A prayer that I wrote for my friend, Rodney Duke, about ten years ago. Pastors, priests, and ministers: feel free to borrow it for Palm Sunday.
God, may your Holy Spirit ride upon my words into the hearts and minds of this congregation, just as Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem; and may that serve as a reminder that you can still use a jackass to reach your people. Amen.
Here’s an inspiring passage I found in on pages 19-20 in Douglas F. Ottati’s book, Theology for Liberal Presbyterians and Other Endangered Species (Geneva: 2006).
Will the mainline churches in America hold together or split apart? Will liberal Protestants criticize the excesses and the idols of contemporary American culture but also remain open to the lessons and wisdom that nevertheless seem present in the wider society and culture? Will liberal Protestants simply disappear? Will the United States find positive, realistic, and responsible ways to exercise power in a multilateral world? What shall we say and do about racism, sexism, and homophobia; about urban policy, transportation, and education; about matters of war and peace? Can we ever become stewards of our natural environment?
These are among the important questions we face. Nevertheless, for Christians and their communities, the more basic question is this: How shall we center a faithful witness? The function of Christian theology is to help us answer this question, and I propose that we answer it in a single sentence: We belong to the God of grace.
Once we are clear about this, a number of things follow. First, we live in assurance, refuse to set limits on the extent of God’s faithfulness, and refuse to exclude anyone from the scope of grace and redemption. We then work for an inclusive church, support a ministry of reconciliation, and invite everyone everywhere to lay hold of the assurance and confidence that come with the knowledge of a gracious God. Second, we acknowledge the human fault and, without losing hope, maintain a realistic attitude toward the present age and its daunting challenges. Finally, we affirm that all people have worth, and we commit ourselves to public practices, policies, and leadership that respect persons, pursue equitable opportunities for the poor, and care for those in need.
We belong to the God of grace. This simple confession will enable us to interpret the many threats and conflicts and issues and promises of our day in a definite theological frame of reference.
My thoughts were stirred toward the Social Gospel movement by a fantastic guest lecturer in my Philosophy of Religion class this morning. So, I thought I might post a little from my old historical friend, Walter Rauschenbusch, an early twentieth century Baptist minister whose work I discovered while living in western North Carolina. He taught at Rochester Divinty School in upstate New York. It just so happens to be the place where I took my ordination exams for the PC(USA). What Rauschenbusch had to say in the second decade of the twentieth century continues to ring eerily true in the second decade of the twenty-first, especially in light of the recent frustrations exposed by the convulsions of Occupy Wall Street:
The natural resources of the country are passing into the control of a minority. An ever increasing number of people are henceforth to live in a land owned by an ever decreasing number. The means of traffic are the arteries of the social body; every freight car is a blood corpuscle charged with life. We have allowed private persons to put their thumb where they can constrict the life blood of the nation at will. The common people have financed the industry of the country with their savings, but the control of the industry has passed out of their hands almost completely. The profits of our common work are absorbed by a limited group; the mass of the people are permanently reduced to wage-earning positions. The cost of living has been raised by unseen hands until several millions of our nation are unable to earn even the bare minimum which social science declares necessary for health and decency, and all families living on a fixed income have felt a mysterious and suffocating pressure.
All this was the necessary outcome of our economic system, but it was a sore surprise to most of us when the process began to culminate and we saw the end of our own doings…
…Sin is the greatest preacher of repentance. Give it time, and it will cool our lust in shame. When God wants to halt a proud man who is going wrong, he lets him go the full length and find out the latter end for himself. That is what he has done with our nation in its headlong ride on the road of covetousness. Mammonism stands convicted by its own works. It was time for us to turn.
We are turning…
…Were you ever converted to God? Do you remember the change in your attitude to all the world? Is not this the new life which is running through our people the same great change on a national scale? This is religious energy, rising from the depth of that infinite spiritual life in which we all live and move and have our being. This is God.
–Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order, 1916
A fierce unrest seethes at the core
Of all existing things:
It was the eager wish to soar
That gave the gods their wings.
From what flat wastes of cosmic slime,
And stung by what quick fire,
Sunward the restless races climb!–
Men risen out of mire!
There throbs through all the worlds that are
This heart-beat hot and strong,
And shaken systems, star by star,
Awake and glow in song.
But for the urge of this unrest
These joyous spheres were mute;
But for the rebel in his breast
Had man remained a brute.
When baffled lips demanded speech,
Speech trembled into birth–
(One day the lyric world shall reach
From earth to laughing earth)–
When man’s dim eyes demanded light
The light he sought was born–
His wish, a Titan, scaled the height
And flung him back the morn!
From deed to dream, from dream to deed,
From daring hope to hope,
The restless wish, the instant need,
Still lashed him up the slope!
I sing no governed firmament,
Cold, ordered, regular–
I sing the stinging discontent
That leaps from star to star!
-Don Marquis, 1878-1937
I am being driven forward
Into an unknown land.
The pass grows steeper
The air colder and sharper
A wind from my unknown goal
Stirs the strings of expectation.
Still the question
Shall I ever get there?
There where life resounds
A clear pure note in the silence.
-Dag Hammarskjöld
Here is a breathtaking animated short that Annie Grove found online. There is so much subtlety to love. I could go on gushing about it, but I think I’ll let the film speak for itself. Here’s to Lent!
“Remember that you are dust,“Earth is dirt, all dirt, but here we find revealed what dirt can do when it is self-organizing under suitable conditions with water and solar illumination. This is pretty spectacular dirt.”
-Holmes Rolston III
Star Wars as a Modern Myth
Yesterday, I was having a lively after-class discussion with my students in the coffee bar at Utica College. The topic: Star Wars as a modern myth.
While I have nothing but disdain for George Lucas as a megalomaniac and director, I have to tip my hat to him as one of the most brilliant cinematic storytellers of the 20th century. He intentionally wrote Star Wars according to the mythical pattern laid out by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Campbell applied Jungian archetypes to the study of comparative mythology. He argued that all the major myths of the world’s religions conformed to a pattern that he called the monomyth.
While Campbell specifically mentions the stories of Prometheus, Osiris, Buddha, and Christ, we can identify the monomythical pattern in the more recent works of L. Frank Baum, J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, and yes, even George Lucas. Thus, Dorothy Gayle, Frodo Baggins, Harry Potter, and Luke Skywalker are all basically the same character. What makes Star Wars different from the others is that Lucas was directly inspired by Campbell and intentionally wrote Star Wars as a “modern myth” according to Campbell’s pattern.
The Jedi as a Religion
Given that Lucas intentionally designed Star Wars as a myth, it shouldn’t be surprising that an actual religion has arisen around it.
The Jedi have been objects of admiration by many (including myself). Part monk, part Samurai, and you get to carry a lightsaber. Who wouldn’t want to convert?
In fact, you can. The Universal Life Church will gladly ordain you as a legal minister over the internet and, for the low price of $10.99, you can order a certificate that identifies you as a Jedi Knight. I’m not kidding. Click here if you’re interested.
For those who are looking for a little more commitment, check out the Jedi Church website.
Around the time that Revenge of the Sith was released, science fiction legend Orson Scott Card published an article on the Jedi as a religion. The question that Orson Scott Card asks is, if we take the Star Wars movies as the foundational texts for the Jedi religion, what kind of religion can we expect to emerge? Are the Jedi, as presented in the films, the kind religious order that we would actually like to see? Card has some fascinating things to say about it.
Click here to read his fantastic article, No Faith in this Force
More collected tidbits from Diarmuid O’Murchu’s Evolutionary Faith.
The dynamic vacuum is like a quiet lake on a summer night, its surface rippled in gentle fluctuations, while all around, electron-positron pairs twinkle on and off like fireflies. It is a busier and friendlier place than the forbidding emptiness of Democritus or the glacial ether of Aristotle. Its restless activity is utterly fascinating!
-Hans Christian von Baeyer
According to this startling new picture, in the beginning was Nothing. No space. No time. No matter or energy. But there was the quantum principle, which states that there must be uncertainty, so even Nothing became unstable, and tiny particles of Something began to form.
-Michio kaku
Since what people call God is not one being among other beings, not even a discrete Supreme being, but mystery which transcends and enfolds all that is, like the horizon and yet circling all horizons, this human encounter with the presence and absence of the living God occurs through the mediation of history itself in its whole vast range of happenings. To this movement of the living God that can be traced in and through the experience of the world, Christian speech traditionally gives the name Spirit.
-Elizabeth Johnson
It is time to outgrow…
our anthropocentric desire to measure and quantify every aspect of existence; to dismiss as irrelevant those aspects we cannot measure or control according to our human-made norms; and to attribute primary significance only to that which can be objectively observed and quantified.
It is time to embrace…
the radical openness that characterizes our universe, and the mysterious fullness that inebriates the whole of reality; the seething energy surfacing from the quantum vacuum, forever begetting novelty and vitality in a universe poised for unlimited innovation, creative possibility, and divine exuberance.
Verbal prayers make sense, I think, if you know in advance that talking to God is like talking to your dog. You say human words to your dog, but he pretty much ignores that in favor of how you smell. Similarly, whatever divinity there is hears your words of prayer but very likely ignores all you say in favor of the aroma of your heart: your kindness, your compassion – for both your own poor soul and for your have-not brothers and sisters in the world. But the words of your prayer do matter to you: they give shape to your thoughts; they warm and give color to your soul and spur you to a focused listening.
-William Cleary
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 