Archive for the ‘faith’ Category
December 18, 2008
Some are claiming that Obama’s selection of Rick Warren to provide the invocation at his inauguration is providing the “first real rift with progressives” because of Rick Warren’s stance on same-sex marriages, with the Human Rights Campaign calling it a “genuine blow to the LGBT Americans.” The President-elect is getting some slack for picking Rick Warren, but many forget that Rick Warren got a lot of heat for inviting Barack Obama to his first World AIDS Day Summit on AIDS and the Church in December 2006. (more…)
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November 7, 2008
What a memorable night. After the election was called for Barack Obama, a couple friends and I ventured over to the Lincoln Memorial – by far my favorite monument that commemorates the last president elected from Illinois and the steps from which Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his historic “I Have a Dream” speech.
It was a quiet, solemn setting. While thousands were block away celebrating outside the White House, there were only a dozen strangers gathered. Luckily a man brought a radio. We gathered around it to hear our new president’s acceptance speech.
Through the course of the speech, our group of a dozen grew to around fifty. It was amazing to look around into the teary eyes of these strangers, as many of them held each other and cried with one another.
Afterwards, a young African American guy who showed up looked over at me and said, “I just feel like hugging someone I don’t know.” Later I thought about how I grew up in a world where I could become anything I wanted to, even president of the United States. That’s probably not the world he grew up in, and I was envious of all the emotions he must now be experiencing.
P.S. It turns out a photographer from the New York Times reflected on this same experience, as well as a blogger at Sojourners.
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March 16, 2008
“The Emancipation Proclamation was delivered in 1863, long before the reality of equality has occurred. In 1863 it was law, it was true, it was binding — and we’ve spent more than one hundred years trying to hammer it into reality. In the death and resurrection of Christ, the emancipation of all things from slavery to sin and brokenness has been established; we’re now in the period of civil war and civil rights, meting out those things into an earthly expression. We are in a battle, working to see His will on earth experienced as it is in heaven.”
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March 16, 2008
The gradual, psychological reorientation process that happens inside us as we adapt to an external change. The transition process often results from a change, or occurs along with a change, but may also begin before the change actually takes place.
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March 1, 2008
From NBC/NJ’s Aswini Anburajan
BROWNSVILLE, Texas — Obama took a detour from the standard rally or economic roundtable Friday afternoon, to hold a meeting with Latino religious leaders and making a spur of the moment stop at the U.S.-Mexico border.
At a small, invitation-only event at the University of Texas-Brownsville with about 150 evangelical and Catholic ministers, Obama spoke of his own conversion to Christianity as a young man working with churches on the South Side of Chicago in his 20s. As a child, Obama grew up in a secular household, as the New York Times noted in April 2007: “The grandparents who helped raise Mr. Obama were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists. His mother was an anthropologist who collected religious texts the way others picked up tribal masks, teaching her children the inspirational power of the common narratives and heroes.” Obama did not grow up with his Kenyan father, whose family was Muslim.
Obama tied the message of his campaign to a religious message, telling the story of Jeremiah 29 from the bible. “God has a plan for his people,” Obama said. “That was the truth Jeremiah grasped — the creed that brought comfort to the exiles — that faith is not just a pathway to personal redemption, but a force that can bind us together and lift us up as a community.” (more…)
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December 25, 2007
Dear Friends,
Life gives you whiplash sometimes, doesn’t it? A stab of pain or loss crashes into a perfect moment or season of great happiness. Or – more pleasantly – you’re grinding along in circumstances that are about as exciting as bad traffic, and suddenly life opens up and you feel the accelerator of joy pressing to the metal, and soon your window is open and you feel a fresh breeze blowing through your hair (if you’re lucky enough to have any!) and your arm is out the window and you’re singing along with the radio. This year has included both kinds of surprises for me – some big challenges and disappointments, and some unprecedented “highs,” all overlapping with each other in surprising ways that often leave me speechless, sometimes from grief, and more often from unspeakable joy.
As I approach Christmas this year, I’m bringing this wide range of experiences to my reading of the sacred stories of Mary, Joseph, shepherds, Magi, Simeon, Anna, Herod, and Jesus. (more…)
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December 14, 2007
It was mid-November that I saw Rob Bell give his “The Gods Aren’t Angry” tour. It was a very post-modern, post-Christian telling of the Gospel – with Jesus Christ as the God’s revelation of the radical message that God is not angry with us. In retrospect, Bell’s anthropological model was not the traditional Christ-centric formula but instead centered more on the histories and anxieties of humanity.
But it wasn’t until just now that I am able to put words to the question emerging from Bell’s dialogue: Is Jesus’ radical message a revelation of God’s preexisting love, that God never was angry with us; or perhaps Jesus was saying that God is not angry now because of him and his coming sacrifice; or maybe Jesus was saying that God is not angry with you but only if you believe in him?
God is not angry. Was he ever? Or he isn’t now? Or he isn’t now if we believe?
The differences are huge, right? (more…)
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December 13, 2007
While most of us won’t be called to sacrifice our physical lives (but many may), having faith in Jesus and sharing the faith ofJesus will lead all of us to make what an early disciple called “a living sacrifice.” We will give up the life we could have lived, the more we would have lived – pursuing pleasure, leisure, treasure, security, whatever. And instead, we will live a life dedicated to replacing the suicide machine with a sacred ecosystem, a beautiful community, and insurgency of healing and peace, a creative global family, an unterror movement of faith, hope, and love.
I finally finished Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change book – and am tempted to start at it again! It seemed to integrate so much of what has been changing in my own life – the twists and turns in my own faith and my deepening concern and commitment around issues of justice. Even more so, it seemed to help provide some direction – clarity that comes from putting all those many jigsaw puzzle pieces together. But a book can only be a “vehicle” through which to begin stirring these things together.
For those of you not familiar, this book examines the societal systems (prosperity, security, and equity) of this world – which are embarked on a suicidal path because of a destructive framing story. McLaren then introduces us to Jesus’ transformative framing story – a way of love that can change anything.
Much of the book is very macro or global focused, which is where my mind likes to operate best. But in the back of my head, I couldn’t stop asking the question: What framing story am I still living by? What are my suicidal systems? (more…)
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