Credit: Creative Commons/Svadlifari.

From before I started my bar mitzvah training, I was terrified of Christians. I was born in the shadow of the Holocaust and grew up with the specter of anti-Semitism in the air. For better or worse, I didn’t actually get to know any “live” Christians throughout my childhood in an overwhelmingly Jewish part of Los Angeles, so my stereotypes of Christians as Jew-haters was left largely intact until I moved to Berkeley for college in the early 70s.

It was as much a shock to me as to my kosher-keeping grandma, then, when at the end of my college years, I was baptized Roman Catholic. I had been taught to be proud of my Jewish heritage, and I was, but the “religious” part had seemed to my youthful, arrogant mind largely obsolete and rather ridiculous. Here it was, the late 20^th century: how could one actually take seriously ancient stories of miraculous manna and mountaintop encounters with God? I was not looking for God or religion. Yet, after a pair of powerful experiences of an inbreaking Presence, I found myself on a quest to discover if and who God might be.

Christianity was about the last place I expected to end up. I grew up knowing nothing at all about Jesus or the New Testament. All I “knew” were rumors and suggestions. Discovering Jesus was an exciting surprise. And, of course, he was Jewish, from the day of his birth until the day of his death.

Self Portrait

Sometimes in the midst of the mundane or the profane of the day, I find myself musing about the meaning of it all. My friend Rev. Jim Burklo just sent along his latest musing, and while it doesn’t answer all the questions about life, the universe, and everything, it did bring a smile to my face and some peace to my morning. May it do some of the same for you too. Read on!

In the story we heard today from the Hebrew scriptures, Eli the priest is not the hero. Samuel is. At one level, the story’s message belongs to a genre beloved around the world, wherein a youth is able to discern the truth which age and experience cannot see or hear. By means of such stories, the keepers of tradition remind themselves that they are passing on – that our ways are not always. But this story has a twist to send us into a channel deeper than the ordinary legend of its kind. Here we are told that “the word of the LORD was rare in those days.” As the story opens, the priest is no longer able to see. Both he and young Samuel are trying to sleep.

Blindness and sleep are figures for ignorance and denial in all the people. A group who cannot face their crisis is sleeping; most of its members are blind. The word of the LORD is rare – not because the Eternal ever ceases from communicating, but because so few are awake and able to discern the word. Now, when Samuel awakes, it is a figure for a whole people preparing to wake from their indifference to action. It can happen in a whole nation. What is the Arab Spring if not whole peoples preparing to wake? It can happen in a church, as the people grow restless with their old ways and evil habits and yearn for transforming meaning and effective action.

Of course, waking comes to individuals, too. Yet on this day of honor for our prophet Martin Luther King, it is well that we remember that no individual, no matter how skilled or gifted, ever simply leads a people out of the valley of the shadow of sleep. No, the rising of a people is a work far more complex. It resists all science and prediction. But this much is sure. The greatness of a leader hangs on the people’s awareness of the severity of their crisis. If most of the people are sleeping, no matter how their heedless practices oppress, there exists no severity in which great skill and wisdom can find expression. But sometimes, something changes in a people. A critical mass of energy arises in the consciousness of enough of them, and they turn in their beds and rise and stand. You know this is how it happened with Martin Luther King. We know from his own words that, fresh from doctoral studies at Boston University, installed in his Montgomery, Alabama pulpit, he anticipated nothing of the public life that unfolded through him. The waking began when the bus riders had awakened and begun their boycott, when they asked him – how shall we put it? – asked him to become great for them.

When John comes down to the Jordan river saying God is on the move, the kingdom of heaven is near — hundreds of years have passed since any prophet offered a word worth keeping about God’s power to save. So far as the Hebrew Bible tells it, after the Jews headed home from exile in Babylon, God pretty much retired from the mighty works business, a.k.a. politics.

Maybe Isaiah of Babylon just went too far. In that gorgeous passage — Comfort, comfort ye, my people — so perfectly rendered by the aria from Handel’s Messiah — Ev’ry valley shall be exalted — there hides a terrible irony. When the poet writes from exile in Babylon, everyone knows that the Persian emperor Cyrus is turning his great army west toward Babylon. The die is cast. Babylon will fall. The Jews will be sent home from their sorrows to Jerusalem. Everyone knows it, but the poet in Babylon sees in it the hand of God and this inspires his song. “Make straight in the desert a highway for our God . . . may every mountain and hill be made low” – for General Cyrus! May this military march move, swift and unhindered, to victory utter and complete. That is Isaiah’s prayer. “See, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him.” Shock and awe in Babylon of Iraq. That is Isaiah’s song.

A mosque in Dearborn, MI attended by members of the reality TV show, "All American Muslim." / Photo Courtesy of TLC

We are community leaders from the three Abrahamic faiths who don’t normally look to reality TV to teach lessons of faith and religious freedom. But TLC’s new show, All American Muslim, is doing just that. It’s also come under recent attack from Islamophobic extremists who seem to have forgotten the values on which this country was founded. Rather than tune out in protest, as Americans, it’s time to tune in.

Nothing could be less celebratory than having to celebrate. Imagine someone holding a gun to your head: “Sing Christmas carols! And sing like you mean it!” Where does celebration come from? What does it mean? I’m inclined to think that any word connected to “celebrity” has to be suspect. 

The dictionary, source of so much wisdom, tells me something unexpected: “to perform with appropriate rites and ceremonies; solemnize, observe, commemorate, sound the praises of, make known publicly.” No wonder we can feel it’s a heavy burden. Appropriate rites: like holiday cards, Christmas trees, and end-of-year letters. I’m happy to observe and commemorate, but solemnize?

By Lourdes Cardenal (Own work)

In the mall culture, Christmas is light as a snowflake, but some part of it is heavy, as heavy as labor, a forced journey while you’re nine months pregnant, on a donkey yet. And what’s the journey for? To pay taxes. Then the hotels are all full. Joseph must have cursed a blue streak and Mary felt the floor drop out, facing her first labor far from home, from a midwife, from her mother.

From my friend the Rev. Jim Burklo, of the Center for Progressive Christianity, a musing.

Press Release: The Virgin of Guadalupe Speaks
For immediate release

At a press conference in Los Angeles, CA, La Virgen de Guadalupe, on the 480th anniversary of her apparition in Mexico, suddenly appeared, held up on a crescent by a little cherubic angel. With brilliant effulgence surrounding her, she declared her independence from the Catholic Church specifically and from the Christian religion as a whole. “I belong to all humanity,” she declared. “No exceptions!”

Chanukah was the first recorded national liberation struggle against Greek imperialism, and Christmas celebrates the birth of a hoped-for messiah to free the Jewish people from Roman imperialism.

What would a non-consumeristic Christmas look like? Here's one vision: a "Christmas Peace Tree" made from post-consumer recycled plastic installed by artists in Washington, DC, as part of Occupy DC's gathering in Freedom Plaza. Credit: Creative Commons/Elvert Barnes.

The symbolism of a homeless couple giving birth in a manger surrounded by animals because the more comfortable people have not been able to make room for them inside a roofed home is akin to the symbolism of the candles lit on Chanukah to celebrate the victory of the powerless over the powerful: both offer a powerful reminder that both Judaism born of slaves in Egypt and Christianity born of a movement of the poor and powerless were in their times the “Occupy” movement that confronted the powerful and those who served them.

All the more tragic to witness how both religions have been twisted in our own time to serve the powerful. Major forces in the Christian world have sided with the war-makers, ultra-nationalists, and the blame-poverty-on-the-poor cheerleaders for vast inequalities and protection of the rich against the needs of the rest. Jews, while retaining their commitment to domestic liberalism, have become tone-deaf to the cries of the oppressed in Palestine, to the huge inequalities of wealth in Israel, and have allowed their American institutions to be governed not by “one person, one vote” but “one dollar, one vote.”

This sermon by Rev. Stephen Phelps, the interim Senior Minister at the Riverside Church in New York, is the first in an ongoing series of sermons by the Reverend.

Romans 12: 1-13; Matthew 22: 16-22

Almost 180 years ago, the French citizen Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the new America and later described the character of our people in essays which still startle us Americans with features so recognizable. He saw, for example, our vaunted individualism. He defined it this way:

a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass
of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society
formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself . . . Such folk owe
no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody. They form the habit of
thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine their whole destiny is in their hands.
(Democracy in America, p. 508)

You could say that something of today’s Tea Party has been part of America from the beginning. Its creed is hardly clear but it contains the belief that What’s mine is mine and I got it with nobody’s help. The extreme expression of this mantra once belonged to libertarians only, with Ayn Rand their evangelist. But since Ronald Reagan taught the catechism that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” hundreds of politicians have been bornagain to the religion of self and wealth.

Creative Commons / JMozzolaa

On Monday night, November 14, 2011 the mayor of New York City ordered the police to evict the 500 or so overnight occupiers in Zuccotti Park. The eviction happened around 2 a.m. He did not tell them to leave within 72 hours. Or 48 hours. Or even by morning. He moved them out by force at 2 a.m. using surprise. In addition the police put the tents and tarps, many of the backpacks, computers, notebooks, sweatshirts and granola bars into a trash compactor and let the grind be heard throughout the park. As Rev. Robert Coleman of Riverside Church said, “I have the receipts for the 100 tents we bought. I’d like the city to repay my congregation for the destruction of our tents.” Sacred space may start with tents and have a middle stage in church buildings, even sanctuaries. Sacred space has no need of one place. It can occupy many, at the same time.

Consider the way in which too many Christians, Jews, and Muslims have imagined the city of Jerusalem as their privately or parochially owned sacred space. We speak often of a two state solution to the “problem” of Jerusalem. That political solution need not stop the sacralizing of space, the universality of the human urge to call one place “Ur” or original home.

A meditation at Occupy Oakland

On Monday night, November 14, 2011 the mayor of New York City ordered the police to evict the 500 or so overnight occupiers in Zicotti Park. The eviction happened around 2 a.m. He did not tell them to leave within 72 hours. Or 48 hours. Or even by morning. He moved them out by force at 2 a.m. using surprise. In addition the police put the tents and tarps, many of the backpacks, computers, notebooks, sweatshirts and granola bars into a trash compactor and let the grind be heard throughout the park. As Rev. Robert Coleman of Riverside Church said, “I have the receipts for the 100 tents we bought. I’d like the city to repay my congregation for the destruction of our tents.” Sacred space may start with tents and have a middle stage in church buildings, even sanctuaries. Sacred space has no need of one place. It can occupy many, at the same time.

What follows is a list of blended do’s and don’ts if your congregation or minister were to decide to open your space as a sanctuary for Occupy Poughkeepsie or OWS Protesters. For the record, my congregation has done so the last two nights, will again tonight, and will consider doing so going forward. We “slept” about 100 each night, turned away about 40. Riverside, our chief partner, in this enterprise, slept about 60. The rest have been scattered to the four winds, originally by the police eviction that separated then forcefully by allowing only forty or so at a time to go any one direction. The police action gave new meaning to the words, “divide and conquer.” It didn’t work – as the movement is already too deep in the hearts and minds of Americans. If anything, the eviction moved us forcefully into a second phase of this movement, which has changed the American story about ourselves. We are now authoring the story again – not reading what Wall Street tells us about our political and economic futures or ourselves.

As the global economic downturn continues into its fifth year, growing dissatisfaction among the public with our malfunctioning economic system has changed the tone and agenda of American political discourse. A number of economists and commentators are asking questions about the future of that economic system and are considering rather unorthodox approaches to address its current failings. NYU economist Nouriel Roubini recently wrote a piece, “Is Capitalism Doomed?,” in which he claims that Karl Marx was “right in arguing that globalization, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct.” Roubini recommends investment in “human capital, skills and social safety nets” to prevent economic catastrophe, including “unending stagnation, depression … and massive social and political instability.” Writing for Bloomberg financial news service, George Magnus, a senior economic adviser at UBS Investment Bank, says we ought to “give Karl Marx a chance to save the world economy.” He approvingly cites the “paradox of over-production and under-consumption” which roots economic crises in the “poverty and restricted consumption of the masses.”

Magnus agrees with Marx that an economic crisis will erupt when capitalists are unable to sell their goods at their original values because the low wages on the part of workers restrict the volume of commodities they can buy. Every capitalist has an incentive to lower wages because this both increases his individual profit and permits him to invest in additional capital. But, if capitalists as a whole succeed in reducing the wages of workers, then they will be unable to sell the goods that their firms produce. This is the “paradox”: capitalists have an incentive to lower workers’ wages, but in the long run lowering wages undermines the position of capitalists. What secures their conditions of existence has a tendency to also undermine them.

Soup & Bread at the Hideout

Sometimes even an atheist needs a community soup kitchen.

This winter, I will probably need one, and so will many many of my fellow Americans. This winter, when the thin veil of November leaves has finally come down in Chicago, the sand is banked on the beaches against the lake shore wind and the dark comes early, I will be happy for a bowl of soup and a place to eat it where I feel welcome.

Like so many this year, for me the recession is grinding down hard, and the things that held me together are beginning to fray, just a little and at the edges, but still, the possibility of coming unraveled hangs over all endeavors while the nights get colder.

Like the people occupying parks the whole country over, I am running out of faith in governments and institutions to provide a little grace and shelter while we all wait out the economic troubles we’ve got to endure.

This article was co-authored by Matthew L. Skinner.

Picture this: an Iraqi reporter becomes interested in the work of a Jewish student in Israel after reading an article about Jewish-Muslim relations in medieval Spain that the student published online. The reporter contacts the student and interviews him about future prospects for Jewish-Muslim coexistence.

As the student in this story and co-author of this article, Joshua Stanton knows first-hand how technology is reshaping the way people of different religions interact. To start with, he and the Iraqi reporter would never have connected without the Internet, which enabled them to bypass regional politics and borders.

Yet the Internet’s potential can yield various outcomes. Despite our increased connectivity, people of different faith traditions remain all too likely to talk past one another. Just look at the comments section of any online news article.

Our friend Rev. Jim Burklo (Center for Progressive Christianity) just visited the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  His visit is chronicled in this latest musing that I found fascinating and wonderful, especially what happened at the very end… (read on).

When I was reading into a book about Adolf Hitler, entitled The Psychopathic God, when I ran across a meaningful quote from a French Revolution-era author, diplomat and orator named Honore Mirabeau. In the book he wrote about his experience visiting the kingdom of Prussia (A Secret History of the Court of Berlin), Mirabeau wrote:

“Prussia is not a country that has an Army; it is an Army that has a country”.

That quote piqued my interest so I did some research into the realities in which Mirabeau found himself. My initial thought was to write column about Prussian militarism and the alarming similarities to our own but instead decided to write about the French Revolution, particularly with the early phases of the current revolution going on around the world in the Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring Uprising movements. There are many lessons to be learned.

I will expand on Mirabeau’s tantalizing quote in another column at another time. In the meantime you can think about its relevance for our time.

The developed industrial nations of the world cannot remain secure islands of prosperity in a seething sea of poverty. The storm is rising against the privileged minority of the earth, from which there is no shelter in isolation or armament. The storm will not abate until a just distribution of the fruits of the earth enables man everywhere to live in dignity and human decency. – Dr. King

In another moment of Great American Irony President Obama inaugurated the Dr. King memorial this week in Washington D.C. He not only invoked the legacy of King but he also spoke favorably of the Occupy Wall Street movement and said King would support it. Yes, of course, King would back the cause. However, despite winning a Nobel Peace Prize, Obama hasn’t shown any willingness to address King’s triple evils of “war, economic exploitation and racism.” These also happen to be similar concerns for many in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Obama should, however, be careful about who and what he praises because the Occupy movement is expanding and Dr. King’s final campaign was going to bring the revolution close to home. He said, “We’ve got to camp in – put our tents in front of the White House…America will have many many days, but they will be full of trouble. There will be no rest, there will be no tranquility in this country until the nation comes to terms with our problem.”

On Dr. King’s birthday, Jan. 15th 1968 – which was sadly to be his last – he was organizing with a multi-racial coalition of Native Americans, Chicanos, Appalachian whites and urban black people to start an encampment in Washington D.C. that would be a massive “nonviolent army” which would “cripple the operation of an oppressive society.” By 1968, King’s earlier emphasis on civil rights had evolved into a revolutionary stance against capitalism, the Vietnam War, U.S. Imperialism and poverty. Leading tens of thousands of poor people, activists, clergy and concerned citizens to camp in D.C. was a “kind of last, desperate demand for the nation to respond to nonviolence.” He even suggested to his staff that after a few days they could call in the peace movements and “try and close down the Pentagon.” King meant business. The encampment would have to be “as dramatic, as dislocative, as attention-getting as the riots without destroying life or property.” He talked about clogging the roads, shutting down bridges and making the “city not function anymore.” The country that he loved so much had strayed so far from its ideals that he said, “We’ve got to go for broke this time…they aren’t going to run me out of Washington.”

Flickr / David_Shankbone

by Donna Schaper

Older people want to know what is next. Turns out they’re the impatient ones. Younger people don’t want to go there – they trust the process.

Everyone’s got a point. Old folks worry that without a plan, without a program, this glorious fragile beginning will remain just that. When Mayor Bloomberg gets annoyed, he’ll shut it down, we worry. If there’s a confrontation with the cops because folks get grumpy, they will shut it down. Or if the weather gets really, really bad, THAT will shut it down.

Younger people know that their tactics have sparked a movement. They figured out how to have public conversations without microphones. They’ve organized Zuccotti Park better than any of my children ever organized their rooms. They have a growing kitchen of good food, well distributed. They have also managed the sanitation problem and the recycling problem with creativity and élan. They meet ridicule with smiles and increasingly creative signs. They created a slogan – “We’re the 99%” – that is inspiring millions of older folks.

They’re the ones who created the center of gravity, and the world – the media, the unions, the politicians, the clergy – has come into THEIR orbit, not the other way around. They’ve changed the conversation of the rest of us – New York Times columnists, a Presidential news conference, countless personal interactions across the country. We haven’t changed theirs. So they worry a whole lot less. You can hear them saying, “Relax, Mom and Dad – it’s going to be all right.”

This is a guest post by Jason A. Kerr, a doctoral candidate in English at Boston College. He is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

On 7 October, Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, was speaking to reporters outside the Values Voter Summit in Washington, DC, where he had just introduced Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry. Taking aim at Perry’s rival for the nomination, Mitt Romney, Jeffress said that Romney, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “is not a Christian.” Jeffress went on to say, “This idea that Mormonism is a theological cult is not news…. That has been the historical position of Christianity for a long time.”

Jeffress has a point: evangelicals have long been uncomfortable with Mormonism, and significant theological differences – most notably over Christology – exist between the two groups. I’m not going to attempt to resolve those differences here, or to defend the proposition that Mormons are in fact Christian (even though I, as a Mormon, affirm my own faith in Christ).

Rather, I wish to seize on an opportunity inadvertently opened by Jeffress’s overly broad invocation of “the historical position of Christianity” to argue that Mormons and Baptists ought to make common cause in opposing the use of such appeals as tests of religious orthodoxy, let alone as de facto religious tests of fitness for political office.

Here’s the thing: “the historical position of Christianity” hasn’t always been kind to Baptists, either. In 1640s London, for instance, Baptist congregations found themselves altogether on the margins. Adherence to the doctrine of believer’s baptism put them at odds with the longstanding practice of baptizing infants, and their belief that church membership depended on such baptism meant separation from the established Church of England. Thus, Baptist gatherings were illegal, and entire congregations occasionally found themselves in prison. With the outbreak of civil war in 1642, enforcement broke down, and some churches began to meet more openly. For instance, a congregation led by Thomas Lambe held meetings in Bell Alley, Coleman Street that were open to the public and drew huge crowds.

by Robert Cohen

Crossposted from Micah’s Paradigm Shift.

Meir Jacob/Flickr

As we move towards a United Nations Assembly vote on the recognition of a Palestinian State later this month, Robert Cohen looks at the effect Israel is having on interfaith relations between Jews and Christians in the United Kingdom. Could the UN vote push Jews and Christians further apart or could it be the spark that kindles a radical reassessment of the Judeo-Christian mission?

Something precious

As a child growing up in a Jewish community in South East London in the 1970s and early 80s, there must have been something precious seeping through into my bones.

Perhaps that ‘something’ came from our Rabbi’s passionate, intelligent and challenging sermons especially on his favourite of the Hebrew Prophets, Jeremiah. Or perhaps it came from our shul President’s annual reading and commentary on the Book of Jonah on the afternoon of Yom Kippur. It was through Jonah and the redemption of people of Nineveh that I understood the Jewish God’s love for all of His creation. Or perhaps that ‘something’ came later, when as a teenager I first heard the words of Rabbi Hillel, the 1st century sage and scholar:

If I am not for myself
Who will be for me?
If I am only for myself
What am I?
And if not now
When?