Monthly Archives: April 2008

Hues Corporation Churches

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Remember the Disco hit Rock the Boat by the Hues Corporation?

Don’t rock the boat baby (rock the boat)

Don’t tip the boat over

Don’t rock the boat baby (rock the boat)

Don’t tip the boat over

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright does. As he explained to Bill Moyers:

Unfortunately, most churches now are “status quo.” And so that, to the extent that they’re not trying to feed the poor, they’re not trying to hook up jobs and people, they’re not concerned about the lowest, the least, the left out. They’re not concerned about the youth, they’re concerned about “Let me come here on a Sunday, hear something that tells me I’m ok, and I’m going to back to where I’ve been going. Don’t rock the boat…”

Hues Corporation churches aren’t just those “other” less liberal denominations, UU readers. We UUs have Hues Corporation congregations as well. How Hues are we? How Hues am I? How Hues are you and yours? And what are we to do about it … ?

Road Trip with Words

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I traveled today to visit a congregation I am working with as a mentor in a District congregational health and vitality program.  Although I have been working with the congregation’s health and vitality team during the previous year, I hadn’t yet been to a service at their church, yet another very historic Massachusetts congregation.

I enjoyed the service. It was difficult at times to remember to notice things to commend and critique because, well, hey I’m a minister and I enjoy church.

I also enjoyed the opportunity to do something I often don’t get to do on Sunday – listen to NPR – or as my son calls it, “the documentary station” – as in “Dad’s been in the car again, the radio’s on the documentary station.”  He becoming a real riot, that tween son of mine.

On the drive down to church this morning, I caught one of NPR’s series of essays “What I Believe.”  The last one of these I remember hearing was by Teller of the comedy team Penn and Teller and it remained with me because it was cogent and passionate expression and explanation of Teller’s atheism.  This morning’s essay, however was a psychotherapist speaking about his belief in adaptation; 16 years of life parenting an autistic son having finally given him the courage to answer with confidence patients who said to him, “I just don’t know how I am going to cope,” with “You’ll do the best you can.”  Which is all any one of us can do.

On the ride home I caught the program Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett.  This morning’s program featured an interview with Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist and  2004 Nobel Peace Price winner.  I was hooked to  hear Professor  Maathai speak of the faith behind her political activism and ecological work because as a person who has run for office on a Green Party ticket, I remember that she won the Nobel, I also learned that she founded the Kenyan Green Party.

Atheist in foxhole sues military over his existence

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United States Army Specialist Jeremy Hall, who has served in Iraq and is currently serving at Fort Riley Kansas in a Military Police unit, is an atheist. An Associated Press story today by John Milburn reports that Hall has:

filed a lawsuit alleging he’s been harassed and his constitutional rights have been violated because he doesn’t believe in God. The suit names Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Mikey Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation have taken on his case. These are the folks who addresses the issues of religious intolerance at the Air Force Academy, where there was/is pressure to be an evangelical/fundamentalist Christian. NPR’s Morning Edition reported on this as far back as May 2005.

Not to get into a conspiracy theory mindset but, it’s a growing concern that if a Dominionist Christianity is to take a real foothold in the United States, one of the places people with these beliefs will want to have a strong presence is in the military. A theocracy needs a strong arm.

It’s a good thing to see more liberal religious Military Chaplains, such as the intern who followed me at church where I did my internship and David Pyle at Celestial Lands (I highly recommend his post/sermon of April 5) and the folks at UU’s in the Military.

Think Globally, Eat Locally

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I spent most of this Earth Day in my garden. This will be the sixth year I have kept an organic garden at home. As I write this tomato plants more than a foot tall, started a month ago fill our living room. They’ve been moved back from the bay window sill to make room for the six inch peppers and the newly sprouted lettuces and kale. There are carrots and kale and lettuces and beans already in the ground outside. That ground has been tilled, the compost (made over the summers with direction from the Rodale Book of Composting) has been worked into the garden plot.

This year, the number of different vegetables in the garden will be reduced to kale, tomatoes, peppers (bell and hot), carrots, beans, and some early lettuce. All these things grow well in the yard. Instead of growing a wide variety things this year I am going to go for quantity and try canning and freezing for the first time.

During the growing season our family will be getting fresh fruits and vegetables from The Food Project. We have bought a Community Supported Agriculture Farm Share for the first time. We are tired of eating genetically modified, chemically fertilized, God knows what food. We want organic produce year round if possible and we don’t want to participate in feeding the industrial food machine that burns fossil fuels to truck in produce from Chile and California when we can grow it right here where we live.

We began our quest towards better eating when our son was diagnosed with multiple food allergies, including corn, soy, wheat, rice, barley, eggs, and fish.

Corn is a killer, not just metaphorically. Corn fed beef may be responsible for higher rates of heart disease as it’s not the red meat itself that is unhealthy but the highly unbalanced ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acids in corn fed CAFO meat, whereas grass fed meat retains a balanced ratio of these essential fats.

My education on eating continued with Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and The Omnivore’s Dilemma as well as a collection of essays called Food & Faith: Justice, Joy and Daily Bread.

So the prayer for Earth Day this year comes from Wendell Berry:

How we eat determines how the world is used.

National Poetry Month

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The Academy of American Poets has been at the forefront of celebrating National Poetry Month since its inception in 1996. April was chosen because students are still in school and April will not conflict with Black History Month in February or Women’s History Month in March.

In honor of National Poetry Month, I want to share some of my favorite poems and poets with you. Some of them you’ve probably heard of before and some, maybe not.

One of my favorite poets is my friend Richard Smyth. Some of Richard’s poems are online at his website and you can even listen to some of them. One series of poems I like by Richard are his Fireman poems. Here’s the link to listen to the mp3 of Richard reading his poem The Fireman and His Search for God. Richard read my favorite poem, The Summer Day by Mary Oliver at my ordination.

I also love slam poetry and one my favorites pieces I’ve seen in person was a poem called Girls Don’t Play Hockey by Valerie Lawson. Because I worked as a teacher, and was very much the kind of teacher in the poem (I think), and because my wife is a teacher I love What Teachers Make by Taylor Mali.

The teacher in Taylor Mali’s slam poem isn’t quite Mr. Keating urging his students to gaze in Uncle Walt’s eyes in Dead Poet’s Society, but here’ my favorite from W.W. anyway:

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

One of the best courses I took as an undergraduate all those years ago was a class in Irish Poetry and Drama. W.B. Yeats I saw coming. The Stolen Child is one my favorites, especially the version set to music by The Waterboys. What I didn’t see coming in the Irish Poetry class were poets I had never heard of before, like Bill Simmons:

Second Coming

The end is in sight now. In the beginning

I had reservations, I was the reborn Christ

perparing to heal the world’s fever with simple

truths and courage fit for the sacrifice.

Marriage changed me. The hero was ashamed

to fail to make one woman happy, I think,

to find himself nonplussed in argument,

lazy, impressionable, fond of a drink.

Now he is glad, with effort, to provide,

food for his wife and children. He feels at night

like a glass globe sheltering the flame

of family, his little world’s uncertain light.

He is teacher, but all he hopes for now

is to get the students talking, coax the shy

and tease the pompous, help them to clarify

their indignation a little. I still try!

That soaring mind I had survives, locked

in its cabin, roaring enigmas for commands

at serviceable Simmons, the first mate

busy at what he seldom understands.

I loved the poetry part of that course, but as much as I love theater I don’t remember a lot about the drama part of the course. I did, however, have a great experience at a show about a poetry reading. Sarah Jones’ Bridge and Tunnel, a one-woman show about race, immigration, and modern American Life in New York City’s outer burroughs is set in an open mike night at a poetry reading in Queens. It’s a fantastic show.

One of my own:

In God’s Room

I wonder sometimes

If God looks down at the world

and then sits in the middle of her room

and draws her knees to her chest

and wraps her arms around her legs

and rock back and forth

and back and forth

and back forth

and back and forth

and cries.

Poetry and theology are, of course, deeply intertwined. Our spirits cry out for artistic expression. Our souls do not want us to just state the facts, our hearts want to be poured out on the page, cried out to the universe, sung out to God. What else, after all are the Psalms? Many other sacred texts take poetic form as well. Poetry is the music of theology.

What are some of your favorite poems and who are some of your favorite poets?

Reform the joint media appearances!

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I slept through the “debate” last night. Literally. I had a sleep test. I don’t have sleep apnea, thank goodness. At least I don’t think so because the technician didn’t put the breathing device on me (which he would have if I had shown signs of apnea).

And it appears I didn’t miss anything substantial between Senators Clinton and Obama, either because all they were asked about were lapel pins, lying about sniper fire, and their pastors. You would think there wasn’t a war in Iraq, a mortage crisis, an environmental disaster and a collapsing economy. Maybe my priorities are just screwed up.

Hunter at dailyKos (thanks Mary) has a great essay up. The first graph:

After the first forty minutes of last night’s Democratic debate, it was clear we were watching something historic. Not historic in a good way, mind you, but historic in the sense of being something so deeply embarrassing to the nation that it will be pointed to, in future books and documentary works, as a prime example of the collapse of the American media into utter and complete substanceless, into self-celebrated vapidity, and into a now-complete inability or unwillingness to cover the most important affairs of the nation to any but the most shallow of depths.

And the last:

Perhaps, if nothing else, it is time to take back the debate process and insist once again on moderators chosen for competence, expertise and neutrality, rather than network or cable network fame. The elites of our press have managed to botch the task time and time again; perhaps it should be left to someone with an actual interest in doing the job.

The one thing this essay doesn’t touch upon, nor does any other commentary I’ve read or heard on last night “debate” is that not only do these joint media appearances need to be rescued from incompetent moderators working for a media more interested in entertainment than issues, BUT these joint appearances need to:

1. be real debates – old school debate team debates

2. once we get past the primaries, they need to include all the candidates on enough state ballots win the electoral college (and hopefully we can soon dispense with the electoral college).

Can you imagine Ralph Nader, think what you will of him, putting up with that stuff last night for one second? Not a chance. Lapel pins? Please? Next question. No I will absolutely not answer a question about lapel pins when we’re spending 700 million dollars a day in Iraq. You’d get the same from the Green Party candidate be it Cynthia McKinney or Jesse Johnson.

Wherever you fall on the political spectrum, there are serious electoral reforms that, if you are a Unitarian Universalist, need your serious consideration if democracy is to be upheld as a core value in society as well as the congregation.  Full participation in presidential debates (and dismantling the Commission on Presidential Debates) is one of them.

Transforming Church

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From the Transforming Church website:

 

Be the Change. A movement is growing in this country to bring the twenty-first century church back to its first century roots. New models of ministry are emerging to create an ancient/modern church. Discipleship is replacing membership, and gift-based ministry teams are replacing committees. TransformingChurch.com is a part of that movement.

I once mentioned that I don’t believe in committees in sermon. I said I believe in ministries. People thought I had lost my marbles. Yet, I truly believe we need to do exactly this type of reframing in our UU context that Transforming Church is talking about.

Krister Stendahl, 1921-2008

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I just learned that Krister Stendahl died yesterday.

Stendhal

I arrived at Harvard Divinity School in 1991, just after Bishop Stendhal went out to Waltham to Brandeis.  Yet he was still around the Div School often and I was very fortunate to have been there to hear him give talks and lead HDS chapel.  He preached on the first chapter of John’s gospel just before semester break my first year there.  One of the best five sermons I’ve heard in my life, at least one of the five that had the most impact at time of hearing.   It is an awesome, inspiring and holy man that touches your life so powerfully from what seems to be such peripheral contact.

In “Why I Love the Bible,” an essay printed in the Winter 2007 issue of Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Stendahl concluded with this paragraph: “Finally, let me leave you with a word which is the one that, in my own long love relationship to this book, I want to have in my mind when my end comes. It reads, in 2 Corinthians 3:18, like this—‘And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” (My emphasis)

Harvard Divinity School Obituary.

New York Times Obituary.

Scopes, Cajun Style

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It would be nice if we lived in a country where we didn’t need to keep fighting this battle. It would be nice if we lived in a country that didn’t drown our diet corn syrup, too, but alas…

In the email this morning was a request for help from the Clergy Letter Project, an effort to gain support for evolution and demonstrate support for evolution and science among (mostly Christian) clergy.   The CLP isn’t necessarily needed in UU circles, but I appreciate their intent in the circles where they aim their efforts.

If you know any of our UU clergy colleagues in Louisiana or other clergy there who might testify, pass it on.

A call for help for clergy in Louisiana from the National Center for Science Education

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is currently tracking a piece of legislation in the Louisiana State legislature and would appreciate your help with it. The bill, called “Louisiana Academic Freedom Act” is a stalking horse for creationism in public schools.  It singles out evolution as a controversial topic, and encourages teachers to present the “strengths and weaknesses” of that topic.  As you know, there’s no reason to single out evolution for that sort of scrutiny, and in other states, such language has been used as a way to sneak creationist attacks on evolution into science classes.  The bill in Louisiana was drafted by a group known for distributing “textbook addenda” which advocate for a 6,000 year old earth, which makes us especially suspicious.

 

The bill will be considered in committee next Thursday morning, April 17th.  It would be very helpful to have a prominent member of the Louisiana clergy there to explain to the senators on the education committee why this bill is unnecessary, and why evolution does not conflict with religious belief.  If you would be available that morning, or can suggest some clergy colleagues who might be available, NCSE would greatly really appreciate your assistance and support.  Please contact Barbara Forrest bforrest@selu.edu  or Josh Rosenau rosenau@ncseweb.org  for further information, with suggestions or about your availability to testify.