I bring you greetings today from the 25 congregations that comprise PIA - Peninsula Interfaith Action - greetings from Good Shepherd Church in Pacifica, from St. Francis of Assisi Church in East Palo Alto, and "shalom" from our newest member congregation, Temple Beth Am in Los Altos. PIA - representing 17,000 families across the Peninsula, working together for justice, building religious community together across racial, economic and social lines, in this complex class and racially stratified peninsula.

I work daily with people in our communities, with clergy and lay leaders from our PIA member congregations who are putting their values and faith into action - who are not satisfied with what is going on in Palo Alto or Mountain View but who want to shape these communities so that values of justice, fairness, good education and housing for all of our people are put into reality.

For those of you who may not be know PIA, we are a federation of religious congregations who are working to improve the quality of life in our communities. Now what does that mean? I think of PIA as putting a front porch on a congregation - the front porch is where, historically, we would sit and converse with our neighbors - get to know people, build relationships and connection and community. PIA helps a congregation build a front porch for itself. Through the model of community organizing, we learn what the issues are in our community, what the pain is in our community and in our congregation, and then what we can do about it.

When you in this congregation joined PIA four years ago, you listened to each other and learned that many of you were concerned about children and education, and so you developed the Ripples program - a tutoring program for children, still going strong. In Palo Alto, All Saints' Episcopal and First Presbyterian Churches were concerned about homeless brothers and sisters in Palo Alto, and they created the Opportunity Center, a facility now being planned in Palo Alto, where job counseling services, social services, and 95 units of transitional housing will be offered to families and individuals who are in the very lowest income level. And it was leaders in this congregation who were instrumental in creating what is now called Oak Court in Palo Alto.

These accomplishments are great. Amazing. But the exciting thing to me about PIA is that what we really do is develop leaders. Now there are so called natural leaders - people who seem to intuitively know how to make things happen - but our congregations are not filled with these natural leaders. PIA helps people who don't see themselves as leaders develop the skills and abilities needed to make a difference in the community.

And that's a necessary thing - because the problems we are facing in our communities are getting more serious and complex. And what our congregations need to deal with these issues, are people who understand power and who have the courage to sit at the table where decisions are made that shape our community, and be powerful.

That is what PIA is about. Power. In PIA, we define power as the ability to act or influence. In PIA, we want to understand power. We want to be powerful. That's what we are about as PIA -that's what we have to be about as people of values - we have to be about power. People of values have to be at the table and in meetings when decisions that affect our communities are made. Who gets to decide what happens on the big scale in our communities? In PIA, we want our congregations - we want this congregation - we want you - to be involved to shape those decisions.

Because if we in the church are not serious about understanding how power operates, then who at the table of power is going to bring values to bear in a decision making process? I do not mean to imply nor do I believe that people at the table of power are devoid of values. There are many good people of faith and values who sit at the tables of power and bring their whole selves to the table. We also know that people are shaped and influenced by their own self interest - that what is of concern to them also gets brought to the table. And in that complex mix of who we are as people, and discussions and decisions being made, often values for the greater good, for the common community, are left behind. I believe that most public officials go into public service because they want to make a positive difference, they have certain values they want to bring to the table. But public officials are not the only ones at decision making table, the table of power, and at times they are not the most powerful ones at the table.

And that's why an organization like PIA is necessary - because we want to shape the decisions that get made that impact us and will impact our children and their community.

So today I want to talk with you about "blueprints". You know what a blueprint is - it's an architectural drawing, a set of plans of what something will look like. We think of it typically as a term used in construction - for building a garage, a house. It shapes and directs what's going to happen.

Now I want to expand this concept of a blueprint and think together about it - let's expand it from its traditional use to the larger idea of its purpose - that what it does is lay out the direction and shape of something in the future. And just as there are architects behind a traditional architectural blueprint, so there are architects involved in the development of our community's blueprint. These architects are business or corporate leaders, public officials, developers, financial people, and sometimes community members.

And there is an ongoing process in our communities that directs what Palo Alto, what Mountain View, and what Redwood City have become and are going to be. This process happens in countless meetings and conversations that most of us never know about, let alone attend. This is the process through which a blueprint is created and which ends up shaping our communities. And this blueprint creating process is open only to those who have access to power and who understand power. The blueprint answers questions such as "who gets to live here, who gets to work here, who has to commute, how is land used, and what our communities will look like in the next twenty years?"

We in the church are often ignorant of these blueprints in our community, and too often we aren't at the table helping to draw the blueprint. These blueprints have several characteristics: (1) directs the resources of a community - where will money go, what will be the focus of the city in the next year? They are (2) are dynamic and changing, (3) they are the product of competing interests, such as government, business, etc. (4) They are largely invisible - in public documents if you can find them, often scattered and in bit and pieces. And finally, they are not neutral - they are biased towards certain interests. Blueprints are created or shaped as a result of powerful people following their self-interests. They are getting what they want for themselves and their concerns.

So if we look underneath the reality in a community, there is an existing blueprint that is being reviewed and revised by powerful interests and people. Every community has a blueprint that is shaped by different groups and individuals.

Last week we were talking about this concept of a community blueprint at First Presbyterian Church in Palo Alto, and Sydney Brown, the wife of the late Robert McAfee Brown, author and social thinker, who Joe quoted in his first reading, referenced a study that her students had done some years ago. They identified the blueprint for the Bay Area - that Richmond was going to be the industrial, polluted part of the Bay Area, that BART would not come down past San Mateo because we didn't want "those people" in Atherton and Palo Alto, that Oakland would be the place where African Americans would settle. It was a fascinating description of exactly what I am referring to - that we in congregations are usually clueless about those kinds of huge decisions that go on without our input and our values shaping the process.

My premise is that what goes on in our community is not an accident. It's not a simple coincidence when things aren't working in a community. It's no accident that a housing crisis has emerged on the Peninsula - I am not saying that twenty years ago, people woke up in the morning and said, "I'm going to make a decision today that will affect housing in twenty years and will create a huge problem," - I will say that the problems we face in our communities today are the result of both intentional, deliberate decisions made by powerful people, and by unintentional and unforeseen developments in the economy, the market,

Robert McAfee Brown's words are even more true today: '"The structures of society in which we participate produce an inordinate amount of suffering…..Acknowledgement of the ongoing reality of indirect structural violence in society means that we must see violence being done ….when a black child wastes away in an Oakland slum because the white power structure pays insufficient attention to providing better schools or job opportunities for the slum's inhabitants."

The white power structure is not going to pay attention to providing better job opportunities or better housing for our neighbors and our kids. And that's where we come in, in PIA and in this congregation. We have to be at the blueprint table so we can direct the power structure to pay attention to these issues, so we can help public officials do the right thing and pay attention to our values in the decision making process. Better jobs and better housing are not happening in the way we need them to happen. This is our responsibility. We who identify ourselves with certain values are not at the table shaping the blueprint. That creates huge problems for us, morally, ethically and practically. Because if we are not at the table with our values, then who is going to make sure our values are inserted into the blueprint design?

Michael Lerner, in his book "Surplus Powerlessness", talks about how a few people have vast power to shape economic and political decisions - the blueprint. He says that there is a small number of people who have power while the rest of us have almost no power.

Lerner says that things could be quite different if we were to engage in the struggle to change things. But significant change does not occur because of the concept of "surplus powerlessness" - a set of beliefs that we have that make us think of ourselves as even more powerless than the actual power situation requires; we then act in ways that actually confirm in us our powerlessness. In other words, we are up against power, folks - this is not something we are imagining - but we make ourselves to be more powerless than we are in reality. And so we give up, we don't act, we become more powerless than we really are.

And our congregations are filled with good people with good values who don't understand power. We don't know how to engage in it, we don't know how to come against it, and we don't know how to use it so that our values get reflected in the blueprint. We are afraid of it, we want to avoid it, we have an ambivalent relationship with it - and I never talk about power but I don't hear that expression, "Power corrupts" as if that is supposed to take care of it all and end the discussion.

And so we stay away from the tables where blueprints are discussed and drawn up - we don't believe we can shape the blueprint, we don't know how to engage successfully when we run into blueprint designers, we believe that the forces are too great against creating change and so we move into being even more powerless than we really are.

And I want to remind you of Martin Luther King's words that Kurt spoke of three weeks ago, words that King wrote from the Birmingham City jail, "I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of goodwill. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people." Kurt finished that quote with the words, "People like us."

And so what are we supposed to do about being "people like us"? Kurt said it takes great courage and maturity of heart for folks like ourselves---affluent, mostly white, members of that class of folk who dominate society---it takes great courage and maturity to hear because as Albert Camus once said," Never befriend the oppressed unless you are prepared to take on the oppressor. "

And so are we going to take on the oppressor, which means taking on ourselves, people like ourselves? Because this housing crisis we are facing - this is a race issue, it is a class issue. It runs smack dab into who is going to be able to live next door to me, who is going to live down the street, who are my children going to go to school with? It's right at our door, it's right in our living rooms. Let's open our eyes and see where people are living and how they are living. Let's really see how this housing crisis is affecting our communities even if we have our housing needs taken care of. It comes down to 2 out of the 95 police officers in Palo Alto being able to live in the city. It comes down to 36 teachers out of 40 leaving the San Mateo High School district last year alone because they could not afford rent, let alone afford to buy a house. It comes down to a member of this congregation living on a fixed income having to sell her house and move to elsewhere because she can't afford to live here, even though she owns her home free and clear. If she is struggling, what about other people who are living on a fixed or limited income?

You know the pain too well in this congregation. You know families who have lost jobs and are leaving in the area.

So now it's time for us to shape the blueprint around housing. And we have a chance to do that in a major way. I will direct you to this flyer "Unite for Housing!" a community meeting to be held two weeks from tomorrow on Monday, March 4. We want a Housing Trust Fund in San Mateo County that over time will create 10,000 homes for 10,000 families. But I'll be honest with you. We need 1500 people present at this meeting because there are blueprint designers who do not want this Housing Trust Fund to happen. They have their own agenda, their own self-interests. We need a overwhelming number of people from across the Peninsula to gather to show the blueprint designers that people of values and faith believe that good, safe, affordable housing is critical to the well-being of all of us. If we are not at the table to shape this part of the blueprint, the opportunity will be lost. And so I invite you to our UNITE for Housing! Community meeting, to be held two weeks from tomorrow night, at the Fox Theater in Redwood City.

And for Palo Alto, there is a real opportunity here, because we are having Liz Kniss, the SCC Board of Supervisor, who represents the northern part of SCC, Palo Alto, Mountain View and further south, come to the meeting. We want Supervisor Kniss to commit her leadership and work to bring money for the Opportunity Center, this amazing new facility that is in the process of being developed in Palo Alto. The Opportunity Center is a $20 million facility and it's in the funding process. SCC has money it can spend on such housing needs and another Supervisor of SCC, Jim Beall, wants this money to go to exactly this kind of project. But Liz Kniss is not paying much attention to affordable housing and PIA is getting housing on her agenda. At our meeting on March 4, she can promise to be a leader to bring a substantial amount of money to the Opportunity Center. But she won't do it unless she knows how important it is to us.

So here's an opportunity to shape the blueprint around housing. To sit at the table with power and shape the blueprint in the way we believe it has to go. In your bulletin this morning is a commitment card that we ask you to complete and pass in at the close of our service - your card can be handed to those who are collecting them, or you can hand them in at the PIA table outside.

So I want to give you a moment right now to take out a pen and fill in the card.

Today our children have been making a banner about housing that will be displayed in the Fox Theater the night of our community meeting.

And I want to close with the words of Dr. King, "Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice; and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love."

So be it.

What is your reaction to this sermon? Please send comments to webmanager@uucpa.org