Many Thanks on behalf of Episcopal Relief and Development for Haiti. Between the Bake Sale, the Sunday Offering, and Discretionary Funds, the parish sent $1,800 this past week. Many parishioners have also donated directly to ERD. The need is growing and I invite you to continue in generosity.
Epiphany began with the Magi journeying across long distances, seeking the Wisdom Child Jesus. This week, your spiritual leaders are also journeying in search of wisdom, new ideas, and refreshment.
Desi Brown, Youth Leader is at the National Episcopal Christian Educators Conference in Menlo Park. Free from household and work responsibilities for three days, please pray that this learning retreat is a time of deep refreshment, networking and learning for her.
Deacon Cynthia Montague is at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco learning about music that makes community. The parish will benefit from this, as will the residents of the Monterey County Jail, where she spends her weekdays in ministry.
And I am attending a five day retreat called Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate, at the Center for Contemplation and Action in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The focus is on critical phases of our journeys of spiritual awakening.
Other journeys are happening closer to home! Seventeen people gathered last Sunday at 9 AM in the Parish Hall to practice Qi Gong under the capable and wonderful leadership of Dr. Michael Luder, Brooke Fiske and Antonia Fiske. You are welcome to try this out and see how it enhances your Sunday morning worship.
And Yvonne Crane and her artist friend Kat Ogletree are busy planning for the Women’s Retreat to be held in March at Mission San Antonio. The Men’s Retreat will be held the following month, led by Deacon Don Fusilier.
Jesus regularly took time away to contemplate, pray and re-group. Please pray for your leaders as they do likewise!
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Journeys Near and Far
Many Thanks on behalf of Episcopal Relief and Development for Haiti. Between the Bake Sale, the Sunday Offering, and Discretionary Funds, the parish sent $1,800 this past week. Many parishioners have also donated directly to ERD. The need is growing and I invite you to continue in generosity.
Epiphany began with the Magi journeying across long distances, seeking the Wisdom Child Jesus. This week, your spiritual leaders are also journeying in search of wisdom, new ideas, and refreshment.
Desi Brown, Youth Leader is at the National Episcopal Christian Educators Conference in Menlo Park. Free from household and work responsibilities for three days, please pray that this learning retreat is a time of deep refreshment, networking and learning for her.
Deacon Cynthia Montague is at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco learning about music that makes community. The parish will benefit from this, as will the residents of the Monterey County Jail, where she spends her weekdays in ministry.
And I am attending a five day retreat called Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate, at the Center for Contemplation and Action in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The focus is on critical phases of our journeys of spiritual awakening.
Other journeys are happening closer to home! Seventeen people gathered last Sunday at 9 AM in the Parish Hall to practice Qi Gong under the capable and wonderful leadership of Dr. Michael Luder, Brooke Fiske and Antonia Fiske. You are welcome to try this out and see how it enhances your Sunday morning worship.
And Yvonne Crane and her artist friend Kat Ogletree are busy planning for the Women’s Retreat to be held in March at Mission San Antonio. The Men’s Retreat will be held the following month, led by Deacon Don Fusilier.
Jesus regularly took time away to contemplate, pray and re-group. Please pray for your leaders as they do likewise!
Epiphany began with the Magi journeying across long distances, seeking the Wisdom Child Jesus. This week, your spiritual leaders are also journeying in search of wisdom, new ideas, and refreshment.
Desi Brown, Youth Leader is at the National Episcopal Christian Educators Conference in Menlo Park. Free from household and work responsibilities for three days, please pray that this learning retreat is a time of deep refreshment, networking and learning for her.
Deacon Cynthia Montague is at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco learning about music that makes community. The parish will benefit from this, as will the residents of the Monterey County Jail, where she spends her weekdays in ministry.
And I am attending a five day retreat called Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate, at the Center for Contemplation and Action in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The focus is on critical phases of our journeys of spiritual awakening.
Other journeys are happening closer to home! Seventeen people gathered last Sunday at 9 AM in the Parish Hall to practice Qi Gong under the capable and wonderful leadership of Dr. Michael Luder, Brooke Fiske and Antonia Fiske. You are welcome to try this out and see how it enhances your Sunday morning worship.
And Yvonne Crane and her artist friend Kat Ogletree are busy planning for the Women’s Retreat to be held in March at Mission San Antonio. The Men’s Retreat will be held the following month, led by Deacon Don Fusilier.
Jesus regularly took time away to contemplate, pray and re-group. Please pray for your leaders as they do likewise!
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Our DNA
Our hearts and minds are overflowing with sorrow over the unspeakable calamity for the Haitian people. The earthquake this past week – este terramoto – brought down buildings –cathedrals, the Episcopal bishop’s home, and thousands upon thousands of apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, homes. People in Port Au Prince report that the smell of death permeates their hair, their clothing, their nostrils – and that no amount of washing takes it away. Water, even just water for drinking, is in terribly terribly short supply. You know all of this. You’ve seen it on the news. You’re read it on the internet.
And it affects the way we hear the readings this morning. What on another morning, we would hear as a gospel reading of joy and festivity – the celebration of a wedding – sounds different this morning – as we mourn for the lost, the dead, and the dying in the streets of Haiti. This morning, when I hear the gospel, I don’t think of celebration, I think of contrast. The contrast of happiness with sadness. The contrast of celebration with mourning. And, in the context of this week’s news, I hear the question of timing.
“It is not yet my time”, Jesus said. And because of the reports streaming in of the difficulty in getting aid into the single airport, and then from the airport to the people in need – we know that timing is everything. Anguish grows as time passes. Rescue becomes less and less a possibility, until it becomes not possible. Chaos erupts as time passes.
“It is not yet my hour,” Jesus told his mother. Jesus was right of course – it wasn’t his hour. Because "His hour" is an allusion that points towards the cross, the resurrection and the ascension. But Mary, confident as the Mother, and confident in the power and compassion of her Son, told the servants, Do as he tells you. And she was right also. It was the time, because there was need. And so, she, as Mother, pointed out the need – and the rightness of responding now, in the present, whether it accorded with God’s timing or not.
The miracle of the gospel reading is not about alcohol. There were prodigious amounts of it for sure, but the real miracle is about a deeply gracious and enormously abundant response to need. The wedding and the party were synonymous. The new couple would have no social standing, no future, without being able to provide hospitality for their friends and neighbors. This wasn’t a crisis of a party run dry, it was a crisis of connection and community. Mary realized this and turned to the person who could do something about it. Jesus heard her request, understood the need, and did something about it.
I love that Jesus’ first miracle – one of his most famous – is done so quietly, so anonymously – only the servants knew about it – and it was done in a relatively private setting. So many miracles are like this aren’t they. People responding to need in ways that don’t ever hit the headlines, that aren’t ever recorded – but just done, quietly, simply and effectively. I am privileged to be privy to more and more stories about how this happens all the time among the lives of the saints gathered here this morning. People quietly, without fanfare, going about the business of hearing about a need and figuring out the best response to it. Sometimes that means bringing in the whole community. Sometimes it means only a few knowing about it. But however it happens, the Body of Christ is built for action. It’s a built in characteristic of the Body of Christ that need among believers or need in the world that God loves so dearly triggers a response by the Christian community. I heard one of these stories yesterday from a parent.
One of our young parishioners told her friend at school that he needed to sit down and listen to her because she needed to tell him something very serious – she said that there were buildings that fell down and people who were dying. Then she said, but my church is going to bake cookies and sell them and we are going to send the money to help those people. You should come to church and buy those cookies. She told her teacher too that she should come to church. When the teacher replied that she didn’t go to church, our young Christian told her that that was ok – but that this Sunday she should come to church and buy cookies so that the people who needed help could get help.
We respond because we are fashioned and formed by a God who responds. It was need that brought God down out of the heavens and into earthly existence in the person of Jesus Christ. God’s splangthna – bowels – were moved in compassion by our plight and he became human and dwelt among us.
It is need that brings God to bend down to earth. Need that moves God to compassion - to entering into this earthly life of earthquakes and buildings falling down and poverty beyond understanding. It is need that moves the Body of Christ, however broken we are, however disjointed and dysfunctional the church, the dear Body of Christ may be – need brings forth response.
But let’s be honest. Some of us – not all of us – but some of us – wonder about this compassionate God – wonder what kind of God would allow the enormity of this kind of suffering. The poorest people in the Western Hemisphere – already buried under crushing poverty, and debt, now buried under cement blocks and slabs. We see the bodies bulldozed into mass graves, and some of us, like Job, raise our voices – Where are you God? Where is your compassion? It is deeply disquieting to our spirits to see these images, to hear these voices calling for help that has not gotten there in time.
Job’s friends gathered around him with their answers – their platitudes, their proverbs, their ready answers. But God did not. When God came to Job in the whirlwind, he did not provide an answer. Instead, he provided himself. God entered into relationship with Job. He took Job and his questions and laments seriously. And when Job came to know God, not only through his mind, but intimately, in his gut, in his bones – in Real Presence, he responded in the only way that he could - with worship. By bowing down in worship. By letting the energy of that relationship move through him and bring him to life again. Bring him back to life again.
Like Job, we are not apt to get an intellectually satisfying answer to our questions about justice and suffering and why or how God could or would allow things like this Haiti earthquake to happen. But when we feel deeply, when we don’t distance ourselves from our suffering brothers and sisters, when we respond in the only ways that are really open to us – through prayer and by sending money – we are likely to find ourselves shoulder to shoulder with God, in relationship. We are likely to find the energy of relationship with the Divine moving through us, breathing life into tragedy.
At heart, this is what the Incarnation is about. It is what the Right Time is about - God entering fully and our receiving him fully into the bricks and mortar of our lives. The Right Time – the Time of the Incarnation is the Time of God entering into and our receiving him into the calamity of crumbling cement and the reality of our human and very broken systems of government and aid and hands held out with whatever small cups of water we’ve managed to find and offer.
The Right Time of the Incarnation is the Now time of small brilliant miracles of hope and connection and comfort and mercy.
So – this is a place, the community of this church is a place – where we can be honest. Honest with our questions about God. Honest about our needs and the needs of the world.
And it is a place that gets that the DNA of who we are as the Body of Christ - is a Body that responds to need, in real Time.
And it affects the way we hear the readings this morning. What on another morning, we would hear as a gospel reading of joy and festivity – the celebration of a wedding – sounds different this morning – as we mourn for the lost, the dead, and the dying in the streets of Haiti. This morning, when I hear the gospel, I don’t think of celebration, I think of contrast. The contrast of happiness with sadness. The contrast of celebration with mourning. And, in the context of this week’s news, I hear the question of timing.
“It is not yet my time”, Jesus said. And because of the reports streaming in of the difficulty in getting aid into the single airport, and then from the airport to the people in need – we know that timing is everything. Anguish grows as time passes. Rescue becomes less and less a possibility, until it becomes not possible. Chaos erupts as time passes.
“It is not yet my hour,” Jesus told his mother. Jesus was right of course – it wasn’t his hour. Because "His hour" is an allusion that points towards the cross, the resurrection and the ascension. But Mary, confident as the Mother, and confident in the power and compassion of her Son, told the servants, Do as he tells you. And she was right also. It was the time, because there was need. And so, she, as Mother, pointed out the need – and the rightness of responding now, in the present, whether it accorded with God’s timing or not.
The miracle of the gospel reading is not about alcohol. There were prodigious amounts of it for sure, but the real miracle is about a deeply gracious and enormously abundant response to need. The wedding and the party were synonymous. The new couple would have no social standing, no future, without being able to provide hospitality for their friends and neighbors. This wasn’t a crisis of a party run dry, it was a crisis of connection and community. Mary realized this and turned to the person who could do something about it. Jesus heard her request, understood the need, and did something about it.
I love that Jesus’ first miracle – one of his most famous – is done so quietly, so anonymously – only the servants knew about it – and it was done in a relatively private setting. So many miracles are like this aren’t they. People responding to need in ways that don’t ever hit the headlines, that aren’t ever recorded – but just done, quietly, simply and effectively. I am privileged to be privy to more and more stories about how this happens all the time among the lives of the saints gathered here this morning. People quietly, without fanfare, going about the business of hearing about a need and figuring out the best response to it. Sometimes that means bringing in the whole community. Sometimes it means only a few knowing about it. But however it happens, the Body of Christ is built for action. It’s a built in characteristic of the Body of Christ that need among believers or need in the world that God loves so dearly triggers a response by the Christian community. I heard one of these stories yesterday from a parent.
One of our young parishioners told her friend at school that he needed to sit down and listen to her because she needed to tell him something very serious – she said that there were buildings that fell down and people who were dying. Then she said, but my church is going to bake cookies and sell them and we are going to send the money to help those people. You should come to church and buy those cookies. She told her teacher too that she should come to church. When the teacher replied that she didn’t go to church, our young Christian told her that that was ok – but that this Sunday she should come to church and buy cookies so that the people who needed help could get help.
We respond because we are fashioned and formed by a God who responds. It was need that brought God down out of the heavens and into earthly existence in the person of Jesus Christ. God’s splangthna – bowels – were moved in compassion by our plight and he became human and dwelt among us.
It is need that brings God to bend down to earth. Need that moves God to compassion - to entering into this earthly life of earthquakes and buildings falling down and poverty beyond understanding. It is need that moves the Body of Christ, however broken we are, however disjointed and dysfunctional the church, the dear Body of Christ may be – need brings forth response.
But let’s be honest. Some of us – not all of us – but some of us – wonder about this compassionate God – wonder what kind of God would allow the enormity of this kind of suffering. The poorest people in the Western Hemisphere – already buried under crushing poverty, and debt, now buried under cement blocks and slabs. We see the bodies bulldozed into mass graves, and some of us, like Job, raise our voices – Where are you God? Where is your compassion? It is deeply disquieting to our spirits to see these images, to hear these voices calling for help that has not gotten there in time.
Job’s friends gathered around him with their answers – their platitudes, their proverbs, their ready answers. But God did not. When God came to Job in the whirlwind, he did not provide an answer. Instead, he provided himself. God entered into relationship with Job. He took Job and his questions and laments seriously. And when Job came to know God, not only through his mind, but intimately, in his gut, in his bones – in Real Presence, he responded in the only way that he could - with worship. By bowing down in worship. By letting the energy of that relationship move through him and bring him to life again. Bring him back to life again.
Like Job, we are not apt to get an intellectually satisfying answer to our questions about justice and suffering and why or how God could or would allow things like this Haiti earthquake to happen. But when we feel deeply, when we don’t distance ourselves from our suffering brothers and sisters, when we respond in the only ways that are really open to us – through prayer and by sending money – we are likely to find ourselves shoulder to shoulder with God, in relationship. We are likely to find the energy of relationship with the Divine moving through us, breathing life into tragedy.
At heart, this is what the Incarnation is about. It is what the Right Time is about - God entering fully and our receiving him fully into the bricks and mortar of our lives. The Right Time – the Time of the Incarnation is the Time of God entering into and our receiving him into the calamity of crumbling cement and the reality of our human and very broken systems of government and aid and hands held out with whatever small cups of water we’ve managed to find and offer.
The Right Time of the Incarnation is the Now time of small brilliant miracles of hope and connection and comfort and mercy.
So – this is a place, the community of this church is a place – where we can be honest. Honest with our questions about God. Honest about our needs and the needs of the world.
And it is a place that gets that the DNA of who we are as the Body of Christ - is a Body that responds to need, in real Time.
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