Sermon: On Fire in Shalom

3 Advent, December 13, 2009

Think of them as anecdotes shared around a family dinner table. This is how great Uncles Zephaniah and Isaiah used to tell the story. This is how Uncle Luke and Uncle Paul told it.

Stir up your power, O God. And stir us up too. Stir up your power working in us! The problem with the collect is that we sound so helpless. Yes, by ourselves we can do little. God is our renewable resource. Yet God saves us to help assist a wider salvation. It may be one of our greatest failings and easiest outs to assume that we are sorely hindered. That’s the point John the Baptist is making to the crowd that has come from Jerusalem into the wilderness to see what he’s about.

Sermon: The Bread of Fidelity

If we take Genesis seriously, we remember that God had a relationship with the flora and fauna before we were created. They have seniority in creation.

Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 2009

Joel 2:21-27, Psalm 126, 1 Timothy 2:1-7, Matthew 6:25-33
Reading ecology has changed my ways of seeing and hearing. I love the lessons for Thanksgiving. This year, we’re using a refined lectionary, and I’m hearing different dimensions of meaning. Of course, it’s always about what we call redemption, the restoration of creation and its community. Scripture tells us that is God’s hope for the world in Jesus.

At this time of year, harvest time, as we celebrate the plenitude of our lives, we are asked to take stock of our resources. What have we sown? What are we putting up into storerooms? What are we plowing under? Who’s invited? What’s served?

At This Church, Parishioners Wear Collars, Too

When a Los Angeles pastor decided his church needed a boost in membership, he did a little soul-searching and decided man’s best friend should be part of the fold. Read/listen to this NPR story!

Women’s Fall Retreat

An ancient African tale holds that before each child is born they are given their own special song. After the child’s birth, the community of family and village teach them their song. In times of crisis or distress in the life of a person, others sing that song to them to help them remember who they are.

We are God’s children and God sings our song to bring us back to who we are in times of uncertainty or confusion. Our song is heard in the events of everyday life, if we listen to our life with the awareness of how God communicates with us. Discernment in the experience of both natural and preternatural events can be learned. This retreat combined ancient spiritual practice, small groups, large groups, time for art/or journaling and laughter.

We met at the Presentation Center, Los Gatos: a lovely peaceful venue that used to be home to a community of nuns, the Sisters of the Presentation. While the program ran from late Friday afternoon to the end of Saturday afternoon, with accommodation and meals, a few women returned home for the Friday night. View slideshow.

Sermon: Twas Blind But Now

21 Pentecost, Proper 25, October 25, 2009

Let’s begin by looking at the premise of the collect for today. Then we’ll use it as a lens, to view the lessons. In it, the church prays for the action of grace to increase within and among us. We ask for spiritual growth, in the exercise of faith, hope, and love. Translate faith as trust. It’s not so much about tenets of belief as about the willingness to risk godly living. And translate charity as altruistic love, born of compassion. To make the translations helps us to understand what we are requesting.

Although these godly virtues are gifts, we are asking for their increase, not for their own merit, but as means to an end. We request their growth in us, so that we may obtain what God promises. The implication is that, somehow, their exercise effectively contributes to their fulfillment. As we grow in these graces, they assist our godly aim. It means that trust, hope, and love, besides being spiritual graces, are also spiritual powers.

Will Dickens In Memoriam

All Saints Day, 2009

Homily by The Rector

Life is an awesome gift, with its inherent and inescapable freedom and responsibility. No one can relieve us of the privilege and gravity of our lives. We can love each other, care for each other, offer guidance and support to each other. But each of us must make something of our lives, and we remain answerable for our choices. Life is an awesome gift.

Will Dickens’ departure from us is a grievous loss. We are still shocked and stunned. We had no indication that he was in distress. As often as the questions return, we will never know what he was feeling or exactly what happened. Neither will we know if there might have been anything any of us might have done differently that might have changed the outcome. We must let the questions go as readily as they come.

What we do know and can say is that Will was a joy and delight to us. His life, besides being a gift to him, was also a gift to us. While we wish we could have had him with us longer, we are grateful for the time he was with us. We thank heaven for his indelible selfhood, for his boisterous company, for his signature grin.

Life is not easy, nor is it altogether benign. Terrible things happen. Sorrow abounds. Despair is a ready resort. Evil is real. We bear the collective load of human error all the time. It can get us down.

“If You Wish to Make an Apple Pie From Scratch…”

“…You must first invent the universe.”

Here’s Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, prophets of our own time, in song.

Sermon: Your Money Or Your Life!

Do you remember the old westerns on TV, when the highwayman would ride out of the brush to waylay the stagecoach? He’d point his six shooter at the driver and threaten, “Your money or your life!” He probably wanted only the money. What he really meant was, “if you don’t give me the money, I may have to shoot you to get it.” In a way, Jesus is answering the young man who waylays him with the same question, although meant differently. He’s posing real options. “In a forced choice, which is more important to you, your wealth or your life?” We’ll come back to that question.

Annual Fall Women’s Retreat

Presentation Center, Los Gatos, November 13 -14, 2009, facilitated by the Rev. Eileen Lindeman.

An ancient African tale holds that before each child is born, he or she is given his or her own special song.  After the child’s birth, the community of family and village teach them their song. In times of crisis or distress in the life of a person, others sing that song to them to help them remember who they are.

We are God’s children and God sings our song to bring us back to who we are in times of uncertainty or confusion.  Our song is heard in the events of everyday life, if we listen to our life with the awareness of how God communicates with us. Discernment in the experience of both natural and preternatural events can be learned.

This retreat will combine ancient spiritual practice, small and large groups, time for art/journaling and laughter. Join us!

We will meet at the Presentation Center, Los Gatos: a lovely peaceful venue that used to be home to a community of nuns, the Sisters of the Presentation.  While the program will from from late Friday afternoon to the end of Sunday afternoon, with accommodation and meals, it will also be possible to return home for the Friday night.

Tell us you’re planning to come! To reserve your space, payment needs to be in by October 15.

Costs are: $65 (no accomodation), $120 (shared accomodation), and $140 (single accomodation – limited availability).

The Rev. Eileen Lindeman is an experienced spiritual director, chaplain, and parish priest. She has a Masters in Christian Spirituality and an active spiritual direction practice. Prior to moving to the Bay Area, the Rev. Lindeman was Associate Rector of Christ Church, Coronado for ten years. She was named Chaplain of the Year for Episcopal Community Services-San Diego (1997) and Chaplain of the Year for Sharp Hospital System San Diego (1998). Eileen was ECW Chaplain for seven years, chaplain of the Companions of the Holy Cross and a teacher and chaplain for the Bishop’s School, La Jolla.

Eileen has an extensive background in human services and was the coordinator of placements in field education for Yale Divinity School. In 1994 she was honored by Nebraska Governor Ben Nelson for her work as an advocate for children with developmental disabilities. She is the author of the book Respite Care, published by the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Eileen is married to the Rev. Mitch Lindeman, rector of Christ Church Portola Valley. The Lindemans have three children, one dog and four parrots.

This is Your Brain… On God

For some time, neuroscientists have been interested in the effect of regular religious practice on the brain, and we’ve discussed some of this research at St. Bede’s in the past. But now a new study is making some rather specific claims. An article in Wired magazine explains:

In a study published Monday in Public Library of Science ONE, Grafman’s team used an MRI to measure the brains areas in 40 people of varying degrees of religious belief.

People who reported an intimate experience of God, engaged in religious behavior or feared God, tended to have larger-than-average brain regions devoted to empathy, symbolic communication and emotional regulation. The research wasn’t trying to measure some kind of small “God-spot,” but looked instead at broader patterns within the brains of self-reported religious people.

“Empathy, symbolic communication and emotional regulation…” That about sums it up. The scientists who conducted the study go on to hypothesize that religious practice may have played an important role in our evolution into such highly socialized creatures.

Playing God with the Word of God

This is hard to believe, but it’s true. Something called the “Conservative Bible Project” has been created with the expressed interest in producing a translation of the Bible that “satisfies the following guidelines”:

Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias.

Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity…

Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle.”

Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.

Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning.

Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story…

Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities.

Breathtaking, is it not? This reminds me of the Episcopalian ethicist William Stringfellow and his reflections on how no one seems capable of truly listening anymore–either to their neighbor or to the word of God.

Listening is a rare happening among human beings. You cannot listen to the word another is speaking if you are preoccupied with your appearance, or with impressing the other, or are trying to decide what you are going to say when the other stops talking, or are debating about whether what is being said is true or relevant or agreeable. Such matters have their place, but only after listening to the word as the word is being uttered. Listening is a primitive act of love in which a person gives himself to another’s word, making himself accessible and vulnerable to that word.

Sermon: Lamb Without Blemish

The Word Is The Energy Of Creation Itself

Last week’s lessons connected Jesus’ understanding of the messianic role with the role of the prophet. This week’s lessons continue the theme. Presumably, the disciples are familiar with the often inhospitable reception of the prophets by the people. But they have a difficult time with what Jesus says about the likely reception of his own work and its connection with the so-called prophet’s reward, even when he spells it out for them.

This week we’re given a passage from Jeremiah. There is a plot against the prophet’s life. Someone must consider him dangerous. He must be doing something right. The word of the Lord that he has spoken must have found its mark. The enemies of God’s word want to silence the inconvenient truth by eliminating the inconvenient truth-teller.

But recollect the passage in Isaiah about God’s word. We typically recite it in Advent:

So is my word that goes forth from my mouth;

it will not return to me empty,

but it will accomplish that which I have purposed,

and prosper in that for which I send it.

Isaiah 55:11

Sermon: Taste and See

Did you know that the names Adam and Eve mean soil and life?

For several years now, I’ve been reading about the slow food movement. First I read Barbara Kingsolver’s food journal. It chronicles a year of sustainable living on the family farm in Kentucky. They undertook an experiment to live as locavores, eating locally while thinking globally. They grew and raised, harvested and slaughtered, canned and prepared their food. Whatever else they needed, they traded with neighbors. They behaved as stewards of earth’s bounty, learning what sustainable eating entails. She changed a familiar phrase to title the journal, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, implying that their effort transformed their awareness. They became more connected to the land, to plant and animal life, to their bodies and each other, to neighbors and community, to the history and food culture of the region. It was an integrative experience. To term it a miracle is to recognize and celebrate not only the slow food they ate, but also these gifts, received as grace.

Then I read the collaborative journal of the founders of the Findhorn commune, established in the sixties in a trailer park on Moray Firth by the North Sea, by utopians with C of E roots, inspired by the mystical practices of east and west. They planted a garden, to eat well and inexpensively (The Findhorn Garden). As they grew their food, they cultivated their souls with daily periods of meditation, during which they began to feel a deepening connection with the landscape, the soil, the plants, and the creatures inhabiting their local environment. To their surprise and delight, they developed an intensely joyful collaboration with their plot of creation, which yielded profuse and abundant results. Findhorn became a kind of Eden, a sign of the potential of human cooperation with the biosphere.

Sermon: Fed By God

Sung antiphon:
The bread we break, alleluia, is our sharing of the Body of Christ.

Today we find ourselves in the middle of the five so-called ‘Bread Sundays’, working our way through John, Chapter Six and various other accounts of God feeding God’s people. Last Sunday, Tom Jackson placed the assigned readings for Bread Sundays in the context of our life of worship and fellowship — “All we ever seem to do is eat! What’s up with all this talk of bread and manna and food?” — and affirmed the reason: “We who are many are one body because we all share one bread, one cup.”

Two weeks ago Irene Lawrence set the tone for our five-week consideration of John Six, and she showed us how in the synoptic Gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — there are six accounts of the feeding of various multitudes, as well as stories of the Last Supper, with what we refer to as ‘the words of institution’: “This is my body. This is my blood.” But in John, it’s all one — the feeding of the five thousand and Jesus’ description of himself as the Bread of Life. From John’s perspective, Jesus feeding the multitude and proclaiming himself as the Bread of Life are words of institution.

Sermon: We who are many are one body . . .

Until recently, I prided myself on being a “first adopter,” the kind of fellow who quickly found ways to use new technology for my own purposes. Starting with e-mail and moving on through to web sites to blogs, I was always among the first on the block to figure out how to use the “world wide web.” I ran out of inventiveness when the latest wave of “social networking sites” came into vogue. I couldn’t see why anyone would be interested in following my life on Facebook or Twitter. My life isn’t that interesting, I thought. Who would care if I went to a movie or shopping? I was genuinely stumped. I started to feel old.

Working Wonders

There are two central claims made in the passage from Wisdom. God did not make death. God made us for incorruption. Volumes have been written in theological argument about them. Do we agree? Most of us come to our own conclusion. We frame for ourselves a working hypothesis.

When the news reported that Steve Jobs would be back at his desk soon, after a liver transplant, they showed a clip from an earlier commencement address at Stanford, after his first bout with life-threatening disease. In it he said that death was nature’s change agent. And St. Francis referred to Sister Death, implying that death is an integral part of life and the life cycle. So what are we to do with the claim that God did not make death? Placing the passage back in context helps.

Tempest and Whirlwind

For about a decade, our family sailed a 38’ cruiser on San Francisco Bay. The boat was responsive for its type. The bay is rated as one of the most challenging, as bay sailing goes. There were times when we would have our children and their friends out there, when the wind and waves would suddenly change. At those times I’d wonder about my judgment, while working hard to be a responsible first mate, in order to get us safely back to the marina. I remember once being overtaken by dense fog, and realizing that we were in the middle of a shipping lane. I remember waking suddenly in the middle of the night to realize that our anchor had lost its hold and that we were being pulled out on the tide. I remember a man overboard in an instant, his face receding fast in the swells. We got him back aboard, but it put a damper on the outing. And that was just inside the bay.

Finding Beauty in a Broken World, Parish Retreat 2009

After 9-11, Utah author and environmental advocate, Terry Tempest Williams stood facing the ocean in Maine, desperate for ‘one, wild word’ to help her ‘retrieve the poetry’ she had lost.

And the word the sea rolled back to me was “m o s a i c.”

In her book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, the word ‘mosaic’ takes her on an inspiring and thought provoking journey from the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, Italy, through Bryce Canyon, Utah, observing endangered prairie dogs, to a Rwandan Survivors’ Village, where with Barefoot Artist Lily Weh, she helps create a memorial to the victims of the genocide.

This was a wonderful book to take with us on our annual Parish Retreat up at Bishops’ Ranch, Healdsburg. Over fifty of us (ages 6 months to over 90!), explored the idea of mosaics, both naturally occurring and humanly created, both real and metaphorical. We discussed the idea of broken pieces and how they can be reassembled (a conversation that had to be quite loud in order to ride over the happy sounds of the children working with Lego in the center of the circle!). More Parish Retreat photos!

The Theology of Battlestar Galactica – RESCHEDULED

Here’s a question: What modern sci-fi (or if you prefer, psy-fi) television show offers a multi-layered commentary upon the Biblical Exodus story, the 4th century Roman empire (when the powers that be were Christianizing the empire at the point of a sword), as well as the United States post-September 11?

That’s right: Battlestar Galactica. And no, not the version from the 1970’s–the one of the past 5 years. And yes, it really does have that much on its mind. We’re not making it up.

A bunch of BSG obsessives from St. Bede’s will offer a presentation on the subject tomorrow evening, May 14 next Thursday evening, May 21 (along with dinner), from 6:30 – 9 pm. We hope to win some converts to the show along the way. So please join us!

Why Is The Bible Such a Big Deal?

This is what I love about our Seekers Dinners.

Tomorrow night, we will be discussing The Holy Bible. Specifically we will be attempting to address the following questions, as raised by one of our young adults in an email to me earlier this week:

One thing I’m interested in is what the Bible should mean (and how it should be used) by modern, rational, serious Christians (or agnostics). Knowing what modern scholarship says about the history of how the Bible was written, compiled, interpreted, etc., why (and how) should we give it any mind? Why preference the bible over other religious/spiritual sources as a focus of study or inspiration? I doubt most people want to turn this thing into a Bible Study, but it’s something I’m interested in… So what’s the justification for being so focused on the Hebrew and Christian Bible?

Great questions! I’m not sure we’ll settle on any definitive answers tomorrow night, but it’ll be fun to try. Which reminds me of a quip I heard yesterday from a Bay Area Episcopal priest I’d just met:

“The Episcopal Church: You’ve got questions… We’ve got questions.”

- Jamie McElroy