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July/August 2003 Wednesday
Evening Worship — 7:00-7:40 pm
July 2 - Vespers
Service Jazz
Vespers Notes July 13 Jazz Vespers has
been canceled due to a scheduling conflict. On
Sunday, July 27, our worship service will celebrate the founding of San
Francisco’s Young Men’s Christian Association 150 years ago.
This service is a part of the YMCA’s Sesquicentennial
Celebration, and honors the role of the Rev. Albert Williams, Old
First’s founding pastor, in its establishment. A founding meeting of the
YMCA was held on July 18, 1853 at the Pine Street Baptist Church, but the
official organizing meeting was held a week later, July 25, at First
Presbyterian of San Francisco, as our church was known in those days. Rev.
Williams was a member of the founding committee, which included one
representative of each of the Protestant denominations; tradition has it
that he wrote the draft of the YMCA’s constitution. Worship
Planning Retreat August 30 On
Saturday, August 30, our Worship Committee will hold a half-day retreat to
plan the service for World Communion Sunday in October. If
you’re interested in participating in this planning, put the day on your
calendar now and watch for an announcement about the location. For more
information, see Alison Armstrong. Church
Town Hall Meeting after worship Sunday, August 31 Topic: “Living with
G6.0106b” (Strategic Task Force Report) Senior
Center to be Renamed in Honor of Doris Krauss by Sarah Taber On
Saturday, September 6, our Senior Center Advisory Committee will sponsor a
catered luncheon to celebrate the Center’s 40th birthday and to rename
the Center in honor of Doris Krauss.
Invitations will be sent out early in August. Doris
was the Center’s first permanent director; serving from 1966 until 1994.
In many ways it is the embodiment of Doris’s vision and her years of
loving labor on behalf of older adults. The Center was founded in 1963 to
provide support, companionship, recreation, education, plus a weekly
delicious meal, to many of the city’s elder residents. It’s
really hopping these days, under Judith Dancer’s spirited leadership,
with around 50 participants each week and a corps of volunteers from our
church and the community. Please
join us on September 6 as we celebrate the last 40 years, honor Doris
Krauss as we rename the Center for her, and support this wonderful
ministry of our church. Potluck
Supper Planned for September 20 Before
your fall social calendar gets too crowded, make a note of Saturday,
September 20. We’ll have an
Old-Fashioned Potluck Supper at the church at 6 pm. The
Congregational Care Committee is now planning a competition (with prizes!)
for such things as Best Old-Fashioned Recipe, Most Original Recipe, Best
Dessert. Watch for details. Pastor's
Ponderings Dear Friends, Just
a couple of thoughts: (not very deep thoughts, but thoughts all the same.) The
Summer brings transitions. Katherine Markov has taken her leave of us and
Leslie Veen is preparing to come to Old First in August. Leslie is an
Intern from San Francisco Theological Seminary as Katherine was. She is a
second year student studying to become a Presbyterian Pastor. Leslie was
Moderator of the Deacons at her home church, Calvary Presbyterian in San
Francisco, before going to Seminary. She has many years of Elementary
School Education experience. As
with Katherine, Leslie will be working with our Children's Church School
for much of her time, but she will also be looking for a "well
rounded" education here. We'll be giving her opportunities to preach
and lead worship, and she'll be working with a variety of committees. By
all means welcome Leslie when she comes in August! (We've lucked out with
Interns two years in a row - let's enjoy it.) On
July 12 we will have the first annual, "Have a Good Time Old First
Golf Outing." I have one
basic rule when I play golf - never keep score . . . and I encourage any
of you who want to come out to the course and enjoy a day with your Old
First friends, to let me or Jonathan Lee know ASAP. We'll be playing the
course at Tilden Park. (We'll arrange transportation somehow.) Hope
to see you there. Have a great summer! Grace
and peace,
Sam Alexander Strategic
Response Task Force Report, Take Two In
the June edition of Shared Life there was a description of the report
submitted by the SRTF at the April 2003 Session meeting. The article
indicated that the report was accepted by Session, but that statement was
premature. While
Session recognized the fine line the task force walked, there was a major
objection to some of the wording used by the task force. Of particular
concern were the sections of the report which stated the intent was not to
ordain or install any person who makes or proposes to make a public
declaration of self-acknowledged sin together with a public refusal to
repent. The Session appreciated the fact that the SRTF was referring to
the entirety of the 253 items considered by the Book of Confessions to be
sins. Nonetheless, in the context of G-6.0106b. Session felt the wording
in the report was hurtful and implied an intolerable "don't ask,
don't tell" position. In
good Presbyterian fashion, the Session referred the SRTF report to the
Planning Committee for additional work. This committee worked on two
aspects: the wording in question and whether Session could technically
charge the Nominating Committee. The
Clerk of Session asked for a ruling from the Clerk of our Presbytery
concerning the appropriateness of the "charge" concept. After
receiving a response from Presbytery, the Planning Committee decided it
was more correct to make a "recommendation to the ruling elders"
on the Nominating Committee rather than to "charge". The
Planning Committee also decided to strike the offending sentences from the
report. A revised report was presented to the May 2003 Session. After
further discussion and modification. the report was accepted and the SRTF
was dismissed with thanks. It
will be up to the Planning Committee to see to the implementation of the
recommendations of the report. The August 2003 Town Hall Meeting will use
the SRTF report as accepted by Session as its topic for discussion. The
task force report will be ready for distribution after the June 2003
Session meeting. See Jeanne Kirkwood for a copy. Church
Picnic Offers Foggy Fun On
June 8, nineteen hardy souls
celebrated the end of the church school year by trekking out to Crissy
Field for a picnic on a chilly, foggy day.
Although
our fearless planners did not have a grill on hand, or plates, forks,
napkins, etc., Marilyn Campbell got things right by making trips to the
Marina Safeway. We then had a
“loaves and fishes” moment when three deli sandwiches stretched into
food for almost ten people. Others
brought dishes to share. After
a bite to eat, it was time to play a modified game of wiffle ball.
Jemma Yamauchi led the way with an awesome display of hitting,
running and sliding prowess. She,
Abigail Lee, Mary Russell, Pat Devine, Ariel Krietzman, Nina Krietzman,
and Esther Kim combined to score approximately 102 runs off the washed-up
pitching of Jonathan Lee, while Forest Cummings manned home plate.
Later,
Don Pender played requests on his soprano saxophone, including a few
favorite hymns. Bart Crosby
helped Don learn the tune to "San Francisco" while the rest of
the group enjoyed the time together. Other attendees included Sam
Alexander, Becca Smith, Larry Browne, Connie Johnson, Hannah Lee, Brenda
Riolo, and Lori Yamauchi. Lectionary July 6 - 2 Sam. 5:1-5,
9-10; Ps. 48; 2 Cor. 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13 July 13 - 2 Sam. 6:1-5,
12b-19; Ps. 24; Eph. 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29 July 20 - 2 Sam. 7:1-14a;
Ps. 89:20-37; Eph. 2:11-22;
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56 July 27 - 2 Sam. 11:1-15;
Ps. 14; Eph. 3:14-21; John 6:1-21 Aug 3 - 2 Sam.
11:26-12:13a; Ps. 51:1-12; Eph. 4:1-16; John 6:24-35 Aug 10 - 2 Sam. 18:5-9,
15, 31-33; Ps. 130; Eph. 4:25-5:2;
John 6:35, 41-51 Aug 17 - 1 Kings 2:10-12;
3:3-14; Ps. 111; Eph. 5:15-20; John 6:51-58 Aug 24
- 1 Kings 8:(1, 6, 10-11) 22-30, 41-43; Ps. 84; Eph. 6:10-20;
John 6:56-69 Aug 31 - S. of Sol.
2:8-13; Ps. 45:1-2, 6-9; James 1:17-27;
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 Sept 7 - Prov. 22:1-2,
8-9, 22-23; Ps. 125;
James 2:1-10 (11-13) 14-17; Mark 7:24-37 Welcome to
Jonathan Edward Taylor, the son of Andy and Susan McCormick Taylor, born
in May 2003. Cultivating
a Stillness Practice by Judith Dancer, Senior
Center Director On
Sundays, July 27 and August 24 from 7-9 p.m., I will teach introductory
classes on the value of cultivating a stillness practice in everyday life
— meditation with a twist! Classes
will be held in Lincoln Park’s sanctuary at 417-31st Ave. (at Clement);
donations will be accepted for the Senior Center at Lincoln Park. I
plan a six-week series on the same topic starting in September. My purpose
is offering these classes is to share my skills as a teacher and spiritful
person with the churches I work for.
It is my hope that members of Old First and Lincoln Park will join
together to take this class to create a linking of communities, sharing
ourselves with each other and connecting with Spirit. We
will discuss and explore stillness in relationship to touch, movement,
sound and the breath, using these modalities to inform our stillness and
to sit in open attention, exploring sensations and the body’s wisdom.
My
background is as a dance, healing and movement educator, specializing in
finding new ways to connect with ourselves through the body.
I’ve studied a wide range of body-based work, including
Feldenkrais, Tamalpa-based work, Continuum, mime-based acting, clowning,
Bioenergetics, belly dancing, improvisation and stilt dancing.
One of my favorite times of the day is when I sit in stillness,
communing with Spirit and listening. For
more information, contact me at judith@oldfirst.org. Why
Go to Church When
There's So Much Good Stuff on TV?
Reason #2 -- For the Peace
by Rosemary Bledsoe "For
you do not come to us as strangers, but as sisters and brothers in the
Lord." That was part of the service which welcomed me into a new
congregation and a new denomination when I joined Old First Presbyterian
Church in 1982, and it was something I had already felt — the first time
I walked into the place, in fact. My
initial response to that sense of belonging had been to slip in and out
the back door. I brought my daughter to Sunday School and attended the
adult class myself, usually with half my attention directed in the
direction of her room, wondering how she was doing. We would go home before the worship service. I told myself
that I'd asked quite enough of my shy little girl and I shouldn't push her
any more. There
was more to it than that, of course. I hadn't come the long way from
Tennessee (by way of Florida, Michigan and Missouri) to San Francisco just
to wind up back in the Bible Belt. I hadn't spent forty years learning to be my own person just
to find myself living the
life of my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents ..... I had a lot of reasons why I shouldn't be in church. I
fought God for my life, and I lost. One Sunday we stayed for the worship
service. The
sanctuary, even in an indifferent state of repair, was palatial compared
to the plain little country church that had been the center of our
community when I grew up. The service was more formal. The officiants and
choir were dressed in actual robes! If there had been kneeling and statues I would have bolted
out of there like a scared rabbit, but the rock-ribbed Calvinist restraint
resembled my own sober and serious Methodist upbringing, the hymns were
familiar, and something in my heart melted a little. There
was one strange event in the service, though: the Passing of the Peace,
which I'd never experienced or even heard of before. You shake the hands
of the people around you and say "Peace to you" and they wish
you Peace in return. I was
confused. It wasn't even Christmas. What did Peace have to do with
anything? Though
I didn’t understand it or even see the need for it, Peace slipped into
my life, unsought and unseen. There was only a little sliver of it at
first. I slept better, I dealt with problems better, and I took all the
credit for myself. It took a
while to realize that it only
worked on weeks that began with worship on Sunday.
When I didn’t go to church, there was no clear and Peaceful space
in my life. “Hey,
God, that’s not fair! After all I’ve been through, I deserve a
break!” I fought God for my Peace, too, and I lost again. I’ve
been fighting God for one thing and another ever since. I always lose. I
never get my own way. And every time I lose what I want, I get what I
need. Zach’s
Legacy -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Many
of us remember Zach Long. Tim Hart-Andersen was our pastor in the last
year of Zach’s life. At the Denver General Assembly in May, 450
Presbyterians from all over the country heard Tim offer this tribute to
Zach at the Covenant Network Luncheon. Thousands are now involved in and
influenced by the work of Covenant Network, a legacy of Zach’s
influence. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I
only began dealing honestly with my own homophobia when I was called to be
the pastor of a church in downtown San Francisco. It was 1990. The AIDS
pandemic among gay men was in full swing, and it hit Old First Church
hard. It was my first parish; I had not even done a memorial
service before. The learning curve would
be steep. When
the pastor search committee interviewed me, they asked my opinion of the
denomination's stance on gays and lesbians. I told them I supported the
church's position -- at which point I expected they would put me on the
next boat to Alcatraz for some serious rehab. Instead they called me as
their pastor. Alcatraz would have been too easy! God wanted me to grow, so
I found myself as the minister of a church right in the heart of one of
the largest gay communities in the world. The
week after I arrived I was told to go visit Zach Long, an elder on our
session, a true southern gentleman originally from North Carolina, a
lifelong Presbyterian and alumnus of Davidson College. Zach was well known
in the gay community. They chose him as Grand Marshal for the Pride parade
that year. In our church he was involved in the worship committee and with
runaway youth in a local ministry we had started. Zach
had AIDS and was moving toward death. My visits with him over the next
nine months became a kind of Tuesdays with Morrie experience for me. In
that book, Mitch Albom, the author, spends time with Morrie Schwartz, his
former professor. He writes, The last class of my old professor's life
took place once a week, in his house. The subject was the Meaning of Life.
It was taught from experience. No books were required, yet many topics
were covered, including love, work, community, family, forgiveness, and,
finally, death. The last lecture was brief, only a few words. A funeral
was held in lieu of graduation. Zach
Long, this Presbyterian elder who loved his church even though his church
could not fully accept him, became a mentor to me. From him I learned that
being gay is first and foremost about being a human being made in the
image of God, not about having sex. It may seem obvious to us now, but
that was a revelation to me back then. On one of my visits, Zach startled
me when he asked, "Did you think that gay men had sex all the time,
and that was basically all they did in life?" "Of
course not, Zach," I said -- saying to myself, "Come think of
it, that's pretty much what I used to assume." Why is it that the
church is so focused on sexual activity as the central defining quality of
the life of a person who happens to be gay or lesbian, while for the rest
of us sexuality -- if it is considered at all -- is generally viewed
simply as a piece of the whole, or as a healthy expression of love between
two people? We're still working on that question in the church. One
of Zach's last wishes was to see his old friend Randy Taylor. I drove him
up to San Francisco Theological Seminary and waited as they talked for two
hours. Zach died a few weeks later. We
were told it would be a big memorial service. The police reserved parking
for a block in both directions. About a half hour before the service I
heard a huge roar outside. I looked out to see the Dykes on Bikes had just
arrived. I knew then this was going to be another one of those learning
experiences. About 30 large Harleys were now parked in front of the
church. A wildly colorful assortment of people streamed into the building:
hundreds from the gay community, quite a few tattered and pierced and
strung-out street kids from the homeless ministry Zach had supported, and
most of our congregation. The
sanctuary was packed. In that Service in Witness to the Resurrection we
worshipped God and sang hymns and gave thanks to God for the life of that
remarkable man. We recalled how Zach had served church and community
faithfully all his life. I read Romans 8 and preached about the power of
God's love made evident in Zach's life in so many ways. The
reception afterwards in the Fellowship Hall was a marvel to behold: our
blue-haired little old ladies and Presbyterian business leaders and
lawyers, all who loved Zach, mixing with the most "out" crowd I
had ever observed inside a church. As I surveyed the scene it occurred to
me that it looked an awful lot like the reign of God having cookies and
tea in the church basement. I knew that my education was only beginning. Our
experience with Zach and the other young men in our church that we buried
led us back to the Bible. We studied those texts that many see as the
scriptural warrants for discriminating against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and
transgender persons. Our wrestling with those few passages finally led me
to conclude that I had been wrong to support the exclusion of a particular
class of church members from ordination. Let sessions and presbyteries
decide as they do with everybody else: on a case-by-case basis. I
am convinced that the resolution to the question of fully including gay
and lesbian people in the church will need to be not only biblical but
biographical, not only political but pastoral. That's why it is important
for us to recover the historic role of our local governing bodies who know
the Zach Longs of this world, and the hundreds of other gay and lesbian
church members God is calling to serve. .......
I remember the service of lament we had at Old First after the first
Amendment A lost. In it I said how hard it is for those of us accustomed
to being in the majority now to find ourselves marginalized in the church.
Afterwards, we held a reception in that same Fellowship Hall where we had
celebrated Zach Long's life several years earlier. Janie Spahr came up to
me. She hugged me and said, "Welcome to the margins, Tim." But
then she went on. "The first thing to learn here," she said,
" is that this is not actually the margin. It's the horizon." For the complete text of
Tim’s talk, |
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