The man who plays the piano brings me coffee

10/23

Nanna Mallan is an artist from Denmark and a friend of  Lotte and Carman. She was in worship last Sunday and has come  for a special tour of West-Park. She does photography. And installations. She dreams big. And from a look at her photographs, delivers. She wants to see the space. Feel the space. Understand the space. At the end, we sit and talk. She’s got ideas for a major installation. It will have to be maybe a year away. As she leaves, I give her one of Angelo’s angelitos. (https://plus.google.com/photos/+ArturoLania/albums/5540478592977526913?banner=pwa) She’s done some amazing things with paper boats.

Pat O drops in for an update. Tomorrow, we’ll do a full redo on what we need to be looking at congregational development wise.

The man who plays the piano who brings me coffee delivers his large coffee with cream and sugar and heads to the Beckstein.

Tricia’s Othello continues to develop. She’s getting closer and closer to her open rehearsal performance.

On my way toy meet Russ J at St. Bart’s for the annual Tree of Life conference on Palestine. Tonight will feature two young women Israeli women conscientious objectors.

From other steps: Marquand Chapel, Yale Divinity School

10/23

Yale Divinity School

Random notes from Yale Divinity School 2014 Convocation and Class Reunions:

Peter S. Hawkins, Poetry and the Psalms: Singing a New Song

* King James has the poetry, the translation we carry in our bowels

* George Herbert’s 1633 lyric metric Psalm 23, the God of Love my shepherd is…unofficial Scottish national anthem. (http://www.ccel.org/h/herbert/temple/23dPsalme.html)

* Gerard Manley Hopkins created his own Psalms, like  Pied beauty: Glory be to God for dappled things…(http://www.bartleby.com/122/13.html)

* Jacqueline Osherow Handiwork/Glory from Scattered Psalms: Dead Men’s Praise http://books.google.com/books?id=db8Y6aMTdFAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PA51&dq=Osherow+%22Handiwork/Glory%22&source=bl&ots=N7uAgKub-P&sig=3cfDTt_ml2zJPf6kh_80HajoG40&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6elJVI7qOu_9sAT8z4HYDQ&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=Osherow%20%22Handiwork%2FGlory%22&f=false

....and for a bonus, Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/hallelujah.html

Christian Smith Parents: the Real Pastors: The Absolute centrality of parenting in passing on religious faith and practice to the next generation

We have moved from religion as a communal solidarity project to a personal identity accessory…

(see youthandreligion.nd.edu)

The Justice Imperative:How Hyper-incarceration Hijacked the American Dream by Marilyn Kendrix et al.

* We have 2.3 million behind bars

* We have more incarcerated than the top 35 eurocentric nations combined

* In Connecticut, there are 16,500 inmates, 46500 on parole, a total of 45000 in  the system

* Connecticut spends a billion a year on  Department of Corrections

* Even though we are a nation of 2^nd chances, formerly incarcerated have penalties that go beyond time. Ineligible for public housing. Unrentable by landlords. Ineligible  for food stamps. Employment  discrimination is legal. Most rational thing to do is to reoffend and be sent back. 60% are back in prison within one year of release. Costs us 52,000 per inmate per year.

* We are the world leader in imprisoning our own people.With 5% of world's population we have 25% of world’s incarcerated.

And none can vote after felony conviction

Like a new Jim Crow (http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431)

 The Blue Note gospel: preaching the prophetic Blues in a Post-Soul World by Otis Moss III, successor to the controversial Jeremiah Wright at Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago

* The church is capitalism in drag

* Society of a neo-religious capitalism

* The blues expresses America from the underside

* The blues is catastrophe expressed quietly

* The blues expresses tragedy without despair

* The gift of the black church is joy in the face of desperate sadness, to express tragedy without ultimate despair, the ability to dance in the dark….

Giving the invocation at Woolsey Hall

My prayer of invocation at the alumni dinner:

Oh God, creator of the universe, of all that is, we praise you. We thank you for all around these tables. For the meeting of old friends. For memories of when ideas were exciting and study brought us close to you. Let these days rekindle the passionate desire to question, thing and learn. Help us remember all who brought this food to our table tonight. From planting to serving.  We thank you for the opportunity to renew our friendships and remember the times we spent together here. Let us enjoy this night together. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

And I guess that I just don't know

10/22

Closed all day Monday for a movie shoot.

Today….the sleeping man is out there under his white comforter between our steps and Barney Greengrass. Excuse me sir, but you’re going to have to....

Look I been respectin you by movin off your steps but you got no call getting hp in my face…

And I’m sayin you still can’t sleep here during the  day.

I’m off your goddam steps…what you’re problem…

It’s still our property..

Fuck your property and fuck you motherfucker. He gets up off the sidewalk, comes up on the steps and gets in my face. Raises a fist. Now you pushin it motherfucker..

Don’t think you wanna do that, sir. It’s not good for you. Not good sleepin’ on the sidewalk. Not good.

Fuck you motherfucker.

I go inside. Tell Leila the sleeping man is uncooperative and downright nasty. Turns out he was nasty to her too. So I call Project Reachout and they agree to stop by.

Pat O comes by to help put the week in order. To help analyze last week’s emotional meeting. Figure out what’s next. I tell him the good of last week’s Sunday service.

Karen is in the sanctuary, playing her music.

Stephanie comes in to schedule the rehearsal times for her choir.

Carman’s Danish artist friend Nanna comes in. Shows me her installation boats on the edge. Paper boats in the sea off Copenhagen. She’ll come back Thursday for a full tour.

I hear back from Reachout. They came by. Got the sleeping man’s name. He refused their offers of assistance. Refused even to accept their street sheets. OK. My way is clear. Our rules are simple. You can stay on the steps as long as you work with our partners to get housing. Otherwise, you got to go. Even still, I wonder. Wonder how Jesus’ parable would change if the man along the Jericho Road called the Good Samaritan a motherfucker. Called Jesus  a motherfucker.

Then thank God that I'm as good as dead
Then thank your God that I'm not aware
And thank God that I just don't care
And I guess, I just don't know
And I guess, I just don't know

He's Got the Whole World in his Hands 3: with Ryan Smith from the Presbyterian Ministry at the Unites Nations

10/19

Victoire, Bob and Ryan 

Our special guest this Sunday is Ryan Smith, our Presbyterian Representative to the United Nations. We begin with a traditional old hymn, God of Grace and God of Glory. I lift up some of my favorite lines:

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage
For the facing of this hour

And most especially:

Save us from weak resignation
To the evils we deplore

And I tell the story of its  writer, Harry Emerson Fosdick, founding Pastor of the Riverside Church after having been brought up on heresy charges by the Presbyterian General Assembly and resigning from First Presbyterian in the Village where he had preached his scandalous Shall the Fundamentalists Win? Sermon which started the furor. Rockefeller built Riverside especially for Fosdick. I also asked us to think about what the world was like in 1930 when  it was written.

Our Gospel passage of the day is Matthew 12: 16-17:

And He said to them, "Whose likeness and inscription is this?" And they said to Him, "Caesar's." 17And Jesus said to them, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." And they were amazed at Him.

It follows in our ongoing emphasis on authority, most recently with the story of the golden calf. Here the message is clear, the whole world is God’s, not the emperor’s.

Following the reading of the gospel, our friend Victoire sings Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind…

And then as a follow up to our participation in the Climate march, Ryan shares with us an overview of what has been going on at the UN. The current round of talks are conclude with a summary of main points so far. Negotiations will continue leading up to a meeting in Paris and then Lima. There is much emphasis on keeping the rise in temperature under 2’ centigrade. At a 2’ rise, some UN island nations would vanish altogether. The process of getting a draft treaty will be long and arduous. And our own country does not have a good record of supporting international treaties. Ryan was impressed by Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s active engagement and leadership on this issue, including higher summer and lower winter temperatures at the UN.

Ryan also shared with us something of his work in the area of trafficking and Israel –Palestine issues.

Once again, we sing He’s got the whole world…

As I look around, my heart feels encouraged. My rabbi friend Steve from Open Mic has come.

Rabbi Steve and Bob

My friend Carman Moore has come with an artist friend from Denmark. And Berik has 3 friends from Kazakhstan here for an art show at the UN. Our circle is larger.

Victoire

I ask Victoire to sing one more dong for us following the service. So we all stay and listen as she sings a traditional French song. 

We’ve had a very good morning together.

What I said at the opening of the Maitreya Loving Kindness Toiur

10/17

Pastor Brashear at the Maitrya Loving Kindness Tour

It is a joy and honor to be with you here this evening for this exhibit and tour, this night, dedicated to loving kindness.

It is pretty generally known that in my tradition, when Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, he responded, 

 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment ^. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

But I have two other passages I would like to share with you this evening. The first is one that is extremely important to me in my own life:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
    and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
    and to walk humbly with your God?

This tells us first of all that justice and mercy are inextricable from one another, They must always go together. And as Thomas Aquinas reminded us, mercy without justice is powerless but justice without mercy is cruelty. We must always hold the two together.

The walking humbly is also an essential  part. As we understand ourselves as creatures, part of creation, we can only be humble. It leads to what Jonathan Edwards called benevolence to all being. And as we walk humbly in relation to creation, justice and mercy are easier expressions of that humility.

Finally, another bottom line verse from the first letter of John 4:7:

 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.

For all of us, the ultimate truth is behind a door. Occasionally that door opens and we get glimpses, but we see is only that and nothing more. We use our own languages to describe what we have seen and build our institutional structures based on that language.

The error is when we mistake our expressions of what we have seen as the whole and exclusive truth, superior to others. The fact of the matter is, we need to share with one another our own particular insights in order to even begin to come closer to the whole vision. And as we are human, it will always be partial.

So we must walk humbly with one another and out of that humility learn to love one another.

The deepest purpose of this tour and this evening is the opportunity to further the experience, the reality of loving kindness in the world we share.

And for the opportunity to share these thoughts with you this evening, and in this experience, I am profoundly thankful.