in the ordinary-day life practice of spiritual values that Riviera members have come to call “reflecting the path of Christ” I am often awed and always grateful for the generosity of our community of faith. This is not a Sunday-only kind of faith community for most of you: in addition to going to work, maintaining a household and nurturing your relationships at home, so many of you give significant time and energy to the practice of your faith week by week. You visit friends and church members in hospital or at home, you run errands for friends and neighbors, you read and respond to prayer concerns that move through the community by phone or cyberspace, you bring the concerns of others, known to you, into our circle of care. You attend choir, volunteer in the office, the hospital, the bay clean up, the walks and runs to eradicate various diseases, you care.

Not a week passes that I don’t hear a story from one of you about how you are attempting to meaningfully relate your faith practice, a sermon or part of worship or education with which you connected, with the challenges and changes you face day by day in the world outside the sanctuary. When you leave after the benediction on Sunday morning, you are not leaving church—you are taking church to work, reflecting the path of Christ in the everyday world. Put another way, (borrowing the words of Jesus!) you are the light of the world.

Viktor Frankl, the philosopher and concentration camp survivor, whose “Man’s Search for Meaning” is a 20th century classic and an awe-inspiring demonstration of how one man with faith made a life of purpose, meaning and even joy in the midst of the most profound and dehumanizing experience of suffering, said this:

“That which is to give light, must endure burning.”

I described you as light – givers, and so you are.

If Frankl is right, and in my experience both as a pastor and as a disaster responder, I think he is correct; if the first part of the statement is true, so is the second.

That is, light-givers experience burning, and need to know how to sustain their “fuel” for a long and joyful life of purposeful shining into the dark places of life.

Care-giving, light-giving, expends fuel. It costs you something to choose to engage in the lives of neighbors, friends, and strangers. It spends something of your spiritual and physical energy to choose after work not to just go home and sack out with reruns of your favorite show, but to cook a meal and take it to a person bound to home, to stop by the hospital for a visit, to write a card, make a phone call, go to church for a meeting or a practice session, show up for your volunteer shift…. it is your joyful choice, and the way you reflect Christ in the world, and it also costs you something. And when stresses and costs begin to pile up to the point where your fuel reserves get low, and when, like now, times are hard and the workplace itself is harder, you may begin to experience what trauma specialists have come to describe as “Compassion Fatigue.” Your life and work of caring for others wears you out, instead of energizing you. You stop burning fuel to keep your light shining, and you start burning yourself….and that’s not the way it should be!

My friend, Compassion Fatigue specialist Dr. Eric Gentry, has developed a wonderful program for treating and preventing compassion fatigue. For the past year, my colleagues from the National Response Team of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, Jim Kirk and Bruce Wismer and I have worked with Dr. Gentry to adapt his transformational material for the faith community. In late August, we premiered this model at Riviera in a Compassion Fatigue mini-retreat with 26 members and friends of RPC. We are planning to offer this material again in the future. In the meantime, beginning on Rally Day, September 13, I will preach a five part sermon on the Spiritual Antibodies that people of faith can put into practice–a vaccine, if you will, to help you become more resilient to the effects of compassion fatigue, if you are experiencing it, or, for the rest of us, to help us stay spiritually resilient and healthy in our everyday work as we seek in our lives to always be light givers.

Put simply, your vocation as a child of God is to shine as light in the world. ..wherever you are. And this “spiritual vaccine” can help you keep healthy, joyful, and intentional in that vocation…whatever you do.

Here are the themes and the texts we will be considering through this series:

September 13: Rally Day!

• Spiritual Vaccine #1: Intentionality.
• Text: Do You Want to Be Made Well?
• John 5:2-9 The Man by the Pool of Bethzatha

September 20: Ordination Sunday

• Spiritual Vaccine #2: Relaxation (Self-Regulation)
• Text: Sanctuary
• I Samuel 16 Samuel and David

September 27: Spiritual Vaccine #3: Self-Validated Caregiving

• Text: Take My Blessing–Please!
• Genesis 32-33 Esau and Jacob

October 4: CHURCH REDEDICATION SUNDAY!!!!

• Spiritual Vaccine #4: Connection and Community
• Text: The Overflowing of Friendship
• (with thanks to RG)
• Psalm 133 How good it is….

October 11

• Spiritual Vaccine #5: Refueling and Self-Care
• Text: The Return of the Prodigal
• Luke 15 The story of the Prodigal Son… and Brother…. and Father