Stuck in Good Friday, waiting on Easter, Singing Alleluias Anyway

There is much that will be happening at the community center and in our projects, reopening the center, working on community health projects, on the food pantry, on the computer center, on our monthly diversity movie night, on Easter gatherings, on the community association meeting this Tuesday at 7 pm at OBrien Park Recreation Center, on the new monthly neighborhood safety group meetings at our Center on the last Thursdays of the month at 6:30 pm, about mission trips with people from out of state coming in to work with us and our partners, and on our many beautification projects around the area at OBrien Park and the trail and of course the big news that you will be reading about soon in the Tulsa World about our national efforts to bring a 40 tree fruit orchard to our developing community park on North Johnstown at a time when so many parks and community centers are being closed by public officials. To help us win the orchard go vote for us at www.communitiestakeroot.com/Plant/Index/. Go to list of states scroll to Oklahoma and we are the only place in the state in the running for the orchard. We were in or close to fifth place out of 120 communities when I checked recently. You can vote everyday.

But, As I write this its only a few hours away from Easter morning, and here we seem stuck in Good Friday. This past week we found out that the Post Office is making plans to close our 74126 zip code postal office in all likelihood, and of course the shock and outrage continues over the unexplained decision still by authorities on closing Cherokee School and now Alcott School in our service area. Both by the way are sites where community members have been active especially in trying to make inroads on community gardening and outdoor classrooms to help bring back foundational skills to combat our continued lowest life expectancy difference in the Tulsa area, to give skills that will help families take care of their food needs without reliance on the powers to be to invest in our area, to take care of their health needs without resorting first to emergency rooms in other parts of the town or to rely on primary care clinics that come and go.

We have been expecting the post office decision for some time and have been collecting signatures on petitions; this will need to increase. They are going to meet with residents here on Thursday May 5 noon to 2 pm. The government is wanting to close a post office in the part of town where people have the fewest resources to get four miles to the nearest post office, where cars are few and reliable cars are few, and where there is a high percentage of those older or those who can't afford computers and email though they are the ones being punished as the postal system bears the effects of increased email and social networking media. Change happens, but the cost saving should be born by the people who live in areas where they can afford to drive to a different post office, and where they have alternatives such as fedex and ups for many of their postal needs; in the 74126 we have none of that. They have been as well neglecting the post office here, cutting back hours and service, and not promoting it with signage, and now taking action they say because of low volume.

The harder shock of abandonment comes with the plan to close Cherokee which seems to have been decided in a room with a few officials from the outset who do not appear to want to say why it was decided. Or Alcott which was not on the initial plan to be closed, while Whitman like Cherokee was on all three plans to be closed but remains open. All the criteria that was said to be used in the decision do not point to closing Cherokee while keeping others nearby open who have criteria which do not meet the goals as much. The result is a plan that will group together within a half mile three elementary schools at Houston Gilcrease and Greeley while closing Cherokee; the same is true for putting two elementary schools next to each other at Penn and Monroe while closing Cherokee. There is much good in the overall plan, though the process has seemed forced and the overall fact that not a single public school administrator has been able from the time the plan was first rolled out to this weekend to tell the parents and staff and community representatives and partners in education here why it has been chosen to be closed; that is the worst offense. Justify it. Be honest about it. Open up a dialogue about the issues of race and politics and class and location and property and history that go beyond the measurement criteria facts; it is the only way that communities will heal and grow, and without communities of diversity and transparency this area will not be repaired and the emptying out will continue.

Our plan was to work toward creating an elementary school of intentional ethnic diversity and ecological diversity that we had at Cherokee and help build back the link between our area of far northside with McLain. We were willing to have a change in school leadership to help make this kind of "Anytown" magnet elementary school happen. It was a plan backed by three state legislators who represent our areas. Cherokee was already accepted into the TPS Community School program process; what is envisioned for Gilcrease could easily have been started at Cherokee since Gilcrease as a middle school was phased out; Cherokee PK to 6 with one transition going to McLain 7-12 would have helped to create the kind of natural far northside integrated schools that I experienced in my time at Cherokee, Monroe,and McLain.

At least with full disclosure Cherokee's families, used to the ethnic diversity here which attracted them in the past few years to come or remain here, may want to move to one of the schools staying open; without it, I am afraid they will send their children elsewhere; and the continuing destruction of the social infrastructure that keeps neighborhoods together will continue to unravel even as we have been working to build back those ties.

I am not objective about community renewal and the place of public education; I live in the Greeley school district, my wife and I met in kindergarden at Cherokee, we have been partners in education, and I have helped found and fund the new Mclain Foundation. I like so much about the new plan, but I am concerned that it will continue to lead to the abandonment of our area in the Cherokee school boundaries that cover both the incorporated sections of Tulsa and the unincorporated urban areas in the county. And I know this for sure: when one area, be it in city limits or not, is neglected and turned away from and left to those who would come in and exploit it, it will not stay contained in this one area; what happens in the 74126 affects all of Tulsa area.

But mostly I want someone to be honest about the decision, and to come to the school and talk about it with the people here who have given so much to turning around this school and to getting community partners. Our community foundation alone has put in more than a thousand dollars of actual gardening to create a healthy food environment and to beautify the grounds to give the children and others a lift in spirit as they come to study and to make it a place of brightness in the midst of blight. As we put together our proactive plan we were told by school officials not to present it in public at the forums but let it be considered by the school project team. Now, in the grief, people mostly want answers and they want presence. That is why I call this a Good Friday continuing movement. So many have fled; so many will want to flee now whose talents and presence we need.

Let us see what shape the area around here is in and how many families are here and how much abandonment vandalism crime despair continues without any investment here. Who will track what happens to the children at Cherokee and where they go, and what happens when you close one of the schools if not the school with the most ethnic balance coming from the area itself and not from people who live elsewhere sending their kids to school. Let us see what happens to the school building itself that houses not only all the gardens but also the historical displays and the grounds have the Memorial Arch from the school here that was built in 1920.

I was once a hospice chaplain. I know what a theology of presence is and how much it means to help people make the movement from times of loss and scarcity to times of looking forward and drawing closer together. I am not seeing any of that yet.

Sometimes Easter Alleluia's do not come on time; and yet we gather together and we sing them each year, even this year, and we tell the old old story, and we wait for Easter, and for the tomb to be what empties out. And that is the best that we can do, and together it is enough....

For my more uplifting Easter message and interpretation of the story go to the link below where I have posted one of my recent reflections for the season, which I will remind all, just begins tomorrow morning. Easter begins but does not end tomorrow; the Season has just begun, and there are resurrection appearances to come....
http://progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com/2011/04/dont-cling-to-me-easter-immersion-in.html

blessings, Ron Robinson
The Welcome Table Center and A Third Place Community Foundation
5920 N. Owasso Ave.

Easter Worship 2011 Common Liturgy

Our order of service for today. First, words about our way of doing and being church; then the Easter liturgy.

The Welcome Table
A Free Universalist Christian Missional Community

About Us
Following the radical Jesus in deeds not creeds. Join us in service to our community throughout the week. That is the primary way we become church. Our Welcome Table of Worship is open to all who welcome all, regardless of belief or denomination, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, physical abilities, economic status, or political affiliations. We don’t think Jesus would have it any other way.

Free because God works in freedom so we are non-creedal. We don’t give theological tests for admission, but encourage you to test us and try us to see if this way is for you. Universalist because we believe God is Love and All who abide in Love abide in God, and God’s love is for all for all time Christian because the generous compassionate way and story of Jesus, is our primary pathway opening up to God. Missional because we are sent to serve others more than ourselves, building up God’s beloved community more than our own, putting our time talent and treasure more into the world than into our own organization. Community because we are made not to be autonomous individuals but to be a people of God.

We are a simple church, but it can be a deep struggle to live toward true freedom, to practice God’s love for all, to follow the liberating Jesus who was crucified for his radical ways of hospitality and justice, to live for and serve others more than self, and to put community first. We invite those who wish to struggle with us, to fail with us, and to continue struggling with us. Worship gatherings and common meal are our times to refresh our spirits for the service of God.

Easter Worship

Invocation
Today is the day which God has made: Let us rejoice and be glad therein.
What does the Eternal require of us? To do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.
This is our covenant as we walk together in life in the ways of God known and to be made known: In the light of truth, and the loving and liberating spirit of Jesus, we gather in freedom, to worship God, and serve all.

Gathering Together
First Reading:
Later Jesus and his disciples were at home having supper with a collection of disreputable guests. Unlikely as it seems, more than a few of them had become followers. The religion scholars and Pharisees saw him keeping this kind of company and lit into his disciples: "What kind of example is this, acting cozy with the riffraff?" 17Jesus, overhearing, shot back, "Who needs a doctor: the healthy or the sick? I'm here inviting the sin-sick, not the spiritually-fit."…Mark 2 (The Message)

“Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”
What a fellowship, what a joy divine, leaning on the everlasting arms;
what a blessedness, what a peace is mine, leaning on the everlasting arms.
Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms;
leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.
O how sweet to walk in this pilgrim way, leaning on the everlasting arms;
O how bright the path grows from day to day, leaning on the everlasting arms.
(Refrain)
What have I to dread, what have I to fear, leaning on the everlasting arms?
I have blessed peace with my Lord so near, leaning on the everlasting arms.
(Refrain)

I. At The Welcome Table Celebrating The Last Supper
Second Reading: When it was time, he sat down, all the apostles with him, and said, "You've no idea how much I have looked forward to eating this Passover meal with you before I enter my time of suffering. It's the last one I'll eat until we all eat it together in the kingdom of God."Taking the cup, he blessed it, then said, "Take this and pass it among you. As for me, I'll not drink wine again until the kingdom of God arrives."Taking bread, he blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body, given for you. Eat it in my memory."
One: I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me. And they said, Lord, when did we do that? And he said, When you did it for the least of these, you did it to me. Here is the bread of life, food for the spirit. Let all who hunger come and eat. Here is the fruit of the vine, pressed and poured out for us. Let all who thirst now come and drink.
All: We come to break bread. We come to drink of the fruit of the vine. We come to make peace. May we never praise God with our mouths while denying in our hearts or by our acts the love that is our common speech. We come to be restored in the love of God where All are welcome and All are worthy. (Robert Eller-Isaacs, based on Matthew 25, alt. Singing The Living Tradition hymnal)
Third Reading:
"Who would you rather be: the one who eats the dinner or the one who serves the dinner? You'd rather eat and be served, right? But I've taken my place among you as the one who serves. ”Luke 22
“Let Us Break Bread Together” #406, SLT hymnal
Passing the Bread of Life Everlasting and the Cup of Hope Eternal
Fourth Reading:
At the end of his last supper with his disciples, Jesus said: Let me give you a new command. Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciple—when they see the love you have for each other.
Reflection

II. At The Table With The Cross
Fifth Reading:
“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”….”It was about the sixth hour and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, While the sun’s light failed and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice said, Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last.”
Prayer of Confession: Gracious and Loving God, we acknowledge to you, to one another, and to ourselves that we are not what you have called us to be. We have stifled our gifts and wasted our time. We have avoided opportunities to offer kindness, but have been quick to take offense. We have pretended that we could make no contribution to peace and justice in our world and have excused ourselves from risk-taking in our own community. Have mercy on us, forgive us our sins, and help us to live our lives differently. We long for peace within and without, for harmony in our families, for the well-being of our neighbors, and love for our enemies. Yet we have too often not made the hard choices that love requires. Show us how to walk in your path of faithfulness, hope, and love. Amen.

Words of Assurance: One fact remains that does not change: God loves all, and will for all time. This is the good news that brings new life. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymns: “Precious Lord” #199 and “Dona Nobis Pacem” #388
Sharing Prayers of Sorrows, Cares, Concerns
The Prayer of Jesus: Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen


III. Entering into a time of Silence, of Emptying, of Stillness

IV. The Table of Resurrection
Sixth Reading:
Early in the morning on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone was moved away from the entrance. She ran at once to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, breathlessly panting, "They took the Master from the tomb. We don't know where they've put him." Peter and the other disciple left immediately for the tomb. They ran, neck and neck. The other disciple got to the tomb first, outrunning Peter. Stooping to look in, he saw the pieces of linen cloth lying there, but he didn't go in. Simon Peter arrived after him, entered the tomb, observed the linen cloths lying there, and the kerchief used to cover his head not lying with the linen cloths but separate, neatly folded by itself. Then the other disciple, the one who had gotten there first, went into the tomb, took one look at the evidence, and believed. No one yet knew from the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead. The disciples then went back home. But Mary stood outside the tomb weeping. As she wept, she knelt to look into the tomb and saw two angels sitting there, dressed in white, one at the head, the other at the foot of where Jesus' body had been laid. They said to her, "Woman, why do you weep?" "They took my Master," she said, "and I don't know where they put him." After she said this, she turned away and saw Jesus standing there. But she didn't recognize him. Jesus spoke to her, "Woman, why do you weep? Who are you looking for?" She, thinking that he was the gardener, said, "Mister, if you took him, tell me where you put him so I can care for him." Jesus said, "Mary." Turning to face him, she said in Hebrew, "Rabboni!" meaning "Teacher!" Jesus said, "Don't cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go to my brothers and tell them, 'I ascend to my Father and your Father, my God and your God.'" Mary Magdalene went, telling the news to the disciples: "I saw the Master!" And she told them everything he said to her.

Seventh Reading:
Jesus said [to Thomas], "So, you believe because you've seen with your own eyes. Even better blessings are in store for those who believe without seeing." (Gospel of John)
Reflection

I Thank You God For Most This Amazing Day #504, by ee cummings
Sharing of Blessings and Thanksgivings in our Lives and Community
Easter Hymns
Jesus Christ Is Risen Today #268
Amazing Grace #205
We’re Gonna Sit At The Welcome Table #407
Benediction
Go out into the highways and byways. Let us Give the people something of our new vision. We may possess a small light, but we will uncover it and let it shine. We will Use it to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. We will Give them not hell but hope and courage. We will Give them Easter all year round. We will Preach and practice the kindness and everlasting love of God.
Closing Songs “Shalom Havyreem Shalom Havyreem” and “Go Now In Peace” #413

Don't Cling To Me: An Easter Immersion in the Christ of Faith

"Don't Cling To Me": An Easter Immersion in the Christ of Faith


The Text: This year on Easter Sunday, one of the texts from the Revised Common Lectionary is from the Fourth Gospel, of John, from the original finale of that gospel. It is the section narrating Mary of Magdala's discovery of the empty tomb, of Jesus, and faith. The story of Mary’s encounter at the tomb in John, goes like this, from Eugene Peterson's The Message interpretation:


“ Early in the morning on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone was moved away from the entrance. She ran at once to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, breathlessly panting, "They took the Master from the tomb. We don't know where they've put him." Peter and the other disciple left immediately for the tomb. They ran, neck and neck. The other disciple got to the tomb first, outrunning Peter. Stooping to look in, he saw the pieces of linen cloth lying there, but he didn't go in. Simon Peter arrived after him, entered the tomb, observed the linen cloths lying there, and the kerchief used to cover his head not lying with the linen cloths but separate, neatly folded by itself. Then the other disciple, the one who had gotten there first, went into the tomb, took one look at the evidence, and believed. No one yet knew from the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead. The disciples then went back home.


But Mary stood outside the tomb weeping. As she wept, she knelt to look into the tomb and saw two angels sitting there, dressed in white, one at the head, the other at the foot of where Jesus' body had been laid. They said to her, "Woman, why do you weep?" "They took my Master," she said, "and I don't know where they put him." After she said this, she turned away and saw Jesus standing there. But she didn't recognize him. Jesus spoke to her, "Woman, why do you weep? Who are you looking for?" She, thinking that he was the gardener, said, "Mister, if you took him, tell me where you put him so I can care for him." Jesus said, "Mary." Turning to face him, she said in Hebrew, "Rabboni!" meaning "Teacher!"


Jesus said, "Don't cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go to my brothers and tell them, 'I ascend to my Father and your Father, my God and your God.'" Mary Magdalene went, telling the news to the disciples: "I saw the Master!" And she told them everything he said to her.


The Turning Points: This is a text full of turnings, and of naming. When we get into the story deeply, it is literally spinning us around, as good faith will, as for the early church the whole world was now being turned around, being named, being created anew….It is the turning of the day from darkness to light, so important in the Johannine gospel and view of Christ as the light of the world. Mary comes to the tomb, probably slowly, mournfully, dutifully, then sees the stone gone and fearing the body has been stolen, more mocking, more shaming, she immediately turns and runs quickly to the male disciples. Then she presumably turns again and follows the beloved disciple and Peter back to the tomb where they do their dance of authority on who will go inside the tomb first and what conclusions of belief and remaining doubt they will have, and then they turn again and leave.


Mary stays this time. Mary weeps. She kneels to get a closer look this time. And she sees two angels whom no one had seen before, located at the two ends of where Jesus’ body had been; had they been there before when Jesus’ body had been laid out there before, had they gone when the two male disciples showed up but returned when Mary came back? Mary continues still, not turning back and prompting an angel to call her Woman, exerting power by the name used, and the angel calls into question her very weeping, as if accentuating here emotions, perhaps her gender, and her reason for being there.


There the story takes a quick turn itself. She expresses her fear that the authorities have taken, have spirited, the body away. The body is important to Mary. Blessing the body is important. And then she turns again, as if toward a presence just around the turn of a corner, just out of sight, and sees someone she doesn’t recognize. Should she? Is her emotion blinding her? Is it another example of her not being a true disciple as much as the male disciples or else she would have recognized Jesus right away? Has her old default mode of believing dead is dead, that the Empire always wins, blinded her instead? In the presence of two angels, which biblical witness says is often a scary fearful thing, and in the presence of someone she doesn’t know, right away at least, and who calls her also by the dismissive title of “Woman” and questions her state, why she weeps, all of this in the realm of the dead and buried, still Mary does not turn and flee mute and terrified, even if awestruck here, as in Mark.


And as if her standing her ground is standing on holy ground, she is rewarded by the pivotal question, the question that turns all of our Easters upside down for us: Who is it she is looking for? Who are we looking for on this day and in this season, this year, this day? Mary, still not recognizing Jesus, answers back, that powerful act of speaking from her heart and truth to the power of those in her midst, turning his question back on him: Mister, she says directly to the nameless man she thinks may hold the keys to her despair, if it is you who has done this, undo it, return the body to me, so I may care for it. So I may do what needs to be done. So I may act in an “as if” world, as if the community of love and support and traditions still exists even despite the crucifixion, anointing the body of Jesus as Jesus anointed and blessed so many bodies in pain himself.


And then Jesus symbolically turns on the light, revealing himself in response to her attention, her faithfulness to love, even justice in caring for the shamed body of an executed criminal. Jesus does this by calling her by her name, that powerful act of relationship, breaking through the boundaries of the system of power and the honor/shame mode, becoming present in the vulnerability of the mutual relationship. That is all it took for Jesus to be revealed, saying her own true name. And she turns toward him. And she names him Rabbi. What had been, which had been taken, has now been restored.


Then the story turns again: She has gone to him and has taken hold of him, for Jesus says “Don’t cling to me.” Peterson and more liberal biblical scholars agree that this is a more accurate phrase than the “Don’t touch me” phrase. It definitely implies there is something there to hold onto, yet as Jesus goes on to explain, his new body is in transition; he is the old body and he is the new body. Don’t cling to the old body. Don’t cling to what was. Let him go to God, as he tells Mary to turn one more final time and go tell the other disciples that he is going on, returning to God. And so she does, telling, teaching them what her Teacher has just taught her.


The Take Away: There is much of what has been thought of as “the feminine” in this story foundational to Christianity, even if much of John overtly may try to sideline Mary’s role and lift up male disciples. Vulnerability, persistence, intimacy, bodily caring; elements present in Jesus as well, though here as in other parts of the gospel of John particularly Jesus himself is revealing of himself through encounters with strong women (such as his mother at the wedding of Cana). Even deeper though this resurrection story seems to signal to us that it isn’t just what we know about Jesus, what we have experienced of Jesus in the past, what we think we can recognize as his shape and his voice, or argue about, but that we shouldn’t cling to all that precisely because Jesus is becoming something new for us, something we will only perhaps be able to understand and appreciate in community, in teaching one another and sharing our experiences of empty tomb moments.


It is as if Jesus is saying if you want to be in my presence from now on, go cling to one another, and cling to those I brought close to me. It might not even be your own personal encounter with me that I am now desiring; it is your becoming me in community with others.


That is what I call the Christ of faith, the shape of the historical Jesus becoming and unfolding in new ways, becoming clear and powerful, giving that power away to others, all in the midst of others. Especially on Easter do we celebrate the truth of this transformation, especially in the places and through the people who are like tombs where we witness the stones being rolled away and the shame give way to Love and we hear our own name called, and turn toward it to be restored and to go restore others. Especially right here, right now, with you.

By Their Fruits Shall You Know Them: The Orchard Vote for North Tulsa, the Tulsa World story and True Value, and Call For Riding Donkeys

The Welcome Table Community Center, Church, KitchenGardenPark, A Third Place Foundation projects... 5920 N. Owasso Ave. Turley, OK 74126, 9186913223 or 7944637 or 430-1150 http://www.turleyok.blogspot.com/, http://www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com/, http://www.missionalprogressives.blogspot.com/, http://www.uuchristian.org/, http://www.ptstulsa.edu/, http://www.redpillbrethren.tumblr.com/, http://www.ccda.org/, http://www.tcpc.org/, http://www.tumm.org/


..........................1. The Vote Is On: Let everyone in your organizations, families, social networks know that they can help bring a 40 tree fruit orchard to far northside Tulsa, to our food desert, simply by taking a minute to register online and then voting once every day easily and quickly for our project, the only one in Oklahoma in the running. Five orchards per month will be given away, including planting and helping set up irrigation system, by the National Fruit Tree Foundation. We were one of 120 communities selected for the competition; of course most of the others are in heavily populated areas, with backing of staffed organizations, and where residents have easy access to internet in order to vote; we have none of that, but great need, and great dreams, and great love putting our dreams and miracles into action.

Go to and send others to http://www.communitiestakeroot.com/Plant/Index. Take a second to register with name and email address and a password specific to the competition then go to the vote page where you click on list of states and scroll down to find Oklahoma and that's us. Vote and then share with others that you have and you want them to do the same also and then bookmark the page to come back each day for a few seconds to do it again whenever you get on the computer. If you know someone with an email address who isn't able to do it, you can vote for them with their name and email address and a chosen password. If you would rather support us through a donation than the voting to win the orchard, send $40 toward a tree and the labor of planting to A Third Place Foundation, 5920 N. Owasso Ave., Turley OK 74126 or donate online at the button above this post. Put the information out via your business, civic group, church email, newsletters, social media pages, etc. ................If you want to help people get a sense of why we feel this so urgently, as well as all of our community renewal work, then send them to http://www.turleyok.blogspot.com/ where they can see the nutrition survey results pretty shocking even for a food desert, and also the videos of what the kitchengardenpark looked like before we bought it last year, with your help, and what its vision will be, and how the work is progressing already. ......................... 2. Our Annual Palm Sunday Demonstrating God's Way Not the Empire Way Project: Today we have been doing our guerilla gardening project transforming an old neglected poisoned corner of our community at the busy 66th and N. Lewis intersection. We are mulching paths, planting more flowers, and continuing to reclaim it and let people know this is a real community they are entering, or living in, and not just a disposable society. One person stopped and we ended up giving him some of our daffodils and irises we were going to plant there, and another person stopped and said thanks and gave us five dollars and drove on. It shows the real wealth and real community here so vital to the real life. Same for our work at Cherokee School with outdoor classrooms, with advocacy, with the summer feeding program. ................................ The values we try to foster, and live up to, of community that is the opposite of both poverty and of property, are in stark contrast these days. In today's front page of the Tulsa World, lead story, it talks about how part of Tulsa County is increasing in property values and lists the top ten areas that are, and it lists the top ten areas where there is the most decline in property values. No surprise to see where I live as the number two spot in the "worst" value area, just one tenth of a percent behind the neighborhood with the sharpest decline in property values. http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20110417_11_A1_CUTLIN721489 ..................................Siderant: The article spends time talking with people who live in the areas where the property values are increasing, but there is not one interview with a family in one of the neighborhoods like ours where the property values are decreasing. What is up with that, journalistically and morally? Come talk to us. We will talk about purposefully moving here, into a house that had been abandoned for around three years like so many of those in our area; we will talk about having to argue with the bank to get the loan to buy here because they didn't believe we were going to live here (who with our degrees, income, jobs, perhaps color of skin, would move here? was the undercurrent); we will talk about why we could live anywhere else but wouldn't; because we know real life is in community, and real lives of faithfulness to the Jesus way, anyway, means finding a way of living with those others abandon. ........................ Part of our conversation in worship today was about how we have made Palm Sunday a part of our everyday community life, as in all we try to do with all of our projects and with all of our partners is to demonstrate the Palm Sunday message that "Another World Is Possible". Jesus riding into the capital city on top of a nursing donkey, a sign of vulnerability and a different kind of power than was being displayed by dominant culture of Caeser and the religious authorities collaborating with Caeser, reminding people that God's Anointed is about love, peace, justice, serving others, risk-taking, and about the decisions we make for those most endangered, that is all about showing another world is possible. Easter is about the revelation that such a world is not only possible but it is real and here for those with eyes to see and hears to hear and hearts to open and hands to serve. .......................................We always have projects to do in our community center with its services and events, in our gardens, and connecting with partners. Let me know how I can help you find ways to help those we serve. We are looking for places for people who come serve with us from out of town to be able to take showers; so if you have ideas or resources please let me know. If you would like to help directly, let me know, either as an individual, family, or group you sponsor or are a part of. ...................... Easter and its season (we always remind people that like Christmas, Easter is not a one day, one morning, or one hour event; but is a full season of the year to reorient toward a Risen Life) is always here full of surprises as we try to surprise the world around us, so stay tuned or just plan to come experience the many ways we are witnessing to the resurrection of life here in the 74126. Alleluia's take many different forms. I do know that next Sunday we will be having a three-act worship focusing on feast, funeral, and freedom, or life, death, and resurrection. ............................And go vote for us and the fruit tree orchard for our neighborhoods here, and keep our partners in education and health and service and especially our northside schools in prayer and in your advocacy, that those in power may enlarge their vision and be open to creative opportunities that see abundance and not just scarcity, and that all those who are rightfully upset be rightfully upset at those who make decisions in Oklahoma City that people in our neighborhoods have to deal with, that our rallies end up in their hallways and on their doorsteps, so that their decisions not go unchallenged to try to gut public institutions in favor of private schools, churches, corrections, charities, health care, workers, etc. which only perpetuate the abandonment of those most in need. There is a concentrated assault on the very notion of a public civic society that pledges its common wealth to take care of one another. It is time to ride nursing donkeys into the places of power once again. Ron feel free to share with others, to follow on facebook at www.facebook.com/revronrobinson

The Big Event of Service Here This Weekend, Our Fruit Tree Orchard Contest Needs You, Faith Gardens Schools Children Radical Health Good News

The Welcome Table Community News from A Third Place Community Foundation... Hi all. First, the good news. We have raised the $1,000 in special donations needed for a matching grant from a supporter in California. This will allow us to continue with our plumbing and bath repairs, which will make it easier for groups to come stay with us on mission trips to here, and get started on our roof repair. We are still putting resources into the community, as you will see below, instead of into our new community center and kitchengardenpark even, so it is great to get these extra gifts that we can put in to our new spaces for the community. If that made sense to you, then you have probably taken the "red pill" of missional community organizing. Speaking of which, I recommend to you a site I am a part of called www.redpillbrethren.tumblr.com. But it is great to see the continuing benefits of the funds raised by many of you for our kitchengardenpark; not only will beds be going in there soon, but again that purchase allowed us the equity to purchase our own abandoned building in our own community and reclaim it as a place for community. Once again, as it was for the first time back in 1909, this little block and building that we now call The Welcome Table Community is again becoming a hub for those in our area of the 74126 zip. Second, remember our good news that we have been selected as a potential winner for an orchard to be planted in our area of northside by the National Fruit Tree Foundation; starting April 15 there will be online voting to see which five communities get an orchard per month until August. We want to win one right away so we don't have to keep urging people to vote all summer. You can vote everyday by bookmarking and then quickly clicking on http://www.communitiestakeroot.com/Plant/Index. Remember it starting April 15 and share with others. We are in an area with few people with internet access; which is why we offer our free computer center and wifi access; so we need the help of many others across the country and world to vote for us. Please pass on to media contacts too; sounds like a good story. Third, more good news. This weekend we are part of the University of Oklahoma Big Event and The Great American Clean Up. We are calling it here our Big Event of Service Weekend. It begins Tomorrow Friday from 2 to 7 pm we will be doing volunteer projects at our Center, 5920 N. Owasso, but even more we will be making some of our infamous forays up and down the major streets where our school children walk, filling up my truck, and maybe yours, with the tvs and trash and mattresses and all manner of waste dumped in our community. People know they can dump this just over the city limit line and there will be no prosecution, no zoning, and, I suppose, if they change their mind they can come get it months from now and it will still be there, until we do our Fall or Spring Trash Runs, especially now as the children in the warmer weather are venturing out along these roads. Free pizza supper for helpers. We also have our ongoing Community Art project redoing much of the front of our building into more welcoming, pleasing, artistic interactive space. It really kicks into high gear with Saturday's April 9 Community Garden Focus at Cherokee School, 6001 N. Peoria Ave., and at our Park Site 6005 N. Johnstown Ave. from 8 am to noon and beyond as people are available, working on the vegetable and flower gardens and trees and more that we have put into this school over the past five years making it into a premier outdoor classroom. Bonnie Ashing is taking a day tomorrow too and meeting with Cherokee students to teach them about gardening and healthy food and learning to grow their own and to help grow for others by helping with our school and community gardens. Breakfast and lunch will be provided at the school for helpers. Then Sunday, April 10 from noon to 4 pm we will be finishing up with projects at our Welcome to Turley areas; if there is rainy weather we will work at the Center itself. All are welcome; all skill levels needed; come learn; bring tools if you have them; if you can support us by helping us provide food for the event you can make donations in person or at www.turleyok.blogspot.com. Why keep putting all this love into a school that has been slated for consideration of being closed? It is not just because of what we have done. Which you can see more about at our www.cherokeeschoolgardenjournal.blogspot.com site. It is because as long as there are children in need, as long as there are hungry families, as long as there is blighted areas all around the school, as long as the spirit that built the school is alive, we can be no other place. And until they run us out of the building or off the grounds, we will be planting and we will be doing our daily free lunches for all under eighteen during the summer months when there is no other access to the free meals the families count on and use during the school year. We enjoyed both our discussions of the DVD documentaries A Powerful Voice on women networking for social justice around the world, and of Economy of Love on economic justice and faith by Shane Claiborne. We own both of these DVDs so they are available for lending and watching again if you missed them. We will be scheduling in a series of movie nights beginning soon. Many more events to follow as we open up in our new building, and outside of our new building. Our Sunday worships may begin being held in connection with our getting our hands dirty Sundays, so stay tuned or come prepared for anything to happen at 11 am or earlier now the days are warmer; singing, praying, communion, serving others, eating together; now that is church. We have been busy with meetings and plans and counter proposals and justice work seeking to keep Cherokee School open. You can read more at http://turleyok.blogspot.com/2011/03/top-10-reasons-for-keeping-cherokee.html. Follow the news there. We have good reasons why under any of the three plans Cherokee should remain one of the school sites open for various grade configurations in our area, both to help the students now, to help rebuild McLain High School, and to keep an important part of this endangered community alive. More proposals will be coming, and we have already achieved something by getting corrected and fuller data about the schools into the hands of the team making the decision of what to recommend to the school board. I do wish that rather than having all of our community anxiety, and anger directed unfairly at this stage at the school board, that energy could be directed and all of us showing up at the state legislature demanding they adequately fund common public education in our state; I hope the school board will decide that these past few weeks have been important wake up calls for community residents who have taken their schools for granted, and that TPS give Tulsans a year to organize massive rallies at the state capitol to get the funds needed to keep schools local, to build community, and to make important new configurations out of a sense of adventure and positive energy and not out of reaction and scarcity, as real as it has been due to the gutting of the public sphere by the party in power. If you are interested in any of our school projects, including the McLain Initiative we are a part of, come visit with us and see how you can help. We have also been working on the new revolutionary health care delivery concept for underserved areas, the Community Health Worker program we have been envisioning with OU and gaining partners throughout the state but also now with Tulane Medical Center. I will be travelling to OKC to do more presentations on it in the next few weeks; we are getting support by the state health care authority interested in its cost saving measures as we create "master patients" to mentor their neighbors who are showing up too often in the ER and urgent care, and as these trained "master patients" (my term, borrowing from master gardeners) also will be teaching the medical residents about the communities in which care is supposed to happen. This will put funds into the hands directly of residents in our neighborhoods instead of in the hands of clinic workers who come to work in our areas, or used to, but who don't live here and often don't have the cultural competencies needed to provide the best care; it will put the money into relationships where trust already exists, and increases health literacy by improving the communication processes; it puts money into the preventive side; it creates more community by increasing the relationships of neighbors to neighbors. It turns the clinic inside out and begins to see health not as a commodity transacted between autonomous persons with institutions, but as a truly inherent village or community concern. If you are interested in exploring this new concept I have written about often in the past few years, ever since we created it here as part of our partnership with OU back when its community health clinic was here, come visit us. Finally, we are still building our computer center; always need new computers; and we are getting ready to create again a selected clothing giveaway room so let us know if you have donations; and our food pantry is open again, and will be increasing in size even more soon; we may have free vouchers for residents to use at a mobile food pantry too; we can always use food donations. Soon we will be scheduling more events so if you would like to teach a class, lead a workshop, put on a program, etc. give us a call. blessings, Thanks, Ron

More Abandonment for an Abandoned Place? Plus Coming Events because we refuse to abandon our place

Hi all. Sad times as I write this. Actually today one of our businesses a few blocks away, where one of our church members works, was robbed and the owner beaten, the payroll for the part time workers who get by day to day was stolen. And yesterday three alternative plans for school closings in the Tulsa Public Schools were announced and all three of them recommend closing our community school. More on that below.

But, we continue to be a presence sowing seeds, and our presence is needed now more than ever before here. We will be reopening regular hours for the community center in our new building, still in phase one of remodelling, beginning April 5, on a part time basis; it is already fulfilling to see how people are finding us out and coming by to see how things are going and to use the resources as we get them available. The Food Pantry is partly back in operation with new hours of Fridays 2-6 pm or by appt or during our special events. We will soon have three computers available in the computer center, and more soon. Our library/free bookstore is available, as are meeting space and DVD watching area, and the prayer chapel space, and community info area, and the outside is being transformed into welcoming artistic space thanks to our community art day last week. We will be moving toward dedication and official opening and more space this summer. But so far on track with the move. Plus we are gearing up for the kitchengarden park work, and our other areas such as Cherokee and more where we serve others.

I had a great time talking about us, and our vision of community, when I was in New England recently. You can read what I said in two sermons here at this link: www.missionalprogressives.blogspot.com Abandoned Places, Missional Communities, and Faith.

Events Underway: Thursday, March 31, 4 pm at Cherokee School, strategy meeting with parents to fight against the school closure; Thursday, March 31, 6:30 pm here at The Welcome Table, a free showing of the documentary "A Powerful Noise" about three women in different parts of the world who made big differences in their local areas with global reverberations, free pizza and popcorn and drinks; come get inspired for the world changing work we must do; Friday, April 1, 5:30 pm Tulsa Community College NorthEast Campus, community coalitions "From Turley to TU"; Sunday, April 3, 11:30 am I will give a talk on "Life, Death, and Resurrection in the 74126" at Emerson Hall in All Souls Church, 2952 S. Peoria Ave., followed by lunch somewhere, then back here to the Center from 2 to 5 pm for a free public workshop on economic justice and faith featuring a DVD by Shane Claiborne of www.economyoflove.org. with a meal to end it. Also beginning April 15 we will be in the running for a big grant for here from the National Fruit Tree Planting Association; we will need all to help with online voting so we get a big donation for our community orchard for North Tulsa area; more on that will come separately but get ready for it.

Big Weekend of Service: Friday to Sunday April 8-10 we will have volunteer projects going on all over the place here, up at the kitchengardenpark at 60th and N. Johnstown to begin getting it ready; here at the Center, and at Cherokee School, and on the streets of our area. Plan to come spend time changing one little part of the world in great need; all ages welcome.

Big Projects Underway: Even with the school under fire, we continue to gear up for our project for the third summer in a row of feeding all the children and youth under 18 years old a lunch whoever needs it whether they live here or elsewhere or are just travelling through, and it will be at Cherokee School two hours a day. The more volunteer commitment we have the better; then we will just pay for staff when volunteers can't make it. So see me or contact me if interested; we will be holding training for it soon...Also we are getting ready to launch a Summer Wellness Survey Project with OU again; I am getting training for that now; we plan to provide coupons for those who participate with the coupons redeemable at local businesses so it will pump a little money and support into our neighborhood. And plans are continuing to unfold to move toward the launch of our revolutionary Community Health Worker plan to develop health mentors from folks who live right here to help uninsured people who live right here from having to end up so often in expensive emergency room care.

Cherokee and Greeley School Vulnerable to Being Shut Down: But the big news is the proposals released which all have recommended our schools being closed. We are now in the public, and particularly parent, feedback stage as the reports were just released. It caught us off guard especially for Cherokee near us because 1: Cherokee School represents a historic community, having been an independent school of its own before the 1938 merger with Tulsa Schools, and is the keeper of the Turley Community historical artifacts and display; in fact all the kids in the Greeley school area once were Cherokee students before it was built, and because 2.) its enrollment is more than some other schools who were not slated to be closed in all the plans (though our other partnered school Greeley is also proposed to be closed in two of the three plans), because 3.) its cost per student for building operation was lower than other schools that were not slated for closure, because 4.) its proximity rate to other schools was also on average with others, better than some worse than others, because 5.) its academic performance was also in the average range compared with some other schools nearby, because 6.) it is one of the most ethnically balanced student populations, and we thought that was one of the goals; and because 7.) its number of students in its area who have transferred out to other schools rather than attending at Cherokee was a lower percentage than most other schools nearby, (its only damaging criteria data was that it has a low number of students transferring into the school compared with others nearby).

So, why was it picked to be closed in all three plans, and why was Greeley picked to be closed in two of the three plans? It will be interesting to hear what school officials say who recommended it; so far nothing specific has been said for the reasons behind this particular closure, nor what would be done with the building if the school is closed. In the midst of the grief, I tried to make a few points at the initial meeting last night at our community association monthly program: there is a tendency to be divided and conquered and if each school only struggles alone that will happen; especially if we end up dividing along racial lines; and also that we wouldn't be having this discussion regardless of the declining enrollment in the district if the state were not slashing funds to schools; we would be celebrating having smaller enrollments to do better teaching; we would be celebrating having extra space in buildings to bring in the community more; we should tax ourselves adequately to meet the basic needs of our children, and this is another attack on the whole idea of public schools which is so much a cherished part of our American value system. That is the big picture which we are in danger of forgetting in our specific anger and confusion over why this or that school may be closed.

I will come back in a second as to my speculation as to why Cherokee in particular was slated for closing, but I want to say that we can't let the school system wall off the effect of this decision on communities; especially after they give lip service and in some few places have built effective community schools; yes, education levels and testing results and the kinds of courses available is important; I have been lamenting the loss of these over the past years as they have starved the schools, and now are penalizing them because parents have often left,who could, because of the previous curriculum cutbacks; but don't forget to take neighborhoods into account in the decision; and not all neighborhoods are equal; this will be particularly devastating to the 74126 if Cherokee and Greeley are closed; we should instead, if we were to follow God's preferential option for the poor, keep these schools open and bring others here. As the NAACP has said, our communities here have suffered from decades of neglect, resulting in lawsuits, because of the segregation Tulsa schools had de facto until the mid to late 60s, and then the way integration was handled led to a showcase high school that took away resources from other high schools, and has resulted in again hugely imbalanced racially high schools; so now, don't penalize schools in communities that have been emptied because the resources were taken away in the first place.

Cherokee and Greeley are on the edges of the district; geographically I think the planners were looking at bringing back closer into the center the schools, shrinking the area of service without shrinking the actual area of the district; which means students here on the edge, where we have the highest poverty, will have the furthest to go to attend school; even with more funds spent on busing, it will mean our parents, many of whom do not have cars and do not have reliable cars, will find it harder to get to the schools for events, for picking up kids who are sick, and it will make it harder to build the kind of parental school involvement that is needed. When schools close, parents move, and an already declining student population in Tulsa will continue to decline as more families go suburb or private; the hope is that more elective programming at all of the schools will keep them in the district even if they have to travel with their child further to get there; I hope so, but doubt it if they can get those electives elsewhere. Those who want to go elsewhere but can't afford it will not make the kind of school supporters they are now. Also geographically, Cherokee serves students within and outside the city limits of Tulsa, but it is located four blocks outside the city limits; there is not then a city governmental representative voice that can speak up for it as there is for nearby schools that are within the city limits.

Deeper still, Cherokee is an ethnically balanced school as I mentioned, and this can work against it as unfortunately there isn't a core ethnic group that can rally around it either. And, here is the rub: many of the white residents in our area have not been supportive of McLain High School and Gilcrease Middle School as they have back in the day when those schools were more evenly integrated and especially when they were primarily white schools; even now the parents of many Cherokee students, though they are not alone in this, have no plans to send their children on to the higher schools close by here, to Gilcrease or McLain, because of the past problems at those schools, which are being turned around, but images and stereotypes and fears are hard to erase; and so why should the school district keep open a school at which many of its students will then transfer to other schools or to charter schools or outside the district? In essence, has our area itself cut itself off from Tulsa Public Schools middle and high schools and are now seeing the District return the "favor" by cutting Cherokee, and perhaps Greeley, too off from it? We need to look at the ethnic demographics of Cherokee compared to the surrounding schools and deal honestly, though painfully, with the emotions and ramifications and history. But, closing it will only make that situation worse, and will make the racial demographics of the schools even more uneven, I believe, as families turn elsewhere.

Our task is to keep our eyes on the real culprits who have failed to tax those things that ought to be taxes, and those people who ought to be taxed, to provide funds for education to all so we can operate out of abundance and not out of scarcity; our task locally is to also envision a new kind of school at Cherokee that will draw on its strengths and help it attract students; I think making it a magnet for overt, intentional, teaching tolerance curriculum as both an Ethnic and Ecological Diverse Elementary School is a key, recognizing its already strong areas of multi ethnic population and the outdoor classrooms we have been putting in place there these past few years through our community foundation and center. We need a place where young people will go to learn how to learn and grow with others of different ethnicities as they get older; it will help them, and their parents, to then remain in the Tulsa district for what it can offer, which is why Bonnie and I moved with our daughter out of Owasso and back to the Tulsa School District. This can be Cherokee's distinctiveness, at a time when diversities and diversity of life are so key to the new economy. I also worry what will happen even more to the vulnerable urban unincorporated area here adjacent to the city limits if the only school in the unincorporated area is shut down; already it is not eligible for community development block grants, etc., and taking yet another resource away will deepen the hurting.

My proposal for this area: (without the advantage of months of deliberations of course and with the caveat that we should just citizen up and tax and spend more for our most vulnerable children)
I like, given the real unfortunate economic circumstances the district is in, the plans to make the high schools multi year campuses, reducing the moves from one building to the other during the adolescent years; I like doing away with middle school as it has been, making the high schools 7 to 12 grades; do this at McLain; it is easier and more appropriate I think to have older children travelling further from their homes, especially in areas with difficult transportation and poverty areas. We then have geography to consider and the value I believe in keeping younger children closer to their homes: Houston and Gilcrease and Greeley are all within a half mile of each, with Houston and Greeley adjacent; Penn and the old Monroe school they are talking of reopening are also adjacent; Alcott and Cherokee are more set off in their own spaces. So, use Gilcrease which is right between Houston and Greeley as a site for those two schools combined, closing their own campuses; and keep Cherokee and Penn and Alcott open, PK-6 or some variation between them of those grades. Don't reopen Monroe. Make Cherokee a Diversity Emphasis Magnet to help attract others and offset that low transfer in criteria and the demographics of the area. Even if you had to, make Cherokee a Special 6th Grade Center with those focuses in order to help prepare students and families for the diversity to encounter and encourge in the higher grade level life, though I in general don't like single grade schools, but it is an idea; just like Rogers High School is going to be transformed into an early college school to prepare students for college and get them started on it; this option of Cherokee as a special 6th grade center would be geared to helping all prepare for the big step into the 7-12 grade centers. Then in the McLain feeder system you would actually have closed two schools which is I think at most all this zip code should have to at worse consider but they are schools close by to another; make up the money elsewhere that would be gained by closing Cherokee too. Gamble on it being pitched as a district wide kind of Anytown School, like the oklahoma center for community and justice has its summer program for diversity called anytown, and add in a focus on ecological diversity and environmentalism and outdoor classrooms, the strengths already in place.

And, as the Cherokees say, make your decisions thinking not of the next budget year, but of the seventh generation.

blessings, Ron
ps I will post these school thoughts separately on Facebook and blog for those who might want to comment or pass them on just as is without the other news.

Abandoned Places, Abandon Church!: Part Two of Embodying Progressive Missional Faith: An Epistle To Plymouth

See part one in the post below. This post is "An Epistle To Plymouth" at the Installation Service of the Rev. Gerald E. Jay Libby as the 24th settled minister of the First Parish in Plymouth, Mass, Church of the Pilgrims, founded Scrooby, England, 1606, settled in Plymouth, 1620. Delivered today. This text and the delivered text are not exact; more here than given orally, same as in the earlier sermon at Worcester.

"An Epistle to Plymouth"
Rev. Ron Robinson

O God, May my words reflect Thy Spirit, May our minds and hearts be open to all the abundance and diversity of Life Itself, and May this time together inspire us to help make Thy Love Everlasting visible in the world.

First, my friends, from The Selected Texts for today from the Revised Common Lectionary comes this passage especially appropriate on this day of new beginnings: It is from the start of the 12th chapter of Genesis. Adonai said to Abram: Go you forth, from your land, from your kindred, from your father’s house, to the land that I will let you see.”

This pivotal passage in the Bible gets even more power and meaning as it comes right after the incident with the Tower of Babel. There humans discovered God does not like uniformity, ego, hubris, and edifice complexes designed to put more and more people into one single place for their own identity and selfish aims. Right after the story of the destruction of the Tower of Babel and the scattering of the people into cultures of peoples, then comes the story of Abram. He is not yet known as Abraham, and at this point is all of 75 years old. When he was a child his father had heard the Lord call him out of their home in Ur to go to Caanan but his father had settled in Haran. It was from there Abram is called out, out of his comfort, his safety, his identity, in response to the Voice that interrupts our plans, and confounds what we know, turns us inside out, and reminds us of whose we are and what that means.

Greetings and Gratitude, I bring to you, the oldest congregation in our Association, from a very small band of folks in the far northside of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who are an emerging congregation in our Association. Gratitude for your gifts today, and your history, and your invitation to be here. Consider the invitation given to come be our guests. Perhaps, though we have a great age difference, we can find ways to walk this road as together, oldest and newest, in both service and spirit.

Walking together. That is what this occasion is all about. It is a phrase from the prophet Amos made popular among our religious tribe by the one whom recently we lost at the age of 94, our historian of The New England Way, Conrad Wright. He helped restore our foundations as a people of covenant, especially those covenants or promises that constitute and create our free church. These include the covenants between a person and church; church and its elected leaders, including minister. Also church and church; and minister and minister. These four are our internal covenants helping to establish right relationships and Identity. They are like the materials of a ship that hold it together and give it a particular shape.

But there are two other more externally focused covenants: 1. that between church and world, be it known as parish, or immediate neighborhood. and 2. ultimately the covenant and connection between church and God, howsoever is called the Transcendent Spirit that is also within, among, and yet beyond us, the Voice that calls us or rises within us, and sets us on a journey, sending us out to be servants among scattered peoples. These two external covenants are like the Sea and the Wind; they are what give the ship of church its purpose, its reason for having its particular shape, and when they change in drastic ways they can sink or stall the ship built in the best of ways for other environments.

The four internally focused covenants are often the ones we spend most of our time dealing with; they are the ones that present us with urgent matters; and because of this they are the easier to grasp, and to write guidelines and policies about and create celebrations like this one. But if you are not grasped by the other two, the church will not be complete, not be church; instead it will become, as Conrad Wright said, merely a collection of religiously-oriented individuals who, if they were to disappear, would not cause much of a disturbance in the lives of the people in their surrounding community. That’s a good question to ask at annual meetings and pledge dinners: are we creating the kind of disturbance in the world that if we were to disappear would be noticed and felt by people in our community, and who are the ones whose absence would be greatly felt?

Today we do celebrate one of these internal covenants, that of church and minister. Know this: this covenant will only be as strong as are all the others. Where any one of them is weak or broken, the others will suffer. Strengthen any one, such as this one we celebrate, and the others will be stronger. Especially, though, to strengthen this covenant do we now need to put a priority on the external covenants we have neglected so long, for they are the Ground of being for the others; they call church into existence in the first place and continually re-orient church toward others, and re-create it among others, as a manifestation of The Spirit’s very own nature as sending, giving, liberating, serving, restoring.

When we make the shift in priority from internal to external covenants, and let them guide how we become church, we shift from a church having a mission, one that it can change like it changes boards or plans or programs, or ministers, to The Mission having a church.

Put in your mind, heart, and lives the mission of healing a hurting world, even writ small in very local ways, and let that dictate everything else, no matter what may then need to be changed. Engage the parish deeply, and let that wisdom, those needs, then create whatever form of church is mandatory to carry out the mission, and whatever personal transformations are called for in order to be sustainable servants.

As you do this, be prepared to see your world anew and not turn away from what you see. This is true at least for those of us like me who were born before 1963 especially, born and raised in Churched Culture. We, who perhaps have been here the longest, and longest steeped in church, are actually now the immigrants, the pilgrims in what has been our own land. Those who have come after us, those who are not and may never be Churched are the natives of this new land, new culture, and if we are to survive and to thrive and leave a more loving world behind us, we will have to learn from the natives, and let them lead us. Without them becoming us, and without them losing touch wiwith their varied cultures so they can continue to be the church there.

A come to us church could thrive in a churched culture with little variance between it and others; but in our world of great distance between our church culture and life beyond, a come to us church must have tremendous resources and resiliency to bridge that gap. And those are few and far between. But the good thing is that being church is older than our models of it, older than Plymouth, older than Wittenburg, older than Rome. Originally church was a “go be with them” people, and is becoming so again.

Here is what we need to remember: The church is not, fundamentally, a 501c3 nonprofit religious organization; it can and has existed, ancient and emerging times, without bylaws, boards, budgets, and buildings, and clergy. Church does not hahave to be thought of as “a” church, that one “goes to” on the corner of this and that, and is even named a certain thing, but church can be lived out organically as a way people, two or more at a time, participate as expressions of “the church.” Imagine. Church anywhere, anytime, by anyone. For Church does not have to be only in the mode of help us to become bigger and better, more competitive, where people despite our best intentions become the means to some organizational end; that is to follow the default mode of consumerism; church doesn’t have to be about attracting and extracting people from one environment, at great expense, and placing them in our environment, always worrying they will leave us; church can be about helping others grow, serving the ends of others, giving ourselves away, incarnating who we are into the greater life, and of course inviting others to do so with us.

Church may in the end choose to fulfill its mission being an organization with boards, budgets, bylaws and buildings, and marketing campaigns, and to make its worship time so attractive it can compete with all around it and fill up its pews again, but when we expand the horizons of church and then choose which one to move toward we will--to use the words fashioned by your, our, ancestors in Scrooby—have done so as the Lord’s free people, knowing we have chosen to be the church in certain ways. In a changing world, we need all the options at our disposal and to exercise as many as possible, even emanating from the very same people. There is no longer a one size one kind model of church; especially not if it is seeking to make visible in the world a Free Spirit of both Intimacy and Ultimacy.

Of course, if Mission creates church, how do you know what the mission should be? Who decides? How can it not change, even as church changes to fulfill it? How can a non-creedal people walk together down Common Mission Road? I am tempted, on this occasion especially, to say that these questions are why you have called a minister and why he has answered both this call and his own calling. But the questions, real and honest they be, are signs themselves of our misplaced priorities, of our old habits, of turning inward, turning only toward concerns for one another and those internal covenants that keep us perpetual in an Identity Crisis, our favorite crisis.

Mission comes from the Greek word missio, being Sent, and so is rooted in those beyond us covenants with the World and with God. Mission becomes then clear and compelling. As writer on the missional church Reggie McNeal says, no church ever votes to become missional. It simply begins living it and soon becomes it. Living into being the likeness of God in the world; or moving the world a bit closer to the Sacred.

In the Jesus tradition I follow in freedom, we take our missional words from Jesus who took his from Isaiah: to take God’s world transforming message of good news to the poor, to heal the sick and broken hearted, to free the captive, give sight to the blind, and proclaim the year of Jubilee when economic justice abounds and even the land is made whole anew. We are to be a Loving Liberating Justice For The Poor God’s Sent People. We fail, because we are people. But our mission is clear. We may differ at times on ways to best carry out the mission, that’s healthy conflict that is externally-focused; but the core mission is a given. All I know is if we argue over what to call it, we will miss it calling us.

You might have qualms about the word missional; it smacks too much of missionary colonialism; coming from Oklahoma, I get that. Here is the key difference: we do not take our Truth out into a world without truth or God, to make people out there like us in here. History has shown that doesn’t work; and theology has shown it limits God and turns God into an idol, something that can be possessed and manipulated. Instead, we are sent into the world to discover and uncover and nurture God’s surprising presence becoming visible there through the mutual relationships of service and study and celebration with others, especially with those most vulnerable, and those most unlike us.

Going back to our metaphor of the church as ship, with the world as sea, and God as the wind, my own community has helped me push this metaphor even further. For in our world today, our task is not just to craft a ship in dry dock then launch it into the world, like ocean liners or even like schooners, worried that it might sink, worried about its captain and crew; so much of church planting and church transforming is like that; it is what happens when we put first changing the church, something we are always trying to do it seems as our starting point, instead of what the real starting point should be, about changing the world.

What if we viewed church as a group of swimmers already adrift in the sea, survivors of wrecked ships already, joined by others dropped in to help them, who band together and assemble in the churning waters makeshift rafts to hold them and what they can salvage; rafts that are built so if they capsize, and they will, oh they will, they will easily right themselves again, even as the wind and the waves take them toward distant shores toward which, like Plimouth, they didn’t originally intend to land.

These are exciting experimental times with many amazing radical stories of how people are becoming church like this in response to such a Mission. Some of these ways are known by names used, like Church Under The Bridge, Church Without Walls, Pilgrims in the Park, The Salvage Yard, The Simple Way, and my favorite based on a saying of St. Paul, Scum of the Earth. Our own small group in Oklahoma is now on its third or fourth name in eight years, now The Welcome Table to bring it in accord with the name of the community center we started and the name of the community gardenpark we have started where abandoned houses once stood. And we are in our sixth main meeting space in that time, though we have worshipped also at gardens, in streets, parks, and bowling alleys while also being in service there.

But some groups becoming church, becoming disciples of love and justice, have no name, fearing, with good cause, that naming inevitably turns us toward ourselves and turns us more into an organization than an organic movement.

My favorite story in this category comes from Australia where a young man had grown up having a hard time, as a sufferer of ADD, sitting still in worship every Sunday in the spectator-manner of his church, and so when he became a young adult he decided that he didn’t have to keep “going to church” and so one Sunday he followed the invitation of a friend to go out on the lake in a boat; while out there, in a lull from swimming, his old habits reared up and he felt guilty for not “being in church” and he asked his friends if he could say part of a psalm and then say a short prayer, and his friend said sure, and he asked his friends if there was anything he could include in his prayer for them, and he did so. And he went back swimming and partying. Next Sunday the same thing happened, but this time he had also brought a Bible with him, and after a short time reading and praying they kept on partying. Gradually more and more friends were joining them. Gradually the prayers had more things mentioned. Soon they were spending time at the lake helping tow boats that had broken down, and were cleaning the park, looking for other ways to do random acts of kindness. They began to take time out for more bible reflection and they held communion on the picnic tables, and they kept partying before and dduring and after. Pretty soon worship was more party than program. And all the while his worried family kept bugging him to “come back to church.” They thought church is something you attend; but it is something you become.

Is that young man and his friends still there doing that? I don’t know. Maybe not; maybe they spun off and did the same thing in other places and ways. Was it a transient thing? Perhaps. But their story has lasted, and inspired, and that is a powerful thing, the most powerful change agent. The world now needs such random acts of church. And now think of something like that story, and like many other different ones in all kinds of places and times, happening not just accidentally or spontaneously, but intentionally too, from here, seeded even by people who love the pews they can’t any longer sit still in.

Reggie McNeal, in Missional Renaissance, writes: “An explosion of missional communities…will occur. These will be groups of believers and nonbelievers who will operate in noninstitutional settings. They will range in size from a handful of participants to a few dozen. Gatherings will take place in homes and restaurants, bookstores and bars, office conference rooms and university dorm rooms, hotel meeting space and downtown Ys, and yes, even churches. Their community life will center on an intense desire to grow spiritually and to aid the community. Some will be connected to churches; many will not be. Affinities will be common passions and similar life rhythms. Leadership will emerge from within.”

What this requires is nothing new, but that we begin again, as we did 400 years ago, gathering people in a new way for a new way, people willing to turn default modes of church upside down and inside out compared to the dominant way of being church at the time. What this requires is that we begin once more sending out such a people again out into the world, even sending them out as small groups while others stay in more familiar land in order to support them. What this requires is being willing to find home again in different harbors than we first imagined. And we require leaders again to remind the people of these requirements, these covenants, thesthese compacts.

Like Abram after Babel, we too live in a changed and much more scattered and diverse world. Like Abram, we have settled into our ways, with our father’s calling unfinished. The mission, the adventure, is a distant fading memory. Until, until, the Voice is heard that says Go you forth, from your land, from your kindred, from your father’s house, to the land that I will let you see.

Abandoned Places, Abandon Church! pt. 1 of a Progressive Missional Faith: The Three Rs of the Spiritual Life

Delivered at First Unitarian Church, Worcester, Mass, March 20.

Readings:

From Luke 13:20-21. The Parable of the Leaven: And again he said, To what shall I liken the kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman stole and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was corrupted.

And From Jorgen Moltmann's "The Source of Life"...Moltmann saw the devastation first hand of whole communities in Europe during and after World War Two:
The ideology of “there is never enough for everyone” makes people lonely. It isolates them and robs them of relationships. The opposite of poverty isn’t property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community. For in community we become rich: rich in friends, in neighbours, in colleagues, in comrades, in brothers and sisters. Together, as a community, we can help ourselves in most of our difficulties. For after all, there are enough people and enough ideas, capabilities and energies to be had. They are only lying fallow, or are stunted and suppressed. So let us discover our wealth; let us discover our solidarity; let us build up communities; let us take our lives into our own hands and at long last out of the hands of the people who want to dominate and exploit us.

Sermon: Abandoned Places, and the Three Rs of the Spiritual Life

First let me give thanks to your church and let you know I have many times spoken of you when I have preached on the presence and what I call the parable of the free church. One Sunday several years ago I was here for the first time sitting right about there…what I remember and tell is that right after the Lord’s Prayer the Rev. Merritt preached a powerful sermon about her belief in God and why it was important for atheists to be a part of this church. That combination of tradition, personal testimony, and inclusive community helped me to see anew and feel deeply what we mean by the free church, and like all good parables it has me still thinking and trying to live into it.

Jesus’ parables are one of the guides for our community back home. A favorite is when Jesus said The kingdom of God is like leaven, which a woman stole, and put into three measures of flour, until it was all corrupted. hat seemingly measures of meal, until it was all corrupted. That seemingly simple parable is about the radical fact of God changing sides. God’s Relocation. The kingdom of God, was itself a parable, for the kingdom, the world, the Empire as everyone knew, was Caeser’s. The evidence was everywhere; if you needed reminders just look at your coins or your crosses lining the roads. Caeser was Lord and Savior and what was divine was power and honor and property and propriety and security. Jesus immediately challenges those assumptions by claiming the world is not Caeser’s but that of the God of conquered, small poor Israel.

Then Jesus goes on to link this God with leaven, something ordinary, and also unholy, not like the purity of the unleavened bread, rather something moldy that was to be kept separate and apart while preparing your meal. Next God is likened to a woman, and as if that isn’t bad enough in the eyes of the world, she is a woman who sneaks or steals this leaven, and then foolishly puts it into enough flour to feed a feast, and what happens? It all goes bad, becomes useless. And that’s where the parable ends.

The God of this parable has relocated…from holiness to unholiness, from power and privilege and public status and acts to what happens in the home, out of sight is no longer out of mind, at least in God’s mind and sight; relocated from fullness and contentment to emptiness and waste; also from A Static Being to a process, a movement that changes and corrupts from within the dominant culture’s status quo and beliefs in what is worthy and respectable. Jesus challenged the authorities of his time, as this parable challenges us today, to also pick sides, to relocate, to go experience God, and help make God visible, where the powerful and the privileged won’t go and even seek to keep hidden from others, in hopes of keeping their honor, their marketing, their economy intact.

One of the best examples of this parable in action in our times can be seen in the life of Civil rights and community organizing activist John Perkins. Little known to the general public, he has had a huge affect especially on young people today seeking to change communities the way an earlier generation sought to change laws.

John Perkins was born 80 years ago in rural Mississippi. His father left when he was young; He watched a white police officer kill his unarmed older brother while standing in a line at a movie theater; his brother had recently returned from service in World War Two. John was full of anger and was a ticking time bomb; he hated church because it seemed to do nothing for the community in the face of injustice; he had quit school at third grade to work. He married but continued to drink and party. His family, seeing his anger and despair and fearing for his life, managed to send him out of Mississippi to work in California. There he began turning his life around and became part of the black middle class of the time and in that place; then through his young son Spencer he began attending a church that had a prison ministry; there in meeting with the inmates and encountering the bible for really the first time he not only became a Christian but began taking seriously this Jesus he was meeting for the first time. A prophetic Jesus that calls out for justice for the poor and oppressed. And It was the late 50s, in the thick of the growing civil rights era in the South, and the Jesus he was now following led him to go back home to rural Mississippi.

At first he was only going to teach this Bible, this Jesus, to the youth so they would get the message earlier than he had when he lived there. But soon the needs of the community, and the voice of this Jesus, were calling out to give more than a message: so a community center and farm was started, food was distributed, health care was begun, child care was given, adult classes begun, and worship held, and civil rights were supported. The God that relocated him also showed him that the work of God is in redistribution, both of goods and justice.
The more public his ministry the more it was seen as a threat. One night he and a van full of youth were stopped on a rural road by police who arrested him for contributing to the delinquency of minors and took him to jail where he was beaten and tortured near to death. In a hospital, the care of a white nurse coming so soon after his treatment by white jailers gave him an epiphany; it helped him to put his hatred into a larger vessel of God’s love, and gave him a new focus, racial reconciliation.

And so were born the 3Rs of community development that has guided and grown his work in the past decades and inspired many other communities: One R is for relocating to places of struggle and abandonment; a second R is for redistribution of services and spirit; and a third R is for reconciliation of peoples.
Actually he points out that to do this work requires combining three groups of people: remainers, those who have never left an area when others have and who have a native’s wisdom; returners, those like he was who came back where they had been and brought new gifts of service and wisdom and perspective with them, and relocaters, those called out to go to new places, called out by their own discomfort at being in comfortable places. All are needed. And while there is nothing like actual physical relocation, getting new neighbors, there are many important ways people can relocate their time, talents, and treasure to abandoned places. I just hesitate to go into them because they so easily become our default mode and will distract us from a more radically transforming calling whose simplicity itself might be what’s the most challenging.

A phrase has sprung up to describe places like where John Perkins lives and where I live, places located all over the place in rural and urban settings. It is called the abandoned places of Empire. It harkens back to the Roman Empire, there at a time when the Empire was crumbling, new communities on the edges were being created as small alternative socieites with values of cooperation instead of conquering. But now The Empire we feel at odds with is a contemporary American CoConsumer Entertainment Marketplace and Governmental Empire with dominant cultural values that champion Appearance, Affluence, Achievement, Coolness, Convenience, Comfort, Strength and Safety. And above all, perhaps, personal autonomy full of choices never ending. Challenging those American Dream values now is akin to Jesus casting God as leaven, as unholiness. This is an Empire who says the good life, even the spiritual life, is found in being surrounded by the so-called best things. The goal of this Empire is for places like ours to exist only as places people leave, as places where people live as punishment for not being able to buy into all the Empire provides us. We are the “Left Behind” places, as if the Rapture had already happened, in an economic, political, communal sense.

John Perkins says think of the shame people have who remain with constant reminders they have not been good enough or smart enough or lucky enough or young enough to leave as they should. That shame breeds a paralysis that makes it hard for people to become active with others for their own and their community’s behalf. It makes it hard for them to see the counter-truth, that as theologian Jorgen Moltmann says, the opposite of poverty is not property but the opposite of both poverty and property is community.

Even the good news of our community, the 74126 zipcode, far northside edge of Tulsa covering an unincorporated and incorporated urban rural small town area, once working class and growing before a racist response to integration occurred and white flight began to suburbs and investment in schools and the community ended. But I sometimes wonder why anyone wouldn’t want to relocate there, where five years ago we bought a home on two acres with a great view for $28,000. Ten minute drive from downtown; ten minutes to a lake. A realtors dream.
Then I remember hardly a night goes by we don’t have a shooting; just between May and August last year there were 311 shootings in Tulsa, and the highest concentration were in our area, which doesn’t actually have the highest crime rate overall. And we also have the city’s huge mountain of a landfill that has risen up in just the past decade to rival the height of the natural hill behind our house, and it is perpetually on fire and being closed for environmental damages, which just means even more illegal dumping on our streets. We are in a healthy food desert where 55 percent worry about how much food they have and 60 percent can’t afford healthy food, and I do wonder if that number would have been higher if people were more aware of what constitutes healthy food. We have no home pizza delivery, no movie theaters, our parks have been closed or redesigned to be used by people driving in from the suburbs, and most of the businesses we do have are owned by people who live elsewhere, as do our teachers and police and many of our preachers; even some churches only rent in our zipcode for the low rent not because they serve people from here. Our average household income keeps going down and is now just barely above $20,000; When we bought our property it had been abandoned for several years like 40 percent of the vacant homes near us, and we had to plead our case to the bankers to get the loan to buy the place; they didn’t believe me, an executive director of a national religious organization, and my wife, a physician, were actually going to live there, moving from our new home in a new subdivision in a fast growing suburb. A place where after spending more than the purchase price on renovation and remodeling the value of our property has remained virtually the same because the the rest of the ones around us have continued to decline.

The opposite of poverty is still even the good news of our community where We have the lowest life expectancy in our greater area, fourteen years less than the area with the highest rate just a few miles away, but we have the fewest, meaning none, health care services in the area. One of the first things our micro-church helped to bring to our area, locating it in the community center we created, was a university health clinic, but the economic and social dynamics of funding it and supporting it were not sustainable for funders and it has closed; while similar clinics in other parts of the city remain open full time, ours couldn’t maintain even a half a day one day presence which it had been reduced to by the end. Getting people to come wasn’t the problem; getting the right people to come, those with some insurance possibilities to help offset the uninsured, was the problem; there just weren’t enough of them, and those that were already were going elsewhere. On the advantage side, in the edge communities and out of desperation can come what we call “creative disruptive innovation” and we are now planning a health care mentoring network hiring people from our neighborhoods to partner both with their neighbors who are high users of the emergency room and to themselves teach medical residents about the communities in which their patients attempt to live.

The opposite of poverty is even our community where government and educational services have been cut and the fact that we are a small blue conclave—my precinct voted 225 to 25 for President Obama--in the only state where every county voted against Barack Obama, doesn’t bode well for having slashed state funds directed our way.

So If one adopts the values of the Empire, then ours and the places John Perkins has lived, are the last places you would want to live. But if you follow the values of the parable of the leaven, if you are intent on growing a soul in relationship and community with the most vulnerable, then these and ones even more severely stressed in other countries, are the first places. And once you relocate, and begin the work of redistribution and reconciliation, you’ll kick yourself for not going sooner. Every day presents an opportunity for the kinds of small acts of random justice, random love and beauty, random church, that sustain and deepen our lives of faithfulness to the Spirit Everlasting. They are the kind of places where a few people with a few resources can spread hope like leaven. They are places where it is easy to experience the counter truth that the opposite of poverty and property is community.

Besides the visible things we have created in just these past four years since we turned our little church group inside out and began incarnating ourselves into the community, instead of expecting the community to come to us, becoming like a guest in our own place, besides the clinic and garden and food pantry and computer center and clothing room and concerts and festivals and all the one on one personal assistance, what has really begun to be seeds of change in our zipcode is simply the ways people have begun to have a way to share their presence with one another through our presence. Which has been done with under a dozen leaders, with no paid staff.

What we have had has been God’s leaven, another name for which is beloved community, or communitas, the kind of community that forms itself by turning away from itself, outward with others. It is communitas on one side, and Empire on the other,and I say, as a Universalist, that God has chosen sides, has moved into the neighborhood of abandonment and not the gated community, and is hoping but not waiting for church to move there too. God hasn’t given up on those behind their gates, not given up on the well-off, on the cool and beautiful people who wouldn’t be caught dead in our zipcode; no, unlike the Empire, God is big enough to be an active loving presence everywhere, with everyone; It is just that God will transform our gated lives and communities not from within them but from the 74126 zipcodes that are located everywhere. I believe it is the next great adventure, mission, frontier, horizon for us as a progressive spiritual people to find ways to be there too. I am sorry I haven’t been able to tell you about the lives we have literally saved, about the joy that overshadows the setbacks. But these words by John Perkins I close with will I hope suffice.

“So what does it take to make beloved community happen? I really believe that it begins with a place. I’ve preached relocation all my life because the communities I’ve been a part of have been abandoned. Everybody left, so I called them to come back. But my real concern is for the place. If the church is going to offer some real good news in broken communities, it has to be committed to making a good life possible for people in the place where we are. If you care about a place, you’ll care about the kids in that place. If you don’t care about the kids, they’ll knock out your windows. But the kids in our neighborhood don’t knocfor the place. If the church is going to offer some real good news in broken communities, it has to be committed k out our windows. One of the first things we did when we came here was to put in a sandbox and build a jungle gym. We made sure there was a field for kids to play ball.

When you’re committed to a place, you also care about the beauty of the place. The flowers around our place are important. Every summer the children come running to ask me if they can take some flowers home with them. They don’t have pretty flowers at home…Shared beauty makes people want to share life together. You don’t have to tend your flowers in a neighborhood very long before you have something to talk to your neighbors about.

It may sound simple but I think you’ve got to have neighbors you talk to and get to know before you can love your neighbor as yourself. That’s why community development has been so important to me all these years. The church can’t organize the perfect community. If people aren’t drawn by the cords of love to a vision of beloved community, you can’t force it on them. But we can organize for justice. We can develop a community so that there is a place for people to know one another. That’s the work God has given us to do. Only God can send the rain, but we can till the ground by committing to a place and making sure people can flourish there. That’s the first thing the church has to do if we’re going to interrupt the brokenness of society.

As we commit to our communities, we also need to learn how to see them as economic places. It’s not enough to just move into a place, plant some flowers and be nice to your neighbors. All of that is good, but that won’t address the brokenness of people’s lives because the structures of the community are broken. People need work, good housing, education and health care. So the church has to invest its resources in developing the community. We also need to use our influence to get businesses and government to invest in the community. ..I wish churches spent more time thinking about how their members could love one another and share a common life by working together as a community. Part of the reason our churches are so individualistic is that we just accept the economic systems of our culture without question. We assume that the people who can get the good jobs should go wherever they have to and the people who can’t get the good jobs should just take what they can get. But churches that want to interrupt the brokenness of society ought to be about creating jobs in the community and giving neighbors an opportunity to work together. If we take our communities seriously as economic places, we’ll spend more time thinking about creating good work than we spend thinking about more relevant worship styles or bigger church buildings." Amen, John Perkins.

So, Go, find the abandoned places and the people who will be the leaven in your own life and for your own church, even as you then walking together with them become the leaven in the world which no Empire can withstand.