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Dear Friends, Neighbors and Members of St. Cyprian's,
some excerpts from Easter Sunday's sermon, Imagine three women making their way early in the morning to the tomb. They are carrying spices to anoint the body of their beloved teacher, discussing the challenge of rolling away the heavy stone guarding the entrance. Jesus's male disciples once so eager to be close to Jesus, when he had a growing fan base & wasn't an executed criminal, are nowhere to be found. These three women came to grieve and care for Jesus' body, despite the personal risk of being discovered by authorities as associated with this dangerous treasonous blasphemer. These three women likely exhausted, emotionally raw, filled with disappointment, perhaps anger, profoundly sad, in mourning are surprised by three things, 1) that heavy stone has been rolled away, 2) there's a strange messenger telling them that Jesus has been raised & 3) that Jesus is waiting for them in Galilee. Of course shock and surprise are to be expected --- who wouldn't be stunned by this turn of events? EKSTASIS Mark's gospel also uses the Greek word ekstasis to describe how these women felt --- they are amazed, more than amazed they are astonished, more than astonished, they are ecstatic. When you have the chance Google the word ekstastis you'll discover the word has many meanings, including to stand outside one self, having an expanded spiritual awareness, experiencing union with the divine or others in the world. Ekstasis is probably what Peter felt too when he discovered that God wanted him, despite what his religious upbringing and cultural prejudices told him, to enter the house of a wealthy stranger, an outsider, an imperial military man named Cornelius. His doing so, helped open up the early followers of Jesus to include Gentiles, non-Jews, among them as equals in the eyes of God. As Peter says in today's lesson, "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him." Christ's resurrection invites humanity into an adventure of amazement, astonishment, and ecstasy... Today, St. Cyprian's we go with amazement... This little church on the corner, has a quite an amazing message to share with the world. We are as equipped as anyone to share the good news in the 21st century. We have experienced collectively discrimination and shame, as our oral history project reveals, we have struggled against injustice, we have overcome and continue to overcome racism, sexism, and homophobia, we have looked death in the face, the death of numerous beloved members, the death of our senses of identity, even the death of our own church, just three years ago a mysterious fire could have taken this entire sanctuary down. We have like Jesus been dismissed, dragged through the mud, been told we're not big enough, smart enough, rich enough --- and yet we deeply hold on to the amazing truth of the resurrection, to the death defying love of Jesus whose resilient spirit compels us to love the stranger, the other, those whom others have cast out. As Eric Metoyer has said, we are the church of the outsider, the church of the outsider of 1923 & of 2012....
CHURCH OF THE OUTSIDER Choosing to go with amazement, to embody the ecstatic message of the resurrection is a vulnerable and intimidating thing. Just as those three women had to open themselves up to a new adventure with the resurrected Jesus, and those other weary, all too human disciples --- we too are invited to open ourselves up to new adventures, to expand our spiritual awareness, to find the face of Christ in those that are the most different from us, just as Peter did with Cornelius. St. Cyprian's can and has been opening ourselves to new adventures for 89 years, our founders left distant islands in the Caribbean to make a home in a foggy, chilly city by the frigid Pacific Ocean, some came from the American south where entrenched racism limited opportunities and crushed the spirit, from a huddling in a small chapel, those Christian pilgrims made their way from one church to another until they turned an old house into a church on Sutter and Lyon, where in the 50s as in many other churches the place was bursting at the seams with BBQ's, bazaars, rummage and bake sales. This too was a church of overachievers, women and men who nurtured movements of social change. One Doctor among our members tended an ill Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he was in San Francisco to speak. This is a church whose daughter's shocked and amazed their parents by their courageous involvement in the sit-in movement in North Carolina & Tennessee. This is a church that practices resurrection, which embodied amazement when the mortgage was set ablaze, paying off this huge building on the corner of Turk & Lyon. St. Cyprian's went with amazement when welcoming the ministry in the 1970s of a Rector who married a woman of a different race, in the early 1980s a Deacon who was gay and HIV positive, hosted a needle exchange program in the 90s, welcomed the first woman Bishop in the Anglican Communion, shared space with immigrant congregations, and launched the ministry of one of the first women Rectors in the Diocese of California. We go with amazement today, as we rip out concrete sidewalks, fix leaky towers, throw monthly concerts, paint our walls with bright colors, dream and raise money for a brand new kitchen we yearn to share, and launch a center of activity that seeks to share resilient wisdom. We go with amazement as we seek to support The Village Project, and reach out to our neighbors throughout the Western Addition. So today, lets choose to be amazed, to continue inviting God's Spirit, the same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead and led Peter to open his heart to the stranger Cornelius, to soften our hearts more and more, opening us to those around us, to their story, that together we may amaze and astonish for years to come...
See you soon at Turk & Lyon!
Peace,
Will
St. Cyprian's Episcopal Church
415-987-3029
turkandlyon@gmail.com
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