The Persistent Widow (The Rev. Dr. Richard Smith; Proper 24, Year C; October 20, 2013)

When I was a kid, this parable seemed to confirm my worst suspicions about God: that he was like a stingy judge who is both unjust and cranky. If I asked him for what I legitimately needed, he was not disposed to grant it. So I had to storm heaven with my prayers, keep praying until finally I managed to manipulate him and wear him down.

This is not what Jesus is getting at. Rather, this is a story about the connection between prayer and justice.

It is about a widow seeking justice from a judge. The judge is both unjust and intractable. As a widow in her day she is by definition without a voice. Without a husband, she lacks the resources to attain justice. The deck is stacked against her. She is at the mercy of this unjust judge.

But she doesn't give up until, finally, the judge relents

How does this happen? What keeps her going?

Since she has no resources of her own in this seemingly unwinnable battle, the implication is she has help. Her persistence and energy come from a source outside her, they are grounded in something deeper.

Jesus suggests she is a woman of continuous prayer. Her prayer connects her with the source of boundless energy that wears down injustice. This prayer is what sustains her in this fight despite the odds against her. Persisting in prayer and persisting in the work for justice are two sides of the same coin.

If I were writing this parable today, I would tell the story of Marisol, a woman I know who is working hard for immigration reform. She is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, a mother of three daughters. Several years ago, she and her husband started a small business together, and over the years they have worked very hard to support their family.

One day, Marisol was slated for deportation--a deportation that was both unjust and illegal.

Marisol is a woman who prays. Constantly.

From her prayer and that of her family and fellow parishioners and friends, she found a boundless passion for justice--justice not only for herself, but for the millions of other immigrants like her.

Out of that passion for justice, Marisol, like the widow, kept crying out to the unjust immigration officials "Grant us justice".  And  she did so without losing heart, even though the forces she was up against were as intractable as the unjust judge in today's gospel.

Praying persistently and working for justice persistently are two sides of the same coin.

This is what happens when you pray--you get flooded with an outrage at the pain and injustice in the world around you, and even though the odds are against you, you--like Marisol, and like the widow in today’s gospel--become determined to make things different; you don’t give up even when the deck is stacked against you.

You may recall the story Martin Luther King used to tell at the height of the civil rights movement. They were picketing a business that refused to serve blacks. The day wore on, with no sign of a breakthrough, and it was very hot.

Toward the end of the day Martin noticed an old woman shuffling along holding her sign, chanting and singing with the rest of them.  She had been one of the first to arrive and had been picketing all day. He said to her, “Mama, aren’t you tired? Aren’t you just tired?” She replied, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”

She was obviously a woman who prayed, and because of her constant prayer, despite all the odds against her, despite the hot sun and her own tired feet, her soul was rested. She did not lose hope. She had the energy to keep walking.

This is what we do when we pray: We tap into that deep down well of faith and hope that sustains life. It gives us the passion and purpose to keep walking.

The best image I know of for prayer involves our patron saint, John the Evangelist. Many scripture scholars say that he is the one referred to in John's gospel as the beloved disciple. In Jesus darkest moment as he hangs from the cross, and after all the other apostles have fled, John is the only man who stands firm, stands bravely with the women at the foot of the cross.

He is the one who, at the last supper, lays his head on Jesus' chest, next to his heart, and from there he looks out at the world. Such a powerful image!

This is what prayer is, whether we do it with rosary beads or scriptures or the Book of Common Prayer, in a quiet corner of your apartment or on the way to catch the bus. Prayer is that moment when we, like John, rest next to the heart of Jesus, bringing our hearts into rhythm with his, feeling what he feels--what makes him happy, what makes him sad, what makes him angry, what makes him laugh. Becoming in tune with the heart of Jesus.

And from that moment and that place, we look out at the world, seeing it all as Jesus does, noticing what he notices, understanding the things and people and events around us in the way that he does, with the same compassion, the same delight, the same anger, the same hope, the same passion for justice.

That's what it means to pray--it means being like our patron, St. John, in that moment at the last supper resting on the heart of Jesus, praying persistently until our hearts are in tune with his, and then stepping out into the world to be his hands and his feet and his heart in the world around us.

TWENTY FIRST SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST PR 23C October 13, 2013 The Rev’d Dr. John H. Eastwood

Hallelujah! I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart.
In the assembly of the upright, in the congregation. Ps. 111:1

This text lends itself well to what we do today.  In recent weeks we have taken up the important task of fund raising because it is the one important way we have as a congregation to share together in the life of Christ and to welcome others into that spiritual life.  We have attempted to emphasize several things: making an annual pledge,  discerning how much you will give through that pledge, and the vision we have to fulfill the mission of St John’s.  We also acknowledge that financial support is important, but, so is the time we volunteer here, and the particular talents we have - time, talent, and money,  the traditional framework of support for mission.

When we bring our offering to God’s altar today we take up not only bread and wine of the Eucharist, but our offerings and also our pledges for the coming year. Each of these are symbols of our thanksgiving for the new life we receive here in community.

  I noticed that The Feast of St. Luke falls on Friday this week.  We remember St Luke the apostle as the patron saint of the Church’s healing ministry which is an important part of the mission we support.  To heal is to make whole, and we believe that God is concerned about our social and political wellness as well as our physical wellness.  As we have heard last week, that mission of healing can take place right here in our church, or in our organizing on the steps of
Well Fargo, or in the state’s immigration legislation, or in the clean water wells of Nicaragua.
That brings us to our readings in which we find the theme of healing with a special emphasis: the healing of the outsider. In the story of Naaman the commander who is healed by the prophet Elisha, he is a Syrian and an outsider to Israel. He is told to go bathe in the Jordan river, but he believes his own streams of water in his country are just as good as the Jordan in Israel.  However, he yields to the prophet and learns that God’s inclusive healing power goes beyond geography and culture. In the gospel story of the ten lepers, while all ten were healed, God’s inclusive healing power is manifested in the case of the tenth leper, a Samaritan prostrating at the feet of the stranger,  Jesus the Galilean of Israel.

To anyone who has experienced or appreciates the experience of being an outsider, these are stories that really reverberate.  To anyone like myself and each of you, who has more than a curiosity about knowing the welcoming love of God that brings you home into God’s arms of embrace, these stories will strongly resonate within you. If you are an outsider you know how it feels to not belong, you have a special sensitivity and openness to others who don’t feel they belong. The cause of concern can be social, political, or one’s state of health. No more pertinent and poignant, than, are these stories about victims of leprosy.

In the bible, leprosy is a physical and social disease.  It not only endangers your health but it also causes isolation, loss of community and deep fear and prejudice.  The book of Leviticus spends two whole chapters teaching how to diagnose skin diseases, how to pronounce lepers ritually unclean, and how to perform rites of purification if healing occurs.   We read in
Leviticus these admonishing words,  “The one who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and cry ‘unclean, unclean’. He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; and he shall dwell alone in a habitation outside the camp.”  Besides all the pain of having the disease, this dreadful affliction was considered an act of God, which besides it being contagious,  gave more  reason to why those with the disease were shunned.  In pain, isolated and lonely, living in camps set apart from the mainstream of life, lepers were feared by the rest of society, especially the religious community.

And so our tenth leper knows full well the pain of isolation. While the others being healed go off to the temple to do their duty and resume their normal lives, when he discovers he is healed, he turns back toward Jesus.  He let’s out a burst of praise and prostrates before the man he hardly knows, but senses something of the divine in him. I don’t know about this for certain, but I can imagine that if you begin your life being born in a stable because the sign said “No room in the inn” that might give a person some sensitivity to what it means to be an outsider.

Plainly, he worships, Jesus, which is not what a Samaritan or a Jew would do.  The Samaritans worship God on Mt. Gerizim, the Jews, including the nine who were healed, worship in the temple.  It is no matter that he didn’t follow the rules and do as he was told.  He was a leper and a foreigner, a double loser; now he is thanking God as if somehow God were present in this man Jesus, whom he hardly knew.  But, he was one of the unclean who could see what the others could not see, and what he saw was new life and he wasn’t going to be
separated again from that.   That’s why the tenth leper makes me more than just a bit curious. I wonder what he has to teach us.

As I reflected on this story this week, many images came to mind. I thought about my childhood and how I learned about who the outsiders were - in school and in the neighborhood I grew up in. The outsider didn’t fit in, didn’t conform to expectations, or didn’t follow the rules.  But I never questioned who was setting the rules.  I thought of healing stories in the bible where being an “outsider” was characteristic of those who came to the prophets or Jesus for healing, and how through God they had found a new life.  And then I thought about my ministry in the church and how we were always working at being welcoming to the stranger who was looking for a spiritual home, or at least needed for a time the strength and comfort of a community in which there were some who were much acquainted with being on the outside.  I remembered street people, visitors from another state or country, people who needed had just experienced some personal loss or trauma, people of all sorts and conditions. The ministry of healing to those who at any time in their lives feel on the outside, is Jesus’ ministry to the tenth leper.

Our calling at St John’s which we support today, this month, every month, year in and year out, is to be a warm, welcoming place to which an an outsider, could bring his or her deepest needs for belonging and find God in community. That just happens to be what this place, and you, the St John’s community, means to me, and I would think to each one of us.  We know this because the passion and the prayers of people’s deepest longings for God stick like glue to
these wall.  Just think of people you know here, or used to be or will be here, from years back and to years to come. They are part of the fabric of this place.  That is why the tenth leper should make us more than just a bit curious.  AMEN

Jesus and the Heavily Burdened (Feast of St. Francis, 2013; The Rev. Dr. Richard Smith)

It is our fundraising season here at St. John's. Today you will receive your pledge cards. We’ll invite you to fill them out over the coming week, listing what you plan to give in the coming year, and then return the card next Sunday. These will enable the Bishop's Committee to put together the budget for the coming year.

I don't think there's ever been a time when a parish like ours is more needed--to speak the truths of gay people and many others to the larger church, to provide shelter and a place of rest to each other and to many people beyond our walls. I’ll say more about these things in a minute, but first a word about today’s gospel.

Jesus’ teachings weren't going over so well, especially among the religious leaders. He’d been talking about how the kingdom of heaven transforms human hearts and societies, but they weren't buying it.

Instead of lamenting this, Jesus praises God who is at work in this situation. “I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants…”

The wise and the intelligent are the religious leaders. They know all about the 613 dictates of the law. They “tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law”, like justice and love and compassion; “they strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.” They like everything that can be seen: greetings in the marketplace, first places at table, long robes, the outside of the cup. What they do best is lay heavy burdens on people’s shoulders, judging and condemning them, all the while coming up with reasons to justify the fact that their own hearts have become flatlined.

They remind me of what the novelist Graham Greene once wrote about the church: “The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn't know what goes on in a single human heart.”

Those rules can be endless and petty; they crush the human spirit rather than nurture it. They cause people to lose zest and pleasure in life, to lose heart.

Not many people could follow all their petty rules and scripts. Many in those days may have wanted to fully participate in worship, for example, but they couldn’t follow all the purity rules needed to do it.

For example, shepherds were judged unclean most of the time, because they dealt with birth, disease, and death among their flocks and did not have the luxury of performing all the washing rituals. Anyone diseased, lame, blind, or disabled was also ritually impure. Lepers, tax collectors, and sinners were shunned for their impurity.

These are the “heavily burdened” Jesus is referring to in today’s gospel: the ones who, try as they might, can never succeed at conforming to all the religious laws and cultural scripts.

All of which brings me to the first reason why a parish like St. John’s can be so important.

As many of you know, my own heart is “heavily burdened” right now, as I know many of yours are, because of the objections that have been raised to my being officially installed as vicar and the charges recently filed against me in the church courts.

I still haven’t seen the charges or the evidence being used to support them, so I admit that my perspective is still somewhat limited. But I suspect this is part of a larger culture war.

A few people have peered into the culture of somewhat typical gay men like me, misread what they have seen there, and made moral judgements and condemnations that are simply unfair. In this case, the “typical gay man” would be me. But it could be any one of a million others--and not just gay men, but also many women and many straight people. This is not just about me.

Since the cultural upheavals of the sixties, many of our lives no longer fit the old scripts. As I see it, we do, in fact, share many of the values of our grandparents, but we live those values differently. Our relationships are hopefully as strong and faithful and loving as theirs--but ours don’t always look the same as theirs.

Unfortunately, this is not always understood by people looking into our culture from outside. Maybe it’s understandable that they misread us. This often happens when people of one culture peer into another. But the judgements and condemnations that arise from that misreading are often wrong and unfair. From what I know so far, I believe that is true in this case.

Let me think out loud for a moment. Rather than lamenting this current situation and feeling victimized by it, what if we try Jesus’ approach in today’s gospel: Give thanks to the Lord of heaven and earth who is at work in this moment.

Maybe there is grace here. For example, maybe this is a moment for “typical gay dudes” like me to say our word, talk a little more about our lives and love and the powerful values we live by. It’s a message the larger church might benefit from hearing. Just saying.

Maybe this is one reason that a community like St. John’s can be so important at this time in history. Our church and our larger culture have come a long way on gay issues, but the present situation may indicate that we still have work to do.

Could it be that, in this moment, our community in particular is being called to an important ministry of dialogue with our larger Diocese and church? This is a question. I’m just wondering about these things...

Back to the gospel for a moment. To those who are weary and heavily burdened, Jesus says, "Come to me, and I will give you rest."

But it's a certain kind of rest. He's not calling for shorter work weeks and better vacation benefits. He's offering the sabbath rest, the rest of the seventh day after God created heaven and earth, and he looked on all he had created and said “It is good”, and he rested.

Rest happens when our true nature is realized, when we live in harmony with ourselves, our neighbor, nature, and God.

This is the kind of rest many weary people like us have found in this crazy character we call Jesus, the one who knows each of us fully and loves us completely. That love transforms us, expands our hearts for even more love and life and joy--so that we can become, like Jesus, a place of rest for each other.

Our community has a history of doing precisely this.

In the early days of the AIDS crisis, when many gay men were being disowned by their families, kicked out of their churches, and fired from their jobs, many came here to St. John’s. They found in this community a home and a place of rest, where they could be themselves, die a little less alone, with a little more peace. They were heavily burdened and we became a place of rest for them. Many of them chose to be buried in our garden. You can see their names in the narthex. In those days, when so many of us were heavily burdened, we became for each other a place of rest.

That story continues today. In our story sharing earlier this year, we learned some of the things that are currently keeping many of us awake at night. Most often mentioned was aging, our own and that of those we care for.  The second was violence in our neighborhoods and City.

To help us address these important issues, we recently joined the San Francisco Organizing Project (SFOP), a coalition of faith communities, many of whom share our concerns about these issues.

Working with SFOP, several of us will soon be giving input to the Human Rights Commission as they form their own recommendations on this topic.  Shortly after that, I expect that people from our community will be sitting down with Members of the Board of Supervisors and staff from the Mayor's Office to tell them how it is for us as we grow older in this city, what we need to stay healthy, have a decent place to live, be secure.

Stay tuned for more information about those upcoming meetings and events. Our community can make a big difference here, not just for ourselves, but for many others.

We also said during our story sharing that we were heavily burdened by all the violence around us. This affects not just us, but many others, including far too many young people in this neighborhood who are swept up into the gangs when they're just 11 or 12 years old. Too many of them have been shot and killed, and too many sent to prison. I've talked to some of their moms, shed more than a few years with them.

In response to this violence, beginning Wednesday, October 16th, clergy and people of faith from the Mission will be regularly walking as a group along our streets that have seen the most violence. In a low-key way, we’ll be letting our neighbors, especially our young people, know that we want the violence to stop, that we want them to be both alive and free.

In other places where similar walks are underway--in Oakland and Richmond--the homicides along their routes have dropped by as much as 30%. We hope these walks will make a similar difference here, protecting our kids and keeping us all safer. Again, this is another thing that has emerged from our story sharing a few months back.

These are a few of the things we do to provide shelter and a place of rest to each other. There are ways we also make a difference, provide a shelter, a place of rest, for many beyond our walls.

We continue working for immigration reform, trying to bring rest to immigrant families now living in fear of being torn apart by unjust immigration laws. Through Mission Graduates, we help kids stay in school--kids who might otherwise get discouraged and drop out. Through El Porvenir we help villages in Nicaragua get clean water for their families. Through the  Julian Pantry we help people in our neighborhood and City get food.

Should I add that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence took a shine to us when they held one of their successful bingos here?

The story keeps unfolding...

Several weeks ago, I was invited to meet with a group of Latina transgendered women in our neighborhood. Many of them had fled their own countries seeking a place of rest and shelter here in the US. I went to their gathering place on 16th Street, and while I was waiting for the meeting to start, I was looking at a large wall with a huge gallery of photos of transgendered women. In the middle of all these photos was a large picture of our Lady of Guadalupe surrounded by votive candles and small Christmas tree lights. I assumed the photos were of famous transgendered women, or perhaps former officers of their organization.

Then I learned that these were photos of women who had been killed right here in our neighborhood in the last several years. This was a wall of remembrance. Many of these women's deaths went unreported and were not investigated because everyone was afraid to go to the police station to fill out the reports--afraid of being harassed by the officers themselves, or of being deported if they happened to be undocumented.

A couple of weeks after that meeting, about sixty of these women gathered here at St. John's to share their stories and to discuss ways to make things better. They loved being here. They felt safe here.

Now discussions are underway with them and with the Human Rights Commission to have our church become officially designated as a safe space, not only for them, but for other vulnerable and heavily burdened groups in our neighborhood. With personnel and resources provided by the City, people like these women will be able to come here, rather than the police station, to fill out police reports, to learn about their rights, and about the resources and services available to them. A newly emerging chance for us to be the hands and heart and feet of Jesus, giving rest to a group that is heavily burdened.

And all these things we try to do begin and end right here each Sunday at this table where we gather as a people, tell the story of Jesus in words and music and gestures, and break the bread.

At the center of it all is an overpowering love for this amazing person we call Jesus. It is as his followers that we do these things. It’s because of him that all these things make sense.

It’s at this table that we most fully remember the kind of community we have been and are and hope to become.

Today you will receive your pledge card, and we ask you to return it next Sunday so the Bishop’s Committee can start planning next year’s budget. Please prayerfully consider how much you can contribute financially to help us be this kind of community. Please be as generous as you can.