Sermons from Grace Cathedral

Sunday Sermons from San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, home to a community where the best of Episcopal tradition courageously embraces innovation and open-minded conversation. At Grace Cathedral, inclusion is expected and people of all faiths are welcomed. The cathedral itself, a renowned San Francisco landmark, serves as a magnet where diverse people gather to worship, celebrate, seek solace, converse and learn.

The Very Rev. Debbie Thomas 09/29/2024

Making Greatness Great Again - Debie Thomas, Author 09/22/2024

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young 09/15/2024

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young 09/08/2024

The Rev. Canon Mary Carter Greene 09/01/2024

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young 08/30/2024

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young “Once there were three baby owls: Sarah and Percy and Bill. They lived in a hole in the trunk of a tree with their Owl Mother…” These are the first lines in the children’s picture book Owl Babies. One night the three children wake up and find that their mother has gone. The older two siblings have theories about where their mother went and wavering confidence that she will return. The youngest one Bill just repeats “I want my mommy.” It is a simple story about growing up, about the difficult task of learning to become separate from our parents. Sweet Alexandra loved owls, animals, babies and the experience of childhood itself. This was her favorite story and the basis for her nickname “Owlexandra” or just plain “Owl.” It is hard to move gracefully from being a child to adulthood. It is hard to leave behind our childhood especially when we are very well adapted to it. It is hard to care for children in this time of transition. It is hard to be a child, or the friend of a child, who is becoming an adult. Stories help to guide us as we make our way. Alexandra loved stories like Frozen, Wicked, and Hamilton. Her mother is American and her father is from England so they read quite a variety of stories including those of the British author Enid Blyton (1897-1968). In Five on a Treasure Island the first book in the Famous Five series, Julian, Dick and Anne are on their way to spend their first summer away from their parents, at the seashore home of their uncle and aunt, and their cousin Georgina and her dog Timmy. “The car suddenly topped a hill – and there was the shining blue sea, calm and smooth in the evening sun…” At the house they meet their aunt for the first time (and they “liked the look of her”). She says, “Welcome to Kirrin [Bay]… Hallo, all of you! It’s lovely to see you… There were kisses all round, and then the children went into the house. They liked it. It felt old and rather mysterious somehow, and the furniture was old and very beautiful.” These books are filled with secret passageways, hidden treasure, stolen goods, old maps, smugglers, spies and suspicious strangers. But ultimately bravery, perseverance, kindness and loyalty are always rewarded. In the end everything is perfectly resolved and clear. You know where everyone stands. There is no gray area or ambiguity. You might say that real life is not like this and you would be right. Each of us is a mixture of good and bad. But we need each other to remind us to feed what is good in us every day so that we grow in kindness. I love the way Alexandra’s parents talk about her as a “gift from God” and uniquely filled with Christmas magic. In London her older sibling asked Father Christmas (or Santa Claus) for a little sister and ten months later she arrived. Alexandra was an angel in our Christmas pageant right here where I am standing. At the age of three she fell in love with the realistic looking babies in the FAO Schwartz store window. She loved children and animals. The Marin Primary motto is “treasuring childhood” and Alexandra did. She participated in theater, sports like cross country. She made art including a painting based on the work of Keith Haring. One of the greatest treasures in this Cathedral is a triptych that Keith Haring (1958-1990) finished only weeks before his death from AIDS. It shows a mother holding her baby surrounded by joyful angels. Alexandra knew that the most important question for a child is not what do you want to be when you grow up. It is who do you want to be; or better how do you want to be. Alexandra was empathetic, a thoughtful caregiver who valued kindness above everything else. This way of being matches the values of this Cathedral where it is not about who is in or out, who is good or evil, who is saved or damned. The style of faith here is not about condemning other people or other religions. It is not overly preoccupied with the sin which is so evident in the world, the cruelty and unkindness that lead to tragedies like a young person’s death. Instead we believe that God loves everyone without exception. We hold a faith that arises chiefly out of gratitude, out of an experience of nature’s beauty and the simple pleasure of being kind and helping the people who travel along with us. Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart… Blessed are the peacemakers” and we try to be people who build bridges and look for the best in others. We sing “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.” And in the midst of terrible tragedy we remember what a gift our life is. At the end of the service my friend Luis will sing a poem by the sixteenth century Anglican priest George Herbert. It ends with these words. They are a kind of invitation to God. “Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart: Such a Joy, as none can move: Such a Love, as none can part: Such a Heart, as joys in love.” Love and joy – these are the qualities exemplified by God. They are the possibilities that we realize in our own life. Jesus does not say much about what happens after we die, about what the poet Mary Oliver calls “that cottage of darkness.” But he does say over and over that God is like a loving parent, an Owl Mother if you will, who always returns, who cares for us as every day of our life as we face the struggles of maturing. And I imagine heaven as like the opening of an Enid Blyton book, the beginning of summer when suddenly we come across “the shining blue sea, calm and smooth in the evening sun,” and we are welcomed with “kisses all round” into an old house and a new adventure. And we will see again our lovely Owl as a kind of angel filled with kindness and the magic of Christmas. “Once there were three baby owls: Sarah and Percy and Bill. They lived in a hole in the trunk of a tree with their Owl Mother. The hole had twigs and leaves and owl feathers in it. It was their house.” Martin Waddell, Illustrated by Patrick Benson, Owl Babies (Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 1992). Enid Blyton, Five on a Treasure Island Illustrated by Ellen A. Soper (NY: Hatchette Children’s Books, 1997 originally published in 1942), 7-9. /episode/index/show/gracecathedralsermons/id/32813352

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young 08/25/2024

The Rev. Joe C. Williams 08/18/2024

The Rt. Rev. Austin Keith Rios 08/12/2024

The Rt. Rev. Austin Keith Rios In the crypt of the basilica in Assisi, there is a shirt made out of hair that once adorned the mortal body of St. Clare. Each time I visited that Umbrian mecca of a kind of sainthood that remains admirable and replicable today—the decision of St. Francis and St. Clare to choose worldly poverty in exchange for spiritual richness—I found myself dwelling on that hair shirt relic. Legend has it that Clare was beautiful and possessed some of the most luxurious golden locks of hair ever seen in the region. And yet because of how she experienced God’s presence in her contemporary St. Francis, who threw off the mantle of his family wealth and stood naked and reborn in front of the local bishop while pledging himself to rebuild God’s church, Clare decided to devote her life to the same Christ—and cut off those golden locks as a sign of her own rebirth in the living God. There were several children of wealthy Italians who lived in the 1200’s, many of whom most likely loved their families and cared for the local populace in admirable ways. But we gather here today in the city of St. Francis, commemorating the feast day of St. Clare, because these two children of 13th century wealthy Italians re-presented the heart of our Christian faith by following Jesus in a radical and life-giving way that transformed their city, their country, and the wider world around them. They let go of what the world believed was necessary for life and incarnated the power of the gospel in their own lives through utter reliance on God and love and service of neighbor. Every time I saw that hair shirt of Clare’s in Assisi, it made me conscious of two things. The first is just how scratchy and awful such a penitential practice must have been. I’m not sure wearing a hair shirt is a practice that would lead me to greater consciousness and trust in Jesus, but I do know that it would lead one to a state of constant discomfort. And the second is that even if a shirt made out of hair—with resonances and reminders of the hair that Clare let go—isn’t the way that may lead me to complete reliance on Jesus, my life’s call is about finding out what will, and about letting only the light and love of God clothe me and flow through me for the continued transformation of the world. We come into the world through God’s grace, “from [our] mother’s wombs, [and so] we shall go [forth] again, naked as [we] came” as the author of Ecclesiastes reminds us. And yet somewhere between the “forceps and the stone” each of us has the opportunity to choose how we will ultimately use the precious gift of our lives. Will we live into the imperial story—that sees worldly wealth as the final goal of human effort and toil, and trample whomever and whatever stands between us and its accumulation? Or will we see the accidental and earned gifts of our lives as tools to employ in the pursuit of the gospel—a gospel that constantly reminds us that our fundamental wealth, security, and influence are found in God and in restored relationships with one another? I stand before you in this magnificent worship space called Grace Cathedral because previous generations of the faithful chose the latter over the former. And yet, just like us gathered here today, the majority of our ancestors struggled mightily with the dual pull of the world and the gospel on their lives. There is something beautiful and enviable about the extreme choices Clare and Francis made—to renounce all worldly possessions and give themselves entirely to God. Perhaps that is the way that lies before some of us gathered here today. But regardless of whether we go all in on the gospel in the exact way they did, each of us are called to go all in on the gospel in our time and in our own way. Whatever method or practice leads us there, all of us must be gravitating toward the realization of a beloved and restored community—on the micro and macro levels. Regardless of our liturgical preferences and proclivities, all of us must be about authentic forms of worship that connect the interior life of our churches with the exterior needs and hopes of our neighborhoods. And no matter the contours of the time in which we live, the specific oppositions we may face individually or communally, nor the strength of the temptation to conflate imperial religion with the living gospel, all of us are called to embrace our unique membership in the larger Body of Christ and become channels of blessing and healing in this precious life we share. My deepest prayer today is that God will grant me the grace to live this calling out among you as your bishop, and that God will likewise grant us all the grace to empower and support one another as we pursue this joyful and difficult work together. As we discern God’s vision together in the months and years ahead, may the same Spirit that guided our forebears Francis and Clare be manifest among us, and may we grow in trust of the one God who clothes us in righteousness, anoints our head with oil, and equips us with the tools we need to see the vision realized on earth as it is in heaven. To the All in All, who brings us unburdened, bare, and free into this life and brings us home one day in the same way, be all honor, glory, power and dominion, now and forevermore. Amen. /episode/index/show/gracecathedralsermons/id/32536192

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young 08/11/2024

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young 08/05/2024

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young “Dark and cheerless is the morn unaccompanied by thee; joyless is the day’s return till thy mercy’s beams I see, till they inward light impart, glad my eyes and warm my heart.” Why practice religion? Last week a New York Times journalist asked me a question I frequently hear from my neighbors. “Is religion dying out?” People raising this topic often cite statistics showing a decline in religious participation. Indeed more people went to church in the 1950’s and 1960’s than at any other time in our country’s history. We were a much less diverse country in those days and we were facing the aftermath of the most destructive war in all history. Perhaps there is an ebb and flow when it comes to expressing our spirituality. I always answer by saying that human beings are spiritual beings and we always will be. We are not going to evolve or grow out of religion. We will never stop asking questions like “where did I come from? How should I dedicate my time and energy? What happens after we die?” We are symbolic creatures who depend on constructing meaning for our social lives and for our individual survival. Despair kills us. The twentieth century philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) calls humans “Dasein” or “being.” He means we are the being for whom being (that is, our very existence), is a problem. Social scientists tell us that religious people are less depressed and lonely (they have more social connections). They are healthier and live longer. They report being happier. Columbia researcher Lisa Miller points out that children who have a positive active relationship to spirituality are 40% less likely to use and abuse substances, 60% less like to be depressed as teenagers and 80% less likely to have dangerous or unprotected sex. This is probably not the reason to become religious. Religion is not about believing the unbelievable. At heart religions share something in common: the idea that you are not the center. Religions evolved with human beings who long for a connection to God and cannot be satisfied by anything else. I think we could spend a year talking about this but let me share two immediate responses to the question “why practice a religion,” one primarily from the head and the other from the heart. 1. Why religion? Because, “Be it life or death, we crave only reality.” Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862) wrote this in his book Walden in a section about our deep desire to fathom the depths of “opinion and prejudice, and tradition and delusion” so that we might reach the rock solid bottom “which we can call reality.” True religion involves opening to reality, becoming aware of the extraordinary mystery both of the world and our inner life. Ed Yong wrote one of my favorite new books. It is called An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms around us. He begins by asking the reader to imagine an elephant in a room, not a metaphorical “weighty issue” sort of elephant but an actual elephant in a room the size of a high school gymnasium. Now imagine a mouse surrying in with a robin hopping along beside it. An owl sits on a beam and a bat hangs from the ceiling. A rattlesnake slithers on the floor. A spider rests in its web with a mosquito and a bumblebee sitting on a potted sunflower… and a woman named Rebecca who loves animals. They are all in the same room, but they have entirely different sensory experiences of the same space. Certain animals can see ultraviolet shades that are invisible to us. Mosquitos smell carbon dioxide. Snakes sense infrared radiation coming from warm objects. Ticks detect body heat from thirteen feet away. The robin feels the earth’s magnetic field. Tiny insects make extraordinary sounds that vibrate through plants. When a fish swims it leaves behind a hydrodynamic wake, a “trail of swirling water.” Did you know that harbor seals can detect this with their whiskers and follow a herring from up to about 200 yards away? No one knew this before the year 2001. There are whole new forms of sensing the world that human beings are only just discovering. We can barely imagine the experience that other creatures are having. I love the word that describes this. It is Umwelt, the German word for environment. But in this case it means the perceptual world of each creature. The ability of our eyes to see details for instance makes us almost entirely unique among all animals other than eagles and vultures. Our Umwelt is predominantly visual one. My point is that we encounter truth through symbols which lie deep in our subconscious and areshared in our culture. You might call this way of seeing a kind of unavoidable mythological Umwelt. Our Umwelt determines what we think about loyalty, family, economic growth, impurity, justice, identity, childhood, politics, duty, fairness and nationality. This worldviewdirects us as we try to live a good life. Why religion? Because we are unfinished creatures made more complete by God and each other. Religion is a way of studying, interpreting, shaping and ultimately embodying values. Participating in religion means more consciously opening ourselves to other people. This includes the diverse people in this room but also those who came before us in history who loved God and wrote hymns, prayers and theologies. Together we pray and listen to the promptings of God’s spirit. During the terrible years of apartheid in South Africa it was dangerous for Desmond Tutu to preach. But this did not stop him. He said “You are love.” “You are the body of Christ that receives the sacraments in order to become more fully the mystical embodiment of love.” God loves us so that we can love another. 2. Why religion? Because of our longing for God and God’s longing for us. Religion is how we meet God. It is how we receive help from beyond ourselves. In her memoir the historian Elaine Pagels writes about the way her rationalist parents dismissed religion as something only for uneducated people, as unscientific. But this also led them in an extreme way to avoid thinking or talking about suffering and death. Mark Twain joked, “I know that everyone dies, but I always thought an exception would be made in my case.” This was how they existed and it left them unprepared for life. Pagels describes having difficulty getting pregnant and then participating in a kind of fertility ritual. Sitting in a candlelit circle a thought entered her mind, “Are you willing to be a channel?” She answered “Yes!” and soon became pregnant. Her son Mark was born with a hole in his heart that had to be repaired by surgery when he was one year old. The night before the surgery she was startled by an experience that could have been a dream although she felt like she was awake. An inhuman male presence came near threatening to kill her son. She wanted to run but stood her ground. The threatening presence returned twice more. The last time she felt like she could not stand another moment. She spoke the name, “Jesus Christ” and the dangerous being fled and she was no longer afraid. Four years later Mark was in Kindergarten when one evening she went into his room to sing him to sleep. Instead he hugged her with his arms around her neck and said, “I’ll love you all my life, and all my death.” The next day at the doctor’s office when they were drawing blood he stiffened and his eyes rolled up. She sensed that the life had left his body, that their connection was breaking. And she lost consciousness. Suddenly Pagels seemed, “to be in a brilliant place, vividly green with golden light.” Her husband came in and she felt as if she could feel her son’s presence there near the ceiling of the room. The cardiologist came in to say, “I don’t want to get your hopes up, but your son’s heart stopped and it is beating again.” Pagels had the impression that the boy had heard his parents talking and gone back to his body only to discover it couldn’t sustain his life. The boy died and Pagels writes, “Strangely, I also sensed that he’d felt a burst of joy and relief to leave his exhausted body. Before that moment, I’d taken for granted what I’d learned, that death was the end, any thought of surviving death only fantasy. Although that may be true, what I experienced that day challenged that assumption. I was astonished, seeming to sense that Mark was all right, wherever he was, and that he was somewhere.” The tragedy deepened terribly a year later when the one person Pagels’ depended on most, her beloved husband fell to his death in a climbing accident. Her parents did not visit when her son was born, or when he had open-heart surgery or when he died or for her husband’s funeral. They stayed away from suffering. She called it a “pattern of oblivion.” Elaine Pagels studied ancient gnostic literature written after the Bible was finished. She quotesthe Gospel of Thomas which says, “the kingdom of God is within you, and outside of you. When you come to know yourselves then… you will know that you are children of God.” Pagels concludes writing, “the kingdom of God is not an actual place… or an event expected in human time. Instead, it’s a state of being that we may enter when we come to know who we are, and come to know God as the source of our being… The “good news” is not only about Jesus, it’s about every one of us. While we ordinarily identify ourselves by specifying how we differ, in terms of gender, race, ethnicity… recognizing that we are “children of God” requires us to see how we are the same – members… of the same family… [T]he “image of God,” the divine light given in creation, is hidden deep within each one of us, linking our fragile, limited selves to their divine source.” Why religion? Because in the face of the great mystery of our life we long for reality. We reach beyond our Umwelt to learn from each other. Why religion? Because beyond even the “pattern of oblivion” God meets us here where we receive help from beyond ourselves. /episode/index/show/gracecathedralsermons/id/32435697

The Rev. Canon Anna E. Rossi 07/28/2024

The Rev. Canon Mary Carter Greene 07/21/2024

The Rev. Joe C. Williams 07/14/2024

Questions, Curiosity and Hope 07/08/2024

The Rev. Canon Mary Carter Greene 06/30/2024

The Rev. Joe C. Williams 06/23/2024

The World is Satan's Home 06/09/2024

Pride Mass 06/03/2024

Through the Sabbath into a Strange New World 06/02/2024

The Rev. Canon Anne E. Rossi 05/26/2024

The Rev. Canon Anna E. Rossi 05/19/2024

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young 05/12/2024

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young Jesus prayed, “I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves” (Jn. 17). Acts 1:15-17, 21-26 Psalm 1 1 John 5:9-13 John 17:6-19 Friendship According to Aristotle and Jesus 1. “We seek one mystery, God, with another mystery, ourselves. We are mysterious to ourselves because God’s mystery is in us.” Gary Wills wrote these words about the impossibility of fully comprehending God. Still, we can draw closer to the Holy One. I am grateful for friends who help me see our Father in new ways. This week my friend Norwood Pratt sent me an article which begins with a poem by Li Bai (701-762). According to legend he died in the year 762 drunkenly trying to embrace the moon’s reflection in the Yangtze River. Li Bai writes, “The birds have vanished from the sky. / Now the last cloud drains away // We sit together, the mountain and me, / until only the mountain remains.” For me this expresses the feeling of unity with God that comes to me in prayer. This poet was one of many inspirations for a modern Chinese American poet named Li-Young Lee (1957-). Lee’s father immigrated to the United States and served as a Presbyterian pastor at an all-white church in western Pennsylvania. Lee feels fascinated by infinity and eternity. He writes this poem about the “Ultimate Being, Tao or God” as the beloved one, the darling. Each of us in the uniqueness of our nature and experience has a different experience of holiness. He writes, “My friend and I are in love with the same woman… I’d write a song about her. I wish I could sing. I’d sing about her. / I wish I could write a poem. / Every line would be about her. / Instead, I listen to my friend speak / about this woman we both love, / and I think of all the ways she is unlike / anything he says about her and unlike / everything else in the world.” These two poets write about something that cannot easily be expressed, our deepest desire to be united with God. Jesus also speaks about this in the Gospel of John, in his last instructions to the disciples and then in his passionate prayer for them, and for us. In his last words Jesus describes the mystery of God and our existence using a surprising metaphor. At the center of all things lies our experience of friendship. On Mother’s Day when we celebrate the sacrifices associated with love I want to think more with you about friendship and God. To understand the uniqueness of Jesus’ teaching, it helps to see how another great historical thinker understood this subject. 2. Long before Jesus’ birth the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) studied at Plato’s school in Athens (from the age of 17 to 37). After this Aristotle became the tutor of Alexander the Great and founded a prominent library that he used as the basis for his thought. Scholars estimate that about a third of what Aristotle wrote has survived. He had a huge effect on the western understanding of nature. He also especially influenced the thirteenth century theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and therefore modern Roman Catholic approaches to Christian thought. For Aristotle God is eternal, non-material, unchanging and perfect. He famously describes God as the unmoved mover existing outside of the world and setting it into motion. Because everything seeks divine perfection this God is responsible for all change that continues to happen in the universe. We experience a world of particular things but God knows the universal ideas behind them (or before them). For Aristotle God is pure thought, eternally contemplating himself. God is the telos, the goal or end of all things. Aristotle begins his book Nicomachean Ethics by observing that “Happiness… is the End at which all actions aim.” Everything we do ultimately can be traced back to our desire for happiness and the purpose of Aristotle’s book is to help the reader to attain this goal. Happiness comes from having particular virtues, that is habitual ways of acting and seeking pleasure. These include: courage, temperance, generosity, patience. In our interactions with others we use social virtues including: amiability, sincerity, wit. Justice is the overarching virtue that encompasses all the others. Aristotle writes that there are three kinds of friendships. The first is based on usefulness, the second on pleasure. Because these are based on superficial qualities they generally do not last long. The final and best form of friendship for him is based on strength of character. These friends do not love each other for what they can gain but because they admire each other’s character. Aristotle believes that this almost always this happens between equals although sometimes one sees it in the relation between fathers and sons (I take this to mean between parents and children). Famous for describing human beings as the political animal, Aristotle points out that we can only accomplish great things through cooperation. Institutions and every human group rely on friendly feelings to be effective. Friendship is key to what makes human beings effective, and for that matter, human. Finally, Aristotle believes that although each person should be self-sufficient, friendship is important for a good life. 3. The Greek word for Gospel, that particular form of literature which tells the story of Jesus, is euangelion. We might forget that this word means good news until we get a sense for the far more radical picture of God and friendship that Jesus teaches. For me, one of the defining and unique features of Christianity as a religion comes from Jesus’ insistence that our relation to God is like a child to a loving father. Jesus teaches us to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven.” Jesus clarifies this picture of God in his story of the Prodigal Son who goes away and squanders his wealth in a kind of first century Las Vegas. In the son’s destitution he returns home and as he crests the hill, his father “filled with compassion,” hikes up his robes and runs to hug and kiss him. Jesus does not just use words but physical gestures to show what a friend is. In today’s gospel Jesus washes his friends’ feet before eats his last meal with them. The King James Version says, “there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved” (Jn. 13:23). Imagine Jesus, in the actual embrace of his beloved friend, telling us who God is. Jesus explicitly says I do not call you servants but friends (Jn. 15). A servant does not know what the master is doing but a friend does. And you know that the greatest commandment is to love one another. Later in prayer he begs God to protect us from the world, “so that [we] may have [his] joy made complete in [ourselves]” (Jn. 17). 4. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 332-395) was born ten years after the First Council of Nicaea and attended the First Council of Constantinople. He writes about how so many ordinary people were arguing about doctrine, “If in this city you ask anyone for change, he will discuss with you whether the Son was begotten or unbegotten. If you ask about the quality of the bread you will receive the answer, “The father is the greater and the Son is lesser.’ If you suggest a bath is desirable you will be told, ‘There was nothing before the Son was created.’” Gregory with his friends Basil and Gregory Nazianzus wondered what description of Jesus would lead to faith rather than just argument. Gregory of Nyssa came to believe that the image of God is only fully displayed when every human person is included. In his final book Life of Moses Gregory responds to a letter from a younger friend who seeks counsel on “the perfect life.” Gregory writes that Moses exemplifies this more than all others because Moses is a friend to God. True perfection is not bargaining with, pleading, tricking, manipulating, fearing God. It is not avoiding a wicked life out of fear of punishment. It is not to do good because we hope for some reward, as if we are cashing in on the virtuous life through a business contract. Gregory closes with these words to his young admirer, “we regard falling from God’s friendship as the only dreadful thing… and we consider becoming God’s friend the only thing worthy of honor and desire. This… is the perfection of life. As your understanding is lifted up to what is magnificent and divine, whatever you may find… will certainly be for the common benefit in Christ Jesus.” On Thursday night I was speaking to Paul Fromberg the Rector of St. Gregory’s church about this and he mentioned a sophisticated woman who became a Christian in his church. In short she moved from Aristotle’s view of friendship among superior equals to Jesus’ view. She said, “Because I go to church I can have real affection for people who annoy the shit out of me. My affection is no longer just based on affinity.” 5. I have been thoroughly transformed by Jesus’ idea of friendship. My life has become full of Jesus’ friends, full of people who I never would have met had I followed Aristotle’s advice. Together we know that in Christ unity does not have to mean uniformity. Before I close let me tell you about one person who I met at Christ Church in Los Altos. Even by the time I met her Alice Larse was only a few years away from being a great-grandmother. She and her husband George had grown up together in Washington State. He had been an engineer and she nursed him through his death from Alzheimer’s disease. Some of my favorite memories come from the frequent summer pool parties she would have for our youth groups. She must have been in her sixties when she started a “Alice’s Stick Cookies Company.” Heidi and I saw them in a store last week! At Christ Church we had a rotating homeless shelter and there were several times when Alice, as a widow living by herself, had various guests stay at her house. When the church was divided about whether or not to start a school she quickly volunteered to serve as senior warden. She was not sentimental. She was thoroughly practical. She was humble. She got things done… but with a great sense of humor. There was no outward indication that she was really a saint. I missed her funeral two weeks ago because of responsibilities here. I never really had the chance to say goodbye but I know that one day we will be together in God. Grace Cathedral has hundreds of saints just like her who I have learned to love in a similar way. Ram Dass was a dear friend of our former Dean Alan Jones. He used to say, “The name of the game we are in is called ‘Being at one with the Beloved.’ The Medieval mystic Julian of Norwich writes that God possesses, “a love-longing to have us all together, wholly in himself for his delight; for we are not now wholly in him as we shall be…” She says that you and I are Jesus’ joy and bliss. We seek one mystery, God, with another mystery, ourselves. We are mysterious to ourselves because God’s mystery is in us.” In a world where friendship can seem to be only for utility or pleasure I pray that like Jesus, you will be blessed with many friends, that you find perfection of life and even become friends with God. Gary Wills, Saint Augustine (NY: Viking, 1999) xii. Li Bai, “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain,” tr. Sam Hamill, Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese, (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2000). About 1000 poems attributed to Li still exist. Ed Simon, “There’s Nothing in the World Smaller than the Universe: In The Invention of the Darling, Li-Young Lee presents divinity as spirit and matter, profound and quotidian, sacred and profane,” Poetry Foundation. This article quotes, “The Invention of the Darling.” More from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Aristotle made God passively responsible for change in the world in the sense that all things seek divine perfection. God imbues all things with order and purpose, both of which can be discovered and point to his (or its) divine existence. From those contingent things we come to know universals, whereas God knows universals prior to their existence in things. God, the highest being (though not a loving being), engages in perfect contemplation of the most worthy object, which is himself. He is thus unaware of the world and cares nothing for it, being an unmoved mover. God as pure form is wholly immaterial, and as perfect he is unchanging since he cannot become more perfect. This perfect and immutable God is therefore the apex of being and knowledge. God must be eternal. That is because time is eternal, and since there can be no time without change, change must be eternal. And for change to be eternal the cause of change-the unmoved mover-must also be eternal. To be eternal God must also be immaterial since only immaterial things are immune from change. Additionally, as an immaterial being, God is not extended in space.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library vol. XIX (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975) 30-1. h™n aÓnakei÷menoß ei–ß e˙k tw◊n maqhtw◊n aujtouv e˙n twˆ◊ ko/lpwˆ touv ∆Ihsouv, o§n hjga¿pa oJ ∆Ihsouvß (John 13:23). I don’t understand why the NRSV translation translate this as “next to him” I think that Herman Waetjen regards “in Jesus’ bosom” as correct. Herman Waetjen, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple: A Work in Two Editions (NY: T&T Clark, 2005) 334. Margaret Ruth Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 105. Ibid., 108. From Jesse Hake, “An Intro to Saint Gregory of Nyssa and his Last Work: The Life of Moses,” 28 July 2022: “For example, Gregory says that the image of God is only fully displayed when every human person is included, so that the reference in Genesis to making humanity in God’s image is actually a reference to all of humanity as one body (which is ultimately the body of Jesus Christ that is also revealed at the end of time): In the Divine foreknowledge and power all humanity is included in the first creation. …The entire plenitude of humanity was included by the God of all, by His power of foreknowledge, as it were in one body, and …this is what the text teaches us which says, God created man, in the image of God created He him. For the image …extends equally to all the race. …The Image of God, which we behold in universal humanity, had its consummation then. …He saw, Who knows all things even before they be, comprehending them in His knowledge, how great in number humanity will be in the sum of its individuals. …For when …the full complement of human nature has reached the limit of the pre-determined measure, because there is no longer anything to be made up in the way of increase to the number of souls, [Paul] teaches us that the change in existing things will take place in an instant of time. [And Paul gives to] that limit of time which has no parts or extension the names of a moment and the twinkling of an eye (1 Corinthians 15:51-52).” Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, “Preface” by John Myendorff (NY: Paulist Press, 1978) 29. Ibid., 137. Paul Fromberg conversation at One Market, Thursday 9 May 2024. Alan Jones, Living the Truth (Boston, MA: Cowley Publications, 2000) 53. Quoted in Isaac S. Villegas, “Christian Theology is a Love Story,” The Christian Century, 25 April 2018. Gary Wills, Saint Augustine (NY: Viking, 1999) xii. /episode/index/show/gracecathedralsermons/id/31253067

The Rev. Mark E. Stanger 05/05/2024

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young 04/28/2024

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2E26 5 Easter (Year B) 11:00 a.m. Eucharist Sunday 28 April 2024 | Earth Day Acts 8:26-40 Psalm 22:24-30 1 John 4:7-21 John 15:1-8 “Mysterious God we have lost our home. We are wandering. Help us to hear your call and find ourselves again in you. Amen." 1. In wild places I have heard the voice of God... From the time beyond human remembering there existed an island called by the first people Limuw. Every spring fantastic cumulous clouds raced over orange and yellow flower-covered mountain slopes. The fast moving streams, canyons, prairies, oak woodlands, cobbled beaches, tidepools and white foamy waters teamed with life. Thousands of birds nested on the cliffs among the waterfalls. But something was missing. And so Hutash, the name for the Spirit of the Earth, planted a new kind of seed. From these, the ground put forth the first people and the island was complete. Thus begins a story perhaps older than human writing told by people known today as the Chumash. You may know this place as Santa Cruz Island. It is the largest island in California and lies in the archipelago off the coast of Santa Barbara. “The Rainbow Bridge” story goes on. Hutash taught the people how to take care of themselves and their island home. For many years they thrived and multiplied until Limuw became too crowded. Then Kakanupmawa, the mystery behind the sun, conferred with Hutash and they agreed that the people needed a bigger place. So they gathered them on the mountain peak and caused a rainbow to stretch over the sea to a broader land. Some of the people easily crossed over. But others became distracted and dizzied by the waters far below them. They fell from the rainbow bridge into the ocean waters where they were transformed into dolphins. In wild places I have heard the voice of God. When dolphins join me as I surf at Ocean Beach my heart expands with ecstatic joy. It always feels like such a holy encounter. But not only does the story concern the deep kinship between dolphins and humans, some believe it might even be about sea level changes that are part of the geologic record. At the end of the last ice age when the sea level was about 400 feet lower the four channel islands were joined together. As the seas rose, the population that the four separate islands could support decreased forcing people to move to the mainland. Rosanna Xia tells this story in her book California Against the Sea because she hopes that the massive rise in the sea level could be an opportunity for human beings to mend their relationship with the ocean and the rest of the earth. During the last one hundred years the sea has risen by nine inches. Before the end of our century in the lifetime of the youngest people here, the sea will probably rise by six to seven feet. Human beings caused and continue to produce a catastrophic change in the composition of our atmosphere. Almost one third of the carbon dioxide released by human beings since the Industrial Revolution and more than 90% of the resulting heat has been absorbed by our oceans. Carbon dioxide mixing with ocean water causes a chemical reaction that increases the acidity of the seas. The oceans are absorbing the heat equivalent of seven Hiroshima bombs detonating every second. We are the first generation to experience the effects of climate change and the last generation that can make a substantially different course possible. We know this but don’t really comprehend it. It’s hard to be continuously conscious of such a danger, and of such a grave responsibility. 2. In the face of our situation Jesus gives us very good news. During the last weeks of Easter our readings show us how to live in intimacy with God. Today’s gospel comes from the last meal Jesus shares with his friends before being killed. Imagine the tangible fear in that room as he prepares them for his departure from this world. It must have been like a last meal at San Quentin Prison before a prisoner is executed. Thomas says, “How can we know the way?” Jesus responds with the last of seven “I am” statements. Earlier in the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “I am…” “the bread of life” (6:35), “the light of the world” (8:12), “the door” (10:7), “the Good Shepherd” (10:11). And today he says, “I am the true vine and my father is the vinegrower” (Jn. 15). Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you.” He uses the image of the vine, organic and integrally connected, to prepare his friends for his death. “I am the vine and you are the branches,” he says. It is almost as if he is reassuring them, “Death will not separate us. I will not be leaving you. We will become even more intimately connected. Do not be afraid.” Jesus goes on. “You will see evidence of our connection. Look at your life and the lives of those who follow me and see the richness of this fruit.” I do not read this as a threat. It is not “stay with me or you will wither and perish.” It is the promise that we do not need to worry, that we are in this together. Jesus is saying our companionship will be even closer than we can imagine. We walk side by side today. In the future we will be abide in Jesus and bring good news to the world. Other examples of this persist in the Bible. In Genesis, God breathes spirit into us and sustains our life. In Galatians, Paul writes, “It is no longer I who live but it is Christ who lives in me.” The Book of Acts describes God as the one, “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” One might even say that the culmination of Jesus’ teaching is about abiding in God. Our goal is not simply to follow Jesus, or to convince others to, or even primarily to obey what he taught. We live in Jesus as he lives in us. This experience of intimacy lies at the heart of my faith and of my understanding of the earth. In wild places I have heard the voice of God. 3. As a student of religion I carefully studied the connection between the spirit of God and the natural world. Many of us here have experienced a kind of transcendence in nature, a moment when everything changes, when the cosmos seems clear. These encounters show that our picture of God is too small. When we begin to glimpse how interrelated all life is, we cannot go back to pretending that one individual, or group, or nation, or species can thrive alone. Religion stops being another form of tribalism and becomes an opening in our hearts to wonder and gratitude and love. Let me talk about two people whose lives were changed in this way by meeting God in nature. As a young man Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) served as the minister of the Second Church of Boston (Unitarian). It was founded in 1650, almost exactly 200 years before Grace Cathedral. He would make pastoral visits to Revolutionary War veterans and just did not know what to say. The prospect of writing a sermon every week for the rest of his life scared him. Philosophically he was not sure what it meant to consecrate bread and wine during communion services. Then the wife who he simply adored died at the age of twenty from tuberculosis and his life fell apart. He was inconsolable. He resigned his pastorate, sold all his household furniture and departed on Christmas Day across the gray expanse of the North Atlantic with the hope that he might find himself. In 1836 Emerson published what he discovered in a short book called Nature. Feeling confined and limited by tradition and the past, Emerson stopped believing in them. He gave up faith in the promise that we could learn about what really matters from someone else. Instead he believed that we should experience God firsthand and that “Nature is a symbol of spirit. He writes, “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear… In the woods, we return to reason and faith… all mean egotism vanishes… the currents of Universal Being circulate though me; I am part or parcel of God.” Later he writes, “behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present… the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old.” Emerson encouraged his young friend Henry David Thoreau to begin keeping a journal and later allowed him to build a cabin on his land by the shore of Walden Pond. Generations later in 1975 a 29 year old woman after finishing her master’s thesis on Thoreau won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in a book recording her own encounter of nature and spirit. Her name was Annie Dillard and the memoir about living along a creek in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains was called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Without flinching Dillard sees the frightening vastness of the void, the uncountable number of swarming insects. She writes about the water bug injecting poison that liquifies its prey. Quoting Pascal and Einstein, Annie Dillard wonders if our modern understanding of God has spread, “as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way that we can only feel blindly of its hem.” In this theological and liturgical book (it follows the Christian year into Advent), Dillard regards the great beauty of this world as grace, as a gift from God. At the end she concludes, “Do you think you will keep your life, or anything else you love? But no... You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked… You see the creatures die, and you know that you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life… I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door… Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret and holy and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.” The seas are rising. How can we know the way? God speaks to us through nature – often in ways that we do not expect, sometimes in ways that are not altogether comfortable for us. But we will not hear if we do not listen. Let us mend our relation to the earth, and build a bridge to a more humane civilization. Jesus, the true vine, reminds us that at the core of every being is the power to love. We will never be truly isolated or alone. He will always abide in us. In wild places I have heard the voice of God. /episode/index/show/gracecathedralsermons/id/31019748

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young 04/21/2024

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2E23 4 Easter (Year B) 8:30 a.m. & 11:00 a.m. Eucharist Sunday 21 April 2024 Good Shepherd Sunday Acts 4:5-12 Psalm 23 1 John 3:16-24 John 10:11-18 “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want” (Psalm 23). When I was at Harvard, on the advice of a friend who is a nun, I decided to take a leadership course at the Kennedy School of Government. My fellow classmates came from twenty-six countries and included CEO’s, a judge, a District Attorney, an army general, a state senator, the founder of an investment bank, the co-founder of a Political Action Committee, an ambassador, a university dean, the head administrator for airports in Israel, etc. Our teacher Ronald Heifetz changed who I am. He spoke with uncanny and absolutely non-defensive frankness. He had an MD, practiced as a surgeon, and had previously taught at Harvard Medical School. He was a cello virtuoso who had studied under Gregor Piatagorsky and music was central to his understanding of leadership. This week I read all my class notes – everything from doodles that spelled my wife’s Hawaiian name in Greek letters to quotes with three stars in the margin (such as, “in disagreements the first value we lose sight of is the ability to be curious”). The syllabus says directly that the course’s goal is, “to increase one’s capacity to sustain the demands of leadership.” It was perfect preparation for the rest of my life. On the first day Heifetz said, “if you are going through a difficult time I strongly urge you not to take this course.” He was right. This was not an ordinary lecture class but a seemingly entirely improvised discussion. Heifetz would start by saying something like, “What do we want to address today?” It felt strangely dangerous. Nothing was going to come easy or be handed to us on a silver platter. We talked about the feeling in class and agreed it was tense. At one point in the early lectures Heifetz just stopped being an authority figure for a while. In the resulting chaos we learned how much we all crave authority and guiding norms. It felt more like a Werner Erhard seminar than a Harvard lecture. Heifetz might not always say it directly but he regards leadership above all as a spiritual practice. The motivations for good leadership are spiritual. The character and the skills that we need to develop for leadership are spiritual. To be effective we have to recognize forces that were previously invisible to us and experience the world with intuition and based on a real understanding of ourselves. Leadership success requires curiosity, compassion, wisdom, honesty, courage, humility, self-knowledge and the right balance between detachment and passion. Today is Good Shepherd Sunday. In the Fourth Gospel Jesus faces accusers who seek to kill him. He uses the metaphor of a leader as a good shepherd. This idea was already ancient in his time and mentioned in the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Psalms. You might be thinking, “No one listens to me since I retired,” or, “I’m at the lowest level in my company, or I’m just a kid, what could leadership possibly have to do with me?” Heifetz makes a central distinction between authority and leadership. Authority comes from one’s institutional standing and involves managing people’s expectations. Jesus was not the Roman governor or the high priest. He did not have this authority. Leadership on the other hand means mobilizing resources to make progress on difficult problems. In many instances people exercise more powerful leadership without having formal authority than with it. Jesus did. And make no mistake Jesus expects each of us to act as leaders regardless of our formal or informal authority. We exist to glorify God and to help solve the problems we encounter. For homework I invite you this week to consciously exercise leadership that is inspired by Jesus. 1. Adaptive Challenges. This morning I am going to do the opposite of what my teacher did, I am going to speak directly and briefly about three of his observations concerning leadership. One of Heifetz’s primary ideas concerns the difference between a technical problem and an adaptive challenge. A technical problem is one that we already know how to respond to; best practices, if you will, already exist. It may be simple like setting a broken bone or incredibly complicated like putting a person on the moon, but an expert, a mechanic, surgeon or rocket scientist, already knows how to handle it. An adaptive challenge is different. No adequate response has been developed for it. I have in mind our terrible problem of people without housing, racial prejudice, addiction, education, misinformation, poverty, war, white Christian nationalism, election denial, despair, isolation, etc. It is tempting to treat an adaptive challenge as if it were a technical problem, to look to an authority to solve that problem for us. But problems like this require cooperation among groups of people who are seeking solutions, not pretending to already know all the answers. What was Jesus’ adaptive challenge? His disciples thought it was overthrowing the Roman Empire or enthroning a king who shared their identity. But this was not it. Instead Jesus was what the theologian Paul Tillich calls “the New Being.” Jesus inaugurated a new way of being human which he called “the realm of God” in which all people would be healed, cared for and treated with dignity. It is a realm of spiritual well-being in which we experience God as a kind of loving father such as the father in the Prodigal Son story. This is what Jesus means when he says, “the Father knows me and I know the Father” (Jn. 10). As a spiritual community Grace Cathedral shares this adaptive challenge of working for the realm of God. And in a society where Christianity is justifiably associated with misogyny, homophobia and unkindness we offer a vision of community in which anyone can belong before they believe. On the basis of our conviction that every person without exception is beloved by God we have taken on the adaptive challenge of transforming Christianity, of reimagining church with courage, joy and wonder. 2. Strategic Principles. Heifetz speaks a great deal about the practical work of leadership. He describes this as creating a kind of holding container for people working on the problem and then paying attention to one’s own feelings to understand the mind of the group. Leadership involves uncovering and articulating the adaptive challenge. A leader also needs to manage the anxiety of the group. People have to be concerned enough to want to act but not so afraid that they will give up in hopelessness. Because human beings tend to avoid hard challenges, a leader needs to keep the group focused on the problem not just on trying to relieve the stress the group is feeling. This involves giving the work back to people at a rate they can assimilate. He also points out how important it is to protect leaders who do not have authority so that they can contribute to the solution. 3. Values. Heifetz taught us that the best leaders have such a deep feeling for their mission they will, if necessary, sacrifice themselves for the higher purpose. Heifetz refers to the leaders getting (metaphorically, mostly I hope) assassinated. This happens when the stress a leader generates in order to solve a problem becomes so great that the leader gets expelled. This is how I understand Jesus’ life. Jesus talks about this. In today’s gospel the Greek the word kalos which we translate as good, as in Good Shepherd, probably means something more like real or genuine. Jesus says that the hired hand is there for the transaction, for the payment, but the real shepherd has the power (ezousian often translated as authority) to lay down his life (the Greek word is psuxēn or soul) for the sake of the sheep. Many leaders at some point have to decide whether to keep pushing for uncomfortable change even when they know it might mean they will be forced to leave. Before closing I want to briefly tell you about a leader who shaped us, our first dean, J. Wilmer Gresham. Dean Gresham moved to San Jose California for health reasons. In 1910 at the age of 39 when he was asked to become the first Dean of Grace Cathedral he hesitated wondering if the damp cold of San Francisco would kill him. Almost immediately after moving here to this block, he discerned his adaptive challenges: to build this Cathedral and to begin a ministry of healing that involved organizing groups to gather for prayer that gradually became an national movement. He helped so many people privately, financially. Trusting God he gave all of himself. After serving almost 30 years Dean Gresham retired and a year later his wife Emily Cooke Graham died. Many evenings he would stand on the sidewalk in front of their old home weeping for her. He found so much comfort in Jesus, the Good Shepherd, that he gave a stained glass window in the South Transept in her memory. He did this so that we would know that like the sheep in the arms of Jesus we are loved by God. At the end of our leadership course Ronald Heifetz reminded us that he had told us at the beginning that he would disappoint us. He talked about how at times the teaching staff too had felt that we were wandering in the desert, that some students might have felt hurt or misrepresented. But most of all he taught us how to say goodbye. Heifetz promised that we could shed light in our life even when there is no light around us. He said that the God of the Greek philosopher Archimedes was called “the unmoved mover.” But Heifetz said that he believed much more in Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s idea of God as “the most moved mover.” My dear ones, we are all called to lay down our lives for the sake of God’s realm. But we are not left without comfort. We have each other and we always have the Good Shepherd. Jesus teaches that God loves us the way that a faithful teacher loves her students or a father treasures his lost child. /episode/index/show/gracecathedralsermons/id/30923053

The Rev. Jim Wallis 04/14/2024

The Rev. Canon Mary Carter Greene 04/07/2024

The Rt. Rev. Dr. Marc Handley Andrus 03/31/2024

Sermons from Grace Cathedral

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