Math Adventures and Word Play

One of the great programs around St. Mark's is Mathematics Adventures and Word Play - an educational outreach to children and youth in our region. Volunteers organize and tutor those who seek educational assistance on any level. Some who receive tutoring also tutor others - of a different grade level or in a different area. It meets at St. Mark's on Saturday mornings from 10:30-noon.

What Do We Want to See?

From the Rector
Arriving in Jericho, Jesus comes upon a blind beggar named Bartimaeus. Though people try to get him to quiet down, Bartimaeus cries out for Jesus to pay attention to him.

Jesus responds to Bartimaeus and his urgency. What does he want? Jesus asks.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Bartimaeus wants to see – to have his physical sight restored.

Of course physical sight is not all it promises to be. Many blind persons have more developed awareness and insight than many sighted people.

We only see if we look, if we pay attention.

Jesus still offers the gift of sight. What do we want to see? What will we allow ourselves to see, by God’s grace?

Most people, sighted or physically blind in our world spend a great deal of effort (sometimes unconsciously) overlooking very important dimensions of reality. A recent New York Times story told of newly wealthy Sudanese living 600 miles from earth’s greatest humanitarian disaster who are ignoring the devastation of violence and starvation in the Darfur region of their country.

What do we want to see? What will we allow ourselves to see, by God’s grace?

As Jesus gives us sight, we also receive, through grace and the Holy Spirit, the strength and courage to see, to understand, and to respond to what we encounter.

In Christ, we can really look at our lives, our relationships, our faith community, our wider neighborhood and the world.

What Interests God?

"It is a great mistake to think that God is chiefly interested in religion."
William Temple, 98th Archbishop of Canterbury

From the Rector
The great 20th century Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, directs our attention away from the established forms of institutional religion by questioning God’s primary focus. How many assume that God frets full-time over the church and its various (sometimes petty) concerns?

But if not religion, what does interest God?

God is beyond our limits, beyond our comprehension. God is beyond our knowing and beyond our direction.

Nothing limits God’s interests. We can only imagine that God is interested in what God loves – all people and all of creation in all times and in all places.

Being in relationship with God calls us to focus as widely as we can on what interests God, to pay attention beyond the restrictions of religious structures. How are we joining with God in attending to the world, to people, and to both dire manifestations of need and the vast array of creative expression?

Our religious practice is meant to direct us beyond the life of our faith community where we are formed and strengthened spiritually. Church has value as it gives us courage, insight, and passion for living life whole-heartedly with God’s unconditional love and boundless hope. Is our primary experience one of opening up, of freeing, of moving beyond constraints and limits?

Is our attention as individuals and as a faith community too small? Can we seek from God an expansion of our focus, of our interests, and of our action?

Blessing Children

From the Rector
We are accustomed to hearing about the very simple and direct action of Jesus taking children into his arms, putting his hands on them and blessing them. We have a stained glass window depicting this scene.

It is heartwarming to consider.

It was a radical act in Jesus day. It ran against the grain and mostly people would not have responded to Jesus with any positive sentiment for what he did.

He was setting the world on its ear, challenging the structures of oppression.

Children were de-valued and on the margins in Jesus’ day.

Just as they are today.

As we gather children in, meet their specific needs and bless them, we are not, by-and-large, going to be rewarded with great enthusiasm. Especially as we serve children who are not “our own” (as in homeless children in the family shelter or children who come to St. Mark’s for tutoring in Math Adventures and Word Play) people will look suspiciously at us. They will question our motives, wonder why we don’t leave well enough alone.

The simple (maybe the only) answer is that we do it because Jesus did it – and we are the Body of Christ.

Sunday Afternoons with Mozart

From the Rector
We are having a Sunday Afternoon with Mozart on Sunday, May 14, the third of three magnificent concerts organized by the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County and offered by the Solstice Ensemble, the splendid chamber ensemble guided by Jim and Laurie Stubbs. The concerts are benefitting a number of projects of the Ethical Cuture Society as well as the day laborer outreach we have begun.

These concerts demonstrate the capability of our building to serve as a small concert or recital hall. They express something of our growing mission and outreach to the arts community in and around Teaneck, "the far west side of Manhattan." I am grateful for the way in which God is giving us opportunities to support and encourage the arts, which are essential to human life.

The concerts are also a sign of another dimension of life at St. Mark's: radical hospitality. What an advantage we have in becoming increasingly clear that hospitality and openness is our first priority.

The Mozart concerts were originally planned to have been at the Ethical Culture Society building but had to be moved due to a scheduling problem. We immediately welcomed the events to St. Mark's. In so doing we are advancing the arts, people in our community, our connection with a range of good work emanating from the local faith community, and we are revealing and experiencing God's openness to all of humanity, as Jesus Christ reveals God's unrestrained love to us.

There are so many ways in which God desires to and does enrich the life of the world as we respond quickly and positively to the openings that are presented to us. As the Mozart concerts strongly reflect, often the result is truly beautiful.

Serving Day Laborers, Expanding our Diversity

From the Rector
For quite a few months we have been serving a group of day laborers who gather in Bergenfield. About 50 men of Latin American origin gather in the site each day.

We have been serving them through providing necessities and companionship in a once-a-week visit on Wednesdays. Many times they have not had basic resources for living and working. We have supplied safety items like dust masks, eye protection, and goggles as well as cold weather items like knit caps, warm gloves, sweatshirts, and jackets. Most days we take some basic portable nutrition like fruit, snack bars, string cheese, or nuts.

In June we will start to offer English as a Second Language (ESL) classes and a simple meal twice a week. Learning English has been the highest priority for the workers (after having more work).

In the months we have been building relationships in this day laborer community we have found the men to be extremely pleasant, intelligent, motivated, insightful, and faithful. Most of them are deeply pious Christians and they have responded enthusiastically to a few special prayer and sacrament times that we have offered on major days like the Epiphany and Ash Wednesday. We have benefitted enormously from the ways in which the day laborers have enriched our lives with their stories, experiences, and personalities.

As we move into a new phase, with English classes and hospitality, we can recognize that St. Mark's is being offered not only this valuable opportunity to serve, to do what Christ mandated we should do: "love one another as I have loved you," but we are being presented with a chance to grow and to expand the range of our diversity. God is very generous to us and the presence of the day laborers in our mission is another strong sign of the way in which God abundantly gives us all we need.

St. Mark's and the Township Council

From the Rector
Since January I have been serving on the Teaneck Town Council, appointed to fill a seat of a Councilmember who made controversial statements about our Fire Department in an ongoing season of conflict in our municipal life. My term ends June 30.

I have found work as a Councilmember to be very similar to work I do at St. Mark's and in the Diocese. The skills are much the same. It has been an intense experience: jumping in and having to be immediately effective in a demanding and fraught time. I commented to a friend that serving at this time is a bit like a graduate-level practicum in handling conflict.

I agreed to serve on the Council for a number of reasons. The first was to serve the community. I see it as similar to serving the homeless, the hungry, the day laborers, the refugees, the young people who come for tutoring, and so many others who seek response and hospitality from our faith community. It isn't exactly this, but it is something like an extended pastoral call on the Township government. In any case, it is definitely ministry.

I also felt it a way to grow in leadership in order to serve St. Mark's and the wider church more effectively. It has been a way of putting my leadership insights and practices into the fire, to test and temper them. This has been a very trying time - the sort of thing that creates new strengths and pulls all of one's gifts and inner resources to the front.

During the time of my service we have settled a complex of law suits for 2.3 million dollars, had an investigative task force that issued a public report to try to improve employee relationships, faced employees and township residents who are struggling with an array of real issues and concerns, worked on the problem of an $80+M school budget defeat that now becomes a Council decision, and worked with the whole array of matters related to facilities, development, and planning. I was glad to be on the Council when we finalized the purchase of and setting up an Advisory Board for an historic burial ground threatened with development, a place where people of Native American, African, and European ancestry were all buried. I've met a tremendous number of fascinating and gifted people who live in our community and who serve this very diverse town.

I am clearer than ever on the central role of leadership in the health of an organization. I have found myself tested. I have had to be strong, clear, to think deeply (and quickly! and a lot!). There's also been a need for perseverance: the time demands have been extreme - especially considering so much else is also demanding (expanding ministry at St. Mark's, Bishop Nominating, Commission on Ministry, new programs with Holy Name Hospital, my doctoral work, to name a few).

I hope I have represented St. Mark's well and that people will understand St. Mark's as a faith community that connects to, ventures into, and serves the real world. I have made controversial decisions that I hope will in no way hurt this faith community, but that were necessary in order to not represent us as weak, vascillating, or of no real practical value (namby pamby Christians). I'm sure there are some things to regret - they will be more plain as time goes along, no doubt.

Overall, this ministry has been highly rewarding and one that I pray will continue to bring forth gifts for the future of St. Mark's and will help shape the overall direction of ordained ministry in my life in the church. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve and for being given the grace to respond to it.