Pledge For Peace

Blake Huggins has given a wonderful speech at Oklahoma City University in opposition to the war. It is worth a read. I'm giving him a virtual standing ovation as I join in his pledge.

"And so today we gather. ‘We the people’ gather to raise our voice against this glaring injustice and we stand in protest of this heinous atrocity. We stand united for the cause of peace and we stand in solidarity not only with our troops, but with the Iraqi people, who, as we speak are suffering under our occupation. We stand with those that have gone before us as a prophetic witness to ask, 'How many more must be killed for a lie? How many more lives must be lost before our government takes responsibility admits they were wrong? How many more must be murdered before we admit that there never was a smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud? How much more death will we allow? How much more blood will be on our hands before we take responsibility?'
[...]
And we must remain fervently indignant, unwavering in our commitment to prophetic truth, unwavering in our solidarity with the oppressed and the suffering, and unwavering in our hopeful affirmation peace with justice, and reconciliation through healing. We believe that another world is indeed possible. And right here, right now, today, in this moment, we pledge to make that world a reality." - Blake Huggins, blakehuggins.com (2008)

Should God Damn America?

The modern Western strain of Christianity has nearly forsaken the ancient art of prophetic voice. Rev. Jeremiah Wright has been criticized for his recent prophetic language because so many of us forgot what a prophet sounds like. Didn’t anyone bother to check this guy’s first name? Compared to the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, Rev. Wright is rather tame. In one sense, Rev. Wright was simply quoting Jesus.

The prophet Jeremiah calls Israel, a prostitute, a corrupt wild vine, a craving wild donkey in heat, and then he slings curses on their children and children’s children. That is only chapter 2! He does this for another 23 chapters. Why does he say such outlandish things? He is offering a bit of creative prophetic imagination that criticizes the rampant injustice in Israel as its wealthy elite ruling class had turned their backs on the ideals of Jewish community. Their covenant with God to create a just society had been broken by their greed and arrogance.

This is what the LORD Almighty says:
"Cut down the trees
and build siege ramps against Jerusalem.
This city must be punished;
it is filled with oppression. (Jeremiah 6:6)
...
Take warning, O Jerusalem,
or I will turn away from you
and make your land desolate
so no one can live in it." (Jeremiah 6:8)

I’m not sure how you hear that, but I feel certain the wealthy elite in Israel heard that as “God Damn Israel!” I think this message is particularly appropriate for us on the Monday of Holy week as we celebrate the day Jesus entered the political capital of Israel and staged a public protest as he echoed the words of Jeremiah (7:11) calling the Temple a “den of robbers”. A couple days later Jesus called for the complete destruction of the Temple. Jesus was clearly a “Jeremiah” style of prophet also as he was essentially suggesting that God would soon damn Jerusalem.

It is important to remember that all these prophets offer us a way out of God’s damnation. We often overlook the fact that when Jesus borrows the phrase, den of robbers, he was making an intentional allegory to the same argument Jeremiah had used against Israel. This is clearly stated in the verses just prior to verse 11.

5 If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, 6 if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, 7 then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever. (Jeremiah 7:5-7)

Should God damn America? I think the choice is ours to make. Are any of these prophets expressing hatred for their nation? Absolutely not! Do they really desire the wrath of God to be poured out on their friends, family, and political leaders? No, not at all. These types of prophetic voices are legitimate criticisms with sincere pleas for change. We shouldn't be afraid of these types of statements. We should worry if they ever stop, because it would mean that all hope for change had been lost.

Can America stop our path to damnation? Yes We Can!

One Day = $720 Million

Thanks for sharing this Jen!

Healthcare For Profit

Change Is Not Easy

In his book “Everything Must Change”, Brian McLaren gives a great example of how Jesus’ political statements have too often been shaped to fit modern middle-class suburban life. He makes the point by looking at Matthew’s account of the Canaanite woman and Jesus (Matthew 15:21-28). Many people look at this message as an example for how modern individuals should treat other people. We should resist the urge to make it easy. This message is bigger than a third grade Sunday school lesson about being nice and letting your neighbors borrow a cup of sugar or an occasional power tool. This message is political and it foreshadows Jesus' critical message about the balance of power in Israel and its political relationships with its neighbors.

Brain highlights the unusual use of the word “Canaanite”. This word was a word of hostility towards a people that had been a long time enemy of Israel. These people had been defeated in order to settle the Promised Land and many border wars continued long after. Israel looked down on them and the way he addresses her at first was a type of racial slur used by the story teller to present the history backdrop for the punch line. In this story, Jesus rejects the woman then he later embraces her to suggest that the way these people were being treated was wrong and that those old divisions and wars are now over. Instead of conquering Canaanites, this Jew will feed her. The parable may or may not have been a literal conversation of the historical Jesus, but the symbolism does reference a real historical system of injustice. The scene foreshadows what Jesus told the authorities in Jerusalem about their treatment of people and how the violence of their past could only beget more violence in their future. I guess Jesus was hip to the concept of Karma.

The point Brian makes is that Jesus is suggesting an entirely different way of dealing with political divisions and settling tension on a global level. This “other way” is justice and forgiveness rather than violence, prejudice, and holding grudges. Jesus' storytellers craft this event in a way that challenges the politics of their leaders who must have cringed at the thought of Jesus' actions toward this long time enemy. It is unfortunate that stories like this have been domesticated and stripped of their power to change the world. The domestication of these stories is what allows our leaders to claim Christ in name, but ignore his message. One solution is to free our stories from their domesticated prison. That won't be easy.

A Just God

David Hilfiker is a physician and co-founder of Joseph's House. He's the author of "Not All of Us Are Saints: A Doctor's Journey with the Poor and Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen". I just listened to Krista Tippett's interview with him on Speaking of Faith. I appreciate his insight into the issues of poverty in America. He gave an interesting answer to Krista’s question about his faith, his uncertainty, and his difficulty in defining the nature of God?

"I can’t even answer the question. I don’t experience God in ways that I recognize from what others say about their experiences of God. So, while I’m a member of our faith community, I struggle with the definition of being a Christian. What I know is that struggling with the realities of injustice and living in a community of people who are also struggling with those issues and are unwilling to settle for pat answers - those two things make a far deeper and richer life than any I could imagine any place else. It is that depth of life that I sense is as close as I can get to defining God."

What a brave and honest answer. Having a pat answer for spiritual experiences is not a sign of faith. Instead, faith is the ability to follow in the absence of pat answers. Hilfiker goes on to quote the prophet Jeremiah and reference Walter Brueggemann’s commentary on the passage.

“He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. Is that not what it means to know me? declares the LORD.“ - Jeremiah 22:16

"It’s not just that caring for the needy acquaints you with God, but caring for the needy is God." - Walter Brueggemann

Hilfiker didn't seem very confident in his ability to understand. But for me, his life and work explains it perfectly. He went on to describe why charity is not enough. We have to work to change the systems which institute injustice so that charity will no longer be needed.

Be a Part of the Solution

The Carter Center is a wonderful organization that has made great strides toward peace and justice around the world. This video is about the irradication of guinea worm disease. I always feel good about donating to the Carter Center and I hope more people will contribute. Sometimes it feels like we are so small and our problems are too big. This is a big problem with a tangible solution that can be accomplished in our life time.

Savage Outrage

Michael Savage recently went on a tirade, spewing hatred and ignorance. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group, has called on radio listeners of all faiths to contact companies that advertise on Michael Savage's nationally-syndicated radio program to express their concerns about the host's recent anti-Muslim tirade. Savage has retaliated with a copyright lawsuit against this group for publishing short clips of his hate speech on the Internet.

Advertisers that have already stopped advertising or refuse to place their ads on Michael Savage's program include AutoZone, TrustedID, Citrix, OfficeMax, and JCPenney.

Leaving Microsoft

From Crackle: Room To Read

Well Said...

This is a great video clip by Brian Mclaren.

I grew up in a church that saw the Kingdom of God as something that happens in the future after we all die. Then I spent 10 years in a couple of churches with people that understood the "now" aspect of this Kingdom, but they thought it was mostly about learning how to perform miracles and telling the future. It is refreshing to finally hear someone within Evangelical Christianity talk about the Kingdom as something other than a fairy-tale, a supernatural phenomenon, or an act of military force. For me, it is all about real people making real changes toward peace and justice right now. I may disagree with Brian's decision to hang onto certain Evangelical beliefs, but I really like his approach to Jesus' message about the Kingdom of God.

Kill Or Convert, Brought To You By the Pentagon

Operation Straight Up (OSU) along with several professional actors like Steven Baldwin are now distributing "freedom packets" to the American soldiers in Iraq. These packages include copies of the video game "Left Behind: Eternal Forces". If you haven't seen the game yet, you should know this is a game which depicts Christian military forces killing non-Christians in an apocolyptic science fiction type environment. To win the game, players must kill or convert all the non-believers left behind after the rapture. Do we really want these people trying to brainwash our soldiers and filling their minds with this type of sick distored bullshit?

Read the full article at The Nation. Thank you Bruce Prescott at Mainstream Baptist for posting a link to this article.

Would Jesus Go to War?

The Metro Spirit ran this article about one man's decision to leave the Army based on his belief that being a Christian means rejecting violence as an option for conflict resolution. Michael Thames wrote the article himself and did a great job. He is a hero in my book!

Keith Olbermann is not holding anything back!

If you didn't watch this last night, then please check it out now.

Courage

"Until we are ready to have the courage for peace that people have for war, nothing is going to change." - Dan Berrigan

The Great Divine Cleanup

What happens when an ancient group of people:

• believe God is all powerful
• believe God is just
• believe God favors them above others
• Live under the oppression of an empire and have no power to change the situation themselves

The answer is easy. These people would have to develop a theology about the divine correction of the injustice by God in what John Dominic Crossan calls “The Great Divine Cleanup of the World”. In his book “God and Empire”, Crossan details a clear and articulate picture of how 1st century Israel (including John the Baptist and Jesus) would have imagined and hoped for God’s plan of justice. I can't imagine any other scenario for these people. They had to believe this or else they had to imagine a different God.

This was not a new idea formed by either John or Jesus. Using different techniques, they both taught an already common understanding of the needed solution. This is NOT what the fundamentalist talk about today when they create those crazy books and video games about the dramatic end of the world. The original meaning of the great divine cleanup was a political shift in power that would leave the world in a better status for those oppressed people. One example of this common outlook is this excerpt from the Sibylline Oracles which was a document dating back to around or just prior to the time of Jesus’ birth:

“The earth will belong equally to all, undivided by walls or fences. It will then bear more abundant fruits spontaneously. Lives will be in common and wealth will have no division. For there will be no poor man there, no rich, and no tyrant, no slave. Further, no one will be either great or small anymore. No kings, no leaders. All will be on a par together" (Sibylline Oracles 2:319-24).

This isn’t a departure from the origins of Judaism. In fact it echoes the formation of Judaism as a community without a king because kings always become tyrants, with a commitment to the forgiveness of debt, and also included the rejection of the dominance created through generational wealth (50th year Jubilee). Israel was formed as a society in contrast to Egypt and its oppressive pharaoh. Throughout the Torah, the Great Prophets, and the NT, Israel desired a return to those first principles of a community of peace and justice.

“Jesus' Kingdom program was not just about politics or economics as distinct from theology. It combined religion, politics, and economics; it was about divine distributive justice; it was about the ownership of this world; it was about a theology of creation.” God and Empire - Crossan.

The value of this story lies in its meaning of justice. This is a contrast to our common view of retributive justice that seeks retribution for wrongs. Justice in God’s kingdom is distributive justice which means distributing resources to all as needed in a just manner. The model for distributive justice in their minds was the Jewish patriarchal view of fathers providing justly (not necessarily evenly) for their wife (or wives) and children.

Too often people look at these stories as if they were magical predictions of the future, but I think that is dangerous and often clouds the real meaning. Instead, we should let the story's truth shape our own vision for how the world could work and become motivated to fulfill our responsibility. The Kingdom of God is a present experience because as Jesus said, it is "inside us" which means it exists as a vision in our minds already. Instead of trying to guess when and where it may magically happen, we should be cultivating the collective vision and developing a plan to make the vision a physical reality. This means that anyone interesting in the Kingdom of God must also be interested in politics. Politics is the process of making our values public realities.

Quotes...

On May 13, 1798, James Madison wrote an oft-quoted letter to his close friend and fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, in which he warned prophetically that:

the management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse, of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or discosed in such parts and at such time as will best suit particular views; and because the body of the people are less capable of judging and are more under the influence of prejudices, on that branch of their affairs, than of any other. Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretend, from abroad.

On April 18, 1946, Reichsmarchal Herman Goring was interviewed in his jail cell at Nuremberg by Captain Gustave Gilbert, a U.S. Army intelligence psychologist, who later reported these words of Goring's in his 1947 book Nuremberg Diary:

Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a facist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship... The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Both quotes are taken from "God and Empire" by John Dominic Crossan.

God and Empire

John Dominic Crossan has created a wonderful new book "God and Empire: Jesus against Rome, then and now". I was fortunate enough to hear Crossan speak in person for the first time in January and he gave a lecture that turned out to be a synopsis of this book. Crossan points out that a major shift in the study of New Testament theology is well underway thanks to the our more developed understanding of the Roman Imperial theology common in the first century. Crossan goes into detail about the archeological findings supporting the Roman mythological claims that Caesar Augustus was the son of god, lord, savior of the world, god of gods and bringer of peace. To claim that Jesus was any of these things was high treason and explains the brutal persecution of early Christians throughout the Empire.

In addition to setting Christianity as an opposing force to the Roman Empire, Crossan makes the case that the bible from start to finish is a radical political statement against the normalcy of civilization. In his eyes, civilization is not art, music, literature, and cuisine. Instead, the normalcy of civilization is imperialism, which can be translated as the use of force to extort and oppress others. It is hard to argue against Crossan. Everything we know about history supports this view of civilization and everything we've learned about Jesus tells us that he didn't buy into this violent approach.

The basic premise of the book is not that Rome was against peace. Instead, Rome was in favor of peace but their roadmap to peace was through war and sustained through oppressive taxation and violence. Augustus was seen as the one that saved the empire from the throws of civil war (hence the term savior of the world) and brought an unprecedented peace to the nations. The premise of this book is that the Romans (and all Empires before and after) sought peace through the method of violence but the vision of God is to create lasting peace through justice. This contrasts human retributive justice (punishment) v. God's distributive justice (sharing). That is where we come in. We have a choice about how we will fight for peace. Will we use violence or justice as our tool? The difference is dramatic because history is filled with examples of how peace obtained through violence is a temporary illusion. Not until we accept Jesus’ principles for peace through justice can we ever hope to achieve the sustainable peace intended by God.

Crossan doesn’t leave the present day application of this lesson up in the air. He boldly makes the claim that America is the new Rome. I agree.

Rev. Bono

Ok, I've never liked U2 and I get tired of preachers that mention Bono so they can boost their cool factor, but this is a great speech that transcends his hollywood rock star ultra-fashion conscience image. If he ever hangs up his designer sunglasses, cuts ties with the fashion/music business and gives up pop music to do more preaching I'll be a big fan. He definately has the chops for it. I hope he also learns that one of the biggest barriers to large scale social justice is the large scale celebration of vanity and materialism.

Palestine - Peace Not Apartheid

Overall I found that the book was helpful but as with most of Carter's books, it became slow at times. I did find valuable information and I continue to respect Carter's character, intelligence, and Christ centered motives. The highlights of this important book are the descriptions of the real people being torn apart by politics and the personal stories of Carter's involvement through the years. He would have done better to concentrate on the former.

The most frequent complaint against this book is the word "apartheid" in the title which has a subtle connection to the racist policies of the old South Africa. That may be an overstatement, but overstatement hardly adds up to the claims of anti-Semitism generated by Carter's critics. I think the criticism largely comes from people that won’t bother to read the book and that are not really looking for solutions in the Middle East outside their own self interest. Apartheid literally means "separateness" and I don’t see that this is a stretch for describing Palestine. A 30 foot wall separating a community of Christians from their own church and roads that are off limits to a particular segment of the population are at a minimum "hints" of apartheid.

The biggest mistake the critics make is that they don’t bother to realize that Carter is not judging Israel or announcing a categorization on their actions. Instead, he is suggesting that there is a choice for the future of Palestine - either peace or apartheid. It seems evident that both options are still on the table and signs of apartheid are clearly visible but peace is still possible.

Carter has the most important gift needed to negotiate for peace. He is able to look at the big picture without getting emotionally attached to one side or the other. People that are only able to see things from their own view can never negotiate successfully. Critics also charge that Carter isn't fair in this book. He does focus mainly one side but that is intentional because it is the view which rarely gets any attention in the US. Why do the critics think Carter needs to waste our time restating the common position in depth? He makes it clear that he is attempting to publicize information that has not been given a wide audience yet - the Palestinian point of view. For this reason the book may seem skewed. The book is not an acquisition. It is a prophetic call for honest examination and quality decisions.

Any one that thinks Carter is being anti-Semitic is short sighted. He has dedicated much of his life to helping Israel live in peace even when it did great harm to his own career. I hope that Israel chooses peace and it is obvious that Carter has the same feelings.

Give a Cow

I've been researching a wide variety of charities over the last few months. The studies which I've seen have given this organization great reveiws and their name keeps popping up in the news more and more. After reading 2 more articles about them this weekend and watching their story told on the Religion and Ethics Newsweekly PBS show, I've decided to start supporting them.

My wife and I are considering a trip to visit one of their facilities in Africa however the cost of the trip could buy many cows. For now, we will settle for giving enough resources to put a cow in the hands of a needy family.