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Br. K
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December 31, 2006
December 30, 2006
Saddam is Dead
Today we executed a near 70 year old man.
A man, once of great power, whom we captured cowering in his underwear in a hole in the ground.
A man who, without a doubt, was committed to evil and performed great sins against humankind...
And yet a man who had been neutralized.
A man who could have spent his life imprisoned for his crimes.
Today, we executed a near 70 year old man...
For crimes committed by countless others whom we continue to support and keep in power
Because it is expedient to our wishes.
We executed him, like we execute so many others in our own country
Because we do not believe in God, despite our protestations to the contrary.
No... we do not believe in God.
We believe in vengeance and retaliation.
We believe in political expediency.
We believe in photo opportunities.
We believe in our own righteousness.
We believe in the gallows because we do not believe in grace.
We believe that death solves the problem because we do not believe that Christ overcame death...
Or that, if he did, he did so only for a privileged few that doesn't include Muslims.
Especially near 70 year old Muslims caught cowering in their underwear in a hole in the ground because he realized that the gig was up and vengeance was at hand.
Saddam went to the gallows with a copy of the Quran in his hands.
I wonder if the executioner did the same... carried to the gallows whatever holy book gives him comfort and strength.
I wonder if our Christian president bothered to take up his Bible and pray at all yesterday while awaiting news of the death his machinations had wrought against a near 70 year old man.
Today I got a note from a friend wondering if we ought to pray for Saddam in church this weekend.
Pray for your enemies and those who persecute you.
Those who live by the sword shall perish by it.
Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.
But what do we care. The biggest fear we have when it comes to executing a near 70 year old man is whether his death will lead to more violence against us.
Or whether, in an age of lies and deceit, we dare show a video of the execution to the world for fear people won't believe he's really dead. How graphic should the news dare to be?
It really is, after all, just a question of taste.
An evil man has died on the gallows, but a man nonetheless.
At our Christian hands.
And in the scheme of things, the cycle of violence continues with no end in sight...
Because we do not trust God nor God's justice.
Our own petty tyrant is more convincing than the petty tyrant just dispatched.
We will hear about our savage victim over the next several days:
How afraid he was.
How resigned he was.
How pathetic he was.
"I saw fear... he was afraid." "It was strange... he just gave up."
He was near 70 years old.
And his death will not quench our leader's thirst.
Nor ours.
Just another dead Muslim.
Caught in a hole in the ground in his underwear.
And I swear...
I just heard someone laugh.
technorati tags:saddamhussein, justice, vengeance
December 12, 2006
Our Lady of Guadalupe de Tepeyac
Today is the feast day of my patron ane the patron of my house. God bless each of us through the blessed aparition of the Virgin of Tepeyac
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mystical Rose, make intercession for holy Church, protect those who believe, help all those who invoke you in their necessities, and since you are the ever Virgin Mary and Mother of the true God, obtain for us from your most holy Son the grace of keeping our faith, of sweet hope in the midst of the bitterness of life of burning charity, and the precious gift of final perseverance.
Amen.
technorati tags:guadalupe
December 11, 2006
God Among Us
Christmas Message 2006
By Katharine Jefferts Schori
God loved us so much that he came to dwell among us, to tent among us in human flesh... There is a wonderful echo there of God's presence in the tent while Israel wandered in the wilderness. The gift of the Incarnation says that God is willing to take on the human tent of flesh and be one with and among us.
That frail tent of flesh proves capable of holding divinity, but also capable of yielding up its spirit. Irenaeus and Athanasius insisted that the gift of Incarnation was that "God became human, that we might become divine." You and I are bearers of the image of God, and you and I share in Incarnation, for Jesus has walked this way before us. God is born in us as well.
The vulnerability of being born in obscurity, to a peasant refugee couple, in an out of the way place, says to us that God is with us in the smallest parts of life -- perhaps a reminder that we, too, may discover God in those humble and unexpected places if we are willing to go in search.
Matthew's story of the wise ones from the east who come searching for this new thing, this remarkable child, is equally a reminder that God's love extends to all, that God comes among us in human form for all humanity, not just for our co-religionists, not just for those who expect God's appearing in the same way we do, and not just in predictable ways at the altar.
Recently I watched and listened to a woman on a bus as she engaged in conversation with a three-year-old boy. The woman asked the child what happens at Christmas, but the boy, though highly verbal, wasn't able to say much. With his parents' apparent agreement, she asked him about Santa Claus, and began to tell him all about waking up on Christmas Day and finding presents. She didn't talk about St. Nicholas on his feast day, or about Jesus and his birth, but she did convey a sense of the wonder and love connected to Christmas.
That is an opening for those of us who claim to be followers of Jesus. It is the kind of invitation heard by the wise ones from the east. Even Santa Claus –- far removed though today's version of the story may be from the holy faithfulness of St. Nicholas -- can be another kind of star leading others to the humble stable where God comes among us. God continues to come among us in humility, God continues to be birthed in fragile opportunities that will need to be nourished and tended by others. The little boy on the bus has had his mind and heart opened to hear the bigger story about Christmas. Now, who will tell the old, old story of God's love to those so ready and eager to hear?
-- The Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori is Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church.
technorati tags:christmas, presidingbishop, schori
December 1, 2006
From a friend at Bending the Rule...
I Need an Unnamed God Whose Ways Are Not Our Ways
I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. Not sure if I could claim the word to my person. Not for lack of love of Jesus the Christ. Or because I doubt the sacraments or the great dogmatic creeds. These I accept and cherish, knowing they preserve the important message and contain the message they keep: Creation is from God, Creation is essentially good, God loves us to the utmost giving very Self to us, God is still working with us, death shall have no dominion for God lives and bids us also.
I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. Not out of some great humility that I fail the term, though I surely do. Humility has oft been a thorn. I don't need more castigation, but building up. If ever I was Christian, it is or was in becoming.
I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. But simply because the title comes too oft on triumph and glory lacking a self-critical spirit, that Protestant principle that even the Protestants and Anglicans have lost, and a commitment to stand wherever we find the crucified, wherever the voices of the crying, the bleeding, the dying, the outcast, the suffering are found. Our news is too often self-congratulatory or self-preserving, too often the reasoning of our own predilictions and temperaments, too often the justification of others' suffering while we line our nest.
I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. I know the worst the Church can dish out to a gay man in the U.S. American context as a former Pentecostal, former Roman Catholic, partner to a Lutheran. Exorcisms at the hands of pastors, when I needed a hug and some understanding. Denial of bread when I was hungry. Conscious attempts to tear away the one I loved in the name of god and church and family. But the Church does far worse and those who claim iconic status, representatives in great hats say so little, they may as well keep silence. Or they say too much, and silence would be a blessing. I am seemingly not counted among those "ordinary Anglicans". And those who justify their own position with moderation, claiming fellow-feeling, to oft their compassion sits suspect, their own status protected, their own person not maligned.
I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. My own nest is too comfortable. I hear of boys, girls, women raped in Sudan. Of brothers and sisters blown up in the streets of Iraq. Of prophets crying on street corners, disheveled, smelly, starving: "Can you spare a little change?" Often, I can't. Or rather, I won't.
I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. I take the pain of the world personally--hunger, violence, death, destruction, theological and psychological warfare, domination, casting out. Each different face, manifest variation, God's glory. But the pain of the world I cannot hold, nor contain, help, nor relieve. And so much of my compassion is my own suffering reaching out to lend a hand, for I do know that pain can shrivel the heart, shrink the soul no matter how oft others tell the suffering it's to our glory--or to God's--that heaven will be better for our bleeding now--the excuses of the comfortable, those who by benefit by accident of birth.
I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. I am far off and too near.
Barbara Taylor Brown notes in her recent work, Leaving Church, she didn't leave finally out of some great anger, but out of tired and a growing sense that there is so much more. That so much of the goodness of our LORD is wasted by the defenders of God.
Am I leaving church? No. And neither does Barbara Taylor Brown. Or maybe somehow "yes". What seems to be unfoling is a revisiting of what is church and with whom and where church can be found. Given the pious, I'll take the prostitutes. Given the authorities, I'll join the crowds. I'm not interested in justifying institutions, of defending my place therein anylonger, nor do I care to belong. Trying to fit in has cost too much poetry and painting and life and love. I find myself small but closer to our auditors "inside" and "out": Blake, Kierkegaard, Weil, Arendt, Stringfellow, Gandhi. Not a prophet's voice really, sounding in the desert or thundering from the city curb. But a pastor's. Or perhaps a friend? No longer interested in preparing the way within the churchyard, or elbowing enough wiggle room to breath air seemingly too clouded by centuries of cultural accretion called "good news". But even criticism gives way to apathy, not out of some great contemplative disinterest. Taylor Brown gets it right, I think, tiredness wins.
On pilgrimage in Wittenberg, we happened upon Judenstrasse across from the Marienkirche (St. Mary's Church), the main city church where Martin Luther oft preached.
Judenstrasse. The street of the Jews. The Jewish section of town in this Saxon town.
1305 anno Domini. Expulsion.
On the Southeast corner of the kirk, Judensau (Jewish pigs) inscribed with an insult to the Name of the Unnamed God as written in the Kabbalah.
This evening, Advent begins for C and I. We'll set up the wreath. Yet to decide on candles. Red or blue? Red is traditional in Germany, being the color of love in that cultural context. Blue is the color of our beloved Mary. Jewish prophetess. Handmaiden of the Unnamed God. Bearer of Love. And I think not of mangers, but of menorae. Of eight candles. Eight days. Of oil enough to renew creation again.
I don't know if I'm Christian anymore. But I love this Jewish man titled Immanuel, God with us, Wonderful Counselor. Has he a word? A wriggling infant in a barn. A crying brother fixed to a tree. A forgiving friend revealing in his Name that the ways of the Unnamed God are not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts. In the flesh of the particular, the Infinite. And I gaze the newspaper, the eyes of a Sudanese child, the joy of two men, the hate of a governor, here the Infinite still works and flees, builds up and tears down, sets trees ablaze and lifts up the dead.
Near the incription a monument.
A placard for the monument near the inscription on the Marienkirche reads:
Here are Christians. Ordinary. Wordly. Secular. Town people. Most come to worship here half a dozen times a year, waiting for a baptism, wedding, funeral. Much maligned by the zealous, the regular attenders, the true Christians. But here at the county office, we could register our partnership had we not done so in Hannover. Here virtues of the godly have passed into the everyday. Often unnamed by pastors too concerned with maintaining their place or by Christians in other lands too self-congratulatory in their religiousity.
Here I see a glimmer that we might yet learn that "never again" has many faces, many shapes and we must ever be watchful of our rhetoric, our theologies, our justifications of others' pain. To ignore the suffering and sorrow and terror and pain we justify in God's Name is to repeat the mistake: God hanging from a tree. This way is not God's way, nor these thoughts God's thoughts. The birth of this God signals the judgement of such and the end.
To this God, I offer my thanks. Light a candle in the dark. Come!
I return to household practice, the way of the early ones. Candles on the table. Bread broken on cracked plates. Raising a toast to God. Even venturing to the gathering far away, I remember that we gather to return here again, the Unnamed God lives or dies in the everyday. Here is where my blessing, thanking, priesting matters.
Amen.
technorati tags:christianity, rebirth