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Grace Episcopal Church Christmas Letter
December 24, 2014 / daniel p. richards	/ Leave a comment
O, friends and family of Grace,
It is Advent, and we are waiting. Three Sundays ago, The Rev. Katheryn King encouraged us to be impatient, to long for the coming of Christ. As I prepare for the coming services and sermons, I am reminded of the promises of God in the prophets and Gospels. I long for the Wonderful Counselor, the Prince of Peace, the God Emmanuel – God with us, who comes at Christmas. I long to see the Day of the Lord when all things are reconciled to him, so I lean into the prophets and face a choice.
We have had a darker Advent in 2014. We are facing news of racial tension, wars, violence, victimization, and disease. Like the first chapters of Luke, we see people tossed around by capricious and controlling acts of governments around the world. We face our own sins as a nation, seeing again our reaction to violence with more violence and wonder how we can justify or atone. Our family and maybe yours has faced losses and death. Many of us carry into this season of bright lights and shiny wrappings buried griefs and barely hidden sufferings. Where is God in all this darkness?
Of course, there is also other news. Our economy is starting to recover, oil prices are providing relief for all of us, and at least we are admitting our past sins and seeking atonement, maybe. With our deaths and struggles, we have also had births and baptisms, weddings and celebrations, growth and wonder. Our families may be struggling, but we are struggling together. We are taking up our faith in worship, study, and service. We have been waiting and welcoming Christ among us.
Yet here in our waiting we all face the choice of Isaiah 61: do we proclaim the day of the Lord’s favor or the Lord’s vengeance? As we read these texts, we certainly believe that the Lord loves justice hates robbery and wrong . Like Jesus’ day, the violence and injustice of our day demand a response. God would surely be justified in vengeance. But then we follow Jesus into Galilee in Luke’s Gospel and see something amazing. Jesus lifts up this text in Isaiah 61 in the synagogue and names himself as the one who fulfills it. But, he leaves out vengeance.
How can God’s justice be sought without vengeance? How can we turn the other cheek in such a day as this? How can we love our enemies and bless those who curse us? This is our Christmas work, to follow the God-incarnate Christ-child into the quiet night and bear witness like the shepherds of the work of God to under throw the world, to love us into holiness rather than beat us into submission, to bless instead of curse, to bring forgiveness instead of vengeance.
If Jesus is the prince of peace, then God’s Rule is the reign of peace brought about by our being transformed into love, justice, and peace embodied rather than enforced, and we all have work to do. Thank God for the Holy Spirit.
This is our season, people of Grace. We are to incarnate Christ’s peace, love, and justice in our everyday lives, in our words and actions. We are to bear witness in our choices to the God who is with us, within us, and in our darkest days by bearing his light through us by Grace. We begin here, gathered on Christmas eve again, seeing the light of Christ come in and lifting our voices in hope together, in proclamation of the good news, breaking bread together, and welcoming our Lord again, God Emmanuel.
The Very Rev. Daniel P. Richards, Rector & Dean
Along the Way: Advent, Attention, and Elegance or Krista Tippett does theology and I complain
December 4, 2014 December 4, 2014 / daniel p. richards	/ Leave a comment
from wvtf.org website
Elegance, Attention, and Advent
I have been annoyed recently at the NPR-shaped faith of the Episcopal Church. I am not innocent of the charge since I listen to National Public Radio all the time at home. (Diane Rehm’s Weekly News Roundup on Friday (my sabbath) is my chance to catch up the with the nuances of the week’s missed stories.) But I was appalled this year when Krista Tippett’s “On Being” episodes were being offered as material for classes through our denominational press’s catalogue. Our faith is Christian; and though Ms. Tippett is one of my favorite interviewers on the radio, she is under no obligation to present our faith or teach it. I am deeply concerned by the scarcity of resources we are actually putting into the primary activity of making disciples as a church, and this seemed like one more reason to cry out for conversion and a return to our raison d’être as a denomination.
Don’t worry, I rant about this stuff all the time to everyone who will listen. Pray for my children. They have to hear me muttering about this kind of thing all the time.
Despite all this, I like “On Being,” especially the unedited interviews that you can get online or through the podcasts of the show. I prefer the unedited version because I read many of the people she interviews and get their processed and canned thoughts all the time. My longing is for the conversation that we rarely get to hear from those who are producing the mental and spiritual diets so many of us eat. I commend the interviews with Jaroslav Pelikan and John O’donahue to you especially; oh and Seth Godin and . . . well you get the idea.
This last week I found Paulo Coelho. Like many others, I have read and been moved deeply by his novels and drank his interview with Ms. Tippett like afternoon wine. But I was pulled up short by his answer to her request for a definition of his use of the word “elegance.” (This transcript is from the show’s website. I have only edited out Ms. Tippett’s unimportant utterances for flow.)
MS. TIPPETT: I want to ask you about elegance. Something you talk about as a virtue, you know, we talked about the virtue of love, and friendship, and boldness, but [I am] very drawn to your use of the word, elegance. Talk to me about the place of elegance in life’s pilgrimage.
MR. COELHO: Elegance is simplicity. I believe that we need to be elegant, because people confound elegance with fashion. And that has nothing to do. I learned about elegance not because I was reading about fashion, blah, blah, blah. Because one day I was in Japan and I saw a just totally empty house. And then they have a small detail like, a flower arrangement, or a painting. And the rest is empty. And I said, oh, my God. What is this? This guy, it was my publisher.
And he said — I will never forget — he said, “This is elegance.” I said, “Elegance?” He said, “Yes, because here, there’s only one detail that you can pay attention. And, because of this elegance is to get rid of all the superfluous things and focus on the most beautiful one.” In this case it was this flower arrangement. So, for me, when I looked at the mountains to the Alps here …that was the line. And I see this white snow and I said, oh, my God, God could have created snow as a rainbow, you know, full of colors. But then this would be a disaster.
You know? Because the beauty of the snow is because it has only one color. The beautiful desert that I — I love deserts, by the way.
MR. COELHO: I spent forty days in the Mojave Desert back in 1989, and it was so magical, so magical, so magical. So every time that I travel, I visit the desert. But then back to elegance, elegance is that. Is to go to the core of beauty, and the core of beauty is simplicity.
There is a lot of material for life in the whole episode, but this one idea resonated with me as we look at the season of Advent and the prophets. In some way Advent is about preparing to have your world changed again, and we think of that in big ways like birth, but the call this year is something closer to Coelho’s insight.
When my wife was pregnant with my son this was obvious in an Adventish kind of way, and when we were preparing for our marriage or getting ready to move the same preparation themes of life came up. When we know that our world is going to change and that we are going to have to change with it, we prepare ourselves. This is Advent, right? The prophets in our lives warn us ahead of time that we will have to change. When we are at our best we listen to them.
On the other hand, what Coelho is talking about is actually closer to the spiritual insight that most of us prepare for and have at Advent and Christmas. We focus on this singular elegance for a moment, and it changes, or can change, our world.
Elegance and Christmas.
The problem of course is that we come to Christmas through Advent by adding things to the room rather than taking them away. We add in events, extra projects and trips to the mall, relatives, obligations, church services, and wrapping and decorations. We don’t remove distractions, we multiply them.
The prophets often went to the desert places to strip away the distractions and listen for the word of God. Mountains, wilderness, and especially the long horizons of the actual desert have often served to put would-be prophets today in the clearings of life to hear and see what God is doing.
I start longing in December every year for the desert, and not particularly for the weather. (That comes in March when winter is not relenting this far north.) I long for the midday escapes along Trail 100 from my condo in northeast Phoenix or the far end of the road that used to take me to the Seven Springs trailhead out east of Tucson: the places where with a few quick steps and fewer provisions I could be out of reach of the demands of the season and regain my sense of clarity.
John the Baptist seemed to see clearly what God was doing in Jesus. He was not pulled away by the Zealots’ cries for justice and liberation, nor was he falling under the spell of the religious powers of his day, nor was he far away in his hopes from what Jesus would do (despite my favorite author’s depiction of their conflict in the Last Temptation of Christ.) No, John’s simple cry set up Jesus’ later one: “Change your mind; the Rule of God is in reach.”
I have to change my mind again this year. Repentance is not a one time thing. I have to clear away the clutter that I let build up, and honestly that I decorate this time of year with. I have to give up my Zealotry and my religious ideals, even as I practice my faith and strive for justice; I have to give up my bitterness and self-righteousness. I have to clear space and go into the wilderness of silence, the landscape of God.
Theology is not really in statements about God anymore than coffee is in the grounds in a coffee filter. Good theology is in conversation and prayer. It is the moment of actual thought and creativity. The statements we pass around are like mementos of those other moments when we were together and thinking and speaking and creating with God. I think that is why I like the longer unedited interviews of Krista Tippett and her guests. They capture moments of theology.
I hate that they would be turned into curricula frankly because I want a church that is capable of the conversations, rather than a congregation that listens to my statements. I want a people who can speak and think and create those moments, loaded with Scripture and poetry and wilderness experiences, a people who can speak for God like a community of prophets wandering in and out of the wild places of life renewed with a divine love that is elegant and clear.
Instead we so often just listen on our way to another cluttered room, busy and scattered. As a shepherd in a world of busy, educated, and beautiful sheep, I want to call out and lead my Master’s flock away from the city streets and stores to wilderness at the feet of Mount Horeb where the bushes are alight like Advent candles and God speaks from the flames.
Clear your mind, the Rule of God is here.
Eschatology and Gratitude – Lessons Along the Way
It is the long view that matters when setting a course. You cannot neglect short-term details, but it is the long term goal that sets the course and allows corrections and a final sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.
“Well done, my good and faithful servant.” That simple phrase from a parable of Jesus sets my long term goal. To have my master come and say, “Well done.”
The master matters to me. God’s character really does completely change what that goal means and could mean for me as a direction in life. It changes my everyday reflections, prayers, and actions. I know that God’s will for human beings is love, justice, and peace.
Shaping my life to follow the Way of Jesus involves some pretty mundane decisions and some really important ones. I greet people I don’t know at the coffee shop, and I don’t watch some movies because I follow Jesus. I try to know the homeless as human beings and not merely a collection of maladies and presuppositions because I follow Jesus. I pray the daily office, gather with others for eucharist, and talk to God all day because I follow Jesus. I tithe because I follow Jesus.
I don’t think God will love me because I follow Jesus and do these things. This is a vital theological point. I do these things because God loves the world, and this is who our master is. If we are going to worship and claim God as our master, we follow Jesus and do these things.
One of these things is thanksgiving. We give thanks to the God who made us and the world, who loves us and the world. On a simple level, we have life and salvation, grace and forgiveness. Everything we have is from God.
“All things come from thee, O Lord; and of thine own have we given thee.” This offering prayer is based on David’s final prayer to God before the assembly of Israel (I Chronicles 29:14). It sums up beautifully all that we are saying about gratitude.
We give thanks in all things because all things come from God. This orientation shapes us away from the greed and self-orientation of our contemporary world. It puts us in right relationship to the God we serve in each other and the world.
A Coffee Connoisseur (Snob) Thinks about Creation and Creativity
November 10, 2014 November 10, 2014 / daniel p. richards	/ Leave a comment
So two weeks ago I was drinking a freshly roasted, and dark enough for a change on my small roaster, Sumatra Mandehling from a Chemex filter in a Hario v60 pour-over filter holder. It was good but really overly refined for a Sumatra coffee.
You see, Sumatra coffees are famously funky; grown on volcanic soil and notoriously poorly sorted has meant that for more than twenty years there has been a sort of typical Sumatran flavor that was reliable crop to crop. Some of that was due to, of course, to the unique growing conditions of the tropical South Pacific Island and its volcanic soil. But, a great deal of the earthy and unpredictably unstable quality was due to the coffee being mostly grown and picked on small family lots or yards and poorly picked through leading to a diverse lot of beans that varied in color, size, and density.
These days, a lot has changed. Twenty or more years of success in the market has meant that Sumatra has better coffee growing conditions, better pay to farmers, and more strict quality control measures than twenty years ago when I first had a cup of coffee that was single origin designated.
That cup was darker, more uneven, and had a wild quality that took that funk that I would describe as orange clay earthiness and layered in complexity with bright overtones and periodic notes of white orchid aromas and pungent citrus that was just short of the sharp smack in the face of grapefruit. The overall quality was wild and dark, like being chased through a dense forest by an unseen tiger.
These days Sumatran coffees are more regularized. They have a more sophisticated, straight forward predictability. It is ecotourism compared to my fearful flight from the teeth of that clay come to life in stripes. This is advancement. Everyone involved is benefitting from these advancements, but I cannot help but miss that cup that first captivated and chased me two decades ago.
I have an odd memory for flavor, I guess, but this moderated coffee has reminded me of Epictetus’s maxim that you can’t step in the same river twice. Now he had never eaten at a McDonald’s, but he lived at a time when the world was still wilder, even than now. Though it should be noted that the trees of Greece were already being lamented by other voices.
Coffee is a fruit, an organic substance that is grown not manufactured, and it changes lot to lot, season to season. I cannot ever have that original cup of Sumatran Mandehling, even if I could find the exact yard those beans were grown in, could process them the same way, and brewed on the same machine. Not one stage of that hypothetical is remotely possible.
How many pursuits in life are a search for that moment when something magical happened, when the right set of circumstances came together in a perfect moment of revelation? Life is a river that moves and dances, always with new circumstances coming upstream or down, with new growth on the banks, new animals and fish, different climate effected by volcanoes or factories a world away. Everything moves, and the water for my coffee is not the same today either.
Life is never caught, never repeatable. We remember but from a constantly new place. Even our memory is created. I am God-obsessed and think God must be a weaver at the loom of creation, moving the shuttle of this moment across billions upon billions of threads, pulling together themes and re-tying broken or lost or ended lines. Every single moment the coming together of a universe in a verse of the song of creation, a line in the poem of making.
This cup of coffee is a new thing, a taste of the creation coming together from several places in the world all at once. Water from a cold Great Lake watershed, beans from a yard turned field on a tropical volcano side, gathered by locals and sold to a processor from Milwaukee who wanted to do good, who shipped by way of a freighter from Norway whose Chinese captain now claims Canada or Oakland as home, delivered by American men of so many descents they are a confusion of history to my father’s warehouse in Mississippi, where I bagged them up myself, unaware of how much of the world went into that bag of burlap.
Yes, I roasted them at home on a small roaster that it takes forever to get up to heat in our midwestern fall as the snow drifts over my green yard for the first time this year, and I recalled that first cup of Sumatran coffee I ever had two decades ago.
Dear reader, I hope you are a creator. We are children of the God of the Loom, makers and creative caretakers of the world. You were designed to work the loom of creation, bringing together threads and themes in new and fascinating ways, whether you are making a cup of coffee or teaching children or running an office or painting a landscape.
You are a maker. Creation is the work of weaving the threads of the existing world and its constant changes and movements into new moments of creativity. A businessman looks at the people in his office and, knowing them, weaves a marketing plan that utilizes their unique skills and abilities and personalities to enable clients to reach potentials that would be impossible without his imagination and prophecy. A craftswoman takes a file to a rough metal housing and shapes the sounds of a concert pianist fingers from force to force of sound through miles of metal cord. What will you do with the raw clay before you? What breath will you breathe into creation? You have been given the breath of God at your making, O little creator, O child of God.
*Take a look at our family business. Coffee Bean Corral: You can find Sumatra coffee and all the stuff a maker of coffee needs, including roasters there.