Red Bison

2012-01-10T01:27:00.002-06:00

Last Sunday at the United Church of Byron we talked about developing a Wilderness Economy that might help us weather the present and upcoming economic storm. We talked about how Wilderness Economies were ready made places for food insecurity and food deserts. There actually may be healthy food in food deserts but people do not have the knowledge to make that food accessible and available. For example, God must teach the people how to secure the manna so that it sustains them. God must teach them how to make the quail available to them. God must teach how they are able to get acidic water potable and how to access water from a rock. The Children of Israel are used to getting their food from the pots and pans of Egypt.

Where I live, the whole west side of Rockford is considered a food desert. And it's getting larger. How do we begin to teach people how to build sustainable Wilderness Economies? Rev. Kenneth Copeland, pastor of New Zion Missionary Baptist Church is regularly teaching his people how to survive and thrive by having "Daniel fasts" two or three times a year. This is a reference to the Biblical Daniel story where Daniel refused the rich food of the Babylonian Empire to eat the faithful diet of vegetables. Rev. Copeland has his people only eating fruits and vegetables during this time. This prepares his people and gets them ready for the coming storm.

This Sunday we will talk about what our food rules are at the United Church of Byron. Michael Pollan wrote a book on just that subject. He asked for and collected food rules from people all across the world that are posted at the New York Times. You can see that great slide show here.

What were the food rules of your grandparents, parents, your family today? Was it no sweets before dinner? Did you have to clean your plate? What food rules would we want to teach and pass on? What food rules would be faithful for your community?

As We Ratchet Up for War in Iran

2012-01-04T09:42:00.000-06:00

Eugene Debs spoke and speaks truth . . .

As portrayed by actor, Mark Ruffalo

Mark Ruffalo reads Eugene Debs's Canton, Ohio, Speech (June 16, 1918) from Voices of a People's History on Vimeo.

Radical Resistance-The Gospel of Mark

2011-11-22T10:16:00.001-06:00

The end of the November begins a new liturgical year. We move from the Gospel of Matthew inLiturgical Year A, where Jesus is a Righteous Teacher and the second Moses, toLiturgical Year B and the Gospel of Mark, where Jesus is an Exorcist, seekingto cast out the systemic and structural evil within us so that we might returnto our “right minds.”

Unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark does not have a birthnarrative. The author of Mark beginswith proclamations, statements that let us know this shall be a piece ofresistance literature. For the claimsmade for Jesus of Nazareth are claims that have already been made for andbehalf of the elite and powerful. Markknows things do not go well for exorcists in the world. For they are throwing out the demonic forceand hold imperial power has on the occupied people. Eventually, that demonic force and hold willturn its attention to the exorcist.

Advent and Christmas in Mark are about how we live in suchterrible and terrifying times. Over andover again, the author of Mark tells readers that the course of discipleship isto suffer, die, and be lifted up. Thisis not easy. But Jesus goes before us. All through December we meet the Jesus whoproclaims and casts out demons. Christmasis a recognition that an alternative force and alternative power with adifferent kind of character is building within the occupied territory. This is good news.

Letter to the Editor

2011-11-09T10:38:00.000-06:00

Sister Polly Esther, Sisters of the Precious Rules Never Taught By the Savior
Peoria, Illinois

My eternal thanks and congratulations go out to those who continue to fight against civil rights legislation for gays and lesbians. People like gay men in particular, who break laws casually mentioned in the Bible should never be protected by the laws of our blessed country. More Christians should be so dedicated. Good work to all of those who continue to preach and teach the hedge around the Gospel. Which brings me to my main concern.

I am concerned that there are others who break laws mentioned in similar locations in Scripture, and yet, nothing is being done to correct these sinners. These people do not suffer discrimination for their mere existence. It is time to set the record straight. I am writing, of course, about the Levitical prohibition stated in Leviticus 19:19: "Neither shall a garment of different fabrics mingled together come upon thee."

Yet you can see people out on the streets every day shamelessly wearing flannel shirts with wool sweaters, acrylic blended with cotton, and all manner of other sinful combinations one could imagine in a nightmare. This sort of disrespect for the Laws of God is leading to the moral decay of our society.

And what's even worse: they flaunt their perverse mixed fabrics in front of children. Why this man who supposedly specializes in the teaching of our children, this Dr. James Dobson, was even seen wearing a shirt that I'm positive was a mix of cotton and some other abominable fabric! What gall! (I've even heard that some of his followers like to dress children in mixed fabric, but this sin is just too perverse for further elaboration . . . and, of course, ALL people who wear mixed fabric have a secret or overt desire to dress children in the very same fashion.)

If a mixed-fabric wearer wanted to become a foster parent, the laws would currently allow it! Do we want these people teaching in our schools? There are no questions on the application referring to the sin. No one asks if the child will be exposed to mixed fabrics or might even be forced to wear them. We should spend some tax dollars to study the effects of mixed fabrics on children, though I am sure it has a negative impact.

Furthermore, are people who eat bacon for breakfast which is allowed in Leviticus 11:17 and Deuteronomy 14:8; rare steak for supper, which is outlawed in Leviticus 17:10-14, and cheesburgers for lunch, which is outlawed in Exodus 23:19, Exodus 34:26, and Deuteronomy 14:21 (This must mean that cheeseburgers are three times as sinful as gay sex since the former is mentioned thrice.)

Now there are so-called Christians who want to liberally interpret the World of God or leave out parts of it. They say that Jesus came to fulfill the law (Matthew 5:18) and that his message of love is far more important (Matthew 19:19; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27; and I Corinthians 13:13) than mixed fabric and cheeseburgers. I point out that there is a curse on anyone who leaves out any part of it. (Revelation 22:18) And I've seen this man running for office, Mr. Mike Huckabee, an ordained Christian minister, and his female counterpart, Ms. Michele Bachmann, who openly proclaims her Christianity, wear a sweater with different fabric than a shirt, or a blouse that is certainly not of one single fabric! Where is their faith? Besides, it's all right to call yourself a Christian, just don't try to be TOO MUCH like Jesus. Look where it got Him!

For the sake of Christianity and the children, I hope there are those who will join me in restoring some morality to government. Together we can put an end to civil rights for homosexuals, mixed-fabric wearers, and unclean meat eaters. Next we can raise the Christian flag against barbers and beauticians (haircuts are outlawed in Leviticus 19:27) and veterinarians (outlawed in Leviticus 22:24).

Then we can enforce all the Biblical laws and directives and restore ourselves as a Christian nation! I can't wait till we apply the death penalty for adultery as Leviticus 20:10 mandates. Imagine how many so-called Christian congressional representatives we will have on the run then! As someone who is without sin, I will be more than willing to cast the first stone!*

*Adapted from the original in Bay Windows, a New England periodical.

Breath Prayers

2011-10-24T12:39:00.001-05:00

I have become a big believer in breath prayers and they fit my description of prayer as something regular, consistent, and persistent. This one is from Teilhard de Chardin:

Breath in: "Trust in"
Breath out: "The slow work of God."

~from the Spirituality and Practice e-newsletter.

And then . . .

2011-10-20T14:22:00.000-05:00

And then, all that has divided us will merge
And then compassion will be wedded to power
And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind
And then both men and women will be gentle
And then both women and men will be strong
And then no person will be subject to another's will
And then all will be rich and free and varied
And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many
And then all will share equally in the Earth's abundance
And then all will care for the sick and the weak and the old
And then all will nourish the young
And then all will cherish life's creatures
And then all will live in harmony with each other and the Earth
And then everywhere will be called Eden once again.

--Judy Chicago
from Life Prayers: 365 Prayers, Blessings, and Affirmations to Celebrate the Human Journey. Eds. Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon, Harper One, 1996.

9/11 and Columbus Day

2011-10-11T19:09:00.000-05:00

When angry, hateful terrorists flew planes into buildings on 9/11,
I will never forget.
I was at the stop sign on Post Road.

Then . . .
They told me we were going to War in Iraq
Where thousands of soldiers from my own country died
And over a million Iraqi people were killed.
They told me to remember and never forget.

They renditioned, imprisoned, and tortured . . .
With the cooperation of dictators and human rights violators,
At Abu Ghraib and Gitmo,
At black sites and with private contractors and psychologists,
Shredding the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,
They told me to remember and never forget.

They expanded the war . . .
Into Afghanistan and Pakistan and throughout the world,
Redeploying and redeploying and redeploying,
Without rational reason or cause,
Casket after casket, suicide after suicide,
Imprisoning those who made their folly public,
And justifying the assassination of their own citizens.
They told me to remember and never forget.

When Columbus brought his lust for fame and fortune to his New World,
He was given a holiday.
So we would never forget.

Then . . .
Disease and violence decimated the indigenous population,
Massacres and sickness left the land for manifest destiny
Human and animal populations were no more.
They told me to forget and never remember.

They imprisoned, enslaved, and drove from the land . . .
Breaking treaties and entreaties,
Creating Trails of Tears and reservations.
Bringing people from Africa to work the land
Making a mockery of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,
They told me to forget and never remember.

They expanded the hatred . . .
Killing leaders in Memphis, Little Big Horn, Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Wounded Knee.
Lynching, burning, executing, and assassinating,
Without rational reason or cause,
State terror after state terror,
Demonizing those who made their folly public,
And justifying the continuing poverty, sickness, and death.
They told me to forget and never remember.

Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now

2011-10-10T09:30:00.003-05:00

Though I am not certain this is the most important thing inthe world right now (We North Americans tend to aggrandize whatever we aredoing—positively or negatively as if we were the fulcrum of the world’sfuture.), I do like Naomi Klein and believe she brings truth and love to thestruggle.

By Naomi Klein

I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I said had to be repeated by hundreds of people so others could hear (a.k.a. "the human microphone"), what I actually said at Liberty Plaza had to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.

I love you.

And I didn't just say that so that hundreds of you would shout "I love you" back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder.

Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: "We found each other." That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can't be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful.
If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.

And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it's a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say "No. We will not pay for your crisis."

That slogan began in Italy in 2008. It ricocheted to Greece and France and Ireland and finally it has made its way to the square mile where the crisis began.

"Why are they protesting?" ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: "What took you so long?" "We've been wondering when you were going to show up." And most of all: "Welcome."
Many people have drawn parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the so-called anti-globalization protests that came to world attention in Seattle in 1999. That was the last time a global, youth-led, decentralized movement took direct aim at corporate power. And I am proud to have been part of what we called "the movement of movements."

But there are important differences too. For instance, we chose summits as our targets: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the G8. Summits are transient by their nature, they only last a week. That made us transient too. We'd appear, grab world headlines, then disappear. And in the frenzy of hyper patriotism and militarism that followed the 9/11 attacks, it was easy to sweep us away completely, at least in North America.

Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, has chosen a fixed target. And you have put no end date on your presence here. This is wise. Only when you stay put can you grow roots. This is crucial. It is a fact of the information age that too many movements spring up like beautiful flowers but quickly die off. It's because they don't have roots. And they don't have long term plans for how they are going to sustain themselves. So when storms come, they get washed away.

Being horizontal and deeply democratic is wonderful. But these principles are compatible with the hard work of building structures and institutions that are sturdy enough to weather the storms ahead. I have great faith that this will happen.

Something else this movement is doing right: You have committed yourselves to non-violence. You have refused to give the media the images of broken windows and street fights it craves so desperately. And that tremendous discipline has meant that, again and again, the story has been the disgraceful and unprovoked police brutality. Which we saw more of just last night. Meanwhile, support for this movement grows and grows. More wisdom.

But the biggest difference a decade makes is that in 1999, we were taking on capitalism at the peak of a frenzied economic boom. Unemployment was low, stock portfolios were bulging. The media was drunk on easy money. Back then it was all about start-ups, not shut downs.

We pointed out that the deregulation behind the frenzy came at a price. It was damaging to labor standards. It was damaging to environmental standards. Corporations were becoming more powerful than governments and that was damaging to our democracies. But to be honest with you, while the good times rolled, taking on an economic system based on greed was a tough sell, at least in rich countries.

Ten years later, it seems as if there aren't any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.

The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.

These are the facts on the ground. They are so blatant, so obvious, that it is a lot easier to connect with the public than it was in 1999, and to build the movement quickly.

We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite -- fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful -- the financial resources to build the kind of society we need.
The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society -- while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take.

What climate change means is that we have to do this on a deadline. This time our movement cannot get distracted, divided, burned out or swept away by events. This time we have to succeed. And I'm not talking about regulating the banks and increasing taxes on the rich, though that's important.

I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it's also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult.
That is what I see happening in this square. In the way you are feeding each other, keeping each other warm, sharing information freely and proving health care, meditation classes and empowerment training. My favorite sign here says "I care about you." In a culture that trains people to avoid each other's gaze, to say, "Let them die," that is a deeply radical statement.

A few final thoughts. In this great struggle, here are some things that don't matter.

What we wear.

Whether we shake our fists or make peace signs.

Whether we can fit our dreams for a better world into a media soundbite.

And here are a few things that do matter.

Our courage.

Our moral compass.

How we treat each other.

We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That's frightening. And as this movement grows from strength to strength, it will get more frightening. Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets -- like, say, the person sitting next to you at this meeting. After all, that is a battle that's easier to win.
Don't give in to the temptation. I'm not saying don't call each other on shit. But this time, let's treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less.

Let's treat this beautiful movement as if it is most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.

Story Sermon--Rules for Living

2011-10-03T11:09:00.003-05:00

A 27 Ord Proper 22

World Communion Sunday

Exodus 20

October 2, 2011

Hewas just intent on walking to St. Louis with the few dollars he had. No sense in ending up as some news story, ahitchhiker who ended up catching a ride from some axe murderer. But then the rain came harder and no viaductor shelter was in sight. Wouldn’t belong before all of the clothes in his backpack were soaked right throughtoo. That’s when hitchhiking started tomake much more sense. He had alwayspictured the walk under bright blue skies and crisp fall air, legs hurting alittle from the walk, but he had worked out a plan that would get him fromDekalb down the interstate to St. Louis. Now . .. there wasn’t a white cloud or a blue sky in sight.

So he turned back, and tried to waive down twosemis headed down 39/51. The one closestto him laid on his horn and then promptly splashed him, and his whole body,which had been peppered with rain water, was now drenched with road water. But for the horn, he might have thought itwas an accident. Only because it seemedjustified, not because it made any difference, he turned south and flipped offthe driver in the right lane. For hisefforts, the driver honked his horn again. The boy shook his head and turned back around, seeing if someone elsewould give him a ride.

He got lucky that the next semi driveractually flashed his lights at him and pulled off to the side of the road aboutfifty yards ahead of him. He ran as fastas he could, slipped, and slid headlong into the gravel. He cursed under his breath as he finally madethe cab of the semi. The driver hadmoved to the passenger side and reached down to grab the boy’s arm and pull himup. “Couldn’t you have stopped anysooner?” the boy snapped at the semi-driver. The driver half-smiled and replied, “I’m sorry, I thought you werelooking for a ride. I’ll be on myway.” The driver’s sarcasm went unnoticed,as the start of the semi lurched the boy forward without his seat belt, hishands bracing against the windshield. “Hey, no, of course I wanted a ride! What’s your problem?”

“Put on your seat belt and shut up.” thedriver said, matter-of-factly. The boymuttered something under his breath, but dutifully put on his seat belt, as thedriver pulled the semi back out onto the highway. He took off his wet jacket and tried to useit as a pillow. Somewhere south of Bloomington the boy wokeup and tried to take note of where they were on the road, the rain comingharder, making it tough to see anything.

“I didn’t wake you up because I thought youwould have told me if I wasn’t going your way.” His passenger nodded. “St. Louis,” he said. “Good,” the man said. “I can take you all the way. I’m headed to Tulsaby way of St. Louis.” The boy nodded again.

“So what’s in St. Louis?” the truck driver asked.

“Freedom. Get to live by my own rules.”

“And what are those?”

The boy stopped and looked at the truckdriver, trying to figure out the intent of his question.

“You said,” the truck driver went on, “your own rules. I’ve got some of my own rules too. What are yours?”

“Freedom. Just freedom.”

The truck driver grinned. “Freedom, oh freedom. That’s just some people talkin’. Your prison is walkin’ through this world allalone.”

“What’s that?” the boy shook his head. “It sounds like you’re trying to write a songor something.”

“Already written. Eagles. 1973. (singing) Now it seems to mesome fine things have been laid upon your table. But you only want the ones that you can’tget.”

“Good thing they pay you to drive a truck.”

The truck driver laughed. “Indeed they do, son. Indeed they do.” He balanced the wheel in his left hand as hepunched the glove compartment, reached in, pulled out a business card, gave itto the boy, and flipped the glove compartment back up.

“I’m Lionel Tward. You can call me Lee.”

The boy read the card out loud. “Mr. Lionel Tward, OTR and other advanceddegrees in life. Recovering andReforming Alcoholic.”

“Why would you put Recovering and ReformingAlcoholic down? And what are your advanceddegrees?”

“First,” Lionel said, “your name. I expect someone who wants so much freedom atyour age doesn’t like me to call them son all that much. And it’s part of my vernacular to keep callingyou son unless you give me a name.”

“Taylor.”

“Ok, Taylor,you see Recovering and Reforming Alcoholic is one of my advanced degrees. That freedom you talk about and raveabout. It took me a long time to learnthat freedom can be just as much a prison as anything else. I can’t touch a bottle, Taylor. That kind of freedom ruins my life.”

(defensively) “I’m not an alcoholic, if that’s what you’retrying to say. I don’t even touch thestuff most times.”

“Oh, hey, sorry, not preaching here. Just sharing what I know. These advanced degrees mean I know what worksfor me. And I need rules to live by.”

“Rules like what? What kind of rules?”

“Well, for a young man, like you, Taylor, I’llimagine that you enjoy staying up all night as a way of having some of thatfreedom. I know I used to. Thought if I stayed up all night, drinkinglite beer (provided freedom from calories), I was as free as a bird. Turns out, I became chained to my ownexhaustion, one more lite beer.”

“Yeah, my freedoms are a little bit moreimportant than those.”

“Of course they are. That’s why I have my advanced degrees. Because my freedoms are always a little lessimportant than somebody else’s.”

Taylor nodded his head. “Hey, I wasn’t trying to make yours seemunimportant.”

“Their just . . .mine,” Lee said, and halfsmiled.

“Yeah.” Taylorknew he had come off arrogantly to the older man, recognized that he was theone receiving the gift of the ride, and recognized it even more when theystopped in Litchfield for supper and Lee picked up the tab. All during supper, Lee listened to him,really listened to him. Lee didn’t evenobject to his view of the world, didn’t tell him he was wrong, didn’t use theword “stupid” ever.

When they hopped back in for the rest of theride, Taylorasked with a smile: “So where do theseadvanced life degrees come from. How doyou get them? And how might apply when Ihit St. Louis?”

Lee smiled back, “Ten Commandments.”

“Oh, now come on!” Taylor protested, thinking that Lee wasstarting him off with Basket Weaving 101.

“The Ten Commandments, son, ummm, Taylor. When you hit St. Louis, you’re going to end up thewilderness. You’ll have to find breadand water and all of the other of life’s necessities in new places with newpeople. But just like those Israeliteswalking in the wilderness, you’re going to have to figure out the rules youhave in this new place for yourself. Sabbath means you have to get the needed rest you’ll need for a newday. Your rules might be better than myrules for you. But you have to figurethem out. Freedom is living inside thestructures that keep you free.

“Find something that’s your ultimate value.”

“You mean, like God?” Taylor hinted at disdain, but truly wanted toknow.

“Yeah, like God, only not the way you hear Goddescribed on TV, the one that wants your cash for salvation, melting all yourgold for the bull market. Find somethingthat is bigger than you to walk the road for. Once you get an advanced degree, burn that God, and walk the betterroad.

“Burn that God? What are you talking about?”

“You’ll figure it out, Taylor. I trust you.”

It was the first time Taylor had heard those words. I trust you.

“Best bet is you’re running away from yourparents. Well, the 10 Commandmentsrecognize that the world was not created the day after you were born. You are going to have to find older people,people you admire to call on and honor if it’s not going to be yourparents. You have the phone number ofone Lionel Tward in the form of a fancy business card. Use it. Call me. I’ll stop in to St. Louis to check in onyou.

“Also, find a group of people who have ruleslike you do. You should measure the longand short of each other. That’s why I’mgoing to check in on you. Life was meantto be lived with other people. Mechecking in on you keeps me on the straight and narrow. ‘Cause I know you’ll be checking in onme. You’ll be measuring the long andshort of me. Don’t build yourself up atthe expense of others so that they will be there for when you need them andyou’ll be there for them when they need you.”

“I feel like another song is coming on. How many lyrics were those?” Lee took a big inhale as if he was preparingto launch into another melody.

“Don’t. Stop. The long and short of youis that you can’t sing.”

Lee laughed and Taylor, caring enough to wait for permission,laughed along.

“So start figuring it out, Taylor. What are the rules that you’re going to live by when we hit thewilderness of St. Louis? The arch is just ahead. I’ve only got a few more minutes to remindyou that freedom comes with frames to keep you free. What rules are you going to live by, Taylor? Get those Ten Commandments in your head andwalk with them when the rain hits. Notevery time Lionel Tward is going to be around when it starts raining. You need to get an idea of how you are goingto live within those rules and frames. How you are going to walk the road that is important enough to walk evenwhen the rain hits.”

“Yeah, I get it, Lee. I think the first rule I need to live by isto give you a call once a week. If youdon’t mind.”

Lee reached over put his hand on hisshoulder. “Taylor, my man, it’s adeal. Keep me honest.”

“Just don’t sing.” Taylor said with a smile.

That was the night that Taylor Rowen, a youngman, walked into the wilderness of St. Louis,leaving the comfort of a semi cab and all that he had known in Dekalb, Illinois. It was a different place. But he had a good idea that he did not walkin that new place alone. Lionel Tward,OTR, Recovering and Reforming Alcoholic, walked with him. And Taylorset out to get him some advanced life degrees. Amen.

Why I Was Maced at the Wall Street Protest

2011-09-27T14:30:00.000-05:00

The employment of law enforcement by the wealthy against the rest of our country is getting ridiculous. We are creeping every closer to a police state, and, it appears, everyone trying to stop it is just a speed bump. Here is a video and article that should make us all cringe.

By Jeanne Mansfield

Boston Review, September 26, 2011

My boyfriend Frank and I are heading toward Liberty Square to check out what’s going on at the Occupy Wall Street protest, when we stumble upon the afternoon march toward Union Square. So we join up and walk along behind. The crowd looks like maybe 300 people, mostly punk-styled kids and folks carrying their computers (for live streaming, we found out later) and some aging-hippie types. People are beating drums, blowing whistles, carrying signs, and chanting: “Banks got bailed out, you got sold out!” and “We are the 99 percent!” and “All day, all week, occupy Wall Street!” and of course the classic “This is what democracy looks like!”

All in all, it starts out as a pretty good time. There are police, but for the most part they are walking behind the group casually, just beat cops bantering and laughing, keeping an eye on things. There are around 30 of them. We reach Union Square, circle it a couple times, and join the human microphone. The human microphone consists of one person speaking or shouting, and then everyone within earshot repeating, thus, a human amplifier, albeit with some delay. After about fifteen minutes, we are on the move again, the crowd spurred toward the United Nations by the messages transmitted from the human microphone.

As we circle Union Square, about twenty NYPD officers haul out orange plastic nets (the kind used to fence off construction sites) and close off the road, diverting the crowd. But the detour, too, is closed, leaving us only one option: straight down Broadway. The lighthearted carnival air begins to get very heavy as it becomes clear that we are being corralled. The main group, about 150 protesters, keeps on down the street, but the police are running behind with the orange nets, siphoning off groups of fifteen to twenty people at a time, classic crowd control.

A new group of police officers arrives in white shirts, as opposed to dark blue. These guys are completely undiscerning in their aggression. If someone gets in their way, they shove them headfirst into the nearest parked car, at which point the officers are immediately surrounded by camera phones and shouts of “Shame! Shame!”

Up until this point, Frank and I have managed to stay ahead of the nets, but as we hit what I think is 12th Street, they’ve caught up. The blue-shirts aren’t being too forceful, so we manage to run free, but stay behind to see what happens. Then things go nuts.

The white-shirted cops are shouting at us to get off the street as they corral us onto the sidewalk. One African American man gets on the curb but refuses to be pushed up against the wall of the building; they throw him into the street, and five cops tackle him. As he’s being cuffed, a white kid with a video camera asks him “What’s your name?! What’s your name?!” One of the blue-shirted cops thinks he’s too close and gives him a little shove. A white-shirt sees this, grabs the kid and without hesitation billy-clubs him in the stomach.

At this point, the crowd of twenty or so caught in the orange fence is shouting “Shame! Shame! Who are you protecting?! YOU are the 99 percent! You’re fighting your own people!” A white-shirt, now known to be NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, comes from the left, walks straight up to the three young girls at the front of the crowd, and pepper-sprays them in the face for a few seconds, continuing as they scream “No! Why are you doing that?!” The rest of us in the crowd turn away from the spray, but it’s unavoidable. My left eye burns and goes blind and tears start streaming down my face. Frank grabs my arm and shoves us through the small gap between the orange fence and the brick wall while everyone stares in shock and horror at the two girls on the ground and two more doubled over screaming as their eyes ooze. In the street I shout for water to rinse my eyes or give to the girls on the ground, but no one responds. One of the blue-shirts, tall and bald, stares in disbelief and says, “I can’t believe he just fuckin’ maced her.” And it becomes clear that the white-shirts are a different species. We need to get out of there.

The other end of the street is also closed off, and we are trapped on this one block along with about twenty frustrated pedestrians. My eye is killing me and I’m crying, partially from the pain and partially from the shock of the violence displayed by these police. A shirtless young “medic” with ripped cargo shorts, matted brown hair, and two plastic bottles slung around his neck runs up to me and says, “Did you get pepper sprayed? Okay here, tilt your head to the side, this isn’t going to feel great,” at which point he squirts one of the plastic bottles of white liquid into my left eye, then tilts my head the other way and does the other eye, then repeats with water. Then he unties the white bandanna from his wrist and wipes my eyes with it saying, “You’ll be okay, this is my grandfather’s bandanna, he got through Korea with it, and if he got through that, then you’re going to get through this. Just keep blinking.” Thanks to the treatment—liquid antacid, pepper-spray antidote—the burning behind my eyes subsides.

A woman with two little girls in tow walks up to a cop at the end of the block and explains that they just need to get to ballet, but he won’t let them through. The woman seems to accept this, turns to the girls, thinks for a second, then marches straight to the edge of the fence at the corner of the building. A different officer sees them coming and, understanding their situation, lets them through. So Frank and I bolt for the same opening and escape.

The farther away we get, the more normal everyone starts to look. People have no clue about what’s happening just five or six blocks down. Frank and I say maybe two words to each other the whole five-hour bus ride home.

Just for the record, I love cops. I do, my mother worked in the justice system for 30 years, and I’ve known a lot of really good cops, really good honorable people just doing their jobs. I’ve never agreed with the sentiment, “Fuck the Po-lice,” and I still don’t. But these guys are fucked up. There was an anger in those white-shirt’s eyes that said, “You don’t matter.” And whether they were just scared or irrational or looking for a target for their rage, there was no excuse for their abuse of authority. I had always thought that people who complained about police brutality must have done something to provoke it, that surely cops wouldn’t hurt people without a really good reason. But they do. We were on the curb, we were contained, we were unarmed. Pepper spray hurts like hell, and the experience only makes me wish I’d done something more to deserve it.

Corporations are not Americans

2011-09-22T22:38:00.000-05:00

They may believe that corporations are persons, but they are certainly not American. ~Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

Class Warfare

2011-09-22T16:35:00.000-05:00

Imagine a bomber pilot cruising high above the clouds, utterly destroying a city below him. After much devastation, a kid with a sling shot hurls a stone at the airplane that is leveling his city and community. The stone pings on the fuselage and the pilot becomes indignant. "These people are engaged in warfare," he exclaims. "Who do they think they are? This kind of behavior will divide people and is just irresponsible!"~Jim Wallis, former editor of Sojourners, author, community activist

May he be free . . . May he rest in peace.

2011-09-22T08:10:00.000-05:00

To All:

I want to thank all of you for your efforts and dedicationto Human Rights and Human Kindness, in the past year I have experienced suchemotion, joy, sadness and never ending faith. It is because of all of you thatI am alive today, as I look at my sister Martina I am marveled by the loveshe has for me and of course I worry about her and her health, but as she tellsme she is the eldest and she will not back down from this fight to save my lifeand prove to the world that I am innocent of this terrible crime.

As I look at my mail from across the globe, from places I have never ever dreamed I would know about and people speaking languages and expressing cultures and religions I could only hope to one day see first hand. I am humbled by the emotion that fills my heart with overwhelming, overflowing Joy. I can’t even explain the insurgence of emotion I feel when I try to express the strength I draw from you all, it compounds my faith and it shows me yet again that this is not a case about the death penalty, this is not a case about Troy Davis, this is a case about Justice and the Human Spirit to see Justice prevail.

I cannot answer all of your letters but I do read them all,I cannot see you all but I can imagine your faces, I cannot hear you speak butyour letters take me to the far reaches of the world, I cannot touch youphysically but I feel your warmth everyday I exist.

So Thank you and remember I am in a place where executioncan only destroy your physical form but because of my faith in God, my familyand all of you I have been spiritually free for some time and no matter whathappens in the days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death penalty, toseek true justice, to expose a system that fails to protect the innocent mustbe accelerated. There are so many more Troy Davis’. This fight to endthe death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength tomove forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. Weneed to dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and countryby country.

I can’t wait to Stand with you, no matter if that is inphysical or spiritual form, I will one day be announcing,

“I AM TROY DAVIS,and I AM FREE!”

Christopher Hedges, posting on truthdig.com

2011-09-15T21:03:00.000-05:00

The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.

Vision or Dream for the Illinois Conference

2011-09-09T19:39:00.002-05:00

Some time ago I sent a dream or a vision to the Illinois Conference Council. I heard back from some folk and had some nice dialog with others. I post it because the conversation has to start somewhere. We are dying. Much like our wider United Church of Christ denomination, we have a top down approach that expects nothing from our local churches except money. That has to end.

Also, some folks are saying they are unable to post "comments." That is frustrating because I thrive on the feedback I get back from posts. If anyone has suggestions, please post them. I know I've experienced the same thing on a friend's blog. I'm asked to log in, I log in, I try to post, and my comments disappear. Please keep trying. I'll try to ask blogspot in the interim.

Here is the post:

I recognize that many folks have put much work intoconstructing a new way of being for the Illinois Conference. I see so much pain in the Illinois Conferenceas the folks who put in that effort go through evangelism, approval,disapproval, and, finally, resignation that we may never get anything changedwhen change is needed so desperately.

I know I have not been privy to the gut-wrenching planning,long discussions, and endless e-mails that have gone back and forth. But I am also a son of the IllinoisConference. I care desperately not onlyabout the United Church of Christ within the Illinois Conference, but also thegeography and people of the State of Illinoisitself. And I saw something missing fromall of our discussions about new polity.

First, we were not being led by our historical values. We began discussions talking about what wewere going to keep and going to throw away. So nobody could “hitch their wagon” to any larger polity because we hadno “north star.” All everybody knew wasthat they had to remain entrenched so their mission or ministry did not getthrown away. Folks, generally, move fromsafe place to safe place. How could weexpect folks move to a new place without a dream of something better? As a result, folks would rather hang on to abroken polity because at least they know who they are in that place.

Second, almost all the changes in polity focused onstaff. We were not asking much toanything of our local churches other than to give more. And if we truly were able to get people inour local churches to give more, would we really be talking about the need fora new polity? And if local churches arethe locus of our power and government, then should we not be considering adream and vision that included asking them for something radical? As a local church pastor, I know too well whathappens when a church tries to balance its future on the backs of its staff.

Gil Rendle and Alice Mann, in their book Holy Conversations: Strategic Planning as a Spiritual Practicefor Congregations want us to see strategic planning as a spiritualpractice. To that end, they postulatethat strategic planning should be done with a Biblical narrative or story thatacts as a “north star” and continues to reflect on us as we reflect on thatnarrative or story. I think we need tofind that Biblical narrative or story for the Illinois Conference.

As one who has always grieved the Chicago/downstate splitwithin the State of Illinois and the Illinois Conference, I would proposeRevelation 22:1-6, a narrative of people who dreamed of life through anintegration of urban and rural in the midst of Empire (a river through themiddle of the city, fruit trees growing on either side of that river, and God’spresence through all of it). With theadvent of issues like food justice, and how that issue impacts rural, suburban,and urban settings through things like “food deserts”, community gardens,immigration, industrial agriculture and its commodity dumping, this passage weneed to find a Biblical narrative that can give life to a new integration, anew Beloved Community that includes all of our faith communities. Food has always been central to theJudeo-Christian story. But that is anissue important to me. We need aBiblical story that will bring us together and help us think creatively aboutwho we are as the Illinois Conference.

Regardless of the story chosen, living with one story wouldprovide us with a great opportunity. Wemight see a great possibility for study and work within the IllinoisConference, remembering that the Bible is a community book, and that, in ourdiversity, there is probably a better narrative or story than the one I havechosen. We could choose I Corinthians 12or Ezekiel 37:1-14, anything that would call us to a unity out of the blesseddiversity we find in the Illinois Conference.

Or maybe, just maybe, other folks see that same story Ichose above at work within the Illinois Conference. All of a sudden we become, not an example ofthe State of Illinoissplit, but leaves that are the healing for this great divide.

Finally, below you will see my proposals for how we need togo about constructing a new polity. Mybelief is these proposals are a wider vision that will take more shape anddetail as we begin to live them out. Theproposals have three movements: ourhistory, our connections, and our strengths. I do not think we can begin talking about a new polity without anassessment of those three movements.

I begin with a celebration of our history.

Our History

1. The Abolitionist Trail

The Illinois Conference has one of the most uniqueconfluences of United Church of Christ history.

From our Congregationalist side, we have the incrediblehistory of Lewis Tappan (probably the leadingfigure in the Amistad event) who came to found over 100 churches (many ofthem Congregational) in the State of Illinoisas a way of furthering the good news of abolitionist mission and ministry. That history continues with the death ofElijah Lovejoy in Alton, the Underground Railroad with several of our localchurches as key players, the radicalizing of Owen Lovejoy’s ministry thatresulted in some unbelievable Congressional speeches, and, finally, our wholeLincoln history complete with Lincoln-Douglass trail (three spots are marked inmy hometown), Lincoln Museum in Springfield, etcetera. Wecould also work with the Illinois South Conference to make this a reality.

I am the pastor of a UCC church that began with defiance ofthe Fugitive Slave Law, had at least two safe houses in town, and the pastorplaying a huge part in the Underground Railroad. The pastor’s stepson went on to be JohnBrown’s right hand man, seeking to free slaves on plantations in “BleedingKansas.” The Rock River Associationitself sent a letter to the east coast asking Congregationalists to be moreradical in support of the abolitionist movement. I would love to celebrate the brave Africanmen and women who sought hospitality among these Congregationalist churches andour continuing role as their spiritual descendants.

I know the rural UCC church in Sheffield, Illinois,has a number of false walls that were used by congregants to hide out runawayslaves in violation of the law. Thinkabout what other issues we might be able to talk about as we celebrate thishistory!

So begun in coordination with historians in the State of Illinois is theconstruction of an “Abolitionist Trail.” Certainly grant money would be available to research so many of thewonderful stories that come from this movement and ministry. We bring Geoffrey Black and Linda Jaramilloin for the groundbreaking. Then one by one,spread over the space of about five years, we begin. Every local church or UCC location that hadeven a smidgeon of participation or contact with the abolitionist movement has,one at a time, the Illinois Conference Minister, their Association Minister,and the local church pastor show up for a photo opportunity with markers thatwe design ourselves. We also celebratethe “Abolitionist Trail” in some extended wing of the Lincoln Museum.

2. The Deaconess Trail

From our Evangelical and Reformed side, we have the gloriousstory of how strong women sought to provide health care for Germanimmigrants. Coming up through St. Louis to Lincoln with Evangelical Hospitalto Evangelical Deaconess Hospital in Freeport to Chicago withAdvocate Health Care, we would do much the same as I proposed for theAbolitionist Trail. We bring in all ofour health care celebrities for the groundbreaking. Again, then one by one, spread over the spaceof about five years, we celebrate every local church, hospital, location,parish nurse resourcing that has had a smidgeon of contact. We have a space or room in Advocate HealthCare that also celebrates this history.

Again, think about what issues we could approach bycelebrating this history!

3. Furthering our mission and ministry

Talking about these trails also opens us up to talk aboutrace in our churches, celebrate our relationship with Angola, talk about immigration in our churches,and further our relationship with southern Mexicoand Guatemala.

These trails can also be followed up by trails celebratingthe Sanctuary Movement or the New Sanctuary Movement (the SanctuaryTrail?). Much as UCC firsts have helpedus to step out in courage for the future mission and ministry, these trails wouldnot only define our past but our future.

Our Connection

1. Church Camps

My hometown, local church left the denomination a few yearsback. One of the ways my hometown churchalways identified with the wider church, however, was through a bridge they hadhelped build at Pilgrim Park. They were proud of that bridge, knew thatthey had made a contribution to the wider church through that bridge, andtalked about it often when trying to get children to come to Pilgrim Park. Not coincidentally, I believe, my hometownchurch stayed in the denomination as long as that bridge survived.

Pilgrim Park and Tower Hill aretwo ministries and missions we all have in common. Though great ministries continue to operatethrough them, one of the strongest groups in the conference administrates them,and we have great site managers, the models for those church camps are stillvery much rooted in the 1950s when mainline churches were busting andbooming. Both camps are now catch-allcamps without intentional focus. I thinkthe model needs to change.

From here on out we focus on making Pilgrim Parkand Tower Hill the two premier church camps in the country.

I propose two major building projects for each of our campsites that would also ask all of our local churches to participate in ongoingweekday and weekend work camp activities to help us make this change. One of our church camps would focus onbecoming a spiritual retreat center incorporating ancient and modern spiritual practicewith regular worship, prayer, and specialized retreat ministries. We may even want to join with a spirituallymature congregation of Roman Catholic monastics who would help develop ongoingcurriculae and practice.

This first church camp may even be split in two to haveanother section be the most hi-tech retreat center imaginable on another sideof the campus. Replete with hotel likerooms, presentation rooms, an auditorium, an indoor swimming pool, etcetera, wehave all of our Illinois Conference meetings in this space. The whole campus is wireless.

This section of the church camp also is the center forclergy excellence and lay training. Training at this place provides a pathway for ordination and Christianeducation certification, training in Bible, training in ministries, and, ofcourse, spiritual practice.

The whole campus is green, geo-thermal, and a communitygarden is in place that is adopted by local churches throughout the IllinoisConference. Each local church has a weekthroughout the year for which they are responsible for the community garden.

The second camp site is thecutting edge place for ecological justice and environmental justiceeducation. In fact, just recently, amodel has been and is being developed within the United Church of Christ. Pilgrim Firs in Port Orchard, Washington isunderway! http://www.ucc.org/environmental-ministries/pilgrim-firs.html. I would recommend Tower Hill’s site for thispossibility. When our family recentlyspent vacation time there we became aware of all the eco-systems that arepresent around Sawyer, Michigan.

Camps, classes, and retreats are focused on teaching allages how local churches, community systems, and wider ecosystems areinterdependent and can be made more holistic.

The camp is staffed by the most cutting edge staff onenvironmentalism, organic farming, and food justice. The mission and ministry of this camp iscreating sustainable, diverse ecosystems that serve as a model for the entireIllinois Conference to be an interdependent, sustainable ecosystem. Again, the second campus is also green,geo-thermal, and a community garden is in place that is adopted by localchurches throughout the Illinois Conference. Many of the meals served at this church camp come from that communitygarden.

2. Write structured polity and guidelines forour Conference and Association Staff

Right now we abdicate our responsibility as a church bynever clearly defining our expectations of Association and Conferencestaff. We set them up for failure bycalling them to our local churches after conflict has hit. We do not set up any standardized procedureto get Association and Conference Ministers into our churches, nor do we detailanything that will celebrate their gifts among us.

So within the contracts of all Association and Conferencestaff, we include definitive ways we will celebrate their ministry among usthat does not involve a pay increase (though that should be included aswell). We also set up a standardizedcalendar and/or liturgies to get Association and Conference Ministers into ourchurches to celebrate them. Weregularly publish their accomplishments and gifts in a special IllinoisConference e-mail blast and notice in Facebook the same month every year.

Too often we have allowed the transient nature of ourleadership to set new, different, or no baseline standards at all. Besides the standards defined in the Manualon Ministry, what are the baseline standards distinctive to the IllinoisConference we would ask from every Association and Conference Minister? What is the baseline training distinctive tothe Illinois Conference we would require for every Association and ConferenceMinister? Do we want standards instewardship development, training in leading clergy retreats, or advanced workin conflict resolution? I can imaginethis process as an exciting one which seeks input from all our churches, asksour local seminaries to offer specialized training in areas required fromAssociation and Conference Ministers, and has that baseline standard andtraining regularly published to remind us what gifts are available.

3. One Book or One Movie, One Conference

When I was serving a local church on the campus of the University of Illinois,I was interested in how the university tried to bring the whole campus andcommunity together through something called “One Book, One University.” A text would be selected by an oversightcommittee that would then be promoted throughout town. The hope was that a significant number ofpeople would have a narrative, or a point of departure, for discussion anddialog. The campus would then end withthe author of the book showing up for lecture, dialog, and discussion.

The Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christselected the movie, Babette’s Feast,as a story they encouraged the whole conference to watch. Study guides were provided. Dialog and discussion was held at theconference meeting later that year, and the whole conference had an opportunityto develop a common language that, I’m sure, enriched their life together.

We need to develop common narratives in our conference sothat we can talk to each other in our conference. We are so split, so divided, and sosuspicious of one another that we have a hard time doing any discernmenttogether. We undercut one another,intentionally and unintentionally. Witha common Scriptural story and a common text or movie we do each year, we hopeto get small traction toward a greater unity.

Our Strengths

1. Diversity

We have the only predominantly African-American Associationin the United Church of Christ! Whilethat is a wonderful part of our Illinois Conference, Eastern, Western, Prairie,and Fox Valley Associations rarely get to celebrate that reality. I believe that has to change.

I suggest creating sister church relationships between localchurches in Chicago Metropolitan Association and local churches throughout therest of the Illinois Conference. Weencourage and facilitate at least one meeting between these sister churchesthroughout the year, pulpit exchanges, and highlight creative ideas done tofoster these sister church relationships. Every year those sister church relationships are “lived out,” we beginto count these anniversaries and celebrate them at our annual meetings (muchlike we lift up ordination anniversaries).

We may even group two or three small local churches withsmall numbers with one of our larger churches. Can we imagine how powerful it would have been if three of our rural,predominantly white churches had stood up in the midst of this controversy withTrinity UCC and said, “Trinity UCC is our sister church. We love Dr. Wright. We love their people. We have eaten with them, prayed with them,worshipped with them. To say the nastyand mean-spirited things about them that have been said is complete and utterhogwash!”? And we can only imagine thethings Trinity UCC’s relationship could mean for two or three of our ruralchurches!

We need each other. Iassume that is one of the reasons we are in covenant with one another. I believe such relationships would begin toremember that we need each other.

2. Our MissionRelationships and the Tuthill Fund

We have two great mission relationships within the IllinoisConference through Angola Mission and Partnership and Chiapas,Mexico/Guatemala. Though some of our local churches haveinternational mission relationships of their own, and I am certainlyprejudiced, I believe local churches miss out on so much if they do not have aninternational mission relationship.

So from here forward we would ask local churches without aninternational mission relationship to begin one with the Angola Mission andPartnership and Chiapas,Mexico/

Guatemala

. We would seek ways for churches to beinvolved in these relationships through entry-level activity likeletter-writing, project funding, or even Skype conversations with our partners.

Though not initially chartered to provide funding fordelegations, we would begin using the Tuthill Fund for internationaldelegations that every year would only include first time delegates. Association Ministers and the IllinoisConference Minister would seek out churches to offer ten to fifteen people fromtheir local church a delegation at very minimal cost (Deposits would berequired to make sure a congregation is “locked in” to a delegation.) At Illinois Conference meetings we wouldcelebrate people who went this year or the year before and actively recruitpeople who have never been to Angola,southern Mexico, or

Guatemala

These delegations would then alert people to the good workof the Tuthill Fund and build wide appeal for adding to the Tuthill Fund. The Tuthill Fund would narrow its scope toIllinois Conference relationships and, therefore, press us to learn more andmore about those relationships.

3. Our congregations and ordained clergy

As I have stated before, we are asking very little tonothing of our congregations in whatever continuing polity changes need to be made. We ask them for money and that’s aboutit. We come very close to doing the samethings with our clergy.

We need to develop “academies” or “certifications” forclergy and congregational excellence. The only time we require anything for clergy is when we get scared aboutlawsuits and require boundary training. I believe it is time to get pro-active. Clergy should be required to show work in continuing education,training, or growth. If you are nottaking more Bible, you should be on delegations, or learning aboutcongregational systems, teaching what you have learned to others, attendingworkshops, or working on your reading list.

All congregations should seek out training and education aswell. Certifications are given for anumber of congregants who attend “Healthy Congregations” workshops or seminars,go through training in dealing with conflict at the Lombard Mennonite PeaceInstitute, study difficult issues within their church life, educate themselveson Bible and spirituality, develop tools for different musical practices withintheir church, or attend regional or national events offered by the widerchurch. Why are we so reluctant torequire or reward our congregations for this work?

My reflection is that we act like our congregations andclergy must avoid conflict, confrontation, and encouragement to mature and grow(spiritually) at all cost.

Saint of 9/11: Remembering NY Fire Chaplain Mychal Judge, Gay Catholic Priest Killed at WTC

2011-09-06T14:09:00.000-05:00

This video brought me to tears. This truly was one of the saints in our democracy. Would that our present pope might consider him a saint as well.

The Poetics of Story in the Scripture for This Week

2011-08-24T09:57:00.000-05:00

In the end, what does Moshe have with which to return from the mount of vision? In the Demille film version his face and personality clearly change; in the biblical text, however, he comes back with a word--the divine promise--and a staff, "with which you shall do signs" (4:17). He had previously been a man whose lack of tolerance for injustice produced violence; now he is armed with words and a wonder-working object--not a sword or a helmet, but a shepherd's staff. ~Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses, p. 272

Are we Children of Earth (Human Ones) or Children of Corporations?

2011-08-22T14:56:00.002-05:00

If my title is a bit mystifying, please read further down this blog where I share how the "Son of Man" story is an important story for our time. In the Biblical text, the question was asked, "Are we 'human' or are we empire?" Empire was always portrayed as the insatiable, devouring, carnivorous beast. Jesus may have taken for himself the title "Human One" (translated often as "Son of Man") as a way of distinguishing himself and his values from the values of Caesar and the Roman Empire. That story is found in Daniel, Ezekiel, the extra-canonical Enoch, Mark, and and Revelation.

I believe the recent Supreme Court decision makes this story even more important for our day and age. Corporations are forever trying to make themselves "persons" or "human." We should be asking ourselves what makes us "human" or "Children of Earth?" Should there not be something organic about that? Because corporations are making this run for humanity out of their greed and profit-making. Is that a basic, human value?

Now comes this important article from the New York Times, "The Kids Are Not All Right," by Joel Bakan. Bakan argues that this story is critical for the lives of our children. If they eat highly industrialized, process food, if we over-medicate them into oblivion, if they are defining themselves by their technology, have our children crossed the threshhold from being children to just being the pawns of corporations? While corporations become defined as persons, our children become defined as corporations.

I'm sure Bakan intentionally used the title as a nod to the movie which tried to say that our children would be ok raised by gay and lesbian parents. While I believe the premise of the movie to be true, I also believe Balkan has it right when he suggests that our children are not ok when raised by corporations to become pawns of corporations. We need to raise Children of Earth, our children to be human.

Being human means cutting the cord, putting the phone down, feeding our children real food, and being methodical about their medications. Bakan quotes Nelson Mandela at the end of his article to say, "there can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children." Indeed.

From Pax Christi USA

2011-08-18T17:10:00.003-05:00

Though this statement does not include a critical analysis of the things that led up to the terrible terrorist attacks almost ten years ago, I think it is beautifully written. And whether one is Roman Catholic, United Church of Christ, Muslim, Jew, atheist, or agnostic, I hope its gritty compassion carries the day. Through the embargo the Clinton Administration levied against Iraq, we killed hundreds of thousands of children under five. What anger kindles in one's heart when such atrocities occur? Who has the right to call one "terrorist" and the other "collateral damage" in such situations? Certainly, God grieves all of this death, and violence, and terror. We are all caught in this web. It is time to repent, find a new way, carve a different path, and build up a new world together.

STATEMENT: On the tenth anniversary of 9-11,

The Things That Make for Peace

In anticipation of the tenth anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Pax Christi USA has released the following official statement.

On the Tenth Anniversary of 9-11: The Things That Make for Peace

As Jesus came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying,
“If this day you only knew the things that make for peace!” (Luke 19:41-42)

Ten years ago, just scant hours after our nation witnessed the tragic events of September 11^th, Pax Christi USA released a statement which said, in part:

We recognize that as the reality of the magnitude of loss becomes clear, our nation’s grief will soon move toward rage. As people of faith and disciples of the nonviolent Jesus, we must be willing, even now in this darkest moment, to commit ourselves and urge our sisters and brothers, to resist the impulse to vengeance. We must resist the urge to demonize and dehumanize any ethnic group as ‘enemy.’ We must find the courage to break the spiral of violence that so many in our nation, we fear, will be quick to embrace. (Pax Christi USA’s Official Statement on 9-11, published on September 12, 2001)

On Sunday, September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of 9-11, as we gather to celebrate the Eucharist together, a question will be put to us:

Could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord?
Can anyone refuse mercy to another, yet expect pardon for one’s own sins? (Sirach 28:3-4)

These past ten years, we have witnessed the failure of policies built on vengeance. Our elected leaders manipulated our grief and fear to justify foreign policy decisions which had little to nothing to do with the tragedy of 9-11. Our nation was ensconced in a culture of fear, where the scapegoating of peoples, the fanning of religious intolerance, and the curtailing of civil rights served the needs of political expedience.

We have been witnesses to the dark places where our government’s response to 9-11 led our nation—the justification of torture, the moral bankruptcy of pre-emptive war, the daily reports of innocent civilians killed as collateral damage, the deaths of thousands of U.S. service personnel, and the stealing of our national wealth to pay for wars abroad as our children, our elderly, and the most vulnerable are left to suffer at home.

Today, as we acknowledge the ten year anniversary of 9-11, there can be no doubt that responding with war and violence can neither console us in our grief nor achieve the security for which we long.

In the weeks following 9-11, Pax Christi USA proclaimed that very message, and challenged our political leaders to seize this moment for peace by establishing justice for all peoples throughout the world. Until we commit our own nation to the pursuit of peace and justice for the entire human family, we should not be surprised when the violence suffered by those living on the other side of the world—as well as those living on the wrong side of town—eventually engulfs us all.

Ten years have passed, but we believe that the opportunity is still with us. Let us start, now, today, in Washington, D.C. and in every city and town across this land, in our schools and our places of worship and within our own homes. Let us write a new chapter and create a new legacy for all those whose lives were shattered on 9-11. Let each one of us decide what it is that we can do to create a legacy which heals instead of harms. Let us begin with the assurance that such healing will come if we make economic, political and social justice for all our top priority.

On Sunday, September 11, 2011, at the responsorial, Catholics will sing in churches throughout our nation:

Our God is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion.
God pardons all our iniquities, heals all our ills, redeems our lives from destruction, and crowns us with kindness and compassion. (Psalm 103)

This anniversary offers us an opportunity to reflect the values of the God to whom we have given our allegiance. Let us remember those who were lost and memorialize this day by committing our lives to “the things that make for peace”—drawing closer to those who suffer, cultivating understanding in the midst of suspicion, finding truth in the arguments of those with whom we disagree, embracing some measure of personal sacrifice today to make a better world for our children and grandchildren tomorrow.

Let us gather one decade from now—not amidst the ruins of all that has been torn down—but in the midst of that new world of peace and security for all which we have built up together.

The Voice of Reason from Somebody Who Is Rich

2011-08-15T01:14:00.001-05:00

This op-ed in the New York Times by Warren Buffett finally shares a little reason with the world. Would that we might have more mature millionaires. But as a colleague of mine has shared, we are creating a leadership vacuum that entreats the sociopathic. The truly scary part is that these sociopathic people are also brilliant. They know how to lie, manipulate, coerce, dominate and do it all with a wink and a smile.

So I beg of you to confront your more conservative friends with this op-ed piece. Share it with friends and family members who just don't get it. Memorize the facts Buffett presents and put them on the table when table talk turns to politics. We have to get on with the work of transformation. Now.

One of the greatest stories rarely told . . ..Children of Earth or Children of Wealth

2011-08-14T19:51:00.001-05:00

Much of the Bible is a story about how to live out faith in the face of imperial mandate and oppression. Hebrew midwives refuse to carry out Pharaoh's order to kill all male children born. The prophet Jeremiah even rails against Jewish imperial gluttony that forgets the God of steadfast love, justice, and righteousness. Christ teaches the poor in Galilee how to maintain their identity and freedom over and against Caesar and his legions who robbed the people of their livelihood and regularly checked on their loyalty. That is the literal definition of the Greek word (pistis) we have defined as faith--loyalty. The Jewish people were forever trying to affirm how to live faithfully over and against empires that demanded their allegiance to another culture, to other practices, and to other gods. How does one live out their faith when the God of Israel states that there shall be no other gods before me and kings and emperors demand obeisance to their god and to themselves as gods?

As soon as Daniel and his Jewish companions arrive in Babylon their names, all containing references to God, are changed to names that reflect the gods of Babylon. This name-changing foreshadows the challenges that lay before them. Will they be the Children of God or the children of empire? Daniel prays regularly, three times a day, facing Jerusalem and continues to do so even though an edict says that whoever does so shall be thrown in the lion’s den. Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego, his three companions, were to bow down to a Babylonian idol or face the fiery furnace. They refused to bow.

The book of Daniel is considered apocalyptic literature. Apocalyptic literature is a revealing or a foreshadowing of the present regime or reign coming to an end and a new world beginning to be born. As a result, apocalyptic literature and the Human One story within it (found also in Revelation, Mark, and the extra-canonical Enoch) is strongly anti-imperialist. Daniel’s dreams reveal empire as a carnivorous beast, teeth as its most prominent feature, destroying life and creating devastation (sometimes ecological devastation as defined by the pale green rider in Revelation). In these dreams, empire is powerful, violent, arrogant, and devouring but not eternal. Its time shall pass.

After judgment has been passed, seemingly by the same violence by which empire ruled (not necessarily by God), the apocalyptic Son of Man or Human One arrives. In this story, the Human One acts collaboratively with the Ancient of Days to restore order out of the chaos empire has created. Their authority is out of their eternal nature. While empires have their day, the Human One and the Ancient of Days existed before empire and shall rule into eternity after the reign of empires.

This revealing creates a decision for people of faith in the present. Shall we be the Children of the Human One (literally, in Greek, "The Son of Humankind") or the children of empire (carnivorous beast)?

This story is still strongly evident in our present mythologies. The screenplay writers for the movie “Batman Returns” and the director, Tim Burton, had Batman, Catwoman, and the Penguin in continuous debate and dialog over whether they were human or beast. Which is their essential nature? Almost as an ode to the present story, the corrupt corporate CEO, Max Schreck, seems to be more “beastly” than anyone else.

The Jesus Seminar takes an interesting turn in defining "The Son of Humankind" (in some Scripture verses in Ezekiel and the Gospels, a reference to the prototypical human being, translated in some versions as "mortal"). They have chosen to translate "The Son of Humankind" as "Son of Adam." I never liked this translation because it is not gender inclusive (in fact, doubles the lack of gender inclusiveness through the use of "Son" [in the translation] and "Adam" [not in the literal translation]). But I do like that it occupies a place in resurrection mythology found in early Christian churches as Jesus pulls all of humankind to him by pulling Adam to him. I really like that the Hebrew word, adamah, means arable land or soil. One of the creation stories in Genesis tells us that we are made of earth, arable land, or soil and breath. So maybe the trajectory proposed by the Jesus Seminar offers another, better, mythological title for who we are created to be--Children of Earth. In a world threatened by global climate change, often because we are not conscious of our connection to earth in pursuit of profit, maybe this story asks whether we are Children of Earth or Children of Wealth.

The Terminator series has been very clear in advancing the Human One story to ask whether we are human or machine. What constitutes “human?” Is it the presence of a physical, human heart? Is it acts of subversion and compassion? Is it the willingness to sacrifice one's life for a larger cause or the common good? Will the empire of machines carry the day which bring about a world of non-organic, monolithic, gray, and metallic world, or will humankind, the resistance, in all of its organic diversity, carry the day?

Finally, “The Matrix” series and Star Trek’s usage of The Borg, ask whether we shall be human or assimilated into the corporate web, losing our diversity to the hive mind. “Resistance is futile,” The Borg declare. In the present day, recognizing that Christian faith has become more ecologically conscious we might ask, “Are we Children of Earth or Children of Wealth? Are we invested in what makes us sustainably human or profitably corporate?” In what daily practices are we engaged, like Daniel and his colleagues, that define our allegiances? Empire threatens us with the lion's den, the fiery furnace, and the cross. How do we maintain our faithfulness in light of such real threats?

Prayer in Honor of Those Whom Jesus Loved

2011-08-04T14:36:00.002-05:00

from the Monasteries of the Heart website:

Jesus who loved the Samaritan woman,
outcast proclaimer of your name,
let us love and support all those
who proclaim your name
to the gay and lesbian community.

Jesus who loved the lepers whom others called unclean,
let us see the glory of creation
everywhere, in everyone.

Jesus who loved the one condemned with him
and promised him heaven by virtue of his faith,
give us the faith to broaden our vision
of the reign of God.

Jesus who loved the hemorrhaging woman,
long ignored and thought to be intrinsically disordered,
give us hearts large enough to embrace
those whom the world calls bent.

Jesus who loved the tax collector the community feared,
enable us to put down our fear of those
who are different from ourselves.

Jesus who loved the Roman soldier,
foreigner and oppressor,
help us to love those who make exiles
of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.

Jesus who loves us in all our humanness, all our glories,
enable us to love those
whose glories we have failed to see.

You who called women disciples in a male world,
who confronted leaders of the synagogue
with their sins of injustice,
who sent out your disciples to the whole world,
give us the courage to stand with
our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters,
their families and those who minister to them.
Give us the grace
to confront their rejection,
to ease their loneliness,
to calm their fears and
to belie their sense of abandonment.

Give us all the grace to own our sexual identity,
whatever its orientation,
as another manifestation of your goodness.
Give us the vision to recognize and reject
the homophobia around us and in our own hearts, as well.

May we and the church of Jesus
open our hearts and homes and sanctuaries
to the gay and lesbian community,
to the glory of God they bring in new voice,
with different face.

Let us bless the God of differences.
Amen.

by Sister Joan Chittister, O.S.B.

Sustainability v. Numerical Growth

2011-08-03T11:04:00.001-05:00

I want to make it clear--this is not about surviving. This is about sustaining. Too often we get hooked into the notion that the Spirit is only involved in these transformative, tornadic, tongue-touching, fire-stoking moments. We forget that the Spirit is also involved in pervasive, consistent, persistent moments as well. Some of our local churches have been the longest running institutions in their communities by a long shot. We all recognize that churches can be these bastions of racism, patriarchy, and worn-out theologies. But if we give up on these small urban, town, and rural churches, don't we end up with voices in those communities who get to speak scary theology and wear down the resistance to nastiness?

Economies in our small urban, town, and rural churches are sometimes not allowing for sustainable salaries for pastors who live in those communities. So what are we doing intentionally to provide creative solutions to churches in this fix? In alternative paths to ordination, are we seeking to train indigenous spiritual growth for people who might be candidates for pastor in those places? Are we helping those communities to determine and discern who might be good candidates for such training?

Instead, what I see going on is adjudicatory staff, Ministry Committees, and local churches trying to piecemeal solutions on the run. Ministry Committees are in the business of making exceptions to the rule just so that someone with any kind of a UCC connection, or sometimes, anyone with any kind of pedigree, might serve a local church in desperation. We should see these issues as symptoms which tell us of a larger dis-ease within our communities.

I believe one of the things we should be consistently offering these local churches is community economic counseling. They need help building economies with real wealth rather than placing their hope in the phantom wealth of the stock market. Are there ways that salary packages can be crafted in such a way that congregations can offer barter or equivalencies to pastors? For example, I know a small urban church in Wichita, Kansas, where one of the long time leaders was a huge leader in the local symphony. Passes to the Wichita Symphony Orchestra are a huge deal that she could come by easily. Or someone who had long time served the local YMCA could offer a family membership to the Y. Those are the basics. How could yoked churches make 1+1=3 by offering a schedule that would make their ministry broader and fill the life of a pastor and her/his family? A local farmer agrees to keep the pastor's family thick in organic and local vegetables throughout the year.

By the same token, what if we had three pastors serving two local churches? One of those ordained clergy persons, a gifted Christian educator and organizer, provided leadership for their Sunday Schools, held a Vacation Bible School that rotated (and that one church could not do, but three could pull off big numbers!), was able to pull off a youth group from joint numbers, and even had a strong national or international mission trip that helped the whole congregation do wider mission. The other two clergy persons would provide the majority of pastoral care and worship leadership. All three would rotate at the pulpit. The churches would receive far more ministry than they could ever imagine, receive diverse viewpoints that would help them sharpen theological insight, and cooperate and share in sustaining each other. My goodness, churches praying for each other in the UCC! Can we imagine that?

What seminary is working on those kinds of models? Who is in charge of that creativity? Who is studying those dynamics?

We are doing theology by desperation in these communities and faith systems instead of doing them by intentionality. As a result, we end up with hodgepodge solutions that, by sheer luck, end up working out sometimes but most times these hodgepodge solutions are leading to the demise of local churches. Christian spirituality calls us to intentionality--to work, study, reflect, meditate, and discern where God is leading us next. In some of these situations, we need to provide a sense of missionary zeal toward creativity and possibility. These places require a critical presence. For without hope, these places become ripe picking for alternative systems that vent their rage--hate groups and right wing militia havens.

My local church has been in the community for 175 years. The chaplain to the local firefighters and police force regularly puts hate and racist rhetoric out into the community. Some of my congregational members share how they love the devotional booklet, dripping with his hatred and racism, he puts out into the community. My prayer is that I am getting in that mix and preaching a different way to this easy gospel of blame and victimization. My prayer is that we might sustain all faith that resists this easy gospel. My prayer is that God is still speaking in small urban, rural, and town churches--not just in UCC mega-churches.

The End of My Beloved United Church of Christ

2011-07-29T15:30:00.001-05:00

I believe there is some question as to whether God considers any faith community worthy of sustainability which depends on paying off huge mortgages, heating bills, and cleaning service salaries. When individual faith practice is about pruning behaviors and attachments that just stand in the way of our relationship with God, neighbor, and earth, why would these same standards not be applied to faith communities as well? Why do we need these monstrosities we call church buildings? Living simply so that others can simply live is a statement of faith not earnestly discussed by church adjudicatories.

To a degree, the strong cultural message preached by evangelical and fundamentalist churches has seeped into the mythology of denominations like my beloved United Church of Christ. So that though the present economic crisis should provide us an opportunity for spiritual discernment around what is at our core, we still find ourselves talking about numerical growth and ideas and funds for rebuilding the local church sanctuary. The "God is still speaking" campaign is a wonderful tool for identity, discernment, and sustainability. Instead, too often, the campaign is used to build numbers and reach out to all those who are "unchurched" or were harmed historically by the church. Mega-churches within our denomination and lured to our denomination become the ideal. Small urban, town, and rural churches, which cannot possibly use the stewardship and growth models offered by mega-churches, are left with no models.

Much like our current economic system, to use unending growth models as the ideal is to leave local churches with unrealistic expectations. The new super pastor is not going to walk in through the door and grow your church, struggling to make its budget, 50% over the next five years when you live in a town of 11,000. At the same time, local church pastors should not have ever expanding salary packages if they are presently being paid a living wage. I have heard Ministry Committees and advocates for clergy salaries using Parker Palmer's theology of abundance to critique churches which cannot come up with a raise every year. Those kinds of expectations create shame for clergy and congregations who are seeking to live faithfully.

Though the UCC may have been historically weak in evangelism, evangelism for numerical growth is one of the weakest justifications for now investing in ad and identity campaigns. We do evangelism to complete mission, to bring talents and gifts into contact with one another to complete the work of community, to say that our church has a peculiar identity that you might find healing and whole. Instead, we trumpet mega-churches while we "slow bleed" off a number of small urban, town, and rural churches who get no help from the denomination to sustain their ministry.

What these small urban, town, and rural churches need most is not money but a new model. And we may be too late. A model which preaches unlimited growth is unsustainable on a planet with, albeit incredibly abundant, limited resources.

What the economic bubbles continuing to pop should tell us is that an economic model of unending growth is not sustainable and is coming to an end. We need sustainable models for small urban, town, and rural churches which speak creatively about "real wealth" (as David Korten puts it and opposed to "phantom wealth") and how that real wealth can pay salaries, build community, do mission, and further justice. For example, if your building has become a luxury, how can you set up sacred space in a congregational member's home or in a community building? Does not having a church building make what a local UCC church does any less valuable in God's eyes? More than ever, if all a local UCC church does is keep hate at bay in a small, rural community and undercut an extremist, militia group, then this is certainly the work of God.

But the UCC is quickly becoming an urban phenomenon, and, in so doing, is losing its ability to become a grass roots movement. Models like the "new monasticism" should midwife a number of UCC house churches in urban, suburban, town, and rural settings. How do we sustain a new monastic community in each of these settings? What resources and models do we provide for identity? How does one of these communities communicate God's work to the rest of us so that all of us experience the flowering of hope from such small groups?

We have great people serving on the national level of our church. I have the utmost respect and admiration for many of them. But my continuing experience, probably from long years of battling with Biblical Witness numnutzes and lone rangers, is that people working in our national church do not trust people in the local churches. So much so now that there is no infrastructure in place to take good grass roots energy and move it through the denomination to get national support. If some initiative is going to get good support at the national level, that initiative better start at the national level.

What is sad about that is that it robs the UCC of diverse energy and gifts and leaves national staff with only their own ideas, models, and energy to make things happen. We have gone from the priesthood of all believers to the idea that "experts" or nationally known local churches and pastors, generally, have all the answers and will inform the rank and file of their work. This model communicates to the rest of local churches and pastors, "We hope you will join us." National staff thinks they know better. And, most of the time, maybe they do. But that model and process and culture kills off life God is sharing throughout our denomination.

My greatest disappointment is that this model leaves our national staff overworked to the nth degree because they are not facilitators who can take credit for the work of others, but they must always be the originators, the planners, the organizers, and the inventors. What we need is an infrastructure that would let every last person in the UCC know how one takes a good idea, ministry, or mission, and moves it through the denomination to get national support. Again, I am not talking about money. That happens. I am talking about how national staff or infrastructure would eventually hold up a grass roots idea that has moved through this process so that we all might say, "I wonder if that same idea, mission, or ministry would work in my neck of the woods?"

It happens. By hook, crook, or contact, some things move through to a national staff person who promotes it nationally. But we have no infrastructure or system everybody can use to make it happen. And, once again, it may be too late.

My beloved church, the United Church of Christ, continues to use unsustainable models or cultures to its own detriment. And, I'm afraid, unless we radically change, we may be already too late. I hope not.

Industrial Farming

2011-05-23T14:50:00.003-05:00

The Need to Re-Think Risk

2011-03-16T11:24:00.001-05:00

This is what truly angers me. I think of those 50 people inside those nuclear reactors, ending their lives to save millions of people. There are no CEOs or wealthy people trying to cool down those plants. The people who have made millions off those plants over the years are nowhere to be seen, no heroic efforts recognizing that they were the ones who sold the public on how safe those plants are.

Yet, there will be some person who tells me again today or tomorrow that the CEOs and the wealthy and the owners are the ones who take all the risks. Really? Really? Those 50 people, inside that plant, coated with radiation take no risk? Really? Where are YOU?

Please stop showing the amount of yen the Japanese currency is losing. That is an economic fabrication made up to do your dirty work down the line. I want to know about those 50 workers. I want to know about their families, their hopes, and their dreams so that we can talk about what this means--their risk and their sacrifice. But they remain nameless.

We know who the CEOs of this plant are, don't we? Isn't it their turn to go in with fire hoses, transport water via helicopter, or work a shift? After all, the risk is all about them. Right? Right?

Now we are receiving word that the UN's nuclear watchdog and the Japanese government cut corners to undermine the safety of these reactors. (See this report from The Christian Science Monitor)All done in pursuit of a yen, buck, euro, what have you. General Electric was the designer that decided not to study Chernobyl so that the industry could hide the event. Their design was cited by outsiders and workers for safety concerns. Tokyo Electric Power Company falsified records and put profit ahead of safety. The Japanese government stood hand in hand with Tokyo Electric to market nuclear. And, of course, the UN nuclear watchdog has been critiqued for not regulating but being in bed with all of them.

Sounds strikingly like the BP oil spill, doesn't it? And yet, we will be told this is the exception and not the rule. Horse hockey. Next time someone tells you that the CEOs and big business take all the risk, remind them of the 50 workers in this nuclear plant. And pray to God for their families.

Dia de Los Tres Reyes

2011-01-07T09:29:00.000-06:00

Gian Carlo Menotti

The Child we seek
doesn't need our gold.
On love, on love alone
he will build his kingdom.
His pierced hand will hold no scepter,
his haloed head will wear no crown;
his might will not be built
on your toil.
Swifter than lightning
he will soon walk among us.
He will bring us new life
and receive our death,
and the keys to his city
belong to the poor.

Source: Amahl and the Night Visitors

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-22T13:50:00.002-06:00

I have always thought the world of Stephen Colbert and his theological statements. He gets it. The segment he ran on The Daily Show, "This Week in God," had so many fine theological points to its biting satire, I assumed Colbert had one time been to seminary. At the least, Colbert reminds Christianity of its heart and brings satire to the way Christianity has been culturally appropriated.

This clip, a satire of Bill O'Reilly, asks whether we really want to keep Christ in Christmas. And it is right on.

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March to Keep Fear Alive

Out of Despair, Hope

2010-12-14T23:14:00.000-06:00

A hope against hope.

At one time, Christopher Hedges was writing countless articles filled with despair. Recently, however, he has begun to write articles which recognize that the only way out is through protest and alternative economies. This article reminds us what has been done historical. Acts, small acts, small, senseless acts offer a counter-cultural wisdom to a world that believes wisdom can be found in the echo chamber of corporate media. What small, senseless act will you do today?

Hedges: Every Act of Rebellion Helps Tear Down Our Corrupt System | World | AlterNet

Bernie Sanders preaches the gospel

2010-12-07T14:18:00.000-06:00

Shared with me by my good colleague, Priscilla.

These are the Advent Scripture verses we have before us. We so rarely hear this in Christian churches because our churches are tied up in being "inclusive" rather than struggling for justice. And those churches worried about inclusiveness are the ones who are progressive! I would love to hear from pastors. How long would you last in your positions if you preached these realities?

We have got to make our local churches the grass roots movements they were intended to be. We have got to risk this. We must have courage about this. It is paramount as we head to another possible crash. If we do not provide leadership for this anger, it will spin out of control and find a victim. I plead with local church pastors to preach this.

As the empire crumbles, the scary truth . . .

2010-12-06T03:11:00.000-06:00

Chris Hedges: Happy as a Hangman - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

In this article, Chris Hedges relates how close we are to some scary precedents. We think evil people will do evil things. Rather, he suggests, it is weak people--people unable to see themselves in the other, willing to make life and death decisions to keep a job, trained to believe that this is just what we do. The ancient prophets believed the consequences of consuming the life of the poor and vulnerable was to incite God to act in the same manner toward the rich and powerful. John Dominic Crossan would say that these were not the result of God acting but the result of natural consequences for fraying the order God put in place, undoing the pillars of justice.

Regardless, these are scary times.

Final, Jeremiah 13, Looking Back on the Exile

2010-11-21T03:27:00.003-06:00

Isaiah 52:7-12

November 21, 2010

Calling Jeremiah a poet, Hebrew Scripture scholar, Walter Brueggemann, believes that the prophet Jeremiah offered Judah and Jerusalem an alternative version of faith. Jeremiah offered a faith filled with risky prayer, that affirmed grief, and led to new possibility, or, as I have phrased it, a hope against hope.[1] The official and royal version of faith, the status quo, was to offer polite prayer that denied pain and led to a domesticated or too easy hope. That official and royal spirituality informs the political and economic values found in Judah and Jerusalem.

Brueggemann points to several scholars who believe that not only the prophet Jeremiah but also the prophet Micah were attacking Judah’s national agribusiness policy. Big banks in Jerusalem were buying up all the land, displacing small and subsistence farmers, and creating a poverty class. According to the Sinai covenant, people cannot be treated in this manner.[2]

Strongly based in the Sinai covenant, the poet and prophet Jeremiah believes that systems and structures based on such values undercut creation and throw creation into chaos. The consequences are dire. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword. Those who live by creating wealth will suffer economic blight and pestilence. Those who live by being wise in the things that harm the nation shall suffer famine as the nation moves from stewardship of the land; to the land as something that can be bought and sold, as a commodity. First and foremost, the Sinai covenant begins with an understanding that God owns the land, and, therefore, the land requires mutual relationship. To treat the land as a commodity makes the land into something we are forever mining, stripping, and poisoning to give us more than it has. War is waged on the land, and famine is sure to ensue.

Jeremiah believed that a return to the Sinai covenant would restore the mutual relationship with the people, the nation, and the land. And so, with the Babylonians about to invade the city of Jerusalem, the poet and prophet redeems the land of Anatoth, the land of his family. Such acts in Judah were intended to protect the poor and sustain the community. Such an act does not win military victories or create wealth. Nor is it wise in the way of the world. Within the commercial enterprise that is Judah and Jerusalem, Jeremiah’s act seems stupid and senseless. Within the covenant culture, Jeremiah’s act is a way of keeping faith.

Jeremiah knows that assimilation into another culture was always the great threat to Judaism. To maintain their identity, Jewish people would have daily disciplines or practices that would remind them who they are in the world. Keeping Sabbath, maintaining kosher eating practices, and redeeming the land to restore the community were some of the daily, regular, and consistent disciplines which maintained that identity. Maintaining their disciplines or practices was a part of remembering their story, a way of orienting them in the universe that held back the chaos.[3]

When the Jewish people forgot their story, did not regularly practice their disciplines, the center could not hold and the nation would be consumed. The nation of Judah enters into the warfare, dislocation, and poverty of the Exile. Where at one time the Exodus had been the defining story, the story to be remembered among the Jewish people, the devastation of the Exile changed all that.

Notice that in the passage read for today, the writer says the people shall not return in haste (like the Exodus), nor in flight (like the Exodus). A new story has become authoritative for the people—the return from Exile.

Going into the Exile, the Babylonian Empire had become the imperial power in the ancient Near East. The Babylonian Empire displaced Judah and Jerusalem as the source of military might, royal wealth, and wisdom in the things that harm. So now, instead of engaging Judah and Jerusalem and their worthless idols, the God of steadfast love, liberation, freedom, justice, and righteousness engages in a deathly conflict with the gods and imperial power of Babylon. To the naked eye, it would appear that Babylonian authority, technology, intelligence, and hardware seemed beyond challenge. Babylonian power appeared to be absolute and eternal.[4] Babylon, to all the peoples and the land that it conquers, is the world.

But to know the history of God, is to know that any Empire which makes absolute claims will run counter to the will of God. Again, though the night is long, faith in God’s character to work against such absolute, imperial claims is to know that God’s purposes are being worked out.

And so the Jewish people wait for hope. Hope is not even on the horizon. The people wait so long that the story of the poet and prophet Jeremiah comes and goes. War, devastation, and tears are the food of the Jewish people every day and every night. So if the war, devastation, and tears are to end for the Jewish people, their “[p]eace depends on having the freedom and imagination to speak the world differently.”[5] Will they remember their story? Will they remember the practices and disciplines so as not to be assimilated into Babylonian culture?

It may seem strange to choose a Scripture verse from Isaiah for our last Sunday in this Jeremiah sermon series. The book of Jeremiah, however, does not really have a Scripture verse that looks back on the Exile to celebrate the end of that horrific time of warfare, dislocation, and poverty for the Jewish people.

As the Jewish people return from Exile, this Scripture verse from Isaiah imagines the Babylonian ruler replaced on the throne by God. God as peace, good news, liberation, salvation, well-being, and life-giving order overthrows Babylon. But for that good news to reach the Jewish people, certain things must take place. First, there must be people observing or watching for that good news to arrive. As sentinels, there must be people ready to receive it. Second, there must be people who discern and determine what the plain meaning of this good news is. There must be people who ponder its meaning. Third, there must be people who are runners or the messengers. The people will act on this good news and share it with others. Finally, celebration and singing are necessary to refuel the nation and the community. There need to be people who will sing and celebrate this good news so that the community and nation have the energy to watch, discern, and act upon the good news again.

Not everyone can do all of the tasks needed. But within a spiritual community there are always people needed to be the watchers, the discerners, the actors or runners, and, finally, those who help the community celebrate. New life, peace, and good news depend on all of the people in these roles to shatter the status quo and the hold the status quo has on the community and the nation.

The author of the gospel Luke uses this Scripture verse from Isaiah within the Christmas story.[6] The language of the New Testament is Greek, and the Greek word for messenger is angelos, the word we translate as messenger or angel. Those angels announce peace, bring good news, announce salvation, and tell those that are listening that God reigns. In that Christmas story the messengers come to announce a peace that depends on having the freedom and imagination to speak the world differently. The shepherds go to observe this good news. Mary, the mother of Jesus, ponders and discerns what this good news means. The shepherds go home celebrating the news. That is how important the Exile story was to the story of Christ. In the life, mission, and ministry of Christ, time after time the gospel writers saw the life-giving order, salvation, well-being, good news, liberation, and peace that would imagine the world differently.

I have shared the story of Jeremiah with you throughout this fall because I believe it has such a powerful message for our time. Jeremiah spoke of alternative values and practices to a people and a nation that did not want to hear his bad news, his grief-filled critique. He was ridiculed, had his life threatened, had his patriotism called into question, and thrown into jail. He believed God had called the Jewish people and the Jewish nation to be different, to have alternative values.

Jeremiah believed the only way to move from the bad news and realism he shared in his critique to the good news and imagination of a new day was through daily or regular disciplines or practices that helped the Jewish people remember their story. Or that the Jewish people would remember their story which made claims on them for alternative disciplines or practices. To not remember the story and their daily disciplines, Jeremiah believed, was to have God’s purposes being worked out against their own nation and religion.

We live in a time when we our told that it is our duty to buy and spend to maintain a consumer culture that consumes us and relies on our greed. If we are to find our role as people who watch for the good news, discern what is the good news, act upon that good news, and celebrate its arrival, we will need to intentionally practice or have disciplines that do not allow us to be totally assimilated into that consumer culture. Here are some possible suggestions, to get us started, knowing that many of you already practice many of these. So, if you do, to begin seeing these things you do as deep spiritual practices that imagine a different world:

1. Notice how many of life’s pleasures exist outside the marketplace—gardening, fishing, conversing, playing music, playing ball, making love, watching sunsets, and so much more.

2. Take time to notice what our community has to offer and take advantage of it. As Brazilian educator Paulo Freire said, “We are more than our schedules.”

3. Become a mentor—officially or informally and get ready to learn as much as you teach.

4. In that vein, introduce a child to something offered by our community and let them see you enjoying it.

5. Buy local and don’t buy online. Investigate how many things you spend money on you could get in more cooperative ways.

6. Barter. Trade your pie-making skills for someone who can help you fix your computer.

7. Be a guerilla gardner. Plant flowers, vegetables, and fruit trees on neglected land in your neighborhood.

8. Patronize and support your public library.

9. Demand that schoolchildren not become a part of public marketing campaigns.

10. Form a study group to determine how our community can be more sustainable.[7]

11. And, finally, shop at the Mission Committee’s Alternative Christmas Fair in a couple of weeks, planning to have a Christmas that is not dictated to us by the mall, the internet, or Kohl’s cash.

I know, for many of you, this has been a long sermon series with way too much repetition. My hope and my prayer, though, is that through this sermon series, I have helped many of you see that the Bible has much more grit and real life than you believed before. That we might have faith enough to be God’s covenant partner, knowing that God goes in front of us and has our back. In so doing, I hope we can begin to work on the real life issues that confront us all and begin to imagine a world where messengers say, “Glory to God in the highest, and, on the earth, peace . . .on the earth, peace.” Amen.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Like Fire in the Bones (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), p. 166

[2] Ibid, p. 201.

[3] Ibid, p. 208.

[4] Ibid, p. 166 ff.

[5] Ibid, p. 174.

[6] Luke 2ff.

[7] Jay Walljasper, “51 Ways to Spark a Commons Revolution,” Yes! Magazine, Issue 55, Fall 2010.

Final, Jeremiah 12, "Building a community of joy"

2010-11-13T18:49:00.002-06:00

Jeremiah 31:2-20, 31-34

November 14, 2010

These are the kind of verses we regularly read from Jeremiah. In contrast to the verses, I preached from during this series, these are the kinds of verses used from the Revised Common Lectionary when Jeremiah rolls around in the third year of the cycle—year C. In contrast to the words of accountability and grief spoken by the prophet going into the Exile, the Revised Common Lectionary chooses mostly from the words of a writer who speaks to the people while they are in or coming out of Exile.

I brought forward some verses never used in the Revised Common Lectionary because I believe that without the backdrop of the bad news and realism Jeremiah shares, without the prophet and poet being critiqued for his lack of patriotism, threatened with death, dropped in an empty well, and imprisoned for his grief-filled words, the Scripture verses before us today read as positive, hope-filled words. These verses, however, are words given to a people who are in the midst of despair and hopelessness. The Jewish people have seen and known the equivalent of ethnic cleansing, loss of meaning, displacement, and wholesale poverty.

Knowing this backdrop is knowing the difference between happiness and joy. Happiness has that connotation of temporary good fortune. The breaks go our way. Happiness may even be indicative of all the outward indicators being in our favor. False prophets tell us that people of faith deserve fame and fortune. As long as we believe and give lip service to the prevailing culture, God will bless us. If, however, we are not part of the prevailing culture and do not salute every time the wealthy and powerful run something up the flagpole, God will condemn and shame us.

By contrast, joy is something deeper. Joy is for a people who have already navigated rough waters, know the heartache of life without glossing over any of life’s pain. Joy is the confidence that we are not alone. We become attuned to a God who not only seeks our joy, but become aware of the joy God wills for the universe. So even in the midst of a storm, we rest in the shadow of God’s wings, knowing that God’s purposes and will for shalom—a peace, a wholeness, a connectedness—are working themselves out. So even though we might not experience material prosperity, familial bliss, or a life of ease, our heart is full with evidence that or knowledge of a loving God who is risking it all for peace, wholeness, connectedness, and harmony.

We can see that difference in the Scripture passage from Jeremiah today. The Jewish people know pain in their present moment, but believe that God is at work to bring about shalom for the universe. In an even smaller passage than the one we read, one quoted by the author of the gospel of Matthew,

Thus says the Living God: A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more. Thus says the Living God: Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears; for there is a reward for your work, says the Living God: they shall come back from the land of the enemy; there is hope for your future, says the Living God: your children shall come back to their own country.

That Scripture verse knows that pain is present, does not try to make believe that everything is ok and all is well. In that verse, Rachel, the matriarch for Israel as naming Jacob, the patriarch, is to name all of Israel, Rachel’s name is invoked to say that all the Jewish people weep over the loss of their children in the midst of Babylonian Exile. They watch their sons and daughters die, maybe even in their arms as war, violence, and oppression create death, famine, and pestilence. Can we even imagine not individual children dying in their mother’s arms, but a whole community, a whole people crying to God as their children die before them? That is not a gospel of happiness. This suffering and pain asks the Jewish people who they are at their core and what they believe God’s activity is in the world.

And the Scripture writer tells those weeping women as a way of telling the whole nation of Israel that there is a hope against hope. Even if you do not believe it or cannot see it, there is a reward for your work. Keep working. Your children will once again be called back and have a future. Your children will live on the promised land of their ancestors. What is that work the Scripture writer tells them to keep doing? It is covenant work. Though the consequences of forgetting the covenant may have doomed Judah and Jerusalem, the renewal of this covenant work, believing that God joins with them to continue this work, brings with it a hope and joy that God wills and wants their shalom.

It is the work of neighborliness that is now not only something they do but is something that describes who they are. The author in Jeremiah states that the covenant will no longer be something carved in stone, but carved in their hearts. Intimate relationship shall no longer be taught, but something the whole people shall experience. Children of Rachel, there is a reward for your work.

As I stated, the gospel of Matthew quotes Jeremiah. The author of Matthew quotes the Scripture to describe the grief experienced whenKing Herod kills all the children under two in Bethlehem. “Rachel is weeping for her children. She is disconsolate. For her children are no more.” The gospel author is trying to poetically compare the Exile to the time of Christ. War, violence, oppression, and poverty are part of the landscape in which Jesus finds himself. Nowhere in Christ’s gospel, absolutely nowhere, does Jesus preach happiness, familial bliss, and material wealth will be yours if you only believe in him. And yet, too often, my experience is that we have many Christians seeking and preaching happiness and few seeking and preaching joy. The false prophets in our age tell us that happiness, familial bliss, and material wealth will be ours if we only believe.

But I have come to tell you, sisters and brothers, God’s purposes are being worked out. And on this Stewardship Sunday, sisters and brothers, I come to tell you that this is a church working, working, I say, on being a church of joy. That is critical, in an age, where the whole national infrastructure may fall down around us. Because, as we heard from the prophet Jeremiah, there are consequences for a nation which bases its happiness on military might, royal wealth, and wisdom in the things that harm us. Whether the president be Bush or Obama, we seem to be a nation chasing after these values. Whether Congress be Republican or Democrat, we appear to be a country that cannot extricate itself from systems and structures of military might, wealth, and wisdom in the things that harm us.

So although the false walls have been constructed to mask the pain experienced in our communities and in our nation, and mothers are beginning to grieve and weep, we will be a community of joy. We recognize the pain here and keep on working. For we know, as the Bible tells us so, that we are loved and that God is seeking to build a world based on values of shalom, of covenant neighborliness.

Stewardship Sunday affirms that we are all in this together with God. We work as we grieve, and all of a sudden, we turn to recognize that God is working alongside of us. So if you did not turn in your pledge today, I invite you to join in this project of joy we call the United Church of Byron. It makes no sense that we would go to places of pain and grieving like Haiti, Biloxi, Mississippi, or Chiapas, but we are not about bringing happiness. We are working with God to bring about a community of joy. It makes no sense that we would deliver over 600 love meals to shut-ins when they cannot pay us back, but we are not about bringing happiness. We are working with God to bring about a community of joy. It makes no sense that we would give of our abundance to a food pantry, pray or send cards to those in pain or grieving, have interfaith dialog with Jewish and Muslim religious leaders, hold a Vacation Bible School open to the entire community, or give to families in need, but we are not about bringing happiness. We are working with God to bring about a community of joy.

The living and loving God is carving out the covenant on our hearts and every one of us, from the greatest to the least is growing in the knowledge of God. We want everyone to be a part of that. We want everyone to pledge, on this Stewardship Sunday, to join us. Say it with me now. For . . . we are working with God to bring about a community of joy. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Final, Jeremiah 11, Living in right relationship

2010-11-07T02:50:00.001-06:00

Jeremiah 23:5-8

November 7, 2010

The days are surely coming, says the Living God, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and the Branch shall reign as ruler and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. ⁶In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “The Living God is our justice.” ⁷Therefore, the days are surely coming, says the Living God, when it shall no longer be said, “As the Living God lives who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of Egypt,” ⁸but “As the Living God lives who brought out and led the offspring of the house of Israel out of the land of the north and out of all the lands where God had driven them.” Then they shall live in their own land.

If you were like me growing up, even though my local pastor may have preached against it, I believed God to be a benevolent monarch. God was loving and just and powerful and God was never to be wrestled with, questioned, or critiqued. In college, even though I was moving out of that understanding, I had this superstition about placing any other book over my Bible. What might the Almighty do if this were seen? How might the All-Powerful God regard me if I could not get priorities straight?

Flowing out of that superstition and understanding of God as a King, I also developed this notion that the morals, laws, and ways to live were more about God than they were about human community. Life was a test. Could I avoid smoking, drinking, drugs and teen pregnancy? Or was I a sinner? Yes, God loved me, but if I inhaled or broke one of the rules, would I be thrown into hell?

But then there is this passage in the gospel of Mark. Jesus is forever having this debate with the teachers of his faith. Not unlike the fear-mongerers of our time, these teachers suggest that morality can often run counter to healing and wholeness. “It may seem arbitrary and cruel,” they suggest, “but it is what he Law demands.” The debate seems to center around the Law’s Sabbath code. Jesus preaches from the Sabbath Code consistently. Releasing the prisoner, letting the captive go free, forgiveness of debt, gleaning from the fields are all part of the Law’s Sabbath code. Jesus heals on the Sabbath.

(shaming and wagging finger ) Uh, uh, uhhhhh, not any form of labor is permitted on the Sabbath. Not even healing. According to the teachers, that is not permitted. And Jesus says, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath.”

Sabbath teaching was about not engaging in labor. One was not, as I have related before, to work twenty-fours a day, seven days a week like slaves. What Jesus knew, is often what we forget when we make God into that far-away King. God did not intend the Law, The Ten Commandments, to be about showing who could be more moral or virtuous in the sight of God. The Law, or the Ten Commandments, were about God’s strong desire for the flourishing of human life and community, that we might people after God’s own heart in our neighborliness toward one another.

To chase after idols, to chase after worthless things, is to build pyramids with few at the top and many at the bottom working night and day for a system that enslaves and ensnares. To truly live according to the Law, was to follow after a love for God, a love for neighbor, a love for the land.

In our Scripture passage for today, the prophet Jeremiah uses Hebrew word play to reverse the name of King Zedekiah and state that the “Living God is our justice.” In other words, King Zedekiah and his kingdom are not following in the way of God, and that way, the way of God, is justice.

The words justice and righteousness come out of a very similar understanding that can be defined simply as right relationship. Jeremiah tells the people that as they remember their stories of God’s liberation and will that they might flourish on the land, their covenant with God to live in justice, the covenant of their leaders to execute justice and righteousness, God will re-member them, so that they might live long on that land.

As the philosopher Aristotle said, justice can be considered the noblest of all virtues because it guides an individual to "exercise [their] virtue in relation to another person, not only [themselves]."[1] Justice is ultimately concerned with how one is to live with one’s neighbor. If the Living God is our justice then, we cannot be people of faith alone. Living in right relationship with God is living in right relationships with others.

I believe that means building systems and structures, encouraging courageous leadership, and living with the personal integrity of neighborliness. It means promoting economies, however small, which serve human community. What I experience, in our day and age, is we, as individuals and communities, run our fingers to the bone serving economies, propping up those economies no matter how much evil they do. Like the teachers in Jesus day, we serve an economy that does not serve our neighbor. I often find myself enslaved and ensnared by that economy—doing the evil against my neighbor I would rather not do.

An example. An acclaimed Chilean economist, Manfred Max-Neef, shares the absolute lunacy of the economy in which we live, an economy that does not take into account the true cost of an item.

I live in the south of Chile, in the deep south. And that area is a fantastic area, you know, in milk products and what have you. Top. Technologically, like the maximum? I was, a few months ago, in a hotel, and there in the south, for breakfast, and there are these little butter things, you know? I get one, and it’s butter from New Zealand. I mean, if that isn’t crazy? And why? Because economists don’t know how to calculate really costs? To bring butter from 20,000 kilometers to a place where you make the best butter, under the argument that it was cheaper, is a colossal stupidity, because they don’t take into consideration what is the impact of 20,000 kilometers of transport? What is the impact on the environment of that transportation, you know, and all those things? And in addition, I mean, it’s cheaper because it’s subsidized. So it’s clearly a case in which the prices never tell the truth. It’s all tricks, you know? And those tricks do colossal harms. And if you bring consumption closer to production, you will eat better, you will have better food, you know, and everything. You will know where it comes from. You may even know the person who produces it. You humanize this thing? But the way the economists practice today is totally dehumanized[2].

Our economies should be about serving our neighbor and the land, living in right relationship, not about propping those economies up and serving them.

Max-Neef goes on to suggest five postulates for an economy that serves neighbor and land, an economy we should serve because it serves us. The first postulate, self-evidently, the economy should serve us and not the people serve the economy. Second, development is about people and not about objects. Third, growth is not the same thing as development and development does not necessarily require growth. Fourth, no economy is possible without ecosystem services. If plants and animals are dead and the land does not bring forth life within the broader arc of an economy, it will not matter what the economy is, because we will be dead as well. There will be no more food. Along those same lines, fifth, the economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible. An economy cannot grow beyond the limits and boundaries God has instituted within the created world. Max-Neef believes the fundamental value to sustain such a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life.

To me, that seems like such a simple, straightforward value, I believe articulated by Christ when he suggests that the Sabbath was made for humankind, I realized, when I looked at Max-Neef’s postulates and value statement, how bewitched I have been by economists who suggest that economics is much more complicated. The reason I don’t get it, is because there is some special knowledge that escapes me. Or, along the same lines, I have been told to turn off all critical thought. Have faith, I am told, because the invisible hand of the market will lead us to the promised land with its values. When I first heard that being said on a radio show, I almost had to pull my car over, recognizing that economists were using god-language to describe the market.

As in Jeremiah’s time, we have allowed a gospel of wealth and greed to dictate the values of the economy to us and given wealth and greed divine qualities. That economy asks of us to value worthless things, to consume and devour, without limit, things that harm us and do violence to others, and to make those at the bottom of the pyramid work night and day just to keep pace with it. In this economy, economist David Korten believes, the seven deadly sins of pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth have become virtues.

Korten offers ten common sense principles for a new economy. Here are three of those principles. First, the proper purpose of an economy is to secure just, sustainable, and joyful livelihoods for all. Second, the Gross Domestic Product becomes a measure of the economic cost of producing a given level of human well-being and happiness. And third, greed is not a virtue; sharing is not a sin. Korten believes that if your primary business purpose is not to serve the community, you have no business being in business.[3]

These are not Christian economists who are offering up these principles for a new economy. These are people who believe there has to be an alternative to the way our present economy does violence to others and to God’s creation. As Christ stated with the Sabbath, economies should be based on principles of and help us build on right relationships. In that vein, economists like Max-Neef and Korten suggest that we should also build resiliency in our communities by buying and selling local, developing skills of recycling, repairing, restoring, and renovating known and practiced by many of our great-grandparents.

Although Paul was the apostle to the Gentiles, he was also a tent-maker. We borrow, share, barter, and ask for help as a way of developing our neighborliness. These are practices we see Jesus doing within the gospels--his disciples bartering tending for the sick in return for a meal; Jesus, using what bread and fish he has at hand, to share and feed the crowds; early Christians borrowing space in homes to host their gatherings.

Today, we celebrate our faith with food. We remember the way of Christ, so that God in Christ will re-member us. Today, the saints at the United Church of Byron sit down to share our sacred meal. As Fred Bahnson, has written about meals, “Live locally, eat locally, serve God by serving your neighbor.”[4] You may remember from last week that Fred Bahnson is the manager of Anatoth Community Garden in Cedar Grove, North Carolina. Bahnson goes on to write about communion, “For Christians, the way we eat also represents—through the sharing of Christ’s body and blood in the eucharist—our most profound engagement with one another. Anatoth Community Garden, as an extension of [Fred’s] church, is a place where those who still hunger and thirst for a sacramental life can be fed. In that way, it is a school for reverence. The garden teaches us that the way we eat, what we eat, and who we eat it with matters.”[5]

And so today, I am honored, as your pastor, to once again eat a sacramental meal with the saints at the United Church of Byron. Do you know what you have done? While I have done all this talking of neighborly economics, you all are the ones who have actually done it. You have let me borrow your trucks, brought over home cooked meals, helped our family with its finances, given us fruit, taken care of our vehicles, moved pianos and tables, let us stay in your homes, looked after and praised our kids, prayed for our well-being, and a myriad of other things. And by the way, can there be anything as useless and pitiful as prayer in a wealth and greed economy? In an economy of neighborliness, prayer means all the world. In an economy of neighborliness, prayer is reverence for life.

You all, the saints at the United Church of Byron, practice these economies all the time, all the time. Our family has never felt so loved in a church. So when people tell me that an economy of neighborliness is impossible, I know, I know it’s already being done by the saints here. You all have, in divine love and grace, always seem to remember our family. Saints of the United Church of Byron, it is an honor to join you as guests at Christ’s table. Thanks be to God! Amen.

[1] See ARISTOTLE, NICOMACHEAN ETHICS (Roger Crisp trans. & ed., Cambridge Univ. Press 2000), at 83, quoted by Robert John Araujo, “Realizing a mission: teaching justice as right relationship,” St. John’s Law Revew, Summer 2000. In the same article, See 1 ST. THOMAS AQUINAS, SUMMA THEOLOGICA 994 (Fathers of the English Dominion Province trans., 1947) (1920) at 1435, Justice, in essence, "is a habit whereby a man renders to each one his due by a constant and perpetual will.. . ."

[2] “Interview with Chilean Economist, Manfred Max-Neef,” Democracy Now! September 22, 2010.

[3] The rest of those principles can be found here: http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/10-common-sense-principles-for-a-new-economy

[4] Fred Bahnson, “A Garden Becomes a Protest: The Field at Anatoth,” Orion Magazine, July/August 2007.

[5] Ibid.

Final, Jeremiah 10, "Hope Against Hope: A New Path with Ancient Values"

2010-11-01T10:27:00.000-05:00

Jeremiah11UCB2010

Jeremiah 32:1-15, 17, 20, 25

October 31, 2010

I hope some of you now understand why I chose to do a Jeremiah sermon series. I hope you can see some of Jeremiah’s time and needed message as a needed message for our time. I know . . . Jeremiah can be a downer, a depressing message when we would rather hear about the audacity of hope. What the Judeo-Christian story has always been about, however, is a hope against hope.

Hope suggests that we can see a glimmer of light in the present way of doing things. There, on the horizon, can you see it? If we tweak this or tweak that, just keep on doing what we’re doing, then we’ll get it done. Hey, did you hear about what they are saying about the new thing in the halls of power, at the university level, or in Wall Street or Washington? Those are the words of hope.

To contrast, and this is usually the message for the beginning of Advent, a hope against hope recognizes that it is night. There is no light. No present system or structure, no way of doing things to which the world gives credence has any hope in it. As Christians, it is the first Good Friday. The Savior of the world has been crucified. A way and a teaching outside the halls of power, outside the reach of Caesar, outside the religious establishment is over. A new path with ancient values had failed with Christ’s death on the cross.

In the same manner, Jeremiah lives during his nation’s 9/11. Rather than Christ’s critique against an outside imperial power that dominates and oppresses his people, Jeremiah levels his critique against the imperial rulers and religious elite of his own country. It is night. There is no light. A way and a teaching outside the halls of power, outside the political power of Judah, and outside the spiritual center of Jerusalem must be found. A new path with ancient values must be tried.

I believe we are in a similar time. That is one reason I wanted to explore what this ancient story might have to tell us. The other reason I wanted to share Jeremiah’s story involves a murder mystery told to me about four years ago by Fred Bahnson of Cedar Grove, North Carolina.

Generally, here is the way Fred tells that murder mystery.

Before Bill and Emma King bought their little bait and tackle grocery in Cedar Grove, North Carolina, it was a haven for local crack dealers. In a small community still strongly divided by race, Bill and Emma created some town conversation with their interracial marriage. The first thing Bill and Emma did when they arrived with their store was to ask the dealers to leave. Parents began bringing their children to the store for ice cream; neighborhood kids rode their bikes down for a soda. When people couldn’t pay, Bill would let them take food on credit.

On a June afternoon in 2004, Bill King was closing up his shop on the corner of Mill Creek and Carr Store roads when someone walked through the door and shot him in the back of the head. Some suspected the killing was racially motivated. Others thought it was a response to the Kings asking the crack dealers to leave. Whatever sense of safety this little farming community had enjoyed before that afternoon in June, one trigger-pull had shattered. The people of Cedar Grove were angry and afraid. The mystery part of the murder was, “What to do next in a little town already torn apart by poverty, drugs, and racial tension?”

Valee Taylor, a friend of Bill King, was just plain angry. Several weeks after the murder, he visited Rev. Grace Hackney, pastor of Cedar Grove United Methodist Church, to talk about what the community should do. It’s was not often that a black man will set foot in a white church in Cedar Grove, but Valee and Grace had become friends after meeting at the post office one day. Valee wanted to put out a reward. Rev. Hackney had another idea—a prayer vigil.

The town of Cedar Grove is no bigger than a church, a post office, and a stoplight, yet over one hundred people attended the vigil in the parking lot of Bill and Emma King’s store. To hear Valee tell it, that afternoon was a sort of mystical experience. He related, “The sunlight was shining down on us, the air was crisp, there was a light breeze. Here were blacks and whites together praying for peace in the community.” One of those in attendance was Valee’s mother, Scenobia Taylor, a fifth-generation African-American descendant of sharecroppers and daughter of the man who was once the largest landowner in Orange County. Scenobia was moved by something she witnessed at the vigil. After the murder, as she tells it, God told her in a dream to give five acres of her land to the community. She felt that, somehow, this land would help heal the community’s wounds. But to whom would she give it?

In a tour of the tri-county area with Valee Taylor, Valee related the number of people who may have had jobs, may have had several jobs, but still were not getting by. These were people off the social service grid—many people with outhouses and without electricity or running water—the mentally ill, illegal immigrants, and, yes, even crack addicts.

In the spring of 2005, Rev. Hackney initiated a series of community conversations about faith and land. People from Cedar Grove United Methodist came, and so did residents of the wider Cedar Grove community—farmers, retirees, even the local librarians. The discussions began a look at some troubling realities. Why was it that many of those gathered had land, yet within five miles of the church there were people who didn’t get enough to eat? Healthy fresh produce wasn’t affordable for most of these folk. As much of the arable land around Cedar Grove was former tobacco land now lying fallow, could it be redeemed and some of that land be used to grow food for people who needed it? And if the church’s mission is to practice reconciliation, doesn’t that include mending the relationship with the land, perhaps restoring some of the fertility lost from years of soil erosion?

Scenobia Taylor knew her dream had been prophetic. She decided to donate the five acres to Cedar Grove United Methodist.

Before I share with you the resolution of this murder-mystery, I should let you know that the year of Bill King’s murder, 2004, was the year the book of Jeremiah came up in the Revised Common Lectionary. Rev. Hackney had begun a study in which Fred Bahnson participated. And the verse before us today, provided the direction Cedar Grove needed in a hope against all hope.

If you have been following along in this sermon series, you know that this Biblical story did not begin with Jeremiah. It began with King David on his death bed telling his son, Solomon, to kill all of his adversaries before he ascended to the throne. After killing off a few of his political opponents, Solomon spares the life of the priest, Abiathar, and sends him out of the spiritual center of Jerusalem and off in exile to a small community within shouting distance called, Anatoth. There the priests of Anatoth, living in exile, watch as those enthroned in Judah and Jerusalem made decisions that cut against the grain of neighborliness instituted by the Sinai covenant. Four hundred years later, the pastor’s kid, Jeremiah, emerges from exile in Anatoth, to call a nation and a faith back to its ancient values of neighborliness.

Those values were put in place to keep the people on the land, protect the most vulnerable, and care for the whole community. Those values sought to keep the people free, out of debt slavery, and in a community that did not seek to profit from another person’s hardship. One of the ways that was done was through redeeming the land. The land was given to families as an ancestral heritage for the benefit of the whole community. If one of your relatives fell on hard times and had to sell their land, the family could intercede to redeem and restore the land back to the family. This practice cut against the grain of any economy which allowed those in power to sweep in and buy property when people were at their most vulnerable. For the land always held the possibility of being redeemed by a family member. Great wealth was not to be accumulated where people joined field or house to house—particularly if someone needed that field or house for their livelihood.

As the nation of Judah is being laid waste by the Babylonian Empire, Jerusalem sacked by its armies, Jeremiah is told by the Living God to do a nonsensical thing. He is to practice an act of neighborliness that seemingly has no value. God directs him to buy back, the literal meaning of redeem, buy back or redeem his family’s land in Anatoth. It is an act of hope against hope, a reminder of a different set of values, as the whole world of Judah and Jerusalem comes crashing down.

Fred Bahnson, member of Cedar Grove United Methodist, tells the Jeremiah story this way:

The known world was crumbling. Yet this little chunk of real estate became a symbol of peace in a war-torn world, a continuation of God’s earlier message to the first wave of exiles already living in Babylon: “plant gardens and eat what they produce . . . seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the [Living God] on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom.” The Hebrew word shalom is often translated as “peace,” “welfare,” or “salvation.” It is a state of well-being, of living in harmony with one’s community and with the land.

How curious that Jeremiah didn’t tell the Jews to escape, or seize the reins of power, or advance the Jewish cause by getting legislation passed in Babylon’s halls of power. Instead, he tells them to build houses and inhabit them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry, and multiply. In other words, settle down and flourish. Shalom doesn’t begin once every last person is convinced they need to get on board. It begins with a few people planting gardens in a land at war. It begins with a field.[1]

So if you cannot guess the answer to this mystery, let me share. What Cedar Grove United Methodist Church decided to do with the land given to them as dictated by God to Scenobia Taylor, a descendant of sharecroppers, what they decided to do was plant a community garden. Fred Bahnson is the manager of this field named Anatoth Community Garden.

I met Fred Bahnson about four years ago at a food justice and faith conference. He and I were to lead a workshop about what we had done in our local churches. Wow, I thought, we have a good group showing up for our workshop. I cannot wait to share what we are doing at our local church. But nobody seemed all that interested in what I presented. They were all there to hear how Fred and his community had brought about racial reconciliation on redeemed land, Anatoth Community Garden.

On their blessed, prophesied, and redeemed land, they built a barn where they host potlucks every Tuesday evening and Saturday afternoons. They host pizza parties (with their brick oven pizza), music festivals, and other community events.[2]

Fred shares how Anatoth Community Garden works:

When members join they pay five dollars for the entire year; they agree to work two hours a week on one of our three work days. In turn, they receive a share of the weekly harvest—everything from arugula to Zapotec tomatoes—from April through November. We advertise by word of mouth. Though we seek out migrant and low-income families, anyone can join. Most members, like Cynthia, a single mom who brings her three kids to the garden, live in the immediate vicinity of Cedar Grove. But Taisuke, a Japanese chemistry student, drives an hour to the garden each Saturday from his home in Raleigh. He wants to grow rice here. Zongyao, a Chinese woman married to an American, started coming when she discovered that we had garlic scapes, the long seed-head tendrils that are a hard-to-find Chinese delicacy.

Then there are the Ebrahimis, a family of Baha’I refugees from Iran. They get especially excited about okra. Adela is from Michoacan. She enjoys harvesting squash blossoms, which she then brings to the following Saturday’s potluck transformed into delicious quesadillas.

From its beginning the garden has been a host site for Volunteers for Youth, a nonprofit organization placing in various work sites for teens with community service hours to fulfill. In an average week we’ll host ten to fifteen of these kids on our Saturday workday. Plans for 2007 include[d] a prisoner work-study program in which inmates from Orange Correctional Center [would be able to] volunteer at Anatoth in exchange for vegetables.

Our goal is to make Anatoth Community Garden sustainable in the most basic sense: it operates almost entirely on sunlight and the work of human hands—and the invisible movement of God’s spirit.

Jeremiah teaches us that the way to get along in this world is to skirt Babylon altogether. Don’t waste time fighting the empire, or trying to make it a little less evil; opt out. Step around it and go about your business. Grow your own food, for instance.[3]

Anatoth Community Garden is a new path done with ancient values. God calls us to small, faith-filled practices that opt out of the hope provided by Empire and provide us with a hope against hope. Whether it is Jeremiah redeeming Anatoth or Cedar Grove, North Carolina, Cedar Grove United Methodist, and Fred Bahnson redeeming the land through Anatoth Community Garden, Fred Bahnson believes that the call of God will not be found in Wall Street or Washington, the university, or the halls of power, though they may contribute. So long as the Christian Church mirrors those places, God’s call probably will not be found here either. Where Fred does believe God’s presence and call is found is in small communities who opt out by doing something as simple as growing and sharing food together.

When spiritual practices like these happen in a community, a murder mystery becomes a Biblical story and a gospel lesson. The land is redeemed, the people are redeemed, and the story is redeemed. Let it be so at the United Church of Byron. Amen.

[1] Much of this material comes from this article www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article312 but I used a little of what I remember from my discussion with Fred. I would commend the whole article for Fred’s incredible political, social, and faith-filled commentary. Though all of it should be in quotes, I decided not to do so for this sermon

[2] http://www.anathothgarden.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=47&Itemid=146

[3] www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article312

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Living God in the tenth year of King Zedekiah of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar. ²At that time the army of the king of Babylon was besieging Jerusalem, and the prophet Jeremiah was confined in the court of the guard that was in the palace of the king of Judah, ³where King Zedekiah of Judah had confined him.

Zedekiah had said, “Why do you prophesy and say: Thus says the Living God: I am going to give this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall take it; ⁴King Zedekiah of Judah shall not escape out of the hands of the Chaldeans, but shall surely be given into the hands of the king of Babylon, and shall speak with him face to face and see him eye to eye; ⁵and he shall take Zedekiah to Babylon, and there he shall remain until I attend to him, says the Living God; though you fight against the Chaldeans, you shall not succeed?”

⁶Jeremiah said, The word of the Living God came to me: ⁷Hanamel son of your uncle Shallum is going to come to you and say, “Buy my field that is at Anathoth, for the right of redemption by purchase is yours.”
⁸Then my cousin Hanamel came to me in the court of the guard, in accordance with the word of the Living God, and said to me, “Buy my field that is at Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, for the right of possession and redemption is yours; buy it for yourself.” Then I knew that this was the word of the Living God. ⁹And I bought the field at Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel, and weighed out the money to him, seventeen shekels of silver. ¹⁰I signed the deed, sealed it, got witnesses, and weighed the money on scales. ¹¹Then I took the sealed deed of purchase, containing the terms and conditions, and the open copy; ¹²and I gave the deed of purchase to Baruch son of Neriah son of Mahseiah, in the presence of my cousin Hanamel, in the presence of the witnesses who signed the deed of purchase, and in the presence of all the Judeans who were sitting in the court of the guard. ¹³In their presence I charged Baruch, saying, ¹⁴Thus says the Living One of hosts, the God of Israel: Take these deeds, both this sealed deed of purchase and this open deed, and put them in an earthenware jar, in order that they may last for a long time. ¹⁵For thus says the Living God of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.

¹⁷Ah, Source of All Being, Living God! It is you who made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you.

²⁰You showed signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, and to this day in Israel and among all humankind, and have made yourself a name that continues to this very day.

²⁵Yet you, O Living God, have said to me, “Buy the field for money and get witnesses” —though the city has been given into the hands of the Chaldeans.

Foreign Money and the Midterm Elections

2010-11-01T01:31:00.001-05:00

It is ironic, isn't it? I hear a number of pundits and citizens all up in arms about the number of undocumented folk in our country who might use their enormous number to overthrow us or, at the very least, throw their party out of office (a la the Hebrews and Pharoah . . . fears that the Hebrews might become too numerous in the land). And yet, here we have this decision made by the Supreme Court that corporations can make campaign corporations virtually without limit. That will be foreign money influencing our elections from here to kingdom come. As economist Simon Johnson has stated, "We have effectively enfranchised foreigners in US elections."

Can there be any doubt that what drives our economy and gives it its reason is grotesque wealth? We serve our economy. It does not serve us.

Draft, Jeremiah 10, "A New Path with Ancient Values"

2010-10-30T23:28:00.000-05:00

Jeremiah11UCB2010

Jeremiah 32:1-15, 17, 20, 25

October 31, 2010

I hope some of you now understand why I chose to do a Jeremiah sermon series. Jeremiah can be a downer, a depressing message when we would rather hear about the audacity of hope. What the Judeo-Christian story has always been about, however, is a hope against hope.

I believe we are in a similar time. That is one reason I wanted to explore what this ancient story might have to tell us. The other reason is a murder mystery told to me about four years ago by Fred Bahnson of Cedar Grove, North Carolina.

Before Bill and Emma King bought their little bait and tackle grocery in Cedar Grove, North Carolina, it was a haven for local crack dealers. In a small community still strongly divided by race, Bill and Emma created some town conversation with their interracial marriage. The first thing Bill and Emma did when they arrived was to ask the dealers to leave. Parents began bringing their children to the store for ice cream; neighborhood kids rode their bikes down for a soda. When people couldn’t pay, Bill would let them take food on credit.

On a June afternoon in 2004, Bill King was closing up his shop on the corner of Mill Creek and Carr Store roads when someone walked through the door and shot him in the back of the head. Whatever sense of safety this little farming community had enjoyed before that afternoon in June, one trigger-pull had shattered. The people of Cedar Grove were angry and afraid. The mystery part of the murder was, “What to do next in a little town already torn apart by poverty, drugs, and racial tension?”

In a tour of the tri-county area with Valee, Valee related the number of people who may have had jobs, may have had several jobs, but still were not getting by.

In the spring of 2005, Rev. Hackney initiated a series of community conversations about faith and land. People from Cedar Grove United Methodist came, and so did residents of the wider Cedar Grove community—farmers, retirees, even the local librarians. The discussions began a look at some troubling realities. Why was it that many of those gathered had land, yet within five miles of the church there were people who didn’t get enough to eat? Healthy fresh produce wasn’t affordable for most of these folk. As much of the arable land around Cedar Grove was former tobacco land now lying fallow, be redeemed, and some of that land be used to grow food for people who needed it? And if the church’s mission is to practice reconciliation, doesn’t that include mending the relationship with the land, perhaps restoring some of the fertility lost from years of soil erosion?

Scenobia knew her dream had been prophetic. She decided to donate the five acres to Cedar Grove United Methodist.

If you have been following along in this sermon series, you know that this Biblical story did not begin with Jeremiah. It began with King David on his death bed telling his son, Solomon, to hill all of his adversaries before he ascended to the throne. After killing off a few of his political enemies, he spares the life of the priest, Abiathar, and sends him out of the spiritual center of Jerusalem and off in exile to a small community within shouting distance called, Anatoth. There the priests of Anatoth, living in exile, watch as those enthroned in Judah and Jerusalem make decisions that cut against the grain of neighborliness instituted by the Sinai covenant. Four hundred years later, the pastor’s kid, Jeremiah, emerges from exile in Anatoth, to call a nation and a faith back to its ancient values of neighborliness.

As the nation of Judah is being laid waste by the Babylonian Empire, Jeremiah is told by the Living God to do a nonsensical thing. He is to practice an act of neighborliness that seemingly has no value. God directs him to buy back, the literal meaning of redeem, buy back his family’s land in Anatoth. It is an act of hope against hope, a reminder of a different set of values, as the whole world of Judah and Jerusalem comes crashing down.

Fred Bahnson, member of Cedar Grove United Methodist, tells the Jeremiah story this way:

So if you cannot guess the answer to this mystery, let me share. What Cedar Grove United Methodist Church decided to do with the land given to them as dictated by God to Scenobia Taylor, a descendant of sharecroppers, they developed a community garden. Fred Bahnson is the manager of this field named Anatoth Community Garden.

On there redeemed land, they built a barn where they host potlucks every Tuesday evening and Saturday afternoons. They host pizza parties (with their brick oven pizza), music festivals, and other community events.[2]

Fred shares how Anatoth Community Garden works:

Our goal is to make Anatoth Community Garden sustainable in the most basic sense: it operates almost entirely on sunlight and the work of human hands—and the invisible movement of God’s spirit.

Anatoth Community Garden is a new path done with ancient values. God calls us to small, faith-filled practices that opt out of the hope provided by Empire to provide a hope against hope. Whether it is Jeremiah redeeming Anatoth or Cedar Grove, North Carolina, Cedar Grove United Methodist, and Fred Bahnson redeeming the land through Anatoth Community Garden, Fred Bahnson believes that the call of God will not be found in Wall Street or Washington, the university, or the halls of power, though they may contribute. So long as the Christian Church mirrors those places, God’s call probably will not be found here either. Where Fred does believe God’s presence and call is found is in small communities who opt out by doming something as simple as growing and sharing food together. Let it be so at the United Church of Byron. Amen.

[2] http://www.anathothgarden.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=47&Itemid=146

[3] www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article312

Final, Jeremiah 9, "Repeating the Same Behavior, Expecting Different Results"

2010-10-23T06:06:00.003-05:00

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Living God: ²Hear the words of this covenant, and speak to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. ³You shall say to them, Thus says the Living God, the God of Israel: Cursed be anyone who does not heed the words of this covenant, ⁴which I commanded your ancestors when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, from the iron-smelter, saying, Listen to my voice, and do all that I command you. So shall you be my people, and I will be your God, ⁵that I may perform the oath that I swore to your ancestors, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey, as at this day.

Then I answered, “So be it, Living God.”

⁶
And the Living God said to me: Proclaim all these words in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem: Hear the words of this covenant and do them. ⁷For I solemnly warned your ancestors when I brought them up out of the land of Egypt, warning them persistently, even to this day, saying, Obey my voice. ⁸Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but everyone walked in the stubbornness of an evil will. So I brought upon them all the words of this covenant, which I commanded them to do, but they did not.

²³
Can Ethiopians change their skin or leopards their spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil.

¹¹The Living God said to me: Do not pray for the welfare of this people. ¹²Although they fast, I do not hear their cry, and although they offer burnt offering and grain offering, I do not accept them; but by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence I consume them.

Jeremiah10UCB2010

Jeremiah 11:1-8, 13:23; 14:11-12

October 24, 2010

When I was doing work as an interim pastor at Pilgrim United Church of Christ in Wichita, Kansas, Rev. John Krueger, the Conference Minister of the Kansas-Oklahoma Conference, wrote a paper that was widely distributed within the Conference. In that paper, Rev. Krueger likened churches and families to community wells from which many people not even associated with a particular family or a church drink deeply. He also stated that families and Christian churches struggle to draw good and healthy boundaries around those wells.

We readily give people permission to poison those wells. Even when we know that a certain family member or a certain congregational member is poisoning the well, destroying it for everyone else, we have a difficult time telling them to stop, or even, when things become really bad, saying, in grief and with tears in our eyes, “Sugar, honey, sweetie pie, we are going to have to ask you to leave. We still love you. But all we see you doing is, unfortunately, poisoning the well time and time again. And until you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that your behavior is changed, we need to ask you to leave.” Because we have such difficulty doing this, many families and churches never have a chance to be healthy.

As Christians, we hear about how we are to forgive and forgive and forgive, and so, we too often allow the poisoning to go on as our well becomes undrinkable, dries up, or becomes toxic far beyond our family and community.

On a road trip one day, Rev. Krueger and I discussed his metaphor of the community well. John said that one day, while he was recording his mileage, after being at a church for several hours to talk about the conflict that was ripping their church apart, he came back to his steering wheel to see the one person he knew was preying upon everybody else’s fears, taking advantage of everyone else’s lack of courage, and poisoning the community well. There that person was, right in front of him, with his hands on the steering wheel, with his car running, right in front of him. In a human moment, he thought to himself, he could take care of many problems if he just stepped a little bit on the gas. Knowing that he entertained such a thought, but would never do it, we laughed, a little bit uncomfortably.

The point is, Rev. Krueger was only able to entertain such thoughts because nobody in the congregation could get past their fear, had enough courage to say, with tears in their eyes, “Sugar, honey, sweetie pie, you need to leave. You are poisoning our well.”

One of the continuing themes in the Bible is the patriarch or prophet who pleads for their people. Abraham, upon hearing from God that Sodom’s destruction is imminent, knowing that his nephew Lot and his family live in the city of Sodom, bargains with God for the life of the city. What if fifty righteous people are found in the city of Sodom, God, will you then destroy the city? “No, God says, I will forgive the rest of the city for the sake of fifty righteous people.” Abraham whittles God down to ten righteous people, God agreeing that if there are ten righteous people in the city, the rest of the city will be forgiven.[1]

Moses bargains with God for the life of the people when God is ready to consume the people for choosing to follow an idol made of gold, the idol of wealth-pursuit practiced by the Egyptians. This wealth-pursuit practice made Hebrew slavery hard and cruel as it asked the Hebrews to produce more and more with less and less. In his pleading for the Hebrew people, in the wilderness and on the mountain, Moses reminds God that the Egyptians will reflect on the Hebrew liberation, see them destroyed by the Hebrew God, and believe that the Hebrew God only brought them out into the mountains to kill them. “Remember your pledge, remember your covenant with the patriarchs before me,” Moses pleads. And the story relates that God’s mind is changed and God’s hand is stayed.[2]

In the Scripture passage we have before us from Jeremiah, however, God does not allow Jeremiah to pray on behalf of the people. In chapter thirteen, God asks a rhetorical question, “Can leopards change their spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil.” Like some kind of snide remark after the rhetorical question, God states that those who are regular and consistent in their practice of evil, yeah, right, they can do good.

In some ways, this is a startling text, a difficult one that suggests that reform is no longer possible. Added religious ritual, whether that be fasting or more offering at the altar, will not change God’s mind. The rulers and the wealthy of Judah and Jerusalem have ripped off the poor for so long, made every law and court ruling bend their way, made the scales in the marketplace tip toward their every whim and desire, that they do not even have an ability to blush, they have an inability to do good.

Before this passage, Jeremiah is repeating God’s covenant language from the Exodus, used for the ritual renewal of the covenant found in the book of Deuteronomy[3], over and over again: “So shall you be my people and I will be your God”; “a land flowing with milk and honey”; “heed,” “hear,” “incline their ear”; and, of course, the word “covenant” repeated again and again. Twice God enjoins Jeremiah not to pray for the welfare of the people.[4] Though they may offer all these religious rites and rituals to appeal to God, their triad of values—royal wealth, military might, and insider wisdom—has consequences for the nation. They will be consumed by the sword, famine, and pestilence.

They value a military might which will come home to roost in the sword, the consumption of their own beloved sons and daughters. They value a royal wealth that will come home to roost in pestilence, the consumption of their own animal livestock and herds, the sign of wealth in ancient times. They value an insider wisdom that will come home to roost in a consumption of the earth, a sure sign that they are smart in all the wrong things, things that use and destroy the earth’s resources.

Last week we heard Jeremiah share God’s holy triad of steadfast love, justice, and righteousness. The consequence of living according to those covenantal concepts was that the community, the nation, would live long on the land. Living according to the triad of royal wealth, military might, and insider wisdom, Jeremiah wrote, had its own dire consequences.

The covenant promise God made to the people is that the Living One would be with them and be their God. But the nation is unable to change its spots, turn around, and has become so accustomed to evil practices that it cannot do good. In such situations, Christians too often see the judgmental God of the Old Testament as compared to the kind and merciful God of the New Testament. In doing so, we do not recognize the need in our own lives for the gifts of absence and accountability.

Yes, I struggle with a God who, as Jeremiah believes, might intentionally bring about warfare, the death of so much of creation, and ecological blight. And yet, I do believe there are times when God’s breath is removed from systems and structures that bring about suffering and death. Transformation will only occur if it appears that God is not giving a shoulder to systems that destroy.

Maybe that is splitting theological hairs. I want to read Jeremiah’s warnings not as a direct result of God’s intentional actions, but as a consequence of values and actions that already create so much death and destruction. If a leopard cannot change its spots, then a new relationship with alternative values must change and transform so that a person, an institution, a community or nation, is no longer a leopard. The community or nation must transform from a leopard to something radically different.

When a community or a nation is so rife with greed, the culture of war, and information manipulation, sometimes all that is left for God to do is to remove God’s self from the community’s or nation’s systems and structures. To pretend that reform can carry the day when, in reality, transformation is needed, only gives credence to the idea that a community’s or nation’s values are not fundamentally flawed. We just have to tweak the system, and happy days will be here again. The problem with that argument is that we will be right back to square one with values that will lead us down the worm hole again.

As a pastor, I have had any number of people come to me expecting me to tell them to take a family member back, forgive and forget, never turn away someone who is of your own flesh and blood. But the reality is that there are sometimes when family members, friends, or even church members will so poison the community or familial well, that we know there is no forgiving unless or until they are willing to prove they are no longer a leopard, not accustomed to harming themselves or others when the whole family or community comes together. They are too often caught, unwilling to recognize the consequences of their actions. And by inviting them or going to see them, our presence affirms the poison in the family and community.

Excluding someone or not offering our presence to someone because they are accustomed to doing evil should not be entered into lightly. We should look deep into ourselves to ask whether we exclude someone because of our own prejudices, uncomfortableness, or shortcomings. In the book of Jeremiah, God suffers and grieves over this loss. God’s unwillingness to forgive Judah and Jerusalem is painful to God, goes to the deepest part of God’s heart. But when the community or familial well is poisoned to the point where it is dry or no one can drink from it, then there are times we must not forgive so that no more evil can be done to us or the wider community. We must no longer give our weight, effort, presence, shoulder, or money to a way of being that will only bring about dire consequences time after time after time.

And I recognize that in the New Testament, Jesus tells neighbors to forgive neighbors over and over again so that the community remains sustainable and viable. Splitting a community during the time of Jesus left the community vulnerable to Roman violence.

I believe there are times, hard and grieving and difficult times, when we recognize that a leopard cannot remain a leopard and change its spots. It must become something else. If we enter back into the relationship, the person or persons poisoning the well must somehow become something other than a leopard, transform their entire value system.

So it is not only with our family and community but also our nation and our world. Rarely, in media coverage of some of our country’s gravest ills, do we hear people asking the question, “Why?” As a person of faith, I worry we do not ask why because we have been pounded on by so much media, infomercials, and so many pundits to believe that our freedom is found in earning as much wealth as humanly possible, believing that we deserved or earned that wealth, and being able to spend it as we please. I believe we are invested in certain systems of wealth creation, however, that are destroying all of us, asking us to take up the sword, and creating ecological devastation.

We are invested in economies of exploding health care costs. We never ask why we continue to invest in economies of high fructose corn syrup, when most of our country is suffering from obesity, has an ever-increasing rate of pre-teen diabetes and heart disease. You pay for the extra care I need to treat me and my family for the complications and consequences that arise as a result of this diet. Our country spends billions of dollars each year supporting this system. We are accustomed to it.

We never ask why we are so invested in economies of immigration. Church World Service has chronicled how our country spends billions of dollars each year supporting a system that creates great wealth for a few and dumps tons of food commodities into the economies of other nations, thereby leaving millions of subsistence farmers without the wherewithal to farm in their own country.[5] As a consequence, we waste billions of our dollars on enforcement by building a wall on poor and middle class parts of the border (not on wealthy golf courses), hiring more and more border patrol agents, pouring millions of dollars into Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and building bigger and bigger prisons. We are accustomed to the hate and fear that feeds more and more money into that system.

President George W. Bush told us that we are addicted to an oil economy with a resource that Oklahoma oil baron Boone Pickens has said has reached its peak. As a country, oil companies spend billions of dollars on lobbying Congress, former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan said that the Iraq War was “largely about oil”, and we send 750 billion dollars a year overseas to purchase oil.[6] As a consequence, we are witness to the ecological devastation and war that is being waged on our planet, must go through the incredible grief of mourning our sons and daughters, and continue to exhaust our national treasury in pursuit of black gold. But, once again, I am accustomed to the freedom my family has with three cars.

These economies and their consequences are consuming and killing us. God is not in them. God is not in these economies. We are just beginning to see the untold suffering that is beginning to happen in our country as a result of these economies. They must become something other than leopards, transform their value system, for us to be fully present in them, for God’s shoulder to hold and lift them up.

To believe that if individual people were only more responsible is to say that people are at fault for drinking from community, national, and international wells that have already been poisoned. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said it best when he stated, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”[7]

We must use the absence of God as a gift to seek out and discern those places where God is moving and bringing life and begin to transform some of those edifices. I know. I’ve become accustomed to all these things. The way feels scary. But doggone it, you know, that’s why we all don’t have all these little shrines at home with communion tables, piped in music, and individual prayer time. We don’t call that church. Here, we have each other. And here we can make small decisions for economies to which we might not be accustomed, but nonetheless bring life to us, to our community, and rippling out, to the world.

In the end, that’s why we call it faith. It is not that we know all the steps toward transformation. It is that we just know the next step. And, as we walk that alternative path, with alternative values, the God of covenant promises to be with us and walk with us. Thanks be to God. Amen.

[1] Genesis 18:28ff

[2] Exodus 32:10ff

[3] Deuteronomy 7:16-28; Joshua 24, The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 1135, n. 11:1-17.

[4] Jeremiah 11:14, 14:11-12.

[5] Church World Service, “Sowing Justice for Family Farmers Everywhere,” 2007, http://www.churchworldservice.org/PDFs/Resources/SowingJustice.pdf. See also http://www.nffc.net/Farmers%20Worldwide/bsf%20declaration%204-3-07-1.pdf .

[6] Glenden Brown, “Robert Kennedy Jr. in Utah: What we spend on foreign oil in four years would pay for total energy independence,” One Utah: Pending Approval, April 3, 2010. http://oneutah.org/2010/04/03/robert-kennedy-jr-in-utah-what-we-spend-on-foreign-oil-in-four-years-would-pay-for-total-energy-independence/

[7] Martin Luther King, “Beyond VietNam,” April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City.

A reminder that no religion, no people . . .

2010-10-23T00:04:00.004-05:00

no race, or tribe is so monolithic that they can be defined by one stroke of the pen.

An exhibit is going on in St. Louis right now that shares the story of Albanian Muslims who risked their own lives and hid Jewish people during World War II. They lived their lives by a code of faith and honor called Besa. Besa requires one to endanger their own life to provide protection for one seeking asylum. Besa supercedes blood feuds, tribal traditions, and faith differences.

One of the men who hid Jews said, "I did nothing. All Jews are our brothers." Time after time, this is the mantra that is heard when people do simple, miraculous, everyday things. "It's just what you do." Justice, although a struggle, often seems self-evident to those who practice it.

Albania's prime minister gave a secret order during the Nazi occupation. "All Jewish children will sleep with your children, all will eat the same food, and all will live as one family."

May your days, my days, the days left on this good earth be numbered by acts and practices of Besa. It may be what saves us.

The full story is found here.

Final, Jeremiah 8, "A Difference in Values"

2010-10-13T22:55:00.002-05:00

Throughout this Jeremiah sermon series, our congregation has been singing this wonderful song written by Brian Wren with beautiful music written by Ron Klusmeier. Ron has a great website with some fantastic songs--many of the words written by people like Brian Wren or Natalie Sleeth. You can find the words and music to this beautiful song by clicking here.

I still need input into these sermons if anyone is willing. I know that I haven't been able to post many early.

Jeremiah9UCB2010

Jeremiah 9:17-24

October 17, 2010

Thus says the Living God of hosts: Consider, and call for the mourning women to come; send for the skilled women to come; let them quickly raise a dirge over us, so that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids flow with water. For a sound of wailing is heard from Zion: “How we are ruined! We are utterly shamed, because we have left the land, because they have cast down our dwellings.” Hear, O women, the word of the Living One, and let your ears receive the word of God’s mouth; teach to your daughters a dirge, and each to her neighbor a lament. “Death has come up into our windows, it has entered our palaces, to cut off the children from the streets and the young men from the squares.” Speak! Thus says the Living God: “Human corpses shall fall like dung upon the open field, like sheaves behind the reaper, and no one shall gather them.”

Thus says the Living God: Do not let the wise boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth; but let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the Living God; I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, says the Living God.

Almost two years ago to the day I began here as the pastor at the United Church of Byron. And almost immediately, I convinced many of you to attend a several week session of the Healthy Congregations curriculum at All Saints Lutheran. Notice I did not use the words conned into or forced. Persuaded, maybe. Thankfully, you were willing to humor the new pastor.

I got a flavor for this congregation and the incredible leadership here when our numbers outnumbered the people attending from All Saints Lutheran. An even smaller number of people may remember the three requirements the Healthy Congregations material puts forward for a good mission statement. First, the statement should be no longer than a sentence. Second, the statement should be understandable to a twelve-year old. Third, if the congregation were held at gunpoint, the whole congregation could repeat it.

When I was doing interim ministry work in Wichita, Kansas, I was able to coax a whole table full of people from Pilgrim Congregational UCC to attend a Healthy Congregations workshop. When the speaker began reciting the requirements for a good mission statement, our moderator began distributing around our table the two-page mission statement written by a former pastor. When the speaker arrived at the third requirement, our moderator hastily re-collected the mission statement she had distributed and leaned in with a smile to whisper, “I’m getting the revolver out of my purse right now.” We all laughed with a lump in our throat.

The reason for such requirements is that mission statements should not demand an encyclopedic memory for us to be able to clearly inscribe or give full throat to their meaning. Mission statements should not be so intellectually-driven that a Confirmand is unable understand them. And, finally, mission statements should so captivate our heart, soul, mind, and strength that we can bring them forward to guide us at times of great stress or discord. We should not have to run for some document buried in our archives to know what our mission statement is. A mission statement should convey the most deeply-held values written on our collective hearts. Like a North Star, a mission statement should lead us forward, tell us next steps, when the way is dark and the night is full of shadows.

A mission statement should state values that say, when the going gets tough, here is how I or we will be acting in the world.

The Scripture from Jeremiah today is the passage just after God is said to be weeping over the plight of the economically poor—the passage we read on World Communion Sunday when God asks if there is a balm in Gilead. The weeping of the poor becomes the weeping of God, and today, the weeping of God becomes the grief and weeping of the nation.

The Exile has begun. God calls in the professional mourners to weep over leaving their land. The land—the very thing that was part of the covenant with the people—is now lost. Homes on the land have been destroyed. Public and community places, where people would gather on the land, are now no longer available. In the fields and farms, the land was fertilized by human corpses. All the ways the land provided for human habitation and vitality were no more.

Why has creation become unraveled, the land become a place of desolation? Where, up to now in the Scripture verse, God is bystander, an observer of all that is going on, God now becomes a subject. God shares what the values, the national mission statement was of Judah and Jerusalem before the Exile began. Judah and Jerusalem boasted of a word used often in Hebrew Scripture synonymous with power and use of the military.[1] They boasted of might or strength. They boasted of a word used often in Hebrew Scripture to connote royal riches.[2] They boasted of their wealth. They boasted of a word used by Jeremiah to suggest the access and control of worldly information and media. They boasted in their wisdom. The Living God asserts that Judah and Jerusalem’s values, their mission statement, which included might, wealth, and wisdom, led to their fall. Let the wailing and grief begin.

These are such important words in the lexicon of Jewish theology that even the apostle Paul, six hundred years later, picks them up to detail his alternative values and his alternative mission statement. In one of his letters to the churches in Corinth, Paul writes, “If I am to boast, let me boast not of might but of weakness. If I am to boast, let me boast not of wealth but of poverty. If I am to boast, let me boast not of wisdom but of foolishness.”[3] To recognize how truly counter-cultural Paul’s values are, think about how many Christians you see on TV or in print boasting of these Christian values—weakness, poverty, and foolishness.

Paul sees those same values of military might, wealth and riches, inner-circle wisdom carrying the day in his time, six hundred years later. The apostle Paul is imploring those he writes to step out of the mission statement that is part of the wider world so that they may seek after something radically different. For Paul knows that early Christians can find themselves unintentionally aspiring after values that will bring their communities and themselves, as individuals, death and desolation.

Continuing in Jeremiah, we learn God’s values. God’s mission statement is found in the last part of the Scripture passage read for today. “I am the Living God. ‘I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight,’ says the Living God.” In contrast to the triad of might, wealth, and wisdom, God acts with the triad of steadfast love, justice, and righteousness—chesed, mishpat, and tzedekah. These are the words I entrust to you, as the people of the United Church of Byron, that they may be written on your hearts, that they might guide each of your next steps, and that they might be to you a lamp unto your feet as you walk through the valley of the shadow of death. These words are found all over Scripture and define the God of our tradition and the life, mission, and ministry of Christ.

Because they are Hebrew words, let me define them as they are seen again and again in Hebrew Scripture. Chesed, steadfast love, is to stand in solidarity within one another, to honor our commitments, and to be reliable partners on the road of life. It means that we will be persistent in our willingness to stand for one another. Even when the world might seek to de-humanize another person or de-value God’s creation, the Living God will not be duped by name-calling or faulty facts.

Mishpat, justice, is making sure all members of the community have access to resources and goods for the sake of a viable life of dignity. In the covenant tradition, Hebrew Scripture focuses particularly on three groups who are vulnerable to having their access to resources and goods compromised—the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant. In a culture still largely governed by the whims and wishes of adult, Hebrew males, these groups needed an advocate. The widow, orphan, and immigrant had no standing of their own in the senate or the square, at the bank or at the market—the places of power and wealth. To do justice then, was to see and know life from their perspective.

Tzedekah, righteousness, is about the active intervention into social affairs to rehabilitate society. Tzedekah is also about having an inner integrity that is expressed through outer action. Interrupting the status quo and working toward transformation are hard. Nobody likes to enter into that much conflict. Righteousness says that if interruption, transformation, and conflict need to happen to rehabilitate society, then bring it on . No hurdles are too high, no stumbling blocks are too many which will keep us off the path. If one says, “I value this!” but then blinks and gives up when things get tough, that person betrays themself as something less than a righteous dude.

I am the Living God. And this is my mission statement. I act with chesed, mishpat, and tzedekah,--steadfast love, justice, and righteousness. The Living God makes it clear that this is no namby-pamby mission statement. God says, “I delight in these things. I get jacked and jazzed for them. I am passionate about these things.”[4] These words are full of persistence, grit, and determination.

People of the United Church of Byron, I give these holy words to you as the Living God’s mission statement. I entrust these holy words to you as the People of God, praying and hoping with all that is within me that they will be our values and mission statement. That same triad of military might, royal wealth, and insider wisdom dominates our culture. Close to 2600 years after the Exile, 2000 years after the apostle Paul, I enjoin you to find alternative values so that the pillars of creation are forever in order and shalom, that we all might live long on the land that God has given us. If someone would put a gun to our head and ask us what our faith is all about, I hope and pray that we would not only be able to recite these words but sing them from our souls.

So let us sing of chesed, steadfast love. Let us sing, of mishpat, justice. Let us sing of tzedekah, righteousness. Let these words be inscribed on our hearts. May they be written above our doorposts so that we may see them as we go out and come in. May we emphasize them when we read from the new Bibles our Sunday School children and candidates for confirmation have received. Let us sing, People of God, of steadfast love, justice, and righteousness.

In the square and in the senate, in the bank and in the market, may we be the people, may we be the community, that sings God’s song. Amen.

[1] I Chronicles 29:12; 2 Chronicles 20:6; Esther 10:2

[2] I Samuel 17:25; I Kings 10:23; Esther 1:4

[3] I Corinthians 1:31ff.

[4] Almost all of these are direct quotes and information from Walter Brueggemann’s lecture at the UCC General Synod, Synod in the City, given at Hartford, Connecticut, on June 23, 2007. There is no way that I can deliver their meaning and understanding as well as he does.

Final Jeremiah 7, "An Inability to Blush" (The Myth of Innocence)

2010-10-11T13:05:00.001-05:00

Jeremiah 7

Jeremiah 6:13-15

October 10, 2010

For from the least to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. ¹⁴They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. ¹⁵They acted shamefully, they committed abomination; yet they were not ashamed, they did not know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall; at the time that I punish them, they shall be overthrown, says the Living God.

Growing up in a town like Byron, I remember how invested I was in believing that my hometown had a certain something that made it better than anywhere else in the world. I had a certain romance with being a Metamora Redbird that was encouraged by my football coaches, promoted, in general, by the whole community, and even encouraged by my local church. Seriously, I remember the organist from our church playing the team fight song for the postlude when our team advanced in the state football playoffs. I was in the best town, in the best school, and in the best church in the whole wide world. It’s not that anyone really believed these things, on the surface. Just that, when push came to shove, we all kind of believed these things down deep.

We all know what went on in those other towns. Morton—that was the community for the uptight snobs. Washington—hardened criminals could be found in their schools. Chillicothe and that Princeville area—a cross between a drug town and river rats. Eureka—bunch of hicks really. Nobody really took the time to disabuse me of those notions.

But, luckily, I had real life experiences that helped me grow and learn about people in different communities and the good and the bad that could be found everywhere. One of the greatest supports for our family when my dad died was the Eureka High School baseball coach, Mike Simenc. He was a class act and said some incredibly words to me about my dad. My brother later coached baseball at Eureka and loved it there. My sister ended up marrying one of those hardened criminals from Washington. He is a great guy, a good father, and, as it turns out, there are more people like him in Washington. I was a youth pastor in Morton, Illinois, for several years and one of my favorite families in the church was a group of pumpkin farmers just outside of town. Rather than stuck up, they were salt of the earth kind of people. And wouldn’t you know, I ended up marrying a woman from the Princeville area. She tells me that they don’t all do drugs there.

I also began to see some of the rain clouds in the romantic picture I had painted of my hometown. Christian fundamentalism run amok harmed my family and my church. Football players, stealing from the Student Council store and using drugs, were not held accountable. I still love my hometown, but that love was measured by some gut-wrenching experiences in school, in church, and in my home. And how incredible it was to have my stereotypes and prejudices exploded by wonderful experiences of others outside my hometown.

We can all laugh at local pride or patriotism gone too far, down deep know that there are good kids that play for other schools, incredible people who live in other countries, and people of other faiths from whom we can learn, but too often we allow others to play our pride and patriotism to step outside our values and do horrendous things.

One of the ways that national patriotism is played is by creating a dream or myth of who we are to suggest that we are the only doers of good in the world and the people particularly positioned to bring about peace and goodwill, regardless of our actions. Folks have referred to this dream of our own goodness regardless of how we act as American exceptionalism.

“In short, there’s simply not; a more congenial spot; for happily-ever-aftering than here; in Camelot.” Richard Harris does it much better when he half-sings it, half says it. Camelot is still remembered in Western society as the ideal benevolent monarchy. Defending a worthy cause against great odds, peace in the land, protecting the weak and the helpless innocent, the king as connected to the land, the egalitarianism of the round table, and the spiritual quest and pilgrimage for the Holy Grail are all characteristics of that holy nation to which we, as both Democrats and Republicans find ourselves aspiring. Whether it was President Reagan dressed as a cowboy on his ranch, President Kennedy’s involvement in the Civil Rights movement, President George W. Bush espousing “no child left behind” or any of our benevolent monarchs ending a speech by saying, “God bless America”, we believe we are in Camelot or headed for it. Our country is divinely ordained.

I am too young to experience much of the Camelot myth created around the Kennedy administration, but I have seen that myth play out in a Time magazine feature article about the Clinton candidacy and presidency, and also in a popular TV show that got very good ratings, “The West Wing.” Remember that show? If only our benevolent monarch were as King Arthur-like, as vulnerable and principled, as Josiah Bartlett. Then we could wield Excalibur, that invincible weapon, knowing that we are truly innocents in the world, set out on a spiritual quest or pilgrimage to make the whole world as just and peaceful as Camelot.

We live in the most powerful nation on earth. And there are sometimes when the wealth and power in our nation can be a buffer against the evils of the world. Nobody exports waste products into this part of the world. No life-threatening, communicable disease threatens to wipe us out. No drought will wipe out crops that might remove our food supply for the year. No para-military group will be sent from Rockford to keep the rowdy people of Byron in check.

Though no evils such as these may be visited upon us, we will still inherit parts of the human condition which are unavoidable. Cancer still ravages us or our nearest and dearest friends. People very dear to us leave and we grieve. Our power and wealth does not protect us from broken families, broken lives, and even addiction. But AIDS/HIV taking a whole generation from us, another country sending troops to the Rock River Valley, or devastating drought or blight will probably not be a part of our landscape in the next several years.

This morning we commission adults to go on mission on our behalf to a place in the world where there is not so great a buffer. In going to such places in the world, I believe we really open ourselves to the incredible power God has given us in the world. We learn in such places that, as the song “God of Jeremiah” states, “when we’ve sown a hundred whirlwinds, but have yet to reap” there are places which do bear the consequences of our actions. The Gulf coast does not have that buffer right now. Whatever we put into the river or stream or ocean, their children will inherit downstream. There is no buffer. Life must be lived in a way that is life-giving, according to the values God intends for all of creation, or they will not survive.

Communities like these not only inherit whatever they sow, they also inherit whatever is sown upstream or in their eco-system. So what these missionaries will experience on this work trip is how life is lived without a net. God’s Spirit is at work in such places, helping to grow life-giving seeds sown by the community. God’s power becomes evident when there is no buffer which competes with the life-giving power that God provides.

Doing mission work outside our own local community, outside our own nation reminds us of the life-giving power of God we would never have experienced otherwise. Sometimes it also rubs the romance off to experience how our values are lived in real life and how we must be accountable to those values.

During the time of Jeremiah, the prophet, many people who lived within the context of the royal courtyard believed that God could only be found in Judah and Jerusalem regardless of their integrity and values. Jeremiah believed these people, the culture created, left Judah and Jerusalem with an inability to blush, an inability to be embarrassed by their own behavior. The ruling elite, the wealthy in Judah and Jerusalem, believed the hometown, the chosen people, the beloved nation could do no wrong in God’s sight. Regardless of the wars they started, the people they harmed, the wealth they amassed, they were innocent because God would forever bless their actions. Everyone lived upstream, never believing that they were to be accountable for their actions, never believing there were consequences for the evils they might do.

Jeremiah wanted them to be aware that the buffer did not really protect them. It merely provided an escape which allowed them to delay the inevitable.

Jeremiah knew what the story of Camelot tells. Truth be told, Camelot is a tragedy. Camelot, as the ideal, is a lie. Scott Johnson, writing for the Los Angeles Times, wrote:

King Arthur’s stainless Camelot ends on a blood-soaked battlefield, without a breath of victory or life. The dying king, ringed by corpses, learns as we one day may that there are no human messiahs, no innocent souls. Wise at his death, he orders Bedvidere, the lone survivor of the carnage to throw Arthur’s Excalibur, the “invincible” weapon that in the end saves not a soul, back to the Lady of the Lake, beyond the dangerous grasp(s) of [humankind]. Bedvidere hesitates, but finally heaves the sword into the waves. It is an act, if we are wise, to imitate.

Local pride and patriotism do not have to be bad things. But if they build a romantic ideal which does not allow us to receive the good things God intends for us from other communities and nations, then we need to abandon them for something more real.

A colleague of mine from seminary, Samuel from Kenya, told me when I asked why international missionary trips were important: “Because, Mike, if you never leave your own country, you think only your own mother cooks well.”

If local pride and national patriotism do not allow us to hold our own community and nation accountable, to blush or be embarrassed by wrongdoing that cuts across the grain of our most deeply held values, then we must dig deep within our faith tradition to ask for something more real. If local pride and patriotism blind us or help us escape to a false sense of self-esteem, then they must die for something more real.

For it is the Living God who seeks to give us gifts far beyond our community, nation, and faith. It is the Living God who wants us to live in full accountability and peace with our neighbor, whether that neighbor be in Winnebago, Back Bay, or with someone who practices a faith in worship of the Beneficent and Merciful Allah. For me, having some of the romance rubbed off in my hometown of Metamora, gives me eyes to see that living life in a community like Byron can be pretty grand. And that there a lot of mothers . . . and fathers here who cook well. Amen.

Final Jeremiah 6, "A Balm in Gilead"

2010-10-05T10:47:00.001-05:00

Jeremiah 6

Jeremiah 8:18-9:3

October 3, 2010

My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. ¹⁹Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land: “Is the Living God not in Zion? Is Zion’s Sovereign not in her?” (“Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?”) ²⁰“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” ²¹For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. ²²Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?

9O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people! ²O that I had in the desert a traveler’s lodging place, that I might leave my people and go away from them! For they are all adulterers, a band of traitors. ³They bend their tongues like bows; they have grown strong in the land for falsehood, and not for truth; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not know me, says the Living God.

In honor of my mother joining us for worship this morning, I thought I would tell a tale about her, share a story from my childhood. Don’t worry, Mom, I won’t tell them about the time . . .well, no, I won’t.

I know it’s hard to believe, but I was not always the gracious, thoughtful person you see before you. It’s true. I know, I know. Hard to believe.

I remember one particular day in high school. My mom had been working around the house all day, and I think I had just been resting, watching TV, getting ready to go out that evening. Life can be hard as a teenager. Some of the details of how much work I had done around the house that day are a little foggy. What I do remember is that it was about a half hour before I was supposed to head out, and I couldn’t find the jeans I wanted to wear. So, without a brain in my head, I queried my mother with a load of laundry in her arms, “Mom, did you wash my jeans?” The look on my mom’s face related to me that I had just crossed over into the abyss and given her the authority to bring the payload. “Your jeans? Your jeans?”

“Ok, mom, I’ll just back away. Stupid question.”

“Jeez, Mike, I’ve been washing everybody else’s clothes, swept and scrubbed the kitchen floor, and vacuumed the house, and forgot about your jeans.”

“Yep, I’m sure I can find something to wear.”

“Your jeans?”

Backing away slowly.

I suppose it is with many of us during our adolescent years, that we have to learn the hard way—the sun, moon, and the stars are not in orbit just for us. We are to remember that family is more than one person. If the family is going to function in a healthy, harmonious way, it cannot be about one person’s jeans. And it is part of the parental prerogative and responsibility to remind us that we have necessary boundaries and limits.

Those of you who were present for my first sermon on Jeremiah will remember that theme. To not heed those boundaries and limits has consequences for all of us. Creation, itself, begins to unravel. Jeremiah suggests that those necessary boundaries and limits, found within the Law given to the people at Sinai, are about creating a space for the whole community, the whole nation.

And notice in the passage we have before us today that this breaking of boundaries and crossing of limits leads to suffering on earth. What we so often fail to miss is that this suffering on earth, particularly among the poor, leads to the suffering of God. God is literally heartsick.

The Scripture verse asks, “Is there no balm in Gilead, nothing to heal the wound of the poor, the wound of God?” We have gotten so used to singing the old hymn that there is a balm, we forget that the original answer was, “No, there is no balm in Gilead.” In fact, God cries so many tears on behalf of the poor that God’s eyes cannot possibly cry enough. O that God’s head were a spring and God’s eyes a fountain to cry day and night on behalf of the poor.

God is so invested in the whole family, the whole community, the whole nation, that no group can claim that is just about getting their needs met, their jeans washed. Grow up and stop pretending that your self-concern and personal relationship is the sum of faith and all there is to life. God is weeping and suffering, and your inability to recognize your responsibility, shows your immaturity.

We find this profound conflict in Jeremiah throughout all of Scripture. There is a major difference between the worldly understanding of why the poor suffer and a Biblical understanding of why the poor suffer. The worldly understanding suggests that the poor suffer because of some fault of their own. We can see it in our own culture. Everyone has a story about a poor person who is buying cigarettes with food stamps or a person who uses a gas donation to buy liquor. We tout the irresponsibility of the suffering poor, costing the taxpayers thousands of dollars, as a way to maintain the system.

In Jeremiah’s time, the ruling elite suggest that an economic system based on greed and debt went hand in hand with love of country and was ordained by God. In our country, some even suggest that a system based on greed and debt goes hand in hand with democracy. The Biblical understanding states that the poor suffer because there is something fundamentally wrong with a system that grinds the poor into dust. We make them responsible for every jot and tittle on their credit card agreement, mortgage, or payday loan when God knows the poor have to use all their energy just to survive another day.

We know the system is especially bad when the wealthy can bilk the system for billions of dollars without any consequence. And, truth be told, very few people seem to have a story that asks if there is any balm in Gilead—asks who will heal the wound of the innocent poor as a result—asks who will heal the wound of God. Only the troublesome prophet, thrown in the mud, put in prison, and having their life threatened will speak these words of grief.

We have been told to be positive about our economic system so often, that we assume it is the only response people of faith can offer. “It will turn around. God will see you through. God never gives you anything you can’t handle.” As Jeremiah might have said, “It’s not time to get positive. It’s time to get real.”

According to the Associated Press, experts believe that 2009 saw the largest single year increase in the U.S. poverty rate since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959.[1]

The U.S. poverty rate is now the third worst among the developed nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.[2]

One out of every six Americans is now being served by at least one government anti-poverty program.[3]

One out of every seven mortgages in the United States was either delinquent or in foreclosure during the first quarter of 2010.[4]

The number of Americans receiving long-term unemployment benefits has risen over 60 percent in just the past year.[5]

One out of every five children in the United States is now living in poverty.[6]

At our recent Byron area clergy gathering, we learned that foreclosures in Ogle County have tripled since 2007.[7]

Not surprisingly, and I believe in correspondence with these figures, according to Forbes magazine’s just released survey for the year, the combined net worth of the 400 richest Americans climbed 8% this year, to $1.37 trillion.[8] Between 1965 and 2000, the ratio of CEO pay to that of a typical worker soared from 24:1 to 300:1, and the gap also widened between the CEO and his or her third in command.[9]

Eric Dezenhall, a Washington, D.C., crisis manager and former intern in the Reagan administration relates that it can be a “career ender” to be the bearer of bad news in the corporate sector. Corporate America has become so enthralled with the power of positive thinking, Dezenhall says, that “[c]orporations can become ruthless about making money, but when it comes to being realistic . . . .” One of the CEOs, Dezenhall talked to told him that, as a CEO, he was most lied to man in America.[10]

After all, who would tell the truth into the climate before the bubble burst? Mike Gelband, who ran the real estate accounts for Lehman Brothers, told his boss, CEO Richard Fuld, that they needed to find a new business model with the crisis he saw on the horizon. Gelband was promptly fired. Two years later, Lehman Brothers went belly-up.[11]

Christian motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar was the keynoter at one corporate gathering where he told workers, “It’s your own fault; don’t blame the system; don’t blame the boss—work harder and pray more.” AT&T had its employees go to one such conference on the same day that they announced they would lay off 15,000 workers in the next two years.[12]

In contrast to Zig Ziglar, I say it is time to get real. I say it is time for people of faith to stop acting like God cares only and primarily about our prayer life, our Biblical study, and what we do for an hour on Sunday morning. Well, ok, a little more than an hour on Sunday morning. It is time for people of faith to rise up, to recognize that we need to get off the grid of greed, and to begin spiritual practices that are neighborly and sustainable. We have been schnuckered into believing that our life’s objective is to get a piece of pie that is bigger than our neighbor’s, to not only keep up with the Joneses, but to get something bigger and technology better than the Joneses, and to make us so afraid of one another that we forget that we are all in it together.

Staying positive and bucking up has been so programmed into our culture that when we hear about the greed, excess, and corruption at the highest levels of private, corporate, or personal government power, we hesitate to critique the greed, excess, and corruption because we fear it might be a statement about the rainbows we have been chasing or the excess we allow ourselves.

It is no accident that Michael Douglas won an Academy Award for the portrayal of a conglomeration of real people in the 1987 movie, “Wall Street.” In that movie, Douglas’ character, Gordon Gekko gives a speech to his shareholders,

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.[13]

I would have been cautious about using a quote from a fictitious movie, but, in doing my research for this sermon, I found an article in the Wall Street Journal by a former Goldman Sachs partner now teaching as a finance professor. The very article’s title was “Greed is good” and tried to explain why CEO bonuses were good for our economy.[14]

You may have also seen that Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko is back at it again, in a new movie titled, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” ESPN was regularly showing clips from the movie as promos for its opening last Friday. One of the more infamous quotes from Gordon Gekko in this movie is: “Someone reminded me I once said ‘Greed is good.’ Now it seems it's legal. Because everyone is drinking the same Kool Aid.”[15]

We need to stop drinking the Kool-Aid and ask ourselves what economies we can build that serve neighborliness, humankind, and the earth[16] instead of values of greed. We have allowed the values of an economy based on greed and debt to carry the day while we ignore a Sinai covenant based on responsible freedom and neighborliness. We have allowed values that suggest the dollar never sleeps to carry the day while we ignore a Sinai covenant that recognizes the need for rest. God sought to build economies that served people. Instead, we have an economy we have to forever prop up to keep the most wealthy afloat. It is not sustainable.

As I shared in a sermon some time ago, Jesus built an economy based on local food supply and sharing, mutual healing and presence, and through a re-definition and expansion of what it means to be family. He knew that the Roman economy was not sustainable. Too many innocent poor were being ground into dust, and, as a result, God was suffering, in tears, saying that this cannot stand.

Today we celebrate World Communion Sunday, a Sunday where Christians all around the world remember that one of the ways we identify who we are as Christians is that we share bread.

Just this past week Tracy shared with me a website that had on display a collection of food posters from World War I and World War II. The posters remembered a time when we are all in it together, that it was not about getting any one single person’s jeans washed, and the importance of food to every person’s life.

One poster, in particular, from World War I, had as its title, simply “Food” at the top. At the bottom was, “don’t waste it.” In between those headings were six guidelines: (1) buy it with thought; (2) cook it with care; (3) serve just enough; (4) save what will keep; (5) eat what would spoil; (6) home-grown is best.[17] And to remember, in keeping with that last guideline, all the victory gardens that were encouraged as a basic, local food supply.

Something is wrong with a household where only one person’s needs are getting met, one person is worried about their jeans getting washed. Something is wrong with the economic system of a nation where only a few people’s needs are being met, while the looting of billions from the common treasury continues, while the poor are ground into dust. Seemingly, we do not have enough prophets crying out to have the whole system changed.

We sing that song, “There is a balm in Gilead” because Christians are to be that balm. We are to be that people. We are to heal the wound of our suffering God and bind up the wounds of the innocent poor. Today, on World Communion Sunday, we say once again that we will be the balm in Gilead, and that balm, it makes the wounded hole, and heals the wounded hands and heart of God. Amen.

[1] Ibid.

[2] These statistics were compiled in an article by Michael Snyder, “15 Facts Show that the Middle Class Is Being Wiped Out,” http://www.alternet.org/economy/148236/15_shocking_facts_show_that_the_middle_class_is_being_wiped_out. I chose six out of the fifteen related by Snyder out of the article. This particular fact was sourced by Snyder at http://thetruthwins.com

[3] http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-08-30-1Asafetynet30_ST_N.htm

[4] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-23/housing-slide-in-u-s-may-drag-economy-into-recession-as-foreclosures-rise.html

[5] http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/we-killed-the-goose-that-laid-the-golden-egg-and-now-the-number-of-americans-receiving-long-term-unemployment-benefits-has-risen-a-whopping-60-percent-in-just-one-year.

[6] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100911/ap_on_bi_ge/us_poverty_in_america.

[7] Byron area clergy gathering, All Saints Lutheran Church, September 16, 2010.

[8] “The Super Rich Get Richer, Everyone Else Gets Poorer, and the Democrats Punt,” September 24, 2010. www.robertreich.org

[9] Dean Baker, Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy (Sausalito: Polipoint Press, 2009), 16; Eduardo Porter, “More Than Ever, It Pays to Be the Top Executive,” New York Times, May 25, 2007.

[10] Ehrenreich, “Bright-Sided,” pp. 184-185.

[11] Ibid, pp. 187-188.

[12] Ibid, p. 115.

[13] "Memorable Quotes for Wall Street (1987)". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2010-08-09

[14] Roy C. Smith, “Greed is good,” Wall Street Journal, February 7, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123396915233059229.html

[15] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1027718/quotes

[16] In Amy Goodman’s interview with Max-Neef, Neef puts forward barometers and values for a new economy: One, the economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy. Two, development is about people and not about objects. Three, growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth. Four, no economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services. Five, the economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible. And the fundamental value to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life . “Chilean Economist Manfred Max-Neef: US Is Becoming an ‘Underdeveloping Nation,’” Democracy Now, September 22, 2010.

[17] http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2010/05/28/american-food-posters-from-world-war-i-and-ii/

A Message from Kathy Griffith

2010-10-05T10:26:00.000-05:00

I'm not a big Kathy Griffith fan but I may become one after this video. This is so straight to the point--challenging one group and offering compassion to the other--that I thought it needed including. Many of my colleagues are posting this on facebook.

Stephen Colbert's appearance before Congress

2010-09-27T09:20:00.000-05:00

I loved watching Stephen Colbert's appearance before Congress. In contrast to the feeble attempts many make to hold Congress accountable, I thought the video did an excellent job of doing just that.

This was Stephen Colbert breaking character to explain why he was at Congress. And it once again explains why he is one of the saints in our democracy.

REP. CHU: Mr. Colbert, you could work on so many issues. Why are you interested in this issue?

COLBERT: [Takes a pause of two or three beats to think before answering, dropping character] I like talking about people who don’t have any power, and it seems like one of the least powerful people in the United States are migrant workers who come in and do our work, but don’t have any rights as a result. And yet, we still ask them to come here, and at the same time, ask them to leave. And that’s an interesting contradiction to me, and um… You know, “whatsoever you did for the least of my brothers,” and these seemed like the least of my brothers, right now. A lot of people are “least brothers” right now, with the economy so hard, and I don’t want to take anyone’s hardship away from them or diminish it or anything like that. But migrant workers suffer, and have no rights.