Street and Altar

Loving our neighbors

2011-08-23T09:09:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from our vicar's sermon, on Sunday August 21st (10th Sunday after Pentecost).

What does it look like for us to love our neighbors as ourselves?

These questions are difficult for any Christian community.

One of our callings at St. Joseph’s seems to be engaging the needs and lives of our homeless brothers and sisters in this neighborhood.

We share breakfast now Monday through Saturday with those who are hungry. This past week we averaged over 30 people at breakfast daily.

Two weeks ago one of our homeless neighbors who sleeps on our property because he feels safe being on the church grounds was hit in the head while he slept, and due to the care of another homeless man, he made it to the hospital in time to save his life.

How do we, as a community of faith –

a ragged bunch of rocks held together by God’s grace –

provide a welcoming place for all,

where people of all walks of life are honored as God’s children and not abused?

How do we create and promote a community in which all present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, not marred by drugs and violence?

The answers to these questions are difficult.

Living in community is challenging as we try to honor one another.

Next Sunday, August 28^th, following fellowship time after church, whoever wishes will gather in the parish hall to have a conversation about what I have no other name for than “rules for behavior” for all who gather at St. Joseph’s in any capacity.

Your vestry has been having conversations with local social service agencies, our homeless neighbors, the Durham police department, local businesses and members of the congregation to try to come to understand ways we might be able to curb illegal and violent activities on our property. Next week we invite your insights, thoughts and conversation. Our discussions will be ongoing.

As rocks as jagged as Peter – one moment boldly proclaiming Jesus as Lord and the next denying him utterly – we will make mistakes but I hope that we will also hold each other accountable to the Kingdom, living into forgiveness and grace.

Karen+

Breakfast News

2011-08-11T13:50:00.000-07:00

Fellowship at Saint Joseph's has always been an important part of our ministry. None more so than the Monday through Saturday breakfast fellowship following Morning Prayer.

Numbers have been steadily increasing, which in the current economic climate is not surprising. In addition, with the new academic year fast approaching, more Divinity School students are returning from internships and are joining and helping us on a daily basis. We have had to add to the size of our breakfast table. Some mornings, the chatter around the breakfast table is so intense that it's hard to focus on your personal conversation.

Gail is never happier than when she sees more joining us to share eggs 'n' cheese, cereals, toast, juice and coffee. "Miss Gail" has one rule and one rule only - no one is allowed to leave without a hug!

We certainly reap what we sow. Sowing the seed of community and friendship around a simple breakfast meal fills us all with a gift. We give and we receive - each and every one of us.

---Mick

Hauerwas' Commentary on Matthew 25:31-46

2011-06-19T18:04:00.000-07:00

"In a wonderful essay entitled "The Scandal of the Works of Mercy," Dorothy Day lists the works of mercy, codified by Thomas Aquinas, based on Matt. 25:

The spiritual works of mercy are to admonish the sinner, to instruct the ignorant, to council the doubtful, to comfort the sorrowful, to bear wrongs patiently, to forgive all injuries, and to pray for the living and the dead. The corporeal works of mercy are to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to ransom the captive, to harbor the harborless, to visit the sick, and to bury the dead.

Her colleague, Peter Maurin, whom Day identifies as the founder of The Catholic Worker, was, according to Day, as much an apostle to the world as he was to the poor. He did not believe that works of mercy were a strategy to care for the poor until another and more effective social policy could be found. He believed that works of mercy were the social policy that Jesus had given people for the renewal of the world. According to Day, Maurin thought that in order to convince people [of this]

it was necessary to embrace voluntary poverty, to strip yourself, which would give you the means to practice the works of mercy. To reach the man in the street you must go to the street. To reach the workers, you begin to study the philosophy of labor, and to take up manual labor, useful labor, instead of white collar work. To be the least, to be the worker, to be poor, to take the lowest place and thus be the spark which would set afire the love of men towards each other and to God (and we can only show our love for God by our love for our fellows). These were Peter's ideas, and they are indispensable for the performing of the works of mercy.

Day calls this understanding of the works of mercy a scandal because it challenges the assumption that Christians are to do something for the poor by trying to create alternatives to capitalism or socialism. The problem with trying to create such alternatives is that we seduce ourselves into believing that we are working to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, care for the sick and those in prison without knowing anyone who is hungry, naked, thirsty, a stranger, sick or in prison. Day and Maurin knew that attempts to create a "better world" without being a people capable of the works of mercy could not help but betray Jesus' response to his disciples' question what sign will there be of Jesus' coming and the end of the age [Matt 24:3]. The sign is that they have the time to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, care for the sick and those in prison.

Moreover, such work will be offensive to those in power who claim to rule as benefactors of the poor and hungry. A people shaped by the practice of the works of mercy will be a people capable of seeing through those who claim to need power to do good, but in fact just need power. Great injustice is perpetuated in the name of justice. Great evil is done because it is said that time is short and there needs to be a response to this or that crisis. Christians live after the only crisis that matters, which means that Jesus has given us all the time in the world to visit him in the prisons of this world."

Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew, 211-12

[Submitted by Colin Miller]

A gloriously busy breakfast

2011-05-17T08:25:00.000-07:00

It seems some time since we have seen such a busy breakfast. In fact we have rarely reached double figures in the past few weeks.

This morning Gail was in her element (the more guys she has "to mother", the happier she is). Helped by Mimi, who kept the toaster working overtime, a dozen hungry friends shared our meal of cereals, eggs 'n' cheese, toast and jam. It was great to hear so much chatter around the breakfast table. We actually ran out of milk and bread, but a brisk walk to the grocery store remedied that.

"Word of mouth", was the reply I received on asking how some of those present stumbled on Saint Joseph's. Word of our ministry certainly spreads and we are grateful for that. It seemed so obvious to me that we were graced by the presence of the Holy Spirit sharing our fellowship.

--Mick

Life in Easter

2011-05-13T15:56:00.000-07:00

As odd as it may sound, Lent was a refreshing season for me this year. I adopted Lenten disciplines that forced me to face the finitude of my life as a creature—my limited energy, time, and strength. And though there were moments of frustration in my disciplines, I also grew to accept and appreciate them. The message of Ash Wednesday (“Dust you are, and to dust you will return”) became a source of gratitude to me. I found rest in being a creature, in resting on God.

This Easter season, however, has been anything but restful to me. The joyful celebrations of the Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday Eucharist have been crowded out by to-do lists and errands. I have felt like Peter, returning to pick up his nets to go back to fishing after Jesus was killed and buried. Some of that is simply because I live the life of a student, and the busiest weeks of the semester coincided with the beginning of the Easter season (yeah, terrible timing!). But I think I also let go of my Lenten lessons too quickly. Easter may bring Lent to an end, but it does so like the birth of a baby. Lent prepares those following Jesus to Jerusalem for the wonderfully abundant resurrection life of Easter. The rest that I found in Lent was not supposed to be something I throw off along with the Lenten disciplines; that rest enters into full bloom in Easter as the Lord of the Sabbath is raised to new life.

So instead of rushing full speed back to my “nets,” I want to spend the rest of the Easter season sitting at the empty tomb, listening for the voice of the risen Lord calling my name, and then spreading the joyous news that I have seen the Lord. I pray that the joy and peace of Easter may overflow in all our lives, at St. Joseph’s and beyond, as the risen Christ walks and abides with us all 50 days. And I pray that, amid the stresses that continue in our lives no matter the season, we will all find Sabbath rest in dwelling with the God of resurrection life.

—Jodi Belcher

Holy Saturday Meditation

2011-04-24T13:45:00.000-07:00

Job 14:1-14

Psalm 31:1-4, 15-16

I Peter 4:1-8

John 19:38-42

Death can be violent, horrific, dreadful. It cuts off life, empties the body of breath and movement, and severs relationships. It is a fearful power before which all of us are defenseless and vulnerable. It turns the strongest among us into victims. When death is near, we may wonder where God is, if God will rescue, if God will deprive death of its power and “let [God’s] face shine on [us],” as Psalm 31 says. The psalmist sees God as a refuge from enemies, from the horror of death, and trusts that every breath of life is “in [the Lord’s] hands.” And so the psalmist cries out to God, believing that God can triumph over the psalmist’s enemies and deliver the psalmist to new life.

Death can also be viewed as rest. It brings an end to suffering, brokenness, and unspeakable pain. This is the portrait of death that Job paints. He says to God, “If only you would hide me in the grave and conceal me till your anger has passed!” The continued presence of God in Job’s life—now scarred by affliction, the deaths of loved ones, and the loss of his future—only continues Job’s torment. He believes it would be better for God to leave human beings alone to live out their brief, fleeting lives, rather than sustain human life in suffering.

Job and the psalmist give us two very different pictures of death with two different visions of God. In Psalm 31, God is the one who remembers and saves the psalmist from imminent death, and the psalmist places all hope and trust in God, who is faithful. But for Job, God is the one whose presence staves off death and enables suffering to continue, and Job laments God’s involvement in his life. The psalmist clings to God in the face of suffering and death, while Job begs God to stop clinging to him in the face of Job’s suffering.

What are we to do with these different pictures? Is one true and the other false? Which God is the real God—the psalmist’s or Job’s?

I wonder if Holy Saturday makes both pictures true. I wonder if the body of Jesus lying in the tomb, bearing the unhealed wounds of execution, shows us the violence and horror of death, but also shows us God’s stubborn refusal to let go of a body even in the worst suffering. I wonder if this day affirms both the trust of the psalmist and the protest of Job because both were on Jesus’ lips just moments before he died and both went with him to the grave (“Into your hands I commit my spirit” and “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). The dead body of Jesus is a sign of God’s faithfulness in life and in death—a faithfulness that may not make sense to us when suffering persists, but a faithfulness of incomprehensible love deep enough to embrace our protest and our hope. In Jesus’ death, God journeys into suffering and death with us—not to relish in our pain—no!—but to show us that nothing—no violence, evil, or deadly power—can “separate us from the love of God,” as Paul says in Romans.

Today, on Holy Saturday, in the psalm and in Job, we see one picture: the broken body of Jesus held in the hands of a faithful God. We see the power of death being destroyed in Jesus’ dead body. And we see the picture of our hope and our protest transformed in his tomb, as his very body, wounded and lifeless, displays the incomprehensible depths of God’s love for us. “[Our] times are in [God’s] hands,” and God has refused to let us go. Ever. Amen.

----Jodi Belcher

April 23rd, 2011

God's work in our garden . . . with help from the gardening crew

2011-04-14T04:19:00.000-07:00

Our vegetables are growing like weeds. (Ok … not technically. If only they did!) The sugar snap peas have just started wrapping their tendrils around the lower rung of twine, and we’ve got spinach and a lettuce mix, too.

The daffodils, azalea bushes and other beauties are blooming, and our fig sapling is thriving.

In a few days the potatoes will go in. After April 15 -- the date after which no more frosts are expected -- we’ll begin planting tomato, eggplant and pepper. We’ll also put in warmth-loving flowers like gladioli and zinnia.

We now have a composter, so all kitchen scraps will help to enrich St. Joseph's garden.

We also have a new bench, donated by Joel and have some exciting plans for the future development of this once neglected area of our grounds.

--- Jamie

Saturday fellowship

2011-04-04T14:43:00.000-07:00

7:45 AM on Saturday saw the Rev. Joe Hensley, Associate Rector at St. Luke's, and a longtime friend of St. Joseph's, bring his youth catechesis class to Matins. Joe's idea was to give this great bunch of young people added experience of helping in the community as part of their weekend retreat.

What a success this turned out to be. After Gail explained where everything was kept, she left it to them to prepare breakfast.

After Morning Prayer it didn't take long for duties to be mutually allocated and agreed (with no adult interference). Cooking eggs, cheese and toast seemed to be enjoyed by those involved and we soon sat down to a hearty breakfast.

After breakfast, and the inevitable clearing up, we checked out the church who uses our upper room - St. Basil the Great Romanian Orthodox Church. Mick explained that was one way that St. Joseph's shared it's resources with the community at large and how a wonderful family spirit was being created between the two churches, despite the differing traditions.

Joe took some time to point out and explain those differences, especially the use of Icons. We all took time to study the many on display and to meditate on their meanings.

Joe, enjoying a well-earned mug of coffee, whilst Gail enjoys a rare "easy" morning. We thoroughly enjoyed their company.

Let it rain . . . please

2011-03-13T04:45:00.001-07:00

Junior Warden Gary Pellom pictured yesterday installing our rain barrels. With the drought still continuing and the prospect of a dry summer, these are an important addition to our gardening efforts.

Much preparatory work has been done and a small band of willing members are enthusiastically working on making this project successful.

We've "plowed the fields and scattered," and now we will wait patiently for it to "be fed and watered, by God's almighty hand."

In the meantime, the Gardening Crew appreciate Gary's hard work, as do we all at St. Joe's.

---- Mick ----

Spring planting

2011-02-24T05:00:00.000-08:00

Our 70 tulip bulbs have gone through a "winter" in the refrigerator (we bought them a tad late!) and have awoken to prepare for what we hope will be a vivid show of scarlet and yellow this spring.

Soon the gardening team will plant them along with some iris bulbs -- but first we’ve got some work to do. On Saturday morning we’ll spread around a truck load of soil and compost. Monty will till it into our long neglected (hard-as-brick) soil. If you’re interested in some sunshine and fellowship, please join us! And we could definitely use extra wheelbarrows and shovels.

In the fall we built four raised beds and planted azaleas, pansies, a date tree, crocuses and other greenery. This year we hope to landscape other parts of the back yard and grow sunflowers, zinnias, aster, butterfly weed, anise-hyssop, wildflowers and more. Many of these we’ve chosen to attract birds (including hummingbirds) and butterflies, as well as beneficial insects like ladybugs that will snack on the tiny pests around our flowers and vegetables.

We’ll keep adding to the grounds little by little. Our back yard soon will become a peaceful, pretty place where folks can meet for lunch or sit quietly. If you're interest in landscaping or caring for the plants, please e-mail Jamie.L.Kennedy@gmail.com.

With God's grace, and some hard work,our yard will be a peaceful enhancement to our community.

------ Jamie

Greetings from Karen

2011-02-16T14:55:00.000-08:00

15 February 2011

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

I write to you with joy as your new Vicar! I know the journey has been long for you all; I look forward to working alongside you in ministry at St. Joseph’s.

To that end I want you to know that I will not come in and start changing things. I will spend some months getting to know you individually and as a congregation. I hope to get to know each of you: your gifts and talents, your history at St. Joseph’s and what you hope for the future at St. Joseph’s. And together we will move forward into the future.

I have begun by reading the story of the first 100 years of history of St. Joseph’s. It is clear that the people of St. Joseph’s are rooted in prayer, study and service to the community. I look forward to continuing that journey with you in our own day and time, seeing how we will be witnesses to God’s Kingdom.

You will be getting to know me over the coming days and months, but please know that I am available to you. I may do some things a little differently; if you wonder why I do a particular thing, please ask. I also will be asking many questions to learn about St. Joseph’s!

I will be taking Mondays as my Sabbath day – my own day for rest and renewal. However, if it’s a Monday and you have a pastoral emergency, please call! Since my position is half-time, I will generally be working Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. During my first months at St. Joseph’s I will be trying to meet with as many folks as possible, so I may be out of the office. If you would like to meet, please email or call me on my cell phone. I look forward to getting to know you.

I look forward to celebrating the Eucharist with you this Sunday, February 20^th.

Blessings,

Karen+

Our new vicar

2011-01-30T14:01:00.000-08:00

The vestry of Saint Joseph's is delighted to announce the appointment of the Rev. Karen C. Barfield as Vicar with effect from February 15th.

Karen, who needs no introduction to Saint Joseph's, celebrates her first Sunday Eucharist as vicar on February 20th.

Karen is married to Ray Barfield and has two children: Micah (15) and Alexandra (11). Karen has been ordained seven years and has served in a variety of settings: urban and suburban; Cathedral staff, campus ministry, and congregations of all sizes; as interim rector, associate rector and interim chaplain. Her greatest joys in ministry involve liturgy, prayer, pastoral care and issues of justice. She was born and raised in Memphis, TN where she served as priest until moving to Chapel Hill, NC two years ago with her family.

In her spare time Karen enjoys reading, gardening, travelling, and designing most anything, especially houses (kitchens and baths in particular). Ray, her husband of 20 years, is a pediatric oncologist at Duke and is Associate professor of Christian Philosophy in Duke’s Divinity School. Ray enjoys writing, playing classical guitar and running. Micah wrestles for Chapel Hill High School, and Alexandra enjoys everything artistic, especially singing and playing classical guitar. The whole family loves to cook together.

Prior to ordination Karen served on staff at St. Luke’s Community Kitchen in Atlanta, GA, and she was co-founder of a prison ministry there as well. In downtown Memphis she helped develop the Hospitality Hub, a non-profit organization which assists persons who are homeless connect with the resources they need. Karen has most recently been serving as Priest Associate and Administrative Assistant at the Episcopal Church of the Advocate in Carrboro.

Mick, Verger

Catechesis 2011

2011-01-02T14:48:00.000-08:00

St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church

2011 Catechesis

The Rt. Rev. Michael B. Curry, Bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina

J. David Belcher, Catechist

The word “catechesis” is derived from the Greek New Testament word, katecheō, which means, roughly, “to teach by word of mouth.” The process of the catechumenate – ancient in origin, its more formal structure stretching back to at least the fourth century – is made up of an entire series of such oral instructions, meant to prepare those instructed to receive the sacraments of initiation: Baptism, Confirmation (or Chrismation), and Eucharist. The catechumenate is thus a time of study, deepening of faith, and intense preparation for incorporation into Christ’s body, the Church.

At St. Joseph’s, the catechumenate is such an intensive time of training and instruction for those not only preparing to be baptized (at the Great Easter Vigil), but also for those who either wish to be confirmed or received into the Episcopal Church, or who simply wish to reaffirm the vows each of us takes at Baptism. However, all are welcome to participate in this ancient tradition, whether to learn more about and thus deepen one’s understanding of the faith or the Episcopal Church more specifically, or to join with others as one body in preparation for the reaffirmation of the vows each of us takes at Baptism. And we are all called to participate by our common prayers, remembering those who embark on this journey, lifting them up to God, and with the Holy Spirit welcoming them into the communion of saints.

Commitment and Preparation

Since Baptism is nothing short of a “new birth” (Jn. 3:3-8) and thus incorporates us into an entirely new way of life, traditionally there are certain expectations that accompany this journey each of us takes to the waters of Holy Baptism. At St. Joseph’s, the following commitments are vital to the catechetical journey:

Worship

Catechumens commit to attending communal worship in the form of the Sunday Eucharist on a weekly basis unless prohibited by illness or some other unavoidable obstacle. Baptized Christians are encouraged to receive the bread and/or cup on these occasions.

Study

Catechumens commit to preparing for and attending group sessions on various topics, including discussing the ongoing process and progress of catechesis. These meetings will take place over the course of roughly thirteen Saturdays beginning just after Epiphany and ending just after Easter Sunday, and will be led by the Catechist or other members of the congregation. Consult the schedule below to determine meeting dates. Catechumens who are unable to attend a session due to illness or another unavoidable obstacle are encouraged to notify the Catechist to receive the preparatory materials for that session.

Works of Supplication

Catechumens commit to praying the Morning and Evening Offices of the Book of Common Prayer daily. Each week, at least one of the Daily Offices should be prayed in community, preferably at St. Joseph’s, but possibly at another church, with one’s family, partner or friends, etc. In addition, catechumens are encouraged to take up the discipline of fasting, especially during the Lenten season (including Holy Week).

Works of Mercy

Catechumens commit to serving in a ministry capacity once per week. This may include attendance and service at morning breakfast fellowship, preparing, delivering, or sharing meals at the House of Hospitality, service at Urban Ministries, or another commitment to be worked out in consultation with Catechist or clergy.

Confession of Sin

Catechumens are encouraged to commit to confessing to a priest once a week during Lent using one of the forms in the Book of Common Prayer.

Schedule of Meetings and Other Important Dates

Weekly Meetings are Underlined, all other dates listed are mandatory Eucharists

Jan 6 – The Epiphany

Jan 8 – Introductory meeting

Jan 9 – First Sunday after Epiphany (Liturgy for the enrollment of catechumens)

Jan 15 – What is Catechesis? – with guest, Maria Doerfler

Jan 22 – No meeting

Jan 29 – The Holy Scriptures: The Old Testament – with guest, Joel Marcus

Feb 5 – The Holy Scriptures: The New Testament – with guest, Jodi Belcher

Feb 12 – The Nicene Creed/Apostle’s Creed/Baptismal Covenant

Feb 19 – Liturgical Calendar/Lectionary, with guest, the Rev. Nils Chittenden

Feb 26 – Works of Supplication: Prayer, Contemplation, and Fasting – with guest, Colin Miller

Mar 5 – Works of Mercy: Charity and Mission

Mar 9 – Ash Wednesday

Mar 12 –The Sacraments: Holy Baptism

Mar 13 – First Sunday of Lent (Enrollment of Candidates for Baptism)

Mar 19 – The Sacraments: Confirmation/Chrismation, Reception, Reaffirmation of Baptismal Vows

Mar 26 – The Episcopal Church: Protestant and/or Catholic?

April 2 – Governance in TEC, with guests, the Vestry of St. Joseph’s

April 9 –The Anglican Communion and TEC’s place therein

April 16 – No meeting

Holy Week

April 17 – Passion (or Palm) Sunday

The Great Triduum

April 21 – Maundy Thursday

April 22 – Good Friday

April 23 – Holy Saturday/Easter Vigil

April 24 – Easter Sunday

April 30 – The Sacraments: Holy Eucharist

Durham Convocation-wide Confirmation Service – TBA

Contact Information:

Dave Belcher, Catechist

j.david.belcher@gmail.com

919 237-1179

A Joyous and Blessed Christmastide

2010-12-25T04:13:00.000-08:00

It's been a tough six months since our dear Vicar left, but on reflection, I think we have coped pretty well.

I won't say it's been easy, being a Christian isn't, but a faithful and loyal church family have made it possible. Thanks to some wonderful supply priests (friends old and new), not one Sunday Eucharist has been missed. We have continued with Bible Study, expanded Daily Office and breakfast fellowship (now six days per week), had a baptism, a funeral and a wedding, have a fully staffed nursery and will shortly be starting Catechesis to prepare candidates for baptism, confirmation, reaffirmation and acceptance at Eastertide. For a small church with no clergy, that's no small achievement and a tribute to the lay members involved.

What am I thinking? That St. Joseph's continued presence is entirely in our hands? Wake up Mick! We all know that the Holy Spirit is guiding the little church with the big red doors, and giving us a helping hand - don't we!!

As our search for a new vicar continues, we realise that God already knows who He is sending to shepherd His flock in Old West Durham. We just have to be patient and put our trust in Him

A Joyous and Blessed Christmastide to all.

Mick

Verger

Christ The King

2010-11-29T13:05:00.001-08:00

The following is the sermon preached by Joel Marcus at St. Joseph's on the last Sunday of Pentecost, November 21, 2010.

Colossians 1:11-20

Luke 23:33-43

CHRIST THE KING

Our collect for the day praises God “whose will is to restore all things in [his] well-beloved Son, the king of kings and lord of lords.” This collect is related to the Epistle reading from Colossians, which describes Christ as the one through whom all things were created, who has reconciled all things to God through the blood of his cross, and who presently holds all things together. It is a grand, cosmic vision, in which Christ already reigns over everything. This is, after all, the last Sunday before Advent, the day on which we celebrate Christ the King. The language about all things subsisting, or holding together, in Christ, is particularly striking.

The only question is whether or not this grand, over-the-top language actually corresponds to reality. Let me make a confession, brothers and sisters: sometimes it doesn’t seem to me that everything is holding together. This may be an idiosyncratic view on my part—but sometimes it seems to me, on the contrary, that everything is falling apart.

We human beings seem to have a remarkable talent for screwing things up. I know some people don’t like to hear about politics in church, but I don’t get to preach very often, so bear with me. Because, hard as it is to believe, our government seems poised on the verge of going into an even more advanced state paralysis than has prevailed before. The opposition party has pledged itself to make its number one goal for the next two years not to allow the executive branch to accomplish anything of substance. This at a time when we are confronted by numerous crises in the foreign sphere, in our eroding economic position, and in the climatic Sword of Damocles that hangs over our heads.

The situation reminds me of a story I heard on NPR yesterday about the greatest naval disaster in American history before Pearl Harbor. It happened during the third year of the Revolutionary War, when our Senior Warden’s ancestors sent three small ships with 700 soldiers try to establish a foothold on the shore of Penobscot Bay in what is now Maine. The colonials responded by sending a huge fleet of 42 ships to dislodge the evil British from their position on the bluffs overlooking the sea, where they were starting to build a fort. The colonials were initially successful; after hard fighting, they gained the high ground and could easily have overrun the British fort, whose soldiers were vastly outnumbered. But then the commander of the American army insisted, "I won’t attack the fort until the three British ships are destroyed." And the commander of the American fleet responded, "I won’t attack the ships until you attack the fort." And each of these generals refused to budge until the other made the first move. And so they stopped speaking to each other and did nothing.

Meanwhile the British were building up the fort and sending a small fleet to relieve their ships. The Americans eventually panicked and were not even able to organize an orderly retreat. The British ended up burning the entire American fleet; only one ship out of the 42 escaped. The man in charge of the American artillery, by the way, whose name was Paul Revere, was later courtmartialed on charges of cowardice and incompetence, and his name would have been mud in our collective memory, had not Henry Wadsworth Longfellow salvaged his reputation with a famous and largely fictional poem eighty years later. In any case, the story of the Penobscot disaster strikes me as a parable for where we seem to be heading today—stupidity, stubborrness, and paralysis, leading to disaster. Things fall apart; the center cannot seem to hold.

On a smaller scale, here at St. Joseph’s, things also seem sometimes to be falling apart. We have been vicarless for six months, during which time a major crisis has hit us in the action taken by the city against our homeless neighbors. We on the vestry and other concerned parishioners, especially our tireless Senior Warden and future Verger, have tried to hold things together, but it ain’t always easy. And, in the personal sphere—well, I bet you can fill in the blanks from your own life there. It may suffice to recall one of the most famous opening sentences in all of literature, the beginning of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”--to recall this sentence and to ask yourself which group you identify with. And if the answer is the first group, please do not let the rest of us hear from you!

So what do we make of Paul’s claim that God has reconciled all things to himself? Is this just a pipe dream, the sort of charming vacation from reality that preachers seem to enjoy indulging in?

I’m seriously afraid now that this may turn out to be one of those sermons in which the questions posed are better than the answers proferred. But let me give it a shot anyway. Because, in spite of everything, Paul’s words do ring true. God has enabled us to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his Son, through whom we have forgiveness of our sins.

Notice that Paul does not say that God has transferred us into a kingdom in which we don’t sin anymore. He says, rather, that He has transferred us into a place where we receive the forgiveness of our sins. This means that we don’t have to be sinless to walk in the light of the kingdom. Good thing, too. All we have to do is acknowledge our sinfulness, our incompleteness, our lack of togetherness, both in our corporate and in our personal life. We are not “together,” to use a sixties cliché; we are not whole; we are not happy. But if we can admit our lack of “togetherness,” then perhaps we are on the road to recovery—as was the one criminal who was crucified with Jesus, who acknowledged that he had been justly judged, but asked Jesus nevertheless to remember him when he came into his kingdom.

For the sense of life spinning out of control is not the only thing we have experienced in our lives. We also know what it’s like for someone to turn to us with a bright and joyous look that we didn’t think we deserved or could expect, and at those moments, we may have felt that we were just about to enter Paradise. As one of the characters in Toni Morrison’s great novel Beloved says about his woman, “She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather me and give them back to me in all the right order.” We have experienced that, too. We have known the wholeness that suddenly floods over us and into us when we come into the presence of someone who is unfeignedly grateful for our existence, who thinks we’re the cat’s meow, that we’re “the top,” as in that great old Cole Porter song:

You're the top!

You're Mahatma Gandhi.
You're the top!
You're Napoleon Brandy.
You're the purple light
Of a summer night in Spain,
You're the National Gallery
You're Garbo's salary,
You're cellophane.

Well, I’m not sure what cellophane is doing in that list, but you get the general idea.

And we have experienced this sort of grace corporately, too, as we struggle on in our quest for a vicar and to discern God’s will for this little church as it battles through the dilemmas of daily life here in Durham. We are still together, the church is still here, six months after our vicar left—in fact, it even seems to be growing. Wonderful, self-sacrificial people have stepped into the breach—people like our Senior Warden, and our beloved brother Nils, who probably didn’t know what he was getting into when he crossed the ocean blue to take the job as Episcopal chaplain at Duke. We on the vestry have learned to put up with each others’ absurdity and stubbornness and volatility, to forgive as we have been forgiven, to just keep putting one foot in front of another until we reach our destination, whatever that may be. And from time to time we have been amazed by the word of wisdom, or of encouragement, or the sudden flash of humor, that comes from one of the unlikely candidates for sainthood seated around the table. And so as we plod along in this way, we realize from time to time that we are not plodding alone. We find ourselves, in other words, in the situation of those disciples on the road to Emmaus who were suddenly joined by an unknown stranger who asked them, “What are you talking about as you walk along and seem so sad?”

Yes, sometimes you reach the point where you realize that it’s time to stop talking about what is making you so sad, and to turn with surprise to the one who has suddenly popped up in your midst, who asks the searching and compassionate question that penetrates to the bottom of your situation, the question that elicits the answer that starts to accomplish what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not do for all us sad little Humpty Dumpties—to take the bombed-out, shattered bits of our lives and start to put them back in all the right order. That miracle is what this place is for, what this table is for, for here we meet and experience and actually consume the one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, who reconciled all things to himself through the blood of his cross. That blood, and his shattered body, will soon become our food and drink, and the means for bringing us together with each other and with him and with the God who rules over all forever. Amen.

For the love of God - week 2

2010-09-19T05:41:00.000-07:00

More work on the Community Garden:

For the love of God

2010-09-11T07:17:00.000-07:00

With a work party scheduled for shaping our new community garden, I was praying that we would see a few extra faces at breakfast this morning. Imagine our surprise when Gail and I arrived to prepare for Morning Prayer. Five of our homeless community, three of whom were new arrivals, were already patiently waiting for breakfast.

Following our 4-week trial period the decision was made to continue with Saturday MP and breakfast even though prayer attendance averaged four, the breakfast averaged eight. This morning twelve attended morning prayer and I lost count of those attending breakfast – it seemed as if Gail would never finish cooking eggs!

With several members staying on to work on the garden project, the fellowship was, as usual, fulfilling. Indeed, the Holy Spirit was among us as our small, but hard working crew set to work with excitement and enthusiasm.

Our community, both inside and outside of our buildings, share a relationship of hard work, love and respect. It is so obvious that our combined love of God is shared every day.

Mick

Community garden

2010-08-29T15:45:00.000-07:00

This weekend our community garden began to take shape in our backyard. The vegetable garden is joined by four 6' x 10' flower gardens that await four "church gardeners" to plant and oversee them. Within the next two weeks gravel for pathways, soil and mulch for the gardens will be delivered.

Everyone interested in assisting with spreading of gravel and soil, as well as those who would like to make the gardens sprout, please speak to Mimi or Gail regarding specifics of the schedule.

We would be grateful for donated plants, and are looking for some funding for rain barrels.

Mimi

Embodying Scripture through Movement

2010-08-18T07:58:00.001-07:00

Following a summer break, our weekly Bible Study recommences on Tuesday, September 14. We will meet, as usual, in the Parish Hall at 7:00 p.m.

Our dear friend Tony Johnson has designed this course entitled

"Embodying Scripture through Movement"

The program schedule is as follows:

Introduction:

Journey through the Book of Mark

Music: Saint Matthews Passion Tears from Heaven

Week One: Mark Chapter 13 verses 1-33

Week Two: Mark Chapter 14 verses 12-31,verses 43-73

Week Three: Mark Chapter 15 verses 1-15

Week Four: Mark: 15 verses: 21-40

Reflection and discussion

How do you identify with the Passion story and what role you play within the story?

What ways does this story speak to you today.

Journey Through the Book of Acts

Week Five: Acts: Chapter 4 verses: 1-36

Week Six: Acts: Chapter 6 verses: 1-9; Acts: Chapter 9 verses: 1-19

Reflection and Discussion

How do you identify with these readings and what role you play in the readings.

How does these readings reflect on your community?

Whose own the journey with you in your community and what gifts they bring?

What do we believe and experiences through the gospels?

How has these readings scripture transform your live and your call to serve?

_____________________________________________________

I'm sure that this will be an enlightening, moving, educational and knowing Tony, an entertaining course. Please do join us.

Mick

“The Lord is my Shepherd…”

2010-08-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

This line of Psalm 23 has kept popping into my head this summer. The psalm is one of my favorites, as it is of many people; what Christian wouldn’t find comfort in the beautiful scene evoked by green pastures and still waters of the first few verses?

This psalm is also a popular one for funerals, and it is this association that I find striking as the opening line “The Lord is my Shepherd” has crept into my mind over the last few months. No, I have not been to any funerals (knock on wood), but I have found myself in mourning over the loss of St. Joseph’s priest. Weeks of supply priests, graciously fulfilling their sacramental duty and privilege, have only exposed all the more the deep emptiness that has pervaded my soul in the absence of our vicar. Don’t get me wrong, St. Joseph’s is a wonderful church body made up of committed people; I would not want to wander through “the valley of the shadow of” loss together with any other group of lay persons (as well as our beloved deacon). But the struggle to continue “finding our way together” without a priest has been like being “sheep without a shepherd”—at least, this is how I have felt, and others may share these weighty sentiments.

So when the words “The Lord is my Shepherd” resound within me, I cannot help but trust it to be the voice of the Spirit, lovingly inviting me to remember and trust that God has not abandoned us. God has continued to lead us, carry us, and provide for us, and God has given and will give healing comfort to us through God’s own presence among us. Whatever has happened and may happen, we truly are not without a Shepherd in our Savior Jesus Christ.

“The Lord is our Shepherd, we lack nothing.

The Lord makes us lie down in green pastures, the Lord leads us beside quiet waters, the Lord refreshes our soul.

The Lord guides us along the right paths for the Lord’s namesake.

Even though we walk through the darkest valley, we will fear no evil,

for You are with us; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort us.

You prepare a table before us in the presence of our enemies.

You anoint our head with oil; our cup overflows.

Surely Your goodness and love will follow us all the days of our life,

and we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

Alleluia.

-jb

Another busy breakfast

2010-08-02T15:45:00.000-07:00

Morning Prayer reverted to the original time of 8 a.m. today. This was welcomed by most, not least by those who are not early morning people and had found the 7:30 a.m. start a tad too early.

During the experimental earlier start, numbers had dropped, but so had numbers attending breakfast, even more so, in fact.

Imagine my delight when, this morning, I found myself busy in the kitchen cooking eggs, making toast for nine, and for the first time in six or seven weeks running out of, rather than throwing out, coffee. My spirits were lifted on seeing lively discussions around and about the breakfast table on a wide range of topics. It was great to see "M" back following an absence, looking well and instructing me how to cook the eggs. "C" had a headache(?), but still managed to be his incorrigible self, "Big S" was planning to remove his weather-beaten tent and replace it with another, new model, in the same spot. “Mick,” he shouts, “I need to borrow your car. I’m moving today and have some furniture to shift”.

Following these past weeks, when on some mornings we had none of the guys in for breakfast, I was struggling with the feeling of “what are we doing wrong?” What I realize now is that in switching the Morning Prayer time and the consequential earlier start for breakfast, we did not take in the feelings of all our community.

St. Joe’s is a community for those both inside and outside the buildings. Would we have told our family at home that “breakfast is now at 8, not 7:30?” Of course not. We would have asked them what they felt about the change. Lesson learned. Thank you guys, you contribute to my life more that I sometimes admit.

Mick

A New Chapter

2010-06-13T17:11:00.000-07:00

An eventful morning at church today.

Our wonderful Vicar's last Sunday with us. There were, of course, a few tears, but mostly we treated this as a celebration of her three and half years with us.

She has been a tremendous influence on many people's lives, certainly on mine, and I wish her well.

A new chapter opens for her, a new chapter starts for us. Bless you dear Rhonda.

Mick

2010-04-18T13:31:00.000-07:00

The following is the sermon preached by Sarah Decker at St. Joseph's on the third Sunday of Easter, 18 April 2010. The text is John 21:1-19.

The Gospel according to John records three different days during which the resurrected Christ appears to his followers. On the first day, Jesus appears initially to Mary Magdalene and then later in the evening to his disciples, minus Thomas. A week later he appears to his disciples, including Thomas. Today’s gospel lesson describes Jesus’ third and final resurrection appearance in the fourth gospel.

The scene is the Sea of Tiberias, where Peter, John, and five other disciples went out at night into a boat hoping to catch some fish, but caught nothing. Just as the sun comes up Jesus (not recognized by the disciples at this point) calls to them from the shore, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” After they answer, “No,” Jesus instructs them to cast their net on the right side of the boat, saying that they will find fish there. Obeying the strange fishing advisor, the disciples cast their net on the right side of the boat and are overwhelmed by a net bulging, but not breaking, with 153 large fish. Perhaps after thinking something like, “Wait a minute… ,” John says to Peter, “It is the Lord!” Peter, who was naked, throws on some clothes, jumps into the sea, and starts swimming to Jesus while the other disciples drag the net of full of fish to land. On the beach the disciples find Jesus preparing breakfast, and after Peter contributes some of their fresh miracle fish, they all eat together around a charcoal fire. And none of them ask Jesus, “Who are you?,” because they know it is him. When they are finished with breakfast, Jesus addresses Peter. He asks him three times, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Three times Peter answers ‘yes,’ and three times Jesus follows Peter’s response with an injunction to feed or tend his sheep.

In this conversation with Peter, Jesus tells us how we ought to love him: by tenderly caring for our neighbor. Jesus reminds Peter of the new commandment he gave earlier in the gospel, “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” (13:34) and repeated a chapter later with the added declaration, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (15:13) Indeed, Jesus, who calls himself the Good Shepherd who lays his life down for the sheep, tells Peter in our gospel lesson that the love he thrice declares will lead to his death. Jesus says to Peter, “Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” And John comments that Jesus “said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.” The expression, “stretch our your hands” likely refers to Peter’s crucifixion, and the language of being led unwillingly with a belt evokes the image of a lamb being led to the slaughter. Therefore, just as Jesus is not only called the Shepherd, but is also proclaimed by the Baptist to be, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” so too Peter is charged to imitate the love of Christ by caring for Christ’s sheep as a shepherd and by laying down his life for them as a lamb led to the slaughter.

When we hear the Risen Christ’s words to Peter and his call to him, “Follow me,” we also should hear a call to discipleship that is self-sacrificial love—laying down our lives for one another. This may indeed mean our physical death, as in the cases of the well-known modern martyrs Martin Luther King Jr. and Oscar Romero, as well as the four American church women who, like Romero, took up the cause of the poor in El Salvador despite the Salvadoran government’s persistent persecution of those working for justice. The day in 1980 before Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan were martyred, at the closing liturgy of an assembly of Maryknoll Sisters, Ita Ford read from one of Romero’s homilies given soon before his assassination earlier that year. Ford read, "Christ invites us not to fear persecution because, believe me, brothers and sisters, the one who is committed to the poor must run the same fate as the poor, and in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, be tortured, to be held captive - and to be found dead." The next day the women were captured by members of the Salvadoran military, were tortured, raped, and murdered because of their love for the poor and refugees of El Salvador. Many Christians, with names known and unknown, have loved Christ in care for their neighbor unto physical death. This is a present reality.

But Jesus not only offered himself upon the cross for us, but also led a life that was characterized by self-sacrificial love, beginning with the incarnation of the Word of God who deigned to take on human flesh and to live among those who would reject him, and plainly expressed in Jesus’ washing of his disciples feet. Thus should our whole lives be marked by self-renunciating love. This may look like changing our plans in order to share a meal with someone hungry, getting a bad night of sleep in order not to cut short a conversation with a discouraged colleague, not purchasing the clothes we like the most because they were made in sweat shops, doing the nasty or boring cleaning tasks at home, suppressing our pride by withholding “I told you sos,” or even letting the other person eyeing the last box of Nature Valley Oat and Dark Chocolate granola bars at Target take home the object of desire.

Maybe each one of these examples does not represent something all that difficult, especially if we are just shooting to accomplish one such self-renunciatory act per day (perhaps with a Benjamin Franklin style check-list). Yet, for them to be mere examples of a way of life that is continual self-sacrifice or the sort of life that leads to the cross is very difficult, perhaps impossible. Even Peter, who zealously declared to Christ earlier in the Gospel of John that he would go to his death for him, could not so much as admit to knowing him when push came to shove.

Yet it is this very same Peter, after his three-fold denial, that Jesus commands to tend his sheep. And it is to this same Peter that Jesus tells that he will in fact lay down his life to glorify God. What is different about this Peter? Sure, he is humbled and repentant. But what gives him the strength this time to make good on his promise of devotion to Jesus? How is it that he is able to go to his death as a follower of Christ?

According to Saint Augustine, it is the resurrection of Jesus Christ that makes all the difference for Peter. He writes, “[Peter] would do, when strengthened by [Jesus’] resurrection, what in his weakness he promised prematurely.” No longer, Augustine maintains, does Peter have a false estimate of himself, but instead has the strength of heart to claim Christ graciously bestowed upon him and the courage to face death because the Lord’s resurrection illustrates the life to come.

Indeed, prior to the resurrection, when Jesus foretells his betrayal and departure, Peter questions him, “Lord, where are you going?” and Jesus replies, “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now; but you will follow afterward.” This is precisely when Peter makes his false claim to faithfulness, saying, “Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.” Peter did not yet understand that Jesus had to die for him before he could die for Jesus.
Jesus did die for Peter, and for us, and he rose from the grave three days later. And from his fullness, manifested by the resurrection, we receive, as the prologue to the gospel says, grace upon grace. When promising his disciples the Holy Spirit, Jesus declares, “because I live, you also will live.” And on the first day of his post-resurrection appearances, Jesus breathes on his disciples and says to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Jesus’ resurrection from the dead means for us, as Jesus says in the Good Shepherd discourse, abundant life, and it means the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Thus it is the grace of the power of the resurrection that takes Peter from an overzealous coward with mere good intentions to one who, like Jesus, tends the sheep and ultimately lays down his life for them. Furthermore, what transformed Peter transforms us. Because of the resurrection, it is not silliness for us to aim to love one another as Christ loved us, by living lives of self-sacrifice. We have cause to hope that our lives may be shaped by self-gift such that if called upon to die for the Shepherd and the sheep for whom he shed his blood we would remain faithful to the end. We can pray and receive the Eucharist with the anticipation that God has provided the grace needed for our isolated efforts to love self-sacrificially to grow into habits and a way of life. We can answer Jesus’ call, “Follow me,” with the confidence that we, like Peter, have received the grace of the power of the resurrection. Amen.

Easter Monday breakfast

2010-04-06T11:12:00.000-07:00

“Alleluia! Christ is risen! Come let us adore him! Alleuia!” Morning Prayer on Easter Monday was well attended and heartily spoken. Mick lead us through the new schedule of liturgy in this new season. The Pascha Nostrum, the Song of Moses, two enthronement Psalms, and readings on the exodus and the resurrection. Now we stand during the Prayers (though as a reflex I began to kneel at “The Lord be with you” and accidentally lead half the worshipers to their knees). This is the Easter position – Christos aneste – Christ is risen – but more literally “Christ stood up.” So we stand with him to proclaim that with him we are raised. What joy! What grace! What can we offer in return for such? Our very lives, which he has now redeemed (=bought! – They are his anyhow!). “Almighty God, we your unworthy servants give you humble thanks for all your goodness and loving kindness to us!” It is great to know, and to learn by the experience of the rhythms of the liturgy, that Easter follows Good Friday. I focus a lot on the cross – and rightly so – but it is good be reminded that after the long, hard toil of the Way, and the pain and torture of the cross itself, stands the inexplicable, illogical, and utterly unexpected glory and joy of resurrection life. We glimpse its reality, if only for a moment, as we gather with the angels in the heavenly choir.

Breakfast followed, of course, in the Parish Hall. The weather was really nice so we are going to have to start eating outside on the picnic tables. All the usual suspects were there – I think we had about 15 total – including about five who spent the night sleeping in the back yard or around town but who then come up for breakfast. One of our usual friends, C, who lives across Durham out in the (comparative) boonies was around for some construction work he did last week. “You going over by my place at all?,” he asked Mick. “No, but I can be,” the good Warden replied. S got out of his tent and came in for a glass of juice and announced that he was going back to bed. “Hibernation,” I think Luke called it. But S didn’t leave before he had announced that (unbeknownst to me) everyone was welcome over at my place tonight to watch Duke play for the national title. We all enjoyed a brand-new egg casserole this morning and quite a good (as usual) one at that. I gobbled up more than my share.

Every week is a new adventure.
--Colin

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

2010-04-06T11:10:00.001-07:00

Is it me, or did Lent seem like more than six weeks this year? Surely it was much longer ago that we celebrated Shrove Tuesday at our Pancake Supper, cooked for us by our friends from the Episcopal Center at Duke? Was it that we were celebrating the Daily Office by using the not so familiar Rite I? Perhaps it was due to the fact that I felt more penitent?

Whatever the reason, Palm Sunday and Holy Week did come and were welcomed.
Here at St. Joe’s we have, what I think is a pretty unusual family. I’ve talked before about our wonderful fellowship, but it goes much further than sharing a meal with like-minded committed Christians.

Our table fellowship that follows each weekday Morning Prayer gives an opportunity to talk, laugh and yes sometimes cry with a wide variety of people, some homeless, some not, but nevertheless needing more than that plate of breakfast casserole, eggs, cereals, toast and coffee. Loving thy neighbor is not always easy believe me. I struggle daily with doing just that. There are challenges to our faith on a daily basis, but I know that with God’s help we can overcome them.

Returning to the Easter theme, the eve of Palm Sunday saw seven of us weaving palm crosses. Sharing conversation, experiences, humor and of course food. I’ll be the first to admit that my crosses were not as artistic as A’s, who hails from Lebanon and was teaching us beginners with wonderful patience. But what a gratifying experience it was – nothing technical, nothing sophisticated, but enjoying the four thousand year art (or attempted art in my case) with, as A proudly says, “Our nearest neighbor to the Biblical lands”.

Holy Week was busy for us. Jokes were made about “our car is on auto-pilot”, or “perhaps we should bring our beds to church,” but seven liturgies marking Christ’s death and celebrating his resurrection between Wednesday evening through Easter Sunday have to be the highlight of the year.

After our short, but moving, Holy Saturday morning service, I was seconded to help our wonderful Altar Guild. I didn’t have much choice (only joking) as I am married to one of their members. But after an hour or so of cleaning and polishing, especially the church brasses, I realized what another important example of fellowship this was.

After six flowerless weeks and veiled crosses, our sanctuary became alive again. A resurrection no less. As later in the day we commenced the Great Vigil, being led into a darkened church by the paschal candle, we knew, all of us, that hope, with the light, would soon spring from Christ’s resurrection. After renewing our baptismal vows it was my task to turn on the lights. Never has Alleluia been shouted with such gusto (well, not since last Easter at least) and a wonderful feeling of joy and yes, relief, swept over the congregation who knew that Christ had risen indeed.
Easter Sunday, without doubt, my favorite day of the year, saw a packed (for St. Joe’s) church enjoy and praise the resurrection of our Savior. I was on acolyte duty and admit that together with the relief and joy I could feel tears of emotion – tears of joy especially at what was something new for me. T, a regular at Daily Office and a professional choreographer and dancer, enriched our celebration with his liturgical dancing. Thank you T. Indeed thank you to our music director, choir and musicians. And a big thank you for Altar Guilds everywhere, but especially to ours at St. Joe’s, who tirelessly work to prepare God’s church for worship and the Lord’s table for us to share in the resurrection throughout the year.

Thanks be to God. Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!
--Mick

2010-04-06T11:04:00.000-07:00

Witnessing to Resurrection Life

2010-04-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

The following is the sermon preached by The Rev. Karen C. Barfield, Chaplain of the Episcopal Center at Duke, at the Great Vigil of Easter celebrated at St. Joseph's by the two missions. The texts were Romans 6:3-11 and Luke 24:1-12.

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (Romans 6:3)

The last congregation I served in Memphis before coming to North Carolina was a fairly large Episcopal Church. On average there were several hundred people there each Sunday morning.

On the day of the bishop’s visitation there were several folks lined up to be baptized.

In one family both brother and sister were to be baptized that morning. The little girl was about 2 years old, but her older brother was about 10 and was very inquisitive and excited.

As the bishop met with those to be baptized during the Sunday school time, this boy sat right next to the bishop and asked all kinds of questions. He was excited about his baptism and was all ready to go.

During the service when it was time for him to be baptized, the bishop called him over to the font, but the boy clung to his mother’s side for dear life.

He looked at the bishop and said, “I don’t want to be baptized.”

As the bishop tried to coax him over, it was clear that he would have to be peeled away from his mother’s skirt.

The bishop, in his wisdom said, “Your baptism is supposed to be a time of joy. If you don’t want to be baptized, you don’t have to be.”

And that was that.

Later in the service when the boy and his family came to the altar rail for Communion, as the bishop approached him, the boy said, “Well, I guess I blew my chance, huh?”

The bishop smiled and said, “No, you have another chance. Meet me at the font after the service, and I’ll baptize you then.”

The boy, smiling, received his blessing and returned to his pew.

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?”

That Sunday morning did that boy cling to his mother’s side out of embarrassment or stage fright before the large crowd gathered in the church?

Or did he have some inkling that what he was about to do was as frightening as being buried with Christ in his death?

Did he know that his life was about to change forever –
that new demands would be placed on him that he might not be able to meet?

Perhaps a little of both.

In my experience, children “get it” – they understand things we barely begin to comprehend.

How many times have we heard stories of young children – 3 and 4 years old – saying to their parents on the way back from the altar rail:
“Boy, I really needed the bread of Jesus today.”

__________________________________

Tonight we gather together on the most Holy of Holy nights –
to hear the story of salvation history:
to hear the story of creation,
of rebellion,
of redemption.

We gather here tonight to celebrate that God became human,
walked among us,
suffered as we suffer,
died
and then rose from the grave.

And here is the key (in the words of Paul):

“Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.
“For if we have been united with him in a death like his,
we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”

We have been buried with Christ so that we, too, might walk in newness of life.

Clarence Jordan, founder of the Koinonia Community in Americus, GA, said,
“The crowning evidence that Jesus was alive was not a vacant grave,
but a spirit-filled fellowship.

Not a rolled-away stone,
but a carried-away church.”

In reflecting on this statement, Lutheran theologian Christoph Blumhardt comments:

“It is not enough to celebrate Easter and say ‘Christ is risen.’ It is useless to proclaim this unless at the same time we can say that we have also risen, that we have received something from heaven.
“We must feel appalled when the tremendous events that took place, the death and resurrection of Jesus, are proclaimed again and again and yet actually nothing happens with us. It has no effect.” (from “Christ Rising” in Bread and Wine, Orbis Books, 2003, p. 350).

As Paul says, “if we have been united with him in a death like his,
we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”

However frightening that plunge into Christ’s death may be:
whether a literal immersion under the waters of baptism
or a turning from the ways of sin and death we encounter daily,
we celebrate with Christ the newness of life that awaits.

As the new fire, the new light, emerges in the darkness,
we remember that the darkness never overcomes the light.

May the fires of God’s love and grace burn within us
so that our lives may be a witness to resurrection life –
casting aside all fear.

God is doing a new thing in us –
birthing God’s kingdom through us
right here and right now.

So, this day and every day let us shout
“Christ is risen”
not only with our lips
but through our very lives.

Amen.

A Meditation for Holy Saturday

2010-04-06T10:58:00.000-07:00

Hope against all hope, when hope looks not only foolish but impossible: this is the call of Holy Saturday. It is an incredibly challenging call to us, to inhabit the tomb with the crucified, lifeless body of Jesus, where the power of death can be palpable, even suffocating. In the face of the death of the Lord, our lives stand still, numb, silent. It is as if the whole world has been sealed up in the tomb with him. Nothing more can be said, nothing can be done. Our future is now completely bound up with his future; our future now rests in him.

From all appearances, though, there is no future for him: this is the reality of Holy Saturday. Jesus has been executed. His life has ended shamefully, horrifically. He did not save himself from the cross or tomb; now he is beyond saving. What shall become of him? What can become of another dead would-be Messiah? What shall become of us who staked everything on him? What can become of us?

The only hope for him, for us, for the whole world, lying in the tomb is God: this is the revelation of Holy Saturday. The future of Jesus is for God to decide. In the realm of death, there is no hope, no security, no foothold, no ray of light; the death of Jesus erases even the tiniest sign upon which we may have based our faith. In the tomb, we are confronted with the sheer absurdity of hope, of waiting for God when all reasons for waiting, for hoping, have fallen short. In the dead body of Jesus, we come face-to-face with the disarming truth of Christianity: the only future we possibly have lies with God because our future lies in Jesus. Easter Sunday does not abolish this truth; it makes it more glaringly obvious.

While it is still dark in the tomb, however, where there is no guarantee of Sunday, let us ponder the lament of Psalm 130: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!...I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in [the Lord’s] word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.” Let us wait in silence and openness for the coming of our God, our future and our hope.
--Jodi Belcher

"We entreat thee, O Lord"

2010-03-16T12:45:00.000-07:00

At St. Joseph’s, we usually pray Morning and Evening Prayer according to Rite II. This year, however, we’ve decided to use Rite I in Lent. The first time I prayed Evening Prayer this season, I was struck by how challenging I found the change. Praying “thee” and “thou,” (which has the virtue of making it crystal clear to 21st-century people that we’re not shouting “Hey, you” to God). Addressing God through dependent clauses (“Almighty God, who has given us grace at this time…”) instead of directly (“Almighty God, you have given us grace at this time…”). And confessing in more, and in my case at least, more accurate, detail (“we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts”). I had to pay greater attention, enunciate the words of the prayers, trusting that they will be my own—or rather, that I am theirs, because they're part of the apostolic faith that has formed, and is forming me. I like the freedom that I feel in praying familiar prayers, but I also appreciate the prod offered by less familiar ones—like a gentle but sharp pull on the bridle, making sure I’m still on the path.

Others have an easier time. That first evening in Lent, as I carefully followed along in my BCP, starting to relax into the repetitive response to the intercessions, I realized that a tiny but clear voice had joined in, from the pew directly in front of mine. Our youngest sister at St. Joseph’s, a beautiful 2-year-old, was praying along in perfect time. “That this evening may be holy, good, and peaceful, We entreat thee, O Lord. That thy holy angels may lead us in paths of peace and goodwill, We entreat thee, O Lord. That we may be pardoned and forgiven for our sins and offenses, We entreat thee, O Lord….”

No concern about thees, thous, or yous; no awareness of dependent or independent clauses; little attention to verbs or adverbs. Just pure prayer, offered by a Christian who’s already steeped in prayer, who’s formed and nourished by it, and who unself-consciously offers it up as her own, in harmony with all the saints. To that, even in Lent, I say: alleluia. And amen.
--Vicar Rhonda

Shrove Tuesday supper

2010-02-18T07:26:00.001-08:00

For the second year, the chaplain and congregation of The Episcopal Center at Duke hosted a Shrove Tuesday meal at St. Joseph's. Thank you all for your hospitality!

Friday Fellowship

2010-02-14T04:59:00.000-08:00

Following Evening Prayer on Fridays, three of us started going for supper and enjoying some end-of- the-working-week fellowship (although all three of us are retired).

The numbers gradually grew and even some who originally declined our invitations started to attend. It might mean a “cheap-and-cheerful” meal at a local cafeteria, an all-day breakfast at a diner, or a more substantial meal, but the common denominator is that it suits everyone and that after the meal it most often includes going back home for yet more fellowship.

Last Friday evening was typical. It happened to be CP’s birthday and he had invited some friends to Evening Prayer thinking that perhaps we could go to IHOP for celebratory pancakes. Meanwhile CM had called me to suggest a pot-luck at their home. Long-story short – a quick change of plan and fifteen of us (that includes CM’s dog Sammie) enjoyed a great evening which included a hilarious ping-pong (mis)match between Gail and CP, heaps of laughter, loads of love, and great food.

Fellowship and hospitality are essentials of Christianity. I thank God I’m a Christian.

--Mick

A Busy Breakfast - January 26th, 2010

2010-01-27T09:29:00.000-08:00

A busy breakfast fellowship followed Morning Prayer this morning after we had celebrated the life of Timothy and Titus, faithful followers of Saint Paul. Just as I was locking up the church, M came over and explained he needed to get back to Raleigh after receiving some medical treatment. He was obviously anxious and declined breakfast, but was grateful for the help we gave him to get home.

Courtney, Dave and Gail had breakfast well under way by the time I got back into the parish house. B, a regular, who now has his own accommodation, brought M for breakfast. M who has been staying with B, was obviously so grateful and was busy organizing his and B’s grocery list - another case of “the poor helping the poor” - certainly a reminder to us all. Will, who had attended Morning Prayer, popped in to say hello and drink his daily OJ, while big S, as usual, managed to put a smile on everyone’s face – a wonderful gift of his.

The very faithful Dave and Tony were, as usual, deep in conversation while Jodi was organizing her two-year old's breakfast of Cheerios.

Tuesday breakfast is always fun and could never be dull, especially with Courtney and Gail in form. At the 194th Annual Convention of the NC Diocese last weekend, Bishop Curry continued and expanded his “All Are Welcome” theme from last year. I thought of his words as I buttered my toast, drank my coffee and enjoyed the fellowship of our brothers and sisters. I felt welcomed by all those present. Praise God.

--Mick

Coming home

2010-01-10T11:09:00.000-08:00

We had been living in North Carolina for about fifteen months, had purchased our new home, settled down and managed to get all our affairs in order - well at least that's what I thought. We had new places to discover, a new life style to get used to and even a slightly different vocabulary to cope with.

However, we both realized that there was something missing, or rather I did. Gail had known what it was for some time. It took a little longer for the penny to drop as far as I was concerned, but at last it did. God was missing, no doubt about it.

We decided we needed not only God but to be surrounded by members of God’s family. So the search was on and we began to “shop for a church”. An awful thing to say I think, but in effect that's what we did. Of course, we didn't have to shop for a god - God had always been with us, although perhaps I had forgotten it. One August Sunday morning we attended Holy Eucharist at a small (very small) urban church in West Durham. St. Joseph's is known locally as "the little church with the big red doors". We walked through those doors and both of us felt immediately at home. I was raised an Anglican, Gail, Roman Catholic, so the Episcopal Church of America's liturgy, using the Book of Common Prayer, was familiar to us.

Between then and now my life has changed. I have met, got to know and trust, become friends with, many people. Many more than I ever had time to get to know while I was "busy" building a life, raising a family, working from dawn to dusk to keep us in so-called comfort. I suppose that's a real plus for becoming a senior. Retiring and having time to mix more with people from outside of your normal work environment and "social circles".

Did I find time to stop and ask a homeless guy if he needed any help? GUILTY!
Did I really mean it when I asked how a work colleague's sick relative was? GUILTY!
Did I really stop and think what I could do today to make a difference to someone else and not me? GUILTY!

Is it incredible how I traveled 4,000 miles to "come home"? ABSOLUTELY!
Is it incredible how the Holy Spirit guided Gail to persuade me to move from Europe to North Carolina? ABSOLUTELY!
Is it incredible that I have met so many of my brothers in sisters in Christ, whether they live in a 5-bedroom suburban house, a one bedroom apartment or on our church parking lot, who share love, trust and respect? ABSOLUTELY!

Who am I kidding? There is nothing incredible about it at all. I may have forgotten God for many years while I was trying to live life, but, He never forgot me! I was ALWAYS part of God's plan. I just needed that gentle push on the shoulder to “come home” to the family of Christ.

--Mick

Breakfast on the Feast of St. John the Evangelist 2009

2009-12-30T05:28:00.000-08:00

We feasted St. John the Evangelist first with Morning Prayer that Robin led and then with a well-attended breakfast. A few of the guys were waiting in and around the parish hall even before I got over there.

Tony has been joining us just about every morning, and he’s very much at ease in this environment. A former Roman Catholic (can you ever really be “former” Catholic?) he spent years in Washington and Baltimore working with the poor, living in a monastic community and discerning a call to become a Franciscan. He’s got a great spirit and it's fun having him around.

We went through a pot and a half of coffee right away (which always makes me happy for some reason). As we all settled into our raisin bran, grits-chicken-cheese-egg casserole thing or regular scrambled eggs, Glenn, who lives in a tent nearby and begs at the freeway exit ramp, asked me if I watched any good football yesterday. “Nope, did anything interesting happen?” “I dunno,” he replied, “my TV in the woods doesn’t work so well.”

Skeet proceeded as usual to construct his scrambled egg sandwich. I’ve seen him eat two of those things plus cereal. We have this brand new toaster that actually beeps when the toast is done like a washing machine or something. It’s a good idea except that nobody ever realizes what the noise is until the toast is cold. Toasters popping are supposed to sound like “ching ching”, someone commented, not like a truck backing up. When Skeet realized that Sammie’s chin wasn’t perched on his lap looking cute in the hopes of a handout he looked around asking “Where’s my girl? You aren’t mad at me is you?”
--Colin
Note to readers who may wonder: Sammie is a Golden Retriever.

Lessons, Carols, and Fellowship

2009-12-08T09:49:00.000-08:00

Last evening Gail and I attended the annual Advent Festival of Lessons and Carols at The Episcopal Center at Duke University. A bit early for carols? Of course, but this regular event is held early as it's the last chance the students get to sing carols and enjoy Christmas fellowship before the festive break.

We have attended this event for the past three years and enjoy it immensely. After the service, we tucked in to wonderful food, hot cider, mulled wine. Sharing food is a crucial part of hospitality and hospitality is a crucial part of Christianity.

After dinner, we settled down, with the huge log fire roaring, to sing carols by request. I'm pleased to say that members from St. Joseph's were there in force, probably sang the loudest, and, as usual, were the last to leave. St. Joe's also provided three of the four musicians, with Lyn seemingly never tiring on the organ, Alison contributed with her wonderful flute playing (and voice) whilst David was our great guitarist.

Thank you Karen (interim Chaplain), the vestry and board at ECD for continuing this wonderful tradition.

--Mick

Journeying home: right here, right now

2009-12-08T09:33:00.000-08:00

The following is a sermon preached by Fr. Chris Tessone at St. Joseph's on the 2nd Sunday of Advent 2009. The texts are Baruch 5:1-9, Philippians 1:3-11, and Luke 3:1-6.

I grew up in a part of Illinois called “Little Egypt” that is famous for growing one thing very well: corn. Our region in Southern Illinois got the name in the 1830s, when there were several years of bad harvests in a row in other parts of the state. People traveled to Southern Illinois to buy corn, just as Joseph’s family traveled to Egypt in the Hebrew Bible during the years of famine in Canaan. Growing up, there was corn everywhere—corn out back behind the church I went to as a child, corn along the interstates leading up to Chicago and St. Louis when we traveled, even fields of corn next to the Wal-Mart we shopped at. I think you’re getting the theme—if there’s corn there, I feel at home!

When I first went away to high school, I worried about how much I would miss home. School was hours away in the suburbs of Chicago, far away from my friends and family. I wasn’t sure whether I would feel comfortable in a big city. But as we drove through the city limits into Aurora, I saw a sign that read “population 140,000,” and then…fields of corn leading up to the school. Despite being hundreds of miles away from Little Egypt, right away this new place did feel a little like home.

Although the homecoming Baruch writes about involves far more pomp and circumstance, the home God welcomes the people of Israel back to is no less foreign to them than Aurora, Illinois was to me nearly fifteen years ago. Baruch, who was the prophet Jeremiah’s secretary, is writing during the exile of the Israelites to Babylon. From where they sit in exile, the land God promises to them is not just someplace where the work is a little easier, someplace warmer and a little sunnier. It is the home every one of God’s children dreams about. It’s a universal hope. It’s the “salvation of God” proclaimed by John the Baptist in today’s Gospel.

The problem for us is that this promised land has no concrete existence. It seems to us, just as it must have seemed to the Israelites hearing Baruch’s vision, that in the world we live in, there is no place where, in the prophet’s words, “the woods and every fragrant tree have shaded” us, where the very mountains and hills are made flat so we have level ground to walk on. This fantastical destination may seem to have no concrete existence in our experience—so how can we have faith that when we arrive at our destination, it will indeed be home?

The lectionary forces us to confront these questions now because we are in Advent again, at the symbolic beginning of our journey to the Kingdom we celebrate on Christ the King Sunday. We need to ask ourselves about the path that connects the life we lead right now, on the Second Sunday of Advent in 2009, to the universal homecoming that Baruch describes in today’s reading.

In the Epistle reading, Paul gives us an answer. The concrete path to the universal home of all of humanity is the local Church. He writes to the Philippians that the bonds of love and fellowship he has with them give him confidence that God will bring the work of the Gospel to completion in them and their community. He points to concrete practices of care for neighbor—in both good times and in bad—as a path to knowledge of God and blamelessness before God. This is the charge we receive from Paul and all the early Mothers and Fathers of the Church—incarnate the universal Church precisely where you are by practicing the Christian faith as you’ve received it. As St. Luke tells us in Acts, we do this through teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers.

What this means is that the Catholic Church we confess each Sunday in the Nicene Creed springs up out of local dioceses—out of gatherings of Christians around the world, advancing the work of the Gospel and loving their neighbors whether they are friends or enemies. The universal Church appears out of thin air in the church buildings of those dioceses—and in hospitals, prisons, and schools—first and foremost because God makes the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ present in them in the Eucharist, but also because that Body and Blood make other miracles happen. The Eucharist and the proclamation of the Gospel lead us to feed and clothe each other. They help us pray for each other when we are sick and wounded. They teach us to rejoice with one another when we are happy, as we do countless times each year in celebrating marriages, anniversaries, and births, and they make us console one another when we hit life’s low points.

Every such encounter with the living God in these concrete little places lights the path to the home we are all looking for. In doing these practices, we take away each other’s doubt about what lies at the end of the road. Just as importantly, if we do the work of the Gospel here in our own time and place, when someone else stumbles across the way of Jesus Christ, they can see what lies at the end of the road more clearly, too. That is why the Church is not merely a collection of sinners looking for their own individual salvation—the Church helps us receive the saving power of Jesus Christ because in the Church we strive to minister God’s grace to one another in everything we do. Two heads are better than one, as the saying goes, but many hearts working together are absolutely crucial for the Church to do its mission in the world.
So the Church year is beginning again, and in our readings at the Eucharist and in the Daily Office we are meditating on what the coming Messiah promises. But while it may be tempting to meditate too long on just where the path we’re taking may lead, today’s Gospel reading reminds us of the urgency of our journey. “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low,”…but not after all of us have passed on from the earth, or in ten years, or even just after Christmas. Now. The vision of a new world that connects Isaiah to Baruch to John the Baptist is an urgent one. It’s the vision of a world that is coming to life right this very moment. We are empowered by the Holy Spirit to see that new world and to journey home to the new life we’ll find there…and the first step begins here, now, in this Church of Jesus Christ.

Thanks be to God.

Thanksgiving feast

2009-12-01T15:44:00.001-08:00

Thanks to all who joined in the fellowship, and, every day, thanks be to God.

Breakfast Club

2009-12-01T08:11:00.000-08:00

The following article by St. Joseph's member Emily Leonardy originally appeared in the Duke Chronicle on November 11, 2009. Her column appears in the Chronicle every other Wednesday.

“Oh, John-boy, you’d be running! You’d run so fast! You’d be chasing Emily in her car!” A friend of mine was telling me how to get John-boy off the couch and out to exercise. The secret is to drop him off in Walltown around dusk.

Only a few blocks off East Campus, Walltown, as my friend describes it, is not somewhere my fellow female first-year should ever run—she just moved to Trinity Park—and somewhere that “John-boy” should only venture if he has a car full of friends he’s chasing.

Durham can be a scary place. It’s a place that can really use our help, though. We can tutor kids for an hour a week at the community center and we can volunteer once a month at the soup kitchen. In my time here, I’ve even helped clean up a not-for-profit consignment shop. Durham is really lucky that it has a major research university that provides lots of jobs and lots of money—we really sustain the local economy. We have a lot of gifts to offer Durham.

Pop quiz: Do you have any idea where Walltown is? Did you know there is a name for the neighborhoods beyond the walls of East Campus and the Gothic spires of West? Of course you know, but that doesn’t mean you have to go there. The Duke administration has sanctioned your isolation, requiring on-campus residence three out of four years. Not that you become more part of the Durham community when you move to Duke 2.0—The Belmont or Partners Place—for your senior year (your humble columnist points the finger at herself too, former resident of A22 that she is).

A few seniors boldly branch out to the neighborhoods off East Campus where there is a long tradition of uneasy relations with neighbors. In these cases, at least there is enough interaction to prove that students venture outside the Duke bubble and try to live life alongside our fellow Durhamites. These sometimes strife-filled relationships have more potential for the rewards of community than do meager attempts to “cure” or “improve” Durham by quick spurts of volunteerism.

I’ve never lived near East Campus, nor have I ever been particularly friendly with those who live in the myriad apartment buildings I’ve inhabited during my tenure in Durham. The convenience of the Trinity Park and Walltown communities, among others close to East, is not lost on me, though. Walking to class, walking to the grocery store, walking to restaurants—one can save gas and root yourself in a not-quite-so-transient neighborhood community.

About a year ago, I started to stumble around what community meant and looked like in Durham. The church I was preparing to join required “service to the poor” once a week. I had visions of driving to the soup kitchen every Saturday for the months it would take to finish my training. Instead, I joined fellow church members in eating breakfast with the homeless guys who live on the church property and anyone else who showed up. There was very little “service” involved—no lining up as the givers and the needy, assuming the positions of the server and the served. Because we all need to feed our bodies breakfast, whoever shows up first starts coffee and we sit around one table and eat the same scrambled eggs. I’ve found that I am just as needy as anyone else around that table.

Just because I have a degree from Duke (and in a few years, two) doesn’t mean that I have no needs to be fulfilled by others. We’re trained to be self-reliant, but we really aren’t. By thinking that we are all independent beings, we’re robbing ourselves of the rich experience of learning how to sit with others in awkward breakfast circles, or laughing around that same table about the best way for John-boy to jump start his fitness training. The way to build community—the way to reap the rewards of investing in others and them in you—is not to put yourself in a place of strength, but to allow yourself to be served and taught by those you think need your help.

It doesn’t take living near East Campus to experience life with our fellow Durhamites, but it does make it easier. Students spend all day together in classes—wouldn’t it be instructive, even invaluable, to experience the rest of our time outside the Duke bubble, in the real Durham community? Many graduate students have the opportunity to do just that.

Since when do the graduate students have all the fun?

Your present abundance and their need

2009-12-01T08:05:00.001-08:00

The following is a message from Mick Capon, our senior warden, to St. Joseph's on the First Sunday of Advent.

At a recent Vestry meeting, Rhonda mentioned that we needed to plan our 2010 Stewardship campaign. She asked members if they wanted to volunteer to make presentations at our Sunday morning Eucharists during Advent.

The following day, Gail and I were reading the Scriptures as part of our “Bible reading plan”. As often occurs we felt the Holy Spirit was guiding us. Our New Testament reading for the day just happened to be 2 Corinthians 8. Paul, writing to the church at Corinth, wanting them to know that the grace of God had been granted to the churches of Macedonia, and told them that their “abundant joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part”.

Like most Episcopal churches we spend most of our money on salaries, property and outreach. Okay, we do get help from the Diocese on the first of these, but an increasing cost is our property upkeep, and our outreach ministries are expanding, more than ever in the current economic climate. St. Joseph’s buildings are old and need constant care. Even with our small band of volunteers we still occasionally need to call in the professionals. For example this summer we installed a new heating unit in the parish hall – insuring no more cold meetings during the winter. We are extremely fortunate that our housekeeping and administration is staffed entirely by volunteers. However, the more important reason for talking openly and extensively about money is theological, not practical. Jesus talked about money. In fact, next to the Kingdom of God, money was Jesus’ most frequent sermon topic.

The Biblical tithe (10% of one’s pre-tax earnings) is traditionally the starting point for giving. This is not a requirement for membership or to get a front seat at Sunday Eucharist (nearer to God perhaps?), but is meant to help us be who we, and God, want us to be: generous people who are known for our charity and desire to give.

To return to Paul: “For if the eagerness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has – not according to what one does not have. I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there be a fair balance.”
Amen.

Stand up and raise your heads

2009-11-29T10:48:00.000-08:00

The following is a sermon preached by Vicar Rhonda Lee on the first Sunday in Advent, 29 November 2009.

Luke 21:25-36

As a transplanted Canadian, I have a long history of complaining to anyone who will listen—admittedly, not very many people—about the timing of American Thanksgiving. For me, it’s clear that Thanksgiving should fall on the second Monday in October—what Americans call Columbus Day, or in some parts of the country, El Día de la Raza. Celebrating Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November, only a month before Christmas, creates far too long a wait for a holiday after the Labor Day long weekend.

Now that I’m ordained, my grudge against U.S. Thanksgiving has intensified. Too often, like this year, the holiday falls just before the first Sunday in Advent. Clergy expect smaller congregations than usual on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, as people straggle—and struggle—back to town after visiting family across the country.

Those who do make it to church may be surprised not only by the news that it’s already Advent, but by the urgency of Jesus’ tone: “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness…Be alert at all times…”

Be alert? Hasn’t our Lord heard about tryptophan?

Avoid dissipation and drunkenness? Does he make exceptions for crucial football games?

If we needed further evidence that the church calendar is out of step with secular festivals, this year’s juxtaposition of Thanksgiving and Advent is it.

While the secular year drags—or rushes, depending on your perspective—to a close, the first Sunday in Advent ushers in a new church year. While advertisers clamor for our attention and our money, urging us to buy things that provide at best a fleeting sense of satisfaction, the Advent season draws our eyes and our hearts toward eternity. We’re all looking forward to welcoming the Christ child on Christmas Eve, but that night’s still four weeks away, and this morning’s Gospel reading contains a sobering reminder about him.

In it, the baby is all grown up, and he’s headed for the cross.

Jesus is in Jerusalem, teaching and gathering larger and larger crowds around him as the feast of Passover, and his arrest, draw closer. His teaching is becoming increasingly urgent until, in today’s passage, he echoes the biblical prophets to turn his listeners’ attention to the only things that endure. Sounding like Isaiah, Joel, and Zephaniah, Jesus speaks, not of the end of his own life, but of the end of the age and the dawning of the reign of God. His language is terrifying: “There will be…on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory.”

Immediately, however, Jesus offers comfort in the form of a strange command: “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

How can Jesus ask these things of us? Daring to stand, heads held high, before God, who’s coming among us “with power and great glory”? Living without fear in a world that seems to be teetering on the brink of apocalypse?

His words make sense only when we interpret them through the cross: the life that led him to it, the death he died there, and the resurrection that transformed it from a symbol of death to a sign of unquenchable life.

His life makes sense only in light of salvation history. He’s the One who fed, healed, and loved everyone as God does, telling them the truth that would make them whole and set them free. The One who gave up everything he had for the sake of everyone but himself. Who wandered homeless as his ancestors the Israelites did, in order to lead us all into the promised land.

His death is inseparable from his life—a final act of self-giving in the face of the world’s brutality. And his resurrection is inseparable from his death—witness to the immeasurable power of God’s love, and the first sign that the new age of God’s reign had begun. That sign was far more dramatic on a cosmic scale than an eclipse, meteor shower, tidal wave, or any of the other signs human beings take as evidence that an era of history is coming to its end, and another preparing to be born.

For most people, the signs of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection went unnoticed, their import not understood. But his disciples saw, heard, and slowly realized that the new age had begun, and they shared that conviction with anyone who would listen—and many who wouldn’t. The resurrected Christ gave them grace to speak and to write the record of his life, and those are the words that will not pass away.

The words of Scripture point to the living Word that is Jesus Christ, and he is the lens through which we look at everything that is, and see it transformed. When we see the world through that lens, we become alert to signs that the old—the order that put Jesus to death on the cross—is passing away, and the new—fresh life—is coming into being.

Here at St. Joseph’s, we see that new life in the fellowship meals that follow prayer services and Eucharists.

In toilet paper and diapers offered at the altar along with the bread, wine, and money, to be blessed and taken back out into the world as a sign of God’s compassionate love.

In a house that’s a home for friends, supported by a larger network of friends.

In a church economy based on gift-giving and mutual sharing, rather than commerce and calculation; where people are welcomed for their inherent worth as children of God, and offered what they need, not judged by how deserving, or grateful, they—we—appear to be.

The value of the relationships that the Holy Spirit weaves among us can’t be measured. They can only be marveled at, for their incarnation of generous, even reckless love. That love is the reality that will endure, and deepen endlessly, after everything else has faded away.

Relationships grounded in God’s love are the place where we stand, heads raised and hands outstretched, in the expectation of Jesus Christ’s return; and when we stand in them, he has already returned. Amen.

2009-11-29T04:18:00.000-08:00

I am not generally a big fan of Martin Luther, but this week the German Reformer’s definition of sin struck me as perceptive. Sin, he said, is “a person turned in on oneself” (homo incurvatus in se). And lately I’m impressed with just how much of my life I spend protecting and pampering me.

I think about me. What’s the next step in my life? How can I get the most out of my opportunities? I hope that person likes me. I can’t believe what that person said to me. Am I happy? Do I think about myself too much?

I decorate myself. I worry about being over-dressed, or under-dressed. Or wearing the right colors, or the right things for the season. And certainly I can’t wear the same outfit twice in one week!

I talk about me. I hate it when people just want to talk about themselves!

I am self-centered, and so I avoid dependence on others: independence gives me the time to do what I need to do for me.

So I secure myself. I spend most of my time running far away from anything that might control me, that might limit my freedom and self-expression. But perhaps most of all, I am running away from anything that might make me dependent upon others. For utter dependence is humiliating.

Worst of all, I separate myself from other members of the church and from God, assuring myself that I don’t really need those other messed up people. Surely these are not the people Jesus prayed for me to be one with!

But I am also self-centered because I avoid dependence. After all, I rationalize, its only the responsible thing to do to spend all my time making sure I am maximizing the potential God has given me.

I spend my time making sure that I am self-sustaining so that I need charity from neither others nor from God nor, heaven forbid, from others in the name of God. I will not be a charity case! I will be a self-made man.

So I avoid dependence because I am self-centered, and I am self-centered because I avoid dependence.

Locked in a cage of narcissism and unable to get free, I realize that I am obsessed with myself!

But then the Gospel is read: Do not worry. Look at the birds and the lilies. Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be given to you.

Jesus paints for us here one moment in his stunning vision of a life of mutual, worry free, dependence for those who seek God’s kingdom before all things. While we do this Jesus promises that God will clothe us, feed us and give us to drink. I don’t think we should hear Jesus saying that, if the - for us - unthinkable happens and we run out of food, God will deliver food from the sky. Rather, Jesus hits much closer to home. As we seek the Kingdom, he says, God will feed us with all that we need by means of one another. This mutual dependence is confirmed by what Jesus says in the immediate context of our passage:

Give to him who begs. Don’t refuse one who wants to borrow.

Ask and it will be given to you; knock and the door will be opened; seek and you shall find.

If a child begs bread or fish he will not be given a stone or snake.

So don’t worry, if God knows how to take care of the lilies and the birds, he surely knows how to take care of us.

And he will feed us, clothe us, and give us to drink, I dare say, both literally and metaphorically.

For God takes care of us not just by people’s gifts, but by the gifts of people. God makes us dependent upon others and others upon us in order to redeem us, in order to shape within us the virtues of his Son. For how can we learn to go the second mile, if we’ve run far from anyone who might ask us to bear her burden in the first place? And how will we learn to turn the other cheek, if we are never in danger of being struck?

As Mother Rhonda said to me this week, "we are each other’s spiritual disciplines." We are each other’s hope of becoming Christ-like.

Only if we realize and live into our deep dependence on one another, will we give thanks the way we should – now, and each time bread is broken and wine poured out.

--Colin

Breakfast 9.21.09

2009-09-22T13:06:00.000-07:00

Morning Prayer on the Feast of St. Matthew was well attended, including our Sr. Warden and Treasurer, B, a homeless man, Betty of Blacknall Presbyterian, who had brought her usual casserole for breakfast fellowship, and a few other regulars. I talked to B after the service about the room he has been trying to rent. I’ve been trying to make a partial payment on his security deposit but things keep getting in the way. “Tuesday,” he told me, “’cause its gonna start gettin’ cold out here.”

B and I walked over to the Parish Hall for breakfast, though he said he didn’t want any. Slowly a few others gathered, a couple inside and a couple on the picnic tables. We warmed up some of the casserole Betty had by this time brought in and we had a few takers. One of the guys said he was looking for a cheap room and that he had money but wanted us to help find him a place. So B offered the list of rentals he had in his pocket.

It dawned on me to check email and I found that, after some negotiation, the place we wanted to be the new locale of our hospitality house for our two guys was being offered to us. This was good news. It’s at 920 9th Street and hardly a half-mile from St. Joseph’s. It’s a little more rent than we might have preferred to pay but all discernment pointed in this direction. I’m learning that such (relatively trivial!) insecurity is surely part of the evangelical poverty to which Christ directs us, however trained I have become to take refuge in a sort of worldly prudence. Isaiah told us this morning not to call conspiracy everything that the culture does and not to fear what they fear (Isa 8:12). The same must be true of what the world calls “responsible.”
--Colin

Holy Cross

2009-09-15T10:12:00.000-07:00

The following is a sermon preached by Vicar Rhonda Lee on Holy Cross Day 2009. The text is Philippians 2:5-11.

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.”

In this lyrical passage from his letter to the church at Philippi, Paul proclaims the bedrock belief of Christian faith: that God lived in the flesh for us, died for us, and calls us to die in order to live.

Paraphrased so simply, those articles of faith sound stark. Paul’s poetic language comes closer to expressing the mystery of the cross: the glorious, profoundly dislocating truth that, through the crucifixion and resurrection, God transformed a brutal, shameful instrument of execution into the gateway to life:

“Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.”

That’s the gift we celebrate on Holy Cross Day: the reality that in Jesus Christ, God suffered torture and death for us. The gift is also a call, the hardest, most rewarding invitation that any of us will ever answer: to lay down our own lives as Jesus did. The only possible answer for Christians is “Yes, Lord, with your help.” When we accept that difficult invitation, God promises that we will discover the way of the cross as the way of joy, peace, and a deeper, richer life than we ever could have imagined.

Through the ages Christians have answered the call to lay down their lives in different ways. Some, from the deacon Stephen in the first century to Archbishop Oscar Romero in the twentieth, have literally died for the faith. Their sacrifices witness to God’s power to transform fear into strength and hatred into forgiveness. Others have moved into monasteries and convents in the desert, in impoverished rural areas, or in burned-out city neighborhoods, finding freedom by renouncing the comforts that money can buy.

For most of us, our journey on the way of the cross doesn’t start dramatically, and it may never lead to a vow of poverty. It begins with the revelation that we need to seek out those things that separate us from God, other people, and the true image of God in ourselves—and to die to them. As the Holy Spirit works to separate us from those forces, whatever they are, we gradually begin to live more fully as the Body of Christ, testifying to his living presence in the world.

The call to live a cruciform life isn’t an easy one to answer, and it often inspires one of two equally mistaken—and equally enticing—responses: heroism, or sloth.

Heroism is a form of pride: when we fall prey to it, we mistake ourselves for Jesus, the savior of the world, and think that its well-being, its redemption, depends on us. We become so focused on what we’re doing that we separate ourselves from his followers who are more timid, or less faithful—or so they seem to us. We lose the opportunities for mutual conversion that the more difficult, time-consuming work of incorporating everyone’s gifts into our ministries would offer. We may lose sight of the fact that some of our friends in Christ have already been crucified by the world’s abuse, neglect, or contempt, and simply need to rest in our love for a while. That vulnerability is also a gift, which allows others to reach out with compassion.

In his song “Come On Up to the House,” the street theologian Tom Waits issues an invitation to those of us who suffer from heroism—which includes most of us at times: “Come down from the cross; we could use the wood.” Instead of standing apart from the other sinful saints who make up Christ’s church, Waits urges us, “Come on up to the house.” Sit, eat, talk, enjoy the fellowship—and commit to doing ministry with the whole body of Christ.

Following through on that commitment can be challenging, especially when members of the body—again, most of us at times—have fallen prey to the flip side of pride: the sin of sloth. When sloth has us in its clutches, we let the undeniable truth that none of us is Jesus, or our despair at the suffering all around us, deafen us to his call to serve him, and others, with love and humility.

The theologian Christine Pohl’s reflections on Christian hospitality are a helpful corrective to those of us who are suffering from heroism or sloth, or simply wondering what the way of the cross might look like in our own lives. She says, “While we might imagine sacrifice in terms of one moment of heroic martyrdom, faithful hospitality usually involves laying our lives down in little pieces, in small acts of sacrificial love and service. Part of the mystery is that while such concrete acts of love are costly, they nourish and heal both giver and recipient.” [Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Eerdmans, 1999), 34]

Small acts of sacrificial love and service. Costly acts of love that nourish and heal the giver and the receiver. Those are the deeds that, over time, shape our minds, our souls, our lives more and more into the form of the cross. As Christians, we don’t—we can’t—do those deeds alone. The church is the community in which we practice the self-emptying Paul writes about, the school that teaches us to make room for others in our hearts and in our lives, showing through our actions that we love them. It also teaches us to accept others’ gifts, allowing them to serve us in ways that surprise us, either because we think they have nothing to offer, or we believe our need is too great to be filled. The church follows the way of the cross because that’s the road Jesus Christ walked for our sake: the true path to communion between human beings, that leads to reunion with God. The way of death, that leads to life.

Celebration for a Home

2009-06-20T08:47:00.001-07:00

Almighty and everlasting God, grant to this home the grace of your presence, that you may be known to be the inhabitant of this dwelling, and the defender of this household; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
(“Celebration for a Home,” Book of Occasional Services, Church Publishing, 2004)

Yesterday evening, 24 of us gathered to bless the new home of Lisa and Colin, which they share with Concrete, and with other guests from time to time. The blessing was a joyful event, culminating in a celebration of the Eucharist, and followed by supper provided by our hosts.

Everyone there knew that Colin and Lisa have asked for their church family's help to discern what form God wants their ministry of hospitality to take. This is appropriate: we all need each other’s prayers, listening ears, thoughtful questions, and love as we seek to live out our vocations. I’ve accompanied Lisa and Colin in this phase of their discernment for several months now, and I believe they are called to offer hospitality in their home. What form that hospitality will take over time, none of us knows, but we trust that will be revealed.

This ministry is one of the ways our sister and brother are called to live out Jesus Christ’s command to each of us to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength….and your neighbor as yourself.” This ministry is deeply personal, affecting Colin and Lisa’s marriage and daily life, but it isn’t individual, or private. It’s an outgrowth of the ministries of fellowship and hospitality which I found at the heart of St. Joseph’s when I arrived in 2006, and which have grown since then. And so it involves all of us.

Our involvement may take a variety of forms. I hope you will all include Lisa and Colin’s process of discernment in your prayers for our parish family. Pray that they, and all of us, may answer God’s call faithfully, whatever form that call may take—and then let Colin and Lisa know what you hear in response to your prayers.

You may be moved to support this ministry in other ways: lending DVDs for guests to watch, dropping off a container of soup when you’re making some for your own household, or stopping by to check on the household while Colin and Lisa are away next month.

Wayne and I provide a modest amount of material support for the house, as a way of affirming its beauty as a sign of God’s in-breaking reign. That support doesn’t reduce our contributions to the St. Joseph’s budget, the poor plate, the flower fund, or any other collection through which our ministries are funded. It’s our response to a call, in a conversation that will continue. Thanks be to God.
--Rhonda

Musings on a week lived in faith

2009-06-17T10:06:00.000-07:00

Looking back over the past week I am reminded of "the curate's egg" - good in parts.

Ups and downs, peaks and troughs or whatever you want to call them, are part of life. It's how we cope with not only the low points, but even the highs, that can make all the difference to others. Both Gail and I experienced unrelated frustrations towards the end of last week. Talking to friends not only helped both of us get past these difficulties (as minor as they were, in hindsight), but hopefully gave those friends a sense of helping and of being "wanted". It's a reminder that we all not only need, but rely on, one another. Seeking help is not always easy, but is generally rewarding for both the seeker and helper. Thank God for the family of friends we have and love.

As this wonderful world continues to turn, a dear friend's younger brother died on Saturday and yesterday another friend gave birth to a beautiful girl, Macy. Lows and highs, mourning and rejoicing, they are an integral part of life . . . and death.

As Gail says every morning "Good morning life . . . how can I make a difference today?"

--Mick Capon

The Patient Kingdom

2009-06-16T15:09:00.000-07:00

The following is a sermon preached by Leigh Edwards, a parishioner of St. Joseph's, at Oriental United Methodist Church, on 14 June 2009. The text is Mark 4:26-34. We pray for Leigh as she serves her internship at Oriental UMC.

I lived last year in a neighborhood known by people outside of the community, and even by some inside, for its drugs, gangs, poverty, and violence. In fact, the house that we resided in used to be a boarding house – which was a veiled way of talking about a transitory location for those looking for some kind of comfort in drugs, sex, or just a roof over their heads. There is a lot next to our house that is long, skinny and weed covered – the neighborhood association is not sure what to do with it – and it is exactly the kind of lot that you would tell your kids to stay away from and that would necessarily bring down adjacent property value. People used it as a thoroughfare from further back in the neighborhood to the bus stop, and often probably for other sorts of business. Once in a while TROSA would come by and clean the lot, though its general state was weed and trash covered. A friend of ours from the neighborhood buried a dead cat that was found on our sidewalk there. In the process he discovered, or was reminded, that even feet down in the dirt it was filled with broken glass, cigarette butts, old tires, bottles, candy wrappers, and even the occasional appliance. The lot had seen the passing of years, and had a lot of stories to tell from the neighborhood. The lot was a mess.

One of my roommates, probably the most contrarian of them all, decided to build a garden, and to build one right there on that lot that we did not own. He spent a week filtering the dirt through the wires of an abandoned shopping cart, just to make it safe to grow seeds in. The plot was maybe 3 feet by 2 feet and framed by discarded white boards. Old bottles were used to help support the raised bed. Thanks to the labor of our housemate, near the end of spring our house was able to enjoy salad greens that were grown in the polluted dirty lot next to our house. It was an unlikely little ray of hope in the midst of abused and trashed land.

I see what my roommate did with that tiny garden plot as embodying the aspects of the kingdom that Jesus describes in the two parables of our gospel lesson today. In the first parable a farmer scattered seed on the ground. The parable says “he does not know how” the seed grows. However, what I suspect the parable is saying is what the farmer actually does know: that he can do only so much in the growth of the seed. It is the work of the earth, sun and rain to produce and bear the fruit of good wheat. The second parable of the mustard seed is meant to be read right in line with the first. In it a tiny seed, contrary to our notions of relative input and output, produces one of the most lush and helpful plants in the garden. The wheat is not so different for, like the mustard shrub and most other plants, it comes from a relatively small beginning. The mustard seed is the same as the wheat because, like the wheat, it grows not on its own but because of reasons not completely understood even by the most learned farmer: the richness of the earth, the heat of the sun, the work of the animals, and the biological inner workings of the seed. There are three aspects of the Kingdom of Heaven illustrated by these parables: faith, hope, and patience. The last one, patience, is probably the hardest one for us to get, as it rests upon hope and faith. It is also one of the most vital and one of the most reflective of who God is. At the end I will return to why I see a tiny garden in the middle of an abandoned lot may be such a patience filled endeavor towards the kingdom of God.

The farmer in the first parable does a completely unremarkable thing. He sows some seeds. It is a normal task for a large, though decreasing, part of the population. It is something that we take for granted as consumers of agricultural products. The farmer plants the seeds, knowing he is not responsible for yielding the whole product and with the knowledge that there are things that he simply cannot control. This is faith. Faith is to know that ultimately someone or something else is in control of the outcome, or in theological language, is omnipotent. We have a part to play – to plant the seeds. The farmer should plant the seeds well, deeply, with sufficient room to grow and in soil that has been properly rotated, lain fallow for a year perhaps, and is respectful of the many systems around it that sustain it. Still, ultimately, no matter what the farmer does the seeds will grow or not grow. There is something bigger.

Faith is a large burden off of our shoulders. Faith in God means that we believe that God’s plans have already been accomplished through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are not in charge of saving the world. Faith means that, guided well in how to plant our seeds, take care of the land we are given, and graciously care for our plots we are not burdened with the tasks of causing the inner workings of the seed to grow. If we live well, work well and play well we do our parts.

However, as the saying goes, even Satan believes in God. So what makes us so different as Christians? I would suggest that the mustard seed provides us with a pretty great response to that – hope. Hope seems to be a dangerous word these days, especially with so many people losing jobs. What, really do we have to hope in? When we daily see women who feel they cannot purchase milk for home, one quarter of this county in poverty, women and men scouring want ads for work, and violence ravaging many nations across the globe, we have to ask: is hope naïve?

It depends on what kind of hope you are talking about. One type of hope will tell us, given an apparently “bad” situation, that those particular bad things will magically get better. This type of hope tends to offer shallow words of comfort to victims of suffering, to downplay hardship, and to insist that there is some solution in grasp if only we can see it. I like to call this type of hope “optimism.” God is not optimistic, God is sure. God has a different type of hope, a theological hope. This is the hope of sitting with people who are broken hearted even if we cannot do a single thing for them. This is the hope that gives when asked, not knowing what really may come of it. This is the hope that befriends those in poverty if only because Jesus told us that is where he would find them. This hope is the planting of a mustard seed. It is a hope of certainty, a hope that when we act faithfully a shrub will emerge. Not any shrub, either, but a beautiful, lush, sheltering shrub that we, (remember the wheat?), may not know how it will grow. Hope is to not only know that you do not have control over the outcome but to delight in it! The outcome belongs to the most gracious, loving and just being that exists: God. This is good news!

Sadly, however, these words – hope and faith – easily become trite words cross-stitched on pillows and thrown around to shallowly try to assuage pain, justify inflicting undue harm, or suppose that being a Christian is only embodied in donating money to the far off hungry while ignoring how our way of life contributes to this poverty. This is what makes the latter portion of the first parable so important. Faith and hope are, in Jesus’ parables, different foundations of patience. Faith and hope tell us why we must be patient and humbles us into remembering that our plans are not God’s plans. Human success is not God’s success and our rewards are not God’s rewards. Patience is ultimately about trusting God to take charge of what God does best.
In the first parable the farmer waits as stalk, head and grain are produced out of the tiny seed that was planted. This is so important. The wheat, and by association the mustard seed, continues to bloom in different ways. The plant is not harvested immediately, nor is it expected to be harvested immediately. The stalk looks little like that the final grain will be! More so, ultimately, the stalk will be discarded, though it was a necessary part of the plant’s growth. What, in the end may seem extra or unneeded was actually fundamental to the product. What is more important to remember is that God is the harvester. We may not know exactly what the final product will look like or when it will arrive, but we know it will be good. Like the farmer, we are asked to wait in patience before the harvest, tilling and caring for the crops.

A young couple a few years ago felt a call to go do mission work in the Middle East in a place that saw regular armed conflict. The couple was traveling in a convoy when they saw the truck behind them blow up. Searching for their friends they came into a village called Rutba that was inhabited by native people. The doctors nursed and cared for the injured people, free of charge. Full of gratitude the young man asked what they could pay the doctor. “Nothing,” the doctor replied, “just tell people about Rutba.” Overwhelmed, the couple returned to the United States and opened a house of hospitality in a racially divided town in North Carolina, encountering the messiness of reconciliation there. The house, now called Rutba house, houses many without homes, facilitates friendship across racial boundaries, offers two free community meals a week to whomever wishes to come, and helped begin a network of these sorts of places all across the country. The doctor in Rutba planted a mustard seed. He was not trying to create peace between the two sides in the war, and he did not kid himself to think that this action did not meant that more of his friends would not be killed later. More of his friends were probably killed by American soldiers. The doctor never saw, and never expected to see, any reward or fruit of his labor. He never saw the Rutba House. What’s more, the Rutba House may not even be the full fruit.

So hope and faith do not necessarily mean searching for quantifiable results, striving for product or improving standard of living - though these things may be important at some point be a part of what we do. Rather, being faithful may just mean getting to know the people around us who are different from us, using the small seeds we have and rejoicing in what God makes of them. Like the five loaves and two fish, or the mustard seed, what comes of what seems like impossibly small resources used in faith can be miraculous. We tend to speak today of ideas of efficiency, size, the best for the most amount of people. In other words, we presume to predict the future based on what we think we may have observed before. This is what science has taught us. We try to do the best, and “best” is defined by our own ideas of what is good at some finite time in the future.

So it may be difficult to justify spending time with people, being with others without a particular task at hand. We have an inclination to only do things that see immediate results. We want to give five dollars to the girl in the grocery line instead of befriending her to wonder why she is struggling financially. We form committees with those “less fortunate” in order to empower and help them, or send the homeless off to shelters. Rarely do we simply sit with and befriend our neighbors simply because they are our neighbors – it goes against every inclination of efficiency and success that our world runs out. But the church, in the words of Mother Theresa, is not called to be successful, but to be faithful. Success will come at some point as a result of being faithful, but it is not that for which we ought to strive. To choose to be with others instead of doing for them plants mustard seeds that are solely based on strong hope and sure faith. They allow us to witness in the most important way: to live so that, were there not a God, our lives would not make sense at all.

This can be overwhelming still – some people forever question whether or not they are being faithful enough without having some sort of graspable result. But we’re not saving the world, and we don’t have to do it all. We should not want to do it all. God calls us to plant just one mustard seed with the confident hope of the coming kingdom – regularly inviting one man to dinner who lives and eats routinely by himself, befriending a man you often see on the street and later finding he has come to live with you and your wife, or planting a minuscule garden in a seemingly barren and wasted plot of dirt.

This is why I see my roommate’s garden as a pretty good in-breaking of the kingdom. The garden was not planted to feed the entire community, or give teenagers something to do in the afternoon – both very good things – but instead did something beautiful, time consuming and good. He transformed a small part of a dirty lot, in some sense against the rules of the neighborhood association, but with the hope that it would be used for good. He had faith that it would grow something, hope that it would come into something good and is still sitting with the patience of what will come of that tiny garden plot, in a week, a year or ten years. One of our Latino brothers uses the phrase “Paciencia Ardiente,” or “ardent patience. This is an eager patience that realizes our integral and loving part in the kingdom, but a kingdom that is ultimately brought about not through our work but through the infinite love, patience, healing and justice of a relational God. This means planting your garden now and loving the garden, the earth, and the people who surround it instead of holding your own expectations. God is not optimistic, God is sure, and God’s wisdom is not human wisdom.

You may be used to hearing faith and hope used with the word love. Love is supreme, but often misunderstood. God loves us with a love that does not expect specific outcomes, but enjoys imagining fruit of goodness. It endures things that do not make sense, and lives with hope even when hope seems completely undeserved. That is why I leave love out, not because it is unimportant but because if you embody faith the size of a mustard seed, patience that humbly endures while still hoping a hope that refuses to shut off the possibility of good, you may be pretty darn close to love. You may be pretty close to the kingdom of God.

Celebrating Pauli Murray

2009-06-12T07:28:00.000-07:00

On Wed., July 1, at 7 PM at St. Titus' Episcopal Church in Durham there will be a service to commemorate the life of The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray.

This will be a service of Holy Eucharist, with Bishop Michael Curry as the celebrant and Sarah Woodard as the deacon. The preacher will be Courtney Reid-Eaton, parishioner of St. Joseph's and Director of Exhibits at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke; she will compile and read selections from the sermons & writings of Pauli Murray.

Courtney testifies: “Pauli Murray has been a significant character in my life over the past few years. She was a Renaissance woman; a courageous person of action, intellect, and spirit, who used her gifts to further social justice and who strove to live as a fully integrated human being. She spoke her truths persistently. I am humbled to be invited to share her words and ideas with our community. Please hold me in your prayers over the next few weeks as I prepare.”

Please join in this celebration!

The following week, the General Convention of The Episcopal Church will consider a proposal to add The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray's feast day to the church calendar. The following biographical sketch was included in that resolution:

The Reverend Dr. Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray was a leader in the struggle for equal rights for women and African-Americans in the United States and throughout the world. She was also a lawyer, writer, poet, teacher, co-founder of the National Organization for Women, and the first African-American woman to be ordained priest by The Episcopal Church. Dr. Murray grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and on February 7, 1977, celebrated her first Eucharist in the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where her grandmother, Cornelia, had been baptized as a slave child. Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Shori celebrated the Holy Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross on February 7, 2007, in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of that ordination.

Space at the Table: Trinitarian Hospitality and Rublev’s Icon

2009-06-10T11:53:00.001-07:00

Colin Miller
Trinity Sunday 2009
Isaiah 6:1-8, Canticle 13, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17

Today is Trinity Sunday. And “Trinity” is a word we use to describe God. So today is about God.

So my sermon will be about God. And I’m sure I will be exhaustive in my treatment.

We have already said and done lots of things today about God. We have blessed God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Perhaps you crossed yourself while you said that with three fingers held together to signify the one God who is three persons. In the Collect Rhonda proclaimed that we confessed God as eternal glorious Trinity, Father Son and Holy Spirit who lives and reigns forever and ever. The Gloria we often sing extols the Father and the Son and ends with a solemn bow at the praise of “Jesus Christ with the Holy Spirit in the glory of God the Father.” We will of course go on in the Creed to be most explicit about all of this. And then in the very heart of the Mass we will once again beg the Father to send his Holy Spirit upon bread and wine to make them the Body and Blood of Christ. The Eucharist itself is Trinitarian.

During the week we start each service of Morning and Evening Prayer by giving glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning is now and will be forever. We say the Apostle’s Creed: I believe in God, I believe in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, and I believe in the Holy Spirit. We often close by asking that the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all evermore. The officiant then bows and blows out the candles on the kneeler in front of a Trinitarian icon.

All this means that when we worship “God” we name thereby a very specific Divinity and therefore exclude many others. I give you three.

First, by “God” we do not name a perfect, all-powerful being who made everything, perhaps set it in good, scientific working order and sent it on its way to carry out its fated course, and whom it makes good sense to venerate in case he cares about things like that. Our God is not the biggest, abstract thing you can imagine, taking occasional interest in the world at really big events like wars and national elections, Duke-Carolina games. God is no more an old white man with a beard man than God is Morgan Freeman. That God is detached form the world, perhaps interested in strictly enforcing a moral code, or in meting out karma, or in condemning mean people or murderers or Hitler types.

And sometimes, even in churches that should know better, there is a variant on this which can look like the God we proclaim but is not. This is the second false god. For it rightly sets Jesus in some relation to God, but one which ends up simply making him a really good guy, or maybe even a special prophet God sent to give us an example of what it is to be moral, or loving, or who shows us once and for all that God love us, or who had a great social vision, or who really wanted to reform Judaism, or who just wanted to say that everyone is welcome, or that God’s nature is love after all. If this is all there is to Jesus, then we do not worship the Trinity.

Thirdly, but equally, to participate in Trinitarian worship is to deny that we all have a little spark of God within us which just needs the right care in order for us to reach our full potential. God is not a personal spirit or guardian angel that each one of us experiences differently, not the life-force which unites us all in a big bond of love and just wants us to tolerate each other. Oprah’s spirituality is not Trinitarian Orthodoxy.

You and I know that these gods and many others are on offer. But by coming to the Eucharist we proclaim that we belong to another.

Specifically, our God is one with a history of continuous and ongoing interaction with his creation. And to worship the Trinity is to claim that this interaction happened in a very specific, if peculiar, story that we tell, for instance, in the Eucharistic Prayer. Prayer B says that, as the culmination of his calling people of Israel and preaching through her prophets God the Father sent his Eternal Word, his Son Jesus, to be borne incarnate and to be the Savior of the world who delivered us from error, sin and death.

But just think for a moment about how strange that story is. God calls the tiny tiny people of Israel – a bunch of Egyptian serfs, preaches to them by his very strange prophets (we read a while back about Ezekiel laying on that brick for a year; you know –camel hair, wild locust, etc). The Father then sends something called his “Eternal Word.” First of all, why should God have an Eternal Word at all? What’s that? And this Word becomes human, without a biological father, by some poor 12 or 15 year old Jewish girl, and so thereafter is ever suspected of being a bastard. This Jesus guy was executed by the state, oh and by the way was also the savior of the world. The same prayer goes on to remind us that in this story the third actor, the Spirit, continually makes this same Jewish beggar present to us when we eat his flesh and drink his blood (no wonder the early Christians were accused of cannibalism). Moreover we hear that by such eating and drinking the Spirit makes the church into that same Jewish guy’s body: “living members of the body of the Son.”

This is the God we celebrate today.

What’s more, this God has this crazy story in spite of being in perfect harmonious communion of love among the Three Persons from all eternity. And what this takes us back to, actually, is that Trinitarian icon I mentioned earlier that seeks to display something of that eternal nature.

The Three Persons are gathered around a table. Table fellowship is at the very heart of God. The very divine nature has something to do with eating together. The eternal dynamism of that infinite power and love is displayed in nothing grander than a shared meal.

But then, if we draw our eyes back, and look at the gathering as a whole, we are struck by the fact that there appears to be space at the table for another. And this is where it is important that this icon actually portrays two moments at once. The name of the icon is the “Hospitality of Abraham”. At one and the same time it displays the Trinity and the story from Gen 18 of Abraham offering three strangers food, shelter and rest. And of course that this one image portrays these two things is anything but accidental. For to worship the Trinity is to worship a God who has provided hospitality for us and who even has left room at the table for us to commune with the divine nature.

And God does this by emptying himself and taking our nature. God has invited us in by assuming our very poverty, and by dying for us. The Trinity provides us hospitality by paying a high price. And of course, because God offers us such hospitality, St. Peter says that we become partakers of the divine nature.

And this means that we too will provide costly hospitality, for that is what the divine nature does. God has saved a place for us to commune with that divine nature that God is. But thereby God makes us hospitable. The Trinity takes on pain, poverty, sin, filth, and even death in order to fill an opening at the table. And we will do this because in it we will find the fulfillment of our deepest longing. In it we will find joy.

This means that St Rublev was right when he painted that icon that human nature most approaches the divine when it says with Abraham from Gen 18 “let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. And I shall bring a little food that you may refresh yourself.”

Thanks be to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Amen.

How dear to me is your dwelling, O Lord of hosts!

2009-06-02T10:18:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I asked a member of our community what had drawn her to visit St. Joseph’s, and to keep coming back. I expected she might answer that the location was convenient, or that she liked the small, intimate feel of the church. Her immediate answer, however, was something I wasn’t expecting. “It was the cardboard.” The cardboard? “Yes. When I saw sheets of cardboard leaning against the pillars of the walkway between the church and the parish hall, I knew immediately that this was a church that welcomed homeless people to sleep on its premises. That meant it was a church that was trying to be faithful. And that made it beautiful to me.”

This sister’s Gospel-trained eyes found beauty, not just in the stone façade of our church, or its stained glass windows, but above all in the flattened cardboard boxes leaning against its pillars. She found faithfulness in the most basic welcome the church can offer to people who have nowhere to call home. Her affirmation reminds us of our call to receive with open arms everyone who comes our way, as God has welcomed all of us, and it urges us to continue to practice the joyful, Spirit-filled discipline of loving one another as Jesus Christ loves us.

That way of life is a journey, not a destination, and the church is our starting point and the oasis to which we return again and again along the way. As we travel, we sing with the psalmist:

How dear to me is your dwelling, O LORD of hosts!
My soul has a desire and longing for the courts of
the LORD;
my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God.

The sparrow has found her a house
and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young;
by the side of your altars, O LORD of hosts,
my King and my God.

Happy are they who dwell in your house!
they will always be praising you.

Happy are the people whose strength is in you!
whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way.

--Rhonda

Breakfast 6.2.09

2009-06-02T09:25:00.000-07:00

A large breakfast this morning, taking up both picnic tables. The day promises to be the first really hot one of the summer, with 95 degree temperature predicted. I could feel that insufferable heat beginning to build on my back as I walked over to Whole Foods after MP to get some cereal and juice.

G, who used to stay on the Hill, but who has found steady job at Arby’s and a decent room to stay in across town, came by early on his way to work for a bite to eat. (“The Hill” is what everybody calls the back parking lot at the church where everybody hangs out or sleeps. I guess specifically it refers to the sloped bank of the property that runs down west to the shops below, but I think any part of the grounds can be so called.) G was in particularly good spirits. He loves Sammie and talked to her as he helped us carry the breakfast supplies out into the courtyard. As we settled in we shook hands with a young newcomer who had stopped in recently. “Welcome to the Hill”, G said.

In no time there were 6 or 8 of us sitting around the table. Of course we went through the OJ immediately and had to switch to water. I told one guy that I had finally gotten my hands upon the clothing and boots that I “owed” him (he had stored some things in the church and someone else had taken them). I told them this time I’d keep them locked up tight in the Vicar’s office until he wanted to use them. Without places to shower or wash clothes, new, or at least clean used clothes from the Salvation Army or wherever, are one way to keep up some semblance of hygiene.

Everybody wondered where C was, and most of them know that he stays with me and so they asked me if I had any idea. I had to suppose he was still sleeping in his room and I hadn’t noticed. Yesterday I was tiptoeing around the house all afternoon thinking that he was taking an extended nap, only to find him sitting up on the Hill when I came to EP. “I thought you were in that room,” I said. He just laughed. I smiled joyfully.

Most of us finishing up our cereal and cheese grits that we get donated from a couple ladies at Blacknall Presbyterian, I started clearing things off and back into the Parish Hall. Most people helped, rinsing off dishes before putting them into the dishwasher. Afterward JR stood outside with one of the regulars talking about life. He’ll confide things to JR I don’t think anyone else knows, and JR will gently nudge him towards the path of wisdom. T, our Parish hall live-in sexton, always does an amazing job of keeping things in there spic and span, and humbly does any dishes that are left. These are the small works of mercy that constitute sanctity.

--Colin

The Economy and the Church

2009-05-29T12:39:00.000-07:00

I keep hearing about how bad the economy is. Unemployment is around 10%. Not quite as bad as the 25% of the Great Depression, but significant nonetheless. I’ve heard lots of people talk about the way that it is affecting them. I’ve heard Christians say that God can use this terrible situation for something good. I’ve heard people pray for the economy.

But I’m not convinced that Christians should be worried about the economy. I’m not convinced that the church has a stake in “fixing” it. And I’m not convinced that fixing it is in the interest of the common good of man either.

If anything, I suspect that what is happening is an opportunity God is giving to church to renew is practices of mercy and to be holy.

Unemployment is up, homelessness is up, evictions are climbing. But we ought not despair, for its not that there is not enough to go around. We still have plenty of food and plenty of beds for all these people. That is not the issue. The problem is not scarcity. The problem is the way that people act, the way that people decide to allocate resources in their control. Fixing a mechanism will not fix the problem. Let me say that again. We have all the goods we need.

The problem is greed, fear, selfishness, pride. The problem is sin. What else can explain that we have more than enough and yet so many go without?

And what this means is that everyone crying about the terrible state of things is really crying about themselves. The rich are crying about taking huge losses to their portfolios - losses will never really threaten their immediate needs. The middle class is crying because that house they thought would make them secure has been taken away from them.

Many are indignant that the economy is taking a toll on the poor. But why be indignant? We have everything we need. If there is crying to do, it is crying because our economy was so good to us. It let us believe that the best way to help everybody, the best way to serve the poor, was to be greedy. There is crying because it is looking less and less like that is going to work. It is looking less and less like any kind of system is going to work. For we have more than enough.

But there is no way to give it to the poor, except to give it to the poor. We are crying because we can no longer be indignant about the poor without being hypocritical. For we can no longer support the system, since the system is broken. If we cry about the plight of the poor we are struck by the fact that we have some of that everything needed to help the poor, so not to give is tantamount to stealing. At the very least, it is hard to be indignant and well-off without being hypocritical.

Is your goal to end poverty? The simplest and quickest way to do that, requiring basically zero changes in infrastructure, would be to take a poor person into your home and feed them. One less homeless person. If everyone with the means to do so did that, we would wipe out poverty and homelessness. Period. And you don’t even have to take in complete strangers. Some might be strong enough or brave enough to do that. I am not yet. The homeless man living with me is my friend. I got to know him for two years before he moved in. And you’d be wrong to think that was because I didn’t trust him before then. It was more that he didn’t trust me. The rich are scared of the poor (why?) and the poor are scared of the rich (why?).

This simple solution gets down to the heart about arguments about performing the works of mercy. It is often objected that they are simply impractical for solving our society’s problems. They are a palliative, a bandaid. The real way to change the world is to get involved in politics, to write letters to congressmen, to vote the right candidates into office. To this the church should rightly reply in the first instance that it is not a club or a government whose job is to work on solving society’s problems. I joined the church whose mission is to follow Jesus, and he told me to perform the works of mercy and give up my possessions and so I do it. He told me to. That’s it. Even if its not efficient.

But then slowly it begins to dawn on me just how deeply practical and efficient the works of mercy are. They provide the remedy for societal ills not by reforming a bureaucratic system but by transforming people. They offer, right now, the most efficient way to end poverty. They say that the way that you help people is, well, by helping them. What we need is a revolution of the heart.

And this shows that it is not the works of mercy that are the palliative. The state and its institutions are the palliative. They, no matter how reformed, are the morphine for the cancer. They, no matter how just, strike at the weed but leave the root. They, no matter how large or small, are inefficient.

And so I don’t think that I have a stake in the economy. It is, after all, really the state’s economy, and the economy’s state. But this is not because I just want to “let it burn” – although that might not be a bad idea. Rather, I don’t think that the state of the economy is a bad thing for the church because I don’t think the economy is the problem in the first place. The way that the changed economy shifts around materials in a different way just gives us a different view of the effects of sin.

The state of the economy gives the church a chance to be the church. To feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to house the homeless.

--Colin Miller

Beloved, let us love one another

2009-05-10T13:44:00.000-07:00

The following is a sermon preached by Vicar Rhonda Lee, on the 5th Sunday of Easter, the 10th of May 2009. The text is 1 John 4:7-21.

God is love.

If John, the author of this morning’s epistle, were writing an academic paper, that would be his thesis statement.

John wants to be sure we understand his claim about God, so he states it twice: once negatively and once positively. “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love”; then, later on, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

In case we’re tempted to define love—and God—according to our own sentimental preconceptions, John makes it clear that his definition is rooted in divine revelation. “Love is from God,” he tells us, and he goes on to remind us of the bedrock Christian belief about divine love: “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.”

Love that heals, nourishes, liberates; love that breathes new life into dead bodies and despairing souls; love that has nothing at all to do with the merits or charms of the beloved; love that never ends. That’s the kind of love God shows toward you and me, on the days when we feel lovable, and on the days we can hardly stand to look in the mirror.

“God is love” is good news, a nurturing message for those who need to know they’re valued, just to get through another day. It’s a direct challenge to the worldly powers that see only some people as worthy of love: the strong, the beautiful, those on the inside of whatever dividing lines they’ve drawn.

John’s words challenge the church too. “Beloved,” he reminds us gently, “since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.” If we had any illusions that living in Christian community was easier two thousand years ago than it is today, John’s warning shatters them: “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”

If we’re honest, most of us can’t help wondering, “John, have you met my sister? My brother? Let me introduce you; once you see what I’m dealing with, you’ll cut me some theological slack.” But again, if we’re honest, we acknowledge that John lists no exceptions. He doesn’t say love your brother or sister except when they don’t, or won’t, listen to you; except when they bite their nails or snap their gum in public; except when they play that song we can not stand for the thousandth time; except when they’re just plain wrong. There are no loopholes.

Loving all our brothers and sisters, all the time, is a tall, in fact, impossible, order, if we think love is a matter of how we feel about someone, and if we think it’s something that happens by our own effort.

That’s not how love works. Love is a holy mystery, evidence of God moving among us, revealed in the way we treat each other. In John’s words, “if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” We know God does live in us, because, as John says, “he has given us of his Spirit.” We are temples of the Holy Spirit, through whom God’s love can work, transforming us into a beloved community over time, as we pray and share the sacraments, study the Scriptures together, and accompany each other through the joys and sorrows of our lives.

Many things can get in the way of love, but John singles out one force as love’s enemy, its polar opposite: fear. Love is the essence of God, and the highest virtue any Christian can practice; fear is a universal animal instinct that causes us to run away or lash out in self-protection. “There is no fear in love,” John states unequivocally, “but perfect love casts out fear….whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.”

As people who base our lives on the two great commandments to love God, and to love our neighbor as ourselves, we don’t like to think we live in fear. But John, a wise elder who addresses his readers as “little children,” knows that all of us have fears, many of which we don’t want to admit even to ourselves. None is more serious than our fear of God’s judgment. John knows that fear, and he reassures us. God has shown us his love in Jesus Christ so that, as John says, “we may have boldness on the day of judgment,” not fearing punishment. Since we know God loves us beyond anything we could have imagined, we can live as free people, in communities bound together by love.

To anyone who’s spent more than a day or two in the church, however, it’s all too obvious that love has not yet been perfected in us—in any of us. Each of us struggles with some fear: of being hurt, or hurting someone else; of not being heard, seen, valued; of being misunderstood, or being wrong; of not knowing the right answer when we’re supposed to be the expert; of letting others down, or being betrayed by those we’ve trusted.

Our fears can loom so large in our mind’s eye that they keep us from even picturing perfect love, much less embodying it. So what can we do?

John’s letter gives us the answer. Remember who God is—pure love—and who we are: children of God, and brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, who still lives through our beloved community. Pray for the grace to serve as vessels of divine love, and to pour it out upon each other, and upon the world outside our church walls. With God’s help, we will be emboldened to take the risks that come with truly opening ourselves to one another. As we draw closer to each other in love, it will become clearer and clearer that our endlessly compassionate God is alive among us, and our love will be this church’s testimony to the world about our faith.

Concrete's home

2009-04-21T08:05:00.000-07:00

You may see Concrete around town today, as he's been released from the hospital. Thanks to everyone for your prayers. Please keep them up, for Concrete and for everyone who wants to be a loving friend and/or family member to him. It's good to have this beloved member of our community back among us.

2009-04-16T10:55:00.000-07:00

The following is a homily preached by JR Rigby at Church of the Holy Family, Chapel Hill, on Wednesday of Easter Week, 2009. Propers: Luke 24:13-35, Acts 3:1-10

In the short passage from Acts 3:1-10 we are immersed in the ordinary and the routine. Peter and John are going up to the temple at the hour of prayer. Indeed, at the end of chapter 2 we are told that the believers “day by day, spent much time at the temple”. Peter and John are just going about the daily routine; it is probably not even the first time they have been to the temple that day.

At the gate of the temple lay a beggar, lame from birth, now in his fortieth year. He is laid there daily. His routine is well known. Luke even notes that the people of Jerusalem recognize him as the beggar at the Beautiful Gate. For this man the routine may have become a source of despair – a lifetime of begging, no longer even looking up at the almsgivers as they pass by.

So, we must imagine that Peter and John have seen this man before, probably many times. Yet this time when the beggar asks Peter and John for alms, Luke tells us that Peter looked at him intently, as did John.

The story continues, almost without missing a beat. It would be easy to pass over this detail. Still, Luke tells us that Peter did not just glance down at the beggar, but that he looked at him intently.

Just what went through Peter’s mind at that moment – Peter, who had been at Jesus’ side through his ministry?

Did Peter perhaps see Lazarus lying at the gate of the rich man’s house? As the beggar asked for alms, did Peter hear Lazarus hungry and pleading for the falling crumbs?

So much has happened since Jesus told that parable: the Passion, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection. It is a new time.

Then perhaps Peter looked up for a moment through the gate toward the temple and saw now the temple as the house of the rich man, and Peter the servant of that rich man, nourished at the sumptuous table of the Lord of that house in the breaking of bread - Peter who has nothing of his own because the church holds all things in common, says with honesty, “I have no silver or gold,” and then with gentleness, “but what I have I give you” – and what crumbs from the table of the Lord can he possibly offer to this beggar at the gate? Nothing less than,

“In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk.”

Then Peter took the beggar by the right hand and, Luke says, “raised him up” – for this is a story about healing, certainly, but only to point to the Resurrection; Peter “raised him up”. As Paul writes, Christ “will transform the body of our humiliation (the body of a lame beggar lying outside God’s house) that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (the healed man running and jumping into the temple, a figure of the new man in Christ) by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself (instantly this man believed and praised God).” Phil 3:21

Peter lives in a community of faithful obedience to ordinary practices, devoted to the prayers, and to the breaking of bread. It is in devotion to these ordinary things that Peter’s eyes are opened to the beggar at the gate – much as Cleopas’ eyes are opened to Jesus in the breaking of bread - and it is through faithfulness to holding all things in common that we find Peter with no silver and gold.

Let us not miss the irony: Through faithfulness Peter’s eyes are opened to notice the beggar, but through faithfulness he also has no silver or gold to give. From the beggar’s vantage it’s a bit of a Catch 22!

But it is a new time - a time not of defeat, nor of despair, but of victory. For, Christ is risen!

Thus in Peter’s faithfulness to the risen Christ, we find that having nothing he yet possesses everything, being poor he yet makes this man rich, and this beggar, whom everyone recognized but no one knew, is yet well-known as he is raised up with Christ.

Peter’s faithfulness turns an ordinary, and potentially awkward, encounter into a mirror of the Resurrection.

We must be faithful in small things, if we are to participate in the glory of God that is the resurrection of his Son. Let us go therefore and devote ourselves to Christ in every small act. Let our daily routines be set by the worship of God. Let our eyes be opened in the breaking of bread.

And may every mundane encounter be transformed by the resurrection of our Lord.

O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his
disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith,
that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives
and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God,
now and for ever. Amen.

2009-04-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

Concrete at Central Regional Psychiatric Hospital

After spending seven days in the Duke ER, Crete was transferred to Central Regional Psychiatric Hospital in Butner yesterday morning.

Sent to the loonie bin - that's the bad news. The good news is that now we can visit him. So Lisa and I went up last night after supper.

The facility is brand new, replacing the older one in that same town. This probably helped to relieve a bit of the awkward nervousness I felt approaching my first mental health ward. They led us through a series of four electrically locking doors. The hallways were white and sterile but bigger than your average hospital types. This would have been comforting, but medical hospitals are usually bustling with doctors, nurses and patients, carts and machinery here and there. Here there was nothing. No other people, bare, slightly curving, medium-light corridors smelling of antiseptic soap.

They led us into an austere little room with two chairs, a table and a bench. "Shut the door behind you," the nurse said. She then opened the other door into the common area of Crete's wing. "Mr. Graham?!" she yelled.

Crete walked in, staring at the floor. He was dressed in his normal street clothes, which had clearly had a recent run through the wash. He looked good.

We all sat down and Crete started talking. He said that he had just been transferred there today and that they hadn't given him any drugs yet. He said he didn't know what had set "that lady they call my sister" to commit him at that time. He ran through various things that had happened in the few days before the police nabbed him, and wasn't sure what it had been. "They just kept telling me that it was because I'm not showering...but that doesn't seem right." To that charge was later added, he said, that he was a danger to himself and others. The former might, by an almost infinite stretch of the imagination, in the state's definition, be entailed in long periods without a shower (which, by the way, is itself highly questionable). The latter is simply laughable.

Crete talked a lot about how his present predicament is caused by the state's inability to put up with or even comprehend his chosen way of life. "They got all their people out on this one...police, FBI, CIA, Army, Navy, Marines, ROTC. They are killing each other all day trying to kill me because I love God. But they really are destroying themselves...they say they are helping me but I know that they gotta do this to function a profit [benefit] for the rest of the world. So they' really just blessin' themselves."

As always, though, he takes this with patience and understanding and never blames anyone personally. Quite in the New Testament sense, he blames "the world." "I talk to folks all day who are trying to help me, and I'm trying to help them, cause I know they're not even intending to do what they are doin'. But whatever I say they just make me look stupid."

He refuses even to speak badly of his sister, who had him committed and whom he has not seen or heard from through this whole process. Responding to something I said hinting of a negative vibe toward his sister he said, "People are gonna think I should make war against her, but I'm not gonna do that."

Lisa and I told him that the Guys were worried about him and that JR and Adam would be up to visit soon. I said that we've been able to talk to his social worker and doctors and that hopefully our testimonies of our normal life with him, along with Adam's ability to speak intelligently about things psychiatric would convince them that the facilities' over-crowed beds need not be taken up by Crete. He looked intently and hopefully when I told him we'd do everything we can.

Probably the biggest obstacle to his release right now is the way he talks. His speach sounds strange, incomprehensible and, well, crazy - to someone who doesn't know him. But it is eminently intelligible and rational - it is simply a different idiom, laden with metaphors and rather apocalyptic in tone, spoken from the underbelly of the world. The problem is that psychiatrists don't know him or live with him, so when he says that he's "gettin' hit" or that "the world is trying to kill him" or that he's "not getting any women" he can only be classed as delusional, paranoid, or perverted.

The ER psychiatrist told us the other day that three weeks is a long stay at Central Regional. Let's pray its shorter than that.

--Colin Miller

2009-04-14T08:34:00.000-07:00

This is the sermon preached by Vicar Rhonda Lee at the Great Vigil at St. Joseph's on Easter Eve 2009. The text is Isaiah 55: 1-11.

“Everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters,
and you that have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without
price.”

By human standards, this passage from Isaiah is a very strange invitation.

It’s addressed to “everyone,” answering the ubiquitous questions about who else will be there, and whether children are included. And not just “everyone” is invited, but, more specifically, “everyone who thirsts,” and those “that have no money.” An open bar and all-you-can-eat buffet for people who don’t eat out: the host is either extremely wealthy, unusually generous, or both.

There are a couple of things the invitation doesn’t mention. There’s nothing about gifts: no indication of where the host is registered. Not even a discreet line of small type stating “no gifts please,” or suggesting a donation to your favorite charity instead. Perhaps because those who can’t afford food and drink are specifically invited, this invitation doesn’t specify the type of attire guests are expected to wear.

This really is a very strange invitation.

It sounds strange to us, and it would have sounded strange twenty-five hundred years ago when God issued it through the prophet Isaiah. Back then, God said, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,” and that’s still true.

The invitation to God’s banquet isn’t just strange. It’s threatening to anyone who would rather keep their guest lists exclusive—and all of us, if we’re honest, fall into that category at some time or another. If everyone’s invited, that includes not only Democrats and Republicans, but ex-wives and former lovers too. Debutantes and street people. Foreigners and fellow citizens: God specifically says that the heralds of the banquet “shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you…” Notorious sinners, and those who have simply offended us. Everyone’s invited. All our host asks is that guests heed this call, “let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts,” and trust in God’s generous promise that, as Isaiah says, “he will abundantly pardon.” That pardon is good news to everyone who knows herself to be a sinner, but it feels like bad news at those moments when we can’t imagine sharing a table with him—whoever he may be.

If the breadth of the invitation to this banquet challenges us personally, it’s also a political threat. Crowds of people gathering in one place for no commercial purpose, without a permit? That’s called loitering in most places, and sedition in many; depending on how the offense is defined, it may be punishable by a fine, jail term, or death. Giving away wine, milk, and food to any and all who show up? Add public drunkenness, contributing to the delinquency of minors, and undermining the moral fiber of the poor to the list of charges. Call the Health Department while you’re at it, because that banquet’s a hazard. And by the way, who’s going to do the dishes afterward?

It’s true: God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and our ways are not God’s ways.

That’s the lesson of the resurrection. That’s the lesson of baptism. By the standards of the world, God’s ways don’t make sense; they’re not rational, reasonable, or profitable. But for us as a Christian community, those paradoxical ways are the wellspring of joy and compassionate love.

That’s why we believe that our sister Kenetta was drowned in water and the Holy Spirit tonight, even though most of her body stayed dry. That’s why we’ve been looking forward to her death for months, and why we now proclaim that this adult woman has just been born.

Our ways are not God’s ways. But, by divine grace God’s thoughts have been revealed to us in Scripture; God’s love has been shown to us in the law and the prophets, and made incarnate in Jesus Christ. God’s ways can become our ways, when we accept the mysterious invitation to his banquet.

Tonight Kenetta has accepted that invitation. She has been baptized, and she will take Communion. Kenetta has already participated in, and even hosted, fellowship meals here at St. Joseph’s. Tonight, she has said she wants to be a part of all the Holy Spirit’s banquets. She has said yes, she wants to feast at the table where seats are never sold, and where’s there’s always room for everyone. She wants to share in the meal hosted by the man who never raised a hand to hurt, only to heal, and yet was executed by a brutal empire whose governors believed, accurately, that he posed a threat to their way of doing business.

Kenetta is proclaiming with all the baptized, here at St. Joseph’s, around the world, and through the ages, that death can be the gateway to life, that bread and wine can become the very body and blood of God, and that by sharing holy food and drink, we can become holy people. She knows that together, we can turn away from empty foods—in Isaiah’s words, from “that which is not bread…that which does not satisfy”—and accept the nourishment God offers, as hungrily as a baby accepts the milk that is the only food it has ever known. We can resist the temptation to measure our worth by whether or not we appear on some exclusive guest list, and instead relax into the joy of knowing we’re loved, and we’re free to love others.

“Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” That’s God’s simple, profound recipe for transformation: accept the invitation to his banquets. If you’re baptized, feast often. Take a seat at the Lord’s table wherever you find it, and make room there for everyone who hungers and thirsts. If you’re wondering whether the Holy Spirit might be calling you to baptism, know that the sacraments and fellowship are God’s gifts to everyone who will accept them, and that his invitation has your name on it. As we share food and drink—bread and wine here at the altar, and rice and beans, sausage and eggs in the parish hall—we will become God’s people. We will be one body in Jesus Christ, and he will teach us to walk in his ways together. Amen.

2009-04-14T08:28:00.000-07:00

The following is the sermon preached by Deacon Maggie Silton at St. Joseph's on Maundy Thursday 2009. The text is John 13: 1-17, 31b-35.

Jesus said to Peter, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” As usual, Peter just doesn’t get it. At first he refuses Jesus’ offer to wash his feet. When Jesus tells Peter he must wash his feet, Peter wants his head and hands washed as well. Peter is so like the rest of us. When he realizes he’s said the wrong thing, he proceeds to put his foot even further into his mouth.

I suppose we shouldn’t be too hard on Peter. Even in a cultural context where foot-washing was a common practice of hospitality, it would have been downright weird to do what Jesus does and start washing feet in the middle of dinner. We can be pretty sure that it isn’t concern for hygiene or even comfort that’s motivating Jesus. I think we can also be sure it’s not ritual cleanliness that’s on Jesus’ mind. Jesus presents a model of servanthood, to be sure. But the lesson Jesus teaches by washing the feet of his disciples reaches beyond even servanthood.

By washing the feet of his disciples, Jesus teaches them what it’s like to be in loving relationship with one another. By washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus teaches them about mutuality in love. Jesus turns the whole notion of the master-servant hierarchy upside down. He offers service to the very people who think it’s their job to serve him instead. By performing the service of foot-washing for his disciples, Jesus teaches them how to receive service. By this point in Jesus’ ministry, the disciples know what service looks like. They’ve seen Jesus touch lepers and minister to outcasts. They’ve seen him eat with people whom others consider beyond the pale. Now, as their own feet are washed by Jesus, they learn what it’s like to be the ones who are served.

The lesson that Jesus teaches in the foot-washing is one that we too would do well to learn. Most of us have internalized the idea that it’s more blessed to give than to receive. I’d venture to guess that most Christians believe that it’s better to serve than be served. Most of us like to think of ourselves as givers and helpers. It certainly is good to give and it’s certainly good to help. But if we are givers and helpers only, and are never receivers, we perpetuate a hierarchy in which some people are defined as being better than others. If we refuse what others offer, if we refuse the service of others, we may—without meaning to—deprive someone else of the chance to give and serve.

We may want to keep Jesus’ lesson in mind as we think about our relationships with our homeless neighbors. In our eagerness to consider how we may serve them, it may be easy to forget what it is that they may offer us. Yes, we want to emulate Jesus and be washers of feet. But Jesus, too, had his feet washed with ointment by Mary, who dried Jesus’ feet with her hair. Sometimes it is as blessed to give as to receive. Sometimes it is as blessed to be served as to serve. Mutuality is essential to truly loving relationships, like the one Jesus has with the disciples and like the one Jesus has with his Father. “Unless I wash you,” says Jesus, “you have no share with me.” Amen.

2009-04-04T05:37:00.001-07:00

Potluck supper at the picnic tables, April 3rd

2009-04-03T09:58:00.000-07:00

Love and the Poor: A Personal Reflection

I have said elsewhere that the only positive thing that we do at St. Joseph's is decline the temptation to exclude the homeless from fellowship. In that sense we have only made the most basic step toward community, which is not to preclude its possibility. Now we have, in a way, moved on. We have long since invited the poor among us, or perhaps we have responded to their invitations - after all, they have been there longer than most of us. But having avoided the first temptation to undermine community, moving ever toward the eucharistic ideal, we are faced with new challenges.

The challenges, I have thought at times, are those of discerning the deserving from the undeserving, or perhaps of convincing my new friends that I am not to be conned, or to establish a level of understanding with them concerning what I can and cannot give, or will and will not. These challenges, it turns out, are all the challenges of maintaining control. The first is to control the reception of my charity, that it not be taken for granted or squandered when others could use it more. The second is control of my dignity. The third is control over the claims that the poor might make of me, as if to say, "I'll give you anything as long as you don't ask for this, or that."

The fear of losing control is at once a fear of "enabling" or perpetuating sin (by giving money to an alcoholic in search of a drink), of being made a fool in a con, or of the slippery slope that one seems to occupy when one starts giving freely to those who ask (because so few exercise proper restraint in asking!). It is clear that these are fears that I face. And yet the fear of enabling rests on a conviction that I am a more responsible steward than the alcoholic, perhaps that spending that money on my own dining-out habits, on coffee for a meeting with a colleague, is somehow more faithful than this man's indulgence in a destructive habit born of who knows what hardship. The fear of being made a fool is a fear of losing the esteem of others, and ultimately a fear of being made lowly, even if it be for the sake of Christ. The fear of the slippery slope is ultimately a fear of becoming poor. And the fear of becoming poor is the fear that God will not provide what I need. The belief that through charity one might be left with too little is fundamentally a failure of faith.

Once I realize that what I thought were the challenges are really no more than my own habits to distance myself from the poor, or even from others generally, I begin to have some idea of greater challenges. The greater challenge as I see it is to see Christ in the undeserving, the needy, the down-trodden. To see a man or woman who is so battered to the point of self-loathing is to see an immensely unattractive person. But Isaiah gave a foretaste of this:

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not…

He was despised, and we esteemed him not. Christ lives among us, as the least of these, the despised, those of little esteem, perhaps as those who have not even their own esteem. Not only is it hard to see Christ in this suffering person - for it is hard, really, to fathom that He went not up to joy but first He suffered pain - but we turn our heads from this pitiful creature perhaps because it makes a fool of us just to see it: the image of God found self-loathing and alone. It is repulsive to see the pearls cast before swine, the beloved of Christ trodden by sin, and we turn our heads in shame and disgust, and distance ourselves from the sacrilege.

But is this not the view of God from the beginning of time, to see sin mingled with his image, the goodness of creation soiled by sin? His response was not to lift himself higher, distancing himself from that which conceived in love and goodness had become tainted, but instead he lowered himself to come among us, to sit in fellowship with sinners, to have himself lifted high on a cross. The perfect image of God became incarnate, first as salvation from the power of death, but also as an example to man of the perfection of the very image in which he was created.

So then in these encounters we recognize that Christ is on both sides. We find him in the least of these, and we find him as our victory over the threats of sin and death. We no longer have anything to fear by encountering Christ in this person, and love of God demands that we raise this Christ-like figure to his proper glory, out of the muck and offal of anonymity and scorn, and into the love of Christ.

The challenges, I have decided, are not challenges intrinsic to the poor. The challenge is no more particular than learning to love another person as Christ loved us. Perhaps he gave us the poor to love in part to convince us how much deeper could be our love even for those to whom we acknowledge our closeness, our spouses and family. This is the sacramental presence of the poor, a vehicle of grace and instrument of Divine Love.

It is a challenge to love the poor not because of their poverty or their faults - not because of smells or impropriety or disease - but because we know so little of how to love in the first place, poor or otherwise.

JR Rigby

Tenebrae

2009-03-06T05:08:00.000-08:00

One of my most vivid memories of church during my childhood is of Tenebrae on Good Friday, a very solemn service where candles are extinguished and readings are proclaimed. At the very end of the service comes the strepitus, when a book is slammed shut, invoking the earthquake that occurred at Jesus’ death (and, to my vivid, childish imagination, also recalling the slamming shut of the tomb). The sudden noise of the book, followed by complete silence all the way back to the car, sent chills up my spine. The rest of the year, my community’s worship was mostly words – spoken or sung, whispered or shouted, but still just words. This very physical Good Friday moment was something I treasured all year. I couldn’t wait for the time when I would hear that slamming sound in the darkness again.

I didn’t know it then, but Tenebrae is part of the Divine Office in the Western tradition. The music and texts of Matins and Lauds toward the end of Holy Week were so beautiful and captivating, the clergy moved the services on those days from midnight to earlier in the evening so lay people could participate. The texts are indeed beautiful, and services by candlelight are always inspiring. But what captivated me more than anything was the feeling that in that slamming book God was physically reaching out to touch the people gathered. It made the Incarnation ring true in a way words alone could not.

At St. Joseph’s, the Office is a very physical experience day in and day out, not only on special days. Many of us bow our heads at the name of Jesus and bend at the waist when invoking the Trinity. We kneel when confessing our sins to God and one another, and again when offering our petitions to God as a family. We hug and shake hands to offer one another the peace of God, passing it physically from one person to the next, not just wishing it at each other with our voices. And when one of us is absent from the church – as I am frequently these days – the Church teaches that our prayer is nevertheless joined together across space and time, so that we are part of the same praying Body no matter where or when we open our Prayer Books.

It is well and good that we talk about the Daily Office as part of the Church’s toolbox for “Christian formation” – but we must remember that that formation is not just metaphorical. Worship in community really does mold us in new ways, forcing us to take on a new form that is sometimes uncomfortable, even painful. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, puts this beautifully in a passage from his book, Eucharistic Sacrifice:

“To be able to praise and adore God worthily is not something instantly and easily accessible: our praise is tied in with the sacrifice, the giving up, of our own sinful and self-protective definition of what we are – and so with the whole act of accepting Christ as the form of the new humanity.”

The Office works on us slowly, getting into our bones and changing our shape from within. Against our own selfish desires and ambitions, it twists our life into the shape of the Cross. Our prayer and praise, expressed in bodily gestures and the words of our lips, break down our bodies and rebuild them into the Body of Christ. Thanks be to God.

Fr. Chris Tessone

Widow's mite

2009-03-03T12:09:00.000-08:00

There is a man, T, who lives in his truck in the church parking lot. He has been around St. Joe's now for a good while - perhaps a year. At first I didn't think he was homeless. He would come to Holy Eucharist on Sunday and stick around for coffee hour to chat. He never asked for anything.

Since taking up residence at the church he has rarely missed a service of Communion or Daily Prayer. He comes to breakfast, sometimes eating and sometimes not (I think it depends on what the casserole looks like), but always politely conversing. I've never seen him drink, though he seems to be on good terms with the others at church that do. T is one of the folks that makes the work we do easy and joyful.

This morning T and I said prayer together, just the two of us, for the first 15 minutes of the service. As we were leaving prayer, a woman who had arrived in time for the last few prayer asked for a bus pass to go job hunting. I said I would have to try to get one for her today because I was out. Then I turned around to the poor plate to see if I could fish the two dollars for the pass out of it. Before I could do so, T had opened his wallet, pulled out two dollars and given them to her.

I smiled in awe of the beauty.

I hung my head half-comically at my hardness of heart. I had been inclined to wait and see if I could get someone to pick up some passes later that day. That would cost me nothing. Then I had turned to the $60 in the poor plate to see if there were a couple of singles. Administering the poor plate costs me nothing, and by it I gain recognition for "serving" the poor. And it is mostly filled by those giving out of their abundance. The poor plate usually costs its donors nothing.

But T had given out of his lack. Such a gift was costly and it must have hurt. With all the cash in the poor plate I could not have given more. It was a sacrifice I did not dare counsel against.

Colin Miller, depauperum.blogspot.com

Soul Song 6 (Put Your Hand in the Hand) - for William

2009-03-03T12:04:00.000-08:00

Stocking cap spelling death
on concrete cloaked
in November leaves,
Body bread broken
by the whisper of morning’s sour wine
and the undying
wail
of the little one
hungry
for the jar of Gerber’s strained plums,
--her favorite—
forgotten at Mel’s when Back Ho
plugged the jukebox with
the song that wouldn’t drown.

A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

Unforgiven,
he fell
in the door to the Fellowship Hall,
reached for your hand
and took mine.

And now,
as the hard rush
of the metal angel’s wings—
lifts me above stormy water,
I sip sauvignon,
listen to the wafer
knitting questions
in my unforgiven bone
and open myself to the lover
who whispers the grace notes
of our names,
waiting for us to come.

Craig Werner
Craig teaches African-American literature and music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is a friend of St. Joseph's.

From our senior warden

2009-03-03T10:58:00.000-08:00

Before arriving to live in beautiful North Carolina, I am ashamed to say I gave those begging on the streets of my former home countries little or even no thought. It was not so prevalent in Norfolk, England (nearly ten years ago anyway), but was very noticeable in the so-called affluent Costa del Sol, Spain.

On walking through those red doors at St. Joseph’s, I can honestly say my life changed. Although at once feeling at home with God, I was nervous of, although by now acknowledging the plight of the “street people” who slept on St. Joe’s doorstep. As I got to know and admire the work of dear Matt Pridgen, Colin and JR, and of course our Vicar, I became more and more in tune in what God sees as the mission of St. Joe’s. It didn’t happen overnight, believe me.

I think it was Lisa, Colin’s wife, Senior Warden at the time, who spoke of her experience, of feeling uncomfortable at first. That’s how I felt, but over a period of time, stopping to chat to the guys, making them a sandwich, making them a bowl of soup, my confidence has grown. It still can produce uncomfortable moments, especially when a newcomer is asking for help (is he after money?, what’s his plan?, etc.).

I still have a long way to go to even come close to matching the devotion of the likes of Colin, Lisa, JR and Adam, who without fail, serve breakfast and just as importantly, spend time with our homeless and needy friends. Notice my change of title, because that’s how I feel about them now.

An exchange of words, lending a friendly ear to their problems, heating a bowl of soup, getting them a clean pair of socks, etc. maybe small things to us, taking little time, but I am aware of how much it mean to those who have very little or in a lot of cases, nothing and are often looked on as outcasts. What would Jesus do? Committed Christian know the answer to that.

If only we could all do just a little bit, we can make life a lot easier for those who have to, or for reasons unknown to us, choose to sleep in the shelter of St. Joseph’s, under God’s umbrella, where they feel relatively safe. One thing I can say is that, yes, it’s great writing a check to a charity (and we should still do that if we can), but God gives us greater rewards by tackling the problem on our doorstep head-on.

Mick Capon