Gasoline or not to gasoline

It is that silly season again; its summer and the frantic cries about boycotting the oil companies are running around the internet. "Don't by from Exxon and BP!" they say. "If we don't stop them we'll have $4 gasoline as they do in Europe!"

My suggestion for the oil price problem is: take the bus. What you don't have a bus? Vote for candidates for public office who will provide more funds for mass transit and less for roads. No one like that running for office? Then complain to the politicians and parties.

America needs to reduce its dependency on oil. That dependency causes us to get sinfully involved in the Middle East. We will run out of affordable oil eventually. Why wait until we have another oil 'crisis' real or manufactured, to work toward an economy fueled by many sources.

Oil along with gas, wind, solar, bio, maybe even nuclear. How about a crash program to develop nuclear fusion? That makes more sense than invading another Middle Eastern country.

Now how much of what I suggest is liberal? Conservative? Right or left; which is it?

Palm Sunday/ the Passion of Jesus

The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. Passion is an eagerness for something. An overwhelming desire for.... I learned passion in high school and college from Park Wayne Cooley and Don Glancy. These two teachers taught me to practice the arts of music and theatre with care for the details and something well beyond care for the enterprise itself.

I learned to love God from my mother .

I am passionate about the Gospel and what it has to say about how humans must, yes, must, must, must, learn to live without violence and bigotry. And must, must, must learn to live with patience, compassion, silence, kindness.

Passion. Passion nearly equals Love. Love is something we do, not something we feel. We 'do' Love because we have been given a passion for something God needs to have done.

Passion can just as easily come from a negative source: jealousy, insecurity, fear. Negative passion leads to violence, hoarding and hatred.

Love comes out of our passion. We do acts of love because God gives us passion. I am serving a Episcopal mission church as priest not because I like the people here more than those I served in other cities; or because I like Clermont County, Ohio, more than I like other places where have I lived. I'd actually rather be in Colorado or London. I am here because God has given me a passion for what we are about. I love this congregation and what I do here because God has given me a passion for the work of evangelism , talking about Jesus, doing the work of the Lord.

For what do you have passion?

Most Christians have a passion for Jesus and something else. As I have shown for me above. Jesus and the prayer book... and justice ministry.... and renewal music..... and habitat for humanity..... and quiet contemplation....and a political agenda right or left. But anything that is Jesus and..... is not Jesus. It assumes something more than Jesus is needed. We seem to say, our passion for Jesus can be known, filled only through our opposition to abortion, or our work to eliminate racial intolerance.

Our passion should be for Jesus only recognizing that as sinful humans we find it impossible not to find some niche to call our own.

Palm Sunday is a passionate day. Joy, celebration,exaltationn as we welcome Jesus home to Jerusalem. Agony, death, torture, terror as we shout ‘Crucify Him,’ as we nail him to the cross and watch him suffocate to death.

The Passion of Jesus is about death. It is about the great need he had to give, to empty himself. "Though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himsel takingkng the form of a slave, being born in human likeness." Philippians 2: 6-7. The God of Jesus has an eagerness for us. See Psalm 18 "He brought me out into an open place ; he rescued me because he delighted in me."

Jesus has a passion for us, God delights in us and so gives himself up for us.

That is what Palm Sunday and Good Friday are about. Our passion is beautiful in God's sight.