During the summer season, vacations and other activities may take you away from our regular worship at RPC.  Please remember that our ministry and mission never take a vacation.  There are a few ways you can make your Faith Commitment if you are away fromRiviera during the summer months.

1. Write a check and mail it to Riviera Presbyterian Church, 5275 Sunset Drive Miami, FL 33143.  Please label it “Offering or Pledge”
2. Electronic Bill Pay – setup a payment using the “electronic bill pay” feature of your bank’s online service.  The church will be in receipt of a paper check by mail if you are unable to attend Sunday service.

Please bring contributions for the food pantry, every Sunday someone will come through the congregation during the offering collecting contributions (food and/or money) for the food pantry.

2011 – 2012 Planning Calendars are now available.  $7 each.  Please call the church office to reserve your copy or pick up a form on the back table in the sanctuary.  We only have 1 copy left.  First Come First Served.

Volunteers are needed for Nursery duty for the month of July and August.  We need two persons per Sunday.  Sign up sheets are on the back table.

If you would like to hear your favorite hymn during a worship service this summer, please send us an email atrivierachurch@bellsouth.net or sign up on the clipboard in the sanctuary.

Please note that there will not be any Wednesday Bible Study during the month of July.

While Laurie is in Kenya pastoral care will be provided by Stephen Sapp, Jacqueline Rhoades and Deacons.  Please contact church office for phone numbers if needed.

New Date for Cabaret: Mark your calendars, update your Smart Phone – Cabaret has a new date: Sunday, September 25 and 6:00p.m.

Lectionary for Sunday, July 17: Genesis 2 and 3 selected texts; Romans 5:12-21

Sunday July 17th Sermon Title: “Lessons from Genesis 1:  The Ruined Garden” by Rev. Dr. Stephen Sapp  - Response by Tracey Schoenblatt

What are a few of your favorite things? Sunday, August 14th at 5:00 p.m. we will be having a Sound of Music sing-a-long in the sanctuary.  Please bring snacks and finger food to share. Suggested donation $5 per person or $15 per family group.  Come in costume if you wish and be prepared to sing – a- long with Maria and the Von Trapp children.

Along with our continued mission needs ­food for the food pantry, socks for the homeless, toiletries for the family and single food bags ­we also have to pay our liability, workers compensation and windstorm insurances. As in all our activities, lives will change because of the summer, so as your life may slow a bit over the summer months, please remember that our ministry and mission never take a vacation.

There are several ways you can make your Faith Commitment if you are away from Riviera during the summer months: Mail us your offering. Please make checks payable to Riviera Presbyterian Church.

Electronic bill pay ­Set up a payment using the “electronic bill pay” feature of your bank’s online service. The church will be in receipt of a paper check by mail if you are unable to attend Sunday services.

Please remember that we are still collecting electronics for the recycling program. You may de­posit the electronics in the recycling bin outside the Fellowship Hall on the south side.

We are also collecting ­used toner cartridges, canceled stamps, Food for Education labels, cell phones, hotel toiletries, white cotton socks please bring these items to the church office or leave them in a bag labeled ­”For Church Office” ­in the sanctuary on Sunday.

–Barbara Prieto

Please remember that Per Capita is due by June 30th. Per Capita is $31.30 per church member. If your teen has been confirmed at RPC he/ she are members. Any questions, please contact me.

Starting June 1 the Greater Miami Youth Symphony will be sharing space in the education building for their administration office. We thank Karen Picciano for bringing RPC and GMYS together. Also some of our youth, Leah Picciano and Nicole Prieto, have performed with the GMYS in the South Florida community.

Founded as the All­-Miami Youth Symphony by Robert Strassburg in 1958, the Greater Miami Youth Symphony was created to foster a love of music in young people and to enrich the cul­tural life of the community. GMYS is an independent five­level orchestra program dedicated to training young musicians between 5 and 18 years of age. Conceived as a complementary facet to musical instruction in the schools, GMYS has continuously succeeded in presenting high caliber performances to South Florida audiences.

The mission of the Greater Miami Youth Symphony “GMYS” is

1. to instill life­long values of discipline, teamwork, responsibil­ity, respect, and cultural appreciation in young musicians, ages five through eighteen, through learning, rehearsing, and performing in a professional, positive environment.
2. to enrich the cultural foundation of our community by reaching out to and recruiting young mu­sicians from different cultural, ethnic and economic backgrounds.
3. to train young people through teaching, rehearsals, and performances to function together as first rate orchestras, and ensembles that bring the communities together in outstanding music performances.

Today, GMYS serves over 600 students in seven beginning instrument classes, four orchestras, and concert/jazz band, and over 300 students in the GMYS Summer Music Camp. GMYS is also the Youth Artist in Residence at the Deering Estate at Cutler and was a finalist in 2009, 2010, and 2011 for a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

For more information about GMYS, see the GMYS website at www.gmys.org.

Riviera Presbyterian Church

Psalm 131, 1 Timothy 1:12-17, Luke 15:1-10

One True Thing

“which one of you…?”

Some of you may have noticed these last couple of weeks that Barbie has begun gathering up the prayers, imperatives, and needs of our congregation and community into a Friday mini-newsletter we are calling One More Thing… It is a way to draw a few minutes of our weekday attention and our prayerful presence into the life we share here at Riviera—a way, we hope, to lessen for our faith community’s part, the one-after-another barrage of memos, requests and information that our overflowing email boxes groan under.  A way to pause, pray, and remember that wherever we are and whatever we are doing, we belong to God and to each other, reflecting the path of Christ.   The title of our little broadsheet, “One More Thing,” is of Warren Broome’s creation, and refers to the way I never, quite, seem to finish a phone  (or any other!) conversation. Oh, yeah, I might say as we say goodbye, or as I call back or text after we have concluded the moment’s business,  I forgot, one more thing….

On Thursday afternoon, Karen Moyer, Kathy Stults’ new bride, invited me to go flying with her in a teensy, weensy Cessna.  Approaching a busy wedding weekend, she wanted to clear her spirit—and nothing, she tells me, accomplishes that complicated task for her like flying—the need to focus one’s spirit, mind and body on just one thing….keeping the plane flying safely through the inconstant and ephemeral air, until the wheels touch down and ground is once more safely underfoot.    Nothing distracts her from this task (I was glad to hear it!) –not the colorful commentary of the old new Englander whose plane we were in, not the beauty of the kettle ponds, dunes and estuaries of Cape Cod, not even the pod of Minke whales frolicking below, whose presence and play was excitedly pointed out by myself and Kathy, along with the other dozen sights our own shifting attention flittered over.   Flying the plane safely, Karen says, takes up one’s whole attention, and thus, clears and settles the spirit.

That singular spiritual practice has had me thinking, these past few days, What one thing compels me? What stops the endless barrage of one more thing, what clears all else away, so that I can see everything more clearly? There’s so much on our minds and hearts! For myself—a small sampling includes Gillian’s move to Chicago, the ugly that is being revealed about our American family by the rage and xenophobia being exposed around the building of an Islamic community center near the Ground Zero site.  Then the news I received from my father on Thursday afternoon, following our glorious flight over the Cape, knocked all other business—the practical matters about a busy fall here at church, imperatives of justice and theology, as well as those more ordinary concerns—right off the instrument panel of my soul.   For the past few days, I can concentrate on little else but cancer—and the small, sweet soul of my mother, whom now more than ever I want to protect, but cannot.   And still, I confess—comparing this present absorption, vital though it is to my family’s well being—

with Jesus’ enigmatic preoccupation with the one lost thing…the one true thing….my concerns and considerations, however pressing, still do not rise to the level of mindfulness practiced by the housewife and the shepherd in Luke 15, they are not the one true thing that, absorbing one’s whole mind, heart and strength, clears the soul to see everything more clearly.

When I read the bible, one of the things I have learned to do is to begin the study of any story by asking myself two questions:  What did I notice?  What did I feel? In doing this, I have found that it is possible to enter imaginatively into the world of scripture, and there to  “find” myself and my community, my commitments and my concerns.  Sometimes I identify with one character, sometimes another.  Sometimes a phrase compels me, or even just a word. Often I am surprised to find a minor character, one I had perhaps never even noticed, demanding my attention, dominating a familiar story in which I thought there was nothing new to be found. So when I read scripture, even stories as worn and familiar as this morning’s tale of lost sheep and coins, I hope to find myself and our community of faith, and I listen for a word from God.

Reading a quotation by the author Sue Monk Kidd while at Ghost Ranch on spiritual retreat last month, I finally found the window through which I want to look at Jesus’ stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin this morning: I have a diagnosis for this spiritual malady which afflicts our culture and, I know, has infected me, time and time again.  She said, I have attention deficit disorder of the soul. Attention deficit disorder of the soul. Well.

What did you notice? What did you feel? Reading the story I felt relief.  Relief.  There are ninety nine things to do, ninety nine places to go, ninety nine messages awaiting a response, ninety nine people who want and deserve your attention, your help, your love.  But there is only One True Thing, one thing that makes everything else fall into place.  The author Frederick Buechner calls it the place where your deepest yearning meets the world’s deep need. What is the one true thing for you?  The one true thing that, if you can pursue it with mindfulness and diligence, helps everything else find its proper place, and you, the place you should be, always:  securely in the Center of your life, and deep in the Center of God? Maybe you call it prayer, or justice, or Love, or God. Maybe you find it while flying, or baking bread, or painting, or teaching, or demonstrating for peace, or walking on the beach. Find that thing, and find yourself as a seeker of it, Jesus’ story urges, and everything else will fall into place.

You know me well enough to know that this is not an invitation to do less at the church, or to become less engaged in your lives, or in the life of this community. The fact is, this community needs our church to take its place in the world. We need you to be learning, teaching, giving, participating, praying…more than ever before. Our elders and deacons being ordained today will, I know, do their best to guide us in our work together, so that our congregation is focused and effective in reflecting the path of Christ here in our city. I hope that we will all find a way to participate, and good success in what we seek to exhibit of the reign of God in our little corner of greater Miami.  But more than that this morning, I hope that we will search our own heart and spirit, that we will search diligently through, beneath, and beyond the ninety-nine people, places and things we still have to do for the One True Thing… and having found it, live out our life together, reflecting the path of Christ in all the ways we can, from this place.      Amen.

Lent is a season for some discomfort and for looking at things from alternative perspectives “along the way,”….and therefore it seems important to pay attention to the discomfort or restlessness many of you have been kind enough to comment on, as you have reflected on worship during this season. Some have noticed that the sun coming through the east windows makes seeing the worship leaders a little more difficult. Others have shared that having “the cross beside us, instead of in front of us” is uncomfortable, and seems almost “wrong.” “It’s as if our attention is pulled from the cross, and is less clear to us. We have to strain to see the cross.”

This, too, seems symbolically significant to me. In the Lenten season, the texts of
scripture, week, by week, attend to the confusion and dread of the disciples
as they begin to grapple with Jesus’ prediction of his impending death. They
speak of the awkwardness of the journey toward Jerusalem, marked by embarrassing excess, frustrated confusion, heartbreaking betrayals, and surely, Jesus’ own very human dread and resistance to embracing the path he has chosen. So if we have found ourselves physically squinting into harsh light, a little disoriented as to our proper place, and straining toward a cross that was once always clearly before our eyes but is, in the moment, less easy to see and not entirely where it should be. . .maybe, in that, we are mirroring the paths of the disciples and Jesus.

On Passion Sunday, March 21, we turned our eyes toward the
smaller cross on the balcony. It was a time for reflection and community,
centered in the hearing of the choir’s powerful rendering of Mendelssohn’s
passion cantata, Christus., a time “away in a deserted place.” The cross
was behind us and before us as we heard sung and read the story of Passion
Sunday. With our Lenten journey coming to an end, we are gathering
our courage and our strength to face the Cross as Jesus did, when he
“turned his face toward Jerusalem.” Beginning on Palm Sunday, our sanctuary
will return to its more familiar forward-facing orientation, the beauty of
our rainbow celtic cross before us again

Please contact Laurie, Chuck Hannemann or the church office if you would like to volunteer and learn more about what is entailed.

Remember also to turn your clocks ahead one hour before going to bed on Saturday.