If you want to support education and emergency financial aid for migrant farm workers and their families, please take one minute each day between now and the end of June to vote online so farm workers can benefit from a $250, 000 grant competition sponsored by Pepsi Refresh. Since 1997, the Harvest of Hope Foundation has distributed more than $800,000 nationally to migrant farm workers and their families for car repairs, gas, rent, utility payments, medical services, and other needs. By going to the web site below to show your support for this cause, you can help Harvest of Hope receive funds from Pepsi to help continue this support. Follow these easy steps:

1. Click on the following link or copy/type it into your web browser: http://votehoh.com

2. In the lower left, click on the Sign in link. If you have a Facebook account, enter it, or alternatively create a free Pepsi Refresh user account for purposes of voting.

3. Check the lower left corner to make sure you’re signed in.

4. Click the “Vote for this idea” button to “Provide emergency financial aid to migrant agricultural farmworkers.”

Thanks for your support of our migrant workers and those in other parts of the country.

When you see these people remember to thank them for helping to make Riviera Presbyterian Church a church that is ministering by reflecting the path of Christ.

• Richard Jimenez-Alicea for coordinating once again a wonderful church picnic.
• Allison Anderson for faithfully preparing communion elements each month.
• Karl Brester and Danny Ricardo for coordinating the Ping Pong Tournament during the church picnic. Congratulations to Stanley Schoenblatt who won first place and Oscar Posada who won second place.
• Larry Peterson and Annie Peterson who staffed the barbecue grills at the picnic.
• Tracey and Stanley Schoenblatt who helped with the water play at the picnic.
• Lee Popham who loaned us his ping pong table.
• Zach Schoenblatt, Maxx Schoenblatt, Nicole Prieto, Donnie Hanson, Dan Dixon, Rey Prieto and Richard Jimenez-Alicea who helped set up tables and
  chairs and then take them back.
• Chuck Hannemann who preached on May 2nd.
• David German and Richard Godbeer who are working very hard in the preparation of the church grounds for the Memorial Garden.

This summer, we propose taking a little of that time for nurturing friendships while we’re still in place, working day to day.

Why not consider gathering with Laurie and with a few friends from church for lunch, once a month? No agenda except friendship…no program except enjoying one another. We’ll set up one in the Coconut Grove area and another on a different date in the Doral. If it works, we’ll keep it up. In June, let us know if you’ll join us on:

• Thursday, June 3, at Green Street Café in Coconut Grove at noon
• Thursday, June 10 in the Doral (place to be determined), at
  noon. Please email Laurie or the church office for the Green Street
  lunch. And Laurie, the church, or Richard Jimenez-Alicea for the Doral lunch.

If you can gather a few more folks in an area not easily accessible
to either place, we can add a third feast… talk to Laurie if that possibility interests you. Hope to see you come summer!

Following the worship service, everyone gathered for a pasta lunch in the Fellowship Hall, where money was raised to support The Child Care Center’s Tuition Assistance Fund. Special thanks are in order for Amanda Jackson Willy (Child Care Center Board member and chairperson of the Fundraising Committee, who organized the event), Mr. Patrick Vital (who graciously donated the food for the luncheon), and to everyone at both Riviera Presbyterian Church and the Child Care Center for making this event a most memorable one!!!

In follow-up to the “Just Eating” Lenten study series, we haven’t so far found a good date to make the trip to visit the ECHO demonstration farm in Ft. Myers (Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization, http://www.echonet.org/), and now it’s getting hot and about to start the rainy season. Therefore we would like to push this idea back to late October/early November.

As background (quoting from their website):

‘ECHO is a non-profit organization whose vision is “to bring glory to God and a blessing to mankind by using science and technology to help the poor.” As an inter-denominational Christian organization located on a demonstration farm in North Fort Myers, FL, ECHO exists for one major reason, to help those working internationally with the poor be more effective, especially in the area of agriculture, specifically small farm tropical agriculture.

A unique attraction for Lee County, ECHO’s Global Farm Tour is a fascinating 90-minute tour of the most creative working farm you have ever experienced. You will find demonstrations, plants, and techniques useful to farmers and urban gardeners in developing countries. Experience six settings of the Global Farm and taste leaves and berries while you explore rain-forest habitats, visit farm animals, stop at a simulated Haitian school, witness urban gardening techniques that allow gardens on rooftops and learn all about ECHO’s mission of helping the poor help themselves.

Appropriate technologies demonstrated at ECHO include biogas (turning cow manure into gas for cooking and lighting): a sawdust cooker; a simple solar food dryer; and more. Tropical sheep, goats, turken chickens, ducks, tilapia, and rabbits are integrated into the farm. If that is not enough to entice you, ECHO has one of the largest collections of tropical food plants in Florida.’

If you are interested in being on the trip list and did not sign up during worship, please email Karen Picciano (picciano@bellsouth.net) with a copy to the church office. By overwhelming preference, the trip will be on a Saturday morning.

Thanks! Karen

For the past couple of months, it has been my privilege and a real joy to meet with five exceptional people who are in conversations about church membership with the community here at RPC. The conversations have been unusually rich, as the group’s participants have explored the wide diversity of perspectives their respective faith journeys have engendered. Like many others in our congregation, some have come into life at RPC as individuals formed by life-long family commitments to church membership, many from traditions far more restrictive socially and theologically than ours. Others have come to faith as adults, starting new in communal religious practice by their own choice, not because they were promised or raised to that
faith by their family of origin. Among all these adult faith practitioners, there are a wide range of understandings of God and God’s work in the world; a breadth of ideas and profound questions about who Jesus was, and who the Christ is, for the postmodern Christian faith community; and, along with those personal belief perspectives, a predictably wide attitude about what the Church is and how to be a part of it. Listening to them, and looking around on Sunday morning, I am newly awed at how the rpc collection of souls: members friends, and all our children, have entrusted such an important part of their spiritual and life journey to life in community. The thing is this: churches may look more or less uniform, seem in their common work and worship as if all their adherents are on the same path in the same place at the same time… but in reality, no believer looks alike…thinks alike… experiences God in the same way—even at different points on their own faith journey, let alone in their communal journey. And yet…somehow, these collections of diverse individuals, these very-different kinds of families, choose to let their individual voices be drawn into common praise and prayer….choose to let their differing commitments, political persuasions and personal styles be knit into shared work in mission and a common process of education for faith, choose to allow
their varying skills, expertise and social locations to be gathered up in varieties of volunteer efforts that manage the life of the congregation, keep its common life vibrant, and care for its hurting and isolated members. With people we barely know outside of this sanctuary, we confess our failures and disappointments. We share our fears and the concerns we have for friends and the world. We stand up and ask for what we need and expect to have it given serious attention. We donate time
we scarcely have for ourselves to projects that were not our idea, because we are trying to bear faith with our neighbors. We
are a community bound together neither by necessity nor fiat, but by faithful intention. We are a community shaped not by the
“rights” to which we are entitled; but by a sense of mutual responsibility. We don’t always get it right…but we keep trying. It
must be a gift of the Spirit!

The feast and season of Pentecost, described in the bible in Acts 2:1-11, sometimes is referred to as the birthday of the church. And often, it is presented that when the Spirit came down on the demoralized and frightened disciples of Jesus; a strong, unified, powerful movement came into being. But a careful reading of scripture, supported by a basic understanding of human history and human psychology, would tell us otherwise. It would tell us that what was born on Pentecost was a sense of community surprising because it was expressed across boundaries of language, experience and culture. The Pentecost
believers didn’t receive the Spirit and all speak in the same language…they received the Spirit, and were able to speak in their
own languages…and at the same time, understand and be understood by their neighbors and by strangers outside their
house. So, if a “Church” was born on Pentecost, and if it continues today, here at rpc and elsewhere…it is for two reasons:
first, because there is at work in the world a Spirit who empowers each of us to express our selves, and our faith journey honestly
and authentically –especially when it differs from that of our neighbor; and second, because there is at work within each of us a Spirit of hospitality that checks our quick urges toward domination and homogenization and equips us to listen to the opinion, the story, the feelings of the person sitting next to us or passing by outside our doors, even and especially when that person’s “language” is different from our own. Many, if not most church growth models teach that the only way to be successful and grow as a congregation is to hone our common ground and cause like to hew to like; but the witness of Pentecost, and the enduring belief of this small expression of the Church called RPC, is strangely, wonderfully contrary. Let’s each keep doing our small but vital part to keep it that way: speaking our own language with humility and trust; listening with love and care
while someone else does the same, and believing that when we do so, God shows up and the path of Christ is illuminated.

Thank you each for being a part of it…. Laurie

We were home the other evening, watching a moving on TV. I lost the toss, and we eschewed a movie about Queen Victoria in favor of a movie starring the very nice-looking Viggo Mortensen, a post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy tale called “The Road.” An hour and twenty minutes into the sepia-tinted, desperate world of a man and his small son who fought hopelessness, starvation, and bands of violent cannibals while walking across a desolate and lawless land toward the ocean, the father was shot by a cross-bow and died and we looked at each other and said—we should have gone for Queen Victoria, at least she won. It was a movie whose order of the day was mere survival in the face of certain death—a road I would not care to walk again, or ever.

The gospel of Luke, our second reading this morning, tells this story: Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow, and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, “do not weep.” Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “young man, I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.

This morning, all around our communities, in every corner of the globe, this is what we see: a young man dies in combat, and the order of the day goes on. A child or two is shot playing on the road in front of their home—a casualty of a drive by meant for someone else, and the order of the day goes on. A pelican, dripping with oil, is lifted from the tide waters, and cradled gently by a weeping volunteer, but still, the order of the day, the order of death, goes on. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that death is commonplace in our lives, unavoidable, even, in our worlds. . .but this morning’s stories are more deeply about another kind of death: that is, what Walter Brueggemann calls daily seasons of death that beset us; how, in the face of fear, grief, guilt, hate, and self-absorption, we draw more and more into a closed, self-preoccupied world that is killing us. This story is about that kind of dying. . . .and what we can do about it, if we are sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

In the Elijah story from I Kings, we can see both kinds of dying, the physical and the spiritual, having their way in a diminished world. Elijah has foretold, and begun to survive, a season of desperate drought that has placed his land at the point of death. In a dream or a prayer, he is directed go now to Zarephath, where I have commanded a widow to feed you. There he finds a woman and a child more desperate than he.

She claims impending physical death for herself and her son, and has lived daily seasons of dying as well: an “order of the day” that dismisses women, widows with their children and “aliens” as beneath notice, beyond community.

Warily, defensively, the woman and the prophet make common cause – they survive together because they must. . . and somehow, the risk they take proves to be a God-thing: the jar of meal continues to hold just enough; the oil for cooking does not run dry. But other than merely surviving, nothing changes. And lest we think that such miracles, these “God-things”, are unambiguous, joyous moments that sweep away human limitation, erasing the daily seasons of death forever with a Divine “happily ever after,” the story of the order of the day does go on. The drought continues, the child becomes ill and declines until there is no breath in him. The tenuous truce that binds Elijah and the widow erupts with accusation, guilt, and mutual suspicion, threatening to rupture everything, including their fragile connection with the sacred…

And then, not a moment too soon, the silent complicity with the daily seasons of death is shattered by a word of power. Oh God, oh, God! Let this child’s life come into him again. It is not God’s word that breaks the silence, the cycle of death and desperation: it is a human one.
A voice from a man who, like us, has learned to survive, but finally wants more.

A voice from a soul who has been worn down by the daily seasons of death, by guilt and accusation and suspicion and self-absorption and not caring—but who has finally had enough. A voice from a believer who had long been looking for a sign from God and who at last has looked into the mirror and found the sign he longed for: himself.

He has seen the face of God, his own face, and he throws his body—vulnerable but resolute, over the body of the boy, and life is snatched from the jaws of death—for the child, for Elijah, and for the widow, who gasps—‘atah yada ‘ti—a confession of faith out of fatalism: now I know that the word of God in your mouth is true.

Last week, on Trinity Sunday, I invited us to consider what holy Name, what image of God was the one we needed, each of us, in this moment of time, in whatever season we find ourselves in. After the service, Isabelle came up to me and said—that brown pelican you mentioned? Covered with oil? I saw it—it was Christ, it is being crucified for our sins.

And I was stunned, and all this week, as the oil has crept nearer and onto our own state’s shores, my carefully balanced compromise of prayer, anger, cynicism and hopeful dependence on BP, the MMS, Congress and Barak Obama to step up and fix everything has been crumbling under those ten words, the image of a Brown Pelican, a Christ, being crucified so that we might rise up and have life through him.

When Jesus stopped the funeral cortege in Nain, confronting those silent people in their daily season of death—he spoke only ten words: Do not weep. Young man, I say to you, rise. When the young man sat up, the gospel tells us that he began to speak…

I imagine that he is speaking still, if we would but listen. I imagine that he is telling us that if we are not the ones to stretch our own bodies, like Elijah did, over those who are weary to the point of death, to cover them with our love, and speak a word of life on their behalf to God, then, who will? I imagine him saying that if we are willing to pass by death in silent complicity with friends and fellow citizens who have all but given up on living with meaning, if we refuse to Stand Up, then there really is for him and others like him, no hope. I imagine him saying, with Jesus: things can be different. Do not weep. Stand up. Do something, for my sake, for God’s sake. And when we do, when we do, I know he will be speaking again, in mighty chorus with a long forgotten widow and her son, and every forgotten one since…. ‘atah yada ‘ti: Now I know, now I know, now I know , that the word of God in your mouth. . .is true.

As plans proceed for the 219th General Assembly (July 3-10), specific attention is being given to how to increase and strengthen the spiritual aspect of the meeting. Here are some examples:

Bible study. Even before the commissioners and advisory delegates arrive in Minneapolis, they and everyone across the denomination will have available online through The Presbyterian Leader a Bible study written specifically for this assembly by Matt Skinner, a Presbyterian minister who teaches New Testament at Luther Seminary in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

The font. This year’s theme, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38), lends itself well to baptismal
imagery, such as the font that will be front-and-center of the commissioners and advisory delegates as they work to discern the mind of Christ for the PC(USA). While each of them will have brought a small portion of water to pour into the font, what is more important will be the rivers of living water that pour from them in the Spirit-led decisions they will make over the course of their week together.

Worship. The opening Communion service on Sunday, July 4, will include not only those who have traveled to Minneapolis for the assembly but also thousands more Presbyterians in the Twin Cities area. In addition, worship will be on the schedule each day, and the traditional ecumenical service will take place in Westminster Presbyterian Church, just down the street from the convention center.

Prayer. A room will be set aside for commissioners, advisory delegates, and others to use for quiet prayer, reflection, and meditation. The area is being designed by volunteer members of the Committee on Local Arrangements, a group of the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area that, along with other myriad tasks for the assembly, is planning the opening and daily worship services.

The opening prayer for each session of the assembly will take place around the baptismal font. New at this assembly will be the practice of inviting commissioners and advisory delegates to turn to a few others in the row in front or behind them to form small groups to pray on a regular basis.

But praying for the General Assembly is not limited to those who will be in Minneapolis! Individuals, sessions, congregations, and groups across the PC(USA) are encouraged to begin praying now for the meeting, for the Moderator who will be elected the first night of the assembly, and especially for those who will be serving as commissioners and advisory delegates.

In addition, the Reverend Gradye Parsons, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly, has written a call to prayer for the assembly that will be featured in the 2010 Mission Yearbook for Prayer and Study on July 3rd, opening day.

Finally, the Book of Common Worship contains a prayer for a General Assembly meeting. You are invited to use it often before and during the gathering of what is the highest governing body of the PC(USA):

Almighty God, in Jesus Christ you called disciples and, by the Holy Spirit, made them one church to serve you. Be with members of our General Assembly. Help them to welcome new things you are doing in the world, and to respect old things you keep and use. Save them from empty slogans or senseless controversy. In their deciding, determine what is good for us and for all people. As this General Assembly meets, let your Spirit rule, so that our church may be joined in love and service to Jesus Christ, who, having gone before us, is coming to meet us in the promise of your kingdom. Amen.

(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993, 805)

Let’s go down, down in the river to pray.