O God … send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love.
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Love. It all comes down to love.

When we say it like this, it all seems so simple. And yet we know love is anything but simple. When love meets the complex realities of our lives it is complicated and messy. Love is brave. And for us to be brave enough to love, we must have a strong foundation and sense of who we are. For us to be brave enough to love, we have to believe in love for ourselves.

It all comes down to love. Always. And love anything but simple.

We hear it in our scripture readings from this morning.

Joseph stands face to face with his brothers. Brothers who tried to kill him and who sold him into slavery. Only now Joseph has the power. The victim stands before his abusers. How many times has this situation played out throughout time? How many times has this situation played out in our lives?

The brothers are afraid that now that Joseph has the power, he will mete out the same abuse on them that they did on him. Joseph, for his part, looks like he is going to play the role that the victim too often plays, trying to soothe his abusers and make sure they are not upset. “Do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves,” he tells them. “It’s OK … I must have done something to deserve you hitting me. I’ll try to be better next time.”

Retribution or submission: Either way, the cycle of abuse continues.

We hurt each other. Sometimes we mean to and often we don’t. And we know from our own lives the journey of healing from abuse and trauma, the building of that strong foundation of who and whose we are is arduous and can be made on no one’s timetable but our own. Scripture is silent on this part of Joseph’s journey … and yet, we know he did take that journey of healing, he did build that strong foundation because something extraordinary happens.

Joseph chooses a third way. A way not of retribution or submission but of restoration.

Joseph claims his power. Not the limited power of the victim but the infinite power of survivor and victor. The power that comes from knowing that you will never allow yourself to be abused again but neither will you allow yourself to become the abuser. The power that comes from knowing you are infinitely loved by God.

And with this power, Joseph chooses that third way. The wonderful, beautiful, arduous, demanding, messy, joyful way of love.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus says one of the most extraordinary lines in all of scripture: “love your enemies.”

Oh, how simple those words are to say … and how often they have been weaponized by the powerful against the powerless, demanding submission to oppression and stripping victims of their right to cry out. Raining down blows and securing heavy chains and when people dare to fight back saying: “Uh-Uh-Uh! You have to love your enemy!”

Jesus’ says “love your enemies” not as a call for submission but as an admonition against retritubution. When Jesus says, “love your enemies,” we must hear echoing in reply the Gospel according to James Baldwin proclaiming: “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”

We hear those words, and We know that Jesus is indeed calling us to love our enemies – not a love of retribution and certainly not a love of submission. Like Joseph, Jesus is calling us to choose that third way. A way not of retribution or submission but of restoration. The wonderful, beautiful, arduous, demanding, messy, joyful way of love.

Love. It really does all come down to love.

When we say it like this, it all seems so simple. And yet we know it is not.

We know that the love that brings restoration does not come without preparation.
The love that brings restoration does not come without organization.
The love that brings restoration only comes when we operate from a firm foundation.

Architects of civil rights movements know that for love to be effective and transformative, there has to be organization and leadership and a deep sense of community. A firm foundation, a strong organization is the difference between a movement that can change the world and a mob that will only justify its oppression.

We have a foundation here at All Saints Church … a foundation of our history of transformative proclamation of God’s inclusive love. We have a foundation of community and love for one another. And the world is calling us to action that will require the strongest of foundations if we are to love with the boldness the present moment requires.

The world is calling us to meet this day and the days to come with the powerful, transformative love that has always drawn us together and sent us out at All Saints Church. The world is calling us, and it is time. It’s moving day, and it is time for us to get ready. We must get prayed up, studied up and suited up. We must make sure that our foundation is sure.

Your vestry and I have identified four foundational goals that will guide our work in the days and months to come.

Four goals that will strengthen the foundation of All Saints Church as we live God’s inclusive love out loud in this place and out in the world.

Four goals that will give us the foundation to be Joseph and Jesus – choosing the hard, transformative work of restorative love and justice that will bring healing to ourselves and healing to the world.

Four goals that will strengthen our foundation as a welcoming, supporting, visioning and inspiring community to love out loud for decades to come.

(You can hear more about these in detail later on this morning at the annual meeting … and I want to lay them out before you briefly now.)

First, welcoming. We must provide space that is embracing in love, that gathers community in love and from which we will be sent out in love.

For decades, these buildings have been both sanctuary and launching pad for this community. We have dreamed big dreams for what they can become … and despite our best and most faithful efforts those dreams remain unrealized and yet the needs remain.

Strengthening our foundation means learning from the efforts of the past and addressing crucial deferred maintenance issues well as engaging in a phased re-imagining and redevelopment of our facilities.

To coordinate the achieving of this goal, the Vestry has commissioned a task force called PACES, which stands for Planning And Campus Enrichment Strategies. Nothing like a good acronym, huh? The vestry has charged PACES with developing a facilities plan – not a grand redesign but recommendations of physical improvements to implement our foundational goal of welcoming.

Led by Phil Naecker and Lonnie Schield, PACES is also building a repeatable process for planning and executing campus improvements and maintenance that we can use each time we take another step. Deliberate and steady progress toward a new, more embracing, more welcoming All Saints Church.

There are already more than 30 people involved in six different teams that are forming PACES. There will be plenty of room for many others to be involved both in giving input, supporting these efforts financially and in rolling up our sleeves. As with all these goals, we will do this together.

Next, supporting. We must equip our staff to support the work and witness of All Saints Church.

We – all of us – are the primary ministers of this church, and we are supported in our work by an extraordinary staff. And each passing year, this staff is stretched more and more beyond their capacity.

Strengthening our foundation means loving our staff so they can help us love. Making sure they have the resources they need to do the work of equipping us for our ministry.

To coordinate the achieving of this goal, the Vestry has established a personnel committee, chaired by Trula Worthy-Clayton.

Together we are putting in place realistic job descriptions and effective system-wide personnel review structures. We will be examining salary and benefit structures to make sure they meet our All Saints standards of justice and love and looking for how we can best restructure our staffing to equip us all for the opportunities and challenges of the years ahead.

This is an area where our financial giving is of paramount importance. We do not have a sizable endowment and we can only employ the staff our giving will support. We will achieve this goal as we all pull together in our generosity … and in the conviction that when we say “All Saints Church should do something,” we are not just talking just about what the institution and staff can or should accomplish but are remembering that before anything, every one of us is All Saints Church, and the call to put our faith into action is the opportunity and responsibility of us all.

Third, Visioning. For generations, All Saints Church has embodied God’s inclusive love for ourselves and for the world. As today and tomorrow bring new challenges and opportunities, it is time for us to claim our values, vision and mission and rearticulate them for a new generation of ministry.

We need clear statements of who we are, what values we hold and where they are calling us that can be on all of our lips and that we can proclaim boldly to a Pasadena and San Gabriel Valley that is increasingly younger, more diverse and unaware of our presence.

Strengthening our foundation means claiming a vision of love lived out loud as All Saints Church that allows us to imagine a future that is a natural outgrowth of who we have been and who we are.

These values, mission and vision will inform the phased redevelopment of our facilities and the restructuring of our staff. To coordinate the achieving of this goal, the Vestry has established a task force, co-chaired by Tony Jackson and Sr. Warden MaryAnn Ahart that is already hard at work designing a process for clarifying and articulating that which we hold most dear and which we know must be at the core of the All Saints Church of today and tomorrow.

Finally, inspiring.

All Saints is a big, wonderful, energetic, inspiring church. There is an amazing energy here that captivates people walking into this community for the first time. And … too often we struggle to make those smaller, more intimate connections that are what keep us in this community and truly embody the transformative love of God in our lives.

Strengthening our foundation means deepening the connections of love within the congregation. Creating opportunities for connection and celebration, for study and sharing life together. For growing the secure relationships of love that inspire us and give us the courage to love boldly in the world. Taking the wealth of leadership gifts in this community and identifying and equipping leaders for the years ahead.

We are blessed to have an amazing congregational development team headed by Nancy Naecker, who has been working full time on this effort in a volunteer capacity. They are in the process of rebooting our small group ministry and working with new initiatives like Feast and Friendship to strengthen the foundation of community we need to inspire and love one another.

What can you do? You can be a part of it. Sign up for a Feast and Friendship gathering. As the structure for growing small groups emerges, dive in and join one or start one.

And right now, think of one person each month or even each week and invite them to something at All Saints Church and commit to going with them.

Right now, today, you can pick one person in this room you don’t know and commit to greeting them and learning each other’s names and laying the foundation for a relationship that will inspire and change you both.

This very day, you can be a part of building and strengthening All Saints Church’s foundation of love.

Because in the end, that’s what it’s all about.

In the end, it all comes down to love. And love is nothing new to us. We know what love is and we know what love does.

Love welcomes.
Love heals.
Love imagines.
Love transforms.

We know this because right here … All Saints Church … is where we have felt that love, God’s inclusive love for the whole human family and all creation.

As the world around us becomes more divided…

As our leaders and far too many others see diversity as something to be feared and not an abundance of riches…

As not only more and more people but the very planet itself cries out for healing… the arc of history that bends toward justice is calling us to meet these challenges in new ways. To take the inclusive love of God that has been the heart of this community for generations and embody and send it into the world anew.

The world is calling us, and it is time. In a world that is crying for retribution and submission we will be a voice of restoration. It’s moving day, and it is time for us to get ready. We must get prayed up, studied up and suited up.

For us to answer this call for this present moment as powerfully and more as All Saints has answered it in the past we will build and strengthen our foundation of love. We will clarify our vision, solidify our community, equip those who support our work and make this space a sanctuary and launching pad for the days, months and years to come.

As Joanne Bland told our young people last summer in the shadow of the Edmund Pettus Bridge where years before she had felt the blood of Bloody Sunday, together, we are the hope. Today is bringing us new opportunities to meet ignorance with understanding, to meet oppression with compassion, to meet greed with generosity. To meet hate the way All Saints Church always has and always will – with the deep, abiding, healing, imagining, transforming, welcoming, supporting, visioning, inspiring power of love.

Together, this is our challenge.
Together, this is our opportunity.
Together, this will be our deepest joy.
Amen.