A sermon preached at All Saints Church, May 21, 2006
From Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor tells some wonderful stories. Here’s one:
A lone cowboy is riding across the range, that beautiful open country out where (as the old song says) the deer and the antelope play. The cowboy approaches a herd of buffalo, dismounts, walks up to one of the animals, looks it over, and says: “Yuk! Just look at you. Look at that matted hair, those bloodshot eyes, that foul breath. Yuk!” Then the cowboy mounts his horse and rides off into the sunset.
The buffalo thinks for a moment, then turns to another buffalo and says, “You know, we seldom hear that kind of thing around here. But I think I’ve just heard a discouraging word.”
Although many of us thought the issues of creation and science and God had been worked through several decades ago – we are today hearing some discouraging words from our Christian fundamentalist sisters and brothers, denying Darwin’s theory of evolution and affirming the literal truth of the Genesis story of creation in six days, 6,000 years ago. Today I don’t intend to allow you to be discouraged for long. So now to Creation, Science and God. Read the rest of this entry »
The South Central Farm was still in existence at 8 AM this morning, when I turned my security post over to another volunteer protester and staggered off towards the Blue Line to come to work. However, it might not be in existence by the time you read this. The farmers are under an eviction notice, and, along with Julia Butterfly Hill ensconced in a tree, dozens of farm supporters are staying on the land, waiting to protest in the only way left when the eviction notice is finally enforced. Read the rest of this entry »
Mama Chezi is a huge woman in many respects. She takes up a large amount of space in the small round, dirt-floored hut where we are clustering around a single candle and a smouldering pile of white sage. Although she can speak English, she refuses to do so, and speaks to our guides, Ayenda and Joe, in Xhosa. As guests in the village of Umngazana, my friend and I have just finished an extravagant dinner of chicken, mussels, mealie pap, and bistiyo, and Ayenda has brought us at Mama Chezi’s instructions to meet her and to see if the ancestral spirits will move her to bless us. The hut is dark and solemn, and when people hear that Mama Chezi will intercede for us, they begin to file in to help her pray — to clap, to sing, and to drum. The hut is full of strangers. And then Ayenda introduces us, in Xhosa, as Americans. One older man, sitting against the side of the hut, looks at us scornfully and says, “Ah, Bush.”
When you are in one of the most remote parts of South Africa, where there are no paved roads, where huge glass bottles of Coke constitute gifts for the ancestors, with little or no electricity or running water, and people still look at you and complain about your president, you know you’re in trouble. Read the rest of this entry »
[Note: This post is extracted from a Baccalaureate sermon given for the Claremont Colleges on May 14, 2006, by the Rev. Dr. Mary Ellen Kilsby, a past president of PCU and Senior Minister Emerita of the First Congregational Church of Long Beach. Rev. Kilsby’s texts were Hosea 6.1-6 and John 21.15-17]
Thank you for inviting me this morning. I am honored to be here. Honored and challenged, read nervous, because this graduation weekend is one of the highlights of your lives. The comic author extraodinaire, Garry Trudeau, once said that graduation speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released in the world until they have been properly sedated. So the challenge is to not repeat all the cliches that are so tempting on a day like today. Read the rest of this entry »
A substantial number of Christians on both the left and right deserve credit for seeing the success of The Da Vinci Code as an opportunity to engage the book’s 43 million readers and the additional millions who will see the movie. But while it’s one thing to assume that most of these readers and viewers have at least some interest in the spiritual, it’s quite another to believe (as the plans of many Christian groups indicate) that these masses are ripe for conversion to the One True Faith.
(For a look at how Progressive Christianity in particular might react to the book and film, please join us for a screening of The Da Vinci Code this Saturday morning at 8:30 a.m. at the Paseo Stadium theaters in Pasadena. PCU’s co-founder George Regas will offer some thoughts after the movie. To reserve a space at the screening, please send an email to , write “Da Vinci” or “Da Vinci Code” in the subject line and give the full name of everyone planning to attend. Tickets will be $12 at the door.)
With the United States already facing budget deficits serious enough to endanger its currency, could there be a better time to give away a huge chunk of future revenue?
President Bush and lunatic fringe in his party (a party that still parades itself as the party of fiscal rectitude) see no problem in doing just that. Tomorrow, along with the extension of low capital gains rates, Bush will sign into law a second boon for rich taxpayers that will pick the pockets of everyone else and rob future generations of workers who do, in fact, pay taxes. The provision will allow wealthy people to swap regular IRAs for Roth IRAs, whose subsequent earnings and payouts will never be taxed. Also–and here again is the beauty part that has hardly been reported–a Roth IRA is not subject to mandatory withdrawals like a regular IRA when its owners turn 70. For Roth accounts, mandatory withdrawals apply only to heirs, which means that the accounts’ value will grow tremendously and provide windfalls to the inheritors of those who keep the money invested. Read the rest of this entry »
As we approach Mother’s Day, I’d like to talk about a truly memorable mother. Her name is Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones. She never got the message that women are to be the caretakers, leaving the pioneering to men. She was both caretaker and pioneer – especially the latter. And what a pioneer she was.
It’s always interesting to hear conservative religious and social commentators ascribe literally demonic motives for the movies and TV shows that Hollywood churns out, when just about all the time there’s only one agenda that the entertainment industry is concerned with: making a buck.
That’s not to say that The Da Vinci Code won’t offer any food for thought regarding religious issues. (To see if Da Vinci has anything to say to you and to hear what PCU co-founder George Regas thinks about the movie, please join us for a screening next Saturday, May 20 at 8:30 a.m. at the Paseo Stadium theaters in Pasadena. Please contact PCU for more details; tickets (priced at $12) will be available at All Saints Church in Pasadena this Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re almost a week away from the opening of the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s mega-bestseller The Da Vinci Code, and it’s hard not to get caught up in the cultural tug-of-war over the movie’s merits. One side insists that Da Vinci be either excused or dismissed as Hollywood fluff, while others are certain that the film will create scriptural illiterates at best and raging pagans at worst.
(For those of you who’d like to judge The Da Vinci Code for yourselves and hear our founder George Regas’ thoughts on the movie and controversy, Progressive Christians Uniting will host a screening at 8:30 a.m. Saturday May 20 at the Paseo Stadium theaters in Pasadena. Call or write PCU to find out how to buy tickets. Read the rest of this entry »
Nomenklatura, a useful Russian word from the Soviet era meaning (approximately) “those with names,” or the people who matter. We should rehabilitate it for our own progressive purposes in 21st-century America, as we have now developed our very own nomenklatura who need not observe the usual rules and niceties the rest of us must live by. My feelings about this have grown as I have witnessed what Robert Reich once called the “secession of the successful” over the past 10 years. The very wealthy these days need never rub shoulders with the hoi polloi: everything for them is privatized. They have their gated communities, their private recreational haunts (never public parks or clubs), private schools and private tutors for their children, personal trainers, personal chefs, special skybox facilities at sporting events, $400 tickets for Broadway shows–the list of privileges is endless. Read the rest of this entry »
