July/August 2005  

Another Chance to Clear Out     

Did you miss the Welcome Ministry’s Spring Cleaning collection in April?  Here’s another chance to clear your home of unwanted but useful items and help the Welcome Ministry at the same time.

They will be accepting items on Saturday, July 30 from 3 to 5 pm, on Sunday, August 1, before 1:30 pm, and on Tuesday, August 3, from noon to 1:30 pm.

Bring clean clothes, small appliances, small TV sets, lamps, books, artwork and nice knick-knacks.

These donations will be taken to the Community Thrift Store in the name of the Welcome Ministry, which will receive funds in return.

Church Town Hall Meeting 

Sunday, July 31 following worship - "Let’s Talk about Marriage"

Familiar Faces in New Staff Roles

• Welcome Ministry Director Megan Rohrer has been retained as Old First’s new webmaster to update and overhaul our popular and informative website.

• In the fall, Yvonne Cheng will assume the new part-time staff position of Church School Director.

• At the same time, Erwin Barron will become a Consultant to the Church School , with particular emphasis on holidays and special events.

• Daniel Pearch has been named Interim Director of the Doris Krauss Senior Center for a period of six months.

Note from your friendly local transitional pastor

The Westminster Confession, written in 1647-8  during the long years of the Westminster Assembly, became a standard statement of Presbyterianism throughout the English-speaking world. Among the questions and answers contained in "The Shorter Catechism", which is based on the Confession, is the following: "What is the chief end of man?" The answer is, "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever".

This question and answer have for years provided me with both comfort and challenge. I tend toward introspection, which needs to find a healthy balance in physical activity and interaction with others. I am a perfectionist, which leads, at its extreme, to continual dissatisfaction with my own and the world's inevitable imperfection. Fortunately, the praise songs I learned as a new Christian in college, and the hymns I have sung in churches since then, have contributed to the process of my opening up to the larger reality of God's love and ultimate responsibility for the universe.

Beyond all of my questions, growing edges, and busy-ness, greater than all those concerns, aches and pains, and struggles, the bottom line, according to that catechetical Q & A, is the experience of joy and ease in the One who created all that is seen and unseen, and who loves each and every human being. Hidden in life's complexity and chaos, there is the heartbeat of eternal peace, if we would but slow down enough to hear it, and thus hear it beginning to beat in us. Soul-rest is found not in ceaseless accomplishment and movement, but in the attitude of trust in the God who is revealed in Scripture and the confessions of the church, in nature, prayer, and many unexpected places, that leads us to place our burdens at the foot of the Cross, knowing that we will receive wisdom and guidance as we need it. We get somewhere by letting go. Our endless need to be more, do more, and have more, which ultimately is debilitating and exhausting, is seen for what it is - based in our anxiety that we will be judged "not good enough" by neighbor and by God, and no doubt by ourselves. It is based in a religion of works, rather than in a relationship with the God of endless grace. The movement of the Holy Spirit dancing within, between, and beyond us, is enough, is what God wants, is all that is necessary.

Now of course this also applies to groups of individuals who are called together to form communities of faith, congregations. On one hand, we are taught by our culture that we are never enough. On the other hand, we are taught by our Christian tradition that God is sovereign, that Jesus is the true leader of the Church, that God provides for the grass of the field and the birds of the air, that faithfulness is more important than success, and that the Church exists for mission as a fire exists for burning. Usually the culture wins the battle, and we translate our tradition in the light of the idols of our age, and thus proceed to be very busy and anxious indeed, losing out on the "enjoy (God) forever" part of the catechism, in which "forever" includes the here and now. "Glorify", which means things like "worship", "elevate", "praise", and "exalt", we take as meaning "we have to work as hard as we can until we drop because if we do not the church will die". Score: Culture 2, Christians 0.

We as followers of Jesus are called to recapture both the true meaning of both "glorify" and "enjoy", that both our separate and shared lives may exude trust rather than anxiety, abundance rather than scarcity, generosity rather than stinginess, joy rather than fear, flexibility rather than rigidity, authenticity rather than pretense, all of which sound like the attributes of Jesus of Nazareth that drew us close to him in the first place.

 All right, so you and I are still learning, and will always be growing into the image of Christ. That is the Christian journey. It is this congregation's journey as well, whether you have a transitional or called pastor writing these letters, whether your membership, level of leadership involvement, bank balance, and so on, are full to bursting or not. The congregation models Christ's faith in God to the world around it. So let's try that "glorify" and "enjoy" thing, shall we?

Following is a prayer from the same period that produced the Confession and Catechism: "O God, who hast so greatly loved us, long sought us, and mercifully redeemed us; give us grace that in everything we may yield ourselves, our wills and our works, a continual thank offering unto thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen" (page 299, 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell; Morehouse Publishing, 1999).

The deep peace of God be with you and yours,

Jeff

Old Firsters March in Pride Parade        

Old First was proudly represented in San Francisco’s June 26 Pride Parade this year by Daniel Pearch, Erwin Barron, Jeanne Kirkwood, Ted and Betsy Chiao, Forrest Cummings, Sidney Hollar, Alexis Davis, Robert Wood, Alison Armstrong, Bryan Nichols, John Fritz and Pam Byers, most of whom were extra-visble in their Old First T-shirts.

They passed out “Presbyterian kisses” and flyers (designed by Erwin) with an invitation to find “the new wine of a warm and inclusive love” at LGBT-friendly congregations in the Bay Area.

Session Notes from the June 21 Meeting           

• Jeff Cheifetz’ contract as Interim Pastor has been renewed for another year.

• Ted Chiao, newly-installed Elder, is the new moderator of the Evangelism Committee.

• The lock on the kitchen door has been changed. It can no longer be opened with the same key that opens the outside door.

Wedding Bells

by Pam Byers

On July 4, Megan Rohrer and Sage Currie will be married at the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco .  Their reception will follow, at Old First.

This is more than simply a tactful way of resolving competing  church loyalties – even though it is true that Sage is deeply involved in the Swedenborgian church and Megan is a much loved member of our community.  Rather, it arises from differences in our churches’ polities and policies.

In December, Megan and Sage brought a request to our session that they be married at Old First.   The session discussed it at length, over two meetings, and reluctantly decided to refuse the request.  Under current Presbyterian law, Old First would have been entirely free to host a Holy Union;  Jeff Cheifetz could entirely legally have performed a service invoking God’s blessing on them and their life together.  In this regard, Presbyterians are actually more permissive than most other mainline denominations.  (A Permanent Judicial Commission [“supreme court”] decision – which Steve Taber actually helped write – gave pastors broad latitude to bless couples and others; and we successfully defeated a Book of Order amendment five years ago to outlaw holy unions.)

However, Presbyterian law draws a distinction between services of blessing and marriage ceremonies, which are still clearly defined as “civil contract[s] between a man and a woman.”  As it happens, there is a case working its way through the church courts in our neighboring presbytery of Redwoods ( Marin County and north) about just this topic.  And Megan and Sage want — reasonably enough, in my view — to be “married,” not simply “blessed.”

By contrast, the Swedenborgian Church actually permits marriages between same-gender couples.  In fact, as a delegate to the most recent Swedenborgian national meeting, Sage was the spokesperson for the amendment that changed their polity to permit same-sex marriages.  So they will be able to take advantage of the new policy of her church.

(Background information:  Megan,  just graduated from the Pacific School of Religion, will seek ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church through their Extraordinary Candidacy Process.  Sage, who also just graduated from PSR, grew up in the Swedenborgian Church and expects to serve a Swedenborgian church.)

Old First’s session strongly disagrees with our current denominational polity.  We are not currently pushing an overture to change it – since in the present climate any change would be more likely to go backwards than forward.  We have, however, offered yet another overture to change our ordination standards; a number of other sessions are voting to endorse it, and it will be voted on by San Francisco Presbytery in the winter.  But we decided we could not simply disregard the church’s policies on weddings, and so wanted to find other ways of celebrating Megan and Sage’s union.  Session asked Michael Berg, Roger Lindahl, Steve Taber, and me to suggest various appropriate responses.

Old First’s session voted to host a reception  for Megan and Sage following their wedding  at the Swedenborgian Church on July 4. Megan’s and Sage’s families and friends, including regular participants in the Welcome Ministry, will celebrate these gifted ministers and the new life they are pledging together.

During worship on July 17, the congregation will have a chance to pray for their union, and also to pray God’s blessing on all couples who’ve made vows of covenantal faithfulness.  And during the Town Hall meeting after church on July 31, we’ll have a short panel discussion and congregational conversation about marriage – between couples both straight and gay.  I hope you’ll plan to come!

We are exploring the possibility of a Saturday workshop or retreat about marriage in the fall. But in the meantime, we give thanks for Megan’s many ministries among us and on our behalf – not least in raising the important issues here – and pray God’s blessing on her new life with Sage.

The Religious Left Gets Organized

A Conference on Spiritual Activism to be held July 20-23 in Berkeley is planned as the formation of an interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives to challenge both the misuse of God by the political Right and the anti-spiritual biases in some part of the Left.

Co-sponsors include the Jewish TIKKUN community, Peace and Conflict Studies at U.C. Berkeley, Pacific School of Religion, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley .

This West Coast founding conference will be followed by another event in Washington , D.C. next February.

Among the many outstanding speakers will be Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics; Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine; and Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong.

Plenary sessions will be held at U.C.’s Pauley Ballroom (Bancroft and Telegraph).

Pastor Cheifetz plans to attend as much of the conference as possible, and he hopes other interested Old Firsters will join him.  Complete information, including registration forms, are available on-line at www.tikkun.org.

Baptized 

Wanda Brown and her daughters, Angela and Felicia - on May 22.

In Memory

Anna Selegean died on May 13, at the age of 102. A memorial service was held at Old First on June 11.

Lectionary

July 3         14th Sunday in Ordinary Time

                  Gen. 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67;

                  Ps. 45:10-17 or S. of Sol. 2:8-13;

                  Rom. 7:15-25a;

                  Matt. 11:16-19, 25-30

July 10       15th Sunday in Ordinary Time

                  Gen. 25:19-34; Ps. 119:105-112;

                  Rom. 8:1-11;  Matt. 13:1-9, 18-23

July 17       16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

                  Gen. 28:10-19a;

                  Ps. 139:1-12, 23-24;

                  Rom. 8:12-25;

                  Matt. 13:24-30, 36-43

 July 24       17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

                  Gen. 29:15-28; Ps. 105:1-11, 45b

                  or Ps. 128; Rom. 8:26-39;

                  Matt. 13:31-33, 44-52

July 31       18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

                  Gen. 32:22-31; Ps. 17:1-7, 15;

                  Rom. 9:1-5;  Matt. 14:13-21

Aug 7        19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

                  Gen. 37:1-4, 12-28;

                  Ps. 105:1-6, 16-22, 45b;

                  Rom. 10:5-15;  Matt. 14:22-33

Aug 14      20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

                  Gen. 45:1-15; Ps. 133;

                  Rom. 11:1-2a, 29-32;

                  Matt. 15:(10-20) 21-28

Aug 21      21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

                  Exod. 1:8--2:10; Ps. 124;

                  Rom. 12:1-8;  Matt. 16:13-20

Aug 28      22nd  Sunday in Ordinary Time

                  Exod.3:1-15; Ps. 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c;

                  Rom. 12:9-21;  Matt. 16:21-28

Sept 4       23rd  Sunday in Ordinary Time

                  Exod. 12:1-14; Ps. 149;

                  Rom. 13:8-14;  Matt. 18:15-20

Let the Stones Speak

by Rosemary Bledsoe

Notes from a seminar in France , May 30 - June 3, sponsored by Veriditas, the Voice of the Labyrinth Movement

When I first see the Cathedral at Chartres   — gray, weatherworn, streaked and stained — it looks like a creature from another age stranded on this hill:  a mastodon, maybe, or a dinosaur. However ancient and misplaced, it still seems to me a living thing:  organic, breathing, and aware.

According to John James, who wrote "The Master Masons of Chartres", the organic look of the Cathedral is due to the fact that it did evolve and change in the thirty years of its construction.  Unlike the buildings of our time, whose elements are machine-made and interchangeable, the cathedral grew stone by stone, and if a particular decoration looked good and worked structurally,  nobody was concerned that it didn't exactly match another decoration carved a generation earlier.  

James spent years inspecting and measuring the building, relating it to other cathedrals being built at the same time. He knows which team of builders laid which stones and carved which decorations.  Their real names are long lost, of course, but he has assigned his own code names to nine teams of contractors.

The story of how this, the first Gothic cathedral, rose on a sacred site where a succession of other churches had stood since who-knows-when, would take much more than a week for a couple of dozen non-architects and non-builders to work though, but we give it a good shot.   We listen spellbound to his brisk and entertaining accounts. We dutifully scurry around inspecting mortar joints as if we know what we're seeing,  poke our noses in corners as if the relationship of one stone to another tells us anything at all.

What I do know a little about is what happens when a church burns and most of the town is destroyed at the same time.   I try to visualize the Presbyterians of 1906 San Francisco rallying to rebuild their First Church the way the citizens of Chartres responded in 1194.   It never could have happened. They were all from somewhere else, the building lost in the earthquake and fire hadn't stood there for hundreds of years, and the prevailing passion of their age was for money, not for God.

Try to imagine a God Rush instead of a Gold Rush. The religious fervor of the Middle Ages was as strong as the 1849 hunger for riches.  Think what it would be like:  pilgrims intoxicated with the love of God instead of miners drunk on whatever they could get; walking hundreds of miles to pray before a little box containing an apostle’s finger-bone,  not to pan for gold;  yearning for Heaven the way the Forty-Niners yearned for their bonanzas, in a world populated with saints and angels and demons instead of millionaires and gamblers and murderers, founded on faith instead of luck.

In one class some of us become pillars of the church, facing each other in two lines, joining our hands to form vaulted arches. When James pulls down on each set of four hands, we find ourselves leaning backward, learning in our bodies how the structural forces of the Cathedral, the forces of weather and time, all push down, wanting to explode the whole thing outward. Then other members of the class become flying buttresses, each standing behind a pillar-person and putting one hand on their shoulder. He pulls down on our hands again, and we find that we are strong and stable now.

When we tour the crypt, the lower floor of the Cathedral that is actually about half above-ground (like the lower level of Old First), we see the remains of the Romanesque  church on which the Gothic structure was built.   I enjoy seeing how the familiar round arches, solid and sensible, hold up all that new-fangled frou-frou above.  Standing by the Well of the Strong Saints, which might have been here long before any building, I look up at the arched ceiling and see something stunningly familiar: a scrap of blue with gold stars on it. The stars have six points instead of eight; the design has the Hand of God, the sun and moon among the stars.  It doesn't matter.   I know that ceiling; I feel at home.

In addition to John James' book, the other basic guide to the building is "Chartres Cathedral" by Malcolm Miller. Both men have encyclopedic knowledge of the sculptural decorations of the building, but Miller's particular field of expertise is the stained-glass windows. He's our instructor for several classes, first showing slides in the classroom, then lecturing in the building. (In every session spent looking up at the windows, bending backward, peering through binoculars, I find myself wishing for my own flying-buttress-person again.)

Three of the windows in the apse are boarded up; the glass is being cleaned and restored. We get more window-facts than I can absorb: the story in each one, the story of how it was created, the mystery of how it has survived weather and wars and revolution. Miller sniffs, “The most damage has been done by the clergy, who destroyed – destroyed! — a number of windows and replaced them with clear glass to let in more light!”

At night the exterior of the Cathedral is illuminated with warm light, as bright as a midsummer day.  Its bells chime all night long. I can see its roof and spires from my bed in a little room on the top floor of Maison St. Yves, a seminary-turned-retreat center.  The Cathedral becomes my clock and my night light.  If I knew how to interpret the movements of the ornate weathervanes on the Towers of the Sun and the Moon, it could probably serve as The Weather Channel too.

Day by day I relax into the beauty, history, peace and civility of the town. One afternoon I give up some study time in the Cathedral to wander outside its tourist-oriented neighborhood over to where the shops offer computer games and cell phones and the cinema is showing “La Revanche des Siths”.  I explore a Monoprix store, a sort of French K-Mart, where real people buy real stuff for their real lives. It has a wonderful grocery store, of course, and along with more exquisite viands, it sells bag salads, meat packaged on styrofoam trays, and ready-made sandwiches wrapped in plastic. When I wander far enough to encounter traffic lights and buses,  I turn back to the medieval  town to have lunch on a pretty terrace above the river.  Lunch consists of the one  item of American food I truly miss --  cold tea, in a can -- plus the best ready-made, pre-packaged sandwich I’ve ever had.

I take petit dejuner with my fellow students every morning and wish "bon jour" and "bon soir" to everyone I meet. I find enchanting walks along the little Eure River , locate the San Francisco-like stairways called tertres that replace streets in steep spots, identify pieces of the medieval city wall, see where the locals play the French version of bocce ball, check out the Saturday morning farmers market and its ravishing vegetables and flowers and cheeses.

The centerpiece of the whole week is the labyrinth.   It's a silent presence in all our classes, all our touristing and socializing:  constant and undemanding, underfoot and ever-present, the way it is in the Cathedral.   We've seen it in the center aisle and under the chairs.   Never mind the windows and statues, the history and scripture and legends. This is why we're here.

On Thursday night we have the Cathedral to ourselves, after hours.   The chairs have been moved off the pattern and lighted candles set around it. The musicians have arrived from Paris .  It's time.

Some sit and meditate for a while before walking; others, the task-oriented ones, start walking right away.  Some walk barefoot or in socks, some with their hands held up prayerfully, some with their heads covered.  We are all experienced labyrinthians, and it takes no particular effort to execute our various do-si-do's as we meet each other coming in and going out on the same path.   Later, others will mention having the same impression that I do:  that the return path takes much longer than it should.   Not that it matters; there could never be enough time to spend here.

All week, every time I return to the Cathedral I feel more at home. One afternoon I sit in the chapel of Our Lady of the Pillar, where there are many more offerings of flowers than any other chapel, watching the old women kneel and pray to The Lady as if they were talking to a friend.  I light a candle to her, not out of understanding but out of respect for what I don’t understand. With the rest of the class, I attend the funeral of Jean Villette, a noted scholar of the Cathedral, who has died at the age of 91; the mayor of announces they are re-naming one of the ancient, winding streets for him.  My last visit is enlivened by a concert by the choir and orchestra of First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta.

On my way to the train station the next morning, I stop to look up at the Cathedral and say a formal thank-you and goodbye.  I don’t see it as an extinct creature now, but as an old gray hen, sheltering this lovely town under her wing.  She sheltered me, too — a distinctly alien little critter — for one unforgettable week, and I am honored to have become one of her flock.

December 2003,  November 2003, October 2003,  September 2003,  July/August 2003, June 2003, May 2003,  April 2003, March 2003, February 2003, January 2003

December 2002,  November 2002, October 2002, September 2002, July/August 2002, June 2002, May 2002, April 2002, March 2002, February 2002, January 2002

December 2001, Nov 2001, October 2001,  September 2001, July/August 2001, June 2001,  May 2001,  April 2001, March 2001, 
February 2001, January 2001 

December 2000, November 2000,October 2000, September 2000, July/August 2000, May/June 2000,April 2000, March 2000, February 2000