All of us remember this day, where we were when we heard the news, our feelings, our fears. There has been a lot of controversy about how the memory of this day has been or is being used or misused for political purposes, but I always come back to one of my life mottoes: the best antidote to misuse is not disuse -- it is proper use.

In many ways we have run from the feelings of that day ... grief, grievance, unity, confusion, dislocation, vulnerability and solidarity. In many ways, we quickly transmuted those emotions into ones that we are more familiar with, ones we know how to "work with" -- anger, lust for revenge, blame, scapegoating, offended pride, even hate.

But maybe now, seven years later, we are able to return to the feelings of that day and in some way learn from them now what we may not have been able to learn from them back then.

Grief -- we lost so much that day. Loved ones. A sense of invulnerability. A sense of transcendence over the rest of the world for whom violence is so much a part of daily life. Ungrieved grief makes us sick, and so it is good, today, to grieve.

Grievance -- we knew instantly that the people who were suffering were not guilty of the violence they were experiencing, and this sense of having been wronged filled us all. Something healthy happens in our souls when we hold that feeling up to the light -- without letting it toxify into bitterness and revenge.

Unity -- we knew that we needed each other and needed to stand together. Now, in the midst of a bitterly fought election, can we recall that understanding of our standing together?

Confusion -- we realized that the world was more complex than we realized, that there were forces at work we weren't attending to, and of the pain in being pushed from the category of knowers to seekers. Not understanding is humbling, and again, it is good to hold ourselves in that humility without relieving ourselves of it by pretending we have everything figured out according to our various ideologies and slogans.

Vulnerability -- our confidence in our own power shaken, we faced that there were other powers that must be reckoned with. We felt that we are more like our neighbors around the world than we realized: that our lives can be interrupted by those with grievances, pain, confusion, and fear of their own ... that we are connected with those who have grievances against us, and we must share the world with them, and they with us.

Solidarity -- many said that the whole world was American that day, but it was also true that we in America felt solidarity with the rest of our war-torn, violence scarred world that day. I believe at some deep level, the Holy Spirit was warming each of our hearts with a longing for shalom/salaam/peace ... since we so acutely felt its absence.

If you just read over each of these emotions, and hold them up in your heart to the light of God, you will see the ways in which these emotions can open us towards the living God of love. Then, perhaps, consider the alternatives -- anger, lust for revenge, blame, scapegoating, even hate -- and think of the effect these feelings can have on your spiritual life, how they can be "sacralized" and baptized and camouflaged under religious language. Perhaps, if you see this dark process at work in you and us, that will move you to repentance and prayer.

If you have a few more minutes, listen to this podcast from my friend Fred Burnham, who was across the street from ground zero, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, when the towers fell. His story exemplifies how we can let the experience of 9/11 be a sanctifying one in our lives, individually and together. May it be so.

Brian McLaren is a speaker and author, most recently of Everything Must Change and Finding Our Way Again. He serves as board chair for Sojourners.

One of the great recent joys of my life has been a thing called "Beer and Bible," which happens every other Tuesday night at a small neighborhood pub in Memphis called, appropriately enough, Kudzu's. Kudzu, our bar's namesake, is the South's most ubiquitous form of plant life. It vines its way over almost everything else in sight, giving a vitality and lushness to landscapes that by this time of year would otherwise be sere and faded in our extreme southern heat. Kudzu's, the pub, is a lot like kudzu the plant. It gives vitality and cool to a lot of landscapes that might otherwise have wilted from the heat or just from life in general.

I had heard of Kudzu's over the years, but because it is in Memphis and Sam and I are not, we had never frequented it. But then last May, a call came. There was a group of regulars at Kudzu's who had been kicking around some God-talk for a while.  They'd begun to call the thing "Beer and Bible," though most of them were drinking whiskey or wine, but would I be at all interested in just stopping by one late afternoon during happy hour to let us all talk together about some things that interested them?

You've got to be kidding. Would I be interested? Interested doesn't even begin to touch what I would be and was and, these three months later, still am. We've kicked around everything from hell to salvation, Christianity to Zoroastrianism, the relative validity of experiential truth to that of empirical truth, etc., etc.

There are usually eight or nine of us regulars around the table at Kudzu's on Beer and Bible Tuesdays. Sometimes there are more of us than that, of course, and sometimes we are joined by an in-house "visitor" or two who hear our racket, leave their barstools to eavesdrop, and -- inevitably -- join us. We've had a preacher or two come by to try to figure out what we're up to, and even a trained theologian or two. But by and large, we are just finding our way toward a form of being together that has no pre-existing aims and certainly no set pattern to follow or expectations to fulfill. I can say, however, that in all my years as a professional religionist, I have never heard theology more earnestly or more intelligently talked than it is at Kudzu's.

I spend a lot of my professional time studying and lecturing about 21st century Christianity -- how it got where it is, what in fact it is, where it's going. And one of the things that people are most troubled about as I go around the country speaking is the patent decline in church membership per se as well as in church attendance. It would irreparably offend most of those distressed people if I were to say to them, face-to-face, that the church is not necessarily in churches anymore. In fact, church is increasingly more active and fully present in places other than sacred buildings than it is in them. But I can say so here.

I can say here what I know to be true: Christianity has never been more alive and vigorous than it is right here and right now. And Kudzu's is but one of thousands of  vibrant proofs that that is so. The kingdom of God comes in many forms and many places these days, and what I really want to say is, "Thanks be to God!"

 

Phyllis Tickle (www.phyllistickle.com) is the founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly and author of The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord and the forthcoming fall release, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why.

As a convert to Orthodox Christianity, I have come to appreciate the strong connection in our tradition between spirituality and creation. Many of our great feasts, minor celebrations, and daily prayers involve joining prayer, blessing, and the material world. Unlike Western Christians who remember the three kings on Jan. 6, 13 days after Christmas we celebrate Theophany, the feast of the baptism of Christ in the Jordan. Part of this feast includes blessing water in our churches or processing to a nearby pond, sea, or ocean where a priest will toss a cross into the water, transforming the whole body into a holy water font. We annually commemorate our loved ones who have fallen asleep in the Lord by making and blessing koliva -- boiled wheat with fruit, sugar, and spices. The wheat recalls the words of Christ, that "unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain," while the cinnamon, clove, and pomegranate remind us of the sweetness of the resurrection to come. And each liturgical day begins in the evening with vespers and the chanting of Psalm 102, a hymn of the goodness of the natural world: "The trees of the Lord are full of sap, the cedars of Lebanon which he planted, where the birds make their nests ...."

Because of this intertwining of spirituality and sacred materialism, environmental awareness can be easily encouraged by our spiritual leaders. His Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew I (whom The Guardian has named "The 'pope' of hope" and elsewhere has been called the "green patriarch") in particular has become a leader among clergy who are dedicated to rallying people of faith to care for the environment. He has organized environmentally responsible cruises for political leaders, journalists, and scientists on the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and the Amazon river in an effort to use his ecclesial rank to change attitudes and policies related to the environment. The patriarch also gave new significance to Sept. 1, our church new year, by calling for prayer and supplication for the environment on this day.

In his book Encountering the Mystery, the patriarch writes, "In the Orthodox liturgical perspective, creation is received and conceived as a gift from God. The notion of creation-as-gift defines our Orthodox theological understanding of the environmental question in a concise and clear manner while at the same time determining the human response to that gift through the responsible and proper use of the created world. Each believer is called to celebrate life in a way that reflects the words of the Divine [Eucharistic] Liturgy: 'Thine own from Thine own we offer to Thee, on behalf of all and for all.'"

Abayea Pelt is the office manager and receptionist for Sojourners.

When I interviewed Phyllis Tickle for Rising from the Ashes: Rethinking Church, she reflected on the seismic changes she sees occurring in contemporary Christianity. "Evangelicalism has lost much of its credibility and much of its spiritual energy as of late, in much the same way that mainline Protestantism has." Lest anyone find this news so depressing they want to run for cover, Phyllis offers some much needed historical and hopeful perspective. "About every 500 years, the church feels compelled to have a giant rummage sale." During the last such upheaval, the Great Reformation of 500 years ago, Protestantism took over hegemony. But Roman Catholicism did not die. It just had to drop back and reconfigure. Each time a rummage sale has happened, in other words, whatever held pride of place simply gets broken apart into smaller pieces, and then it picks itself up and to use Diana Butler Bass's term, "re-tradition.

As I ride along the religious superhighway, I find I need some new tools to help me navigate this process. For starters, Andrew Jones' blog provides excellent ongoing reflections of the changing Christian landscape from a global perspective, as Proost UK offers worship resources that help refuel me and recharge my batteries. Recently, I caught wind of Tickle's radical yet totally orthodox retelling of the gospel. In The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord with Reflections Tickle categorizes the sayings of Jesus into five categories: Public Teachings, Private Instructions, Healing Dialogues, Intimate Conversations, and the Post-Resurrection Encounters.

"Psychologists have demonstrated many times over that what we say is tailored to and informed by the audience to whom we say it. In a sense, in other words, while each of us may be an integer, we have various configurations or arrangements of our "self" that we modify, exchange, and employ according to our perception of those whom we are at any given moment engaging. Jesus of Nazareth, being fully human, followed that same pattern, though once again I had never perceived or even entertained such a possibility until I began listening to Him shift emphases, adapt rhetoric, and fashion varying modes of analogy to fit those with whom He was speaking."

Thanks to Lacey's latest and, unfortunately, last book, The Liberator (a revolutionary retelling of the New Testament), the Inspired by the Bible Experience: New Testament audio CD (nothing says "Oh my God" like Samuel L. Jackson channeling the voice of the Almighty), and Tickle's commentary, I've been immersed in scripture from some rather unique vantage points. Over the past year, instead of trying to memorize scripture and verse, I'm allowing these sweet holy words to fall on my ears and into my mouth. It's like I'm falling in love all over again with this radical love-making, rule-breaking, life-taking Christ.

Becky Garrison is senior contributing writer for The Wittenburg Door. Portions of this posting are excerpted from The New Atheists Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail.  Reprinted with permission from Thomas Nelson, Inc.

I'm always a bit anxious in new worship environments. As I settle into my plastic chair at New Beginnings Lutheran Church, I realize that now is certainly no different. At least, I think to myself, my cell phone won't go off in worship; it was confiscated by the guard before I went through the metal detector.

New Beginnings is a congregation on the inside of the Denver Women's Correctional Facility, and I've come with three others from my own community to share in their worship service. My anxiety is not at all lessened by the praise music - of which I have an almost irrational aversion - coming out of the jam box behind the purple-draped altar. Seriously, I'm sinfully snotty about this issue.

The problem is that, as the women file into the room in their dark green scrubs and black boots, many immediately pick up the song sheets and begin singing along. I've always associated what I call "Jesus-is-my-boyfriend music" with privileged white suburban mega-churches. But here in front of me are women of untold sin and sorrow, worn, unlike many of us, on the outside; singing "Lord I Lift Your Name On High" - singing about how faithful and marvelous God is from the inside of a prison.

I feel moved - and not by the emotionalism of the overproduced praise music. I'm moved again by how God seems to continually show up in ways I find objectionable. Like John the Baptist attempting to talk Jesus out of being baptized, and the disciples scandalized by Jesus' conversation with the woman at the well, and Peter's "God forbid that ever happen to you" at the news of how his messiah would die, I too object. God forbid that God's own redeeming work in the world be done through music and theology I find abhorrent. It's totally annoying and absolutely predictable. It happens every time.

Nadia Bolz-Weber is a Lutheran vicar living in Denver, Colorado where she is developing a new emerging church, House for all Sinners and Saints.  She blogs at www.sarcasticlutheran.com and has a book for Seabury Press coming out this Fall; a theological and cultural commentary based on having watched 24 consecutive hours of Trinity Broadcasting Network and survived.

Last week I shared a snapshot of the new monastics. This week I will look at the mosaics. God is doing something new through a new generation of multicultural church planters.

Efrem Smith, who coauthored The Hip-Hop Church, will be keynoting our conference on the theme of Dr. Martin King's vision of "The Beloved Community." By 2060 the United States will become the first Western country in which Europeans will no longer be the dominant demographic group. We will become a richly multicultural society, and Smith will explain how the church can help us welcome this future.

Smith has planted Sanctuary Covenant Church, compelling evidence that God is doing something new through young people from different races and cultures. They are experiencing something of the richness of God's kingdom not only in their worship but in their life together across race and class.

The emerging church movement tends to be very white and male. But Tommy Kyllonen, a multicultural church planter in Florida, states in Un.orthodox: Church. Hip-Hop. Culture that the emerging church is also the young black male in the hood. It is the second-generation Mexican in L.A. and the child of the Chinese immigrant in Houston. The emerging church is the Puerto Rican female on Wall Street.

Smith tells me that urban hip-hop culture isn't just postmodern but also post-institutional, post-soul, and post-civil rights too. I find that multicultural churches, like the best of emerging and missional churches, tend to be more outwardly focused in mission. For example, Smith's church invests more than 50% of their giving in local and global mission.

As we race into an increasingly multicultural future, all of our largely monocultural churches are going to need to build bridges to the growing numbers of multicultural immigrant and ethnic congregations sharing life and mission. Read more at www.thenewconspirators.com

Tom Sine founded Mustard Seed Associates in 1989. He has worked as a consultant in futures research and planning for numerous nonprofit organizations and speaks at gatherings all over the world with his wife, Christine. His newest book, The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time, comes out next month. Discover what God is doing through a new generation of risk takers, innovators, and prophets February 28-March 1 in Seattle. Visit: www.thenewconspirators.wordpress.com

Discover what God is doing through a new generation of risk-takers, innovators, and prophets at The New Conspirators. We have asked these young conspirators, who comprise at least four new streams, to share their stories, dreams, and struggles on Feb. 28-March 1, 2008, in Seattle. These four streams include: the new monasticism, the mosaic (multicultural), the missional, and the emergent. I want to share snapshots of these four streams, starting with the new monastics.

Shane Claiborne will be at our gathering sharing about the new monasticism movement and from his new book, Jesus For President. Over the past two decades, a new Protestant movement very much like the Franciscan order has emerged. Like many in the traditional Franciscan order, they have moved into the poorest urban communities in our world, live in community as families and singles, and care for the poor, often living at the same lifestyle level of the poor around them. A number of them have even developed a rule of life. These include groups like Word Made Flesh, InnerCHANGE, Servant Partners, Servants to Asia's Urban Poor, and Urban Neighbours of Hope (UNOH).

In 2005, a group of several hundred primarily younger people convened in Raleigh-Durham to discuss the need for a New Monasticism movement to more faithfully live out the gospel of Christ in our troubled world. As we met together, I was impressed by the desire of these young people to give more authentic expression to their faith.

Their communities include Rutba House in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; Communality in Lexington, Kentucky; Camden House in New Jersey; and the Simple Way in Philadelphia. They are also connected to older intentional Christian communities, including Reba Place in Chicago and the Church of the Sojourners in San Francisco. Together, they have published a book, School(s) for Conversion: Twelve Marks of a New Monasticism, and they run Schools of Conversion for those who want to find their own way forward.

What makes the new monastics distinct from the other four streams is that they have no interest in planting new expressions of church; rather, they are creating new forms of community in which they seek to embody the gospel and reach out to those in need. Shane says, "Our deserts are the inner city and the abandoned places of the empire." This stream offers the most robust critique of modern culture, but also has the strongest voice for social justice and the care of God's creation.

Tom Sine founded Mustard Seed Associates in 1989. He has worked as a consultant in futures research and planning for numerous nonprofit organizations and speaks at gatherings all over the world with his wife, Christine. His newest book, The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time, comes out next month.

Far too often, activists do little to nurture their souls. Consequently, they "burn out." Ignoring the need for spiritual revitalization to sustain their zeal on behalf of the poor and oppressed, they wear out and fade into oblivion. Often those who were one-time dynamic spokespersons for social justice while living out countercultural values become exhausted from working hard with very little sense of accomplishment. Becoming cynical, they sometimes say disparaging things about those who still remain in the fray.

It was out of deep concern for the spiritual condition of social justice activists that I teamed up with a young professor from Spring Arbor University, Mary Darling, to write The God of Intimacy and Action: Reconnecting Ancient Spiritual Practices, Evangelism and Justice.

In this book I, along with my co-author, endeavor to present ways to renew the energies of social activists by tapping into spiritual practices of Catholic mystics that we Protestants often ignore. In particular, we focus much of our attention on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius whose directives can help us move beyond the often shallow and mundane prayer styles that are common among Protestants.

First, we explore what Ignatian spiritual directors call centering prayer. Centering prayer is something I do each morning for at least 15 minutes. During the early hours, I take time to center down on Jesus as I say his name over and over again. I do this until everything else is driven out of my mind and I am almost totally focused on Jesus. In stillness I wait for Jesus to reach out from the cross and absorb into his own body the sins that mark my soul. Then, in the midst of quietude, I wait for the Holy Spirit to flow into me and saturate my personhood. I have learned from experience that "they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength" (Isaiah 40:31).

Secondly, I practice Lectio Divina. This is a spiritually informed way of reading scripture in which there is no reliance on scholarly interpretations, such as Bible commentaries. I read some carefully chosen verses, shut the Bible, close my eyes, and wait patiently for the Holy Spirit to tell me what I need to hear from God through what I have just read. There is something mystical in recognizing how verses that I have read many times before speak to me in new ways when practicing Lectio Divina, bringing new meaning that is especially relevant to my existential situation.

Next, there is a practice called "The Prayer of Examen." This I do at bedtime. With my head on my pillow, I reflect on all the ways God used me to do good during the past day. I think of all the things I did that were "honest … just … pure … lovely … of good report … and worthy of praise" (see Philippians 4:8). Only after such "feel-good" self-affirmations am I ready to review the day for a second time--this time remembering the ways in which I sinned and fell short of what I should have been and done. I confess and wait for Christ's cleansing.

Of course, there is much more to the spiritual exercises that have proved so essential in keeping me alive spiritually and revitalizing my "first love" for working for justice and doing evangelism. In the book Mary and I go into these exercises in depth and attempt to show how biblically prescribed and spiritually valid mysticism has motivated leaders such as John Wesley and George Whitefield to proclaim a holistic gospel.

I hope you get this book and find it useful in making spiritual renewal a daily practice. Developing spiritual depth through such exercises will enable you, in accord with the teachings of Jesus, to bring forth fruit, some a hundredfold, some sixtyfold, and some thirtyfold (Matthew 13:8). Without such care of the soul you are apt, as the scriptures tell us, to "wither away" (Matthew 13:6).

Tony Campolo is founder of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education (EAPE) and professor emeritus of sociology at Eastern University.

I would love to live as a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.

The Irish writer, priest, and environmental activist, and my beloved friend - John O'Donohue - died unexpectedly and peacefully in the early hours of Friday, Jan. 4, 2008. His witness to peace, his work on the human heart, and his actions for justice make him someone that I want to introduce to readers of this blog who may not already know him.

John's work on retrieving the earthiness of celtic spirituality and helping make sense of it in a postmodern world is so profound that its impact has not yet been fully felt, and it represents something rare in a consumerist culture: a work of art that will outlast its author. He knew that work for justice and peace in the world depends on the inner work we must do to allow our own souls not to become corroded by whatever wounds we have sustained on our journeys.

What many may not know is that in addition to his ministry in the Catholic priesthood, and latterly as a writer and speaker, he was a serious environmental activist, helping to spearhead a small group that successfully prevented the despoilment of the Burren, one of Ireland's most stunning natural landscapes. He put his reputation on the line to save something worth preserving, even being prepared to go to prison to do so; and through building community consensus and taking on the powers that be, won an astonishing David and Goliath victory that resulted in substantial change to Irish law and politics.

John knew that we live in the intersection of the sacred and the profane, and he wanted to nudge us in the direction of understanding that holiness has more to do with being aware of the light around us, and living lives that honour it, than moral puritanism. In the introduction to his book To Bless the Space Between Us, to be published in March, he writes of how, in any given day, some of us humans will experience the shock of being told of the sudden death of a friend. John wanted us to be tender to the fact that the faces of strangers we meet every day all hide secrets that are both divine and tragic. We do not always know who among us is suffering some unnameable torment, nor who is rejoicing at the blessing of a lifetime.

In his activism, as well as his writing and speaking, and most of all, in his life, he wanted people to have shelter from the storms their lives would bring. To those of us privileged to know him, he showed love and friendship of a rare sort; he was the kind of spiritual teacher who revealed mysteries that most of us can't see; he truly lived a life to the full. And at the beginning of this year, which brings the 40th anniversary of the deaths of three other men who sought to embody an extraordinary kind of leadership – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Father Thomas Merton – most of all what I want to remember about John O'Donohue is that he taught me that the best corrective to evil is not just to kick against it, but to make something beautiful in its place.

John O'Donohue's books Anam Cara, Eternal Echoes, and Beauty are all available; his latest and final book, To Bless the Space Between Us, will be published in March.

Gareth Higgins is a Christian writer and activist in Belfast, Northern Ireland. For the past decade he was the founder/director of the zero28 project, an initiative addressing questions of peace, justice, and culture. He is the author of the insightful How Movies Helped Save My Soul and blogs at www.godisnotelsewhere.blogspot.com

During Advent, as I kindle the wreath candles that mark the journey to the Bethlehem stable, I return to particular writers that I love and certain music that I can't seem to get through the seasons without. I have Advent habits.

For instance, I often re-read W.H. Auden's For the Time Being. In one portion King Herod weighs the threat to publiic order posed by the birth of the Christ child. Is the collatoral damage of murdering the male children justified in order to maintain security and social stability? If this Messiah survives, ponders Herod, then:

Reason will be replaced by revelation … Justice will be replaced by pity as the cardinal virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish … The new aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums, and permanent invalids. The rough diamond, the consumptive whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the new age, when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.

I listen to the San Antonio Vocal Art Ensemble's Guadalupe: Virgen de los Indios CD. The ancient Nahua Indian hyms welcoming the Christ child and extolling the virtues of Mary are haunting - interweaving complex indigenous harmonies gleaned from 400-year-old deerskin musical scores:

The world guards the memory of the life that He gave in the earth, and there in the heavens the presence of Your glory is felt. The vision of happiness, then, exists in the memory of this earth.

It's also an opportunity to keep company with the Bible's holy ones. Episcopal priest Margaret Guenther writes movingly about Anna and Simeon in the December issue of Sojourners. And Ade Bethune's silk screen Icon of the Mother of God reminds me that the saints are keeping watch over me – even in Advent's terrifying darkness.

Rose Marie Berger, a Sojourners associate editor, is a Catholic peace activist and poet.

When I went to check my post office box after Thanksgiving, among the pile of mail waiting for me were review copies of Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great about Christianity and Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.

I first picked up D'Souza's bestseller. Throughout this book, he seems to possessed an amazing self-confidence that all the world's problems could be solved if only we would just become Christians. It reminded me of those books I read in my twenties back when I thought I knew all the answers. It's only been within the past few years that I've learned to start asking the right questions.

Yet, I have to admit that a side of me wished that I still possessed that absolute certainty about my faith. This year hasn't been an easy one for me on many fronts. In fact, I don't know where I'd be without my spiritual friends, who sometimes prayed on my behalf when I was too distracted to think straight.

When I picked up Come by My Light, I discovered a stark honesty that caught me off guard. Mother Teresa was not the woman the world thought we knew. As Shane Claiborne noted when I interviewed him for The Wittenburg Door, whenever people ask him about his trip to Calcutta, "they say, 'Oh, you met Mother Teresa,' like she glows in the dark or something."

While rest of the world put her on a pious pedestal, this seemingly simple nun from Calcutta spent most of her ministry wandering in the wilderness. She pours out her personal pain in private letters that she penned to her spiritual director and others in her life. These letters indicate that ever since she began her ministry to the poor, the voice of Jesus that guided her to start this work became silent. This silence continued throughout her entire ministry. She describes the darkness with a piercing honesty that brought me to tears.

Pray for me - for within me everything is icy cold - it is only that blind faith that carries me through for in reality to me all is darkness. As long as our Lord has all the pleasure - I really do not count.

As expected, atheists like Christopher Hitchens use her personal pain as further evidence that God does not exist. Hitchens gloats, "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person."

Unlike this anti-God guru, Mother Teresa knew that just because God was absent from her heart, that didn't mean God had abandoned her. With a Job-like sense of determination, she learned to embrace this darkness as a part of her ministry.

Let Him do with me whatever He wants, as He wants, for as long as He wants. If my darkness is to light some soul - even if it be nothing to nobody - I am perfectly happy - to be God's flower of the field.

Just as I'm about to finish this book, Shane Claiborne just happened to arrive in New York City on the first Sunday of Advent. (For a recap of that visit, see "What Would Jesus Buy?") I'm not about to call him a saint because I know he'd just start to giggle and throw paper airplanes at me. This ordinary radical relayed stories of finding hope and healing through his work with those spiritual souls that society has discarded. I couldn't have asked for a better Advent candle to help illuminate my darkness.

During my interview with Shane, he remarked:

Someone asked me after she died, 'Is her work going to live on?' I actually think Mother Teresa died a long time ago when she submitted herself to Christ, and the thing that everyone loves about her was her work, that's Jesus. That's going to live forever. I've been to Calcutta since Mother Teresa died, and there were more people there than were ever there when she was alive. She's sort of like the seed that dies, and fruit is born.

For those who find themselves struggling in the darkness during this Advent season, I highly recommend reflecting on Mother Teresa's words. Through her prayers of pain, I pray that you can be reminded that you are not alone.

Becky Garrison's books include The New Atheist Crusaders and their Unholy Grail: Their Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith (Thomas Nelson, January 2008), Red and Blue God, Black and Blue Church, and Rising from the Ashes: Rethinking Church.

As a child I found no joy in an Advent calendar; all those little flaps and doors and bite-size pieces of chocolate signified nothing more than the fact that Christmas was still a really, really long time away. Especially as I got down to the last few doors, just a few days before the big event, time seemed to take on a pace as slow as molasses sucked through a straw. Admittedly, the coming of the Christ child was not what had me wound so tight. It was the portly fellow in the red suit who delivered untold delights on my living room floor that made the Advent season so terribly long. While the object of my desire may have been misdirected, the spirit of Advent was palpable. I was waiting for something big and it was taking a very, very long time to arrive.

How odd that the older we get, the faster Advent seems to fly by. Barely has the Thanksgiving turkey been devoured before we find that we're out of time to prepare for Christmas. There have been several years when I've realized that Christmas was a week away and I'd not yet put up a tree or even hung a wreath on the door. The units of time have not changed over the years; a minute is still 60 seconds, a day is still 24 hours. How is it, then, that Advent speeds past us when once it crawled along?

Perhaps it is because as adults when we want something we can usually find a way to get it without waiting very long at all. When we do have to wait longer than expected – someone decides to write a check for their groceries or the line at the coffee shop is out the door – we get antsy, even angry for the delay.

This past year my husband and I embarked on an adventure in anti-consumerism. To date, we've gone 11 months and three days without purchasing anything new (except for things like toilet paper and shampoo), and through it all I've learned an old but timeless lesson: good things come to those who wait. Unable to run out the store whenever the whim for something new crosses my mind, I've learned to work hard for the things I really want and let the desire for useless stuff just fade away.

Advent should be a time for slowing down not speeding up. On Christmas Day we celebrate a world transformed by the birth of a small child. What if we lived as if the world might be transformed once again? Our faith tells us that how we keep ourselves busy ourselves during the wait is important. We are not called to lives of idle desperation but active hope. Would Advent creep up on us if we truly believed that the world might be so transformed again by something as unassuming as a child born in a manger? How would you prepare your household, your family, and your neighborhood for a gift so radical and promising?

This year I'll try to wait (the active hopeful kind of waiting) as if I believe that my most impossible dreams - a world where no child goes hungry, no sick are left to die, no bombs explode - could be made real. The anticipation will certainly rival anything from my childhood. I'm waiting for something big this year but I've found that God's gifts always surprise.

Amy Ard is a former national field organizer for Sojourners, and her related commentary, "A Simple Christmas," appears in the December issue of Sojourners.

Since the publication of my book, The Practicing Congregation, in 2004, when I first wrote about my research on vital mainline churches, hundreds of clergy groups and church leadership gatherings have invited me to share with them insights on what makes for a good congregation. At every gathering, I include the project's key finding: "Congregations that intentionally engage Christian practices are congregations that experience new vitality."

The sentence combines three components: intentionality, practice, and vitality. Further defining them, I point out that intentionality involves choice and taking responsibility for individual and communal spirituality; that practice is not a program, rather it is a meaningful way of life; and that vitality cannot be measured in terms of numbers, as it means spiritual health and maturity. A vital congregation is one where all people—including the pastor—are growing members of an organic community of spiritual practice.

Inevitably, someone asks: "How does this relate to a Willow Creek strategy for church growth?" Most every pastor knows about Willow Creek and its wildly successful seeker-oriented, market-driven church growth program—and many pastors have labored to recreate such programs in their own churches or denominations.

Until recently, my answer has been, "Not very well. They focus on numbers, on getting people into church, and on 'one-size fits all' programs for the spiritual life. That isn't bad for them; it is their path. And it is different from what my team found in small and medium-sized mainline churches. We found the programs don't make Christians. Practices do."

Now, however, I can answer in the words of Bill Hybels, the founding pastor of Willow Creek, as reported on the Leadership Journal blog. After an extensive study of their congregation (and several similar churches), Willow Creek's leaders concluded participation in programs did not inculcate Christian discipleship and that they had spent "millions of dollars" on programs thinking that they would help people grow—only to find that there was no real increase in parishioners' love for God or their neighbor.

"We made a mistake," says Hybels: "What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become 'self-feeders.' We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own."

Notice what Hybels says is missing: intentionality, practice, and vitality. Or, as the Leadership blog put it, "Spiritual growth doesn't happen best by becoming dependent on elaborate church programs but through the age old spiritual practices of prayer, bible reading, and relationships. These basic disciplines do not require multi-million dollar facilities and hundreds of staff to manage."

To point this out is not "I told you so." Rather, this is a profound development in North American congregational life. When one of the nation's leading programmatic churches says that programs do not work and that their vision of spiritual maturity was "wrong," we best all sit up and take notice.

For more than a decade, a quiet renewal has been spreading across American religion and is changing the way faith is experienced and practiced. Willow Creek's self-doubt is indication of that change.

As I have traveled across the U.S. and Canada, I have found that many congregations—including mainline churches, progressive evangelical communities, and synagogues—are rebasing their life on spiritual practices including prayer, theological reflection, doing justice, generosity, storytelling, discernment, shaping community, hospitality, and leadership. These faith communities have developed a healing sort of grassroots wisdom and have grappled successfully with the very issues that Willow Creek is now seeking to address. Their modest wisdom may be the very thing that mega-churches like Willow Creek need in order to experience a deeper way of life—the maturity in faith that they admit is alluding thousands of their members.

In all of this, we may well feel the Spirit's tug toward a different kind of congregational cooperation. What if we begin to see other faith communities as pilgrims on a journey to God, instead of competitors in a religious marketplace? Can we share with and serve each other as we walk a new—yet very old—road of shaping communal faith as a way of wisdom?

I do not read Bill Hybels' confession as a moment to shout that the emperor has no clothes. Instead, I read it as an invitation to open our collective imaginations—to rethink congregations, form new relationships, and encourage one another on a journey of transformation. We all, even Willow Creek, need friends along the way of learning to love God and love our neighbor.

Diana Butler Bass (www.dianabutlerbass.com) has written on new religious trends in several books including The Practicing Congregation and Christianity for the Rest of Us. This post was adapted from one originally appearing in The Alban Weekly.

The critics of the suburbs say that you and I live narrow lives. I agree. My life is narrow. From one perspective or another, all our lives are narrow. Only when lives are placed side by side do they seem larger. —D.J. Waldie, in Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir

Prompted by the ubiquitous bracelets and bumper stickers, many Christians are asking (or being annoyed by) the question, “What Would Jesus Do?” Thanks to the creative folks at the Evangelical Environmental Network, we’ve also been encouraged to ask, “What Would Jesus Drive?”

So here’s another pithy iteration to ponder: “Where Would Jesus Live?”

If you’re like most Christians concerned about justice and peace, “the suburbs” would probably not appear in your answer. You might say the city, where Jesus could minister to the poor and the oppressed and walk downtown to preach to corrupt politicians. Or perhaps you think of the country, where he and his disciples could raise organic tomatoes and share their free-range chickens with the hungry. But Jesus in a split-level, mowing his lawn on Saturdays and waving to the neighbor kids on their trampoline? Hmmmmmm....

So what about those of us who do live in the suburbs? Are we doomed to live narrow lives of conspicuous consumption, super-commutes, and obsessive lawn care? Or is it possible to be a faithful, broad-minded Christian in a land of housing developments, minivans, and strip malls?

The recent or upcoming publication of several books on Christianity and the suburbs shows that many Christians are ready to begin examining the particular privileges and challenges of the suburbs. While the authors vary in their perspectives, all of them conclude that Christians can live authentic lives of discipleship in the ‘burbs. “The things I am called to practice here in suburbia are the same Christian distinctives of love, witness, mercy and justice that all Christians should embody wherever they may live,” said Al Hsu, author of The Suburban Christian, in a recent interview.

Christians in the suburbs may have more chances now than ever before to practice those works of mercy and justice right where they live: a recent study from the Brookings Institution found that more Americans in poverty now live in suburbs than in cities. And many of them are finding that the suburban communities they now call home aren’t as equipped with services such as public transportation, accessible health care, and job training programs as the cities from which they moved.

This changing economic face of the suburbs may mean that the fabled narrow suburban life might not be quite so narrow anymore. It may remind us to look for Jesus in the suburbs after all....

Valerie Weaver-Zercher is a writer and editor in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Read more about suburban spirituality in the July issue of Sojourners magazine.

The biblical use of the word "righteousness" is the moral equivalent of what we mean when we speak of holiness. It incorporates such concerns as a passion for justice and a concern for truth along with the need to live an ethically responsible life. It involves reflection in what we do and the Christian moral vision by which we understand who we are. Righteousness is the human expression of holiness embodying a vision rooted in moral perspective.

- James C. Fenhagen

excerpt from "Invitation to Holiness."

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

The righteous know the rights of the poor; the wicked have no such understanding.

- Proverbs 29:7-7

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat.

- Exodus 23:10-11

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Christ is the true philosopher because he embodies in his ministry the welcoming and caring reception of others so that they might more fully be the beings they are meant to be. Indeed, in the Christlike effort to understand, serve, heal, feed, and reconcile the earth and its communities we show forth the highest wisdom.

- Norman Wirzba
excerpt from the essay "Placing the Soul: An Agrarian Philosophical Principle" in The Essential Agraian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land, edited by Wirzba. (c) 2003.

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Religious silence is silence that is undertaken as an act of worship. Whether I hear God or not makes no difference.

- Thomas Merton
quoted in Alive Now! November/December 1990

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

The word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, say to it: You are a land that is not cleansed, not rained upon in the day of indignation. Its princes within it are like a roaring lion tearing the prey; they have devoured human lives; they have taken treasure and precious things; they have made many widows within it. ... Its officials within it are like wolves tearing the prey, shedding blood, destroying lives to get dishonest gain. Its prophets have smeared whitewash on their behalf, seeing false visions and divining lies for them, saying, "Thus says the Lord God," when the Lord has not spoken.

- Ezekiel 22:23-28

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Honest, direct confrontation is a true expression of compassion…The illusion of power must be unmasked, idolatry must be undone, oppression and exploitation must be fought, and all who participate in these evils must be confronted. This is compassion.

- Donald P. McNeill et al.
from “Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life”

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

For the righteous will never be moved; they will be remembered forever. They are not afraid of evil tidings; their hearts are firm, secure in the Lord. Their hearts are steady, they will not be afraid; in the end they will look in triumph on their foes. They have distributed freely, they have given to the poor; their righteousness endures forever; their horn is exalted in honor. The wicked see it and are angry; they gnash their teeth and melt away; the desire of the wicked comes to nothing.

- Psalms 112:6-10

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Why do people think the spiritual life demands withdrawal drom the ordinary? Because they've been taught, at least by implication, that the physical is a block to the spiritual. When we assume that the spiritual, unlike the physical, is impervious to corrosion, then we assume that all things material are not to be honored. But the fact of the matter is, the material is the vehicle of the spiritual.

- Joan Chittister
from Alive Now! July/August 1994

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.

- Leviticus 19:13-14

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

God acts mercifully not by contradicting his justice but by doing what is over and above it .... Mercy does not displace justice; rather it is the fullness of justice.

- Thomas Aquinas

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord God of hosts.

- Isaiah 3:14-15

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord God of hosts.

- Isaiah 3:14-15

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

To keep struggling against hate and to practice forgiveness need not mean abdicating one's rights or renouncing justice. This should be emphasized over and over again. It is part of loving one's enemy that Christians must remind the "enemy" of justice and right. It is part of loving to speak the truth.

- Naim Ateek
from "Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, "Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,' when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye.

- Luke 6:41-42

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

We cannot merely pray to You, O God to end war:
For we know You made the world in a way
That we must find our own path of peace
Within ourselves and with our neighbor.

We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to root out prejudice:
For you have already given us eyes
With which to see the good in all people
If we would only use them rightly.

- Rabbi Jack Riemer
excerpt from a prayer entitled "Social Action" found in "Living God's Justice: Reflections and Prayers."

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Why do you call me "Lord, Lord," and do not do what I tell you?

- Luke 6:46

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

I have the immense joy of being [human], a member of a race in which God became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

- Thomas Merton
from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Jesus said to him, "If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

- Matthew 19:21-22

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

If I have withheld anything that the poor desired, or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail, or have eaten my morsel alone, and the orphan has not eaten from it ... if I have seen anyone perish for lack of clothing, or a poor person without covering, whose loins have not blessed me, and who was not warmed with the fleece of my sheep; if I have raised my hand against the orphan, because I saw I had supporters at the gate; then let my shoulder blade fall from my shoulder, and let my arm be broken from its socket. For I was in terror of calamity from God, and I could not have faced his majesty.

- Job 31:16-23

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

I believe the basis for valid political action can only be the recognition that the true solution to our problems is not accessible to any one isolated party or nation but that all must arrive at it by working together.

--Thomas Merton

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

We are not disembodied spirits. God apparently values the material enough to endow it with the spiritual. That's what the Incarnation is all about. We've come at this whole notion of the exaltation of the spirit by losing respect for the vehicle of the divine, which is the body. Where do we see God? We see God in nature and the people around us.

- Joan Chittister
from Alive Now, July/August 1994

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

For the needy shall not always be forgotten, nor the hope of the poor perish forever. Rise up, O Lord! Do not let mortals prevail; let the nations be judged before you. Put them in fear, O Lord; let the nations know that they are only human.

- Psalms 9:18-20

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

We fear so deeply what we think other people see in us, so we talk in order to straighten out their understanding. ... One of the fruits of silence is the freedom to let our justification rest entirely with God.

- Richard Foster
from Celebration of Discipline

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

- Luke 6:20-23

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

I have glimpsed intimations of baptism being fulfilled in a multitude of unexpected reminders: laughing with the inner-city children I taught as we spashed in the gushing water of a fire hydrant on a sweltering afternoon. Washing dishes at the kitchen sink with my grandmother. Sharing a canteen of icy water with thirsty hikers at a trail junction in a mountain wilderness. Hand watering my dad's newly planted vegetable garden.

- Pat Peterson
from Alive Now, May/June 1994

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, "Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor." And they scolded her. But Jesus said, "Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me."

- Mark 14:3-7

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

In our chatty world, in which the word has lost its power to communicate, silence helps us to keep our mind and heart anchored in the future world and allows us to speak from there a creative and recreative word to the present world.

- Henri J.M. Nouwen
from The Way of the Heart

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

One sabbath while Jesus was going through the grainfields, his disciples plucked some heads of grain, rubbed them in their hands, and ate them. But some of the Pharisees said, "Why are you doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?" Jesus answered, "Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and gave some to his companions?" Then he said to them, "The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath."

- Luke 6:1-5

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Jesus chose to be around small children a number of times in his ministry, often over the objections of his disciples. Sometimes he seems to have done this in order to hold children up as examples of the childlike qualitites that enable God's Realm. But maybe, sometimes, he just wanted to hold them.

- Susan Ross
from Alive Now, July/August 1994

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

A certain ruler asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: "You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honor your father and mother.' " He replied, "I have kept all these since my youth." When Jesus heard this, he said to him, "There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me."

- Luke 18:18-22

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

When the ear heard, it commended me, and when the eye saw, it approved; because I delivered the poor who cried, and the orphan who had no helper. The blessing of the wretched came upon me, and I caused the widow's heart to sing for joy.

- Job 29:11-13

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

All travelers, somewhere along the way, find it necessary to check their course, to see how they are doing. We wait until we are sick, or shocked into stillness, before we do the commonplace thing of getting our bearings. And yet, we wonder why we are depressed, why we are unhappy, why we lose our friends, why we are ill-tempered. This condition we pass on to our children, our husbands, our wives, our associates, our friends. Cultivate the mood to linger. ... Who knows? God may whisper to you in the quietness what [God] has been trying to say to you, oh, for so long a time.

- Howard Thurman
Deep Is the Hunger

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and will be repaid in full.

- Proverbs 19:17

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Silence, for many people, allows the soul to grow and develop in its spiritual dimension. In fact, the more one finds the reality of silence, the more significant it becomes. While this in itself is a danger, the same is true of anything else we touch which has such real value.

--Morton T. Kelsey
from The Other Side of Silence

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

- Leviticus 19:33-34

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

If our usual response to an annoying situation is a curse, we're likely to meet emergencies with a curse. In the little events of daily living we have the opportunity to condition our reflexes, which are built up out of ordinary things.

- Madeleine L'Engle
from The Irrational Season

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

If a man is righteous and does what is lawful and right ... does not oppress anyone, but restores to the debtor his pledge, commits no robbery, gives his bread to the hungry and covers the naked with a garment, does not take advance or accrued interest, withholds his hand from iniquity, executes true justice between contending parties, follows my statutes, and is careful to observe my ordinances, acting faithfully—such a one is righteous; he shall surely live, says the Lord God.

- Ezekiel 18:5-9

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

The rhythm of life for a kingdom dweller puts chronos in service of kairos, the cyclical in service of the directional, the calendar in service of the kingdom. ... As we submit our anarchy to a rhythm, in a sort of earthy, mystical way, all of life is lived lucidly, intentionally, and to the glory of God. Every washing becomes a baptism; every eating a Communion. Every sleeping becomes a dying; every rising a resurrection.

- Kenneth Gottman
from Ministry and Mission

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Covering the Daily Digest while Duane Shank is taking a much-deserved long weekend, I read this chilling report of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe's threats against the Catholic bishops in his country:

Once [the bishops] turn political, we regard them as no longer spiritual and our relations with them would be conducted as if we are dealing with political entities and this is quite a dangerous path they have chosen for themselves.

We've had several reports on this blog from friends connected to the suffering in Zimbabwe, including a former intern Nontando Hadebe, but this unequivocal and direct threat by Mugabe conjured echoes of those who killed Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, Guatemalan Archbishop Juan Jose Gerardi, and other church leaders who were assassinated for defending their people.

Earlier this month, the Zimbabwean bishops issued an open letter titled "God Hears the Cry of the Oppressed," which courageously and unambiguously describes the violence and oppression of Mugabe's regime:

The consequences of such overtly corrupt leadership as we are witnessing in Zimbabwe today will be with us for many years, perhaps decades, to come. Evil habits and attitudes take much longer to rehabilitate than to acquire. Being elected to a position of leadership should not be misconstrued as a license to do as one pleases at the expense of the will and trust of the electorate.

As well as the colonial roots of the crisis:

The present crisis in our country has its roots deep in colonial society. Despite the rhetoric of a glorious socialist revolution brought about by the armed struggle, the colonial structures and institutions of pre-independent Zimbabwe continue to persist in our society. None of the unjust and oppressive security laws of the Rhodesian State have been repealed; in fact, they have been reinforced by even more repressive legislation ...

Why was this done? Because soon after independence, the power and wealth of the tiny white Rhodesian elite was appropriated by an equally exclusive black elite, some of whom have governed the country for the past 27 years through political patronage. Black Zimbabweans today fight for the same basic rights they fought for during the liberation struggle. It is the same conflict between those who possess power and wealth in abundance, and those who do not; ... between those who only know the language of violence and intimidation, and those who feel they have nothing more to lose because their Constitutional rights have been abrogated and their votes rigged. Many people in Zimbabwe are angry, and their anger is now erupting into open revolt in one township after another.

Their letter includes a biblical mandate:

The God of the Bible is always on the side of the oppressed. He does not reconcile Moses and Pharaoh, or the Hebrew slaves with their Egyptian oppressors. Oppression is sin and cannot be compromised with. It must be overcome. God takes sides with the oppressed. As we read in Psalm 103:6: "God who does what is right, is always on the side of the oppressed". ...

We conclude our pastoral letter by affirming with a clear and unambiguous "yes" our support of morally legitimate political authority. At the same time we say an equally clear and unambiguous "no" to power through violence, oppression and intimidation. We call on those who are responsible for the current crisis in our country to repent and listen to the cry of their citizens. To the people of Zimbabwe we appeal for peace and restraint when expressing their justified grievances and demonstrating for their human rights.

Please pray for our sisters and brothers in Zimbabwe. Pray, as the bishops ask in their letter, that "those responsible for causing the crisis repent, heed the cry of the people and foster a change of heart and mind." Pray that such a transformation could occur peacefully, and without more violence and suffering. Pray with the bishops, as their letter concludes:

God Our Father,
You have given all peoples one common origin,
And your will is to gather them as one family in yourself.
Give compassion to our leaders, integrity to our citizens, and repentance to us all.
Fill the hearts of all women and men with your love
And the desire to ensure justice for all their brothers and sisters.
By sharing the good things you give us
May we ensure justice and equality for every human being,
An end to all division, and a human society built on love,
Lasting prosperity and peace for all.
We ask this through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Ryan Rodrick Beiler is the Web Editor for Sojourners/Call to Renewal.

Therefore, somehow, we have to learn to get our satisfaction and our joy in faithfulness and in our intimate relationship with Christ. Then the question of effectiveness and success, in the usual sense of those terms is not the issue. We can transcend that and get energized and nourished by faithfulness knowing we are doing what we must do to live- not what we must do to change the neighborhood. The constant struggle is the deepening of faith that enables us to really trust that somehow the whole show is going to come off right in God's timing.

- Gordon Cosby
Co-founder and pastor of Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. Excerpt is from "Spirituality and Community: Reflections on Evil and Grace."

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free- and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

- 1 Corinthians 12:12-13

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Living God, you want us to have hearts that are completely simple, to the point that the complicated things in life do not bring us to a halt. Through the Holy Spirit, the spirit of the Risen Christ, you come to open a way for us, a way that is possible; on it we understand that you love us first, before we loved you.

- Brother Roger of Taize
from Life from Within

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Living God, you want us to have hearts that are completely simple, to the point that the complicated things in life do not bring us to a halt. Through the Holy Spirit, the spirit of the Risen Christ, you come to open a way for us, a way that is possible; on it we understand that you love us first, before we loved you.

- Brother Roger of Taize
from Life from Within

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

- 2 Corinthians 6:8-10

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

This past weekend, my wife Joy Carroll Wallis was the commencement speaker at Goshen College in Indiana. She began with a story:

My hope today is to equip you with a warning and commission that might be helpful as you set out on this journey, as you begin the next chapter of your lives. So I want to tell you a story. One evening, an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, fear, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other one is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.”

The grandson thought about this for few minutes and then he looked up at his grandfather and asked: “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed. The one you feed.”

Joy said,

You see, just because you are all set with this fabulous educational and spiritual experience here at Goshen, it doesn’t mean it’s easy or plain sailing from here on in. Most people assume that if we can get this life thing and how to live it figured out in our heads that we’re fine. At college, we often believe we can think our way into a new way of living, but that’s actually not the way it works. In reality, it’s more likely that we will live our way into a new way of thinking. And that’s the challenge before all of us. It’s all about the choices and the decisions that we make – making the right choices, feeding the right wolves, and it’s something we will all wrestle with for the rest of our lives, even on a daily basis.

Then she challenged the students:

Don’t just ask the question, “Does this career path bring me job satisfaction?” Ask, “Does it bring meaning?” and the Christian question is, “Does it contribute to the building of God’s kingdom?” Don’t just go where you are directed or invited. Don’t just do something because you can – but try and make the connections between your talents and gifts and your deepest values and beliefs. Go where your moral compass leads you.

You can read the entire speech, "Feeding the Wolves."

True silence which is creative silence is the most demanding activity God asks of any of us. Here it is that heart and mind and will, memory, and imagination are gathered up and collected in God.

- Robert Llewelyn
from Love Bade Me Welcome

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem in a ministry to the saints; for Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to share their resources with the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. They were pleased to do this, and indeed they owe it to them; for if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material things.

- Romans 15:25-27

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

If I cannot listen to all of life, then any part that I do hear will be only partial or distorted. If I am listening only in chapel, if I am listening only to my peers, if I am listening only to my profession, if I am listening only to my routine, then I have cut out the poor, the children, the needy, the holy where it is calling me to be present.

- Joan Chittister
from Alive Now! July/August 1994

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey! What will you do on the day of punishment, in the calamity that will come from far away? To whom will you flee for help, and where will you leave your wealth, so as not to crouch among the prisoners or fall among the slain? For all this [God's] anger has not turned away; [God's] hand is stretched out still.

- Isaiah 10:1-4

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

It is not what happens to us in any day that gives content to our lives, but whether or not we let its experience sink into us. ... It is one of the highest powers given to anyone. In reflection I come upon feelings that I had been too afraid to experience in the moment. In the quiet of reflection I take the risk and the time to let censored thoughts as well as feelings into consciousness, to discover what is causing the uneasiness in me.

- Elizabeth O'Connor
from Cry Pain, Cry Hope

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Peter began to say to him, "Look, we have left everything and followed you." Jesus said, "Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first."

- Mark 10:28-31

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

After preaching at an evangelical conference for young Latino/a ministers in Florida some time ago, someone asked me, “Gabriel, how would you define yourself?” This question certainly has a myriad of answers but considering the context of my surroundings I guess I knew what he was asking. The query had to do with how I position myself theologically, socially, and politically. This was a difficult question to answer in light of my embracing what Brian McLaren calls A Generous Orthodoxy. The small biography attached to the programs gave some clues to my theological and social eclecticism. I grew up as a Pentecostal pastor’s kid, serve as a Nazarene pastor, have an M.Div. from a Reformed seminary, and am doing doctoral work at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Often when speaking to a new group of people, many assumptions are made depending on how I am introduced. If they lead with "Pentecostal" or "Nazarene" I’m pegged as a conservative Republican who has made up his mind about most things. If they lead with "Latino" and "Union Ph.D. student," the assumption is that I am a theological social liberal who has made up his mind about most things. Now I know I'm not the only one who, in searching to be a faithful disciple of Christ, eschews facile definitions too often used to divide and alienate. There are an increasing number of Latino/a, black, white, and Asian evangelicals (just to name a few groups) who in their search to be faithful to the gospel draw from a plethora of sources. Perhaps we are labeled as post-modern believers or anti-traditionalists. The truth is we are part of a long history of Christians struggling to be faithful witnesses to Jesus Christ.

So, who am I? I am just one of a growing group of Latino progressive evangelicals. In the words of John the Baptist, from the Latin Vulgate, “Ego vox clamantis en deserto.” I am Latino, because I was born in New Jersey of Puerto Rican parents and learned both español and Ingles. I am evangelical because I believe in the transforming power of Jesus Christ and the gospel for the individual and the larger social structures. I am progressive because I hold to the prophetic stream in Christian tradition that says we must do better to live more in line with Christian moral imperatives.

What does this mean to the larger Christian church in the United States, independent of nomenclature? Progressive Latino/a evangelicals are a growing group that says, “Hear us. We have something to say to the larger church.” We do not say "amen" to everything just because someone claims to speak from the evangelical perspective. Neither do we nod in affirmation for all who claim to speak from a Latino/a progressive perspective. We understand our paradox quite well. We are usually pro-family and pro-comprehensive immigration reform that gives dignity to the undocumented. The war in Iraq is of deep concern, particularly in light of the loss of life not just of Iraqi non-combatants but also of too many poor whites, Latinos/as, and blacks. We think that poverty, economic inequality, and the environment are just as important moral issues as abortion, stem cell research, and same-sex marriage.

Some years ago I began meeting with Latino/a evangelical colleagues who were working on articulating together who we were. The Latino Leadership Circle is just one manifestation of people living fully and authentically in ways that some call paradox.


Rev. Gabriel Salguero is the pastor of the Lamb’s Church of the Nazarene in New York City, a Ph.D. candidate at Union Theological Seminary, and the director of the Hispanic Leadership Program at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is also a board member for Sojourners/Call to Renewal.

I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth. For you say, "I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing." You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.

- Revelation 3:15-17

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Water ... has an enormous range of meanings for us as human beings. Our bodies are mostly water, and our thirst reminds us to replenish that water. We are born from the waters of the womb, and something about a pool draws us to plunge back into it and covers ourselves. But if we stay under for too long, it means death. Coming up to the surface and breathing again is almost like being reborn. ... Water washes us clean and makes us feel fresh and new again. Baptism takes - and adds to - all these meanings.

- Hoyt L. Hickman

from the Workbook on Communion and Baptism

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers who eat up my people as they eat bread, and do not call upon the Lord? There they shall be in great terror, for God is with the company of the righteous. You would confound the plans of the poor, but the Lord is their refuge.

- Psalms 14:4-6

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Be still and know. Civilization is littered with unsolved problems, baffling impasses. The best minds of the world are at the end of their tether. The most knowledgeable observers of our condition are badly frightened. The most relevant contribution that Christians make at these points is the act of prayer -determined, repeated, leisurely meetings with the personal and living God. New life is conceived in these meetings.

- Eugene H. Peterson

from "Earth to Altar"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Martin Luther King Jr. is celebrated as the Dreamer. He was more than a dreamer, however; he was a visionary who drum-majored a liberation parade that challenged and changed the status quo. He was not killed for dreaming. He was assassinated because his vision prophetically spoke truth to a powerful status quo. A God-sized vision will always challenge the territorial custodians of what has been. Change is painful and must be nurtured and negotiated, or the vision or pastoral tenure will be assassinated!

- Frederick D. Haynes III

"From Vision to Action: Principles of Organizing a Theologically Grounded and Vision-Driven Church to Effectively Implement Ministries at the Local, National and Global Levels."

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Surely one does not turn against the needy, when in disaster they cry for help. Did I not weep for those whose day was hard? Was not my soul grieved for the poor? But when I looked for good, evil came; and when I waited for light, darkness came.

- Job 30:24-26

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.

- Luke 6:43-45

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

It is part of the genius of the Bible that it preserved a record both of the good and of the bad.

- Naim Ateek

from "Justice, and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.

- James Baldwin
from "The Fire Next Time"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

The Lord rises to argue his case; he stands to judge the peoples. The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes of the people: It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord God of hosts.

- Isaiah 3:13-15

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of all the destitute. Speak out, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy.

- Proverbs 31:8-9

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

We can make the power of those who exploit us irrelevant... Choose to know the truth about global struggles, and live in a way that supports a just alternative.

- Vandana Shiva
from the 2002 World Social Forum

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

When a gun gets loose on a Virginia campus, or a high school rampage occurs in Colorado; when a building blows up in Oklahoma City, or a plane hits a tower in Manhattan - people follow their horror and disbelief with liturgy and love.

I’ll never forget the little shrines of stuffed animals in Manhattan and Oklahoma City, or the three crosses erected on the hills outside of Columbine High School (which were later taken down by students who “didn’t believe” any more). These street liturgies are the reflex ritualizing that comes when things happen that can’t be explained. They are ritual attempts to explain what can’t be explained.

The cell phone has changed our approach to disaster (we rush to phone someone), but not our approach to worship. We still want face-to-face contact after disaster strikes. What follows here is a small guide to good worship when disaster strikes. The first part is for the professional, the second for the participant.

1. First of all, act quickly. Don’t wait, act. The congregations in Virginia acted swiftly to gather people together. Mazel tov to them. Don’t worry about the quality of the service or music: It will pour out. People want religious leadership at times like these.

2. Create symbols. The white ribbon that the Bronfman Center at New York University is promoting is instructive. People want to say, "We connect. We object to what happened." The Bronfman Center is having a companion event at 2 p.m. today in New York City. They also sent delegations of students to Virginia. Again, mazel tov.

3. Involve diverse constituencies. This (in my view) is not the time to invoke the name of Jesus so much as the name of the God beyond God. Don’t alienate people who may never have wanted religious connection before!

4. Sing. Help people to cry. Especially help people who have been victims of previous violence. You know who they are. Invite them especially.

5. Follow up on anniversaries. Put on your calendar the one-year anniversary and have some other kind of remembrance.

6. Don’t expect the relatives of the victims to speak, or be able to speak. Invite them and let them be surrounded by the clumsy love of the service.

7. Give people THINGS TO DO, even if it is distributing leaflets or phoning people or cleaning up the room where the remembrance will be held.

8. Be careful not to accuse the perpetrator of the violence. Leave the anger for later. Resist the temptation to join the hate you oppose.

These instructions go to religious professionals as we go beyond street liturgy into human gatherings with awesome spiritual content. For those who are not professionals, the point is to participate. Show up some place. Act like you care. Isolation is our biggest enemy when terrible things happen.

My own Sept. 11 day in Miami went like this: I found my daughter and was the first parent to take a child home from school. Next, I fed my animals, got money out of the bank, packed food, and went to the church. I was then Senior Minister of the Coral Gables Congregational Church in Miami. I realized my process was strangely, almost absurdly, practical. I got my daughter, age 16, to start calling the youth group on their cell phones. We got almost all the youth group to the church. Then we called the whole congregation, using all the cells and phone lines. We called 900 people that day to see if they were okay. By 4 p.m. we had put out a press release that we were having worship that night at 7 p.m. - and over a thousand people came. The best thing that happened in that worship was that we invited a Muslim woman, a Pakistani-American doctor at the local hospital, to speak. She was brilliant, and received a standing ovation. We worshipped and wept and put a finger in the dike of anti-Muslim hatred. We liturgized love in the face of hate.

As we move into the aftermath of yet another violent disaster, we can imagine a range of responses. They will be a collage of the revenge and awe, fragility and the concomitant preciousness of daily life, fear and insecurity, all packaged in as practical (and absurd) a way as removing our shoes at the airport. This nearly absurd but very holy experience is what ritual and liturgy are all about: They bring together our longings for love and our opposition to hate and violence. They matter more than we can ever know, because they have the last word. They fill up the space where hate has tried to come with its opposite. They prevail.

Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper has served as the Senior Minister of the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, New York City, since 2005. She blogs at Dolly Mama.

Blinding light assaults the darkness;
Children wait for guns to cease.
In the midst of war’s confusion,
Make us instruments of peace.

Hungry for your visitation,
We are waiting –
lost,
afraid.

You alone,
O God,
can save us.
Heal the wounds that we have made.

-Jean McMullan
Written the morning after the war erupted on the Persian Gulf.

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Incline your ear, O Lord, and answer me, for I am poor and needy. Preserve my life, for I am devoted to you; save your servant who trusts in you. You are my God; be gracious to me, O Lord, for to you do I cry all day long. Gladden the soul of your servant, for to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call on you. Give ear, O Lord, to my prayer; listen to my cry of supplication. In the day of my trouble I call on you, for you will answer me.

- Psalms 86:1-7

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Yet, for all this lukewarmness, we hunger. And we know well enough the there is a response. There is an answering back to the Grace of God on your part and on mine that is all-important. We know, too, that the redeeming of our time calls for nothing less than the blazing up out of our prostrate bodies of an authentic, original, passionate, interior life in answer to the Living Flame that confronts us.

-Douglas V. Steere

from “Together in Solitude”

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am. If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.

- Isaiah 58:9-10

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

When tragedies like the Virginia Tech massacre occur, we all share certain questions.

Why did this happen? How could this happen? Should anyone be blamed? Should someone be punished?

Often these questions lead us to seek a kind of rational explanation - so that the irrational can be folded into our sense of order in the universe. Often these questions send us on a search for someone to blame - a person, a group, the devil, even God.

I have found that our understandable need for an explanation - often including the need to name someone to blame - springs not just from our rational minds, but also from our hearts, from levels we are barely conscious of.

We feel grief at the loss, pain for our neighbors who suffer, confusion at the irrationality, and anger at the injustice of it all. Sometimes all of these emotions seem to coalesce in a kind of vague rage that simmers inside us, building up like steam in a closed chamber.

We hope that the pressure can be released and the rage relieved by finding an outlet in explaining ... or in naming, blaming, and shaming someone for being at fault.

There is certainly a time for seeking explanations, including investigating fault.

But I find we make a mistake in believing that explaining and blaming will help us escape our pain. Pain in times like this, I believe, is not simply something to be escaped, resolved, fixed.

Instead, it is something to be suffered, something that must, in a sense, crash over us like a wave or knock us down like a fever, shake us so that we truly feel our feelings and name them; so that we can speak of them and share them and feel an exchange with others of sympathy, empathy, common grief, and common sorrow.

This kind of sorrow doesn't make us bitter; it makes us better. It doesn't make us smug at having an explanation; it makes us humble as we understand our shared vulnerability. It doesn't make us put up walls of blame; it tears down walls as we feel our common humanity. In so doing, it teaches us wisdom - wisdom that, in the scriptures, is often associated with pain and struggle. It softens us, makes us more sensitive to the pain that others suffer but we often ignore. It forms compassion in us.

We often are tempted to run from this softening process, which is understandable. But as we all share in this experience of tragedy, as we walk through the un-rushable process of feeling and then healing, may we allow the spirit of God to form us into more gracious, compassionate, and wise people. Doing so will raise other questions:

How can I help? Who around me needs to talk? What question can I ask that will allow my neighbors to share their pain, their fear, their anger, their sorrow? How can we open ourselves to the healing presence of God so we can walk together through "the valley of the shadow of death" - so that, even in great sadness, we "fear no evil?" (Psalm 23)

I found myself looking back today on other moments of shared sadness - the terrible assassinations of the 1960's, the loss of the space shuttle crews, the terrorist attacks of recent years, the outbreak of wars, the 2004 tsunami, Hurricane Katrina ... there have been many. I find myself now praying that our current shared sadness will do in us what it can and should. We're all in this - all of us, all of this - together. Lord, have mercy.


Brian McLaren (brianmclaren.net) is an author, speaker, Red Letter Christian, and serves as board chair for Sojourners/Call to Renewal. His next book, due out in October, will be called Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope.

The shooting deaths of 32 students and staff of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, is the latest example of the senseless violence that seems so often to enter our daily lives.

In the midst of the shock such events bring, it is difficult to know what to say.

So, I was moved by an editorial in the Los Angeles Times this morning:

IN THE BIBLICAL Book of Job, the anguished hero is visited by three friends who attempt to comfort him by drawing airy and sententious lessons from his agonies. Of course, they end up adding to his troubles; Job endures not only the real pains of grief and sickness but the indignity of having his suffering milked for rhetorical effect.

If only it were true that Monday's mass murder on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University was the kind of tragedy that moves us to quiet reflection. In fact, the shootings that killed more than 30 people and wounded nearly 30 others occasioned a blizzard of hasty conclusions, instant position-taking and the rehashing of old arguments. For the sake of the dead, for the sake of the living, and even for the sake of honoring this grim milestone — the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history — we should remember that there are times when silence is the best response.

Events like these are almost impossible to react to sanely. A group of people you don't know have been killed in a senseless crime. Too young to have established much of a past, they've been robbed of present and future; the weight of the offense, the rotten meaninglessness of it, makes it awkward not to have something to say.

The editorial notes that there will be discussions about gun control and other political issues, but concludes: "There will be time for both in the days to come. But now is a time to respect, quietly, the tears and the pain of this terrible event."

Along with the rest of our country and the world, all of us at the God’s Politics blog send our condolences and prayers to the families and friends of those who died, and to the entire Virginia Tech community. We pray that the comforting presence of God will be felt in the midst of this unexplainable tragedy.

While we're still reeling from the news of the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech, we offer this excerpted reflection from the November 2004 issue of Sojourners magazine:

Soon after Sept. 11, 2001, my 14-year-old daughter, Jenny, was killed in a car accident. In that moment, the global grief I had been witnessing at a distance became intensely personal for me. I shared the pain of every mother everywhere—American, Afghani, Iraqi—as she struggled to bear the unbearable.

When my daughter died, she was at the beginning of her blossoming, filled with indignation against injustice, hunger for justice, and the early flames of spiritual love. I had believed that Jenny would grow up to consciously help alleviate the suffering in this world. The loss of such potential, coupled with the primal agony of missing her, threatened to destroy me.

But there was another reality just beyond the edges of my anguish. A palpable sense of holiness began to pervade the emptiness carved by my shattering. As my family and community rallied to support me in those first hours and days of my loss, filling the air with their prayers, tears, and singing, I noticed a radiance wash over my heart and the hearts of my circle of support. God was with us. And Jenny was with God. The exaltation accompanying this phenomenon confused me. The most terrible thing imaginable had happened and, while my suffering was acute, I was also being soothed and lifted by this ineffable holy joy.

For a year or more, all I could do was tentatively face the fire of my feelings, offering quiet prayers for peace on the planet and in the hearts of all who were grieving. I sat amid the wreckage of my own heart, allowing the broken fragments to re-form according to the inscrutable timetable of the Divine, relinquishing any last illusions that I had control of anything in this life.

Eventually, like so many victims of tragedy, I turned my attention to service. This was the only path that made any sense. The ordinary concerns of daily life had dissolved in the inferno of my loss. Struck by the rarified awareness that had begun to grow in me, I became intensely interested in those whose own losses had acted as a catalyst for spiritual transformation in their lives.

+ Read the entire article

Mirabai Starr, the author of translations of Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross and The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila, was a certified grief counselor and an adjunct professor of philosophy and religious studies at the University of New Mexico, Taos, when this article appeared.

Confronting our feelings and giving them appropriate expression always takes strength, not weakness. It takes strength to acknowledge our anger, and sometimes more strength yet to curb the aggressive urges anger may bring and to channel them into nonviolent outlets. It takes strength to face our sadness and to grieve and to let our grief and our anger flow in tears when they need to. It takes strength to talk about our feelings and to reach out for help and comfort when we need it.

- Fred Rogers
from "The World According to Mr. Rogers."

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

For the Lord will comfort Zion; he will comfort all her waste places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song.

- Isaiah 51:3

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Enough of phrases and conceits and metaphors!
I want burning, burning...

Light up a fire of love in thy soul,Burn all thought and expression away!

- Jelalludin Rumi

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth...

- Isaiah 11:1-4

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

See, a king will reign in righteousness, and princes will rule with justice. Each will be like a hiding place from the wind, a covert from the tempest, like streams of water in a dry place, like the shade of a great rock in a weary land. Then the eyes of those who have sight will not be closed, and the ears of those who have hearing will listen. The minds of the rash will have good judgment, and the tongues of stammerers will speak readily and distinctly. A fool will no longer be called noble, nor a villain said to be honorable.

- Isaiah 32:1-5

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

See, a king will reign in righteousness, and princes will rule with justice. Each will be like a hiding place from the wind, a covert from the tempest, like streams of water in a dry place, like the shade of a great rock in a weary land. Then the eyes of those who have sight will not be closed, and the ears of those who have hearing will listen. The minds of the rash will have good judgment, and the tongues of stammerers will speak readily and distinctly. A fool will no longer be called noble, nor a villain said to be honorable.

- Isaiah 32:1-5

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Prayer leads you to see new paths and to hear new melodies in the air. Prayer is the breath of your life which gives you freedom to go and stay where you wish and to find the many signs which point out the way to a new land,. Praying is not simply some necessary compartment in the daily schedule of a Christian or a source of support in time of need, nor is it restricted to Sunday morning or a as a frame to surround mealtimes. Praying is living.

-Henri J.M. Nouwen

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

God’s life and our lives are bound together, as a vine with branches as a body with members. So corporate are we that no one can give a cup of cold water to the least person in the world without giving it to [God]!

-Rufus M. Jones
from “The Double Search”

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

[Jesus] looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. He said, "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on."

- Luke 21:1-4

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Where are the gentle spirits and the prayerful souls among our leaders? When will we trust the qualifications of credible lifestyle and courageous witness as much as articulation of programs and financial expertise? When will we die to the styles of government and authority that characterize our secular society and choose the style of the gospel? So that what is most evident in those who direct and encourage us is their pilgrim status, their ability to listen and to learn and to change, and their global sensitivity.

- Joan Puls
from "Every Bush is Burning"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Those who mock the poor insult their Maker; those who are glad at calamity will not go unpunished.

- Proverbs 17:5-5

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, "Have a seat here, please," while to the one who is poor you say, "Stand there," or, "Sit at my feet," have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

- James 2:1-4

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another. We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study and calculation in our own isolated meditations. The meaning of our life is a secret that has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love. And if this love is unreal, the secret will not be found, the meaning will never reveal itself, the message will never be decoded. At best, we will receive a scrambled and partial message, one that will deceive and confuse us. We will never be fully real until we let ourselves fall in love - either with another human person or with God.

- Thomas Merton

Love and Living, edited by Naomi Burton Stone and Br. Patrick Hart Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985, page 27

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

From a video by Christian Aid:

Christian leaders, including Jim Wallis (Sojourners), John Bell (Iona Community) and the Bishop of Durham (England), reflect on the biblical call for justice. This film was produced by the video team at Christian Aid, the international development agency of the churches of the UK and Ireland. Christian Aid works wherever the need is greatest – irrespective of religion or race. For more info, please visit http://www.christianaid.org.uk/

Jim appears at :34 and 3:15. Watch it:

On Good Friday, 2007, a friend drew my attention to a fascinating editorial by CNN contributor Roland Martin. It expressed in both intellectual content and emotional intensity what many of us think and feel about the state of the Christian community in the United States. Along the way it offered this rather inspiring vision - evocative of the biblical vision of the lion and the lamb lying down together in peace:

I'm looking for the day when Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Joyce Meyer, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, James Kennedy, Rod Parsley, "Patriot Pastors" and Rick Warren will sit at the same table as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Cynthia Hale, Eddie L. Long, James Meek, Fred Price, Emmanuel Cleaver and Floyd Flake to establish a call to arms on racism, AIDS, police brutality, a national health care policy, our sorry education system.

An aside: Martin's use of the warfare language in the editorial - call to arms, holy war, set our sights, and so on - mirrors the surge in military rhetoric currently (over) deployed by our news media. Every conflict, it seems, quickly becomes a full-blown war - from "The Battle over Anna Nicole's Body" to "the nuclear option" in Congress to Newt Gingrich's proclamation during the invasion of Lebanon last summer that World War III had begun. (I found myself using warfare rhetoric just the other day, in a completely inappropriate ministry context. I guess the language of war, like war itself, can be contagious.) We should all do some serious reflection on how the warfare rhetoric we use can turn the tables and start using us.

But putting that important concern aside for the time being, let me quote Martin again. Speaking of the deep polarization between the Christian "left" and "right," he observes:

Many people believe we are engaged in a holy war. And we are. But it's not with Muslims. The real war - the silent war - is being engaged among Christians, and that's what we must set our sights on.

Martin's insight about the conflicted Christian community in America reminded me of three books I read recently about Islam.

In the last chapter of Caryle Murphy's A Passion for Islam (Scribner, 2002), the Pulitzer-prize-winning author speaks of "the divisions that mark Islam today as it passes through one of its most crucial periods." She continues, "It is this internal battle for the hearts and souls of fellow Muslims, rather than Bin Laden's call for jihad against the West, that is most crucial for the future of Islam's contemporary resurgence" (276).

Similarly, Irshad Manji's courageous book The Trouble with Islam (St. Martins, 2003) speaks of the great need for ijtihad - honest reflection, self-criticism, self-examination, vigorous rethinking, renewal, reformation. Manji explores the conflict between those who look inward, seeking to root out internal hypocrisy and religious dysfunction through ijtihad and those who externalize their anxiety by pursing violent jihad against external enemies instead.

Finally, Reza Aslan, in No god but God (Random House, 2005), concludes:

The tragic events of September 11, 2001, may have fueled the clash-of-monotheisms mentality among those Muslims, Christians, and Jews who seem to mistake religion for faith and scripture for God. ... What has occurred since that fateful day amounts to nothing short of another Muslim civil war - a fitnah - which ... is tearing the Muslim community into opposing factions (266).

As I read Roland Martin's editorial, I couldn't help but feel the resonances between his call for conflicted Christians to find a way beyond their impasse and the parallel struggle among our Muslim friends and neighbors in seeking a way forward for their conflicted faith. For all of their differences, members of the two religions have at least this in common: both faiths are in "crucial periods," experiencing an "internal battle" or "silent war" among opposing factions, a struggle to retain what is true and good and generous, to reject what is inconsistent with each faith's highest ideals and dreams, and to do so in ways that won't blow us all to smithereens.

The fact that Martin's editorial came out on Good Friday got me thinking of Jesus' role as one who challenged the religious establishment of his day with its polarizations and paralysis. Jesus called for a kind of ijtihad (repentance) among his brothers and sisters, proclaiming a new commandment of love, leading to a new way of being godly people - as reconcilers, peacemakers, servants of the last, least, and lost. I thought about what his message cost him on the first Good Friday, and what it may cost anyone today who seeks a better way beyond the politicized, fractious status quo.

We've probably heard many people here in the U.S. ask, "Why aren't there more moderate Muslims speaking out against the violent extremists and calling for reform in Islam?" As I reflected on Roland Martin's editorial on Good Friday, 2007, I couldn't help but think, "Maybe around the world, 'behind our back,' so to speak, people are asking a similar question about Christians in the U.S."

These reflections stayed with me over the weekend and were with me still on Easter Sunday. In his Easter sermon, my pastor quoted Romans 8, where Paul says that the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in us. Those words challenged me to believe that the impossibility of resurrection is indeed possible ... not just in our individual lives, but also in our religious communities, if we are truly open to the life-giving, death-defying Spirit of God. I'm grateful to Roland Martin and cnn.com for prompting this Easter reflection.


Brian McLaren (brianmclaren.net) is an author, speaker, Red Letter Christian, and serves as board chair for Sojourners/Call to Renewal. His next book, due out in October, will be called Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope.

Without faith, hope, and love nothing sinful is totally abolished, nor is anything good fully attained.

- St. Maximus the Confessor

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

You who fear the Lord, praise him! ... For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him. From you comes my praise in the great congregation; my vows I will pay before those who fear him. The poor shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the Lord. May your hearts live forever!

- Psalms 22:23-26

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

I am on spring break with my family this week. As we approach Good Friday and Easter, I wanted to share with you the concluding chapter to my book, The Call to Conversion. It's a reflection on the cross and resurrection, "The Victory." It will be posted in three parts: Below is the final installment. I wish all of you a happy and Holy Easter.

What about you and me today? Do we still doubt that this kind of love makes much sense in our complex technological world? Does the way of suffering servanthood seem out of place in our world of huge and powerful institutions? That doubt was the experience of the disciples between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. They, too, felt overwhelmed by the powers and forces that ruled the day. But they were converted. The disciples became the people of the resurrection. They began to live lives filled with the fruits of conversion. They began living in the power of the resurrection. We, too, can know the power of Christ's resurrection.

But such power will not come simply by attesting to the theological fact of the resurrection. We, like the first disciples, must come out of hiding and see the risen Lord. Seeing is believing, and believing is knowing that we must turn and follow Jesus. The wisdom of God in Jesus Christ will then be made known to the principalities and the powers through the church. The place in which the dominion of the powers is broken is the fellowship of the resurrection, the church community that nurtures growing confidence in the power of God's love. The resurrection restores broken fellowship. Because the Lord is risen, love reigns where fear once controlled.

To doubt or be suspicious of the power of that love is to doubt the resurrection. The doubting, suspecting parts of our lives are yet unhealed because we have not been converted; we have still to receive the love that would heal us and change the world.

We are invited to celebrate the victory of Christ and to live in the world showing we believe it to be true. We are invited to experiment with its truth by risking our security, comfort, resources, time, energy, and our very lives for the sake of his victory. We are called to be those who have left all and risked everything in testifying to his victory. We are called to demonstrate to the world, with our lives, that we have been converted by the resurrection.

The basis of our faith is that Jesus Christ is stronger than any of the powers that confront us: political tyranny, economic oppression, the logic of war. We confront the world's powers not merely with our own strength, resources, ideas, commitment, work, or resistance. Rather, we confront the world with the very life of the resurrected Christ among us.

Like Jesus' other disciples, who were controlled by their fear, we can be converted by seeing the resurrected Christ. Whenever we act in obedience to Christ, we are demonstrating his victory. Every time we act upon Jesus' lordship in our lives, are reconciled to a brother or sister, refuse to be controlled by the economic system, deny the absolute authority of the state, claim Christ's freedom over our fear, tear down the walls of race, class, and sex, love our enemies, stand with the poor, or resist the violence of the nations by acting for peace - we are demonstrating the victory of Christ in the world. His victory is present wherever it is claimed and acted upon. We are those who evaluate themselves and the whole world in the light of Christ's victory.

Preaching the cross and the resurrection of Jesus is foolishness to those who perish. Yet, fools for Christ formed the early church. As that tiny band of believers grew, the world could see the power in such foolishness.

That same foolishness is the only hope we have of breaking free from the present realities that so gravely threaten us. Only in the recognition of something that is more real can we see their authority as unreal. The greatest threat to any system is the existence of fools who do not believe in the ultimate reality of that system. Indeed, the first step in making new realities possible is to break free from the grip and the authority of the old realities. To repent and to believe in a new reality - that is the essence of conversion. We join the body of Christ whose purpose is to make visible this new reality in the world.

Without the resurrection, the defeated followers of Jesus would have simply faded away. He would have been just another prophet who was killed. But the resurrection vindicated the cross and validated the way of Jesus, establishing the authority of his Lordship. At the same time, the resurrection invalidated the authority of the system. It showed the world's way to be a lie. The world's definition of reality crucified Jesus. His resurrection proved that definition of reality to be false. Our system, too, has its definitions of reality - national security, economic expansion, political realism. The way of Jesus is thought to be as foolish today as it was in his day. His kingdom is totally alien to the present world order.

If we believe the resurrection, the world will consider us unreasonable, unrealistic, irresponsible, and irrelevant. A world full of incredible foolishness, of myths called "truths" and of lies called "logic," will insist that we are the fools. Yet the resurrection convinces us of God's wisdom. We finally know God's power to heal us and to transform our relationship to the world.

On Easter morning, and each day of our lives, we celebrate the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which triumphs over every other reality. In the face of the world and its systems, we proclaim the resurrection, saying, "We have seen the Lord." We see him in the lives of our brothers and sisters. We discover him in the faces of the poor, in the faces of all the victims, and in the faces of our children. We see him in the lives of Christians who have suffered and died because they believed. And we see the Lord in the bread and the wine. He shows us, as he did his disciples, the evidence of his suffering. He invites us to reach out, take, eat, and drink; he wants us to remember him, to see him, and to know his victory.

His way is life. The world's way is death. We can now stand before the world's false realities and securities, free to deny them, denounce them, and remove ourselves from them. We stand before the reality of the resurrection and confess with the first disciples that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.

We stand before the world as fools. We are foolish enough to believe that Jesus' way is stronger and more true than the way of the world. We rest secure in the knowledge that he has, and will, overcome. We are called to be fools for Christ, a people saved by his cross and converted, finally, by his resurrection.

May God convert us to such foolishness.

At the center of the Christian understanding of revelation and redemption stands the person of Jesus. Of him we say that he not only brings us the revelation of God, but that in his person he is the revelation of God.

-Monika K. Hellwig
from Jesus: The Compassion of God (The Liturgical Press, 1983)

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Thus says the Lord: Do not let the wise boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth; but let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the Lord; I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, says the Lord.

- Jeremiah 9:23-24

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

In the early 90s, I lived in Santa Barbara, Calif., and attended a dynamic, renewing, spiritually vital liberal congregation, Trinity Episcopal Church. There, I was fortunate enough to meet the Rt. Rev. Daniel Corrigan, an aged Episcopal bishop who was also the first bishop to ordain women to the priesthood. Dan Corrigan was a unique breed: one of those mid-20th century liberal princes of the pulpit, a Protestant minister whose stirring preaching and passionate commitment to social justice pushed Christians to enact God's shalom toward the oppressed and the outcast. He was both pastor and prophet. Even at the end of his life, Dan Corrigan wore the Holy Spirit like a mantle around his shoulders, always ready to speak for God.

One year, as Easter approached, I overheard an exchange between this octogenarian liberal lion and a fellow parishioner. "Bishop Corrigan," the person asked, "Do you believe in the resurrection?" Frankly, I could not wait to hear the answer – like most of his generation, there was no way that Bishop Corrigan believed in a literal resurrection. He looked at the questioner and said firmly, without pause, "Yes. I believe in the resurrection. I've seen it too many times not to."

Progressive Christians often stumble on the resurrection. Many will sit in churches this Easter Sunday, silently doubting or questioning the minister's sermon. They may like the music, appreciate the tradition and liturgy, and delight in the feelings of joy – but they will not really believe the resurrection. One of the great theological problems of old-style Protestant liberalism was the doctrine of the resurrection – it defied logic, reason, and human experience that a man would be raised from the dead. Having rejected the idea of the miraculous, the liberal tradition turned resurrection into an allegory or a spiritual metaphor.

As a writer, I happen to appreciate the power of allegory and metaphor. And I thought that was the theological tack Bishop Corrigan would take with the parishioner. However, he did not. Instead, Bishop Corrigan headed right for the dicey territory of historical witness: I've seen it too many times not to.

The problem with trying to prove – or disprove, for that matter – the resurrection is that actual historical evidence of the event 2,000 years ago does not exist one way or the other. In his popular book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, Josh McDowell goes through a torturous process of picking and choosing facts to establish a legal case that proves the resurrection. On the other side of the theological ledger, the recent book, The Jesus Family Tomb, likewise picks and chooses from meager data to intellectually establish that Jesus died and stayed dead. Both sides of this street are an intellectual and historical dead-end, an argument with no solution – only overheated opinions.

Bishop Corrigan's comment – a comment upon which I have mediated for some dozen years – points to a different way of embracing, of believing, the resurrection. His answer both defies the conventional approach to the resurrection (as a scientifically verifiable event), and maintains the truthfulness (the credibility) of the resurrection as historically viable and real. The resurrection is not an intellectual puzzle. Rather, it is a living theological reality, a distant event with continuing spiritual, human, and social consequences. The evidence for the resurrection is all around us. Not in some ancient text, Jesus bones, or a DNA sample. Rather, the historical evidence for the resurrection is Jesus living in us; it is the transformative power of the Holy Spirit, bringing back to life that which was dead. We are the evidence.

There is a woman in my church in Washington, D.C., who was homeless for 15 years. Several years ago, she came to Epiphany Church and was welcomed by the congregation's ministry to homeless people. "It was the first time," she told me, "that I came into a church and no one looked at me as if I was going to steal something." Epiphany's people respected her humanity, fed her, listened to her, and helped her – all in the name and power of Jesus. Eventually, she moved off the street into Section 8 housing, secured both work and support, and pulled her life together. An active member of Epiphany, she helps run the homeless ministry, serves as a Sunday reader, and usher.

When I see her on Sunday, she is a living, breathing, historical witness that the resurrection is true.

Like Bishop Corrigan, I, too, can say that I believe the resurrection. I've seen it too many times not to.

This Easter Sunday, consider all the resurrections you have seen. If you are anything like me, those resurrections are not only stories of homeless people who find a home in Christ. They will be stories of your own life, of your myriad deaths and rebirths – of all the times you thought God had deserted you only to discover that God was finding you anew. The resurrection cannot be intellectually proved; it goes well beyond allegory and myth. It is the continuing, transforming power of God to bring back from death all that was lost – that ever-renewing love at work changing ourselves, our communities, and our world. Go ahead: believe.


Diana Butler Bass (http://www.dianabutlerbass.com/) is the author of Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith (Harper San Francisco), recently chosen as Book of the Year by the Academy of Parish Clergy.

I am on spring break with my family this week. As we approach Good Friday and Easter, I wanted to share with you the concluding chapter to my book, The Call to Conversion. It's a reflection on the cross and resurrection, "The Victory." It will be posted in three parts: Below is the second of the three.

Today, Jesus stands among us, with the marks of his suffering plainly visible. He knows us, he knows our fears. We are afraid of economic hardship and diminishing resources; of the enmity between black, white, red, brown, and yellow peoples; of the volatile gulf between rich and poor; of the hurt between men and women; of violence stalking on every side; of the drift toward endless war; and of the ways that restoring broken fellowship might disrupt our lives and our security. We fear for ourselves and for our children. Like the disciples, we are afraid of the power of the systems of the world with their armies, their courts, their prisons, their threats. Like them, too, we fear our own powerlessness, weakness, and sense of inadequacy. We are insecure, frightened of our own emotions, and wary of trusting one another. We feel both the guilt of our sin and the vulnerability of our broken places. Above all, we fear pain, suffering, and finally death.

We, too, are hiding behind locked doors and are afraid to come out. Jesus knows our fears. He wants us to know his resurrection. He says, "Go, tell my disciples that I have risen and that I am going before them. And go tell … " - he slowly repeats each of our names. Tell him, tell her that we need not be afraid anymore. Like Peter, we have betrayed Christ because of our fears. But Jesus didn't hold Peter's fear against him. Nor does he hold our fears against us. We, too, have doubted like Thomas. We have become cynical, skeptical, and faithless. But Jesus stands among us, shows us his hands and his side, and he tells us to reach out and touch him. He tells Thomas and he tells us not to doubt but to believe.

Jesus died for our sins, our doubts, and our fears. He rose from the grave to demonstrate his victory over them and to set us free from their power. He wants us, like Peter, Thomas, Mary, and the others, to know his resurrection. He wanted them to know, and he wants us to know, that his love for his disciples has no bounds, that he died to set us free, and that he rose from the dead to show us his way was true. "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."

A conversion was wrought in the disciples. No longer afraid, they fearlessly proclaimed his resurrection in the streets of Jerusalem. What had brought about this miraculous transformation? They had experienced the resurrected Christ, and the experience converted them. They had seen the Lord, and they believed. They turned from fear and turned toward the Lord. Their lives became evidence of the resurrection.

Most people considered them fools for believing. The Jews did, the Romans did, the whole world did. But no one doubted that the disciples believed. The authorities told them to stop preaching, but to no avail. Peter, who had denied his Lord, now rose in the presence of the Jerusalem multitudes to preach the good news of Jesus Christ.

What is the good news? When all that sin had done, or could ever do, was laid on Jesus, it did not overcome him. Death could not swallow him. The grave was denied its victory. The witness of history and of his followers is that "he is risen." He is alive. He has triumphed over all. He is the victor over every sin, hate, fear, violence, and death. Nothing is stronger than his victory - nothing past, nothing present, and nothing future.

The Crucified One has prevailed over every principality, power, and dominion. He has "disarmed" them, made a "public example" of them, "discarded them like a garment," and "led them captive" in his victory procession (Colossians 2:15). He has unmasked their illusions, exposed their lies, and showed them for what they are. He stands free of their threats, power, and control. He defeated them by letting them do their worst to him, then he vanquished them by the power of God's love and truth - weapons stronger than all the weapons of the world. Jesus bore the full weight of the world's sin, and he overcame it all. Today, as then, his people come together to confess, "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again."

The resurrection always exists in relationship to the cross. The cross of Jesus, which appeared to be a complete defeat and utter failure, is revealed as the very means of the kingdom. The cross is, for us, not only the symbol of atonement for our sins but the pattern of our lives. Jesus moved toward it and provoked it when he could have chosen otherwise. "Bearing our cross" is more than simply enduring difficult personal circumstances. For Jesus, the cross was the expected result of a moral clash with the powers of his society. His cross, therefore, not only frees us from personal sin; it also liberates us from the power of this world. Living freely in relationship to those powers, establishing a moral independence from them, will ultimately lead to a cross. The cross is the sign of that freedom. The resurrection seals the truth of the cross; it declares that, once and for all, oppression and death are swallowed up in Christ's victory.

If this is God's way of salvation and liberation, do we have the right to choose any other way for relating to the world? The greatest offense in this world is the love that was willing to go to a cross in order to save the world. That was the political stance of God's suffering servant, a stance that was vindicated by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism, are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.

-Martin Luther King, Jr.
from “A Time to Break Silence”, King’s address given on this day, April 4th in 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York City.

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

The lover of money will not be satisfied with money; nor the lover of wealth, with gain. This also is vanity. When goods increase, those who eat them increase; and what gain has their owner but to see them with his eyes?

- Ecclesiastes 5:10-11

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

I am on spring break with my family this week. As we approach Good Friday and Easter, I wanted to share with you the concluding chapter to my book, The Call to Conversion. It's a reflection on the cross and resurrection, "The Victory." It will be posted in three parts: Below is the first of the three.

But the angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid; for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him" (Matthew 28:57).

Jesus is alive. That was the rumor that spread through Jerusalem that first Easter morning. Women came to the tomb early in the morning, the first witnesses to the resurrection. Their testimony as women was not even admissible in court under Jewish law; the word of a woman had no public credibility in that patriarchal culture. But God chose to reveal the miracle of Jesus' resurrection first to women. They were told to report the astonishing news of the empty tomb to the men. At first, the men did not believe it.

Jesus' first appearance was also to a woman, Mary Magdalene. She was in the garden near the tomb, stricken with grief. The one who had accepted and forgiven her, the one whom she loved so deeply, was gone. She saw a figure she thought was the gardener and said to him, "They have taken my Lord. Do you know where they have laid him?" Then a familiar voice called her name, "Mary." She looked up and recognized him. "Master!" she cried. Her Lord had come back, and the heart of the woman who had been cleansed by his love leapt for joy. Mary went straight to the disciples with a simple testimony, "I have seen the Lord." Their excitement must have been enormous.

The disciples were in hiding behind locked doors from fear of the authorities, says the Bible. They had seen what had happened to their leader and were afraid they would be next. So they huddled in secret.

The ones at the tomb who appeared as "young men in shining garments" told the women to go tell the disciples and Peter. Peter had always been the leader among the disciples, but he had betrayed his Lord three times with oaths and curses. Peter denied his Master from fear. The strong fisherman wept bitterly and became utterly dejected after the death of the Lord. Jesus especially wanted Peter to know of his resurrection. He wanted to make sure Peter was told, not as a rebuke, but so Peter would know that he was alive and that he still loved him. When the women told them the news, Peter and John ran to the tomb. John, younger and faster than Peter, arrived first and waited at the entrance, peering into the darkness. Peter, always the impulsive disciple, didn't stop at the entrance; he went right inside. He had to see. He had to know. They saw the empty tomb, and they believed.

Then there were the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. They didn't recognize Jesus until he broke the bread. They also rushed to tell the disciples. Imagine the situation. The air was electric with rumors and reports of witnesses who said they had seen him. Most of the disciples had not yet seen him and were full of wonder. Could it be? It was too good to be true. A world that had ended for them three days earlier now seemed to be opening again.

Then Jesus came and stood among them. "Peace be with you," he said, as he looked into their eyes. Think what they must have felt at that moment. He showed them his hands and his feet. "It is I, myself touch me and see." They could hardly believe what they were seeing. He even took a fish and ate it, just to show them he was real. He recalled to them the Scriptures and his own foretelling of his death and resurrection. It was really he, and he was really alive.

Thomas wasn't there. When the others told him, he didn't believe it. Perhaps wounded with pain and disillusionment, perhaps filled with bitterness and cynicism, Thomas would not let his hopes be rekindled. He said, "Unless I see the marks of the nails in his hands, unless I put my fingers in the place the marks were, and my hand into his side, I will not believe."

Later, Jesus came to his disciples again. This time, Thomas was present. "Thomas," he said, "put your finger here and see my hands. Put out your hand and place it in my side. Do not be faithless, but believing." Thomas must have witnessed the marks of Jesus' suffering with tears in his eyes. "My Lord and my God," he humbly exclaimed. For Thomas, and for them all, unbelief was turned to belief when they saw their Lord and the marks of his suffering. They were converted by the resurrection.

The disciples had left everything to follow Jesus. He had touched their lives as no one else ever had. He was the one who loved them, and the one whom they had grown to love. Jesus was alive again and among his disciples as before, but now in a new way. The first words spoken to Jesus' followers at his empty tomb were, "Do not be afraid. He is not here; for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay." And the Scriptures say, "When they saw the Lord they were filled with great joy."

Jesus of Nazareth was delivered up by the chief priests and killed by the Romans under Pontius Pilate. He was dead and, three days later, was alive again. A man who died had been raised from the dead. History has been able to offer no other believable answer to the fact of his empty tomb.

The guards who had been posted at the tomb ran to tell the chief priests what had occurred. Their very lives were at stake for failing to prevent the tomb from being opened. To break the Roman seal that had been placed at the entrance to the tomb was against the emperor's law and punishable by death. The resurrection of Jesus Christ was, then, an act of civil disobedience. The chief priests agreed to protect the guards if they would go along with a story they made up, saying that the disciples had stolen the body.

But the story failed. Something had happened and the disciples had lost their fear. A dejected and defeated band was filled with faith and confidence. They had seen the Lord, and they had been converted.

When the disciples saw Jesus, they came out of hiding. Until then, they had been cowering behind closed doors, controlled by fear. They had feared the Jewish authorities and the Romans who stood behind them. They had feared the power of the soldiers, the courts, the temples. And they had been afraid of their own faithlessness and inadequacy.

Until they saw Jesus, the disciples viewed the world the way others did. The central reality of their lives had been the power of the system and their own powerlessness. But when they saw him, they unlocked the doors, came out, and began turning the world upside down. The disciples were converted; they knew another reality then, one that was truer, greater, stronger, and a more compelling authority than the realities that had paralyzed them with fear. Jesus had risen, and Jesus was Lord.

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: "You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.' " He said to him, "Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth." Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me."

- Mark 10:17-21

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

[I]f confrontation is to be an expression of patient action, it must be humble...When confrontation is tainted by desire for attention, need for revenge, or greed for power, it can easily become self-serving and cease to be compassionate.

- Donald P. McNeill et al.

from “Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life”

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them. That one is like a [person] building a house, who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock; when a flood arose, the river burst against that house but could not shake it, because it had been well built. But the one who hears and does not act is like a [person] who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the river burst against it, immediately it fell, and great was the ruin of that house."

- Luke 6:47-49

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Reverence is a gentle virtue; it is also strong. Reverence is a tender virtue; it is also tough. Reverence is a patient virtue; it is also persistent. Reverence bears no ill will toward others; it is able to bear the ill will of others when necessary. Reverence is a virtue that prepares us well to belong to one another; it reaches out to thise who have given messages of not wishing to belong.

When we approach others with gentle reverence, we bring gifts and share theirs with us.

- Paula Ripple
from "Growing Strong at Broken Places"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground! ... They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth. Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins—you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate.

- Amos 5:7-12

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Whoever loves true prayer and yet becomes angry or resentful is his own enemy. He is like a man who wants to see clearly and yet inflicts damage on his own eyes.

- Evgarius the Solitary

Treatise on Prayer, 64.

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Great indeed is the baptism which is offered you. It is a ransom to captives; the remission of offences; the death of sin; the regeneration of the soul; the garment of light; the holy seal indissoluble; the chariot to heaven; the luxury of paradise; a procuring of the kingdom; the gift of adoption.

- Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem (c. 315-386) from "Catechetical Lectures of S. Cyril"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

"You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

- Matthew 5:43-45

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

There are those who rebel against the light, who are not acquainted with its ways, and do not stay in its paths. The murderer rises at dusk to kill the poor and needy, and in the night is like a thief.

- Job 24:13-14

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

To be a follower of Jesus means in the first place to enter by compassion into his experience, with all that it expresses of the divine and of the human. And it means in the second place to enter with him into the suffering and the hope of all human persons, making common cause with them as he does, and seeking out as he does the places of his predilection among the poor and despised and oppressed.

- Monika K. Hellwig
from Jesus: The Compassion of God (The Liturgical Press, 1983)

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Those of steadfast mind you keep in peace—in peace because they trust in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for in the Lord God you have an everlasting rock. For he has brought low the inhabitants of the height; the lofty city he lays low. He lays it low to the ground, casts it to the dust. The foot tramples it, the feet of the poor, the steps of the needy.

- Isaiah 26:3-6

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Water comes from its own source which is God. And since God desires to do so ... God produces this delight with the greatest peace and quite and sweetness in the very interior part of ourselves. I don't know from where or how, nor is that happiness and delight experienced, as are earthly consolations, in the heart. I mean there is no simliarity at the beginning, for afterward the delight fills everything; this water overflows through all the dwelling places and faculties until reaching the body. ... It begins in God and ends in ourselves.

- Saint Teresa of Avila
from "Interior Castle"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Seek good and not evil, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, just as you have said. Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.

- Amos 5:14-15

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

To show great love for God and our neighbor we need not do great things. It is how much love we put in the doing that makes our offering something beautiful for God.

- Mother Teresa

from "A Gift for God"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

For you have been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress, a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat.

- Isaiah 25:4-4

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Wholeness for us, as people of God,
is moving ever toward oneness with God,
regardless of the conditionof our bodies,
our lives,
our minds.
Everyone equally has a capacity
to be whole.Wholeness is a gift from God.

- Beth A. Richardson
in "Alive Now!" March/April 1992.

"Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?" Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high.

- Isaiah 58:3-4

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

When shall we have the courage to outgrow the charity mentality and see that at the bottom of all relations between rich and poor there is a problem of justice?

- Dom Helder Camara

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Help me, O Lord, to make a true use of all disappointments and calamities in this life, in such a way that they may unite my heart more closely with you. Cause them to separate my affections from worldly things and inspire my soul with more vigor in the pursuit of true happiness.

- Susanna Wesley
from "Alive Now!" March/April 1992

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.

- Matthew 5:23-24

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice; you shall not take a widow's garment in pledge. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this.

- Deuteronomy 24:17-18

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Do you believe that God is present in the smile of a child, in the tears of a parent's grief over a suffering adolescent, in the sudden breakthrough of understading between quarreling spouses? Eternal truths can be learned by observing the most common elements of life: nursing an infant may be a window into God's nurturing care for each of us; bandaging a cut can help us know the healing desire of God; playing games may speak of the divine playfulness that knows our need for recreation; tending a garden may teach us the dynamics of growth. Families learn that they are sacred communities when they begin to name and claim the many forms of God's grace in their daily life.

- Marjorie J. Thompson
from "Family: The Forming Center"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.

- Thomas Merton, from "Thomas Merton on Peace"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God. They are brought to their knees and fall, but we rise up and stand firm.

- Psalms 20:7-8

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so, for on this account the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake.

- Deuteronomy 15:10-10

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

It is not scientific doubt, not atheism, not pantheism, not agnosticism, that in our day and in this land is likely to quench the light of the gospel. It is a proud, sensuous, selfish, luxurious, church-going, hollow-hearted prosperity.

- Frederic D. Huntington, in Forum magazine, 1890

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

The identifying of gifts brings to the fore [a] large issue in our lives - the issue of commitment. Somehow if I name my gift and it is confirmed, I cannot "hang loose" in the same way. I would much rather be committed to God in the abstract than be committed to [God] at the point of my gifts.

- Elizabeth O'Connor
from "Eighth Day of Creation"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" Jesus answered them, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me."

- Matthew 11:1-6

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

Hear a recent sermon by Diana at Calvary Episcopal Church in Memphis, Tennessee.

+ Listen to the streaming audio


Diana Butler Bass (www.dianabutlerbass.com) is the author of Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith (Harper San Francisco).

Bright Sadness is the true message and gift of Lent: ... the sadness of my exile, of the waste I have made of my life; the brightness of God's presence and forgiveness, the joy of the recovered desire for God, the peace of the recovered home. Such is the climate of Lenten worship; such is its first and general impact on my soul.

- Alexander Schmemann
from "Great Lent"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?

- Jeremiah 8:21-22

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.

- James 2:8-9

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

What God requires of those who call on God's name is responsive servanthood. God wishes to act in and through us, so Christian hope does not relieve men and women of responsibility. We are not primarily responsible for shrewd analysis of problems, for strategic selection of means, for maximizing the chances of success. We are primarily responsible for turning to God, for attempting to know and do God's will. That well may lead us into actions which are not shrewd, strategic, or successful, as the life of Jesus suggests. But as Jesus' life demonstrates, human action which is faithful to God's will can have transforming effect.

- Parker Palmer
from "The Company of Strangers"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work. As it is written, "He scatters abroad, he gives to the poor; his righteousness endures forever."

- 2 Corinthians 9:7-9

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

The conversion experience is a personal transformation that involves a change from an old primary allegiance to a new commitment to God in Christ. It is a change which brings about healing and liberation.
-Bonganjalo Goba
from the Journal of Theology for South Africa

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.

- Leviticus 19:18-18
+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

For many of us it is not our politics that constrains us to say and do what we do and say in opposition to apartheid and in working for a new South Africa. It is precisely our relationship with God, it is our worship, our meditation, our attendance at the Eucharist, it is these spiritual things which compel us to speak up for God, "Thus saith the Lord ...," to be the voice of the voiceless. For many the spiritual is utterly central to all we are and do and say.

- Desmond Tutu
from "Cry Justice!"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

With my mouth I will give great thanks to the Lord; I will praise him in the midst of the throng. For [the Lord] stands at the right hand of the needy, to save them from those who would condemn them to death.

- Psalms 140:12-13

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

For in Christ and through Christ and because of Christ Christians have been given a revealed insight into God's nature and character. ... This understanding of God was vindicated for us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, whom we acclaim as the Christ, God incarnate. Jesus the Christ thus becomes - in himself and in his teaching - the true hermeneutic, the key to the understanding of the Bible, and beyond the Bible to the understanding of the action of God throughout history. In other words, the Word of God incarnate in Jesus the Christ interprets for us the word of God in the Bible.

- Naim Ateek
from "Justice, and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.

- Ezekiel 16:49-49

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

The earth provides enough resources for everyone's need, but not for some people's greed.

- Mahatma Gandhi

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

"To what then will I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, "We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not weep.' For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, "He has a demon'; the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, "Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Nevertheless, wisdom is vindicated by all her children."

- Luke 7:31-35

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

With a power given from above we shout, "No!" to him who promises the whole world if we will only worship him. We crucify the old mechanisms of power- push, drive, climb, grasp, trample. We turn instead to the new life of power, love, joy, peace, patience, and all the fruit of the Spirit.

- Richard Foster
excerpt from "Money, Sex and Power."

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

My guess is that most Americans either don't know or don't think much about Christians in Iran. The country is, after all, the Islamic Republic of Iran, a theocratic state where Islam is the state religion.

While Islam is certainly the dominant religion, there presently are Christians in Iran, and they trace their roots there back to the 5th century. There are a number of significant minority populations in Iran (including about 25,000 Jews who have a representative in the Iranian Parliament), with the largest being ethnic Armenians. The vast majority of Armenians are Christians, with most identifying as Orthodox Christians.

We had the privilege of actually meeting with the Archbishop of the Armenian Orthodox Church during our visit to Iran. Archbishop Sebu Sarkissian was a very charismatic leader who welcomed our delegation and spoke with us about the ethnic and religious community of Armenians.

There is a limited amount of religious freedom for Armenian Christians, as they are free to worship on a regular basis, and they have schools that are supported in part by the government. Within those schools, religious education is actually a part of the curriculum, and therefore, Christian education is allowed by the state.

There is also a smaller Armenian evangelical Christian community in Iran, numbering around 2,000. This community dates back over 100 years to missionary work established by the Presbyterian Church (USA). We had a wonderful meeting with the pastor of the largest Armenian evangelical church in Tehran, and I was asked to preach at their weekly worship service. Due to the fact that Friday is the Islamic day of worship, most Christian churches hold services on Friday morning.

While there is freedom of worship for Christians, there is not complete religious freedom such as that found in our country. Proselytizing is actually a crime in Iran, so being an "evangelical" has a very different meaning there. To be honest, I didn't know much about the Christian community in Iran prior to this trip, and I did not go prepared to preach a sermon. It was quite an honor, however, to be asked to preach to a group of Christians who are a minority group in an Islamic-dominated country. It was an even greater privilege to worship with a group of people who have experienced some difficult times in the last 27 years as a community. I took the opportunity to try and encourage them as best I could, and chose Hebrews Chapter 11 as the text for my message. Following are some of the excerpts:

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1)

I want you all to know that we have come to Iran as Christians, not as representatives of our government. We have come because we share a deep love for Jesus Christ and a belief that Jesus was a healer and peacemaker. During this time of increased tensions between our nations, we have come as followers of Christ to listen to the Iranian people, to learn about your country, and to return home and share with our churches and the American people what we have experienced while here in Iran, with the hope that it might have an impact on the policies of our own government. Today, however, I didn't come to talk about politics or peace. I came to talk briefly about faith and hope.

As Paul says to the Corinthians, after love, there probably are not two more important aspects of our faith in Jesus Christ than faith and hope. I know in my own faith journey it was love that freed me from the bondage of sin in my life, but it was faith and hope that enabled me to see the possibilities the future might hold.

In this letter to the Hebrews, the author is laying out to his Jewish audience the basis for faith in Jesus Christ, and the faithfulness of God throughout human history. If you read through Chapter 11, the writer takes us on a journey through the scriptures, demonstrating the power of faith and hope in the lives of His people. It reads like an Old Testament Hall of Fame, with stories of Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Joshua, and Rahab.

What an amazing and inspiring passage of scripture.

I believe the author is telling us here, "Look at all these ordinary people who did extraordinary things because of the faith they had in God and the hope they had for the future. In spite of impossible and often terrible circumstances, God was faithful. In the face of death and destruction, God was faithful to deliver his people. In spite of disobedience, God was still faithful." If that does not inspire hope, I don't know what will.

And I don't believe the faithfulness of God ended with the stories here in Hebrews. The story of God's faithfulness continues even to today, and gives us reason to hope. In the face of personal struggles in our own lives, the faithfulness of God offers us hope. In the face of persecution, faith in God gives us hope. In the face of war, we have faith in God and hope for peace.

I guess I want to leave you this morning with a new translation of Hebrews 11:1 that my boss, Jim Wallis, shares with people as he speaks around the world. He says, "Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and watching the evidence change."

Hope is not a feeling. Hope is a decision. It is a decision to stare the evidence of the challenges right before our eyes, and have faith that God can change the evidence. May each of us leave the sanctuary this morning walking in faith and the hope of the power of God in our lives.

Jeff Carr is the Chief Operations Officer for Sojourners/Call to Renewal. Learn more about this delegation at http://www.irandelegation.org/.

It is not we who do Christ the favor of worshiping him; it is Christ who empowers us by strengthening us, and enabling us to fight for the things that are worth fighting for, the things that endure; and that is a promise worth fighting for, worth dying for, and worth living for.

- Peter Gomes, excerpt from "Strength for the Journey"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for [God] is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.

- Luke 6:31-35

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

We are reclaiming a world precariously on the edge. We take action not with arrogance and certainty, but with humility and uncertainty. It is our giving that counts - not our success. But in selfless giving, we have victories. And through everyday actions, we reweave the web of life.

- Vandana Shiva
Excerpt from "Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace."

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God.

- Leviticus 23:22-22

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

I put on righteousness, and it clothed me; my justice was like a robe and a turban. I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. I was a father to the needy, and I championed the cause of the stranger. I broke the fangs of the unrighteous, and made them drop their prey from their teeth.

- Job 29:14-17

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

In a society that is entirely hostile, and, by its nature, seems determined to cut you down - that has cut down so many in the past and cuts down so many every day - it begins to be almost impossible to distinguish a real from a fancied injury. One can very quickly cease to attempt this distinction, and, what is worse, on usually ceases to attempt it without realizing that one has done so. ... And this leads, imperceptibly but inevitably, to a state of mind in which, having long ago learned to expect the worst, one finds it very easy to believe the worst.

- James Baldwin
from "The Fire Next Time"

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

In essence, what Jesus imparted to his disciples was that they must strive for true justice on earth as in heaven, as their righteous service to God; that they must honor God by doing indiscriminate justice, by lifting up "the least of these" on the altar of God's justice and mercy; that they must set into motion a revolution of love and holistic spirituality that demonstrates love for God by treating the needs of even the least of God's children as holy.

-Obery M Hendericks, Jr.
excerpt from The Politics of Jesus.

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail

You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor.

- Leviticus 19:15-15

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

For [a king] delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper. He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy. From oppression and violence he redeems their life; and precious is their blood in his sight.

- Psalms 72:12-14

+ Sign up to receive our social justice verse of the day via e-mail

As an act of love, prayer is a courageous act. It is a risk we take. It is a life-and-death risk, believing in the promises of the gospel, that God's love is indeed operative in the world. In prayer we have the courage, perhaps even the presumption and the arrogance or the audacity to claim that God's love can be operative in the very specific situations of human need that we encounter.

- John E. Biersdorf
excerpt from Healing of Purpose.

+ Sign up to receive our quote of the day via e-mail