A supplement to the Parish Calendar

Kenneth L. Schmidt
1 May 2013

CONGRATULATIONS! on the birth of three children:

• to Paula Walker and Keenan Moore, on the birth of Kahlil Marley Moore, 4 February.  Kahlil, the grandson of Lucille Walker, will be baptized at All Saints’ on Sunday, 26 May.
• to Jeff Russell and Carrie Sloan, on the birth of Harlan Ellison Russell on 3 March.
• to Seth and Susan St. Martin, on the birth of Joseph Omar St. Martin on 24 March.  Joseph was baptized this past Sunday, 28 April, with Kevin Ames and Michelle Paulson as his Godparents.

CONGRATULATIONS also to Marcus Crim, our Parish Seminarian for the 2012-13 academic year.  Marcus was recently approved as a postulant in the Diocese of California in preparation for ordination to the vocational diaconate and will graduate from the School for Deacons on 19 May.  We will say farewell to Marcus this coming Sunday, 5 May, when he will preach at the 10 a.m. Mass.

FAREWELL TO THE REV. ELIZABETH J. WELCH, Pastoral Associate:  On Sunday, 21 April, we said farewell to Elizabeth who moved to Montreal, Quebec, last weekend to begin graduate studies in biomedical ethics at McGill University.  A member of All Saints’ since 2003, Elizabeth became a volunteer Pastoral Associate at All Saints’ upon her ordination as a Deacon and then a Priest in 2008, during which time she served as the Spiritual Care Coordinator of the Sojourn Chaplaincy at San Francisco General Hospital.

Special thanks to all who helped plan and organize the farewell for Elizabeth:  to Rick and Margaret Trezevant who selected the antique (18^th century) Tibetan “singing” bowl we gave Elizabeth as a gift; to Edwin Waite who ordered the sheet cake; and to all of you who contributed money to help us purchase the bowl and cake, and give Elizabeth a check for $1,000 in appreciation for her many years of leadership in the parish.

NETS FOR LIFE:  Thanks also to all who contributed to our Lenten appeal for the “Nets for Life” program sponsored by Episcopal Relief and Development. The $1,800 we raised will provide 150 mosquito nets to assist in malaria prevention in sub-Saharan Africa as part of the Diocese of  California’s Millennium Development Goals.

REST IN PEACE:

• Robin Smith, who died on 21 March, served as the Sexton at All Saints’ from 1995 until his retirement in 2005.  I said the Burial Office for him at his home the evening of his death, assisted by Laurie Rus, our former Verger.
• Ethel Henderson, who died on 13 April at the age of 94, was a member of All Saints’ since the early 1960’s.  Margaret Trezevant, our Parish Deacon, officiated at the Burial Office at All Saints’ on 18, April and at the Committal at Skylawn Memorial Park in San Mateo immediately afterward.  Thank you to Myron Chapman and Margaret Hamilton for assisting at the service.

May their souls, and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God rest in peace.  Amen.

WELCOME TO ALL SAINTS’!  We extend a special welcome to:

• The Rev. Michael T. Hiller, whom we will commission as a volunteer Pastoral Associate on Trinity Sunday, 26 May, Sunday, when he will preach at the 10 a.m. Mass. Michael, who has been attending All Saints’ for several months now, retired in 2010 as Vice President of Administration at Stanford Federal Credit Union after a career in finance and administration.  As a priest he recently served as the Interim Rector at St. Mark’s Episcopal Priest in Berkeley from 2010-12.  Along with Tom Traylor, Margaret Trezevant, and me, Michael will preach and serve at the altar regularly.  In addition, he will bring his skills to All Saints’ to assist with the technological updates we will make.  To learn more about Michael, visit www.hillerleiturgia.com to see his blog which includes and “Break Open the Word,” a commentary on the readings from the Bible for each Sunday of the Church Year.
• Dan Burner, who will be doing a supervised ministry for six months starting this coming Sunday, 5 May, as he prepares to become a candidate for ordination to the priesthood in the Diocese of California.  With our Pastoral Associate Tom Traylor as his mentor and supervisor, Dan will assist at Sunday Mass, the Wednesday evening education program, the Saturday food program, and the monthly Eldercare ministry at the Grove Street Extended Care and Living home.  A graduate of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Dan is a member of St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco and works for All Saints’ Company which provides liturgical resources to churches and other religious organizations.

SERMON FODDER: Several people asked for the sources I quoted in my sermon at the 10 a.m. Mass last Sunday, 28 April, for the baptism Joseph Omar St. Martin.  You can easily find them online:

• T. M. Luhrmann, “The Benefits of Belief,” The New York Times, Sunday, 21 April, p. 9, The Sunday Review.
• two songs from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, music by Andrew Lloyd Weber; lyrics by Tim Price: “Any Dream Will Do” and “Go, Go, Go Joseph.”

My wishes for a happy Pentecost come from “Go, Go, Go Joseph.”  I send them to all of you, whatever your name:

Go, go, go Joseph you know what they say
Hang on now Joseph you’ll make it some day
Sha la la Joseph you’re doing fine
You and your dreamcoat ahead of your time
Go, go, go Joseph you know what they say
Hang on now Joseph you’ll make it some day
Don’t give up Joseph fight till you drop
We’ve read the book and you come out on top

Kenneth

Special Liturgies and Events

GROUNDWORK CONTINUES
“Followers of the Way”: Faith as a Way of Life
Wednesday evenings throughout May, 7-8:15 p.m.

• Discussions based on the Gospel reading for the coming Sunday, led by parish clergy and laity.
• If you can come early: Mass at 6 p.m. followed by bag supper at 6:30.

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FAREWELL TO MARCUS CRIM
Sunday, 5 May at the 10 a.m. Mass

Marcus has been our Parish Seminarian from the School for Deacons for the 2012-13 academic year. Thank you, Marcus, for your ministry with us and congratulations on your graduation from the School for Deacons this month!

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ASCENSION DAY
Thursday, 9 May, Low Mass with Hymns at 6 p.m.

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SAN FRANCISCO DEANERY CONVOCATION
Saturday, 11 May, 9 a.m.—Noon
St. James Episcopal Church,
4620 California Street, San Francisco

Parish clergy and representatives will attend the spring convocation.

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DAY OF PENTECOST
Sunday, 19 May

• Regular Schedule of Sunday Masses with the reading of the Gospel in many languages at the 10 a.m. Mass in celebration of the outpouring of God’s spirit on all people.
• If you would like to read the Gospel in a language other than English at the 10 a.m. Mass, call the church office by Tuesday, 14 May. Texts are available from the office.

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TRINITY SUNDAY
Sunday, 26 May
Regular Schedule of Sunday Masses

• At the 10 a.m. Mass, Kahlil Marley Moore, grandson of Lucille Walker, will be baptized. Congratulations to Kahlil, his parents Paula and Keenen, and to Lucille!
• The preacher at the 10 a.m. Mass will be the Rev. Michael T. Hiller, whom we will commission as a volunteer Pastoral Associate at All Saints’. Retired in 2010 as Vice President of Administration at Stanford Federal Credit Union, Michael served from 2010-12 as the Interim Rector at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley. Welcome, Michael!

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REGULAR EVENTS:

The Rev. Kenneth L. Schmidt, Rector

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, 31 March 2013

A religious commentator whom I read regularly said in a recent column that for many years now, as he approached Easter, he read a poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter” by John Updike.  It’s the fourth stanza he finds particularly striking:

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping transcendence,

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

In other words let us not try to explain the resurrection of Jesus by explaining it away, as if it were primarily a metaphor, an analogy, or a parable—not that he has anything against it also being all those things too.  “Some things cannot be reduced to an explanation and are greatly diminished in the process of trying,” he writes. “The task is proclamation, not explanation—offering an invitation”. . .  an invitation to “walk through the door.”

So from John Updike, through John Buchanan, and by way of our celebration of Jesus’ resurrection, I invite you this morning to “walk through the door.”  Not that we are absolved from trying to understand the resurrection as best we can,  After all Jesus himself challenged us to love God, not only with all our heart and soul, but also our mind.  Still when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus, the worship of God with all our mind often brings us to a dead end.  We definitely know what the resurrection of Jesus is not: it is not the resuscitation of a corpse, creating some kind of frightening, zombie-like figure, who flies off into outer space at his Ascension, splashing down back to earth at his Second Coming.  That we know this is probably best seen by the fact that even though there are many quality books published each year for children on the birth of Jesus, you can count on one hand the authors who try to tell the story of the resurrection of Jesus to children.

So if that is what the resurrection of Jesus is not, what is it?  Sorry to disappoint you, but I have no plausible explanation to offer. And how could I?  Or anyone else?  We are celebrating a mystery that is unimaginable, for that reason unexplainable, and therefore [to be quite honest]  unbelievable.  That’s why I sometimes think unbelievers know more about what we are celebrating today than those of us who believe.

But however deficient we believers may be in trying to explain the resurrection of Jesus, we have the opportunity by the power of Jesus’ resurrection to [using Updike’s words] “walk through the door.”  Because ultimately it doesn’t matter to what extent we may or may not understand the resurrection of Jesus.  What matters is that you and I extend to each other the invitation to live the resurrection of Jesus.

That invitation came to me in several ways this past week.  I relate them this morning as samples of the ways I hope the invitation to “walk through the door” may come to you, Today, of course. But always.  All of them happened on Thursday.  Which means that for me Maundy Thursday was very much an Easter.

The day began, as most days do, with walking Maisie, our dog, and then reading the New York Times.  Two articles not only gave me news, but helped me “walk through the door” of Jesus’ resurrection.

One headed:  “Dolan Goes Behind Bars To Commune With Inmates:  Mass at State Prison was Inspired by the Pope.”  ‘Dolan’ is Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of  New York.  Following the example of Pope Francis who decided for his principal Maundy Thursday Mass to wash the feet of youth at a detention center in Rome instead of visiting one of the grand basilicas, Dolan visited the Shawangunk [maximum security] Correctional Facility in the Hudson Valley. With his usual vivaciousness and good humor Dolan commented in his homily, that in the papal enclave in Rome, he, like the prisoners at Shawangunk, “was locked in,” adding the disclaimer “I was locked in the Sistine Chapel, which is a lot nicer than here.”  He went on to say that “I love to say mass in a prison.  Nobody ever comes late and nobody ever leaves early.”  But according to the article, he also was very serious:  “Jesus Christ was a prisoner,” mentioning his arrest before his crucifixion.  “Jesus Christ, God’s only son, felt [as] alone [as you do].”  He also humbly described his visit as selfish.  Because of his visit to Shawangunk, Dolan hopes that at the Last Judgment he’ll be able to answer in the affirmative when Jesus asks him when he had visited those in prison.  “I’m going to able to say, ‘Yes, Jesus.  You ask the guys at Shawangunk.”

Let us walk through the door.

The other article was headed:  “Plaintiff, 83, Is Calm Center in a Legal and Political Storm.”  The article was about Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the case argued in the Supreme Court the day before over DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act.  Windsor brought the suit against the US when  she received a whopping estate tax after her wife Thea died, which she would not have had to pay if, in her words, “Thea [her partner of 40 years whom she legally married in Canada just a couple of years ago] “were Theo.”  Though she has difficulty walking and is quite hard of healing, her wit is thoroughly intact.  As she said to the reporters and admirers surrounding her on the Supreme Court steps following the hearing:

Hi, I’m Edie Windsor, and somebody gave me a large speech, which I

am not going to make.  I am today an out lesbian, O.K., who just sued

the United States of America, which is kind of overwhelming for me.  .  .

For anybody who doesn’t understand why we want it and why we need it,

it is magic.  As we increasingly came out, people saw that we didn’t have

horns.  People learned that . . . we were their kids and their cousins. . .It

just grew to where we were human beings like everybody else . . .

Then as shouts of “Edie! Edie!” came from the crowd surrounding her, she politely excused herself.  “There are a lot of people who came here to see me, and I’m just going to go see them.’’

Let us walk through the door.

I can’t spend all day reading the paper, of course.  Nor would I want to.  Especially this past Thursday. Not only was I looking forward to the Maundy Thursday service that evening here at All Saints’, but I had [among several other things] on my schedule my participation every Thursday at the Quaker Vigil for Peace on the corner of Laguna and Golden Gate in front of the Federal Building a block away from Civic Center.  Usually the  times I “walk through the door” of Jesus’ resurrection happen by surprise.  This one I plan weekly.  And it almost always work.  It’s like a retreat, in the old-fashioned spiritual sense of the word.  For while some see the Vigil as a protest, for me it is pure prayer. My practice is to walk to the Vigil.  Once that got me press in the San Francisco Chronicle I didn’t find very flattering. After identifying me as a priest in the Episcopal Church, the Rector, of All Saints’, the article said “at the age of 60, he walks all the way downtown.”  Why, I walk that far all the time!  Even now.  Six years later.

Anyway, once I get to the Vigil, I pull out my Anglican Rosary, and recite the words from the Rosary for Claire of Assisi, based on the Psalm for her day:  “O God, you are my God, eagerly I seek you.”  Over and over again.  84 times.  To some that sounds like “vain repetitions.”  But for me those repetitions are not vain at all.  They place in my heart a keen sense that God is my God.  And they help me strive to eagerly seek God. There in the midst of all the noise of traffic and the conversations of passers-by, the Quaker Vigil carves out a zone of inner silence that opens me, as few other places and times, to pray for peace on earth among all people of good will.

Let us walk through the door.

Of course walking through the door of Jesus’ resurrection will [a lot of the time, maybe most of the time] seem as difficult as understanding it. If you and I despair.  Think of how God must be tempted to despair too.  Said so humorously in a cartoon in The New Yorker a decade ago.  There’s the old, white haired, wrinkled faced God sitting on his throne in highest heaven speaking to an angel on the back of his throne as he looks across the cosmos at the distant planet earth and says, “And this time—no ark!”

But thanks be to God, God always builds an ark: the ark of Jesus’ resurrection and the example of those who walked through the door before us.  Like the prophet Martin Luther King, Jr., whom we honor in the Episcopal Church this coming Thursday, 4 April, the anniversary of his assassination.  The rest of the nation honors him on his birthday [or the Monday closet to it].  But the Episcopal Church prefers to be out of sic. Not because we are ornery —though there’s some truth to that.  But because we see Martin Luther King, Jr..not just as a saint, but as a martyr.  And martyrs are honored not on the date of their birth but on the date of their death.

Whatever else we know about someone we now affectionately call MLK, we should at least know the account King gave in a sermon in 1956 to a death threat he had recently received.

“Nigger,” the voice on the phone said, “we are tired of you and your

mess now, and if you’re not out of town in three days, we’re going to

blow your brains out and blow up your house. Something said to me,

you can’t call on daddy now; . . . You’ve got to call on that something,

on that person your daddy . . . told you about, that power that can make

a way out of no way.  And I discovered that religion had to become real

to me and I had to know God for myself.  And I bowed down over a cup

of coffee.  And I prayed out loud . . . “Lord, I’m down here trying to do

what is right . . . I think the cause we represent is right.  But Lord, I must

confess . . . I’m faltering.  I’m losing my courage, and I can’t let the

people see me like this because if they see me weak . . . they will begin

to get weak.

Almost out of nowhere I heard a voice:  “Martin . . . stand up for

righteousness. Stand up for justice.  Stand up for truth.  And, I will be

with you, even until the end of the world.

I was ready to face anything.

And you and I will be ready to face anything too.  If like Martin Luther King, Jr., we know that when we “walk through the door” of Jesus’ resurrection in all the deaths we face in life and at the end of life, we enter the wide embrace of God’s everlasting love.

So, let us walk through the door.

Alleluia. Amen.

The Rev. Elizabeth J. Welch

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, 30 March 2013

The women went to the tomb with certain expectations – to find Jesus’ body and to honor him by performing the proper burial rites.  Instead, “they found the stone rolled away from the tomb.”  This would have been no small stone – it would have been large and unwieldy, more like a boulder, snuggly fit against the opening of the tomb.  One of them, or even all of them together, would likely not have been able to push it out of the way.  In Mark’s Gospel, as the women proceed to the tomb, they wonder aloud to one another “who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance?”

And yet, they arrive with their ointments and their spices to find the stone already rolled away and Jesus’ body nowhere to be found.  This is not seemingly a discovery they respond to with hope or even excitement.  Luke tells us they are “perplexed,” and “fearful.”  They seem to have forgotten the words Jesus told them about what his journey would entail.  The mysterious two men in dazzling clothes must remind them saying, “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.’ Luke tells us that upon hearing this, the women “remembered Jesus’ words.”

As I prayed with this passage this past week, I thought to myself.  Yes, I too am often forgetful – I forget to buy the milk at the store, I forget the name of someone I’ve only met once, I forget where I’ve put my keys.  But if someone said to me “I am the Son of Man, but I will be handed over to sinners, will be crucified, and on the third day rise again.”  Well, I rather think that’s something I would remember.

But as I reflected on it, I realized: I forget these words all the time though, don’t I?

Oh maybe I don’t actually forget the words in my mind, but I forget them; perhaps it would be better to say, I deny them, in my heart.  I convince myself that the stone will always seal the tomb; I fall into the despair that death will be allowed to have the final word.

Think of all the close-ended stories we tell.  How often do we say to ourselves: “I will never be able to change?  I am incapable of doing anything differently?  I am not able to do something more?   How often do we make declarations about others, saying: she is selfish, she is proud; he is arrogant, he is cold-hearted.  That’s just how they are, they’ll never change.  How often do we cast our judgments on particular communities: they are prejudiced, they are close-minded; they are uncaring.  They will always be that way.  How often do we write conclusions to the stories of our world: this problem will never be solved, war and destruction and death will always have the final say; there’s nothing we can do.  These words of stone block us from the love of God.

And so the question I pose to us this night is: How might we invite God to roll back the stones that block us from newness of life?

I cannot answer that question for you, but I can tell you something of where reflection on this question led me.  It led me to an earlier verse in Luke’s telling of the Passion when Jesus says: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do?”

It is my experience that the mystery of newness of life lays in forgiveness.

In my own experience the process of forgiving feels like this.  It’s as if I have a heavy stone cupped in my palm (the stone may be cruel words or a closed heart or a harsh judgment), I have the one who wronged me in my sites, I have a perfect shot, and I could hurt them; I could watch that stone whirl through the air and make contact; I could inflict on them the pain that I am sure that they deserve to feel.  But to some tomb-like place in my depths, God speaks a question, “what would it be like, my child, if you let the stone fall from your hand; what might it be like, my love, if you allowed that stone to slip through your fingers and fall to the ground?”  God does not force; but God asks.  And God keeps asking.  Perhaps we each carry stones that we could let fall from our hand?

One small thing I’ve learned is that, forgiveness, like love, is not something we earn or deserve.  Forgiveness is anything but a rational appraisal of what is deserved, or what is owed; forgiveness is reckless and irrational.  But in forgiveness is liberation.  Perhaps this is why forgiveness and healing are so often paired in Scripture.  When I reflect on what it feels like to be forgiven, I think of Jesus raising Jairus’ daughter.  When he is told that the girl is dead, Jesus simply says, “do not fear, only believe and she will be saved.”  They laugh at Jesus.  But he takes the little girl by the hand and says, “child, get up!” And she gets up at once.  It’s really not a story about forgiveness at all, and yet, perhaps in some way it is.  For who knows what behind the closed doors of that home needed forgiving?  It sometimes seems to be the case that one individual’s decision to receive forgiveness, opens him or her up to love in a way that becomes a source of liberation for others.  A father, for example, might be moved to forgive his father, and this might stay his hand from throwing stones at his children.

To receive forgiveness, to be forgiven, and to forgive, requires that we simply and fully give up the idea that living in the world is about being right or feeling powerful.   It does not mean that we place ourselves in contact with individuals who continue to hurt us, but it does mean that we give up allowing ourselves to mold our hurts into weapons.  Even unto saying from the cross: “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  Even unto shouting from the crowd, “Father forgive me, for I know not what I do.”

By recalling these stories of the history of our salvation we learn to trust that God is doing a new thing here and now.  The poet Czeslaw Milosz writes in his poem titled, With Her,

“Those poor, arthritically swollen knees

Of my mother in an absent country.

I think of them on my seventy-fourth birthday

as I attend Mass at St. Mary Magdalen in Berkeley.

A reading this Sunday from the Book of Wisdom

About how God has not made death

And does not rejoice in the annihilation of the living.

A reading from the Gospel of Mark

About a little girl to whom He said: ‘Talitha cum!’

This is for me.  To make me rise from the dead

And repeat the hope of those who lived before me . . .”

And this telling is for us, to make us rise from the dead and repeat the hope of those who lived before us.

Take a deep breath for a moment.  Can you not feel that even now, God is pushing back the stones from our tombs, those closed-off places in our souls?  God is breathing in new life.

Listen, the one who suffers with us, the one who bore the heaviness of the cross, the one who feels the weight of the stones we carry, the one who loves us as friends, he is calling. Can you not hear?

He is saying: My child, my love, Get Up! Get Up! Step out into the light and be free.

The Rev. Margaret Anne Trezevant

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, 29 March 2013

Diana Butler Bass reminds us that in the year 1373 Julian of Norwich, the great English mystic, lay dying from the plague.  Well, it turns out she didn’t die after all, but as she lay delirious on her sickbed she had a series of visions, which she later put into a book “Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love”.  Her eighth revelation concerned the Passion and the Cross, and it was here that she had her great insight:  “Here saw I a great ONEING betwixt Christ and us: for when He was in pain, we were in pain.”  This theological insight changes the perspective from one who died FOR us to one who suffers WITH us.  The implications of this are profound.  The implications of what it means for us as witnesses to Christ’s suffering and death and how we are to be in the world are profound.  How we proceed in life, carrying the cross that Jesus carried, can never be the same once we see the cross in this light.  

I was beginning to have glimpses into this truth when I was taking Anglican ethics and my professor, John Kater, pointed out the language we use in our prayer book, when we pray for the poor, the suffering, the sick, the lonely.  “What do you notice?” he said.  We all looked, we scratched our heads, we came up empty.  Taking pity, because he is a patient and kind man, he said, “We’re always praying for someone else.  We aren’t in the equation, as if we aren’t poor, we aren’t suffering, we aren’t sick, or lonely.”  Duh!  There it was, right in front of us!  Out of our largesse, I guess, we offer our prayers, but we stay tidily out of the mix.

Traditionally I think we, at least I know I was, taught to think about Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross as something he did FOR us.  It was transactional.  We messed up, he paid the price for us forever, and now we will be grateful by doing good things for others.  And being good.  But way back in 1373, Julian lay on her sickbed and realized that wasn’t it.  God was with us.  God was with us in the mess then and is with us in the mess now.  

I don’t know if any of you are following “Lent Madness” on Facebook.  It’s a tongue-in-cheek riff on the basketball March Madness where different saints are pitted against one another until finally one is left standing to receive the “golden halo”.  Every day two saints are pitted against one another and we all vote.  Sometimes the votes are quite wrenching, like pitting Martin Luther King Jr. against Martin Luther…I mean, come on!  Or Damien of Molokai against Frances Perkins, the first woman Secretary of Labor under FDR, a good Episcopalian woman who brought us the 40 hour work week, the minimum wage, Social Security and worker safety regulations, to name just a few.  What I found particularly noteworthy was the number of martyrs, both modern and ancient.  We don’t call them saints for nothing.  

These saints took up their crosses and followed Jesus, yes, but when you look closely you realize that they followed Jesus right into the stuff of life.  Damien of Molokai—now there’s a saint for you.  When leprosy swept through the Hawaiian islands in the mid-nineteenth century, and the lepers were isolated on the island of Molokai with no one to help them, Damien, like Isaiah before him, said “Send me”.  What could he do, really?  There was no cure, he had nothing to offer them but his presence.  Like Jesus, he suffered with them, until he himself died of leprosy at a fairly young age. 

We read about, and voted on, people like Jonathan Daniels, the young Episcopal seminarian who felt himself called to work with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma. He marched with, and was jailed with the protesters.  When he was unexpectedly released from jail, he and some of his companions walked to a small store when a man with a gun appeared, cursing them.  The man aimed his gun at 16-year old Ruby Sales.  Jonathan Daniels pushed her aside and shielded her, and instead, he was shot and killed.  Then there is Janani Luwum, Archbishop of Uganda during the regime of Idi Amin, speaking truth to power for his people, knowing that it was very likely that he would be killed, which he was.  Or Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, appointed by the Vatican because they thought he could be counted on to be conservative and not rock too many boats.  But once he was appointed, he took up his cross and followed Jesus.  He lived in a hospice rather than the fancier digs he was entitled to as an Archbishop.  It kind of reminds me of Pope Francis doing the same thing in Argentina, and taking the bus to work.  Romero couldn’t be silent about the suffering of the poor in his country.  He appealed to the church, he appealed to the U.S.  What he got instead was shot while he was celebrating Mass.  He said at one point that he knew he was going to die, but he was OK with that.  He said he “believed in resurrection, and he would live on in the Salvadoran people”.

Now, none of these people died for anyone’s sins.  But they all died because of them.  They all died because they stood with the suffering, stood in their midst and suffered with them.  When Jesus tells us to “take up our crosses and follow him”, I’m not sure he’s talking about our own personal sufferings.  Life is hard.  We know that.  We have crosses too numerous to count and sometimes inconceivably hard to bear.  I think we are being called to set foot into the sea of life, to experience life beyond ourselves, to be with our brothers and sisters in their pain and their struggle, just as Jesus is with us.

They said of Jesus, “He eats and drinks with sinners and tax collectors”.  Oh my.  They seemed quite happy to have him there with them.  He was the one everyone wanted at the party.  I’m not sure he would have been so welcomed if, every time he showed up he was there to preach, to “offer them salvation”.  When was the last time someone rang your doorbell on a Saturday morning, eager to share the “good news” with you?  How many of you said “Oh, do come in!  And what’s that little magazine you got there?  I’ll take 10 of ‘em!”

For our Lenten series this year we were using Jane Shaw’s book “Practical Christianity”.  Jane is the Dean of Grace Cathedral.  She talked about the four models of church, which I found very interesting.  Model 1 is the view that the world is bad, and you have to withdraw from it to not be corrupted by it.  She uses as an example the Amish, or the Mennonites.  Or I would add, the Desert Fathers of the early church, and maybe, if you look closely, some churches that seem more like well-guarded gated communities rather than a welcoming church community.  Our Christian community is not immune to these things.  We sometimes gather together in little church ghettoes of people who look and think like us.  

Then there is the Model 2 church, which says the world is bad, but we can change it by bringing Christ to everyone.  Well, Jane Shaw points out that Christ is already here, thank you, we don’t need to bring him here.  This is not a Jesus-model of “being with”.  It’s a something else model of “doing to”.  A la those people on Saturday morning!  I’m sure they’re fine people, but any of us should get a little nervous if we think we have all the answers for other people.  We need to be listening for the voice of God in our own lives, and sometimes God might be speaking through those people we are so assiduously trying to convert to our way of thinking!  There was a woodblock print at a church I used to go to.  It’s a food line, with the jobless and the hungry standing in line for a food handout.  In the midst of the line is Jesus.  He looks like everyone else, but you can tell its him because he’s the one with the halo.  But I love that picture.  I wish I had it.  We forget that we might meet Jesus in some very unexpected places.

Then there is the Model 3 church, which I admit to liking quite a bit, and have probably had some of that thinking seep into my sermons from time to time.  That is the view that the world is bad, but we can change it by “getting our hands dirty” and getting to work to change it.  It’s a social justice model, a social gospel model.  It has a lot to recommend it.  We DO need to advocate for justice.  We ARE called to build the kingdom of God here and now, or as the Quakers like to call it, the Commonwealth of God.  I like that.  That’s how I have always seen our diaconal callings, to be a force for good in the world.

But then there is the Model 4 church, and here is where we get closer to that “ONEING” that Julian of Norwich saw.  It’s the God With Us that Butler Bass talks about.  In that model, the world is both good and bad, and in living in that tension we can expect to come up against some of the same resistance that Jesus did.  We can also expect to meet Jesus in the unholy mix of it all.

Last week at our School for Deacons faculty meeting, Rod Dugliss read an address by Aaron Scott, who is part of a mentorship program called “The Seven”, engaging young people who are discerning a call to the diaconate.  Scott said that he had been blessed to be part of a grassroots movement to end poverty, and by “grassroots” he meant a movement led by the poor themselves, the poor fighting for themselves on their own terms.  He said that when we experience having to fight for every small thing it gives one a sense of freedom and power, the kind that radically deepens ones sense of accountability to, and togetherness with, the rest of God’s children.  He says “For too long, those of us in the church who care about justice have believed and perpetuated the lie that we must become ‘a voice for the voiceless.’  That’s a lie….It’s like Arundhati Roy(who wrote that powerful book “The God of Small Things”) said:  “We know of course there’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’.  There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard”. …Scott goes on to say “In a living, spirit-filled diaconal ministry, you do not get to speak “for” anybody.  You get to 1) speak for yourself, and 2) amplify the voices of others in the world whom the powers and principalities seek to silence.  Even when the church itself acts as one of those silencers.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said “It’s not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world”.  If we are truly living in the midst of God’s creation, and not holding ourselves apart, as if this is about “them” and not “us”, we too, will suffer as Jesus did.  We might even die for it.  But I think almost more important than that, we will find Jesus where we least expect it.  Like the travellers on the road to Emmaus, we may find that we have been walking with Jesus all along.

The Rev. Thomas W. Traylor

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, 28 March 2013

A question is a thing of great power.  The physician asks a question of her ailing patient and derives a clear diagnosis from what had been a swarm of puzzling symptoms.  The lawyer puts a question to an evasive witness and uncovers the truth of the case.  The scientist asks a question about the natural world discovers larger patterns and deeper connections within the buzzing confusion of the cosmos. The teacher asks a question and creates a new awareness in the mind of his student.

A question is a thing of great power.  It can lead to greater understanding, or lay bare hidden truths, or spark new insights.  A question also creates a bond between the one who asks it and the one of whom it is asked. To pose a question is to create a relationship.  That relationship may be as momentary as the exchange between the customer and the Starbuck’s barista who asks, “What can I get you?”    Or it may be as enduring as the bond created by the question, “Will you marry me?” The more probing or profound the question, the deeper the relationship it creates may become.

There is a question at the heart of the gospel we read this evening.  Jesus, the master questioner, poses it to his disciples, his friends, on the night before he dies.  He rises from the table, casts off his robe, ties a towel around his waist, takes up a pitcher and basin and moves from disciple to disciple around the table and washes their feet.  When he has finished, he returns to his place at the table and asks his astonished friends, “Do you understand what I have done to you?”  In that moment it is a question about what Jesus has done by washing their feet.   But in a larger sense, it is the question for all of Holy Week: “Do you understand what I have done to you?”

Jesus had asked many questions before the great question of that fateful night.  The four Gospels record one hundred seventy-three questions Jesus asked.  There are more than forty in John’s gospel alone.  Some were those he placed on the lips of characters in his parables.  Some were challenges to his adversaries.  Some were the private musings of Jesus’ own heart.  The most pivotal questions, like the question he asks tonight, are those Jesus put to his disciples.  Every time Jesus put a question to his disciples, the relationship they had with him changed in some way.   Those changes, with their new insights and new challenges, became part of the answer to the larger question, “Do you know what I have done to you?”    The questions Jesus asked have power to change our own spiritual paths as well and our own relationship with Christ.  His questions continue to shape our own answers to his question, “Do you understand what I have done to you?”

Long before they came to that final meal with Jesus and heard him ask his question, Simon Peter and his brother, Andrew, had heard the first of the many questions Jesus would ask them.  They had been standing on the bank of the Jordan River with John the Baptizer.  Jesus walks by.  John exclaims, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”  Peter and John take off after Jesus.  He turns, sees them following him, and asks them, “What are you looking for?”

What had compelled these two men to tail Jesus?  Was it simple curiosity or a longing for something deeper than a sunburned life in a Galilean fishing boat?  Jesus asks them the first question of any spiritual journey:  Where is your heart taking you?  What are you looking for?  In the moment there by the river, the only answer to Jesus’ question Peter and Andrew can think to say is, “Teacher, where are you staying?”  Jesus says, “Come and see.”  And off they go.  In that moment did they understand what had Jesus done to them?  His question was an invitation to journey with him.  In this moment, tonight, do we understand what has Jesus done to us?  He has set us on a path toward God and invited us to walk it in company with him.

So Peter and Andrew walked with Jesus, collecting friends and fellow travelers along the way.  They weren’t sure where they are going, but the journey was full of wonder.  Day by day excitement built, the crowds grew, until one day, more than five thousand people flocked to see this wonder worker, Jesus.  Then Jesus turns to his disciples and asks his question:  “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?”  You remember their incredulous responses, the powerlessness they feel in the face of such a challenge.  All they can do is place the meager resources they have in the hands of Jesus.  It turns out to be enough.

By his question Jesus said to them, “To walk with me is to care for those I care for, even when the odds are long.  The relationship you have with me is more than a path of personal spiritual fulfillment.  It means to feed the hungry, to care for the sick, to champion those whom others forget.  It means to live and work so that the voices of those on the margins can be heard.  In that moment, in the face of that crowd, did the disciples understand what Jesus has done to them? In this moment, this evening, do we understand what has Jesus done to us?  He has charged us to share in God’s work of justice and love.  He has asked us to offer the resources we have trusting that in Christ’s hands they will be enough.

On they go, Jesus and his band.  Things begin to get rougher.  Jesus’ adversaries plot to kill him.  Jesus begins to speak of giving his life for the world—his very flesh and blood.  Some of those who have followed him find his words so troubling that they turn back.  Watching them go, Jesus asks those who have been closest to him, “Will you also go away?”  With that question their relationship once again changes. What had begun as a path of spiritual discovery had led to a call to care for the world. Do the disciples now understand what Jesus has done to them?  Do they begin to understand that the path they are on with him will lead to sacrifice?  No only his, but theirs.  Not only theirs, but ours, if we choose to follow.

Now we come to that table, to Jesus kneeling to wash his astonished disciples’ feet.  We come to his great question, “Do you understand what I have done to you?”  How would they have answered, when this man in whom they had placed their hopes, this man in whose face they had begun to see the face of God kneels before them and washes their feet?  Can it be that this how God’s love is made real, not in splendor or power, but in humble service? That night, Jesus says to them, “Do you understand what I have done to you?”  Then he tells them, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another as I have loved you.”  Is this how they are to love one another?  Is this how we are to make God’s love real in our fellowship and in the world around us?

Before the sun rises the next morning, John’s gospel tells us, Jesus will ask two other questions.   When supper ends, Jesus and his friends will go across the Kidron Valley to a place where there is a garden.  Jesus will pray there for those he loves, whose feet he has washed. While he is praying other men will come up behind him.  Jesus will turn to them and, in an echo of that very first question he asked long ago at the Jordan River, he will say to them, “Who are you looking for?”  But these men will not have come out of curiosity or spiritual hunger.  They will have come with lanterns and torches and arms to arrest him.  Jesus will say to them, “I am the man you are looking for.  Let my friends go.”  Peter will leap to Jesus’ defense, reach for a sword, and strike one who has come to arrest Jesus.  Jesus will say to Peter, put your sword back into its sheath.

Then Jesus will ask, “Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?”  In that question is all his resolve not to turn back from what lies ahead. In that question, Jesus reveals how far God’s love will go.  Having loved his own who were in the world, he will love them to the end.  Could those with him that night have understand all that Jesus had done to them and all that he was about to do for them?  Could we?

On a hot July night in 1933, in the mountains of North Carolina, folklorist and singer John Jacob Niles came upon a traveling revival meeting that had made camp on the outskirts of a country town.  In his journal Niles wrote that as he watched the proceedings, “A girl stepped out to the edge of the little platform attached to the automobile.  She began to sing. Her clothes were unbelievable dirty and ragged, and she, too, was unwashed. Her ash-blond hair hung down in long skeins…. But she was beautiful, and in her untutored way, she could sing. She smiled as she sang, smiled rather sadly, and sang only a single line of a song.”

Niles took down the words she sang.  They became the basis for a song we now sing as a Christmas Carol.  But it is really a song for Holy Week.  Let the question that young girl sang be the question our hearts sing as we contemplate all that Christ has done to us and for us:

“I wonder as I wander out under the sky
How Jesus the Saviour did come for to die
For poor on’ry people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.”

Br. Simon

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, 24 March 2013

O God, take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire with your love.  Amen.

I have always been drawn to the drama of the Passion narrative, so much so that when it came time for me to choose a religious name when I joined the Society of St. Francis I decided on the name “Simon” in honor of Simon of Cyrene, whose brief part in the Passion story is so easily overlooked and yet who has been remembered by the Church in the Fifth Station of the Cross.  So I feel like I have something of a personal connection to the Passion story.  And when Kenneth asked me two months ago to preach on Palm Sunday I readily said yes, and shortly thereafter began to regret it.

This is a HUGE day.  There’s a LOT going on, Scripturally and liturgically.  And one of the struggles of this day is trying to figure out where we should focus.  Amid all the personal drama, the religious and prophetic intrigue, and the political machinations, what is the essential message of this somewhat familiar, emotionally packed, and “zig-zaggy” story?  Where is the good news?

Well the good news of course is “Love.”  It is about God’s unconditional and abiding love for all of Creation – a love from which NOTHING can separate us, not even death.  A love modeled perfectly by Jesus himself.

There’s a quote from “No Man Is An Island” by Thomas Merton that has been floating around on facebook.  It’s a description of the way that God loves; the way that God asks us to love.  Merton says that, “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image.  Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

When we take this definition of love to the furthest degree, we find the sacrificial love that Jesus incarnates.  As Paul reminds us in the letter to the Philippians, this love propelled Jesus “to empt[y] himself, taking the form of a slave.”  A slave – one whose duty is to serve, and whose livelihood and very life is dependent on another.  Jesus IS that sacrificial love.  This Jesus who did not utter a defense before his accusers and who, from the cross, could ask God to forgive his executioners “for they do not know what they are doing.”  THIS is the call of the Christian life:  to do the right thing at all times in the cause of love even when it means we might lose the respect of our community, or might be abandoned by those closest to us, or might be hurt, or even die.

I am very struck in the Passion story by the incident on the Mount of Olives when the crowd, led by Judas, came to arrest Jesus.  In defense one of the apostles strikes the slave of the high priest cutting off his ear.  In contrast Jesus heals that slave and, accepting what is to come, goes with the crowd to the high priest’s house.  St. Francis of Assisi, when he was offered a house for his fledgling community of poor wandering mendicants, declined the gift saying that if he and his followers were to own property they would then need weapons to protect it.  Like Jesus, Francis knew that a defensive posture does nothing to advance the Kingdom.  To do that we must love one another in the way that Jesus shows us, in the posture of the crucifixion.  With arms outstretched it is a posture of vulnerability and risk, but also one of invitation into a deeper relationship.

In a talk on why the spirit of St. Francis appeals to so many people, Ilia Delio – an author, a Franciscan scholar, and a Franciscan sister – defines “sin” in the Franciscan understanding this way:  “Sin is dwelling in the exile of unrelatedness.”  Dwelling in the exile of unrelatedness…  In other words, sin is the choice to deny the connection that already exists between all beings; the connection we have because we are all God’s children.  In Christ we are all, TRULY, brothers and sisters, related to everyone we meet, to everyone on the planet – regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, economic status, religious affiliation, clan affiliation, ethnicity, and even geopolitical boundaries.

But herein lies the problem for Christianity.  In the world’s thinking it makes perfect sense to defend ourselves from the unknown, from the stranger, from our enemies.  Whole industries and foreign policies have been built around the need to create a sense of safety for ourselves, for our neighborhoods, for our nations.  But while security and self-defense are good things, they do not trump the “Great Commandment” to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  How might things be different if instead of a policy of ensuring our own interests at all costs we adopted a policy of seeking the common interests of all?

Earlier this week I heard in a news report that the government of South Korea has issued a call to develop its own nuclear weapons program in response to increasing threats from North Korea.  The rationale from the conservative ruling party of South Korea is that the only way to ensure their security is to create a “balance of terror” that matches nuclear weapons with nuclear weapons.  A balance of terror…

I know that the situation on the Korean peninsula is a complicated one with real danger involved.  But I wonder how things might be different if our sisters and brothers in South Korea instead spent this time deciding how to commit their resources to cooperating with their brothers and sisters in North Korea in figuring out how to feed their hungry and how to ensure their mutual security.  That might sound Pollyanna but I prefer to think of it as a Christian witness that chooses not to focus on what is possible given current circumstances but instead to strive for a vision of the Kingdom of God that demands we live in the awareness of our relatedness.  That kind of living requires a sacrificial understanding of love; a love we have witnessed today in the Passion drama, and which we celebrate and proclaim every Sunday in the Eucharist.

How might our own lives be different if instead of protecting ourselves, protecting our feelings, protecting our status and our image, we instead adopted the stance of Christ crucified, and risked being vulnerable in order to invite others in more closely?

In this province of the Society of St. Francis, the Province of the Americas, it is our custom once a week for the brothers in each friary to gather for a Feelings Meeting.  We also do something like this which we call a “Time of Unminuted Sharing” at the beginning of any of our “official” meetings.  It is a time, with no cross-talk and no feedback, simply to be vulnerable with each other – to share what we have found particularly challenging in our ministries, or in our personal lives, or in our community life.  It is an opportunity to clear the air so that we can see each other more clearly and know each other more intimately.

Now we’re not perfect, and we don’t always take full advantage of this time.  Sometimes the sharing becomes a travelogue, or sometimes what we call an organ recital – you know, my knee has been acting up, my stomach has been unsettled, I’ve got a dickey ticker, I’ve got a ringing in my ears.  But regardless of how we use the time, we are all committed to being there, week after week, and the invitation to share is always present.  So if you are not already doing this kind of thing, I commend it to you for your own use as just one model of living into a sacrificial love in the context of community.

This path of following Christ which we have chosen, my sisters and brothers, is not an easy one.  But it IS our vocation.  So pray for me, as I pledge myself to pray for all of you, that we may persevere in our high calling to incarnate the truth of God’s sacrificial love.  And may this Holy Week deepen our commitment and lead us all to an abundant life in Christ.

Let us pray.

O Divine Lover, we bless you and we thank you for the gift of life and the gift of community, in its most intimate to its most expansive forms.  Grant us the courage to risk being known – to share our hopes, our fears, and our needs with each other.  Give us the grace to hear and to respond with love.  Draw us ever closer to one another, and in so doing, draw us ever closer to You.  This we pray in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

The Rev. Thomas W. Traylor

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, 13 February 2013

Ash Wednesday is a day of contrasts.  There is no service of the church year over which light and shadow play more strongly than Ash Wednesday.  The stark beauty of our Ash Wednesday liturgy throws into sharp relief the linked realities of sin and forgiveness, intention and action, abundance and need, mortality and hope.  Our liturgy tonight brings us face to face with who we are within ourselves, who we are meant to be for each other, and who God is for all of us.

We began our worship with a prayer of frank acknowledgement:  We are sinners in need of God’s forgiveness.  I trust that this does not come as a complete surprise to any of you.  I’ll admit the word “sin” has an ominously “old-time religion” ring to it.  And too many preachers in too many times and places have used the language of sin as a cudgel to beat people down or keep them in line.  So it is little wonder that you hardly hear it in some progressive religious circles.  Even some of the big evangelical Christian enterprises scarcely mention sin.  Some fifty years ago the famed American psychiatrist Karl Menninger observed that the language of sin was disappearing from common parlance.  Menninger entitled his book about this cultural shift, Whatever Became of Sin? He observed that our culture has increasingly psychologized away the concept of sin.  He voiced concern about the erosion of the sense of personal and collective responsibility for our actions and what this erosion could mean for the spiritual and moral health of our society.

Tonight in our liturgy we acknowledge from the top that we are sinners.  We acknowledge that time and again we fall short. We fall short in love for God. We fall short in love for our neighbors.  We fall short of living in the fullness of life that God created us to enjoy.  We fall short.  Perhaps not in obvious ways, not in what the Prayer Book in one place refers to as “notoriously evil” lives.  But we fall short.  In a few minutes we will pray together the Litany of Penitence.  It is one of the finest prayers in the Prayer Book and one of the most searching in its understanding of the ways in which you and I have fallen short.  I hope that you will listen to it carefully and pray it seriously.  It is not an easy prayer to pray; but like all the prayers by which we acknowledge our sin and our need for God, it leads on to the assurance of God’s unfailing pardon.

Many years ago I heard of a priest who began to omit the Confession of Sin from the regular Sunday services. His rationale was that people already came in the door of the church feeling bad about themselves and he saw no need to make them feel worse.  Finally, one parishioner approached him to say, “If I’m not able to confess my sins, I don’t get to hear the word of forgiveness.”  The Confession and absolution came back into the liturgy.  Sunday by Sunday, and especially on Ash Wednesday, we confess our sins so that we may go on to experience God’s grace.  We may begin our worship on Ash Wednesday by acknowledging our sins.  But the last word of Ash Wednesday is not about sin, but forgiveness.

As we move forward through our liturgy we hear Jesus’ words about the link between inward intention and outward action.  Throughout his ministry Jesus had a lot to say about this and what he said got him into terrible trouble with his critics.  Jesus said, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them.”  This is the same Jesus who said, “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”  So what gives here?

From earliest times fasting was believed to be a means of opening oneself to receive communications from God.  Prayer was the discipline by which relationship with God was built and nurtured.  Almsgiving was understood not as an act of individual charity which set the giver apart from the recipient: to give alms was to affirm that the one who gives and the one who receives are members of a common family.  Jesus had no quarrel with prayer or fasting or giving alms.  They were deeply rooted in his religious tradition and he plainly expected that his own followers would observe them.  What matters, Jesus said, is not the act but the motive.

Unlike in our own time, when it seems almost no one wants to appear overtly religious, Jesus lived in a day when some people’s religiosity was on abundant and often ostentatious display.  Their public prayers were loud and long, fasting was highlighted with dramatic cosmetology, and alms were given with the flourish of trumpets. “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them,” Jesus said.   What did those who acted in order to be seen want others to see?  I think that they wanted those who watched their pious displays to see that they were not like “ordinary” people, that they were a cut above.  What did the pious Pharisee in the Temple pray in that story Jesus told?  “I thank Thee, God, that I am not like other men.”  Jesus condemned religious acts whose intent is to set one apart, to separate rather than to unite, to highlight differences of rank and station rather than to affirm common bonds.  To act from this motive, Jesus said, brings the reward of smug self-satisfaction.  But it closes doors, between us and God, between us and each other.

Our Ash Wednesday liturgy calls us to the observance of a holy Lent.  I’m happy to say that as a parish, we are way beyond thinking that Lent is merely a matter of giving up chocolate!  I know that many of you think seriously and prayerfully about how you will shape your spiritual life and practice during this season. I hope that all of us will.  For some it may mean fasting, for others, a more deliberate prayer life, for others, a deeper generosity with time and treasure.  Whatever pattern of life we adopt this Lent, if our intention is to enter into deeper communion with God and if our actions create more solidarity with each other and with the human family, our Lenten observance will be a holy one.

There is a particular poignancy in Jesus’ words about prayer and fasting and giving alms and a note of irony in his admonition not to lay up treasures on earth.  Wealth and want are tied together in Jesus’ words. Those whom Jesus criticized for their pious hypocrisy had money enough for finery and trumpets and public displays of generosity.  But the great majority who heard Jesus speak these words were very poor.  First-century Palestine was a subsistence culture. Most people barely scraped by.  Long hours of work left little time for prayer.  Most people earned hardly enough to keep food on the table and had even less to give away.  The poor who heard Jesus would have had no means to lay up treasures on earth if they had wanted to.  Yet to them Jesus said, “When you pray . . . when you fast . . . when you give alms.”   What might Jesus be saying about finding a deeper connection with God and each other in and through the scarcities in our lives?

Our society values strength, not weakness. Our culture teaches us to engage the world out of what we have in abundance, not out of what we lack.  During this season of Lent, might Jesus be inviting us as people of faith to be willing to meet God not where we are strongest, but where our own need is greatest?    Might Jesus be inviting us to draw from whatever scarcities mark our lives a greater compassion for others and a greater commitment to doing what is right?  Might there be a holiness which comes through acknowledging our mortality and our need?

This brings us in our liturgy to the linked realities of mortality and hope—and to the ashes which symbolize both.  From ancient times ashes have symbolized repentance and return to God.  Ashes were also used to acknowledge loss and as a sign of mourning, so that others who saw the ashes could share the grief and help carry the mourner’s load.  Ashes remind us of our mortality, the dust from which we come and to which we shall return.

I remember my first Ash Wednesday here at All Saints’ as a priest vividly.  When it came time to impose ashes, a woman came to the rail with a very young child in her arms.  I cannot remember now who they were.  I marked the mother’s brow with ashes then looked from mother to child then back again.  The mother nodded her assent.  It was a sobering moment to mark that very young life cradled in his mother’s arms and to speak the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  But seeing that young child in his mother’s arms was a reminder that his life and all our lives are God’s creation, that from dust God has made us, who will always be held in God’s embrace.

In her poem, “Blessing the Dust,” Jan Richardson said:

All those day

you felt like dust,

like dirt,

as if all you had to do

was turn your face

toward the wind

and be scattered

to the four corners

or swept away

by the smallest breath

as insubstantial—

Did you not know

what the Holy One

can do with dust?

This is the day

we freely say

we are scorched.

This is the hour

we are marked

by what has made it

through the burning.

This is the moment

we ask for the blessing

that lives within

the ancient ashes

that makes its home

inside the soil of

this sacred earth.

So let us be marked

not for sorrow,

And let us be marked

not for shame.

Let us be marked

not for false humility

or for thinking

we are less

than we are

but for claiming

what God can do

within the dust,

within the dirt,

within the stuff

of which the world is made,

and the stars that blaze

in our bones,

and in the galaxies that spiral

inside the smudge

we bear.

In a moment our liturgy will bring us the invitation to come to receive ashes.  As you come, receive them as an acknowledgement of our sin and God’s forgiveness.  Receive them as a mark of our intention to live lives of inward holiness and outward service.  Receive them as a sign of our poverty and God’s gracious abundance.  Receive them as a reminder that we are dust.  But receive them, as well, to remember what God can do with dust.  Amen.

Annual Planning Retreat for the Vestry and Officers
Saturday, 2 March, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Church of the Advent of Christ the King

Lent 2013 Opportunities for Worship, Study, and Prayer

Please see special flyers for more information about:
“People of the Way”: Faith as a Way of Life, the Wednesday evening Lenten series.
Nets for Life Appeal for Episcopal Relief and Development
Lenten Meditations 2013 for prayer at home.
Volunteering with the Saturday food program at the Church, and the Eldercare ministry of the Grove Street Extended Care and Living Home.
Rite of Reconciliation.

Deanery of San Francisco
Convocation attended by deanery clergy and parish representatives
Saturday, 9 March, 9 a.m. to Noon St. Aiden’s Church 101 Gold Mine Drive, San Francisco (Diamond Heights)

HOLY WEEK & EASTER
Please join us for a blessed Holy Week and a Happy Easter

SUNDAY OF THE PASSION: PALM SUNDAY—Sunday, 24 March
Mass with Blessing of Palms at 8 a.m.
Solemn Mass including Liturgy of the Palms and Passion Gospel at 10 a.m.

MONDAY, TUESDAY, & WEDNESDAY IN HOLY WEEK—25, 26, 27 March
Mass at 6 p.m

MAUNDY THURSDAY—28 March
Solemn Mass with Foot Washing at 7 p.m. followed by the Stripping of the Altar.
The church will be open for the Watch at the Altar of Repose from 8:30 -10 p.m.

GOOD FRIDAY—29 March
Watch at the Altar of Repose from 6 a.m.–Noon
Stations of the Cross at 12:15 p.m.
The church will be open for prayer and Rite of Reconciliation until 3 p.m.
Mass of the Pre-Sanctified with Passion Gospel and Veneration of the Cross at 7 p.m.

HOLY SATURDAY & EASTER EVE—30 March
Office of the Lord’s Burial at 10 a.m.
The Great Vigil of Easter at 9 p.m., followed by Festal Reception in the Parish Hall

SUNDAY OF THE RESURRECTION: EASTER DAY—31 March
Mass at 8 a.m.
Solemn Mass at 10 a.m., followed by Children’s’ Easter Egg Hunt in the Parish Garden

Weekly Events
SUNDAY MASSES at 8 a.m. and 10 a.m.
CHOIR REHEARSAL Sundays at 9 a.m. and Thursdays at 7 p.m.
OFFICE HOURS Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 1 p.m.-5 p.m.
WEEKDAY MASSES at 6 p.m. in the Lady Chapel, Monday through Thursday, with Evening Prayer on Friday
RECTOR’S DAY OFF Friday
SATURDAY NEIGHBORHOOD BRUNCH PROGRAM 10:30 a.m. in the Parish Hall, Sponsored by the Haight Community Services Committee

Monthly Events
VESTRY MEETING Monday, 1l March at 7 p.m.
ELDERCARE MINISTRY Sunday, 24 March at 2 p.m. at the Grove Street Extended Care & Living Home
BUILDING AND GROUNDS COMMITTEE as announced

ALL SAINTS’ EPISCOPAL CHURCH
1350 Waller Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
Telephone 415.621.1862
Facsimile 415.624.7008
E-mail: info@allsaintssf.org
Website: http://www.allsaintssf.org

ALL SAINTS’ MISSION STATEMENT
All Saints’ is a progressive Episcopal church in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. In the name of Jesus, we strive to build a spiritual home rich in worship, parish life, and community service in gratitude for the fullness of God’s love. Please join us in our prayer and work:

Sustain us, O God, in your Holy Spirit. Give us an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works. Amen.