Gratitude Gestates Generosity, the Rev. Jacqueline Cherry, October 18, 2015 – Proper 19, Yr. B Mark 10:35-45

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O God.

This is the second week of our fundraising campaign. My task this morning is to talk about why we should give; specifically why we should make a pledge to St. John’s. Fr. Robert Cromey doesn’t like the word stewardship. He prefers we use “fundraising”. I love Cromey, but I don’t always agree with him. Fundraising is about money. Period. I believe if we put money at the heart of our campaign, we will fail. So, with pure delight, I will explain how the act of giving can transcend balancing a deficit budget and can, in fact, transform lives.

In the gospel stories we’ve heard over the last few weeks, Jesus and his disciples are traveling to Jerusalem.  Now Jesus is acutely aware of his fate, but the disciples have no idea that their messiah is a dead man walking. Rather, James and John, seized by vainglory, have their hearts set on scoring the exulted positions at the right and left hand of Jesus.

Last Sunday we heard about the rich man who asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’ explicit response - “Sell what you own, give it to the poor, and follow me,” was hardly the answer the man was hoping for.  And I doubt it’s what we want to hear either.

Almost three years ago, when my 82-year-old dad was dying, and when nobody else was listening, he told me he had only two regrets: One, he wished he had traveled more.  And two, my dad wished he had given away more money.

Never in my life had I heard him say anything like that about money. It was precisely because he carefully considered every dime he spent, that we always had what we needed, and more. I’ll tell you a little more about William Robert Cherry, Jr. He was really smart, very handsome, charming and funny, and he was really stubborn. For 25 years he worked hard at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UCSD. He loved nature and cared about the environment. My dad always understood how precious water was. Way back in the 60’s he hooked up a hose to the washing machine that diverted the water to the plants in our backyard. When I was older, he timed my showers, and on occasion turned off the hot water if I had exceeded his time limit. He held firm to the conviction of “If it’s yellow, it’s mellow,” though he didn’t use those words. At heart, my dad was an environmentalist, and sometimes I teased him about it.  Oh dad, I would say, you don’t care about saving the water, you care about saving your money. Both things were true.

I’ve thought about how my dad must have felt at the end of his life, with more money than he needed, and regretting not having given away more. Though our theme this morning is “Why Give?”, in light of my dad I have to wonder why he didn’t give. Was he gripped by a relentless fear of not having enough? He was, after all, born 3 months before the start of WWII, during the Great Depression. For the last 6 weeks of his life, I stayed by his side. There are endless stories, both funny and gut wrenching I could tell. But this morning I want to tell you that I think my dad’s inability to believe in something greater than humanity was the reason he didn’t give away more of his money. You see, my dad’s empirical mind didn’t allow for the existence of God. He believed he was nothing more than flesh and bones. It’s interesting that the rich man in last week’s gospel turned away from Jesus even though he believed in God and the promise of eternal life. Either way, both men chose to hold on to their possessions.

By now, most all of you know that I’m alive today because I received a new, very healthy kidney last March. Many in this congregation intimately witnessed the rejection of my 20-year-old transplanted kidney, while prayers for healing flooded in from around the world. In mind-blowing acts of generosity, Sarah, Kevin and Kathy offered their kidneys. A loyal group of people, all of whom are from this congregation, drove me to, and sat with me through dialysis, week after week, month after month. They were with me for the early morning procedures, scans, ER visits, hospital stays and countless runs the pharmacy. At times I was so close to death that even now it scares me to think about. I suffered like this for 8 months. And, at the same time, my heart was broken wide open by the love of my friends. Before I ever got the transplant, I was healed. Even during dialysis treatments, I couldn’t help but feel grateful.

One day, while hooked up to the dialysis machine, I had a great epiphany — gratitude gestates generosity. When I am grateful I want to give. And it sounds nice too — Gratitude Gestates Generosity. Then, in a wave of urgent compassion, and I had a clear vision of how I could put my gratitude into action.

Do you remember Jesus’ response to James’ and John’s self-serving request to occupy a position of extreme honor at his right and left side? Jesus says, “Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.” This doesn’t mean we should abandon our power to become servants. It means that if we are fortunate enough to be in a position of power, because of authority or money, we should use that power to take care of others rather than manipulate them, or in Jesus words, “Lord it over them.”

Jesus is suggesting we use the resources we have to exalt others, rather than look to others for praise and recognition of our accomplishments. Jesus is telling us that power and authority manifested through grace and humility can reorder society.

In the kingdom of heaven there will be no thrones for the powerful.
In the kingdom of heaven stone hearts return to flesh;
In the kingdom of heaven the lowly are lifted up;
In the kingdom of heaven the thirsty have clean water to drink.
Brick by brick, step by step, prayer by prayer, this congregation is helping to build the kingdom of heaven on earth. It’s the love of this congregation that has inspired me to give what I can to help create a new and just social order.

As most of you know, Liz Specht helped to found El Porvenir, an organization that works side-by-side with rural families in Nicaragua to construct wells, latrines, and washing facilities. On February 12, a group of volunteers from St. John’s will travel to Nicaragua on a 10-day work trip. My understanding is that they will help the villagers install some 40 or 50 latrines. With my dangerously suppressed immune system, I can’t make the trip.

But because my dad showed me how to love nature and care for the environment, and because he loved saving money as much as he loved saving water, I am blessed with the opportunity to give away some of the money he regretted holding on to. I will be donating $25,000 to pay for those 40 or 50 latrines and to help with some of the work party’s travel expenses.

To be clear, I’m not giving away my dad’s money because I’m a good person;
I’m giving away his money because I’ve been inspired by good people.

Now I need to tell you one more thing about my dad. With all of his stubbornness, he fought death to the end (oh boy did he put up a fight). His last two days were spent in the Hospice of San Diego. Out of the blue an older woman, who reminded me of a sophisticated Aunt Bee from Mayberry R.F.D., walked into the room. She asked if she could touch my dad. I said she could. She stood at his head and touched his chest, then she leaned down and whispered something in his ear. She stayed with him just 3 or 4 minutes. When she finished I asked what she had said. She apologized for not asking my permission to talk to him. That was okay, but I really wanted to know what she had said. She told me she recited a couple of short psalms. I only remember one - Psalm 4:8

I lie down in peace; at once I fall asleep;
for only you, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.

He died shortly after her visit. Somehow this unknown woman spoke of God in a way that resonated with my dad. And the God he couldn’t believe in during his life, was there to comfort him at his death.

A couple of weeks ago Jamie told us that he gives to St. John’s because he hates change. I don’t want St. John’s to change either. Because when I enter this holy place, I am aware of God’s presence. It’s as if this very church were God’s dwelling place.  When I walk into this sanctuary, I know I will be loved just as I am. Every time I am here, I am filled to overflowing with gratitude. This church changes lives. This church saves lives.

And that’s why we should give to St. John’s. When we give we are not simply filling the gaps in a bare-bones budget. Giving allows us to keep the doors of St. John’s open so anyone can walk in off the streets and dwell in the peace of God’s presence. Giving allows us to keep our doors open so we can follow Jesus back out into the world in love, to lift up the lowly and offer clean water to the thirsty.

Amen.

Hellfire, Mark 9:38-50, the Rev'd Dr Richard Smith, September 27, 2015

We have a built-in desire to be great, to be awesome and fabulous. It’s the way the Creator made us, with an infinite desire to know more and more, to drink in more and more beauty, to love infinitely. Our mantra here at St. John’s, “More Love”, speaks to that desire. One medieval theologian calls it our most fundamental natural desire.

The problem is we don’t always know what truly satisfies that desire, where our true greatness really lies, so we try to satisfy it by various means: climbing the social ladder, running with the right crowd, dropping the right names, earning the right amount of money.

In this country, if someone asks “How much are you worth?”, we usually answer in dollar figures. “I’m worth $100K, $10K, or, embarrassingly we might say, “Well, uh, I have no money,” implying I’m not worth anything. We often measure our greatness by how much money we have.

This misunderstood sense of greatness puts us in competition with others. We compare ourselves: I might not be as “great” as that person, but at least I’m “greater” than this person over here. This is a teeter-totter of elation and depression, because there is always someone “greater” or “lesser” than we.

In today’s gospel, this desire to be great affects how the disciples react to the outside exorcist they run across. They see someone casting out demons in Jesus’ name, and because this exorcist is not part of their own community, they immediately perceive him as a threat. Someone is poaching on our territory. They guard their turf against anyone who might rival them in importance.

I see this as a face-palm moment for Jesus. I see him slapping palm to forehead and going "OMG. Why did you tell him to stop?"

Rather than celebrating with the ones from whom the demons were cast out, rather than rejoicing that their nightmares have finally ended, the disciples have become a tight knit power group. When good is done, and it does not result in their own enhanced standing in the world, they try to stop it. Their focus has become not the work of Jesus, but that others follow them, admire them, hold them in esteem. This, and not the work of the kingdom, determines what they do, the decisions they make, the strategies they develop as they move through life.

It’s been a family neurosis in Christianity down through the centuries, with one Christian community seeing another not as a co-creator in an amazing adventure of bringing a kingdom of justice and love to birth, but as a rival.

Over the centuries, this rivalry has led Christians down the path of war and bloodshed -- Catholics and Protestants, Orthodox and Roman Christians, Anglicans and Roman Catholics slaughtering each other, warring against each other, burning each other at the stake. Not to mention violence between Christians and Muslims, between Christians and Jews.

I suspect it is this sad legacy that Pope Francis had in mind this week in Washington when he spoke of the need to serve people and not ideologies, and to create a culture of encounter and dialogue.

It’s this path of violence lurking beneath what seems at first like petty rivalry between two communities that Jesus rails against in this passage, using images that are both grotesque and disturbing -- images of unquenchable hellfire, of cutting off your hand and foot and plucking out your eye. The kind of strong and grotesque images some artists might use to make a point they feel is critical. We saw this in the gospel a few weeks back where Jesus tells us to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Grotesque images enlisted to make a critical point.

The southern novelist Flannery O’Connor also uses grotesque and disturbing images. She says, "I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear." Jesus is using the grotesque in this passage in the hopes of getting his deaf, dumb, and blind disciples to hear, see, and speak.

One of the grotesque images he uses here is a hell of unquenchable fire. Preachers often interpret this to mean a place of punishment for sinners after they die, but in the original Greek, Mark’s words suggest something very different. He’s referring to a place outside Jerusalem called Gehenna. The ancient prophet Jeremiah spoke of that place. It’s where the Hebrew people once disobeyed God by killing and burning their own children in sacrifice. It was a place of cruelty and violence, of painful screams and a fire that seemed unquenchable.

Jesus is saying that the path of rivalry among the disciples can lead to this same kind of cruelty and violence -- as in fact it has over the centuries. And he is saying he will have none of it.

He adds even more grotesque images to make his point: “I’d rather see you cut off your hand, cut off your foot, pluck out your eye than to take that path of cruelty and violence.” He's using disturbing images and extreme language to make a critical point against war and cruelty and violence among his followers. The tragic history of violence by Christians shows how little we’ve understood this teaching.

Is there a way out of this? This misunderstanding of where our greatness really lies, with its subsequent rivalry and violent cruelty. Is there a way out?

Jesus final words in this passage give a hint: “Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."

Salt is what gives our lives zest. It unlocks the flavors, the meaning, purpose, pleasure of our lives. It’s our awareness of how infinitely great, how fabulous, how significant we truly are.

Salt is the simple awareness that our worth is not something out there that is somehow lacking in us that we must strive for, compete with others for. We carry it inside, a gift from the one who made us. It has nothing to do with how much money we have, or which social ladders we’ve managed to scale, or whose names we can drop, or what we have accomplished. Salt is that abiding peace from knowing that we are, without ever lifting a finger, worth more than many sparrows, and every hair on our heads is counted.

Have salt in yourselves, Jesus counsels.

The task is simply to become conscious of who we already are: each of us a beloved daughter and son of a God who loves us extravagantly. At the end of the day, that’s all that matters. The task is to live from that awareness, to become more and more who we already are.

No need for rivalry to shore up an insecure sense of our importance. We are already infinitely important, infinitely great. No one, nothing, can ever take that away.

Scandal, August 23, 2015, The Rev'd. Dr. Richard Smith

The sun is warm,
The wind is wild
The grass is green along the shores,
Here no bull can hide

The teacher held up his staff and waved it before his monks.
"If you call this a staff," he said, "you deny its eternal life.
If you do not call this a staff, you deny its present fact. Tell
me just what do you propose to call it?"

And here’s one you’ve heard many times:

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

These are koans from the Zen masters. A koan is a riddle without a logical answer. To the casual reader some of these riddles will seem utter nonsense.

“The purpose of the koans,” one Zen teacher writes, “is to break the mind of logic. What the master wants of the pupil is not understanding in any usual sense. He wants to "burst the bag," and drive the pupil with whole-souled precipitation into [enlightenment].”

Jesus is using a similar teaching method in today’s gospel, but instead of koans, he scandalizes his disciples. The Greek word scandalon means a stumbling block, something you trip over as you pursue your spiritual journey.

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them...whoever eats me will live because of me.” His words here are a scandal, a stumbling block. Many people, once they hit that stumbling block, give up the journey.

Those of us who grew up in the faith are hearing this after centuries of teaching and practice of the Eucharist, so we’ve gotten used to this imagery, but for those hearing it for the first time, you can’t blame them for doing a 180 degree pivot. The words are a stumbling block.

But as with a Zen koan, if you can hang in there, that very stumbling block will lead you to a deeper understanding and a fuller life.

Jesus does this. He scandalizes people. A lot.

He’s like Georgia O’Keeffe, the artist known for her amazing paintings of flowers. The paintings are huge and colorful and in your face. She says why she paints them this way:

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

And like O’Keeffe, Jesus in today’s gospel wants to make sure we, in all our rushing around, really, really come to understand a profound paradox, whether we want to or not.

This particular stumbling block points us beyond an either-or kind of consciousness common among Greek thinkers in John’s day: time versus eternity, the good versus the bad, truth versus falsehood, life versus death, male versus female, past versus future, darkness versus light, earth versus heaven.

One of these oppositions in John’s time was flesh versus spirit. Many Greek philosophers saw flesh as evil, spirit as good. The spiritual path required disciplining and denying the flesh for the sake of the spirit. We in the West are heirs of this philosophy. It helps explain today’s cultural distrust and disregard of the body and many of our taboos against sex and women.

Over against this split, John says starkly: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The Creator spirit who existed before time entered fully into our human flesh. Now there’s no more split, and this is the paradox Jesus wants his disciples to grasp here: that flesh is charged with spirit, earth is wedded to heaven.

You can no longer say that becoming spiritual is at the expense of your body--your bones and muscles and ligaments, your pleasures and pains, your delight in good food and music and sex, your physical health, your veins and arteries, your breath and heartbeat. All these bodily things are charged with spirit because the Word has become flesh.

This opens a new spiritual appreciation. As one spiritual writer puts it,

As our senses sharpen, we pick up the buzzing of the bees and the rustling of the wind through the leaves. We become aware of the remarkable artistry in the veining of every leaf and bird feather. Inevitably, at some point, we sense the musculature beneath our own thin skin that miraculously holds us at 98.6 degrees in both snow and blistering sun. We wiggle our toes and stretch our arms and enjoy the sun or perhaps the taste of a raindrop on our tongue. This is God’s gift of sensuality awakening--becoming more sensitive and appreciative. 

This oneness of flesh and spirit has implications for how we live, because this spiritual path demands a profound love for our bodies, a concern for what we eat, the substances we put into our bodies, how we exercise, make love. It involves not subjecting ourselves to the absurd Barbie-doll and Ken-doll body images the media present to us. It involves creating living environments for ourselves and each other that are healthy and beautiful. This spiritual path is very fleshy.

And this oneness of flesh and spirit has implications for life in our larger society.

• In a gentrifying city like ours, with the bodies of so many families and seniors being evicted from their homes and ending up on the sidewalk, this oneness insists on the basic human right to decent physical shelter.
• In a culture of rape, this oneness of flesh and spirit involves women stepping forward to demand respect for their bodies, and the rest of us honoring that demand. 
• In a racist culture, when black and brown bodies are confined to ghettos and prisons and detention centers and many times beaten and killed, this oneness of flesh and spirit involves people of color demanding respect for their bodies as well, and our society honoring and protecting those bodies. 

Te-nehisi Coates, a black writer, reflects on what honoring his body has meant for him as a black man:

You preserved your life [as a black person] because your life, your body, was as good as anyone’s, because your blood was as precious as jewels… You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs nor to the insidious gravity of the streets. Black is beautiful--which is to say that the black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded against the torture of processing and lye, that black skin must be guarded against bleach, that our noses and mouths must be protected against modern surgery. We are all our beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before barbarians, must never submit our original self...to defiling and plunder.

Because the word has become flesh, spirit and flesh are now one. In scandalous words--eat my flesh, drink my blood--Jesus guides us to embrace and honor that oneness.

At the end of this passage, after many have left, Jesus turns to his apostles and says, “Have I scandalized you? Will you also leave?”

This joining of flesh with spirit, with all its implications and demands, can be for us, as it was for them, a stumbling block, leaving us with a choice: to leave what seems on the surface a very strange and grotesque spiritual path, or to continue with just enough trust and a wild hunch that these scandalous words of Jesus just might lead us to life.

St. Mary the Virgin, August 15, 2015, the Rev'd. Dr. Richard Smith

I want to say a few things about Mary herself and then about her song in today’s gospel.

• She was a teenage Jewish girl from a fourth world country, a country under brutal occupation by a foreign power. 
• Despite the efforts of Western artists to portray her as white, she in fact had dark skin, dark brown eyes, and dark hair. 
• Some English translations say she was a handmaiden, which sounds nice, but the Greek word Luke uses is “doulos,” which means slave or servant. She was a servant girl in a fourth world occupied country. 
• And her name was Mary, a Hebrew name with two meanings. The first meaning is bitterness. She lived in a bleak time of struggle. Like many of her fellow Jewish women from Miriam on down, Mary knew the bitterness that her own people experienced under the slavery and oppression of foreign nations, from Egypt to Babylon to Rome. Like them she struggled to keep hope alive in her people.
• The second meaning of her name is rebellion. Not the Mary meek and mild of Hallmark Christmas cards, she is the one who rebels against anything that crushes the human spirit.

And this young woman is betrothed to marry Joseph when, in a powerful moment, she suddenly has an extreme makeover. She becomes not only pregnant and a mother, but also a powerful prophet who sings the revolutionary words of the Magnificat.

God, she says, 

...has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

Words you might not expect, from a slave girl in an occupied land. Where did this powerful song of hers come from?

These words emerge not from the hot political winds of her day, but from a deeper place, a moment of solitude. Away from all the ruckus and the noise, in an annunciation she had heard an angel say to her: “Rejoice, highly favored one!”  She took those words in. They transformed her. 

Seeing herself as a beloved child of God with an infinite beauty and dignity, she is able to discern the ways God is moving and acting in her own individual story and that of her people. She says Yes. Out of her solitude she embraces a new calling, steps into a new, larger identity as both a mother and a powerful prophet.

It starts in solitude. Her words are grounded in a profound relationship with God, with the child in her womb, and with her own people.

In our society we are inclined to avoid this kind of hidden solitude. We want to be seen and acknowledged. We want to be useful to others and influence the course of events.

As Henri Nouwen writes: “When we enter into solitude to be with God alone, we quickly discover how dependent we are.  Without the many distractions of our daily lives, we feel anxious and tense.  When nobody speaks to us, calls on us, or needs our help, we start feeling like nobodies.  Then we begin wondering whether we are useful, valuable, and significant.  Our tendency is to leave this fearful solitude quickly and get busy again to reassure ourselves that we are "somebodies."  But that is a temptation, because what makes us somebodies is not other people's responses to us but God's eternal love for us. To claim the truth of ourselves we have to cling to our God in solitude as to the One who makes us who we are.”

In the normal comings and goings of our lives, responding to other’s reactions and evaluations and judgments of us can leave us alienated from ourselves, distorted. We can lose touch with our true selves. We can create what early teachers in the church called false selves, distortions of who we were called to be.

I’ve mentioned before the story of the guy who went to buy a suit. He’s standing in front of the mirror and says to the sales clerk, “The sleeves are too long.” The sales clerk says, “Oh, no, sir. The sleeves are fine. Look, you just need to hold your shoulders a little higher and stretch out your hands a little farther. Like that. See, the sleeves are fine.” The man says, “Yeah, but, look, one pant leg is longer than the other.” The clerk says, “No, no, sir. If you just slightly bend one leg, like this, the legs are fine.” The man says, “Yes, but look, one shoulder seems higher than the other.” “Oh, no, sir,” insists the sales clerk. “If you just hold your left shoulder like so… There, the shoulders are even now.” Reluctantly, the man decides to buy the suit and to wear it home. As he is walking out the door, trying hard to keep his suit in place, two elderly women are watching. One says, “Oh, did you see that poor man, how crippled and twisted he looks.” The other woman says, “Yes, but did you notice how nice his suit looks!” 

In our day-to-day lives, responding to all the reactions and evaluations and judgments others have of us can leave us alienated and distorted like that guy with the suit. We can lose touch with our true selves.

But if we can step away from the crowd, as Mary does in that moment of annunciation, then solitude can be a place of purification where we can find our true selves as beloved sons and daughters of God. We can connect with the source of our strength, discern the fullness God is calling us to.

In our neighborhood right now, many poor families and senior citizens are being evicted from their homes. With all the new luxury condos being built, the market value of property is going up. Landlords are seizing the opportunity to raise their rents sometimes by 50 and 100%. 

And in our neighborhood and all across the country, many young people of color continue to die from gun violence, often at the hands of the police. From Ferguson, to Charleston, from Michael Brown to Amilcar in our own neighborhood, we’ve seen some bleak moments this past year. 

In the bleakness of her own times, with her own people at times being slaughtered by the Romans, Mary moved into a moment of solitude, and there she heard a call to become larger, more loving, prophetic. I wonder what we might hear today if we, in our own context, listened in solitude as she did. 

James Baldwin, the African-American writer, was an insightful critic of both Christianity and of religion in general. He rightly rebelled against the ways religion, in the face of cruelty and injustice, was often used to constrict and paralyze the human spirit, especially the spirits of African-Americans. He wrote at one point, “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

He’s right. If your own image of God crushes you with anxiety, diminishes you in the face of the world’s challenges, constricts your compassion for those suffering around you, and diminishes your joy, then you’re better off being an atheist. Better to have no God than a God who diminishes you like that. 

Because this cannot be the true God. This is not the God whom Mary encounters in her solitude and from which emerges her powerful Magnificat. This is not the God who waits to speak to our own hearts in this neighborhood and this country at this critical moment.

One of the early teachers in the church said that “the glory of God is the human person fully alive.” 

This is the God that Mary encounters, the one who calls her to be more fully alive. 

This is the God that St. Paul says gives us “not a spirit of timidity, but one of power, and love, and a good mind.” 

This is the God who speaks to us, calls to us, as he did to Mary. 

The popular American spiritual writer Marianne Williamson puts it beautifully. “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Mary emerges from her solitude with a new stride, a new and larger sense of herself, a new song, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” We should take her words at face value: that God becomes bigger, magnified, by this young woman's unique soul. Over time, the unique shape of her life will make God more God than before. This was the calling she heard and said yes to in that moment of solitude when she was able to hear the angel’s words.

I wonder what song would emerge from our own hearts if you and I-- as individuals, as a parish, in our own contexts--entered into the kind of solitude that Mary did. What would we look like?

Would we emerge larger, full of more life, more love, more joy, more compassion, more justice? 

In the new expansiveness of our own souls we discovered there, how would we in our own ways make God bigger?

Touching the Fringe of His Cloak, the Rev'd Jackie Cherry, July 19, 2015 – Proper 11, Yr B

They begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak;
and all who touched it were healed.

Imagine, the sick on their mats at the marketplace need only touch the fringe of his cloak to be healed. Where is Jesus? Has anybody seen Jesus? The whole world needs his cloak.

Most of you know that I had a miraculous healing 4 months ago. I rejected my transplanted kidney that I had had for 20 years, and for seven months I struggled to stay alive. During that period, I asked for prayers, but I didn’t pray for healing. My prayer was that I remember God is with me. Always.

My friends asked me what they should pray for. When I told our congregational Dean of Prayer, Liz Specht to pray for God’s will, she said, No, that’s not going to help me; I need to know what specifically to pray for so I can tell other people what they need to pray for. Liz was insistent, so I gave her some details: I need prayers for breath; I need prayers for the water in my body to shift away form my heart and lungs and move back into my vascular system; and I need prayers for an O+ kidney that I don’t have antibodies against. This information satisfied Liz, and learned how to text so she could transmit her prayers via social media.

I want you to know that the last prayer for an O+ kidney that I didn’t have antibodies against was theoretically impossible; immunological studies had revealed that I have antibodies against 100% of the population.

This crisis began last August with the doctors at UCSF trying aggressively to stop the rejection. I was given round the clock infusions for 3 days and then discharged. Once home, Sarah Lawton called several times. I didn’t answer the calls; I was in no condition to talk and I did not want visitors. But you know the way Sarah works relentlessly for social justice in the national church, and in the world - she’s a powerhouse, and in that vein she was resolute in changing my no visitor policy.  I buckled and allowed her to come over. Sarah found me in bed in my dim disheveled room. She sat beside me and said I want to give you my kidney. And then, as if she were standing on the podium on the floor of the House of Deputies, Sarah recited an eloquent outline of the reasons why I should accept her gift.

• I have been thinking about this for 10 years;
• My kids are independent now;
• I am very healthy;
• You are my son’s Godmother;
• You are my sister in Christ;
• In Christ we are one body and I have what you need.

Sarah punctuated her compelling list with this question:
Can you think of anybody more qualified to give you a kidney?  I couldn’t think of anybody more qualified.
Will you accept my kidney? Yes I will. And we both cried.

Do you remember when I said, I asked for prayers, but I didn’t pray for healing?
Well, I was healed the moment Sarah offered me her kidney. Don’t get me wrong,
I was still sick as a dog - every system in my body was failing. But Sarah’s offer broke open my heart to the immense love that surrounded me that I didn’t even know was there. I was overwhelmed. The only words I could muster were, I didn’t know you loved me so much.

It didn’t stop there. From every direction, in ways I never expected, again and again, an outpouring of love knocked me over until it seeped fully into my bones. Kevin and Kathy, Michael Clark and even a stranger offered their kidneys. I asked for prayers,
but I didn’t pray for healing because I had already been healed.
We found out in November that I wasn’t compatible with any of my living donors.
To stay alive, dialysis was my only option. During dialysis blood is pumped out of the body and filtered through an artificial kidney, known as a hemodialyzer, to remove waste, chemicals and excess fluid. The bodies total blood volume is circulated through the machine several times during each treatment. Dialysis clinics, at least the two that I’ve seen, are isolation pits with no natural light, occupied mostly by old people who will never be candidates for transplants. Each station consists of a hard, blue vinyl reclining chair, the huge dialysis machine, and a TV. While the blood is cycling through the artificial kidney the waste is shunted into an elaborate plumbing system that’s built into the wall. All of us hooked up the machines have no chance of life without the grueling treatment. Most all of the patients arrived alone, sat alone for the 3 or 4 hour treatment and left alone.

My dialysis schedule was T, TH, F and S. If there were no complications, each session lasted 4 hours. During the 5 months I was on dialysis, I only had 2 or 3 sessions without complications. The truth is, despite all the pain that I suffered, and all the suffering I watched those around me endure, I began to look forward to my dialysis days. You see, I had a group of people, all of whom are from this congregation, who volunteered to drive me week after week, month after month. And they didn’t just drive. Every Saturday Birgit and DD stayed with me through the whole thing. Jan had Tuesdays, Liz drove to San Francisco from Mill Valley on Thursdays. Jack, Judy and Rebecca were all over the calendar whenever I needed them. Sarah got off work early to take the Bart back to the city so she could pick me up. Heather and Kathy spent their Christmas in the clinic with me. I could go on and on. With their love, my friends lit up that dark dialysis room, by their presence I was comforted. And everybody, the doctors, nurses, technicians and patients witnessed it. They told me how lucky I was to have such a huge support network; they had never seen anything like it.

But I wonder if they really knew what they were seeing. During that time, I was just trying to survive. It’s only when I looked back that I recognized not just the fringe, but the entire cloak.

They begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak;
and all who touched it were healed.

+++
I want to change my tack here and give you a few statistics.

• As of April 22 of this year there are 101,662 people awaiting kidney transplants.
• On average, over 3,000 new patients are added to the kidney waiting list each month.
• 12 people die each day while waiting for a kidney
• Every 14 minutes someone is added to the kidney transplant list.
• In 2014, 4,270 patients died while waiting for a kidney transplant.
• And another 3,617 people became too sick to receive a kidney transplant.

With so many serious medical complications, I wasn’t cleared for surgery until mid-March. It was only a week after I was listed on the National Kidney Registry when I got the call from UCSF with the news they had found a compatible kidney. The transplant surgery was on March 21st.

At the end of June I received this letter:

Dear recipient,
Writing a letter like this is difficult to say the least. I’m not sure what to say or how to address you. I’ll just begin.
Several months ago you received the most honorable gift a person can give; life. You received life from my husband Russ. With his death, the past few months have been trying. One thing that has helped me through this transition without him is knowing he gave renewed hopes and dreams to you and your family.
My husband worked in Alaska managing projects like the building of power plants and large commercial retailers. He spent his free time outdoors and with his family. We had a fulfilling life together fishing, traveling, snowmobiling, hiking and raising our daughter. We were always planning our next adventure. As an all-Alaska kind of guy he loved the mountains. Russ made good choices and challenged others to do the same. He had an eternal optimism, contagious smile, and infectious spirit unmatched by anyone. He made his friends and family better people, and he made us smile even when we thought we couldn’t; Russ continues to make me smile. He loved his little girl Ridgely without question. She was seven months old when he was killed in an avalanche while snowmobiling in the mountains he so loved. He was 33.
With his death I grieve the loss of the one I loved most deeply, the one I was closest to, and the man who protected me and made me whole. I shared the ultimate partnership and friendship with Russ. I built my life, my home and my future with him. He was my soul.

While our daughter may never remember her daddy, she will surely know him through the stories and memories of friends and family. Through the eyes of our daughter he lives on. He lives on through you.
My wish for you is to honor my husband and “climb your mountain.”
Sincerely, 
Kolbey

Here is what I know - by the love of my friends, all living cloaks, I was healed. I don’t think this to be the miracle. It was compassion, and generous love put into action in the manner of Jesus and his disciples. This was not divine intervention - it was good people practicing the gospel of Jesus.

The death of a 33-year old man wasn’t the lack of a miracle.  It was a tragic accident
that left a 7-month old baby girl without her father and a grieving wife without her husband.

The miracle as I see it is that Russ may have had the only kidney in the world that would save my life, and he had chosen to be an organ donor. He didn’t die because I needed a kidney. He just died. And here I stand, wrapped in the cloak of Jesus with prayers of gratitude for our remarkable medical technology and the ordinary people who choose to be donors.

Drops in the bucket, July 5, 2015, the Rev'd Robert Cromey

What is a prophet? Not profit.

A prophet is a person is regarded as an inspired teacher or proclaimer of the will of God.

Today, prophetic voices are those who follow the radical teachings of Jesus. They do not predict the end of the world. They are teachers who teach humanity. Much of the political and business world teaches and worships money. That is the word profit not prophet.

Jesus comes into his hometown. He is a famous teacher and healer.
His neighbor immediately questions him. How come he talks like this? How did he get so smart? Is he a wise guy? His dad is only a carpenter! They also say, “He is only the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon.”

Jesus says, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their home town, and among their own kin and in their own house.” He is discouraged.

The writer gives us throwaway line. “Yet he leaves after healing a few sick people and cured them. He went on with his work anyway.” He heals the sick while getting out of town.

This weekend celebrates the Declaration of Independence. Brave English citizens living in the American colonies chose to become independent of their mother country England. The signers of the Declaration of Independence could have been hanged as traitors to their country. The signed the declaration. They were prophets of a new country and a new world. And they were without honor in their own country – England.

Bishop Pike in the 60s was a strong voice for civil rights for African Americans and free speech opposing censorship of book and movies. He was brought up on charges of heresy in the House of Bishops of our church. He was without honor in his own country.

Paul Moore, great Bishop of New York, chose to hide his gayness so he could preach love and acceptance for gays and Lesbians. LGBT had not been defined in his day. He was a prophet without honor in his own country.

Brea Newsome made a wonderful direct action in pulling down the Confederate flag at the South Carolina capital.

What’s also interesting about this to me is the outsized role single activists can sometimes have in moving conversations forward, setting off new movements, and exposing the power structure that oppresses people. Most of us are simply not going to climb that flagpole. But we probably should. ...

Lonely acts can sometimes prompt vast movements. But lonely acts will often -- usually -- sink without a ripple. What's hard is to predict which actions will make enduring waves. What Newsome did certainly amplified a cresting tide already in motion. She's won an honored place in the long river of resistance -- but she is certainly not alone.” She is a prophet without honor in her hometown.

In the Nuba Mountains of Sudan Dr. Tom Catena, a Catholic missionary from Amsterdam, N.Y., is the only doctor at the 435 bed Mother of Mercy hospital in the far south of Sudan. He is the only doctor for a population of more than a half million people. The area is under constant bombardment and shells from the Sudanese government. It is up to Dr. Tom to pry out shrapnel from women’s flesh and amputate limbs of children as he delivers babies and removes appendixes.

There is no telephone, electricity, or running water. Obviously no X-Ray machine. Dr. Tom has worked in the Nuba Mountains 24/7 for eight years. Muslims and Christians praise Dr. Tom’s work “People are praying he never dies.”

He is paid $350 a month, no retirement and no health insurance. He is driven by his Catholic faith. “I have been given benefits from the day I was born, a loving family, a great education. I see my work as an obligation, as a Christian and a human being, to help.

A Muslim Chief says Dr. Tom is Jesus Christ. Jesus healed the sick, made the blind see and helped the lame walk – and that is what Dr. Tom does every day.

When we try to do good things we often feel like they are a just a drop in the bucket and don’t do much good. When we write to the President, our senators and representatives it seems like just a drop in a bucket.
However, empty bucket gets filled to overflowing.

Each of us is a drop in the bucket of helping the hungry – Julian Pantry

Drop in the bucket – Fr. Richard leads a Mission Walk against police brutality.

Drop in the bucket – Some hold a sign calling on a Vigil for Justice and peace.

Drop in the bucket - The Julian Pantry is our program for feeding the hungry.

They are all drops in the bucket but after a while the bucket gets full. Look at all the drops in a bucket too bring about the right for LGBT people to have the right to marry.

Crossing over; about the murders in Charleston. June 21, 2015. The Rev'd Dr. Richard Smith

There are no words to capture the pain and anger and horror of what happened in Charleston this week. No words. I’ve read and listened to many words -- from the President’s to Jon Stewart’s to the New York Times’ to several pastors’. Their words, no matter how eloquent, all fall short of what happened, and I know mine will, too.

It would not be so hard if this were simply a matter of someone’s mental instability. But this is not mental illness. This is profound and ugly racial hatred.

It would not be so hard if this were simply an isolated case, a particular bad apple. But it’s not. This is part of a larger sinful fabric in which we are, each of us in one way or another, implicated. 

One Navajo scholar has lamented just how profoundly broken we are, how deeply this ugly sin of racism runs in our American DNA. He writes,  

Today I lament, I mourn over the life of each and every person that was violently taken in Charleston South Carolina. 

I lament that a 5 year old child was robbed of her innocence and forced to "play" dead in order to survive. 

I lament that today, the confederate flag is still flying in the Capitol of South Carolina. 

I lament the roots of dehumanization that exist within the founding documents of the United States of America; in our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution and our Supreme Court case precedents. 

[He’s referring to that document we’ll so proudly read across the country in a few days on the Fourth of July. Just a few lines after it so nobly proclaims that “All men are created equal,” it refers to Native Americans, the very people we slaughtered as we stole their lands and livelihoods, as “Indian savages”.]

He continues,

I lament that our nation continues to celebrate its racist foundations with holidays like Columbus Day, sports mascots like the Washington Redskins and the putting of faces like Andrew Jackson on our currency. 

I lament the deaths of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and countless others. 

[We could add Amilcar and Alex who were killed by the police near our church.] 

I lament the words of our political candidates who promise to lead America back to its former "greatness", ignorant of the fact that much of America's "greatness" was built on the exploitation and dehumanization of its people of color. 

I lament that today the dominant culture in America is in shock because in the city of Charleston South Carolina one individual committed a single evil and heinous act of violence, while minority communities throughout the country are bracing themselves because the horrors of the past 500 years are continuing into their lifetime. 

I lament with every person and community, throughout the history of this nation, who, due to the color of their skin, had to endure marginalization, silence, discrimination, beatings, lynching, cultural genocide, boarding schools, internment camps, [immigration detention centers,] mass incarceration, broken treaties, stolen lands, murder, slavery and [the doctrine of] discovery.

Lamentations by a Native American at the profundity of the evil unleashed in Charleston.

Today’s gospel is about a crossing over. Jesus and the disciples are crossing a lake. A storm arises, and the disciples get paralyzed with fear. Jesus, in that terrifying moment, gives them a teaching.

And maybe that teaching can speak to us this morning, give us a sense of how to stand, how to speak and act in this time of our own crossing over.

For we as Americans are crossing over. The racial, cultural, and economic makeup of our country is changing dramatically. This crossing over arouses fear and exposes some of our worst features: profound racism and white privilege, the incarceration of innocent men, women -- and in the case of immigrants, entire families -- all the police shootings, the displacement of so many poor families and seniors from their homes, and, most recently the murders in Charleston.

It is a time of profound upheaval and change, and in this crossing over, we, like the disciples, now find ourselves in a violent storm. 

Many scholars say that Mark intended this gospel story to be a metaphor for his own community’s struggle at the hands of the Roman Empire: Rome is literally slaughtering them, destroying their culture, forcing them to worship Caesar, stealing their modest wages in heavy taxes to the Emperor and leaving them and their families impoverished. In that context, the hope of throwing off Roman oppression was stirring, the hope of crossing over to a new world more rich in possibilities for life. Could a storm be far off?

They were crossing over, and along the way a storm arose. And Jesus, as the story goes, falls sleeps. And the fury of the waves becomes too much, and so the disciples wake him, they shout at him “Don’t you care that we are being destroyed?”

Then, after he has calmed the winds and the waves, but before they reach the other shore, Jesus offers these trembling disciples some challenging words. 

In Greek these words are often translated, “Why are you afraid? Where is your faith?” But I think they are better translated, “Why are you so timid?” It’s a subtle difference. The Greek word here is the same one Paul uses, for example, when he writes to Timothy, “God did not give us a spirit of timidity. He gave us a spirit of power, and of love, and of a good mind.”

So in the very midst of the storm Jesus is challenging the disciples “Why are you so timid? Where is your faith?” This is no time for cowering, for being shy, for being cynically resigned as though this is just the normal way of things. This perilous, terrifying moment requires all the more boldness and all the more love. 

Just when all hell is breaking loose and they are losing everything, when they have nothing left to hang onto and God seems to be asleep and they feel so helpless and fear is in their throats, Jesus is challenging them not to be timid, but to live out of their faith. 

Their faith that, despite all evidence to the contrary, God will not leave them to face this violent storm alone. And that same God empowers them, urges them now, in the face of this violent storm and all this bloodshed and oppression, to stand boldly and to speak and live their truth. 

A couple of days ago in Charleston, several family members of the slain spoke to Dylann Roof, the man who killed their loved ones. After a number of them had spoken, the granddaughter of one of the victims said  “Although my grandfather and the other victims died at the hands of hate ... everyone's plea for your soul is proof that they lived in love.” And then she added with boldness and determination, “Hate won't win." 

This is how it works sometimes for followers of Jesus: In the midst of the storm, with all the hate and trauma and grief, with tears running down your cheeks, and your knees shaking, you live, speak, act not with timidity but with boldness, out of your faith.

“God did not give us a spirit of timidity. He gave us a spirit of power, and of love, and of a good mind.”

Could the teaching of Jesus in today’s gospel guide us in our current crossing over? What might it mean for you personally to live, speak, and act boldly at this hour?

Let me close with the words of South Africa’s Alan Boesak: “When we go before Him, God will ask, "Where are your wounds?" And we will say, "I have no wounds." And God will ask, "But why? Was there nothing worth fighting for?”