Stop the Hate

These are their names.  These are their stories.
 

Thirty Years

Precious On Every Side

I'm interested in what folks think about this clip...about Cornel West's careful, but passionate articulation of urgency and the cry for justice in a Holy Land.  I hear a very clear repudiation of anti-Semitism (couldn't be much clearer, really) and an appeal for honesty in naming occupation for what it is.  And I hear a desire, most broadly, for justice and peaceableness: on every side.

We Dance Together: A Sermon

Sunday, June 19, 2016
A Meditation on Acts 3:1-10

1.

Emil Nolde: 'Christ and the Children' (1910)

Now when Jesus was around, when Jesus was hanging with Peter and John and Mary and Martha and the rest of them, he used to say to them, "My body is the new temple."  "My body is the new temple."  Kind of a gutsy thing to say as you go around Jerusalem, in and out of the marketplace, up and down the steps of the great and holy temple itself.  "My body is the new temple."

And that would get all kinds of folks worked up--priestly types and government types and the opportunists who made a pretty good living off the temple pilgrims in those days--it would get them all worked up because they heard Jesus saying that he didn't care much for the old temple.  Which was only partially true.  "My body is the new temple," he used to say.  And his words had an edge to them.  Jesus' words always had a kind of an edge to them.  "You can tear me down," he used to say, "but God will raise me up."  No doubt he wanted to provoke them--no doubt he wanted them to see and feel everything that was at stake.  In his life.  In their lives.  "My body is the new temple," he used to say.

You see, Jesus wasn't messing around.  Jesus proposed to inaugurate the kingdom of God on earth.  Nothing less than that.  This was his great proposition.  The kingdom of God on earth.  And not ten years down the line.  And not a little bit at a time.  But at that moment.  In his lifetime.  In Palestine.  The kingdom of God on earth.

And that, you see, that meant experiencing his own body as the temple of God.  Jesus experiencing his own body--his heart, his hands, his life force--as the temple of God.  As the location of God's revelation in the world.  As the venue of God's daring action in the world.  His body.  As the most beautiful, most sacred site on the planet.

And you know this, right?  You know that this is how Jesus talked; this is how he talked to Peter and John and Martha and Mary and the others; this is what he preached in the streets, and on the temple steps, to everybody listening.  "My body is the new temple," he used to say.  And of course, once you go there, if you're Jesus, once you go to your body as the temple, you're on a wild ride with a holy God who calls your body home.  And that's a wild ride that changes everything about your days and your nights, your dreams and your dear ones.  Once you go there, everything is transfigured and transformed.

You see, if Jesus experienced his own body as the temple of God, then he came to know that Peter's was too, and John's was too, and Mary's too, and Martha's too.  And if their bodies were temples of God, then the diseased guy on the corner, the guy talking to himself all the time: his body was the temple of God too; and the Roman centurion all puffed up and proud: his was too; and the little children, all those little children who bounded Jesus' way and bounced on his knee.  Their little bodies were temples of God too.  You see what I mean about that wild ride that changes everything?  You see what I mean about the kingdom of God?

Now I want to get to this morning's story in Acts, but this is all part of it.  Background, context.  My colleague Julian DeShazier at University Church in Chicago talks about the critical difference, the prophetic difference between what he calls the Temple Perspective of Jesus and the Pornographic Perspective of 21st century capitalism.  The Pornographic Perspective is the way the markets see our bodies: as body parts, as body parts only, as some body parts better than other body parts, as some bodies better than other bodies.  We're nothing more than objects for somebody else's enjoyment or enrichment.  You know how this goes, right?  It's the Pornographic Perspective; and it's all over our television sets and our computer screens.  And it's making some people very rich and the rest of us very, very poor.

But the Temple Perspective--well, that's something else entirely, right?  The Temple Perspective: that's Jesus' way of seeing things.  That's the way Jesus sees our bodies, the way God makes our bodies.  We are temples of God, every one of us.  And all of us is sacred stuff.  And all of us is holy ground.   With Jesus, you don't have to choose: I like my eyes, but my hips?  Not so much.  I like what I look like in that suit, but those shorts?  Not so much.

Jesus is working with a Temple Perspective.  Your black body is a temple of God.  Your brown body is a temple of God.  Your curvy body, your skinny body, your HIV-positive body, your differently-abled body: these aren't just pieces of somebody else's puzzle, these aren't just cogs in the market's money-making machine, these arent' just a bunch of pornographic parts.  Your body is a temple of God: it's where God's action's going down, it's where the holy life of the spirit unfolds.  Your body is the location of God's revelation.  So Jesus says, "My body is the new temple."  And every one of your bodies is a temple too.

And you know this.  This is what Jesus's talking about when he says that the kingdom of God is at hand.  Literally!  The kingdom of God is in your hands.  And in your heart.  And in your abdomen and in your hips and in the vessels and arteries and tissue nobody else can see.

Honesty in Leadership

"We've gone through moments in our history before, when we acted out of fear.  And we came to regret it.  We've seen our government mistreat our fellow citizens.  And it has been a shameful part of our history."

Do Not Steal

This is some of the finest writing and most provocative writing I've seen in quite some time.  Once again, Nick encourages me to think about what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and what kinds of impact all this has on others.  We go back a long ways, and I'm grateful.

DO NOT STEAL.  Isn't this simple teaching, maybe the very heart of Torah and Gospel, what's most needed right now...?  In churches?  In mosques?  In synagogues?  And it's not just a belief, it's not just an intellectual exercise.  It's a practice.  It's a lifestyle.  It's a commitment of the body and the heart.  DO NOT STEAL.  It implies, I think, a love for one's neighbor and a dedication to one's neighborhood.  And maybe that's the faith part.  Do we believe in one another? 

If we do, the teaching follows.  And just seems so damn holy.  DO NOT STEAL.  Don't stoke the fires of hatred, raise your kids on bigotry and self-contempt.  Don't steal their hearts.  DO NOT STEAL.  Don't march into a night club, like some kind of video game character all juked up, and steal the lives of 49 happy dancers.  DO NOT STEAL.  Don't steal the votes of congresspeople and senators with your obscene money and your vicious fear-mongering.  (I'm talking to you, NRA.)  Don't steal the communities we live in by making every street an avenue of death.  DO NOT STEAL.  Don't settle for a country in which poor kids and kids of color and immigrant kids have to settle for second-rate schools and second-rate health care and emaciated dreams.  THAT'S STEALING, PLAIN AND SIMPLE.  Don't steal Palestinian hilltops for illegal settlements and call it just and right.  BECAUSE THAT'S STEALING TOO. 

I hear Amos in the wind tonight.  I hear Hosea.  I hear Jeremiah.  DO NOT STEAL.  I hear Mary of Nazareth.  I hear Jesus her son.  I hear Moses who started it all.  And I hear Mohammed too.  Loud and clear.  DO NOT STEAL.  I hear Dorothy Day.  I hear Chief Seattle.  I hear Martin King and Malcolm X and Alicia Garza.  I hear Cesar Chavez and Harvey Milk and the lovely, lost voices of 49 dancers in Orlando.  Like prophets crying out.  DO NOT STEAL.  So damn holy. 

Tell Us Who We Are (Tom Engelhardt)

This piece by Tom Engelhardt reminds me of a couple of things: (1) Trump is a symptom of "the virus of right-wing authoritarianism" that shows up almost everywhere we look these days: from the Tea Party halls of Congress to Russia, North Korea, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the rest.  (2) We desperately need new language, prophetic language that describes our decaying democracy and the dangerous role of big money in determining representation and then charting the agenda of government.  The entire piece is worth reading and takes the shape of a letter to the graduating class of 2016.

From Tom Engelhardt on Tom Dispatch: 

"Perhaps it would be better to see Donald Trump as a symptom, not the problem itself, to think of him not as the Zika Virus but as the first infectious mosquito to hit the shores of this country. If you need proof that he’s at worst a potential aider and abettor of authoritarianism, just take a look at the rest of our world, where the mosquitoes are many and the virus of right-wing authoritarianism spreading rapidly with the rise of a new nationalism (that often goes hand in hand with anti-immigrant fervor of a Trumpian sort).  He is, in other words, just one particularly bizarre figure in an increasingly crowded room."

And: 

"Here’s my thought: to change this world of ours, you first have to name (or rename) it, as any magical realist novelist from Gabriel García Márquez on has long known.  The world is only yours when you've given it and its component parts names.

"If there’s one thing that the Occupy Wall Street movement reminded us of, it was this: that the first task in changing our world is to find new words to describe it.  In 2011, that movement arrived at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan calling the masters of our universe “the 1%” and the rest of us “the 99%.”  Simply wielding those two phrases brought to the fore a set of previously half-seen realities -- the growing inequality gap in this country and the world -- and so briefly electrified the country and changed the conversation.  By relabeling the mental map of our world, those protesters cleared some of the fog away, allowing us to begin to imagine paths through it and so ways to act.

"Right now, we need you to take these last four hard years and everything you know, including what you weren’t taught in any classroom but learned on your own -- your experience, for instance, of your education as a financial rip-off -- and tell those of us in desperate need of fresh eyes just how our world should be described.

"In order to act, in order to change much of anything, you first need to give that world the names, the labels, it deserves, and they may not be “election” or “democracy” or so many of the other commonplace words of our past and our present moment.  Otherwise, we’ll all continue to spend our time struggling to grasp ghostly shapes in that fog.
Now, all you graduates, form up your serried ranks, muster the words you’ve taken four years to master, and prepare to march out of those gates and begin to apply them in ways that your elders are incapable of doing.

"Class of 2016, tell us who we are and where we are."

Trillion Dollar Upgrade?

 

From Tom Krebsbach's Op Ed in the Seattle Times (5/11/16): "The U.S. is about to embark on a $1 trillion upgrade to its nuclear arsenal. Investing so much tax money on these horrible weapons systems means they will likely be around for most or all of the 21st century. One can just imagine how $1 trillion of tax money could be used for more constructive purposes, such as infrastructure repair, research into cancer and other diseases and paying off student debt, among other uses."

Spiritual Gravitation

"If we believe in a real kingdom of God--an organic fellowship of interrelated lives--prayer should be as effective a force in this interrelated social world of ours as gravitation is in the world of matter.  Personal spirits experience spiritual gravitation, soul reaches after soul, hearts draw towards one another.  We are no longer in the net of blind fate, in the realm of impersonal force: we are in a love system where the aspiration of one member heightens the entire group, and the need of one--even the least--draws upon the resources of the whole--even the Infinite.  We are in actual Divine-human fellowship."

Rufus Jones, American Quaker, Founder of AFSC, 1863-1948

UCC Speaks Out on First Amendment Freedoms

UCC leaders issue statement supporting the First Amendment right to use economic measures in the case of Israel-Palestine: Prompted by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's plan to halt state business with companies that back a boycott of Israel, and the growing interest in several state legislatures in criminalizing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement, the national officers of the United Church of Christ are speaking out against what they see as an infringement of First Amendment rights.

Protect Free Speech: No on AB 2844

Senator Bill Monning 
701 Ocean Street, 318A

Santa Cruz, California   95060

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Dear Senator Monning:

As California residents, religious leaders and committed social activists, we urge you to oppose AB 2844 (“Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions of Recognized Sovereign Nations or Peoples”), a disturbingly unconstitutional attempt to silence those who oppose Israel’s well-documented human rights abuses against Palestinians.  Though its title has been changed, the bill clearly aims to punish or chill constitutionally protected speech.  It is part of a nation-wide effort to discredit criticism of Israel’s record and shame Palestinians and other activists into inaction.  In its own poignant analysis, the Assembly Judiciary Committee voiced “very serious and perhaps insurmountable" First Amendment concerns.  It is our strong belief that California should avoid the costly and unconstitutional minefield that AB 2844 will lead our state into.  We can’t afford it.  And it’s not right.

Over several decades, our Christian denominations have responded—in faith and conscience—to the call of Palestinian civil society for support and solidarity.  Most recently, this has led many of our churches to support the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement as a nonviolent expression of social action and resistance.  The movement itself includes many Israelis and Palestinians, Jewish-Americans and Palestinian-Americans, students and activists of many kinds.  It is fundamentally based on principles in the United Nations’ own Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948); it is most certainly not anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish.

Just as importantly, our Supreme Court has long held that boycotts are a protected form of political speech.  As you well know, boycotts have long been used to achieve important social and political change—from the Montgomery bus boycott during the Civil Rights Movement to the grape boycott here in California and the boycott to end apartheid in South Africa.  AB 2844 is a blatant attempt to subvert this core constitutional idea and practice.

Every civil rights legal organization that has weighed in on AB 2844 has warned of the constitutional defects that arise when the state seeks to suppress political boycotts.  You’ll see a full list attached.  It includes: the ACLU, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild and Palestine Legal. 

Senator Monning, with respect for your strong commitment to free speech and social change, we ask that you affirm the free speech rights of all Californians by opposing the unconstitutional and short-sighted AB 2844.  We recognize that political pressure comes from many sides on this issue, yet we urge you to take a bold and prophetic stand.  We would welcome a chance to meet with you around our strong opposition to this bill.

Yours truly,

The Rev. David Grishaw-Jones, Senior Pastor, Peace United Church of Christ
The Rev. Herb Schmidt, Lutheran Campus Pastor, Emeritus
The Rev. Darrell Yeaney, Retired Campus Minister, Presbyterian

Ramadan Mubarak!

Zogby on the Nomination

James Zogby describes the dismissive process by which he's marginalized and so many voices with him.  Whatever else happens over the next few weeks, I'm glad for Bernie Sanders' courage in nominating him to the Platform Committee.  It's another indication that he's speaking truths too long unspoken, even and especially in the Democratic Party.  These conversations have to happen. 

Pride!

A beautiful and gorgeous day in Santa Cruz...and a celebration of PRIDE and Peace United's OPEN & AFFIRMING COVENANT.  There was laughter and joy, and renewed commitment, and all kinds of young people reveling in a church that takes the gospel call to inclusion and justice SERIOUSLY!  At 9:30 we worshiped and sang together in Abbott's Square...at 11 we marched together, a single church of fantastic diversity.  What a marvelous parade!  Just as it should be when the PEOPLE OF GOD are in action!

And maybe the most inspiring part of the whole day: our daughter Claire reading an original poem ("Too Little Too Late") during our Celebration of Pride just before the parade!  Her voice...her spirit...her integrity!  Wow.

Resolute. Ali.

Ways to God: Kabbalah Practice

Food Activism: Voices of Conscience

Peace on the Road

I give thanks to God for my friend Curtis Reliford, whose courage and spirit are a blessing to folks across the country!  For years--since Katrina hit the Gulf Coast--he's gathered good will and necessary aid and travelled the country to share his heart.  This summer, he returns to the Hopi Nation, to build friendships and to be of service.

May the road be easy for you, Curtis, and the journey delightful, and every new friend a gift from God!  You go with peace.