Beatitude

Sermon by the Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.

St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church, San Francisco

January 29, 2017

Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, Year A

[Watch a video of this sermon.]

When Harry Potter is about to turn eleven, he’s living with his aunt and uncle, who treat him like an outsider, favoring their own son Dudley. Harry sleeps in a cramped closet under the stairs. His story, as he understands it, is he’s an orphan whose parents had died in a senseless car crash when he was a baby. At least that's what he understands, until one night when everything changes.

A half-giant named Hagrid appears and reveals to Harry that he is not simply an orphan with a tragic story, but rather a wizard slated for wizarding school in the fall.

Later, Harry is talking with a wise old teacher named Dumbledore. Harry wants to know more of his own story, of what had happened, and who he really is.

It’s then Harry learns that his parents did not die senselessly in a car crash after all. Rather, they died trying to save him from the evil wizard Voldemort who had tried to kill him when he was a baby.

Dumbledore explains, “Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign. To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. It is in your very skin.”

This is a transformative moment. Suddenly, Harry is longer an unwanted orphan, an unwelcome outsider. He has a new identity now. He is someone who, from his earliest days, has been deeply loved, protected, cherished, even though he’d known nothing about it. This new sense of himself changes how he lives and acts in the world.

Today’s gospel follows a similar dynamic. Jesus goes up on a mountain to be closer to God. From this higher perspective he looks at the crowd and at his disciples. This higher perspective enables him to see more than what meets the physical eye: that they are blessed.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice.

He’s referring to the ones caught up in a corrupt system, who get ground up by it, whose poverty goes so deep it crushes their spirits--makes them poor in spirit, and reduces them to a constant state of mourning.

He understands the terrible toll this social reality takes on their bodies and families and souls.

But he also spies, at the center of their struggle, a blessedness. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.

The rhythm is striking: blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed.

This blessedness is given by God, so it is more powerful that the social-political system that overwhelms them.

This blessedness enables them to lean into life, to withstand whatever the world throws at them.

This blessedness is constantly at work, moving mourning toward comfort, meekness toward inheritance, hunger and thirst toward satisfaction.

And this blessedness has your name on it. This reading is your Harry Potter moment that, if you let it, redefines and transforms you--this dawning realization of who you really are, that you are more than meets the eye, that you are blessed, made in the image of God with an infinite beauty and dignity, a power and strength no one can take from you.

This blessedness is yours in every moment, but especially when things fall apart--when coming up short in trying to pay the bills, or when you get bad news from the doctor, or lose a job, or grieve the loss of the one you love the most.

Blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed. Can you get into this gospel’s rhythm, let it seep into the marrow of your bones, especially into those corners of your life where God seems most absent?

Can you pick up the refrain, announcing this blessedness not only to yourself, but to your fellow parishioners in their struggles, and to the larger community we’re part of?

Can you let yourself get caught up in this great work of blessing?

Because it’s not just you and I who could use a little blessedness right now, but so does our world. I’m sure you know what I’m referring to.

This is no ordinary time. Since the Inauguration, the President has signed a cascade of executive orders that threaten the safety and lives of hundreds of thousands of people--refugees, immigrants in this neighborhood, Muslims, indigenous people, Black people, and working people in need of healthcare.

He has directed our government to construct a wall on our southern border, punish Sanctuary cities like ours, facilitate the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and construct pipelines despite the protests of indigenous people. And he has signaled more to come, including rolling back voting rights.

Because of his order on Friday, people fleeing Syria and other war-torn Muslim countries are being turned away in their moment of greatest need--even despite yesterday’s powerful protests at major airports and a partial stay of the president’s order by a federal judge.

This is a time of great cruelty and fear.

I think of the fear that now runs through the entire immigrant community here and around the world. I think of my friend Eva, a domestic worker who fled here from Guatemala 25 years ago for her life and those of her kids. She works sixty-hours a week cleaning homes and looking after children. She’s raised her own kids here, and now helps with her own grandkids. And she’s afraid. Even before the election she sent many of her clothes to family in Guatemala, asking them to keep them for her so that when President Trump deports her, she’ll have what she needs to begin looking for a job and get her life up and running.

The fear among our immigrant brothers and sisters right now is immense.

Whether we like it or not, this is our context. It is in this moment that we must be a blessing, both in what we say and in what we do.

This context gives a whole new meaning to the work we do here at St. John’s every day.

With a historic level of inequality likely to increase in the next four years, we continue to offer a quiet, dry, safe place for homeless people to sleep.

Many people in this neighborhood are running short of food.

You may remember the encampment we had here on 15th Street recently. Each evening, the campers would share whatever food they had with anyone who needed it, inviting passersby to join them. Sometimes there were as many as 30 people lined up to get the food. Many of the people in line were not homeless; they came from the various SROs in the neighborhood, but they had run short on food.

Our food ministries, including the Julian Pantry and a twice monthly free community dinner, are becoming all the more essential in these days of struggle for so many.

• With a law-and-order administration now in office, many understandably predict more police brutality against people of color. Our weekly vigils for Amilcar in front of Mission Police Station and our Nightwalks calling for an end to violence, including violence by the police, now take on a whole new urgency.
• As white nationalism and cries of America First increase, several of us are planning next year’s trip to Nicaragua to join people in rural villages in the simple tasks of building latrines and providing clean, safe water.
• Many experts say the world is much less safe now. The war drums are once more growing louder. Robert Cromey’s vigils outside the Federal Building now become all the more necessary.
• And as people continue to flee the historic levels of gang and police violence in Central America, we are providing Sanctuary for Mirza and Isrrael, helping them with practical needs like housing, food, and clothing, and committing ourselves to stand with them to resist any efforts by Immigration to deport them back to the life-threatening situations they fled. 
• And each week this sacred space, with its noble and faded elegance, remains a home to so many others--from Native Americans celebrating their powerful festivals, to meditating Buddhists; from survivors of HIV to our friends at Mission Graduates.

These are just some of the ways we try to be a blessing at this critical and perilous moment. And I haven’t even alluded to the work so many individuals in this parish do in their professional and volunteer lives--in scholarship, and the arts; in political leadership and social work.

And what makes sense of it all, helps us keep our eye on the ball, is our weekly gathering at this table. Without this moment, none of it makes sense. It’s here at this table that we come to see and understand with the eyes and the heart of Jesus.

Because at the end of these tumultuous days, this one question will remain: Through it all--through all the political upheavals, the protests, the conversations with friends, the victories, the disappointments--have our hearts become more like the heart of Jesus? Have we become more like Jesus--full of more love, more compassion, more joy, more life?

Let me close with this Epiphany blessing from Jan Richardson.

There is so much I want to say, as if the saying could prepare you for this path, as if there were anything I could offer that would make your way less circuitous, more smooth.

There is so much I want to say, as if the saying could prepare you for this path, as if there were anything I could offer that would make your way less circuitous, more smooth.Once you step out, you will see for yourself
how nothing could have made you ready for this road
that will take you from what you know
to what you cannot perceive
except, perhaps, in your dreaming
or as it gives a glimpse in prayer.
But I can tell you this journey is not about miles.
It is not about how far you can walk or how fast.
It is about what you will do with this moment,
this star that blazes in your sky
though no one else might see.
So open your heart to these shimmering hours
by which your path is made.
Open your eyes to the light
that shines on what you will need to see.
Open your hands to those who go with you,
those seen and those known only by their blessing,
their benediction of the road that is your own.

The Gentle Whisper

Sermon by the Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.

St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church, San Francisco

January 22, 2017

Third Sunday after Epiphany, Year A

The last several days have been a whirlwind for so many of us--from the inauguration to the Women’s March. From the President’s threat to deport millions of undocumented people and deprive many more of their healthcare to passionate calls to resist those cruel policies.

A whirlwind. How do we find our bearings in such a moment? How do we find a way forward?

Can we take our cues from something deeper than the cliches and labels--Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal, progressive--and from something deeper than knee-jerk reactions to the latest headlines and presidential tweets and posts on Facebook?

How to get our bearings in this whirlwind?

Maybe you remember the old story about Elijah... It was a dark moment in Israel, a time of great upheaval in the land. Elijah had spoken out against all the corruption and murder in Israel, the ways Israel had abandoned its own deepest values and dreams.

Many great prophets had been killed, and now many in Israel were coming after Elijah, wanting to kill him as well.

He’s hiding in a cave. One day God tells him to go outside and stand on the mountainside where God will pass by.

And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind.
And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake.
After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire.
And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

And that’s where God’s voice was to be found, in that gentle whisper. There, in that gentle whisper, Elijah finds the energy and the guidance for his next steps.

I love the story, and I’m hoping that same grace, that same gentle whisper, will come to me and to each of us in this crazy time, to help us get our bearings and find a way forward.

I hope that we can find that gentle whisper deep in our own hearts, deeper than all the roles we play, the hats we wear--spouse, parent, friend, professional, priest. Deeper than all the fear and anger and the need to be right. Deeper than all the labels--Hillary voter, Trump voter. Deeper than our skin color or sexual orientation.

I hope we can reach deep into our own hearts to hear that gentle whisper, the voice of God.

Which is a long way of saying I hope in these days we can be people of deep prayer.

Because even with all the other noise going on around us, we can still hear that gentle whisper if we want to, can still live out the joy, the passion and compassion, the love it stirs in us.

I recall the story of the teenager from rural Iowa who was visiting Manhattan with her mom. It was high noon, and there were taxis and trucks zooming by, horns blaring, people pouring out of the office buildings racing off to lunch. In the midst of it all, the young woman stops and says, “Wait, mom! I hear a grasshopper!” This annoys her mom who says, “Honey, we’re right in the middle of Manhattan. They don’t even have grasshoppers here! And even if they did, you’d never hear them because of all this racket.

At that, the girl went over to a small bush next to a light post and pulled back the branches to reveal a grasshopper happily chirping away.

Her mom was astonished and said, “How did you manage to hear that grasshopper in the midst of all this craziness?” The girl got very philosophical and said, “Well, we hear what we want to hear.”

Which is true not only of grasshoppers but also of that gentle whisper God placed in our hearts.

I see that same gentle whisper, that voice of God, playing itself out in Jesus' life.

For example, in today’s gospel Jesus has had an Elijah moment. Jesus’ time, like Elijah’s, like ours, was dark and turbulent. The Romans occupying Palestine had slaughtered many innocent men, women, and children; they had inflicted much poverty and cultural genocide on Jesus’ own people.

And in today’s reading, things take an even sharper turn for the worse. Herod has just incarcerated John the Baptist. The darkness is closing in.

And in that moment, Jesus immediately moves to Galilee, into Herod’s own territory and jurisdiction. This is a bold and dangerous move on Jesus’ part. It brings him onto Herod’s radar.

And when he gets back to Galilee, he goes even further, he does three things:

• He begins proclaiming the exact same message that got John into trouble: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” The kingdom of heaven--so completely different from the kingdom of Herod and the empire, a subversive alternative to the world as we know it. Jesus takes up this message knowing full well it is likely to bring down Herod’s wrath on his own head just as it had on the Baptist's.
• And he begins to gather a community of disciples who can support each other in proclaiming that same message, be a light in the closing darkness, defy every effort to crush the human spirit.
• And he reaches out in compassion to heal the sick of diseases, many of which had resulted from what the Romans had inflicted on the Jews: the economic hardships, the lack of clean water, the shortage of good, nutritious food.

Proclamation, community, compassion--ah! God is here!

Where does Jesus get this boldness and courage, this deliberateness and clarity of vision in such a perilous time as his?

My guess is that, as with Elijah, it springs from that gentle whisper deep in his own heart. That whisper is what drives Jesus--more than fear or anger or dread, more than any expectations others may have of him, more than his own need to be right or recognized or successful or in control. He stays attentive to that small gentle whisper, trusts it, follows it, regardless of the consequences, with a deliberateness, a fierce determination.

Jesus, in other words, prays.

May it be that way for us as we get our bearings, find our way forward, together, in the dark and challenging days ahead.

Pray any way you like. Meditate here on Tuesday nights with the Buddhists in Mission Dharma, or take up a mindful form of yoga. Try some of the ancient Christian practices: centering prayer, the rosary, the Daily Office, Ignatian contemplation of the Scriptures. Or if music’s your thing, spend time listening attentively to Bach or John Coltrane or the other great composers.

Do it in your own inimitable way. But do it! Pray!

However we do it in these stormy times, may we, like Elijah, like Jesus, listen attentively to that small gentle whisper of God, trust it, and follow it--together--with deliberateness and courage, determination and joy--through the coming dark days of struggle.

Come and See

A “Come to Jesus" moment

Richard Smith

Second Sunday after Epiphany

Year A

The term “Come to Jesus moment” has seeped into everyday conversation. Back in my days in Silicon Valley, whenever a manager faced a rapidly approaching deadline and wanted to be sure the product would be ready for delivery on time, they’d gather the team for a “Come to Jesus meeting”. It was a moment of reckoning; each team member would have to report on the status of their deliverables; would they pass Quality Assurance; would everything be ready to ship on time. A Come to Jesus moment.

I’ve heard the phrase used in other contexts, like when friends and family need to confront a loved one who is abusing drugs or alcohol or engaging in some other destructive behavior. They sometimes call that intervention a “Come to Jesus moment.”

As I understand it, the phrase originated in the evangelical revival camp meetings of the 1920s when evangelists exhorted people to “come to Jesus.”  Sinners would walk down the aisle and come to the altar to repent of their sins, and ask Jesus to come into their heart.

In its purest form, it’s the kind of moment you realize what’s most important in your life--an Aha! moment--in which you reconnect with those basic values you may have lost sight of in the daily grind of making a living, deciding what to have for dinner, folding the laundry. It’s the clarifying of priorities that can come with a brush with death, say a car accident or a sudden health problem. In its purest form, a Come to Jesus moment brings you back to what you know is true and beautiful and good.

Welcome to today’s gospel. Two of John the Baptist’s disciples follow Jesus. Jesus asks them, “What are you looking for?” It’s not a question about finding lost car keys or a misplaced cell phone. It’s rather about their deepest desires, what they most want from life, what they most cherish and long for. “What are you looking for?”

Because our deepest desires have something to do with what God is calling us to. To paraphrase a popular theologian, “The place God calls you to is where your deepest desire meets the world’s deepest need.”

What are you looking for? Underneath all the surface wants to be billionaires, with looks like George Clooney or JLo--underneath those surface wants, what is your own deepest desire?

The disciples reply they want to know where Jesus staying, where he lives. This is code, a way of asking not only where he lives physically, but more: what drives him, what is he about, why does he do what he does? We might say colloquially today, “Where are you at?” or “Where’s your head at?” It’s the right question to ask of Jesus, the right thing to be looking for.

That’s when Jesus turns their following him into a calling. “Come and see,” he tells them. They came and saw and stayed. It was a come to Jesus moment. A calling.

Sometimes, as for these disciples, a calling can be a bit dramatic, involving an actual displacement, physically moving from one place to another.

But more likely it’s a matter of recognizing and embracing the displacements that have already occurred in the ordinary course of our lives: a discouraging report from the lab, the loss of a job or a loved one, the birth of a child, or taking up new and exciting responsibilities. Or maybe as the years go by, we realize ways of thinking or rituals or family traditions that once helped us understand our lives are no longer appreciated, leaving us lost and alone.

The task is to allow these actual displacements to become places where we can hear God’s call.

The fact is, God is always active in our lives, calling us, asking us to follow. And usually that call comes not in some dramatic moment, but much more subtly in the ordinary stuff of our lives.

But do we see, feel, and recognize God’s call, or do we keep waiting for that illusory, dramatic moment when it will “really” happen? Can we embrace the displacements that have already occurred in our lives and discern the callings they hold for us?

This weekend, we’re celebrating Martin Luther King. Like us, he had to navigate a time of great polarization in the country. At a time when the Civil Rights movement was struggling to make gains, the Vietnam War was also in full swing. Although it was very controversial among his followers, he discerned a calling, a vocation, to speak against the war even as he continued his struggle for civil rights.

Here is how he put it at the time, in words that could have been written just last week:

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

In the chaos and polarization that history had bequeathed to his generation, King discerned a vocation. It was for him a Come to Jesus moment, to reach deep into his heart and his faith tradition and speak a prophetic word.

Perhaps the coming week with its inaugural celebration, is our Come to Jesus moment. Perhaps in this moment, we, like Dr. King, need to reconnect with our own deepest values and desires and discern our own vocation. Whether we join a march, or call our representatives, or hold a sign for Amilcar at Mission Police Station, the questions that Dr. King wrestled with are ours as well. How will we speak? How will we break the silence of the darkness that seems so close around us?

The Epiphany 2017

Robert Warren Cromey

January 8, 2017

I read in the newspaper that Christmas sales were up again this year. Or were they down. I forget.

Why do we have the shopping frenzy to buy gifts and presents? Well, you can blame it all on the Three Kings. They brought gifts to the holy family and now we give gifts to our beloved families, friends and even to our rotten relatives.

We have just heard the ancient story of the three kings who travelled many miles through the desert to visit Jesus, Mary and Joseph. They were following a star.  The kings brought Jesus gifts, Gold, Frankincense and myrrh.

They were not Jews. They were Gentiles. The writer of Matthew wanted to tell his readers that the Jesus was not just for the Jews but also for all people.

St. Matthew showed us that the message of Jesus was for all people.

What was the message of Jesus? Shall I give you a quiz?
We are to be truly human. To be truly human is to love, forgive, care for the poor, the homeless, the sick and those facing injustice.

I want to tell you a story about another man who travelled afar in the desert.

In the 1960s TV show Branded, Chuck Connors plays a classic Western figure, Jason McCord--courageous, loyal, yet aloof and alone.  In the first episode, he meets a dying man in the desert and saves his life by giving him water and even carrying him on his own horse--only to find himself held up at gunpoint at an oasis, as the duplicitous Colbee takes McCord's horse and leaves him to walk across the desert, very likely to die in the attempt.  Colbeen explains that he has to do this because he has a wife and two daughters, and so he has to live--and to get to town in time for his daughter's birthday!  McCord survives, and meets up with the Colbee family in town.  A friend urges him to anger and confrontation.  McCord really is angry, and he walks toward Colbee resolutely, as Colbee's two little daughters play around him with their hoops.  McCord, looking at the family, then has a second thought; he turns around and walks away.  As he does, he says over his shoulder, with a wry smile, "Happy Birthday, Janie."

Here is one way to handle anger and move to forgiveness, a basic teaching of Jesus.

Some members of this parish are happy that Donald Trump will be our new president.

Some of us are angry and upset that he is our president elect.

We are a community who call ourselves followers of Jesus.
We are on a life-long quest to learn how to forgive.

Creative Christians will move on, past our upsets, or our self-righteous glee, and into a new life.

We continue to insist:

 That the people living in the tents outside our church have adequate housing.

That all people have adequate food to eat. We try through the Julian pantry.

That legal and illegal immigrants find justice and residency.

That all Americans have adequate medical care.

That there is continual witness for peace in the world.

I have noted over my many years that both Democrats and Republicans do not care much for these basic rights and needs.

We need to stop squawking about the election and get on with the gifts we have been given in following Jesus.

The light given to everyone

Feast of St. John the Evangelist

John 1: 1-14

The Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.

Back in the days of slavery, there were certain passages of scripture the slaveowners would not allow the slaves to hear. Today’s gospel from John, the patron of this parish, was one of those passages.

This passage is the start of what, for John, will be a new creation story. It begins with the very same words as the old creation story in Genesis: “In the beginning…” And it goes on to speak about everything in the cosmos coming into being. And then it says out of the Creator came life, and that life was a light given to every person. That light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.

That divine life, that light, is given to every person--no matter their skin color, or gender, or whether they’re Christian or Muslim or Jewish or card carrying atheists. That divine light was planted deep in every one of our hearts by the one who made us. It is very powerful. The darkness cannot overcome it.

The slave masters were afraid that if the slaves started to really believe they carried in their own selves this powerful divine light, they might begin to see themselves as creatures of vast and infinite beauty and dignity. They might start to resist the slave masters’ brutality and cruelty; they might rise up.

John’s message in today’s gospel has powerful implications.

Women who start to believe it might not be as willing to go along with all the subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations of a rape culture--whether those manifestations come from a President-elect, or at work, or just walking down the street.

Undocumented immigrants might reject the characterizations they are rapists and criminals, might rightfully take pride in their determination against enormous odds to find a way care for their kids, their amazing contributions to this economy and culture. They might refuse to let their families be torn apart by unjust immigration laws.

Let me say this another way drawing from the recent work of Richard Rohr…

Take a look at this fifteenth century icon by the Russian iconographer and mystic Andrei Rublev. It’s called “The Hospitality of Abraham”, or simply “The Trinity”.

There are three primary colors in Rublev’s icon, each illustrating a facet of the Holy One:

• Gold: “the Father”—perfection, fullness, wholeness, the ultimate Source
• Blue: “the Incarnate Christ”—both sea and sky mirroring one another (In the icon, Christ wears blue and holds up two fingers, telling us he has put spirit and matter, divinity and humanity, together within himself. The blue of creation is brilliantly undergirded with the necessary red of suffering.)
• Green: “the Spirit”—the divine photosynthesis that grows everything from within by transforming light into itself (Hildegard of Bingen called this viriditas, or the greening of all things.)

The gaze between the Three shows the deep respect between them as they all share a meal from a common bowl.

Notice the Spirit’s hand points toward the open and fourth place at the table. Is the Holy Spirit inviting, offering, and clearing space?

At the front of the table there appears to be a little rectangular hole. Some art historians believe the remaining glue on the original icon indicates that there was perhaps once a mirror glued to the front of the table. There was room at this table for a fourth.

That fourth person is you, the observer. You—and all of creation—are invited to sit at the divine table.

This is the Christmas mystery. As one of the most ancient prayers of the church says, God humbled himself to take on our humanity so we might share in God’s divinity.

This is who we each are: beloved creatures, bearers of a divine light that is powerful and can never be overcome, welcomed into the very life of God.

Our task is to claim that dignity.

The problem is we forget who we are, lose touch with that light and life the Creator planted deep in our hearts. All around us, we hear so many messages to the contrary:You’re too old, or too you. Too skinny, or too fat. The wrong color or gender or sexual orientation. If we’re not careful, we can unconsciously start believing those voices.

Which is why we need other people to remind us now and then of our own profound beauty and dignity that no one, not even we on our worst days, can take away.

Cleve Jones, one of the leaders in the modern gay rights movement, says that when he was a kid, he never knew any other gay people existed. He thought he was the only one who felt and experienced the world and people as he did. After being beaten and bullied several times at school, he began to quietly stash away whatever pills he could find, thinking someday he might use them to commit suicide.

Then he found a copy of Life magazine that told about some homosexuals in San Francisco, the culture they were forming, the movement they were creating. He stumbled across authors like Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Allen Ginsberg and eventually came to believe that he was not alone.

Once he discovered there was a community of people who were like him, who could understand and welcome him, Cleve says he flushed all those pills down the toilet. A few years later, he arrived in San Francisco, joined the movement for LGBT rights, and the rest is history.

Sometimes we lose touch with the unique dignity and beauty given us by the Creator. We forget who we are: bearers of God’s own light, invited into his very life. We need other people to help us see it.

It’s why we need communities like this one at St. John's where we gather week after week to immerse ourselves once more in the ancient stories, and share this meal, and remember not only God's mighty deeds in history and who Jesus is, but also who we are.

I hope we in this crazy community can be this reminder to each other in the year ahead; each of us in sheer awe of the beauty and dignity and dignity the Creator has given us, reminding each other of theirs.

Let me close with a poem by Jan Richardson...

Blessed Are You Who Bear the Light Blessed are you who bear the light
in unbearable times,
who testify to its endurance
amid the unendurable,
who bear witness to its persistence
when everything seems in shadow and grief.
Blessed are you
in whom
the light lives,
in whom
the brightness blazes—
your heart a chapel,
an altar
where in the deepest night
can be seen the fire
that shines forth
in you
in unaccountable faith,
in stubborn hope,
in love that illumines
every broken thing it finds.