First Presbyterian Church Of San Anselmo

Often churches speak of unity as agreement – a calm and comforting sense that we all get along – that there’s no real difference or dispute – no controversy, no disagreement, no protest. But that works well only if you are in the majority. Whenever there is any power imbalance – which is always – thinking about unity-as-agreement only works for our places of power and privilege – where the status quo is a comfort and a balm. Unity is not a feeling of agreement. It is a location, and that location is Jesus. We find our unity when we come to stand with Jesus who always stands with the poor, the oppressed, and the vulnerable.

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a: Paul uses the metaphor of the human body to explain how God's gift to the Church is that people have a variety of skills, gifts and talents to bring to the ministry in Christ's name. He uses the same metaphor to explain how the church are bound together, suffering when one of us suffers and rejoicing when one of us is honored. The challenge in our culture id not that we lack compassion for community members, but that we are reluctant to be vulnerable with each other. We need each other, and we need to need each other to build community.

2 Corinthians 12:2-10

Mark 4:35-43; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13: Mark's story about Jesus' calming the storm shows us how to move from fear to trusting God. Jesus reveals a God who cares passionately for the wellbeing of all God’s people. Jesus invites people to trust in that God, and trust, in the end, is the only thing that overcomes fear. Ultimately, the question isn’t what moves us from fear to trust, but who. The answer Mark offers is Jesus, the one who will not rest until we see and hear and experience and trust and live into God’s passionate love for us and all the world.

Acts 1:1-11; Daniel 1:1-17; “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” the poem by James Weldon Johnson Guest preacher the Rev. Floyd Thompkins, Director of the Center for Innovation in Ministry at San Francisco Theological Seminary, looks at the story describing Daniel's invitation to compromise his beliefs and his integrity in order to be seen as successful and important, as defined by the king and the dominant culture. Daniel refuses to give up his integrity, not because being himself "works," as the culture defines it, but because God called him to be faithful, regardless of what appears to work. God promises not to make him successful but to sustain him. Faith is not about doing what works, but about who we are and what God is calling us to do and be.

Matthew 11:28-30; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26: Three of the church leaders who served in key leadership roles in the congregation's REST program [Rotating Emergency Shelter Team] over the 9 year course of the ministry to people experiencing homelessness in Marin County reflect on their experiences.

Acts 8:26-40: Philip converts the Ethiopian Eunuch - but it's Philip who is the one converted. The church needs the stranger, the foreigner, the "other" to convert us again and again to the open-hearted and ever-widening circle of faith in Jesus Christ, and to show us what the church can be.

Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24: "I shall not want" doesn't mean we'll have no desires. It means God provides all we need. God provides enough to sustain all life on the planet. The problem is not supply, but distribution. If we trust that "the Lord is our shepherd," as the psalmist proclaims, rather than greed or consumerism, we will trust that there is enough to share, enough to go around, as well as to protect our planet from the destruction that rampant consumerism causes.

John 21:1-14: Interns Molly Morris and John Lyzenga describe the hospitality modeled by Jesus in this post-resurrection appearance, when he invites the disciples to join him for breakfast on the beach. Jesus always welcomed the stranger, and that is our calling as well. Even if, as is sometimes the case, the stranger we need to welcome is someone who looks like the person who hurt or excluded us.

John 20:19-34: This work of fiction serves as the "sermon" on Holy Humor Sunday, culminating a Lenten and Easter series on spiritual practices. In her search for a spiritual practice that fits her, the main character, Jenna, discovers that humor and laughter may be her spiritual practices, healing her when she hurts and fueling her to walk the walk. In the process, she realizes that her humorous take on "Doubting Thomas" helped her grasp its central message: That Jesus shows up for us, whether we doubt or not.

John 20:1-18: When John talks about "believing" in the Resurrection, he is talking about relying on it, trusting it, as though our lives depended on it. There are many paths to "believing" or trusting, as John, Mary and the beloved disciple show us. One path is practicing resurrection, because as Henri Nouwen said, “You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.” Practicing resurrection means practicing partnering with God in transforming despair into hope, apathy into compassion, hate into love, and death into new life.

Guest preacher the Rev. Sue Fleenor shared her experience on El Camino de Santiago de Compostela and compared her journey to the journey of faith and the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem that ended on Palm Sunday.

Psalm 25:1-10, Luke 10:25-37: Part of our Lenten sermon series, "Breathe on Me, Breath of God, on faith practices that sustain our faith during turbulent times, Molly Morris, Director of Family Ministries and seminary intern looks at the practice of storytelling. Our stories are part of us and a huge part of the way we interpret the world. When we tell our stories and listen to others' stories, we are given better understanding of the world around us, enter into community and begin to create the Kingdom of God, to which Christ calls us.

Genesis 1:1-12; Mark 1:9-15: Jesus emerged from his journey into the wilderness of nature, a form of vision quest during which he wrestled with his calling and self-definition, with the conviction that we need to move toward what he called "the kingdom of God," based in the old biblical stories that God created us in love and desires us to be free. The mirror of nature helped Jesus to see the ways competing stories offer only captivity and self-destruction. Nature helps us remember that we are part of the web of life, not separate from it or above it.

This sermon on Amos 5 and Psalm 10 explores communal lament as a faith practice. In scripture, lament is the response to recognizing and confessing that God's people are participants in a broken system or culture.

Mark 9:2-9: In the story of the Transfiguration, God tells the disciples to listen to Jesus, and offers a miraculous, supernatural event to underscore who Jesus is. While we may not see many occurrences as flashy as the one Mark describes, we are surrounded by "supernatural" occurrences in which God invites us to hear, see and notice God. We have only to pay attention. During Lent, we will be exploring Christian practices that help sustain us and inspire us in turbulent times. They all begin with paying attention.

Mark 1:29-39: Jesus needed time alone to pray. He needed to spend good, quality, one-on-one time with God in order to keep doing what God called him to do, and to keep being what God called him to be. So do we.

Mark 1:21-28: The very first act of Jesus' ministry that Mark describes is confronting an "unclean spirit" that is depriving a man of heath, life, meaning, purpose and joy. This tells us that opposing whatever deprives human beings of health, life, meaning. purpose and joy is at the heart of Jesus' ministry. God opposes whatever stands in the way of our having what Jesus called "abundant life." This took place right in the synagogue on a Sabbath, pointing to the Church's calling to confront brokenness even in church, even when it's caused by the church, as is too often the case for people declared by our culture to be "not normal," including our LGBTQ companions in the faith.

Jonah 3:1-5, 10: Guest preacher the Rev. Scott Clark retells the story of Jonah, and how God surprised him with the truth that no matter what we think about God or how we imagine God, God always loves us more.

1 Samuel 3:1-9, John 1:43-51: This sermon by guest preacher Douglas Olds explores how our relationship with God requires communication to make it authentically human. Without communication, there is no relationship. Looking at two readings about the calling by name of God to God’s followers, we learn that we are called by name—and hear God’s voice–in our conscience. God is lord of the conscience, our Presbyterian confessions state. Our sense of rightness and justice can direct us, give us a path in life. God wants us to follow our conscience that is based on knowing the voice of God.