Willy Mac – Pastor, Peacemaker, Labyrinth Maker

Saying Sorry

2011-01-11T21:52:00.000-08:00

Yes, saying sorry may be enough, but we may have to say it more times than we are comfortable.

http://player.vimeo.com/video/18439292

Presbyterians: Modern Day Pharisees

2010-08-27T16:32:00.000-07:00

Today, the Permanent Judicial Commission of the Presbytery of the Redwoods voted to rebuke Rev. Janie Spahr for offering the same pastoral care to all couples she marries. The commission noted the ministry of compassion and justice of Rev. Spahr, recognizing the "conflicting and even contradictory rules and regulations that are against the Gospel." Part of the Book of Order describes marriage as "a gift God has given to all humankind for the well-being of the entire human family." W-4.9001. That sentence is followed by an untrue statement, "Marriage is a civil contract between and woman and a man." While the commission recognizes that this is a cultural standard, and differs from marriage in the Bible which describes marriage as a transfer of women (plural) from one man to another.

In narrowly following the rationale of the Authoritative Interpretation on W-4.9001, they continue to perpetuate a definition of marriage that is not true in six (6) states and the District of Columbia. In doing so, they perpetuate the second class citizenship of LGBTQ church members in those jurisdictions and those states which have not yet recognized the inherent dignity and civil rights of LGBTQ person - despite PC (USA) policies elsewhere calling for the full and equal civil rights for all people. The easiest way for such equality is for federal marriage equality to be enacted.

Asking the forgiveness of the couples who testified while censuring the Minister of Word and Sacrament who has been the face of Jesus and the expression of God's kingdom to them effectively places keeping the inconsistent rules of the denomination above the pastoral care, equality, and justice of the people involved in these legal weddings. Because the GAPJC didn't address this issue directly in 2008, exonerating Rev. Spahr by saying the weddings she performed previously weren't real, legal marriages, the issue that the weddings being considered in this PJC were legal weddings remains. Ministers in these seven jurisdictions remain in the unenviable position of having to choose between following those parts of the Book of Order which compel them to offer the same pastoral care to all people, including pre-marital counseling and the performance of legal weddings, or adhering to the biases of other parts of the Book of Order mentioned above which discriminate against LGBTQ members.

I can't see Rev. Janie refraining from performing marriages in the future. What I do forsee, however, is a growing number of Ministers in the PC (USA) who will no longer participate in such discrimination, despite the potential results. I for one, will no longer do so. I won't be a Pharisee any longer. I will live out the Gospel by doing those acts that point to the full humanity of all people, including performing marriages for all those couples who will take the time to prepare for the most important partnership in their life. Only this will allow me to keep all of the ordination vows I made in July 2004 when I was ordained as a Minister of Word and Sacrament in the PC (USA).

I helped write and offer to you the Minneapolis Declaration of Conscience. Perhaps you are ready to sign on: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/minneapolis-declaration-of-conscience/

-------------------------------------------------------

There was some amazing analysis on the unscriptural nature of such questions offered on the Presbyterian Outlooks Blogs. Perhaps it is time to reclaim the biblical faith and follow Jesus into challenging all of those interpretations of scripture that tell sisters and brothers to wait for the kindom of God in their midst.

tomegg's Blog on the Presbyterian Outlook:
Description:I'm currently an interim at Covenant Presbyterian Church, Los Angeles. I was ordained January 27, 1970, and that seems a long time ago. I've been all over the map with the Presbyterian Church, and these days, love it more than ever, though love, if it's real, is never blind! I'm married to a lovely lady who's never been afraid to challenge me, which makes her my best friend. I have two fascinating adult children with big hearts and much skill. I am blessed for sure!

http://www.pres-outlook.com/blog/tags/Jane-Spahr/

As I read today's note in the LA Times about Jane Spahr to be tried by the PCUSA, I couldn't help but think of the text for this past Sunday, Luke 13:10-17, Jesus setting a woman free from 18 years of affliction, and doing so on the Sabbath, to make a point (he and the lady could have waited 24 hours) - healing is what the Sabbath is all about.

And then the synagogue leader weighs in - scolding folks, "Hey, we've got six days for work, and if you want healing, come on those days, but the Sabbath is for rest - keep it holy - no work!"

And that's when Jesus lays into the leader and his gang, "You hypocrites. You wouldn't treat an ox or donkey this way - you lead them to water on the Sabbath, so why deny the water of life to this woman on the Sabbath? What better day is there for revealing the love of God and the freedom therein?"

While Jesus stood on the intent of the law, the leader clung to the letter of the law. And according to the law, the leader was right and Jesus was wrong.

So, here we go again, arguing about our laws.

And missing the point of the kingdom of God.

Jane Spahr is technically wrong, if that's the tact we wish to take. Jesus was wrong, too, and someone might have told him, "Wait 24 hours. Then do your healing. No one will be offended, the law will be maintained and everyone will be happy."
But Jesus didn't wait, because love and mercy and forgiveness and hope can't wait.

So ... we'll drag Jane into the mud of our own foolish little world of rules - rules that keep people bound - hungering and thirsting for a better day.

We wouldn't treat a dog this way.

But people?

Yeah, keep 'em tied up, and tie 'em up all the more with rules upon rules, until no one knows which way is up.
Sure, I am what I am - a supporter of marriage equality, comfortable with the biblical work done by Jack Rogers and others.
And I've been called an apostate, a heretic and a servant of Satan.

No one has the final word, and I surely don't claim that, but with prayer and study, I've made my decision some years ago to no longer wait, and just to keep myself honest, I continue to study and think about these things.

But I write this note with a certain conviction, that Jane Spahr is pointing the way ahead, reminding us what the church and our faith is all about - setting people free. While the charges fly and the legal briefs are prepared, the PCUSA finds itself in the uncomfortable place of the synagogue leader.

That's how I see it these days.

August 24, 2010Posted by tomegg | Sabbath, PCUSA, Ordination for GLBT persons, Jane Spahr, GLBT Concerns | Comment (2)

Minneapolis Statement of Conscience - Sign on!

2010-08-25T14:13:00.001-07:00

1. We believe that the restrictive definition of marriage as “between a man and a woman” is binding of our pastoral discernment and unduly restricts our conscience. Such a definition does not find congruity with the established legal definitions in five U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and numerous countries in the world.

2. We recognize an individual clergy’s pastoral discernment in making decisions relating to same gender marriages according to individual congregational needs, regional law, individual conscience and Biblical conviction.

3. We recognize that restrictive language hinders our pastoral care duties to members in full standing and shackles our liberty in Christ. Such language makes us choose between the new openness we are called to (G-3.0401) and enduring unscrupulous charges made in the courts of the church. We are either a church for all people or we are not (G-4.0401-3).

4. We believe that binding our liberty in Christ in matters to which we believe the Spirit of God is directing us runs counter to our confessional and reformed heritage, which calls us to encourage covenant faithfulness and love rather than thwart it.

5. We believe that Christ’s teaching, the Pauline witness, and our confessions guide us to reject binding our consciences against actions that we find to be counter the Spirit of God.

6. We call on people of good faith to cease from using our church courts to promote schism for their definition of purity.

7. We believe that Sessions should be able to approve the use of their church buildings for all marriages, especially since they will know the people requesting services of marriage better than those in higher governing bodies. A national policy ties the hands of the local Session, and diminishes their church’s ministry of pastoral care.

8. Therefore, we cannot and will not abide by overly restrictive ecclesial/liturgical definitions of marriage continued by the 219th General Assembly out of scruples.

If you are a PC (USA) Minister, Commissioned Lay Pastor, Elder or Deacon we would invite you to sign the Declaration at: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/minneapolis-declaration-of-conscience/

Following Christ vs being a Christian

2010-08-07T16:57:00.000-07:00

As many of you have seen recently on Facebook, author Anne Rice has quit Christianity. Can't say I blame her. Here is her statement:

"For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being "Christian" or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to "belong" to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else."

Later on, she added,

"My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become."

Here is an interview Rice gave on CNN:

I almost always like Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s responses. His article on Rice is here:

Another favorite response of mine is Michael Rowe on Why Rice has never been more Christian:

Yes, perhaps the problem is Christians. Gandhi famously said: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

Growtivation

2010-05-09T23:48:00.000-07:00

If you didn't see at least one thing here in satire from your church, then you aren't looking close enough. Love it!

"Sunday's Coming" Movie Trailer from North Point Media on Vimeo.

The Four Chord Song - by the Axis of Awesome

2010-04-22T23:17:00.000-07:00

From my friend Mitchell Sturges' blog (http://talesofatenor.wordpress.com/2010/04/22/clip-of-the-day-33/). Too good not to share.

Bruce Springsteen - War

2010-04-10T12:15:00.000-07:00

I forgot about Obama's campaign trail promise. Bring the troops home.

"I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama, 27 October 2007

Thanks to http://stopwar.org.uk/content/view/1825/186/

The Story of Bottled Water

2010-03-23T15:19:00.000-07:00

video at http://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/story-of-bottled-water?r=FB and www.willymac4.blogspot.com Why bottled water is unhealthy for us and the planet.

The Gay Vicar - Getting over one's persecution complex

2010-03-17T15:04:00.000-07:00

Warning - Irreverent Church humor zone.

Little Britain - The Gay Vicar

What happens when we take on the posture of victim? Can we be freed from the tyranny of having to protect that position, even when others have moved on? What do you think?

GLAAD Awards winner, Will Phillips

2010-03-16T12:01:00.000-07:00

I wasn't nearly this articulate at 10. How about you? I don't think I was nearly that cognizant of my rights and responsibilities as a citizen either.

More Gay Movies & Entertainment News

Speaking with authority

2010-01-20T13:48:00.000-08:00

Take a look at this creative video of the poetry of Taylor Mali.

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Do you agree? Do we speak with question marks at the end of our sentences? Really? When do we claim what we know to be true?

You can see more of Taylor's work here.

Open Canon - the poets - Rumi

2009-10-11T17:04:00.000-07:00

Geoff Browning shares, "Love this exploration. How 'bout Rumi, Rilke, Muir, Thomas Berry, Shakespeare..." So which of their writings would you include?

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, but known to the English-speaking world simply as Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian poet, Sunni Islamic jurist, and theologian and mystic:

-------------------

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.

When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.

Praise God for those two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.

Oh soul,
you worry too much.
You have seen your own strength.
You have seen your own beauty.
You have seen your golden wings.
Of anything less,
why do you worry?
You are in truth
the soul, of the soul, of the soul.

Only from the heart Can you touch the sky.

Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.

Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?

The way you make love is the way
God will be with you.

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.

Every tree and plant in the meadow seemed to be dancing, those which average eyes would see as fixed and still.

Christian, Jew, Muslim, shaman, Zoroastrian, stone, ground, mountain, river, each has a secret way of being with the mystery, unique and not to be judged.

Everyone is so afraid of death, but the real sufis just laugh: nothing tyrannizes their hearts. What strikes the oyster shell does not damage the pearl.

If in thirst you drink water from a cup, you see God in it. Those who are not in love with God will see only their own faces in it.

He is a letter to everyone. You open it. It says, 'Live!'

In truth everything and everyone 
Is a shadow of the Beloved, 
And our seeking is His seeking 
And our words are His words... 
We search for Him here and there, 
while looking right at Him.
 Sitting by His side, we ask:
 'O Beloved, where is the Beloved?'

God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches you by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly - not one.

Remember, the entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you.

Load the ship and set out. No one knows for certain whether the vessel will sink or reach the harbor. Cautious people say, "I'll do nothing until I can be sure". Merchants know better. If you do nothing, you lose. Don't be one of those merchants who wont risk the ocean. 

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy. 

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. 

Conventional opinion is the ruin of our souls. 

Whatever possessions and objects of its desires the lower self may obtain, it hangs on to them, refusing to let them go out of greed for more, or out of fear of poverty and need. 

-------------------

What are your favorites? What would you add from Rilke, Muir, Thomas Berry, or Shakespeare?

"Be patient with all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek answers which cannot be given to you now because you would not be able to live them now. And the point is to live everything, to live the question now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

- Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Open Canon - U2's "Pride (In the Name of Love)"

2009-10-11T16:41:00.000-07:00

This song has been around for a while, since the 1984 "The Unforgettable Fire" album.

One man come in the name of love
One man come and go
One man come here to justify
One man to overthrow
In the name of love!
One man in the name of love
In the name of love!
What more? In the name of love!

One man caught on a barbed wire fence
One man he resists
One man washed on an empty beach
One man betrayed with a kiss

In the name of love!
What more in the name of love?
In the name of love!
What more? In the name of love!

...nobody like you...there's nobody like you...

Mmm...mmm...mmm...
Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

In the name of love!
What more in the name of love?
In the name of love!
What more in the name of love?
In the name of love!
What more in the name of love...

It has also been linked with Dr. King's life and assassination. For a full history of the song, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_(In_the_Name_of_Love)

Adapted from Songfacts.com:

Bono is speaking about those throughout history who have died because they preached of the equality of all humanity and practiced non-violence as the only way to achieve their goal of having this equality universally recognized. MLK is the primary example of non-violent resistance as the only way to bring about changes in civil rights. But there are allusions to others; Christ for example. The song is about individual people who lived their life with pride – not in a boastful way, but with the pride a person has when their thoughts and actions are motivated by their understanding and full awareness of the dignity and sanctity of ALL human life.

The song is a tribute or illustration or reminder to us, of martyrs to this ideal. It speaks to how they lived their life with an inner Pride in all of humanity and that this Pride is really an expression of God's love for all of humanity. These people did what they did because they were trying to spread this message of God's love for all of mankind.

videos at http://willymac4.blogspot.com/

Open Canon - Bob Marley's "Get Up, Stand Up"

2009-10-11T16:32:00.000-07:00

We were created for love, and we were created to live in freedom.

Dale suggested this song, and I wholeheartedly agree.

videos at http://willymac4.blogspot.com/

The Ultimate Open Canon - Nature

2009-10-10T14:14:00.000-07:00

My friend Jesse Perry said, "I'm for voting creation into the Canon, and following the Spirit--no more texts needed, unless I inherit a publishing house." Knowing his great love for music and his musical ability, I then asked, about songs. He said, "Ah, yes -- all songs, whether sung by children, trees, humpback whales, or church choirs. and the Book of Nature."

I have to agree, having heard many times the wisdom of the lilies of the field, and the ravens of the air. While this video includes the Beatles song, Across the Universe, I hope it doesn't distract too much from the beauty of the universe.

Paul (if you can call him a saint) says, that creation or the universe is the second book of scripture. I would say that if the Hebrew and Christian scriptures are proven wrong by what we can learn from the universe, then we need to reconsider our scriptures. Either way, Jesus remains the living Word of God – while we understand his message as it is mediated through the scriptural accounts and our experience of human life.

Still, I recently heard of a Presbyterian minister who had never heard of Panentheism (god is in everything), and when they were exposed to a Christian who described their relation of the sacred in terms of the nearness of God in nature, they automatically referred to it as Pantheism (god is everything). It's as if every theologian since Jurgen Moltmann is rolling over in their graves. (I thought Presbyterians were supposed to be the educated, and rational form of Christianity?) What is so threatening about recognizing god's presence in all that is? I imagine that some would attempt to preserve their view of a theistic god in as many personal, holy, and "wholly other" terms as possible, but still I don't think it does any of us any favors by separating the life of spirit and nature.

How do you experience god in nature? What song does it sing to you?

videos at http://willymac4.blogspot.com/

Open Canon - not just what Dr. King would do - but what we are called to do.

2009-10-07T18:05:00.000-07:00

Open Canon - Rev. Lee points out that we are called to be on the side of right.

Discerning "right" is a hard thing to do, and can get messy within a community that has differing values. While Rev. Lee believes Dr. King would do the right thing by opposing Prop 8 - he doesn't mention that one of Dr. King's closest advisors was Bayard Rustin. While Rustin was openly gay at a time when that was almost unheard of, the enemies of the civil rights movement – especially Strom Thurmond – used Rustin’s homosexuality as a weapon against Dr. King, and Rustin was forced into a background role to help save the movement.

The question remains: What are you are called to do? What in the world is worth standing up for, even at the cost of your livelihood?

Still Exploring an Open Canon - God is still speaking – Share your ideas.

2009-10-05T00:58:00.000-07:00

Still Exploring an Open Canon - Share your ideas.

What are the texts (sacred and secular), poems, songs, art, short stories, videos and movies that you would include into the canon that give expression of what it means to be human, to live fully, and to explore the meaning of life? What additional human expressions would you add to make sense of the Jesus experience?

If you are viewing this as a Facebook note, check out the blog version for the videos and links at http://willymac4.blogspot.com/

Open Canon - Dietrich Bonhoeffer “Life Together: A Discussion of Christian Fellowship"

2009-10-03T17:24:00.000-07:00

After his martyrdom at the hands of the Gestapo in 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer continued his witness in the hearts of Christians around the world. In his book Life Together we learn of Pastor Bonhoeffer's experience within Christian community. This story of a unique fellowship in an underground seminary during the Nazi years reads like one of Paul's letters. It gives practical advice on how life together in Christ can be sustained in families and groups. The role of personal prayer, worship in common, everyday work, and Christian service is treated in simple, almost biblical, words. Life Together serves as bread to all who are hungry for the real life of Christian fellowship. (www.christianbook.com)

An introduction to the book by Professor Brian Hartley of Greenville, Ill.
http://religionprofessor.blogspot.com/2009/09/introduction-to-bonhoeffers-life.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer

Quotations from Life Together:

"For Christians the beginning of the day should not be burdened and haunted by the various kinds of concerns they face during the working day.... Therefore, in the early morning hours of the day may our many thoughts and our many idle words be silent, and may the first thought and the first word belong to the One to whom our whole life belongs" (51-52).

“Only those who give thanks for little things receive the great things well.”

“Pastors should not complain about their congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. Congregations have not been entrusted to them in order that they would become accusers of their congregations before God and their fellow human beings. When pastors lose faith in a Christian community in which they have been place and begin to make accusations against it, they had better examine themselves first to see whether the underlying problem is not their own idealized image, which should be shattered by God.”

“Like Christian sanctification, Christian community is a gift of God to which we have no claim. Only God knows the real condition either our community or our sanctification. What may appear weak and insignificant to us may be great and glorious to God.”

"It is not necessary that we should discover new ideas in our meditation. It is sufficient, and far more important, if the Word, as we read and understand it, penetrates and dwells within us."

"The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists of listening to them. Just as love of God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for our brothers and sisters is learning to listen to them."

"I can no longer condemn or hate a brother [or sister] for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me is transformed through intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died."

"So long as we eat our bread together, we shall have sufficient even for the least. Not until one person desires to keep his own bread for himself does hunger ensue."

Other Dietrich Bonhoeffer quotations:

In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give; life can be rich only with such realization. source: (Letters and Papers from Prison)

To be silent does not mean to be inactive; rather it means to breathe in the will of God, to listen attentively and be ready to obey. (Meditating on the Word)

When we come to a clearer and more sober estimate of our own limitations and responsibilities, that makes it possible more genuinely to love our neighbor. (Letters and Papers from Prison)

There is not a place to which the Christian can withdraw from the world, whether it be outwardly or in the sphere of the inner life. Any attempt to escape from the world must sooner or later be paid for with a sinful surrender to the world. (Ethics)

You have granted me many blessings; let me also accept what is hard from your hand. (Prayers from Prison)

The first call which every Christian experiences is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. (The Cost of Discipleship)

Earthly possessions dazzle our eyes and delude us into thinking that they can provide security and freedom from anxiety. Yet all the time they are the very source of anxiety. (The Cost of Discipleship)

From God we hear the word: “If you want my goodness to stay with you then serve your neighbor, for that is where God comes to you.” (No Rusty Swords)

Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others, we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as ourselves. (The Cost of Discipleship)

We have learned a bit too late in the day that action springs not from thought but from a readiness for responsibility. (Letters and Papers from Prison)

Which of us has really admitted that God’s goodness can also lead us into conflict. (No Rusty Swords)

Our enemies are those who harbor hostility against us, not those against whom we cherish hostility… As a Christian I am called to treat my enemy as a brother and to meet hostility with love. My behavior is thus determined not by the way others treat me, but by the treatment I receive from Jesus. (The Cost of Discipleship)

In a world where success is the measure and justification of all things, the figure of him who was sentenced and crucified remains a stranger. (Ethics)

For the working class world, Christ seems to be settled with the church and middle class society. (Christology)

The future and the hope for the middle class church lies in the renewal of its lifeblood, which is only possible if the church succeeds in winning the working class. (Sanctum Communio)

The believer is neither a pessimist nor an optimist. To be either is illusory. The believer sees reality not in a certain light but as it is, and believes only in God and God’s power towards all and over all that is seen. (No Rusty Swords)

There remains an experience of incomparable value . . . to see the great events of world history from below; from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled ---- in short, from the perspective of those who suffer . . . to look with new eyes on matters great and small. (Letters and Papers from Prison)

Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now. Christian should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong. (Sermon on II Cor. 12:9)

There is no way to peace along the way to safety. For peace must be dared. It is the great venture. (Address at Fano)

The followers of Christ have been called to peace. . . . And they must not only have peace but also make it. And to that end they renounce all violence and tumult. In the cause of Christ nothing is to be gained by such methods. . . . His disciples keep the peace by choosing to endure suffering themselves rather than inflict it on others. They maintain fellowship where others would break it off. They renounce hatred and wrong. In so doing they over-come evil with good, and establish the peace of God in the midst of a world of war and hate. (The Cost of Discipleship)

See also www.dbonhoeffer.org

Open Canon - “The Shawshank Redemption: Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free."

2009-10-03T16:42:00.000-07:00

A video portrayal of freedom, wrongful arrest, and innocent suffering.

The Book: "The Shawshank Redemption" by Stephan King, The Ballantine Publishing Group, 1982.
The Movie “The Shawshank Redemption” Director: Frank Darabont, Screenplay: Based on The Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King, Released by Columbia Pictures, Date Released: 9/23/94 (limited), Running Length: 2:22

Text Week Lectionary Resource lists these Themes:

• Baptism
Andy Dufresne crawls through the sewer and emerges a free man.
• Bible
Andy Dufresne hides his rock hammer in his Bible. "Freedom is found within."
The warden quotes from the Bible as a Pharisee - using the words as a Law which binds people to his own benefit.
Covenant
Andy and Red's covenant for Red to find the box under the tree. "If you ever get out of here, do me a favor...promise me, Red, you'll find that oak."
• Decision
Red's conscious decision "for life" at the place where Brooks had killed himself.
When Red gets out of jail and he is on parole he walks by the store and he sees a gun and a compass. two ways one way is death (the gun) another way, the right direction (the compass) Red said the only thing that kept me from going the way Brooks went was Andy's promise that he kept. (Patrick W. Memphis TN)
• Determination
Andy uses a rock hammer to break out of prison.
Entry into Jerusalem/Palm Sunday
The protagonist is accepted by the Warden when he needs him but has a fall from grace in the Wardens eyes when he challenges the status quo. (Chandler)
• Exodus/Moses
Andy as Moses figure - murderer/prisoner who finds freedom and shows his friend the way to the promised land.
• Fate
Andy Dufresne: "It floats around. It's gotta land somewhere. I was in the path of the tornado." (speaking of his fate of being falsely accused of his wife's murder)
• Freedom/Liberation
Andy Dufresne standing in the rain after his escape.
• Friendship
The friendship between Red and Andy.
• Greed
The publicly devout Warden is laundering money with Andy Dufresne's help. When there is a chance for Andy to be free, the warden has the inmate who has the information killed.
• Guilt/Regret
Andy feeling guilty for his wife's death even though he didn't pull the trigger. Red's reply.
Red stands before parole board and talks about his regrets. Start cue: bars slide open, doors open to parole board. End cue: "I gotta live with that" (Luke Whiteside, Youth Alpha Australia)
• Healing
In the Shawshank Redemption, the narrator (Morgan Freeman's character) is healed from his despair by Tim Robbins'character's hope in the face of suffering. This is also the "redemption" of the title (I think), that one man is redeemed by the suffering of an innocent man who takes on the suffering of prison anyway, seeing life within and beyond it, and living fully, and freely, even in his captivity, and can still seize the opportunity for freedom. (Edie Bird, Fayetteville, Arkansas)
• Hope
Red's hope for a life after prison. " I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it is in my dreams. I hope....."
Andy's motivating hope.
• Institutional Evil
Cruelty of guards and of other prisoners as institutional evil within corrupt system.
• Overcoming Obstacles
Andy survives and pursues his goal of freedom despite the obstacles.
• Rebirth
The scene when Andy was in solitary confinement for telling the warrden that he could have a chance to have another trial. The warrden goes to talk to Andy after a month had passed and when the officer opens the door Andy shuns his eyes, (allegory of the cave). The warrden tells Andy that Tommy Williams has died. Then the warrden gets up tells the officer that he is to give him another month in the confinement, and leaves. (Patrick W., Memphis TN)
• Redemption
In the Shawshank Redemption, the narrator (Morgan Freeman's character) is healed from his despair by Tim Robbins'character's hope in the face of suffering. This is also the "redemption" of the title (I think), that one man is redeemed by the suffering of an innocent man who takes on the suffering of prison anyway, seeing life within and beyond it, and living fully, and freely, even in his captivity, and can still seize the opportunity for freedom. (Edie Bird, Fayetteville, Arkansas)
• Sin
The publicly devout Warden is laundering money with Andy Dufresne's help. When there is a chance for Andy to be free, the warden has the inmate who has the information killed.
• Suffering of the Innocent
Andy's conversation with Red after Red discovers that Andy is in prison unjustly.
• Wilderness
Prison as the wilderness where people are tested, and their True Identity becomes known.
• Wrongly Accused
Andy is imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit.

Open Canon - “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

2009-10-03T16:32:00.000-07:00

The Epistle of St. Martin of Atlanta

A letter to the church in response to:

Statement by Alabama Clergymen
April 12, 1963

We the undersigned clergymen are among those who, in January, issued "An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense," in dealing with racial problems in Alabama. We expressed understanding that honest convictions in racial matters could properly be pursued in the courts, but urged that decisions of those courts should in the meantime be peacefully obeyed.

Since that time there had been some evidence of increased forbearance and a willingness to face facts. Responsible citizens have undertaken to work on various problems which cause racial friction and unrest. In Birmingham, recent public events have given indication that we will have opportunity for a new constructive and realistic approach to racial problems.

However, we are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens, directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.

We agree rather with certain local Negro leadership which has called for honest and open negotiation of racial issues in our area. And we believe this kind of facing of issues can best be accomplished by citizens of our own metropolitan area, white and Negro, meeting with their knowledge and experience of the local situation. All of us need to face that responsibility and find proper channels for its accomplishment.

Just as we formerly pointed out that "hatred and violence have no sanction in our religious and political traditions," we also point out that such actions as incite to hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be, have not contributed to the resolution of our local problems. We do not believe that these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified in Birmingham.

We commend the community as a whole, and the local news media and law enforcement officials in particular, on the calm manner in which these Demonstrations have been handled. We urge the public to continue to show restraint should the demonstrations continue, and the law enforcement officials to remain calm and continue to protect our city from violence.

We further strongly urge our own Negro community to withdraw support from these demonstrations, and to unite locally in working peacefully for a better Birmingham. When rights are consistently denied, a cause should be pressed in the courts and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets. We appeal to both our white and Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and common sense.

Signed by:

C.C.J. Carpenter, D.D., LL.D., Bishop of Alabama
Joseph A. Durick, D.D., Auxiliary Bishop, Diocese of Mobile-Birmingham
Rabbi Milton L. Grafman, Temple Emanu-El, Birmingham, Alabama
Bishop Paul Hardin, Bishop of the Alabama-West Florida Conference of the Methodist Church
Bishop Nolan B. Harmon, Bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the Methodist Church
George M. Murray, D.D., LL.D., Bishop Coadjutor, Episcopal Diocese of Alabama
Edward V. Ramage, Moderator, Synod of the Alabama Presbyterian Church in the United States
Earl Stallings, Pastor, First Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama
The statement by eight white Alabama clergymen, reprinted by the American Friends Service Committee, prompted King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail."

Full text below

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Birmingham_Jail

*AUTHOR'S NOTE: This response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama (Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter, Bishop Joseph A. Durick, Rabbi Hilton L. Grafman, Bishop Paul Hardin, Bishop Holan B. Harmon, the Reverend George M. Murray. the Reverend Edward V. Ramage and the Reverend Earl Stallings) was composed under somewhat constricting circumstance. Begun on the margins of the newspaper in which the statement appeared while I was in jail, the letter was continued on scraps of writing paper supplied by a friendly Negro trusty, and concluded on a pad my attorneys were eventually permitted to leave me. Although the text remains in substance unaltered, I have indulged in the author's prerogative of polishing it for publication.

Letter From Birmingham Jail
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr.

April 16, 1963

MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against "outsiders coming in." I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I. compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham's economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants--for example, to remove the stores humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained.

As in so many past experiences, our hopes bad been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?" We decided to schedule our direct-action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic withdrawal program would be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham's mayoralty election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run-off we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run-off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct-action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken .in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: "Why didn't you give the new city administration time to act?" The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain for civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant 'Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

We have waited .for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you no forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may won ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all"

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I-it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state's segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you can see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly (not hatefully as the white mothers did in New Orleans when they were seen on television screaming "nigger, nigger, nigger"), and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fan in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "An Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this 'hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At fist I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self-respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best-known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible "devil."

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the "do-nothingism" of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle.

If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble-rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or. unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides--and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence. This is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. Now this approach is being dismissed as extremist. I must admit that I was initially disappointed in being so categorized.

But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that an men are created equal ..." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremist for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some--such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle--have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as "dirty nigger lovers." Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful "action" antidotes to combat the disease of segregation.

Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a non-segregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find. something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

So here we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a tail-light behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice.

I have travelled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when tired, bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? l am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators"' But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide. and gladiatorial contests.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an arch supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ecclesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham, and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation--and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

I must close now. But before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and "preventing violence." I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if .you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I'm sorry that I can't join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a .degree of discipline in handing the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather "nonviolently" in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."

I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering, and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feet is tired, but my soul is rested." They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience's sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, and thusly carrying our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter (or should I say a book?). I'm afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think strange thoughts and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

Martin Luther King, Jr.

(King's letter was first published as "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in the June 12, 1963 edition of The Christian Century.)

Still Exploring an Open Canon - Share your ideas.

2009-10-03T16:26:00.000-07:00

What are the texts (sacred and secular), poems, songs, art, short stories, videos and movies that you would include into the canon that give expression of what it means to be human, to live fully, and to explore the meaning of life? What additional human expressions would you add to make sense of the Jesus experience?

If you are viewing this as a Facebook note, check out the blog version for the videos at http://willymac4.blogspot.com/

Open Canon - Deb Matthews suggests the hymn "Lift Every Voice and Sing"

2009-10-03T16:16:00.000-07:00

"Lift Every Voice and Sing"
The "Black National Anthem"
words by James Weldon Johnson
music by John R. Johnson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_Every_Voice_and_Sing

Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet,
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered;
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou Who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou Who hast by Thy might, led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.

Open Canon - Deb Matthews suggests "The Creation" in "God's Trombones" by James Weldon Johnson

2009-10-03T15:59:00.000-07:00

"The Creation"
by James Weldon Johnson
(God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, 1927)

And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I'm lonely -
I'll make me a world.

And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.

Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said: That's good!

Then God reached out and took the light in his hands,
And God rolled the light around in his hands
Until he made the sun;
And he set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.
And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining ball
And flung it against the darkness,
Spangling the night with the moon and stars.
Then down between
The darkness and the light
He hurled the world;
And God said: That's good!

Then God himself stepped down -
And the sun was on his right hand,
And the moon was on his left;
The stars were clustered about his head,
And the earth was under his feet.
And God walked, and where he trod
His footsteps hollowed the valleys out
And bulged the mountains up.

Then he stopped and looked and saw
That the earth was hot and barren.
So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And he spat out the seven seas -
He batted his eyes, and the lightnings flashed -
He clapped his hands, and the thunders rolled -
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down.

Then the green grass sprouted,
And the little red flowers blossomed,
The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,
And the oak spread out his arms,
The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,
And the rivers ran down to the sea;
And God smiled again,
And the rainbow appeared,
And curled itself around his shoulder.

The God raised his arm and he waved his hand
Over the sea and over the land,
And he said: Bring forth! Bring forth!
And quicker than God could drop his hand,
Fishes and fowls
And beasts and birds
Swam the rivers and the seas,
Roamed the forests and the woods,
And split the air with their wings.
And God said: That's good!

Then God walked around,
And God looked around
On all that he had made.
He looked at his sun,
And he looked at his moon,
And he looked at his little stars;
He looked on his world
With all its living things,
And God said: I'm lonely still.

Then God sat down -
On the side of a hill where he could think;
By a deep, wide river he sat down;
With his head in his hands,
God thought and thought,
Till he thought: I'll make me a man!

Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till he shaped it in his own image;

Then into it he blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.

From The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume Two, Second Edition, 1053-1055.

David Perkins

The work for which Johnson is most remembered is God's Trombones, which caused a sensation when it was published in 1927. Impressed with the power of the imagination and speech of the Irish peasantry, Johnson wished to create a similar monument—and literary movement—for his own race. God’s Trombones consists of seven sermons by a black preacher. Though Johnson did not use dialect, his free-verse paragraphs are in the rhythms of this indigenous oratory and his imagery caught the simplicity and grandeur of the preacher's imagination, nurtured on the Bible:

And now, O Lord--
When I've done drunk my last cup of sorrow—
When I've been called everything but a child of God
When I'm done travelling up the rough side of the mountain--
O--Mary's Baby—
When I start down the steep and slippery steps of death—
When this old world begins to rock beneath my feet—
Lower me to my dusty grave in peace
To wait for that great gittin' up morning.

The use of the redundant auxiliary ("done"), the biblical, concrete imagery ("cup of sorrow"), the anaphora ("When I've . . . When this . . ."), and the allusion to well-known spirituals ("Mary Had a Baby, Yes, Lord" and "In Dat Great Gittin' up Mornin’") are typical of Johnson's style in this work. In an actual church sermon the last line would be a signal to the congregation to break into singing the spiritual.

From A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode. Copyright © 1976 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Wr'near Wilcox suggests "Every Grain of Sand" by Bob Dylan

2009-10-03T15:53:00.000-07:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Grain_of_Sand

Dylan included this on his 1985 album Biograph. In the notes to that album he said, "That was an inspired song that came to me. It wasn't really too difficult. I felt like I was just putting words down that were coming from somewhere else, and I just stuck it out."

This was partly inspired by the following lines from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Bob Dylan

"Every Grain of Sand"

In the time of my confession,
in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet
flood every newborn seed
There's a dyin' voice within me
reaching out somewhere,
Toiling in the danger and in
the morals of despair.

Don't have the inclination to
look back on any mistake,
Like Cain,
I now behold this chain of events
that I must break.
In the fury of the moment
I can see the Master's hand
In every leaf that trembles,
in every grain of sand.

Oh, the flowers of indulgence
and the weeds of yesteryear,
Like criminals,
they have choked the breath
of conscience and good cheer.
The sun beat down upon the steps
of time to light the way
To ease the pain of idleness
and the memory of decay.

I gaze into the doorway of
temptation's angry flame
And every time I pass that way
I always hear my name.
Then onward in my journey
I come to understand
That every hair is numbered
like every grain of sand.

I have gone from rags to riches
in the sorrow of the night
In the violence of a summer's dream,
in the chill of a wintry light,
In the bitter dance of loneliness
fading into space,
In the broken mirror of innocence
on each forgotten face.

I hear the ancient footsteps like
the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there,
other times it's only me.
I am hanging in the balance
of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling,
like every grain of sand.

Open Canon - Gail Doering suggests "Betty's Diner" by Carrie Newcomer

2009-10-03T15:46:00.000-07:00

Carrie Newcomer "Betty's Diner" Lyrics:

http://www.carrienewcomer.com/bettys-diner.html

Miranda words the late night counter In a joint called Betty’s Diner Chrome and checkered tablecloths one steamy windowpane
She got the job that shaky fall And after hours she’ll write til dawn With a nod and smile she serves them all

Chorus: here we are all in one place The wants and wounds of the human race Despair and hope sit face to face When you come in from the cold Let her fill your cup with something kind Eggs and toast like bread and wine She’s heard it all so she don’t mind

Arthur lets his earl grey steep Since April it’s been hard to sleep You know they tried most everything Yet it took her in the end Kevin tests new saxophones But swears he’s leaving quality control For the Chicago scene, or New Orleans Where they still play righteous horns

Jack studies here after work To get past high school he’s the first And his large hands seem just as comfortable With a hammer or a pen Emma leaned and kissed his cheek And when she did his knees got weak Miranda smiles at Em and winks

Chorus

Bridge: You never know who’ll be your witness You never know who grants forgiveness Look to heaven or sit with us
Deidra bites her lip and frowns She works the Stop and Go downtown She’s pretty good at the crossword page

She paints her eyes blue black Tristan come along sometimes Small for his age and barely five But she loves him like a mamma lion

Veda used to drink a lot Almost lost it all before she stopped Comes in at night with her friend Mike Who runs the crisis line Michael toured Saigon and back Hair the color of smoke and ash Heads are bowed and hands are clasped One more storm has passed

Singer Gives Tour Cut to Charity
October 11th, 2007
by Andrew McGinn

Singer gives tour cut to charity

Audio: Listen to Newcomer sing "Betty's Diner"
By Andrew McGinn
Staff Writer
Thursday, October 11, 2007

SPRINGFIELD — As a Quaker activist first and foremost, Carrie Newcomer would prefer if people stopped sowing their wild oats.

But she's at least making it easier to live a purpose-driven life — just attend one of her gigs.

Playing Kuss Auditorium on Friday, the Indiana singer-songwriter has given a cut of her tour sales to charity since the '90s.

The Second Harvest food bank network has been on the receiving end of tour receipts in recent years.

Newcomer also leads workshops on everything from creative writing and songwriting to faith and "living with intention."

She'll present a creative writing and songwriting seminar from 7 to 9:30 p.m. today at the Glen Helen Building, 405 Corry St., in Yellow Springs. Call (937) 475-7357 for reservations.

Musically, Newcomer released "Regulars and Refugees" in 2005, marking her 10th album for Philo/Rounder.

A concept album, the songs are set inside Betty's Diner, a fictional greasy spoon in southern Indiana.

And if you're a Nickel Creek fan who thinks her name looks awfully familiar, they covered her song "I Should've Known Better" on the 2003 disc "This Side."

Newcomer also has toured Europe with Alison Krauss.

Open Canon - Gail Doering suggests Mary Oliver's poem "Wild Geese"

2009-10-03T15:44:00.001-07:00

Gail Doering suggests:

Mary Oliver's poem, "Wild Geese" ending with

"Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
published by Atlantic Monthly Press
© Mary Oliver

Open Canon - Deb Matthews suggests Ragman by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

2009-10-03T15:37:00.000-07:00

http://walterwangerinjr.org/new_web/publish_details.php?id=21

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0060692294, Paperback)

"In a little while, when the sky showed grey behind the rooftops and I could see the shredded curtains hanging out black windows, the Rgaman came upon a girl whose haed was wrapped in a bandage, whose eyes were empty. Blood soaked her bandage. A single line of blood ran down her check.
Now the tall Ragman looked upon this child with pity, and he drew a lovely yellow bonnet from his cart.
'Give me your rag,'he said, tracing his own line on her cheek, 'and I'll give you mine.'"The stories, meditations and allegories in Ragman together explore the power and meaning of love within an often inhumane urban landscape. Walter Wangerin's vivid depictions touch our deepest pains with rays of joyful healing.

Open Canon - Mike Foster suggests "Here I Go Again" by Coverdale

2009-10-03T15:34:00.000-07:00

"Here I Go Again"

(coverdale/marsden)

David Coverdale - Here I go again
by kati_kallisto

I dont know where Im going
But, I sure know where Ive been
Hanging on the promises
In songs of yesterday
An Ive made up my mind,
I aint wasting no more time
But, here I go again
Here I go again

Tho I keep searching for an answer,
I never seem to find what Im looking for
Oh lord, I pray
You give me strength to carry on,
cos I know what it means
To walk along the lonely street of dreams

An here I go again on my own
Goin down the only road Ive ever known,
Like a hobo* I was born to walk alone
An Ive made up my mind
I aint wasting no more time

Im just another heart in need of rescue,
Waiting on loves sweet charity
An Im gonna hold on
For the rest of my days,
cos I know what it means
To walk along the lonely street of dreams

An here I go again on my own
Goin down the only road Ive ever known,
Like a hobo* I was born to walk alone
An Ive made up my mind
I aint wasting no more time

But, here I go again,
Here I go again,
Here I go again,
Here I go...

An Ive made up my mind,
I aint wasting no more time

An here I go again on my own
Goin down the only road Ive ever known,
Like a hobo I was born to walk alone
cos I know what it means
To walk along the lonely street of dreams

An here I go again on my own
Goin down the only road Ive ever known,
Like a hobo I was born to walk alone
An Ive made up my mind
I aint wasting no more time...

Open Canon - Mike Foster suggests "What I've Done" by Linkin Park

2009-10-03T15:31:00.000-07:00

http://www.imeem.com/angelofdeath128/music/6qb9fbhT/linkin-park-what-ive-done/

"What I've Done" by Linkin Park

In this farewell
There's no blood
There's no alibi
Cause I've drawn regret
From the truth
Of a thousand lies

So let mercy come
And wash away

What I've done
I'll face myself
To cross out what I've become
Erase myself
And let go of what I've done

Put to rest
What you thought of me
While I clean this slate
With the hands
Of uncertainty

So let mercy come
And wash away

What I've done
I'll face myself
To cross out what I've become
Erase myself
And let go of what I've done

For what I've done

I'll start again
And whatever pain may come
Today this ends
I'm forgiving what I've done

I'll face myself
To cross out what I've become
Erase myself
And let go of what I've done

What I've done

Forgiving what I've done

Open Canon - Mike Foster suggests "Miracle Drug" by U2

2009-10-03T15:28:00.000-07:00

Mike Foster suggested this song for the canon.

Miracle Drug Lyrics
Artist :U2

"Miracle Drug"

I want a trip inside your head
Spend the day there...
To hear the things you haven't said
And see what you might see

I wanna hear you when you call
Do you feel anything at all?
I wanna see your thoughts take shape
And walk right out

Freedom has a scent
Like the top of a new born baby's head

The songs are in your eyes
I see them when you smile
I've seen enough I'm not giving up
On a miracle drug

Of science and the human heart
There is no limit
There is no failure here sweetheart
Just when you quit...

I am you and you are mine
Love makes no sense of space
And time...will disappear
Love and logic keep us clear
Reason is on our side, love...

The songs are in your eyes
I see them when you smile
I've had enough of romantic love
I'd give it up, yeah, I'd give it up
For a miracle, a miracle drug, a miracle drug

God I need your help tonight

Beneath the noise
Below the din
I hear your voice
It's whispering
In science and in medicine
"I was a stranger
You took me in"

The songs are in your eyes
I see them when you smile
I've had enough of romantic love
Yeah, I'd give it up, yeah, I'd give it up
For a miracle, miracle drug

Miracle, miracle drug

Open cannon - or closed cannon

2009-10-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

I'm on study leave this week, and as my colleagues and I explore what it is we experience in parish ministry the topic arose (again) about how God continues to speak in the world. While the ecumenical councils waited until the Council of Hippo in 393 to say what biblical books should be codified into the biblical canon of accepted texts for use in the churches, since then we have found many other such texts that have meant the world to others during the short history of Christianity.

So at dinner tonight, I asked "What would you add to the canon?" This is a different question for biblical scholars who are familiar with the ancient texts that perhaps should have made it to the canon (Thomas, Peter & Barnabas, and the Infancy Gospels of Jesus). Of course, each of us have different lists of what we would want to take out - especially those that encouraged an Imperial, misogynistic Christianity, but what we would like to add is an altogether question. What kind of texts do we understand as part of the tradition?

My friend, the Rev. Steve Blackstock and I, both resonated that a first entry into our Canonical Hall of Fame is a song from the Joshua Tree Album by U2.

U2 - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

I have climbed highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you
I have run
I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I have kissed honey lips
Felt the healing in her fingertips
It burned like a fire
(I was) burning inside her

I have spoke with the tongue of angels
I have held the hand of a devil
It was warm in the night
I was cold as a stone

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
But yes I'm still running

You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Oh my shame
You know I believe it

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

In the video version from the concert in Milan, Bono pointed out that the Italians kind of invented the movies, that stories told in the stained glass windows in the churches nearby were the cinema of the day. And even when he sings, he voices the situation of many today.

"I believe in the Kingdom Come....
You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains....
You know I believe it
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for..."

There is an eternal truth in this song, for we are always “works in progress.” But this version of the song points out that this is also a song we sing with each other, and as the band sings, and the choir adds their refrain, even the lead singers of the choir have their riffs to share. The very work of the universe is a process that continually evolves with us as co-creators.

So I ask you the question now. What are the texts (sacred and secular), poems, songs, art, short stories, videos and movies that you would include into the canon that give expression of what it means to be human, to live fully, and to explore the meaning of life? What additional human expressions would you add to make sense of the Jesus experience?

Don’t hesitate. No answer is out of bounds. Just claim for yourself what speaks to you and your life situation. As we together explore I’ll add additional posts in the coming days of other inclusions I would make.

Defining the emergent church

2009-06-30T18:36:00.000-07:00

Much has been said and written about the emergent church lately. It is a very diverse group of mostly former fundamentalists and evangelicals trying out a new way of being church similar to what Progressive Christians have been talking about for the last few decades. Here is a video of Peter Rollins from the Ikon Community in Ireland doing an interview with the Inner Compass show from Calvin College. He raises some important questions.

• In what way is Christianity a set of beliefs that we give assent to to belong to the community, or does being a Christian make us different people and changes our ways of looking at the world?

• How would church be different if we could become more honest about who we are and what our motivations lead us to be?

• How do our actions lead to living out the way Jesus taught his disciples?

Explaining Emergent Churches - Inner Compass from Calvin College on Vimeo.

This blog allows us to have a conversation. Please sign in and make a comment about what you think or how you respond to the video.

California Youth Energy Services

2009-06-19T16:22:00.001-07:00

Here is a video about a group coming to CPC on Sunday to offer help to parishioners in saving energy and natural resources in their homes through energy audits. Teenagers: consider joining this program next year!

The Presbyterian Church and the Civil Rights Question for LGBTQ Persons in America.

2009-06-02T18:24:00.000-07:00

There are many within the church who choose to restrict the conversation of Marriage Equality to those of opposite genders. But I would like to ask: Does not such a conversation neglect our other Presbyterian commitments to universal equality, human rights, and the preservation of justice not only at home in the U.S., but abroad as well?

While the PC(USA) has not voted to approve of the celebration of same-gender loving marriage rites, we have allowed pastors and congregations to perform and host holy-unions. At the same time, we have reiterated our call for the church to preserve the full access to civil rights for every LGBTQ person.

Ironically, what we are now seeing in many American states is the recognition of civil unions for all as a form of preserving equal rights for each of their citizens, even though the Federal Government does not now recognize such rights because of the Defense of Marriage Act. While many in the church are discussing this issue as a marriage issue, what is missing is any conversation about the inequity between the many human rights and tax breaks given to heterosexual couples that same-gender loving couples do not enjoy. And what about the immigration rights of partners whose partners are of the same-gender? Furthermore, should people have to be married to be guaranteed health insurance and inheritance rights? Should not every American be able to live their lives free of discrimination and hate-crimes? Why are we not in the streets fighting to give every American the same civil rights?

Right now a state Proposition collecting signatures in California will allow the state to only recognize civil unions - restricting the term ‘marriage’ to the arena of the churches. This would effectively move the Gay Marriage Debate to religious institutions. While this Proposition would bring about an equality between heterosexual couples and homosexual couples, if this passes it will mean that the LGBTQ community will then ask which religious communities will recognize the full humanity of all of its members and which will not. Are we ready for this?

Marriage is usually discussed in Scripture, the Confessions, and the Book of Order in the context of covenant faithfulness. Those who make covenants are expected to remain faithful to those covenants. And, when in our human weakness we break covenant, God is faithful to restore us to faithfulness in love.

Such covenants are to be fraught with love - luring us into our best selves. While the context of biblical marriage is found mainly within polygamous relationships, as was the custom of the time (Patriarchs until circa 1000 CE), there is also a polemic in scripture against such marriage relationships, with a progressive display of the struggles between wives (ie, Sarah and Hagar, etc.). The prophet Hosea uses the metaphor of marriage fidelity as an example of the nation of Israel's lack of fidelity, and the lengths God goes to to redeem his beloved.

While the scriptures do include a polemic of the idolatry of the temple prostitution popular among the foreign nations (Lev & Romans), there is not a polemic against what we know today as same-gender loving couples because it was unheard of. The word homosexual was anachronistically imported into the RSV English translation, which is why we have a PC (USA) task force looking at creating a better version of the Heidelberg Catechism that doesn't import our modern biases into the our historic confessions. As believers who have made peace between religion and science, we will need to include our best human knowledge from both a social-scientific and scriptural perspective. Remember, that any 'natural argument' effectively becomes an argument from and for our cultural norms.

Jesus had some strong words about marriage and divorce, protecting the partner who was most at risk of being uncared for in a divorce during his era. I would contend that the real issue remains to be 'covenant fidelity' - do we keep our promises. Since it is clear that same-gender loving couples are as able to live in covenant fidelity as heterosexual couples, the question will eventually move from the state's rights arena into the church: Will this church recognize the covenants of every believing couple who desire to live in covenant fidelity?

Perhaps the real question remains: What if the Mainline Protestant Christian Tradition was not prepared to lead in the realm of human sexuality when it was most needed? We weren't ready to talk about the Sexual Revolution because we had been denying our sexuality for so long that we could only deny it. We had little understanding about the diversity of human sexuality, and so we gave a knee-jerk reaction. Perhaps today we are almost ready to offer a well-considered response. But if we lead with 18th century theology and biases, we will continue to be laughed at by the rest of our culture. We Protestants lost our chance to lead the culture 40 years ago because we were unprepared. Same-gender loving couples have shown that their covenants are as fraught with love as those covenants made by heterosexual couples. The question for us as a church remains: When we will be the church of Jesus Christ. When we will begin to live out our discipleship as a function of Christ’s love, rather than as a function of the culture wars at this particular time in the U.S.

Today, our only hope is to repent from our collective misrepresentation of sexual minorities, and reclaim those parts of our tradition that welcome all. Perhaps we need to reclaim Isaiah's 'House of Prayer for all Peoples' which included those priests who were made eunuchs in the courts of Babylon, and recognize Philip's preaching to the eunuch whom the Spirit of God fell upon and he could not refuse baptism. It is time to separate ourselves from those hermeneutics that have oppressed those least understood by our society, and to reclaim an ethic of covenant faithfulness that includes who have stood firm within Christ’s covenant even though we have not stood firm with them.

Healing from Prop 8

2009-05-27T13:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a busy day for many leaders in the faith community. For those of us who serve congregations with Gay and Lesbian parishioners, it was a day of tending torn hearts, and helping people find their voice. For those in the Yes on 8 campaign, it was celebrating that discrimination could be so easily written into a state constitution to protect heterosexual superiority in California.

My day began with an Interfaith prayer service at St. Francis Lutheran Church in San Francisco, where we were encouraged to be hopeful and peaceful, whatever decision came down from the California Supreme Court. We then marched together, singing songs down to the Supreme Court building. There were already hundreds of people there by then, with signs both pro and con. So, we kept singing, supporting those present whose actual relationships were being decided upon by the court.

I was hopeful that the Supreme Court would invalidate Prop 8, as I believe they should have before the election. But their decision on the narrowest portion of the question of the referendum created three classes of people in California. Heterosexual couples, same-gender loving couples (who were fortunate enough to get married while available), and those same-gender loving couples who would like to marry but now cannot do so. Will these couples really have all the same protections of their rights that the other two classes now enjoy? They will not be able to file joint tax returns in California, though married same-gender loving couples are still not able to file jointly on their federal taxes. One married Lesbian friend mentioned how difficult it is to file taxes when they have to be prepared multiple ways to fill out the forms correctly.

The other item lost in the conversation is the portability of marriage rights. While an increasing number of states recognize the marriages of all from other states, for couples traveling in those that do not means that they go without hospital visitation rights or prepare a half-an inch thick wad of paper documentation to keep with them wherever they go. This is why genuine Marriage Equality will not be fully achieved until this civil right is recognized by the Federal Government.

So in the meantime, as a pastor, I find my role is two pronged. I must be available for my gay and lesbian parishioners during this time of grief and anger, and I must lend my voice and position to calling this country – and my denomination – to accept the full humanity of every citizen and member. This is why I joined the civil disobedience in the streets of San Francisco after the decision was made public. If the church cannot stand up for its own members and families, then how can we call ourselves the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. I am sure that there are those who don't understand why anyone would do this – or what difference this will every make – but at least I can sleep at night knowing where I was on that day. I was listening to the stories, hearing the pain, and walking in solidarity with those that the well-funded Christian Fundamentalists want to strip of their humanity. There is another way to follow in Christ's footsteps, and that is the way of the outcast, the foreigners, and the aliens.

Below is a brief video from the Contra Costa Times, which did an article on the different responses around the county. After this brief time out on the street, our group of 30 or so went into the church and had an opportunity to share about how it felt to hear the news. People who haven't set foot in a Christian church in years decided to join us for the conversation, because we decided to be the church and provide a sanctuary for them.

The Pope and Condoms

2009-04-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

The Pope commented on condoms during his recent trip to Africa. But saying that the use of condoms contributes to the spread of HIV AIDS is just plain irresponsible. Perhaps even Jesus is against such unscientific malarky.

Instead of being afraid of sex, perhaps it is time for the church (Protestant and Catholic) to make peace with human sexuality. One way to do so would be for the Pope to recognize that of all the commandments in the scriptures, the only one we have kept is "be fruitful and multiply." In fact, we have been so good at keeping this command, while ignoring the others like caring for the poor, the widows, and orphans, that 33,000 children die each day of hunger and waterborne illnesses. If we were to celebrate how well we have filled the earth, perhaps we could focus our energy on reducing the number of children we have - to spend more time with them. If we recognize that the gift of our sexuality provides an intimacy that is essential to human flourishing, we could reclaim the beauty of our sexuality. Then protecting our sexual partners with the use of a condom would be seen as an act of love and respect, not as a threat to a biblical mandate we have already kept.

What do you think?

Against Gay Marriage? Don't Get One.

2009-03-21T14:59:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday we talked about Gay Marriage in our Adult Ed Sunday School class. We recognized that people come at the question from many different angles and social locations, including: the scriptures, linguistic arguments (accepted definitions of the term marriage), a place of fear of otherness, sociological, psychological, anthropological, biological (nature/nurture debate), but mostly we have heard cultural arguments (both religiously cultural and socially cultural).

Now, one of the arguments we didn't hear was this one made by Portia De Rossi, Ellen Degeneres' partner. Have fun with it, it was on Jimmy Kimmel live.

Irony of Gaza

2009-03-06T22:14:00.000-08:00

Lately, I have run into multiple interfaith circumstances that have become fraught with tension around the issue of Gaza. Sometimes this is because one party wishes to enforce the language of their understanding of the conflict – usually in defense of the military strikes of their religious or ethnic compatriots. This has been true of Jewish friends who insist that Israel was reacting to previous strikes from Hamas. It is hard for them to hear that I was leaving Tel Aviv the day that Israel broke the cease fire (Nov. 4th). And why does such arguments always focus on Hamas when other groups in Gaza, including Islamic Jihad and others, have been firing rockets into southern Israel.

On the other hand, some Muslim and Christian friends have been responding with their own reactions to the conflict. Some are hypersensitive to any statement about the conflict, including any criticism of Palestinian armed resistance such as the firing of rockets. Others are just as sensitive about who started the Gaza conflict, or insist that the disproportionality of those wounded and killed on both sides proves which side is right.

Both people are indigenous to the region. Both people have been traumatized. And the future hope of a settlement depends just as much on the U.S. becoming an honest broker for peace. Polemical statements against Hamas because they don't recognize the right of Israel to exist never question why Israel has never recognized the right of a Palestinian state to exist. Those who have been there know that the growth of Settlements in the West Bank and the cordoning off and siege of Gaza make a viable Palestinian state impossible. But until a negotiated, just peace is restored both peoples will continue to live in conflict: and until there is genuine hope for a peaceful resolution, perhaps we who have loved ones on every side of the conflict need to learn how to live out support for every victim of the conflict - especially the nonviolent civilians caught in between.

Here is a video from a Jewish friend in Israel called "Closed Zone":

Happy Evolution Week!

2009-02-09T18:46:00.001-08:00

This week we celebrate the scientific discoveries of Charles Darwin. While we have learned much since his time, Darwin's insights into the universe have provided a paradigm shift not only about human origins, but also about the ongoing process of discovering the meaning of human life.

As you watched The Simpsons clip above, did you find anything close to your view of evolution? For you, is evolution consistent with being a Christian? If so, how have you come to terms with such a reconciliation? Sure, there are those who would say that the two are irreconcilable - among them are some atheists and most biblical literalists. Isn't it interesting that in the last 200 years that most people have begun reading the Bible through scientific lenses – and either write it off completely or attempt to defend it against all attacks. But that raises an important question: Did the pre-modern writers of the Bible really set out to make a scientific explanation for the beginning of the world? I don't believe so. What if those writers were more interested in battling against the Babylonian creation myth with an adapted Hebrew creation myth (Gen. 1-2:1a). Or what if those earlier writers desired to explain the human predicament - why do we die and why we do bad things – with a story that shows all the evidence of being told for generations over campfires (Gen. 2:2b-3).

So what happens when we take such stories as historical fact? First we have a lot of explaining to do, because the biblical narrative doesn't provide a historically verifiable timetable. The universe is much older than described in the pages of the Bible, and since Copernicus we have known that the world is not flat with a dome or firmament as a sky as suggested in Gen. 1. And it is difficult to locate a garden of eden when only three of the four rivers are known. The language of the Hebrew text suggests a metaphorical reading, rather than a literal reading as well.

So the real questions is what do the stories mean? For the Priestly writer of Gen. 1, the high Hebrew poetry emphasizes the 7th day - the Sabbath – with a series of "chiasmus" or parallelisms, if I can call them that. Day one corresponds with day four - light to sun, and darkness to the moon. Day two corresponds with day five – separation of air and water with the filling of both with birds and fish. Day three corresponds with day six – separation of land and water and the creation of plants (before the sun by the way - not consistent with evolution) – and then the filling of of the land with animals and the apex of creation being humanity, which are created for the seventh day, the Sabbath. If you have ever read the Gilgamesh Epic, then you know that this story is a polemic against the Babylonian creation myth that said that humans were created to be the slaves of the gods - not the apex of the animal kingdom, with consciousness to boot.

The Jawhist - King David's scribe who put that ancient fireside tale of Gen. 2-3 into writing – uses many word plays as he tells his tale. In this story, creation happens the other way, with humanity created before the animals. The human being – adam – literally an earthling – is formed from the earth – adamah. The earthling is then divided into a man and woman after the animals don't provided a needed helpmate. They are placed in a place of spontaneous production of food, but when they pretend to be gods themselves by eating of the tree they are expelled from God's presence to a life of labor and pain. We aren't told that they couldn't die, but it is inferred with their expulsion. In some forms of Jewish mysticism and Gnostic Christian thought, returning to that unity enjoyed by the first earthling is the point of human existence. But unfortunately, most Western Christians read this tale through the eyes of the 4th century Bishop of Hippo St. Augustine, who invented the theology of "original sin" – which is foreign to both Eastern Christian and Jewish thought.

So, what if we were to think of the universe – and our place within it – in terms of evolution? Life is a process. We see our own lives in terms of an evolutionary process of learning and growing and adapting. If the universe has been evolving over the last 13 billion years to be able to provide a habitat where human consciousness can thrive, then it may take us a while more to see and quantify jumps in human abilities during our lifetimes. Most of human evolution in the last 10,000 years has been technological, but over the last 100 years we are becoming much more visually oriented than orally oriented. Our scientific prowess continues to offer us better health care technologies and more sophisticated ways to kill each other. Perhaps the issues that the earliest writers were really writing about need fresh attention.

Sabbath keeping is a lost art in a 24-7 culture. Do we need to learn how to rest and enjoy the fruits of our labor? What would our lives be like if we consciously took more time to spend with family and enjoy God. For the last 1,000 years in the west, human weakness has been discussed in terms of guilt and innocence rather than honor and shame. What if we looked at human weakness in terms of our genetic and tribal histories. Perhaps our natural tendencies toward war, greed, and violence could be understood in the context of human nature, encouraging us to focus our energies on providing the basic needs to every human being to prevent such activity. Sexual orientations and gender identities could be understood as a part of the diversity of the human family rather than an illness or lifestyle. Maybe such an approach would take away what most divides us. Could that be why religious fundamentalists want to preserve their anachronistic interpretations of sacred texts and human nature?

Generation We

2009-02-02T20:53:00.000-08:00

Generation WE: The Movement Begins... from Generation We on Vimeo.

You can see more about this movement at http://gen-we.org/

I am interested in hearing responses from older Americans when they see this video. While the video has some political implications, it also has some religious implications. How will the church have to change to begin to speak the language of Gen We?

Spiritual Consumerism

2009-01-17T16:57:00.001-08:00

Have you ever wondered why your life isn't as full as those happy people that go to church on television? Would you like to find the one book that will help you become completely cheerful and fulfilled? Would you like to receive the latest spiritual gift such as “barking in the Lord” or “holy laughter” without an expensive trip to Toronto? Are you looking for the secret biblical prayer that will give you both prosperity and a full head of hair? Would you like to receive the impartation of the Holy Spirit without the hassle of a flight to Pensacola? Do you need the latest spiritual tool to feel complete? Well now it is as close as your nearest Christian Bookstore!

You need, the "Porpoise Driven Life!"

Thanks Maggie.

BCS Shenanigans

2009-01-04T17:48:00.000-08:00

As some of you know, I am a huge University of Utah fan. I come to it quite naturally, being born into a family of Ute fans. (We still think my brother Shane is adopted because he is a BYU fan.) Naturally, football season is a big deal for my family. It was huge in 2004-5 when the team went undefeated and was the first team from a non-BCS conference to "bust" into the BCS bowl games. They gave the Utes lowly Pitt to play, whom they blew away 35-7. They finished ranked 4th that year, after blowing everyone away that they played. Then coach Urban Meyer took the job at Florida, and Utah started rebuilding.

Of course, then other non-BCS conference teams did likewise: undefeated Boise State beating Oklahoma in the 06 Fiesta Bowl, and undefeated Hawaii getting blown out by Georgia last year, which increased the distinctions made between BCS and non-BCS teams. Highly ranked non-BCS teams were not invited to the BCS bowls before, and under pressure from congresspersons the rules were changed to guarantee that any non-BCS conference teams that were ranked in the top 12 received a guaranteed spot. Still, most of these teams have been kept out of the top 5 of the polls, supposedly because of their "weak strength of schedule."

The BCS system was supposed to satiate those fans that desired to see a playoff system to end the long past of questionable national champs based on two separate polls. Instead, it has created a system that is updated almost every year to change the weaknesses exhibited that year. BCS conferences were assumed to be tougher conferences, and hence, a Boise State, Hawaii, BYU, TCU, or Utah team was automatically suspect because of the conferences they are in. And when an undefeated team from a non-BCS conference breaks in, it is supposed to be enough for them to get one of the other BCS games, rather than the championship game.

Here is how ESPN was talking about the Sugar Bowl on December 7th.

That argument was just blown out of the water by an undefeated University of Utah team that entered the game against Alabama as a 9.5 point underdogs. Utah didn't just beat the Tide by a greater margin than Florida did, but it dominated them from the very get go with a stunning 21-0 first quarter. Alabama fans were shown on television in shock, and a significant number were shown walking out of the stadium with four minutes left in the game. Of course, this surprised the analysts on ESPN, and those who see the SEC as the toughest conference in FBS college football. But should they have been surprised? This was a Mountain West Champ who beat the Oregon State team that beat USC. Utah also beat ranked teams in its own conference such as TCU and BYU, and the Mountain West Conference went 6-2 against Pac-10 teams this year.

So, why doesn’t the MWC get an automatic bid to the BCS bowl games? Because the NCAA has allowed the college presidents from the BCS conferences to run the BCS system, rather than creating a genuine playoff system like it does for every other college sport. Perhaps this is why a 12-0 Boise State from the WAC, ranked number nine in the country, was not given a BCS bowl game as well as Utah. The BCS system offers the highest payout per game, and BCS conferences love it when they are able to get two teams into one of these top games, rather than just their conference champions. So, despite the numerous calls for a playoff system, even a limited playoff with the top 8 teams, has fallen on deaf ears because the BCS bowl system is a huge cash cow.

Even ESPN analysts are getting in on the new BCS controversy.

So, who should be named National Champion? USC coach Pete Carroll said, “I don’t think anybody could beat us.” With one loss, he thinks his team is just as good as any other BCS conference one loss team. Texas was left out of the BCS Championship game because of a Big 12 tiebreaker rule that uses the BCS ranking, which depends on national polls instead of head to head wins. Texas beat Oklahoma earlier in the season, but lost to Texas Tech later in the season. Florida’s loss to unranked Mississippi was early enough in the season to allow them to rebound in the rankings, and their 31-20 win over Alabama in the SEC championship vaulted them into the BCS Championship game. Left out again was an undefeated Utah team that finally had the opportunity to show they can play with the top teams of the BCS conferences. Yes, we need a playoff season. Yes, we need to return college football bowls to the control of the NCAA itself. And yes, we need to allow the student athletes themselves to prove whose team is best, rather than rankings voted upon by their coaches and the media that cover their games. The nation is too big and the parity between teams is too close to continue to allow the most popular conference, and the teams with the largest fan base, to determine who gets to play in the postseason. I am voting Utah number one until we get a real playoff system to prove it on the field.

Advent Conspiracy – Rev. Billy's Christmas Special

2008-12-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

These are a couple of video clips that didn't quite make it to the Children's Message time slot this year.

The Credit Card Exorcism:

And the Church of Stop Stop Shopping Gospel Choir:

Advent Conspiracy – Worship More

2008-12-18T22:41:00.000-08:00

On the 14th, we had our annual Children's Pageant, which included Christmas traditions from around the world. For the Children's message, we watched another conversation on participating in the Advent Conspiracy - this time encouraging us to preserve our Advent preparations through worship.

Consuming Christ-mas

2008-12-11T23:35:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday, we watched a movie trailer as our continuing series of Children's Messages on reclaiming the meaning of Christmas from the consumerism that has become so normal in our society. This clip shows the shopping "mad dashes" that have claimed more lives again this year. Someone in Pittsburg heard that an employee at Walmart was punched by a shopper when they didn't have what they wanted. This isn't what Christmas is supposed to be... is it?

Advent Conspiracy

2008-12-02T11:37:00.001-08:00

Are you tired of spending too much time worried about what to get your family and friends for Christmas? Check out this video, and see if it helps.

Adding new ways to worship to the church

2008-11-22T12:05:00.000-08:00

Our Session last week voted to add an "alternative worship service" to the church in the future. We are still very much in the midst of planning what this new service will look like, and gathering the musicians and artists necessary to do some of the creative things we are discussing. In the mean time, my kids found this on YouTube, and definitely have mixed feelings about what a "new" kind of worship could look like. This gives a new definition to "trying too hard to be hip." Have fun...

Israel doesn't know what to do with non-violent resistance to the Occupation.

2008-11-19T22:05:00.000-08:00

A few of those who were picking olives with us – including a London reporter for Al Arabia – went to the weekly non-violent protest in the village of Bil'in, just North of Ramallah. I visited this place a couple of years ago and met with Abdullah and others in the village who welcome the Israelis and internationals who come to help stand against the theft of their land.

The "Security Barrier" runs up next to the village, stealing the village's olive orchards in order to build an illegal multi-story settlement on their land. The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that they should have access to their olive groves – where many of their trees have been destroyed – through a gate in the fence. But over the last year, the non-violent protests of the closed access to their groves has been met by increasingly violent responses from the IDF. A Nobel Peace prize winner from Ireland was hit with a rubber bullet there a while back. Not one suicide bomber has come from this region of the West Bank, but the IDF continue to argue for the placement of the fence well inside the Internationally recognized line. Here is footage from October 31st at Bil'in:

Of course, many of the Jews who come to Israel from abroad don't fully understand what is happening in the Occupied Territories. They are happy to be free and away from the Anti-Semitism expressed in Russia, Eastern Europe, or Ethiopia. But some of those who buy homes in the West Bank are not told that the homes they are buying are on land owned by Palestinians. Many of them get "buyer's remorse" after learning that their homes or condos are built on another's property, but they are stuck in mortgages worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even if they would like to get to do the right thing, they cannot afford to do so. As the New York Times reports, things are changing. Please visit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/world/middleeast/14settlers.html

The other issue for Palestinians who try to protect their rights in the courts is that Israel does not have established borders or a constitution that guarantees Arabs any rights – even marital rights, if they wish to marry someone who lives in the West Bank. The tragedy is extended to those cases when a family or village is able to get a decision in their favor from the Israeli Supreme Court, if the Military decides that a specific checkpoint or region is essential to Israel's "security" then they are free to ignore the Supreme Court and build a concrete wall between a Palestinian village such as Um Salomona and the villager's olive and almond groves. Isn't it time for human rights in Israel-Palestine?

American Religious Fascism

2008-11-06T19:35:00.000-08:00

When did the United States cease being a Constitutional, representative Democracy? The moment states started allowing the tyranny of the majority to supersede our constitutional freedoms and civil rights.

• It happened when the issue of slavery wasn't made a part of the U.S. Constitution's guarantees of the humanity of every resident in the colonies.

• It happened again with the Chinese Exclusion Act.

• It happened again when the Latter-Day Saints were stripped of their religious freedoms expressed in the practice of polygamy.

• It happened again with the internment of Japanese-American's during World War II.

• It happened again when interracial couples were not allowed to marry who they choose.

• It happened again as women were not guaranteed the same rights as men in society and the same pay as men in the workplace when the Equal Rights Amendment wasn't ratified.

• It happened again as the U.S. ignored their humanitarian responsibility on the Mexican border in deference to an "enforcement only" approach to the immigration issue it created with the creation of NAFTA.

•And it happened again this week when religious conservatives misrepresented a California State Supreme Court decision that recognized the constitutional right of all couples to marry who they choose, and voted for a citizen proposition to attempt to write discrimination into the Californian Constitution.

Living in a Constitutional Democracy is supposed to ensure that the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" trumps any majority vote to curtail such rights. But there is a group of Americans who aren't interested in life under the law. It is not that they are not law abiding citizens, but they wish to impose their religious and cultural norms on the rest of American society - wishing to recreate America as a "Christian nation." These folks are fundamentalist Calvinists that ascribe to a form of Christian Dominionism that seeks a Christian Fundamentalist Theocracy rather than the secular system the founding fathers and mothers provided for us.

Umberto Eco writes, "In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view––one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Facisim, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. There is in our future a TV or internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People....
Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and point our finger at any of its new instances––every day, in every part of the world." (Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt, as printed in "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America," by Chris Hedges.)

When any part of society gets targeted, even in the name of "family values," a little bit more of our civil liberties protected by the bill of rights gets eroded away. What eventually happens, as in the case of Prop 8 in California, is that heterosexual privilege gets instituted as a cultural norm that allows other kinds of discrimination against Gays, Lesbians, Bi-Sexuals, Transgender and Intersex persons, and the Queer and Questioning. Then the differences between the rights of those with Civil Unions and those who are Married become more pronounced. A targeted class of people must pay lawyers hundreds of dollars to enact as many of the rights that Civil Union do not provide – such as inheritance rights. Meanwhile, the favored class of people can get a quickie marriage in Las Vegas as easily as setting up a haircut. Separate and unequal indeed.

Yes, heterosexual marriage is in crisis, but denying marriage to all loving couples will not fix it. Instead, Prop 8 is blatant discrimination, it is still unconstitutional, and it is morally wrong. The California Supreme Court recognized marriage as a right everyone has always had, yet hadn't been officially made available to every citizen. It is time for every American to demand that we return to a Constitutional Democracy and correct this egregious wrong perpetrated by the tyranny of a slim majority.

Peace tax for a peace dividend

2008-10-23T09:49:00.000-07:00

While the Presbyterian Church, among other non-profits, has been discussing divestment as a way of not profiting from the occupation and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I wonder how willing we would be to start talking about a peace tax.

Many may not know, but right now the U.S. taxpayers are helping pay billions of dollars each year to both Egypt and Israel for the peace agreement between them negotiated in the Camp David Accords, signed in 1978. It can be said that such an investment helped in the transition of the Sinai back into the hands of Egypt and helped bring about stability between the two nations.

So it makes me wonder, if there is ever to be a peace dividend between Israel and Palestine, would churches and other non-profits be willing to encourage another set of peace taxes. Churches and other NGO's have been considering how to best help those most affected by the conflict, most notably the Palestinian poor. They have also considered how to invest for peace, though most of our funding mechanisms center around mission and grant funding of certain projects that we find consistent with our way of doing church. But I wonder if we would be willing to risk asking our nation, and others, to consider funding such a way of making peace where such conflict fuels the fire of hatred and animosity of much of the Arab world against the West. Such a peace tax would be necessary in any peace talks to provide for the compensation of the refugees of Palestine displaced by Jewish settlers since 1948, and the number of Sephardic Jews who were displaced from Arab countries after that war.

I believe the peace dividend of such a tool could be used to get over the thorniest issues of negotiations, and that it would show the wrongs made on all sides of the issue, including those states that contributed to European-American anti-semitism while displaying to the Arab world our desire for peace.

Historical Critical Pilgrimage

2008-10-21T12:47:00.000-07:00

I made it safely to Israel late last night. Today, our group went to Tel Megiddo (the ruins of the ancient city of Megiddo referred to in John's Apocalypse by the term Armageddon). We also went through the Church of the Annunciation. Our Greek Orthodox tour guide is very similar to the Malkite Catholic guide I had a couple years ago. The place names and biblical stories are woven together in an allegorical and "orthodox" historical reading that doesn't exactly square with the latest that we know about biblical archeology and history. It has been a good trip, but I find myself catching my tongue at some of the simplistic stories told about the history of Israel. It is not that seminary has ruined such travel. I think that most tourists who come wish to see the holy sites, and perhaps don't like to be told that there is no proof that this or that church or site is the actual site of ______________ event.

When the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, his Christian mother Helena must have been ecstatic. Shortly after Christianity became the official religion of the empire, Helena toured the Holy Land and heard the legends of what happened where. Now we have churches, shrines, and monuments built for the Beatitudes, a building where Mary was supposed to have been buried before her ascension into heaven, and a path that goes through modern streets of Jerusalem as the "via dolo rosa" – the pathway of the lord to his crucifixion – even though the original road was 3 feet lower and may or may not have followed the same path.

It is good to be here, don't get me wrong. I just wish that those sharing "the party line" about such things would also describe or take us to the other sites that claim to be the household of Joseph in Nazareth. But such honest tourism threatens other parts of the tourism trade. What if Jesus wasn't born in Bethlehem, a point which is added to the synoptic gospel tradition in Matthew and Luke in the 5th and 10th decades after Jesus died? Scholars believe that this story was placed here in order to make Jesus the Son of David. But what if he really was born in Nazareth? And even if it could be proven, would churches starting singing "O Little Town of Nazareth"?

It was good today to help put some of the Northern Tribe's stories into context at Tel Megiddo. Seeing its strategic place along the trade routes between Egypt and Mesopotamia, and witnessing the vast archeological evidence that this place had been inhabited from 9,000 to 400 BCE, all helps describe the resources Solomon put into the place in order to extract the taxes of goods going through this region. It also helps us understand why the place had been run over and rebuilt 28 times. Both Egypt and the Assyrians and their successor Empires would desire this key point in order to control the flow of goods and taxes back to their respective empires.

It was also good to be able to look across the Jezreel Valley at the Mt. Tabor (the supposed sight of the Transfiguration) and Nazareth. While Nazareth was so small in Jesus' time that it didn't need mentioning in most documents that survive, its proximity to Sephoris, Mt. Tabor and the Sea of Galillee help put Jesus into context. No wonder Jesus taught with agricultural parables. This is the bread basket of Galillee, and the beauty is astounding. It makes me wonder how our natural surroundings influence our cosmology and the stories we live by. Perhaps John the Baptizer did grow up among the Essenes, as many scholars now believe. It would account much for for his ascetic style and brash tone. But Galillee gives us a Jesus of Nazareth – who continues to give us a world of possibilities as we look out at the world.

I am happy to continue giving my own responses to the trip here, but if you want to keep up with the group's blog, please visit http://keephopealiveca.blogspot.com/

The Ancient Celtic Cross

2008-10-09T23:02:00.000-07:00

The Celtic cross is a symbol we have seen many times, and we are used to seeing tall Celtic crosses carved out of stones in graveyards and on the tops of churches.

Before Christianity came to what is now Ireland and the British Isles, there were already Celtic crosses in use but they were not high crosses. It is said that St. Patrick added the circle to the Christian cross as a way of communicating that the God who created the sun, and hence the universe, also was known in Jesus of Nazareth who died on a Roman cross. Instead, the ancient Celtic cross is more ancient than that.

Instead of upright crosses, such carvings were placed flat on the ground, the four quarters pointing to the four directions. To the North lies wisdom, silence, Winter, death, and the element of the earth. To the East lies rebirth, youth, Spring, growth, sunrise, and the element of water. To the South lies vitality, vigor, Summer, strength, noontime, and the element of air. To the West lies knowledge, experience, Autumn, guidance, sunset, and the element of fire. The circle which connects the four points is the cycle of the eternal returns of all these things, and the Center represents the Spirit and the soul. If you noticed, there are both elements of the divine masculine and feminine in this description.

It seems to me that our culture seems to have lost the ancient connection to the cycles of nature, and the cyclic cosmology from that time. Instead, we think in more linear ways, as if everything has a beginning and an ending. This not only affects the ways we look at life, but influences our conceptions of history and our misunderstandings of such biblical terms as "the end of the age." Instead of the end of an era and the beginning of a new era, many hear a term that refers to the end of the world. Hence, a word like apocalypse (which means to reveal) then begins to take on meanings of the "end times" and the destruction of the world. The cyclic world of most ancient peoples who depended on knowing and living within the agrarian cycles of nature gets displayed in such symbols as spirals and circles. But the Celts also had quite an affinity for the number three, which melded neatly with Trinitarian thought. And so, for hundreds of years Ireland had both an ecologically aware and a very relational form of Christianity. What if we could reclaim such a cosmology as a way of healing Christianity from its pretenses of power over others, alienation from creation, and the reclaiming of the divine feminine?

Celtic Cross

2008-10-09T22:38:00.000-07:00

Some of you know that my youngest brother Steven died in a truck rollover accident last May. He was 27 years old, and left an ex-wife and two children. It has been a hard few months personally as I continue to come to terms with his untimely death. He had just moved to Grand Junction, Colorado in an attempt to find a greater access to work for his painting business. The distance and separation from the facts of his accident provided many questions as we tried to put pieces together.

Needless to say, his loss was a shock to all of us. I didn't have much of a sense of his presence except for one evening while going through his pictures while preparing a slide show for the Memorial. Losing a brother I expected to be able to play softball with continues to be difficult. What surprised me, however, was not having a sense of his presence. So as a part of my grief, I found a great tattoo artist named Dr. Skins. He studied art at UCLA and was a jazz harmonica artist with a few rock bands in the 80's and 90's. He helped turn a picture of a Celtic cross into the art you see above, with intricate shading that makes it look like aged stone.

Now I have a remembrance of Steven with me all the time, and a celebration of our Celtic heritage that both of us enjoyed. Life isn't the same without you. Love ya bro'. Go Utes!

Water Security

2008-09-26T15:29:00.000-07:00

I saw the documentary "Flow" this week. This movie is still playing at a few theaters around the Bay Area, and I recommend it highly. It shows the consequences of allowing corporations to privatize what has been a part of our environmental commons: Water. What happens when companies bottle municipal tap water? What happens when companies take over publicly owned water systems? What happens when cities, counties, states, and nations allow this transfer of control over drinkable water in a time of drastic climate change? It tells the story of Bechtel in Bolivia, our SF Presbytery mission partners through Joining Hands.

Flow is still playing at:

Shattuck Cinemas

2230 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley

2:45 pm 9:35 pm

Rafael

1118 Fourth St., San Rafael

6:45 pm

Opera Plaza Cinema

601 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco

1:50 pm 4:40 pm 7:15 pm 9:50 pm

Visit the site at www.flowthefilm.com

What do we do with conflict in the church?

2008-09-06T22:18:00.000-07:00

Do we ignore it, hoping it will go away? Do we overreact? Instead, it seems that Jesus invites us to keep short accounts with one another. In fact, he compels us to meet conflict head on.

About this dynamic of life, Jude Siciliano says,

"Jesus isn't calling us to be wimps, to lie dow and let the world run over us in its pursuit of pleasure and ease. He wants us to be an assertive, believing community, ever challenging by our values and ways of living what the world takes for granted and calls "blessings." We are, according to the beatitudes, people who practice unlimited forgiveness, peacemaking and patient loving, in the ways Jesus taught us by his living and dying."

It is too bad that many Christians use Matthew 18:15-20 as the necessary steps to go through before one has an excuse to exclude someone from the community – rather than positively as a way of resolving conflict. It makes me wonder how many of our judicial cases in the Presbyterian Church could be solved before major expense if we followed these words with the grace they were intended.

Alaska siting - yes, there are labyrinths there too.

2008-09-01T22:25:00.000-07:00

I spent this last week with my lectionary group at the Shrine of St. Therese of Lisieux near Juneau, Alaska. We shared papers on lectionary scriptures for next year's texts, went out whale watching, and did a little fishing. On the grounds there was this 11-circuit Chartres labyrinth made of stone and gravel. At each of the turns there were local plants, and a large stone in the middle where people have left symbols of prayers. The labyrinth is built into the side of the hill with large retaining stones that are perfect for sitting. And, of course, there are roses all around, a symbol of the presence and prayers of St. Therese.

It can be a little hard to walk when the stones are above ground, like in this labyrinth. It is still possible to walk such labyrinths with others, but it makes it harder to pass one another. Metaphorically, what obstacles to we find on life's journey of faith? Do we wait for others to make their way before us? Do we feel constrained by the path, or do we experience the freedom of venturing off the path on our way to Christ's presence in the middle? What do we take away from such an experience with us back into the world?

Walking the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral

2008-08-06T01:05:00.000-07:00

I took some time on my day off last week to go to Grace Cathedral to walk their new and improved labyrinth. As you can see, they replaced the wool tapestry labyrinth with a stone inlaid labyrinth that looks more like the original 11-circuit Chartres labyrinth in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Chartres, France.

While I walked, it was very crowded as people came to walk after work. Staying for a while, walking slowly as people rushed through their experience, allowed me to remain later to have most of the labyrinth to walk by myself. This is one of my favorite places on earth, having taken the Facilitator's Training in 2002. Imagine walking in this space with a live harpist and rose petals falling down from the ceiling! More information is available at www.veriditas.org.

More Labyrinths:

2008-08-06T00:59:00.001-07:00

The last labyrinth I helped create is another indoor seven-circuit modified Chartres style labyrinth at Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, CA. This is also painted on the floor of the Fellowship Hall, protected by a laminate. Having a labyrinth in the midst of a theater and multipurpose room is a great way to add depth to a room, while increasing the opportunities for creating programming in the spiritual discipline of group walking of the labyrinth. Of course, I can't take credit for this wonderful labyrinth because Rev. Catherine Oliver was not only the inspiration for it, but she also helped draw, tape, paint, and organized all the volunteers who helped create this special space. If you are in the Pacific Heights neighborhood, drop by for a walk.

More Labyrinths:

2008-08-06T00:55:00.001-07:00

I helped make a seven-circuit modified Chartres style labyrinth made with local materials at Westminster Woods. Across the river from the green and cafeteria, this labyrinth is nestled into the hillside with a small retaining wall that doubles as a bench. The path is redwood duff, divided by rocks from the riverbed nearby.

(picture coming.)

More Labyrinths:

2008-08-06T00:37:00.000-07:00

This is a seven-circuit modified Chartres style labyrinth I painted in the back yard of a friend's house when her house was a part of a garden tour. I have made similar temporary labyrinths at my church – Community Presbyterian Church of Pittsburg, CA (www.cpcpittsburg.org) – at various times over the last four years.

More Labyrinths:

2008-08-06T00:34:00.001-07:00

This is an 11-circuit modified Chartres style labyrinth inside Duncan Hall at First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo, CA. Accross the street from the seminary, this labyrinth is the only permanent indoor labyrinth in the area and is perfect for rainy days or lazy afternoons. We have led evening Lenten services on and around the labyrinth, with candles, and a creativity table for journaling or drawing about the labyrinth experience. The indoor space also makes it more intimate for times with live or recorded music.

More Labyrinths:

2008-08-06T00:28:00.000-07:00

This Cretan style of labyrinth was made by planting concrete pavers into the grass. This is the oldest style of labyrinth in the world, and can be found on coins from the Mediterranean and even in some stone labyrinths in Britain and some Scandinavian countries. We added a Celtic circle to the interior axial cross of this labyrinth. The secluded spot between Baird Hall and the Lloyd Center at SFTS is very private. Take off your shoes and spend some time.

Labyrinths I have helped build:

2008-08-05T21:19:00.000-07:00

This seven-circuit modified Chartres style labyrinth is on Geneva Terrace at San Francisco Theological Seminary. We tested a version of this labyrinth in chalk during holy week when I was a chaplain's assistant at SFTS. A classmate suggested turning the entrance toward the mountains and it has made all the difference in the walking experience. I drew this labyrinth, which was then created with an acrylic Portland cement applied by Rob Cowger, and then sealed to protect it from the sun and rain. The acrylic cement bonded with the regular cement, and even exhibits the same pattern of cracking with the cement underneath. The purple color today is closer to gray, perhaps because it hasn't been sealed as often as it needs, but it is still the most accessible labyrinth on campus.

AIDS Walk San Francisco

2008-07-26T22:57:00.000-07:00

Marcus Jung, Will McGarvey, Bruce Reyes-Chow

It amazes me that 25,000 people helped raise over $4.5 million dollars. While many people were at worship in churches around the Bay Area, others were walking and praying for a cure to a disease that continues to ravish people all around the world. Almost three decades after the first victims of AIDS were targeted and excluded from the church, today even Evangelical Christians in America are working to end this terrible disease around the world. While in Seminary, I remember organizing my congregation in creating home health care kits to send to southern Africa. People went shopping for rubber gloves, bandages, gauze, scissors, and bedsheets, and we mailed them in large boxes to our Presbyterian partners. With the increasing number of AIDS orphans, the families and villages that have been devastated, and the those here in the U.S. who continue to live with the effects of the virus, let us continue to pray, and walk, and heal.

This year, about the same number of Presbyterians joined in the walk. The Episcopalians raised $19,000, the Lutherans raised $16,000, and the Catholics raised $13,000. Next year, lets send teams from every congregation in the Presbytery, and see if we can catch up with our brothers and sisters in raising money for a cure. Then more of us will be able to participate in the great hospitality offered by Mission Bay's community!

The New Social Creed

2008-07-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

The recent General Assembly updated its Social Creed from the versions of the past in an attempt to be able to address the current needs of the world. What do you think about this? What would you add, or leave out? What is the role of the Church in the world? How does this affect our local mission?

A Social Creed For the 21st Century

Remembering the prophetic Social Creed of the Churches of 1908, we respond to God’s call to transform our social order toward justice and peace, and address the 21st century’s great challenges of globalization and sustainability. Hearing also concerns of churches and peoples around our globe, we pledge ourselves to specific practices of personal and social responsibility that reflect our Triune God’s gracious will for all creation. We rejoice in the Biblical vision where all “shall long enjoy the work of their hands” and “not labor in vain or bear children for calamity”(Isa.65: 22-23).

In faith, we celebrate the full humanity of each woman, man, and child, all created in God’s image, by working for:

Employment for all, at a family-sustaining living wage.
Protection of workers from dangerous occupational conditions, injuries, and death.
Full civil, political and economic rights for all people, protected by new governance structures.
Abolition of forced labor, human trafficking, and the exploitation of children.
The rights of workers to organize, and to share in workplace decisions and productivity gains.
Adequate time and resources to care for families without fear of work penalties.
High quality public education for all, free from racial, gender, or economic disparity.
A fair, de-racialized criminal justice system, based on restorative justice and rehabilitation.

In the love taught by Jesus, despite the world’s sufferings and evils, we honor the deep connections within our human family and seek to awaken a new spirit of cooperation by working for:

Abatement of poverty and enactment of policies benefiting the most vulnerable.
Universal healthcare.
Safe, affordable housing, served by adequate public transportation.
An effective program of social security during sickness, disability and old age.
Tax and budget policies that reduce disparities between rich and poor, strengthen democracy, and provide greater opportunity for everyone within the common good.
Just immigration policies that protect family unity, safeguard workers’ rights, require employer accountability, and foster international cooperation.
Public service as a high vocation, with integrity in voting, campaign finance and lobbying.

In hope sustained by the Holy Spirit, we pledge to keep and heal the environment, recognizing our responsibility for its health and our interdependence with Creation and one another, by working for:

Adoption of simpler lifestyles for those who have enough.
Access for all to healthy food, clean water and air, with wise and equitable land stewardship.
Sustainable use of all resources and promotion of alternative energy sources.
Equitable global trade that protects local economies, initiatives, cultures and livelihoods.
Peacemaking through international cooperation and rule of law, mutual security rather than unilateral force, nuclear disarmament and a strengthened United Nations.
Redirection of military spending to more peaceful and productive uses.
Relationships of mutuality among the world’s churches and faith communities.

With all those who labor and are heavy-laden, we commit ourselves to a culture of peace and freedom that embraces non-violent initiatives, human dignity and greater equality, with a deeper spirituality of inward growth and outward action. By these means, we witness to our hope in the God who makes all things new, whom we know in Jesus Christ.

Welcome

2008-07-18T10:54:00.000-07:00

Ok, so our Moderator, and my friend, the Right Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow has encouraged the church to increase the different ways we as pastors communicate with our congregants and the church at large – and so, after much arm twisting I have finally started a blog.

I will use this space to go down the many rabbit trails our weekly lectionary scriptures take us. I also hope to further explore what it means to be a Christian in the midst of Empire – both as citizen and critic – asking what it means not just to believe in Jesus but to be a follower of his radical message in a time of much Christian complacency and complicity with injustice around the world.

So read and struggle along with me. Replies are always welcome. Let's start a conversation about our lives and loves – exploring how God calls us into the future together.

Will