ah, YouTube evangelism ... coolness! I now have an entirely new image in my head whenever I hear "We Three Kings"
Friday, December 28, 2007
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Fourth wise man bearing a case of Red Bull
We’ve gotten the first advertising casualty of the Christmas season—this animated Red Bull spot from Italy, which shows a fourth wise man joining the better-known other three in offering gifts to the baby Jesus. While the others bring gold, frankincense and myrrh, the fourth guy lights up the room by hauling in a case of Red Bull. Following complaints from Italian priests, the ad has been pulled off the air.
We’ve gotten the first advertising casualty of the Christmas season—this animated Red Bull spot from Italy, which shows a fourth wise man joining the better-known other three in offering gifts to the baby Jesus. While the others bring gold, frankincense and myrrh, the fourth guy lights up the room by hauling in a case of Red Bull. Following complaints from Italian priests, the ad has been pulled off the air.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Our dear kitty, Francis
So, in the week before thanksgiving it turned out to be the time to begin to gain some knowledge and expertise about feline kidney disease and chronic renal failure.
So, in the week before thanksgiving it turned out to be the time to begin to gain some knowledge and expertise about feline kidney disease and chronic renal failure. Erin's 9 year old cat had been lethargic (she's a danger kitty so anything short of being alpha female is lethargic) so we took her to the vet. Turned out she had horrible blood chemistry values and the vet asked if I wanted to put her down or see if they could get her to improve. After I remembered how to breathe again, decided that Francis (the kitty that looks so cute in the picture) deserved the best chance we could give her. She lost another half a pound that next week at the vet's but her blood chemistries improved to the point that could take her home the day before Thanksgiving.
So, in the week since then she's progressed to eating some wet cat food and we've learned about giving IV fluids and ProCrit to a cat subcutaneously three times a week, along with an oral liquid vitamin every day. Stairs are still tricky for her but she takes them at an angle; she also is strategic about jumping onto furniture by finding something nearby that's shorter (sometimes moved closer for her convenience but not telling her that) so it's two shorter jumps instead of one big one.
She's starting to get her attitude back so it's still up to her for how long we continue the kitty dialysis with the IV fluids. She doesn't like to be held so we'll see. But she got her chance and she's thriving for now, thanks be to God...
Postscript: Francis did fairly well, though continuing to slowly decline, until mid-January when she decided that she no longer desired our medical procedures. She passed into a peaceful sleep on January 25, 2008. Thank you "baby kitty" for your companionship and introducing me to the joy of playing with puff balls.
Francis Shanks: February 14, 1998 - January 25, 2008.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Pilgrimage of Resistance
From November 16-18, 2007, thousands will converge at Fort Benning, Georgia. We will take a stand for justice. We will close the School of the Americas (SOA/WHINSEC) and change the racist system of violence and domination that institutions like the SOA/WHINSEC represent.
Ain’t no Power like the Power of the People
If one thing in history is true, it’s that change is inevitable. People around the world who want a change know that the only way to shape that change is by organizing and joining with others in the struggle for a better world.
Mass mobilizations have always been an important tool for social justice movements. When we gather at the gates of Fort Benning this November, we’ll do so in the strong and rich tradition of worldwide struggles for justice and dignity. We will commemorate the victims and survivors that stood up for justice and freedom before us, we will celebrate the resistance to violence and oppression and we will hold those who are responsible for terror and repression accountable.
Join the movement, be a part of history!
Amazing musicians, grassroots activists and social movement leaders from throughout the Americas will come together and take a stand for justice at the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia.
Mobilize your Community
Order the November Organizing Packet. For more information, visit SOA Watch on the internet at www.SOAW.org or call 202.234.3440
Engage in Nonviolent Direct Action
Engage in nonviolent direct action to help close the SOA and to liberate us all from oppressive U.S. policy.
Nonviolent direct action has been the backbone of the movement to close the SOA. Talk to your friends now and form affinity groups. Some people will decide to carry the protest onto the military base, risking six months in federal prison for their stands. Others will engage in different creative nonviolent protest.
Actions have occurred at the main gate of Fort Benning, at other entrances and at various locations inside the base, including the barracks where SOA soldiers are housed and the SOA building itself..
If you are considering engaging in nonviolent direct action during the vigil weekend, please contact Eric at elecompte@soaw.org This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and plan to attend the direct action preparation sessions in the convention center on Friday and Saturday nights. If you will cross the line onto Fort Benning, plan to bring $1,000 for bail money.
During the funeral procession, there will be a space for non-arrestable actions in the center of the street for groups to reenact massacres and to create commemorative vignettes. If your group would like to be a part of one of these vignettes, please plan to attend the direct action session.
We’ll see you at the gates!
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Athens Alabama KKK ku klux klan
this is quite a video that someone has put together in response to the silent witness and nonviolent direct action in reponse to the klan rally in Athens, Alabama on Saturday, September 15th. Thanks be to God.
love and prayers, steve
Dropkick Murphys - The Making of "Tessie"
it's september, the bosox beat the yankees today and i'm starting to let myself get excited about post-season - hence "Tessie"!
Go Red Sox!
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Indigenous Women Last in Line for MDGs
Inés Benítez
GUATEMALA CITY, May 7 (IPS) - Guatemala is making slow, uneven progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), with maternal mortality and illiteracy remaining the most persistent problems, mid-way to the 2015 deadline.
"One of the hardest goals for us to fulfil is to reduce maternal mortality (by two-thirds)," the under-secretary of the planning and programming secretariat of the Guatemalan president's office (SEGEPLAN), María Castro, said at a forum organised by Fundación Solar and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Guatemala City.
In Guatemala, the maternal mortality rate fell from 248 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1989 to 121 per 100,000 in 2005. However, the target of 62 maternal deaths per 100,000 in 2015 is "still a long way off," Castro said.
That is because most maternal deaths occur among indigenous women in rural areas --the segment of the population with the least access to benefits like health care.
Castro said that maternal deaths, which in most cases are caused by haemorrhaging during childbirth, "are the principal indicator of exclusion" in Guatemala, where 21.5 percent of the population of 12.7 million are living in extreme poverty.
The forum on Guatemalan Society's Role and Challenges Towards the Millennium Development Goals, held on Apr. 27 at Landívar University, brought to a close a week in which different social sectors participated in a range of workshops reviewing advances and challenges related to fulfilling the MDGs.
In 2000, the U.N. member countries jointly committed themselves to halving world hunger and extreme poverty, improving maternal and child health, eradicating illiteracy, and combating HIV/AIDS and other serious diseases, taking 1990 levels as the reference point.
They also promised to ensure gender equality in education, at work and in politics, promote sustainable development while protecting the environment, and establish a world partnership for development.
Another difficult goal for Guatemala, the second of the eight MDGs, is achieving universal primary education and improving literacy among 15 to 24-year-olds. Literacy was estimated to be 82 percent among this age group in 2002, according to the second progress report on fulfilment of the MDGs in Guatemala, published by SEGEPLAN in 2006.
Again, rural indigenous women and girls are the furthest behind: six out of 10 indigenous women over 15 cannot read or write. Although indices of primary school enrolment are encouraging, the drop-out rate is high, and "a great deal of effort is needed to ensure that all children complete their primary education," the report says.
The first MDG is to halve extreme poverty and hunger in the world. It is consistent with the working agenda outlined by the peace agreement signed by the government and leftwing rebels in 1996, which put an end to 36 years of armed conflict.
Poverty will be hard to overcome unless a frontal attack is waged on it by the forces of the government, civil society, and each and every individual, said resident representative of the UNDP in Guatemala, Beat Rohr, speaking at the forum.
Guatemala has an erratic track record on poverty. In 1989, 20 percent of the population was living in extreme poverty (on incomes of less than a dollar a day). In 2000, the proportion fell to 16 percent, but in 2004 it rose again to 21.5 percent, according to official statistics.
The goal is for the proportion of people living in extreme poverty to fall below 10 percent by 2015.
Over the past decade, economic growth has been slow, with gross domestic product (GDP) expanding at an average of 2.4 percent a year, official records show. This has been attributed to a precipitous decline in direct investment, continued high levels of social inequality, the country's overwhelming dependence on agriculture, and low social security coverage, among other factors.
Rohr deplored tragic situations such as the fact that 48 percent of Guatemalan children suffer from chronic malnutrition. He pointed out that undernutrition affects not only the body but also the development of the brain. An enormous effort was required, he urged.
"Unless we courageously confront this problem (of chronic malnutrition), which hits indigenous people hardest, our future will be bleak," Castro said.
She aknowledged the need for the government to implement more effective social policies and improve income distribution.
The UNDP's Human Development Index (2006) ranks Guatemala 118th out of 177 countries. Officially, 40 percent of the population is indigenous, although non-governmental organisations like Refugees International put the proportion closer to 65 percent.
Castro admitted that in the field of environmental sustainability, the seventh MDG, although the government has done some reforestation and has expanded protected natural areas, it has not been able to discourage the widespread use of firewood as an energy source.
As for the sixth MDG, combating HIV/AIDS and other diseases, Castro pointed out that Guatemala has successfully increased the use of condoms, which is the main method for preventing sexual transmission of HIV, but 73,000 adults aged 15 to 49 are known to be HIV-positive.
According to the second progress report, the proportion of women infected with HIV/AIDS is rising, so that there is now almost parity between the number of men and women living with HIV.
The head of the Canadian Centre for International Studies and Cooperation (CECI), Flor de María Bolaños, called on civil society to get involved in striving for the goals by demanding more from government leaders and politicians, and emphasised that the peace accord was "a perfect fit" with the MDGs.
"This country is multicultural and multiethnic," said Simeón Taquirá, a priest of the Mayan Council of Elders.
Mayan, Xinca and Garífuna medicine should be preserved, recovered and legalised, he urged, and their ancestral cultivation techniques and worldview should be taught at universities. He also advocated sustainable agricultural projects.
"Our peoples have been marginalised," Taquirá stated, while criticising such paternalistic approaches as "giving people chickens, but not teaching them how to turn a profit and create sustainable projects." (FIN/2007)
Copyright © 2007 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
Inés Benítez
GUATEMALA CITY, May 7 (IPS) - Guatemala is making slow, uneven progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), with maternal mortality and illiteracy remaining the most persistent problems, mid-way to the 2015 deadline.
"One of the hardest goals for us to fulfil is to reduce maternal mortality (by two-thirds)," the under-secretary of the planning and programming secretariat of the Guatemalan president's office (SEGEPLAN), María Castro, said at a forum organised by Fundación Solar and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Guatemala City.
In Guatemala, the maternal mortality rate fell from 248 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1989 to 121 per 100,000 in 2005. However, the target of 62 maternal deaths per 100,000 in 2015 is "still a long way off," Castro said.
That is because most maternal deaths occur among indigenous women in rural areas --the segment of the population with the least access to benefits like health care.
Castro said that maternal deaths, which in most cases are caused by haemorrhaging during childbirth, "are the principal indicator of exclusion" in Guatemala, where 21.5 percent of the population of 12.7 million are living in extreme poverty.
The forum on Guatemalan Society's Role and Challenges Towards the Millennium Development Goals, held on Apr. 27 at Landívar University, brought to a close a week in which different social sectors participated in a range of workshops reviewing advances and challenges related to fulfilling the MDGs.
In 2000, the U.N. member countries jointly committed themselves to halving world hunger and extreme poverty, improving maternal and child health, eradicating illiteracy, and combating HIV/AIDS and other serious diseases, taking 1990 levels as the reference point.
They also promised to ensure gender equality in education, at work and in politics, promote sustainable development while protecting the environment, and establish a world partnership for development.
Another difficult goal for Guatemala, the second of the eight MDGs, is achieving universal primary education and improving literacy among 15 to 24-year-olds. Literacy was estimated to be 82 percent among this age group in 2002, according to the second progress report on fulfilment of the MDGs in Guatemala, published by SEGEPLAN in 2006.
Again, rural indigenous women and girls are the furthest behind: six out of 10 indigenous women over 15 cannot read or write. Although indices of primary school enrolment are encouraging, the drop-out rate is high, and "a great deal of effort is needed to ensure that all children complete their primary education," the report says.
The first MDG is to halve extreme poverty and hunger in the world. It is consistent with the working agenda outlined by the peace agreement signed by the government and leftwing rebels in 1996, which put an end to 36 years of armed conflict.
Poverty will be hard to overcome unless a frontal attack is waged on it by the forces of the government, civil society, and each and every individual, said resident representative of the UNDP in Guatemala, Beat Rohr, speaking at the forum.
Guatemala has an erratic track record on poverty. In 1989, 20 percent of the population was living in extreme poverty (on incomes of less than a dollar a day). In 2000, the proportion fell to 16 percent, but in 2004 it rose again to 21.5 percent, according to official statistics.
The goal is for the proportion of people living in extreme poverty to fall below 10 percent by 2015.
Over the past decade, economic growth has been slow, with gross domestic product (GDP) expanding at an average of 2.4 percent a year, official records show. This has been attributed to a precipitous decline in direct investment, continued high levels of social inequality, the country's overwhelming dependence on agriculture, and low social security coverage, among other factors.
Rohr deplored tragic situations such as the fact that 48 percent of Guatemalan children suffer from chronic malnutrition. He pointed out that undernutrition affects not only the body but also the development of the brain. An enormous effort was required, he urged.
"Unless we courageously confront this problem (of chronic malnutrition), which hits indigenous people hardest, our future will be bleak," Castro said.
She aknowledged the need for the government to implement more effective social policies and improve income distribution.
The UNDP's Human Development Index (2006) ranks Guatemala 118th out of 177 countries. Officially, 40 percent of the population is indigenous, although non-governmental organisations like Refugees International put the proportion closer to 65 percent.
Castro admitted that in the field of environmental sustainability, the seventh MDG, although the government has done some reforestation and has expanded protected natural areas, it has not been able to discourage the widespread use of firewood as an energy source.
As for the sixth MDG, combating HIV/AIDS and other diseases, Castro pointed out that Guatemala has successfully increased the use of condoms, which is the main method for preventing sexual transmission of HIV, but 73,000 adults aged 15 to 49 are known to be HIV-positive.
According to the second progress report, the proportion of women infected with HIV/AIDS is rising, so that there is now almost parity between the number of men and women living with HIV.
The head of the Canadian Centre for International Studies and Cooperation (CECI), Flor de María Bolaños, called on civil society to get involved in striving for the goals by demanding more from government leaders and politicians, and emphasised that the peace accord was "a perfect fit" with the MDGs.
"This country is multicultural and multiethnic," said Simeón Taquirá, a priest of the Mayan Council of Elders.
Mayan, Xinca and Garífuna medicine should be preserved, recovered and legalised, he urged, and their ancestral cultivation techniques and worldview should be taught at universities. He also advocated sustainable agricultural projects.
"Our peoples have been marginalised," Taquirá stated, while criticising such paternalistic approaches as "giving people chickens, but not teaching them how to turn a profit and create sustainable projects." (FIN/2007)
Copyright © 2007 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
Monday, May 14, 2007
LAPD May Day brutality details emerge
LAPD bruality at May Day immigration protests
This is some youtube footage from Democarcy Now's coverage of LA cops shooting immigrants' rights protesters with rubber bullets and beating the shit out of people with batons.
Monday, April 23, 2007
"This is a college Columbine."
-Virginia Tech Student, Fox Television News, April 16, 2007
It is urgent that you email or call your elected officials today.
They must hear that you want action to keep guns out of the wrong hands.
Please make as many of these phone calls as you can:
President George W. Bush
202-456-1414
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
202-225-0100
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
202-224-5556
The message for all three calls is simple:
It is much too easy for the wrong people to get deadly weapons in this country. It is time for you to take steps to end gun violence to prevent tragedies like the one at Virginia Tech.
If you can't make the calls, you can click here to send an email, which will go to the President, the Speaker, the Majority Leader, as well as your U.S. Senators and Representative. One click will email all six of them.
Monday, March 26, 2007
If Jesus knew that Judas was going to betray him, why did he keep him in the circle of his close companions until the end?
from the community of Taize 21-Mar-2007
Among the many disciples who followed him, Jesus designated twelve to be closest to him, to share and continue his mission. He took very seriously the formation of this group of twelve apostles, praying an entire night beforehand.
But at a certain moment, Jesus realized that one of the twelve, Judas, had changed his attitude. Jesus understood that Judas was becoming distant from him, and even saw that he was going to “hand him over,” as the gospels put it. According to John’s gospel, Jesus understood what was happening already in Galilee, long before the events in Jerusalem that would bring him to the cross (John 6:70-71). Why then did he not send Judas away? Why did he keep him close to him until the end?
One of the words used by Jesus to speak of the creation of the group of the twelve apostles gives us a clue. “Did not I choose you, the Twelve?” (John 6:70; see also 13:18.) The verb to choose is a key word in Bible history. God chose Abraham, and then chose Israel to become the chosen people. It is God’s choice or election that forms God’s people, the people of the covenant. What makes the covenant unbreakable is that God chooses to love Abraham and his descendants for ever. The apostle Paul would comment on this: “God’s gifts and call are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29).
Because Jesus chose the twelve just as God chose his people, he could not send Judas away even when he realized that he was going to betray him. He knew that he had to love him to the end, to show that God’s choice was irrevocable. The prophets, Hosea and Jeremiah in particular, spoke in the name of a God wounded and humiliated by the betrayals of his people, but who nevertheless never stopped loving them with eternity’s love. Jesus did not wish to do less, nor could he do so: humiliated by the treason of one of his closest companions, he kept on showing him his love. By lowering himself before his disciples to wash their feet, he made himself the servant of all, Judas included. And it was particularly with Judas that he shared a peace of bread, a fragment of burning love that the disciple took away with him into his night (John 13:21-30).
If he wanted to be faithful to his Father – to the God who chose Abraham and Israel, to the God of the prophets – Jesus could do nothing else but keep Judas close to him until the end. He loved Judas even when Judas was enshrouded by darkness. “The light shines in the darkness” (John 1:5). The gospel says that Jesus “was glorified” at the moment he gave his love to Judas, when he loved him without gaining anything by it and beyond all measure (John 13:31). In the darkest night of resentment and hatred, Jesus manifested the unbelievable radiance of God’s love.
Why are the gospels so discreet concerning Judas’ motives?
It is astonishing that the first Christians did not keep silent about the fact that one of the twelve apostles handed Jesus over to the hostile authorities. This fact casts doubt on the character of Jesus himself: did he make a mistake in choosing one of his companions? But it is equally astonishing that the gospels say almost nothing about the motives of Judas. Was he disappointed when he realized that Jesus was not a Messiah with a program of political liberation? Did he think he was acting in the best interests of his people by bringing Jesus’ career to an end? Some have supposed that he was motivated by the lure of a reward; others that he acted out of love, to help Jesus to give his life….
In the gospels there are only two indications concerning the reasons for what Judas did. One is the mention of the devil. “The devil placed in Judas’ heart the intention to hand him over” (John 13:2). But this only deepens the mystery. The devil, or Satan, is the one who opposes, criticizes or slanders. Jesus sensed the resentment that had come to birth in Judas’ heart and that was rooted there to the point of no return. But about why it existed, not a word, not even an allusion.
The other indication is the reference to the Holy Scriptures. Regarding Judas’ betrayal of him, Jesus said, “so that the words of Scripture will be fulfilled: The one who eats my bread turned his heel against me” (Psalm 41:9, quoted in John 13:18). It is important to understand correctly the meaning of this reference to the Scriptures in the gospels. They are not a kind of script where the role of each actor is written down in advance. Everyone who reads the Bible carefully knows well to what extent it offers choices and sets everyone before their responsibilities.
Quoting the verse of the psalm “The one who eats my bread turned his heel against me” (Psalm 41:10), Jesus does not mean to state that Judas could not have acted differently, but rather that God remains the principal actor in what is being played out. There is the drama of the betrayal, and at the same time God is the one at work. For if through Judas the Scriptures are being fulfilled, that means that, in a mysterious way, God’s intentions are being carried out. God is causing his words to come about (Isaiah 55:10-11). The reference to Scripture enables us to believe in God even during the night, even when what happens is incomprehensible.
If Judas’ resentment and hatred remain incomprehensible, Jesus’ love “to the very end” is still more beyond all understanding. The gospels are so discreet concerning Judas’ motives because they do not want to satisfy our curiosity, but rather to lead us to faith. They do not clarify the abyss of darkness of the drama of Judas; they reveal the unfathomable and incomprehensible depth of God’s love.
from the community of Taize 21-Mar-2007
Among the many disciples who followed him, Jesus designated twelve to be closest to him, to share and continue his mission. He took very seriously the formation of this group of twelve apostles, praying an entire night beforehand.
But at a certain moment, Jesus realized that one of the twelve, Judas, had changed his attitude. Jesus understood that Judas was becoming distant from him, and even saw that he was going to “hand him over,” as the gospels put it. According to John’s gospel, Jesus understood what was happening already in Galilee, long before the events in Jerusalem that would bring him to the cross (John 6:70-71). Why then did he not send Judas away? Why did he keep him close to him until the end?
One of the words used by Jesus to speak of the creation of the group of the twelve apostles gives us a clue. “Did not I choose you, the Twelve?” (John 6:70; see also 13:18.) The verb to choose is a key word in Bible history. God chose Abraham, and then chose Israel to become the chosen people. It is God’s choice or election that forms God’s people, the people of the covenant. What makes the covenant unbreakable is that God chooses to love Abraham and his descendants for ever. The apostle Paul would comment on this: “God’s gifts and call are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29).
Because Jesus chose the twelve just as God chose his people, he could not send Judas away even when he realized that he was going to betray him. He knew that he had to love him to the end, to show that God’s choice was irrevocable. The prophets, Hosea and Jeremiah in particular, spoke in the name of a God wounded and humiliated by the betrayals of his people, but who nevertheless never stopped loving them with eternity’s love. Jesus did not wish to do less, nor could he do so: humiliated by the treason of one of his closest companions, he kept on showing him his love. By lowering himself before his disciples to wash their feet, he made himself the servant of all, Judas included. And it was particularly with Judas that he shared a peace of bread, a fragment of burning love that the disciple took away with him into his night (John 13:21-30).
If he wanted to be faithful to his Father – to the God who chose Abraham and Israel, to the God of the prophets – Jesus could do nothing else but keep Judas close to him until the end. He loved Judas even when Judas was enshrouded by darkness. “The light shines in the darkness” (John 1:5). The gospel says that Jesus “was glorified” at the moment he gave his love to Judas, when he loved him without gaining anything by it and beyond all measure (John 13:31). In the darkest night of resentment and hatred, Jesus manifested the unbelievable radiance of God’s love.
Why are the gospels so discreet concerning Judas’ motives?
It is astonishing that the first Christians did not keep silent about the fact that one of the twelve apostles handed Jesus over to the hostile authorities. This fact casts doubt on the character of Jesus himself: did he make a mistake in choosing one of his companions? But it is equally astonishing that the gospels say almost nothing about the motives of Judas. Was he disappointed when he realized that Jesus was not a Messiah with a program of political liberation? Did he think he was acting in the best interests of his people by bringing Jesus’ career to an end? Some have supposed that he was motivated by the lure of a reward; others that he acted out of love, to help Jesus to give his life….
In the gospels there are only two indications concerning the reasons for what Judas did. One is the mention of the devil. “The devil placed in Judas’ heart the intention to hand him over” (John 13:2). But this only deepens the mystery. The devil, or Satan, is the one who opposes, criticizes or slanders. Jesus sensed the resentment that had come to birth in Judas’ heart and that was rooted there to the point of no return. But about why it existed, not a word, not even an allusion.
The other indication is the reference to the Holy Scriptures. Regarding Judas’ betrayal of him, Jesus said, “so that the words of Scripture will be fulfilled: The one who eats my bread turned his heel against me” (Psalm 41:9, quoted in John 13:18). It is important to understand correctly the meaning of this reference to the Scriptures in the gospels. They are not a kind of script where the role of each actor is written down in advance. Everyone who reads the Bible carefully knows well to what extent it offers choices and sets everyone before their responsibilities.
Quoting the verse of the psalm “The one who eats my bread turned his heel against me” (Psalm 41:10), Jesus does not mean to state that Judas could not have acted differently, but rather that God remains the principal actor in what is being played out. There is the drama of the betrayal, and at the same time God is the one at work. For if through Judas the Scriptures are being fulfilled, that means that, in a mysterious way, God’s intentions are being carried out. God is causing his words to come about (Isaiah 55:10-11). The reference to Scripture enables us to believe in God even during the night, even when what happens is incomprehensible.
If Judas’ resentment and hatred remain incomprehensible, Jesus’ love “to the very end” is still more beyond all understanding. The gospels are so discreet concerning Judas’ motives because they do not want to satisfy our curiosity, but rather to lead us to faith. They do not clarify the abyss of darkness of the drama of Judas; they reveal the unfathomable and incomprehensible depth of God’s love.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
The Ivy Bush: Christian Peace Witness includes reflections on the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq as well as a link to the video that is available online through the National Cathedral.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Nonviolence music video
... nonviolent actions in places including India, Nashville, Birmingham, Serbia, and others... we must meet physcial force with soul force... love and prayers, steve
Christian Peace Witness for Iraq
Video from Ken Butigan of Pace E Bene during civil disobedience in front of the White House.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Christian Peace Witness for Iraq
Friday, March 16, 2007
It was a long but joyous day on Friday with facilitating Nonviolence Direct Action trainings with Janet Chisholm and Kolya Braun-Greiner for those participating in the worship, as well as, for those discerning a call to civil disobedience. In the morning at St. Mark's Capitol Hill (rain); in the afternoon at Epiphany downtown (sleet); the National Cathedral (snow) where I was honored to have participated in the procession as the Episcopal Peace Fellowship representative and by the seating in the north transept immediately adjacent to the speaker's platform. To have an opportunity to be in the company of the speakers especially Celeste Zappala of Philadelphia (whose son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, was killed in Iraq), Pastor Raphael G. Warnock (Senior Pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, spiritual home of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), and Jim Wallis (Call to Renewal and Sojourners) was moving and inspiring.
Janet and I, and others, were part of an Affinity Group that provided support for a friend from Nova Scotia who was arrested. Heather was one of 325 that offered themselves for civil disobedience by praying at the fence in front of the White House that evening.
All topped off with a gathering of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship at St. Alban's on Saturday.
For more coverage check out articles by the Washington Post,
United Press International, and the DC local Fox 5 news coverage (brief glimpse of me at 2:05)
Friday, March 16, 2007
It was a long but joyous day on Friday with facilitating Nonviolence Direct Action trainings with Janet Chisholm and Kolya Braun-Greiner for those participating in the worship, as well as, for those discerning a call to civil disobedience. In the morning at St. Mark's Capitol Hill (rain); in the afternoon at Epiphany downtown (sleet); the National Cathedral (snow) where I was honored to have participated in the procession as the Episcopal Peace Fellowship representative and by the seating in the north transept immediately adjacent to the speaker's platform. To have an opportunity to be in the company of the speakers especially Celeste Zappala of Philadelphia (whose son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, was killed in Iraq), Pastor Raphael G. Warnock (Senior Pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, spiritual home of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), and Jim Wallis (Call to Renewal and Sojourners) was moving and inspiring.Janet and I, and others, were part of an Affinity Group that provided support for a friend from Nova Scotia who was arrested. Heather was one of 325 that offered themselves for civil disobedience by praying at the fence in front of the White House that evening.
All topped off with a gathering of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship at St. Alban's on Saturday.
For more coverage check out articles by the Washington Post,
United Press International, and the DC local Fox 5 news coverage (brief glimpse of me at 2:05)
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Priests to Purify Site After Bush Visit
Washington Post, AP
March 9, 2007
Mayan priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate "bad spirits" after President Bush visits next week, an official with close ties to the group said Thursday. "That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, said Thursday.
Read more at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030900076.html
Washington Post, AP
March 9, 2007
Mayan priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate "bad spirits" after President Bush visits next week, an official with close ties to the group said Thursday. "That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, said Thursday.
Read more at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030900076.html
Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.
From Louie Crew's Do Justice site
Posted by permission
St. Thomas’ Parish, Washington, DCMarch 11, 2007Readings: Exodus 3:1-15. Psalm 63:1-8. Luke 13:1-9. 1 Cor 10:1-13
Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.
I AM THAT I AM has sent me.
We stand on holy ground. This parish is a holy place.
I am a native of Alabama and was brought up in a devout Baptist family. As young teacher on my first job, I fled the Baptist church and was confirmed at St. Peters in Rome, [Georgia ] on October 29, 1961, and two years later I fled life behind the “Cotton Curtain” and moved to St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware. For me St. Andrew’s was a splendid closet in which I could hide from myself except in the far reaches of the night. I buried myself in the task that I loved best, teaching. For cabin fever, I would visit Octavio, a close classmate from Baylor, who worked at Walter Reed and lived on 17th Street, a minute’s walk from this parish. On many a visit I came here to St. Thomas’ to pray.
St. Thomas’ is holy ground for me. I rejoice that it is holy ground for you too, in all of your rich diversity.
Later I attended Eucharists many times while Integrity met here. Again and again I have reconnected here with many people important to my own spiritual journey. Yall have a splendid history of welcoming gay and lesbian people and everyone else as well.
This neighborhood is holy ground.
I discovered that long before I founded Integrity, or even imagined that the liberation to which God called Moses could prefigure the liberation to which God would call me, you, and so many others before us in this place.
The cry of the lesbians, gays, and transgendered has now come to me; I have also seen how the Church oppresses them. So come, I will send you to the Episcopal Church to bring my people, the Lesbians, gays and transgendered, out of their captivity." But then we said to God, "Who are we that we should go for you?" He said, "I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when the people have come out of oppression, you shall worship God in this holy place."
When I first visited St. Thomas’, I was deeply closeted and told no one what I knew about my body chemistry or my heart. I vividly remember on one visit riding out to the National Cathedral on a bus on a very hot day in late spring. Many on the sidewalks had removed their shirts. The traffic was slow, and at one light the bus waited for several minutes. I stared uncontrollably at a man just standing by the bus no more than a foot from my window. I was glad that my friend Octavio was at my back and could not see my eyes. Then Octavio whispered to me, “Isn’t he gorgeous!?”
I turned in complete surprise. “You too?!” I asked. He smiled from ear to ear, his eyes sparkled, and he shook his head up and down.
Do you see the enormity of it! Octavio and I had been close friends for almost 10 years, yet so oppressive was the hetero dictatorship in our minds, that we dared not even share with each other the beautiful innocence of who we were.
That was 45 years ago, but almost any day now the legislature in Nigeria is expected to pass a law that not only will prohibit lesbian and gay marriage, but will also give harsh prison sentences to any gays who associate with each other in public (Look out a bus and whisper ’Isn’t he gorgeous!’ Hold hands? ) and will also punish any heterosexuals who advocate for such gay rights. Last week Time Magazine and The New York Times have joined many newspapers worldwide in condemning this proposal and in pointing a finger at Peter K. Akinola, Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria, who is one of the loudest in promoting the new law and in condemning the Episcopal Church.
The old English word hāl gives us three words in modern English: whole, hale [healthy] and holy. They still are one entity. You cannot be whole if you are not healthy. You cannot be holy if you cannot integrate body and soul, mind and spirit.
We stand on holy ground. We stand in a place safe enough to be whole, to be hale, to be holy.
I hope that you are having a good Lent. It is a penitential season. Throughout Lent we look closely at our sins and strive to repent. Rethink! Rethink! The Kingdom of God is very near you. Rethink! gets closer to the opportunity Lent provides than does Repent! Repent! too easily is received as “Feel guilty!“ God does not want us to grovel: God wants us to use our minds and when necessary, to change them.
I learned an important lesson from the Baptists about the dangers of reviewing my sins: namely, don‘t take someone else‘s word for what your sins are. When I arrived as a freshman at Baylor in 1954, I already knew that it was sinful to cuss, smoke, drink, chew, and beat your wife, but imagine my surprise when Texas Baptists talked about “the sin of mixed bathing”! Do men and women here in Texas actually take a bath together? I wondered in Alabama horror!
Baylor did not allow dances: instead, they renamed them as “functions.” Baylor did not allow fraternities and sororities, but instead, named them “social clubs.”The huge amount of time we consumed in sustaining these hypocrisies distracted us from looking at the sins of segregation and racism, of which we were all the silent, uncritical beneficiaries. Our missionaries to Africa could not even get their own graduates admitted to Baylor. It was not until after I graduated that a strong black tackle from the University of Texas scared the beJesus out of Baylor and prompted it to integrate.
Our beloved Presiding Bishop has invited us all to spend this Lent in a time of deep reflection about the place of the Episcopal Church in the Anglican Communion. I join her in that appeal, with a strong caveat that we not accept uncritically what the Lambeth Conference, the Windsor Report, and the Primates Meetings have told us to be our sins. Octavio and I were not sinning to look out the window of that bus and, like God, to call creation “good.” On the rooftop in Joppa, Peter heard correctly what he had not expected to hear, “Call nothing, [call no one] unclean that I have made!”
As many of you know, the primates of the 38 provinces of the Anglican Communion have issued an ultimatum that come September the bishops of the Episcopal Church must assure them that they will no longer consent to the consecration of lesbian or gay bishops and will also not allow the blessing of any more lesbian and gay unions.
Yet, the primates have no juridical authority to make such demands. The provinces of the Communion are autonomous -- interdependent we believe, but autonomous. The word autonomy loses all its meaning in the primates’ demands.
Suppose a president of the US (any one of them, this is not a partisan illustration) were to say to the Senate, “The House of Representatives is too cantankerous for me to bother with. Since both Houses must agree on any legislation before it becomes law, I will deal with them no longer, but only with you; and I expect you to vote down anything of which I disapprove.”
That’s the power play the primates are trying, to have only our bishops decide for the church, and unless enough leaders are vigilant, they just may get away with it. It doesn’t occur to most people in the pews that a bishop might be a sinner, that a bishop might grab power.
I believe that our sin is indeed driving this conflict -- not the sin being talked about, but the one we keep hidden: the sin of colonialism with its attendant racism is visiting itself upon us unto the third and fourth generation. Lesbians and gays are but scapegoats, a convenient issue that presents itself to those whom we have systemically devalued and abused for centuries flex their muscles as for the first time, their bishops have become a majority of the Anglican Communion.
The Anglican Communion is the accidental byproduct of British colonial rule, and in time, a byproduct of American colonialism as well. The New York Historical Society has for several years now mounted a series of exhibits about slavery in New York City. The “stock” at the original New York stock market was human stock: it was the slave market. Much of the wealth and power of this country, of this city, and of the Episcopal Church, derives from the fortunes made, directly and indirectly, by slavery and by the continued economic subjugation of descendents of slaves.
During this Lent, take a tour of neighborhoods you don’t normally visit in this marvelous capitol and ask yourself, “Of what I see here, how much is part of the continuing legacy of slavery?”
The cure for sin is not guilt -- the gift that keeps on giving -- but rethinking and right action.
Ask yourself what you can do to reverse the legacy of slavery? For example, you might organize a diocesan task on Reparations. You might ask John Johnson how you can become more involved in supporting the Millennium Development Goals (the MDGs). If you have not already done so, calculate .7% of your own annual income and send it to Episcopal Relief and Development earmarked for microeconomic projects in the world’s poorest nations, or earmarked for work with bringing black people back to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
My friend Alex Baumgarten, John’s colleague in our Washington Officeis has warned me that even in individual responses to MDGs we may make ourselves feel better and yet still miss out on an opportunity to have a bigger impact in eradicating economic injustice. .7% from every Episcopalian, if given, would be fine, but only a drop in the bucket to the amounts that Episcopalians can hope to raise for MDGs if we pressure our government to make a similar contributions to the economies of the poorest nations, whose resources corporate and individual American interests have too often exploited.
And hear the words of today’s Gospel writ in our own context:
"Do you think that because these poorest nations suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all us Americans? No, I tell you; but unless we rethink, we will all become as endangered as they are. Or those 2,600 who were killed when the World Trade Center fell on them or the 174 who were killed here in Washington--do you think that they were singled out as offenders? No, I tell you; but unless we rethink our foreign policy, unless we can see God’s image in every Muslim, in every dispossessed person, in every “enemy,” and love our enemies as we love ourselves, many more of us will perish just as they did."
Asked whether he believed in infant Baptism, Mark Twain replied: I not only believe in it: I have seen it happen.
When Ernest Clay and I married thirty-three years ago, I wrote my parents and told them about him. They wrote back saying they were happy for us but asked me not to bring him home to visit. “We are old,” they said, “and while most of our friends would remain our friends, we don’t want to put them to the test. We have to live here, and you don’t. But we hope you will continue to come to visit us on your own.”
I showed the letter to Ernest. He smiled when he had finished, but said nothing.
“Well, get your things. We’re driving to see them. It’s only 250 miles and we’ll be there before bed time.”
“Didn’t you read the letter?” he asked.
“They wrote that only because they don’t know you yet. When Dad sees how gentle you are, just like Mother, he will fall in love with you; and when Mother sees….”
“Louie, you’re going to see them, but I am not. I respect their wishes. They have a right to their quiet retirement.”
And you’re going to see them, because if you don’t, something very important in you will die. You are able to love me because they loved you. In that way, I get the best of both worlds: I have a good husband and I don’t have to spend time with my in-laws.”
“But….,”
“No but’s about it,” he said. I sulked, but I went.
After several visits, my father said, “Son, I don’t want to hurt you but I probably will because I don’t know how to talk about it except as a man of my generation, a son of one of the poorest counties in Alabama.
“I don’t understand how flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood could live with a black man as with an equal. At first I thought you might have chosen a black man so that you could feel superior, and I knew that could not be healthy for either of you. Then I feared you might think yourself as inferior because of being gay, and therefore chose a black man. Yet I have listened and listened and I have found no evidence that either has happened.
“And Son, something about you has changed. I loved you before you were ever born. I remember seeing you in the maternity ward with one foot out from under the cover the way I sleep, the way your grandfather slept, the way your great grandfather slept. I remember my joy the first time that I heard in your laugh your mother’s laugh. But son, up until now, something about you has always been incomplete. That’s not so anymore. I am not ready yet to meet Ernest, but you must go home and tell him that I love him, because he has given my son back to me whole.”
We often were amused that neither set of parents could recognize us when we answered the phone. Apparently we have the same answering style. Six years into our marriage, I answered and Dad said, “I’d like to speak to my son, please.”
“Dad,” I am your son, I laughed.
“No, Louie, I want to speak to my other son.”
This one’s for you, I whispered.
He told Ernest, “We are Christians, but we have not behaved like Christians. Will you forgive us, and will you and Louie come spend this weekend with us. We have invited all our friends to come and meet you.”
I believe in the Holy Spirit. I have seen the Holy Spirit happen.
As late as 1979 the General Convention held the view of gay people stated in Lambeth 1.10, in the Windsor Report and in the primates’ recent communique. If the Holy Spirit has needed almost 30 years to change our hearts, cannot we love those in the rest of the Communion enough for the Holy Spirit to work on their hearts?
I believe in the Holy Spirit. Amen.
--Posted by Ann to Walking With Integrity at 3/12/2007 04:49:00 PM
From Louie Crew's Do Justice site
Posted by permission
St. Thomas’ Parish, Washington, DCMarch 11, 2007Readings: Exodus 3:1-15. Psalm 63:1-8. Luke 13:1-9. 1 Cor 10:1-13
Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.
I AM THAT I AM has sent me.
We stand on holy ground. This parish is a holy place.
I am a native of Alabama and was brought up in a devout Baptist family. As young teacher on my first job, I fled the Baptist church and was confirmed at St. Peters in Rome, [Georgia ] on October 29, 1961, and two years later I fled life behind the “Cotton Curtain” and moved to St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware. For me St. Andrew’s was a splendid closet in which I could hide from myself except in the far reaches of the night. I buried myself in the task that I loved best, teaching. For cabin fever, I would visit Octavio, a close classmate from Baylor, who worked at Walter Reed and lived on 17th Street, a minute’s walk from this parish. On many a visit I came here to St. Thomas’ to pray.
St. Thomas’ is holy ground for me. I rejoice that it is holy ground for you too, in all of your rich diversity.
Later I attended Eucharists many times while Integrity met here. Again and again I have reconnected here with many people important to my own spiritual journey. Yall have a splendid history of welcoming gay and lesbian people and everyone else as well.
This neighborhood is holy ground.
I discovered that long before I founded Integrity, or even imagined that the liberation to which God called Moses could prefigure the liberation to which God would call me, you, and so many others before us in this place.
The cry of the lesbians, gays, and transgendered has now come to me; I have also seen how the Church oppresses them. So come, I will send you to the Episcopal Church to bring my people, the Lesbians, gays and transgendered, out of their captivity." But then we said to God, "Who are we that we should go for you?" He said, "I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when the people have come out of oppression, you shall worship God in this holy place."
When I first visited St. Thomas’, I was deeply closeted and told no one what I knew about my body chemistry or my heart. I vividly remember on one visit riding out to the National Cathedral on a bus on a very hot day in late spring. Many on the sidewalks had removed their shirts. The traffic was slow, and at one light the bus waited for several minutes. I stared uncontrollably at a man just standing by the bus no more than a foot from my window. I was glad that my friend Octavio was at my back and could not see my eyes. Then Octavio whispered to me, “Isn’t he gorgeous!?”
I turned in complete surprise. “You too?!” I asked. He smiled from ear to ear, his eyes sparkled, and he shook his head up and down.
Do you see the enormity of it! Octavio and I had been close friends for almost 10 years, yet so oppressive was the hetero dictatorship in our minds, that we dared not even share with each other the beautiful innocence of who we were.
That was 45 years ago, but almost any day now the legislature in Nigeria is expected to pass a law that not only will prohibit lesbian and gay marriage, but will also give harsh prison sentences to any gays who associate with each other in public (Look out a bus and whisper ’Isn’t he gorgeous!’ Hold hands? ) and will also punish any heterosexuals who advocate for such gay rights. Last week Time Magazine and The New York Times have joined many newspapers worldwide in condemning this proposal and in pointing a finger at Peter K. Akinola, Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria, who is one of the loudest in promoting the new law and in condemning the Episcopal Church.
The old English word hāl gives us three words in modern English: whole, hale [healthy] and holy. They still are one entity. You cannot be whole if you are not healthy. You cannot be holy if you cannot integrate body and soul, mind and spirit.
We stand on holy ground. We stand in a place safe enough to be whole, to be hale, to be holy.
I hope that you are having a good Lent. It is a penitential season. Throughout Lent we look closely at our sins and strive to repent. Rethink! Rethink! The Kingdom of God is very near you. Rethink! gets closer to the opportunity Lent provides than does Repent! Repent! too easily is received as “Feel guilty!“ God does not want us to grovel: God wants us to use our minds and when necessary, to change them.
I learned an important lesson from the Baptists about the dangers of reviewing my sins: namely, don‘t take someone else‘s word for what your sins are. When I arrived as a freshman at Baylor in 1954, I already knew that it was sinful to cuss, smoke, drink, chew, and beat your wife, but imagine my surprise when Texas Baptists talked about “the sin of mixed bathing”! Do men and women here in Texas actually take a bath together? I wondered in Alabama horror!
Baylor did not allow dances: instead, they renamed them as “functions.” Baylor did not allow fraternities and sororities, but instead, named them “social clubs.”The huge amount of time we consumed in sustaining these hypocrisies distracted us from looking at the sins of segregation and racism, of which we were all the silent, uncritical beneficiaries. Our missionaries to Africa could not even get their own graduates admitted to Baylor. It was not until after I graduated that a strong black tackle from the University of Texas scared the beJesus out of Baylor and prompted it to integrate.
Our beloved Presiding Bishop has invited us all to spend this Lent in a time of deep reflection about the place of the Episcopal Church in the Anglican Communion. I join her in that appeal, with a strong caveat that we not accept uncritically what the Lambeth Conference, the Windsor Report, and the Primates Meetings have told us to be our sins. Octavio and I were not sinning to look out the window of that bus and, like God, to call creation “good.” On the rooftop in Joppa, Peter heard correctly what he had not expected to hear, “Call nothing, [call no one] unclean that I have made!”
As many of you know, the primates of the 38 provinces of the Anglican Communion have issued an ultimatum that come September the bishops of the Episcopal Church must assure them that they will no longer consent to the consecration of lesbian or gay bishops and will also not allow the blessing of any more lesbian and gay unions.
Yet, the primates have no juridical authority to make such demands. The provinces of the Communion are autonomous -- interdependent we believe, but autonomous. The word autonomy loses all its meaning in the primates’ demands.
Suppose a president of the US (any one of them, this is not a partisan illustration) were to say to the Senate, “The House of Representatives is too cantankerous for me to bother with. Since both Houses must agree on any legislation before it becomes law, I will deal with them no longer, but only with you; and I expect you to vote down anything of which I disapprove.”
That’s the power play the primates are trying, to have only our bishops decide for the church, and unless enough leaders are vigilant, they just may get away with it. It doesn’t occur to most people in the pews that a bishop might be a sinner, that a bishop might grab power.
I believe that our sin is indeed driving this conflict -- not the sin being talked about, but the one we keep hidden: the sin of colonialism with its attendant racism is visiting itself upon us unto the third and fourth generation. Lesbians and gays are but scapegoats, a convenient issue that presents itself to those whom we have systemically devalued and abused for centuries flex their muscles as for the first time, their bishops have become a majority of the Anglican Communion.
The Anglican Communion is the accidental byproduct of British colonial rule, and in time, a byproduct of American colonialism as well. The New York Historical Society has for several years now mounted a series of exhibits about slavery in New York City. The “stock” at the original New York stock market was human stock: it was the slave market. Much of the wealth and power of this country, of this city, and of the Episcopal Church, derives from the fortunes made, directly and indirectly, by slavery and by the continued economic subjugation of descendents of slaves.
During this Lent, take a tour of neighborhoods you don’t normally visit in this marvelous capitol and ask yourself, “Of what I see here, how much is part of the continuing legacy of slavery?”
The cure for sin is not guilt -- the gift that keeps on giving -- but rethinking and right action.
Ask yourself what you can do to reverse the legacy of slavery? For example, you might organize a diocesan task on Reparations. You might ask John Johnson how you can become more involved in supporting the Millennium Development Goals (the MDGs). If you have not already done so, calculate .7% of your own annual income and send it to Episcopal Relief and Development earmarked for microeconomic projects in the world’s poorest nations, or earmarked for work with bringing black people back to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
My friend Alex Baumgarten, John’s colleague in our Washington Officeis has warned me that even in individual responses to MDGs we may make ourselves feel better and yet still miss out on an opportunity to have a bigger impact in eradicating economic injustice. .7% from every Episcopalian, if given, would be fine, but only a drop in the bucket to the amounts that Episcopalians can hope to raise for MDGs if we pressure our government to make a similar contributions to the economies of the poorest nations, whose resources corporate and individual American interests have too often exploited.
And hear the words of today’s Gospel writ in our own context:
"Do you think that because these poorest nations suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all us Americans? No, I tell you; but unless we rethink, we will all become as endangered as they are. Or those 2,600 who were killed when the World Trade Center fell on them or the 174 who were killed here in Washington--do you think that they were singled out as offenders? No, I tell you; but unless we rethink our foreign policy, unless we can see God’s image in every Muslim, in every dispossessed person, in every “enemy,” and love our enemies as we love ourselves, many more of us will perish just as they did."
Asked whether he believed in infant Baptism, Mark Twain replied: I not only believe in it: I have seen it happen.
When Ernest Clay and I married thirty-three years ago, I wrote my parents and told them about him. They wrote back saying they were happy for us but asked me not to bring him home to visit. “We are old,” they said, “and while most of our friends would remain our friends, we don’t want to put them to the test. We have to live here, and you don’t. But we hope you will continue to come to visit us on your own.”
I showed the letter to Ernest. He smiled when he had finished, but said nothing.
“Well, get your things. We’re driving to see them. It’s only 250 miles and we’ll be there before bed time.”
“Didn’t you read the letter?” he asked.
“They wrote that only because they don’t know you yet. When Dad sees how gentle you are, just like Mother, he will fall in love with you; and when Mother sees….”
“Louie, you’re going to see them, but I am not. I respect their wishes. They have a right to their quiet retirement.”
And you’re going to see them, because if you don’t, something very important in you will die. You are able to love me because they loved you. In that way, I get the best of both worlds: I have a good husband and I don’t have to spend time with my in-laws.”
“But….,”
“No but’s about it,” he said. I sulked, but I went.
After several visits, my father said, “Son, I don’t want to hurt you but I probably will because I don’t know how to talk about it except as a man of my generation, a son of one of the poorest counties in Alabama.
“I don’t understand how flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood could live with a black man as with an equal. At first I thought you might have chosen a black man so that you could feel superior, and I knew that could not be healthy for either of you. Then I feared you might think yourself as inferior because of being gay, and therefore chose a black man. Yet I have listened and listened and I have found no evidence that either has happened.
“And Son, something about you has changed. I loved you before you were ever born. I remember seeing you in the maternity ward with one foot out from under the cover the way I sleep, the way your grandfather slept, the way your great grandfather slept. I remember my joy the first time that I heard in your laugh your mother’s laugh. But son, up until now, something about you has always been incomplete. That’s not so anymore. I am not ready yet to meet Ernest, but you must go home and tell him that I love him, because he has given my son back to me whole.”
We often were amused that neither set of parents could recognize us when we answered the phone. Apparently we have the same answering style. Six years into our marriage, I answered and Dad said, “I’d like to speak to my son, please.”
“Dad,” I am your son, I laughed.
“No, Louie, I want to speak to my other son.”
This one’s for you, I whispered.
He told Ernest, “We are Christians, but we have not behaved like Christians. Will you forgive us, and will you and Louie come spend this weekend with us. We have invited all our friends to come and meet you.”
I believe in the Holy Spirit. I have seen the Holy Spirit happen.
As late as 1979 the General Convention held the view of gay people stated in Lambeth 1.10, in the Windsor Report and in the primates’ recent communique. If the Holy Spirit has needed almost 30 years to change our hearts, cannot we love those in the rest of the Communion enough for the Holy Spirit to work on their hearts?
I believe in the Holy Spirit. Amen.
--Posted by Ann to Walking With Integrity at 3/12/2007 04:49:00 PM
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Quiz: Which theologian are you?
 | I scored as Jürgen Moltmann. The problem of evil is central to your thought, and only a crucified God can show that God is not indifferent to human suffering. Christian discipleship means identifying with suffering but also anticipating the new creation of all things that God will bring about.
Which theologian are you? created with QuizFarm.com |
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Ash Wednesday 2007
at Trinity Episcopal Church, Clanton, Alabama
by the Rev. Steve Shanks, Deacon
Isaiah 58:1-12 | Psalm 103 | 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10 | Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
at Trinity Episcopal Church, Clanton, Alabama
by the Rev. Steve Shanks, Deacon
Isaiah 58:1-12 | Psalm 103 | 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10 | Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Beloved sisters and brothers, let us look to the Lord.
May only God’s word be spoken,
May God’s word be heard.
In the name of Jesus, I pray.
Amen.
Sometimes it seems best to simply read the texts slowly, clearly, and well, and then sit down. It is almost as if the read word speaks and comments clearly on itself, and a person like me who is called to offer a reflection on the readings must be careful not to detract from the written word. It seems that way to me for these passages appointed for Ash Wednesday.
A friend, Jim Sundholm, describes a time some years ago when a friend of his, a pastor in the American Baptist tradition, was reading the Isaiah 58 text in worship, that we heard just a few minutes ago, getting ready to preach from it. As Jim tells it, his friend got up to begin preaching, and said, “I can’t.” He paused. Again he said, “I can’t.” He then started to gently cry and said, “These words are beyond me, I can’t preach them.” The result that day, from the silence that followed, was that people spontaneously spoke out in similar confessions for about twenty-five minutes.
It is on this day that we face our frailty, our coming from and returning to dust, our sin. The Holy Scripture that we encounter calls us to be conformed to the values and character of God. For Isaiah, the call is to “do” the fast that the Lord chooses. For the psalmist, it is David’s desperate words about enduring the deep sadness of sins past that literally bring him, and us, to a position of humility and brokenness before God. For Paul in Corinth, it is engaging and demonstrating “the righteousness of God.” For Matthew it is recognizing that the “fast” is for you, it is about your internal life being conformed to the “mind” of God and “storing treasures in heaven.”
Isaiah in chapter 58 longs for a new day, one that is not formed or defined by the circumstances of injustice and oppression but rather a day that God chooses. A day of bonds being loosened and suffering being undone, a day of sharing our food with hungry people, offering shelter to those who are poor, and clothing those who are naked.
Kimberly Smith is a friend of mine whose heart burns for work in the international missions’ field. It is where her heart is broken. She and her organization, Make Way Partners, are engaged in work to prevent and combat human trafficking and modern day slavery which affects 30 million persons, mostly women and children. The work has taken this group to Portugal and Romania, and they are also on the ground in the south Sudan.
Today, at this moment, the challenge in the south Sudan is disease. Kimberly is there and in the midst of the ongoing meningitis outbreak. The disease is considered a fatal infection and is caused by bacteria that affect the thin lining of the brain and spinal cord, though if diagnosed and treated early it can be survivable. Those who do recover are very weak and face a variety of complications resulting from the disease, including brain damage and deafness. When a person survives meningitis, they are in great need of vitamins and minerals. The best way to get those into them is by using supplements since there is not a reliable, continual source of adequate food. Of course, it takes money to buy the supplements and arrange transportation to get it to where it’s needed.
The outbreak continues to spread throughout this area. It has been said that there is now written confirmation that 300,000 doses of meningitis vaccine are to arrive in the area on February 26th, more than a month after this current outbreak began. Hopefully, the aid promised by the government will come. Kimberly is today in the midst of working to organize an international medical team to bring skilled care givers and medicines to the region, but the costs and logistics are great.
There is a pressing need for simple medicines. A six-week old baby died just this past Monday due to not having anti-diarrhea meds. Kimberly reports that it is “frustrating” not to be able to get simple medicines. There are no local pharmacies where one can just go and pick up what you want. Meningitis can also cause pneumonia or other respiratory problems, and there is not an adequate supply of decongestants. I invite you to join me in remembering Kimberly and Make Way Partners in our prayers, as her team continues the work of raising up and delivering resources to people living in the dust in the south Sudan.
Isaiah knows the story of exile, as does Kimberly – the story of the scattered, starving refugee, those who are wandering, bearing great suffering. Isaiah cries out to God’s followers in their personal comfort, “Heed the unmet need about you, that’s what pleases God.” Yet, the cry goes on in every generation. The “fast” that Isaiah describes is what a broken, recovering community needed long ago; but the words are tragically fresh in our own day.
Matthew, in our gospel reading, reveals Jesus offering from the beatitudes – given from the mount in Matthew’s previous chapter and from level ground in Luke a couple of Sunday’s ago – a new, yet very old, word. Jesus’ call also seems similar to Joshua’s to “choose this day whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:15). I can choose the gods of this culture who entice me to pursue exterior comfort and appearance, or I can choose the Lord of inner confidence and certainty who treasures the connections that I make to the others around me.
When Matthew speaks (v. 21) about our heart and our treasure being located in the same place, it was helpful for me to reflect on the Hebrew concept of a single “heart-mind” where the heart is the center of our physical, mental, and spiritual life as human beings. This Hebrew sense of heart is not just about feelings, but is also linked with the activities of the mind and the will. The Hebrew sense of heart is about what is at the center of our moral and spiritual life. So, my treasure reflects not just how I feel about something, but it also how I “do” the fast that Isaiah describes, how I decide to choose to live out Christ’s call to me in every moment of my life.
For me, that includes a reordering in this new day that reflects the values of a new kingdom worth dying and rising for. This is a kingdom that not only recognizes that we both come from and return to dust, but a kingdom that invites us to reflect the new day of an old order, in both the fabric of our lives and the choices we make.
In Christ’s name, Amen.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
I was pleased to have an opportunity to provide a gospel reflection and deacon's witness talk at the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in Leeds, Alabama this Sunday. I have many connections and friends to and through the parish. Below is the final draft of the my offering for this Sunday.
Beloved sisters and brothers, let us look to the Lord.
May only God’s word be spoken,
May God’s word be heard.
In the name of Jesus, I pray.
Amen.
My sisters and brothers in Christ, allow me to say right now: It is good for us to be here in this holy place! I have been blessed to be with you at various times over the years, for some very happy occasions and for some tinged with the sadness of loss, but always in celebration, thanksgiving, and joy for the gift of God’s boundless grace. This parish of Epiphany has always seemed to me to be a place of tenacious hope, and for that I give thanks.
So, as we come to the end of the Epiphany season and start to look toward the beginning of Lent three days from now on Ash Wednesday, we find ourselves this morning in the midst of the scene of the Transfiguration.
I’ve read, that the Apache people of Arizona when they see the powerful lightning displays and hear the thunder echo from the canyons of the Superstition Mountains say, “That is the home of the thunder Gods.” The Kikuyu people of Kenya when they look at the majesty of Mount Kenya, alternately hidden and revealed by the clouds, say, “Ngai (god) lives there.” When the Hebrew people see Moses come down from Mount Sinai, his face shining with such a brilliance that he has to cover it to protect their eyes, say, “The Lord reveals himself there.” And when Peter and James and John come down from the mountain, after witnessing Jesus’ transfiguration and the appearance of Moses and Elijah, say, “God does spectacular things there!”
Mountains hold the mystery of the ages, the rock solid strength of the divine, the beauty of fellowship with God. They seem to have long held that kind of power for human beings, and I am no exception. I know that I’ve had the experience of going somewhere or doing something that lifts my soul to such a new height, that I’ve said, “I’ve had a mountaintop experience!” The psalmist even tells us to worship at God’s holy mountain. Mountains call us to worship God; who is Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of all that is.
Of course, my problem has always been that I want to stay on the mountaintop. There have been times when I’ve felt God’s presence so strongly that, like the disciples, all I want to do is to build a little house and stay there, soaking up all that divinity for myself. But, unfortunately, that’s not the way it works. As God told Abraham, “I am blessing you so that you will be a blessing,” and God has the same message for each one of us. Just think about what Moses had on his hands when he comes down from Sinai – a grumbling, mumbling people to be lead in desert wanderings. When Jesus and the disciples come down from the mountain; a great crowd of people meets them, wanting all kinds of blessings, including the healing of a child with a demon.
When the people of Kenya come down from their mountain there are more than one million children infected or affected by HIV/AIDS, seven hundred deaths per day from the disease, and massive poverty caused by fifty percent unemployment. It has been said that the people of Africa don’t struggle for quality of life. They struggle for survival, to keep themselves and their families alive for another day.
When we come down from our mountaintops, we also encounter the reality of the urgent needs of the people around us that are to be met. I found encouragement for myself, when the psalmist describes this experience as looking at God and responding with praise; because God loves justice, and establishes fairness and righteousness. Paul (in his second letter to the Corinthians) says that when we have seen the Lord’s glory on the mountaintop, we who are created in God’s image are truly transformed into that image. That is when we become people who not only seek righteousness for ourselves, but also strive for fairness and justice for all of God’s people.
One of the ways that we seek to strive for justice and meet the needs of those around us, here in the Diocese of Alabama, is through the network of Jubilee Ministries. Jubilee Ministry as it exists today was created by action of General Convention in 1982 and now encompasses over 700 different ministries throughout the Episcopal Church as well as 13 foreign countries.
My role in this ministry is as Diocesan Jubilee Officer, to provide support and encouragement for folks doing, or interested in doing, Jubilee Ministry in this diocese. But what does it mean to “do” Jubilee Ministry? Well, the mission of Jubilee Ministry is to make a direct and dynamic link between our theology and our ethics – in other words– it is where we connect the Talk of Our Faith and the Walk of Our Faith. As Christians we do this by:
Of course, the idea of Jubilee is established in the book of Leviticus: “You shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants” – although there is no evidence that it actually took place then. But it can and is taking place now, in the church and in this diocese, this time is a “season of unfoldment in which God’s blessing, compassion, and justice are unleashed, not from some remote heaven but from within the human heart.”
What better description of the Christian journey can there be? Being stretched and cracked open by God’s own joy and desire for our full flourishing leads us to acknowledge that it is not only ourselves who need to flourish: we, as the body of Christ in the world, are called to be agents of healing for the entire earth.
The concept of Jubilee has its roots in the idea of Sabbath – a time of “re-creation, reordering, and release.” Former presiding bishop Frank Griswold once said that, “ in Jubilee, all creation is to be liberated for the sake of finding proper balance and relationship in union with God and one another. God's liberation unfolds as we cease to hold one another hostage through unyielding bias, prejudice, judgment, suspicion, fears, and forgiveness. ... Jubilee is fundamental to our life as a resurrection community.” Indeed, indeed…
So, how does Jubilee Ministry work? Why does it continue to flourish 25 years after the resolution establishing it at General Convention, and why has it now grown to be a vital part of the ministry of more than 1 in 10 parishes in the Episcopal Church?
Jubilee Ministry begins with an Episcopal congregation, an ecumenical cluster with Episcopal presence, or an agency with connections to the Episcopal Church being involved in ministry programs among, and with, poor and oppressed people wherever they are located. That’s the point of beginning.
A Jubilee Center then includes at least one or more of the following:
In the Diocese of Alabama, Jubilee Ministry Centers take the form of, and I’ll briefly describe just some of the ministries at each: Grace Episcopal Church in Woodlawn with 55th Place Thrift Store, Grace-by-Day, Community Kitchens; St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Athens providing a multi-cultural preschool with bilingual teachers and a drop-in pantry; The Jubilee Community Center in Montgomery providing after school programs, an entrepreneurial class, direct health services, job training, and vacation bible school; Christ Episcopal Church in Fairfield with CityWorks which is an interfaith Community Development Corporation providing affordable housing, in addition to, a literacy program, thrift store, prison ministry, and emergency services; and the newest member of Jubilee Ministry in the Diocese of Alabama, Good Samaritan Health Clinic in Cullman providing free primary health care serving low-income, uninsured, and under-insured residents of Cullman County. In the 4 years since opening its doors, the clinic has delivered $4.6 million in services to more than 7800 persons in the community. Also of note, services are being provided on budget's that last year totaled $200,000 and a total of in-kind contributions of $325,000. This year the clinic anticipates around 4,000 patient visits and will potentially provide approximately $4 million in services to our patients. They currently have three medical clinics per week and could use one more, two dental clinics per month, one eye disease and one hearing clinic per month. We also have twice monthly diabetes and nutrition classes and provide diabetic monitors, test strips, lancets and insulin syringes to our patients.
Perhaps you’re wanting to discern your place in this vineyard. I found a great resource in this important little book "What Can One Person Do?" In it, two accomplished economists, Sabina Alkire and Edmund Newell, who also happen to be Anglican clergy, have outlined seven simple steps that we people of faith can take to heal a broken world. They are (1) pray for the healing of the world, (2) be informed by study of the realities of global poverty, (3) give 7/10ths of 1% of our own incomes for international development, (4) connect on a personal level with those who are poor and marginalized, (5) get active in events addressing global poverty, (6) become vocal about these concerns, and (7) get political and advocate for the poor in our governmental processes. If you want to know more about how you can become engaged with this work, then getting a copy of this book can be a good place to start, and, of course, you can also talk to me or Mother Lynette or Deacon Clyde.
My Sisters and Brothers in Christ, like Moses and Jesus and the Kenyans, we go to the mountaintop to strengthen and renew ourselves, and to affirm our place in God’s heart. Then we, too, come back to the valley, to level ground, where there are people who are struggling for life, and where we are called to carry on God’s purpose. In this process, we will not only discover shalom, God’s Sabbath Peace¸ within our spirits, but we will also become bearers of that shalom to the earth and all her inhabitants in response to Jesus’ call to us: “You are gifted with my grace; you are the light of the world. Now go forth in my name, proclaim jubilee, and above all, surprise me.”
The Last Sunday after Epiphany 2007
at Epiphany in Leeds, Alabama
Exodus 34:29-35 | Psalm 99 | 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 | Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a]
at Epiphany in Leeds, Alabama
Exodus 34:29-35 | Psalm 99 | 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 | Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a]
Beloved sisters and brothers, let us look to the Lord.
May only God’s word be spoken,
May God’s word be heard.
In the name of Jesus, I pray.
Amen.
My sisters and brothers in Christ, allow me to say right now: It is good for us to be here in this holy place! I have been blessed to be with you at various times over the years, for some very happy occasions and for some tinged with the sadness of loss, but always in celebration, thanksgiving, and joy for the gift of God’s boundless grace. This parish of Epiphany has always seemed to me to be a place of tenacious hope, and for that I give thanks.
So, as we come to the end of the Epiphany season and start to look toward the beginning of Lent three days from now on Ash Wednesday, we find ourselves this morning in the midst of the scene of the Transfiguration.
I’ve read, that the Apache people of Arizona when they see the powerful lightning displays and hear the thunder echo from the canyons of the Superstition Mountains say, “That is the home of the thunder Gods.” The Kikuyu people of Kenya when they look at the majesty of Mount Kenya, alternately hidden and revealed by the clouds, say, “Ngai (god) lives there.” When the Hebrew people see Moses come down from Mount Sinai, his face shining with such a brilliance that he has to cover it to protect their eyes, say, “The Lord reveals himself there.” And when Peter and James and John come down from the mountain, after witnessing Jesus’ transfiguration and the appearance of Moses and Elijah, say, “God does spectacular things there!”
Mountains hold the mystery of the ages, the rock solid strength of the divine, the beauty of fellowship with God. They seem to have long held that kind of power for human beings, and I am no exception. I know that I’ve had the experience of going somewhere or doing something that lifts my soul to such a new height, that I’ve said, “I’ve had a mountaintop experience!” The psalmist even tells us to worship at God’s holy mountain. Mountains call us to worship God; who is Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of all that is.
Of course, my problem has always been that I want to stay on the mountaintop. There have been times when I’ve felt God’s presence so strongly that, like the disciples, all I want to do is to build a little house and stay there, soaking up all that divinity for myself. But, unfortunately, that’s not the way it works. As God told Abraham, “I am blessing you so that you will be a blessing,” and God has the same message for each one of us. Just think about what Moses had on his hands when he comes down from Sinai – a grumbling, mumbling people to be lead in desert wanderings. When Jesus and the disciples come down from the mountain; a great crowd of people meets them, wanting all kinds of blessings, including the healing of a child with a demon.
When the people of Kenya come down from their mountain there are more than one million children infected or affected by HIV/AIDS, seven hundred deaths per day from the disease, and massive poverty caused by fifty percent unemployment. It has been said that the people of Africa don’t struggle for quality of life. They struggle for survival, to keep themselves and their families alive for another day.
When we come down from our mountaintops, we also encounter the reality of the urgent needs of the people around us that are to be met. I found encouragement for myself, when the psalmist describes this experience as looking at God and responding with praise; because God loves justice, and establishes fairness and righteousness. Paul (in his second letter to the Corinthians) says that when we have seen the Lord’s glory on the mountaintop, we who are created in God’s image are truly transformed into that image. That is when we become people who not only seek righteousness for ourselves, but also strive for fairness and justice for all of God’s people.
One of the ways that we seek to strive for justice and meet the needs of those around us, here in the Diocese of Alabama, is through the network of Jubilee Ministries. Jubilee Ministry as it exists today was created by action of General Convention in 1982 and now encompasses over 700 different ministries throughout the Episcopal Church as well as 13 foreign countries.
My role in this ministry is as Diocesan Jubilee Officer, to provide support and encouragement for folks doing, or interested in doing, Jubilee Ministry in this diocese. But what does it mean to “do” Jubilee Ministry? Well, the mission of Jubilee Ministry is to make a direct and dynamic link between our theology and our ethics – in other words– it is where we connect the Talk of Our Faith and the Walk of Our Faith. As Christians we do this by:
- First, calling the church to live out its prophetic role of empowering local people to “Do Justice, Love Mercy, and Walk Humbly With Their God.” (Micah 6:8)
- and Secondly, by responding to the Gospel Imperative to “Feed the Hungry, Give Drink to the Thirsty, Welcome the Stranger, Clothe the Naked, Care for the Sick, and Visit the Imprisoned” (Matthew 25:35)
Of course, the idea of Jubilee is established in the book of Leviticus: “You shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants” – although there is no evidence that it actually took place then. But it can and is taking place now, in the church and in this diocese, this time is a “season of unfoldment in which God’s blessing, compassion, and justice are unleashed, not from some remote heaven but from within the human heart.”
What better description of the Christian journey can there be? Being stretched and cracked open by God’s own joy and desire for our full flourishing leads us to acknowledge that it is not only ourselves who need to flourish: we, as the body of Christ in the world, are called to be agents of healing for the entire earth.
The concept of Jubilee has its roots in the idea of Sabbath – a time of “re-creation, reordering, and release.” Former presiding bishop Frank Griswold once said that, “ in Jubilee, all creation is to be liberated for the sake of finding proper balance and relationship in union with God and one another. God's liberation unfolds as we cease to hold one another hostage through unyielding bias, prejudice, judgment, suspicion, fears, and forgiveness. ... Jubilee is fundamental to our life as a resurrection community.” Indeed, indeed…
So, how does Jubilee Ministry work? Why does it continue to flourish 25 years after the resolution establishing it at General Convention, and why has it now grown to be a vital part of the ministry of more than 1 in 10 parishes in the Episcopal Church?
Jubilee Ministry begins with an Episcopal congregation, an ecumenical cluster with Episcopal presence, or an agency with connections to the Episcopal Church being involved in ministry programs among, and with, poor and oppressed people wherever they are located. That’s the point of beginning.
A Jubilee Center then includes at least one or more of the following:
- Advocacy – on behalf of others – by being the voice of those who have not yet dared to believe that their voice can literally change society and social structures.
- Empowering volunteers and staff, as well as the population being served – for the good of others and our own life in community. By working together with others – by breathing in sync with the Spirit of God and of each other to bring about a new way of being in which we truly do live out our baptismal vows of respecting the dignity of every human being.
- Evangelism – in our action, in our prayers, in a pastoral presence, in inviting others to share in our worship.
- Reflecting theologically upon learnings in ministry,
- Demonstrating the operation of programs as models to others, and to
- Act as a resource center for other Jubilee Ministry Centers.
In the Diocese of Alabama, Jubilee Ministry Centers take the form of, and I’ll briefly describe just some of the ministries at each: Grace Episcopal Church in Woodlawn with 55th Place Thrift Store, Grace-by-Day, Community Kitchens; St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Athens providing a multi-cultural preschool with bilingual teachers and a drop-in pantry; The Jubilee Community Center in Montgomery providing after school programs, an entrepreneurial class, direct health services, job training, and vacation bible school; Christ Episcopal Church in Fairfield with CityWorks which is an interfaith Community Development Corporation providing affordable housing, in addition to, a literacy program, thrift store, prison ministry, and emergency services; and the newest member of Jubilee Ministry in the Diocese of Alabama, Good Samaritan Health Clinic in Cullman providing free primary health care serving low-income, uninsured, and under-insured residents of Cullman County. In the 4 years since opening its doors, the clinic has delivered $4.6 million in services to more than 7800 persons in the community. Also of note, services are being provided on budget's that last year totaled $200,000 and a total of in-kind contributions of $325,000. This year the clinic anticipates around 4,000 patient visits and will potentially provide approximately $4 million in services to our patients. They currently have three medical clinics per week and could use one more, two dental clinics per month, one eye disease and one hearing clinic per month. We also have twice monthly diabetes and nutrition classes and provide diabetic monitors, test strips, lancets and insulin syringes to our patients.
Perhaps you’re wanting to discern your place in this vineyard. I found a great resource in this important little book "What Can One Person Do?" In it, two accomplished economists, Sabina Alkire and Edmund Newell, who also happen to be Anglican clergy, have outlined seven simple steps that we people of faith can take to heal a broken world. They are (1) pray for the healing of the world, (2) be informed by study of the realities of global poverty, (3) give 7/10ths of 1% of our own incomes for international development, (4) connect on a personal level with those who are poor and marginalized, (5) get active in events addressing global poverty, (6) become vocal about these concerns, and (7) get political and advocate for the poor in our governmental processes. If you want to know more about how you can become engaged with this work, then getting a copy of this book can be a good place to start, and, of course, you can also talk to me or Mother Lynette or Deacon Clyde.
My Sisters and Brothers in Christ, like Moses and Jesus and the Kenyans, we go to the mountaintop to strengthen and renew ourselves, and to affirm our place in God’s heart. Then we, too, come back to the valley, to level ground, where there are people who are struggling for life, and where we are called to carry on God’s purpose. In this process, we will not only discover shalom, God’s Sabbath Peace¸ within our spirits, but we will also become bearers of that shalom to the earth and all her inhabitants in response to Jesus’ call to us: “You are gifted with my grace; you are the light of the world. Now go forth in my name, proclaim jubilee, and above all, surprise me.”
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Well, I'm happy to announce that, accompanied with lively debate both in the resolution committee and on the floor of convention, the living wage has been adopted as a standard for The Episocopal Church in the Diocese of Alabama. Please, keep our diocesan council in your prayers as they determine how to implement the living wage in our diocese. The final version of the resolution is as shown below.
A Resolution in Support of a Living Wage
Resolution # 4
Resolved, that the 176th Convention of the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Alabama actively support the establishment of a living wage for all workers; and be it further
Resolved, that a living wage standard be defined as the Alabama poverty guideline for a family of four, to wit: 125% of the most recent federal poverty guideline for a family of four, as adjusted and published annually by the United States Department of Health and Human Services; and be it further
Resolved, that this Convention strongly urge those responsible for planning events hosted by the Diocese of Alabama to comply with this resolution and to commit the Diocese of Alabama at all levels, whenever possible, to obtain confirmation that local prevailing living wages are paid by hotels the Church uses; and be it further
Resolved, that the standard defined above shall be the goal of all parishes, worshipping communities and institutions of the Diocese as the minimum compensation of lay employees.
Adopted by the Diocesan Convention, February 16, 2007
Explanation
One of the central biblical imperatives is the call for us to uplift those living in poverty. Persistent and widespread poverty is for us a primary issue. In the Hebrew scriptures, the biblical prophet Isaiah offered us God’s vision of a good society. His words are as relevant today as they were 3,000 years ago, and show us the way forward. Isaiah envisions a society where:
"No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live a lifetime…They shall build houses and inhabit them: they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit: they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen will long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain, or bear their children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord….” (Isaiah 65:20-25)
In the New Testament, Jesus defines his mission to be:
“to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives, new sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18-19)
Jesus identifies so completely with poor and oppressed people that he told his followers that to meet or fail to meet the needs of the hungry, the stranger, the one without clothing, the sick, or the prisoner is to serve or not serve Jesus himself (Matthew 25).
This vision includes fair and good wages, housing and health, safety and security. In America, people who work should not be poor, but today many are. We must ensure that all people who are able to work have jobs where they do not labor in vain, but have access to good health care, decent housing, and are able to support their families. The future of our country depends upon strong and stable families that can successfully raise their children.
As encouraged by General Convention Resolutions GC2003-A130 and GC2006-D047, and in the midst of our prayerful conduct of the business of this Diocesan Convention, we call your attention to those who work in the hotels we occupy here; those workers who make the beds, vacuum the rooms, clean the toilets, carry our bags, and prepare and serve our food. We trust all will agree that in their work they deserve justice, respect, and a living wage that will support their families in our current economy. We therefore call your attention to the following facts, and invite your support of this resolution.
It is our understanding is that none of the hotels here in Tuscaloosa are either union hotels or providing a living wage. We deeply lament this. Some facts to consider:
In Alabama, 4.6 percent of hourly workers, or 53,000 people, earn the minimum wage of $5.15 or less, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The average hourly wage in Alabama for a Food Preparation & Service-Related worker is $7.04. (Source: The Living Wage Calculator at http://www.livingwage.geog.psu.edu/)
Working full time (2080 hours per year), a Food Preparation & Service-Related worker above would earn $14,643/year. That falls well short of what it would take to provide even a minimum acceptable income - given today's soaring housing, health, and transportation costs. It is also reported that in 1999 (the last year for which figures are available) about 24% of persons at work in non-agriculture industries were employed less than 35 hours per week.
(Source: http://www.allcountries.org/uscensus/658_persons_at_work_by_hours_worked.html)
This proposed resolution provides a definition and formula (125% of the federal poverty guideline for a family of four as published by the United States Department of Health and Human Services http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/) for determining the current poverty guideline, and is also intended as a minimum guideline, on an annual basis, for compensation of lay employees of parishes, worshipping communities, and other institutions. The living wage is the minimum compensation to be paid to those employees.
For the year 2006, the federal poverty guideline is $20,000 annually for a family of four. The living wage guideline in this proposed resolution is 125% of that number, or $25,000. This equals $12.00/hour for a full-time worker.
Adopted by the Diocesan Convention, February 16, 2007
A Resolution in Support of a Living Wage
Resolution # 4
Resolved, that the 176th Convention of the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Alabama actively support the establishment of a living wage for all workers; and be it further
Resolved, that a living wage standard be defined as the Alabama poverty guideline for a family of four, to wit: 125% of the most recent federal poverty guideline for a family of four, as adjusted and published annually by the United States Department of Health and Human Services; and be it further
Resolved, that this Convention strongly urge those responsible for planning events hosted by the Diocese of Alabama to comply with this resolution and to commit the Diocese of Alabama at all levels, whenever possible, to obtain confirmation that local prevailing living wages are paid by hotels the Church uses; and be it further
Resolved, that the standard defined above shall be the goal of all parishes, worshipping communities and institutions of the Diocese as the minimum compensation of lay employees.
Adopted by the Diocesan Convention, February 16, 2007
Explanation
One of the central biblical imperatives is the call for us to uplift those living in poverty. Persistent and widespread poverty is for us a primary issue. In the Hebrew scriptures, the biblical prophet Isaiah offered us God’s vision of a good society. His words are as relevant today as they were 3,000 years ago, and show us the way forward. Isaiah envisions a society where:
"No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live a lifetime…They shall build houses and inhabit them: they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit: they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen will long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain, or bear their children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord….” (Isaiah 65:20-25)
In the New Testament, Jesus defines his mission to be:
“to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives, new sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18-19)
Jesus identifies so completely with poor and oppressed people that he told his followers that to meet or fail to meet the needs of the hungry, the stranger, the one without clothing, the sick, or the prisoner is to serve or not serve Jesus himself (Matthew 25).
This vision includes fair and good wages, housing and health, safety and security. In America, people who work should not be poor, but today many are. We must ensure that all people who are able to work have jobs where they do not labor in vain, but have access to good health care, decent housing, and are able to support their families. The future of our country depends upon strong and stable families that can successfully raise their children.
As encouraged by General Convention Resolutions GC2003-A130 and GC2006-D047, and in the midst of our prayerful conduct of the business of this Diocesan Convention, we call your attention to those who work in the hotels we occupy here; those workers who make the beds, vacuum the rooms, clean the toilets, carry our bags, and prepare and serve our food. We trust all will agree that in their work they deserve justice, respect, and a living wage that will support their families in our current economy. We therefore call your attention to the following facts, and invite your support of this resolution.
It is our understanding is that none of the hotels here in Tuscaloosa are either union hotels or providing a living wage. We deeply lament this. Some facts to consider:
In Alabama, 4.6 percent of hourly workers, or 53,000 people, earn the minimum wage of $5.15 or less, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The average hourly wage in Alabama for a Food Preparation & Service-Related worker is $7.04. (Source: The Living Wage Calculator at http://www.livingwage.geog.psu.edu/)
Working full time (2080 hours per year), a Food Preparation & Service-Related worker above would earn $14,643/year. That falls well short of what it would take to provide even a minimum acceptable income - given today's soaring housing, health, and transportation costs. It is also reported that in 1999 (the last year for which figures are available) about 24% of persons at work in non-agriculture industries were employed less than 35 hours per week.
(Source: http://www.allcountries.org/uscensus/658_persons_at_work_by_hours_worked.html)
This proposed resolution provides a definition and formula (125% of the federal poverty guideline for a family of four as published by the United States Department of Health and Human Services http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/) for determining the current poverty guideline, and is also intended as a minimum guideline, on an annual basis, for compensation of lay employees of parishes, worshipping communities, and other institutions. The living wage is the minimum compensation to be paid to those employees.
For the year 2006, the federal poverty guideline is $20,000 annually for a family of four. The living wage guideline in this proposed resolution is 125% of that number, or $25,000. This equals $12.00/hour for a full-time worker.
Adopted by the Diocesan Convention, February 16, 2007
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Sample Bible Study for Living Wage Discussion
Read Matthew 20:1-16 (The Laborers in the Vineyard) aloud.
‘For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the market place; and he said to them, “You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.” So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” They said to him, “Because no one has hired us.” He said to them, “You also go into the vineyard.” When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, “Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.” When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” But he replied to one of them, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” So the last will be first, and the first will be last.’
Discuss it as a group:
Read Matthew 20:1-16 (The Laborers in the Vineyard) aloud.
‘For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the market place; and he said to them, “You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.” So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” They said to him, “Because no one has hired us.” He said to them, “You also go into the vineyard.” When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, “Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.” When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” But he replied to one of them, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” So the last will be first, and the first will be last.’
Discuss it as a group:
What is your first response? What is this parable about?
Two scenarios are described below. The instructor/leader may form the class into two groups that report back to the main group, or address both scenarios in the main group:
The field: “The workers gathered in a parking lot hours before dawn. As with every day, they hoped the buses would come soon, and that the drivers would choose them to go into the field that day and work. The buses arrived, and one by one, workers were picked to go to the tomato fields. They picked tomatoes, gently tossing them into 32-lb. buckets and taking the buckets to large trucks. They received a token for each bucket. At the end of the day, their backs were sore and their hands were discolored with pesticides. Some of the people never got picked to ride a bus to work. Sometimes, a bus came back if there was more work to do, but it was unlikely. At the end of the day, those who had worked all day might take home $30. Those who had not worked went home with nothing.”
This is a present day description of the plight of many farm workers. It is uncannily similar to the story described in the parable.
The store: “The workers got to work fifteen minutes early, as always. They lifted boxes and stocked shelves for seven and a half hours, with two fifteen-minute breaks. One coworker had to miss work that day because she took her child to see a doctor. She did not have health insurance, because her employer limited her hours to 35 per week, less than “full-time,” and therefore exempt from the health insurance requirement. She had to pay for the doctor visit and her prescription out-of-pocket on top of missing a day’s wages – sick days are not in the hourly workers’ plans, either. After earning $7 per hour, the workers clocked out and took the bus to their various homes.”
In each small group, discuss the short scenario. Imagine being in the position of the worker in the field or the store. What would it feel like to take home such low wages each day? Do some math together and calculate the monthly salary. Would you be able to pay your rent/mortgage? Would you be able to buy groceries? Pay for your electricity and other utilities? Pay for car, insurance, and gas? Do you have children or other dependents to feed?
Most Americans agree that someone who works a full day should not be in poverty. What kind of wages do you think a person should get paid and why?
In the large discussion group, ask each group to briefly describe their discussion. What happened in the scenario they read, and what were the sentiments/thoughts of the group?
Ask someone else to read the parable again out loud.
Discuss:
- What do you notice this time?
- How do the present-day scenarios lend a new perspective to this parable?
- The vineyard owner in the parable says he will pay, “Whatever is right.” What is “right,” in today’s society? Minimum wage is currently $5.15 per hour. Is that “right?” Why or why not?
- Often, the authors of parables want the reader to imagine themselves in the role of the main character. Here, the writer is describing the day of the vineyard owner, the person with the power to affect wages. In what ways do we have the power to affect wages (lobbying congress, purchasing goods or services only from those who pay fairly, paying our own employees – including church employees—fairly, etc.)?
Offer the good news, that Christ came “to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." (See Luke 4:16-19) One way Christ does this is through us, the church.
Closing prayer:
Holy God,
You bring good news to the poor.
Help us to be the bearers of that good news.
Help us to be the subject of that good news.
Help us learn how to make that good news happen.
You proclaim release to those who are captive.
Help us proclaim your will to the ones who may affect change.
Help us release those who are held captive by poverty.
Help us learn how to break those chains.
You bring recover of sight to the blind.
Help us learn what to look for, and
Help us to see it.
Help us teach others to see.
That we may speak your truth
That we may follow your way
That we may bring your light
And create your justice, your peace.
In the name of Jesus Christ, we pray, AMEN.
adapted from Jeannie M. Hunter, Emory University, 2005.
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