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Birmingham Pressure
A few weeks ago I preached a sermon on Baptism. It is one of my favorite sermons. Since I preach extemporaneously, I can be surprised by what happens when preaching. In this sermon I included part of a poem I had heard 12 years ago. I loved these words but I had never connected them to baptism before.It was written by a classmate of mine. We were in our first week of classes of a three-year program we had just started. Our assignment was to re-contextualize an ancient text. We were to take the text and write something that would express the sentiment of the text so it made sense in our modern context. We were given several passages from which to choose. Martha Due (now Robertson) and I chose the same passage, Amos 5:18-24.
Here’s the second part of that passage:
21I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
22Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings, I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
23Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
24But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
Amos is writing against the Israelites who are looking for the “Day of the Lord” to deliver them from their enemies who are about to attack them. He says, Why are you looking for the Day of the Lord when it is you who will be judged. God is angry because the Israelites have not been caring for the poor and needy. He then launches into the passage quoted above.
The last verse became a popular refrain in the civil rights movement.
I don’t remember what I wrote. It wasn’t memorable. I do remember what Martha wrote. Or to be more precise, I remember the last few verses of what she wrote. Keep in mind the connection between “justice flowing down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream” and the civil rights movement.
Here’s my memory of how Martha’s ended her poem:
“Douse me with those waters
forced through a fire hose
to Birmingham pressure
and give me companions
with whom to rise
from the pavement and build”
I remember when I heard those words read in class. We were all moved. It was a holy moment. We just sat in silence. I wish I had the entire poem.
My new realization is that in Baptism we are doused with those waters. We are knocked over by, and drenched with, the waters of God’s justice and compassion and we are given companions with whom to rise from the pavement and build God’s Kingdom.
Every few years I come to a new appreciation of baptism; I discover a new way this ritual shapes the spiritual life. Thank you Martha for this new understanding of baptism.
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The Hidden Power of the Gospels
We just hosted a service for the launch of Alexander Shaia’s The Hidden Power of the Gospels. He sees each of the four gospels as highlighting a different aspect of the spiritual life. Matthew begins with “How do we face change?” Mark asks, “How do we move through suffering?” John elevates us with, “How do we receive Joy.” Luke moves us on with, “How do we mature in service.”I have always appreciated the different foci of the four gospels and I’m looking forward to reading this.
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God Hates Ponies
The God Hates _______ (fill in the blank) super-hatemongers from Fred Phelp’s Westboro Baptist Church are coming to Sacramento next week. You can see their schedule toward the bottom of this page. I think the plan is to ignore them. I will be in Utah visiting my daughter when they are here, so couldn’t do anything anyway. But it would be so fun to hold a mock counter-protest like the one held in SF when they were protesting google. Here’s a picture I got from Laughing Squid.
Check out the guy in the unicorn costume:
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Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing
I am way behind in blogging. Time for a little catch-up.Last week, Kirstin Paisley, a member of Trinity who works with our homeless ministry was in our Thursday night Catechumenate class, where they study the upcoming Gospel reading. They looked at the text from Luke’s 4th chapter, where Jesus goes into the synagogue, opens the scroll from Isaiah and reads, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Jesus then rolls up the scroll and says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Friday night Kirstin welcomed 120 homeless people into the Great Hall, helped feed them dinner and gave them a warm, safe place to sleep. Throughout the night, that last sentence from Jesus kept resonating for her. As she was eating and resting in safe community she realized that it indeed is being fulfilled. She wrote a beautiful reflection that’s posted on Trinity’s Crosstalk Blog. I commend the entire piece. Here’s an excerpt:
This is easy. It’s joyful and loving and wonderful. This is just fun. And sometimes it breaks my heart.
Wednesday at breakfast, I was passing out napkins at the front of the line. I wasn’t even fully awake yet. I was rolling spoons inside of napkins, offering them, and saying hi, or asking how someone slept; that sort of thing. Without the slightest bit of consciousness of how my behavior might affect anybody.
I gave someone a spoon and a napkin. I have no idea what I said to him. He asked me, “Why are you always so nice to us?”
I answered with the first thing that came to my head: “Because we’re all human beings. And because you guys deserve it.” I was thinking, “My God, what did you expect me to be?”
That’s what it does to someone’s soul when everywhere they go, they’re trespassing.
The homeless people that we host come here because they know that they can. They know that we will welcome them. We offer them food, company, community. We invite them into church—we explicitly do not compel them. They are free to be themselves here. We laugh with them. We listen to them. We love them. And they love us.
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
On these cold, wet nights, “inbreaking” is too weak a word. Time and time and time again, we witness the reign of God crashing into the space we walk around in. There is so much love here.
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Sacramento Bee Article on Trinity’s Homeless Ministry
Jennifer Garza visited our new homeless ministry on Monday night. We have started feeding and housing up to 120 (so far) homeless people when it gets wet or cold. There are lots of people with no place to go, and when it is raining or cold, it is not only uncomfortable, it is dangerous. A group of Trinity folks decided to partner with the “safe ground” movement and open our parish hall. We don’t have any authorization to be a “shelter” and we don’t want to adversely impact our neighbors, so we don’t do this more than two nights in a row. We are working on getting other churches to partner with us so there is a place for people to go on other nights. I’ve posted the first paragraphs of Jennifer’s article. The full article is HERE.
The homeless people who walk through the doors of Trinity Cathedral in midtownSacramento have faith in the church, the only one in the area to offer them a hot meal and a roof over their heads.
Since mid-December, the homeless have escaped the wet and cold for a warm sleeping bag on the floor of the church hall twice a week. A slice of heaven on earth, said one.
“You have no idea how much that means,” saidRonnie Holiday, who has been on the streets for years. “They’re going to be blessed for doing this, I’ll tell you that.”
No other church runs a program like the one atTrinity Cathedral, homeless advocates said.
Read the entire article HERE.
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Thriving L.A. Church compared to Church of England
Lucy Broadbent compares her homeland’s Church of England to the progressive parish she now eagerly attends in L.A. in an article published in London’s The Times. It is an upbeat article about a parish getting things right. Here’s the beginning of the article:It’s not that I am especially pious. Believe me, I was mostly praying for cashmere this Christmas. As the old joke goes: Am I religious? No, I’m Church of England. But I have a confession to make: I do go to church, and not just at Christmas either. I go all the time. Even on weekdays sometimes.
I’m aware that such an admission is rather like owning up to being a trainspotter these days, but then I don’t have to put up with the desolate aisles and empty pews that most of you have become familiar with in Britain — where the best that can be hoped for on a Sunday is a faint whiff of incense and three old ladies and a homeless person singing watery hymns.
According to a report published tomorrow there is a sharp decline in religious belief in Britain. Half the population now calls itself Christian, down from two thirds in 1983. At the same time, the proportion who confess to “no religion” has increased from just under a third to more than four in ten. If Jews and Muslims are included, non-Christians now represent 7 per cent of the population, up from 2 per cent 25 years ago.
I hate to sound as if I’m boasting, but at the Anglican church my family attends in Los Angeles, you have to go early if you want a seat. Rather like being at a football match when your team has just won, the sheer numbers alone leave you with a spring in your step and a song on your lips.
St James Church, which sits at the intersection of an affluent middle-class neighbourhood, and many poorer communities in LA, is an Episcopal Church, that is the American equivalent of the Church of England. But, unlike its British cousins, it is packed because it goes out of its way to create a community in a big, sprawling city. There’s a supper club on Wednesday nights, set up with the intention of giving mums a night off, and a chance for families to make friends.
You can find the entire article HERE.
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Update from Haiti
From Episcopal News ServiceRejecting offers to evacuate him from Port-au-Prince, Episcopal Diocese of Haiti Bishop Jean Zaché Duracin said Jan. 18 that he must remain in the Haitian capital.
“No, I will stay with my people,” the Rev. Lauren Stanley, one of four Episcopal Church missionaries assigned to the Haitian diocese, told ENS the bishop said in response to the evacuation offer.
Stanley was home in Virginia when the magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck just before 5:00 p.m. local time Jan. 12 and has been monitoring diocesan reports from there.
“The people are strong,” Duracin told Stanley, echoing messages she has received from other priests. “We still have our people, and they are strong. We need to help them.”
Another Episcopal Church missionary, the Rev. Canon Oge Beauvoir, the dean of the diocese’s seminary, is still in Haiti and working with Duracin. Mallory Holding, 23, and Jude Harmon, 28, two Young Adult Service Corps missionaries, left the country late last week.
Duracin, who was made homeless by the quake, said he is caring for 3,000 other homeless victims of the quake in a tent city in downtown Port-au-Prince. More than 100 of the diocese’s churches have been damaged or destroyed, he said, including the demolished Cathédrale Sainte Trinité (Holy Trinity Cathedral) in Port-au-Prince. At least four of the diocese’s 254 schools, ranging from pre-schools to a university and seminary, were destroyed.
Read it all HERE.