This sermon is available as an audio file (MP3.) The reading of the Gospel precedes the sermon.

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August 30, 2009

2204

Beth Foote - Aug 30, 2009

James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

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On one of our favorite family vacations to Maui we went on a snorkeling trip to a crescent shaped reef called Molikini, where we spent the day snorkeling. We saw huge turtles swim beneath us, and coral, and beautiful tropical fish swam all around us. It was a very beautiful, complex marine ecosystem to explore. And lots of fun.

Preaching here this summer has been something like that snorkeling trip. It’s been fun for the preacher, and we’ve been swimming together in the beautiful, very theologically rich waters of John 6. One week we looked at the feeding of the 5,000, another week we looked at “I am the Bread of Life.” Like snorkelers at Molikini we have explored each aspect of this passage, and made multiple connections to the Eucharist.

Well, today, our boat has moved onto new waters, and we’re back to the plain-speaking Gospel of Mark, and a different sort of narrative. Studying The Gospel of Mark is more like a white water raft trip---it’s quick and Jesus moves from one situation to the next, “immediately.” The Jesus of Mark’s Gospel is sarcastic. Today we see him confront the Pharisees and call them hypocrites for caring more about following the letter of the law rather than being in right relationship with God.

What does this passage say to us about who we are as people of faith in our own context, especially in light of where we have been swimming recently, in the beautiful, ritual oriented language of John?

Let’s first look at the passage in its own, first century context. Jesus was pushing back against the Jewish holiness code based on the laws in Leviticus and interpreted by the Pharisees, a sect of Judaism that especially valued following the rules. The holiness code set the Jewish people apart from the gentiles. Scholars believe that Mark was writing his Gospel to a gentile community because he has to explain these practices, and one of those asides to the audience is in our passage today.

How you approached eating, and who was allowed to eat with whom were important themes of the holiness code that Jesus runs up against throughout all four Gospels. We see Jesus eat with sinners, tax collectors, and women. And earlier in Mark the disciples pick heads of grain as they walk through a field of grain on the Sabbath, and the Pharisees question them. Jesus defends his disciples just as he does in our passage today.

As a devout Jew, Jesus knows the holiness code well, and yet he chooses to move beyond its boundaries to show that following the rules is not enough. He sees that the holiness code leaves people out because they cannot follow the Law because they are sick or poor, or because they are gentiles.
In our passage today, Jesus says that focusing on what we eat is a distraction from the real issue, what our relationship to God is, what is inside our heart, and how that plays out in our lives.

Now we think of the heart as the source of feeling, our emotional center, but in the ancient world everything was shifted a bit lower. Your heart was the source of thinking, and your gut was the source of emotion. I think it’s interesting that the negative things he mentions as coming from the heart also take some degree of pre-meditation, they are all active in nature.

Our world is so different than the world Jesus lived in. But there is much that sounds familiar to me as well. Because we also have our own holiness codes based on our own culture that separate us from others. They’re harder to see, because they’re knit into our society. But maybe the effect of the holiness code was hard for the Pharisees to see, too, because it was so woven into their daily lives.

Our holiness code or cultural law is more based on who has money. This plays out in the debate on health insurance reform now raging. If you can’t afford it, you’re excluded. The cultural code of rugged individualism that judges our worth as people by what we earn, overshadows the justice issue of having universal health insurance so that everyone receives the health care they need. That kind of economic judgment ignores our basic common humanity. Making changes to cultural holiness codes are always controversial, and we’ve seen this play out in the news this summer.

Jesus says, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” What role does our religious ritual play in this? Is it human tradition? How does our religious ritual stand up to Jesus’ judgment here?

Now here in the Episcopal Church, we do ritual really well. How we worship shapes what we believe. Couldn’t our rituals become a cultural holiness code for us?

Well, certainly the Reformation was set into motion over this kind of question in regards to the medieval Catholic church. And in our passage today, Jesus does sounds a lot like Martin Luther when Jesus says “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” Jesus protests against human customs being given the weight of divine law, while the essence of God's message is ignored.

Tradition for tradition’s sake can become empty. Doing things the way we’ve always done them can steer us into a dead end. Why do we do the things we do in worship? Once we know the “why” behind the ritual of our liturgy, and are drawn into the mystery of our liturgy, our worship experience becomes infinitely richer. Our spirituality deepens.

Now last week Matthew preached his first sermon about finding God within ourselves. And I think that is precisely what Jesus is advocating here.

Jesus is saying that the Laws are good ---And it’s always good to wash your hands!---and we need to know right from wrong, we need to know the ethical standards of our day. But Jesus is saying that’s not enough. Those rituals, those ethics need to be sincere, and must emerge from the best intentions of our hearts, from our relationship with God.

Our reading from the letter of James speaks about this in more detail. It’s a how-to kind of message. The author of James writes: “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. …religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” So we are to put our beliefs into action, and have a deliberate preference for the vulnerable people in our society.

As Matthew said last week, our inner relationship with God, our worship and contemplation informs our action, our ministry in the world.

I thought of our readings today as I watched Senator Ted Kennedy’s memorial service on TV yesterday. I was struck by how, in all his flawed humanity, Senator Kennedy put his faith into action and over the course of his lifetime, did become a “doer of the word” and made a difference in the lives of so many vulnerable people. He brought the Spirit of the Law to the Law so that the Law itself worked for justice.

The implanted word that James talks about here today is a different way of saying what the Gospel of John said in our long exploration of John 6 through the summer. These are not just beautiful words, these are not just empty rituals.

I am the Bread of Life,” Jesus is “the implanted word,” which calls us into a relationship of love, and sends us out from this beautiful space to serve the world in Jesus’ name, and heal the world.

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August 16, 2009

2178

Beth Foote - Aug 16, 2009

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August 09, 2009

2177

Beth Foote - Aug 9, 2009

The Rev. Beth Foote August 9, 2009
1 Kings, 19:4-8
http://bible.oremus.org/?passage=Ephesians+4:25-5:2
John 6: 35, 41-51

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Food is much in the news lately. Food writer Michael Pollan wrote in the NYTimes a couple of Sundays ago that we now spend much more time watching people cook on TV, on shows like Iron Chef and Rachael Ray, than we actually spend cooking ourselves. Friday night we saw the new movie, Julia and Julie, about a young woman who cooks through every recipe in the original Julia Child cookbook, which was very fun. So we watched people cook for 2 hours. It also brought back memories of my mother trying lots of recipes from “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” and how eggs benedict with real hollandaise joined her repertoire of sixties jello salads, and ground beef casseroles.

Food is much in our scripture lessons today as well. Our first reading from 1 Kings shows us Elijah being fed by the angels, and we return to John 6 once again. Jesus says, “I am the Bread of Life.” What is God is trying to tell us in these readings about food and faith, about eating and the spiritual life?

Let’s get a little context on Elijah first. It will help us reflect on both passages.

Elijah is one of the major prophets in all three monotheistic religions. He is revered by Judaism, and Islam---his story is also in the Qu’aran. Remember that Elijah does not die, but departs from the earth in a chariot of fire pulled by fiery horses. References to Elijah pop up several times in the New Testament narrative. Once the disciples ask Jesus if they should call down fire upon a disinterested Samaritan village, like Elijah called down fire upon the priests of Baal. Herod thought that Jesus might be Elijah returned. Remember that Elijah appeared with Moses on either side of Jesus at the Transfiguration. Witnesses of the crucifixion wondered if Elijah would come and save him. We as Christians view Elijah as a great Jewish prophet who is a forerunner of Jesus. There are echos of Jesus’ ministry there. Let’s look at his story.

When Elijah first appears in the narrative of 1st Kings, God immediately sends him out the wilderness and God sends ravens to feed him, so this is not the first time that Elijah is fed by God.. Then God sends him to a poor widow who feeds him from the last of her meager stash of meal and oil. Elijah assures her that there is enough, and the supply of meal and oil are miraculously restored. Then Elijah heals her dying son. In the next chapter Elijah challenges the prophets of the god Baal to a contest and proves how much more powerful the God of Israel is by calling down the fire of the living God on a sacrifice, and, in the process killing the priests of Baal. Afterwards, he is chased out of town by the evil Queen, Jezebel. Which brings him to this wilderness place where we see him today being fed by angels.

The angels feed him in the wilderness because he is about to go on a fasting journey of 40 days and 40 nights, to Mount Horeb, the same place where Moses went when he received the 10 Commandments. There, Elijah, encounters the Living God in a very personal way, through a small, still voice.

So, being fed by God is an important theme throughout the Elijah narrative. God leads Elijah and Elijah follows, and eats. The angels say in our passage today, “this is the food for the journey…you will need it.” So Elijah eats these unusual feedings from ravens, widows, and angels, and is faithful in his prophetic ministry.
We’ve spent the last month working through the sixth chapter of John, which is all about unusual feedings, beginning with the Feeding of the 5,000, and moving onto the great “I am” statement, “I am the Bread of Life.” Today we hear Jesus say, “I am the Bread of Life” again and then we skip to a dialogue between Jesus and the grumbling people who, once again, know Jesus as a fellow villager, son of Joseph and Mary. John uses the same Greek word for “complain” “Gongyzo” as the Septuagint, the ancient, Greek translation of the OT uses to describe the grumbling Israelites in the desert. “Gongyzo”

Let’s hold this gospel passage up against the Elijah story for a minute because it gives throws some things into relief.

Elijah was fed by God so that he can draw Israel back to a right relationship with God. The Elijah story was very important to the very people who were questioning Jesus. Elijah was a big deal, up there with Moses, who also called upon God to feed the Israelites with manna.

The feeding of Elijah is from God to one person---Elijah. And even the manna in the wilderness is an isolated incident. What Jesus says in John 6 about being the Bread of Life is a step beyond---into divine territory of faith, and belief, and eternity. He says that it will be for the world, and it is in the present tense.

Jesus bluntly says to the grumblers, “Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.” He contrasts that feeding with what he offers---himself, the Bread of Life. Jesus takes those great scriptural images of being fed and transforms them. The metaphor of feeding, of bread, now points to God through the person of Jesus.

Now, in the other great “I AM” statements, Jesus compares himself to many commonplace things: the Light, the Gate, the Good Shepherd, the True Vine. But Bread is unique in that it is a food.

Bread is also unique in that it is perishable, it is a daily need, something ongoing that we need to live. Jesus is comparing himself to something so simple take it so for granted. Bread. We eat it, we digest it and it becomes part of us.

Now, “I am the Bread of Life,” are not the official words of institution we hear in the Eucharistic Prayer. But an interesting thing about the Gospel of John is that there is no institution of the Eucharist as there is in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. At John’s version of the Last Supper, Jesus washes the disciples’ feet instead. So some scholars think that this scene where Jesus feeds the 5,000 and says “I am the Bread of Life,” is the institution of the Eucharist for John’s community.

Like Elijah, we are fed by God. But unlike Elijah, God is feeding us with Godself, the mystery of Jesus Christ. In the Incarnation, in becoming human Jesus enters our world, and in being the living bread he enters our very being, our physical bodies. We become holy. Here in chapter 6 Jesus says, “whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” These are sacramental words that take us into another plane of meaning.

Well what does this mean for us today in our daily lives? As I mentioned in the beginning, the food writer Michael Pollan says that we now spend more time watching other people cook than cooking ourselves. I think there’s an analogy there between Elijah being fed, and Jesus feeding us in the Eucharist. We can only imagine Elijah being fed in the story. It’s secondhand knowledge. It happened to someone else long, long ago. But when Jesus says, “I am the Bread of Life,” it’s something that is there for us right now, it’s in the present tense, always being renewed, always being offered to us, like fresh bread out of the oven.

As you may know, I’ve been baking the Communion Bread for the 10:30 service for the last year. It’s become a Saturday ritual for me to mix up the dough, kneed it, let it rise, role it out and cut it into rounds that then bake it. The house really smells good. As I bake the bread I think about all of you, and pray for Sunday’s services. (As much as I’ve enjoyed baking every week, it’s now time to pass on this ministry to others in the congregation.)

Baking the bread every week has retaught me the value of repetition, it’s like practicing the piano until you know the piece by heart. After awhile you just KNOW it’s going to work. In the beginning I had to read the recipe closely, and worried whether the dough would rise. Now, I KNOW the recipe, and feel a sense of deep satisfaction in KNOWING it will be bread. I trust that it will turn out. It’s become a kind of demonstration of faith for me.

And I think there’s something in there about daily prayer, daily living with God, with Jesus by our side. Knowing the bread will turn out is a kind of belief that feels so solid…you could compare it to eternity...yet it’s not a “sign on the dotted line” belief that so many people are afraid of. It’s a living thing, it comes out of my lived experience.

And that lived belief is, I think, what we need to cultivate: an attention to these moments of sacramental “knowing” and trusting God in our daily lives. Jesus says, “I am the Bread of LIFE,” meaning it is in living that we know God. As Jesus says, the Father draws us to him, and perhaps it’s that sacramental trust of God day by day in our daily struggles, our daily living, that makes us aware that we are being called into a relationship with God, if we can only allow ourselves to smell the bread baking in the oven and be drawn into the kitchen.

Paying attention to where we know God in our daily lives and then bringing that knowledge with us to our church community creates an environment where we can be transformed by the Eucharist. Living this way is a daily process of new bread, new life, new thankfulness, new being in the moment, which, draws us into a place of eternity…living eternally.

When we do gather here on Sunday morning, there are moments when the Eucharist brings us individually into communion with the Holy and with each other in “real time” in community. We’re not watching a cooking show, we’re all members of the liturgical team. Not just me. We’re there with each other and with Christ at the altar as we make the Eucharist together. Hold onto these moments of belief and living in eternity together. They make a great deal of difference in our daily lives.

They make a great deal of difference in the life of our community, too. Because we are a sacramental community, more than a social club, or a non-profit charity. So this physical knowledge of the Eucharist forms our beliefs and our community in ways that are beyond our understanding. Together, as we are fed the Bread of Life, we become the Body of Christ in the world. And as we go about our daily life in the world, we live knowing we are loved by God, and are called to pass on that love in our daily lives.

As our Psalm for today says, let us “Taste and See that the Lord is good.”

Amen.

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July 05, 2009

2140

Beth Foote - July 05, 2009

This sermon is available as an audio file (MP3.)

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May 31, 2009

2136

Beth Foote - Pentecost 2009

This sermon is available as an audio file (MP3.)

Trinity Family Ministries Director Beth Foote and the kids of Trinity provide the reading and "sermon" for this festive day.

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May 10, 2009

2091

Beth Foote - May 10, 2009

John 15: 1-8 (Mothers Day)

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Last week my husband Hale gave me a wonderful pre-Mother’s Day present, he hired two gardeners to come rip out all the weeds in my once-glorious flower garden. All that’s left is a rose bush and a Mexican sage. It makes me happy to have open ground to cultivate my summer cutting garden. This week I discovered the amazing nursery down the street, and I brought home various varieties of tomato plants and zinnias. It feels good to reconnect with the garden on such a beautiful weekend.

Our gospel reading today takes us close to the land as well, and Jesus uses this beautiful metaphor, one of the great “I am” statements from John, to teach us about the relationship between the vine, the vinegrower, and the branches. Where last week’s “I am” statement, “I am the Good Shepherd,” is primarily about who Christ is, this “I am” statement is a rich meditation on who WE are. Jesus is very clear when he says, “I am the Vine, YOU are the branches.” What does it mean to be a branch? What does “branchiness” and “fruitfulness” mean to us here today at Trinity?

Jesus’ metaphor assumes that the grape vine is going to grow abundantly, and with many branches. It’s a lush picture of growth. We as branches are expected to be vigorous growers.

And vigorous growing branches are supposed to bear fruit. How does that come about? Vines don’t always bear fruit on their own. Or they often break under the weight of too much fruit. To be good fruitbearers, vines need help. They need to be cared for and trained to grow by a vinegrower.

Jesus says, “I am the true Vine, and my Father is the vinegrower.” So God, the Father, is the vinegrower, and is in charge of pruning.

I noticed something new in this passage. Jesus says, “You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you.” The Greek word for prune is the same as the word for cleanse. And it turns out that in agriculture, the two terms are often used interchangeably. This means then that if we are branches, we have been pruned or are being pruned by God, the vinegrower, through God’s own initiative, and also through our attentiveness to Christ’s words.

Pruning is an ongoing process. Gardeners are always standing back, taking a good look at a plant and thinking, “if I cut here, it will grow this way,” and I think that the vinegrower trains us in much the same way. And on our own part, continually listening to God’s message, having an ongoing prayer practice of our own, is also an ongoing process. By doing so we can be more attuned to what the vinegrower is up to in our lives as we are being trained.

Speaking as a branch, I find it comforting to know I am being cultivated by the vinegrower. I am not in totally in charge of my own fruitfulness. The vinegrower is cultivating my growth in ways I do not understand. It reminds me of the phrase in the baptismal covenant, when we make promises, and then say “I will with God’s help.” The Vinegrower is continually helping us grow in positive ways.

In addition to pruning fruitful branches, the vinegrower, or God the Father, “removes every branch in me that bears no fruit.” This is a kind of ominous image. Later in the passage, this seems to connect with the image of branches being gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. This tends to bring up classic images of hell, sinners being separated out and thrown into the fire. But I don’t think this is the case. God, the vinegrower, is cultivating us to be more fruitful, not punishing us if we’re not so fruitful. I do think there is an advantage to being open to pruning, though…more about that later.

But let’s look closer at what being fruitful means.

In our bottom-line, production-minded culture, we jump to the conclusion that being fruitful means to bear a high yielding harvest…a bumper crop. But I question whether that is what Jesus means here. At our gospel preview group on Wednesday someone said that this passage made her uncomfortable because in her childhood church tradition, being fruitful was about making more converts. I don’t think that is it, either.

A closer image might be that of the sustainable harvest idea we explored on Earth Day. A long term, fruitfulness that relies on a loving relationship between the vinegrower and the vine.

Back on Christmas Eve, our master gardener, Nancy Grove, gave me a wonderful book called Epitaph for a Peach, four seasons on a family farm, by David Masumoto, who grows peaches and grapes on his family farm in the central valley. The book is a lyrical memoir about the challenges and joys of working the land in a time of factory farms and agribusiness. The title refers to his struggle to save his orchard of heirloom Suncrest peach trees, which have a marvelous taste, and I can attest to that since Nancy also gave me a jar of canned Suncrest Peaches with the book. But because they are so juicy, they don’t keep well, and so there’s not much of a market for them these days.

Masumoto describes his long-term loving relationship with his land, and the crops and trees that grow there. He tries to work with the particular qualities of his land rather than forcing it to produce a bumper crop. He loves his trees, and wants them to grow well and bear much fruit. There are many passages in the book about pruning, and here are a few excerpts:
“The art of pruning involves seeing into the future….I force myself to think in the long term and allow imagination to guide my cutting….it’s hard to envision new growth and the new shape the tree will take two or three or four years from now. When I prune I have to keep that vision in mind….With a sense of optimism, I can imagine new shoots filling the blank spaces…New shoots require guidance, a gentle pull to bend them toward the open space….I have to see with next year’s eyes…I maintain optimism that new grwth will come and new shoots will appear…I’m always working with the future. I’m like a bonsai gardener with my peach trees, shaping each tree for the long term. When pruning trees I feel one of the most important and strongest emotions a farmer has: a sense of hope.”

So being a fruitful branch means trusting the vinegrower’s wisdom and love, and being open to be pruned and shaped for the future. Which makes me think of the line in the Lord’s Prayer, “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

The discipline of pruning and training leads us towards abundance and hope. I like to think of God the vinegrower being something like David Masumoto, loving each of us like Masumoto loves his peach trees.

If Jesus is the Vine, we are the branches, and God the Father is the vinegrower, then what is the fruit that he’s training us to bear?

The fruit of the vine is what comes into being when we are well-connected to the vine, well-pruned by the vinegrower, and receiving the nourishment that comes from the vine. The fruit, of course, is love.

Love, the fruit, is the product of the love Jesus has for us within our connection to him, and him to us. The mutuality of the phrases, “abide in me as I abide in you,” shows us how Jesus approaches love. It is an expression of mutual connection and joy. He says, “if you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” There is a caring and trusting relationship between the branch and the vine, and the vinegrower that expresses the Love that’s produced as fruit. And if I may take a theological leap, perhaps that relationship between the vine, the branches, and the vinegrower is the Holy Spirit at work. We need that relationship to be truly loving, truly fruitful.

Love is meant to be shared. Love, like fruit, is sweet and nutritious, and brings us new life and is an outward sign of God’s care for the vineyard. The word Love does not occur in this narrow slice of the “I am” passage, but we sense it, and understand it here in the care of the vinegrower, in the mutuality of the connection Jesus describes between the vine and the branches.

So, how do we do we live into our “branchiness” and our fruitfulness here at Trinity?
“I am the Vine, you are the branches.”
We as individual branches at Trinity must continually strengthen our connection to Jesus. Those connections to the Vine create our healthy, growing community Vineyard that is Trinity. We are a vineyard full of branches connected to the Vine, twining out, serving the church, and the larger community, sharing our fruitfulness made possible through our connection to Christ. You might ask yourself, “how do I feel connected to Christ?” Is it through worship, prayer, giving my time, volunteering at church, or in the community? Explore and pray about it. Ask one of us to help you discern where you feel connected or called to live out your connection to Christ.

So I see Christ’s vision of the vineyard as a rich vision for our parish. And a challenging one. We cannot be many individual, unconnected branches. Unconnected branches are otherwise known as sticks. And sticks are brittle and break. Or become pokers.

Healthy branches are supple and green, and bend. They can wrap around things and climb. Because they’re connected to the source of moisture and nutrients and life; they’re connected to the Vine. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has introduced the African concept of Ubuntu to the West. Ubuntu is the theme of the upcoming General Convention of the Episcopal Church this summer in Anaheim. Ubuntu means that "a person is a person through other persons." Tutu writes that someone who has ubuntu is, "open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed."

Finding an exact translation for Ubuntu in western thought is difficult, but many other cultures have similar words for describing this way of being. I think the image of the healthy vineyard, with branches connected to Christ the vine comes fairly close.

I think our vineyard here at Trinity is becoming closer to the concept of Ubuntu, because we are becoming better connected to the Vine and to each other. We are becoming more supple and more generative. We have been pruned and trained in many ways by the Vinegrower in the last few years, and now we are beginning to bear fruit abundantly.

And now, since my specialty is children and family ministry, I am going to graft Mothers Day in right here. In my experience, being a Mom throws your “branchiness” and “fruitfulness” into relief. For one thing, you are literally a fruitbearing branch when you bear children. You bear your children, your fruit, and then are connected to them through love in a very primal way.

God entrusts us as parents to be co-vinegrowers with God in the vineyards of our families. But we don’t all have to be moms to participate in the joy of growing children. And as a church community, a church vineyard, we are called into a relationship of support for the many branches of families, children and youth here at Trinity. Again, in the baptism service, we say we promise to uphold parents in their baptismal vows and say,“we will with God’s help.”

We’re putting together our new photo grapevine here in the church to help us live into our “branchiness” and “fruitfulness” as a community, and our connection to the true Vine. We want our photo grapevine to help us and our new Rector connect faces and names, so we know can know all the branches that make up our community vineyard here at Trinity.

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me as I abide in you.” Let us all thank our mothers today for their love, and let us give thanks for our connection to the true Vine that nourishes our fruitfulness, and calls us to share that fruit of love with the world. Amen.

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March 15, 2009

2039

Beth Foote - March 15, 2009

The Rev. Beth Foote
Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25 
John 2:13-22


Lent is a time to reflect on our faith and prepare for Easter, and we are in our third week of Lent, the “purple season.” We’re preparing for Easter in lots of ways. We’re building Easter Baskets for children in need. Our New Rector Search committee is interviewing candidates. About 20 adults are involved in the Confirm not Conform class, and another group is meeting on Monday nights discerning their spiritual gifts. This week I’ve been thinking about what David Perry, our priest in residence last fall used as the theme for our parish retreat. “God is a Surprise,” which is another way of saying that God is an agent of Change. This Lent it seems be all about change. Each of these three lessons today talk about change initiated by God.

We started out hearing God deliver the 10 Commandments. They sound so familiar, you may wonder what’s so revolutionary about them. God commands that the Israelites put God before all other Gods, all other idols. Monotheism was an overturning of the status quo. Worshiping an invisible God was overturning the status quo. Creating a society based on respect for each other was an overturning of the status quo.

What does this say to us today? Creating a society based on respect for each other is still something that overturns the status quo. Creating such a community is an ongoing process that requires our constant attention, and requires a constant willingness to change on our part, to think beyond ourselves.

In the last few months many of us have taken the on-line course on child abuse awareness to fulfill the requirements for our diocese’s “Called to Right Relationship” initiative. This has been a change in the way we do things in our community. It has made us think about unpleasant realities in our society. But more importantly, “Called to Right Relationship” calls us to be together as a community in healthy ways, working with each other respectfully, and to be awareof unhealthy patterns.

The 10 Commandments sound very relevant today as we struggle with rebuilding our economy and other global issues. These 10 rules for living put God first, then our neighbor, and then ourselves. They create a sustainable, balanced society. In the 10 Commandments God tells us that we need to think of the whole society, not just our own unquenchable wants and desires. As we have seen recently, when we only think of ourselves and making as much money as possible, society drifts into to a more primitive zone of deceit and the quest for domination. Drug gangs, poverty, and Bernie Madoffs flourish in such a community that is so out of alignment.

Remember what happens when Moses brings the Tablets down the mountain and sees the Israelites worshiping the Golden Calf? Moses gets really angry. And Moses’ anger is a righteous, frustrated anger that reminds me of the way Jesus reacts in our lesson from the Gospel of John. We tend to think of anger as “bad”, but righteous anger is a positive thing. It’s a great motivator for change. Personally, I love it that Jesus gets angry here. There is so much we need to be motivated to change in the world.

In the Gospel of John, John puts this story at the beginning of the Gospel, right after the Wedding at Cana. John puts this episode out of chronological order to emphasize what Jesus is doing.

Jesus cleansing the temple is a physical manifestation of turning over the status quo, which is what Jesus did continually throughout his ministry of teaching and healing. Here we see him literally turning over the tables of power. John uses the Cleansing of the Temple to show that Jesus will complete the change begun with giving of the 10 Commandments. Look out.

John says that it was only later that the disciples understood what he meant by overturning the moneychangers, and saying that he would rebuild the temple in 3 days. John writes, “After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.”

In a time of great change it takes time to understand the dimensions of that change. This Lent has been a time to contemplate many great changes going on in our society, and our place in it. It’s felt like a secular Lent. Think for a minute about the change that has taken place with the election of Barack Obama as our first African-American President. As a country, we are still digesting how far we have come, and how far we have to go in other areas. Likewise, it took time for the disciples and the early Christians to understand what Jesus was up to. It took time for them to understand Jesus’ teaching, in light of their Jewish roots. And there was the biggest unexpected change to interpret: Jesus died on the Cross and then rose again. Easter, God’s Surprise.

In our reading from Corinthians, Paul addresses that great symbol of change, the Cross, about thirty years after the fact. The Romans used crucifixion as a tool of oppression, to humiliate as well as kill. Yet, the Cross became the central symbol of Christianity. Why would you ever make an instrument of torture the symbol for your religion?

Last Sunday I helped teach the Godly Explorers class for 9/10/11 year olds, and we tried to address that question. We had a good discussion, and one that caused all of us to think about Holy Week. Then we had a photo scavenger hunt around campus. We took pictures of all the crosses we could see, in nature and in architecture, and in church. There were crosses everywhere, in trees, in the X of the EXIT sign, as well as where we thought they would be. But it got me thinking. There are other crosses still with us. They’re just not as obvious as the Roman version. There are crosses of injustice born by many in our society: crosses of racism, sexism, and violence towards women.

As Paul says, the Cross is a “foolishness to the wise” It is a symbol of great power because it acknowledges pain and suffering, which we as human beings try to ignore. There is pain in the world. There is oppression. But there is hope.

If the 10 Commandments tell us to change the way we treat other people, then the Cross tells us that change is painful and there is hope for that pain.

The Cross reminds us that God is with us. Franciscan theology says that the Cross is an intersection between the human and the divine. And that God loved us so much that God had to be there in our suffering.

Jesus is in solidarity with us when we experience pain and oppression. On the level where it hurts.

The Cross is a symbol that reminds us of the sacrifice of change God puts into motion. The Cross is a symbol of the great turning over of Christ from death to resurrection. The Cross is a symbol of the change towards love.

At the last Adventure Sunday, we heard the Godly Play story, “the Mystery of Easter,” which shows how the six weeks of Lent prepare us for the Mystery of Easter. Over the course of the story, the storyteller fits the image of the Cross together out of six dark purple shapes. For a moment the Cross is whole. It is purple, and solemn. And then the storyteller turns over each piece, one by one to reveal white, the color of Joy. And the sadness of the Cross is turned over into the pure Joy of Easter. God’s Surprise. That is the power of the Resurrection, the overturning of the status quo by God. It comes out of the sacrifice of the Cross, the reality, the pain of living. God turns over the pieces.

Paul calls the Cross “foolishness” because it makes no logical sense. But the pieces are turned over by God, who is more powerful than we can understand. Paul says, “we proclaim Christ crucified…For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

God operates beyond our power structures, and God calls us to connect with that power of love. The 10 Commandments get us started. Yet God’s dream for us is that we may live focused on the Gospel: the overturning of our hearts, the overturning of oppression. Dying to self, living connected to God in community.

As we celebrate the Eucharist, remember that Jesus embodied this overturning, this change towards love. When we share the bread and the wine together, we receive the grace necessary for our hearts to be turned over, from purple to white, from death to life. We become the Body of Christ. We become graceful. We become one with the loving agent of Change, of love, in the world. Amen.

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January 11, 2009

1966

Beth Foote - January 11, 2009

1 Corinthians 4: 1-5 ; Matthew 6: 24-34 ; Psalm 131

Baptism of our Lord
Genesis 1: 1-5
Mark 1: 4-11

Every summer our family goes to Johnson’s Beach on the Russian River in Guerneville, for a daytrip and a swim in the river. I love this place. The snack bar has soft serve ice cream for $1.00, and $2.00 homemade hamburgers. A kind way to describe it would be “homespun.” The changing room is a shack behind some willows. On the roof of the snack bar there’s a scratchy speaker that plays Frank Sinatra, and the old guy who runs the place sometimes bellows over the sound system at people on the beach who are horsing around. It has memories for me. I went there as a child, and I have photos of my grandparents there in the 1920’s. I rediscovered it when our kids went canoeing there with St. Dorothy’s summer camp.

Besides the retro ambiance of the beach, there’s something really cool about swimming in a river. As a life-long city/suburb dweller, I notice the lack of chlorine when I swim in a natural body of water. And unlike the Pacific ocean, and Lake Tahoe, it’s not that cold.

Today we’re standing on a similar kind of beach, Baptism Beach, ready to plunge in with several young candidates…Cairo Blair, Ava, Lydia and Teddy Honerkamp, and Jackson Sims.

Welcome to all of you who are here to support the Honerkamps, Sims, and Clowson-Blairs and your families and godparents to this wonderful occasion. It’s great to share this day with you.

Now, have you ever wondered why we use water in baptisms? Why do we get people (mostly little people) wet? Is it just to hear them cry? I promise the water is warm…

I think it goes back to Genesis, as we heard in our reading today. We heard about the very beginning of the world. A formless void. And a wind from God blows over the face of the waters. Water is the basis of life on earth. God creates water before anything else, before the first day.

Water is a mystery. Water is cleansing, quenches our thirst, and you feel so good when you’re well-hydrated. Water is always changing, flowing and moving. Water needs a container or plumbing system to make it work for us. We can try and manage water, but it’s a very wild thing. It can spill, flood, do damage. In fact, back at Johnsons’s Beach, the Russian River floods on a regular basis.

Water, like Life, is a mysterious, and wild phenomenon that can sometimes overwhelm us. We can even drown in it. And ironically, I think that is one reason why we use water in Baptism.
It makes the rite of Baptism that more real to us.

In getting our candidates wet, we acknowledge that life, like water, is unpredictable, messy, and sometimes dangerous.

Now, as parents and godparents, we protect our children from danger as best we can. But it’s still out there. The best we can do is to keep protecting them and to understand that God is with us and our children. In the baptism service today we will say, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” By being baptized, we’re saying yes to the essence of life, and yes to God being with us on our unpredictable, amazing journey.

We’re also saying yes to God’s cleansing power. Baptism takes the form of ritual bath. By being baptized we acknowledge that we need God’s help because we are human. We need to be washed in God’s holiness. The symbolism of water’s cleansing properties reminds us of that.

In our reading from Mark we see Jesus standing on his Baptism Beach at the River Jordan. I imagine that beach on the Jordan might have been a little like Johnson’s Beach. A little rough around the edges. John the Baptist has always sounded a little cranky to me, like the guy at Johnson’s. Instead of a yelling over the public address system, John just shouted. Mark says that John wore an eccentric costume: camels hair with a leather belt around his waist. And who knows, with so many people there from Jerusalem and Judea, there may have been a biblical snack bar. Although I have a feeling only John ate the locusts and wild honey.

So Jesus comes to John down on the beach to be baptized. We don’t really know why he wanted to be baptized. It does seem important because this story that is in all four Gospels, and Mark’s is the earliest version.

If Jesus was sinless, why did he come down to the river to confess his sins and repent?

My sense is that Jesus knew his ministry was beginning and he wanted to mark it in some way. Perhaps he wanted to be dipped into that experience of being human, of washing and acknowledging that people are flawed and need forgiveness. Perhaps he did it to be more closely attuned to our human predicament, and prepare for his earthly ministry.

And really, isn’t it a bit mysterious why do we bring our children to be baptized, or come to be baptized ourselves?

Not so long ago, we baptized largely out of habit and fear. For hundreds of years, babies were baptized automatically right after being born. The Church believed that if you weren’t baptized, God might not let you into heaven, you didn’t belong. And there was the very real spectre of infant mortality. Infant baptism was part of the Christian culture. It’s just what you did. And perhaps there’s an element of that with us, still. We want to do the right thing.

But now, in this post-Christian world, I think that people make more of a conscious choice about their beliefs and the way they will live their lives and raise their children.

I think, like Jesus perhaps, we yearn for sacraments, for rituals that are markers for the transformative moments in our lives. As parents, our children grow and change before our very eyes.

Baptism acknowledges this and gives us an opportunity to pray and dedicate ourselves to their nurture and care with God’s help. We offer them to God’s care, and bring them to our Church community for care and so that both parents and the community can promise their involvement and support.

And just as Jesus marked his commitment to humanity, when he was baptized, our baptism marks our commitment to God. When we are baptized, we are join with Jesus in his journey from life into death and into resurrection. And our Baptism marks the beginning of our Baptismal ministry, which lasts the rest of our lives.

Mark says that John predicted that Jesus would come to be baptized. John said to the crowd, “I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
This is another mark of Baptism. We invoke the Holy Spirit to come just as the Holy Spirit came when in the form of a dove when Jesus was baptized in the Jordan. We may not see the Holy Spirit arrive like a dove---we can always hope that will happen---but at every baptism the Spirit does show up in some way.

It’s very powerful. The invocation of the Trinity, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit,” is the way all people in all branches of the Christian church are baptized, in fonts, rivers, lakes, and pools. It is the universal sign of there being One baptism, One Lord of all.

It’s an interesting sidebar today that we have the reading from Acts that shows something of the evolution of baptism. The Ephesians were baptized in a similar way as Jesus, for repentance. Paul says that receiving the Holy Spirit is crucial to baptism, but there is missing the three-fold Trinitarian formula of being baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In Acts, we see the beginnings of the Church and of the Sacraments.

Our Sacraments are an outward and visible signs of inward and invisible grace. And it’s no coincidence that our Sacraments are physical. In Baptism, we use real water and get wet. God knows we are physical creatures and that we crave physical assurance that we are loved. Likewise in the Sacrament of the Eucharist that we’ll share after the Peace, we eat real bread and drink real wine to help us understand that God becomes part of our very being.

Baptism is a one-time thing that lasts forever. You can’t “unbaptize” someone. One of the most beautiful moments in our service is when we anoint each candidate and say, you are sealed with the Holy Spirit, and marked as Christ’s own forever.

As a Mom, I’ve reflected on that phrase in times of struggle and found strength in knowing that our children are sealed in the Holy Spirit, and marked as Christ’s own forever. The sign of the cross remains with you all the days of your life and beyond.

The river of life takes us many unexpected places. By being baptized we know in a sacramental, deep way that God knows us each by name.

In the next few moments our parents and godparents will proclaim their intention to do some very important things: to renounce Satan and the works of evil, and to acknowledge Jesus Christ as their savior.

This is all good stuff, but hard to do along with working, taking care of small children, driving to after school activities, doing the laundry, and paying the bills on time.

But remember that you’re not in this alone.
The whole community will also renew their Baptismal Vows and vow to uphold you in your promises.

You wonderful people are loved by God, and are supported by our Trinity community.

Let’s join Jesus on the Beach now, and prepare for Holy Baptism.
Amen.

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December 28, 2008

1965

Beth Foote - December 28, 2008

Isaiah 61:10 – 62:3; John 1: 1-18; Psalm 147; Galatians 3: 23- 25; 4: 4-7

We prepare for Christmas for four long weeks in Advent. We had our Christmas Eve services and our Christmas Day service, and now we’re at a unique point in the liturgical calendar between Christmas and Epiphany called The Season of Christmas. Today is a day to celebrate and savor and reflect on the mystery of Christmas. Because Christmas is kind of a Mystery, a kind of who- done it? After all the preparation, all the shopping, wrapping, partying, Adventing, what was that all about? It is a Mystery. Let’s look at the readings and try and unwrap this big mysterious present.

Our first clue comes in our opening Collect which says, “Almighty God, who has poured out upon us the new light of thine incarnate Word.” What does that phrase “incarnate Word,” capital W, mean?

In ancient times, the concept of Word meant something different than our everyday concept of a group of letters on the page. OR a word processing program… Words, and indeed individual letters in the Hebrew language, had mystical meaning. And really, if you think about it, they do to us as well.

If you’ve ever traveled outside the U.S., you might remember the first time you went to a foreign country and didn’t speak the language? You were cut off from understanding, from fluid communication with other people that you always took for granted.
We use language so carelessly, we take it so for granted, that we often forget how powerful it is.

The ancients, who lived in an oral culture, understood the power of communication as something holy and linked it to the concept of Wisdom. Wisdom, accumulated knowledge of the Wise, was largely passed down through spoken language.

In ancient Judaism, Wisdom, the Word, came from God and God spoke to humanity through the patriarchs like Moses and the prophets. Wisdom and the Word were ways of contemplating the mystery of God.

But what does incarnate mean?

The word itself in English means, “in the flesh.” We all know how much better it is to meet someone in person. Think about how much more real it is to speak to someone in person than talking with them on the phone or communicated with via email. So think about incarnate that way, as “in person,” Here is God’s Word, God’s Wisdom, “in person”, in the flesh.

Our reading from Isaiah foretells this as something to celebrate. Isaiah speaks with urgency and excitement about a new thing with images of a wedding, the dawn, a burning torch. This is one of the clues… this mystery is not a murder mystery, it is a good, wondrous mystery.

Our reading from Paul’s letter to the Galatians gives us another clue.

Paul makes one of the earliest written connections between Jesus as God’s Son. When you open the Bible as a book, the letters of Paul come after the Gospels. But Paul wrote his letters before the Gospels were written. Paul says that before Christ, people lived with God under the Law, and people tried and tried to reach God by trying to be good followers of the Law. But something always got in the way. Our flawed humanity, our habit of getting ourselves in the way. Paul asserts that Jesus has come into the world to make the connection to God for us. Jesus reconciles us to God. We do not need to try and be perfect under the law anymore. Jesus has made that connection to God for us. The mystery is getting more and more full and full of good news.

Which brings us to our Gospel reading, the Prologue of the Gospel of John, which is one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible, both for its language and its meaning.

This opening of John sounds a lot like the very opening of the Bible, in Genesis, when God creates the world. Like Genesis, it starts with “In the beginning…” But instead of God creating the heavens and the earth out of nothing, John says that in the beginning there was the Word.

So the Word, this mysterious thing we have just talked about, was there before the world was made, and John says “All things came into being through him.” Quite an assertion. Think back to Genesis and how God speaks the world into being. God says, “Let there be light.” God says, “let there be…water and land and all the creatures of the earth.” John equates the act of God speaking with creating life itself.

The Word is one with God, and creates through God’s speech. Besides being beautiful, this passage is also one of the scripture passages that points to the doctrine of the Trinity. Another clue to solve the Mystery of Christmas.

Yet the mystery continues. John says that “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him.” The light of the world, the Word, came into the world quietly, and over time his influence and love became known through the church. Notice how John restates what Paul has said earlier, that through Jesus, those who seek to understand the mystery of the Incarnation become children of God.

In the last paragraph, John says, “The World became flesh and lived among us…full of grace and truth.” And the passage ends with: “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.”

So the mystery of Christmas is that this cosmic force of Life itself, the Word, Wisdom, Christ, came into the world he was instrumental in creating, as a helpless baby and “lived among us”.

David Perry, our priest in residence this fall used the theme, “God is a surprise” for our retreat at Bishop’s Ranch.

The mystery—and surprise--of Christmas is that God did what no one could have expected. God has reached out to us, in person, and lived as one of us so that we may know God in person. Amen.

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May 25, 2008

1760

Beth Foote - May 25, 2008

1 Corinthians 4: 1-5 ; Matthew 6: 24-34 ; Psalm 131

It’s prom season, and our son Colby is renting two tuxes with red vests this year because his girlfriend Noelle has a red prom dress and she lives on this side of the bay. Last weekend they went to her prom and next weekend they’re going to his prom. Although it turns out that both dances are being held at the Julia Morgan Ballroom in San Francisco!

It made me remember my senior prom long, long ago, back in the 1970’s. A little different…I remember Powder blue tuxes and driving in my convertible Volkswagen named Max…no limousines. …And way back when, my prom date quickly figured out that I am a first class worrier. He gave me a hilarious book called “How to Make Yourself Miserable, a training manual,” which I still have today. There are chapters like “How to select a 3 dimensional worry”, and my favorite, a chart that has disastrous possibilities to consider while flying. Six geese could fly into engines simultaneously. Excessive vibration could loosen bolts holding plane together. And my favorite: “disturbed pilot could jump out of plane in fit of pique.”

I’d like to think that I’ve grown out of my worrying ways over the years. But unfortunately, some things are hard-wired. So, being a first class worrier, this passage in Matthew has always been a favorite of mine. What is worry after all? What does it mean to live without worry? How can we do that?

One of the great things about the Revised Common Lectionary, the system of readings we now follow in the Episcopal Church, is that for most of Ordinary Time, we will read through a big chunk of Matthew. So we will get a good sense of the flow of Matthew’s gospel which was written primarily for Jewish Christians, and reflects Jewish customs. Today we look at the sixth chapter of Matthew, a discourse by Jesus on how to pray. I encourage you to look at the whole chapter sometime this week. Jesus gives us the Lord’s Prayer in this chapter, and advises people to seek an intimate relationship with God through prayer; he says we should not pray publicly for effect. He says we should go into a room in private to pray. Our passage on worry comes after his discourse on prayer and I think it develops out of it; I believe Jesus is saying that to get to the place where you don’t worry, you need to have an intimacy with God.

Several weeks ago I traveled down to UC Santa Barbara to see my oldest daughter. I also wanted to spend a quiet day at Mount Calvary, an Episcopal monastery and retreat house. It sits at the top of the mountains overlooking Santa Barbara.

I got to Mt. Calvary in time for had lunch with the community of 7 monks and their guests at the monastery. I happened to sit next to Brother Roy, who does calligraphy and teaches Centering Prayer. As we ate together, we found we knew people in common in Berkeley, and I told him a little about the many transitions going on in my life. He said simply, “God is in all of it. God is usually in the midst of turmoil” He recommended I walk their labyrinth outside.

The mountains behind Santa Barbara are very dry and rocky, and the Mt. Calvary labyrinth is made out of native rocks. It’s rugged. Dry and homemade. They had a flyer with suggestions on how to walk the labyrinth, and the following stood out for me: “Take the risk of recognizing an emptiness in ourselves that only love can fill.” And “consider the possibility of the new, the miraculous, the transfiguring entering our lives.”

There are three movements to walking the labyrinth: moving inward, centering, moving outward. Moving inward means shedding our roles, our worries, our expectations, and just be.

This is difficult for those of us who are worriers. Worrying really is a way of trying to be in control; if you worry enough, something bad won’t happen, or by worrying enough about the what-ifs, then you’ll cover all the bases. In a way, a worrier is always on guard. At the opening to the labyrinth I struggled to let down my guard. An image came into my mind of coming to airport security where you have to take off your shoes, empty your pockets, in a sense shedding your outer defenses. So I walked into the rocky labyrinth, and I offered my worries up to God.

When I got to the center of the labyrinth I sat there in the dirt for a long time. I watched a California quail and many other birds I would not have usually noticed. Then I began to notice that in between the dry boulders of the labyrinth there were small green plants pushing up shoots. There was a large wild fennel plant that smelled of licorice pushing aside several boulders. People had left pebbles at the center of the labyrinth. All was very quiet. Within my soul and around me on the mountaintop. In those green shoots, those birds, that experience of quiet, at the center of that dirt labyrinth, I found that intimate connection with God, and that experience of being held.

Our Psalm today describes this state. Being like a baby on mother’s breast. Quiet. Absolutely trusting. Perhaps that is what Jesus is talking about here in Matthew. That place without worry. That place where you are in the presence of God, in the now.

I think worry is part of the human condition. Whatever our life situation, there seems to be something to worry about. In contrast to those around the world today who really worry about having enough food, and the fundamentals of living, we are so privileged here in Menlo Park in the early 21st century. Yet we still worry because the bar has been raised, and we’re living at such a high level of materialism that demands so much to maintain. And our culture says that we cannot let any weakness or cracks show in the veneer. Especially perhaps for those of us who are good at the game of making money, and have signed on to the total package. We have so much to lose. Perhaps this reality relates to what Jesus says about serving both God and wealth being impossible.

Jesus is saying here that worry is wasteful. Worry fills up our mind with useless and essentially hopeless white noise. When we worry we’re distracted from the centrality of God because we’re focused inward on worrying.

Worry diminishes, faith grows. Worry closes us down, faith opens us up to God’s abundance. When we are faithful rather than worry full, there is a sense of God’s time, God’s depth and breadth. God’s possibilities that are always bigger than any we could worry into existence and beyond our imaginings. Faith brings us into connection with the “Wow, I never thought of that.”

The Spirit moves in surprising ways. Worry closes us off to only what we know and can personally imagine. Perhaps this is what Jesus means by the Kingdom of God. “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.” The Kingdom of God, the place of surprises, is a hard place for worriers to enter because we’re always thinking up our own kingdom of known possibilities, our own kingdom of worry, and we miss the exit into wonder and surprise.

These days we hear a lot about being good stewards of the earth, about being green. Let me suggest that as Christians we can be good stewards of our relationship with God, too. In our reading from Corinthians, Paul suggests that ministers are to be servants and stewards. When we move away from worry and move towards God, we becoming better servants to God and better stewards of our relationship with God.

This has been a challenging time for us here at Trinity, and I think this passage also speaks to where we are as a parish. Collectively, we may be worried about the direction Trinity will take. What’s going to happen now? Can we withstand more change? Who will be our interim? Who will be our new rector? How will all of this play out? How will we get through it? One could really make a 3 dimensional worry, a first-class anxiety out of all of this.

Yesterday as an alum, I attended the graduation at CDSP, my seminary in Berkeley. Retired Professor Bill Countryman preached. He spoke about how the Holy Spirit is like a great storm, stirring up everything in her path, including the Episcopal Church as a whole. I agree. The Holy Spirit is not a tame little flame from a bic lighter, she can be a storm, a whirlwind that often feels destructive and chaotic when she’s moving through. Certainly, the Holy Spirit has been roaring through Trinity as of late. Professor Countryman also said that the Holy Spirit does not leave a barren wake of destruction, though, like Hurricane Katrina. She clears the ground, and then seeks out raw recruits to rebuild in a new way. In the context of the graduation, he pointed to the new seminary graduates as the raw recruits. In the context of Trinity, I think we who are here are all the raw recruits.

How do we know our marching orders? Jesus recommends we do not worry about it, but pray about the path, the labyrinth ahead. The instructions for walking the labyrinth said, “Take the risk of recognizing an emptiness in ourselves that only love can fill.” And “consider the possibility of the new, the miraculous, the transfiguring entering our lives”

AMEN

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May 05, 2008

1761

Beth Foote - May 5, 2008

The Rev. Beth Foote; Acts 1: 6-14; Psalm 68:1-10,33-36; 1st Peter 4:12-24, 5:6-11; John 17: 1-11

The Ascension. Faster than a speeding bullet, leaping clouds in a single bound…Up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s….Jesus?

The Ascension has always been a mystery to me, as I’m sure it was to the apostles. I can imagine them saying, “but wait!” Everything seemed to be coming together: Jesus had risen from the dead. He revealed himself to them on the Road to Emmaus, and in the breaking of the bread, to Thomas, and then there was the breakfast on the beach. Then up on the Mount of Olives, they ask him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” I can imagine them thinking, maybe it was all going to make sense now.

Jesus replies, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem…” And then he ascends. And they are left with a question mark.

I can hear them saying, “but wait a minute!” Now we’ve seen it all! And he leaves us here…and as usual, we don’t know what he means.

At that moment, the apostles enter into in what I recognize, somewhat painfully, as transitional time and space. They have lived through so much, and given it their all, and now, they don’t know what’s next. They don’t know that Pentecost is coming right up for them. They just know they are where they are, The Upper Room.

Transitional time. There’s also transitional space. Have you ever noticed that we don’t have narthex or lobby here in our sanctuary? It makes for strange Feng Shui in here. We walk directly from the social space of the courtyard into the sacred space of the church with no transitional space to get ready for worship. Last week I took the Godly Play storyteller training, and we learned about creating sacred space in the classroom and how to prepare the children to be “ready” for hearing the story. Adults need that, too. Transitional space creates a place where people can get ready for encountering the sacred.

A transitional time and space. That is, in fact, where we are as a parish. Betwixt and between rectors. We need to ponder what has happened, to grieve for whatever we need to grieve for, and it will be different for each one of us. We will need to determine who we are as a parish now that we have been changed and enriched by Father Mike’s ministry, before we can move on to the next stage.

Like the apostles, I think we would rather be zooming ahead to the next chapter, and the new, rather than be in this in between place.

Because it is rather uncomfortable to be in this transitional space.
I know something about this transitional thing myself, since I have been in the transitional time and space of the ordination process in the Diocese of California or 4 plus years. There are many steps to being ordained a priest. It’s a whole labyrinth of its own. I’m going to digress a bit here to fill you in a little on how it works.

It all starts with a call to ordained ministry, that then needs to be conveyed to your community. You begin the ordination process as an aspirant and must receive the sponsorship of your parish. Then you enter into a long series of interviews and assessments by the Commission on Ministry and the Bishop of your diocese, and others. And you do a three year graduate degree in Divinity at a seminary. The progression is, you become a postulant, then a candidate, then you’re ordained a deacon, then a priest. You must be at each one of those stages for at least six months, and each one has its special steps. My favorite was the three day psychological exam. (I was relieved to know that I am certifiably sane.)

For me, the step between postulancy and candidacy was the sticky one. I bombed my candidacy interview with the Commission on Ministry. I was so nervous being interviewed by twelve people at once that I completely clammed up. They said that I should come back in six months. I disagreed; I thought I was ready to move on. But now I think they were right.

It was a difficult time for me, and it happened the week before I started my position here at Trinity. I had done everything I was supposed to do…got the good grades, did hospital chaplaincy for 10 weeks, and then look what happened. I felt over my head. Angry. And stuck.

The reading from 1st Peter reading for today describes well how I felt then, it felt like a “fiery ordeal…a testing …something strange was happening.”

The 1st Peter reading has relevancy to our situation at Trinity Parish, too. We are in that transitional space. We are being tested by this strange thing that has happened to us. It’s almost unprecedented that a rector dies in office in their first year at a parish. Extraordinary. It takes time to absorb something like that and make meaning out of it. It takes transitional time and space.

Let’s go back to the narthex for a minute. Maybe it’s a coincidence that we don’t have one and then again, maybe it isn’t. This place was built in 1950, a time when there was great confidence in modernity and reason; and new things were best. And part of that ethos was that we could throw out traditional things that were old-fashioned and mystical. That meant it was ok to skimp on that transitional space of a narthex. The absence of a narthex says to me that those in charge thought the sacred was easily accessible. Just walk right into it. Find your pew. At that moment in time, 1950, the world of progress had such momentum, moving forward as fast as possible “made sense”, and this absence of a narthex speaks to that, moment, I think.

I think we’re not so different from those folks. Like those at Trinity Parish in 1950, we in 2008 are do-ers and like to keep things moving. It’s daunting to think of being in the in between stage again. Is it really necessary? Isn’t it old-fashioned and churchy? Let’s march right in and do what needs to be done. I’ve been having those thoughts myself.

Well, I’ve come to realize that transitional space and time is not wasted space. It’s essential. It’s a time to learn, reflect, and grow. It’s a gift. My rocky patch in the ordination process made me dig deeper and accept my vulnerability in answering my call. By doing the work of ministry here with you I better understood my call. And, my second candidacy interview was a home run. I also learned it’s best to be in a transitional space with others together as a community of real people linked together by God’s love.

And that is what we see in our Acts reading as well. Here they are, the original parish, the apostles and the women, huddled together after Jesus ascends. What are they doing in the Upper Room? They were “constantly devoting themselves to prayer.”

As I was writing this sermon, I received my email newsletter from the Episcopal News Service, and it had a blurb for a new book called “The First to Follow” by John R. Claypool. I quote it because it seemed to arrive at just the right time.

“One of the first things that Jesus did in his ministry was to reach out to twelve individuals and draw them into a circle of close companionship with him. This series is about those twelve apostles, their relationships with Jesus and with each other, and what the dynamics of that community can teach us…Jesus did not wait for people to be perfect in order to call them into the circle of God's love. As we look at those that Jesus called, and consider ourselves as part of that enlarging circle, we gain not only a deeper sense of our own reality, but also a deeper sense of how Christ would like to work with us.”

“An expanding circle. Those Jesus selected… Jesus did not wait for people to be perfect in order to call them into the circle of God’s love and a deeper sense of how Christ would like to work with us.” In this transitional time it is good to remember that none of us is perfect and God calls to us in our brokenness, where we are today, to call us into the circle, into God’s service.

We are part of that expanding circle. We have all been called here. As many of us found out yesterday at the National Brain Tumor Walk, we are Team Trinity.
In the last few months, as uncomfortable as they have been for me with Father Mike’s illness, I have come to understand that I’ve been personally called to be here at Trinity for some reason. It’s mysterious but true.

On Monday I met with Bishop Marc in his office at Grace Cathedral, and we had a wonderful conversation. I realized it was the last step in the transitional time called the ordination process. Afterwards, I walked through the cathedral by myself and imagined how it will be to be ordained there. I imagined all of you there. And so many other people, from Christ Church, and other parts of my life. I felt God’s love manifest in all those relationships. It was a little overwhelming. I had a good cry. I realized I was moving forward into a new phase of life and ministry.

And Trinity will, too.

In the last two weeks I’ve been reminded by clergy friends all over the diocese that so many of our sister parishes are praying for us, and have been for many months. We are not in the Upper Room alone. The whole diocese is praying with us in this sacred, transitional space, in this uncomfortable Upper Room. And good things will come to us in God’s time. Christ wants to work with us. The Holy Spirit is coming. Amen.

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April 13, 2008

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Beth Foote - April 13, 2008

John 10: 1-10, Psalm 23, Acts 2: 24-47

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want…

Last week we gathered here at Trinity and heard from my good friend Katie Evenbeck, Director of St. Dorothy’s Rest retreat center in Sonoma County. Katie wove the story of the 12 Mile Hike to the Ocean, with the Road to Emmaus story as a metaphor for carrying on, and being transformed by the experience of the journey. This morning we “go pastoral” again, returning to the countryside with our readings from the Gospel of John, and the 23rd Psalm.
Over the course of the week, I learned that today, the Fourth Sunday of Easter, is traditionally known as Good Shepherd Sunday. However, today, we do not actually hear Jesus say “I am the Good Shepherd” because the Lectionary, or plan of readings appointed for each Sunday, cuts the Good Shepherd reading into separate pieces. But we do hear the 23rd Psalm, which I am so glad about and hear those beautiful words, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

Today we read the first part of the passage from John, which includes an elaborate metaphor. Jesus talks about shepherds, gatekeepers, thieves and bandits. It’s hard to know who is who. Reading it this time I noticed that John says the disciples did not understand what he was talking about, so Jesus, the consummate teacher, shifts gears and tries to get his point across again with a simpler metaphor, saying “I am the gate.”
It sounds simpler, but is it?

My son Colby and I just returned from a quick trip to Eugene, Oregon to check out the University of Oregon one last time before committing. (He decided to go there and accepted their offer…Go Ducks!) I was thinking about this sermon during our trip and I was amazed by how many gates we passed through: Security gates, boarding gates. Car rental return gates. It got me thinking, what is a gate? A gate is an opening, an official point of controlled access which guards something of value behind it. By passing through the gate we access whatever is within, and often must pay some sort of price to pass through.

Gates were a big deal in the ancient world. Cities were surrounded by walls, and gates in walled cities like Jericho and Jerusalem controlled access to the cities, and earlier in the Gospel John we hear about the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem. Maybe Jesus knew this gate? Jesus’ knowledge of gates also might have something to do with his talking about “thieves and bandits.” In those days, only thieves and bandits got into a walled city without going through the gate. By pointing to a commonly understood situation, Jesus is able to get across a point to his listeners, that the Gate in his metaphor is important.

Walls and gates continued to be key throughout the medieval and modern times. Siege warfare, moats. The Brandenburg Gate and Checkpoint Charlie in West Berlin. And of course, gates are still all around us. Besides the airport, I can think of many everyday examples: gated communities, tollbooths, border crossings. Usernames and passwords on websites. And we can’t forget Bill Gates as well. You will have to make your own connections there.

Gates are often symbolic or decorative as well as functional. Think of the Golden Gate Bridge, the ornate gate at the entrance to Chinatown. Or the Arch de Triomphe. English church traditionally have a Lychgate that marks the entrance to the sacred ground of the churchyard. And until recently, St. Dorothy’s had a Lych Gate, too.
Getting to St. Dorothy’s is part of the fun of the place. You turn off the Bohemian Highway in Camp Meeker up a one lane path that winds up the hill. There are several heartstopping points along the way where you are so close to the edge you can only pray, curse, and look straight ahead, and God help you if someone is coming the opposite way. Finally, you drive up a rise and with a flurry of gravel under the tires, you’ve arrived. That is where you used to see a rustic structure that spanned the entrance to the camp, the St. Dorothy’s Lych Gate. Two summers ago they had to tear it down because it was rotting away. This summer they’re rebuilding it in grand, Arts and Crafts style.

My oldest daughter was very upset when the Lych Gate was demolished. I think she was upset because it was an important landmark in her young life. Andrea first came to St. Dorothy’s as a camper when she was 10. The Lychgate symbolized for her a her passage into a new world of being away from home and having cool adventures away from Mom and Dad.

So, we can think of gates as landmarks for transition points in our lives. As we all know, there are times in our lives when it feels like a gate swings open before us, or shuts behind us. I’m sure you can think of your own gateway experiences when your life is forever changed. Perhaps it was going away to college, getting married, starting a new job, having children, retiring. There are others, too, that we don’t talk about as much: diagnosis of a serious illness, an accident or injury, divorce, estrangement, death of a loved one, losing a job, depression. These are all experiences we pass through that are difficult, and we must carry on through the transition and beyond it.
“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures/he leadeth me beside the still waters.”

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says many other “I am” statements like today’s “I am the Gate.” “I am the light of the World.” “I am the Way, the Truth and the Light.” There are also many passages where Jesus says “the Father and I are one”, “the Father has sent me,” which is the closest we get to an explanation of the Trinity in the Gospels. In John, Jesus is tightly bound with God the Father so that in looking at Jesus, we are encouraged to see God.
In Trinitarian theology the three persons of the Holy Trinity are all in conversation with each other; it is a dynamic, circular, social, loving relationship that models how we can interact with each other as people of faith in community. Orthodox Christians picture the relationship of the Trinity as a dance.

Perhaps as “the Gate,” Jesus is our access point to this way of living in the Trinity as community. By knowing Jesus, we enter into the Gate, like the sheep, in our passage today, and enter into the life of faith, the ever changing web of life in community, the dance. Our reading from Acts today describes this shared life well.
He restoreth my soul/ he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his Name’s sake.

As we enter this Gate that is Christ, we trust in the Good Shepherd even “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for thou are with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”
Today we’re at the threshold of one of those gateway transitions in the life of our parish, as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death with Father Mike and his family. This is a difficult time for all of us. There is much uncertainty, sadness, helplessness, and uncomfortable feelings of “Why, God?” and “what ifs?” Our souls are tender. We have all had experiences with loss in our own lives that reemerge in times like this. I’ve been reminded once again of the loss my family experienced twelve years ago when my brother died at 35 of alcohol abuse.
Yet out of that tragic experience, something new emerged. It was during that time of walking the path of shock and grief, through the valley of the shadow of death, that I learned to pray and ask for God’s help. How could this be happening to my family? Out of desperation, I learned to offer it all up to God. And God took it and held it for me while I walked through that valley. It was during the trip up to Arcata where Mark died under sad circumstances, that I found the Good Shepherd walking with my parents and me. And it was some time after that experience, maybe five years later, that I began to feel the first stirrings of a call to ordained ministry. Out of great pain, God brought forth something new and life-giving in my life.

“Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies/thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.”

We do not know what seed God has planted in the heart of our parish during this difficult time at Trinity. Father Mike’s ministry has been a seed of change and growth. He is part of our story at Trinity and he is in the dance of the Trinity, the web of relationships that is Trinity parish.

Father Mike is on a journey to the resurrection, and is still traveling in the shadowlands. The Shepherd is with him, as the Shepherd is with us as we live through this experience as a parish. The Shepherd’s rod and staff, the disciplines of prayer and worship comfort us today as He guides us onward.

We are in the shadowlands with Father Mike and his family, yet we see the green pastures, the still waters beyond the Gate. Together, let us break bread and drink from the cup that runneth over and remember:
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” Amen.

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February 17, 2008

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Beth Foote - Feb 17, 2008

Romans 4: 1-5, 13-17; John 3: 1-17; Psalm 121

Tomorrow is the Feast Day of Martin Luther on the Episcopal calendar of Saints. I mention this because The Letter of Paul to the Romans made such a dramatic impression on Martin Luther. In what was known as the “Tower Experience,” Luther, already a monk, had a moment of conversion when he read from Romans 1:17 about being justified by faith. He went on to say that Romans was “the purest Gospel,” and should be read everyday. In today’s reading we heard the famous passage that affirms righteousness or being accepted by God “depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace.”

Luther was forever changed by this epiphany that grace is a free gift from God, and many historians say that the Reformation really began with Luther’s “Tower Experience.”

The other juicy, beautiful text we have today is the story of Nicodemus from the Gospel of John, which includes the classic verse John 3:16.

Nicodemus was a Pharisee, and member of the powerful Sanhedrin council who condemned Jesus. Scholars believe that Nicodemus can be traced to Nicodemus ben Gurion a wealthy Jew who lived in Jerusalem in the first century C.E.

Nicodemus visits Jesus secretly at night, and the darkness is a significant piece of the story. African American slaves felt a kinship with the Nicodemus story because in the ante-bellum South slaves could only worship at night. Perhaps Nicodemus was sneaking out at night so no one would know he was talking to Jesus. Perhaps you could say that Nicodemus was enslaved in a way by the powerful system he was a part of; at that time, the Sanhedrin had become a puppet of the Roman occupation. What did Nicodemus see in Jesus that caused him to seek him out secretly, under cover of darkness?

I confess, I feel a kinship with Nicodemus. He is one of us, one of the well-heeled city dwellers, one of the respected ones, who is comfortable in their home at night, who has enough to eat, who has the weight of religious tradition behind them. And then he meets Jesus. The challenger, the truth-bearer.

In their conversation, Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Of course, Nicodemus takes this literally and gets stuck on the metaphor of birth. He says, “How can this be?” Like Mary at the Annunciation, he wonders at the miraculous. “How can this be?”

This passage is the original context of the term “born again.” To be a “born again” Christian has become an American cultural phenomenon. In “born again” Christianity, one knows exactly when you were born again, or accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior. And it’s only after that moment of personal conversion that one is baptized.

How do we do we see conversion in the Episcopal Church? I’d like to point out that in our baptism service we ask, “Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Savior? Do you put your whole trust in his grace and love? Do you promise to follow and obey him as your Lord? (BCP 302-303) That’s pretty darn direct. It sounds like the process of being “born again,” to me. But in our tradition, we often say those words as parents for our infant children, and our parents might have said them for us. We ourselves may not have a decisive “conversion moment.”

I suggest that if you’re looking for something special to do in Lent, meditating on that one question in the service for Baptism could be your discipline. Like many vows we take in life--marriage comes to mind--the questions answered at baptism take years to live into and understand. That is one of the reasons why we usually have baptisms during a Sunday morning service: to pledge our support as a community, and to have the opportunity to repeat our baptismal vows. and say those words over and over again.

In the Episcopal Church I would say the process of conversion is usually a slower process of “inwardly digesting” Scripture, participating in the Sacraments, and learning from each other as we serve as members of a faith community. One way is not necessarily better than the other, but I think it’s important to understand that conversion not just about “being saved” myself as in “I’ve got mine” vs. “you don’t.” Rather, it means a lifelong process of accepting God’s grace and responding to Christ through service.

Lent is a good time to do this kind of work, to examine where we are on our faith journey, or using another vocabulary, in the conversion process. Like Nicodemus, we often approach Jesus when we are in the dark or searching for deeper meaning. Jesus meets us in the dark. He listens but he also challenges. He speaks, but we often hear the message and respond with “How can this be?”

Jesus says, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” One commentary I read this week said that the water Jesus refers to here is not baptism as we assume; as a Jew, Nicodemus had no knowledge of baptism. When Jesus talks about being “born again,” Nicodemus naturally thought of the watery fluid released during the birthing process. As women know, birthing takes time, and is mysterious. For me, that mystery included a deep sense of the physical and spiritual being intertwined. Like Water and the Spirit are intertwined. I think it’s important here that Jesus underscores the reality of physical birth and spiritual birth; they are inseparable in our lifelong process of spiritual formation. Jesus challenges Nicodemus and us to widen our vision, go beyond the literal.

Working hard is part of our culture. We tend to believe that if we work harder, we will succeed. The early bird gets the worm. My daughter the college student uses that term, “pull an all nighter.” Just be more focused. Use best practices. That’s part of the American work ethic, the Silicon Valley work ethic. We unconsciously also apply that ethos to our relationship with God

But Jesus says, “Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You must be born from above. The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?”

I love it when we hear the humorous edge to Jesus’ voice. In addition to being mysterious, the birth process is capricious. If we go with nature, babies are born on their own timetables. It’s the same way with our spiritual formation. There IS capriciousness to life in the Spirit. Some people DO have conversion experiences. Some people don’t. God doesn’t schedule conference calls. Holy epiphanies come while we’re in the shower, or on the freeway, or cooking dinner, or exercising. God’s time is Kairos, outside of our everyday 24/7 structures. God’s spirit blows where it will.

Ultimately, the initiative comes from God. Martin Luther’s revelation about the passage from Romans was correct, we are justified by faith, and grace is a gift. But I believe that we have to keep our ears and eyes open to hear it, understand it, and feel that deep acceptance of God’s love. As we hear in the classic verse this morning, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life,” God reaches out to us through the Incarnation of Jesus, the mystery of the Cross, and Resurrection. Grace is always a free gift. And like Nicodemus and Martin Luther, we may need to be in a searching mode to be ready to notice the gift, accept it, and sense God’s deep freely given love for us.

And I must add, that once having accepted God’s grace, Christ asks us to act in His name in compassion and justice, to take the risks for our faith that Nicodemus took. For the encounter with Jesus was the first installment in the Nicodemus story. Later in John’s Gospel we see Nicodemus stand up for Jesus at the trial, and later, after the Crucifixion, risk an enormous amount by joining with Joseph of Arimathea in anointing Jesus’ body. In the Eastern Church Nicodemus is known as “the myrrh-bearer” because he brought 100 pounds of myrrh to the tomb. Handling dead bodies was something that would have made him very unclean under the temple purity system. Martin Luther accepted God’s grace and then went on to nail the 95 Theses on the Wittenberg cathedral door.

Grace is free and it changes us forever.

May we continue to grow in our response to that grace, with acts of compassion and justice. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

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February 06, 2008

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Beth Foote - Ash Wednesday 2008

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…

Last Saturday my family and I went to the burial service for Irene Totah, a dedicated Christian who lived to be 92 years old. Irene was one of those people who seemed timeless, eternally about 65. She had olive skin, beautiful white hair, and she looked radiant in bright colors. Irene was a greeter when Hale and I walked into Christ Church 16 years ago with two toddlers, and she was inspirational…She was one of the first women to serve on the vestry in the 1970’s, and she volunteered 25 hours a week until she was 90 years old, including thirty years of service on the altar guide. Over the years, Life dealt Irene several serious blows: she was widowed in her fifties, and her daughter predeceased her. Through it all, Irene remained a person of faith. The parish went through challenging times in the 1990’s, but she did not leave, or become bitter. Instead, she exuded wisdom and patience in the midst of controversy.

On Saturday afternoon, I saw her ashes beautifully displayed on the table in front of the altar, by the Pascal candle, and I was moved. Once again, I experienced the finality of death. Ashes. Irene is not here. Just ashes with her name on them.

It was a jolt. Irene was 92, her life had been full and complete, and yet the jolt of reality was still there. Irene, as we knew her, was gone. But it was a good jolt. To mourn someone and realize and how much we loved her. It wasn’t a bad jolt, but a “reality check” in the best sense of the word; she was truly one of the community of saints.

And I think Ash Wednesday can be that kind of positive jolt, a good reality check. In a way, it’s a mini-preview of our own burial, that we ourselves get to attend. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It makes us think of our beginnings and our endings. Ash Wednesday invites us to think about our mortality.

Beatrice Buttreau writes in her book, Easter Mysteries:

“We human beings are made of dust---star dust—as is everything else in this universe. The cells of our bodies…are composed of molecules made of atoms whose complex nuclei were fused together in the fiery hearts of exploding stars…we are a traffic of molecules, constantly coming and going, building up and forms coming part…Living is the name for this traffic, this constant motion, this coming and going, this building and destroying, this birthing and dying. The human body is always being built up from the dust and is always reverting to dust. The situation is not so simple as being born once and dying once. Coming to be and passing away are going on all the time…”

I think it is important to hold these two ideas together: ashes to ashes, mortal start and mortal finish, along with this dynamic, amazing, ever changing process that is called living. As Christians, God calls us to channel the process of living so that we become more like Christ. To do this, we occasionally need to do some spring cleaning, clear some space, roll up the rugs so that we have more room to dance with God.

This is what I think Lent is all about, a time to look at ourselves at this specific point in time and ask, “where are we in terms of our relationship with God?” Given that we are constantly changing, what direction is that change moving in? What fine tuning do we need to do so that we can better hear the voice of God who calls us and beckons us?

That is the point of the traditional Lenten disciplines, to draw us closer to God in the midst of our busy lives. “Giving up” something like a certain food, or fasting on certain days, has been seen as a way to become closer to God. And let’s admit it, we all have daily habits that are all about satisfying the self. Our culture encourages us to satisfy our every personal craving. Perhaps Lent is a time to examine those daily habits and see if they’re helping you in your relationship with God. But as Jesus says in our gospel reading, do not use disciplines like fasting as a way to boast or call attention to ourselves as pious people. Jesus wants us to use such changes as a way to become closer to Him. When we change our usual patterns, we gain clarity. I’ve always been a night owl, and I’m know for being barely civil in the morning, yet over the last year or so I’ve learned to appreciate getting up early on Sunday mornings to drive to Trinity. I see the sunrise over Hayward…I know it doesn’t sound very glamorous, but there is no traffic; it feels like anything is possible. Making a small change in our habits is one way of saying, “I’m open to new things, God.”

As human beings, we often wish to freeze life the way we think it ought to be. I know I do. I resist letting go and letting God into my life. But how exciting it is when I do take the risk of saying, “thy will be done.” What would happen if we let the Holy Spirit into our lives a bit more this Lent? What if we said, “Your will be done, God” more often?

Here are a couple of little suggestions for Lenten practices. They’re basic, everyday kind of things. Throughout the day pay attention to your thoughts. When life starts to get you down or you experience frustration or anxiety, notice it. Then lift whatever it is to God. Just a simple, “You take it, God,” will do.

Take time daily for prayer. Be quiet, and talk to Jesus like a friend. Then listen and pay attention throughout the day. There will be dialogue in unexpected ways.

Challenge yourself to read one of the Gospels from start to finish in a couple of sittings. Each one is only about 50 pages. It’s an amazing experience. You are a different person each time you encounter the Gospel. You will gain a new perspective this Holy Week and Easter when you’ve read the whole sweep of the Gospel message. And that’s what Lent is all about, moving us to a new perspective by the time the Holy Mystery of Easter comes on March 23.

So much of life, even the spiritual life, involves simply showing up. God is everywhere, but there’s a reason we have a church, to draw us together as a community around Christ. As Christians, we are living beings always in conversation with other living beings with a shared purpose. Perhaps a Lenten discipline means being here every Sunday in Lent. Make a commitment to come to a Lenten program. Explore spiritual practices for everyday people with Father Mike. Come on Wednesday nights for the Beatitudes. Come learn about the Millennium Development Goals and how God calls us to share our treasure and minister to the poor. We are so fortunate to have our own, beautiful labyrinth; come walk it on a guided walk or on your own.

At baptism, the priest makes the sign of the cross on your forehead with the blessed oil and says, “you are marked as Christ’s own forever.” Today we anoint with the ashes of the palms, and say, “to ashes you will return.”

The smudge of ashes etches over that original anointing with oil and makes it visible once again for us. It is a promise and a challenge of love. In our gospel today, Jesus says, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumer and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” This Lent take that dusty raw material of your life and offer it up to God. Together, we as individuals and as a parish can grow in a Godly direction.
May you have a Holy Lent and be transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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January 13, 2008

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Beth Foote - January 13, 2008

The Rev. Beth Foote January 13, 2008
Isaiah 42: 1-9 Matthew 3:13-17

I love baptisms. Being newly ordained, baptizing is one of the things I’m most excited about doing in the coming years. In the last year and a half it’s often seemed like my seminary training was all theory and not enough practical knowledge, but they did teach us at least one practical thing: when baptizing babies, make sure the water is nice and warm! And I can guarantee the water for the font is nice and warm.

Baptisms are always happy occasions, with gathered friends and relatives, and godparents. Today is the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, one of the traditional days on the church calendar for baptisms, and all over the world people are being baptized this morning. We have two candidates for Holy Baptism, Tyler and Francesca. I’d like to welcome the Corbett and Timar families and all their friends to Trinity. It’s a pleasure to have you here with us.
I also love it when we baptize older children and adults. If you are thinking about becoming baptized, please talk to one of the clergy. If you’re feeling self-conscious about it because we mostly see infants being baptized, remember that Jesus himself was a grown man of thirty when he entered the River Jordan to be baptized.

Of course that is the story we just heard from the gospel of Matthew. And this story is so important that it’s found in all four gospels. In the Jewish tradition at that time ritual cleansing was a common thing, although mostly in the context of special stone baths called mikvahs. Jesus’ baptism was totally different, an alternative kind thing. Jesus’ baptism was out in the wilderness, in the free-flowing Jordan river. It was conducted by the John the Baptist, wild man prophet who lived on the margins out in the desert, wore camels hair clothing and a leather belt, and who ate locusts and wild honey. Probably not a seminary graduate.

In today’s sanitary era of daily showers, baby wipes, antiseptic hand cleaners, vacuum cleaners, and swiffers, being clean is something that we take for granted, it’s a constant state of being for us.

Yet in the ancient world, cleanliness was unusual enough to be the mark of something important. By cleansing, we rinse away dirt or other impurities. And after the cleansing process, the person or thing, is transformed in some way, fresh and ready for a new chapter. Something like this happened with Jesus baptism. This ritual cleansing was a marker of transformation After his baptism, he began his ministry. Something like this will happen for our baptismal candidates. Baptism is a marker of transformation.

This story also shows us Christ’s approach to ministry. Consider that he wades into the water and asks to be baptized. He insists on being one of the baptized, not the baptizer. As Isaiah writes in our reading today, God says, “Here is my servant…” Throughout his life, Jesus ministers to others as the servant. He asks the lepers and the blind, “What can I do for you?” And at the end of his life, he took a bowl of water, and washed his disciples feet like a servant. It is a surprising thing…Isaiah also says, “the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare.” In his servanthood, he becomes the New Covenant between the people and God that Isaiah talks about, and calls us to take on his servant ministry today.

Matthew writes that when Jesus emerged up out of the water, Jesus saw the Holy Spirit come down like a dove and heard God’s voice say, “This is my Son, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Here we have echoes from Isaiah, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him.” God blesses Jesus with words of love, and if we connect the dots, we can see the Trinity: God, the Father speaks, God the Holy Spirit comes down like a dove, and God the Son is baptized and his ministry begins. The holy becomes visible.

We participate in this holiness made visible at every baptism. The Book of Common Prayer says,” In Baptism, “God adopts us as his children and makes us members of Christ’s body, the Church, and inheritors of the kingdom of God.”

This means that through ordinary things: a water bath, a prayer, words of love, a touch, the holy becomes real among us here today. Like Jesus’ baptism, these baptisms today are markers, once in a lifetime milestones of transformation, making Tyler and Francesca full members of the Church and “marked as Christ’s own forever.”

And remember, in our tradition, they are both now eligible to gum down a Communion wafer as soon as their parents decide they’re ready to safely do so.

Several weeks ago we celebrated our annual 4:00 Christmas Eve pageant here at Trinity. The children acted out the Nativity Story, and this year we had a real three month old baby for our baby Jesus. At 3:45 or so, it was pandemonium in here, with angels and shepherds arriving with their families, and the band was setting up. Right then, Emily, the mother of our young 4:00 Jesus asked me if I wanted to hold her baby son. She handed him to me and I held him—so light—Ahhh! A beautiful moment of peace for me. It reminded me that with a baby that age, just holding is important work. I could feel the tension, the frenzied buildup to Christmas fall away. This was what Christmas was about, God coming into the world as a tiny baby.

Babies teach us about servant ministry, about love, what it means to “be love” to a tiny person and to “be loved” in return. Holding our baby Jesus reminded me that we all began as babies, even Jesus. It reminded me that this is what the real baby Jesus felt like on Christmas Eve.

Holding our baby Jesus on Christmas Eve, I was reminded how vulnerable the real baby Jesus was, and how much trust God had in Mary and Joseph to be the holy parents. Holding our baby Jesus on Christmas Eve reminded me of how much Jesus trusts us to be holy parents to our own children, to children we nurture in our church community, and in the wider world.

In a few minutes, in the course of the Baptism ceremony, the whole Trinity community will stand and we will renew our own Baptismal Covenant. In that rich and challenging litany God calls all of us, not just the parents and godparents of Tyler and Francesca, to support them as they grow, and to follow Christ and take on the ministries each of us is called to exercise.

When we are baptized we begin a lifelong process of growing into our faith and following Christ. Baptism is a onetime thing, but it is the beginning of an all the time process of ministering in Christ’s name. Baptism is our common ground as Christians.

Christ calls all of us to take up this holy work. It sometimes feels heavy when use these large words like “covenant,” “ministry” and “forever.”

But Christ promises us that his burden is light, like the featherweight of a baby, because He is with us every step of the way, and He is an everflowing source of strength, like the running river of the Jordan, the font of every blessing.

And after we greet the newly baptized, and share the sign of Peace, we will continue with that other ancient Sacrament, the Holy Eucharist, which feeds us spiritually, and supports us in everything we do. Remember that God, the source of life everlasting said to Jesus, “You are my beloved. With you I am well-pleased,” and as we continue on our baptismal journeys, remember that he says the same to you. Amen.

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November 11, 2007

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Beth Foote - November 11, 2007

Job 19: 23-27a, Luke 20: 27-38

My husband is the fifth of six brothers, and I love each one of my brothers in law dearly… but I cringe when I read today’s gospel, and imagine the plight of that poor woman the Sadducces would have marry one brother after another to fulfill the Law of Moses…It also reminded me how as a woman I am so fortunate to live my life in the 21st century.

Who were the Sadducces? This is their one appearance in the gospels. They were a Jewish sect who did not believe in the resurrection. We know a lot about the Pharisees, and we know that the Essenes were another more mystical sect.

How would this thing called the resurrection, the afterlife work? Clearly, in this story, they are laying out a sort of trick question for Jesus. Kind of an unsolvable story problem. They’re saying, How can you believe such an off the wall thing? How would the social order continue? But the Saducces were a “show-me” kind of group, a lot like us much of the time, really.

In some ways I see the Sadducces’ point; they are honest about how little we know about life after death. Where are you on the resurrection? Of course, the resurrection is one of the central beliefs of Christianity. Let’ look a little closer at our own Episcopal tradition.

One of the readings appointed for today comes from the book of Job. Job is famous for suffering; he has everything taken away, and as he suffers, Job laments, wrestles and questions God and his own faith.

We did not hear it today, but I’ll read it for you…
Job says, “O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever!”

The rest of the reading also appears in the BCP on page 491, the first page of the Service for Burial, and I’ll quote from that:

“I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth… After my awaking, he will raise me up; and in my body I shall see God. I myself shall see, and my eyes behold him who is my friend and not a stranger”

Believe it or not, even though I’m on the road to being a priest within the year, I’ve only attended two Episcopal burial services with a coffin. Witnessing the priest meet the body at the door to the church and say these words as the procession enters the church is a deeply moving experience. Both times the tears of mourning were mixed with tears of love and joy at those comforting words. “I know my Redeemer lives…in my body I shall see God…who is my friend and not a stranger.”

Our tradition honors the wrestling and questioning about the nature of life and death. Indeed, we may believe in the resurrection, yet it may not seem possible in the midst of our grief for a loved one. And our tradition is deeply rooted in the Ancient Creeds, and the traditions of the early church. The Apostles Creed says, “I believe in the resurrection of the Body and the life of the world to come.” Just last week we celebrated All Saints Day and remembered those who have died and entered the communion of Saints, the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us, alive in heaven.

In the midst of suffering and in the valley of the shadow of death, we say these words together and let God carry us in faith. The rubrics in the Prayer Book say “the liturgy for the dead is an Easter liturgy. It finds all its meaning in the resurrection. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we, too, shall be raised.”

Jesus responds to the Sadducces by affirming the resurrection as something that transcends the social norms of the time, and really, of most of social norms of the world today. It is a radical vision that makes no distinction between men and women; all are liberated to be children of God, “children of the resurrection.”

Recently, a neighbor of mine lent me an audio version of C.S. Lewis’ “Great Divorce” to listen to on my commute. It’s a fantasy tale about the afterlife. The protagonist is a ghost who takes a bus ride with other ghosts up from a grey town Lewis describes as a washed-out, joyless “hell” to a strange, beautiful country that turns out to be “heaven.” Lewis has the reader overhear various conversations between ghosts and heavenly beings who patiently try and expand the vision of the ghosts. But almost all of them are stuck on the issues of their earthly life, on protecting themselves from spiritual growth. Many of the passengers on the bus give up and go back to the grey town. At the end of the story, the narrator wonders why the heavenly beings can’t get on the bus and go back down to the grey town and help out those poor ghosts who seem so stuck in their ways?

His guide laughs and says that the heavenly people would literally not fit back into the grey town. He reveals that the bus the narrator rode had actually come up through a tiny crack in the ground; the people who now lived in the heavenly country had grown so big that there was no way they could become that small to return…so their heavenly souls were now gigantic, they were so filled with joy and light.

Lewis does a marvelous job of challenging us to see the largeness, the unexpected awe of God’s vision of the effect of the resurrection. Perhaps the ghosts are something like the Sadduccees, or ourselves much of the time. They want heaven to fit into their “box” of the way things are on earth. Social systems would remain the same. Women and men would have their roles. Jesus says, “no, it’s bigger than that.” God is capable of much more than we can fathom. But we can’t see it if we continue to make the rules for ourselves or, like the ghosts in Lewis’ tale, protect ourselves from spiritual growth and God’s grace.

So, the resurrection means we are transformed after death. And I think knowledge of the resurrection also transforms us, expands us as people of faith in this life. Several years ago, Nora Gallagher wrote a fabulous memoir called, “Practicing Resurrection.” What a great idea, to “Practice Resurrection” the way we practice prayer or meditation. Do you practice resurrection in your own life? How does the belief in the resurrection affect the way you live your life? What difference does it make?

For me, when I’m aware of the resurrection, and practice living that way, there always appears to be a breath of fresh air, a whisper in my ear that there is more going on than meets the eye. My belief in the Resurrection adds an openendedness to my life.

“Practicing resurrection” makes me aware of God’s grace that comes from outside myself. Just when I think that I have things all figured out, and that I know all the parameters to the “system” of my life, the Holy Spirit swoops in and stirs up the waters, rearranges the pieces on the gameboard so that I have new horizons, and I see the abundance of God’s grace. And I grow and stretch in grace and awareness of God’s limitless potential. The resurrection brings hope into all aspects of my life, even places where it might look hopeless.

How can we access this hope? How about what we do every week here at the Eucharist. The Eucharist is a weekly reminder of this hope; they embody the hope of the resurrection. This is made clear to me each week as we share the Eucharist here at Christ’s table. It’s always something of a revelation. (and I have to say that I’m loving being a deacon, and distributing the bread.) When we receive the blessed bread and the wine, I often think that that grace, that hope from God becomes molecularly part of who we are. It really is awesome. We carry it out within us to coffee hour, and home with us into the world from week to week. The resurrection becomes part of us. As we gather again this morning, consider how God’s abundant love of the resurrection flows through your life. What an awesome gift we have. Come receive the resurrection, become a “child of the resurrection.” Live your life out of that abundance. And consider how you can share this abundance with others. Amen.

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September 30, 2007

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Beth Foote - Sept 30 2007

Luke 16:19-31

Today we celebrate St. Francis Day, a little bit early to match up with our Brunch, and we bless our animal friends, both alive and stuffed. St. Francis was born, a long time (826 years ago) in Assisi, Italy. His mother was French, so they named him Francesco, or “Frenchie.” The 12th Century in Italy was a time of poverty, constant war, and disease. Francis was very fortunate to be the son of a wealthy cloth merchant. But as a young man, he was captured in battle and was a prisoner of war for over a year.

During that time, he faced loneliness, and sickness. When he returned to Assisi, he sensed God calling to him, and had several visions. Once when he was alone in a little country chapel that was falling down from disrepair, Christ spoke to him from a crucifix and said, “Francis, rebuild my church.” At first Francis thought Christ wanted him to physically rebuild the little church, and he reset the stones, and restored the little chapel. Then, he heard a sermon on the story in Matthew 10, where Jesus says to the disciples to go out and teach but do not bring anything with you. After that, he decided to listen to what Jesus said, and really “do” it. He denounced his father’s wealth and pledged to live a life of poverty.

At first, the people of Assisi thought of him as something of a freak. So did his family. What was wrong with this guy who had everything, and then gave it up? But then, people began to see that he lived what he believed; he walked the walk. He lived as closely to the way Jesus lived as he could. He treated others the way he would like to be treated. And as he lived into that simple way of life, Francis began to really “see” the poor and the unfortunate. All around him were many sick people who were disfigured by disease and rejected because they were unattractive. They were forced to live outside the city walls. So Francis went to live with them. He cared for them. He “saw” them as people like himself, beloved of God, no different than himself, a radically simple yet profound idea. It was a difficult way of life, and at the same time he achieved a spiritual freedom and joy that was contagious. When people radiate that kind of simple joy and peace, it is very attractive. Almost immediately, people followed Francis, and he really did rebuild the church in the larger sense, by inspiring people to more fully live the Gospel. His little band of followers quickly became the Franciscan Order, which lives on today.

I’m sure Francis knew today’s gospel reading about the rich man and Lazarus. There are basically three acts to the story. In the first act, we’re introduced to the rich man with his purple linen robes who lives behind a gate and Lazarus, the poor, sick man, who sits just outside the gate. He lives in such a state of poverty and disease that the dogs passing by lick his sores.

In the second act, we see the two men again, in the afterlife. Now, they have switched places. Lazarus is “carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham.” In ancient Judaism, this was a very honored place to be. The rich man is in a “hot spot,” being tormented by flames.

In the third act, the rich man can see Lazarus over there in his “luxury box seat,” but he can’t bring himself to talk directly to Lazarus the poor beggar. Instead, he addresses Abraham and says, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.”

Notice how he only “sees” Lazarus as a poor man of the servant class who can “do” something for him. Lazarus is forever below him, a potential servant, an underling, not as good as he is. In life, the rich man never thought to give Lazarus a cup of water, or help him in life, and still expects Lazarus to wait on him in the afterlife.

So, Abraham, the patriarch, speaks for Lazarus, the lowly beggar, and tells the rich man, that he’s no longer in charge and he better get used to it. I sense a little amusement in Abraham’s voice.
He also points out the “great chasm that has been fixed.”
But wasn’t there always a great divide of social hierarchy and privilege? After a lifetime of putting himself first, the rich man has made his own uncomfortable, painfully lonely niche.

The rich man then realizes that he’s stuck. He begs Abraham to send someone to tell his 5 brothers how they can escape his fate.

Will the 5 brothers get the message? It’s an open question, for us, too. Are we going to listen to Jesus? Are we going to heed the warning? And just how are we supposed to do that?

This week I went to the annual clergy conference at the Bishop’s Ranch. The theme was the environment and the Millenium Development goals. We had the privilege to meet our Presidiing Bishop Katherine Jefforts Schori on Friday, and what a wise person she is. Over the two days, I found many links to both St. Francis and our Gospel for today.

We all know that humanity is degrading the Earth. One speaker said that if everyone on the planet consumed at the same rate that the Bay Area does, it would take the equivalent of 4 Earths to make that possible. Add to the equation the extreme poverty in much of the world that the Millenium Development Goals seek to address. Here are the two extremes: extreme over-consumption and extreme poverty, kind of like the rich man and Lazarus, flip-sides of the same coin. Our Presiding Bishop said that there might be a reason the word “consumption” used to be a slang term for tuberculosis, a disease that sucks the life out of people. Could our level of material consumption be doing the same thing to us and our Earth? Is it a disease?

Yes, I think it is a disease, but I don’t think it’s anything that new. The rich man suffered from it when he didn’t see Lazarus, and the people in St. Francis’ time suffered from it when they threw the sick people outside the town walls. It’s selfishness and it’s fear mixed together. What is new in our time is the presenting symptom of massive over-consumption shutting out and affecting the whole Earth and the rest of its people.

If that’s the disease, what’s the antidote? At the end of our gospel reading, Jesus suggests that we repent, or turn toward God. And we have a loving and forgiving God who is always waiting for us to turn that way. As faithful people of God, we can do this. One day at a time. Turning toward God changes our perspective, and it can change the world’s. It causes us to look up, and see beyond ourselves. At that point we can begin to see Lazarus at our gate. We can begin to see how interrelated we are, and as living members of the environment, how everything we do effects the environment and everyone who lives within it.

We might begin to change our habits of living so that we reflect God’s face rather than our own. We might be able to “see” other people who aren’t “like” us. We might begin to “see” them more the way Francis and Jesus did, as people beloved of God, and living members of God’s creation.

In the last few weeks we’ve had an invasion of hummingbirds in our backyard. I have a tall, perennial plant about my height called a monkeypaw plant, that they seem to like. The other day I was watering the garden, and a hummingbird came up to one of the monkeypaw blossoms at my eye level. I looked at the hummingbird and the hummingbird looked at me. For a brief moment, we saw each other eye to eye, as living beings created by God.

That is what Francis did, and what Jesus wants us to do with our animal friends, and with our fellow human beings. Today at the Peace, let’s all say to one another, “Peace be with you, beloved being of God.”

One of my earliest memories is watching my grandfather put out his hand and coax a hummingbird to come light on his hand. It’s so faint, but so beautiful. I think I was about 3 or so. That beautiful memory now reminds me a bit of St. Francis’ way with animals. He saw animals as fellow creatures of God, more than something to be hunted for food, fattened up on the farm to eat or to provide transportation. He “saw” them as beautiful, fellow beings created by God and loved by God.

Amen.

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August 05, 2007

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Beth Foote - Aug 5, 2007

Beth Foote, August 5, 2007 Colossians 3:1-11, Luke 12:13-21

I don’t know about your home, but ours often seems like a “possession farm.” Things come home with us and then seem to multiply. Backpacks, athletic shoes, CD’s, notebooks, cords for electronic devices, and tennis rackets, are the most prominent things in our entry hall these days. Before that it was soccer cleats and swim goggles. And before that it was Fisher-Price plastic toys, Playmobile figures, Barbies, and legos which always seemed to be under foot. If you’ve ever gotten up in the middle of the night and stepped on a lego piece, you know how painful that can be.

But I can’t blame it all on the kids. I am a famous collector of magazines, books, and other items that feather my nest wherever I go. My son calls the interior of my car “the lost and found.”

I often wonder…why do we have so much stuff?
I think a lot of people are asking the same thing these days. With our awareness of Global Warming, we’ve become more conscious of our wasteful consumption habits. The bumper sticker, “Whoever dies with the most toys wins,” doesn’t seem quite so funny anymore. But then, why do we have so much STUFF?
Acquisition has become the cultural norm. We also live in a society so focused on our individual’s “needs” that shopping has become a sport, and we approach the world from a “What’s in it for me? perspective. We think, “I need THIS for my child, or to fulfill my desires” or “That thing will make me feel complete, and will add to my security.” We need to have more and more money to keep this up and to make us feel secure. Perhaps that is the crux of it really. Things, and the accumulation of wealth make us feel more secure.

This seems to be part of human nature. Jesus often talks about how wealth can get in the way of our relationship to God, and our reading from Luke today contains one of those passages, the parable that’s known as “the Folly of the Rich Man.” I’d like to look a little more closely at it this morning.

Notice that the rich man starts out already rich even before his land yields abundantly.

But he wants more. Notice how Jesus, the master storyteller, brings us right into the thought process of the rich man; we’re in his head as he thinks through what to do with his bumper crop. Notice also, that he is having a monologue. No one else is included in the decision-making. He’s the center of it all.

What does he not do? He doesn’t consider other people. He doesn’t consider that perhaps he could store some of the harvest in the existing barns and share with the poor. He doesn’t think of what good he could do for other people or his community with this windfall. Instead, he sees one path: to build a bigger storage system---bigger barns---to store it all securely for himself so that he can sit back and keep it all to himself and feel more secure. This sounds familiar. People my age are bombarded with advertising about saving for retirement. …the message is, there can never be enough in the bank.

Certainly, we need to do our best to provide for ourselves. However, just like the rich man in our parable, the societal dream is to be able to sit back and “relax, eat, drink, be merry.” It sounds good, but is it? Should it all be about my security? What about those less fortunate in our community? The Epicopal Church has championed the Millenium Development Goals to challenge us to share our wealth with the extremely poor of the world. And I think we’re on the right track there.

At what point do wealth and the quest for security equal “greed”? Greed is a pretty strong word, but Jesus uses it here. He says, “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed.” As Christians living in our extremely affluent American culture in one of the most affluent areas of the country, I think we need to ask ourselves: are we like the rich man in the parable?

Well, what happens next to the rich man? He meets up with God and faces his own mortality. It reminds me of Ebenezer Scrooge in Dicken’s Christmas Carol. God calls the rich man a fool because he’s spent his lifetime accumulating the wrong kind of wealth, and building bigger and bigger storage units for it. It’s a sobering moment.

We’ve had our own sobering moments here at Trinity lately as we begin to travel the road toward healing with Father Mike, his family, and with our beloved office manager, Alecia MacDowell. We’ve also been confronted with our own sense of mortality and vulnerability, and how we love much Father Mike, his family, and Alecia.

And maybe that has some connection with today’s readings. Out of confronting this unexpected suffering, I think we as a parish have already experienced a sense of becoming richer toward God. On Wednesday we gathered together in prayer at a healing service in the chapel, and many people came forward for anointing. We’ll have this service every Wednesday at noon and there will be labyrinth walks also. God is at work here, teaching us to pray, to practice our faith and learn to live leaning on God rather than ourselves. We are beginning the process of growing together in faith.

How else are we going to do this? We are moving forward with our new Sunday morning services and programs for the fall. We ask for your support and participation as we walk in faith together. This week I had lunch with Kris Goodrich, who founded Child and Family Institute which shares our campus, and we are going to start a Faithfull Families group especially for young families at Trinity. CFI has another program that helps Moms discern their “heart voice” in the midst of the loud voice of the culture that is so focused on consuming. Small groups who gather to pray and discern God’s movement in their lives. This is something we could do at Trinity as well, and not just for Moms.

St. Ignatius called whatever brings us closer to God “consolation,” and whatever takes us away from God, “desolation.” As we move together into the fall, I hope that we can open our hearts to the “heart voice” more, and share our faith journeys, including our sobering moments, with each other. We have lined up several speakers this fall who have written about their faith journey or explored it through art. I hope that together we can continue to move toward consolation and away from desolation.

Our faith journey with Mike and Alecia these past weeks has brought home to me that living is a risky business and that living with security as our highest goal is not how Jesus calls us to live. He calls us to risk for the sake of love.

Our reading from the letter to the Colossians gives us a hint of how to do this:
“If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.” In other words, we are no longer the center of it all…”Christ is all in all!”

Instead of building bigger barns, bigger storage units for our earthly wealth, Jesus asks us to build BIGGER HEARTS and trust that we are secure in God’s love.

Jesus asks us to build bigger hearts that can accept his love, be thankful, and then give it away. Perhaps we could look at it as a paradigm shift, changing from storage units and into distribution centers. From desolation to consolation. From collecting to sharing.

As we grow together as a community of faith, let us to risk becoming richer in God’s love and risk letting God’s love flow through us. Amen.

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May 27, 2007

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Beth Foote - May 27, 2007

Pentecost, May 27, 2007 - Acts 2:1-21

How about those special effects? I think that Steven Spielberg or George Lucas should film the Book of Acts. It reads like an adventure novel. In today’s reading there’s rushing wind, tongues of fire…and then… how about those disciples? How do these “hicks”, these uneducated guys from the backwater of Galilee bypass Berlitz lessons and instantly speak all these different languages? Wind…Fire…the power of language.

If you’ve ever been sailing on San Francisco Bay, you understand the power of wind. Several years ago, I was out on the Bay sailing near the Golden Gate on my friend’s sailboat and we decided to put up the spinnaker. A spinnaker is that huge, usually colorful bubble of a sail that puffs out in front of a sailboat. We unpacked this huge spinnaker out of the seabag and struggled to put it into position. Those sails are big! It luffed and puffed, and made a great racket as the wind played with all that material… and then we came about, turning the boat, and pointing it downwind, so the wind would fill the sail…and suddenly… it felt like the wind picked up that 40 foot sailboat. We flew along under the Golden Gate, past Alcatraz. What a ride! It was a joyful, hang-on, here we go, kind of moment. A Pentecost kind of moment.

Then there are those mysterious tongues of fire. Yet God’s fire is all through the Scriptures. There’s the Burning Bush. A pillar of fire by night led the Israelites across the desert. God descends upon Mt. Sinai in a cloud of fire and indeed, the disciples were gathered in that room to celebrate Pentecost, the Jewish festival that celebrates Moses receiving the 10 Commandments.

And, God’s fiery spirit continued to reach out to us. God’s Spirit spoke through the fiery speech of the prophets, and then the quiet fire of the Holy Spirit came to one particular woman, Mary, and God entered our human world as Jesus, the Christ.

Now, have you ever thought about how we know about Jesus today? There were no newspapers, and, of course, no internet. Communication meant….literally, word of mouth. And it was all up to the disciples.

They witnessed how Jesus’ ministry of love and hope, his death and resurrection lit up a dark corner of the Roman Empire like a fireworks display. Yet it often seems like the disciples would just as soon go back to fishing. It was too overwhelming to do on their own.

So.. how did they do it? God gave them the Gift of the Holy Spirit.
Tongues of fire rested over their heads…but it was only as I prepared for this sermon that I realized that they must have literally had tongues of fire to communicate the gospel so well…

We see it in the amazing “Berlitz moment” we hear about in our reading today…suddenly these ordinary guys from Galilee, of all places, had the ability to communicate the message of Jesus to their multi-cultural ancient world… they were able to communicate in all the languages, all the idioms of their time.

How do we reconcile this with our own experience of the Church? Are we doing that? Do we have tongues of fire? Are we communicating the gospel in the language and idioms that people today understand? Do we have that ability?

Several weeks ago I read in the Chronicle that scientists were researching how we could harness the power of the jet stream. The jet stream typically blows from west to east 6 to 9 miles over the northern hemisphere at speeds up to 310 mph. Professor Ken Caldiera, down the road at Stanford says,

"My calculations show that if we could just tap into 1 percent of the energy in high-altitude winds, it would be enough to power all civilization. So the idea that we're not tapping into it -- or at least investigating it -- seems crazy to me. All the energy we need is flying by, 5 miles over our heads."

What if…the Holy Spirit, like the jet stream, is flowing by, over our heads and it’s just out of reach. How could we access it?

First of all, we have to be humble. We cannot “harness” the Spirit to do what we want. Instead, the Spirit, kindles and energizes us to do God’s work. From my perspective as a strong-willed, 21st Century person… maybe the amazing thing about Pentecost is the disciples’ willingness to be led by the Holy Spirit.

But let’s not forget that the disciples lived with Jesus day by day, throughout his time of ministry. They traveled together. They ate together. They listened and prayed together. They were formed in faith by this experience, ready for the Spirit’s coming. They spent time with the Master. They spent time with the Master.

We need to spend time with the Master, too, if we are to receive the Spirit. We need to prepare for the Spirit, make a home for the Spirit to enter in. We need to pray and listen, take time to read and hear God’s Word. We need spiritual practice and listening hearts. We need to admit our vulnerability, and sit with it…which is sometimes uncomfortable.

It’s so hard for us to let go of our own agendas. We want to be in charge, not changed. Life for us is pretty good…we are comfortable… this is the temptation…to seek our own comfort rather than asking to be led by the Spirit.

If we give in to our temptation, if we do what WE want, not preparing for the Spirit, we’re not going to get very far. Our own power is limited. If we rely on ourselves, we may look shiny from the outside like we have it all together, but our efforts will ultimately, be rather cold… because the Spirit isn’t there. The fuel, the fire and the energy of God isn’t there.

Last night in Alameda was freezing…instead of eating outside with our next door neighbors we had the last indoor fire of the year. And since I was preaching about the tongues of fire this morning, I watched the fire with new interest…

This is obvious, but true: Fire is hot! It’s alive! It radiates warmth. Heat. Energy.
Those tongues of fire over the disciples heads must have been hot! What a great image for being “fired up!” I thought of John Wesley, the 18th Century Anglican priest, how found his heart “strangely warmed” and led a revival that became the Methodist Church.

We need the Spirit’s fire, that HEAT, to be authentically Christian, and fueled for ministry. As a church, we need the Spirit’s warmth to shine out beyond Ravenswood, beyond Pine and Laurel. With the power of the Spirit, we could become a church known by our warmth, by our love, by our faith.

The power of the Holy Spirit is a gift. However, we CAN ask for it through prayer. We ARE in control of whether we pray or not; we ARE in control of saying yes or no to being led by the Spirit to do God’s work. And in my experience, we most often ask the Spirit’s help when we’re in a place of vulnerability.

The Spirit is here, stirring among us. Last Sunday, I sensed it swirling around the room at the Dream Sessions.

Personally, I feel the Spirit challenging me to radiate God’s warmth and communicate Christ’s message to children in the language of today. And I pray for the Spirit’s help and your help in this work.

The motto of St. Dorothy’s Rest (retreat center and camp in Sonoma County) is, “The Winds of God are blowing, so keep your sails unfurled.” I keep thinking of what the researcher at Stanford said, "So the idea that we're not tapping into it -- or at least investigating it -- seems crazy to me. All the energy we need is flying by, 5 miles over our heads."

As we move forward together as a church, let’s come about… into the wind of the Holy Spirit. Believe it or not, it’s much closer than 5 miles over our heads. It’s right here. Let’s unpack our spinnaker and hoist it high. Let’s make a space for the Holy Spirit to fill us with God’s power. Amen.

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March 25, 2007

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Beth Foote - March 25, 2007

Beth Foote, Director of Family Ministries
Lent 5, Year C: John 12: 1-8 March 25, 2007

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One of the pleasures of my life these days is watching movies with our daughter Hannah, who’s 12 going on 13. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Titanic, The Queen. You could say these are all chick flicks, but all three of them are also about something precious that is lost—first love, great ship, great diamond necklace (Titanic), Princess Diana (The Queen), innocence, or end of an era (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Queen, Titanic).

I think the movies are one of the rare places in our society where we’re allowed to experience the power of symbolism. For example, in “The Queen,” after Princess Diana’s death, Queen Elizabeth is visited on the moors by a magnificent and elusive stag. The Queen gasps and says, “You are beautiful!” and shoos it away. Several scenes later, the stag is shot, and the Queen visits her neighbors’ estate to see the stag…in a sense to pay her respects. The stag is too beautiful a creature to survive.

In our passage today from the Gospel of John, Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus, expresses her deep love for Jesus by anointing his feet with a “costly” perfume. Mary, the faithful and thoughtful listener understands that Jesus will die soon. What a scene. John would make a good screenwriter.

We get to know Jesus in the gospels through stories, and through his interaction with an “ensemble cast” of characters in the stories. Like us, he is embedded in a community. In this episode, we have Jesus with Martha, Mary, Lazarus…and, of course, Judas. But let’s leave Judas offstage for a few minutes.

This is the third “ensemble scene” we have of the friendship between Jesus, Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. In the first dinner scene, in Luke, Martha, the busy sister, complains to Jesus that her sister Mary, is not pulling her weight in the kitchen because she sits at Jesus’ feet and listens. Jesus tells her that Mary is choosing the better part.
In the second “ensemble” scene, Jesus calls his friend, Lazarus, from the tomb after Martha has confronted him and asked him, “where have you been all this time?”

Here, in the third “ensemble” scene, it’s a week before Passover, about where we are today in terms of Palm Sunday, which comes right after this passage in John. Once again there’s a dinner party. Martha serves, and Mary takes her place at Jesus’ feet. Jesus knows he is going to die. Perhaps you could say that is the “elephant in the room.” Some of his followers understood and some didn’t. The tension is building. In the midst of the party, Mary leaves her seat, takes a “pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”

To continue with the movie analogy, I’d like to stop “the film” for discussion here and go a bit deeper…
First, I think it’s important to note that this is not Mary Magdalene. There are many famous paintings that confuse the two. This is Mary, sister of Martha, friend of Jesus.

Second, Washing the feet of guests was an expected act of hospitality in the ancient world. It was most often done by slaves or servants. Mary is doing a servant’s work, just as Jesus takes the part of a servant when he washes the feet of the disciples in the following chapter, at the Last Supper.

But this is no ordinary footwashing. Mary takes a “costly” perfume, and applies it to Jesus feet, using her hair. Even from 2,000 years distance, we feel ourselves pull back a little. It seems too personal. She expresses her respect and love for him through touch. Through the primal sensory experience of fragrance. This is an extraordinarily intimate thing to do.

Especially in the context of Jesus’ Jewish culture. As in almost all of human history, this was a man’s world. Women were separate from men, and believed to be often unclean. Notice how John identifies the house as belonging to Lazarus. Women’s hair was a symbol of their sexuality, and had to be kept covered. Here, Mary’s hair tumbles down and she uses it to touch Jesus, a man. This is an extraordinarily intimate thing to do.
Mary’s anointing of Jesus feet has a sacramental feel to it. In fact, Jesus acknowledges that Mary is doing this for him as anointing for his burial. The last rites.

This is an act of worship. Like the scent of incense that lingers in the air after a high church service, John says that Mary’s gift of Nard filled the room so that everyone was included in the experience.

In seminary, we study the sacraments, their history, their meaning. My Liturgics professor at CDSP was in favor of “extravagant symbols” like total immersion baptism at the Easter Vigil. Anointing meant pouring, not dabbing, scented oil over the candidate’s head and smearing the sign of the cross on their forehead. Once, as I was sitting in the front row, I became his demonstration model Fortunately, he did the demonstration without the oil. He would like Mary’s style. This is an extravagant symbol.

What is the purpose of this kind of thing? Is it necessary? Why do it?

Every Saturday I look forward to reading Peggy Noonan’s “Declarations” column in the “Pursuits” section of the Wall Street Journal. In January she wrote a column called, “An Ode to Ceremony,” that talked about how Gerald Ford’s Presidential funeral at the National Cathedral unexpectedly touched thousands of people on a level deeper than they were used to. The ceremony, music and beauty brought them to tears. Why was it so moving? Why do we need ceremony? She writes: “We do it to make the picture broader for a moment, and free ourselves of our cynicism. And we do it finally to enact what so many feel and rarely say, not only because it’s corny but because if you mean it, it’s beyond words.”

Corny. That’s an interesting choice of words. Perhaps this is a good time to bring Judas back on stage. In a sense, Judas sees Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet as Corny. He asks “Why?” Judas is not equipped to understand love beyond words or its expression. Sure, John also says he’s a thief, but mostly I think he is CYNICAL….
Judas focuses on the fact that the Nard is “costly.” John makes a point to note that Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with “costly” nard---which adds weight to its symbolism. To her, only something costly would fully express her love for Jesus. We can also look at it as honoring the costly price Jesus will pay.

How does Jesus react? He says to Judas, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You will always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” Jesus once again says, in essence, that Mary has chosen the better part, rather than the busyness of Martha or the cynicism of Judas. Jesus accepts Mary’s “over the top,” gesture as an expression of love that is, as Peggy Noonan says, beyond words.
Love that is beyond words. The sacramental. Ceremony. Of course, we Episcopalians are good at this sort of thing. We’re famous for a “good show” and people from the outside world drop in to sample it during Holy Week and Easter, especially.

But every Sunday we celebrate the Holy Eucharist together to “commune” to “be with” Christ and each other in a ceremony of feeding from “one bread and one cup.” We do it very well.
What we don’t do so well is communicate why we do it. It’s difficult to talk about a love beyond words…because it is “beyond words.” Maybe we’re afraid that we look corny to the rather cynical world we live in that is used to experiencing symbolism only in the movies, distrusts it in everyday life and relegates ceremony to weddings, funerals and graduations.

Our reading from Isaiah today says, “I am doing a new thing, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” My prayer for you is that you may perceive the new things God is doing in your life, and in our life together as a community. This movement of God reaching out to us is, like the best movies, a love story. When we worship together and share the sacraments, we are brought to a new place, beyond our cynicism. We are brought to Christ’s feet. And often to tears… Help us to perceive God in our midst, and honor Him, like Mary does in our passage today, by giving the best of ourselves.

Together, here at Trinity, we are an ensemble cast with Christ acting out God’s love beyond words. New things, good things, are happening among us. Lord, help us to share this sacramental love beyond words with others, out in the larger world. Amen.

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