Grace Cathedral

1 Samuel 3:1-10; Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17; 2 Corinthians 4:5-12; Mark 2:23-3:6

It’s hard, walking around through the world, not to develop some expectations about how things work. An understanding of cause and effect will make many interactions go more smoothly and helps prepare us for our own roles going forward. It’s a lovely and useful capability of our human minds, to take what we’ve already experienced and weave it into a picture of what is likely to come next.

When God enters the picture, however, we need to expect the unexpected. The child Samuel expects that when he hears a voice in the dark, it’s the person in the other room, not the Holy One. Paul tries to temper his friends’ expectations that being beloved of God might make life easier. (It doesn’t.) And Jesus encounters the darker side of human expectations, when those who are deeply invested in playing by the rules want to punish him for reaching beyond the ordered and the ordinary, into the truth of God’s abundance and freedom.

So how can we manage our expectations? I invite us to remember that our understanding and our reason only go so far. In the borderlands of the unexpected and the amazing, we need to open our hearts and our senses. Isaiah said it last week, Samuel says it this week. “Here I am, Lord.” That’s always the right response.

Carol James has been part of the cathedral community for over a decade. She has served as a co-mentor in the Education for Ministry program. She currently leads the evening prayer providers in the Jail Ministry and is a cathedral staff member.

Isaiah 6:1-8, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17

Our readings today feature folks who aren’t quite sure why they’re there. The narrator of Isaiah and Jesus’s night visitor Nicodemus are reluctant to come forward and declare themselves, but they can’t resist creeping a little closer to the Word that beckons. Can you remember a time when you felt you weren’t worthy? Has there been a moment where it felt risky to open yourself to something new?

God is not waiting for us to be perfect, or even reasonably prepared for change. In the abundance of God’s gracious response to our needs, even when we’re not able to articulate them, there is always both a will and a way. It may not look like what we expect or what we’ve striven for, but it stretches past our fear and our timidity into a place where our capacities can receive the nourishment and encouragement they need. That’s where we can finally cry, “Here I am!”

In some traditions, Nicodemus is honored as the patron saint of the curious. How lovely to see our questions as holy, our doubts as a pathway to the divine! Where do you need help coming closer? What questions are you bursting to ask?

Acts 2:1-21; Romans 8:22-27; John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15; Psalm 104:25-35, 37

Paraclete, the Greek word that our Gospel reading today translates as advocate, has a long theological history and many other synonyms: comforter, counselor, helper. Its deepest roots point to “who is called to one’s side,” and its first attribute is to speak for us and with us. It may have come to have a legal implication, but the Paraclete has its origins as our companion.

When Peter and the other disciples are visited by the tongues of fire and begin to speak in Jerusalem, those who hear them are not miraculously able to comprehend a language foreign to them. Each listener is met by their own words of comfort, words from their own homes. It’s a reminder that God’s grace lies in meeting us where we are as well as pulling us toward what we may yet come to be.

As those we baptize today grow and learn and head out into the adventure of living, we pray that they will always know themselves to be companioned by God’s loving presence, who speaks to them both in gentle comfort and in wild wind. Whatever they encounter, we hope that they will be emboldened to seek for and speak the truth. We await their dreams and their prophecies with excitement and joy.

Thanks to everyone who attended the Annual Meeting of the Congregation on Sunday, January 21. It’s exciting to come together and remember all that happened during the Year of the Gift, and look forward to the Year of Truth.

In addition to hearing from Bishop Marc Handley Andrus and Dean Malcolm Clemens Young, other congregation leaders such as Board President David Walker, Congregation Council President Jean Krasilnikoff, and Deanery Co-Convener Karma Quick-Panwala shared information about Grace, its people, and its impact on the wider Church, the community, and the world.

We honored two extraordinary congregants. Arthur Yeap received the Dean and Chapter Award for his guidance and mentoring of the Cathedral’s growing technology strategy. Roberta Sautter’s leadership of the Education for Ministry program and her crucial contributions to our liturgical life were recognized with the Office of the Congregation Award.

We elected representatives to governing and advisory bodies, and welcome our new trustees, councilors, and deanery representatives:

Board of Trustees: Herbert Jeong, Patricia Calfee Picache, Mary Wood

Congregation Council: Sarah Benjamin, Alexandra Fraser, Anneliese Mauch, Carlos Enrique Torres, Fred Tsai

Deanery Delegation: Connie Archea, Niall Battson, Joe Garity, Ron Hermanson, Ron Johnson, Regan Murphy, Karma Quick-Panwala

Genesis 1:1-5; Psalm 29; Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1:4-11

It’s not hard to see why people in early Palestinian cultures would view water as a deeply holy substance: life-giving, purifying, primal and revered. Our reading from Genesis today places water firmly at the mysterious core of creation, one of the first and most powerful things on which God’s creative agency acts. Water was not to be taken lightly in a desert land; thirst of body often echoed thirst of spirit in the songs of an arid country.

Yet John directs his followers to look past the baptism of water, past what cleanses and soothes, to the baptism of the Spirit. There’s both power and risk in following Jesus out of the waters of the Jordan, into the bustle of the towns and villages of Judea. The gift we carry, whatever we encounter, is God’s love, and the name we will always be known by, whatever we do, is beloved child.

To those beloved ones we baptize today: we wish you all the good things this good world offers, including an abiding awareness of how deeply you are woven into the love that brings this world to life. You are cherished as you are blessed and named, and you will be cherished every step of your journey.

Image: Grace Cathedral’s baptismal font in 1867, photographed by early California photographer Carleton Watkins.

Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Galatians 3:23-25, 4:4-7; John 1:1-18

It’s an odd time of year to be looking for hope and new beginnings. A little bedraggled from the stresses of the festive season, we stumble across the threshold of a new year, resolving to do better in so many ways. Are we wise to make this the moment for reflection and self-improvement? Sure, the hinge of the solstice has turned and days are lengthening again … but not by much. I don’t think I’m the only one whose energy is at lowest ebb this week.

And yet here are Isaiah, Paul and John crying with one voice: We are beloved. We are God’s family. We are destined to rejoicing and salvation as surely as grass grows and flame warms. However persistent is the darkness within and without, we are promised that light can never truly be conquered. The wheel of the year, running its ancient cycles of birth and growth, decay and dissolution, always pushes on toward life and light, regardless of the obstacles it encounters.

As beloved heirs of God, we’re called to keep pushing back at encroaching darkness and to nourish the light as we find it. How are you resolved to take up your inheritance as a caretaker of hope?

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28

Many scholars believe that Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians was among the earliest preserved writings of the new Christian community. The community of believers in Thessalonica was a small, vulnerable collection of Gentiles and Jews in the midst of a port city bustling with rival religions and philosophies. Paul expresses his pleasure in their faithfulness and tries to allay their anxiety about what they are waiting for by focusing attention on how they are waiting.

They – and we – are offered a “to do” list that’s short on words but deep in commitment: pray without ceasing. Rejoice and give thanks constantly. Stay open to hearing the Spirit. Keep thinking critically. Stay strong and faithful to what we know to be good. Paul invites us to be alert and engaged, while offering us few sureties of what we’ll encounter ahead.

Even as we wait for the kingdom, we must live out the kingdom in our daily lives. Advent waiting isn’t passive or dull. We’re called to sharpen our senses and our skills, because the Lord is counting on our participation in what’s to unfold. Christ can come into the world in any time and in any space that we make for him. Braiding prayer, work, and love, we can be faithful to the God who is so endlessly faithful to us.

Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37

Keep awake.

Our readings today vividly remind us that waiting for God’s transformative power to break in our world is not a safe or tame or passive undertaking. Our prophets and teachers challenge us to rise and meet God wherever we stand today, with our gifts and our sins intermingled. When short days and crammed schedules conspire to make hibernation look pretty attractive, voices of Advent call us again and again: Keep awake. Prepare the way of the Lord. Keep awake.

For me, keeping awake has a lot to do with paying attention. The more loving focus I can offer to what’s immediately around me, the more I feel connected and able to do the work that’s given to me to do. Generalities, especially the generalities of injustice and greed that seem so widely abounding, are tiring, and a burden that’s hard to carry day by day. Paying attention isn’t the whole of our work of keeping awake, but it’s a good start to our Advent journey.

When we’re awake, we can act. When we’re awake, we can connect. When we’re awake, we can imagine possibility. Join me this week in committing to stay awake, to seek and respond to God’s invitation and loving energy in the world around us and within us.

Revelation 7:9-17; Psalm 34:1-10, 22; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.”

Our reading from the first letter of John offers us a startling possibility: when we celebrate the saints, we might be celebrating ourselves. The mystery of each human, honeycombed with competing impulses, gifts, blind spots and longings, waits to be opened bit by bit by our encounters with each other and with the divine.

Suddenly, I see the Beatitudes as a litany of those who have walked forth in faith, never sure of their destination. They may hope that their mourning will lead to comfort, that their thirst for righteousness may be quenched, but they do not know. We do not know. Yet we continue to walk.

Our faith keeps us brave when we help launch new lives into unexplored seas, delighted and aghast at the possibilities in front of them. Our faith beckons us forward as those we love step beyond our sight, into a light and love we try to trust, and hope to reach in our own time. It summons us into this motley assortment of pilgrims, where the road is the blessing and where maps are unreliable, even when many have gone before us. Amid dust, sore feet and grumbling, what radiance will be revealed as we travel onward?

Leviticus 19:1-3, 15-18; Psalm 1, 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8, Matthew 22:34-46

In our readings today, God’s call to us seems so simple: love each other and love God. It’s core to who we are that we connect with one another to share and celebrate things that are bigger than each of us individually. Yet we seem to live in a world that seeks to define “neighbor” in smaller and smaller increments, and where there are some who use God’s name to call for division and diminishment of others. How do we help turn the tide towards connection and growth?

In the reading from Leviticus, the Lord calls the people of Israel to look into the roots of injustice, past personal gain and personal vengeance. Paul describes a hard road to proclaiming the good news to communities in conflict. Walking the path of love requires both looking in and looking out. It’s not a state of mind, but a practice that must be strengthened, act by act, every day.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, giving a midday homily here many years ago, asked us to try blessing each person we passed on the street for a day. “Not aloud, or else they’ll think you’re crazy!” he explained, but in lifting his hands to show us how we could lift others to God in our hearts, we looked up. And up. And up.

Jonah 3:10-4:11; Psalm 145:1-8; Philippians 1:21-30; Matthew 20:1-16

“It’s not fair!” That heart-cry has sprung from the lips of so many children — do you remember saying it yourself? As we grow older, perhaps we grudgingly accept that many things in this world aren’t fair, and aren’t going to be fair, as we understand fairness. Yet surely we can always expect fairness from God?

If God was fair, Jonah reasons, the city of Nineveh would be a smoking ruin. If God was fair, the hearers of Jesus’ parable might think, those who have been working longer would receive greater wages than those who show up at the end of the day. “We played by the rules,” this logic goes. “We deserve something more.”

It’s unsettling to think that God looks past the world of quid pro quo, to a deeper and more surprising abundance. It’s troubling to imagine that the good gifts of our lives aren’t the result of our cleverness or of our deservingness, but something beyond our control and offered freely to all. With that understanding of God’s boundless giving, how do we hold or share the gifts we’re given? What call is uncovered when we quit counting?

Genesis 50:15-21, Romans 14:1-12, Matthew 18:21-35

Many years ago, I worked for a woman who had once been a senior nurse in a teaching hospital. She brought us a wonderful rule from her experience there: if we came to her and freely shared any mistake we’d made in our jobs, there would be no blame. We could immediately focus our attention on fixing what could be fixed and learning what could be learned, not on assigning culpability. It was a liberation and a blessing, day after day, to be forgiven. To have permission to forgive ourselves.

How much weight of blame do we carry each day, weight that we gather to ourselves or heap onto others? We struggle along with Peter, wondering how it’s possible for forgiveness to be a fountain, leaping in the sun over and over again, with too many joyous arcs to count. It isn’t simple. Forgiveness only begins with the arc — there’s still the hard work of repair and the slow unfolding of healing that follows. Without that work and without tending to the unfolding, we live with the myth that we are powerless and that our actions, good or bad, can have no consequences.

What would it be like to undertake what God calls us to, this sacred tikkun olam, the repair of our suffering world, with our eyes fixed on promise, not punishment?

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