Jubilee brings out the best
Flanked by an interpreter, Serafin Duran, daughters Edith, 3, and Fabiola, 8, are introduced to a thousand people by Habitat for Humanity Santa Rosa's John Davenport, Wednesday, Aug. 2, before Habitat founder Millard Fuller spoke. The Durans are the soon to be owners of the Habitat house "blitz built" during Jubilee.
Top speakers, preachers inspire at event of the year
By Ted Langdell
Jubilee is found in Leviticus, Chapter 25 as told to Moses by God on Mt. Sinai. To be observed by the Hebrews every 50th year, Hebrew slaves (but not “heathen” or non-Hebrew slaves) were to be freed, alienated lands returned to original owners and the fields left uncultivated to allow rest for the land, plants and animals.
In keeping with the modern-day definition of the word, this Jubilee was a celebration of United Methodism, God’s Love and learning rolled into one.
Kicked off Tuesday, Aug. 8 by the beginning of a “blitz-build” housing project in cooperation with Habitat for Humanity (See HabitatBlitzBuildatJubilee.html), the first evening program featured music with Jim and Jean Strathdee, touring United Methodist musicians based at St. Mark’s UMC in Sacramento.
The spiritual theme for the mass worship services was the Lord’s Prayer... “Our Father, who art in heaven...” presented phrase by phrase on banners hung behind the stage with each new speaker.
Pastor Mariellen Sawada of Wesley UMC, San Jose explored praying to God in her sermon, Wednesday night.
Recounting the prayers of her Japanese grandmother, Sawada said “she prayed with hope... with belief” for her family, many of whom became Christian.
Her voice rising, Sawada said a “huge, big Cosmic God with an address that Heaven, and an earthly relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ is who we need to pray to, when you think about it! Because if you pray to small, limp God... mediocre, maybe can’t really care all that much God... God who is only as good as the last result... If you think maybe its the God who is limited... who is God only in certain situations... If that is to whom we pray, then all our prayers are just wishes,” she said emphatically, “just desires.”
“If God was any less than ‘Big Huge Cosmic God’, then my grandmother’s prayers would have been meaningless against the hostility and hurt of her family,” Sawada asserted.
“That is something that we need to think about,” she said, “because the stuff in the Lord’s Prayer to God is powerful and life-changing. It is revolutionary!”
Just retired from 36 years at 8,000 member Glide UMC in San Francisco, the Rev. Cecil Williams woke people up Wednesday morning to the point that they were hollering “Yes!” and “Amen!” and were applauding various points.
“When we begin to talk about the Kingdom, what we must understand is that the Kingdom of God all ways powers its people!” Williams said, pounding the last five words as though he were driving nails into a post.
“People become powerful when the Kingdom is alive... and they become stilted... boring and dry and dull when the Kingdom is not alive.”
“Thy Kingdom come... Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” said Williams, “and it seems to me we ought to get a little joy out of that.”
Williams warned that thinking “our way is the only way” is the way “that we lose people, and abuse people, and misuse people, and send them some other place.”
“And it seems to me that their place is my place, and my place is their place is my place,” Williams said to scattered calls of “Yes!” and “Right!”. “So what I do is get courage from the power,” Williams said to “live my ‘I Am-ness”, as a person he quoted called it.
In a reggae-style song about rehabilitating the earth, Medema had the audience clapping as he sang: “
More than 1,200 people turned out for Jubilee 2000, the Conference-wide spiritual event of the year, held last week at Sonoma State University near Santa Rosa. While there, people lifted their spirits through gifted preaching, marvelous music and inspired instruction from a diverse group of clergy and lay presenters.
Gifted musician/songwriter Ken Medema (Med’-eh-ma) shared the Wednesday morning worship with Williams, then opened and closed the evening session in the gym with 45 minutes of interaction.
Medema created a 700-strong chorus for the refrain, about turning it over and turning it around. Then they followed him and laughed through funny vocal variations on the song’s last line “Love and Justice we will do,” including “Lutheran”, operatic and “good ole country boy” renditions.
Before the evening was over, his music had Bishop Talbert dancing a few steps with a young girl from an adjacent seat.
Medema closed with a rousing song that got most of the folks into a conga line, which snaked through the aisles, up into the bleachers and under an arch of arms two women formed across an aisle at the back of the gym.
After that, the fresh air and stars overhead were a welcome change on the short walk to hear “Say-So” at the campus coffee house. http://members.aol.com/saysofans/index.html
Their song "Stand By Me" has been on two episodes of Party of Five and one episode of Dawson's Creek. "Mercy Me" was featured on the premiere episode of Dawson's Creek in January, 1998. An older song, "Something Between Us" was featured on an episode of Baywatch.
Wednesday's late night crowd in the Jubilee coffee house hears Say-So's Jim Thomas play while wife Kim shows young and older hand motions that go with a song the duo will perform the next night in the gym with speaker Tony Campolo.
