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Month: February 2006

filled with power

filled with power

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When the Holy Spirit comes upon you, you will be filled with power, and you will be witnesses for me …

That’s what Jesus promised his first apostles: you will be filled with power … and they were:

  • power to boldly proclaim a message of good news
  • power to heal broken bodies and broken souls
  • power to stand up to fierce opposition and harsh persecution
  • power to see what they could not see before — the ever-widening circle of the Lord’s embrace.

You will be filled with power …

Do you feel powerful, empowered, filled with power? Sometimes it seems that for us faith is more about comfort and assurance than about power, more about belief than about action, more about what Jesus can do for us than about we can do in Jesus’ name.

What can we do in Jesus’ name?

  • Can we boldly proclaim good news to a world that is cynical, hurting, despairing, splintered?
  • Do we expect to bring healing to broken souls and broken bodies?
  • Will we stand up and not back down in the face of doubt, derision, scoffing, verbal attacks, political isolation?
  • Will we see the still-widening circle of the Lord’s embrace?

I don’t want to be part of a church that is innocuous, self-absorbed, timid. I don’t want to be content with a faith that promises future blessing, but makes no real difference now. I want to know what it is — to explore with you, my fellow believers, what it is — that we can do here and now in Jesus’ name!

Do we believe the good news? Do we believe Jesus is alive? Do we believe Jesus is alive in us? Do we believe that we are filled with power, and are we ready to exercise that power in love, in Jesus’ name, for our neighbor’s sake?

national religious campaign against torture

national religious campaign against torture

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Thank you to Rev. Dr. George Hunsinger of Princeton Theological Seminary for notifying this weblog of the work of the National Religious Coalition Against Torture. Read their statement, “Torture Is A Moral Issue,” on their website (www.nrcat.org) and consider adding your signature. An excerpt from the statement follows:

Torture violates the basic dignity of the human person that all religions hold dear. It degrades everyone involved –policy-makers, perpetrators and victims. It contradicts our nation’s most cherished ideals. Any policies that permit torture and inhumane treatment are shocking and morally intolerable.

Torture and inhumane treatment have long been banned by U.S. treaty obligations, and are punishable by criminal statute. Recent developments, however, have created new uncertainties. By reaffirming the ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment as well as torture, the McCain amendment, now signed into law, is a step in the right direction. Yet its implementation remains unclear …

National Religious Coalition Against Torture logo
bono at the national prayer breakfast

bono at the national prayer breakfast

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Worth reading: U2 lead singer Bono’s remarks delivered at the National Prayer Breakfast yesterday. Very much worth reading for those who take faith in Jesus seriously!

Here’s a brief excerpt:

Here’s some good news for the President. After 9-11 we were told America would have no time for the World’s poor. America would be taken up with its own problems of safety. And it’s true these are dangerous times, but America has not drawn the blinds and double-locked the doors.

In fact, you have doubled aid to Africa. You have tripled funding for global health. Mr. President, your emergency plan for AIDS relief and support for the Global Fund, you and Congress, have put 700,000 people onto life-saving anti-retroviral drugs and provided 8 million bed nets to protect children from malaria.

Outstanding human achievements. Counterintuitive. Historic. Be very, very proud.

But here’s the bad news. From charity to justice, the good news is yet to come. There’s is much more to do. There’s a gigantic chasm between the scale of the emergency and the scale of the response.

And finally, it’s not about charity after all, is it? It’s about justice.

Let me repeat that: It’s not about charity, it’s about justice.

And that’s too bad.

Because you’re good at charity. Americans, like the Irish, are good at it. We like to give, and we give a lot, even those who can’t afford it.

But justice is a higher standard. Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties, it doubts our concern, it questions our commitment.

6,500 Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drug store. This is not about charity, this is about Justice and Equality …

unforgettable haiti

unforgettable haiti

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Haiti … unforgettable

That was the last line I wrote in the journal I kept during my ten-day visit to Haiti in the summer of 1991. And it’s true. The land and its people are still very much with me, in my mind and in my heart.

So a reference to Haiti on an internet news server caught my attention … and reading the article (a blog post for the Washington Post, submitted by photojournalist, Ron Haviv) brought back many memories. You may read his commentary here: Glimmers of hope in Cite Soleil. Be sure to check out his photo gallery as well. I bring this to your attention, because we know so little in this country, and, too often, care so little about this near neighbor of ours.

One afternoon in that summer of 1991, I walked the alleys of Cité Soleil in Port-au-Prince. It was a hopeful time. We were there just months before the coup that removed Jean Bertrand Aristide from power, but while we were there, in the midst of the systemic poverty and the pervasive despair, there was a sense of hopefulness, of new possibility. In Cité Soleil, the seaside Port-au-Prince slum, we saw new wooden houses with raised cement floors and many construction projects — trenches and walls. Our guide, a man with numerous previous visits to Port-au-Prince, told us there was more building activity in Cité Soleil than he had ever seen.

We stopped at a one-room shop in a cement block building. Claire’s Boutique, it was called. It sold the artwork and crafts of local artisans, insuring them a fair share of the earnings. I purchased a carved wooden nativity for my wife: Joseph, Mary, the baby in a manger, three strangers bearing gifts, and several barn animals. The faces of the carved people are long and narrow, somber and beautiful. The nativity occupies a special place on our mantle every Advent season.

Maybe things can/will change …, I wrote in my journal that evening.

But all too soon, for the majority of Haitians, hope was turned once more to resignation and despair. Once more and still, violence is rampant and poverty intractable and oppression the “norm” and we American neighbors virtually oblivious.

Next week, the Haitian people go to the polls. René Préval, a former Aristide associate and the favorite of Haiti’s poor, leads the presidential field. Maybe things can/will change …

And maybe we will pay attention. Maybe we will not forget.