Montclair Presbyterian Church

This Friday, I’ll be driving up to Mendocino so that on Saturday morning I can attend a memorial service for a woman named Nancy who was the mother of one of my childhood friends. Most of us understand that it takes a village to raise a child, and the woman whose life we’ll be honoring on Saturday was, like many of the adults with whom I interacted as a child, a member of Mendocino Presbyterian Church, which, during my formative years, was the village that guided my upbringing.

There was nothing formal about my relationship with Nancy. As far as I know she never was one of my Sunday School teachers, and while she and her husband were great supporters of the youth program, she didn’t participate directly in the leadership of the youth group.

But Nancy interacted with me directly at church. She talked to me and, on occasion, dispensed wisdom that usually was unsolicited and always was much-needed. When we talked Nancy respected me and expected to be respected in return, and it wasn’t just me. She knew all of her children’s friends by name and was a “village elder” to each of us.

Nancy was a living example of what it means to take one’s baptismal vows seriously. When we baptize children we promise to be a village of support for them and for their families. We promise to provide strong Christian Education and youth programs for them but more than that, we promise to befriend those who are baptized and to respect them enough to give them the gifts of our attention and our wisdom, just like Nancy did.

After celebration last Sunday, Mariah Carray and Jay Gregory spoke to us about work they have done in Bolivia and in Peru. It was inspiring to see young adults, who’ve been raised in our congregation, out making a difference in the world, and it was heartening to see the love and support they get from the village that raised them. Clearly, for Mariah and for Jay, there have been many folks like Nancy, people who have honored the baptismal vows and have been wise guides in the difficult journey of becoming adults.

Thanks for all you do, and may God bless us all!
Ben

Over the course of the next year most of my sermons will be taken from passages in the Gospel According to Mark. Mark’s Gospel is interesting because it was the first gospel written and it is one of the oldest books in the New Testament. As such, it was written at a time when early church’s ideas about who Jesus was were more vague and less settled. Mark does not speak of Jesus’ miracle birth, and while it speaks of his resurrection Jesus never appears in his resurrected form. Mark is filled with stories of miracles, but Jesus’ role as a teacher is less important (though his miracles are all object lessons, which means that in Mark, Jesus leads more with his actions than with his words).

The Gospel of Mark is written with a strong sense of urgency. It seems that the author of Mark was convinced Jesus would be returning soon, and he wanted to make sure the story got out. Mark’s literary style makes use of short, simple sentences (think Earnest Hemmingway rather than Gabriel Garcia Marquez), and many of the stories of Mark begin with the word “immediately.”

As we go through Mark together, I hope you will consider what it means to meet God in ways not necessarily encumbered by Church doctrine, and I hope you will ask what it means to practice an urgent faith, a faith that is eager to change the world, a faith that is quick to dispense grace and to live lives marked with God’s love.

I look forward to reading and considering Mark with you!
Ben

Dear Friends,

Over the last few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to talk with several of you about the existence of God, which is, perhaps, the most basic questions of faith. Montclair Presbyterian Church is a congregation in which quite a few people describe themselves as atheist and even more people are self-professed agnostics. To be honest, this probably is true of most Presbyterian congregations, but what makes MPC special is that so many of you are willing to tell your pastors about your doubts and disbeliefs. I love you for that. The honesty leads to rich conversations.

Part of what makes Advent and Christmas so wonderful is that the stories of Christ’s birth have the potential to speak to us in places that lie beyond the simple binary of belief and disbelief. During this time of year, stories of Mary’s faithfulness, Joseph’s wisdom, the Shepherd’s wonder, the angels’ beauty, and the Magi’s curiosity can inspire us even when we don’t believe the stories are historically accurate. Motifs of light shining in darkness and of relentless joy that abides against all odds are universal.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Jean-Paul Sartre, who was, famously, an atheist (and who was, less famously, Albert Schweitzer’s cousin), wrote and directed the performance of a Christmas play while in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II: even when we don’t believe, still we long for tidings of comfort and joy and we incline our spirits toward the light in winter’s darkest hour. And the language that (perhaps) best articulates these aspirations is the mythic vocabulary of sacred story. Here is a passage from Sartre’s Christmas play Bariona, or the Son of Thunder. The character speaking is Balthazar the Magus; he’s addressing the protagonist, Bariona, a shepherd who does not believe the message of the angels:

…You were telling me before that God has no power of human freedom, and it’s true. But so what? a new freedom is going to shoot up toward heaven like a great pillar of bronze. Would you have the heart to stop it? Christ is born for all the world’s children, Bariona, and each time a child is born, Christ will be born in him and through him to be forever mocked, along with him, by all the pains of life, and in him and through him, to escape all those pains. Forever. He is come to tell the blind, the disabled, the unemployed, and the prisoners of this world…for even for the blind and the disabled and the unemployed and the prisoners there is joy. [From The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Volume 2: Selected Prose by Jean-Paul Sartre, edited by Michel Contat and Michael Rybalka, translated by Richard McCleary (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 131]

So whatever you do or don’t believe, come to the manger-side where you are welcome regardless of your faith, lack of faith, or faith that rocks back and forth, squeaking like the rusty chains on a playground swing. There is room for you in Bethlehem’s stable.

God’s Peace,
Ben

Q: How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb?

A: CHANGE?!

It’s an old joke, and to be fair, Presbyterians probably aren’t any more afraid of change than other denominations (though, again, to be fair, my first serious crisis in leadership as a pastor involved pouring oil on the waters of an insurrection that erupted when a couple of young woman in the congregation—one of whom was the Pastor’s Wife—changed the setup of tables in the fellowship hall of the Gonzales Community Presbyterian Church where I served my first call).

Churches and pastors put a lot of time and energy into studying change within congregations. We learn how to manage change and even to lead change that is constructive and life-affirming, and as a result we are getting better at changing within the church. Less well-studied, and less familiar, is how to address change that happens outside of the church. When society changes we feel it in the church but we don’t always know how, as congregations, to address the feelings of discomfort societal change can bring.

I’m mentioning this because currently we are living in a time of societal change and upheaval. We’ve entered into an era when Americans are having to face the fact that our economic, educational, and justice systems are organized around preserving White privilege, and, while we’re at it, we’re needing to confront the fact that the United States used torture in a futile attempt to gather intelligence during the war on terror.

And as we’re processing all of this change, we need also to address the fact that old modes of protest and trusted forms of dissent no longer seem to work—or at least they’re not being used by today’s leading activists. Todays’ protestors are more likely to block a freeway than to boycott a business. They’re more prone to die-ins than to teach-ins. The change is hard to confront, hard to process, hard to accept.

What hasn’t changed is this: congregations like ours can be places of mutual support and strength. If we live with a lot of grace and extra measures of patience and kindness, if we do not neglect the sacred duty of laughter, if we remember to love one another, then our congregation can be support and strength, even in the most strenuous days of change.

Here’s what I know about MPC: in the past, during times of societal change you have been a strong support for each other, and I know you are equal to the task of meeting the stress of contemporary change. I’m glad I’m here with you for the ride.

Dear Friends,

Advent is the season during which we prepare ourselves for Christmas, and for most of us Advent is a season of happy expectation because for most of us Christmas is a celebration that brings with it tidings of comfort and joy while visions of sugar plums dance in our heads. But not everyone is so filled with giddy happiness at Christmas. For a significant portion of the American population, Christmas is a time of sadness, disappointment, stress, and depression, and it can be hard for churches to make room for and to give voice to those whose experience of Christmas is less than joyful.

Two years ago I came across a Christmas sermon by Robert Louis Stevenson, which remains one of my favorite essays by a man who has a well-deserved reputation as a novelist, but who is, I think, underappreciated as a moral philosopher. Stevenson’s Christmas Sermon is interesting because in it he looks at Christmas not so much as a celebration of Jesus’ birth but as a season at the end of the year, during the darkest days of Winter, when it’s impossible not to contemplate one’s mortality and to consider what it means to live well. As such, in the sermon, Stevenson gives voice to those for whom Christmas is less than joyful, and in doing so he finds spiritual richness in Christmas’ shadow.

This isn’t to say that Stevenson’s thoughts on Christmas are entirely gloomy. In fact, after providing a fairly solid critique of the prudishness of Victorian morality, Stevenson writes,

Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties. And it is the trouble with moral men that they have neither one nor other. It was the moral man, the Pharisee, whom Christ could not away with. If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say “give them up,” for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

He then follows his admonition to gentleness and cheerfulness with a strong call to social action:

“But the truth of [Jesus] teaching would seem to be this: in our own person and fortune, we should be ready to accept and to pardon all; it is our cheek we are to turn, our coat that we are to give away to the man who has taken our cloak. But when another’s face is buffeted, perhaps a little of the lion will become us best. That we are to suffer others to be injured, and stand by, is not conceivable and surely not desirable.”

Yet undergirding all of this is a solid (dare I say Scottish Presbyterian) familiarity with human frailty.

To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness;—it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man’s vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is—so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner–call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys—this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much:—surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.

This is not the stuff of traditional Christmas Eve homilies, and it certainly isn’t the kind of holiday message that fuels the hedonistic materialism of the Shopping Mall Holiday Season. It’s not how I experience Christmas, and it may not be how you experience the holiday, but it is an expression of how many folks do experience Advent and Christmas. For too long those of us who are happy in December have pitied those whose experience of the season is less than joyful; it’s a far better thing, I think, to listen to their wisdom.

Anyway, I recommend the Christmas sermon, particularly if for you Christmas is less about eggnog, mistletoe and clogged shopping mall parking lots, and more about reflection on the mysteries of life that lie hidden in the dark of winter. Here’s a link to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Christmas Sermon.

A Blessed Advent to You,
Ben

Friends,

For my contribution to the Contact this week, I’m sending you something I wrote while sitting in the library of the Iona Abbey. As I wrote this, the howling wind was lashing rain against the leaded glass window that afforded me a wonderful view across the water to the Isle of Mull.

I’m sure I’ll be telling you more about my stay in Scotland in the coming weeks, but for my first report on my time away, I’d like to tell you about an experience I had while visiting Shrewsbury in England on the first day of my trip. I was in Shrewsbury because it is the birthplace of Charles Darwin, and on my trip I was trying to finish up a book that, in one chapter, tries to address what I consider to be the unnecessary folly of those who, in the name of faith, reject Darwin’s ideas about Evolution.

The passage is below.
May God’s spirit blow through you like the Scottish wind.
Warmly,
Ben

***

On the night I stayed in Shrewsbury, as I was preparing to leave my hotel, to go out into the rain and find a simple dinner before collapsing in jet-lagged exhaustion into comfort of my bed, a young violinist started talking to me in the hotel lobby where I was using hotel’s meager WiFi service. He was free with suggestions about where I could find a nice dinner that wouldn’t break the bank, and he invited me to join him and some of his friends, later in the evening, at a nearby pub, where he told me the best jam session in all of Shropshire would be taking place.

The invitation made me feel a little bit nervous. Part of me still felt like a child who’d been warned never to talk to strangers, and I wasn’t sure if the violinist inviting me would misinterpret a visit to the pub as an invitation for further romantic overtures, but I went anyway, and I’m glad I did because it was a magical experience. The pub was tiny, and the room we occupied —no larger than my study at church—didn’t really hold all of us. The musicians included the aforementioned violinist, three guitars, a bassist, a mandolin player, a guy on banjo, and a gentleman with a penny whistle; those of us without instruments included the wife and daughter of the banjo player, a tourist couple from somewhere in the south of England who seemed to the in the very springtime of romance, a lonely-looking trans-woman and me. The music ranged from traditional Irish jigs, to bluegrass, to the Beatles, by way of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and the Delta Blues. Those of us without instruments sang.

All the musicians played well, and as the evening turned to night, and as we sang song after song, I came to experience deep joy and a sense of belonging born not of nationality or of personal familiarity, but of music and of fellowship between people in from the cold and sharing the warmth of a small room, heated by a fireplace, bodies, and beer. I have no idea if any of the people with me in the Shrewsbury pub were people of faith, but I do know that religion deals in the currency of such moments, when a diverse and beautiful gathering of God’s children come together to make music, to share friendship and to extend hospitality to strangers.

When yet another musician showed up with a dreadnaught guitar, I gave up my seat and walked back through the rain to my hotel. It was 11PM in England and I’d been awake for more than thirty hours; I needed sleep. There on dark, damp streets of an English town I realized that Darwin’s detractors don’t just misunderstand the science of evolution, and they don’t just read the bible in ways it was never meant to be read, but they also misunderstand what it means to live a life of faith. Religion’s finest moments don’t happen when defenders of a relatively modern way of reading the Bible are able to banish evolutionary biology from high school classrooms; rather, religion is at its best when the people of God make music together, singing in such beautiful harmony that they become impatient for all in the world that is ugly, violent, unjust and unkind.

And nothing Darwin–or his detractors for that matter–has ever done, can compromise the Christian faith so long as Christians remember to come in from the cold, to sit down by the fire, and sing, welcoming the stranger and creating beauty, with all that true beauty means for justice and peace.

This coming Sunday is Remembrance Sunday, an informal Presbyterian holy day observed on the first Sunday in November, because that is the Lord’s Day closest to the days (November 1st and 2nd) when our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers observe All Saints Day and All Souls Day/Día de los Muertos.

Traditionally, Presbyterians and other Protestants have chosen not to pay any attention to Roman Catholic holidays (in fact, early Calvinists didn’t even observe Christmas because it felt too popish), but in recent years, a lot of us have revisited the practice of setting aside a Sunday to remember in worship our loved ones who have passed from us and have now joined the Church Triumphant.

I have found Remembrance Sunday to be a wonderful experience, as it invites me to give thanks for the lives of my dear ones who are no longer living, and it gives me a way, formally, to express gratitude for those I did not know, but whose lives touched me and formed me nonetheless.

I also love Remembrance Sunday, because it creates space for tears. Americans seldom allow ourselves to cry in church. We don’t usually let down our guards and we don’t often express our sorrow. This is too bad, because if ever there was a place in which to lament and mourn, it should be church, where the love of God is manifested in a beloved community.

***

Now, we also are going to dedicate our solar panels in Celebration on Sunday. This may, at first, seem inconsistent with the work of Remembrance Sunday, but consider this: those of us alive and active in the church today, will, with time, be among the saints commemorated on Remembrance Sunday. As we dedicate our solar panels, we will do so with the understanding that when we take action to protect the earth we do so as a gift to those who someday will remember us. This is true for all of the great earth-care work at MPC—our vegetable garden that bears witness to the health of the earth, our commitment to recycling and to collecting rainwater, our transition to efficient lighting, our use of washable dishes, our composting and so much more—it is an offering of love to future generations. And future generations will remember us for the good work we do.

Dear Friends,

Because this coming Halloween will mark the 497th anniversary of the day Martin Luther posted a long list of complaints about the Roman Catholic to the door of his church in Wittenberg, Germany, in Celebration on Sunday October 26th, we will be observing Reformation Sunday. This is not, perhaps, one of the most famous or prominent festivals on the Church calendar, but it feels important to me because Martin Luther—and those who followed in his footsteps—changed not the just the Church but all of Western Civilization in ways that I think are important.

In many ways the Reformation was the theological and ecclesiastical expression of Humanism, an intellectual and cultural movement born of the Renaissance. Humanists believed humans were capable of doing great things. They rediscovered the work of Greek philosophers, engaged in the work of science, and created amazing works of art. As an expression of humanism Protestantism embraced science and allowed itself to be informed by learning of every kind. We haven’t always allowed that spirit to abide in us, but at our best we have been great learners.

Politically, the Reformation helped mold modern democracy by rejecting the power of the Pope, by questioning the divine right of monarchs, and by believing ordinary humans are capable of making decisions and shaping society.

So three cheers for the Reformation. Be sure to show up on Sunday to help celebrate the great tradition in which we stand. We’ll sing great Reformation hymns and we’ll recommit ourselves to embracing the best in our tradition.

See You Sunday!

Ben

As many of you know, the MPC session voted in September to explore ways our congregation might come alongside and offer assistance to the Ordoñez family who, last summer, escaped extreme violence in Honduras. So far our assistance, for the most part, has been to help them navigate the vague and obscure ins and outs of the US legal system. Currently the Ordoñez family has legal status—they are not facing immediate deportation and won’t face deportation until their legal case has run its course. However, if the United States government refuses to give the Ordoñez family asylum, our congregation may need to talk about offering them sanctuary.

On Tuesday evening I attended an event at which I spoke publically about our congregations’ relationship with the Ordoñez family, about our help so far and about the possibility of providing sanctuary, should the need arise. Here is the text of the short speech I gave, on why a congregation should be prepared to provide sanctuary for those fleeing violence in Central America.

***

If you were to ask me why a congregation should be prepared to provide sanctuary for a family that has come to the United States to avoid extreme violence in Central America, I’d answer that question by asking you a question in return: what if it was one of your neighbors?

What if one of your neighbors owned a small business and lived in a city where organized crime, with the cooperation of law enforcement extorted large sums of money from business owners?

What if one of your neighbors suffered beyond anything you can imagine, because he or she tried to avoid participating in the extortion?

What if, in order to provide safety for his or her family, one of your neighbors had to travel great distances by bus, across several international borders?

What if, for the crime of attempting to provide a safe place for a family, one of your neighbors was thrown in jail and faced deportation back to the place of violence from which he or she was fleeing?

What if you knew that your own country’s foreign policies were largely responsible for creating the conditions that fostered the violence that caused hardship for your neighbors?

If one of your neighbors had to face the kind of hardship I just described to you, I’m guessing you’d offer to help in any way possible, because neighborliness is something we value.

Well, here’s the thing: if we use a Biblical and historically Christian understanding of what it means to be neighbor, then you need to know that all the awful things I’ve described have happened and are happening to your neighbors. Some of these neighbors live here in the East Bay, some of them still live in Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador, but your neighbors—our neighbors—really need our help, and what kind of Christians would we be if we didn’t lend a hand, if we didn’t offer support, if we didn’t provide sanctuary?

If we use a Biblical and historically Christian understanding of what it means to be neighbor, then the question shouldn’t be why my congregation might—if asked—be willing to offer sanctuary—the question is why your congregation is not offering sanctuary.

Friends, our neighbors need our support. Let’s see what we can do to help.

Ben

Friends,

In 2008, when I started working on the writing project that eventually would evolve into my book on immigration (Neighbor: Christian Encounters with Illegal Immigration), the initial vision for the project was that I would write my book in conjunction with Mason Funk, a filmmaker who was interested in doing a full-length documentary on the same subject.

Eventually, the book/film deal fell through. The publisher with whom we were working decided not to move forward with the project. I found another publisher and Mason pursued other funding sources. Six years later, the film, Anchor Baby, finally has been made, and on Sunday, October 26, at 4PM we will have the opportunity to see the film here at Montclair Presbyterian Church. For the first time the book and the movie will come together as originally planned.

Anchor Baby follows the lives and experiences of a woman who is receiving sanctuary from a Presbyterian church in Los Angeles. It focuses primarily upon the relationship between the woman–an undocumented Guatemalan migrant–and her US-born teenaged daughter. It also explores the impact providing sanctuary had on the congregation.

This is a timely film for our community to be watching. Currently, we are entering into a relationship with the Ordoñez family, which may need some kind of sanctuary in the future. I think we all find Mason’s film to be informative and inspiring as we move forward in our work with the Ordoñez family.

Besides, I’m excited to introduce this congregation to Mason and his fine filmmaking. I’ve actually never met Mason in person, but I went to college with his husband, my father published Mason’s mother’s novel, and I’ve spoken and corresponded with Mason at great length. I’ve also seen some of Mason’s films, including Anchor Baby. Mason is a talented filmmaker, he is a good person and it will be great to have him here.

So if you are free at 4PM on Sunday, October 26, I hope you will join us!

Cheers,
Ben