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.    

A dream partly come true

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

The first time I ever set eyes on Petaluma I was farming down in Marin County.  Part of my work was to make a trip every month or two up to Harmony Farm Supply, outside Sebastopol, where I’d buy fertilizers and irrigation parts and tools.  And on one of these trips I was nearing Novato when the traffic report on the radio said that a tanker truck had tipped over on 101 just south of Petaluma, and the freeway was closed in both directions.  Any sensible person would have turned around and gone home, but instead, I headed west, out into the country, to try my luck on the back roads.  I didn’t have a map, just a good sense of direction, and somehow, by a long and roundabout way, I found myself at the junction of Gravenstein Highway and Stony Point Road, a place that I recognized. 

In the process I got a nice tour of the countryside to the south and west of here, and my first glimpse of downtown Petaluma.  It was a time in my life, my mid-twenties, when I was thinking a lot about my future, and the uncertain prospects for society-at-large.  And I thought the best thing I could do, for myself and for the world, was to be a farmer.   I liked to dream about finding a place somewhere to settle down with some friends and family, and get back to the land.  And I remember thinking on that particular day that I was glad to know about Petaluma, that this was a place I’d like to come back to sometime, that it might even be the right place to stake my claim.

So here I am, only somewhere along the line I went off on a different kind of journey, so I’m not a farmer living and working on my agrarian commune out on Chileno Valley Road.   I’m an Episcopal priest, living in a tract house in a subdivision near Casa Grande High School.  It’s funny how nothing happens the way we expect, even when our dreams partly come true.  And how, when we get to where we thought we are going, we find it’s not the place we thought we’d find.  

These experiences, the expectation that turns up the unexpected, and the  journey to a destination you don’t really know, appear in the scripture readings this morning as images of the life of faith.  Jesus tells his disciples to be always on the alert, always ready for action, because the thing you’re waiting for is going to come when you least expect it.  And the author of the letter to the Hebrews holds up the example of Abraham, who wandered off in search of a land he’d never seen, following a promise to a place he’d never really call his own.

Both of these examples are about receiving a gift from God.  It is a gift that is gratuitous, that depends solely on God’s will to give, but it also depends on human faith; it is our willingness to receive the gift that makes all the difference.  It is the gift that makes faith possible, and it is the faith that makes the gift real.  For Abraham the gift is the promise of a homeland, and of descendants “as many as the stars of heaven and the grains of sand on the seashore,” but its his faith that sets his feet on the road.  

The faith that Jesus commends to his disciples is also founded on God’s gift—“Do not be afraid, little flock,” he says, “for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”  But this kingdom is not a place on the earth, it’s not a homeland you can journey to.  It’s a kingdom that comes upon us, that catches us by surprise.  Jesus’ teaching career begins with his appearance, as if from nowhere, announcing that “the Kingdom of God has come near.”  His parables point to the unexpected signs of the kingdom in everyday happenings and ordinary things.   And today we hear the surprising news that this kingdom is given to us, and that having it, we have nothing to fear.  God’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom is the promise of a treasure more worthwhile than the things we thought were valuable, an invisible treasure nothing on earth can take away.  

These words rang true for the disciples of Jesus because he said them.  And that was perhaps the most surprising thing of all.  All their lives they had heard about the power and the goodness of God.  All their lives they had heard about the Spirit of God that anointed the prophets, putting words of truth in their mouths and power to heal in their hands.  All their lives they had heard how God had promised a homeland to his people, a place where they could dwell in safety and plenty, where he himself would be their shepherd and their righteous king.   

And they may have believed in the old stories; they may have hoped and prayed fervently for such things to be revealed in their own day.  But they probably didn’t expect that they actually would.  They didn’t expect that they would have first-hand experience of the presence of God and the power of the Spirit.  They didn’t expect to be called irresistibly away from their homes and their former occupations to be sent wandering through the towns and the villages on a mission to heal and forgive.  They didn’t expect to find that when they did, they did not go hungry, but their needs were all supplied.  The disciples of Jesus didn’t expect to see lives transformed, the broken fragments of society made whole, or to see and to know, in a land seething with violence and oppression, the peace and justice of the Kingdom of God.  And they certainly didn’t expect that all this could flow from one person, a person like them, a carpenter from Nazareth in Galilee. 

When I had my dream of a little place in the country, it was, at the most basic level, a dream of peace.  It was a dream of building a private little homeland, where I could be safe.  Surrounded by people I know and trust, and supplying my own needs, I could live in minimal dependence on the world of stock market bubbles and nuclear meltdowns, Mexican drug gangs and government surveillance.  But instead I ended up here, with all of you, squarely planted in the middle of that world.   I ended up giving my life, not to building myself a separate little homeland of safety and peace, but to our shared project of showing the turbulent world the kingdom that God is building there. 

My job here may look at times like it’s about building up our institution, so it’s stable and secure.  But my real work is to take risks, to encourage us all to take the risks, of receiving the gift of God that is Jesus Christ.  It’s a gift that we receive on behalf of the whole world, and that is a risky proposition, because it’s a gift the world isn’t sure it wants to have.  We’re not so sure we want it ourselves, when hear things like, “sell your possessions, and give alms.”   This is not the charter for our Rummage Sale, but words that put us at risk, the risk of admitting that all we can really count on is our relationships, and no one is a stranger in the kingdom.  

The world remains deeply ambivalent about such words, unsure whether Jesus is the master of the house or a thief come to break in and steal the things we prize.  That is why it is mostly content to leave him where it saw him last, hanging on the cross.  But we persist in praying for the kingdom that is still to come.  We insist on acting as if Jesus has a future.  And that means staying awake, of being alert and on the lookout for the unexpected.  It means remaining hopeful, not just of finding our own private homeland of safety and peace, but of meeting a person, the truly human being.  He may come at midnight, or just before dawn, like the master of the house returning from a wedding feast, or like a thief coming to break in, but either way, the point is to be ready, because we won’t want to miss him when he comes.