December 2000

ADVENT AND CHRISTMAS

Please read the calendar of Old First’s Advent and Christmas services and activities with care. There are a few changes from our usual holiday events. The Christmas Eve family service will be at 5 pm instead of the now-familiar 5:30. The Larkin Street Youth Center Christmas dinner will not be held at the church, but at a Larkin Street location. There will be three Wednesday Evening Prayer services in December instead of only one.

On Sunday, December 4, everyone is invited to stay after worship to make their own Advent wreath.  The Christian Education committee will provide all the materials you need, plus devotions to use at home.  We will also serve a community soup lunch.  Everyone eating is asked to bring either a can of soup or vegetables to add to the pot.  Cost of the event is $5 per wreath. 

The children of the church will be singing and acting out the traditional Christmas story in Biblical costume, and we all get a chance to share dinner together, on Sunday, December 17 at 6:00pm.  Everyone in the church is invited to re-live this Christmas pageant tradition with our children.  Bring a dish to share and join in the carols, the fun, and a healthy dose of Christmas spirit.   Please sign up in the fellowship hall during coffee hour.

                        The whole world waits in December darkness

                                    for a glimpse of the Light of God.

                        Even those who snarl “Humbug!”

                                    and chase away the carolers

                        have been seen looking toward the skies.

                        The one who declared he never would forgive

                        has forgiven,

                                    and those who left home

                                    have returned,

                        and even wars are halted,

                                    if briefly,

                        as the whole world looks starward.

                        In the December darkness

                                    we peer from our windows

                                    watching for an angel with rainbow wings

                                                        to announce the Hope of the World.

                                              — Ann Weems, Kneeling in Bethlehem       

The window of my office at the church overlooks the Old First parking garage, and above it, I can see a few stars before the fog rolls in.  I’m spending a lot of time these dark December days peering out of my window looking for those rainbow wings to settle on the Old First garage and announce the Hope of the World. 

 There is good reason that Christmas comes near the winter solstice.  These are literally dark days when the sun sets before office hours are over.  It’s easy to get depressed this time of year, especially when you cannot escape the incessant happy Christmas music playing in every elevator.

But, you know, I’m with the wonderful Presbyterian poet Ann Weems.  Though I’m tempted to snarl, ‘Humbug!’  I also continually look toward the skies this time of year.  In the midst of my darkness, God intervenes and brings light and hope and joy!

That’s the amazing thing about our faith.  It takes seriously the suffering and the darkness that most of us experience in our lives quite frequently.  We don’t paper that over with Christmas wrap.  Yet, we are not left there.  In the midst of real life, from the reality of a sheep’s feeding trough, hope is born in the cries of a newborn! We are forgiven, wars cease, and we return home. 

That’s what Christmas is about.  And that is cause for real joy!

This Advent and Christmas, let us all keep looking starward with joy!

                                                                                     Erwin Barron

CHRISTMAS GIVING TREE FOR EDGEWOOD CENTER

In 1850 our church founded the Protestant Orphans Asylum, which still exists as the Edgewood Center for Children and Families. This holiday season we will celebrate our shared history of 150 years with a Christmas Giving Tree for the residents of the center.

The Giving Tree is now “taking root” in the Fellowship Hall with your offerings of gifts and cash donations, which will be accepted until December 10.  With the help of the children and Santa, Betsy Chiao has made a gift list for every child at Edgewood. She will be happy to provide you with gift suggestions and volunteer opportunities.

Dear Friends:

It’s hard to believe it has been sixteen years since the birth of Larkin Street Youth Center (nee Polk Street Town Hall) and the opening of the doors of our Drop-In Center!

Larkin Street has come a long way since 1984 but our roots remain firmly grounded in the soil of the powerful community spirit that nourished our beginnings, and nurtured by a never shaking belief in our mission -- to ensure the presence of love, hope and a second chance in the lives of all runaway and homeless youth.

With the ongoing partnership, caring and commitment of the members of Old First Presbyterian Church, Larkin Street Youth Center has been able to expand our services over the past sixteen years to meet the changing needs of our youth. Today, we are able not only to provide for the critical, immediate needs of our youth – by offering a warm meal, a change of clothing, or medical exam --- but also to offer longer-term assistance to the overwhelming majority of our kids who can’t go home again and to help them make a successful transition to independent, productive adulthood.

Operating sixteen different programs out of seven separate sites in San Francisco, Larkin Street is now able to be there 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for any youth who needs our help, and to offer each and every one a permanent pathway off the street. Perhaps no single element has been more critical to our success in helping over 77% of the youth we serve each year exit street life than our ability to offer them housing -- a place they can call home – for many for the first time.

The holidays have always been a particularly difficult and lonely time for our youth. Every year, long before Larkin Street ever dreamed of being able to offer housing for them, our Old First “family” worked alongside us to make sure that our kids would have a taste of home during the holidays by opening your hearts and inviting us to celebrate in your home. Our shared Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners have been a time of celebration and community, warmth and joy for all of us and for the young people for whom we all care so deeply.

This year, Larkin Street faces a bittersweet moment of transition, one not dissimilar to that which occurs in other families, when we feel the time has come for us to host the holiday dinners in our own home. It is a momentous step for us and a decision we have thought long and hard about, but we know it is the right one for our youth. With your help, we have developed and built desperately needed housing programs for our youth. We think that you will agree that the logical step forward in living our mission is to give them the chance to do what most other youth do every year -- to celebrate the holidays in their own home.

We hope that the members of the Old First “family” will join us in celebration of how far we have come together in sixteen years by accepting our invitation to spend the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays with us and the young people of Larkin Street at our home. We can think of no greater joy than the opportunity to host the dinners with all of you, our friends and volunteers  -- who have helped to make holiday miracles happen for so many years for so many young people -- by our side once again.

On behalf of everyone at Larkin Street Youth Center, most importantly our youth, I forward our heartfelt gratitude and warmest wishes for a joyous holiday season to all.

Best regards,

            Anne B. Stanton,

                       Executive Director, Larkin Street Youth Center

LARKIN STREET YOUTH CENTER

HOLIDAY WISH LIST

Your contributions of new or unused items from the list below will help bring a smile to a young person's face.  Donations are accepted at our Drop In Center at 1044 Larkin Street from 10:00am until 9:30pm each day.  Feel free to call Anita Schatz at (415) 749-3847 for more information.  We greatly appreciate your help!

Clothing Toiletries Gifts Household Items Jackets/Coats Toothbrushes CD Walkmans Pots/Pans Flannel Shirts Toothpaste Backpacks Fans Hooded Sweatshirts Band-Aids Art Supplies TV/VCR Long Underwear/Boxers Deodorant Pocket Games Dining Room Table Undergarments Soap Journals Pool Sticks/Balls Gloves/Scarves Shampoo BART/Muni Passes Mini Desk Belts Conditioner Phone Cards Hats/Beanies Combs/Brushes Haircut/Makeover Athletic Shoes Sewing Kits Gift Certificates Shoes-for work/interview Cosmetics Books Rain Gear/Umbrellas Toiletry Bags Blankets/Comforters Holiday Dinner Food Items  -  Non-Perishable Supermarket Vouchers Dessert/Snack Items Salt/Pepper Cranberry Sauce Canned or Liter Soda/Juice Paper Lunch Bags Chicken Broth Lemonade/Ice Tea Mix Sandwich Bags Stuffing Mix Canned Yams Paper/Plastic Ware                                               
Please note our 501c3 Tax ID number:  94-2917999

IT’S NEVER THE SAME

by Rosemary Bledsoe

“Christmas won’t be the same this year,” we sigh, adding up a year’s losses and arriving at a very small number — or even a ravening negative that threatens to erase a whole season from the calendar.

Christmas-this-year is never just Christmas-this-year. That’s the good news and the bad news, all at once. It’s a chain of celebrations going backward and forward in time, holidays echoed and foreshadowed by other holidays: sweetened and embittered, comforted and blighted: all at once.

It’s never the same, but it’s always Christmas. It’s still there, it’s always there: everything we’ve ever invested in this best of all seasons — not lost, just at a different place, as we ourselves will be one day, one Christmas Day, the day we ourselves prepare for by preserving traditions and passing them on. We are always haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Future, by that empty place at the table that one year will be our own.

Why do we work so hard to give our children Christmases to remember? So they will remember. When they are three, four, five years old, we are already spinning out the threads of all the Christmases of their lives, braiding in bits and pieces from our own past and the pasts of our parents, grandparents, nameless ancestors. Looking forward, we trust in the power of love and memories.

When we celebrate the Incarnation, we celebrate everything about life: its beginning and its end and what happens after the end. We know the story of Mary’s Child, how it began,  how it ended, how it began again. Betrayal and death are back there in the shadows, behind the shepherds and the angels, and we know it — and we celebrate in spite of it, or maybe even because of it.

Please, my friends, I beg you in the name of everyone you love and have ever loved, to honor them by rejoicing in the gifts of their lives, to praise God by accepting the wholeness of your own life, and to bless your descendants-in-the-flesh and descendants-in-the-spirit by keeping Christmas as a truly holy day, in the sacred time that is beyond time and that never changes.          

(For other articles by Rosemary Bledsoe see her column, “The Ragged Edge: Inspiration with an Attitude” http://www.themestream.com/articles/206081.html)