We have come to the end of another liturgical year, and prepare now for Advent. We prepare for the most upside down gift of all: a God who comes to dwell with us in the form of a poor, helpless child born in obscurity to peasants. God came to us as 'one of the least of these'--and still does. In preparation we hope to become wise, and watchful, and ready.

The Dalai Lama describes us this way: "If the love within your mind is lost, if you continue to see other beings as enemies, then no matter how much knowledge or education you have, no matter how much material progress is made, only suffering and confusion will ensue."

When we open ourselves to questioning, scrutiny, correction, painful refining and radical reorientation by a love whose capacity goes far beyond what we can achieve through our own efforts, then we are open to the kingdom of God, to that radical birth.

In both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, divine judgment is the flip side of divine promise. To be renewed and reconstituted in the image of God is to undergo, says the Epistle to the Hebrews, a ‘shaking process’ (12:27-28). Only that which echoes the new life God is bringing about can survive. Everything that destroys life will itself face destruction.

Here is the message and invitation of the kingdom of God. It is a divine promise of gift and abundance in an economy of grace, not one of selfish interest.
In economic hardship and uncertainty; in the loneliness and grief of our human condition; when we own the bitter truth of torture, unjust imprisonment and execution in our names; in the overwhelming reality of illness and infirmity and death, can the power of God lift us up? Can God transform our lives, give us hope and set us on our way? Can we affirm that, ultimately, God is in charge, and we’re not?

One of our hymns says, “In all our living, we belong to God.” If we truly belong to God, then we need to trust that everything is held in a loving embrace of wisdom and care. Jesus Christ understands our pain and our questions AND Jesus has triumphed over death, over misery, over every doubt and dark night of the soul. We surrender then, to this.

laying a new foundation at every moment

Kathleen Norris, in her book "Acedia and Me," describes acedia as a kind of “bad thought” that we can find in much of the “restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that plagues us today.” It does overlap depression, and “while depression is an illness treatable by counseling and medication, acedia is a vice that is best countered by spiritual practice and the discipline of prayer…. At its Greek root, the word acedia means the absence of care. The person afflicted by acedia refuses to care or is incapable of doing so…acedia offers a kind of spiritual morphine: you know the pain is there, yet can’t rouse yourself to give a damn.”

I am amazed by her book, 20 years in the living, researching, and writing. What suffering and what clarity mark her pages.

“A coalescence of music, Scripture, and other people in a worshipping congregation had brought me to my senses. I had been dwelling in a drought-stricken land, like the famished prodigal, who, envying the pigs their husks and slop, suddenly remembers that he is a beloved child who has a home. I know that, in the words of a great hymn, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” my temperament makes me “prone to wander from the God I love.” But if I have forgotten who I am, getting back on the road may help me remember. I am both humbled and exalted by the reception I receive when I make my move: the world itself seems to open up and accept me.”

Amidst her commentary on the necessity of repetition and perseverance in prayer and labor: “Abba Moses asked Abba Sylvanus, ‘Can a man lay a new foundation every day?’ The old man said, ‘If he works hard enough, he can lay a new foundation at every moment.”

Ah, the beauty of a faith community in which we can live alongside people who have been practicing and living this for 70, 80, 90 years. How much we have to learn just by sitting next to one of these elders.

With my first baby I was all fussed about diaper rash and asked my mother-in-law, who lived nearby, whether her son had had rashes like this as a baby. She, the mother of seven, looked at me and said, “I don’t remember. There were so many worse things.” My perspective shifted!

Sis was a tough woman, a widow who lived day by day, coming up with the resources she needed day by day. She could be grim as she pushed to complete her tasks, but she was also a woman who knew how to fully enjoy tea and laughter with whomever dropped by in the afternoon. And so many did drop by.

How I miss her now! How I would love to have tea with her again: hot, sweet tea steeped in a teapot, poured into thin china cups, always accompanied by a treat, usually homemade. What a model of "keep on keeping on!"

That’s the kind of model one can find in a church. Women and men who have lived through the best and worst of life and, because of that or in spite of that, still enjoy all the little pleasures, whether tea or children or a good book or an inspiring hymn.

Thanks be to God!

refuse all marriages?

Last weekend's NCNC (northern CA & Nevada) UCC (United Church of Christ) annual conference offered the recommendation that California ministers and churches refuse to perform legal marriages until Proposition 8 is repealed.

That's a courageous suggestion and it should get the word out that many Christians understand marriage equality to be completely compatible with the Christian faith. I have friends in another denomination who are already practicing this form of resistance to discrimination.

I can imagine that for larger congregations, and for churches that raise a lot of their annual budget through performing community marriages, this could be a crucial ethical question: where does our faith call us to stand on this issue?

I'm surprised that I have no enthusiasm for this form of public resistance. I don't perform a lot of legal, heterosexual marriages, and those I do are with couples who are in complete sympathy with marriage equality. I understand that it's not fair that they can be legally married and my gay couples cannot in this state. But if they have reasons to go ahead anyway, I will not stand in their way.

Likewise, I was legally married to my same-gender spouse a year ago. I am not happy that now we enjoy a legal status not available to my not-yet-married gay friends. It seems a Pyrrhic victory at best to be in a special legal limbo. And even though it's not just to leave some with and some without, I will not renounce this marriage. I look forward with joy to the day when we will ALL have this choice!

I want to add possibilities, not subtract them. I want more joy, more love and, God knows, more kissing in this world, not less!

So for those of you who want to take this stand, God bless you and may your witness count a hundredfold. Unless my congregation asks me to take this stand, I will not.

Perhaps the best solution long-term will be for ministers to be allowed to perform only sacred unions regardless of gender, and civil entities required to perform all legal, civil marriages/divorces. That will finally make clear that the covenant the church blesses is different than what the state does with its legal contract.

Lent: a time for joy?

In the last days of World War II, maybe in Italy, amidst land mines and bombs and booby traps, surrounded by death and destruction, an Army nurse, Hana, overhears that her fiancé was killed the day before. Shortly after, her best friend is blown up by a land mine right before Hana's eyes. In grief and horror she says, “I must be a curse.”

Still Hana cares tenderly for a patient who has been horribly burned. He is a mystery: neither he nor she knows who he is, nor, for sure, which side of the war he’s on. Hana’s medical unit is on the long road home, but the patient is dying, and truck travel on bad roads is causing him needless suffering.

So the determined Hana and her stretcher patient move into a ruined estate, a bombed-out mansion along the road. Here she will care for him until the end; only then will she rejoin her medical unit.

This is the part I remember with pleasure, this is the part that says "Lent" to me. In this respite station it does not matter where anyone is from, what they did before they came here, or what madness is consuming the world. Here is a sanctuary for the soul.

Hana sets up camp in the ruined house with her English patient. As her unit drives off, she cuts off most of her long, tangled hair, she scrubs herself in a makeshift courtyard bath, she forages for fresh food. Hana is coming back to life, coming home in a way.

Life here is simple, simple. Only one assignment. Care for the soul, care for the body, his and hers. She finds a flowered dress and sets aside her olive drab.Strangers show up at the old gate of the house, bringing misery, bringing joy. It doesn’t matter. She minds her one assignment and keeps to her simple practices.Kip, a soldier from India, comes. We have seen him doing the dangerous and delicate dismantling of road mines. When Kip comes dusty off the road, when he takes off his Sufi turban for a shower in the courtyard Garden of Eden, Hana brings him a saucer of olive oil to help untangle his long, naked hair.

Now there is music in the house, music and joy, and Hana’s heart opens to love all over again. Hana who cannot stand to lose one more person is loving a man who is dying and in love with a man whose work is the dismantling of bombs.

In the last scene of paradise, Kip takes Hana to a dark cathedral, hands her a flare for light, and hoists her up on ropes to see the ancient frescoes. Slowly she revolves in the air like an angel, gazing at the faces, still there, still intact.

They can’t stay in this Garden forever. The patient must die, Hana must rejoin her unit. Kip must go back to dismantling bombs and mines. There will be more losses.

But this was a healing time, a Lenten season, and they can go on. Lent is that time when we come home, wherever we are; we clean ourselves, put oil in our hair, and remember that in our center the work is very, very simple -- not easy, but simple.

The prophet Isaiah tells us that if we return home, “if we remove the yoke from among us, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if we offer our food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then our light shall rise in the darkness and our gloom be like the noonday. The Holy One will guide us continually, and satisfy our needs in parched places, and make our bones strong; we shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.”

May this be so.

Psalm for a new leader

The psalm for this day, Martin Luther King Day, the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration as president, is for a new leader facing a mountain of challenges. Today I will pray this psalm for our new president, on his behalf.

Psalm 86

Incline your ear, O Lord, and answer me, for I am poor and needy. Preserve my life, for I am devoted to you; save your servant who trusts in you.

You are my God; be gracious to me, O Lord, for to you do I cry all day long. Gladden the soul of your servant, for to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call on you.

Give ear, O Lord, to my prayer; listen to my cry of supplication. In the day of my trouble I call on you, for you will answer me.

There is none like you among the gods, O Lord, nor are there any works like yours. All the nations you have made shall come and bow down before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name. For you are great and do wondrous things; you alone are God.

Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart to revere your name.

I give thanks to you, O Lord my God, with my whole heart, and I will glorify your name forever. For great is your steadfast love toward me; you have delivered my soul from the depths of Sheol.

O God, the insolent rise up against me; a band of ruffians seeks my life, and they do not set you before them. But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

Turn to me and be gracious to me; give your strength to your servant; save the child of your serving girl. Show me a sign of your favor, so that those who hate me may see it and be put to shame, because you, Lord, have helped me and comforted me.

Amen and Amen.

Have a great day!

People of note

This morning I woke up excited to talk about a movie I just saw: Doubt. Both Doubt and the last movie I saw, The Reader, are full of moral dilemmas and ambiguity. After both movies, my partner Barbara and I couldn't wait to talk about what happened, what we would have done, who did what to whom. We haven't completely agreed on our perspectives and I want to talk further -- now that's what I call a great movie.

But that discussion needs to wait, because I have one more "new year" post to write. On December 31st, 2008, I found this in the Chronicle: "Bay Area People of Note Who Died in 2008."

What delighted me about the article was the list that followed. "A restaurateur. A lion keeper. A breast cancer activist. A heroine in the AIDS epidemic. A nightclub singer, Bayview-Hunters Point community activist, World War II hero and key figure in the Free Speech Movement. They were among the thousands of people who died in the Bay Area in 2008. Some were legendary in local history. Others led full lives, but were less well known. All of their lives reflected - and helped shape - the diversity of the Bay Area."

What a beautiful memorial! Instead of more about the famous folks, we got to read about a few of the amazing people who live in the Bay Area, people who have led interesting, full lives -- people we likely never met or even heard of before.

If you want to read the article, copy this address for your web browser: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/01/01/MNR014PJ96.DTL

That story reminds me of what we did at Mira Vista UCC during worship last February: The History We Missed. Each Sunday a volunteer told a story about an African American who, because of racism, never made most history books. These were people of integrity and accomplishment from whom we wanted to learn. People loved it, and we'll do it again this year.

Isn't the beginning of a new year a great time to think about who's with us, who's left us, and whose creativity is making life in our own Bay Area more interesting and sustainable as the days go by?

It inspires me to be one of those people.

It inspires me to go out and meet more of these people. You never know what amazing stories lie behind the exterior you see walking down the street!

I give thanks for these lives, now over, that have enriched my life without my knowing. These are the people on whose foundations we build, every day. Thanks be to God.

Watch Night: I read in yesterday's Chronicle about Bay Area Watch Night prayer services: "There are no party favors, no paper whistles, no shiny hats for these New Year's celebrants. They won't be greeting the new year with a champagne toast while the ball drops in Times Square."

When slavery was legal in the United States, the Watch Night service was a spiritual and political ritual for African Americans; it continues today partly as a commemoration of the most important Watch Night service on December 31, 1862.

"Skeptical that President Abraham Lincoln would keep his word about emancipation, on that night African Americans as well as abolitionists prayed through the night and into the next day."

Frederick Douglass waited at a church until 10 pm New Year's Day for a cable that assured him the law had been passed.

For slaves, Christmas meant good eating, less work and visits to relatives and friends. New Year's Day, however, was known as "heartbreak day," because owners balanced their books at the end of the year by auctioning off hogs, horses, and slaves, tearing families apart.

What a bitter legacy this year-end accounting left behind. No wonder some didn't trust that New Year's Day 1863 could bring good news. I wonder what deep fears might be stirred by all the layoffs at this year's end?

I'd like to pray in the new year with healing from heartbreaks, redemption from hatreds, and a new way forward for all of us.

That might take some waiting and watching on my knees.

Watch Night. Watch and pray.

May the new year ring in all of the determination and stamina of Frederick Douglass waiting however long it takes for the good news!

And now let us welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.
-Rainer Maria Rilke