If this question sounds like one a child might ask a harried parent, it is. Gestation is involved since ministers are made not born, and church officers need to consider where they really come from.
It has finally occurred in a public aside, in the March meeting of the Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. A conflict erupted that many people have been waiting for impatiently. Could it be that the real challenge of status confessionis before the church of Jesus Christ in the United States of America is not homosexual ordination but the imperial conduct of this 'Christian' nation in its Middle East pursuits? If the Confessing Church movement has something to confess, then over against what apostasies and soul-destroying idolatries on behalf of Jesus Christ do they take their stand? Are they simply against other Presbyterians whom they deem heretical and unbiblical? Is the Covenant Network espousing a confessional position on the removal of G-6.0106b.? Are these organizations implicitly positioning themselves for "severance?"
Dear Sisters and Brothers,
For seventeen years I was a minister of the church in Switzerland, and since 1986 I have been Professor of Reformed Theology in Germany at the university in Goettingen. In Switzerland most Protestants are Reformed. In Germany the Reformed are a small minority in relation to Lutherans and the United Churches, but they are Reformed more consciously than in Switzerland.
Reflections on Matthew 28:1-10
It is a dark and stormy night in upstate New York as I write this, and I close my eyes to recall the sun that warmed me one spring day several years ago, in Jerusalem. I was on a seminary trip and I had taken my last free day to go back with my video camera to “The Garden Tomb,” a verdant postage stamp-sized plot of ground off Nablus Road that stands as good a chance as any of being the actual site of Jesus’ burial and resurrection.
Our polity as Presbyterians is grounded on the proposition that all authority rests in governing bodies acting either in plenary session or through committees, commissions, councils, and task forces. Though frequently described as a democratic process, it is decidedly not a democratic one, at least not in the common understanding that the will of the people is expressed through their representatives.
Editor's Note: As I write, we are preparing for tonight's Maundy Thursday observance at Second Church. The news reports are full of the latest court maneuverings related to the Terri Schiavo tragedy. By the time you read this, it will be a very different time. But the questions raised today deserve continued, prayerful consideration
We who belong to the church of Jesus Christ might do well to cast ourselves before God and beg for mercy for our part in (either to ignore, to cheer, or to feed) the deplorable circus that has grown up around the life and disability of Terri Schiavo. How did one family (out of hundreds who are now faced with similar circumstances) gain such notoriety over what ought to have been from the outset a matter -- not of personal preference -- but of decision by family, doctors, priest, pastor, and social worker?
In an interview on National Public Radio February 27, Andy Trudeau was talking to Sheilah Kast about film scores nominated for an Oscar this year, one of which was composed by John Debney for The Passion of the Christ. That was Trudeau's choice. We heard selections accompanying various scenes in the film. Trudeau's discussion of music for the resurrection caught my attention.
Director Mel Gibson had told Debney that he wanted a martial feeling to the resurrection sequence because "that's where the real battle begins for the souls of mankind." Trudeau explained over background drum rolls of victory, pomp, and circumstance that the music represents a "moral marshalling of the troops."
What does it mean to be an Easter Church—that is, a church that confesses “God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead?” Is there only one correct interpretation of that most central of Christian confessions or is there room in that confession for different interpretations of what it means? Is there only one “orthodox” interpretation?
Reflections on John 20:1-18
Every few years the calendar conspires against the church by placing the moveable feast of Easter on the same day most of the country springs forward to Daylight Savings Time. This year’s calendar is kind to us, and this ecclesiastical “perfect storm” is avoided.
The visit of your new Secretary of State to the Middle East, during which Condoleeza Rice met with Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, raised the tantalising possibility of an end to the Intifada. Carefully dipping her toes into the previously unrewarding swamp of Middle Eastern politics and peace making, Miss Rice spoke of the possibility of a new beginning for the peace process.
In 1922, a young Baptist minister delivered a sermon before a Presbyterian congregation in New York City, entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” It resulted in his leaving that pulpit to become one of America’s most influential Protestant preachers. Harry Emerson Fosdick, both loved and reviled, delivered intelligent and often controversial sermons from the church that John D. Rockefeller provided for him on Moningside Heights. The Riverside Church has stood for decades as a bastion of progressive theology.
I warn my seminary students to watch out for “litmus test” theology. “If you find yourself getting backed into a corner on a doctrinal issue, with someone pressing you merely to ‘check “yes”’ or ‘check “no,”’ do your best to redirect the conversation,” I advise them. Being a Christian believer is not, primarily, about checking the right boxes.
Christ is our peace. The gospel is not that peace is possible, but that it is actual. The dividing wall of hostility has been broken down, first between earth and heaven, then between Jew and Gentile, then between male and female, then between slave and free. If these divisions fall — biblically the great divisions — they all fall.
Reflections on Matthew 21:1-11
On Palm Sunday at the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City, churchgoers arrive early to get a good seat. The graceful procession of the children waving palms is a sight I recall decades after I worshipped there.
Luke 7:31-32 and 2 Corinthians 1:8-10
Editor’s Note: The author gave this presentation at a Vigil of Remembering for the 37th anniversary of the Tet Offensive and Counter-offensive in Vietnam. He writes: “This year, with one son now on station in the Gulf of Arabia with the 15th MEU(SOC), the vigil takes on an added significance for me.” Most of those attending were Vietnam War combat veterans and their families.
Last July, I was troubled by the General Assembly’s resolution condemning the invasion of Iraq as “unwise, immoral and illegal.” It wasn’t the assembly’s weighing in on a public issue that bothered me, since it does so almost every year. Nor was it the church's stand against the war -- I had questioned the invasion myself.
THE OUTLOOK has received a multitude of letters responding to Moderator Rick Ufford-Chase’s Guest Opinion, “Is Peace Possible,” in December 2004 (reprinted on p. 14 of this issue.) His hope has been realized, for in these pages, the church has begun serious, even heated, conversation about peace and war.
In this funny old town where I live and where I was trained theologically (at Union Seminary in Virginia) a continuing controversy is plaguing Black History Month. It concerns the use of a mock slave auction in an elementary school classroom in one of the conservative (red) suburbs that surround Richmond, the former capital of the Confederate States of America. Ironies abound.
While I make no brief against Black History Month or mock slave auctions, I do question the value of the latter in an elementary school. More to the point, I question the value of anything other than strict, basic education in elementary school (and in Sunday School) for elementary children. Children need to learn the basics if they are going to function responsibly as adults, as citizens, and as faithful Christians.
The meditation for Lent IV on Jesus' healing of the blind man in John's gospel effectively opens the central question before our beleaguered, cacophonous church. The PC (USA) is in an identity crisis. Publications and websites put forward by numerous associations claim to know the truth and to have the truth, and the truths are as different as night and day. Such stubborn knowing (seeing) is appropriately called into question by Chris Chakoian's meditation.
It set me thinking about how our eyes are opened, and how we learn to see. In John's story, learning to see is costly for the man healed, for his community of faith -- and even for the disciples. It is not, pun intended, a pretty picture. The healing provokes judgment as well as grace, for the light, which in John is never extinguished by the darkness of the cosmos, reveals as well as it enlightens.
It’s easy to bash the Pharisees in the gospel of John, but we do so at our peril. One writer notes, “For the Pharisees, protecting the identity of the Jewish people in the midst of a hostile world was an overwhelming priority. To continue to be ‘God’s people’ meant that they had to use every tool they had to remain distinctive, to resist the temptation to assimilate into the dominant culture.” [1]
THE SEVEN LAST WORDS FROM THE CROSS. By Fleming Rutledge. Eerdmans. 2005. $12.00. 91p. (0-8028-2786-1). Pb.
Rutledge presents seven meditations on the final sayings of Jesus. He links the sayings from the cross with contemporary events and concerns, incorporating recent biblical scholarship and modern questions about the death of Christ.
Editor’s Note: After the OUTLOOK guest opinion “What have we done for Brown?”, Nibs Stroupe, pastor of Oakhurst Church in Decatur, Ga. responded with the following letter. His letter in turn sparked a reply by Ken Woodley, author of the original opinion piece. Both letter and response add to the information about this chapter in civil rights history in the United States.
The year was 1965, the Second Vatican Council’s “Decree on Ecumenism” had readjusted the ecumenical landscape, and the Roman Catholic Church was thrust headlong into an ecumenical movement that had been a largely Protestant and Orthodox enterprise.
“Jesus began to weep.”
This man does not do this often.
This is the only time that the gospels record Jesus’ weeping. Something has struck the deepest chords in Jesus. This is a resurrection story, but Jesus is weeping. What do the tears mean?
Rarely has a film captured my attention as did Hotel Rwanda. I recommended it to the congregation this past Sunday (1/30/05), something I've not done previously, and even declared that it should be required viewing in every school and college, beginning with Middle School. Hotel has no gratuitous violence or language. It is based on a true story, and those who wrote and directed it are to be commended, not only for making an excellent, suspenseful film, but also for bringing public attention in a mass market to the horrors of continuing genocide. In three months Hutus massacred 800,000 Tutsis, a horror that began immediately after a peace accord signed under the watchful eyes of Western powers. The Rwandan government, in the hands of a Hutu general following the president's flight into exile, did nothing to prevent the slaughter.
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