Annual Meeting Address & Sermon for the Feast of the Presentation of our Lord, 2-1-26

What is the state of the Saints? Is there a word or a phrase that comes to your mind about the health and welfare of All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco – the people who form it and the work that we do?

Today’s second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that Jesus was like us: flesh and blood; himself tested, to help us when we are tested. This is usually what comes to mind: he suffers in our sufferings, he consoles us in our desolations, he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins – all which is true and well and good, thanks be to God!

This past year has been difficult for many of you. Some of you have suffered personal trials and setbacks and disappointments. Some of you have suffered over our nation’s political climate, feeling both outrage and worry. When we gather here in God’s name, day-by-day and week-by-week, we suffer together. We bear one another’s burdens all the while Jesus gives us his very Body, broken open for us – God who suffered, feeding the suffering.

But did you ever consider that Jesus also delights in our delights, celebrates our triumphs, and encourages us in our progress? Since Jesus was like us in our sufferings, surely he was like us in our successes, too. What would Jesus say about the state of the Saints?

Jesus is watching us, after all – now and in the years behind us and in the years ahead. That Jesus watches us comes up in The Rule of Saint Benedict. A few days ago, I read Sister Judith Sutera’s commentary on this. Here is what she has to say:

“God is watching you” can easily conjure images of angels with ledger books and God as a stern supervisor just waiting for a mistake. Like Santa, God is making a list and checking it twice to see who’s naughty or nice. What if instead we were to see God as doing a different kind of watching? Picture a child on a playground shouting “Watch me!” while proudly showing off their latest achievement … and their look of pure joy when the watching adult encourages and praises. […] Being watched this way means that someone cares. What if God watching felt like that for us? (p. 69).

Surely God watched with encouragement and praise what we did last year, and which you will read summarized in the Annual Report: the joy we shared in our Sunshine Ministry events; the beauty and faithfulness of our liturgy; the careful yet generous stewardship of our resources; the consistent presence in our Haight-Ashbury parish; and even the plodding progress in bringing our kitchen and bathrooms up to code so we can begin our meal ministry.

Jesus encourages us and praises us. Jesus suffers with us. Jesus also challenges us. Repent, he says. Follow me, he says. Take up the cross, he says. Forgive as you have been forgiven, he says. Step out of the boat on faith, he says. Do not be afraid, he says.

All Saints’ has a deficit budget this year of somewhere north of $45,000. Deficit budgets are nothing new for us. They occur most every year, but this one is more substantial than most. The deficit might have been higher, as you will see in the annual report, but some pledges, new and revised upward, came through in the weeks since the vestry last met and the budget was printed.

I grant you that naming this rather large negative number is a challenging way to conclude a sermon and annual address, but there is something encouraging about this deficit and the opportunity it affords.

Mary and Joseph “offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, ‘a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.’” This was what we might call a working-class sacrifice, prescribed for those who could not afford a sheep or a goat as an offering. We can infer, then, that Mary and Joseph were not wealthy, but neither were they destitute. The law allowed the truly poor to bring as their offering a small measure of flour.

Wealthy, working-class, and poor are all relative terms. Economists attempt to assign income and asset ranges and cost-of-living data to pigeon-hole individuals and households, which is true to a point. Few would deny that the tech-titans, bathing in their multiple-billions, are wealthy. And the same holds true for the demonstrably destitute. What is murky is categorizing the rest who live in between.

I like to tell the story that, when we lived in Flint, Michigan – a city with a median annual household income of something less than $30,000 (median means half of the households were below that mark) – Kate and I cracked the top five-percent. A librarian and a priest. Our income remains about the same in San Francisco. I assure you we are not in the top five-percent here. Rather, this city calls us a low-income household. Thank you, All Saints’, for the foresight of maintaining a rectory for us to live in!

All Saints’ has never been a wealthy congregation. In our history we have had some well-off members (if not wealthy), and some destitute members. Most have come from the broad middle: the professional and the working-classes – some comfortably set, others just getting by, still others, in this boom-bust city, swaying like a pendulum between the two.

To put it in gospel language, over the past 120 years, some have given sheep, others pigeons, and others a small measure of flour. Just as the law of Moses made provision to include everyone, so too, All Saints’ makes sure that people with deeper or shallower pockets, or no pockets at all, are included. I hope you will agree that this is a good thing.

And God, working through you and the saints who preceded you, God has always seen to it that All Saints’ got by – that we had what we needed when we needed it. We have been and remain a wealthy congregation when measured by faith and just-in-time generosity.

I charge you to keep this faith again this year, and let us see what God will do through you, the spirited Simeons and the devout Annas who worship and pray and study and serve in this temple. You, the observant Marys and Josephs who bring Jesus into this temple to fulfill your obligations, and who take him with you back to your own Galilees and Nazareths. God is watching with encouragement and praise. And always, always, with love.

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

Presentation-Annual Meeting Sunday, Feb. 1, 2026

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“God is watching you … and that’s a good thing!”