bread

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Tucson has announced its mission: "The community at St. Andrew's seeks to deepen our faith, nurture relationships, and feed our neighbors. You are always welcome here." 

What does it mean to feed our neighbors? For one thing it means welcoming people into our fellowship. For another it means hosting Neighbors Feeding Neighbors, the longtime ministry of The Rev. Deacon Jefferson Bailey and his crew as they prepare and deliver meals to elderly and other people in Armory Park, downtown Tucson, and beyond. 

Beyond ... speaking of that there are a couple of ways we are involved in the larger Tucson community. Neighbors Feeding Neighbors is an active partner of the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona. We are listed among the sponsors of Interfaith Community Services too. These local food banks are part of a larger network, the Association of Arizona Food Banks. 

But how do food banks get their food? How do they get started in the first place? And how can we go beyond - that word again - these local efforts?

Well - here's one way to get started, give support (besides our gifts and donations), and make a difference in the wider world. Some decades ago a pastor on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Art Simon, realized that while the parish food bank and soup kitchen had lines stretching around the block and the clothes closet was very busy, they were only reaching a fraction of the need. What they needed was traction, and scale, that only federal government policy and action could provide. 

So they organized Bread for the World (USA) the Christian citizens' lobby, a nonpartisan ecumenical group that has worked for decades now, pretty effectively, to coax federal legislators toward policies that will combat and reduce extreme hunger - and poverty and all its causes - around the world and here at home. They have advocated for support of effective programs (food stamps, aid for women and families with dependent children, and more) that will help not harm food security. And they invited other congregations to join them. 

We can join them. And have some influence many times beyond what we can (so vitally) accomplish on the local scene. We can begin by writing our legislators, individually and as a church, during their annual Offering of Letters campaign. Details : https://www.bread.org/blog/conversation-about-2020-offering-letters

This year’s Offering of Letters has the potential to unite all of us around a cause that can literally impact millions of people.

By the way, should you wish to make an individual contribution to the work of Bread for the World, please give through your church. Make checks payable to St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Tucson, and write "Bread for the World" in the memo line.

dawn

5:35 a.m. Jerusalem. Winter. At the third time of prompting I got out of bed and pulled on my shoes. From the hotel I made my way through the souk, its stalls all shuttered, and turned left toward the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Inside I wandered alone. There was a marble slab set into the floor in front of me. Dark cavernous space to the left. On the right a small group stood talking. Around the inner circuit of the building I walked and came back to them. I had a question. The priest motioned me to wait, then I told him I didn't know what I was looking at. Well, you'll want to go up for sure. Up those stairs I climbed to two altars, with a space underneath one. Golgotha. Down again and across into a small inner chapel. Empty. I didn't go all the way inside but I looked around. There were maybe a dozen people in the whole place. That afternoon my group went together. It was packed. In a long line we waited, let through six at a time. Some people tried to rush ahead but the Slavic assistant - deacon? - motioned them back. Inside again at the end all the way in. I knelt on this marble slab covering the tomb of Jesus and rested my forehead on the cool smooth stone. It was dark. After an indeterminate period I heard an intake of breath - my own - opened my eyes, stood up, walked, crouched, slowly as newly awake, out to the larger space. "Father," the deacon motioned, and smiled, guiding me. And the next group of pilgrims went in.

January 12, 2020. For The Christian Century, Buechner Writing Project.

revolutionary baby

Have you ever been present at the birth of a baby? … Oh yes you have! 

There’s a lot going on - excitement or hush, quiet, fuss, anxiety, hope, sorrow, wondering what happens next. Rarely do you have to make a run for it…as if having a baby were some sort of criminal activity, John Dillinger in diapers — or a threat to the state, a subversive activity — so you had to go on the lam into hiding, or exile. But with this baby— 

Maybe there is a threat! A threat to the old regime, the old order of doing business.

Because this is a revolutionary baby. Its birth means the old order of things is going away and something new is emerging. It’s a revolution that begins with a child — and a little family sheltering in the old home town, a visit from total strangers who smell of sheep and then some travelers who smell of strange spices, followed by a warning, in a dream, to get out of there, leave it all behind, and go far away. Over the border, across a river and a desert, to sanctuary.

Like anyone fleeing what they cannot stand and face. 

Like anyone carrying something so precious that the hope of the world, the promise of ages, depends on its deliverance.

That could be any baby. Couldn’t it, but it’s this one, right now, in the little town of Bethlehem, under the shadow of the soldiers and their towers, then into exile in some distant place then return — another dream — and then settled down in the hill town of Nazareth in Galilee. 

Not back home. Not really. The situation has changed.

And that is the threat, and the promise of this infant revolution. All is calm, and then nothing is. And we will see this child grow, as he learns who he really is, and who we really are.

Behold the child of God. And behold God’s love for all his children.

Old Herod the Great and his three dysfunctional sons and the emperor over the sea and all their minions and sycophants, — know what it takes, know what it means, for this small infant to come.

It seems fanciful, ridiculous, that a king, a great builder, and an empire could feel threat from something so small as a family, and a child. But the hope — that is great and inexorable — that is fragile and perfect, is already present in this small beginning. 

And in the small beginning each of us makes. Knowing that we too are the children of God. And that now something new, a new way of being, is coming to life.

***

Eric celebrated his 70th birthday again this year. He and his wife Viviana, my cousin, have been working together creating the Blue Ox Millworks and Historic Park in Eureka, California, since they were married. I was there for their wedding and three years ago for their fortieth wedding anniversary. That afternoon as we gathered in the yard of the Blue Ox they stood in front of their Redwood Shrine, built around a very large cross-section of a coast redwood tree. Describing it, I imagined a 16 foot diameter. Nope. More like 35. The tree that it came from was called the Fieldbrook Giant. It was more than 350 feet tall, and was felled a hundred twenty years ago on a bet. Sections were shipped as far as England. And one ended up in a Eureka tourist shop, for a hundred years, until Eric salvaged it and brought it to the Blue Ox. 

The thirteen-and-a-half ton section they took to England ended up in Cliveden, the trophy home of the wealthy man who had the tree cut down. The National Trust had an interest in studying its tree rings - but it was set in a floor and the researcher they called in, another cousin of mine, decided not to mar it. So there it was, a once living thing over a thousand years old, in pieces, one on the floor of a building in England and another propped against the back of a shop in Eureka, California.

Pretty dead huh? But the story continues… in a minute.

Matthew recalls that the Scripture says he will be called a Nazorean” - probably a conflation of two separate verses. And the meaning is unclear. A Nazirite is a person set aside, dedicated. Which fits. They are settling in Nazareth. Okay. Obvious. And last — and this is intriguing —

the word Nazorean could come from the Hebrew nezer — which means “shoot” or “branch.” The prophet Isaiah says, “A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse.” (11:1) And there you are — the branch of Jesse’s tree has come to life.

Now whatever happened to that big old tree cut down in 1896? We heard about the sections here and there, distributed for the admiration of tourists. But what was left of the living tree? No way could you make anything grow again, right? Is there hope for a tree cut down?

Someone learned of a project to clone the one hundred oldest biggest trees, to make a living archive of these ancient giants - and as they were thinking about it they walked by the Blue Ox. There was the Fieldbrook Giant - or a slice of it. 

What if…? So he went in and talked to Eric, and then to the living archive people. And the tree archive people got ahold of the landowner in Fieldbrook where the stump still stood - and from the stump a shoot had sprouted and they were able to start a few new little saplings. 

One of them I saw in September, in front of that big old round off the old tree. And when I went back in early December, it had grown…

The story of the Holy Family, the Flight into Egypt, is at first a story filled with fear and apprehension, with sudden movement from safety and joy into a harsh world, and through the desert seeking refuge in a new place. 

But then it becomes again what it was when we beheld the babe in a manger - a story of extraordinary hope, revolutionary hope, of seeing beyond dreams to a new reality. God’s vision is of a future for us of hope.

For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. (Jeremiah 29:11)

What happens when a new tree emerges from an old stump? When a people re-emerges from captivity into new life? When we, held back perhaps by the sins of our own lives or the circumstances we are surrounded by, are able to look beyond and see that God is with us?

Then that is revolutionary indeed.

January 5

Second Sunday after Christmas

• Jeremiah 31:7-14
• Psalm 84 or 84:1-8
• Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
• Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

https://www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/redwood-reborn/Content?oid=15732133