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June 2008

THANK YOU for all the attention to my surgery and recovery.  I am always glad for the chance to get one more time than I fall down!  I am healing well and owe special thanks to Noel in the office and those who have preached and led worship and made pastoral calls – and to Shirley for getting back faster than I!

More and more people now ask about biblical “end times.”  What signs point us toward grasping what happens to us “in the end?”  Some say “apocalyptic” – a predetermined pattern that people and events “fit” into to bring about “God’s” desired outcome.  Others say “eschatology” – bringing to bear on the present (and interpretation of the past) the “new thing” God is always doing – creating what Dr. King called “the fierce urgency of now!”

The future presses upon us – demanding insight, decision, and action/reflection.  Not that we always get it “right” – or event that there is a “rightness” to it all.  But that we keep trying, failing, confessing, forgiving, learning, growing, changing, trying again!  Toward an outcome not PRE-determined but TO BE determined!

Thus Pentecost’s wind blowing as it will, flames leaping from person to person, place to place, give birth to the earliest movements of Christ’s body the church.

Some read the Bible without any hope for this world, with heart set on the “next.”  Others read the Bible as “hope for things not yet seen” and act to find them.  In the same way some look for the perfect church, others perfect the one they’re in.  This congregation is 140 years young!!  Our acts include building the Sanctuary!  Adding Fellowship Hall and Office!  Digging out Sunday School rooms!  Selling off Parking Space!  Helping “plant” St. Paul and South Reno UMCs!  Hiring Mike Cleveland and Cheryl Shingler!  Helping start Kairos/Ridge House! Training Stephen Ministers!  Beautifying and securing Buildings and Grounds!  Helping start IHN/Family Promise!  Now Drop in the Bucket/New Orleans Recovery!!

Every challenge an opportunity!  Every closed door an open window!  Dream!  Invest!  (Even when about to “lose everything” – See Jeremiah 32!)  Imagine!  Create!  Turn loose the powerful and adventuresome (Think recurrent Advent!) Spirit (Angel!) of this ever-trying, ever-failing, ever-learning, ever-growing congregation!  A body of Christ still in the discovery of the gifts of all of our parts! 

Love, John 

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May 2008

Letter from Student Associate Pastor, George Bennett

You Are a Gift

As a family going through the process of ordination in the United Methodist Church, we are consistently faced with the temptation tobelieve that someone else has already lived our lives for us. We are given mentors, and we are put into environments of field education where we meet people who have been doing the work that we feel called to do. We meet people who have had full lives in relationship with the denomination in general and the local church in specific. If you think this is not scary, your not trying hard enough to imagine it.

Think of Ebenezer Scrooge looking at his own grave in his vision of Christmas future. We are constantly asked to imagine our lives unfolding in ways that the lives before us have unfolded; and as we look at out future we cry out to God. Is this what has to be? Is this my actual future or is this merely a possibility in my future? The specter never answers. The specter is silent and grim, sitting, pointing, waiting for us to choose to live or wait to die.

Hope comes to us when we live the way that we were created to live, trusting in God and engaging with the community in which God put us. Each person we meet is an opportunity for meaningful companionship in our journey. We share our joys and our sorrows, our dreams and our memories. We share our food and our time and our resources. We share our very essence and all that God has given us because these are not our property these are our gifts. God has made each one of us a gift, and as a gift we exist without meaning unless we are given away. I am so thankful to Reno First United Methodist Church for being a gift to my family. In your selflessness you have broken our gaze from the horrors of Christmas future. In your selflessness we will keep the memories of the time we shared alive in our ongoing work as the body of Christ.

Our last Sunday as Student Associate Pastor (SAP) is May 18 th, 2008. I pray that you know that our time together has been a pure blessing. Keep us in your prayers, and we will always look back to our memory of our service here when we think the specter is pointing at the tombstone.

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April 2008

Dearly Risen,

A favorite Orthodox chant for the season – “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death.  And upon those in the tomb, bestowing life!”

As Paul says Jesus is just the first of those raised from death.  It is both a promise and an offer to us all.  And it starts NOW – whoever we are, in whatever condition or position of “death” we find ourselves!  With faith in the risen Christ overcoming powers of death in this world and in us, the bad news is not to die but never to live – never to get around to being and doing and standing for how we have always felt called.  The good news is not life after death but life before!

Please remember, Easter is not done with us yet!  Forty days (balancing Lent!) to the Ascension – when Jesus leaves “the body” for good – that we may become it!  Ten more days (Fifty!  The Jubilee!) to Pentecost!  As much the “return” of Jesus as we are likely to get – sending the Spirit to fill us to overflowing with his own life beyond every death!  His life of witness and service to every last ember of life!

I am so joyful and thankful for the many ways we were led through Lent, Holy Week, and Easter Sunday – The “WWJD” bracelets and bulletin-cover calligraphy!  The inspired readings of the gospels!  The children in “disciple garb” entering Jerusalem a slippery snowy morning behind the Tongan Brass Band!  And welcoming us to the “upper room” for a last meal with Jesus – who “showed up” dressed as a clown and “fool for Christ” offering to wash our feet!  The powerful passion-story readings by the youth group in darkening gloom!  Deep and daring personal witness to Jesus’ “seven last words!”  The “virtual garden” of visual delight that greeted us Easter morning!  And always the MUSIC, MUSIC, MUSIC!  From the haunting saxophone to the bells with violin to the soaring brass and choir – THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU.

And in the midst and at the heart of it all, our first-ever VIM Team returned from its mission of hurricane recovery in New Orleans!  We cannot wait to hear from them and to receive and to share in the gifts of life their experience will bring to our life together – as church and as community.  Truly, we are given to witness and serve for life in the midst of all death -- all destruction, defeat, and despair!

We cannot live at peace with death.  When the writer of Revelation spoke of the coming of the day of shalom, he did not say that on that day we would live at peace with death.  He said that on that day “There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”  I shall try to keep the wound from healing, in recognition of our living still in the old order of things.  I shall try to keep it from healing, in solidarity with those who sit beside me on humanity’s mourning bench. – Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son

Love and Life, John

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March 2008

Fellow Followers of the Lenten Leader!

Patsy Gehr’s (Dotty Oakey’s daughter) powerful “paper quilt” entitled “Hands” is on exhibit in the Parlor.  It is displayed beside a prayer by Diane Neu based on the psalmist’s “Blessed be the works of your hands, O Holy One.”  She blesses all these works of our hands – Touching life!  Nurturing creativity!  Holding those in pain!  Embracing with love!  Planting new seeds!  Tending gardens!  Harvesting ripe fields!  Preparing nourishing food!  Cleaning, washing, mopping, scrubbing! . . .  Remaining open!  Holding the future! 

Asking “What Would Jesus . . .?”  “What Shall We?” through Lent makes us bold to imagine we -- even we! -- take head and heart and hope of God embodied in Jesus into our own hands!!  Pete Seeger sings, “One person’s hands can’t change the human race . . . but if two and two and fifty make a million, we’ll see that day come round!”  Toni Morrison writes – “Love your hands!  Love them.  Raise them up and kiss them.  Touch others with them . . . .”

Thanks to all who gave and received anointing, laying on hands, praying the Sunday leading to Lent. Thanks to Elizabeth Wong, Kay Montgomery, and Young Lowe for the “WWJD” Lenten bracelets!  Thanks to our intrepid band to commission in worship March 2 for UMVIM (Volunteers in Mission) trip of their head, heart, hope, and hands to the people of New Orleans still rising from traumas of Katrina!!  Special Offering that day for emergency relief work of UMCOR (Committee on Relief) – “One Great Hour of Sharing!”

PALM SUNDAY, March 16, we gather in the park across the street and follow the Tongan Brass Band into worship -- processing with Jesus triumphantly into Jerusalem and tragically through the week.   Maundy Thursday, March 20, we gather in Fellowship Hall for soup supper and communion at 6 PM, served by the Sunday School – followed by “strangers” offering to wash our feet! – not because they are dirty but because we ourselves are called to be broken – then by Service of Shadows (Tennebrae) in the Sanctuary with Choir and with readings of Passion by Youth Group.   Good Friday, at 7 – as if at the tomb, we reflect upon Seven Last Words as volunteers offer brief testimonies of their own lives.

EASTER SUNDAY, March 23, we venture timidly, cautiously back to the tomb – fearing the worst – and finding . . .  8 AM (Renewing Baptismal Faith), 9 and 11 AM (Festival of Resurrection!!).

Yours in Jesus’ Way, John

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February 2008

Dear Vocationers,

Epiphany barely gives time in light of Jesus’ life to begin sorting out our own – our gifts, our callings, our passions and our priorities – which may not remain the same year to year – but always are good for re-praying on and re-proclaiming.  You and I need that as congregation and pastor – for with the 4-5 year time any pastor is appointed come issues of spirited restlessness with one another.  We have come to know one another well – “too well” some would say! – yet never quite fully and freely enough to trust open wrestling with each other’s souls!!

Which brings us all-the-more quickly to LENT!  Can we believe it?  Ash Wednesday, February 6 (Get all that leavening out of the pantry!!) – Ashes available 7 to 9 am with devotional materials for the day – Service of Repentance and Renewal 7 pm.  Our worship/preaching theme follows from the ongoing Adult Class study at 9 AM each Sunday in Fellowship Hall – “Follow the Leader —What Would Jesus Do (Beyond Theology)?” 

We will discover ourselves all variations on that question as we try to keep up with this dangerous life-over-death driven one who keeps breaking out of our neat-headed boxes and plunging us into wild-hearted risks of witness, service, analysis, action -- against all odds!!

We will both comfort and challenge ourselves with these words of Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy – as one kind of “job description” for this “God on earth” we follow in the life of Jesus the Christ –

To love.  To be loved.  To never forget your own insignificance.  To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you.  To seek joy in the saddest places.  To pursue beauty to its lair.  To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple.  To respect strength, never power.  Above all, to watch.  To try and understand.  To never look away.  And never, never to forget.

WWJD, John

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January 2008

Wandering, Wondering Stars,

This year will be for Julie and me the 40th since Dr. King’s death called us to seminary and, in time, to ordained ministry in the United Methodist Church.  It is a call we have “lifted to light” many times in wonder at all it has held for us.  Does one ever know anything so momentous for sure?  Or ever work out any fully acceptable response?  Each year, each day, each person, each event of it, remains a wonder to wander -- an invitation to accept, a mystery to embrace!

Each year begins with Epiphany – enlightenment spreading from Bethlehem to all the earth!  Giving birth to myriad ways of knowing, naming, approaching, honoring the Light of the World – in whom may be seen every last child of God!  Stained-glass windows of San Rafael FUMC portray seasons of the church year.  The sun projects the yellow star in the Christmas/Epiphany window onto the back wall of the sanctuary.  As the sun rises, the star wanders across the wall.

Dava Sobel in Galileo’s Daughter recounts the courageous call to challenge the ways we tend to “self-center” our lives – personally, congregationally, nationally, cosmically.  “Who better than Galileo to propound the most stunning reversal in perception ever to have jarred intelligent thought: We are not the center of the universe.  The immobility of the world is an illusion.  We spin.  We speed through space.  We circle the sun.  We live on a wandering star.” 

Poet Kathleen Norris adds, our learned scientists “armed with large / finite numbers and radiotelescopes / as big as football fields to measure the pulse of light / from stars beyond the range / of human vision, conclude that this world, / all we call nature, / was once inside such a star.”  She points out that even 500 years before Galileo, “Hildegard / saw it plain . . . / Eve / as a cloud, / leaf-green, shining, / containing stars . . .”  Like us!!

Happy Startreks, John

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December 2007 

HERE COMES ADVENT – Ready or not! 

It’s a New Church Year!  The whole world’s in need of a New     Creation!  Our Sanctuary is beaming with new lights!  Our Advent theme proceeds from Genesis 1 – “Let There Be Lights!!”  Join the “Yellow Star Underground Conspiracy to Wait for Jesus!”  Let the season of waiting and watching BE a season of waiting and watching!  AVOID “the Christmas Rush” to shop and spend unconscionably.  Ask what difference each decision makes IN LIGHT OF the “New Thing” God is doing for us even now!

5 Adult Class 9 AM Sundays during Advent will be reading Elie Wiesel’s short book Night experiencing the absence and silence of God during the Holocaust. 

We will struggle with finding paths to the light in very dark times – personally and more. 

How do we affirm the darkness as well –  “The face of the deep?”  The womb?  Our youth will be looking for music videos to share with us – “Here Comes the Sun”?  “Blinded by the Light”?  We’ll be called to worship by “Canticle of Light and Darkness” and “I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light.” 

We await this time of shortest days and longest nights -- deeply, darkly restful for the earth, yet fruitful for our dreams  We imagine life in bold new mind-blowing ways – Deserts blooming!  Children saving!  Peace prevailing!  Come!  Let our lights shine!  Each of our “inner lights” in response to the Great Light of All!  Christ is the Light, we are the lights, of the World! 

Lightly as I can be, John 

 

Pastor Letter from our Associate Pastor, George Bennett

Reconciling Ministries Report

It is my pleasure to announce the decisions of the judicial council to our congregation. As the only reconciling church in the state of Nevada, our church council decided that we would be honoring our position in support of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community if we had a presence at the judicial council meeting of the United Methodist Church (UMC) on October 24th, 2007. We were able to create a banner that we can use in future opportunities to be a public voice, and we brought it to the candle light march that was attended by over seventy people from all over our annual conference.  Furthermore, our congregation sent a financial gift to the movement. This level of participation and support deserves to know the results.

The judicial council has published their decisions on the UMC website and the council did not find that the UMC discipline justified discrimination against members of the LGBT community. This outcome was more positive than the reconciling witness organizers had imagined it would be. All three decisions were favorable. The chair of the judicial council, James Holsinger, an outspoken conservative voice on the council, was intentionally absent. If you take the time to read these decisions, you will also see that they invite further controversy. For instance, the council did not affirm that a transgender pastor has the right to serve in an appointment; but instead, they declared that there is no current language in our discipline that prohibits this pastor from serving. I am certain that the General Conference will have much to say about these issues in April.

Thank you for your support,  George Bennett

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November 2007

Dear “Cheerful Givers!”

I love the gracious gratuitousness of this congregation in all its ways! When Albert Morgan recently needed to be close to the hospital in San Francisco for possible liver transplant, you were there - offering support that helped him move - and then helped Charley recover his ashes following his death. Even as God must feel sometimes, we win some and lose some on our investments in one another. We also know that nothing finally is “lost” to God - no investment of ours is too small for God to use in ways we never imagine but only trust.

Thank you again for MAKING APPORTIONMENTS last year - It’s time to make them again! We need a lot of help between now and the end of the year. Thank you for going far beyond our goal for the CAPITAL CAMPAIGN. The rewiring of the sanctuary will begin this month. The Missions Project Committee is meeting. Much of our indebtedness is paid off. Even in all the smaller ways we give gladly and generously - our “loose change” for Kids Kottage on Children’s Sabbath, our “Trick-or-Treat” for UNICEF, our Office Discretionary first Sundays.

Now we approach the annual Fall Stewardship Campaign for support of our day-to-day life and work, ministry and mission in the new year 2008! We are hoping to strengthen ourselves through what the new budget makes possible in at least six ways  - 

1. Participation in Children’s Ministries and Youth Group. New ways to reach and invite families and friends with children and youth.

2. Sense of “Mutual Friendship,” camaraderie, solidarity, among new and established members and friends. Through prayer, calling and visitation, small groups, short-term studies, new member “experience” (remember the Parsonage Pot Luck every last Sunday at 6pm!), sponsoring and mentoring.

3. Care for the church building and parsonage as we share uses with others. “Adopting a Space” ourselves and proceeding with goals of Capital Campaign.

4. Sense of connectional/global “mission” through apportionments and special offerings. Follow-through Mission Projects from Capital Campaign. Participation directly/indirectly in UMCOR/UMVIM trips to New Orleans and Tonga.

5. Connection and care, witness and welcome to and with “downtown” community. Riverwalk Merchants, ad hoc cooperation with other agencies and congregations, ART, Artown, Drop In the Bucket, Family Promise/IHN.

6. Worship appeal, availability and participation. Varieties of music and other elements. Enhancing the uniqueness of 8am, 10am and 2pm services, as well as other special services throughout the year. Incorporating all the arts - song, dance, rhythm - into our worship.

On our “Friendship Celebration and Thanksgiving Sunday” November 18th, we should all prayerfully and purposefully fill in our Commitment Forms for 2008 and offer them up in worship. Then EVERYONE PLAN TO JOIN WITH CHURCH FAMILY AND FRIENDS after the 10am service as we share and “Break Bread With Our Friends!”.  We encourage all to bring their favorite breads and spreads to share during the Fellowship Hour celebration

Thanks always, John Auer

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October 2007

Dear War- and World-Weary,

I want to “apologize” in the more classical sense.  It’s not so much I fear I have offended anyone (never my intent).  It’s that I cannot help seeing and saying, feeling and doing as I am about this war.  How can I begin to be faithful in anything less disastrous for us all unless I am faithful in this?  I am so sure it never should have been  started.  I am so afraid it never will be ended.

As we contract out management and operation to highest private bidders, the war becomes a way of life -- a way of death for our culture and for the church.  The tragedy goes so far beyond any administration, any congress, any party, any person.  Nobody “governs” this war.  Soldiers fight it the best they can.    But it’s run by our own fear, our preoccupation with security and well-being, at all costs. 

The war reflects how the world is evolving into what seems to be a highly fortified “Green Zone” for a prosperous and protected few and a wildly perilous “Red Zone” for everyone else.  One direct observer writes, “Everywhere in Iraq, the wildly divergent values assigned to different categories of people are on crude display.”  In other words, some are the “worthy,” the “chosen,” and others the “victims,” the “expendables.”  It may be just as true of New Orleans.

So what am I asking in this apology?  That we drop, if not everything else, something, at least, to re-enfranchise and empower ourselves as a culture and as the church.  Let’s join with a growing interfaith moving to FAST on “Columbus Day,” October 8.  It is the season of Ramadan and the Night of Power in Islam – the High Holy Days and Sukkot in Judaism – the Feast Day of St. Francis and World Communion Sunday in Christianity – Pavarona/Sangha Day in Buddhism – and Mahatma Gandhi’s Birthday!  Spiritual power is everywhere!  Let as many of us spend as much time as we can in the Sanctuary that day – praying and offering ourselves for the end of the war.

Love, John 

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September 2007

Dear End-of-Summerers,

I write this as we leave for vacation to a number of far-off and exotic spots where family and friends may await us – Oakland, Fresno, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Orange, Palm Desert, San Diego – and back again! We promise! “We love this place and the people who enrich our lives!!”

I literally staggered and fell across the finish line at a humungous meeting last night (August 6) to reaffirm and reestablish our children’s ministries and Sunday School. Thanks to the strong foundations nourished in us by Sharon and Claire, we were moved by the vision that “if we build it” – true to who we are as United Methodists, a biblically-literate (NOT literalist!) downtown congregation with passion for the personal and the social well-being of all ages and stages of our community and our world! – “they will come!” And “they” always starts with “us!”

Labor Sunday is September 2 – Come put the “Union” back in “Communion!” September 9 Chancel Choir returns! (Thanks to all who have provided such inspired Special Music this summer!!) September 16 is HOMECOMING Sunday – a full display after each worship of all the groups and activities available and “inevitable” to us. SEPTEMBER 23 Sunday School resumes – we are all “Tribes of Israel,” dispersed and still dispersing into every last end of the earth!

We are an immigrant people. We welcome the stranger and sojourner. We see them in us and us in them. (S. Brian Willson: “We are not worth more. They are not worth less.” See www.nevada-shakespeare.org – “On Track”) Justice for immigrants – for all unsettled and seeking peoples – may be the national calling of our lifetime. We dare not let our preoccupation with “homeland security” panic us into subversion of all our most generous and gracious values – as nation or as church. Earth as we see her so preciously made from outer space shows no borders, no boundaries, no barriers, and no biases – She just IS! For us all!!

In Genesis 32 Jacob brings his family, his tribes, to the border, the river, the Jabbok. They are bound to reconcile with Esau whose birthright Jacob stole. Can we think of some stolen birthrights of access to God’s provision today? Jacob wrestles all night with a border guard – who turns out to be Border God! God may test our readiness to be reconciled, but God will not keep us apart. Are we ready to abandon a future of fear and separation? For a future of trust and communion? Out of shadows into full light of God’s new day?

Bill Moyers says, “To cross over to freedom you have to show the bogus gods at the border that you have a mind of your own.” No wonder we treasure the “quadrilateral!” In each one of us scripture, tradition, reason, experience meet uniquely. We express ourselves in prayer and action, engagement and endurance, sometimes refusal and resistance –even to the “bogus gods” of our own making and tolerating. Stay tuned for news of the “New Sanctuary Movement” . . . Please rest up for the long haul . . . .

Love in Motion, John
 

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August 2007

Dear Journeyers Onward,

I cannot tip my hat highly enough to express all respect and appreciation for who this congregation has been – to each other and to the world – and what this congregation has done – in the past four years and past year in particular!!
 
Denis Graham suggested at Finance Committee a year ago that we invite Bishop Shamana to visit with us. We were despairing already of making apportionments last year. We thought the Bishop would help boost our own morale and increase our sense of connection with Conference and General Church.
 
By the time we worked out the July date, we overwhelmed ourselves to discover we made our apportionments – God only knowing how!! By the time we got deep into planning for Artown, we were off on another campaign for building and mission. Before we knew it, we had oversubscribed it! So by time we planned the worship and reception for Bishop Shamana’s day with us, the focus shifted!
 
No longer did we have to be the center of her and our own attention. We could well afford to share her abundant gifts -- person, preacher, artist, author – as well head of the UM Church in our area. She was here to embody and extend the whole church’s commitment to creativity and the arts. She was here to receive recognition in our larger community of the role congregations can play in public witness and service – especially so long as we get our own “stuff” together!!
 
So thank you, ALL, for the faithfulness of this journey – with all the care and prayer we have shown, for Sharon Stephenson, Millie Keiper, and others – with all the willingness to volunteer in the office so Noel could attend to her daughter – the hospitality shown to concerts and other Artown events – the courage and commitment to carry on the Molly Ivins “Pots ‘n Pans” brigade every Tuesday.
 
Sisters and brothers, I believe we can stop this war!! I believe we can begin to stop ALL wars. Join our brother John Emerson in the call upon local Congressman Heller to do the simple constitutional courtesy of addressing constituents about his apparently non-responsive, non-negotiable position on the war in Iraq. WHEREVER you stand, let him know it! Come out August 28 for “Take a Stand” day to end the occupation. Join our General Church Board of Church and Society (chaired by our Bishop) preparing to fast all day Monday, October 8 (“Columbus Day”). Call for an end to the war. Begin a “Season of Commitment” to pray and act together for peace through Thanksgiving weekend.
 
Praying, fasting, giving – Jesus’ fundamental practices of the means of grace. We have learned much about them in our own practice this year. Who knows how far we can go . . . Remember what practice makes! On to perfection . . .

Love, John
 

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June 2007

Dear On-Looking, Up-Looking Friends,

While we are still looking on, puzzled what to make of these “rumors of resurrection” – and/or still looking up, dumbstruck at Jesus ascending to clear away every remnant of his former self to be with us again in miraculous ways --  here comes that HOLY SPIRIT, that Pentecost Day again – sneaking in under cover of Memorial Day Weekend this year! 

(If you get this announcement in time, please come by the Memorial Day observance between 10 AM and 5 PM at the Federal Building, Liberty and Virginia Streets, reading the name and planting a flag for every American life lost thus far in Iraq.)

Pentecost is for me the heart and soul of the church year!  Christmas may be the mind of God.  Easter may be the body of Christ.  But Pentecost is the hope of the World.  It even looks and sounds like the “United Nations” that day – pilgrims gathered from every known part of the world to receive “the Law, the Torah” all over again – this time not in letter but in spirit, not on the outside but on the heart of every believer!  And each person present hears the disciples preaching and teaching by “instant translation” – like the UN! – into their own language! 

Like anyone, I know just enough about the Resurrection to be dangerous.  All I know is, it never happened to anyone else in all recorded history.  Nobody else’s death ever had such an impact on life – the life of each one who had known him, the lives of those who met him after his death, and the life of the world itself.  I believe the Resurrection is fully realized on Pentecost Day.  I believe there is no other “second coming” or return of Jesus.  The Holy Spirit is the radical presence, passion and power of Jesus alive and well and at work in the world now and forevermore!  “Radical” here means “grassroots,” taking us always back to our origins in Jesus through the Advocate – the vision, the voice, the vote, the victory of the “shalom,” the eternal and universal common life and common good.

I believe Jesus is the Messiah!  Only I among so many of us do not act as if I believe.  We talk so glibly about “making disciples” of others.  My prior question is, have I really and continually let Jesus make a disciple of me?  Of the “us” I am most intimately part of?  How can we offer Jesus as “Messiah” (anointed one, savior, lord, et al.) to others – when it is so clear by our own lives and life together that we have not received him fully and freely ourselves?  Where is our belief, our trust, our risk, our action upon the messianic works of Jesus?  When he promised we would do “even greater works than these?”  Where are our messianic works?  All the signs of healing and wholeness, justice and peace – all the good news to the poor and freedom to the oppressed Jesus and the prophets announce will show forth the messianic presence, passion, and power on earth?

I also believe such presence, passion, and power have been more fully and freely revealed and taught to us by the Spirit and by one another – past, present, and future – through our Capital Campaign – We love this place and the people who enrich our lives!  We have caught glimpses and glances, bits and pieces, fits and starts, of the works that lie among and before us.  Surely, the spirit of this campaign and all who contribute to it in any and every way is part of perpetual new beginnings in the midst of place and people!  Surely, this is the Spirit “coming again” – and again and again!  Revealing and teaching all of the works of Jesus to us and for us, with us and through us – until the end of the age!!

Happy Ahead-Looking, John

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May 2007

Dear Fellow Troublers,

My favorite Resurrection poem? "The Rebel" by Mari Evans -- When I die I'm sure I will have a Big Funeral ... Curiosity Seekers ... Coming to see If I Am really Dead ... Or just trying to make trouble." Like Jesus, we are called to make nonviolent trouble for life in our own time, place, and people. 

Here are excerpts from a poem by Nicanor Parra of Chile called "The Discourse of the Good Thief' who hung beside Jesus on a cross Good Friday.. It speaks volumes to me of the hustles of all our systems of so-called church and state - here and in such places we may invade and occupy - four years now in Iraq.

Remember me when thou comest into thy Kingdom /Appoint me President of the Senate /Appoint me Director of the Budget/Appoint meAttorney General of the Republic Remember the crown of thorns / Make me Chilean Consul in Stockholm /Appoint me Superintendent of Railroads /Appoint me Commander-in-Chief of the Army I'll take anything at all ... Put me in as Director of the Zoo. Blessed be the Name of.the Father/And of the Son /And of the Holy Spirit/ Put me in as Ambassador to any place ... If it comes down to it / Put me in as Superintendent of Graveyards!

Doesn't that sound like. Easter morning? Didn't Mary mistake Jesus for the "Superintendent of Graveyards?" Commander of life and death! There is such a temptation to ask from Jesus, to take from Jesus, only what we want and need - and to leave all the rest of the mess to somebody else. Can we believe we are still asking ourselves, will "winning" this war make it right? Worth every cost?

Jesus, when you come into your kingdom, just give us the very best deal we can get! And, "when the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes and divided them into four parts ...

"Does this not begin to sound like the spoils of war?" The more things are forced to change, the more they are longing to stay the same. Many" chief priests" and crowds in our congregations of all faiths still choose Barabbas all over again - answering Pilate, "We have no king but Caesar!" I mean, I just paid my taxes this month, war and all - didn't you?

Rev. John Schweibert, Metanoia Peace Community UMC, Portland, OR, and wife Pat did not. For many of the past 30 years they have not paid Federal Income Taxes. Instead they donate all they owe to county government. They have learned to live on less-than-taxable income. They refused to pay 2002-03 as their way to say they find the war immoral and illegal. Now our General Board of Pensions and Health Benefits informs them the IRS is putting a lien on John's pension for those taxes. John has asked. the Board not to honor the lien - the church not to do the work of the state! Or God the work of Caesar.

The Board's first response was of appreciation for John and Pat's ministry and their presentation of it and of reaffirmation of the Board's policy to comply with all laws while carrying out their mission for clergy and lay workers of the UMC. Yet they are referring the matter for "further study and deferment." We all have our own consciences and personal and congregational priorities and even our own "church-state" issues around taxes and assessments! But the least I know I  can do is send some small percentage of my taxes to John and Pat, whose monthly income is significantly reduced by the Board's action -

John and Pat Schweibert
2116 N.E. 18th Avenue
Portland, OR 97212

 

Love,

One More Fallen Sinner Raised by Amazing Grace!!

 

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March 2007

Lent is time for taking the life and witness and action of Jesus outside ourselves. Time to take “to the streets” as Jesus does upon his arrival in Jerusalem. Time to offer the “powers” -- in others as in ourselves -- God’s chance to repent what violates one another.  Time to renew ourselves in right relation with all of creation!  We dwell in images of “lost and found” this season.  Each one of us longs to be a “found” piece of the peaceful whole God is still piecing together.  Jesus encourages us by example -- finding himself, coming home, by losing himself for others and for the world.

Remember last year’s Lenten theme of “the walls in our way”?  It ran through Easter, “our way through the walls,” and to Pentecost – when Mike Cleveland gave us a bold new anthem of “Jericho.”  When prophetic columnist Molly Ivins died recently, poet Maya Angelou called her “America’s Jericho Voice” --

Up to the walls of Jericho / She marched with a spear in / her hand
Go blow them ram horns she cried / For the battle is in my hand
the Walls have not come down, / but they have been given a / serious shaking. / That Jericho voice is stilled now. / Molly Ivins has been quieted.

I am wondering how each of us in our own ways might be a “Jericho voice” this season?  A voice boldly declaring some “serious shaking” of the walls between and among us?  Walls that keep us from being full loving people we long to be in the just and beloved community we know God means for all?

Always with good humor, Molly Ivins decried our shared ignorance, fear, prejudice, cruelty toward one another.  She decried the dying of her own light – reaching out to us, “Every single day every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.  We need people in the streets banging pots and pans and demanding ‘Stop it now!’”

Might that suggest a discipline of Lenten witness to us?  Find some way “outside” ourselves every day?  Literally and/or figuratively “banging pots and pans”?  Paula McDonough has started a time of meeting to make such “joyful noise” at the Federal Building each Tuesday from 11 to 11:30 a.m.  If we cannot be there in person, might we take that time to do our own ways of banging -- Praying!  Journaling!  Writing letters!  Supporting peace efforts!  Addressing powers.

Especially since the war “comes home” to defund so many good things that need doing for one another at state and local levels.  (Please see RAIN’s “Legislative Concerns.”)  Pieces and voices are coming together!   Maya Angelou concludes,

Molly, / I am shouting, / with two voices,

Walls come down! / Walls come down! / Walls come down!

I can hear you!  Love, John     

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December 2006

Dear Advent Anticipators,

It is said in the Talmud, “In front of every Child of God, 10,000 angels blow their trumpets and proclaim, ‘Make way for the Image of God!’”  Each one of us has within us an image of God the whole world is waiting for!  Advent is about God doing everything possible to reveal that image both in us and to us.  As we become clear about the many changing ways God may be reflected in us, we become open to the same many ways God is reflected in others. 

Rabbi Yerachmiel reports on God as saddened by false divisions hiding and distorting our essential created unity.  So “God calls each person to stand before a divine mirror in which each person sees reflected not only her own image, but the images of everyone else.”  What a scary experience – especially with such Advent characters as the wild prophet John the Baptist: HE is a part of ME??

But “God helps us.  God takes the great mirror and makes millions upon millions of tiny mirrors.  God places these tiny mirrors in the eyes of every human being, even you and me, so that if we look in another’s eyes we will see there the whole world and the One who created it.”  Imagine!  Being “in the image” means we are by nature “imaginers.”  There is no end to the new creation we can see!   

God provides mirrors and “magnifiers” -- such Mary’s confessing and offering of herself – “My soul magnifies the Lord.”  So does the soul of each one of us.

That is the question we are asked to bring to our Advent worship – How does MY soul magnify the Lord?  How does OUR soul as a congregation?  How might we hold helpful mirrors and magnifiers before one another?  During the season we are asked to bring some mirrors, prisms, cut glasses, even kaleidoscopes in and through which to see ourselves and each other more clearly, more completely.    

God requests our Advent attentiveness to what is about to be born in and around us, between and among us all.  We light candles each week as assurances in the ways of awareness, acceptance, affirmation, and action.  Advent awaits the birth of a child – not only to Mary but also to us! – a child who offers new glimpses of faith and love, joy and peace, to a world that is waiting, ready or not! 

According to Rabbi Yerachmiel, “The children look at each other in awe.  Some see and smile.  Some see and cry.  Some cannot see (yet) at all.  But all hold tight, one to the other, and God sighs a great sigh of hope!”  Christmas Eve Services, Sunday, December 24 – 8 and 10 AM, 7 and 11 PM.  Children’s Musical Sunday December 17, 10 AM.   

Hope-fully, John Auer

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November 2006

Dear Ones,

We are so grateful to Jane Nichols for the inspiration and to Sandy LeSourd for the (must be a better word!) execution of the 32-week Disciple Bible Study enjoyed as well by Deborah Apel, Julie Auer, Kay Greene, Evelyn Grupe, Barbara McMeen, Gwen Shonkwiler and George Smith!

As we await discernment on doing another 32-week study (Might you attend?)  various ones of us are proposing such shorter studies as – 1) a home class in daily relevance of scripture; 2) a class from the School of Mission materials on “India-Pakistan;” 3) brief lectionary study at monthly meetings of FMW;  4) a class called “Reel Faith” connecting scripture and film!  These would most likely begin with the new year – so please make your interests known now!

I am offering to resume my own tentative lunchtime and/or suppertime gatherings on Mondays – and to give them a bit more structure by looking at lectionary scriptures for the following Sunday.  We will also begin to print each Sunday’s texts a week ahead in the Bulletin and monthly in the Visitor.  I would like to follow the “base ecclesial community” approach to scripture -- SEE (what is going on in and around us), JUDGE (what texts have to say to that), ACT (on points where “text” and “context” meet), REFLECT – and start over again!

Remember for United Methodists Scripture is part of the “quadrilateral” approach to faith and action – along with Tradition, Reason and Experience!  Scripture is a living Word of a living God made flesh in a living Christ present as a living Spirit in a living People for a living World.  Scripture is no more fixed and dead than we are!  We have to take responsibility for the violences we find there.  We approach the end of the liturgical year looking not for the “sword” of Christ to conquer all others but for the “word” of Christ to indwell and inform the living Creation for all.

In this season of harvesting and Thanksgiving, I am sustained by Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s words I found in the UMW text Shalom, Salaam, Peace (Another study op?).  From an article “We All Live in a Sukkah” – a fragile hut with leafy, leaky roof (like the “Cardboard City” IHN fund-raiser?), built to last just the week of the harvest festival Sukkot – when Jews ask God – “Ufros alenu sukkat shomekha” – “Spread over all of us your sukkah of shalom” -- 

We all live in a sukkah.  There are only wispy walls and leaky roofs between us.  The planet is in fact one interwoven web of life.  The command to love my neighbor as I do myself is not an admonition to be nice: It is a statement of truth like the law of gravity.  For my neighbor and myself are interwoven.

In the name of the One who never “weaves” us “awone,” John

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October 2006

Congregation of KAIROS and Ridge House,

The recent death of lovely, lively Betty Walls gives occasion to recall the pioneering ministries of this congregation -- to offer Kairos spiritual retreat weekends with inmates and Ridge House supportive residences for ex-prisoners returning to our community.  Thanks to Mike Faulstich, Doug McCoy, and others for the spirit-stirrings that got these ministries started – thanks to Alice Morgan, Ruth Stacy, and others who keep them going.

The first Ridge (Street) House opened 25 years ago this summer – official celebration planned for next year.  A person leaving Nevada prisons STILL gets the same $21 to start over they got 25 years ago!!  Recidivism for the state is 61% -- for Ridge House 9%!  Ridge House estimates it saves the state $3,000,000 a year by helping clients re-enter the community productively.  Ridge House now runs 5 residential houses and 2 transitional ones – plus outpatient services to 100 clients!  THANK YOU, Ridge House.

Bishop Beverly Shamana reminds us, 1956 was a banner year for setting things right in the United Methodist Church.  In addition to granting justice to women by assuring their appointment along with their ordination, the church also took an unprecedented stand against the death penalty the same year . . . . On this 50^th anniversary year of the United Methodist stance against the death penalty and retributive justice, the church is called to take steps that recognize and work against the systems that perpetrate legalized killing by the state.

While the US stands nearly alone among industrialized nations executing citizens, retributive justice still dictates much national and international “policy.”  Jesus was briefly a death-row prisoner.  Paul says all Christians are, in effect – for in baptism we put behind us the powers of death to intimidate or to control us.  Following Jesus closely as we can, expecting to drink his cup of retribution, we live as if each day were our last – an offering up of thanks and praise for LIFE!!

The month of October calls us so fully and richly to life – OCT. 1 is World Communion Sunday with Special Offering to promote transnational good will!  OCT. 8 is National Children’s Sabbath!  OCT. 15 we rejoice in brother John Emerson’s 50 years of ordained ministry!  OCT. 29 we celebrate Reformation and United Nations Sunday – and prepare for “the Day of the Dead!”

And OCT. 22 we are visited by Marietta Jaeger-Lane.  Her daughter at age 7 was abducted and murdered 25 years ago.  Yet Marietta remains committed to forgiveness in place of death and speaks for Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation.  Her appearances in Reno/Sparks that weekend are sponsored by Amnesty International’s “National Weekend of Faith in Action on the Death Penalty” and the Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty.

For the Love of Life, John    

 

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September 2006

Back to – School, Work, Church, Life!

Lord, it is time, begins the poet Rilke.  The summer was very big. / Lay thy shadow on the sundials, / and on the meadows let the winds loose.  Command the last fruits that they shall be full . . . .  So what of your summer?  What are your shadowed dials?  Your loosened winds?  Your fulfilling fruits?  In what ways are you, and are you not, prepared to resume “the fall?”  I implore us all to carry the gift and grace of summer onward with us!

A thoughtful pastor/teacher observes, There is no better place to forget that the United States is at war than in church.  I know in our broken and halting ways we try to keep tragedies of our national/transnational life before us each Sunday – specially remembering those of our congregation living/dying daily through the war.  We are not of one perspective or opinion.  We try not to avoid, deny, ignore or escape.  This writer says of fellow clergy understandably reluctant to be seen as “choosing sides.” Most of us have held enough broken hearts in our hands to wonder if this is not the division that matters most . . . .

Yet, she cautions, Churches do not exist exclusively for the comfort of their own members . . . There can come a time when keeping the flock together rubs hard against reminding the flock why it exists.  She recalls finding a khaki-colored booklet of “Prayers for Private Devotions in Wartime” in the pews of Harvard’s Memorial Church (to the Harvard dead of World War I).  I found prayers for justice instead of victory.  I found laments for the fathomless sorrow of war, which kills the souls of the living along with the bodies of the dead.

Among the prayers for soldiers, civilians, children and enemies, I found words to confess the sins of my own nation and to ask that we be made equal in our high trusts, reverent in our use of freedom, just in our exercise of power and generous in our protection of weakness.  Such prayers are neither antiwar nor pro-war; they do not choose sides . . . They suggest a different vision of unity.  It’s the kind of unity in which people of faith who do not agree on many things may still bring their deepest concerns to church instead of leaving them in the parking lot.

And the people of Reno FUMC asked only...What parking lot?  

Summer laughter through Fallen tears, John  

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August 2006

Dear Summer Con-SPIRIT-ors,

 I love the Holy Spirit!  First in that direct personal sense of the spark touched in us each morning -- We awake and arise to embrace that given day!  Then in more hidden corporate sense of connection we find in each other -- We grow aware and alive to the gifts and graces shared by us all.  I always wonder how better to honor the whole Church Year – or “Earth-Liturgical Year, if we will – especially the months after Pentecost!  So-called “Ordinary Time” – from 23 to 28 Sundays depending on date of Easter!  All things “faith” follow from Easter.

Months of the Holy Spirit!  Marked less by gospel events of Jesus’ life – Advent through Epiphany, Lent, Passion and Eastertide, to Pentecost – than by life and work of the Church as the Body of Christ!  Filled and led by the Spirit in whom Christ “returns” to us every day!  No longer awaiting some oft-ideological, far-off vision and version of “the Second Coming!”  Have we got “the First Coming” right yet?  What about conditions of war – violence, vengeance, poverty, oppression, ignorance, isolation -- Jesus comes to overcome?

So I offer us “Five First Sundays of Spirit-tide!”  May they call us to a range of insight and application of the sanctifying and sustaining work of the Spirit.  (Look at The Hymnal some time – 200 hymns under “The Power of the Holy Spirit!” -- Prevenient!  Justifying!  Sanctifying & Perfecting! -- Another 200 under “The Community of Faith” and “A New Heaven and a New Earth!”) --

1)  July 2, Independence Sunday – We lifted up our love of this land and God’s Spirit-led “Exodus” call of all peoples to liberation and to justice! 

2)  August 6, Hiroshima/Nagasaki Remembrance Sunday – We lift up our national and transnational addiction to weapons and our global responsibility as the only nation ever to drop atomic bombs.  

3)  September 3, Labor Sunday – We lift up our lives as “co-creators” with God, “co-workers” with one another -- and with Jesus the carpenter!  Churches and Unions called “Sisters and Brothers” together!

4)  October 1, World Communion Sunday – We lift up the Church universal and inclusive and our commitment to ecumenical, interfaith conversation and cooperation.

5)  November 5, All Saints Sunday – We lift up our mothers and fathers and martyrs in faith – of this congregation and beyond – whose lives in faith still touch and shape ours -- remembering “all saints” to come after us, too!

PLUS, 6) December 3, First Sunday of Advent!

 

Melt Us, Mold Us, Fill Us, Use Us – Love, John

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May 2006

Eastertide Riders,

I write this as I come from the carefully-billed “U.S. Senator Harry Reid’s Northern Nevada Faith-Based Services Summit.”  I found it quite a let-down from Easter Sunday two days before.  Now there was a faith-based event!  This event was money based – not even that but the illusion-and-lure-of-money-based!  It was hard to see the faith-based planning to it.  The premise was that a well-meaning bi-partisan government has embraced the wisdom of working with peoples of faith, among others, already in the trenches for social service and social change.

In fact, that always has been possible.  But now the premise is fully politicized.  In fact, there are no faith-based monies available through the whole government.  Such legislation never passed.  These monies are a purely political creation of the administration, a “patronage system” such as we trained on in Chicago under Mayor Daley.  The monies go where the votes may follow!

The presenters at the summit – good people all – presumed we were there not for faith but for money.  The starting point was the crumbs from the table (Just compare social with military services in the budget and para-budget!) funneled from the president’s office through the president’s appointed cabinet officers.  The only actual funding is for the purpose of getting us all to believe and engage in the process!  It is to turn us from being pastoral and prophetic in the most open honest senses and spirits to being political and partisan in the most narrow self-conning, -compromising, -deceiving, -deprecating senses and spirits.

Jesus rose from the grave for this?  For us all to gather and strategize with the money-lenders and -launderers for the sake of preserving our temples?  When Jesus says the only temple we need from the third day after his death is the temple of his own body – the Church?  Let others be who they will and do what they have to do.  But, for God’s sake, let the Church be the Church!

Sisters and brothers, I fear there are no truly faith-based funders but us!  WE have to decide, individually and together, what this risen Christ with risen Spirit calling a risen Church into all the world, starting at our congregational doorstep – What is this worth to us?  What cost are we willing to pay?  What time & energy will we put in?  What priority will we give the life and work of the church as the Church?  Where we are and throughout the world?

Let’s not pretend there is anyone come but Jesus to rescue us.  Let the evidence of our rescue, our deliverance from bondage to powers of fear and of death, be so compelling as to convict us – and others who may wonder at us – at the hope that is in us in spite of it all!

Praise the Lord – Christ Is Risen!  CHRIST IS RISEN INDEED! 

Riding on, Tiding on,    John  

 

April 2006

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August 2005

Dear Summer-Weatherers!

The Gulf Coast of Florida?  In August?  Heat?  Even hurricanes?  That’s where Julie and I will be.  We’ve made it to 40 years of marriage.  We’ve learned, by grace, to celebrate anywhere, everywhere.  Besides, it’s free!  My grandparents settled in Naples, FL, when it was but a fishing village.  It is now a sprawling and costly metropolis.  But a tiny condo stays in the family just two blocks from sandy beach and toasty waters.  We could all paraphrase Langston Hughes: “We’ve known waters” of life – “waters ancient as the world and older than the flow of blood in human veins.”  I wrote this poem of generations following my father’s death in 1999.  It’s called “For Dad, at Lent” –

My dad stands / still in the gulfstream waters.

He barely rocks / with the wash of the tide.

He is unwavering. / My dad is talking.

Sometimes he’s talking to me.

His dad stands there, too. / Now I don’t have to listen.

I swim around, all different strokes.

I float, I dive.  I drag / my feet along the bottom.

With my toes, I seek out / sand dollars, starfish and shells.

I dive, I float.  I stay down / as long as I can.

I poke around their ankles. / I slip shells in their shorts.

They take notice.

The waters cover my life: / Hollywood to the Fox River,

Twin Lakes to Tides Inn, / Naples to the Ohio,

The Dicle to Lake Michigan, / Fresno to this ocean-bound Bay.

The waters have me covered. / Without them / I cannot live.

Still / they are standing there. / Soon,

my sons, stand with them.

  I float, I dive. / I dive, I float. / I swim to live!

Now we add the banks of the Truckee!  “Truckee Jubilee!”  By whose waters we stand as a Tree of Life!  Our leaves for the healing of all the nations.  I swim to live as I strengthen full use of my legs.  Julie and I swim to live as we plunge new depths of endurance in relationship.  We people-fishes everywhere swim to live together as we learn to share the one precious water of life for all on this earth!

Come on in!  It’s fine!  Love, John

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June 2005

Dear Pentecost Empowerees!

Once more we are zapped with Holy and Wholly (our youth might add Holly) Spirit!  Becoming “one” in the Spirit – not so much conforming, being like everyone else – but discovering even in difference we are essentially “whole!”   Some “globalization” seems to mean “one size fits all,” the bigger the better – the Wal-Marts, the McDonald’ses, the megachurches.  I prefer “glottalization,” the gift of tongues -- every size speaks for itself, with plenty of room for us all!.

Different parts and rooms of our church life and building lend themselves to different ages, different sizes.  We give rapt time and attention to children in worship each Sunday.  We nurture our youth through that strange phase of self-definition that both joins us and sets us apart.  I hope a growing number of big and old persons (like me!) will find ways to reach and relate to the smaller and younger.  I hope some who can, will keep checking the great basement spaces used by children and youth, to be sure we are keeping them well!  We are committed that all our policies and practices protect the absolute right of our children to safety and security.  And we know that right extends to all children everywhere.

I SAY THANK YOU to us for welcoming the 3-day “Chrysalis Flights” for 10^th to 12th graders (similar to adult weekends like “Walk to Emmaus”) held in Northern Nevada for the very first time:  the girls flight June 23-26; the boys flight July 7-10^th.   Some 75 young people will be using our every available space for those times!  Like cuddly caterpillars becoming breath-taking butterflies, they will be growing beyond themselves in the loving, forgiving, liberating, healing and whole-making power of Jesus’ Spirit!  What a privilege to watch them grow – in faith and commitment, in care and support – for home, church, school, and community!  While Chrysalis shares building use expenses with us, what these weekends give and receive is beyond calculation.  Please talk with Pat Smith, Nancy Wong or Holly Waltz-Watkins for details.  See also http://upperroom.org/chrysalis/.

Some of our 6^th and 7^th graders just spent an overnight on Confirmation Retreat with Bishop Shamana at Camp Lodestar!  We are getting the word out about conference camping. All ages and sizes, all functions and forms of family and home, make up the larger ever-extending family of God.  We not only surround, but are surrounded by children and youth and parents of every description who may learn to treasure the time and the space, the life and the work of the church.  Our birth and baptism, by water and Spirit, connect and commit us to others.  Each Sunday we share the Spirit of peace with whomever we happen to find ourselves – for all are the family of God in Christ!

Shalom, John

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May 2005

As I recovered from foot surgery (Thanks for all the calls, notes and prayers!), Terri Schaivo and Pope John Paul II, their lives ending in very different circumstances and ways, gave me much to reflect about.  Our biblical faith is “eschatological.”  We believe in “the ending” of things.  We may differ on both the meanings of the end and the means by which we get to the end.  But we cannot escape prophetic language, some attributed to Jesus, calling upon us to live as if “the ending” were near.  During this Resurrection Time of the year, we specially remember to “live with our deaths,” as freely, as fully, as fearlessly as we can.

UM Bishop William Willimon encourages us, “Eschatology is the very basis of prophetic action.  We are able to act with courage and conviction because we know the last chapter of the story.”  It never hurts, under any duress, to “sneak a peak” at the Resurrection and at the healing of nations in the New Jerusalem at the end of Revelation!  For me the Trinity means the Holy Spirit is always leading us to a “third” or “alternative” view, vision and voice.  I’d like us to consider taking up the Book of Acts this summer as a “book of gifts” of new ways of feeling, thinking, listening, talking, seeing, doing.  I’d like to do so in ways that are economical, ecological, and ecumenical – new life in the world household of God!

Willimon says our prophetic testimony is not so much “our judgment” upon the world, for that is up to God, but “our joyful announcement in word and deed, that God is bringing all things to [God’s self] in Christ Jesus!”  One way of “the ending” is offered by the popular “Left Behind” books and now the TV “Revelation” series.  Some choose to escape what we cannot embrace, to run from what we cannot confront.  Colman McCarthy says there are at least three choices: fight, flight, or friendship!  Making “friends” of the “irreconcilable” parts and pieces, persons and peoples of life and of ourselves seems pretty basic to healing and wholeness.

Amazingly, there is also much thinking, talking, proposing, even planning today around “the endings” of

Homelessness! (www.endhomelessness.org) 
Hunger! (www.bread.org, www.hungernomore.org) 
Poverty! (www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/endofpoverty)
Even war! (www.peopleforpeace.net)  How different is that?  How biblical?  Remember polio?  Some day, please God, remember AIDS? . . .

Pope John Paul II – “The waging of war is not inevitable or unchangeable.  Humanity is not destined to self-destruction.” 

Arundhati Roy – “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.  On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”

Awaiting the Holy Spirit, with You, John

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March 2005

Dear Hearts,

Lent invites us to wear our ashes on our foreheads and our hearts on our sleeves.  To let out of hiding, out of fearing, out of sheltering, out of protecting, our innermost/outermost selves.  To make our hearts vulnerable to all the world!  We seek to be led by our hearts, foremost among “body parts and spirit gifts,” for where our hearts, our most deeply personal self, may lead us, there, says Jesus, we find our real treasure, one nothing destroys and no one takes from us!

Hearts look the same breaking or mending, or doing both at once.  Like Lent, life often comes to the crack in the middle, whichever way the sides are moving.  (Are we right- and left-hearted as we are handed and brained?)  Our hearts are made for stretching beyond all destruction and loss, all pain and all grief.  They are where God dwells as one who “sees what is done in private.”  In this, our most private of places.  God, only God, alone finally knows, and judges, and values our hearts.

God knows the giving of our every heart, the praying of our every heart, the fasting of our every heart.  God knows the living, the loving, the longing, the losing of our every heart.  God invites us in this season to let our hearts come out, not only to pray but to play – to a playing kind of praying, a receiving kind of giving, a feasting kind of fasting, -- a healing kind of breaking, a welcoming kind of leavetaking, a living kind of dying.

Blessed be you, / heart of matter, hand of God, heart of God.

Blessed be you, harsh matter, / barren soil, stubborn rock.

Blessed be you, perilous matter, / violent sea, untamable passion.

Blessed be you, mighty matter, / March of evolution, the always, ever new.

Blessed be you, powerful matter, / in whom the multitude of monads are bound.

Blessed be you, mortal matter, dying / you lead to the heart of all that exists.

You batter us and dress our wounds, / You resist then yield to us,

You wreck and build, / Shackle and liberate, / You sap of our souls.

Hand of God, / Flesh of Christ, / You I bless.  You I bless.

In your oceans stirs the Spirit; / In your fountains, our soul’s source.

In your clay slumbers the incarnate Word. / At your molten core seethes the heart of God.

Raise me up, sweet matter. / Take me in your arms,

Where flesh is so transparent / It is the memberance of infinity.

Raise me up, fierce matter. / Let the universe’s embrace melt me,

Melt me / In the fiery heart of God. 

(Wendy Wright, “Heart of Matter”)

Lenten Love, John

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February 2005

I like to say we improvise this Epiphany trip in search of full hope and scope of God’s promise.  We make it up with God as we both go along.  For the reality of the faith-and-life journey is, as soon as we think we’ve come to the end, to any “final answer,” God takes off in another direction and does another “new thing.”  

I see our congregation going through generational changes.  We look for new ways to give and maximize resources, including the gift and the use of our building.  We reach out in new ways to our community and invite in new people to see who we are and what we offer.  We try new things in programs with and for youth and children and their families.  We experiment in times and styles and contents of worship.  And we make up leadership and organization as we go along!  There’s plenty of room, plenty of chance, for us all!!  Jump in.

For instance, we held two open conversations about “social justice” ministries, to take advantage of some energies and anxieties in and around the recent elections.  We wonder out loud together how to live out in new ways differences and diversities of orientation and opinion, of attitude and action, toward public issues and events.  I agree with Rabbi Myra Soifer.  She confesses to her congregation at Temple Sinai a renewed calling to take her public work, her prophetic work, in some ways her “political” work, more passionately again. 

She knows, I know, conflict happens among us.  Jewish tradition calls it “disagreement for heaven’s sake.”  It happens not in spite of but because of who we are as a community of faith hoping to keep up with God.  We care so much.  The challenges are so profound.  God is so committed to the poor and to the earth.  We can disagree without becoming disagreeable.  We can find what unites us as well and build on our common ground in Christ and the Church.

I see my work as made up of at least four “P’s” – Pastor and Prophet, Preacher and Priest.  Those are the work of relating to needs and desires in both the personal and the public realm, and the work of both witness and service, what we call “word and table,” in worship which lies at our center as a congregation.  These all come of my ordination to “word, sacrament, and order,” which is organizing in both congregation and larger community, for justice and for peace.  Bishop Shamana just sent a letter of support for workers’ rights to organize in the Quebecor printing plant in Fernley.  She just joined in a public appeal to the governor of California to commute a death sentence into life imprisonment.  And she will be at the Nevada Test Site for Holy Week in March to protest the militarization and nuclearization of our world.  We are free to join with her.

The longer I’m in this life and work I find, the more things change, the more things stay the same.  And vice-verse!

Love, John

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January 2005

Happy New Year!

As I write we are approaching the longest nights of the old year.  John of the Cross gives us the image of “the dark night of the soul.”  One of my “favs,” Bruce Springsteen, sings of “Dancing in the Dark.”  I suggest the preaching theme of “Living/Working the Darkness” for Epiphany, continuing “Mountains & Plains, Highs & Lows” for the Winter Season.   Please sort through the invisibilities of your life and ours and wonder with me what and how to bring to light!

Church Conference Nov. 22 began with the DS’s moving remembrance of reunion with his sisters in North Korea – speaking of light in the darkness!  Many shared highlights of the passing year and hopes for the coming one.  We are adding a Lay Leader and creating a Building Use Committee.  We are making Stewardship a year-round call to the biblical living of giving.  Once more, we revised our “Prayer of/for/with Our Church” –

Lord God, we pray to keep up with You who are making all things new!

We pray to be outreaching, embracing, accepting, reconciling,

restoring to right relationship, growing together and with You.

Jesus is always but only for us our beginning point with You.

Your mysteries to us soar far beyond comprehension.

We know You by other faces, other names, other faiths, other works.

You call us to be as family with others and with ourselves

 

● to love the diversity of all and respect the identity of each,

● to love the complexity of all and respect the integrity of each.

 

We pray to be full open, expansive and inclusive.

We pray to be fully downtown, cosmopolitan and creative.

You know we consist of believers and agnostics,

 

● skeptical and conventional, hopeful and despairing,

● all colors, all cultures, all classes, all conditions,

● of varying orientations and lifestyles.

 

Our common desire is to love You whom we call “God”

● by loving neighbors we meet on the life-and-faith journey,

● by doing justice, loving kindness, walking humbly,

● no matter what life-in-faith, love-in-faith may cost us.

We agreed early in the new year to set out upon a “visioning” or “long-term planning” process together.  May this prayer-in-progress begin us.

I said of myself, “I feel the personal need to renew a commitment to stop the war and to find alternatives to the violence we seem willing to do to each other in virtually every dimension of life.”  Will you help me?  May I help you? 

“There are lots of perspectives and points of view and a range of commitments among us. . . . The potential to grow congregationally is here and increasing all the time. . . . We are called to live, fully and faith-fully, in critical times.  I cannot imagine a more worthy challenge, nor people I’d rather face it with! Thanks.”

John Auer, Pastor

COMING SUNDAYS –

• Epiphany Sunday  (“Three Kings/Tres Reyes”) January 2
• Baptism of the Lord/Covenant Renewal/Leadership Recognition January 9
• Dr. King’s Birthday/Human Relations Offering January 16
• Reconciling Congregations Sunday/Church Council January 23
• Youth Sunday/Soup-er Bowl January 30
• Transfiguration/Healing Sunday February 6
• ASH WEDNESDAY February 9!

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December 2004

Dear Adventistas,

When the Youth Group last summer set out on their mountainous, musical, missional mystery trip to Yellowstone, they were following Jesus up the mountain to pray!  Mountains loom traditionally as meeting points – heaven and earth, divine and human, promised and real, eternal and now. Spiritual travel is a quest, a climb, an approach, an address to infinities of time and space.  Mountains illuminate and reveal to us “the big picture” of life and our tiny place in it.  Soon we return to the valleys, but filled with new views & vistas, new vision & voice.

We enter the Earth Church Year, Winter, Advent/Christmas/Epiphany, to the call – “Come!  Let’s go up the mountain of our God!  Let us journey in the light of God!”  We will worship and preach around “Mountains and Plains, Highs and Lows: Wait and Watch, Imagine and Dream!”  We affirm both the highs and the lows of the holidays and of our everyday lives, -- both the magnificence and the mercy of God who “sits high and looks low.” 

We look for God’s highness made lowness in the rebirth of Jesus at the center of this season’s cycle.   We realize it is the birth of the best in each and in all of us.  Each