Reflections on Advent

by Rachel Hoobing

I was startled when I began to reflect on Advent, because in all my time in seminary I never thought about the incarnation of Jesus Christ as much as when I was giving the little girl who I take care of her bottle.

I was seated on a couch, holding her in my lap. She was happily taking in her mother’s milk. We often gaze at each other during this time. It is a special time. I was amazed at how much she had grown (I have known her since she was five weeks old, and she will turn one year old in February.) She is becoming a little girl with a personality, likes and dislikes. She is impressionable.

My thoughts drifted to Mary holding Jesus -- just a baby, new to the world with personality, likes and dislikes and who was also impressionable. I wondered: what was Jesus like as a baby and a small child? What was Mary like? Did she often gaze into Jesus’ eyes, wondering who and what kind of God is this to be born? And how about Joseph? Did he ever ponder about God while holding Jesus?

At Christmas we see the nativity scene -- Jesus in a manger, Mary beside Jesus, Joseph close by, and all of them watched over by a donkey and an ox. There is an angel in the background, a gathering crowd of wise ones bearing gifts, and shepherds with sheep and maybe a small lamb. Above this gathering there is a star. It is quite a scene -- a quaint scene that we often find on a Christmas card.

I would invite you to imagine, for a minute, being one of these gathered around the miracle of new life and new creation. Maybe you are one of the wise ones, wondering what does this all mean and what is the importance of this birth? Maybe you are a shepherd, a social outcast of a sort with a bad reputation, who has just been visited by an angel, told not to fear, yet ever so curious as to why the invitation came to see a newborn and his parents. Maybe you are Mary and you see your son and you are in love with this new little person. Maybe you are Joseph and you are also in love with this new person and your wife.

For all these, the smell of the animals, hay and feces does not matter. All that matters in that moment, in the words of Isaiah, is that a child is born; a son is given. This is a gathering rooted in love, hope, faith and grace.

In Advent we are invited to the gathering. A gathering that is all too familiar and one we might approach differently each year.

During Advent we are given the opportunity to ponder on the incarnation of Jesus Christ. We hear the words Emmanuel, or God-with-us, quite often during this time. Advent is a time of preparation and is also a time to really think about the incarnation, birth, and life of God -- a God who is revealing, in-fleshed, made human, and with-us. God loves the world so much that God comes into the world to be with us.

It is absolutely amazing to think that God became human -- a little baby. I think that the incarnation of Jesus Christ reveals a God who loves the world so much that by being born into the world- into creation and into the life of humanity -- dares to enter into a just, meaningful, and real relationship with humanity and all of creation. This is good news!

Let us as theologians -- lay persons and pastors -- focus our attention on the baby Jesus Christ, the way I hold and focus on the baby I care for. Hold him and sit with him for a little while. Take some time thinking about the incarnation of Jesus Christ to help form and inform our theology and understanding of God.

The story is not over. Granted, Jesus Christ was born at a particular time and in a particular place, but the story is not over. The thirteenth century theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart said, “We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.” Martin Luther said that we are to be bearers of Christ.

God calls us again and again to new life and new creation. God does not work alone in the world. We are called to be the hands and feet of God. We believe in a God who calls us into relationship. Let us dare to enter into a relationship with God, with others, and all of creation that is life-giving, life-producing, just, right, meaningful and real. Peace to you as you enter into this holiday season.

Rachel Hoobing is a graduate of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary with a Masters in Theological Studies. Rachel intends to back to school and become an elementary school teacher.

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The Moon of Long Nights

by Jessica Prentice

On November 22, the moon was new and we entered the lunar cycle once known as the Moon of Long Nights. The nights are indeed long, and will be getting longer and longer until the winter solstice -- the longest night of the year -- which happens to fall on the night when the moon is new again. It is a strange and exciting coincidence that the solstice and the dark of the moon fall at the same time this year. It will make December 21st an especially long, dark night.

During this Moon of Long Nights we enter Advent -- “coming.” It is a period of waiting. Through the long nights, we await a miracle: the coming of the light. In the Christian tradition and throughout much of our culture, the miracle we await is Christ’s Mass, the birth of the Son of God. It is also the rebirth of the Sun. The Sun returns. The days begin to lengthen once again, the nights to shorten. We can have faith that spring will come, and with it a thaw, and the opportunity to till and to plant the next year’s crops.

There is something very special about this time, about the darkness, about the expectancy and the waiting. All too often, that is lost in the rush of holiday plans, of shopping and purchasing, of making a list and checking it twice. It is not part of our cultural consciousness to let ourselves be ‘in the dark,’ to meditate upon that darkness, to listen, to pray. Instead, we rush headlong into the light. We zoom past the winter solstice in a rush of last-minute to-do’s, and arrive exhausted on Christmas morning, glad to have survived the ordeal once again.

We live in a secular, commodified culture that has little use for parts of the traditional calendar such as Lent and Advent that were once so important. Lent is particularly useless to an economy based on sales: there’s no money to be made on people fasting and praying and exercising self-restraint. Better to skip to Easter, to the celebration that comes after, and try to generate some income from chocolate bunnies and an array of tchotchkes in pastel hues.
 

Preparation

But I must admit that my nature is better suited to the contemplative, expectant times. Advent is my favorite part of Christmas. Part of it is that I love the rituals involved in preparation that take place during this time: decorating the tree and hanging the stockings. A couple of years ago I began carrying on the tradition of the advent wreath, which was new to me. This year, I assembled a wreath of ornamental eucalyptus leaves around the four candles, and on the first Sunday in advent we lit the first candle and said a prayer before eating our evening soup. To me, all of these advent rituals are about creating a space for light to come into the darkness. Not about running away from the darkness, but about having faith that the light will come.

It is important to acknowledge that the holidays can be a difficult time. The five or six weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are a period of increased suffering and depression for many of us. It is the Moon of Long Nights, and depression is often likened to a long night, to a period of darkness. For me, this moon is about recognizing the night, the darkness, the sadness even, the hope for a miracle. Many of us are frustrated and disheartened by so much of what we see around us: the war, the political situation, the ecological degradation, the materialism of our culture. We feel squeezed by the pressures of life, the day-to-day scarcity of time or money or both. In the midst of so many gatherings and activities, we can still feel alienated and lonely.

Maybe instead of running away from this darkness, we can sit with it a little bit. We can let ourselves be in the moon of long nights, and let ourselves hope for a miracle. Maybe this is a time to have faith, and hope, and to let go of our need to control everything, our illusion that we are in charge. It is also a time to reach out, to ask for help, to be willing to be vulnerable.

For many of us, the holiday season begins with Thanksgiving. This is one of my favorite holidays. I know that to some people it is a negative symbol, a celebration of colonial theft and duplicity. While I recognize this perspective, to my mind the heart Thanksgiving is not at all a victory celebration. Rather, it is an acknowledgment of our vulnerability.

This is in itself a rarity in the trajectory of European-American culture. It is an opportunity to recognize our interdependence with all of life -- to know that we depend on God’s green earth for the food we eat, on soil and water. A chance to remember that we rely on the wisdom and experience of other people from other cultures, that we need help, that we don’t survive alone and isolated, but in and through relationship.
 

Independence and interdependence

And perhaps most important of all it is a chance, in the midst of the moon of long nights, on the cusp of advent, to pause and be full of gratitude for all we have been given. We can stop grabbing for the next thing, take a break from wanting and striving, and feel how really blessed we are, and in how many ways.

Here on the Left Coast, and maybe in other parts of the country as well, there has been an effort to recast the Fourth of July, Independence Day, as INTERdependence Day. But the Fourth of July, with its fireworks and flags, will always be about freedom and pride. And besides, we already have an Interdependence Day -- that is, Thanksgiving. A day when we get together with family and with strangers, when we feed the hungry, when we eat home-cooked food, when offices and stores are closed and we take a break from working and buying.

In remembering the “Pilgrims," the seekers, who came to this continent fleeing oppression, we have a chance to remember all who have been oppressed, have fled, and have found themselves vulnerable, in a strange and distant land. It is a chance to acknowledge that these pilgrims, these wanderers, made it through the winter through the generosity of human beings from an entirely different culture. The pilgrims gave thanks for the people who were indigenous to this continent, who had helped them. And they gave thanks for the foods that were indigenous to this continent: turkey, cranberries, potatoes, corn, pumpkins. They gave thanks for the Earth’s abundance.

So Thanksgiving is one day a year when we actually pay attention to the food on our table, how blessed we are to have it. We acknowledge the hands that grew it, harvested it, cooked it. We may also acknowledge the Earth, which supports all this life, all this abundance. It is, to my mind, a celebration of relationship.

Let us keep this spirit alive through advent as well. If there is one thing that will carry us through the Moon of Dark Nights, through the holiday season, it is relationship. It is gathering together, and lighting candles. It is acknowledging the darkness, but making space for the light. It is reaching out when we need help. It is extending a hand to others. We are all vulnerable, we are all needy; we all suffer in darkness, we all long for the light.

Many blessings to you all on the Moon of Long Nights.
 

Following is a simple recipe for cranberry sauce, the perfect accompaniment to turkey on Thanksgiving or Christmas. It is made with maple syrup rather than sugar. The people indigenous to the North and Northeast areas of this continent used maple syrup extensively. If cranberry sauce was eaten at that first Thanksgiving, it was probably made something like this:
 

Many Blessings Cranberry Sauce

12 oz fresh cranberries
1 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup water
pinch of cinnamon and cloves (optional)

Wash the cranberries and put in a pan. Pour the maple syrup and water over them, add the optional spices, and bring to a simmer. Cook until the cranberries pop open, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat and allow to cool to room temperature. Refrigerate until ready to eat.

Jessica Prentice is currently working as the Director of Education Programs at the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (www. cuesa.org). This article is adapted from one of the columns on her website, Stirring the Cauldron.

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Remarkably Like Us

by Robin Ressler

When I was a social work intern, several of us participated in collegial fantasizing about what the world would be like if it were free of what we considered to be the twin banes of American society: addiction and child abuse. In such a world social workers would likely be unnecessary, and we would be free to have fun jobs.

My ideal job was to be a hostess in a fancy restaurant. Imagine how much fun it would be to get dressed up, greet people who were anticipating a good meal in a pleasant environment, and then bid them good evening after they had refreshed themselves with good food and good company!

Unfortunately, years later child abuse and addiction to drugs and alcohol are still here. But one morning a week I do have the joy of getting up, putting on my Sunday best, and being hostess to as many as sixty hungry people -- at St. Francis’s weekly hospitality hour.

I remember brainstorming in the old office (in what is now St. Clare’s Room) at St. Francis several years ago with Pr. Phyllis Zillhart and other members of St. Francis’ St. Vincent de Paul group, about what we might do for the neighborhood. We had recently finished the building project that included the construction of the Memorial Terrace and improvements to the fellowship hall, and we were discussing how we might use our blessings to be a blessing to others.
 

Many greeters

Hospitality hour started out as donut hour, as we invited people in for coffee and donuts before worship. Since then, our project has undergone several changes. We now serve a full lunch, including a sandwich and coffee -- and hot soup on cold, wet days, when we can -- to as many as sixty people (reflecting the seating capacity of our room).

We have a small, dedicated band of volunteers who shop, cook, prepare, and serve food. Chuck Hancock (who is the volunteer overseer of this program, as well as one of the faithful laborers) and other volunteers prepare sixty lunches, make coffee, and prepare the room. At about 8:30, one of the volunteers (usually, but not always, Mike Callahan) goes out to distribute tickets to the folks who have assembled. A while back we discovered that distributing tickets allayed our guests’ anxiety about whether or not they would get in and be fed. Many, but not all, are homeless.

Aside from the ticket person, who is the first “official” greeter, other volunteers frequently go and hang out with the gathering group. By now we have long-time regulars, and volunteers and guests greet each other by name. A colorful character who goes by the name of “Spaceman” calls me “The Queen” or “Your majesty.”

Arriving shortly before the doors open, I get a cup of coffee and hugs from fellow volunteers, and we join together in prayer.

Occasionally one or more of our guests is not in fine fettle, and the outside crew has to soothe a wounded ego, calm a temper, or remind someone how to act. As a last resort, if someone cannot or will not improve their behavior, he is denied admission for that day. By now, however, most of our guests are regulars who appreciate our hospitality and respond with good manners and friendliness. They “police” their own, which is to say, they often nip problems in the bud before we even know about them.

The second official greeter is Chuck, often with Fr. George or Gabe, who opens the doors at 8:45 and admits a few folks at a time to the restrooms to wash their hands on the way in. The third official greeter is Max, who also has a great job. He greets the men and women with a “Good morning!” and a cup of excellent coffee. (We get many compliments on our coffee. We are told that most free meals in San Francisco come with coffee that is weak, decaffeinated, or in some other way less than what we would serve our guests at home.)
 

Attitudes change

Coffee in hand, each guest surrenders a ticket in return for a plate of food, stops to add sugar to the coffee, if necessary, and takes a seat.

I have the best job. I am the server of yogurt, or juice or soup, depending on the day. A helper follows me around with a tray of food or drink. I greet each person and offer whatever it is we are serving. The great joy in this process is planting the seeds of relationship and watching them grow. Many people who would not even meet my gaze in the beginning, and would answer with an inarticulate sound or a monosyllable, are people who now return my “good morning,” call me by name, and are ready to chat!

I have witnessed a remarkable change in attitudes since we began this program -- both in the St. Francis people serving and in the neighbors receiving. In the past, “they” would shuffle in, eyes downcast, and go quietly to their places. When we began, Max wondered what he would have to say to “them.” (He was pretty sure that “So, what’s it like to be homeless?” would not fly.) Back then, some of us wondered what kind of trouble would walk in with these strangers, and if we would be able to handle it. In the beginning, it wasn’t quite so much fun when I would serve up a greeting and some food to people who barely acknowledged that I was a human being. At first we wondered about these people and their lives, and wondered what on earth we were doing, and why.

All along, however, our guiding principle has been hospitality. We aimed to provide hospitality worthy of the children of God, the people who are our guests. On a pragmatic level, one of Chuck’s maxims serves us well: “If you treat people with dignity and respect, they will treat you the same way.” We have yet to encounter a problem we could not solve. I have discovered that it is in fact true that a “soft answer turneth away wrath.”

Now there is often the verbal hubbub of camaraderie as folks we know and new friends assemble, get their coffee and take their places. It’s not unusual for one of us to break into an animated conversation to offer a box of juice or to remind our guests that it is clean-up time.

Now we know lots of our guests by name, and they respond to our hospitality with hospitality of their own. One is a student nurse. We cheered him on when he was studying for his state exam, and he shared my joy when I learned I passed my big German exam. Another man -- always with a book -- has caught me up with sci-fi, mysteries and crime novels, as well as the movies based on them. Another regular is a woman who makes the trip down from Chinatown where she lives. She has taught Mike how to say a few words in Chinese, and after breakfast she goes over to Belcher Street, where she studies Japanese.

And then there’s Freddie, who always flirts with me, and when I am having a bad week, believe me, it makes me feel good. I was a bit put off when he started with this, and somewhere along the line I decided to tell him that I have a special man in my life -- which did not deter him a bit. Finally I had the chance to sit and chat with him for a while. I was touched when his tone changed, and with seriousness and real concern he asked me if my fella treats me well.
 

Praying together

Sometimes I get to hear people’s stories -- their struggles and their joys. We have prayed together. I have heard stories about death and illness, hopes and fears.

One person lost his job as a street sweeper when the business he worked for folded. Another was overjoyed at an ever-so-brief chance meeting on the street with his adult child whom he usually never sees. Someone else told me the story of arriving in America thirty years ago, working and bringing the whole family over. One person embarked upon a business venture with a friend and hopes to earn some money. Another told me he “hit the lottery” -- that is, he got his very own place to live. Several have talked about illnesses and injuries that would be difficult even for people with homes and private medical insurance.

Sometimes we talk about God. Some count their blessings. Others are honestly ambivalent. After one such conversation a young man told me, “You are the only person I can talk to about things like this.”

I pray for our guests, and I know that sometimes they pray for me.

We certainly are not solving everyone’s problems, but rather, as Christians, we are bearing one another’s burdens, at least a bit. Hopefully, we are providing hospitality, which has been our intent all along.

Last week I was talking with one of our regulars, a younger man who introduced himself as “Stigmata” (!). I was noting that our program was a pretty small operation. He responded by saying that he appreciated the fact that we were small and said we created a nice atmosphere. In contrast to “some places” where the volunteers appeared to act out of unsmiling duty, “looking like they’d rather be anywhere else,” our volunteers, he opined, are genuinely friendly.

At 9:15 it’s time to begin cleanup. After volunteers put out the trash; clean the kitchen; clean and disinfect the rest rooms, tables and chairs; and put extra chairs and tables away, we turn the premises back over to the care of our sexton, Clifton King (who is normally not around for hospitality hour -- it’s not his job!). Sometime between the end of hospitality hour and the beginning of coffee hour, Clifton washes the floor, something, I am told, he has always done after the Saturday night meetings, anyway.

A few weeks ago the St. Vincent de Paul/St. Francis group had a mini-retreat in which we contemplated being a stranger and the giving and receiving of hospitality. We had so much to share -- as well as business to conduct -- that we ran out of time. In closing, I asked everyone involved in hospitality hour to consider how they had been changed, if they had been, by their experience.

Just this morning, Max , who has long since found lots to discuss with our hospitality hour guests, summed it up for me like this, “If there is one thing we have all learned about the people who come to hospitality hour, it is that they are remarkably like us.”

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The Stranger in the Mirror

by The Rev. Susan L. Van Dreser

The function of the stranger in our lives is grounded in a simple fact: truth is a very large matter, and requires various angles of vision to be seen in the round. It is not that our view is always wrong and the stranger’s is always right, but simply that the stranger’s view is different, giving us an opportunity to look anew upon familiar things.

Parker Palmer, The Company of Strangers

 

This week I took part in a clandestine activity in the notorious North End: I feasted at an American Thanksgiving celebration. As most of you know, I’m not a great socializer, so I felt anxious about joining mostly strangers for dinner. My anxiety didn’t last long. The girls and I arrived to the scent of roasting turkey and the laughter of those already gathered. Our hosts quickly smoothed over the awkward moments of introduction and soon we immersed ourselves in conversation. One couple hailed from a town near one I once lived in. Another had a set of sixteen-year-old triplets. The ten teenagers entertained each other while a three year old dashed among us spreading his glee along with the checkers he flung with abandon. I soon felt at home.

This household has a special tradition of reflecting together in thankfulness before beginning to eat. On this night, our host began by acknowledging that more than 5000 Americans fewer than once planned were missing this holiday. He distributed photocopies of brief biographies from the New York Times of some of those who died in the September 11 attacks. We took turns reading them to one another. At first I felt a reprise of the awkwardness, wondering how we all fit together, these dead strangers and ourselves. Then as we read about the trader who made dinner each evening for his elderly neighbours, the model who incarnated grace on the runway and fell over coffee tables at home, the grandfather who has just finished building his dream retirement home on the New Jersey shore, the Sephardic immigrant who sang Turkish folksongs to the child yet in his young wife’s belly -- as we read about these we discovered the connections. We learned the heroism of the ordinary. We heard just how these ordinary people had changed the world in their ordinary ways.

We read on through a few bursts of the smoke detector overwhelmed by four turkeys baking and then sat a few moments in silence. I grieved these people, individuals, each one. I grieved their violent deaths. I grieved never having met them, not having known their ordinary grace, never having witnessed their sheer courage to live, not having laughed with them, shared dreams, paper clips or French fries.

It turned out that others shared my grief. We realized how thankful we were that the newspaper with its commitment to eulogizing these strangers helped us to see our own lives in a different way. We tend not to tell stories about the meaning of a person’s life until he or she is dead. We certainly do not tell our own. Somehow it feels immodest to do so -- or perhaps we are just too close to see the story while we live it. So we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to explore our life’s significance within the whole. Yet we all live stories, examples of fortitude, moral courage, persistence, gentleness, purpose, clarity, kindness, compassion, and generosity. Reading the stories of the September 11 dead, helped us to appreciate our own ordinariness, to reclaim its inherent worthiness and its place in the worthiness of our world.

Ours was an amazing discussion for a group of strangers and at the end, when we finally headed to the laden table, we felt strangers no longer. We filled our plates and the sat together in small groups all around the home, chatting with an intensity not often part of such gatherings. I left the evening immensely grateful for new connections and a new sense of self. Perhaps it is just my own stage in life, firmly in middle age and well connected with my own mortality in a vivid way, but I felt glad that I could acknowledge the ordinary me, disburdened of my self imposed expectations that I must be and do more to become fully who I am. All of us are wholly ourselves at every moment, I learned. We do not need to strive to be more. In a sense, then, not only did the strangers I met become less strangers to me, I became less a stranger to myself.

Who, then, are the strangers? We think of strangers as “other,” those not ourselves. The stranger is not of us. Strangers are “they,” not “we.” We tend to be suspicious of strangers, fearful, maybe anxious. Who knows what a stranger might be or do?

In one of those ironies so useful to perspective, the dictionary reminds us that the words stranger and extraneous share the same Latin root. The stranger is “extra,” that is, outside of us. I think that all of us at one time or another feel that the stranger is not only extra but extraneous, unnecessary. Sometimes life would be just fine, thank you, without strangers coming around to disrupt our routine ways of thinking, feeling, seeing.
 

The Role of Stranger

Yet, as the author of the Book of Hebrews admonishes, instead of pushing the stranger away as extraneous, we need to receive the stranger. “Do not neglect to show hospitality, for thereby some have entertained angels,” it says. This writer echoes a long tradition of showing hospitality to strangers. The codes of the ancient Hebrew people outline the priority of hospitality. A Hassidic proverb reminds people to treat every stranger as if he or she is the Messiah. Hospitality to strangers remains embedded in the culture and traditions of the Berber tribes of the desert, the Kung! of the Kalahari, the Haida of the Pacific Northwest. The Hindu people greet everyone with the word “Namaste,” “I salute the God in you.” While hosting families from Kosovo several years ago, we learned of the code of hospitality of that people. Once you have eaten and drunk together, you are forever sworn to a relation of mutual protection.

These rituals and traditions acknowledge the danger presented by strangers by quickly converting the stranger from “other” to “we.” They function to contain the threat the stranger may present. In some cases the danger may be very real. In the tribal system of Northern Africa, for example, the system of hospitality does help to contain the threat of territorial rivalry. In other cases, hospitality serves to seal relationships against future hardship, as among the Kung! who have a system of sharing almost everything.

But sometimes the threat lies more in the perception than in reality. The angels of the Hebrews don’t flutter on golden wings and sing carols, they bring revelation. They open doors of perception. They help face possibilities we would rather not face, to find our feet on the path, to wrestle with which path we ought to take. The angel stranger does not threaten with blades of steel, but with possibility, promise, change and opportunity. Refusing to entertain the angel may not mean physical death, but may mean emotional, psychological or spiritual stagnation and a dead end life. Receiving the stranger means receiving yourself, opening to opportunity and transformation.

Parker Palmer says that the stranger is a person of promise. The stranger lives on the margin: the margin of acceptability, the margin of the known, the margin of understanding. The promise is the promise of truth. Not, he says, that the stranger is always right and we are always wrong, but that the truth always needs many perspectives to see it completely. The stranger offers the possibility of new perspective. “Neither truth nor love tends to flow freely when we are comfortably in the middle of society, successful in society’s terms, profiting from the way things are arranged,” he writes. “Certain crucial truths about our lives are more easily seen when we are on the edge, at the margins, when we are poor or sick or hungry or in prison -- and these truths can break open the heart to compassion.”

Compassion for whom? I suppose the hardest thing to realize is that each of us is a stranger. As often as others are strange to us, we are strange to them.

The question is, do we want to remain strange? Remember the Dr. Seuss story of the pale green pants with no one inside? The fuzzy bear-like narrator is nearly knocked down one night by a bicycle ridden by the pale green pants with no one inside. His shock at this sight turns into fear and then terror. Then one dark night in the snipe field where he had to go to pick snipes, he hears under the chatter of his own teeth, weeping. Curiosity overcomes him and as he explores he discovers the pale green pants with no one inside cowering in fear. The pants were as afraid of him as he was of the pants!

An old Rabbi once asked his pupils how they could tell when the night had ended and the day begun.

“Could it be,” asked one of the students, “when you can see an animal in the distance and tell whether it is a sheep or a dog?”

“No,” answered the Rabbi.

Another asked, “Is it when you can look at a tree in the distance and tell whether it is a fig tree or a peach tree?”

“No,” answered the Rabbi.

“Then what is it?” asked the students.

“It is when you can look in the face of any man or woman and see that it is you brother or sister. Because if you cannot see this, it is still night.”
 

Faces in the Mirror

We are all of us strangers. The face in the mirror is ours. Or maybe the mirror is a stranger we think is ourselves. We are strangers here in this church today. Some of you are here for the first time today, as all of us have been at one time or another. Some of you have been here only a short while. Others may have returned after a time away only to feel a strangeness in all that has changed: new faces, new ways, new space. Even those who have seen this congregation through its great changes of the last five years feel strangers in this church. It is not the same. We are not the same. Not only are the newer people strangers to the older, the older are also strangers to the newer people.

We welcome strangers for their gifts as stranger. Strangers see in a way that comfortable intimates cannot. Strangers can detect unwritten rules. Strangers can ask questions that comfortable intimates cannot. We need strangers. But strangers don’t want to always be strange.

That is the reason we, strangers in the world, come together, I think. To shed our strangeness. By this I mean more than becoming friendly, belonging. We come to shed the strangeness of our isolation from one another, to shed the strangeness of a confined life without challenge, to exchange homogeneity for heterogeneity, to open ourselves to the grand, complex and mysterious universe that calls us to expand with it beyond known boundaries into the unknown. And as we are expanding, to grow closer also, to find the daylight in which we can see that any man or woman is our brother or sister, to shed the darkness of isolation for the light of compassion.

But we do not, indeed we cannot, shed all strangeness. For as growing human beings, we will always be coming into that which is different, that which is marginal, that which challenges. Youth become adults who become middle aged and then old, but never cease growing. Relationships begin with fervour and passion and grow wise and comfortable, but, we hope, never stagnant. Friendship begins tentative and grow firm, but not brittle. Intimacy begins softly and grows round and mature. We are always leaving our old selves and becoming new and if we are lucky the community we choose renews itself, too.

So we must make room for the stranger, avoiding easy intimacy. An African proverb says that joy is a fruit that Americans eat green. I think we could easily say North Americans or Canadian and we could also say that we too often eat intimacy green, too. Green intimacy doesn’t allow human differences their full maturity, doesn’t foster the exploration that leads to a wise depth of relationship. Green intimacy, in fact, threatens compassion, threatens dawning daylight by painting a false homogeneity on the surface of relationship.

Strangers live in the daylight and so do we. This is a dance we do, complex patterns of stability and transformation, of knowing and not-knowing, of promise and compassion, of vision and rest, of closeness and not closeness weave among one another to create our community. This is our humanity, to live and move together in the spirit of love, trust and compassion, strangers and intimates leading and following always in the daylight, always in hope.

The Rev. Susan L. Van Dreser is pastor of the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This sermon was delivered on Nov. 25, 2001, and is reprinted with permission.

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The Lord of Time

by Michael Hiller

During a visit to the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, we chanced upon an exhibit called “Painted Prayers -- The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art.” The beauty of the books on exhibit was twofold. Physically beautiful, they were filled with either woodcuts, or hand painted miniatures depicting scenes from the life of Christ, the lives of the saints, the seasons of the church year, the seasons of the year, or the zodiac. And, since they spanned a period of time lasting several centuries, they exhibited in miniature all the movements in art that led up to and included the Renaissance.

It is the second beauty, however, that moves me to recall the exhibition here. These “Books of Hours” were compilations of liturgy and prayers, meant to be used by the faithful to pray the Liturgy of the Hours -- morning and evening prayer, Compline, and so on. What I realized, however, is that they acted as calendars that allowed lay Christians to celebrate the flow and rhythm of their own lives and their lives in faith.

Time has always been at the core of religion. The mere concept of an “after-life” in Egyptian theology is an acknowledgement of time. The fertility rituals of Sumerian and other Mesopotamian religions was deeply set in time, moving from planting to harvest and seeing in those cycles the very salvation of their world.

Judaism has its own sense of time as well. In the first Creation account (Genesis 1:1-2:3) we get a sense of the importance of time: “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years…” (Genesis 1:14). Along with Judaism, Christianity developed a series of prayers and observances that relied on the calendar. In his book Mapping Time -- The Calendar and Its History, E.G. Richards traces the history of the calendar and time-keeping, and notes that it was the Christian urge to determine the correct date for the celebration of Easter that drove a great deal of the science that gave us today’s ordinary calendar. I once commented in a sermon at a service of Evening Prayer that “time itself becomes an icon of Christ.”

In many respects, the Christian sacramental system, at least as it has been practiced in the last few centuries, serves as a mirror of a person’s journey through life. Baptism (birth), Confirmation (entry into adult life), Marriage and/or Ordination for some (maturity), Anointing of the Sick (older age), and the “Last Rites” (death), mark a path through life sustained in an every day manner through the Eucharist and Penance. Often the Book of Hours was given to a believer at one of these singular life moments, with the notion that the book would serve as a sort of map or guide. It was the fashion in some medieval cathedrals to place somewhere in the building a totentanz -- a dance of death. It depicted the whole spectrum of society being led in an inexorable “dance” to death. Pope, emperor, king, cardinal, priest, professor, housewife, stable hand, shepherd, farmer -- all being led by a skeleton. This depiction of death personified, guiding people to the afterlife, is a recognition that at the most important moments in our existence, we need a guide.
 

The Cycle of the Year

There are two determines of year that are observed in the Christian Calendar. The first type is the old lunar year that sets the dates associated with Easter. The date of Easter (determined by a calculation involving the phases of the moon) then governs the celebration of several other Christian feasts: Ash Wednesday, Passion (Palm) Sunday, the Triduum, Ascension, and Pentecost. The other calendar is the solar calendar, which governs the celebration of Christmas, a fixed date on the calendar.

These are the two nodes (or cycles) of the “festival half” of the church’s year. The first is the Christmas Cycle, which begins with the First Sunday in Advent (the closest Sunday to St. Andrew’s Day, 30 November) and extends through the Christmas celebration (24 December -- 6 January) and on to 2 February, The Presentation of our Lord, also known as Candlemass. The date for Christmas, close as it is to the Winter solstice, 21 December, was a replacement for the Roman celebration of Saturnalia. As such it acknowledges the sense of time and season that older civilizations used and honored. Eastern Christians honor another day for Christmas, 6 January, which we in the western church celebrate as The Epiphany (the manifestation) of our Lord.

The other cycle, the Easter Cycle, begins with Ash Wednesday -- the date of which is determined by counting backward from Easter -- followed by the five Sundays in Lent (forty days), Easter Day and the following seven Sundays of Easter, culminating with Pentecost (fifty days after Easter). These two cycles are the core of a celebration of the life of Christ.

But what about all of that other time -- the time after Groundhog Day (2 February) and before Ash Wednesday, and all those “Sundays after Pentecost?” This is called “ordinary time.” Not that it is plain or undistinguished, but rather that it is marked by the ordinal numbers (for example, the Second Sunday after the Epiphany, or the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost). It’s during this “ordinary” time, indeed throughout the entire calendar, that the saints are celebrated. Their days are usually celebrated on the date of their death. Other days, such as Holy Cross Day, are celebrated on the date of a significant event, here the finding of the true cross by St. Helen, the mother of the Emperor Constantine. Also peppered throughout these cycles are parish anniversaries, and other events the community wants to remember. At St. Francis, for example, we celebrate the last Sunday of December as the “Feast of the Expulsion” to remember Dec. 31, 1995, when our congregation was expelled from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America for our role in ordaining lesbian and gay clergy.
 

The Cycle of the Day

Even in the course of a single day, the faithful have marked liturgical time. Following the Jewish custom of praying at given times during the day, both Christians and Muslims adopted this practice. We get a feel for this in Daniel 6:10: “(Daniel) went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem; and he got down upon his knees three times a day and prayed…”

There is a Christian cycle of prayer during the day. Lutherans know this in three offices (or services): Morning Prayer (or Matins), Evensong (or Vespers), and Compline. This is a simplified arrangement of the prayer offices of the monastic communities that developed and grew in the medieval period. There were seven such offices: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, and Vespers, as well as Compline. These offices were not totally devoted to the convent or abbey, however; they are reflected in the Books of Hours used by laypeople as well. All Christians, whether in cathedral church, abbey, or at home, were encouraged to pray at these moments during the day. The services themselves revolve around the psalms, but have their own themes and emphases. The texts for Compline, for example, revolve around the parallel themes of going-to-bed and death, and provide assurances for the end of the day, and the eventual end of earthly life, as well.
 

Smaller cycles

There are smaller cycles of time that Christians use to pray and to remember the events of their salvation. Some of these are new to Lutherans of this century. One example would be the Stations of the Cross -- which is all about the passage of events (time) and about movement. In this service, we walk with Jesus along the via dolorosa, the way of sorrows, moving from Pilate’s place of judgment, to Calvary, to the tomb.

Such devotions allowed individual Christians, in their own time, to be reminded of the Passion or other events and to pray for themselves and for others. By providing times and places for these devotions, churches provided an opportunity not only for corporate worship (the Mass) but for private worship as well (the Stations of the Cross, the lighting of votive lights, the Rosary, etc.).

Which brings us to the Rosary. On the ELCA website the other day, I was surprised to notice a link to a “Lutheran Rosary for Lent.” The saying of the rosary was rejected early on in Lutheran circles for a variety of reasons. The Marian focus of the prayers, although comfortable for Luther, was a problem for many of his followers. The repetitive nature of the rosary may also have smacked of “works” (doing something for salvation). Finally, it’s probable that the use of the rosary in church as an alternative to active participation in the Mass dealt the final blow.

So this appearance of a “Lutheran Rosary” intrigued me -- and we’ll deal with that in Lent some time. The aspect that interests me here is the notion of repetition. In the rosary, the passage of events (the seven sorrowful mysteries, etc.) is coupled with the repetition of prayers; this allows the Christian a small cycle of time in which to think about the totality of his or her salvation. The striking use of repetition in saying the rosary -- the prayer “Hail Mary, full of grace” is said dozens of times, for example -- may be about learning through repetition as much as anything else. Other prayers, such as “The Jesus Prayer” (Lord, Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me), are meant to be repeated over and over again, not so much as work, but rather in a mantra life fashion. The hymns of Taizé are similarly constructed.

I have a lot more I could say about how we use and commemorate time in our worship. In this article I wanted to make clear, as we enter this new liturgical year with the First Sunday in Advent, how our awareness of time can inform our personal and our corporate worship. Bedtime and mealtime prayers are rooted in this understanding of time. I hope that you will develop your own practice of “the hours” to enable you to pray and to ponder the mystery of Christ’s incarnation.

Michael Hiller is Associate Pastor for Liturgical and Community Life at St. Francis.

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Toward a St. Francis Charism

by Mark Pritchard

The “cottage meetings” conducted in October by our congregation’s Visioning Team got us thinking about our identity. Called for the purpose of forming a future vision, the meetings were an opportunity for members of St. Francis to talk about the things we do well -- our worship, the Senior Center, and our speaking up for sexual minorities were named in my group -- and things we wanted the congregation to do in the years ahead. In answer to the second question, my group seemed to think we should mostly keep doing what we’re doing.

Perhaps it’s a sign of our success as a small, tightly knit congregation that members of my group couldn’t name anything we did badly and needed improvement on; perhaps it’s also a sign of our insularity. We have things the way we like them -- the worship, the building and grounds, the programs for families and seniors, the contributions made by a variety of clergy (only some of them on staff). We have even grown comfortable with our status vis-à-vis the national church. We look in the mirror, like what we see, and the only way we can think to improve things is to become ever so much more so.

This focus on our deeds makes me a little uneasy because it shows only the surface of who we are: our programs and accomplishments. It reduces our identity to a series of events and projects. What it doesn’t show are the values and spiritual gifts which form the foundation of our character as a congregation -- without which we would never be able to identify, plan and accomplish these deeds.
 

Basic values

I would like to suggest we take a look at these basic values. I think that figuring out why we do things is as important as figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

For example, take our worship services, something I’m proud of. Our worship is recognizably Lutheran, following the same order of service as the hundreds of other churches belonging to our erstwhile denomination. But within this similarity, we make subtle changes in emphasis and tone, and these small shifts make for a worship service which is warm and alive. Many innovations, which are also among the most meaningful elements in our service, are actions which encourage a large number of the people present to take part in the service. Whether they are acting in the altar party, or speaking out during the Prayers of the People or the prayers of thanksgiving, or joining in the strong congregational singing, or physically gathering around the Book when the Gospel is read -- the people of St. Francis participate vigorously every Sunday.

We didn’t achieve this because we started with some abstract idea of having strong worship; every congregation wants to have good worship services. I think we achieved it, by God’s grace, because of a shared vision of inclusivity. In other words, rather than working toward a goal of “good worship,” we work with a common value that informs our worship planning: the value of inclusivity. We want everyone to take part, to be included, and this desire infuses the worship service. It’s not the elements of the worship services themselves -- we could have gender-inclusive language up the yinyang and it would be only an outer manifestation. What makes it work -- what makes it alive -- is our inner ethos of inclusivity.

I believe we have another shared value at St. Francis: that of honoring those who have gone before us. This value is reflected in our constant support of the Senior Center, which has been a neighborhood resource now for more than ten years; in our construction of the Memorial Terrace, which took a tremendous amount of time and money but which now serves as a resting place for our forebears (as well as a gathering place for us today); and even in the portraits of the Danish King and Queen who supported the founding of our church a hundred years ago, portraits now hanging in the Parish Hall.
 

Moving in unaccustomed ways

We do these things not because some consultant said, “Look, you need to present some sense of history -- it gives the place a little dignity.” We do them because this honoring draws us together and unifies us. It works -- that is, it makes us a stronger church -- because it turns out to be a common value, something we teach and share with each other, and reinforce every Wednesday with seniors, no less than on All Saints Day.

What are some of the other basic values we share? Could one of them be hospitality? We’re certainly good at throwing parties. And in recent years we’ve gone beyond inward-focused hospitality and started to include our neighbors, so that we have a growing Community Night and a Sunday morning breakfast program and a nascent food pantry. The name for this impulse -- to welcome the stranger, offering food and drink with no strings attached -- is hospitality. And it’s a very powerful ethos, one that can move us in unaccustomed and even uncomfortable directions if we let it. That’s a possibility I find very exciting.

There’s an old word, still used by religious orders, to describe basic values such as these. That word is “charism,” and it literally means gift, as in the gifts of the Spirit. If you asked a Benedictine what makes a Benedictine, she or he would instantly answer: hospitality, and a balance of work and prayer. If you asked a Franciscan, he or she would say their charism was concern and care for creation and for the lowest in society. A Jesuit would say intellectual work -- teaching, writing, research. And if you study what each of those orders do, those characteristics are obvious.

I wonder what our congregation would discover if, rather than just looking at what we do, we also look at who we are. That before we start looking at people, programs and property, we set about uncovering the charism -- still developing in our young, hundred-year-old congregation -- of St. Francis Lutheran Church. Would we reveal spiritual gifts that help point the way toward our future?

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Upcoming events

Dec. 24, 10:30 a.m. -- Christmas Eve service of lessons and carols.

Dec. 25, 11:00 a.m. -- Christmas Day Eucharist.

Dec. 28, 11:00 a.m. -- Our annual “Feast of the Expulsion” service to commemorate our expulsion from the ELCA (the national Lutheran body). Preaching today: Bishop David Mullen of the Sierra Pacific Synod.

Jan. 18 -- Pieter Oberholtzer, our missionary to the LGBT community of Cape Town, So. Africa, will preach.

Feb. 1 -- Annual Meeting of the congregation.

Feb. 21 -- Jesus in a New Light: Discussions in Queer Theology. Aday of theological reflection.

Feb. 22 -- The Rt. Rev. Barry Hollowell, bishop of the Anglican diocese of Calgary, will preach.