The place we call home

• Isaiah 43:16-21
• Philippians 3:4b-14
• John 12:1-8
• Psalm 126

On Thursday I went to the home of a neighbor here in Petaluma, where I’d been invited for lunch.  A smiling woman met me at the door and showed me into her beautiful home which was painted in warm primary colors and decorated with Mexican folk art.  There were two other people already there, and two soon more soon arrived.  They were a couple of young community organizers from Santa Rosa, and a fellow I’d met before from the Unitarian Universalists, a folks from St. Vincent’s Catholic parish, and me, and we ate squash soup and bread and salad, and talked about the critical shortage of affordable housing in Petaluma, and what our faith communities might come together to do. 

You don’t have to look outside of this room to find persons of low- or moderate-income who are at the mercy of rising rents and vacancy rates that are vanishingly low.  Several of our members have already had to move, some of them out of Petaluma, because a home was sold out from under them and the new owner jacked up the rent, or because they wanted to buy a house and found that they could not afford to do so in their home town.  And I get regular calls in the parish office from people asking for help, who’d been just scraping by until a lay-off, or an illness, or a car crash, brought them to the brink of homelessness. 

So this is a problem that concerns me professionally and pastorally, but also personally.  It wounds my conscience.  So much insecurity about something as basic as having a home can’t be what God intends for her people, and something needs to be done.  And yet I didn’t go to that meeting on Thursday feeling certain that I know what that “something” is.   Which I found to be a great relief.  So often in my daily work I feel like I’m the one who’s expected to know what we’re all supposed to do.  But at this meeting I could sit back and listen to the conversation and learn about who these people were, and what they’re passionate about, and what they see happening in Petaluma, and what they’d like to see.

Which was kind of the same thing we were talking about doing in the meeting, only on a wider scale.  As I understand it, what was being proposed was to select a couple of precincts in town where there are a high density of renters, and voter turnout is low.  And the participating churches would divide up those neighborhoods and send out volunteers in pairs, each with at least one Spanish and English bilingual member, to go door to door.  And affordable housing might be a good place to start a conversation, one that might come around in time to the upcoming election and whether folks were eligible and planning to vote.  But the focus wouldn’t be to convince them to adopt an opinion, or to promote a candidate or political party.  It would be to ask questions and to listen, to what is on the minds of our neighbors.  It would be to build relationships of common interest and concern.

But when we got to the end of our meeting on Thursday, and it came time to plan the next one, I had to say that I couldn’t commit to being there.  With everything else I’m already engaged, the Russian River Deanery, and the College for Congregational Development, the Living Legacy Storytelling Events, the Interfaith Sustainable Food Collaborative and the Interfaith Springtime Fellowship gathering that’s coming up on Trinity Sunday, I just don’t have the “bandwidth”, as they say, to be out in front of an effort like this, so if St. John’s is going to get involved it will depend on other folks in the congregation.  If you’re interested, speak to me later.

Of course it’s likely you don’t have the extra time and energy either.  We still have our hands full developing our capacities in basic areas of congregational life, like liturgy and music, and inviting and welcoming newcomers, and stewardship of our buildings and grounds, and teaching our tradition to the children.  But I like the idea of doing this voter engagement.  I’m intrigued by the possibility of receiving training from experienced community organizers, and joining in the effort with other congregations in a discrete project with a set timeline and a modest goal.  I like to think that within with this supportive context some of us could take a step toward acquiring new skills and confidence in the art of engaging strangers in conversation, and listening for common ground, of building relationships across the barriers of culture and language, and religion and class. 

And it’s fun to imagine that one day I’ll the time for this kind of thing.  It’s not that what we’re already doing isn’t worthwhile.  As I left that meeting on Thursday, our host told me that she’d attended labyrinth walks at our church and said how much she loves what we’re doing at St. John’s.  But as I drove away I reflected on how good it had been to have a brief break from doing the work of the church, to be able to break out briefly of my ceaseless thinking and working and praying only about what I can do to strengthen this congregation, and care for its members, to spend an hour as one citizen among other citizens talking about the welfare of the place where we all live—it was refreshing, and it made me wish for more.

Because even as we are making a mighty effort to rebuild the internal fabric of this church community, powerful economic, technological, and ideological forces are tearing the wider community around us apart.  Our national politics display, to a frightening degree, the breakdown of civility and mutual respect, or any pretense of concern for the common good; but the same thing is happening on the local scale as well.  The eviction of elderly renters is a symptom of the same progressive, potentially terminal disease.  And it is not only the poor and marginal who are suffering.  As Mother Teresa of Kolkata said, forty years ago, in a famous interview:

“You, in the West, have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness. They feel unloved and unwanted. These people are not hungry in the physical sense, but they are in another way. They know they need something more than money, yet they don't know what it is.  What they are missing, really, is a living relationship with God.”

And I think we all know that when we are estranged from each other, when we are trapped in structures of social interaction that pit us against each other and make us vie competitively for our own narrow self-interest or that of our group, we aren’t really free in relation to God.  When Mary of Bethany takes a pound of perfume worth a working man’s pay for a year and anoints Jesus with it, she is acknowledging the supreme value of that living relationship.  Judas complains about the waste and indulgence, but Jesus affirms the gesture that Mary has made.  When he says, “you always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me,” he is not saying to be indifferent to the plight of the less fortunate, or fatalistic about their prospects for relief.  He is pointing to the essential work that he has come to do, of breaking down the barriers we put between ourselves and each other, which are really barriers to God.  He is saying that without this work, we are all in poverty, a poverty that is absolute.

The energy of Jesus’ work is reconciling love.  Without it, we are like Judas, whose appeal on behalf of the poor is just another self-serving scheme.   With it, we dare hope that God can open every prison of separation that keeps us bound, even the prison of death.  Mary of Bethany has seen Jesus free her brother Lazarus from that prison, for love of her family, and she repays him her own extravagant gesture of love.  The fragrance of her outpouring fills whole house.

But she is, as Jesus says, anointing him for his burial.  She pours her perfume on his feet, the feet that will carry him away from her and the intimate circle of her family home, away to complete the work he came to do.  They will carry him into the city, to the temple in the midst of the Passover crowds.  They will carry him to the place of public execution, and there the soldiers will drive a spike through the feet that Mary caressed with her hair.  Because the reconciling love of God isn’t for Jesus’ particular friends.  It isn’t for the rich, and it isn’t for the poor, for sinners or for the righteous.  It’s for us all.  

Are you envious because I am generous?

Exodus 16:2-15

Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45

Philippians 1:21-30

Matthew 20:1-16

When we read something, it makes a big difference what we are reading it for.  Take, for instance, a historical novel.  One might read it for entertainment, and focus on the characterizations and the plot.  Another might read it for information about the historical period in which it is set.  A third person might be interested in both.  And something similar goes for the parables of Jesus.  Most often we read them for an encoded moral and spiritual lesson.  We take them as metaphors for principles about God and faith, salvation and forgiveness.  What we are less likely to do is read these stories for a message about the daily realities of the world we live in.

But Jesus made his parables out of the stuff of daily experience because he wanted his audience to do more than open them, like fortune cookies, for message inside.  He wanted people to see themselves in the real-world situations that the parables describe, so that his teaching would alter, not just the way they felt and thought about God, but also the way they saw the world.  So he used such homely examples as a farmer sowing seeds and a woman kneading bread and fishermen casting a net, things that everyone would have done, or at least seen, countless times. 

Jesus also made parables out of social situations that would have been familiar.   And it is interesting how many of them deal with painful situations, touching the raw nerves of social experience, oppression and injustice and powerlessness in the face of them.  We might be forgiven for not noticing this about the parables, because the church’s tradition of interpreting them has essentially overlooked it until very recently.  But in the last fifty years or so, two things have happened to change this.  The first is that poor and oppressed people in African-American and Latin-American and African and Asian communities, and communities of women throughout the world, have found it necessary to put aside the Bible as it has been read and interpreted for them by elites.  They have gone back and read it again with fresh eyes, for wisdom that speaks to them about life as they live it.

The second thing that has happened is that a wave of scholars, in universities and seminaries around the world, have also been rereading the Bible, in the light of social science, of cultural anthropology and archeology and political science, to better understand the social forces that were at work in the time of Jesus, and how his teaching and his movement addressed them.   And what has emerged from both of these developments is a new reading of the social context of Jesus’ ministry.  We understand better now that it was a time of great economic and cultural upheaval, of rising inequality and social and cultural dislocation.  Along with this upheaval came increasing, and increasingly violent, social and political conflict.

Fishing on the Sea of Galilee was becoming an industrial operation, mass-producing a salty fish-sauce for an export market.  The grandiose building projects of Herod and his sons, especially the massive expansion of the Jerusalem temple, were taxing the traditional village landowners deeper and deeper into debt, while local markets for their produce were being flooded with cheap imported grain.  Forced to sell out, the proud, independent farmers of Galilee were reduced to sharecropping, or hiring themselves out as day laborers on sprawling estates made up of land that used to be theirs, or, in the worst case, selling themselves and their children into slavery.  Landless men, turned bandit revolutionaries, lurked in the hills, levying their own taxes and carrying out terrorist attacks on government officials and collaborators.  This, in turn, provoked ruthless retaliation from the Roman Army that did not discriminate between combatants and civilians.

So when Jesus talks about robbers waylaying a traveler on the Jericho road, or a corrupt estate manager fudging the record of the sharecroppers’ debts, or a rich man who tears down his barns to build bigger ones for hoarding his wealth, he isn’t just coming up with colorful illustrations of religious principles.  He’s showing his audience their own lives.  And he’s asking them to imagine how God might act in such times.  Jesus says, "The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard,” and his audience pictures a scene they know well, one that, depending on their social class, might make them feel a twinge of guilt or a swell of shame and anger. 

But as the story unfolds they hear that this landowner is like none they’ve ever heard of.  What he cares about is that every idle laborer should find work, and that all of them get paid enough to keep going for another day.   Maybe it would have reminded them of other stories, like the one about their ancestors’ journey through the desert to freedom and how God fed them on bread from heaven, just enough for everyone, just enough for one day.  Maybe they would have noted the contrast with their own experience of landlords, and no doubt there would have been some people who heard a concealed  revolutionary critique.  But what Jesus is really asking them to do is to examine themselves.  

“Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?” says the owner of the vineyard, “Or are you envious because I am generous?”  It’s a reminder of who the real owner of the land is, that everything that comes from it is God’s gift, and that it is God’s will that all should have work, and all should be fed.  But it’s also a reminder of how social upheaval and economic insecurity pit people against each other, and turn everyone against the least fortunate and most vulnerable, begrudging them even the barest minimum needed to survive.  When Jesus closes the parable with one of his favorite aphorisms, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last" he is not so much threatening the rich, or calling for revolution—he is warning us that the kingdom of Heaven is built on the generosity and forgiveness of God, whose sense of justice is not the same as our self-righteous work ethic, and doesn’t take its cues from our cut-throat social pecking-order.

Last night there was a fundraising event over at the Petaluma Sheraton Hotel to kick off a campaign to create a Day Labor Center.  Because you don’t have to build a time machine and travel to ancient Palestine to find landless men standing around, waiting for someone to hire them for the day.  You can just walk about three blocks northwest of here to the corner of Washington and Howard.  So when we read Jesus’ parable of the laborers in the vineyard we don’t have to treat it as only a literary metaphor for some theological principles.  It shines a light on our own real-world experience and some real people in our town. 

Some say it would be wrong to do anything for those men because it wouldn’t be fair to other workers.  But immigrant day laborers don’t cost other workers jobs, they create them.  They support all kinds of enterprises at the base of the economic pyramid, independent tradespeople like painters, carpenters, and landscapers, and small farmers, manufacturers, and food-processors, that depend on irregular extra labor.  I was one of those, when I had my little one-man gardening business in San Francisco from 1997 to 2003.  I usually worked on my own, but once in a while I needed another hand to do the bigger jobs where I made the better money.  Until the San Francisco Day Labor Center opened, at the north end of the Mission District, this was a matter of pulling over next to six lanes of fast moving traffic on Cesar Chavez Street and hiring whomever jumped into the truck first.

I could go on for a while about the net benefits to the economy of immigrant workers, but if we’re followers of Jesus, the economic questions aren’t the ones that really matter.  The important questions for us today are the ones the Bible asks, questions like, “who really owns the land, anyway?” and “Whom did our ancestors depend on when they were migrants?” and “When times get hard, what will save us—beating out our neighbor for a bigger slice of the shrinking pie?  Or taking a stand together, on the generosity and the justice of God?”       

   

Building a Legacy, Part II

This is part two of an article that appeared in the newsletter of St. John's, Petaluma in August and September of 2013.

 

In 2007 the continuing St. John’s Episcopal congregation made the fateful decision to pursue the recovery of the historic parish property.  This decision was more than a claim to the right of inheritance of a legacy from the past.  It was also a claim on the future.  It was a declaration that this group of people aspired to a prominent and lasting presence in the social landscape of Petaluma, a presence symbolized by these buildings at the corner of Fifth and C. 

Ernest Coxhead, Architect (1863-1933).

In the years since retaking possession of this property, we have been learning anew what that prominent and lasting presence implies.    Even when we are embroiled in the immediate challenges of meeting our present needs, the intention to be here for a long time shapes the way we go about doing what we do.  When the vestry approves an enabling resolution, an investment policy, and other policies for a parish endowment, as it did in July, it says that we have a long-term investment in this place, and we encourage our members to see St. John’s as part of the legacy of their lives to the generations to come.  When we put resources into redecorating our nursery, or developing our Godly Play Sunday school, or sponsoring the Petaluma Children’s Chorus, we are saying that St. John’s is a place not just for today, but for tomorrow.

But this commitment to the future is not just a matter of how we attend to our own affairs.  If our mission were simply to win as many individual souls for Christ as possible before God’s imminent destruction of the world, we wouldn’t care much what our neighbors were up to.  But I believe that Christian eschatology (a fancy academic word that means “words about the last things”)  is better understood as radical hope for what Christ’s love can do in and with this good old world.   And this kind of hope requires us to act as thoughtful citizens of a larger community.  If we really intend to be here for a long time, we are going to need an economically vibrant, socially-just, and ecologically sustainable town to sustain us, and that is not something we can achieve by ourselves.

But neither can we be assured that it will happen without us.  And God has given us a particular gift, a charism, to give to the shared enterprise of making a durable future for Petaluma.  Coming to understand what that gift is, valuing it, claiming it, and learning to give it, is the real work of our process of congregational renewal.  Our beautiful Episcopal tradition gives us deep springs to drink from, and the rootedness of timeless forms.  This gives us a firm place to stand when engaging in conversation about what values, practices, images, and stories ought to shape the future of our town.  At the same time, our stable forms are the vessel for a dynamic, fearless, boundary-crossing Spirit that urges us into these conversations, not just as people with testimony to give, but as those who seek to be converted.  Against every urge to grasp onto the past, or retreat from the unknown and unfamiliar, the irresistible imperative of the Gospel keeps sending us forward to meet the future.  The mission of Jesus keeps impelling us outward to seek and find and know all the places where God’s dream is coming true.

Our unique and beautiful church building is a symbol, in wood and glass and stone, of aspiring to be grounded in tradition, and at the same time creatively attuned to the emerging possibility.  Ernest Coxhead, the architect of St. John’s, received the finest schooling, in France and England, in the classical disciplines of his trade.  But a restless search for something new sent him to America.  He spent a few years on the East Coast, where the Gothic revival in church architecture was in full swing, but finally found his way to California, where Bishop Kip put him to work designing Episcopal Churches.  What Coxhead gradually developed was a style that suited this strange new land on the far edge of the world.  In buildings like St. John’s he playfully combined elements of Gothic, Romanesque, Classical, and Queen Anne styles in a way that evoked the past but did not attempt to imitate it.  He put in a curved apse wall like in a Roman basilica, but he put it at the wrong end of the church. 

It’s weird, but somehow it works.  It feels timeless, but it’s actually daringly new.  When we reclaimed this property in 2009 we didn’t just get an old building.  We inherited the spirit that inhabits it, a spirit of appreciation for the past and enthusiasm for the future, of commitment to the whole and inventiveness with respect to the parts, of determination to make something beautiful, and the willingness to risk being absurd.  This spirit, not always an easy one to discern or to follow, has from time to time led this congregation down some strange paths, and into blind alleys.  But the lessons of those mistakes are part of our inheritance.  In any case, it is our gift, and it is a legacy we can build on.