Pastor Phil's Place

NCEW makes me a Life Member

2011-10-14T09:28:00.000-07:00

The National Conference of Editorial Writers, a group I have been part of since 1984 and that I served as president in 2002, this year honored me with a Life Membership. It practical terms, it means I don't have to pay fees for future conventions. But what is more important is the recognition from my friends and colleagues in the opinion-writing world of journalism.

This text is posted on the NCEW web site, but it is in the members-only section, so I am posting it here. Below the text is my response. Thanks to all who made this possible.

From the NCEW Convention, Sept. 17, 2011, in Indianapolis, IN.

This year’s honoree as an NCEW Life Member is gentle man, but also a man with firm, well-grounded convictions he never shies from defending. During his fourteen years as an opinion writer, he wrote with style and argued with substance. His soft spoken approach belies the intensity of his convictions.
He well understands that a key role for opinion writers is to help those he serves to understand and deal with the complexities life presents. His principled approach to his chosen profession made him a valuable guide and his graceful style fortified with persuasive substance made him an effective and respected writer and editor.
His understanding of and loyalty to his home state and its capital was at the heart of his long and productive career.
But his leadership was not confined by the Wisconsin state borders. He brought his skills to the NCEW as a committee member, board member, Foundation trustee and, ultimately, as president. During his service on the NCEW board and during the years he held the ladder offices leading to his presidency, he was always the voice of reason, steadiness and creativity. He cares deeply about our profession and about how NCEW can make its members better at their craft.
His leadership leading up to and during NCEW’s management changes set him apart. He was sensitive to the needs of all involved and yet deeply committed to the need for NCEW to move to a new level of operation. His skill and grace were nowhere more apparent than during that difficult transition.
When he decided to shift his devotion to "speak truth to power" in a different venue as a minister of his faith, a newspaper colleague wrote that he was "one of those men who actually practice what they preach." His NCEW colleagues know the truth of that.
Therefore to Phil Haslanger, with appreciation and deep and great affection, NCEW renders its most significant honor, Life Membership, for all that he has done and all that he will continue to do.

I could not be at the convention to receive the award, so Neil Heinen of WISC-TV in Madison arranged for me to do a video response. Here's what I said:
Why, oh why, you might ask, when I should be with you in Indianapolis to be totally surprised at this wonderful award am I instead sitting in Neil Heinen’s TV studio talking to you in disembodied form?
While you are letting that dinner settle in and awaiting what I know will be a delightful presentation by Joel Pett, I am on an airplane somewhere between North Carolina and Wisconsin. I’m now on the board for the Religion News Service, run by the Religion Newswriters Association, and that meeting is still going on. I also need to be back for that church thing I do on Sunday mornings where we have some special things happening tomorrow.
I’m really sorry not to be with you tonight, especially when I get this incredible honor from my friends and colleagues at NCEW. I know how significant this award is – not because I get a price break on future conventions (that’s nice, of course) but because it represents a recognition by some of the most important people in my professional life of my connection to this amazing organization.
Since I joined NCEW in 1984, it has been the primary journalism organization that has nourished me professionally. It was an NCEW seminar in San Antonio in 1995 that introduced me to the possibilities of using the Internet as a new way of extending the opinion role of journalism. The insights I gained there led me to be part of the team that moved my own paper in Madison, The Capital Times, into what we then called cyberspace. That experience continues to enrich my work in connecting people, whether through journalism or the church world I now inhabit.
It was through NCEW that I had the chance to be part of a group having lunch with Ronald Reagan at the White House, with Kofi Annan at the United Nations, to go deep inside Cheyenne Mountain where the nation’s air defense system was headquartered and to share a seat on the King Kong ride at Universal Studios with a couple of Pulitzer Prize winners. There is no end to NCEW convention stories, of course, but you can hear some of those from the folks you are sitting with tonight.
Mostly, I just want to say thanks for this honor, thanks for all NCEW has done for me professionally and personally over the years, for the many friendships that have grown out of this organization. I’m glad that over the years, I could play a role in helping lead it through some times of transition. My best wishes to all of you as you navigate the choppy waters of journalism in 2011 and help create a future where informed opinion can emerge from the cacophony of public life to strengthen our democracy.

Atheism out of the shadows

2011-09-17T20:42:00.000-07:00

“The new atheism has been more than matched by the new sectarianism,” author and civil libertarian Wendy Kaminer told the nation’s religion journalists today.

Kaminer was part of a provocative panel called “Atheism Revisited” at the annual conference of the Religion Newswriters Association, help this year in Durham, N.C.

Todd Stiefel, head of the Stiefel Freethought Foundation based in Raleigh, N.C., has as his goal to more than match the sectarian forces in America.

While acknowledging the deep prejudice in the U.S. that faces anyone who proclaims they do not believe in God or doubt the existence of a divine being, Stiefel is part of a new civil rights movement hoping to build on the increase in Americans who stand outside any of the traditional religious currents.

“We need the same passion as other movements for equality,” he said.

For New Testament scholar and best selling author Bart Ehrman, who teaches at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, the story is more personal than societal. Still, he told how his public movement from evangelical Christianity to agnosticism has narrowed his job options, gotten him disinvited from speaking engagements and hurt the sales of textbooks he has written.

The fact that a panel on atheism was at center stage for a group whose stock in trade is writing about religion for mainstream media was notable in itself. There is a recognition that there are good stories to be told among those who reject belief as well as those who embrace it and recognition that one of the trends in American society is an increase in those trying to increase the acceptance of those who reject religion.

Kaminer, who writes for The Atlantic Monthly among many other publications, said she traces the growth in the free-thought movement to what she called “the faith-based attacks on Sept. 11.” She said that people saw “the potential viciousness in religion” and rejected religion (although she acknowledged that for religious people, the reaction was to blame people for adhering to the “wrong” religion.

She talked about the therapeutic approach that seems to have dominated a lot of the discussions of atheism in recent years. Atheist talk about “coming out,” about forming “support groups,” and self discovery and self expression. “It’s been a highly successful movement from a therapeutic standpoint,” she said. “From a political and legal perspective, it’s been less successful and the therapeutic approach may even be counterproductive.”

She said that the free-thought movement has increased the visibility of atheists, but not their clout. “It is inconceivable for anyone to run for high office as an atheist,” she noted.

But Stiefel would like to change that, saying his mission is “seeking full equality for all free-thinkers.”

He told stories of groups rejecting charitable donations from atheist groups, of proselytizing by some military chaplains, of hiring discrimination against non-believers. He told of families torn apart when a son or daughter “comes out” as an atheist or agnostic. And he told how the fastest growth among agnostics and atheists is among those 18-25.

Stiefel also talked of plans to boost the public visibility of the movement – community service projects, celebrity endorsements and a Reason Rally next March 24 on the National Mall in Washington D.C.

Ehrman talked about his own journey from a “hard-core, borderline-fundamentalist Christian” to one whose doubts about God increased as he explored the issue of suffering and where God fit in the midst of life’s tragedies.

Making a moral pitch on the economy

2011-09-16T19:46:00.001-07:00

It does not take a lot of insight for a political scientist to say that the economy will be the most salient issue in the 2012 presidential election. But exactly how that plays out – and how religious factors affect the equation – provided good material for John Green and Laura Olson.

One important variable may be how the candidates cast the debate over the economy in moral terms.

Green is one of the nation’s pre-eminent students of the connections between religion and politics. A professor at the University of Akron, he is also a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Olson is a professor at Clemson University in South Carolina. They spoke at the annual conference of the Religion Newswriters Association on Friday in Durham, N.C.

Olson argued that the real task for both President Obama and whoever his Republican challenger is will be to mobilize the religious middle in this country – a group that constitutes about a third of the electorate.

Will the budget debate be framed around the morality of not leaving the next generation to pay the bills of this generation? Or will it be framed around protecting the least of those in society?

There are moral values underlying both of those appeals, but they have their touchstones in different religious groups.

Catholics, for instance, while identified most often with issues around abortion, may well resonate with talk about social justice, a concept deeply imbedded in the teachings they grew up with, a concept that is often framed as part of a consistent ethic of life.

Many Protestant denominations, too, have emphasized Jesus’ message of caring for others as central to their faith. And yet there are also strains of not passing on one’s burdens to others, of not forcing charity but seeing it as a voluntary good that underscores some of the conservative approaches to the economy.

Olson was one the one who articulated the moral dimensions of the budget debate most thoroughly in this discussion. Olson cautioned that part of the needle that candidates have to thread on these issues is that Americans are quite ambivalent on expressions of faith by public leaders. They want leaders to be “moral” but not too “sectarian.”

So a lot of the language around issues like the economy will be framed broadly, but with an appeal to moral values that candidates hope will make sense to the voters they are targeting.

Muslims in America: From fear to the future

2011-09-15T18:36:00.000-07:00

The early stories are about fear.

Americans fear about Islam after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Muslims fear about what life holds for them in this nation.

The current stories are about crossing bridges, tentatively at times, but with some sense that there may be something better on the other side. Students of different faiths share service projects. Adults begin to share their beliefs.

The stories of the future grow out of the histories of other beleaguered religious groups in this country – Catholics, Jews, Mormans.

The stories were told in many ways by many voices during a day-long seminar today at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. They were told by professors, by religious leaders, by students, by journalists.

The gathering was for members of the Religion Newswriters Association as it began its 67th annual conference. The session was hosted by Duke’s Islamic Studies Center.

First, the fear.

Eboo Patel, the founder and leader of the Interfaith Youth Corps, a dynamic voice for crossing those bridges that separate faith traditions, recalled the signs he saw at protests: “All I know about Islam I learned on Sept. 11.” They were signs reflecting the fear of Americans who knew little about Islam and who let the attackers who not only hijacked airplanes but who also hijacked Islam define this long, rich and varied religious tradition.

The fear is reflected more recently in signs opposing the use of Shariah law in America, the efforts in 16 states to ban the use of Shariah law – efforts based in a fear stoked up by those who would demonize Muslims with no basis in reality.

The fear was reflected in the experience of Nona Sherif as she arrived for classes two years ago at Duke and met a woman on her way to the bookstore who grabbed the cross around her neck and held it out towards Sherif with a look of terror on her face.

The fear was reflected in the phone call Patel received from his mother after efforts to build a Muslim community center in New York City burst in to a spasm of anti-Muslim feeling across the nation. She told Patel his kids’ names – Zane and Kalil – sounded to Islamic and he ought to Americanize them before it was too late.

Charles Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, offered some facts as an antidote for Americans’ fears.

He recently published a book called The Missing Martyrs: Why Are There So Few Muslim Terrorists. He talked about the data he had gathered. Since Sept. 11, 2001, there have been 175 arrests in this country for Muslims suspected or convicted of acts of terror. That’s not quite 18 a year … and some of those were arrested as they were headed to foreign lands like Somalia to join terrorist groups there.

Kurzman’s point is not that there are not threats from terrorists, but they are not anywhere near as overwhelming as the fear industry would have us believe. And, important in the context of this day’s discussion, they represent an infinitesimal fraction of the Muslims in this country.

Imam Abdullah Antepli, the Muslim chaplain at Duke, does not deny that there is what he called “the cancer of Islamic terrorism” in this world. But he called for a better understanding of the roots of that terrorism not in the theology of Islam but in the political and economic actions of major world powers.

“Radicals, extremists, are not products of Islamic theology or Islamic societies,” he said. “They are products of deeply broken societies, products of American foreign policy, products of greedy economic policies.”

When someone challenged him on citing American foreign policy as a factor, he asked that as an American Muslim, he be given the same opportunity to call for a better foreign policy that other Americans have.

He also told one of the most compelling stories of the day. Last month, he was in Afghanistan, where for the first time in his life, he came face to face with Muslims who believed it is their duty to kill Christians and Jews.

“I went ballistic,” he told me later. He said he pulled a Koran out of his pocket and argued verse by verse with them. He was so shaken by the experience, he now plans to go back to Afghanistan every summer to build programs to counter that kind of ideology.

“There is a form of Islamic theology that prepares the ground for violence,” he acknowledged. “That theology is reinforced through certain foreign policies and economic policies. People who are not religious at all suddenly find resonance in that theology. It will take global efforts to eradicate this poison,” he said in explaining his hopes for this project in Afghanistan.

But in the midst of the fear, there are efforts in this country to find the bridges that will ease the fear.

Meredith Rahman, a sophomore at Duke studying French and biology, noted that the head of the Muslim Student Association on campus is not a Muslim. This is a bridge.

The other students all talked about the pressure they feel as Muslims in a largely non-Muslim environment to explain their faith, to act in proper ways, and yet they also described that as an opportunity to help shape a more pluralistic society.

Patel calls this an example of how Muslims in America are moving from “the architecture of the bubble to the architecture of the bridge.”

He noted that Muslim immigrants who came to this country initially focused on building their own institutions, on staying relatively separate from the dominant culture, much like Catholics and Jews did as their communities took root in America. That was the bubble.

The reaction to Sept. 11 changed that. Muslims came to realize that they had to engage the wider community, they had to become part of the American experience. Just as Catholics and Jews and Mormans faced deep-rooted prejudice at one time and now are part of the American mainstream, he sees that happening to Muslims as well.

“We are going to be part of the story of American opportunity and expansion,” Patel said.

(Patel and other speakers also cautioned that there are two very different Muslim experiences in the U.S. – the immigrant Muslim community that is getting most of the public attention, and the large African-American Muslim community, that has lived a very different experience in this country. He acknowledged the absence of the African-American Muslim view on this day.)

A few days with the nation's religion writers

2011-09-15T04:19:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Durham, N.C.

I'm here with journalists from around the country who write about religion for the nation's newspapers, magazines, web sites, etc. The group is called the Religion Newswriters Association and it's one of the fine professional associations for journalists.

Today, we'll explore "Muslims in America: The Next 10 Years" in a pre-conference program at Duke University. One of the speakers willl be Eboo Patel, whose book, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American the Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation, is on deck for our next Friday morning book group at Memorial UCC.

Other things coming up - tonight, the author of a new book on teen sexuality; Friday, sessions on the new evangelical mega-churches that serve many sites simultaneously and are breaking new ground in the use of social media tools; a panel on religion in the 2012 elections; a briefing called "Youth in Crisis: What Everyone Should Know About Growing Up Gay;" how journalists can use social networking effectively.

Then on Saturday, breakfast with the family that inspired HBO's "Big Love" series; reports on studies of changes in American congregations; on the depth and complexity of America's religious landscape and a new study on the demographics of American Muslims. There will also be a provocative panel called "Atheism Revisited."

It promises to be a very rich few days. Stay tuned.

Voices for social justice in a divided state

2011-08-19T06:55:00.000-07:00

On Aug. 18, 2011, I was part of a group of religious leaders who unveiled a statement drawing on our faith traditions to address the breach in the social covenant in Wisconsin during the past eight months. Here are my comments at the news conference. Afterwards, a group of us took the statement to Gov. Scott Walker's office as well as to the legislative leaders of both parties in the Assembly and the Senate.

As a pastor at a local congregation, I get several calls a week from folks who need financial help to keep from being evicted or need help paying overdue utility bills or people feeling domestic violence who need a security deposit for a new place to live. As pastors, we experience the issues facing people on the margins of society in a very personal way.

We're gathered here at Grace Episcopal Church, which hosts one of the primary shelters for homeless men in the Madison area. The congregation I serve helps with meals at the Community Meal Program and gathers items for food pantries. All of us here look for ways to shelter the homeless, feed the hungry, care for the sick. And these are important actions.

But we also know that there are conditions in our society that make things harder for people on the margins. So we also look at issues of justice. In the United Church of Christ, when someone is baptized, they promise to follow in the way of Jesus, "to resist oppression and evil, to show love and justice." Seeking justice is a core part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

That's why we make our voices heard on behalf of the poor, the marginalized, the oppress in public debates. Our statement on the social covenant looks back at how that has frayed in the first half of this year. But we are also looking forward, signaling that our voices will continue to be raised on behalf of those being left out. Our statement focuses on the state level, but we know this has an impact on the county and city as well. Scott McDonell from the Dane County Board is here. He and his colleagues need to keep the needs of the most vulnerable in mind as they approach this year's budget.

We know that in a democracy, elections are the heart of the democratic process. We know in Wisconsin over the last year through a series of elections that the people of this state are closely divided on the direction this take is taking. We also know that a democracy is more than voting. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution spells out the many forms of democracy - freedom of religion, which means our voices have a place in the public square, recognizing that other faiths, even other understandings of Christianity, also have a place in this debate. The First Amendment also talks about freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. We've seen a lot of that around this Square in the last eight months. And it talks about the right to petition our government.

Now we are going to walk over to the Capitol and petition our government as we deliver copies of our statement on the social covenant to the governor and the leaders of the Legislature. We hope you will join us in being voices for those who are most harshly affected by the actions of the last several months.

UCC folks "imagine what's possible"

2011-07-07T09:19:00.000-07:00

There was sand everywhere at the national gathering of the United Church of Christ this past week.

There was a small sandy beach at the foot of the stage that was the platform for worship. There was sand in the bright red cabanas at the far ends of the assembly hall. There was the expanse of a sandy desert projected on the screen across the back of the stage. And, of course, there was sand on the real beaches of the Gulf shore along the coastline near Tampa.

This gathering is called a General Synod - the 28th such gathering since the UCC was formed in 1957. It is the decision-making body for our denomination, but it is also a place to connect with the many and varied segments of the UCC, to delve into vital social issues and to get new energy in those times when we feel we are just wandering on the hot sand.

"Imagine What's Possible" was the theme of this gathering. As the event moved toward it's conclusion, the images of sand gave way to images of water - an ocean on the screen as well as fresh branches dipped in water that was sprinkled over the crowd at the closing worship as we sang about "crashing waters at creation" and "living water, never ending" that can "drench our dryness, make us whole."

This was a place where younger clergy could stage an unannounced "flash mob" communion service in the lobby of the convention center.

This was a place where Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts could challenge the crowd to live in such a way that when the news media find them, “they find you living in authentic faith, a faith in service to humankind. Make sure they find you up to your knees in the muck of the nation’s troubles, working and praying for changes that other people deem impossible.”

This was a place where delegates could live out those words when the left the hall to join tomato farm workers in a protest outside a nearby Publix grocery store seeking a one-cent increase in what they pay for a pound of tomatoes so that the workers could receive their first increase in wages in 30 years.

This was a place where one of our new leaders, J. Bennett Guess who was elected to head Local Church Ministries, said that the measure of our success is neither membership nor money given, but rather mission. “McDonald’s doesn’t tell you how many stories they have,” Guess said, “they don’t tell you how many employees they have. They say what matters in a service industry: billions and billions served. The church needs to learn to do the same.”

One way the UCC is going to do that is with a major initiative this fall called Mission 1 – using the first 11 days of November to focus on feeding the hungry and confronting food-related injustice. We’ll be exploring that more at Memorial UCC in the months ahead.

During the Synod, we adopted a number of resolutions highlighting some of the difficult issues in our world.

The battle for rare minerals in Congo that are used in our cell phones and computers has brought horrible oppression on the people of that nation. The UCC said it would advocate on behalf of the people of Congo.

The threats to gay and lesbian people in many nations put their lives at risk and the UCC promised to fight against that.

The suspicion of Muslims in this country festers and the UCC promised to work against such hostility.

There were resolutions on mindful eating, adoptions for gay and lesbian couples, the nuclear test ban treaty, political prisoners in Puerto Rico.

We also took a step toward smoother relationships among Christian denominations by adopting a common statement on baptism shared by Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, the Reformed Church in America and the Christian Reformed Church. This should remove an obstacle that sometimes gets in the way when people change denominations.

And within the UCC, we streamlined our governing structure so there is a smaller but still widely representative governing board and fewer barriers between the various agencies that work within the UCC.

The leaders of the UCC sketched out the three "core values" they see within our denomination - continuing testament, extravagant welcome for all, and changing lives.

We had powerful worship services throughout the week, but it was the ending of the final worship service that really offered an image of hope for our future. As Rev. Geoffrey Black, the general minister and president of the UCC, took the stage, he invited the teens and young adults to join him on and around the stage. They came by the hundreds. Then the teens offered a blessing to Black and the four other top leaders of the UCC (three of them newly elected) and the officers, in turn, offered a blessing to the young people.

Then music and dancing broke out, the young people took the branches and sprinkled the crowd with water as a reminder of baptism and finally, standing alone once again on the stage, Geoffrey Black sent us all out to do God’s work in our world, to carry the light to all the earth.

Woodstock for Preachers - final notes

2011-05-19T18:45:00.001-07:00

After a week of hearing some amazing preachers and musicians, participating in a wide variety of worship, sharing stories with colleagues and gathering materials to bring back home, a few final notes:

Barbara Lundblad, preaching professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, offered a rich menu of options for thinking about Ordinary Time – that time between Pentecost and Advent. It does not really need to be so ordinary, she said, offering great opportunities to explore the stories and themes that really define the realities of every day life for Christians in some ways even more than the big feasts do.

Brian McClaren took us on a journey of spiritual development, from simplistic to complex, from perplexed to harmonious. And then he led us to scripture texts and spiritual practices that allow us to sink into each of those stages.

Diana Butler Bass offered a provocative look at “Christianity After Religion” (which happens to be the title of her next book that will be out next February). The key idea from her two-hour presentation – belief, behavior and belonging are the ways people enact religion and those are all in flux. We are creating the new future.

And since the end of the world is coming on Saturday, musician Nate Houge suggested we had all made a wise decision to spend our continuing ed money early in the year this year.

Actually, I think it was a good idea even if the sun rises again on Sunday.

Falling, dying and then what?

2011-05-19T18:22:00.001-07:00

Death was in the air as Barbara Brown Taylor talked at the opening session of the Festival of Homiletics last Monday.

The death of a grain of wheat in the ground.

The death of a man on a cross.

The death we fear in our own lives.

The death of churches as we once knew them.

“It’s hard to preach the Gospel to people who are scared to death of dying,” Taylor said. She’s a noted author, teacher, preacher.

She talked of how people come to pastors looking for the Jesus who can give them a pass on “the full catastrophe.” Then they meet the Jesus who said “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

That’s not a message calculated to increase church membership, Brown noted.

And then pastors themselves start focusing on a message that will bring to people to their church. But then, Brown added, “it’s hard to preach self-preservation is the presence of the cross.”

This led to her key observation: “No one is much interested in learning to fall. We all want to rise.”

So then maybe we learn how to find salvation in the falling.

She talked of being at the bedside of someone dying. Death is very literal in this case. And yet as the family gathers around, stories are shared, good-byes are said, hands are held in prayer, touches are exchanged, there is life emerging from the death.

She talked of a family devastated by the falling economy. No more meals out, cable television gone, no trips to the movie theater. Instead, there are books read together, games played on the living room floor, meals around the kitchen table. Is it what they were used to, what they had hoped for? No. Was there high anxiety? Yes. And was new life emerging out of the falling? Yes.

“There are worse things than falling on the ground that can happen to a grain of wheat,” she suggested. The grain of wheat dies and gives birth. Jesus knew about bread. Jesus knew about life.

Death was in the air. And so was life.

Trust this, Brown suggested. When you are falling, “God will know what to do with you next.”

Or as Anthony Bailey said as he thanked Brown for her words, “We are all waiting to fall into the waiting arms of God.”

Speak boldly, listen deeply

2011-05-18T19:58:00.001-07:00

For Walter Brueggemann, the message was one of speaking boldly the things preachers often feel they cannot say.

For Krista Tippett, the message was one of listening more carefully, more deeply, to those who may disagree with us.

Both are vital messages to people engaged in the very public role of preaching in the nations’ congregations. They came in very different voices at the Festival of Homiletics this week in Minneapolis.

Brueggemann looks like what I imagine a Hebrew prophet would look like – tall, white hair (what hair there is), grumbly voice, piercing eyes. But he also has a sense of humor not often associated with those prophets. And he has a resume as a scripture scholar and professor that includes more than 50 books.

And as befits someone who looks and sounds like a prophet, today he used the story of Jeremiah, that dour profit of Israel, as his model for what happens to preachers when they are unable to speak hard truths. It tears at their guts, he said.

Or perhaps George Carlin and his seven words that could not be said on broadcast television should be the model, he suggested.

“George Carlin is not the last one who has a list of the unsayable,” Brueggemann said. “There is, for instance … you.”

It’s hard for today’s preachers to say that the war is stupid, that capitalism has failed in its excessive greed, that oil spill is a measure of Western technological hubris, that we have forfeited our democracy to a secret government protecting the wealthy. They can’t say that parents racing to get their kids to soccer practice and dance lessons will never win the rat race or that we can’t welcome the immigrant.

“It takes so much energy to remember what not to say,” noted Brueggemann. “What we cannot say (echoing Carlin) is that the body is fragile and smelly and cannot be otherwise. What we cannot say is that our body politic has the smell of death about it.”

OK, that’s harsh. And Brueggemann was quick to note that as a tenured professor, he has a lot more latitude to be harsh than the average pastor in the pulpit – what he called “such a dangerous place as you are every week.”

Then again, Brueggemann suggested, “you will get your self back in telling the truth before the authorities.”

Tippett is a soft-spoken radio host whose public radio program, “On Being” (formerly “Speaking of Faith”), explored people’s beliefs in a thoughtful, respectful way. And she is fascinated by how that kind of listening can lead not to agreement but at least to a deeper respect across ideological and theological lines.

“Listening is part of truth telling,” she said, reflecting on what Brueggemann had said. But it sure has a different feel to it.

She quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and martyr during the rise and fall of Nazism who said, “Christians are talking when they should be listening.” She noted that in the American political landscape in recent years, Christians have not been famous listeners.” (And those doing the speaking don’t have quite the same views as Brueggemann.)

So in an era when the pace of change has forced fundamental questions about life and relationships and authority and faith to the forefront, Christians have centuries of resources to draw on – but that requires asking questions with deep meaning and listening with sincere interest to the variety of answers.

“There is something redemptive and life giving that comes from asking better questions,” Tippett said, with the experience of one who has asked questions for years. The task for preachers, she said, is to “help people live the questions until they can be answered in their fullness.”

She talked about her conversation with Frances Kissling, the woman who for many years led Catholics for Choice. Now in retirement, Kissling is working on creating new relationships with her political opposites.

Two key questions Kissling asks:
What can I see that is good in the position of the other?
What troubles me in my own position?

This is not to reach agreement, Tippett noted. It is to understand better what the other – and you – believe. And a task for the church is to create the safe spaces where those kinds of conversations can take place. It goes back to that old Christian practice of hospitality.

Speak boldly, said Brueggemann, even about things you think you are forbidden from saying. Listen deeply, said Tippett, even to those you disagree with sharply. For both, a care with words and an honesty of spirit, a vulnerability of self and a tending to the soul are critical.

Gospel shouts and the blues

2011-05-17T19:51:00.001-07:00

Notes from the Festival of Homiletics this week in Minneapolis.

The blues notes from pianist Kwasi Kena were still echoing in the room when Rev. Otis Moss III strode to the pulpit. He’s the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and one of the most dynamic young African-American voices of our era.

The scripture text he read was a bit obscure – a passage from the Jewish prophet Ezra about the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. A new generation of Levites – special temple workers – were appointed to oversee the construction. When the foundation was done, priests in their vestments and the Levites with cymbals sang songs of praise and gave thanks to God. But, wrote Ezra, the older generation “who had seen the first house on its foundations, wept with a loud voice when they saw this house, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping, for the people shouted so loudly that the sound was heard far away.”

Or as Otis Moss said, “they could not distinguish between the Gospel shout and the blues moment.”

He talked about the role of the blues in Africa-American culture, whether in music or food or comedy, where ‘joy is always married to sorrow.” He talked about the “blue note” – waking from addiction lying in your own vomit, the son returning from two tours in Iraq only to be murdered on the streets of Chicago.

“If you want to learn to worship, you must learn how to weep,” Moss said. “If you want to get to the joy of Easter Sunday, you’d better deal with the pain of Good Friday.”

Moss knows how to play with words, to create rhymes and construct words to keep his audience engaged and laughing. But he kept coming back to the notion that God is a God who knows the blues. If we are true to our history as human beings, we too have to include the blues in our Gospel songs.

World, church, sanity, insanity

2011-05-17T11:10:00.001-07:00

Notes from the Festival of Homiletics this week in Minneapolis.

At first, it sounded like they had very divergent views on the “world” versus the “sacred,” these two preaching superstars.

Tom Long, a Presbyterian who teaches at Candler Seminary in Atlanta, talked about the tensions between sanity and insanity, how those who think they are sane may in fact be part of the demonic insanity of the world.

Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopalian who teaches at Piedmont College in Georgia, warned against pitting the “world” against the “church.” As she told the 1,700 or so preachers at others gathered here for the Festival of Homiletics, “watch your language, especially when you are talking about the world.”

Long was reflected on the story in Mark’s Gospel of Jesus driving demons from an insane man into a vast heard of sheep that plunged to their death. He talked about the “apocalyptic combat between the holy and the demonic” that runs through Mark’s telling of the story of Jesus, adding that often “it’s hard to tell the difference between the holy and the demonic.”

The religious bureaucrats of Jesus’ day, after all, “checked their DSM4s and said, yes, he’s insane all right. Not even CPE could help him.” (Acronym decoder: Diagnostic Statistical Manual and Clinical Pastoral Education)

Long talked about the 19th century composer and pianist Franz Liszt, who was a rock star in his era, then confounded people when he threw himself into a lifestyle modeled on Jesus. As he was dying, writing a piece of music that Long described as moving from frenzy to shalom, Liszt’s son-in-law, Richard Wagner, said to Liszt’s daughter, “I think you father is insane.”

Who was more insane, asked Long? The musician wrestling with the deepest questions of life or the one whose martial music and anti-Semitic writings would become favorites of Adolph Hitler?

While Long was not exactly casting the world against the sacred, BBT worried that too many preachers do just that – including an earlier version of herself. She described the transformation she went through that led to her book, An Altar in the World,” where she went beyond the church-based use of tangible items – water, bread – to the patterns of church life that led her to see the sacred in filling a cat dish with water or eating a cucumber sandwich at her desk.

Instead of pitting the world against the church, the flesh against the spirit, she wondered what happened between the creation stories of Genesis and the line in the Epistle of James that says, “whoever wishes to become a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.”

What happened, she said, was Caesar. The Roman emperor defined himself as God and Jesus created a world in opposition to Caesar’s world. This was not the same as calling flesh bad. Jesus, after all was the word made flesh, the incarnate God.

BBT talked of finding the sacred in the line at the post office as a little girl kissed her wounded hand, in the chemotherapy room where she sat with her father, in the walks and touches and thirsts that fill her life.

Watch your language, she told the crowd. God is in the world.

Day three of labor protests

2011-02-16T14:15:00.000-08:00

Labor Protest Feb. 16, 2011

Standing in the stream of justice

2011-02-15T13:32:00.000-08:00

By Phil Haslanger

Feb. 15, 2011

In the midst of the thousands of people gathered on the Capitol Square on Tuesday was a small group holding up signs saying that people of faith support working people. They were invoking a deep stream in the major faith traditions that supports the efforts of working people to band together to defend their interests.

These streams draw on the biblical call for treating workers justly. They draw on the biblical notion of covenants that bind people to one another. They draw on the biblical teachings of people looking out for one another. These streams are deep within my own Christian tradition and they are what brought me to stand with other religious leaders in the midst of the crowd.

The gathering at the Square – inside and outside the State Capitol building – was to protest Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s fast-tracked proposal to effectively eliminate most collective bargaining for most state and local public employees.

There are immediate economic consequences for some 175,000 state and local workers if the Legislature adopts this plan. In one measure, those are the give and take of tough economic times. The more serious and long-term consequence, though, is abolishing the right of public workers to negotiate with their employers. And that’s at the heart of what brought religious leaders to these days of intense demonstrations.

No, Jesus did not say anything about the right to unionize. And yes, followers of Jesus and people in other faith traditions may well have differing views on the proper balance to be struck between employer and worker. No economic structure is perfect.

Within faith traditions, though, there is a consistent message of defending the rights of workers against those who would exploit them. In contemporary America, there is a history of Christian and Jewish leaders joining union organizers to make sure that individuals are protected from the economic and social forces that can overpower workers.

Yes, it is a little trickier with public employees, because they do not work for a profit-making entity. It is taxpayers that ultimately pay their wages and benefits. Ordinary taxpayers have taken quite a hit of late as the tax system has tilted more and more to reward the wealthiest individuals and corporate entities in our country. So there is less sympathy toward public employee unions than might otherwise be the case since other hard-pressed workers worry about their tax bills.

Yet as my colleague Rev. Curt Anderson, pastor at First Congregational United Church of Christ, told the crowd on Tuesday, a consistent theme in the Bible is that “it is the responsibility of those in power to make sure that all workers are treated fairly.” That would include the governor and lawmakers who hold power in Wisconsin.

It is worth remembering that Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the night before he was assassinated, spoke to public employees - sanitation workers - in Memphis, Tenn. who were seeking a contract with the city. He invoked the great story of the Jewish people breaking the bonds of slavery in Egypt by their unity in the face of injustice.

“The issue is injustice,” King told the crowd gathered in a church. “The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants.”

But it is not just modern faith voices who speak about this. John Calvin, who lived in the 1500s in Switzerland, well before the formation of modern unions, described work as a calling from God to help build a better community but he also said that work should be wrapped in justice - safe working conditions, a living wage, and fair relations between employer and employee.

Those are some of things at risk in what Gov. Walker has proposed for public employees. My own denomination, the United Church of Christ, says that “Christians are called to accompany people wherever they are and especially through the rough places of their lives. So we must be in offices, factories, stores, farms, schools, health care facilities, and all the places where people work.”

So there I was with other religious leaders, standing with those on Square facing a particularly rough place in their work lives. I was there as a follower of Jesus who worked as a carpenter and who talked about treating others as we would like to be treated.

Or as the Jewish prophet Amos once said, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Listening for the voices

2009-11-13T06:10:00.000-08:00

We shared lunch with Gosayna Karam in the ancient village of Nazareth, remembered as the town where Jesus grew up, and heard her talk about her worries for her children’s education in a country where there is huge disparity in funding between Jewish and Arab students.

We sat in the living room of Hani Abu Haikal, a Muslim living right next door to hostile Jewish settlers in Hebron, a city where both Muslims and Jews revere a site where they believe their common ancestor Abraham is buried. We heard how Hani is trying to create non-violent responses to the oppression of occupation.

We walked with Shadi through the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, where 13,000 Palestinians live – the original refugees of the creation of Israel in 1948 and generations of their descendants, people without a country. We watched sewer water draining onto the narrow road we trod through the densely-populated camp.

We listened as Naila Kharroub, the principal of the Dar al-Kalima school in Bethlehem told about the work she does with her 300 Christian and Muslim students from kindergarten through high school to create a sense of understanding of each other’s faith traditions as well as those of the Jewish people who share their land.

And we drank coffee with Ed Rettig as this rabbi who leads the American Jewish Committee in Israel told us how he and his family now feel so much safer because of the high levels of security Israel has put in place – the same security measures that makes life so difficult for the Palestinians.

These are a few of the voices telling of lives today in Israel and Palestine, the tinderbox of global politics, a land holy to three great faith traditions and a land torn by heartache. I was there for two weeks earlier this month with a group of seven friends from the United Church of Christ and Presbyterian churches. We heard the stories of a wide range of people trying to fashion lives caught in the swirl of so many larger forces.

There are no definitive statements one can make after a short time in such a complex place. But there are vivid images that remain.

At Augusta Victoria Hospital, Mark Brown from Lutheran World Services took us out back to look across a grove of olive trees to the area where his group hopes to build new housing to help keep the dwindling number of Palestinian Christians in Jerusalem.  

Farther out, we could see the separation barrier – the 24-foot high concrete wall that the Israelis have put in place snaking through West Bank land. And beyond that, we could see one of the large Jewish settlements housing 35,000 residents on land that is in the West Bank.

Voices. Images. Glimmers of hope breaking through an overriding sense of pessimism. It’s a tough place these days, Israel and Palestine. It’s a place that needs its many voices to be heard.

A swirl of religious sounds

2009-11-10T16:02:00.000-08:00

It was noon on Friday in the Old City of Jerusalem. As we walked near the beginning of the Via Dolorosa -- the spots marking Jesus' journey from Pilate's headquarters to the cross -- the Muslim call to prayer rang out across the city.

We were in the Muslim quarter of the Old City and soon every street was filled with Muslims headed toward the various mosques in this area, including the al-Aqsa Mosque near the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site in Islam. Muslims believe that Mohammed was transported in a night journey from Mecca to this site.

At the same time, bells were ringing from the churches in the Christian sector marking some of the holiest places in Jesus' life -- the hill where he died, the tomb where he was laid and from which he rose.

Inside some of these churches were Russian Orthodox carrying candles down to a spot commemorating the prison cell where Jesus held while awaiting his appearance before Pilate, the Roman governor of this area. In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, pilgrims knelt quietly to kiss the slab on stone which legend says is the place Jesus' body rested after being removed from the cross.

There were scenes of deep piety like this all across the land that is holy to the three Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Even when the expressions of piety did not reflect the styles of those of us liberal Protestants traveling across the centuries in these places, we were moved by the depth of feelings that we witnessed.

Occasionally, we had chance to experience the depth of spirituality in these places as well. For me, one such moment was in the village of Capernaum in the Galilee region of northern Israel. There is a banyan tree between the excavations in this village that Jesus used as his headquarters and the seashore where he walked with his followers. I sat there in silence, contemplating the links across the centuries.

Another day, we gathered in a church in Abu Ghosh, nine miles out of Jerusalem, marking one of the traditional places of Emmaus (there are three other possibilities) where Jesus met two followers on the road after his resurrection. Inside the Gothic church, we sang "Let Us Break Together" as our voices echoes off the stone walls covered with aging frescoes.

In the Mea Shearim neighborhood -- just across the line that used to divide Jerusalem from East Jerusalem when it was controlled by Jordan before the 1967 war -- we saw ultra-conservative Haredi Jews gathering for Shabbat services on a Friday evening. These are followers of the most theologically conservative branch of Orthodox Judaism, living in one of the oldest neighborhoods of west Jerusalem. It is a 19th century Eastern European enclave in a modern city, a place suspicious and not particularly welcoming of visitors. On this night, as we walked past one of the buildings, we could hear the prayer chants of those inside, we could see the men bowing repeatedly in prayer.

We could see how beliefs affected the commercial life in the places we would visit. Muslim shops would be closed on Friday, Jewish shops would be closed on Saturday, Christian shops would be closed on Sunday.

In the early morning in Bethlehem, we would be wakened shortly before 4 a.m. by church bells calling Christians to the pre-dawn time of prayer known as Matins. A few minutes later, the first call to prayer of the day would start emerging from multiple mosques around the city. Outside August Victoria Hospital on the Mount of Olives, a lone man knelt on his coat outside the entrance to the hospital at noon, fulfilling his obligation as a Muslim to pray five times daily.

On the plateau of Masada, where Jewish rebels in the first century killed themselves rather than surrender to Rome, new Israeli soldiers come to swear a sacred oath. At the Western Wall of the old temple in Jerusalem -- the one destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, Jews from around the world come to place their prayers on slips of paper into the cracks in the wall. And so it goes in this land.

The wars, the on-going tensions dominate the landscape. But every day, people from many sectors of these three great faiths find places where they can connect to the divine being.

Obama and the settlements: two Israeli views

2009-11-08T04:36:00.000-08:00

For Ed Rettig, one of the biggest mistakes Barack Obama has made in foreign policy is demanding that Israel halt all building of settlements in the occupied West Bank.

For Larry Derfner, Obama's mistake was in caving in to Israeli insistence that it continue to work on existing settlements.

Both Rettig and Derfner are savvy observers of the Israeli scene. Rettig is the acting director of the American Jewish Committee's Israel office. He began his professional life as a lawyer, later became a Reformed Rabbi and now is a central figure among Jewish advocacy organizations. Derfner emigrated from the U.S. to Israel in the mid-1970s and is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post. He describes himself as "a left-wing Zionist."

Rettig argued that Obama's mistake in demanding that all settlements stop was that it united the people on the fringes of Israeli politics who are ideological about the settlements with the mainstream. He pointed out that 85 percent of the 300,000 or so Israeli settlers -- those living in cities built by Israelis on Palestinian land in the West Bank -- live in five settlements that are right on the 1967 border between Israel and the West Bank. The more ideological -- in some cases, very aggressive -- settlers are in the other settlements scattered farther across the West Bank.

Obama's demand, Rettig said, "united Israelis instead of breaking off the margins. It drove them into the lap of the settlers."

After Israeli uproar and lobbying following Obama's demand, the U.S. administration has been easy the pressure, which in turn has led the Palestinian leadership to back away from the peace process.

That is the big mistake Obama made, said Derfner. When Benjamin Netanyahu became Israel's prime minister earlier this year, he undid most of the understandings that the previous Israeli government had reached with the Palestinian leadership. Obama's settlement freeze demand was a way to give the Palestinians something to work with in resuming negotiations. But when Israel refused to go along, the prospect for negotiations ran aground.

Derfner said that the settlement lobby is incredibly powerful within Israeli government -- not just the settlers themselves, but real estate interests, commercial interests, religious splinter groups all have much invested in expanding the settlements.

"Israel of its own volition will not and cannot get out of the West Bank," Derfner argued. "The only thing that will do that is a fear of a greater god than the settlers -- and that is America."

While they disagree on the politics of the settlements, Rettig and Derfner did share a common theme in our conversations with them on our last day in Israel. It is a theme of pessimism -- hardly a high note on which to end the trip.

Rettig cited a mood of exasperation among Israelis. "The Israelis have had it," he said. "They are cynical and doubtful of the capacity of anyone to bring peace." He said the Palestinians are in a weird place, with Hamas unable to govern in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority facing uncertainty in the West Bank with Mahmoud Abbas' announcement that he will not seek another term as their leader. And he thinks the Obama administration is inexperienced and naive in foreign policy.

Derfner's criticism of Obama is for not putting enough pressure on Israel, he thinks his adopted country has moved very far to the right politically and that is has let the chance for peace slip away by not dealing seriously with Palestinian leaders like Abbas who have brought some sense of order to the West Bank and who have an openness to dealing with Israel.

One of the most constant realities of this part of the world is that the prospects for war and peace are continually shifting. At the moment, few of those we talked to during our two weeks here were feeling much optimism. But all of them in their own way are trying to create a path to a better life for all those who inhabit this contested country.

A friend's voice of anguish

2009-11-08T04:30:00.001-08:00

My friend Amal Othman lives in Madison and is a U.S. citizen, but she was born in Jordan and her parents are Palestinian refugees whose home was near East Jerusalem. At the same time our group was in Israel and Palestine, she was with a group called Interfaith Peace-Builders visiting many of the same places we were. One of the places she went was to her parents' home town. This is her compelling account of that visit.

We walked the streets of the old city in East Jerusalem. The Jewish presence is clear: soldiers with guns, settlers with the Torah, the Star of David on doors, and the Israeli flag on roofs and balconies. Surveillance cameras in every corner ensure the Israeli control and dominance. “Help Us Build Jewish Life in the Old City” says one sign printed on a metal sheet in Hebrew and English mounted in a busy alley for everyone passing by to see.

A Palestinian woman selling vegetables on the street shared her grief with me. “We live a miserable life. We’re threatened everyday and no one cares.” My heart ached for I have felt her broken spirit and had nothing to say to comfort her. Waves of tourists passed her. Some acknowledged her presence and others ignored it, celebrating Israel and the distorted history. Since when an illegal occupation has become a tourist attraction!

Then we went to Jabel Al Mukaber , a small town near Jerusalem where my mother was born. We drove by the 27 foot high wall that separates, in some areas, Palestinian towns from Palestinian towns slicing through the lives of families and friends, farmers and their land, students and their schools. I’ve read about it. I’ve seen pictures of it. And now I have no words to describe it after seeing it with my own eyes. It’s a beast; a devastating reality that prevents any kind of dialogue between the two peoples to achieve a just peace.

The wall on the Israeli side is hidden by trees and cleverly planned landscapes just like some destroyed Palestinian villages are hidden under forests. And the wall on the Palestinian side is just across the street, blocking the air they breathe.

There is nothing holy about the Holy land. It’s divided, broken, and strangled with injustice.

Stories of women crossing boundaries

2009-11-05T22:22:00.000-08:00

When Nina Mayorek's sister died a few months ago, the gathering of people for her funeral created a moment when some sharp boundaries were crossed.

Mayorek is a Jewish Israeli virologist, a professor -- and an activist. She is part of Machsom Watch, a group of Israeli women who oppose the occupation of Palestine and who monitor activities at the checkpoints between Israel and the West Bank.

She joined our group for dinner along with her colleague from Machsom Watch, Ivonne Mausbach Kleinfeld, and Dalia Landau, whose story of coming to Israel as a very young child with her family after World War II and her unusual and often strained friendship over 40 years with a Palestinian activist was told in the book The Lemon Tree.

As Nina's colleagues gathered to share in the mourning of the death of her sister, one was a woman who is an Israeli settler, an person of deep religious conviction. She does not dress as a religious Jew, Nina noted, and her work as a virologist provided a common bond, even as they differed on the politics of settlements.

Another visitor was a Palestinian virologist whose appearance also gave no immediate clues to her heritage. She dresses in contemporary, stylish clothes.

So both of these women who are just short of turning 40 began talking amid the other mourners. They talked about their work in virology. And then the Jewish settler learned that her new acquaintance was a Palestinian working at a Palestinian university. At first, she was surprised to learn that there was a Palestinian university. Then she was surprised to learn that they had laboratories. With microscopes. With two microscopes more powerful than the ones she used in her Israeli lab.

For her friend, Nina said. it was "a real discovery. Those people are not only terrorists. They have microscopes, they have labs.

But the surprises went both ways. The Palestinian woman was also stunned, said Nina, saying, "It cannot be! How can she be such a nice person when she is a religious settler?" What Nina witnessed she called "a process of discovery - you are a human being."

But there are so few opportunities for such encounters. Much of Dalia's work has been to bring Palestinian and Israeli children together so they can get to know each other, to shatter the stereotypes that exist.

It is not easy to cross either the physical or psychological boundaries that allow these two peoples who share land and history to get past the deeply held suspicions of each other. "All the time there are fewer opportunities because of the checkpoints and the travel restrictions," said Ivonne .

And even if they could cross the lines to meet the Palestinians, "the fear among Israelis is unbelievable," Nina added.

She told the story of the same Palestinian colleague who came to Nina's sister's funeral. When the colleague's mother died, her Israeli colleagues told her they would like to visit her, to console here, but they were afraid to come into Palestinian areas. Nina quoted her friend's reaction; "My mom died. I cannot deal with your fears about security."

Dalia noted that the fear is very real nevertheless. "Why should they not be afraid to go?" she asked. "They've never been there."

So one of the critical questions for Israel and Palestine is how to overcome the fear on both sides that drives so much of the hostility.

For Nina and Ivonne, it is standing by the Palestinians as they deal with the daily indignities of the checkpoints.

For Dalia, it is finding ways to create places where Israelis and Palestinians can get to know one another.

To bring peace, Dalia says, both sides must be willing to make sacrifices. "How can you make a sacrifice if the good will toward the other is not there?" she asks.

A view over East Jerusalem

2009-11-05T22:15:00.000-08:00

Mark Brown stood at the top of the hill behind Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem and looked beyond the grove of olive trees to the place where the Lutheran World Federation hopes to build 84 housing units for Palestinian Christian families.

Brown is the regional representative for Lutheran World Federation in Jerusalem. He has been involved in issues of the Middle East most of his adult life. Agusta Victoria Hospital is in a historic building that sits atop the Mount of Olives. The Mount of Olives Housing Project illustrates the complexity of life in this fractured city.

"We are at a point where in a few years, there may not be a Palestinian Christian community in Jerusalem," Brown said.

He laid out the numbers. In 1946 in Jerusalem, there were 31,000 Christians, 35,000 Muslims and 98,000 Jews. Today, there are only 10,000 Christians compared to 220,000 Muslims and 450,000 Jews in the city.

One of the things that has diminished the Palestinian Christian population here is the difficulty of sustaining family ties. With the intricate and oppressive system that Israelis now have in place of security barriers and check points, travel between East Jerusalem and the West Bank, where Bethlehem sits only a few miles away, is extraordinarily difficult. So Brown says that one big political issue is that of family reunification.

The wall that separates East Jerusalem and the West Bank is very visible from this hill behind the hospital. Later, our driver, George, who grew up in East Jerusalem, took us down tho Jericho Street, where the wall cuts across what used to be the main street in that part of the city.

"You used to be able to go from this point in Jerusalem to Bethany in two minutes," George said. "Now it takes 40 minutes" to go around the wall and through a checkpoint.

The travel restrictions and their impact on family reunification is only one of the complexities facing the housing project. Another is getting the permission of the Israeli government to build it.

One piece of the puzzle is a law that allows Israel to take the equivalent of 40 percent of a property owner's land in exchange for housing. That means land on some other part of the hospital grounds will have to be given to Israel.

But there is a more subtle issue as well. There is a sense among the Arabs living in East Jerusalem that Israel is doing everything it can to push them out. The road restrictions that make travel difficult nudge families to move to the West Bank where they can be together. College students who go away may have their permits to be in Jerusalem torn up on their return. Bulldozers come in and level houses if the government is displeased with something.

The housing demolitions -- we saw one right across the street from the spot where Jesus is said to have begun the Palm Sunday procession into Jerusalem -- create a fear factor, Brown said.: "They create such anxiety that people want to leave."

And then there are the Israeli settlers moving into East Jerusalem, a traditionally Arab part of the city that belonged to Jordan before Israel claimed it in the 1967 war.

Brown said one element in the settlement efforts seems to be a desire by Israel to break up traditional Arab neighborhoods so that if there is ever a peace agreement that includes the status of Jerusalem, Israel will be able to keep the Palestinians from claiming that these are intact Arab neighborhoods.

The housing project is just the latest in a long commitment from the Lutheran church to serving the people of East Jerusalem.

Augusta Victoria Hospital was set up after the creation of Israel in 1948 to serve the population of Arab refugees displaced by the formation of that nation. Over the years, it has developed specialties like cancer treatment (it is the only major cancer center for residents of the West Bank and Gaza), diabetes, geriatrics and others. It treats Muslims as well as Christians.

As in so many areas, the disparities in health care for Jewish residents of Jerusalem and the Palestinians served by August Victoria are stark. Patients at the hospitals in West Jerusalem - the Jewish part of the city --- have an 80 percent chance of surviving cancer, Brown said. But at Augusta Victoria, 80 percent of the patients receive palliative care -- helping that have a less painful death -- because their cancers are too far advanced to successfully overcome.

Brown is struggling to create hope for the future for the Palestinians living in the shadow of the Israeli occupation. In health care, in the vision for new housing, in advocacy on human rights issues, in work with a coalition of church groups lobbying the U.S. government, he is a gentle but strong voice of hope in a place where hope often seems to be in short supply.

Petra, Masada -- two ancient symbols

2009-11-04T12:26:00.000-08:00

They both trace their origins back the a time before the birth of Jesus, they both intersected with the power of Rome, they both are fascinating places blending history, archeology and spectacular sites.

Yet there are profound differences as well.

Petra is in Jordan, Masada is in Israel.

Petra was built by the Nabateans, masters of the trade routes across the Middle East, who had an intricate religious system reflected in their buildings. Masada had its origins among the Jewish leaders in the period just before the beginning of the Christian era.

Petra is down deep in a valley, defended by narrow canyons called siqs that provided absolute control over access to the city. Masada is high on a plateau, overlooking the Negev desert, a place that should have been able to repel an any attack -- until the Roman Army came with 8,000 troops in 74 AD, laid seige to the mountain and eventually battered their way in, only to find that virtually all of the 1,000 Jewish rebels who had taken refuge there after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD had killed themselves the night before the final assault, choosing death over defeat, surrender and slavery.

For Jordan, Petra is a place of national pride and tourist income. It is very had to get to -- a couple of hours ride of Aquaba, three hours from Amman. Once there, you hike down a long trail, through the Siq and then into the ancient city.

For Israel, Masada has become a symbol of defiance over anyone who would attack their nation. Every Israeli soldier as part of his or her training goes to Masada to take an oath that those who died their will not have died in vain, that Masada will never be conquered again. It is a major tourist attraction for isiral, just off the main highway about 45 minutes from Jerusalem, with cable cars that shuttle you up to the top of the plateau in three minutes.

For photos from Petra, click here.

For photos from Masada, click here.

Spirituality in the midst of struggle

2009-11-02T11:50:00.000-08:00

Step by step, we worked our way on Sunday towards St. George's Monastery in the Judean desert outside of Jericho.

Our steps did not actually begin until after a fairly challenging van ride up the mountain to where the walking path begins.

"Don't buckle belts," our driver said, using the few English words he knew. No need to. The belts were all broken. Not that we didn't feel a need to, what with dodging Bedouins on donkeys, tractor loaders and steep mountain cliffs that could give us a fast trip into the valley of the shadow of death.

But then the walk began. We had intended it to be a reflective walk along the winding, hilly path overlooking the valley whose image lives on in Psalm 23. We had not counted on the four Bedouins on donkeys who thought we might like to ride up the monastery with them. When it was clear we wanted to walk, they suggested maybe we could pay them to go away. Real life was intruding on our spiritual quest.

Keep in mind the four of us -- Bonnie, Nancy, Petra and me -- were all alone in the wilderness at this point. Our non-English speaking driver was far behind us. There were no other pilgrims on this path. But finally, we shook the "helpful" donkey riders. And then the sight of the valley was ours to behold in peace.

When we reached the monastery perched on the side of one mountain, we found the only monk still living there. When you learn in Christian history about the 'Desert Fathers," this is what it was like for them.

Now the chapels were adorned with ancient icons. One cave above the monastery is said to be the place the Prophet Elijah sought refuge and heard the small, still voice of God. There is a sense of solitude and austerity in this place. It is a place where one comes to know God in the struggle with the harshness and the beauty of the elements.

I thought back to our visit a few days earlier in Hebron with Hani, the man who faces constant harassment from his neighbors, the Israeli settlers. Yet he is trying to carve out a path of creativity and non-violence for his children and the other children in his neighborhood. (See earlier post.)

For Hani, every day is a struggle. He is in an urban wilderness -- not in solitude, not exposed to the elements of nature, but his spirituality has grown here as well. He is rooted in Islam, not Christianity. He hopes that someday the children of his Jewish neighbors will find their own path to peace.

Spirituality can be shaped in so many different ways. A mountainous desert. An urban cauldron. Yet somewhere in the mix, there is the facing of life's struggles and finding God's presence in the midst of them.

Creating a new reality in Bethlehem

2009-11-02T11:46:00.001-08:00

Take your stereotypes of Palestinian society, put them on hold, and visit the Dar Al-Kalima Health and Wellness Center and the Dar Al-Kalima School, both on a hill overlooking Bethlehem.

Bethlehem is in the West Bank, hemmed in by the Israeli security barrier, home to three camps of Palestinian refugees. It is a place that not only is famous for the church honoring the birth of Jesus, but also for sitting in the cauldron of Israeli-Palestinian tension. And while it may be most famous for its Christian sites, it is a majority Muslin city.

Yet here at Dar Al-Kalima, a group of Christians are creating a place that is breaking through many of the boundaries and stereotypes that are so common in the Middle East. (Dar Al-Kalima - the school, health and wellness center and a college, are all projects of Christmas Lutheran Church, the partner church of Memorial United Church of Christ in Fitchburg.)

Consider the pride with which Rami Khader, the manager of the health and wellness center, spoke of the girls' soccer team that is on the verge of competing in national championships. The program for women's sports, he said, "is a good way to advocate for equal rights for women and equal participation for women in sports."

The members of this year's soccer team - ages 16 to 23 -- will become the coaches of the next generation of women soccer players from Bethlehem.

The swimming pool at the health and wellness center has hours for men and hours for women -- something you might expect in a heavily Muslim culture. But it also has family time when men and women and children can all swim together.

"We try not to advocate separation," Rami told us.

The community nurse, Raida Jeries Mansour, talks about bring older women together for mutual support, first from the churches, then from the mosques. More barriers are broken. In the private Christian school, 57 percent of the students are Muslim this year.

Naila Kharroub, the director (what we would call a principal) said the goal is to have an equal number of boys and girls, an equal number of Muslims and Christians. While the Muslim and Christian students have separate religion classes to learn about their own faiths, they share a common prayer time drawing on verses from both the Bible and the Koran, they learn about the commonalities of each other's faiths in joint classes once a month.

It is no secret that these children live in a place of intense conflict. So Kharroub has made peace studies a high value in the curriculum and in the overall tone of the school. (She was thrilled that we brought a peace banner from the children at Memorial UCC for the school, shown in the picture above).

"We believe peace at first comes from the inside of the person," she said.

The staff works on promoting peace between the children, who come from a wide range of backgrounds. "You know in our part of the world, we do not have peace," Kharroub told us. "In our community, we have to raise our kids peacefully if they are going to have a good life."

Equality of the sexes. Respect for different religious traditions. A commitment to non-violent techniques to solve disputes. These are values that are helping to create a place within the world that bit by bit, may change the culture around Dar Al-Kalima. And along the way, they are making a huge impact on the lives of the people touched by these institutions.

Selected photos

2009-11-01T02:47:00.000-08:00

Scenes from Israel/Palestine

Refugees forever?

2009-10-31T12:40:00.000-07:00

As Palestinians fled from their villages in 1948 as the Israeli army was taking control of the land, they began to gather together in communities in what was then land controlled by Jordan or Lebanon or Syria. The flood of refugees quickly became a humanitarian crisis.

The floodwaters have not receded. You can see the aftermath as you stroll through the Dheisheh Camp in Bethlehem. There are now nearly 13,000 refugees living there, the generational growth from the first 3,500 who settled there when the United Nations took responsibility for the camp in 1954. The camp then and now covers 1.5 square kilometers.

The original homes were 9 square meters for each family. Because there is no room to expand outward, families over generations have built upwards, adding second and third floors.

One thing is slightly better now. The original camp had one public restroom for each area of these tiny homes. Now there is running water and more bathrooms.

Overlying all of this, however, is the political stalemate between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. One of the central Palestinian demands in negotiations is for the right of these refugees to return to their villages in Israel. The Israeli government has consistently rejected that, since Israeli families now live in those place and since an influx of Palestinians would significantly shift the demographic balance in a state created as a place for Jewish people.

A young man named Shadi, our guide through the camp, said that at this point, most refugees would no longer choose to return to Israel. Some older ones might, but the younger ones would make a life for themselves elsewhere. But they want it to be their choice, not yet another restriction put on their lives by Israel. In the meantime, they walk this odd balance in the camp.

"We are trying to make our life here better, but we are not accepting that we will stay here forever," Shadi told us. He said that the Palestinian Authority provides no assistance to those in the camps because that would imply they are citizens of the West Bank. And memories are alive from the last time this happened -- in 2002 -- that the Israeli army can come in and exert its power whenever it wants.

"The problem is not food, the problem is not water, the problem is not the checkpoints," Shadi said. "The problem is the occupation."

But the daily problems in the camp are also realities.

Many people in the camp used to work in Israel, but with the construction of the separation barrier following the Second Intifada in 2002, many of those people can no longer get to work and they have lost their jobs.

Unemployment in the camp runs around 75 percent. The electricity network in the camp - built in 1954 and then upgraded in 1960, is totally inadequate for the camp of today, said Hazem Al Qassas, the acting director of Ibdaa Cultural Center in the camp.

Shadi said there are 1,800 school students in the camp and only 25 teachers. The clinic has one doctor, two nurses and is open six hours a day, with some 280 patients coming in each day.

And given the extraordinarily congested conditions in the camp, going back to the original nine-by-nine houses, Shadi said that "one of the biggest problems we have here is the privacy problem. You can't have any time for yourself."

Still, there is a strong sense of solidarity in the camp, of family members looking out for each other. And they look to the rest of the world in the hope that someone will listen to their story, that someone will care.

A morning in Hebron

2009-10-31T06:54:00.000-07:00

The three hours our group spent in Hebron on Friday morning offered an incredibly powerful look into the life of the Palestinians in that city where Israeli settlements right next to Palestinian neighborhoods, where they occupy apartments on one side of a narrow market street while Palestinian apartments are on the other side. The following three posts will introduce you to two fascinating people we met that morning -- Hani Abu Haikal and Walid Halawah -- as well as some impressions of the current situation in this major city.

Overcoming hatred in Hebron

2009-10-31T06:49:00.000-07:00

Hani Abu Haikal speaks with passion about the future he wants for his four children -- and for all the children of Hebron.

It is a future built around a commitment to creativity and to non-violence that stands in stark contrast to the image of this West Bank city described by one prominent Palestinian resident as "The City of Conflict."

Hani also speaks with passion about the suffering he has endured at the hands of his neighbors -- Israeli settlers who torment him regularly, burning his cars and his 268 olive trees. And there is suffering at the hands of the Israeli Army that intrudes into his house regularly.

Our group of seven visitors from the United States sat in Hani's living room as he told the stories of life under Israeli occupation, stories including the harrowing hours when his wife was in labor and the ambulance got delayed at checkpoint after checkpoint.

Hani's stories are remarkable because of the way Hani has committed himself to helping youngsters find a different path. The story of his wife's labor indicates the hardship of living under occupation. The story of the arsons shows the kind of harassment he lives with. But it is the story of how he and his friends outwitted the occupying forces to rescue the house next door that offers a light for the future.

The labor story is all too common in this land of checkpoints and arbitrary decisions by the soldiers that staff them. Hani had arranged in advance for an ambulance to come get his wife went she went into labor with their fourth child. He had all the necessary permits to get the ambulance through the checkpoints. So when his wife went into labor and he called for the ambulance, he thought all would be well.

But one hour went by, then another. He called the ambulance driver, who said he as stopped at a checkpoint and the soldiers were taking everything out of the ambulance to inspect it. More time went by. Still at the checkpoint. And there were two more checkpoints to go. His wife's labor was progressing rapidly.

Finally, in desperation, Hani picked up his wife to carry her over hilly, rocky, snow-covered paths as his sister used the glow from her cell phone to light the way. The birth was fine. In fact, it was well over by the time the ambulance finally cleared the last check point -- 14 hours after Hani had called for it.

He showed us videos of his car burning, set on fire by settlers. This was the sixth car he has lost to arson. He showed us a video of his olive trees burning, again the result of arson. The Israeli soldiers watched until the wind shifted, then they helped put out the blaze since it was now heading toward their post.

Hani also told the story of the curfew imposed by the Israeli army in 2000 as the second Infitada began across the West Bank. Some of the soldiers took over his neighbor's house, located on a hill that commands a good view of a large area of the city. After a while, they used the house as a jail. Hani said from his house next door he could hear the cries of the Palestinian prisoners there as they were being beaten.

Hani and some other neighbors tried to get the owner of the house to reclaim his home from the Israelis. The soldiers told him if he gave up his Jerusalem identification card -- a prized possession that allows Palestinians to enter Jerusalem -- they would give him his house back. He refused to do that.

So the neighbors made a contract with the owner to rent his house and won an order from the Israeli Supreme Court to have the soldiers vacate it. They did -- but only after demolishing it. Hani and two others rebuilt the house with help from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. Volunteers from human rights organizations slept there to protect it during the rebuilding process.

Now it is an educational center for Palestinian children between the ages of 9 and 16. Ten children come there for English lessons, 15 girls come for a course in video production, 25 youngsters come for non-violence training.

"Remember how I heard the screams of the tortured prisoners" coming from that house, Hani said. "Now I hear the laughter of children." That's where his hope lies.

He said when he listened to his children going to bed at night, he heard them talking about revenge on the settlers. That's not what he wants for them. He knows that path from his own past. He spent six years in an Israeli jail as a security prisoner.

"My culture was to throw rocks," he explained. "I don't want my kids to be like that."

He worries that radical Palestinian organizations will try to teach his children and other children the ways of revenge. "I don't believe in guns," Hani explained. "We have no protection. God just protects us."

And then there are the video cameras. He teaches his children and other children to use the camera as their weapon, to document what harassment they see, to post it on You Tube.

"I refuse to bomb buildings," Hani said as we ended our time with him. 'I will fight that. That is not being weak. To be non-violent, you have to be very strong."

No one who spends any time with Hani could doubt either his passion for justice nor the strength of his being.

Restoring downtown Hebron

2009-10-31T06:45:00.001-07:00

Walid Halawah stood on the roof of his office building for the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee. From there, we could see this major West Bank city spreading out in all directions.

We could see the mosque and synagogue built over the caves that both Muslims and Jews believe house the remains of Abraham, the father of both of their faiths.

We could also see the Israeli army watch towers on hills on three sides of the city, symbols of occupation. And we could see the refurbished buildings in the old city of Hebron, a symbol of both renaissance and resistance.

Halawah is the spokesman for this effort to revive and secure the future of central Hebron. The tensions around the Israeli occupation and the establishment of Israeli settlements in Hebron, including some in the oldest parts of the city, have stifled what was once a thriving commercial center. Walid told us that 500 shops in this old are were closed by Israeli military orders "for security reasons." Another 1,500 shops have closed because of a lack of business. Road repair and building projects are stalled in Israeli permit red tape.

"These circumstances force people to move out," Walid said. His goal, and the goal of the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee for whom he is a spokesman, is to get people to move back in.

He cites some statistics suggesting a bit of success. In 1996, the Palestinian population of the Old City area had dropped to 500. That was the year the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee began its work. Today, there are 5,000 people living in this area. Five green areas have been created for playgrounds. A vocational training school has opened. Buildings are being restored. This is more than an aesthetic issue for the Palestinians in Hebron.

They are also hoping to block any efforts to connect the Israeli settlements through the downtown. "As long as the downtown can stay, the settlements cannot be connected," Walid said. "That's why it is so vital to bring it back to life."

Hebron: The City of Conflict

2009-10-31T06:35:00.000-07:00

Hani Abuhaikal and Walid Halawah are each trying to build a future for Hebron following different paths. Yet each path offers a glimmer of hope in this place that embodies the deep animosity between Palestinians and Israelis who battle over the major city in the southern part of the West Bank.

We call it "the city of conflict," Walid told us -- a sharp difference from Bethlehem's motto of "City of Peace."

This division between the children of Abraham plays out in the shadows of the place honored by both Muslims and Jews as the burial site of Abraham and his wife, Sara, as well as Isaac and Rachel, Jacob and Leah. Even here, at this holy site -- one part mosque, one part synagogue -- Muslims and Jews enter the building over the Cave of the Patriarchs from different sides, at different times, through different security systems. They are kept apart at the tomb of their spiritual ancestor.

This mosque was the site of a massacre that is etched deep in the consciousness of the Muslims here. It was on Feb. 25, 1994, that an Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein, entered the mosque during dawn prayers and strafed the worshippers with bullets from a submachine gun. He killed 29 of them.

But embedded in Jewish consciousness is another massacre 65 years earlier, when a group of Arabs in Hebron killed 67 Jewish residents and burned synagogues and homes. Other Arabs there provided shelter for the 450 Jews fleeing the violence. A city of conflict indeed.

Our guide through Hebron on Oct. 30 was Michael Hiller, who just finished a three-month tour there with the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), a project of the World Council of Churches. EAPPI volunteers from around the world serve as observers at the hot spots in cities like Hebron. He was sent here by the Evangelical Church of Southwest Germany.

He described Hebron to us -- the biggest city in the West Bank, with a population in the city estimated at about 200,000, in the region of somewhere around 650,000. It is the commercial center of the West Bank, tracing its history back nearly 6,000 years, located on the pilgrimage route to Mecca for Muslims, on the trade route between Damascus, Syrian and Cairo, Egypt. It is a predominantly Muslim city, with virtually Palestinian Christians presence here.

But there are six Israeli settlements that have grown up here since 1970, including one in the central vegetable market. Hiller reminded us that under international law, it is illegal for an occupying power to settle land in the occupied region. Yet that is precisely what has happened here as well as at many other places in the West Bank.

We stood with Michael at one of the borders between the two political regions in the city -- H1, which is for Palestinians, and H2, which is called a closed military zone -- the areas where the Israeli settlers live. But even in the H2 zone, Hiller told us, there are 40,000 Palestinians. There are about 500 Israelis there, with about 1,500 Israeli soldiers providing security to them and controlling he comings and goings of the Palestinians.

Here as in so many other places in the West Bank, the Israeli control system of check points forces Palestinians to take circuitous routes to work and to school. One particularly striking example of the impact of this control occurred at an intersection near the Ibrahimi Mosque. This street is within the controlled zone and both Palestinians residents and Israeli settlers use it. The Palestinians must approach the checkpoint on the left side of a concrete barrier that runs along one part of the street. The Israelis and international visitors like us may use the main part of the street. They are then funneled into the separate entrances to the mosque, where Palestinians must go through three security checkpoints. By the time he sets inside, Walid Halawah told us, he feels like "I'm not entering a holy place. I'm entering an Israeli military zone."

At that check point near the mosque, there is an Israeli community center named after Yosef Yitzhak Gutnik, a wealthy Australian who has provided significant financial support for the Israeli settlements in Hebron. Loudspeakers on the roof blast Israeli music all day long, disrupting the call to prayer from the mosque and making life miserable for the three Palestinian merchants at that checkpoint as well as the Palestinians walking to the mosque for prayers.

The Palestinians see all this as a concerted efforts to push them out of central Hebron, to let the Israelis create a large area that connects all of their settlements into a contiguous community. Because of the proximity of Israeli settlers and Palestinian residents along with the military control exerted by the Israeli army, tension is always high here.

The settlers in Hebron, a majority of whom come from the U.S. and Europe, have a reputation for being particularly aggressive. The settlers in the downtown area toss their garbage down on the vegetable market, which is now protected by nets that catch the garbage (see photo above). There are many verbal confrontations.

The once thriving commercial area along Al Shuhada Street is now block after block of closed stores, some with Stars of David painted on the doors signifying the settlers intent to claim them.

Hebron -- a city of conflict in desperate need of the hopeful initiatives of people like Hani Abuhaikal and Walid Halawah.

Holy sites, hard realities

2009-10-29T12:50:00.001-07:00

It has such a richness in its name - Nazareth, the village where Jesus grew up. But Nazareth in 2009 is a far different place than it was 2,000 years ago. It is a place that mixes holy sites with some of the hard realities of contemporary Israel.

There are the well known holy sites, like the Church of the Annunciation, commemorating the story of Gabriel, God' messenger, telling her that she would conceive a son who would be God's ultimate revelation to humanity.

But just down the street is the convent of the Sisters of Nazareth, a French order of Catholic nuns who came to this city in 1855 to teach Palestinian girls. About 30 years later, in 1884, a worker cleaning a cistern discovered the underground remnants of what has been identified as a first century Nazareth home and burial crypt.

Sr. Marguerite, who guided us through the passages beneath the convent, told us there were about 40 homes in Nazareth in the first century. While there is no evidence that this was the home of Joseph and Mary and their son, Jesus, their home would have been similar to this one. And since the families were pretty well interconnected, it is reasonable to assume that Jesus at least visited this home.

Off to one side, deeper in the earth, is a tomb honored over the years as "the tomb of the righteous one." Again, there is no evidence who that might be, but the speculation of course runs toward Joseph, Mary's husband, known as "a righteous man." (Matthew 1:19) Sr. Marguerite was careful not to make any claims in that direction, but the twinkle in her eyes offered the tantalizing possibility.

We darted through a rare rainstorm up the hill to Nazareth Village, a modern re-creation of a first century Jewish village. But the real story of Nazareth came over an authentic lunch -- lentil soup, cabbage salad, apples with date dip -- we shared with Gosayna Karam, a staff member at Nazareth Village. Both she and her husband grew up in Nazareth, they were married in a grand ceremony in the Church of the Annunciation and they are raising their four children there. But she spent part of her life growing up in Australia and their first three children were born in the San Francisco area.

She talked about the mixed blessings of life for Palestinians in Nazareth. She values the closeness of family ties, which means that even when someone is unemployed, they are cared for by their extended family. There are no homeless people here, she said. The Israeli health care system covers everyone, even those without jobs, Arabs and Jews equally.

But the education system - that is another story. Schools receive four times the amount of government aid for a Jewish child as for an Arab child. The curriculum is dictated by the government and ignores any sense of Palestinian history. While Gosayna appreciates that her children are learning four languages -- Arab, Hebrew, English and French -- she is dismayed by the teaching style that emphasized facts but not learning. She lamented classes of 40 children all expected to look straight ahead, teachers who yelled rather than encouraged, homework for even young children that stretches into four hours a night.

Nazareth is a predominantly Arab village -- now with a Muslim majority, but still with a significant Christian presence. A new city just up the hill - Nazareth Illite -- is a Jewish city with far better facilities provided by the government. But at least here, the existence of Palestinians is acknowledged. When we talked about our visit to Biram, the Palestinian village that has virtually been obliterated from Israeli consciousness, she told of many other Palestinian villages that are no longer acknowledged by the Israeli government, which means no more building permits, no electricity, no running water. She said that Palestinian aid organizations work to help residents there.

Such is the story of Nazareth. The tourists come to visit holy sites. Doing the work Jesus talked about -- embracing all across social and political boundaries, caring for those in need -- goes on in less visible places.

It's not all that different from what Jesus did in those relatively obscure years he lived in Nazareth, doing the work of God even when he was not being noticed.

You can't get there from here

2009-10-29T12:43:00.000-07:00

Our journey from Nazareth through Jericho to Bethlehem provided a classic illustration of the absurdity of travel restrictions between the West Bank and Israel.

Yes, I know the Israelis would say there is nothing absurd about protecting there citizens from the threat of terrorism. But on this day, the absurdity played out in a journey that went on far longer that it needed to. We drove from the Galilee region down the Jordan River Valley, entering the West Bank with just a nod from George, our driver, to an Israeli guard at a check point. So far so good.

But when we got to Jericho, we had to bypass the first entrance to the city -- just a couple of minutes into downtown had we been able to take it -- to the only open entrance several miles down the highway. We went through an Israeli checkpoint where the soldier said he was just checking to make sure we were all wearing our seatbelts. (We were.)

The main issue here was to make sure no Israeli citizens entered into this West Bank area which is under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Then we came to a Palestinian checkpoint, where George and the guard had a brief but friendly conversation.

When we left Jericho, we could take a direct route to Bethlehem, which is also in the West Bank. We had to head out past the same two checkpoints, although now both were unguarded. Then we had to drive to Jerusalem, enter Israel (another checkpoint) and drive to the main entrance to Bethlehem from Jerusalem. There we were waved off because there was an Israeli celebration at Rachel's Tomb near that checkpoint and the checkpoint was closed. ("When they celebrate, we suffer," said Rev. Mitri Raheb when we arrived at the International Center in Bethlehem.)

The next nearest entrance to Bethlehem had about a two-hour wait, so George drove a circuitous route to a third checkpoint that would let us in through Beit Jala, a city adjoining Bethlehem. We could get in that way, but George pointed out that as tourists, we could not leave through that checkpoint.

What should have been a couple of short journeys into Jericho and into Bethlehem became extended and exasperating adventures in life in an occupied territory. For us, this was just one adventure. For the residents, it is a daily reality.

Wandering along the Sea of Galilee

2009-10-28T12:59:00.001-07:00

We were seated in a semi-circle on the hill where tradition has it that Jesus spoke the phrases known as the Beatitudes to the crowd that had gathered to hear him.

Behind us was the Sea of Galilee, that body of water that is so central to the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life. Down the coast we could see Capernaum, the village that served as Jesus' base of operations for so much of his ministry. Up the hill a ways was the Church of the Beatitudes, where people were participating in a Catholic Mass.
Bonnie Van Overbeke read the Beatitudes as Matthew recounted them: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blesses are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted ... Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled ... Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God..." (Matthew 5: 1-12)

There were tourists milling all about, of course, but for these few moments, we had this beautiful space to ourselves, letting the spirit of those words sink into the core of our beings. A bird sang from one of the bushes behind us.

There were other moments like that on this day as we traveled along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. At Capernaum, you can see a church built over the excavation of the house of Peter, the apostle. You can walk into the fourth century synagogue built on the foundation of the first century synagogue where Jesus came to teach. But for me, the stunning moment of the day came under a banyon tree that rises grandly above the Galilee shore. I sat under the tree, watching the water, imagining the times Jesus would have walked along this shoreline letting his spirit connect with God. It was a sacred moment.

Down the road a bit is the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes. This commemorates the story of Jesus feeding a crowd of 5,000 with five loaves of bread and two fish. (told in Matthew 14: 16-21) Nearby is the Chapel of St. Peter's Primacy. These are both in an area called Tabgha, which means Seven Springs. There is wonderful access to the Sea of Galilee behind St. Peter's Chapel. This spot commemorates Jesus' appearance to his apostles after his resurrection when he came ashore, ate fish with them and told Peter to "feed my sheep," which some interpret as giving Peter primacy among Jesus' closest followers. Both of these stories use food to show how Jesus opened people up to a spirit of hospitality and generosity.
We stood near the shoreline as Nancy Baumgardner played her recorder and we sang the wonderful hymn about Jesus coming down to the lakeshore to invite the fishermen to follow him. "I have abandoned my small boat," we sang. "Now I will seek other seas."

Two more stops. We saw a first century fishing boat similar to the one those fishermen would have used. It has been restored and is displayed at a museum near Magdala, the home village of Mary of Magdala. Then we ended the day at the point south of Tiberius where the Jordan River flows out of the Sea of Galilee. This is honored as the spot where John baptized Jesus. As darkness crept over the river, people dressed in white garments gathered along the bank to re-enact their own baptisms -- or perhaps to be baptized for the first time. Here was one group where the baptizer wore a cowboy had. One way down the river were a group of African men and woman being plunged into the water. The other way, a group of Mexican-American Catholics were standing barefoot in the water as a priest led them in a renewal of baptismal vows.

Somewhere ... beyond the rows of tour buses, the ever-present gift stores, the variety of legends about each place ... somehow along this shoreline, the spirit of Jesus is still vibrant, calling people to step out of their boats, share a meal with someone in need and live in the way of the beatitudes.

The hidden story of Biram

2009-10-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

From the entrance, it just seems like a pleasant national park area. You pay a fee, park your car and meander up the rock steps to the site of an ancient Roman temple that had been converted into a synagogue by the Jewish community in the third century in the Christian era. The ruins of another synagogue are nearby. A sign an the entrance to the park tells part of the history.

What it leaves out are the hundreds of years when this village of Biram was the home of the Melkite Christians, generations of Palestinian families who cared for this land. One of them was the Chacour family. A son of that family, Elias -- the founder of amazing educational institutions at Ibillin, now the Melkite bishop of Israel -- wrote about that point in history that gets only a glancing reference in the tourist brochure.

"During the War of Independence (1948), the villagers were evacuated," the park brochure says. In Chacour's book, Blood Brothers, he offers a lot more detail.

First the Israeli soldiers, moving to take control of their newly formed nation, showed up in Biram and took up residence in many of the family homes, including that of the Chacours. The family slept on the roof. Then in the spring of 1949, the military commander told the village elders that they needed to evacuate for a few days. Leave the keys with us, they told the elders, nothing will be disturbed.

So the families "evacuated," as the brochure said. But they never again would be allowed back in their homes. After extensive legal battles, with two rulings from the Supreme Court that the army should let them return to their village, the commander told the Biram residents who had been staying in a nearby village that they could return on the morning of Dec. 25, 1951. But as they approached in joy that Christmas morning, the Israeli artillery opened fire on the village, destroying virtually all of the home, damaging the church.

So as we walked deeper into the park, we came to the church, rebuilt in the 1960s by some of the young men who had been born in Biram. Chacour tells of helping them "rebuild a symbol of hope for the Palestinian people." The church is now used for Christmas and Easter ... and for funerals. This day, our group from Wisconsin and Mississippi stood outside the church. Nancy Baumgardner took the stairs up to the roof and rang the bell.

If there is a glimmer of life at the church, the rest of the village of Biram is a monument to destruction. The ruins of the old homes dot the landscape. You can see the door frames, a grill, a window. But mostly, you see weeds overgrowing the piles of stone rubble left by the artillery barrage of 1951.

At the edge of the village is the Chacour home, just a bit down the road from where Eilas' parents are buried. In the book, Elias tells the story of his older brother Rudah, who came home one day with a rifle back in the late 1940s when he heard that the Israeli soldiers would be moving in. (It was Rudah and his son who took me on my first tour of this village in 2004). When their father, Michael, saw the gun, he erupted in a rare display of anger: "Get it out of here! I won't have it in my house." He paused, then said more calmly: "We do not use violence ever. Even if someone hurts us."

There is a rich history of family love and tragic displacement in these stones. It's a history that most visitors to this Israeli national park never encounter.

2009-10-26T06:29:00.001-07:00

It's one part pilgrimage to holy sites. It's one part bonding with friends we know. It's one part exploration, planting seeds for new friendships as we learn about life in Israel and Palestine in a time of tension.

Eight of us are leaving today to spend 12 days in Israel/Palestine. Four of us have ties to Memorial United Church of Christ in Fitchburg -- Bonnie Van Overbeke, the former pastor there; Nancy Baumgardner, a very active member; Petra Streiff, the former parish nurse who is now associate pastor at Swiss UCC in New Glarus; and me, the current full-time pastor. Memorial has a partnership with Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, where we will all be worshipping next Sunday (Nov. 1). Joining us are two couples from Mississippi -- Rims and Judy Barber (Rims in Bonnie's brother) and their friends Glenn and Betty Gentry.

We will arrive in Israel on Tuesday afternoon and head to Nazareth. We'll see various Biblical sites around the Sea of Galilee; visit Biram, the hometown of Elias Chacour, an amazing Melkite archbishop who works to cross the barriers among Christians, Muslims and Jews; and spend some time at Nazareth Village, a recreation of the first century village where Jesus grew up.

We will head to Bethlehem on Thursday and spend several days there, including time chatting with Rev. Mitri Rabeb, the pastor at Christmas Lutheran Church and a good friend. On Monday, Nov. 2, we will head east to Eliat on the Red Sea. We will visit the ancient city of Petra and on the way back to Jerusalem after a few days, we will stop at the Dead Sea and visit Qumran, the site of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

We arrive in Jerusalem on Wednesday evening, Nov. 4. We will visit the holy sites there, spend time at Augusta Victoria Hospital and meet a wide variety of people. And then it's back home.

I'll file updates and photos as I can along the way.

Peace. Shalom. Salaam.

Videos of the demolition

2009-06-30T10:26:00.001-07:00

Watch Michael Magness make an assault on Tuesday on the crumbling - but very tough shed -- with a tractor. Then watch our gang on Wednesday make the final push to topple what remained of the structure.

Thoughts from the students

2009-06-27T19:47:00.000-07:00

One of the most amazing parts of the trip for me was a conversation in the kids' room at the hotel we are at in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. I wanted to hear a few of their thoughts about he experiences of the week. They talked and talked and talked. Clearly this week had a profound effect on all of them.

They talked about the bonding they had with one another, starting with the afternoon at City Museum in St. Louis on the way down and continuing through the week. They talked about the bonding and their new friendships with our colleagues from Cedar Hills UCC in Portland, who shared the week with us. They were happy about the good food they got during the week, about the experience of living in a couple of trailers at Back Bay Mission in Biloxi.

They were very appreciative of the stories they heard from the people they were helping in Biloxi -- at houses, at the meal program, in the service areas at Back Bay. They were very excited about being part of the worship service Wednesday night at Missionary Baptist Church in Biloxi, a traditional African-American congregation. They liked seeing the French Quarter, Bourbon Street, the various neighborhoods in New Orleans. The bad parts? Long car rides, one bad restaurant stop along the way, the heat.

They were struck by the contrast of huge casinos right across the street from one of the poorest neighborhoods in Biloxi. They wondered how many houses could have been built for the cost of the huge guitar sign outside the Hard Rock Cafe and Casino. One of them said they expected to see poverty in Biloxi, but once they met the actual people living in poverty -- living in a tent, struggling with disabilities. "I never thought about the stuff that made people poor," Austin said.

That's the kind of insight that these kids gained on this trip. I am so proud of them. They were easy to travel with, extraordinarily hard working, lots of fun and very thoughtful. Thanks to all who helped make this happen.

Heading home

2009-06-27T19:41:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where we are spending the night on our way back to Madison. It has been a great week for all of us.

We spend Friday seeing some of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. On the way from Biloxi to New Orleans, we drove along the Gulf Coast, including an amazingly beautiful and haunting trip through the Bayous to the southeast of New Orleans. We got a briefing on the situation from a woman at Good Shepherd UCC in Metarie, who works with relief groups. She took us over the Ninth Ward and the Lower Ninth Ward to see what is happening there now.

In the Lower Ninth, one of the poorest areas of the city, it is striking how few homes have been rebuilt four years after Katrina. We did see the very modern and sustainable homes being built with help from the Brad Pitt Foundation. In the main Ninth Ward, which suffered a bit less destruction during the storm, we saw Musicians Village, a reconstruction project of the Marsalis family to help keep musicians in New Orleans by helping them with housing.

Then it was down to the French Quarter, dinner in Metarie at a wonderful oyster restaurant. We were on the road on Saturday by 9 a.m.

A slide show our week at Back Bay Mission

2009-06-26T05:11:00.000-07:00

We posted a link to our photos earlier, but we have added many more since then. They are all on the earlier link, several posts down the blog, but here they are as a slide show.

An old shed bites the dust

2009-06-24T14:00:00.001-07:00

For most our crew, Tuesday and Wednesday invovled destruction. And they loved it.

"Demolition seems like the opposite of Back Bay," said Elliot. But as our group learned, it's also an important piece of helping out people here.

In this case, the group was tearing down a large shed that had been used as a house for a while. The owner, JW, had led some relatives live there after Katrina hit in 2005. It eventually became used as a drug house. Once officials got wind of this, they condemned the building and required JW to tear it down.

The thing is, JW has his own Katrina story. He's a man in his late 50s, the kids estimated. His wife is from Scotland. They got married just after Katrina and he was helping fix stuff that had been damaged by the storm. He was going through several small heart attacks that week and finally went to the hospital in Gulfport, where they diagnosed what was going on and eventually did bypass surgery. But he said he had been unconscious for 28 days and diminished circulation led to the amputation of a leg and several fingers. So he was in no condition to tear this structure down himself.

Back Bay came to this assistance and our folks were the assisters. Michael and Beth, the four guys -- Adam, Austin, Elliot and Phillip -- and Janine went out on Tuesday to begin the work. They stripped off the tin roof and began removing pieces of the structure. But the temp was setting new records for Biloxi in June, cracking 108 degrees where they were working on Tuesday. And as flimsy as this structure looked .. well, as Austin said, "Now that we're trying to tear it down, it seems a lot sturdier."

Michael tried to pull the whole thing down with a tractor, but that did not work on Tuesday. Eventually, the crew came in from the heat with a plan for Wednesday.

There was one casualty the first day. Phillip tried to break out what seemed to be fiberglass, but actually was real glass and got some cuts in the process. The second day, he really did get covered with fiberglass and he had the experience of a huge cockroach crawling up his leg and onto his bare stomach. But mostly, the casualties were tee-shirts drenched sweat.

So the gang got up before sunrise on Wednesday and left the trailer at 6:15 a.m. to do their work in the cooler part of the day. By 8:30, the structure was down. But getting it down took a combination of pulling with the tractor and guys lunging toward it like the front line of a football team. "All" that remained was the cleanup. That was done by 12:30 and the crew headed back for lunch, showers and a trip to the beach.

And then there's a footnote. At that point in the day when everyone was feeling pretty dragged out and discouraged, JW came out with something for us to read. It went like this:

TO: You
DATE: Today
FROM: God
SUBJECT: Yourself
REFERENCES: Life

This is God. Today I will be handling all of your problems. I do not need your help. So have a nice day. I love you.

P.S. And remember ...

If life happens to deliver a situation to you that you cannot handle, do
not attempt to resolve it yourself. Kindly put it in the SFGTD (something for God to do) box. All situations will be resolved, but in My time.

Once the matter is placed into the box, do not hold onto it by worrying about it. Instead, focus on all the wonderful things that are present in your life now.

If you find yourself stuck in traffic, don't despair. There are people in
this world for whom driving is an unheard of privilege.

Should you have a bad day at work, think of the man who has been out of work for years.

Should you despair over a relationship gone bad, think of the person who has never known what it's like to love and be loved in return

Should you grieve the passing of another weekend, think of the woman in dire straits, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week to feed her children

Should your car break down, leaving you miles away from assistance;, think of the paraplegic who would love the opportunity to take that walk.

Should you notice a new gray hair in the mirror, think of the cancer patient in chemo who wishes she had hair to examine.

Should you find yourself at a loss and pondering what is life all about, asking what is my purpose? Be thankful. There are those who didn't live long enough to get the opportunity.

Should you find yourself the victim of other people's bitterness, ignorance, smallness or insecurities, remember, things could be worse. You could be one of them!

Should you decide to send this to a friend, thank you. You may have touched their life in ways you will never know!

Now, have a nice day!
God

Drama in the front office

2009-06-24T13:57:00.000-07:00

Kirsten spent part of Tuesday and Wednesday helping out in the reception area at Back Bay Mission. This is where people in need of help come. Sometimes the folks at the reception desk can direct them to services. Sometimes they can give them the things they need. Often, they connect them with one of the caseworkers at Back Bay.

Back Bay Mission is the only service agency in Biloxi (population about 50,000) that offers daily emergency assistance to people, so they get a steady stream of visitors.

Kirtsen said she loved this part of the trip because she was actually getting time with the people who live here. And on Tuesday, she was part of an extra measure of drama.

One of the gentlemen who came in was a frequent visitor to the mission. He was sweating a lot this day -- not unusual as the temp was climbing to 100. Kirsten talked with him a bit and eventually he went back to see a caseworker, where he told about his chest pain and shortness of breath. She determined that the man was having a heart attack and called 911.

Devastation remains along the coast

2009-06-24T13:56:00.000-07:00

Tuesday night, we took a four-vehicle caravan with all 26 of us from both congregations along the Gulf Coast to get a little sense of the devastation that still exists after Katrina. It's an odd sense. There is a fully functional mall -- Dillards and all - right next to empty lots. Someplaces there are long stretches of grass growing over And then there are businesses and condos that are in full gear. There are almost no homes rebuilt along this stretch.

We went as far west as the University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Park. The dorms and administration there still stand empty, windows blown out, blinds dangling. You can peer inside and see things that have been thrown around the rooms. This is also the site of a sprawling Friendship Oak, that dates back to about 1487.

Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with our God

2009-06-24T13:52:00.000-07:00

Shari Prestemon's predecessor at Back Bay Mission came there with a well-defined task -- close the mission. The divisions of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s had split local churches. Back Bay's activism on behalf of the had created controversy in Biloxi. There were no longer any UCC congregations in Mississippi. The mission appeared doomed. But, Shari noted with a smile, her predecessor "failed." Back Bay Mission experienced a rebirth. And now it tries to live out the words of the prophet, Micah -- to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God.

Shari talked about the kindness part -- the food pantry, the outreach workers, the housing reconstruction. And she talked about the justice part -- asking why people faced oppressive conditions and then trying to change those conditions. "When you go home," she told our groups, "think about the justice issues in your back yards and then figure out what you can do about them."

A photo view of our week

2009-06-22T15:00:00.000-07:00

Back Bay 2009

A day of painting

2009-06-22T13:34:00.000-07:00

We started out this morning putting the final (we thought) coat of paint on the ceiling of a new house that is about to be turned over to a woman who has been displaced in the last four years since Katrina. "You know how excited you are when you move into a new house," said Bob, our crew leader from Back Bay. "Just imagine what it's like if you have had no home for the last four years."

But, of course, things did not go totally as planned. The paint was not quite dark enough and some slotches were showing through. So this afternoon, all five of our teens plus Michael and Janine went back to put on a second coat while Mary Kay, Beth and I, along with Allison from Cedar Hills UCC went to Winn Dixie to buy groceries for the next few days. When everyone gets back, we'll head to the Gulf shore and do a bit of swimming before dinner.

The temp, by the way, is pushing 100 and the humidity is, shall we say, noticeable.

Off the road – at last

2009-06-22T13:28:00.000-07:00

The Memorial crew rolling into Biloxi at about 8:15 Sunday night. That was just about 11 hours after we left Parkway UCC in St. Louis, our home overnight on this journey. Other than being a long trip, we all had a good time, shifting the configurations of who rode where and who drove which car several times along the way.

A few of our group checked out early. Others stayed up to wait for our partners from Cedar Hills UCC in Portland, Ore. Part of their group was flying into New Orleans on a late flight, so they arrived in Biloxi at midnight and quietly (really) settled into the trailers with us.

Along the way, there were some highlights:

* Climbing outside on metal structures at the City Museum in St. Louis, "sweating half our body fluid out," according to Phillip Bessemer.

* Riding the tram to the top of the Arch, looking out over the Mississippi River on one side and downtown St. Louis on the other. It was an amazing view.

* Searching and searching for a place to have supper. We abandoned the idea of eating downtown because it was getting too late. We tried to find something near Webster University in Webster Grove, but got lost. Finally, we wound up at a Pizzaria Uno in Kirkwood, which turned out to be the perfect spot for a bunch of tired and very hungry travelers.

* Seeing a car on fire on the side of the road in central Mississippi.

* Endless rounds of DVDs, games on i-pods, music and converstation.

* Falling into our beds in the trailor at the end of the journey.

Heading for Back Bay Mission

2009-06-18T08:19:00.000-07:00

A group of us from Memorial United Church of Christ leaves Saturday morning for a week of work and exploration at Back Bay Mission in Biloxi, Mississippi. There are 10 of us -- five confirmation students (Adam and Phillip Bessemer, Elliot Schad, Kirsten Scheller-Suitor and Austin Young) and five adults (Janine Bessemer, Michael and Beth Magness, Mary Kay Scheller-Suitor and me). We will stop in St. Louis overnight on the way down and we hope to arrive at Back Bay early Sunday evening.

While we are there, we will be working with a youth group from Cedar Hills UCC in Portland, Ore. There are 12 young people and three adults in that group. We will be sharing trailers, food preparation and the work experience.

Then on Friday, we will go over to Good Shepherd UCC in Metairie, La., just outside of New Orleans. They have been deeply involved in the Katrina recovery work in New Orleans and will show us some of what is happening there and also show us a bit of New Orleans. Then we start the journey home on Saturday morning, June 27 and should be back in Madison at dinnertime on Sunday, June 28.

We hope to be posting updates here as the week goes on. Meanwhile, please hold us in your prayers.

(If you are interested in the November 2007 adult trip to Back Bay, you can read posts from that trip here.)

Koran scholarship sparks fresh thinking

2009-04-25T06:16:00.000-07:00

Nick Kristoff of the New York Times had a fascinating column this week about the explorations of Islamic scholars into the historical context of passages of the Koran. Those explorations are setting off debates within Islam analogous to the historical/critical scholarship done on the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. You can click through to read the column -- "Islam, Virgins and Grapes."

Trading violence for violins a tough task

2009-04-09T04:37:00.000-07:00

There's a poster on the wall in my office that reflects the hopes of many people who get to know residents of the tension-filled lands of Israel and Palestine.

It shows a young Palestinian boy -- perhaps 6 or 7 years old -- his hands clutching broken pieces of rock ready to throw at the Israeli army. Looming above the boy is a handsome, poised young man playing a violin.

They are the same person, a man named Ramzi. The poster reflects the work done at the International Center in Bethlehem to create hope for Palestinian children in the midst of the violence of their world, to offer them creative outlets that can transform their lives.

It's the kind of image we in America like to see. It's the kind of image I treasure as someone who has a long-time commitment to nonviolent solutions to conflicts, who as a pastor often talks about the things Jesus said about loving enemies and forgiving one another and working for peace. Those teachings come into sharp focus during this week when Christians recall the execution of Jesus -- a time when he forgave his enemies -- and the message of Easter about life winning out over death.

So you can imagine my discomfort a few weeks ago as I watched Sol Kelley-Jones' powerful play, "The Birds That Are Your Hands: How to Start a Fire Under Siege." (It's playing weekends through April 19 at the Broom Street Theater.)

There is a scene where Ingrid, a woman representing a non-governmental organization from Sweden, meets Khalad, a Palestinian described as a "former" fighter.

"He was involved in the fighting?" Ingrid asks Hassan, who has arranged this meeting.

Hassan nods. "Lost all of his friends, most of his family." He shrugs. "This is the life."

Ingrid tells Khalad her charity wants to launch a humanitarian campaign for children. It would involve violins.

"Violins?" Khalad asks incredulously.

"Trading violence for violins," she says. "It has a nice ring. Where there is a Palestinian youth holding a stone to throw, well, we replace that stone, with a violin."

There was that poster on my wall.

Khalad is more than skeptical: "I see very few violins, many stony hills and, no open ears. That's what I see." He hears her talk about the beauty of music without any of the harsh words about the realities of living in an occupied land.

He compares the Palestinians to a bird in a cage. He hears her asking this: "That song about the cage, we don't like it so much, sing a song that is pretty to our ears and then we might shed a tear for you and maybe think about letting you out of the cage."

And then there is actual news about violins from Israel and Palestine. On March 25, a group of teen musicians from the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank traveled into Israel to a suburb of Tel Aviv to present a concert for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. There was a glow of hope around this extraordinary event.

Then a few days later, some of the political activists in the Jenin refugee camp condemned the concert and banned the Israeli Arab who led the orchestra from coming back into the camp. One of these leaders told the New York Times that the Palestinian teens had been brought into a political situation that "served enemy interests" and aimed to "destroy the Palestinian national spirit in the camp."

Once again, there were clouds over the hope that lingers in that poster on my wall. There are no easy answers here, just the tension that exists when people feel trapped like birds in a cage, when they hope to bend the bars and find freedom, when the sound of a song seems too weak in a cruel world.

For those who listen for the music, though, beauty is not enough. The music must also propel those who cling to hope to find ways to open the doors to that cage.

Published in The Capital Times, April 8, 2009

Crisis of faith in lands split by walls

2009-03-24T18:24:00.000-07:00

When Sol Kelley-Jones was writing her powerful play about the people on the margins in the West Bank and on the U.S.-Mexican border, religious themes were only a subtext.

These, after all, were the stories of the people she encountered during a three-month stay in Palestine last spring and then a summer near Tucson working on the border. They were stories that often have a political edge, which is not surprising given how much politics affects the realities of life in these regions.

There are walls that separate people in both places, walls built by governments seeking to keep people out in the name of protecting those who are on the inside. The walls divide people in ways that the best of religious traditions would not accept, even though religious reasons may well be cited as justifications for the walls.

But for someone coming to this play – The Birds That Are Your Hands -- with a sensitivity for the religions dimensions at work in these two places, Kelley-Jones has managed to bring issues of faith into a sharp focus.

(You can read more about the play in my column in the Cap Times. The play is running at the Broom Street Theater through April 19.)

She said in an interview that in both Palestine and in the border region, she found that it was people working in faith-based aid groups that performed amazing tasks, often putting themselves at risk. What motivates her is progressive politics more than a specific religious commitment, yet she shows in the play her deep understanding of the religious tensions at work in these societies and in the lives of individuals.

There is the Jewish commitment to living an ethical life reflected in the ruminations of an old Jewish man who ponders what his country is doing to the Palestinians in their midst.
“Europe has always has a habit of hating Jews,” he tells the audience. “Now we can be colonizers. It is the Palestinians who pay the price for Europe’s anti-Semitism.”

He shakes his head in disbelief. “Jews – my people – are pondering the merits of concentration camps. I have live too long.”

Later, Jewish woman who is a rabbi talks about losing her faith in the Holy Land after witnessing what was happening there, then finding her faith restored when she began to bond with women in refugee camps – “my Muslim sisters.”

When the Palestinians face a crisis, they cry out the traditional Islamic prayer, “Allahu Akbar.” This is usually translated “God is great,” which often seems odd in a moment of tragedy. Kelley-Jones offered a more nuanced translation: “God is greater than this.”

But for a priest in the Arizona desert, the notion that God is great is mocked by the dead baby he finds. It is one of the heart-wrenching scenes in the play. The priest is kneeling, holding a rosary in his hands, reciting Jesus’ words from the Gospel of Matthew about how “I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink.”

Then he looks up in anger at what people who call themselves Christians are doing to the immigrants who are dying in the desert. He mocks their words: “Who does this Jesus Christ think he is? He’s not with the program.”

As the priest’s despair over what he sees deepens, his posture shifts to the Muslim position for prayer, head touching the ground. He still holds the rosary, reminiscent of the Muslim prayer beads.

“I pray and I doubt,” he cries. “I pray for forgiveness for my doubting. God will care for you ... and the desert fills with bodies.”

Kelly-Jones does not offer any easy answers to the doubts of the priest or the rabbi or the Islamic characters in her play. She simply poses the questions for people to weight against their own faith traditions. It is provocative theater at its best.

Finding a place in a changing religious landscape

2009-03-09T16:45:00.000-07:00

Two studies that have come out in the past few weeks raise some interesting questions for those of us who are part of the United Church of Christ.

The first study -- The 2009 edition of the Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches -- reported that the UCC was declining in membership faster than any other Protestant denomination. We were down 6.1 percent between 2006 and 2007, according to the data the UCC gave to the yearbook.

We were not alone in this decline. The two largest Christian denominations in the U.S. also reported declines -- 0.59 for Roman Catholics, 0.24 for Southern Baptists. They had been steadily growing in the past. The fastest growing denominations were the Jehovah's Witness (up 2.12 percent), the Mormons (up 1.63 percent), the Assemblies of God (up 0.96 percent).

The second study looks at the overall shifting of religious identification over a 20-year period. The headline - Christianity is shrinking as a proportion of the U.S. scene and people calling themselves non-religious are increasing. The study is called the American Religious Identification Survey and you can find it by clicking here.

Almost 20 years ago, in 1990, the survey reported, 86 percent of Americans described themselves as Christian. That percentage is now 76 percent. Likewise, in 1990, about 8 percent of Americans declared no religious affiliation. That is now up to 15 percent. And Wisconsin follows a similar pattern -- see this story from the Wisconsin State Journal.

So does this mean we should all crawl into bed and put our heads under the pillows? I don't think so.

These trends are useful to know about and to try to understand. They reflect the changing landscape in which we live. They provide material to think about as we look at we describe ourselves as followers of Jesus. But they really don't have much to do with what I believe as an individual.

My affiliation with Christianity grew out of my family experience as a child -- I was raised Roman Catholic -- but it has been shaped and refined by my experiences as an adult. I have made a conscious decision to be a Christian and I have chosen the UCC as the place that I think best enables me to deepen and live out my Christianity. Others may have chosen other denominational expressions or the non-denominational, evangelical Christianity that is has grown so much in this country over the past few decades.

I think I have something to learn from the evangelicals, from the disaffected, from Muslims and Jews and Wiccans and others. It may seem like it would be more fun to be part of a growing, thriving denomination. Within the UCC as an institution, there are all sorts of struggles about budgets and the staff and directions for the future. Those are institutionally important, but they are not at the core of Jesus' message.

That message is about loving God and loving others as we love ourselves. It's about working in this world to help it be the kind of place God created it to be. At Memorial UCC, that's what we are about. It's a vibrant community that sails against the tide of the trends showing up in these surveys.

That's not something to be smug about. That's all the more reason why need to nurture God's spirit in our midst and let it affect how we have an impact on the people and the world around us.

Finding hope in Mumbai

2009-03-06T12:08:00.000-08:00

Ebo Patel, who heads the Interfaith Youth Core and is one of the great voices of our time for getting across the faith divides in our world, wrote this about how Mumbai avoided a religious battleground after the terrorist attacks there late last year.

60 Minutes on Israel/Palestine

2009-02-02T19:16:00.000-08:00

Watch CBS Videos Online

After the fighting in Gaza

2009-01-01T17:49:00.000-08:00

Ebo Patel, director of the Interfaith Youth Corps and one of my favorite people these days, offers a view of the current catastrophe in Gaza that I have not seen elsewhere. He moves beyond the predictable rhetoric to try to find ways to hold American Jews and Moslems in conversation even in the midst of warfare.

You can read his column at the On Faith site of The Washington Post/Newsweek.

The Green Bible

2008-12-28T18:36:00.000-08:00

The Good Book goes green

Here's a column from the Cap Times about the new Green Bible.

Christians in Bethlehem

2008-12-25T13:13:00.000-08:00

One of my interests (and one of the partnerships for Memorial UCC) is the situation of Palestinian Christians in the West Bank, especially in Bethlehem. Here are three links from Christmas 2008 that provide insight into the current situation:

From the New York Times:
Palestinians Work to Jolt West Bank Back to Life

From CNN:
Christians in Bethlehem (includes interview with Mitri Raheb, pastor at Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem) -

Christmas in Bethlehem

Memorial at Back Bay -- the crew

2007-11-16T19:55:00.000-08:00

For a slide show, click here.

Hanging up the hammers

2007-11-16T19:30:00.000-08:00

Let's start at the end. About 20 of us were sitting around the living room in our trailer, having finished off a shrimp boil put on by Don Morgan from the Back Bay staff. Our group of nine shared the meal with about a dozen folks from Congregational UCC in St. Charles, Ill. And then people began to talk about what the experience of the last week meant to them.

For some, it was the satisfaction of the work they did on the houses. For others, it was coming face to face with people who are homeless. For still others, it was the joy of new relationships with people from their own congregation and meeting those from others. Some talked about the conversations they had with people who had survived the hurricane. One woman from Illinois said what she saw this week was what church is really all about. Many reflected on the vast array and energy of volunteers from the UCC and from other denominations who have come to the Gulf Coast and New Orleans to help people.

There were reflections on the things that disquieted people as well. Several mentioned the sense of discouragement about the long-term prospects for Biloxi, to say nothing of the poor who live there. Others talked about the greed that has siphoned off recovery money to the wealthy that should have gone to programs to aid low-income people.

Those of us working on Darrell's house wrapped up our work at mid-day, having reframed all the walls and installed five new windows. There is more work to be done there, but that will be picked up by the next group. We all gathered with Darrell outside his home for good wishes to each other and a prayer together. And then we were on our way.

Two links you might want to pursue:
A column for the Cap Times about gratitude
An audio of a sermon about the trip -- click on the Nov. 18 service.

It's been a great week. Thanks to all of you back home for your care and support and prayers on our journey. See you soon.
Phil

Mississippi leaves out the poor

2007-11-16T05:02:00.000-08:00

The Nov. 16 New York Times has a fascinating story about how Mississippi has used only 10 percent of federal post-Katrina aid to help its low income residents. You can read the details by clicking on the headline: Poor Lag in Hurricane Aid From Mississippi

On Nov. 25, The Washington Post ran an article that looked at the disparity in Biloxi's recovery. You can click on the headline: Biloxi's Recovery Shows Divide

A waitress' story

2007-11-15T19:47:00.000-08:00

As our waitress was clearing dishes off our table at the end of dinner at the Biloxi Schooner in the downtown area tonight, she started telling us her story. Her name is Shalom and she has lived in Biloxi for about six years -- right through Hurricane Katrina. Next month, she is moving to San Antonio. She simply sees no more future in this city.

She said her house was destroyed in the hurricane. Now rents are so high she cannot afford to live here. It's hard to find a gas station, her kids are not getting the kind of education she wants them to have. Many former residents have never come back, she said. Others have already left. She talked about her sadness at leaving, said she wants to come back to visit, but said she cannot stay living here now.

She asked whether we were visitors or volunteers. "Volunteers," we said. She thanked us for taking the time to come down to her city and wished us well. We wished her well, too. She was off to the kitchen and we were off to our trailer.
Phil

Hitting the wall

2007-11-15T19:19:00.000-08:00

Each morning at 7:30, our work camp group gathers with others from Eagle River, Illinois and Connecticut for morning briefing with Leah Lyman, the volunteer coordinator; Craig, the construction supervisor, and Don Morgan, who oversees the whole volunteer effort. This morning, the room was extraordinarily quiet as people dragged themselves in. The pace of the work was taking its toll.

That's the way it went all day long. At the work sites, lots got done, but the bodies moved at a more sluggish pace. Numerous folks were at new work sites. The painting job at one house where Denise, Mary and Linda had been working was done. The huge project in Gulfport was scaled back, so John H, John Van O and Jim were free agents this morning. The three of them along with Mary and Linda went to work at a new site where the focus is on the renonvation of the interior of the house. Lots of painting of doors going on there. Denise helped out at the Loaves and Fishes noon meal program and also worked with the group from St. Charles, Ill. at their work site. Howard, David and I continued at the house we have been working on all week, with Howard taking a lead role in putting in new windows -- a major feat of creative engineering. (See pictures above.) The windows are in straight, but the house is crooked, so the windows look a bit odd from the outside. We won't get all the windows done on Friday, but we've made significant progress on that house.

As we settled in for the night (interrupted briefly when we turned on the heat, only to have all the smoke alarms start blaring), folks were reflecting back on the week. It was Howard to articulated something many of us had noticed -- no end to the number of times people would say thank you to us. Sure, the homeowners said thanks, but so did the folks in the hardware stores and at the restaurants and anywhere else we stopped in the Biloxi area. These folks are struggling to bring their communities into the future against great odds and they sure are glad some people from around the country are at their sides week after week.
Phil

Tales from the trailer

2007-11-14T20:03:00.000-08:00

Sure, we're all busy working down here. But one of the best parts each day is when the nine of us gather in our trailer and tell stories -- stories of the day or stories of our lives.

John H, John VanO and Jim spent the first three days working at the site of a new house under construction in Gulport, about 10 miles away from Biloxi. This has been ... er ... a challenge. It's a huge, complex house, being built for three related families. This is not a typical project for Back Bay, but it is one the mission took on. It is a project, however, beyond the scope of volunteer labot. So it has not gone well, or, as John Hilliard said, "That place is nothing but trouble." The rafters are not going up well, the doors and windows don't fit, the list goes on and on. So today, at one point, our intrepid trio went to Home Depot to buy a tape measure. Once they got back to the work site, they realized that none of them had picked it up off the counter at the store. Back they went. And so it goes.

Last night, Mary had us all in stitches as she read selections from the Wisconsin Outdoor News that John Van O brought along. As she read through "Cuffs and Collars" about DNR arrests and citations of hunters and fishers, she combined naivete about hunting with deadpan delivery. Why would someone be arrested for hunting bear with seven dogs, she asked, in a tone that suggested maybe even one dog would be too many. (John Van O explained that hunting rules say you can only use six dogs.) By the time the evening was over, we figured if we had taped the conversation, we could have given "Guys on Ice" a run for its money.

Denise has managed to set up a running battle with John Rodgers, the leader of the St. Charles, Ill. group. John doesn't think much of Spook, our adopted black cat outside the trailer. So he needles Denise, who in turn needles him. We think ... think ... they will both survive the week.

Dave, Howard and I have been working on the inside of a house of a man who violated historic preservation rules by painting the exterior of his home blue and white because he is a Dallas Cowboys football fan. We've been fantasizing about repainting it green and gold just before we leave on Friday (and just before Dallas plays Green Bay at the end of this month).

This a group that loves a good story ... and the stories never stop. What a great bunch to be with.
Phil

Willing hearts

2007-11-14T19:51:00.000-08:00

One of the highlights for people who come to Back Bay for work camps is attending worship services on Wednesday evenings at Main Street Missionary Baptist Church in Biloxi. Rev. Don Morgan, who is associate for volunteer services at the mission, is also connected with this church. So folks from Wisconsin and Illinois and Connecticut gathered with about a dozen Biloxi residents to sing a few hymns, hear a bit of scripture, form an improptu gospel choir under Don's direction and then hear Don preach. And can he ever preach!

His theme was that a willing heart and a made-up mind with availability and ability can get the job done. He applied that to those of who are here as volunteers this week. One reminder -- that many folks back at our home churches have a willing heart, but not the availability to come to Biloxi. He urged us to thank them for their support in prayers and in money to help get all of us here (so thanks, y'all). He also talked about how those of us with willing hearts were learning this week to do a lot more than we thought we were able to do. Lots of heads nodded as he said that.

After the service, John H and John VanO met a woman whose house they had worked on last year. This afternoon, Dave and I were talking with the man whose house we are working on this year and he told us how he had been baptized at Missionary Baptist Church when he was a child.

So this night tied a lot of threads together in an interesting way. We ended by forming a circle around the sanctuary, holding hands and saying the Lord's Prayer. People from many backgrounds, from many points on the compass, all came together in this wonderful moment.
Phil

The whole experience

Biloxi after Katrina +2

2007-11-13T19:00:00.000-08:00

Driving around the streets of Biloxi two-plus years after Hurricane Katrina swept across this metropolitan area, it's easy to get lulled into thinking everything is well on the way back to normal.

Sure, there are still wrecked buildings like the souvenir shop you see above on the coastal highway -- U.S. 90. Sure, you can still see boards on some houses and empty lots where other houses used to be. But just before we arrived in Biloxi, the massive new bridge between Biloxi and Ocean Springs opened, replacing the one ripped apart by the hurricane. The neon lights of casinos fill the night sky, and these resort centers are making record profits. The main building at Back Bay Mission is all fixed up and looks beautiful.

Rev. Shari Prestemon, the executive director of Back Bay, offered us a view of the scenes not so immediately evident when she talked to our work camp group Monday afternoon. Of the 450,000 people living in the metro area of Biloxi, Gulfport and Ocean Springs, 40 percent earn less than 80 percent of the median household income. And what is the median household income in these parts, you ask. It's $48,000. That means that 80 percent of the families live on less than $38,500. That does give them much to work with for fixing up a house or buying a place to live.

That's the big issue, Shari told us. Land values are skyrocketing as people hold out hope that casinos will buy their land. That has frozen the market for new housing. Insurance costs have escalated beyond what many people can afford, often exceeding the value of mortgage payments in housing escrow accounts. Many people are choosing to live without any homeowner's insurance. "The insurance is a real mess," Shari said.

So while the glitter of Biloxi is returning for tourists, here's what Shari and her crew see on the back streets.

* Emergency assistance given out since Katrina by Back Bay -- which was already helping the poorest people here before the storm -- has increased by 500 percent. In 2006, Back Bay provided assistance to 3,300 people.

* About 11,000 people are still living in FEMA trailers.

* Many other people are still living doubled up with family or friends.

* An influx of Latino workers brought in by contractors and casinos has added to the housing crunch, with employers sometimes stuffing a dozen people into a small house.

* Homelessness continues to be a big issue, with people living in their cars, on the streets, under bridges. There is only one small homeless shelter, and that serves victims of domestic violence.

As we work on building a house for three families struggling to go on after the hurricane, as we paint the exterior of one house and rebuild the interior of another, our group from Memorial is making just a small dent in a huge crisis of affordable housing here. In the process, we are learning up close the pervasiveness of poverty and the on-going impact of this region's largest natural disaster.

Phil

Scenes from Back Bay

2007-11-13T18:36:00.000-08:00

Here are some shots from our work at Back Bay. The shot of Denise, Linda and Mary is at the house they are helping paint. Howard, Phil and Dave are at the house they are reframing with Pastor Pat Tucker from the UCC church in Eagle River, Wis. Her group is in the trailer next to ours. They have their own blog on their web site.

Hard at work

2007-11-12T19:38:00.000-08:00

Today was our first real work day in Biloxi. John Hilliard, John Van Overbeke and Jim Mayhew went off with a crew to Gulfport to put up roof rafters on a new house for three families. It's a very high, steep and ususual roof. (Think about the roof at Memorial and you'll begin to get the idea.)

Denise Brandl and Mary Upshaw went with a group painting the exterior of a house in Biloxi. This also involves some work on window frames and the like. Phil Haslanger and Howard Cosgrove were working inside a house helping put up interior wall frames. Dave and Linda Michael got lunches ready for our group as well as the 13 or so people from St. Charles, Ill.

We are likely to stay on these jobs all week.

We also met with Shari Prestemon, the executive director at Back Bay. She told us a lot about the current situation in Biloxi and the work of Back Bay. More on that in a future post.

Just know for now that we all feeling like we put in a good day (that means people are feeling tired) and that we celebrated Jim Mayhew's 65th birthday and Howard Cosgrove's 60th birthday this evening. That ... and a game of euchre ... was a great way to end the day.
Phil

Pictures from Biloxi

2007-11-11T18:04:00.000-08:00

Greetings from Biloxi

2007-11-10T20:20:00.000-08:00

Our work crew from Memorial UCC has settled in for the night. We arrived by car (John Hilliard, John Van Overbeke, Jim Myhew and Howard Cosgrove) and by plane (Phil Haslanger, Denise Brandl, Mary Upshaw, Dave and Linda Michael. By midafternoon, we had settled into our trailor at the Back Bay Mission site. Then we were off to New Orleans to explore a bit of the city.

Katrina remains a dominant presence here. On the flight from Memphis to Gulfport, I was talking with a woman who lives about 30 miles north of Biloxi. "Did Katrina affect you?" I asked. "Five and half feet of water," she replied. She and her three children -- then ages 5, 7 and 12 -- had taken refuge at her mother's place in another community before the storm. But even there, they watched water with white caps rush down the street. At their home, water destroyed everything. They lived in trailor for a year or so, now they are back home.

As Denise, Mary and I drove from the airport in Gulfport along the Gulf Coast to Biloxi, we saw a study in contrasts:
* The white sand on the beaches, carefully tended but still pretty unsafe as a result of all the debris washed up by Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005.
* Palm trees snapped off and dying on one side of the street, bushes manicured into the shape of dolphins in front of a resort on the other side.
* Brand new buildings next to empty lots next to the shells of buildings torn apart by the storm.
* Stretches of emptiness offset by casinos rising high into the sky, neon lights flashing.

And so it goes.
Phil

Ordination observations

2007-11-05T14:26:00.000-08:00

Two colleagues wrote their takes on ordination day.
Gordon Govier, a long-time Madison journalist, handles press relations for Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. He wrote this on his blog, All God's People.
"Late Career Clergy: Their Number is Growing"
Bill Wineke is a columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal and a UCC minister. This appeared as his column on Nov. 3.
Truth has its way of prevailing

Occasion for hope

2007-11-05T14:22:00.000-08:00

My friend Mimi Wuest from Reedsburg wrote this reflection after the ordination ceremony. Mimi and her husband Gene (and their daughters Emily and Abigail) have been part of our lives for a long time, so it was wonderful to read this.

As I have grown older, my closest spiritual relationship has been with St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. I have to say the dear fellow has never let me down. We have grown very close, St. Anthony and I, since I keep losing things, right and left. Keys, phone numbers, important letters and tools are the most frequent subjects of my prayers, but some of his successes include Halloween costumes, misplaced birthday gifts and over-due books.

Other than my on-going conversations with St. Anthony, my latest spiritual adventure led me to the ordination of a friend into the United Church of Christ ministry. I’ve always liked the openness and inclusivity of the UCC churches; my old church home in Chicago was a black sheep congregation of Disciples of Christ which was affiliated with the UCC.

It was heart-warming to see and hear the variety of religious leaders who attended this ordination. Ministers and laity were there from many UCC congregations as well as Lutherans and Catholics. I was there representing my own home-grown version of protestant paganism. Since my mother was frightened by the Methodists at an early age, I had little religious training as a child. I pieced together a belief system out of old radio broadcasts of “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” the Girl Scout laws and a stint with the Unitarian children’s choir.

Then I hooked up with the Disciples (the congregation, not the street gang) and spent 14 years singing fine music with them. Since I left Chicago my spirituality, like my life, has taken a path closer to nature. While I have visited some truly fine cathedrals in my life, I feel closer to God in the wilderness or seated beneath a great old tree than I do in the splendid monuments Man claims to have built in God’s honor.

Of late, I have been sorely disappointed in what passes for religious leadership in this country. Far too many of these “leaders” seem determined to turn us against one another. They indulge in finger-pointing and scape-goating and all manner of un-Christian behaviors. Under their tutelage, we move further and further away from peace on earth and good will towards men every year.

So a good dose of UCC empowerment was very welcome. Sunday’s ordination service at Lake Edge United Church of Christ in Madison was full of presentations, exhortations, examinations, acclamations, declarations and benedictions. Each one of these contained a healthy call to be of service to all of those in need, regardless of their race, religion or culture. A ministry of love and inclusion was not simply mouthed, it was practiced as a veritable throng of ministers came forward to lay their hands upon the newly ordained one and to give him their blessings.

Surely, we can see that the leadership we so desperately need in order to restore peace to the planet and attend to the ubiquitous miseries of hunger, disease, pollution and ignorance will not come from the self-serving political arena. Neither will it come from those who preach hatred and condemnation. Perhaps, just perhaps it will come from this new minister and others like him who will teach us to extend compassion to the entire human family and to the earth that sustains this family. Sunday’s ceremony offered everyone in attendance a much-needed occasion for hope.

Ordination Day

2007-10-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

As I walked into Lake Edge United Church of Christ on the east side of Madison on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 28, I could sense the energy in the place. Kelly Jetzer and Donna Kuelz were setting up to sing. Choir members were arriving. Ellen and our friends Donna Chaney and Linda Micke were getting an artistic installation in place in front of the communion table.

All of this was to get ready for my ordination service at 3 in the afternoon.

Even though I have been working at various local congregations as an authorized lay pastor in the United Church of Christ for several years, this would be the moment when ordination would define my role as a minister serving people on behalf of the whole church. For me, this day was a long time coming, considering that in my teen years, I was studying to be a priest. Now some 40 years later, the moment of ordination was at hand.

What was the thing that you liked best? Ellen asked me after the ceremony was over.

Well, certainly when all the other ordained clergy came forward to lay hands on me, that was mighty powerful. Julia counted 34 clergy -- UCC, of course, but also Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Baptist, Pentecostal, Catholic -- a wonderful expression of the range of traditions within Christianity. There I was in the center, listening to Donna and Kelly sing "Send Forth Your Spirit, O God," as hands pressed down upon my shoulders and my back. My eyes were closed and I just drank it the moment. In the UCC tradition, it is the community that does the ordaining. Here, the community had given its assent, it had joined together in prayer, and now those who had been set apart before me as ordained ministers were embracing me in that calling we all share.

Another vivid impression was the range of folks who had gathered for his moment. There were people from all four churches where I have worked as a pastor, a contingent from the newsroom at The Capital Times where I have worked for the past 34 years, Jewish and Muslim colleagues from the community forum that I am part of this year at the Center for Abrahamic Studies at UW. Friends introduced themselves to the congregation as "pagans from Reedsburg" and as part of the Free Thought Society and as members of the Unitarian Society. One of the leaders of the area Evangelical Lutheran Church in America brought greetings. Family members came from as far away as Detroit and Indianpolis and Minneapolis, from Missouri and from Kansas. Friends, neighbors, black, white, gay, straight, male, female, young, old, the physically fit and those who labor with physical limitations. During the communion service, I said, "We gather at this table set with bread and cup, common elements shared in many forms by people all over the world, to remind us that this table is wide and vast beyond our imaging." The gathering here indeed was wide and vast.

The glow lingers. It is a real rush to have a couple hundred friends gather together on your behalf. I am deeply grateful for their presence, their prayers and they promise of on-going support for my ministry. And I am hopeful that as a minister, as a pastor and teacher, I can help people come and see and experience the love of God poured out in Christ Jesus our Lord.

There is a slide show from the ordination you can see by clicking here.

More action for poverty as an issue in '08

2007-06-11T14:06:00.000-07:00

One week after Sojourners gave a well-noted push to getting poverty on the radar screen for the 2008 elections, another group with a lot more money weighed in to push the issue. The rock singer Bono and his ONE campaign, with financial backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and with bi-partisan support from two former Senate majority leaders - Democrat Tom Daschle and Republican Bill Frist -- announced a huge push in the coming year to get candidates to address issues of poverty. You can find more about that campaign here.

Two other useful resources from the last few days.

The New York Times Sunday magazine was a special issue all about income inequality in this country. If you don't have access to a paper copy, you can get to it online. (You may have to register, but it is free.) One of the articles is this issue focuses on Ruby Payne, the author of the book recommended by Steve Fine at our discussion. It is at this link.

Also in the New York Times, religion columnist Peter Steinfels had one of the most sophisticated assessments of the Sojourners event. You can read the whole column, but here is a wonderful set of questions that Steinfels posed:
On Monday, Ms. O’Brien kept describing the forum as one about “faith and politics,” and Ms. Zahn was backed by a logo with the same phrase.

But there was no “and” there. These conversations were about faith. They were about politics. They just weren’t conversations about faith and politics.

Think of questions that could have explored that “and.”

What does the Bible or any other religious source tell you about fighting poverty — and what doesn’t it tell you? Likewise for writing tax legislation or extending health care.

Does your faith dictate any absolute principles, ones you would never compromise, for using military force? For interrogating prisoners? For making peace in the Middle East? For legal provision of abortion? For recognizing gay marriage?

What is your reaction to the claim that religion is “a conversation stopper” that should be kept out of political debates because it appeals to emotionally powerful convictions beyond rational examination?

Do you agree with the large proportion of voters — perhaps half or more — who say they wouldn’t vote for an atheist for president, even one generally qualified for the office?

What do you say to those who fear that even conversations like this one constitute a religious test for the presidency?

Some books about poverty

2007-06-07T19:41:00.000-07:00

On Monday night, Sojourners co-sponsored a discussion with three presidential candidates -- Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama -- about faith, politics and poverty. About 30 people gathered at Fitchburg Memorial UCC to watch it together and this discuss the ideas that came out of it. Here is a reading list that I put together coming out of that discussion:

Steve Fine recommended this book during our discussion:
A Framework for Understanding Poverty
By Ruby K.Payne
199 pp., $22, 2005
aha Process Inc.

A good new book for linking faith to hunger:
Take This Bread: A Radical Conversation
By Sara Miles
283 pp. $24.95, 2007
Ballantine Books

For a evangelical warning about getting too caught up in politics:
The Myth of a Christian Nation:
How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church
By Gregory A. Boyd
219 pp., $14.95, 2007
Zondervan

For a look at folks engaged in living with global poverty:
The New Friars: The Emerging Movement Serving the World's Poor
By Scott Bessenecker (he's from Madison)
199 pp., $15, 2006
IVP Books

And for folks living with poverty in this country:
The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical
By Shane Clairborne
368 pp., $12.99, 2006
Zondervan

A woman writing about her own experience of being poor:
My Name is Child of God, Not "Those People"
By Julia K. Dinsmore
176 pp., $13.99, 2007
Augsburg Books

And don't forget the basic book for Sojourners -
God's Politics
By Jim Wallis
432 pp., $14.95, 2006
HarperSanFrancisco

And in the beginning ...

2007-06-07T19:22:00.000-07:00

... I created a blog. I'll use this to post reflections on life in our world, post sources of material that others might find interesting, provide links to places you might find useful. I hope you will write back, so this can become a place for conversation rather than a one-way rumination.

Let the fun begin.