filled with power

filled with power

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When the Holy Spirit comes upon you, you will be filled with power, and you will be witnesses for me …

That’s what Jesus promised his first apostles: you will be filled with power … and they were:

  • power to boldly proclaim a message of good news
  • power to heal broken bodies and broken souls
  • power to stand up to fierce opposition and harsh persecution
  • power to see what they could not see before — the ever-widening circle of the Lord’s embrace.

You will be filled with power …

Do you feel powerful, empowered, filled with power? Sometimes it seems that for us faith is more about comfort and assurance than about power, more about belief than about action, more about what Jesus can do for us than about we can do in Jesus’ name.

What can we do in Jesus’ name?

  • Can we boldly proclaim good news to a world that is cynical, hurting, despairing, splintered?
  • Do we expect to bring healing to broken souls and broken bodies?
  • Will we stand up and not back down in the face of doubt, derision, scoffing, verbal attacks, political isolation?
  • Will we see the still-widening circle of the Lord’s embrace?

I don’t want to be part of a church that is innocuous, self-absorbed, timid. I don’t want to be content with a faith that promises future blessing, but makes no real difference now. I want to know what it is — to explore with you, my fellow believers, what it is — that we can do here and now in Jesus’ name!

Do we believe the good news? Do we believe Jesus is alive? Do we believe Jesus is alive in us? Do we believe that we are filled with power, and are we ready to exercise that power in love, in Jesus’ name, for our neighbor’s sake?

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national religious campaign against torture

national religious campaign against torture

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Thank you to Rev. Dr. George Hunsinger of Princeton Theological Seminary for notifying this weblog of the work of the National Religious Coalition Against Torture. Read their statement, “Torture Is A Moral Issue,” on their website (www.nrcat.org) and consider adding your signature. An excerpt from the statement follows:

Torture violates the basic dignity of the human person that all religions hold dear. It degrades everyone involved –policy-makers, perpetrators and victims. It contradicts our nation’s most cherished ideals. Any policies that permit torture and inhumane treatment are shocking and morally intolerable.

Torture and inhumane treatment have long been banned by U.S. treaty obligations, and are punishable by criminal statute. Recent developments, however, have created new uncertainties. By reaffirming the ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment as well as torture, the McCain amendment, now signed into law, is a step in the right direction. Yet its implementation remains unclear …

National Religious Coalition Against Torture logo
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bono at the national prayer breakfast

bono at the national prayer breakfast

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Worth reading: U2 lead singer Bono’s remarks delivered at the National Prayer Breakfast yesterday. Very much worth reading for those who take faith in Jesus seriously!

Here’s a brief excerpt:

Here’s some good news for the President. After 9-11 we were told America would have no time for the World’s poor. America would be taken up with its own problems of safety. And it’s true these are dangerous times, but America has not drawn the blinds and double-locked the doors.

In fact, you have doubled aid to Africa. You have tripled funding for global health. Mr. President, your emergency plan for AIDS relief and support for the Global Fund, you and Congress, have put 700,000 people onto life-saving anti-retroviral drugs and provided 8 million bed nets to protect children from malaria.

Outstanding human achievements. Counterintuitive. Historic. Be very, very proud.

But here’s the bad news. From charity to justice, the good news is yet to come. There’s is much more to do. There’s a gigantic chasm between the scale of the emergency and the scale of the response.

And finally, it’s not about charity after all, is it? It’s about justice.

Let me repeat that: It’s not about charity, it’s about justice.

And that’s too bad.

Because you’re good at charity. Americans, like the Irish, are good at it. We like to give, and we give a lot, even those who can’t afford it.

But justice is a higher standard. Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties, it doubts our concern, it questions our commitment.

6,500 Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drug store. This is not about charity, this is about Justice and Equality …

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unforgettable haiti

unforgettable haiti

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Haiti … unforgettable

That was the last line I wrote in the journal I kept during my ten-day visit to Haiti in the summer of 1991. And it’s true. The land and its people are still very much with me, in my mind and in my heart.

So a reference to Haiti on an internet news server caught my attention … and reading the article (a blog post for the Washington Post, submitted by photojournalist, Ron Haviv) brought back many memories. You may read his commentary here: Glimmers of hope in Cite Soleil. Be sure to check out his photo gallery as well. I bring this to your attention, because we know so little in this country, and, too often, care so little about this near neighbor of ours.

One afternoon in that summer of 1991, I walked the alleys of Cité Soleil in Port-au-Prince. It was a hopeful time. We were there just months before the coup that removed Jean Bertrand Aristide from power, but while we were there, in the midst of the systemic poverty and the pervasive despair, there was a sense of hopefulness, of new possibility. In Cité Soleil, the seaside Port-au-Prince slum, we saw new wooden houses with raised cement floors and many construction projects — trenches and walls. Our guide, a man with numerous previous visits to Port-au-Prince, told us there was more building activity in Cité Soleil than he had ever seen.

We stopped at a one-room shop in a cement block building. Claire’s Boutique, it was called. It sold the artwork and crafts of local artisans, insuring them a fair share of the earnings. I purchased a carved wooden nativity for my wife: Joseph, Mary, the baby in a manger, three strangers bearing gifts, and several barn animals. The faces of the carved people are long and narrow, somber and beautiful. The nativity occupies a special place on our mantle every Advent season.

Maybe things can/will change …, I wrote in my journal that evening.

But all too soon, for the majority of Haitians, hope was turned once more to resignation and despair. Once more and still, violence is rampant and poverty intractable and oppression the “norm” and we American neighbors virtually oblivious.

Next week, the Haitian people go to the polls. René Préval, a former Aristide associate and the favorite of Haiti’s poor, leads the presidential field. Maybe things can/will change …

And maybe we will pay attention. Maybe we will not forget.

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who’s to blame?

who’s to blame?

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From the Los Angeles Times (Exxon Reports Record-Breaking Profits)

Exxon Reports Record-Breaking Annual Profits
By Jesus Sanchez, Times Staff Writer

ExxonMobil Corp. today said its annual profits soared more than 40% last year to a record-breaking $36.1 billion as the world’s largest publicly owned energy company reaped the benefits of soaring prices and demand for crude oil and gasoline.

The company’s annual and quarterly profit figures, which were even larger than Wall Street had expected, sent the company’s shares up more than 3% in early afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

ExxonMobil’s annual profit was the largest ever reported in corporate history, Standard & Poor’s stock market analyst Howard Silverblatt told Associated Press.

The energy giant also claims the second-largest annual corporate profit ever reported, $25.3 billion in 2004.

The Irving, Texas-based company’s profits rose strongly across most of its units despite the damage and disruption to production and refinery facilities suffered during the Gulf Coast hurricanes. For the fourth quarter, the company said profits, including special one-time items, surged 27% on a year-over-year basis to $10.7 billion.

Company officials, mindful of the anger triggered by last year’s surge in energy prices that sent gasoline soaring to $3 a gallon in many parts of the nation, stressed the company’s investment in expanding production. Last year, ExxonMobil spent $17.7 billion in exploration and facilities.

“There is a great deal of public interest in global energy prices,” ExxonMobil Chairman Rex W. Tillerson said in a statement. “We recognize that consumers worldwide want and need reliable supplies of affordable energy — to fuel their vehicles, light and heat their homes and run their businesses. Our strong financial results will continue to allow us to make significant, long-term investments required to do our part in meeting the world’s energy needs.”

ExxonMobil and other industry officials have been active in trying to head off renewed calls to slap a windfall profits tax amid record profits.

Last week, Chevron Corp. also reported record high fourth quarter and annual profits despite costly repairs to its Gulf Coast facilities. The San Ramon, Calif.-based company said that annual profits surged to $14.1 billion last year from $13 billion in 2004.

——————————–

We have no one to blame but ourselves. We create the demand that drives up prices. We do not worry over much about finding alternative sources for tomorrow’s energy needs as long as we have enough to maintain our accustomed lifestyles today. We cannot blame elected leaders or oil company executives for an economic reality that we have created and we permit to endure.

And yet … There is something disturbing, something almost sinister, about the juxtaposition of regular folks in our own nation and around the world feeling the energy squeeze, choosing between heat and food, choosing between heat and health care, with the huge oil companies (and their executives) reaping unprecedented profits. Maybe that’s how the economic “game” works, but there are clear winners and losers. The pain is not shared. The people’s pain is the oil company’s gain.

I know I would have a hard time living with myself if my windfall came at the expense of someone else’s suffering …

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wackos?

wackos?

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Environmentalists are just a bunch of wackos …

  • They believe that every human being is entitled to breathe clean air and to drink clean water.
  • They believe that a healthy planet is essential to the welfare of all living things, including human beings.
  • They believe in leaving the world a better place for future generations.
  • They believe in the virtue of making small sacrifices now to preserve the bounty of the earth’s resources for later.
  • They want their children and their children’s children and their children’s children’s children to experience the same awe and wonder they experience in encountering the astounding variety and complexity and beauty of the natural world, of all that human beings have not made for themselves and barely understand.
  • They believe that the divine mandate to be good stewards of this earth means to take care of it, not to exploit it.
  • They believe that a horned owl or a piping plover or a topeka shiner or an eastern prairie fringed orchid have as much right to exist as they do, and that plants and animals and matter itself have value in and of themselves, not just in their usefulness to the human economy.
  • They believe in respecting life, in appreciating life, in enjoying life, in all its forms.
  • They love this earth and show that love by being zealously protective of its well-being.
New River Gorge

Just loony, isn’t it?

If it is crazy to harbor such beliefs … I pray that there may there be a worldwide epidemic of such insanity!

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saying “no” to torture means “no”

saying “no” to torture means “no”

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I am hopeful that we may be of one mind as a nation in saying an unequivocal “No” to using torture in any and all circumstances. I am concerned, as are the retired miltary officers cited in the following article, that the “signing statement” appended to the bill undermines the intent and effect of the McCain amendment banning cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of detainees in any form.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A group of retired military officers urged President George W. Bush on Thursday to spell out how he will enforce a ban on the torture of U.S.-held prisoners, complaining he muddied the issue in a statement last month.

Bush reluctantly accepted the ban, pushed by Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, after scandals over abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, harsh interrogations at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and reports the CIA ran secret prisons abroad to hold terrorism suspects.

Retired military leaders including Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, who was U.S. Central Command commander-in-chief, said Bush should clarify his stance after making a statement last month that some experts said signaled he would bypass rules for treatment of detainees when he saw fit, even after he signed them into law.

The 22 former military officers in their letter said Bush should ensure that “your administration speak with a consistent voice to make clear that the United States now has a single standard of conduct specified in law that governs all interrogations.”

In a telephone news conference, Hoar said Bush’s statement last month “diluted the impact of the McCain amendment” by indicating “that there were going to be exceptions and the president has the ability to do that.”

McCain, who endured torture as a war prisoner in Vietnam, spearheaded the bill to set standards for detainees’ treatment that won big majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives.

Bush’s statement, issued on a Friday evening after he signed the bill putting the amendment into law, said the “executive branch shall construe (the law) in a manner consistent with the authority of the president … as commander in chief.”

The statement also said the White House’s approach would be “consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the president … of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.”

Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, said Bush should “clarify the signing statement so there is no question that the commander-in-chief considers this law binding on all U.S. personnel.”

Human Rights First held a news conference on the letter from retired generals and admirals.

Retired Rear Admiral John Hutson, a former Navy judge advocate general, said the McCain amendment reinstated long-standing U.S. policy on the treatment of prisoners. “Then to have a signing statement in which that becomes blurred again causes us great concern,” he said.

By Vicki Allen

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