Teaching Justice

After the devastation in South east Asia a year ago, a child was lauded on the front page of a local paper for getting a hundred fifty dollars contributed to tsumani aid. What she is learning is not generosity, but pitance generosity and a romantic view of the world. She sacrificed a little money and so learned that feeling good about what she did is all that is necessary. She learned nothing about justice. She learned nothing about making an important choice between spending hundreds of billions of dollars on war and a few millions on chairity. This is not the way we teach our children the way of the Christ. Sacrifice for others is much more expensive than this article teaches.

A social and political policy that allows and encourages the rich to be rich with the view that everyone has the chance to be rich is not just a mistake. It is a lie. For the people who preach that know it will not happen. People who earn $6.50 an hour will never earn enough from the stock market to retire.

Shame on the politicians and conservative Christians who preach such tripe.

Being correct.

In her book titled, Called to Question, Joan Chittister defines religions as "systems designed to  lead humans to the divine."  She presents a thought provoking concept regarding religion and spirituality in the following writing:
 
 
"Religion is the mooring of the soul.  Spirituality is its lodestone.  Religion is, at best, external.  Spirituality is the internal distillation of this external  witness to the divine.  Spirituality is what galvanizes us to fill up the lack we feel within us.  It is the desire for wholeness that evades us.  It is the burning need to find the more.
The very purpose of religion is to enable us to step off into the uncharted emptiness that is the spiritual life, freely but not untethered.  We have under     our feet the promise of the tradition that formed us and the disciplines that shaped our souls.  We can then wander through the pantheon of spiritual traditions freely, going deeper and deeper into every question from every direction.  In the end, then, we become more, not less, of what we ourselves know to be our own religious identity." 

I don’t know why it is that people who believe in and want and live by mystery and ambiguity and people who believe in and want absolutes and unitary truth cannot share God.

The Bible is filled with metaphors and ambiguity, contradictions which require us to decide matters of faith and morals for ourselves, but with God’s help.

Others see scripture and church etc. as defining for us more completely what we should accept in faith and morals. These two attitudes are not opposites, they are on a continuum.

Does unity trump orthodoxy or does orthodoxy trump unity.

Why is it in religion that we need to deny the value of someone elses’ religion/piety/spirituality?

This is where I work and worship

This the inside of the Episcopal church of the Good Samaritan in Clermont County, Ohio. The building was built by the members of the congregation. It is intended to grow into a full sized parish over the next four or five years.

On Being a Christian in America

Friday in the third week of Lent
When I was 15 or 16 I began to take Jesus seriously. He meant what he said. We are supposed to care for the poor, the mistreated. We are not to kill other people. I saw at that age that Christian people did not really practice what Jesus taught. We still don’t. That is disillusion.

I am often disillusioned with life. I am disillusioned with the Christian church. I am disillusioned with American democracy. I am disillusioned with me.

It is not a Christian thing to do to go to war to protect our way of life and to do so claiming some higher principle which allows us to ignore Jesus’ teaching. We may not engage in preemptive war in order to spread democracy and our way of life; those are not our baptismal vows.

Lest you think this is a partisan political speech against one party, I don’t see a dime’s worth of difference between George Bush and John Kerry in regard to the war in Iraq and the so called war against terrorism. That too is a source of disillusion. How can you have a war against a technique of war? A war against al Kaida, or a particular nation I understand. But a war against terrorism is like a war against cavalry charges or arial bombardment. It is not just that we cannot ever erradicate terrorism, but we are as guilty of it as the other side. What makes flying a plane into the Pentegon terrorism and 'Shock-and-Awe' bombing something else?

Many of us struggle with American culture which is no where near as moral as it pretends to be. Or has limited morality to sexual issues.

Sisters and brothers , Christians are called to worship God, to tell the good news of Jesus Christ and to live as though the Holy spirit is igniting us. America fails to live up to ‘values’ because it is looking at the wrong values: purity, safety, security, ease and comfort.

Now let us get up on this Lenten morning and prepare for Easter by declaring our sins, placing our selves in God’s loving hands and begin again. Let’s do the same tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Together let us scour the scriptures for guidance. Together let us pray. Together let us show what it means to be accepting of all others, to be fearless in advocating truth and to insist on the priority of the poor. Let us be joy filled. Let us be witnesses for Jesus Christ in all the communities we inhabit.

Feast of Gregory the Illuminator
From Disorganized Religion "Ministry for the Meantime"” by Sam Portaro
"“If by evangelism we mean ... ‘an incarnate and dynamic expression of God'’s love for the world and each person in it that is so compelling it invites a response, then our evangelism will not look like marketing so much as it will become a ministry, a way of being with people in the world."” p. 22

If Resurrection is true, there is no such thing as life and death issues.

What all Christians should be doing is
1. Worshipping together indicating our love for each other. This includes singing each other'’s music
2. Gathering new people into our community indicating our love for our neighbors. This includes our children.
3. Learning more about the sacred journey indicating our love for God. This includes everyone.

The long term call of God to all Christians is to make new disciples for Christ by being witnesses to him. I believe that means active work to develop a new generation of Christians and acts of social service to those most in need. Evangelism, youth work, acts of justice and mercy.

I don'’t understand why some Christians think it is appropriate to engage in Evangelism, bringing people to Christ but ignoring the plight of dying children and others think it is appropriate to raise social issues but are unwilling to talk about Jesus. In the political world George W Bush is in the first camp and John Kerry in the second.

Why can'’t we, why don'’t we do both at the same time. Jesus is Lord and because he loves us, we are passionate about caring for global poverty and the environment and also want to bring people to God's altar.

Let us keep in mind the more significant events of our time. The death by starvation of children all over the world. The death from AIDS especially in Africa, the continual resort to violence and impoverishment by our own government.

At the moment I have some excitement about ministry as parish priest. I am in a place which seems to want to care for the local poor and engage in evangelism. I need to spark them to learn more about the faith and to pay attention to issues of justice.

Wednesday, 22 March 2006 The Feast of James de Koven
Some people see the church as an institution for the preservation of the Gospel: its liturgy, music, socialization etc.
Others see the church as a permanent revolution: The Gospel as a force that transforms.

On the first Sunday of my sabbatical in 2004, Nancye and I went to a service at The Vineyard Church in Columbus. It is a huge place that looks more like a Mall than a church. A large interior court yard, with coffee and breakfast stations; you have to pay for breakfast even for coffee. There is to the side a cafe which serves fast food. There is a book store and off in several directions what appear to be offices and class rooms. The auditorium is in a square room with the stage, for that is what it is, in a corner. Elaborate lighting, projection, music and sound equipment. The music is for listening, even though many try to sing along. The amplified band performs rather than leads singing. Half hour sermon plus altar call. Communion done very informally with individual containers of wafer and grape juice.

Why can'’t we Episcopalians develop the enthusiasm, economy of scale, expertise, welcoming that these people have?
If the Episcopal church dies it will not be because we have a gay bishop, but because we care only about preserving the past.

We need more critical thinking about Bible, morals and culture. We need to draw in new People to Christ. Work for justice and mercy.


I do not understand why some who call themselves evangelical or conservative [Stage Right] find it necessary to deny the validity of the faith life of others. Of others who disagree with them, have had other experiences of God.

Perhaps it is because an alternative experience of God must be denied because otherwise their experience is denied. It seems to me a cardinal tenant of conservatives [Right wingers?] that truth is unitary. Anything that suggests that truth might be multiple is beyond their understanding.

Can we take is as an axiom of liberalism most if not all issues have serveral sides, that truth is both multiple and mysterious? Is it then the case that conservatives [Stage Right] believe that on any issue there is a correct and an incorrect answer? "“Ha,"” he says, “It can't be that simple!"”

From my standing as a religious liberal and I really am not sure that is what I am; I prefer orthodox, I accept the faith expressions of intolerant people as being legitimate. Buddhists. Southern Baptists. Racial Bigots. Unitarians Roman Catholics. They have all had real experiences of God. I honor these. My experience of God is that the Lord of creation loves and disciplines and supports us all. I'’ d like to hear that from conservatives.

Stage Right. Stage Left

March 21, 2006 The Feast Day of Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells.

When I stand on the stage facing the audience everything on my left is Stage Left. Everything on my right is Stage Right. For the audience it is the opposite. Stage Left is however still Stage Left even if it is to their right.

Down stage is toward the audience and Up stage away from them. These stage directions are left over from a time when theatre stages were raked; when you walked up stage you were going up a ramp.

In theology and politics we often talk about right and left. Conservative and Liberal. The political use of these terms comes from the seating in the French parliament; legislators who wanted to change things sat on the left side of the chamber. That is Stage Right. Hmm.

I have come to a degree of puzzlement about the common use of left and right. Are you left wing and liberal if you want to change things from the way they are? So those people who want to end the current laws about abortion and restrict that practice are left wing liberals? And those who want to keep abortion legal are conservatives?

Or do left and right in religion and politics mean something else. You are a liberal if you are in favor of abortion, against the war in Iraq, want to allow gay people to be ordained to the clergy and get married and want the government to solve all our problems no matter what the cost. Conservatives think the Bible should be our rule book and taxes should be reduced as far as possible.

How much sense does any of this make? Where are the overriding principles in these collections of ideas? How much sense does it make to approve of war and capital punishment but oppose abortion?

We humans are a wondrous mixture of emotions, ideas and physical contradictions. Standing someplace on the stage facing God, my audience all day long, I pray for his love to help me, us, as I struggle to remember my lines and my blocking.