowly. Hannah, beloved wife of Elkhannah, is so desperate for a son that, after an apparently boozy feast with her husband, loses her mind with grief and weeps bitterly, as she staggers to the local tent-shrine to pray.

This tent-shrine is called a temple, but this was in Shiloh, not Jerusalem and she prayed her fervent prayers in a glorified tent, not a gleaming white and gold temple. She insists to the scandalized priest attendant Eli (as drunk people often do) that she is NOT drunk, but desperate for a son. She makes a vow to consecrate her much hoped for son to God, and Eli tells her that God will grant her wish. She goes back to her husband, they eat and drink even more, and then she conceives a child. The real birth pangs must have been more than bearable for Hannah, because her deepest prayers have been answered.

And in our beautiful psalm today, we hear Hannah’s prayer of thanksgiving, on which the Magnificat of Mary is based. There is a litany describing the falling of the mighty, like the great stones of the temple, and the rising up of the lowly, like the barren woman who finds she is with child.

We live every day every day in a culture, which like the Old Testament times of Hannah and the New Testament times of Jesus, values grandeur, real estate, gold and status over almost everything. And so, of course, we are tempted, like the disciples to forget the constant teachings of Jesus, who would probably favor Hannah’s tent shrine in Shiloh over the vast property that was the second temple of Jerusalem. Who would probably prefers Hannah’s drunken pleas over the pretentiously long prayers of the Jerusalem scribes. Over and over again Jesus reminds the disciples who has an easier time entering the kingdom of heaven, and who does not. We forget that God does not dwell exclusively in the very best addresses,.

It is not small thing to try to follow in the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a counter-cultural, counter-intuitive, counter-survivalist, revolutionary way to live. Not to gawk at the gleaming stones and gold this culture holds out to us. To actually have as our priority the familiar things that Jesus spoke of time and again. Letting go of grandeur, lifting up the lowly, opening our hearts, even and especially to the unlikely. And to see that we ourselves are the lowly temples of God, everyday feeling the birth pangs that precede our inevitable, slow, lowly and miraculous transformation.

Amen.

Remembrances of Rion Wight

2010-08-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

November 14, 2009
All Souls Church, Berkeley

Rio Wight was such a remarkable young man. As has been said in many different ways, Rio was an old soul in a young man’s body. I will always remember the way that Rio would look at you. He had kind and piercing brown eyes that seems to know so much, that communicated so clearly the life of that old soul, the deep and compassionate inner life he had. Quite aside from any suffering he may have had in his life, to look into those eyes was to see a serenity and a maturity and a wisdom that was undeniable. This sense he projected was so strong that it is evident in photographs of him, that calm and steady countenance, and that slight, almost Mona-Lisa-like smile

Rio’s given name was Rion a French name after his grandfather, that Rio changed when he was only six years old. When Rio had been mixed up with a boy named Ryan one too many time, he adjusted the French pronunciation to “Rio.” He could not have known then that he would grow to have a great love of rivers, and the name would fit him so perfectly. I met Rio when he was only nine years old, but I have been told that that his artistic spirit and even his talent and love of architecture was readily apparent from an even earlier age. At pre-school he would spend hours and hours building castles with legos or duplos, or later with those big card board blocks. And he would not build them the typical way. He would build these structures in surprising ways- ways that no other kid would have thought of. He later lovingly drew and painted these castles with fantastically tall towers and spires.

But as important as these expressions of his artistic soul were to him, his great love of nature was just as important, and also started at a very early age. Rio spent his summers for many years with his beloved mentor and former pre-school teacher, Brian, and an assortment of pre to grade school children in Tilden park, wiling away the hours spotting hundreds of species of birds- owls, great herons, red tailed hawks, one time even an arctic tern. They would play with newts in the creeks, and hike along blackberry-fringed paths. And best of all, they would listen to Brian’s endless and wonderful stories. Rio loved these summers and he became Camp Brian’s first paid counselor, helping out with the little kids once he had grown up a bit.

Later Rio grew to love tracking in the forest, trying to find and identify the tracks of his fellow creatures in the woods. Nature seemed to connect him to his own nature like nothing else. And Rio’s nature was rich in so many ways- he had a fine intelligence, all that artistic talent, that kind, compassionate soul. He was a beautiful young man, inside and out, and he had and has wonderful loving parents, a devoted younger brother and many loving friends.

It seems fitting that the last vacation the Wight family took together with Rio was to the exquisite natural wonder of Mount Shasta. At the end of the vacation, Susan asked Rio if she could take a picture of just him. So now we have this treasure- a beautiful picture of Rio, wearing that serene and slightly amused expression so typical of him, with the mountains just behind him, almost ready to go on his last journey.

I remember a day in 1999 when I was taking a hike in the Berkeley hills and I saw a figure literally appearing through the mist- that was Rio’s mother, Susan. We started walking and talking, and she told me about an idea she had that she thought would be really good for her artistic, somewhat introverted son- an after-school arts program for middle schoolers.

This became the Youth Arts Studio, and I never saw Rio happier than when he would sit at the tables- over there in the parish hall, drawing and painting to his heart’s content. The portfolio he developed at Youth Arts Studio helped him to be accepted at Cornell University where he studied architecture- a fulfillment of his early childhood castle-building ambitions. He had taken a leave of absence from Cornell in the past year, but then returned, re- connecting with his good friends there, hoping to resume his studies.

After a memorial service was set up for Rio at the Episcopal chapel at Cornell, Rio’s best friend called Susan to say, you know, Rio wasn’t religious, and none of his friends out here are really religious either- can we have the service in the architecture building? And so it will be- Rio will be remembered not only here, where his spiritual and artistic lives were nurtured, but in the place where he pursued his life’s calling with his fellow artists.

A week or so after Rio was gone, his mother told me that she had had a very specific sense of his presence. Rio had so loved to go off on new adventures on his own, and she said she got a sudden and certain sense of his joy in the adventure of this next part of his journey, a joy of discovering something utterly, thrillingly new.

There is a spiritual concept that I’ve always loved, about a great river- that the great stream of life, before, during and after our earthly existence is like a great river. When it hits a waterfall and the individual drops separate for a few moments- this is what we call life. And then the drops re-join the great flow of that river.

Happy travels, Rio. Wherever you are on the river, we hope that our love and our thoughts reach you. We know that you are now joyful, please know how much we love you, and know that you will always be with us in our hearts.

Be Not Afraid! October 11, 2009.

2010-07-25T14:07:00.000-07:00

Be Not Afraid!
October 11, 2009 St. James, Fremont
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor
On this day, one week from in-gathering Sunday, I would like to say a bit about this church and all churches and what we are about. We are about something very specific. We are named after the anointed one- the Christ- that’s why they call us Christians.
We are named after the anointed one whose very anointing goes to the heart of what we are about. Jesus was anointed, not by a person of power, but by a woman that most of us would probably not invite to dinner. A woman who poured an incredibly precious treasure of perfume on Jesus’ head to anoint him for his work on earth. Jesus’ life and teachings reflect that kind of radical giving.
Now in terms of the teachings of Jesus, people think that Jesus said all sorts of things. Some people think he said a lot of things about family. Some people think he said a lot of things about marriage. Some people think he said a lot about who we should or should not associate with. But the subject that Jesus spoke about the more than anything else was money. Rich people and poor people and riches and poverty. And he spoke a lot about giving.
The word “believe” appears in the Bible 273 times, the word “pray” 371 times, the word love appears 714 times. But the word “give” appears 2,172 times.
Now that may be a frightening thought, the idea that the whole of the bible just urges us to give, give, give, because the thought of giving may be frightening. I understand that fear, because the first time it occurred to me that I should tithe, I was positively terrified. But amazingly, once I did it the fear disappeared. So BE NOT AFRAID
So I want to tell you that the phrase “Do not be afraid”, said mostly by angels or Jesus, appears 365 in the bible.!
One time for every day of the year. This makes me think that we are called every single day of the year, every single day of our lives, to be not afraid to do what God is calling us to do. What is God calling us to do? Luckily we have not only an advocate with the Father, but a specific road map in the life and works of Jesus of Nazareth.
Now, as leaders and fellow children of God, you are called to do some calling of your own. And I urge you to hear these words in your heart and in your souls and in your ears before you make those calls:
BE NOT AFRAID! You are doing the work of the Kingdom, the work of God. You are helping those you call to BE NOT AFRAID. You are asking them to prayerfully consider what percentage of their income God is calling them to give. Urge them to joyfully join you next Sunday, whether or not they are ready to pledge. If they hesitate to come because they are not ready to pledge, and they don’t want to sit conspicuously in their seat while others walk up with their pledge card, remind them that they may mark in the box on their pledge card that they are not yet ready to pledge, and they can bring that forward with the rest, because whether or not they pledge, we are all one body. We are the Body of Christ, even if we are feeling a little wounded, as we all so sometimes. Christ was wounded too.
Some people in this church may be ready to tithe. Some may be ready to do more than tithe, and they may find joy in this. But even those who feel called to be radically generous may feel afraid to do so
To those people I say BE NOT AFRAID. Remember the exquisite story of the anointing woman. To those who objected because of the cost, Jesus defended the woman extravagantly, and said that she would always be remembered for what she did on that day.
She got called to do something a little outrageous, totally extravagant, utterly loving.
Maybe we might be called to do something similar. Maybe we might be called to ignore the carping of our minds, like the carping of the disapproving disciples.
Maybe we can spring ourselves from the awful reality of this culture of ours that makes a God of money. Some would say it takes a miracle for us to be released from it’s pull. Luckily we have a miracle. We have the miraculous life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and we have our calling as Christians.
And we have the knowledge, deep within us, if we can admit it, that it is not money that brings us joy. It is love, service, and community that brings us joy.
A word that we hear frequently in the New Testament is repentance. But repentance is a bad translation of the word metanoia, which means transformation. It is transformation, and not comfort that Jesus offers us. We can transform from people whose first concern is comfort and caution to people who’s first priority is the bringing of the Kingdom of God. This is the miracle we can effect in our own lives.
There is one biblical text that I never connected with transformation until I heard my daughter’s interpretation: The rich young man comes and asks Jesus what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus says to keep the commandments and the young man says that he has always kept them. Jesus looks at him with love, probably smiles, maybe even laughs, and says, “One thing more- sell what you own and give the money to the poor. Then come and follow me. The text goes on to say that the young man went away grieving, for he had many possessions. Jesus then turns to his disciples and gets off the one-liner about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.
But then he says, “With God, all things are possible.”
My daughter, who was ten at the time, and identified as Jewish, like her dad, had a good midrash for this story. She thought it was obvious that the young man went away sad, gave his possessions away, became joyful and came back to follow Jesus!
Jesus gives us a forge for our transformation, which is our faith, our membership in the body of Christ. The amount we give does not matter. It is the completeness of the transformation, the great growing up of the mustard seed, the rising of the bread. It is our own personal miracle-
Praying to hear God’s call and then acting on the answer to the question: What is God calling me to do?
BE NOT AFRAID!
Amen.

Area Ministry: Whoever is not Against us is For Us!

2009-09-26T21:48:00.000-07:00

Christ the Lord, Pinole, 9/27/09

Good morning and thank you for having me. My name is Este Gardner Cantor, and for a little over a year I have had the privilege of working as coordinating chaplain for a 28 year old chartered organization of the Diocese of California, “An Episcopal Ministry to Convalescent Hospitals.” Very soon after this name was chosen, it was recognized as way too unwieldy, so that unwieldy name was turned into an unpronounceable acronym- AEMCH. Sort of rhymes with the Yiddish word, mensch: but not quite.

As I have spoken to the elders of our organization who have blazed the trail before me, I began to piece together a creation story for AEMCH.

Well, In the beginning there was the Rev. Bill Clancy, dynamic Rector of All Souls Parish in Berkeley. And as far as an organized ministry to convalescent hospitals went, things were pretty much without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the East Bay. But Rev. Clancy had a bright idea and he said “let there be light” and Deacon Arlinda Cosby suddenly appeared across the table from him at a CDSP community night dinner and was positively lit up with enthusiasm for an idea he had.

This igniting spark of an idea was to form a ministry dedicated to those people who live in convalescent hospitals- people who Bill Clancy and Arlinda rightly felt to be among the most needful of fellowship, worship and friendship. The idea was to train, encourage and inspire each Episcopal parish to have a thriving ministry to at least one local convalescent hospital. So Arlinda proceeded to be the light in the firmament of heaven, to give light upon AEMCH for 27 years.

All Souls church was the first to be swept along, and St. Mark’s Berkeley next took flight, followed by St. Alban’s church in Albany which hit the ground running.

Many other East bay churches came on board with AEMCH, including your own, and the wonderful work of supporting, training and encouraging congregations to bring their energy and love and worship to the populations of their local convalescent homes began, providing the warmth that has warmed so many people. And Bishop Swing who was closely involved with AEMCH until his retirement, saw it all and saw that it was good.

I have had absolutely wonderful personal experiences with convalescent ministry and I have had wonderful community experiences with congregations doing this good work. The residents you see are not always bright and chipper, but you do meet some amazing people.

I got to know Camille Folker, who was 109 years old when she finally left us, sharp and funny and politically conscious as ever. When I first met her, and she was a mere lass of 108, I immediately complemented her on her sharpness and liveliness.

“What do ya mean?” She said “I’m lyin’ here like a wart on a pickle!” In her more serious moments she would tell me what she thought about when she woke at night and could not go back to sleep. “I think a lot about God,” she said. Then, back to her old self she said

“It comes in real handy being spiritual when you’re an old bag like me.” She remembered Indians in Mill Valley. She remembered when her family got their first model A and how handy it was not to have to crank it up. She remembered the 1906 earth quake- after all, she was born in 1899! I always felt I that I had traveled through time when I visited her.

I have had the pleasure of bringing youth groups and groups of children to convalescent hospitals and seeing how the faces of the elders light up at the sight of children. I am always struck by the commonality of the young and old and how small things- cards, cookies, ice cream- can be so enthusiastically shared between the generations.

And I have had the great pleasure of sharing the ministry with groups from various East Bay and now Marin and Contra Costa congregations, seeing how contagious the joy of this ministry can be. Seeing the wonders that a little attention and love can do for those who may not get many visitors, or any at all.

So on this day I am bringing to you the gospel of AEMCH, and for those of you who might be doubters, we have the perfect Gospel reading.

Ever since Bishop Marc began to talk about Area Ministry, I have been pleased to note that AEMCH was Area Ministry before there was Area Ministry. The gospel story today shows us a very early form of the competitiveness that sometimes exists between local parishes. John thinks he has done a good thing in castigating the non-homey exorcist, who was in fact doing what the disciples themselves had just failed to earlier in the same chapter- casting out a demon in the son of one of Jesus followers

But Jesus recognizes good work being done in his name, even outside of his small group of intimates. Jesus, I am sure, would have believed in Area Ministry.

According to Bishop Mark, Area Ministry encompasses three things:
Diversity in the participants, collaboration between parishes, and a non-word that Bishop Marc made up: “Embeddedness” in the community. In other words, action that will benefit the community in structures and institutions within the community. I am happy to say that AEMCH fulfills all three requirements. We welcome all parishes to join with us in this Jesus-filled work, that takes us out of our churches and into the institutions who need us so much. And to the individuals in those institutions who need our love, our touch, our listening and our worship services.

In the second half of the Gospel reading, Jesus gets really serious. He invokes the term “stumbling block” for whoever causes harm to his “little ones” in other words, his followers. He goes on to very sternly warn of the seriousness of sin, and to offer a few gruesome suggestions as to how to deal with our own foibles. I don’t believe he was literally speaking of removing body parts, but he may have been referring to something almost equally unpopular in our society: sacrifice.

Sacrifice of any kind, like discomfort of any kind, is avoided in our culture as much as self-amputation. We have a hard time sacrificing, which creates our own stumbling block to really living a life which honors us as Christians.

Discomfort is our stumbling block. If you had a crew from another planet come and look at how we actually spend our weeks, and they ignored Sundays, they might sometimes have a hard time telling that we are Christians. What do we actually do?

My favorite shorthand for the Christian life is in Mt. 25:35:

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.

When the disciples object that they never did these things for Jesus, he answers them back,

Inasmuch as you did it to the least of my brethren, you have done it to me.

Jesus wants us to take care of, feed, clothe, visit and welcome the poor, the powerless, the friendless.

We have opportunities everyday to do these things, but I have never found a ministry that encompassed so many of these sweet dictates as the one I am presenting to you today.

I invite you from the bottom of my heart to join us in this joyous and communal ministry, to join me as we step over our stumbling blocks and live into the Kingdom of Heaven together, free of competition, free of fear and doing it in the name of Jesus.

Amen

A Lot to Swallow

2009-09-11T11:01:00.000-07:00

Holy Innocents, Corte Madera
August 23, 2009 John 6:56-69

Once upon a conference, we were asked to identify what Christian feast day we would be if we could be any one of them. I jokingly said “Halloween.” Then I found that the next step was to begin to design a liturgy for that personal feast day. The group got into the spirit of the thing and I asked "OK- what would be a good hymn be for my Halloween liturgy?" Someone immediately began to sing “Eat my flesh, drink my blood…” Everyone laughed of course, but it did high-light the fact that it is a phrase that conjures up more vampire than messiah.

This hymn repeats the words from the Gospel of John verbatim- and in a hymn the words sound less shocking- less earthy and challenging. But as we know, Jesus never shrinks from being earthy or challenging. Instead he kind of rubs our face in it: “Eat my flesh and drink my blood. That’s a lot to swallow…

We have been going along on what I think of as the Summer of Bread for six weeks now, delving into the Gospel of John and it’s mysterious and profound meditation on the Bread of Life. Although the Gospel of John does not have a last supper breaking of the bread event, what is called the words of institution of the Eucharist, it does seem to have this very long and very significant reverie on the Eucharist.

There are many thoughts as to why this is. I read one source that felt that those words, “This is my Body which is given for you…and the rest of that section of our Eucharistic prayer, which first appeared in the letters of Paul : I Corinthians 11:23, was so sacred that the words were meant to be kept secret knowledge. But a half a century of so after Paul, the words were included, though slightly changed in Matthew, Mark and Luke. But no where in John.

Our Summer of bread begins with a miracle: the feeding of the five thousand, the followed by Jesus patient and persistent attempt to try to explain the deeper significance of this “sign.”

Then comes the first of three references to the Manna from heaven that God sent to the children of Israel during the Exodus in the wilderness. As is so often the case in the Gospel of John, a line is drawn between the traditions, miracles and feast days of the Old Testament and the revelations of the new- the manna was bread from heaven indeed, but after eating of it you still lived and died as you would have anyway. The Bread of Life is something altogether different- something above and beyond mere nourishment for the body. It is bread that will bring you a kind of utter transformation- a kind of radical real time abundance that Jesus calls eternal life. The people plead with Jesus, “Sir- give us this bread always.” The next week’s reading answers the hungry crowd with the beautiful words, “I am the Bread of Life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.

This leads up to last week’s reading, when Jesus first uses the word abide - “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” In case anyone did not catch the distinction between manna from heaven and the bread of life, he makes it again. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.” He says “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood ABIDE (or LIVE) in me, and I in them. Abide- is trannslated from the Greek work menos which has many meanings: abbide, remain, stay, live, dwell, last, endure, continue, await, wait for.

To abide in Jesus is all of that. He urges us to remain with him, stay with him, live with him, dwell with him, endure with him, continue with him and await him.

Finally, in this week’s passage, the last in our Summer of Bread, we are led to several essential elements to compete this long teatise on the Bread of Life.

The only reference (veiled though it is) to the last supper is heard nin the words, “Jesus knew which one would betray him.” Even this has a Eucharistic tone, because the only breaking or giving of bread in the last supper in the Gospel of John, consists of Jesus handing a morsel of bread to Judas, just before Judas betrays him. I have always felt that this underlined the universality of the mercy and grace of God- even when we are betrayers, God’s mercy is available to us, God will feed us still, the body and the blood are there for us still.

But with Jesus’ continued urging to eat his body and drink his blood, like so many of us, who read the teachings of Jesus, some of the disciples recoil. “This teaching is difficult- who can accept it?” They ask. And many of them desert him. Anticipating further betrayal, , Jesus says to his faithful twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?”

And it is the bumbling Peter, another one who exemplifies the faithlessness in all of us, who sees that there is no where else to go. Who proclaims that Jesus is the Holy One of God. Who says, “You have the words of eternal life..” And so we are harkened back to the beautiful prolog of John- Jesus is the word of God- the word made flesh. It is Jesus the word made flesh that is our bread- the word that is spirit and life. To me this is the meaning of the incarnation- the word made flesh- Jesus living the word of God. And if we truly allow Jesus to abide in us, and we in him, that spirit, that word will be incarnated in us. I beleive that the meaning of the incarnation of God in Christ is incomplete without the the incarnation of Christ in us. Of Christ abiding in us. Of Christ remaining with, staying with, living with, dwelling with, enduring with, continuing with and waiting, always waiting, for us.

Amen.

Bless Me a River

2009-05-23T15:11:00.000-07:00

John 17: 6-19

The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor

Church of the Holy Innocents, Corte Madera

Today we are privileged to eavesdrop on an exquisite 3-part prayer Jesus prays to God his Father in the presence of his beloved disciples. This beautiful prayer is often called the high priestly prayer of Jesus. In the first part Jesus prays for himself, in the longest section (our Gospel for today) he prays for his disciples, and in the short last section he prays for the believers yet to come- you and me.

Jesus prays with great love and great concern for the welfare and protection of his small flock. He begins by affirming that he has made the name of God known to his disciples- he has made God himself known. He has in fact fulfilled the promise of the beginning verses of the Gospel of John- the glorious hymn that reads in part:

It is God the only Son who is close to the father’s heart, who has made God known.

This prayer we hear today often echoes the Lord’s Prayer, which is given to us in the Gospel of Matthew. The name of our Father in Heaven is frequently hallowed in this prayer. And references to the Kingdom proliferate: The disciple’s joy that will be made complete speaks of the coming of the Kingdom, as does the longed for oneness of the community- Jesus prays to God, “That they may be one as we are one.” Jesus asks God to “protect his disciples from the evil one” just as the Lord’s Prayer asks that we be delivered from evil. But this is not a prayer Jesus teaches us to pray. And this is not a discourse addressed to the disciples as the rest of the long farewell address at the last supper has been. Jesus prays this prayer directly to God for the disciples, for us, perhaps as a lesson. In his last hours on earth Jesus does not make a last ditch effort to give the disciples a final list of revelations. He addresses it all to God, as if to instruct that he is leaving the church in the hands of God, which is where the disciples should place their future and their hopes. They need to understand that the life of the community rests in God’s hands.

We get to hear as did the disciples, the utter intimacy of Jesus’ relationship with God his father. The Hebrew word Abba, that Jesus used translates not as father, but as Daddy, an affectionate term you will not hear in used in Old Testament references to God- this intimate relationship with God was something new. Jesus’ faith in the love that God has for him is striking, and the confidence that he will be heard seems to be complete. ”You have given, you have loved, you have sent. Now keep, sanctify, and let them be one.” Jesus prays. Jesus is moving toward his pre-existent relationship with God- moving into a permanent oneness with Him. But for Jesus to return to this pre-existent glory, the incarnation must come to an end- Jesus must die. So there is an urgency- a poignancy to this intimate intercession.

When hearing Jesus’ great intimacy with God, we are given a glimpse of the Kingdom. We are given a glimpse of a relationship with God that transcends all limits and conventional notions of life. A glimpse of a day when our joy will in fact be complete, a day when God’s care and love and knowledge of us will be realized. We will experience the end of ordinary reality and the beginning of our reunion with the divine.

And finally, at the end of this prayer, it becomes clear that what we are hearing is a commissioning. We are to be sanctified in the truth. To sanctify is to be commissioned for some particular task, and therefore to be made holy. But it is mission that is the substance of this sanctification- the task is more important that the holiness.

And so the disciples, and you, and me, are being sent out- commissioned, to spread the truth. A chapter after our Gospel story, Jesus, being interrogated by Pilot, says to him,

I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilot famously asks him, “What is the truth?” Jn 18:37

Truth in the Gospel of John seems to be the whole of the revelation of God, and it seems to be synonymous with “the word,” and synonymous with Jesus. Jesus brings grace and truth (1:17); he is the truth (14:6) the true light (1:9); and the true vine (15:1) and he is the way, the truth and the life. This truth then, is the revelation of God’s substance as redeeming love as expressed in Jesus. Jesus then prays for the disciples to be set apart for the truth. This truth is both the sanctifying power and the purpose for the sending out of the disciples, for the sending out of all of us.

As much as the gospel message today is full of Jesus’ great love and protectiveness for his disciples, its last words are these words of commissioning- of dedication. The prayer is no less that the sanctification of the whole world through the sanctification of Jesus’ disciples.

I am reminded of a time I was preparing some young people to watch a baptism. I was about to show them the blessing over the water that is part of the baptismal service, when one rather precocious child said, “Shouldn’t we use living water- wild water for something like that? So we walked a short block to a creek in the park and we scooped up a bowl full of water. Having brought the prayer book with me I said the blessing over the water, and we prepared to head back to the church. Another one of the young people suddenly lit up and said “Why don’t we pour the holy water into the creek- then the creek will run into the river, and the river will run into the ocean, and all that water will be holy!” Unable to resist such an original theological thought, I handed the bowl to her and she poured the water into the creek. I never checked in with the creatures of the creek and on-ward to the sea, but we never forgot that day, when we sent out that blessing, all the way to the ocean.

Jesus poured his disciples into the river of the world, having sanctified them, having taught them to know God’s name, God’s truth and God’s son. And those disciples poured us out into that untested water. And in the last part of the priestly prayer, Jesus says, “May the love with which you have loved me be in them, and I in them.”

This is a solemn commissioning, but it is not without levity- even joy. Jesus wants to make our joy complete- he said so. “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” He wants for us the joy of the children who were so easily welcomed into the kingdom of heaven, the joy of children who stop at nothing in their joyous attempts to sanctify a creek and a river and an ocean. If we can but glimpse that infinite love that exists between Jesus and his father, that Jesus so generously shared with us, if we can even begin to mirror it with our own fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, friends and especially strangers, that blessing just might begin to stretch from ocean to ocean, and illuminate a truth we will never have to explain.

Feed My Sheep

2009-05-05T08:37:00.000-07:00

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Berkeley

May 2, 2009

The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor

Good Morning, and thank you for having me. Well, as we can hear from our exquisite readings, today is Good Shepherd Sunday. It seems appropriate on this day to honor the ministry that St. Marks has faithfully carried out for an amazing 25 years to the ever-changing flock of elders at Berkeley Pines Convalescent Hospital, and to listen to see if we might hear the voice of the shepherd calling us to do something similar.

All our beautiful readings today, and perhaps psalm 23 most gorgeously of all, sing the glories of the Good Shepherd- the glories of healing and nurturing, binding up wounds and protecting the weak. And like so many images in Jesus’ stories, the image of the good shepherd vs the bad Shepard (the hired hand in our Gospel of today) is an Old Testament reference, in this case from Ezekiel. Initially in the book of Ezekiel, the Lord God seems to damn all shepherds as selfish, careless, carnivorous. He childes the shepherds for only being interested in feeding themselves. He says,

You eat the fat, clothe yourselves with the wool, slaughter the fatlings, but you do not feed the sheep.

The Lord God then goes on to further scold the shepherds, pointing out the utter lack of the pastoral skills that later defined Jesus ministry:

You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not sought the lost.

In contrast to this image of a hungry, careless and selfish shepherd, The Lord God says:

I myself will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places they have been scattered on a day of thick darkness.

This is the course Jesus is claiming when he says, “I am the Good Shepherd.” If the wild animals come, the course of the good shepherd is staying with his sheep thereby risking his life to protect them. There was a practice of shepherds at the time of Jesus, of lying down to sleep across the threshold of the enclosure to insure that wild animals could not get in, and the sheep could not get out. This was literally laying down the body for the sake of the sheep, which recalls of Jesus laying down his life, with great willingness and authority, out of a great love for his flock.

What is described in all these beautiful words is a kind of true community, a community where the weak are protected and comforted. A community where there is chance for reconciliation and redemption for everyone.

In our reading from the first letter of John, it is our brothers and sisters for whom we are asked to lay down our lives. As Jesus has elsewhere said, it is the least of our brothers and sisters who most need to be found, healed, strengthened, loved. These are least esteemed of society, that Jesus always raised up- the sick, the poor, women, orphans and widows. The hired hand may have the job, he may be in the community, but he is doing little more than taking up space and feeding on lamb chops. We may feel sympathy and some identification with the hired hand because all the sacrifices that are implied in creating true community, putting other’s needs before our own, are hard to make in our present climate of economic crisis, flavored with swine flu. It might seem like it would be better to stay home- hold no one’s hand, avoid contact with the rest of the flock, keep your store of fat and wool close to your chests, hang on to what you’ve got. But it could be argued that too many hired hands and not enough Good Shepherds got us into our present situation where too many wolves are at the door of too many of our flock. I have heard it said that most people will not see the light until they feel the heat. We are feeling the heat of the neglect, worldwide, of the realities of true community. We really are utterly inter-dependent.

The only reading today that does not specifically sing the praises of the Good Shepherd is our reading from Acts, which celebrates a healing at the Beautiful Gate and the power of Jesus’ name.

Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit proclaims to the rulers of the people and the elders:

`The stone that was rejected by you, the builders;

has become the cornerstone.'

And he goes on to say that there is salvation in no one else but Jesus.

Well, what is it to be saved- what is salvation? We often hear that it means proclaiming Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. We might think it means that if we believe in Jesus, we will go to heaven and not to hell.

Or we may think of salvation as freedom from the prison of our membership in the society of the hired hand. Maybe salvation is freedom from the hell of living only to eat fat, wear wool and save our own necks, attractive as that hell might sometimes be to us all. But Jesus clearly points out that doing that is not the way to salvation. Jesus is the Good Shepherd and Jesus is the beautiful gate- and it is through him- through modeling, however imperfectly, his own acts of mercy and justice that we will be saved. And as he continually reminds us, the sacrifices we make toward this end shrink in comparison to all you get back- the life you take up again, the promise of overflowing abundance.

Maybe salvation is hearing and then answering the voice of the shepherd, calling us into true community, calling us to be a true shepherd, or at least a true member of the flock. The hired hand who runs away at the pain or need of a brother or sister, the loneliness of the old or the pain of the wounded, pays for his comfort with his soul. Pays with the loss of a community of the spirit.

Sometimes it is good to hear from a voice that is technically not of our flock- here is a reading from the brilliant Sufi mystic Jellaladin Rumi:

There is a community of the spirit.

Join it, and feel the delight

of walking in the noisy street,

and being the noise…

Open your hands,

if you want to be held.

Sit down in this circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel

the shepherd’s love filling you….

Be empty of worrying.

Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison

when the door is so wide open?

Amen.

The Unexpected Kingdom

2009-04-17T17:25:00.000-07:00

A Reflection on Mt. 29:13:31- 13:52
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor

I went on a pilgrimage recently, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that I had an experience of the Kingdom of Heaven in the most unexpected of places.

The destination of the pilgrimage was supposed to be the gigantic Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where one would expect to have a revelation. But my first unlikely glimpse of the Kingdom was in the huge and dilapidated Methodist Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on 86th and Broadway. I stayed there for 8 days with my fellow priest, Father Richard, the other adult chaperone, Gay Johnson, and 7 of our wonderful high school youth.

There is no denying the fact that the church was a daunting place to live. We shared a shower with the homeless shelter, and after my first look, I attacked the stall with a long brush and some Comet and strove to make it look clean. But for all my scrubbing, this was not really possible. There was also a considerable population of mice in that church. We took to adopting the habits of wilderness campers who hang their packs high in the trees to keep them from the bears. We hung our bags from the wall lamps to keep them from the mice. Our youth group was housed in two fine rooms the first night- until a huge youth group took over one of our rooms, and then, later in the week, a third youth group was welcomed in, and even our plan B space became endangered.

There were always meetings going on in our room when we wanted to be there to rest. We soon learned that obtaining a set schedule for these meetings was not possible. When we wanted to use the kitchen, we would often find it occupied by some darn program feeding the homeless. It was an amazing experience to be there, but it certainly was uncomfortable. We actually considered leaving at one point, and then one of our youth pointed out to us we were on a pilgrimage, not a vacation.

I slowly began to realize that this dilapidated church we were camping in resembled nothing so much as the radically welcoming branches of the transformed mustard seed.

This church runs a women’s shelter. They host a food pantry, run by former clients, who are now happily employed there. The church sends out hundreds of Meals on Wheels packages every day. They have a mothers and babies group. They have a martial arts class for youth. They have a tutoring program. They have music classes in the sanctuary. The night we arrived there was a huge and joyous Indian flavored rock concert in progress, also in the sanctuary. They have a beautiful theatrical stage on the 2nd floor, which was used by no fewer than six theater groups. They have dozens of 12 step programs going all the time, and they often happened in the room we were staying in! The church houses a very large and rather famous radical synagogue, B’nai Jesurun. It also houses a Presbyterian church whose usual space was being renovated. During the Sunday service on Gay Pride Day all of the marchers were welcomed to the center of the church, and everyone laid hands on them to bless them on their march. They used inclusive language in every prayer- God was never a “he.”

Everyone was welcomed in- even us- even the mice. It seemed that no bird would be turned away from building a nest in this great tree, and if a place could be said to have a great heart, this one sure did.

It seemed to me that the blessing and the curse of being part of this great teeming Kingdom was the same thing- we were automatically part of the hospitality because we were given hospitality. We had to accept that our nest was just one of hundreds, and not the center of the tree. And after a while we found that even if we were bumped out of our room there was always somewhere for us to perch, and we found some rather lovely places. We could always camp on the cool and quiet balcony of the vast sanctuary, sometimes hearing the beautiful strains of music from some of our neighboring birds. It did feel a little like heaven up there.

The Kingdom of Heaven popped up unexpectedly again for me in quite another place- this time after the planned part of the pilgrimage was over.

My husband joined me after the pilgrims went home, and after a few days in New York, we decided to go to Washington DC to see the fireworks on the 4th of July. I had lived in Washington for many years, so I called an old boyfriend of mine, Art Grosman, who still lives there, and I asked if we could stay with him. He was delighted to offer us a room at the big brownstone he shares with his girlfriend. I hadn’t seen him in 20 years, but he hadn’t changed a bit. Long ago, when we were both professional hippies, we had crossed Canada together in our VW van, resplendent with tie-dyed curtains. When I saw him on this recent visit, he still had all the photos from that trip, which included the many and sometimes motley hitch-hikers we picked up along the way.

I left this man because he was always doing exactly what he had done for those hitch-hikers and for my husband and me. He was always inviting anyone and everyone to stay- every derelict old friend of his was welcome at the table. Art’s particular call was providing services for free that usually cost something. He started the Washington Free Press. He started the Washington Free clinic, and when he got together with his girlfriend, they housed the Washington Free School. I now realize that I had to leave him because my heart was not big enough. But I got to know his girlfriend Marty for the first time on this trip, and realized that this time he had found someone whose heart was big enough. Before he met her, Marty had already adopted two kids whose parents had been institutionalized. Nobody else wanted these kids. Then, once they got together, they spent the next 20 years, taking in emergency foster kids- kids whose parents were in prison, or on crack, or just not there. Some of these kids stayed for 10 years or more. During this time they managed to have two of their own biological kids as well.

Art is a Jewish atheist (like all my friends were in Washington), and so I was surprised to see an obituary tacked up on his wall for Kenneth Taylor, the man who started the huge Christian publishing house, Tyndale Press. Kenneth Taylor created “The Living Bible” which I have on my shelf because my grandfather gave it to me. This was an early attempt to put the bible into understandable English. I was told that this titan of the Christian publishing business was Marty’s father. He used to read the bible to his children every night and explain what it meant. One time Marty said, ”Well, if that’s what they mean, why don’t they just say it?” This was the catalyst for the creation of "The Living Bible.”

Art and Marty never married during their 30 year old courtship, and this was hard on Marty’s father. But I understand that before he died, he came to realize that Art and Marty were married in the eyes of God. And I hope he realized that contrary to appearances, the words of the bible he had read his daughter all those years had not fallen on deaf ears. Married or not, Marty and Art were doing the work of the Kingdom of Heaven-- taking in the homeless orphans, providing for the poor, opening their house to everyone who needed it- even me and my husband.

Being part of this bustling kingdom must not have been easy. I’m sure there were hardships for their birth children, navigating between so many little sheltered birds, and probably difficulties among the many foster children. And surely there were stresses between the two parents. But they too, apparently recognized that they were on a pilgrimage, not a vacation.

This led me to consider that life is, or should be a lot more like a pilgrimage than a vacation. And if we believe what Jesus tells us, that the Kingdom of God is at hand, maybe that Kingdom isn’t supposed to be entirely comfortable either. Or maybe in the Kingdom of Heaven we are transformed in a way that changes the meaning of being comfortable all together. How comfortable is the wolf when she lies down with the lamb? And if the lamb is comfortable, it is in a way we can’t yet fathom.

I read that if we wanted to have every human being on earth enjoy the lifestyle of an affluent North American, we would need four planet earths. I wonder if the bustling and rich kingdom of our New York City Methodist church, or the loving chaos of Art and Marty’s house could be microcosms of what life might be if we evened out the score on a global basis. It might not be comfortable in our own present terms, but it just might be our introduction into the Kingdom of Heaven.

I believe that in the Kingdom of Heaven, we all get enfolded in the great green branches spawned from that tiny mustard seed, we all glory in the abundance of unconditional love. And, if we can bear it, we get to bring out our treasures, both old and new, and scatter them out from our comfortable households throughout the whole of the Kingdom.

Amen.

The Undefended Heart

2009-04-17T13:18:00.000-07:00

The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor
Reflection on John 12:22-33 and Jeremiah 31:31-34

Archbishop Desmond Tutu points out that Jesus did not say “I draw SOME people to myself." He said, "I will draw ALL people to myself.” And the most ancient texts are even more radically inclusive- they say, “I will draw all THINGS to myself.”

What strikes me about this passage, as with so much of what Jesus said is the radical inclusivity, the radical abundance, and the radical love that is illuminated, even with the approaching darkness.

The introduction of the Greeks at the very beginning clues us into the idea of universality- of an abundance of nationalities, of ethnicities. Then Jesus speaks of the grain of sand that dies, but then bears much fruit- in fact has to die in order to bear an abundance of fruit.

Jesus speaks of those who love their lives losing them- a frightening comment on the face of it. But it could be that those of us who hang on too desperately to our life as we need to see it (and I preach to myself here) may not end up with the kind of abundance we most want. Like us, the crowd in the story never seems to get what Jesus is talking about. Like us, they sometimes hear God speaking and all they perceive are storm warnings. But even in a storm, there can be abundance. In fact I have just recently heard it said that life is not about waiting for a storm to pass- it is about learning to dance in the rain.

The things that I hear over and over again from Jesus, the things that stand out either because they are said so often, or because they are so revolutionary and impossible, are all expressions of divine abundance: abundance of love, of inclusivity and of courage:

Love your enemy
Let go of your possessions
And do not be afraid.

“Do not be afraid,” said mostly by angels or by Jesus, appears in scripture 365 times- perhaps once for every day of the year. So Jesus must have meant it we have to work this practice every day of our lives- have this faith on a daily basis- do not be afraid, no matter what.

In this terrifying time of economic insecurity I have had the twin traumatic experiences of losing my job, (and I am very sorry to be leaving you) and my daughter preparing for college, and so, potentially leaving me. And then a tragedy occurred that made my misfortunes seem like nothing. Someone I knew lost her child. Suddenly I realized that I had been living in riotous abundance- paradise, really, possessing a literal embarrassment of riches, without even noticing it. It also made me realize with a shock how fragile, how precious, and how terrifyingly unpredictatable life really is. I absorbed some of the shock myself and was initially plunged into fear. I learned the meaning of “pray without ceasing” and I saw at very close vantage point Job’s whirlwind.

I spent as much time as I could with my friend, and to my astonishment I saw grace and healing even in what I considered to be the very worse possible thing. Her community embraced her, she was not alone with the bearing of her cross, floods of love came her way, not just from her community but from her daughter’s sweet friends as well. I saw the beginning of healing, the beginning of resurrection.

And yet my friend’s loss struck me in the heart- removed my denial that something like that could ever happen even to someone I knew, let alone to me. In our passage today the human Jesus tells us, “Now my soul is troubled.” He apparently is fearful because he forsees his own death, and perhaps tempted to say what he did say in the Gospel of Luke “Take this cup from my lips.” But Jesus is steadfast and heaven answers him that he made the right decision, that his Father’s name will be glorified. The fearful moment seems to pass.

It is somehow comforting to have an incarnated God who is sometimes fearful, sometimes in pain and grief and even rage. Jesus cries tears of blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, he weeps at the death of his friend Lazareth, he explodes into a violent rage at the money changers in the temple. And yet he somehow returns to faith, to love, to an awareness of God’s abundance. Even at the threat of death, even through death itself.

In the Old and New Testaments, there is a constant reminder that God’s abundance, God’s grace is limitless, and is there is for all people- therefore there really is enough for everyone, in spite of our fears. I have heard this described as God’s “more-than-enoughness.”

We are now moving to the end of Lent, and we are asked by Christ to mimic the ridiculous abundance of the anointing woman- to have such over-flowing abundant love that we wash each other’s feet- doing the work of a slave, as Jesus the master did. Jesus models the abundance he sees in God his father, described in the scripture he knew so well. In Genesis, God makes his covenant, when he places the rainbow in the sky, not with humans only, but with all creation.

God Blesses Abraham and Sarah so that they will bless all nations.

And when the Pharoah finally lets the Hebrews slaves go, they start on their way across the wilderness, with “A mixed multitude and very many animals, both flocks and herds.” So it follows that the covenant at Sanai was not given only to the Jews, but to all people- to the whole “mixed multitude” of humanity. To ALL of us, God extravagantly declared, “I will be your God and you will be my people.”

With the birth of Jesus, it was the foreigners, the non-Jewish Magi who found the Christ child- the abundance of revelation was not only given to the chosen people even in this treasured nativity story of ours. They brought valuable gifts, like the nard ointment the woman poured so recklessly on Jesus’ head, like the spices brought by the women at the tomb to lavish on what they thought was their dead master.

In the Revelation to John, he speaks of “a great multitude that no one could count, of every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the Lamb.”

And in the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “I will draw ALL people to myself.” This is Jesus of the undefended heart- the mind of Christ that St. Paul urged us to attempt. Jesus always accepted, always loved “all people.” The undefended heart knows no fear, knows no limitation, and excludes no one. Jesus’ impossible but persistent teaching is that we love abundantly-fearlessly- even our enemies. That we have nothing to be afraid of, because abundant life is all around us in the abundant love of God. As the Buddhist/Christian poet and holy man Thick Nat Hahn has said “The winds of grace are always blowing- you have only to put up your sails.”

It may not look like the abundant life we thought we should have. It may sound like thunder and look like crucifixion. It may scare the daylights out of us. But Jesus said “I will always be with you”- this is the meaning of Emmanuel- “God with us.”

Jesus would have known well the beautiful passage from Jeremiah about the new covenant. This is one of my very favorite passages in the whole bible. How can we think the Old Testament is Old when it contains the New Covenant?

"The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah."

We have the rainbow covenant in Genesis and the covenant at Sinai revealed to be for all people- surely this promise is as well: Surely the law will be written in all of our hearts. Surely the struggle can end- straining to know the law, know the Lord, know the answers to everything. Surely this promise holds abundantly for all people- that we will know God without fear, and know that even in all circumstances, even in the very worst circumstances, even in our pain and in our fear, that we are deeply and abundantly forgiven, and deeply and abundantly loved, and that God is with us.

Then we can feel, beating in our breast, the undefended heart, the heart that has opened up and let go of fear where God can and will write her law.

2009-01-23T12:42:00.000-08:00