Mini-sermon
By scripture we are INFORMED
Of wondrous acts that God PERFORMED,
So that, no longer CONFORMED,
The church can be REFORMED,
And we — and through us the world — TRANSFORMED.
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A note to my readers
With great reluctance, I have placed an ad banner on the sidebar of this blog. I hope it is not too much of an annoyance. While blogging will probably never be a profitable enterprise for the likes of me, the reality is that it would be foolish not to take advantage of ethical opportunites to offset some of the costs of doing what I do. Please notify me (email or comment below) if you see something inappropriate in the ad space, over which I have only limited control. And, also, if you would, let me know if any link you see proves useful. Thanks!
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Today
Today is only the beginning
Of the eternal always
Which was and is and ever shall be
World without end, amen.
Today if you will hear his voice
He sets aside a certain day, calling it Today
Act today
Sing today
Love today
Give today.
There is no other day.
There never has been.
Now is the time.
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Progress
Progress: Making sure that the mistakes we make this year are not the same as the ones we made last year.
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Memorial
O, Beautiful, for heroes proved
In liberating strife!
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America! May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!
In liberating strife!
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America! May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!
-Katherine Lee Bates, America the Beautiful
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Peace Scriptures
Crossposted from The Search for Integrity
9 He makes wars cease to the end of the earth.
He breaks the bow, and shatters the spear.
He burns the chariots in the fire.
10 “Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations.
I will be exalted in the earth.”
Jim Wallis likes to point out the ironic fact that many people trained in teaching Bible in their churches seem to have missed the thousands of scripture texts that speak of God’s special concern for the poor. Similarly, many who have attended evangelical churches could easily, based on the teaching they hear, gain the patently false impression that the Bible rarely speaks of peace, and that the few places where it does do so, it is with disapproval. They repeatedly hear just a handful of seemingly relevant texts: “I came not to bring peace, but a sword” (in which Jesus is actually speaking, not of armed conflict but of the danger his teaching is to traditional family values); “They have healed the wound of my people slightly, saying ‘Peace’ when there is no peace” (Jeremiah’s assessment of the false hopes being raised by false prophets who, more interested in profits than real security, were insisting that the Babylonian army would fold up and go away if only the people kept up their armed resistance a little longer); and perhaps the incident in the temple where Jesus physically disrupts the profitable business of those who were taking advantage of the religious sincerity of others by spilling their carefully counted money on the floor and driving their merchandise (animals destined for slaughter) from the temple courts.
But in fact there are hundreds of texts throughout the Bible that teach about peace, its source and its place in God’s plan for the world, and it’s time that Christians everywhere stop being afraid of them. Below is a very small sample.
I’ll start with one that should be held at the ready whenever someone takes the saying of Jesus (Matthew 24:6-7) that “there will be wars and rumours of wars; see that you be not troubled, for the end is not yet” as proof that war is inevitable and will always be with us (which only makes sense if the end is always going to be “not yet”). Once too often I have heard someone put that out as a final argument against peacemaking, since “I believe the Bible!” Well, I believe the Bible, too, including….
Psalm 46, especially Psalm 46:9-10
9 He makes wars cease to the end of the earth.
He breaks the bow, and shatters the spear.
He burns the chariots in the fire.
10 “Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations.
I will be exalted in the earth.”
The Words In Red
Matthew 5:3-10
3 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. 5 Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. 6 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. 7 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. 8 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. 9 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. 10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
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Re-Visioning
This space is again freshened up with an updated back-end (WordPress 2.5) and a new look. How important it is to take a fresh look at everything familiar! On the day of this upgrade, with much attention being paid to the fortieth anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., I’m reflecting on the urgency of every day of life, and the fact that ordinary people, people like you and me, can make a difference. Had he lived, King would be an elder statesman by now, 79 years old. I wonder on such an occasion if it would have done more honor to the man and his legacy to annually remember the day of his death rather than the day of his birth. Less than 24 hours before a bullet ended his life, with uncanny prescience he mused upon mortality, and spoke in near-regretful tones of his own life and legacy: “I‘ve been to the mountaintop, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you…” A full generation later, that promised land of full equality still eludes us. Some, no doubt, have passed beyond the Jordan, and more yet have gazed from atop Mount Pisgah at what seems still so near, and yet so far: a place where the great ideals are not just respected but acted upon, where all God’s children can live together without being afraid of seeing each other take away what we have worked for. MLK spoke vociferously against the tripartate evils of racism, poverty and war, and understood that all three work against the freedom we hold dear. Racism is less entrenched, today, at least in law and public expression; but all who say so are quick to add that much more still remains to be done. Less boast can be made about poverty, and today the hope of eliminating war seems laughably out of reach. But here in this space, we will speak of the kingdom of God, the place where everyone is able to invite his neighbor to sit with him “under his own vine and under his fig tree, where none shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:4).
Jesus came proclaiming that Kingdom within reach, “at hand” — a kingdom where no one is hungry, so he fed thousands on a few loaves and fishes; a kingdom where health prevails, so he healed all the sick who came to him; a kingdom where love and reconciliation is the rule, so he taught about a Father who is merciful and expects his children to be the same; a kingdom where forgiveness is required of each subject, and not left as the optional prerogative of a stern monarch. Wherever he went, that kingdom came. He sent his apprentices out to proclaim in village and town, even where they were rejected: “Be sure of this, that the Kingdom of God has come near to you” (Luke 10:8-11). He taught them, and through them all of us, to pray for that kingdom to come, and in the fashion of Hebrew poetic repetition to repeat the sense of that prayer by saying (Matthew 6:10) “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The authorities thought that by destroying that king, whose kingdom was already in the world, though not of it, they could drive it out; but by triumphing over the ultimate means of destruction available to this world’s authorities, namely death, the good news was made available that the Kingdom has not retreated to a distant heaven or a far-away future, but is still here, breaking in to this world’s affairs wherever there are courageous people who are willing to bring Kingdom characteristics into their own lives, their own surroundings, their own world. Forgiveness, peace, the sharing of abundance, remain the means God has chosen to overcome hatred, prejudice, war, greed, and shortage.
In its fullness, in its final manifestation, the Kingdom has not yet fully come. But it is here, for those with eyes to see:
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Increase of peace?
Edge: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE By Steven Pinker
An excerpt:
The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.
At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley, Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population-wide rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.
Are we, perhaps, less far than we think from the time envisioned by the ancient prophets, when “nation will not take up sword against nation, neither will they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:4)? I have long observed, to anyone who will listen, that most people, at most times and places, live most of their lives in relative peace. Pinker’s study seems to suggest that this is increasingly true, despite even the horrors of the twentieth century. Our attention focuses on acts of violence precisely because they are anomalous, whether the occasion is murder, terrorism, or organized warfare.
“Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end” says Isaiah 9:7 of the one identified in the previous verse as the Prince of Peace, in a passage widely held in the Christian tradition as pointing to the birth of Christ: yet today, many who claim to be followers of that Christ, who insist they are believers in the very selfsame sacred text that gives us these words, have given up on any hope that there can be any increase of peace, but instead hope only for a bloody, fiery apocalyptic end of the world — and some of them think their “blessed hope” lies, not in the increase of peace, but in being on the winning side in an upcoming battle. They concern themselves not a whit with the increase of peace (though the chief apostle, Peter, admonishes them to “seek peace and pursue it”) 1 , thinking that there will be time enough for all that after the end of time.
Yet for the Christian, the evil that we fight is not the evil outside of us, but the evil we find within: not sinners but sin, not bad people but the wickedness to which people, including ourselves, so easily succumb: “for our struggle is not against flesh and blood” (Ephesians 6:12). Our enemies are not those who hate us, but the hatred within us, not terrorists but our own sense of terror, not those who threaten to ban talk of God from our public places but our own fears and suspicions which threaten to banish the peace of God from our inner life. When the victory is gained over these enemies, we can become stalwart warriors for peace.
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One Commandment
crossposted:
Never mind fighting battles over posting the Ten Commandments in public places. There is one commandment that will take up a lot less space, makes no overtly religious statement, yet calls for an even more radical change in priorities, is common but not exclusive to all Abrahamic religions, yet especially revered in the founding documents of Christianity, and still promotes no sect of organized religion.
I’d like to see it on billboards all across the country, but I’d even more like to see it taken to heart by those who want to honor God.
How about the one thing that is agreed upon by Jesus and those who opposed him, as well as by the apostles Peter, Paul and James in their writings (not to mention John, who takes it even further)?
How about the only passage from the book of Leviticus that is quoted multiple times in the New Testament?
Jesus says it is “like” the Great Commandment, the one about loving God with all one’s heart, strength, soul and mind.
John agrees, when he suggests that a person who does not love a fellow human, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.
Paul says that all of the commandments are summed up in this one saying. Elsewhere he says that it fulfills the law.
James calls it the Royal Law, and refers to it as the perfect law that gives liberty.
Love your neighbor as yourself. A greater commandment than all the Ten put together; and you know, it doesn’t even mention God.
Just God’s image.
Bless God, America!
What Jesus said: see Matthew 22:34-40, Matthew 19:17-18, Mark 12:28-34, Luke 10:25-37.
Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “Do not commit adultery,” “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: Love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
— Paul (Romans 13:8-10)
Do not seek revenge, or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. (Leviticus 19:18)
When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)
The entire law is summed up in a single command: Love your neighbor as yourself. —Galatians 5:14 (Paul)
If you really keep the royal law found in scripture, Love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing right. — James 2:8
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All Together, NOW!
The following thoughts were shared at the “Chew and Chat” held at the corners of Port Tobacco Road and Tayloe Neck Road, Nanjemoy, MD on July 31st, 2007.
I’m honored to be here and share a few thoughts with you today. We’re here to affirm and celebrate the value of community, to make it known that all of us understand the truth embodied in a certain passage of scripture. Paul the Apostle says in one place, that when one member suffers, all suffer together, and when one rejoices, all rejoice together. Just as this is organically true with a physical body, I’m here to tell you that for all of us this is not just something to think about, it is a fact.
Sometimes we don’t know why we suffer. We might have plenty of food, a safe place to sleep, good family, a well paying job, and we might feel like just so long as we keep these things, no matter what happens with anyone else, we’ll be fine. And we might even work to see to it that we keep what we have even if it means someone else doing without; but the result, the spiritual and dynamic fact is, that to the extent we contribute to someone else’s suffering, we increase our own. The Bible tells us that Jesus came with good news for the poor, but that good news benefits rich and poor alike, because all suffer together to the extent that any of us suffer.