In grateful celebration of today’s decision by the Supreme Court, I am posting this video produced by my friends in the Unitarian Universalist Association.
The struggle for equality is not yet over, but today marks an epic victory. As a Christian, I’ll continue working with my UU neighbors and others in the quest for equality in our country and in the Presbyterian Church.
“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
As many of you already know, in the years immediately following my graduation from seminary, I worked as a counselor at the Addictions Crisis Center, which is part of the Rescue Mission of Utica. This is a great program. They serve as the “first line of defense” that people come to when they’re beginning their recovery from dependence on drugs or alcohol. They offer food, shelter, medical care, treatment, and counseling to folks in the earliest stages of recovery. Some of them would even show up on our doorstep still under the influence of whatever substance they had been using. As one friend of mine put it, “Basically, [we] meet people on the worst day of their lives.”
One of the most interesting (and often frustrating) things about people in those first few days away from their substance of choice is their adamant (and sometimes violent) resistance to the treatment, which was usually their last, best hope for healing and recovery. They would kick, scream, and test every rule and boundary of our program. Their substance of choice had such a hold on them that they would fight the treatment process, even after they realized they had a problem and voluntarily checked themselves in to our facility.
Working with them for two years gave me a new appreciation for the meaning of the term possessed. My clients’ addictions, their compulsive, uncontrollable desire for drugs or alcohol had taken over their rational faculties so thoroughly that they perceived our attempts to heal them as an attack. The addiction owned them in a manner of speaking and led many of them to do all kinds of destructive things to themselves and others. Most people in our facility had sacrificed money, friends, jobs, houses, and relationships to appease the false gods of their addictions. There are many things worth sacrificing for in this world, but I think we can all agree that recreational substances are not among them.
A lot of people in the general public, people who don’t struggle with addictions, wonder why these folks can’t just stop what they’re doing and make better choices. What most people don’t understand is that it’s not a moral issue. Addiction is not a choice; it is a disease. The electro-chemical processes in the brain have literally been hot-wired and hijacked. And just like an airplane hijacked by terrorists: it’s not going where the pilot (the rational, moral part of the brain) wants it to go. They are not in control. They are possessed and they need help.
This, in a metaphorical sense, is what I see going on in today’s New Testament reading. There is no mention in the text of any addictive, mind-altering substances being used. All we know about the Gerasene man that Jesus encounters is that he “had a demon”.
In pre-modern times, all kinds of things were blamed on the activity of demons (e.g. seizures, mental illness, socially unacceptable behavior, bad luck, other religions, etc.). They didn’t have the kind of knowledge or diagnostic equipment we have today. For example, we now know that a person with schizophrenia doesn’t need an exorcism from demons, she needs anti-psychotic medication in order to make the voices in her head go away. That’s not to say that there isn’t some kind of spiritual element to people’s problems, but I think we have developed a more informed, nuanced, and holistic way of looking at things than our ancestors had.
When people come to me as a pastor, asking for exorcisms (and they do, believe it or not), my first question for them is always, “Have you seen your doctor?” I often end up making referrals, doing short-term pastoral care, praying with, and visiting these people in distress. I find that a combination of medication, counseling, and prayer tends to resolve the vast majority of cases where exorcism was initially requested.
I don’t tend to think of demons as beings or entities in their own right. The image of monsters with horns and bat-wings that take over your mind is the stuff of horror movies. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the reality of the demonic. I believe I encountered a kind of demonic possession every day when I was a substance abuse counselor. The people I worked with were possessed by their compulsive need for a particular substance. The things they did as a result of that compulsion were truly evil, you might even say demonic: They lied, stole, neglected and abused children, some of them had even hurt or killed others. Those who found recovery from their addictions often had to own up to and make amends for the horrible things they had done under the influence.
And the amazing thing is that, in spite of all this harm to self and others, they continue to refuse to let go of their addiction. They cling to their substance of choice as if it were more precious than air. Many of them would refuse treatment and walk out of our program. The average recovering addict has to go through rehab four or five times before they finally get clean and sober for good. Only about one out of every ten clients finds recovery. The rest go back out, pick back up, and continue to use or drink, despite the consequences. That’s what I call possessed.
The Gerasene man in today’s gospel reading was similarly resistant to Jesus’ efforts to heal him. When Jesus commands the demonic spirits to leave the man alone, the man cries, “I beg you, do not torment me”. Torment him? Didn’t this guy realize that Jesus was trying to help him? It was the demons that were tormenting him! But then again, as we’ve already seen today: people sometimes prefer an old, familiar slavery to a new, unknown liberation. Getting over that hump is often half the battle of recovery.
The good news is that this doesn’t seem to present a problem for Jesus. He just keeps at it with this possessed man, this hopeless case, until he has sufficiently separated the person from the problem. That’s a key difference between Jesus and the people of the Gerasene region. They just tried to lock him up and forget about him, but Jesus went out to see and to save the man behind the madness. I think our task, as followers of Jesus in the present-day, is to do the same with those outcasts in our society, those people our culture of achievement has given up on.
Where God is concerned, there is no such thing as a hopeless case.
Now, it would be easy enough to leave things at that: the addict finds recovery, Jesus sweeps in and rescues the man from the demons, and everybody lives happily ever after. But life is more complicated than that.
It would be so easy for us to sit here in our (semi)comfortable pews on Sunday and say prayers for those poor addicts down in Utica, never once taking the time to look hard at our own lives. We tend to take notice of people addicted to drugs and alcohol because (A) those addictions are highly destructive and (B) they’re socially unacceptable. But there are many other kinds of addictions out there as well, many of which don’t involve recreational chemicals of any kind. In recent years, we’ve become more aware of behavioral addictions to things like sex, work, food, exercise, shopping, and gambling. Scientific studies have shown that our brains can’t tell the chemical difference between these behaviors and drugs. Either way, it’s a massive hit from a neurotransmitter chemical called dopamine that our brains get used to having and eventually come to depend on in order to feel normal. The best single book I’ve ever read on this topic is Addiction and Grace by Gerald May. I highly recommend reading it if you want to learn more about addiction from psychological, medical, and spiritual perspectives.
In addition to the aforementioned behaviors, I would go on to say that anything can be an addiction, depending on the place it holds in our lives. Even good and healthy things like family, relationships, church, religion, country, and school can be addictive. Whenever we let just one thing take over our whole field of consciousness for extended periods of time, we are in danger of becoming addicted or possessed in the way we’re using that language today. Spiritually speaking, we are committing the sin of idolatry: worshiping false gods, serving a part of reality at the expense of the whole, or even treating a part as if it were the whole. We can even be addicted to (possessed by) a certain way of thinking or way of doing things. This last one especially applies to groups of people as much as individuals.
I find it interesting that, in today’s gospel reading, the demons themselves ask Jesus to let them stay in the area. They ask to be sent into a herd of pigs that immediately goes berserk and destroys itself. After that, the people of the Gerasene community approach Jesus and ask him to leave. Why? Because, according to the text of Luke’s gospel, “they were seized with a great fear.”
Isn’t that interesting? When Jesus first tried to help the possessed man, the man cried out in terror, “I beg you, do not torment me”. He was afraid of the very person who had come to help him. Now, at the end of the story, that man is “clothed and in his right mind” while the rest of the so-called “normal” people in his community are suddenly terrified of Jesus the healer.
This is another aspect of this story that bears a striking and frankly eerie resemblance to my experience of working with people who have addictions. More often than not, so often in fact that it became a predictable pattern, my clients would return home after completing treatment to discover that their families no longer know how to relate to them. In the years while my clients were active in their addictions, their families adapted in order to learn how to function in a dysfunctional environment. They were used to operating under the assumption that one member of the family would always be drunk, high, or absent. This is what experts mean by the term co-dependency: one person in the family unit is chemically or behaviorally dependent while all the others are “dependent with” that person or “co-dependent”. When the dependent person comes home clean and sober, ready to rejoin the family system, the family suddenly has to rethink their old patterns for relating to each other and learn new ones. This process is difficult and scary because they think they have to maintain the old balance and fulfill their old roles in the dysfunctional family system in order to survive. It’s not at all uncommon for families to go through stress or even break up when someone is in the early stages of recovery.
The solution is for family members to participate actively in their own recovery process alongside their loved one who is getting clean and sober. Addiction is a family problem that requires a family solution. That’s why support groups like Al-Anon exist: to help the co-dependents of alcoholic people with their own recovery
And the same goes for the rest of us in the broader community. Participating in the work of building God’s kingdom on earth is not just about helping those poor, unfortunate souls who struggle with addiction. It’s about facing our own addictions and co-dependencies (even the socially acceptable ones) so that Jesus can liberate us from our own demons and bring healing and wholeness to the entire community.
If we are open to that process taking place in us, if we can trust that Christ is here to help us and not to harm us (even when his healing presence feels scary and unfamiliar), then we can say that we are walking the path of faith toward the promised land of God’s kingdom of heaven on earth.
Reblogged from the epic Rachel Held Evans:
I’m blessed to have had several such pastors in my life, though I realize such humility isn’t a given. The irony, of course, is that saying these things not only liberates a congregation; it also liberates the pastor. Often, the most meaningful and impactful words a pastor can share are spoken away from the pulpit.
So what would you add to this list?
What’s something a pastor has said to you that was painful or destructive? What’s something a pastor has said to you that encouraged, healed, or inspired?
When she walked into the party, they were sizing her up like a piece of meat. She was that girl: the one with a reputation.
They had all kinds of ideas about her. Who knows if any of the rumors were actually true? It didn’t matter. Somebody had to occupy the bottom rung of the social ladder and it might as well be her.
Those religious folks, the upstanding citizens, made a good show of cutting her down in public. They said people like her were the problem with society these days: no morals and values, no respect for the law.
They said this world would be a better place without people like her. But secretly, she knew: they needed people like her to exist. Without the scumbags and lowlifes, who would they have to look down upon? Their self-righteousness was built on appearances and comparisons. They only seemed high and holy next to people like her because they did a better job of hiding their faults. They put on a fancier show, that was all.
The problem was that everyone else in town accepted the reality of their show. Heck, she almost accepted it herself. That’s the problem with labels: when you hear them enough, you eventually start to believe them yourself.
Maybe I am worthless, she thought. Maybe no one will ever love me. Maybe this world would be better off without me in it.
That’s a pretty thick mental fog to get lost in. It can lead to some pretty severe and irreversible rash decisions. For all we know, she might have been on the verge of one such decision herself.
But then she met Jesus.
No, I don’t mean to say that she found religion, saw the light, or got born again. That’s too easy. Too cut and dry. Besides, those folks in the “upright citizens’ brigade” love that stuff. They eat it up like candy: the wayward sinner reforms her ways and comes back home where she belongs. Classic redemption story. Good propaganda. It reinforces their assumptions about the world and makes them look like loving and gracious heroes to welcome someone so despicable as her.
But this Jesus guy was different.
They didn’t seem to like him very much either. At first, he seemed like one of them: he was a religious teacher, people called him Rabbi, and he had a lot to say about God. He knew the Bible pretty well too. He was always quoting from it, but every time he did, all the religious folks in the crowd would get real red in the face and start clenching their jaws, like he had just said something to annoy them. Didn’t they love that stuff? Wasn’t the Bible kind of their “thing” after all? Then why would they get so mad when Jesus recited parts of it in their presence? I guess they didn’t like what he had to say about it.
Maybe he was making them uncomfortable. After all, he was a rabbi, but he didn’t act like other rabbis. For one thing, he hardly ever went to synagogue. Most of the time, he was hanging out in the streets with folks who wouldn’t be caught dead in a synagogue on the Sabbath… people like her.
Nobody knows how it happened. They just seemed to come from everywhere. Jesus said it was God drawing them, but that didn’t even make any sense. What would God have to do with people like them? Still, something inside of her made her stick around on that first day. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. That same feeling kept her coming back around for as long as he was in town.
The things he had to say made sense to her. He certainly knew the Bible but he didn’t throw it in her face. He knew all about the Temple and its elaborate rituals, but he didn’t seem to care much about it. He kept saying the day would come when “not one stone would be left on top of another” in that place. He seemed pretty irreligious for a religious teacher.
He said, “The place where God lives is within you and around you.” He spoke from the heart and didn’t bother with all of that fancy philosophy and theology that the other rabbis used. When people asked Jesus about God, he usually pointed to whatever happened to be in his line of sight at the time:
“Do you see that woman baking bread? That’s what God is like. Do you see those crops growing in that field over there? God is like that. Do you see that farmer sowing seed, that woman sweeping out her house, or those merchants in the market? God is like all of those.”
He even saw signs of God’s presence in the lilies of the field and the sparrows of the air. That didn’t sound like any rabbi she had ever heard before. What’s even weirder is that he didn’t seem to be bothered by all the freaks and misfits who kept gravitating toward him. In fact, whenever zealous devotees came up to pledge their allegiance to him, Jesus kept turning them back to those very same freaks and misfits. “These people are my family,” he would say, “Whatever you do for them, you do for me.”
Family? Did he mean her? Nobody had ever talked to her like that before. People called her a lot of things, but never “family.” She hadn’t even spoken to her own family in years…
Why would anyone want her of all people in his family?
All the same, she kept coming back, drawn by that inexplicable something. Who knows? Maybe Jesus was right and it really was God that was drawing her?
She loved listening to him. She loved the way he stuck it to those religious hypocrites, using their own Bibles against them. She loved his stories and the way he looked at the world: finding God everywhere in it. But most of all, she loved the way he looked at her.
Men often looked at her, but not like that. They usually looked at her with some perverted combination of disgust and desire. Regardless of whether or not the rumors about her were true (some were and some weren’t), they believed them all and treated her accordingly. But Jesus called her family. He saw what she was capable of, not just what she was (or what she represented to everyone else). When he taught, his eyes would sometimes momentarily lock with hers, as if he was speaking directly to her. She would swell with pride and sit up a little straighter, imagining that he really was talking to her.
He wasn’t of course. She was just a woman, and a bad one at that. Women weren’t allowed to study under rabbis in that day. Even socially respectable women would only be allowed to sit in and listen to his lectures. But then why did he keep looking at her? Why did his words make so much sense? She was getting it! Could it be possible that maybe (just maybe) he really was speaking to her? I don’t know… but she kept coming back.
And something was happening inside of her. She was looking at the world in a whole new way. It was as if she had been blind all along and was really starting to see things clearly for the first time ever. It was almost as if she had been some lame beggar by the roadside and Jesus was taking her hand, lifting her up onto her own two feet, and teaching her how to walk her own path. For the first time in a long time, she felt like a person again, a real human being. It felt like those cold, numb, dead spaces inside of her were coming alive again when she was around Jesus. Who knew that was even possible?
Earlier that afternoon, she was hanging around town as usual and she heard some folks talking. They said Jesus would be moving on tomorrow, headed to another town. She felt her stomach jump with fright. Leaving? He was leaving? To where? Would he be back? Was this the last chance she would ever have to see him and feel that amazing feeling?
She had lost track of time those last few days. They seemed like an eternity to her. She was so caught up in everything he was saying, everything that was going on, it didn’t occur to her that Jesus wouldn’t be staying there forever. What was she supposed to do?
Something inside her heart told her she should do something, but she didn’t know what. Shouldn’t there be some kind of religious ritual for thanking or blessing a rabbi who was leaving? It seemed like there should be. After all, those religious folks had prayers, and blessings, and rituals for just about every other occasion, why not this one? But what would it be? She wished there was someone she could ask, but certainly no other rabbi would ever give her the time of day, much less let her ask a question. Besides, most of those blessings and rituals could only be performed by men. She would only get to sit out and watch, if she was lucky.
But that didn’t sit right with her. That didn’t do justice to the kind of person Jesus was. She might not know the correct thing to do, but she had to do something. It was getting late. The sun was almost down. There wasn’t time to plan anything elaborate. Besides, she heard that Jesus already had plans. He was invited to dinner at some big shot Pharisee’s house. They would have all kinds of fancy food and entertainment there. Nothing she could do would measure up to that. They would never even let her in the door, anyway. It was a hopeless cause… unless…
Nah, that’s too crazy… it would never work… but then again…
She had this jar. It had been with her a long time. Nobody knows how she got it. It was the only thing she had that was worth anything. It was filled with a very rare and expensive perfume, worth about as much as a full year’s salary for a working man. Once upon a time, that jar of perfume was worth more than her life, but not anymore. Jesus had showed her that she was worth so much more than that. The dignity she had discovered through him made that jar seem cheap and worthless by comparison.
It was right then that she knew what she had to do. Maybe she didn’t know the proper ritual for blessing a rabbi, but she would make one up to demonstrate to Jesus and everyone else what it was that he meant to her.
She went home, grabbed that jar, and made a bee-line for the house where Jesus was having dinner. Her heart was pounding and her adrenaline was pumping as she got closer. Right up to the front door she walked. And right through. The bouncer happened to look the other way for a second and so he didn’t notice her until she was already inside. He shouted and tried to grab her, but it was too late. She had already made it to the place where Jesus was sitting: reclining actually, with his feet stretched out behind him.
She looked down at those feet. Just like everyone else’s, they were disgusting. Without paved roads or organized sanitation, city streets in the ancient world were cesspools of filth. A person’s feet would get caked with mud and excrement just from walking around. Nobody liked to touch feet or wash them. It was the worst job, even for a slave. Feet were gross.
The woman looked down at Jesus’ feet. Then she looked back at the jar in her hand. After pausing for a second, she broke the jar open and dumped its precious contents onto Jesus’ feet. The pungent smell of lavender filled the room. She had never opened the jar before. She always wondered what its contents might smell like. Now she knew. It was beautiful. It reminded her of the way that Jesus made her feel inside. Through him, she had come to be aware of her own inner beauty for the first time ever. She was like that jar of perfume: broken open, poured out, precious, and beautiful.
As the weight of this truth hit home for her, she began to cry for joy. Her tears dripped down off her cheeks, chin, and nose and onto Jesus’ feet. Looking down, she realized the tears mixed with the jar’s contents were washing away the layer of filth left from the long, hard road. She could see his beautiful, soft, brown skin showing through. Bending down even further, she took each foot in her hands, undid her long, dark hair, and used it like a towel to wipe away those last remnants of slime, continuing to weep as she did it. This felt right. It was all she had: the only thing she could think of to do.
The host of the party was, predictably, indignant. He pulled out all those nasty names and labels that people called her. But somehow, those names didn’t phase her as she ran her fingers over Jesus’ smooth, clean, sweet-smelling feet. In that moment, she was prepared to let him talk and say whatever he wanted, but Jesus wasn’t. Jesus interrupted the Pharisee’s tirade with a single word: Simon. That was his name, the Pharisee that is. Jesus called him by name, not by his status or position. “Simon,” he said, “I have something to say to you.”
You better believe that shut him up quick. Jesus then told another story about debts being forgiven. “Do you see this woman?” Obviously, Simon didn’t. All Simon saw was another sinner, another woman who didn’t know her place, another scumbag lowlife. Simon didn’t really see her but Jesus saw her, so he asked Simon, “Do you see this woman? I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love.” Did she just hear him right? Did he just say forgiven?
Seeing the shock and confusion on her face, he said it again just to drive the point home. He spoke her name… she didn’t even realize that he knew her name, but he called her by it. She looked up and their eyes met again. He repeated, “Your sins are forgiven.”
Forgiven. She never thought she would hear that word spoken to her, but somehow she knew he was right. That was what she had been feeling all along. Forgiven. Restored. The shame and stigma washed away.
And Jesus wasn’t just making it happen for the first time either. He was announcing a reality that had already come true. She was already loved, forgiven, and clean. Jesus’ words were only sealing the deal and making it real to her. She was a person with a name and dignity, no matter how hard society might try to take that away from her.
Almost as soon as Jesus had said this, the room erupted into theological debate over who has the authority to announce such forgiveness. The religious machinery was hard at work, already pumping out Bible verses and quoting rabbinical commentaries on the matter.
Jesus just rolled his eyes, shook his head, and looked back at her smiling. And then, leaning down to whisper in her ear while the debate raged on around them, Jesus spoke her name again and said, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
This woman, whose name has been lost to history but was known to Jesus, was not the only one who experienced such wholeness at the feet of Jesus. There were other women among his disciples as well. We read about some of them this morning: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna. They were an integral part of his ministry, contributing a vital part. There were men too, of course.
And the amazing thing is that all of them together… all of us… from first century Palestine to twenty-first century New York, are still hearing in our hearts and proclaiming with our lives that same message of forgiveness that continues to resound through the halls of history:
“I love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Be blessed and be a blessing!
To love is to live
with an open heart,
a broken heart.
To give of oneself until empty.
To not grasp equality.
To devalue oneself.
To give to what only knows how to take.
To be the apple tree picked clean.
To be swallowed by darkness.
To be spent but not touched.
To play the whore and the virgin at the same time.
He did it.
Don’t mythologize.
Don’t romanticize.
Don’t let him be dismissed so easily.
He is the cheap trick,
the unfulfilled desire,
the itch you can’t scratch,
the pain that passeth understanding,
the walk like blues.
He is dead,
and gone,
and never coming back.
Really?
Is that what you think?
Son, you talk an awful lot,
but maybe you should listen:
An unfamiliar voice.
A deer crossing the road in front of me.
A chipmunk on his way to do something (apparently) very important.
A bee otherwise occupied.
Green.
Blue.
Grey.
Brown.
Hot breath, 93 million miles old.
Cold fingers brushing past my cheek and through my hair.
A passion play:
astir,
exploding,
in motion.
Seeds of new life:
Sarah’s laughter knocked loose after 90 years or more.
The atmosphere is full of it.
What is it called?
Where is it from?
I don’t even know,
except to say
everywhere.
All of this is not an answer,
except to a question
I have not yet learned to ask.
It is neither an ending nor a beginning.
It is only a moment.
This is everything I wish to say about the scandal surrounding the original advert…
God language can tie people into knots, of course. In part, that is because “God” is not God’s name. Referring to the highest power we can imagine, “God” is our name for that which is greater than all yet present in each…
Proposing that “God” is not God’s name is anything but blasphemous. When Moses asks whom he is talking to up there on Mount Sinai, the answer is not “God,” but “I am who I am,” or “I do what I do.” That’s what the word “Yahweh” means. When the Hebrews later insisted that it not be written out in full, they were guarding against idolatry: the worshiping of a part (in this case the word-symbol for God) in place of the whole (that toward which the word-symbol points).
So it was for the biblical Jacob, who wrestled for life and meaning with a mysterious heavenly messenger. When dawn finally broke after a nightlong struggle, Jacob demanded to know his adversary’s name. “Don’t worry about my name,” God replied. “It is completely unimportant. All that matters is that you held your own during a night of intense struggle. You will walk with a limp for the remainder of your days. Yet that is simply proof that in wrestling for meaning you did not retreat, but gave your all. Therefore, though my name is unimportant, I shall give you a new name, Israel, ‘one who wrestled with both divinity and humanity, and prevailed.'”
-Forrest Church in The Cathedral of the World: A Universalist Theology (Beacon Press: 2009), p.3
The most ancient shrine described in the Bible was a rock. As the story is told in Genesis, Jacob founded the shrine because of a dream. Traveling alone, he fell asleep one night in the mountains, with his head resting on a stone for his pillow. Perhaps it was one of those bright nights when the stars are thick and close, like a spangled quilt thrown over the earth. He dreamed he saw a ladder connecting heaven and earth, with angels climbing up and down. “This is none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven” he exclaimed when he woke. He set up the stone to mark the place and named it Beth El – the House of God. Another night, on another journey, Jacob tossed and turned in fear that his brother, whom he’d wronged, might kill him. An angel came in the darkness and fought him. Jacob survived the fight but limped ever after, and he gained a new name – Israel, which means “one who struggled with God and lived.”
The divine-human encounter is the rock on which our theological house stands. At the heart of liberal theology is a mysterious glimpse, a transforming struggle, with the oblique presence of God. “Theology” literally means “God-talk” and derives from theos (God) and logos (word). But talk of God is tricky business. The same Bible that tells of Jacob’s marking stone also warns, “Make no graven images of God.” God may be sighted by a sidewise glance, sensed in a dream, felt in a struggle, heard in the calm at the heart of a storm, or unveiled in a luminous epiphany. But the moment human beings think they know who God is and carve their conclusions in stone, images of God can become dangerous idols. In Jewish tradition, God is ultimately un-nameable, and some never pronounce the letters that spell out God’s unspeakable name.
In liberal theology, at the core of the struggle with God is a restless awareness that human conclusions about God are always provisional, and any way of speaking about God may become an idol. This is why not everyone welcomes talk of God. God-talk has been used to hammer home expectations of obedience, to censure feelings and passions. It has been invoked to to stifle intellectual inquiry and to reinforce oppression. For many people the word “God” stands for conceptions of the ultimate that have harmed life, sanctioned unjust systems, or propelled people to take horrific actions “in the name of God.”
-Rebecca Ann Parker in A House for Hope: The Promise of Progressive Religion for the Twenty-first Century (Beacon Press: 2010), p.23-24
Reblogged from ucc.org
The Rev. Robin Raudabaugh won’t be deterred by the actions of a vandal spewing hate. Her Minnesota United Church of Christ congregation remains unwavering in its support and affirmation of LGBT persons despite the fact that Pilgrims United Church of Christ, in Maple Grove, Minn., was vandalized twice in a one-month span.
Click here to read the full article
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ba_hRwUviLw%5D
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 